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The Walt Disney Company has decided to close Disney English, a 12 year old chain of 25 language schools in China, ending a once promising business that, at times, prompted questions about education as brand building. The learning centers, in six cities and using Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and the Little Mermaid in their curriculum, have been closed since late January, when the Chinese government began to take aggressive efforts to contain the coronavirus. Traditional schools have been allowed to slowly reopen, but some supplemental education centers, including Disney English, have remained closed. Mahesh Samat, Disney's executive vice president of consumer products commercialization in the Asia Pacific region, told parents in a letter on Monday that Disney English had made the "difficult decision" not to reopen. The chain was founded in 2008, when China's fast growing middle class had created increased demand for English language learning. Disney developed the curriculum in partnership with Columbia University. "Over the past few years, we have noticed a shift in consumer preferences toward online learning experiences and this trend has been accelerated by the global pandemic as families are hesitant to resume in person supplemental learning classes," Mr. Samat said in the letter. "We are proud of our award winning Disney English language learning program in China, which has welcomed more than 100,000 learners."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
As he sat in his office in central Paris, Christian Bombrun, an executive at Orange, the French cellphone and cable operator, got an unexpected call. It was Netflix, the American streaming giant, proposing a deal. Netflix was looking to offer its stable of movies and television programming to the 10 million Orange customers across France. What followed were six months of often tense negotiations, as both companies wrestled over the details. "There were some difficult discussions," said Mr. Bombrun, director of entertainment and digital services for Orange in France. At certain points, both sides thought the talks would fail. But in the end, he said, "we got a deal done." Such negotiations have become increasingly commonplace for Netflix as its global ambitions have taken the content streaming service far from its California roots into markets across Europe, Latin America and Asia. The company's partnerships with cable and cellphone operators worldwide give it almost instantaneous access to potential new users without having to spend a fortune on advertising and distribution deals in markets where its brand and content are often still relatively unknown. This growing symbiotic relationship will take center stage on Monday when Reed Hastings, the company's chief executive, gives the keynote address on the first day of the Mobile World Congress. The conference is an annual trade show in Barcelona, Spain, where executives from across the telecom, media and technology worlds gather to meet and, potentially, sign new deals. Mr. Hastings's headline act part sales pitch, part industry update comes as Netflix's attention has increasingly turned to its overseas subscribers. The Orange deal, one of Netflix's first international partnerships, is a case in point. The two sides finally reached an agreement in late 2014, just as Netflix began expanding across much of Europe. As part of the deal, Orange customers are offered a one month free trial with Netflix and the ability to pay for the streaming service through their existing monthly contracts. Orange has also entered into an undisclosed revenue sharing pact in France, which has often been wary of the potential for Netflix's American shows to outmuscle local content. But the talks were not all smooth sailing. Along with the typical back and forth about how much revenue each side would receive from the deal, Orange was concerned that Netflix, whose European headquarters are in Amsterdam, had not signed on to French rules requiring online video distributors to fund local language content. Stephane Richard, the company's chief executive, also had said he would not work with Netflix, fearful that Orange would become a "Trojan horse," potentially helping the streaming service gain a global following, only to then cast Orange aside. But for cable and cellphone companies from Bulgaria to Bolivia, the calculation is simple. Though many of them initially resisted such deals with online content providers, gaining access to Netflix's exclusive programming helps set them apart from local rivals, just as customers' online habits have shifted toward video, particularly on their smartphones and other mobile devices. "Netflix wants to be exposed to as many people as it can," said Tom Harrington, an analyst at Enders Analysis, a media and telecom industry research company in London. "Telecom operators want to keep people inside their walls, so they are willing to let Netflix in." Netflix's American revenue, 1.4 billion in the fourth quarter, still constitutes a majority of its sales. But after a somewhat stuttering start to its global expansion, its international revenue is quickly catching up, hitting almost a billion dollars in the three months through December. The company offers its streaming services in 190 countries, and added more than five million new international subscribers in the fourth quarter, or more than double the number of new users in the United States, according to regulatory filings. Even Netflix's senior executives equate much of that growth to the company's strengthened ties with cable and cellphone operators around the globe. "All the partnership deals, we really believe in; that is why we are doing more of them," Mr. Hastings told analysts last month. "Those partnership deals are good for the customers, good for us and good for the partner." Such bonhomie between Netflix and carriers is a relatively recent phenomenon, and there are still teething pains whenever the company wades into international markets. In the United States, Netflix had an often difficult relationship with the likes of Comcast and Verizon Communications, which wanted Netflix to pay to use their high speed networks. After an uneasy standoff, Netflix eventually agreed to pay for improved access. In response, late last year, Comcast decided to include the streaming service on its set top cable box, so people could watch Netflix without having to leave Comcast's digital universe. Overseas, Sky, the British content and cable provider, has refused to include Netflix on its own set top box, primarily because it views the streaming service as a direct competitor to its own original programming. Telekom Indonesia, that country's largest telecom operator, also banned Netflix from its network last year, saying it was not registered to offer content there. The company, which is state owned, later signed a deal with iFlix, a competing streaming service from Malaysia. Analysts say many operators, even those that have signed partnership deals, still fret that Netflix alongside other American tech giants like Google and Facebook will benefit more from these relationships than they will. Avid television watchers, for instance, have invested emotional capital into popular Netflix shows like "House of Cards" or "Narcos," and often view their cable provider as a mere conduit to watching such digital content. "Netflix's exclusive shows are dominating people's water cooler moments," said Tony Gunnarsson, a senior analyst at Ovum, a technology research firm, in London. "Consumers are already watching Netflix, so it's better for operators to add Netflix to their services or people will go elsewhere." For Bob Greene, managing director of online entertainment at Liberty Global, a cable giant controlled by the billionaire John C. Malone, his relationship with Netflix is rooted in the new realities of how people watch content online.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Physical pain, relentless and undeniable, throbs like a bass line in "Behind the Sheet," the deeply affecting new historical drama by Charly Evon Simpson at Ensemble Studio Theater. Sometimes it takes the audible, metaphoric form of a hammered drum. And every now and then a scream, quickly muffled, lances the air. But for the most part, agony holds its tongue in this meticulously assembled story of a dark chapter in medical experimentation. Like its core of heroines plantation slave women used as gynecological guinea pigs in the South of the 1840s "Behind the Sheet," which opened on Thursday night, resists the natural urge to shout in righteous defiance. Instead, as directed with Olympian calm by Colette Robert, the production takes on cumulative power in its steady, cleareyed depiction of a time when it was a given that pain would be borne uncomplainingly by human beings regarded as chattel. That "some things are just the way they are," as one character says, becomes a stoic's creed for survival. What the young black women portrayed here have to survive includes repeated vaginal surgeries as many as 30 performed without anesthetic. "Behind the Sheet" was inspired by the career of J. Marion Sims, an American physician and plantation owner known as "the father of modern gynecology" (and a figure whose commemorative statue was recently removed from Central Park, as we're reminded in an onstage postscript). Sims pioneered an ultimately successful technique for sewing vaginal fistulas, acquired during difficult childbirths, through experimentation on slave women he owned or bought from other plantations. It is a subject that would seem to lend itself to sensationalism and horrified indignation. But Ms. Simpson and Ms. Robert understand that sometimes discretion can be the better part of power. "Behind the Sheet" doesn't have the electrifying conceptual bravado of other recent works about the legacy of slavery, like Branden Jacobs Jenkins's "An Octoroon" or this season's astonishing "Slave Play" by Jeremy O. Harris. This is, for the most part, a straightforward, conventional work that is not above plying the cliches of scientific breakthrough dramas of yesteryear, right down to a "eureka" moment of unexpected inspiration. But the context, in this case, casts shifting, unsettling light on such classic elements. At the play's center are two figures. George (Joel Ripka) is a physician transplanted from Philadelphia to Alabama who has been gifted a small plantation by the prosperous family of his wife (Megan Tusing). Philomena (the excellent Naomi Lorrain) is his wife's servant, who doubles, chores permitting, as George's invaluable assistant. She is also heavily pregnant with his child when the play begins. Everything that happens here is predicated on its characters' matter of fact acceptance of a status quo that now seems beyond comprehension or tolerance. As Philomena says to another slave, Lewis (Shawn Randall), who fantasizes about freedom, "How does someone imagine that when they've never experienced it?" The education of Philomena gives the play its moral structure, which parallels and intersects with the more familiar arc of a maverick scientist's progress. Only 19 when the play begins, Philomena is a woman of self contained poise and intelligence. Acting as a liaison and troubleshooter between George and the increasing number of slave women who become his patients and subjects, she knows she has it good. She feels sympathy, slightly detached, for the others, whose surgeries she witnesses firsthand. But despite the precise and horrible catalog of side effects of these women's conditions lacerating scars, burning seepage, an abiding stench they try to disguise with homemade perfumes she doesn't really understand what they are going through. Then she has her own disastrous experience of giving birth, and her role in George's house and his life is altered forever. Embodied with wonderfully delicate ambivalence by Ms. Lorrain, Philomena is the audience's surrogate in coming to consciousness. But it's the developing and changing bond among the slave women and their different degrees of resignation to their lot that gives the play its heart. Portrayed by Nia Calloway, Cristina Pitter, Amber Reauchean Williams and Jehan O. Young, they're all first rate. They convey a bone deep familiarity with one another that is obviously the product of much thoughtful rehearsal. (Philomena to Lewis, after he says he likes to keep to himself: "We survive longer when we don't.") Each of their characters has to some extent been defined by archetypal shorthand the funny one, the angry one, the helpful one, etc. But the actresses here inhabit their parts with grounding, defining detail and without comic or tragic exaggeration. To a one, they convey how a situation that is reprehensible to contemporary eyes is simply life to these women. They speak of parents sold to other masters, of children left behind, with a wistful acceptance and pragmatism. (Ms. Young's character to Philomena, talking about Lewis: "Might as well love him while he's still here.") The white performers, rounded out by Stephen James Anthony, don't turn their characters into Simon Legree like villains. They, too, are products of a warping time and place. But it's impossible not to shudder when you see George's perception toward Philomena flicker between that of solicitous lover and condescending, even contemptuous owner. The design team Lawrence E. Moten III (set), Sarah Woodham (costumes), Adam Honore (lighting) and Fan Zhang (sound) matches the eloquent understatement of Ms. Simpson's script. The production is punctuated by haunting silhouettes of women reaching out in pain and a sequence that presents them as anatomical specimens, gathered to be observed and analyzed. These voiceless moments paradoxically give a resonant voice to women who never got to tell their stories. "Behind the Sheet" may be a quiet play. But its echoes are thunderous.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Nurses are known to be caring, patient, full of equanimity. You don't go into the profession for cushy hours and padded salaries, and nurses are selflessly devoted to their jobs and their patients. But the way Covid 19 has been handled in this country had pushed many of them to the brink. Nurses are now scared and angry to an unprecedented degree, at least if we go by the new virtual docu play "That Kindness: Nurses in Their Own Words." Based on interviews conducted by V, the writer and performer formerly known as Eve Ensler, the work in progress "That Kindness" (which the Brooklyn Academy of Music is streaming through Monday, in cooperation with two dozen theaters around the country) slowly builds up from feel good stories of nurses discovering their vocation to seething evocations of frustration and even fury.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In the midst of national shortages of testing swabs and protective gear, some medical suppliers and health policy experts are looking ahead to another extraordinary demand on manufacturing: Delivering a vaccine that could potentially end the pandemic. Making a vaccine is not easy. More than two dozen companies have announced programs to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, but it may still take a year or more before one passes federal safety and efficacy tests in humans and becomes available to the public. Here in the United States, more than 300 million people may need to be inoculated. That means at least as many vials and syringes or double that amount, if two shots are required. To meet that demand, companies will have to ramp up manufacturing; products that doctors give little thought to now could easily become obstacles to vaccine delivery in the future. "We're thinking about the vaccine, but what if the vials it is stored in, or rubber stoppers in the vial or the plungers in the syringes become the constraint?" said Prashant Yadav, who studies health care supply chains at the Center for Global Development in Washington. Timing the orders of medical products like syringes and all the raw materials required to make them will be essential. Medical device manufacturers could increase inventory or find alternative supply chains for products that are running low, but everything will need to be systematically planned. Adding the capacity to make millions more syringes could take a manufacturer as long as 18 months to complete such a large order, for example. "The Covid 19 pandemic is creating industrywide challenges, including expected delays in inventory replenishment for certain products," said Lucy Bradlow, a spokeswoman for Cardinal Health, which makes vials and syringes as well as other medical supplies. Several manufacturers worry that the Trump administration may be waiting too long before ordering an ample supply of medical equipment needed to deliver a vaccine. One manufacturer said it had recently received an order for syringes, but was concerned that the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a branch of the Health and Human Services Department built to help with pandemic preparedness, was still soliciting too few supplies for nationwide vaccine delivery. Elleen Kane, a spokeswoman for the H.H.S., said the department had been "working daily with our manufacturers to secure those supplies and assist them with any anticipated obstacles in their supply chains." The White House is also developing a plan, called Operation Warp Speed, to accelerate vaccine production and try to get manufacturing capacity set up in advance of a vaccine approval. But some experts say that it is unclear whether the plan would apply to vaccine delivery devices like syringes, and details are still scarce about which federal agency would be responsible. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. In April, New Hampshire's senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, urging him "to ensure that the federal government obtains the materials to meet the demand for a vaccine when it becomes available." Of course, a lot will depend on the type of vaccine and when it is approved. A variety of RNA and DNA based vaccines are currently undergoing clinical trials, as well as more traditional types, which are made by placing instructions for coronavirus spike proteins inside a different dead or harmless virus. RNA or DNA vaccines might have different storage and refrigeration requirements because the technology has never been used for an approved vaccine before. The final vaccine might be packaged in ready to use glass syringes, which are commonly used in flu campaigns in Europe, or in a single dose or multidose vials that would be administered with disposable plastic syringes, which are standard for many vaccines in the United States. The amount of vaccine manufactured by a company could also affect the number of delivery systems needed, said Michael Gusmano, a health policy expert at the Hastings Center and Rutgers School of Public Health. It is unlikely that a pharmaceutical company will be able to match demand immediately nationally or internationally. "The good news is we have time," Dr. Gusmano said. Medical device manufacturers could slowly scale up vials and syringes as a vaccine becomes more widely available. Early estimates of the coronavirus's infectiousness suggest that at least 70 percent of the population would need to be immunized to reach what experts call herd immunity, when enough people are immune to a disease that they can also indirectly protect others who are not immune. "That's a remarkably high number, and I don't think we're anywhere close to that just with people who have been exposed to the virus and developed antibodies," Dr. Gusmano said. "So you're talking about a fairly massive vaccination campaign." Preliminary surveys in California and New York suggest that between 4 to 21 percent of people have developed antibodies to the coronavirus. But the accuracy of many antibody tests has been called into question. And it is still unclear whether having some of these antibodies provides effective and long lasting immunity against the coronavirus. Plus, most vaccination campaigns aim to immunize a high proportion of the population around 90 percent to successfully prevent transmission of disease. To produce the number of vials and syringes needed for a coronavirus vaccine, medical suppliers will need to increase manufacturing shifts and overtime for their employees, as well as collaborate with American and foreign trade authorities to expedite shipments and shorten lead times. A handful of manufacturers are based in the United States, but many still have to import the glass tubing for vials, polypropylene for syringes and rubber or silicone for small parts like the stoppers and plungers in these devices. Becton Dickinson Company, one of the world's largest manufacturers of needles and syringes, said it made nearly all components of its needles and syringes in house in the United States. Other companies may source from their factories and partners located largely in China and India, where lockdowns and export bans have already decreased production and exports. Although syringe manufacturing is mostly automated, with parts like the barrel and plunger made from a mold and put together on an assembly line, Dr. Yadav said manufacturers in India had told him fewer employees were able to work than needed for full capacity. At least 69 countries have also banned or restricted the export of medical devices, medicines and protective equipment, according to the Global Trade Alert project at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, because of their own needs during the pandemic. Manufacturers of medical syringes may have to find new supply channels, including partnerships with glass and plastic manufacturers that operate outside of the health care industry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Privacy advocates got a big win last year, pushing through a landmark law in California. Now, before the law even goes into effect, they are moving to make the statute tougher. Californians for Consumer Privacy, the nonprofit group behind the privacy law, announced a plan on Tuesday to give Californians new data rights and place new obligations on companies. Most significant, the proposal would require California to establish a data protection agency with the power to enforce the law and issue new regulations. The group's leader said he wants to amend the law through a ballot initiative next year. In order to do so, the group will need to first collect the valid signatures of more than 620,000 registered voters in California. "People are waking up to the fact that they've lost control of their information and are trying to take that control back," said Alastair Mactaggart, the founder and board chair of Californians for Consumer Privacy. The new privacy effort is likely to further inflame a debate over who should regulate the vast stores of personal details that tech giants have amassed on billions of people. The law passed last year, the California Consumer Privacy Act, will give consumers the right to see what personal information companies have compiled on them, delete that data and stop companies from selling it. It is scheduled to take effect next year. But many tech companies and trade associations have urged Congress to pass weaker federal privacy legislation that would overrule state laws. Trade associations have argued that it is too onerous for companies to comply with dozens of different state privacy laws and that American consumers should all have the same protections. "Internet companies stand ready with the broader business community to support unified, national privacy legislation," Michael Beckerman, chief executive of the Internet Association, said last week in a statement. The group's members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Uber. Mr. Mactaggart, a real estate developer, started Californians for Consumer Privacy to push for a comprehensive state privacy law. He and two colleagues Rick Arney, a financial industry executive, and Mary Stone Ross, a lawyer who had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency drafted a consumer privacy bill and introduced it as a ballot initiative. Ashkan Soltani, a privacy expert, worked on technical parts of the bill. Many tech companies and trade groups have been working to defang the California Consumer Privacy Act ever since. The statute is believed to be the most comprehensive state consumer privacy law in the United States. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. But after a recent spate of data mining failures at Facebook and other tech giants, Mr. Mactaggart argues that Californians need stronger rights to control the spread and use of their personal information. He plans to file a new ballot initiative on Wednesday. Among other things, it would give Californians the right to opt out of having sensitive details like their race, ethnicity, precise location, health and financial data used in advertising or marketing. It would also require companies that use algorithms to automatically make decisions about insurance and lending to explain their system's reasoning to consumers. California has long led the nation on consumer privacy. It was the first state to require companies to report data breaches, and to require companies to allow minors to delete their posts, tweets, photos and other material. In 1972, Californians voted to amend the state's Constitution to add privacy to its list of inalienable rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Mr. Mactaggart said he hoped that California would also become the first state to establish an independent data privacy regulator.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Two superheroes, both alike in not taking themselves too seriously, had very different experiences at the box office this weekend. Warner Bros.'s "Shazam!" made 25.1 million domestically, a solid sum that kept it in first place after a strong debut last weekend. That PG 13 film centers on a teenager (Asher Angel) who can transform into a hero with an adult body (Zachary Levi) by speaking the word "shazam." Based on a DC Comics character, "Shazam!" has a jaunty and lighthearted tone, and its continued box office success provides further evidence of the success of Warner Bros.'s shift away from the dark mood of "Suicide Squad" and "Justice League." "Shazam!" picked up an additional 35.9 million outside of North America this weekend, according to Warner Bros., which brings the film's worldwide gross to 258.8 million. That's more than double the roughly 100 million the movie cost to make.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The HBO show changed New York by making new New Yorkers. These are the stories of our "Sex and the City" dreams and nightmares. On June 6, 1998, HBO broadcast its first episode of "Sex and the City," introducing the world to Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha: four single women who conquered Manhattan. Much has been written about how the show changed television, and its depiction of female friendships and sex. Less remarked upon is how the show spurred a generation of young, ambitious and single professionals to move to New York to chase their own "Sex and the City" dreams whether that meant finding Mr. Big or sipping cosmopolitans in the Hamptons. Just ask Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, 43, a writer who was living in suburban New Jersey with her fiance. "I was watching 'Sex and the City,' and I just went, 'Oh my God, there's a whole thing I didn't do yet,'" she said. "'I can't live in New Jersey and get married now.'" In 2001, she ditched the fiance, moved into a tiny East Village apartment and became a full time writer. Her latest book, "Sex and the City and Us," is out this month. To mark the 20th anniversary, we asked readers to tell their stories of how "Sex and the City" inspired their moves to New York. Several hundred replied, with many recounting how the show painted a seductive vision of Manhattan: endless brunches with gal pals, rewarding careers, a sea of handsome suitors and, of course, shopping sprees. Lots of these respondents were men. In a sign of the show's enduring cultural influence, many also criticized its crass consumerism, blaming "Sex and the City" for the demise of the West Village, in particular, and all that is good with downtown Manhattan before the days of cupcake lines and what one reader called "the influx of vapid, self absorbed wannabes." Here are some of their stories, edited for space and clarity. They followed in Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo clad footsteps. With some stumbles. Age: 28 Occupation: Lifestyle writer From: Boca Raton, Fla. Move date: 2014 Lives now: Studio apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn I grew up watching "Sex and the City" on VHS whenever I convinced my mom to let me stay home from school. I read all of Candace Bushnell's books and dressed up like her for the movie premiere, complete with beachy curls and enormous accessories. I was convinced I had to move to New York, vacation in the Hamptons and take the Jitney, which I imagined to be incredibly glamorous after reading "Four Blondes." I moved to New York four years ago, and couch surfed for the entire summer while freelancing for women's lifestyle publications in my quest to be just like Carrie (with a little Charlotte thrown in). Now I am a lifestyle writer at the New York Observer, which is exactly what Carrie did (although I don't have a similar shoe closet). I write about pop culture and am currently working on my first book, a millennial's answer to "Sex and the City." Age: 30 Occupation: Special events director for the High Line From: Bel Air, Md. Move date: 2010 Lives now: Hell's Kitchen I always knew that "Sex and the City" inspired my move to New York, but I couldn't have said exactly why. As a gay man, I grew up without a close knit group of friends who were just like me. College gave me my first taste of that. But even then, there was still something missing: the city itself. So, when my parents dropped me off at a studio sublet on the Upper East Side almost eight years ago, my quest for my New York City family began against the backdrop of having the freedom to date for the first time. And every adventure in dating became bearable, by the group of boys I met along the way. As my own versions of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha, they became the fabric that wove together every job, every heartache, every anger and every hope. One August, I had a fleeting exchange with a guy I met on Fire Island that we didn't pursue because he was in the midst of a breakup. A few months later, I was (randomly) photographed by the Styles section of The New York Times while in line at Joe's Pub, and he saw me in the paper and sent me a text. We've been together ever since. And when I dished to my best friend about how this guy got back in touch with me, he said, "That's so Carrie Bradshaw." Age: 40 Occupation: Video journalist From: Houston Move date: 2000 Lives now: In Harlem with her fiance I moved to New York in 2000 to pursue a career in fashion P.R. I was a newly minted college grad from Texas and arrived with all the optimism and naivete of a typical newcomer. I had interned with fashion designer Cynthia Rowley the previous year and had fallen in love with the city's energy and glamour. But I quickly learned how unglamorous fashion P.R. actually is. The position, however, did offer moments that now seem auspicious. One of those was meeting Sarah Jessica Parker at a work event. She was gracious enough to pose for a picture with me and, for years, I was so proud of that photo, especially as I realized how much I would come to love the show. Before then, I hadn't actually seen "Sex and the City," but I was instantly hooked. Here was a show that so perfectly captured the frustrations and hilarities of single women living, dating and working in New York. It was like my life playing out onscreen. Sure, I couldn't afford Manolos or a summer share in the Hamptons, but like Carrie, I loved fashion and got to be a part of that world. And I definitely dated my share of duds. We all spent too much money going out, partying and drinking cosmos. In the end, fashion P.R. wasn't for me. The egos were too big to handle and the priorities left me yearning for something more meaningful. I pivoted to fashion TV, working as a production assistant, then later moved on to cable TV, local news and finally network news. I now work as a video journalist for Voice of America. New York, I Love You, But ... They came, they spent. And then they left. My son, Jack, only lived to be three weeks old. Shortly after his death, my marriage to his father ended just as abruptly. I was crushed. My life, as I knew it, was over. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and moved back to the Bay Area to be near my friends. As much love and support as I received from them, there was no rule book on how to deal with my loss. I was often left out of their kids' celebrations to spare me from the reminder. Their intentions were good, but not being invited made me feel worse. Something had to change. I was 38 years old, newly divorced and childless. But I was also completely free free to live any way and anywhere I wanted. I chose New York City. I had always loved New York, and as with most women back then, "Sex and the City" was a favorite escape. My friends would often tell me that I was the Charlotte of the group, and when I moved to New York in 2009, I identified with her the most. I put everything I owned in storage, purchased a one way ticket and created a blog called Sevinthecity about my experience. I made a point of doing as much as I could so I could share my experiences with the few who followed me. In doing so, I somehow turned what was supposed to be a one year sojourn into seven. I fell in love twice, had my heart broken twice and lived in four different apartments. When I returned to San Francisco in 2016, I came to realize I no longer identified with Charlotte but discovered after seven incredible years in New York that I was really Carrie Bradshaw all along. Just look in my closet. Age: 33 Occupation: Sales manager for an oil and gas company From: St. Louis Move date: 2008 Lives now: A Southern style doll house in Houston with her husband I was an N.F.L. cheerleader when I received a job offer for a marketing position at a financial firm in Jersey City. I jumped at the chance to use my degree and be the woman I knew I was destined to become. My room in Chinatown was the size of my mom's dining room rug; 750 a month earned me "once a day" bathroom privileges. One night I had to relieve myself in a Duane Reade shopping bag; this would not have happened to Samantha. I was lonely. I called my dad every night from the fire escape outside my room, my only place of solitude. Those nights, complaining of the beautiful idiosyncrasies of New York life, were the best conversations with my late father. Until New York, we hadn't spoken on the phone since the divorce. He was the only person who understood this strange new city. God had me move to New York not to find my Mr. Big, but to meet my father. Age: 31 Occupation: Art and photography buyer for a shopping app From: New London, Conn. Move date: 2008 Lives now: Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin I remember watching the first episode of "Sex and the City" on DVD when I was 15 years old in 2001. That first episode (and every episode after that) was absolutely life changing. As a young, small town closeted teen still struggling to figure out who I was, here was a show that gave me a glimpse into how my future could potentially be like: independent, confident and fabulous. Moreover, that was the moment my romance with New York began. The city seemed so endless, with adventures around every corner. The chance of falling in love and finding "the one" overpowered everything. All of that turned out to be true once I moved here in 2008. As a 21 year old, I was definitely a Carrie Bradshaw: wide eyed, hopeful and a bit naive. But as I grew up, I can definitely say I am now a full blown Samantha Jones; someone that truly knows who they are and doesn't give a darn what people think. In a twist to my story, after 10 full years in this incredible beautiful place, I just moved to Berlin (not Paris, thank God). And I couldn't help but wonder: What kind of person would I be if I had never moved to New York? Definitely not someone that would move his entire life to another continent, that's for sure. Age: 31 Occupation: Marketer and writer From: Coto de Caza, Calif. Move date: 2008 Lives now: A two bedroom condo in La Mesa, Calif., with her husband. In 2006, I was a junior in college, and "Sex and the City" episodes were on repeat in my sorority house. The scenes in Manhattan made me ripe with envy, and the clothes made me swoon. I was a wide eyed journalism major and spent the summer between my junior and senior years interning for Conde Nast. Upon graduation, I promptly moved back to Manhattan. But 2008 was a disaster: an unfortunate time to graduate, much less move to what felt like the most competitive city in the world. Bouncing off the subway, I returned to Conde Nast to find my paid internship as an undergrad, was now an unpaid internship as a graduate. I filled my days with freelance work, lackluster waitressing gigs and spirit crushing temp jobs. I had New York City at my fingertips. What I didn't have were friends, family, a job, somewhere to go each day. I became my own best friend, an invaluable lesson. But my heart ached when I walked by girlfriends laughing at brunch together. Days were spent blasting my resume out, and at night I fell asleep to the show. My year in Manhattan was the best and the worst year of my life. I may not have moved there because of "Sex and the City," but I sought refuge in the stories. These days, watching the show makes me nostalgic for the young woman I was at 21, even with all of my doubts, fears and insecurities. I feel proud of who she grew into. And I still quote Carrie whenever possible. The show also inspired its share of critics. "Sex and the City" created an unrealistic fantasy for some women. I dated one. We were having a birthday dinner one year, when I surprised our table with some delicious pastries from a neighborhood bakery. My girlfriend's sister, K, asked if the pastries were from Magnolia, the Bleecker Street place best identified by the hordes of tourists waiting for their "Sex and the City" cupcakes. K's face displayed pure disdain when I answered in the negative. They were from another, far better bakery down the street, I told them. My girlfriend and K tried to hide their disappointment and feigned interest while taking their obligatory bites. Our relationship crumbled within weeks. It wasn't until months after the breakup, while walking past that infamous bakery that I realized how the idolization of her basement apartment (on the perfect street!), the move, the shopping, the shoes and the disappointing birthday pastries were all linked to a fantastical life she saw through a TV series and rewatched exhaustively. It was a life I found too banal. A year later, spotting my ex and her new husband, I wanted to give him the only advice I had: Watch every episode and watch it twice, and then you will have the keys to understanding part of her. I never shared that advice, choosing instead to continue walking homeward with my new partner, munching our superior pastries. I lived in the East Village throughout the 1980s and '90s, then a neighborhood strewn with junkies, despair and endless inspiration. Madonna was performing at Danceteria. The Blue Man group was playing a tiny club on Avenue A, while cross dressers danced on the bar of the Pyramid Club. The world as we knew it was thrilling, and it was nothing like "Sex and the City." My first apartment had the bathtub/kitchen setup, with a plank you raised to wash the dishes or take a shower. It was not an easy life, but we felt on top of the world anyhow. We wore Doc Martens, never Manolo Blahniks. We cared a lot about fashion, but our style required low rent creativity. The Hamptons? My worst nightmare, still is. To leave town back then, we'd take the F train all the way out to Coney Island, to walk in the ashtray sand along the endless Atlantic. As it turns out, "Sex and the City" marked the end rather than the beginning of my great love affair with New York. Uptown girls were soon occupying our former tenement apartments for exorbitant rents. The East Village is now as safe and pretty as the West Village. I didn't watch the show until after I left New York in 2000. I identified with Carrie (except for her apartment and wardrobe), a writer who was smart, funny and had sexual agency. I enjoyed the beautifully written episodes, and after leaving the city, I watched it to be among sassy, confident New York girls again.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
At the risk of sounding critical, the second day of Q. A. in the Senate's impeachment trial of President Trump was less than illuminating perhaps even the teensiest bit tedious. The questions were just as transparently loaded as on Wednesday; the answers just as predictable. The arguments the same. At times even Chief Justice John Roberts looked bored as the hours wore on and he found himself reading variations on the same tired queries over and over. The political stunts were stale as well. For the second straight day, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky submitted a question aimed at revealing the name of the C.I.A. whistle blower whose complaint effectively sparked the impeachment investigation. And for the second straight day, the chief justice refused to read it as he had warned on Wednesday that he would. Mr. Paul (who is an ophthalmologist, not a lawyer) then left the chamber to hold a quick, huffy news conference at which he upbraided the chief justice over his "incorrect finding" and then read aloud the rejected question. It named the individual he believes to be the whistle blower and asked House managers to respond to "reports" that this person had worked with a Democratic staffer on the House Intelligence Committee "to plot impeaching the president before there were formal House impeachment proceedings." Mr. Paul helpfully tweeted his question as well. There was no shortage of attempts to gin up outrage. The House managers raised questions about who had been paying Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney and point man on the Ukraine scheme. More than one member of the defense team went after the Biden family. Pam Bondi, the former Republican attorney general of Florida, reprised her breathless account of Hunter Biden's gig with Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company. He was paid 83,000 a month, she reminded everyone. "He had a very fancy job description." One of the more fascinating moments came when defender Eric Herschmann launched into what could have been a campaign ad for Mr. Trump. He ran through a list of the president's accomplishments, from cutting taxes to replacing NAFTA to building the wall or at least getting it started before gushing, that, if all that had been done "solely, solely in their words, for his 'personal and political gain,' then I say, God bless him! Keep doing it! Keep doing it!" MAGA comes to the floor of the United States Senate. And after all that back and forth? The battle lines remained exactly where they were the day the process began. The key takeaway from the president's legal team: Nothing to see here, folks! Plus, the House managers have done such a shoddy job of uncovering and presenting that nothing that this entire exercise is a travesty. Validate it at your peril. And from the House managers: There's a ton to see here! And if you want to see more, why don't you subpoena John Bolton and other witnesses and documents? Friday's witness drama is, of course, what Thursday was really all about. Forget the Q. A. Around Capitol Hill, everyone was on the hunt for clues as to how the vote count was shaping up, with the handful of senators considered ambivalent being read like tea leaves: What did the questions submitted by Susan Collins of Maine portend? Alaska's Lisa Murkowski was seen during a break talking to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell! What was he saying? Had anyone heard anything from Lamar Alexander of Tennessee? Mr. Alexander, who is retiring at the end of this year, is an institutionalist concerned with upholding the integrity of the Senate. But he's also one of Mr. McConnell's BFFs. Which way is he leaning?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
AMERICAN MASTERS: RAUL JULIA THE WORLD'S A STAGE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). By the time of his death in 1994, the actor Raul Julia had become famous both for performing on and Off Broadway and for his later film roles, which included the role of Gomez in "The Addams Family" (1994). This documentary revisits his life and career through archival footage and interviews with figures including his fellow "Addams Family" star Anjelica Huston, the Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis and James Earl Jones, whom Julia once starred opposite in a production of "King Lear" in Central Park. ROOM 104 11 p.m. on HBO. The brothers Jay and Mark Duplass are behind this chameleonic anthology series, which kicks off its third season on Friday. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes funny, the show's stories take place in many different time periods, and all revolve around a single room at an American motel. The third season involves an exotic animal and the reunion of a pair of estranged siblings.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
SHOULD you trust your hard earned retirement dollars to a robot? These robots, of course, aren't like those you see in the movies. But they are capable of providing investment advice usually delivered by a human adviser sitting behind a desk and for a lot less money. So called robo advisers which assemble investment portfolios after customers answer a series of questions online have been widely praised for their easy, low cost approach to investing. The automated services, which include start ups like Betterment and Wealthfront, along with offshoots from established players like Schwab, have quickly amassed 53 billion under management in just a handful of years, according to estimates by Aite Group. But in recent months, critics have raised questions about their limitations. The flow of funds into robo adviser accounts is expected to accelerate because of new federal regulations, which require all financial professionals to put their customers' interests first, at least when providing advice on their tax advantaged retirement accounts. The rules, issued by the Labor Department, are expected to push more customers into lower cost investments. Aite predicts that robo advisers will collect nearly 285 billion by 2017, still a small portion of the 20 trillion in retail investors' assets held at brokerage firms and registered investment advisory firms. Robo advisers were already required to follow the highest standards of consumer protection on every dollar they manage, not just retirement money because most of them are registered investment advisers. That means they are required to act as fiduciaries, the legal term meaning they must put customers ahead of all else. And it's a banner the robo advisers wave proudly. Given their status, the Labor Department, which oversees retirement accounts, has essentially given the robo advisers its blessing, since many firms avoid the conflicts of interest embedded in the way the brokerage industry and its armies of representatives conduct their businesses. But at the same time, other regulators have raised concerns about whether robo advisers are thorough enough when gathering information about investors. A robo adviser does not ask about money held outside of its service, for example, which can provide a distorted picture of a customer's financial standing. Others argue the robo advisers try to wiggle out of too much responsibility in their customer agreements. The Massachusetts Securities Division recently put investors and the state registered investment advisers it oversees or those with less than 100 million in assets on notice. In a paper issued this month, it bluntly stated that it did not believe an algorithm alone was capable of serving as a fiduciary, at least not the way robo advisers are structured now. "I am not sure that many investors, in many cases, can be adequately taken care of by answering questions," said William F. Galvin, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, who likened the services to driverless cars. "You need a human that is responding to them.'' Arthur Laby, a professor at Rutgers Law School, said investment advisers, as fiduciaries, can limit the breadth of their relationship with clients. Still, he does not view robo advisers as fiduciaries in the traditional sense because of their inability to address subtleties that may arise in conversation. "They are not able to provide the kind of personalized advice that a customer can get from a human on the phone or sitting across the desk, where the customer can say: 'Oh, I have a new wrinkle. I might be inheriting assets in the next 12 months,'" he said. "Or: 'I may need to care for a sick parent. How will that impact the cash I need?'" Many robo advisers say that they make their limits clear, noting that they are not in the business of providing full scale financial planning. But often that kind of information is buried in the fine print. Being a "fiduciary is not about the types of service you offer, it's about the quality of service," said Adam Nash, chief executive of Wealthfront, a robo adviser managing more than 3 billion. "There are financial planners helping you figure out what type of house you should buy. It's not required that everyone do that." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The Massachusetts regulator and other industry critics argue that robo advisers should go further, evaluating assets held elsewhere before investing customers' money. (Wealthfront and Betterment already have technology in place that lets customers connect as many accounts to their services as they would like, giving the firms a bird's eye view of a client's assets. But for now they do not factor that into their investment analysis.) So exactly how deep are robo advisers required to go? The law and legal precedents that govern investment advisers, and that shaped fiduciary duty, do not specifically spell that out. But several legal experts seem to agree that advising on a portion of an investor's financial life is perfectly fine. "It is not unusual for clients to expressly or secretly withhold information from their advisers about other assets," said Mercer E. Bullard, a professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law. "For example, if a 35 year old says, 'I'm not going to tell you what other assets I own and I want you to invest 100,000 for my retirement,' you can do that with disclosure that the allocation might be different if you knew all of their assets." Kara M. Stein, a commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission, recently said the idea of a robot that generates advice certainly bumps up against the traditional view of a fiduciary, which is based on a human relationship. "We should be asking whether these new robo advisers can be neatly placed within our existing laws," she said in a November speech. "Or, do we need certain tweaks and revisions?" Mary Jo White, chairwoman of the S.E.C., said in a March speech that as part of the commission's effort to monitor emerging automated investment models, staff members from its exam program were looking into robo advisers. "Through these inspections," she said, "we deepen our knowledge of the range of services provided, as well as the challenges associated with different automated models." And last May, the S.E.C. and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, jointly issued an investor alert on automated investment services that highlighted their risks and limitations. For example, these services may suggest a certain mix of investments, the regulators said, but not realize that the investor needs some of the money in a few years to buy a new home. There is also a hybrid breed of robo adviser, with human advisers who rely heavily on computer driven portfolios. These include Personal Capital and Vanguard Personal Advisor Services. Finra issued a report just last month, providing guidance for investors and advisers using such automated services. The report suggested that investors evaluate whether a firm is gathering enough information to understand their needs and stomach for risk. The report said Cerulli Associates, a research firm, had compared the stock to bond mix across seven digital advice providers, based on a 27 year old investing for retirement. The suggested stock allocations ranged from as high as 90 percent to as low as 51 percent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
WITH electric cars and plug in hybrids at last trickling into the showrooms of mainstream automakers, the dream of going gasoline free is becoming a reality for many drivers. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt can cover considerable distances under electric power alone certainly enough for local errands and even most daily commutes while enabling their owners to shun gas stations. Indeed, charging the car's battery pack at home, or topping up at the office or shopping mall, will work fine for most drivers. But what about trips that are beyond the range of a single battery charge? Couldn't a driver in need simply pull up to a charging kiosk and plug in for a rapid refill? Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery. As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models. But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging or even on a single electrical connector. Today's prevalent D.C. fast charge systems are built to a standard developed in Japan by Nissan, Mitsubishi and Subaru in conjunction with Tokyo Electric Power. Called Chademo, which translates roughly to "charge and move," it uses a connector that is different from the plugs in most electric cars. As a result, a Chademo compatible car like the Nissan Leaf requires two separate sockets. Overcoming the limitation of a short driving range is vital to achieving acceptance by consumers who want uncompromised, do everything vehicles. The potential solutions all have drawbacks. Larger batteries are expensive and saddle the car with added weight. An onboard generator turned by a gasoline engine, as used in the Volt plug in hybrid and similar future models, are another possible solution, but such systems add cost and pounds and compromise the emissions free image that attracts consumers to electric cars in the first place. Leisurely overnight recharging is no problem. All electric cars come with a standard charging cable that can plug into a common 120 volt household electrical outlet. More than just an extension cord, this cable incorporates various safety features. "There is no energy flowing through the cord until the car talks to the box," said Gery Kissel, an engineering specialist for General Motors, referring to the charging cord's electronics. "It also has a G.F.C.I. and signals the car that the cable is connected, making it impossible for you to drive off if you forget that you're plugged in," he said, using the abbreviation for the safety provision known as a ground fault circuit interrupter. The Leaf and the Volt, as well as future electric cars coming to the American market, can use these 120 volt cords interchangeably because they are all designed to the SAE J1772 standard. A task force assembled by SAE International, an organization of scientists and vehicle engineers, developed the design specifications for the J1772 standard through a committee of 150 carmakers, electrical equipment makers and utilities. Other groups, including the American National Standards Institute, are also working on standards and codes for electric cars. Charging an electric car on a 120 volt circuit, called Level 1 charging, is undeniably slow. The Volt requires about 10 hours to fully charge on 120 volts and the Leaf, with its larger battery, needs closer to 20 hours. For plug in hybrids, which generally have smaller batteries, Level 1 charging works for overnight and at work refills, but pure electrics need something stronger. That next step, called Level 2 charging, uses a 240 volt circuit. Typically, this charging cable is not portable; instead, it's hard wired to a garage or charging station, though the actual charger is built into the car. These higher voltage cables also cost extra about 2,000, the majority of which goes to the installation. "This is the type of charger we'll be seeing in parking lots," said Nancy Gioia, director for global electrification at Ford Motor. "The hardware on 120 volts won't provide enough incremental range to satisfy customers." With a 240 volt unit, the Leaf can recharge a depleted battery in less than eight hours and the Volt can do it in about four. These chargers use the same SAE J1772 connection As you might expect, with electric cars just starting to reach volume production these chargers are not yet common. Level 2 charging stations are planned for each of Nissan's 1,100 dealers, but the Web site carstations.com lists only about 1,350 charging stations of all types scattered across the 50 states, mostly in California and the Northeast. The Leaf's navigation system can display nearby charging locations. In the long term, however, commercial chargers will proliferate, especially as private companies get into the business. Among these is NRG, a power utility, which announced in April that it would install 120 Level 2 charging stations in Houston and Dallas Fort Worth by the end of 2012. NRG will charge fixed monthly fees to use the stations, with a three year contract. For unlimited usage the rate is 89 a month, or 1,068 a year the equivalent of 7,000 miles in a car that gets 25 m.p.g. with gas costing 4 a gallon. The NRG charging stations will incorporate not only Level 2 chargers, but also D.C. fast chargers. Fast chargers have complex hardware a permanent installation, not an onboard system that requires a connection to 480 volt three phase alternating current. Sensitive circuitry is needed to convert this high voltage A.C. power into direct current without frying the car's battery. As you might expect, such chargers are expensive at least 20,000 for the charger and another 20,000 for the installation. The payoff is the ability to charge a Leaf's battery to 80 percent capacity in half an hour, compared with six hours on a Level 2 charger or roughly 15 on a Level 1. Or put another way, 10 minutes on a D.C. fast charger can add about 30 miles of range. The SAE committee is working on a modification of the J1772 connector to incorporate this high powered D.C. charging as well as the existing Level 1 and 2 charging in a single connector. "BMW prefers the SAE 1772 approach to having a single connector," said Rich Steinberg, manager for electric vehicle operations and strategy at BMW North America, echoing the view of many carmakers. The revised J1772 prototype will not be ready until this fall, according to Peter Byk of SAE, and the final version is unlikely to be ready until late 2012.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A roundup of motoring news from the web: General Motors has joined Ford in the practice of removing heavy items like rear bumpers from its trucks when calculating their total payload capability, the automaker told Automotive News in an email Wednesday. Chrysler's Ram brand and Toyota use unmodified curb weights to calculate payload capacity, and although G.M. said in a recent Automotive News article that it used the same method, Tom Wilkinson, a spokesman for the automaker, said this week that the claim had been made in error. (Automotive News, subscription required) Chrysler is recalling about 30,000 Fiat 500Ls because an air bag meant to protect the knees of front passengers may not inflate in the correct position. Chrysler said that it was not aware of any injuries related to the defect. (USA Today) Consumer Reports on Monday called for Toyota to recall about 177,500 Camry hybrid sedans from the 2007 11 model years for a power brake system problem that could lead to brake loss. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had already begun a look into related complaints on vehicles from the 2007 8 model years, and Toyota said in a statement this week that it was working with regulators. (Reuters) BMW said this week that it had developed a new suitcase size electric vehicle charger that it said could be used not only for BMW E.V.s, but also on plug in vehicles from competitors like Nissan and General Motors. BMW said it hoped the DC quick chargers would help create a nationwide charging network. (Automotive News, subscription required)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SAN FRANCISCO No matter which political party you belong to, one thing is clear: Donald J. Trump's presidency has galvanized political activism to a level of passion not seen since the civil rights movement. Far less clear is what you can do in reaction to the Trump administration's changes. And in an era that promises instant gratification like cars, couriers and food summoned to your driveway with the tap of a smartphone app you might think tech is a quick and easy solution to becoming a political activist. But it turns out software and web tools can go only so far. "Sitting behind your computer is not going to be as effective as showing up for people where they really need it," said Joshua Tauberer, the creator of GovTrack, a popular web tool for tracking legislation. "Government is people." At best, tech is an excellent resource for staying on top of political activities. But at some point, you will have to go outside or pick up the phone and engage with people, like fellow citizens and members of Congress. That's not to say tech is powerless. Opponents of Mr. Trump's immigration ban, for example, used Twitter and Facebook to rally thousands of people for protests at the nation's airports last month. Similarly, protesters used social media platforms to help coordinate the Jan. 21 women's marches, which by one account constituted the largest day of demonstrations in American history. But what else can you do besides following news and events on Twitter and Facebook? What follows is a guide to some of the most useful resources and tools I uncovered after interviews with tech skilled activists. The first challenge to getting more politically active is filtering out the torrent of political news to understand what you should care about. One high level approach is to read the executive orders posted on the White House website. Beyond that, following your members of Congress is an important way to get deeper information, says Indivisible, an activism guide published by former congressional staff members. These are the people who introduce legislation, so keeping up with them is crucial if you want to be more politically active. After identifying your members of Congress, visit their websites and sign up to receive their newsletters and invitations to local events. You can create Google News alerts on certain lawmakers to keep up with their actions. Another approach is following the legislation you care about. Mr. Tauberer's tool, GovTrack.us, lets you share your location, select an issue and view the bills that have been introduced. For example, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California introduced a bill to nullify the effect of the executive order on immigration. The site says there is a 7 percent chance of the bill being enacted. You could then contact Ms. Feinstein's office to say you support or oppose her bill. After becoming educated, the next step is to engage by contacting lawmakers and letting them know what you think. Political activism is surprisingly low tech: Phone calls carry more weight than an email or a tweet, partly because a phone ringing incessantly is harder to ignore than a flooded inbox. Less obvious is how to do all that. You have to find your local representative and then figure out what to say. Mr. Tauberer recently published a new web tool, phonecongress.com. The site detects your location to identify your local representatives, and then lists contact information and instructions on what to say about various issues to each lawmaker. For example, if you live in Dallas and disagree with President Trump's nominations, the site instructs you to call Senator John Cornyn and say, "Hi, I'm a resident of Dallas and I would like Senator Cornyn to vote against President Trump's nominations for his cabinet." You will only get so far working alone. At some point, joining a group will help you coordinate broader actions like protests or coordinated phone calls. Where to find one? That will depend on your political beliefs: You will have to ask around or search social networks like Meetup.com, a site to find local events and people who share your interests.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
As a child, Ellen Moses spent summers at her family's 1930s lake house in Detroit Lakes, Minn., where her father used to tell her a story about how the home was built on top of tree stumps. Ms. Moses, now 55, always assumed that was nothing more than family folklore. But when she called in a contractor to peel up the floor as part of a kitchen renovation in late 2016, she was suddenly faced with proof: The story, it turned out, was true. "The house was built on tree stumps and logs set sideways," said Ms. Moses, whose father passed away in 2001. "On top of that, there were a lot of animals living under the house. It was quite a discovery." Ms. Moses, a New York based ceramist who grew up in Fargo, N.D., was acting on behalf of her mother, Linda Moses, who owns the property and lives there during the summer. The younger Ms. Moses and her wife, Lori O'Dea, live in the West Village and had been spending a few weeks at the house every summer for years and were looking to extend their stays. "We really love the place and have such a lot of fun there," said Ms. O'Dea, who works in educational content development at the College Board in New York City. "We were trying to think about how we could spend more time there," she continued, by creating more comfortable living spaces for everyone, as well as separate quarters that would allow her to work remotely. As the scope of the project expanded, Ms. Moses, an avid cyclist, turned to one of her racing teammates, Ceren Bingol, for help. Ms. Bingol, an architect who had just left the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and was on her way to becoming the interim architect in residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, invited Ms. Moses and Ms. O'Dea over to her freshly renovated Upper West Side apartment for brunch. "They walked in and were like, 'We want this. This would be perfect,'" said Ms. Bingol, whose apartment is a crisp, white minimalist space with extensive concealed storage. "It was both the aesthetic of the apartment, which was lofty and light, but also making the best use of a small space." From Ms. Bingol's perspective, the biggest challenge was the schedule. "They said they only had five months, because they wanted their mom to be in by May," she said. "Ideally, it would have been a one and a half year project." She agreed to take it on anyway and started working on the plans in January 2017, at the same time that demolition began a process that required designing on the fly and daily coordination. "We had phone calls at 7 a.m. every day," Ms. Bingol said. Then, at night, "I'd have another phone call with Ellen, at 8:00 or 9:00. Sometimes we would talk at 2 a.m." Following Ms. Bingol's instructions, the contractors poured a concrete slab foundation with integrated radiant heating. They added steel beams overhead to open up a wall between the kitchen and living room. They replaced knotty pine paneling with gray painted shiplap paneling. They added expanses of storage cabinets, a built in desk and a new kitchen with cabinets that had a satin conversion varnish finish, quartz counters and integrated Miele appliances. The squat brick wood burning fireplace, which was almost never used, became a point of contention. Ms. Moses wanted to remove it, but her mother and Ms. O'Dea were hesitant. After consulting with Ms. Bingol, they arrived at a compromise: The fireplace was resurfaced in stone, the surround extended to the ceiling and a gas insert added.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"Not quite rural but very non suburban," is how Lisa Arrigo, a resident of Goldens Bridge, describes this 2.6 square mile hamlet of rolling hills and densely wooded areas in the town of Lewisboro. It has few restaurants and only one supermarket but, being bifurcated by Interstate 684, is an easy drive from southern Westchester and Connecticut. "It's only 30 minutes to Westchester Mall, and four miles from my office in Katonah," said Ms. Arrigo, a psychologist. "The interstate makes travel very easy." The highway, which dates to the 1960s, started out highly unpopular in the area, because it diverted most north south travelers away from Route 22 and dried up commerce in that section of Goldens Bridge. By the 1980s, though, Metro North Railroad's electrification of the northern section of its Harlem Line, along with the convenience of the highway, had increased commuters' interest in Goldens Bridge, which is 50 miles north of Midtown. The population grew as a result; as of the 2010 census, there were 1,630 residents. Back before the highway, Goldens Bridge a major 19th century dairy stop along the New York and Harlem Railroad was a favorite summer destination for New York City dwellers. The bars are long gone; development was slack by the mid 2000s, and the hamlet like many in the area didn't fare too well during the housing crash. Close to a decade has elapsed since development stagnated, although that may be on the verge of changing: On 95 acres, Boniello Land and Realty, a local developer, is working on a community it calls Falcon Ridge, envisioning 11 custom properties, costing 1.5 million and up, on lots ranging from two to seven acres. None of the lots have sold yet. Real estate generally is relatively affordable, as Ms. Arrigo and Tammy Neubauer, her partner, found eight years ago when they bought a new four bedroom three and a half bath colonial for about 950,000. Their other reasons for choosing Goldens Bridge, Ms. Arrigo said: its highly rated school system, its wide choice of housing options, and the benefits afforded by Interstate 684 and the railroad. Ms. Neubauer, the aquatics director of a local health club, has three daughters, 24, 21 and 16, all of whom attended Katonah Lewisboro district schools. The youngest attends John Jay High School. Another asset is the outdoors: Natural beauty is abundant, and hiking trails thread through many scenic areas. For officials like Mr. Parsons, however, the topography presents infrastructure challenges, especially during hard winters. To start with, there are 96 miles of roads across six hamlets: Goldens Bridge, Cross River, South Salem, Vista, Waccabuc and Lewisboro. "Nobody ever says they live in Lewisboro," Mr. Parsons said, adding that residents identify more with their hamlet than the town. "They say, 'I'm from South Salem' or 'I'm from Goldens Bridge.' Richard Beaven for The New York Times "Being the supervisor of Lewisboro is like being the king of the Belgians. The hamlets are so spread out geographically, each with its own separate needs." The Goldens Bridge Fire District has 822 single family homes, one co op building with 48 units, three townhouse developments with 184 units and about 20 lots that are zoned commercial, said Lise Robertson, the town's assessor. There are 1,117 lots in the hamlet, 110 of them vacant. One of its older sections, the Goldens Bridge Community Center, a 150 acre area often referred to as "the Colony," was founded as a summer getaway cooperative in 1927 by workers from New York City many of them union members concerned about civil rights and labor issues. It is no longer a cooperative, but it still has the lake built by its founders. Its summer homes have been winterized, and in the warmer months it is home to a summer camp. There is also an older neighborhood of modest wood frame homes across from the train station, dating to the second half of the 1880s, when the Croton Reservoir was being built, and flooding threatened the area. A group of residents used teams of oxen to hoist up their houses and relocate them there. There are several developments, including Wild Oaks Village, which was built in the 1970s and includes townhouses and detached homes. Richard Beaven for The New York Times Four years ago Shalyn Courtney, a financial adviser who commutes to an office in Purchase, and her husband, Buddy, a client service manager for Wells Fargo in White Plains and Shelton, Conn., paid 419,000 for a three bedroom two and a half bath townhouse in the Glen, a 1998 development. The two, once professional opera singers, have a daughter, 7, who attends first grade, and a son, 5, who will enter full day kindergarten in the fall. At the close of 2013, the median sale price of a single family home was 637,500 in Goldens Bridge; in 2006, before the housing crash, the median was 999,000, said Maryellen Walsh, a branch manager for Houlihan Lawrence. The hamlet is more affordable than other northern Westchester communities. In the nearby hamlets of Bedford and Bedford Village, for example, the median was 737,500 in December. In the county as a whole, however, the median was lower than that of Goldens Bridge: 610,000 at the close of last year. As of March 12, there were nine houses for sale, ranging in price from 649,000, for a four bedroom two and a half bath colonial on one acre, to 2.149 million for a five bedroom four and a half bath house on 4.2 acres. What Goldens Bridge lacks in restaurants and shopping, it makes up for in outdoor activities. 7 Webb Lane A four bedroom four bath (914) 232 5007, ext. 319 A four bedroom four bath Cape Cod on more than an acre, listed at 679,500.(914) 232 5007, ext. 319 Richard Beaven for The New York Times Lori Laub, who owns a boutique at a health club, and her husband, Andrew, who owns a Bronx real estate company, moved here 16 years ago, paying 700,000 for a four bedroom three and a half bath ranch on two acres. They have two children, Melanie 17, a senior at John Jay High School, and Travis, 13, who attends John Jay Middle School. Like other residents, they travel to Mount Kisco or Bedford for movies and dining. But they frequently walk a few blocks from home, choose one of several trails and hike for hours. "It's something the whole family enjoys," Ms. Laub said. The Katonah Lewisboro School District has a total enrollment of about 3,400 in four elementary schools, John Jay Middle School and John Jay High School. Enrollment has declined since 2001, and the Board of Education decided earlier this year to close Lewisboro Elementary. On the most recent state tests, 64 percent of students were deemed proficient in both English and Math; that compares with percentages of 30 and 36 statewide, said Jonathan Burman, a state education spokesman. SAT averages at John Jay High School last year were 575 in reading, 595 in math and 575 in writing, versus 496, 514 and 488 statewide. The trip to Grand Central Terminal takes about an hour and 10 minutes during peak travel times. A round trip ticket during rush hours costs 31; a monthly commutation ticket is 343. There are two parking lots at the Goldens Bridge station, with a total 592 spaces available, 346 of them with meters for up to 24 hours. The wait for permitted spaces, which cost 464.64 a year, is eight to 10 years, according to LAZ Parking, a subcontractor of Metro North. Many residents drive to work in neighboring Connecticut or in southern Westchester. The western section of the town, including Cross River and Goldens Bridge, used to be part of Cortlandt Manor, a 1697 land grant to the Van Cortlandt family by King William III. The manor lands were divided in 1732 into farms of 150 to 300 acres, according to Lewisboro's published history. The properties became part of the town in 1788 when New York State established boundaries.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Kevin Boseman has spent the past few weeks sitting under a towering pecan tree at his childhood home in Anderson, S.C. He and his brother used to play on a swing there and chase each other around the backyard. Between Bible studies and summer reading, it was the place where they made their fondest memories. Kevin, 48, went there to remember his brother, the star of "Black Panther" and other films, who died a month ago from colon cancer at 43. To millions, Chadwick Boseman was known as T'Challa, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall and Jackie Robinson. But for the Boseman family and his friends in the small town of Anderson, he was simply Chad. "I have been trying to remember Chad and not Chadwick," Kevin Boseman said. "And there's just been a lot of Chadwick in the air." When someone is a celebrity, Kevin said, "You have to start sharing that person with the world; I always endeavored to just treat him like my brother." Kevin Boseman has his own success as a dancer, actor and writer. It was Chad Boseman, not Chadwick, who walked the small town's streets, attended its schools and prayed in one of its churches. In the tight knit community of about 20,000 people, he showed residents that they could do anything, his family said. His renown brought the town together. "Him being born there is an inspiration that you can come from there and become anything," said Derrick Boseman, a pastor in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and, at 54, the oldest of the three brothers. Their parents, Leroy and Carolyn Boseman, had a combined 25 siblings, with roots in Anderson going back generations and hundreds of family members. That turned soul food Sundays into a huge family affair, Pastor Boseman said. And even as the youngest brother's fame grew year by year, they kept his illness secret. Chadwick Boseman learned in 2016 that he had Stage 3 colon cancer as he was on the cusp of his greatest fame as a film star. It is a cancer usually screened for later in life, but rates of colorectal cancer are higher among Black people and cases among younger people are on the rise. The Boseman family boasts other artistic talents. The father, Leroy, reupholsters furniture, sews and sketches. Hanging above the kitchen table at their family home is a painting of two hands in prayer, painted by an uncle. "Chad was gifted," Pastor Boseman said, noting that from a young age, he could sit and draw anyone. "He's probably the most gifted person I've ever met." But their parents were not supportive of Kevin taking on an artistic career at first. "It wasn't something that my family understood," Chadwick Boseman told an interviewer from The New York Times in 2019. When Kevin moved to New York City and became a successful dancer, touring with the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey troupes and appearing in the stage adaptation of "The Lion King," it paved the way. When his younger brother moved to the city, he stayed in his brother's apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. That's where he wrote the play "Deep Azure." At one point, their father asked if his youngest son would ever make it in show business. "A lot of people think making it means becoming an A list movie star," Kevin said. "I didn't force that. I just knew that if Chad wanted to work in the arts, he would find a way and take care of himself." When the boys were younger, their father always told them to do their best. They took that to heart, especially Chad. "He always did his best," Kevin said. "His best was incredible." Those who knew Chad as a young man credit his devotion to theater and writing to a play he wrote in high school to cope with the death of a friend. He presented the play across Anderson, but its first audience was at church, his childhood pastor, Dr. Rev. Samuel Neely of Welfare Baptist Church, said at a memorial event in Anderson. "Tears began to fall from those who observed," the Reverend Neely said. "And many came to me and were shocked to see such a young man to have so much talent and able to use it in such a way." Directing and writing were his first loves, his brothers said, but his professors at Howard University urged him to act if he wanted to be a better writer and director. And he was driven to work harder than his peers, something he had learned as a young Black man growing up in Anderson. "You don't just have to be good," his oldest brother explained. "As an African American, you have to be twice as good." Their mother worked as a nurse and chaperoned on field trips. She was adamant about her boys furthering their education and keeping them busy. Every week during the summer, they checked out books at the library. Faith was an anchor in their lives. The boys had Bible studies, went to Sunday school, were involved in a youth group and sang in the choir. The Reverend Neely, who had been the pastor at Welfare Baptist since the early 1980s, noticed a young boy in the back row of the choir one Sunday who later introduced himself as Chadwick Aaron Boseman. His parents embraced their faith, vibrating through generations. "And that same faith was passed on to those boys," he said. "I can hear it; I can almost see it." Biblical teachings motivated the actor to give back to Anderson when he had the means, his family said. He bought hundreds of movie tickets for needy children in Anderson and for his family and friends to see "Black Panther." Many of his other contributions to the town were never publicized. "That's the way we were raised, that when you can help, you should help, and you don't broadcast it," Pastor Boseman said. He took that faith to his dying breath, his brother said. When he was sick, the Boseman family had prayer calls with the actor. No matter what he was going through, he always said, "Hallelujah."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
SEATTLE Last week, Dave Clark, Amazon's senior vice president in charge of operations, stood on a ladder in a warehouse near Los Angeles and announced to employees that Amazon was raising pay for its vast blue collar work force. As soon as he said "new Amazon minimum wage of 15 an hour," Mr. Clark was drowned out by more than 10 seconds of cheers and high fives. Mr. Clark posted a video of the meeting on Twitter, where it has since been viewed more than 400,000 times. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had repeatedly criticized Amazon for how it treated its workers, praised the raise and shared the clip, adding another half a million views. But in Amazon warehouses across the country, many longtime workers are fuming that based on the information they have received so far they may end up making thousands of dollars less a year. Yes, Amazon is increasing wages, which will benefit most employees. But it will no longer give out new stock grants and monthly bonuses. Some workers believe that means their total compensation will shrink. Whether Amazon finds a way to close that gap will be closely watched in Washington. On Thursday, Mr. Sanders, an independent from Vermont, sent a letter to Jay Carney, who runs Amazon's public policy, "asking Amazon to confirm how the total compensation of employees who would have received stock options those with the company for two or more years will be affected as a result of the recent changes," according to a copy provided to The New York Times. Mr. Sanders, who was alerted to the issue by workers, has not yet received a response from Amazon, a spokesman for the senator said. The New York Times spoke to about a half dozen workers around the country, from Texas to Kentucky, and viewed numerous employee discussions on Facebook. All of the workers shared their pay stubs, but few would allow their names to be used. Near Minneapolis, Katy Iber, who handles returned products at an Amazon warehouse, works the night shift. Her region has a tight local labor market, so she already makes more than 15 an hour. In an "all hands" meeting at the start of her shift on Thursday her first day at work after the pay raise was announced she learned Amazon was raising her base pay by 1 an hour. But it was also ending monthly attendance and productivity bonuses, known as the Variable Compensation Plan, or V.C.P. And she would no longer be granted valuable Amazon shares. The trade off meant she'd be losing money, she said. It was as though the company were saying: "'Thanks, we appreciate you going into the holidays. Here's less money,'" Ms. Iber said. The Times reached Ms. Iber through the Awood Center, a nonprofit that is organizing East African workers in the region. Amazon maintained in a statement that the higher hourly wage "more than compensates for the phaseout" of the stock and incentive bonuses. A traditional pay raise, the company said, is "more immediate and predictable." Amazon said more than 250,000 employees and an additional 100,000 seasonal workers would benefit from the pay changes, and announced similar changes for workers in Britain. Deutsche Bank estimated that Amazon's pay increase "represents less than 1 percent of its projected 2019 revenue." For many workers, including those who work part time and were never eligible for stock and bonuses, the raises in base pay will certainly put more cash in their pockets. Amazon officials said that over the next week they would adjust the pay of some employees to make sure workers did not end up losing money with the changes. The difference between what some employees believe is their total compensation and what the company believes they are being paid also may come down to accounting rules. Amazon said that if employees in 2018 get stock that was granted to them two years ago, that legally counts as compensation this year. But some employees believe that was compensation for work done two years ago. The difference whether because of miscommunication or incomplete information given to employees has resonated in Amazon warehouses around the country, particularly with employees with a longer tenure at the company. The dispute is over two compensation programs that will end on Nov. 1. The first, the Variable Compensation Plan, is paid out each month. It offered up to a 4 percent bonus for attendance, and an additional 4 percent if a worker's building met certain production goals. Ms. Iber said someone in her warehouse wrote "BRING BACK VCP!!!!" on a whiteboard where employees are encouraged to communicate with management. In the three months around the holiday season, known as "double down," the bonus doubles, meaning employees could earn as much as 16 percent on top of their regular wages. The second program gave employees shares in Amazon stock each year. They get to keep the shares if they're still working at the company after two years. Recently, employees have been getting two shares, worth about a combined 3,725 at the current market value. With the changes, workers get to keep the stock granted in previous years but will not earn new shares. Documentation that Ms. Iber provided showed that her bonus amounted to 1.28 an hour in August. In the three months around the holidays, that could be more than 2.50 an hour, far more than the 1 an hour increase in base pay she's getting. She is down even more when stock grants are taken into account. She will keep old shares but will not be granted new ones. In a Facebook group popular with employees, workers fumed over the changes, according to screenshots from the page that were viewed by The Times. There were so many negative pending posts on the day Amazon announced the 15 wage that a moderator wrote that she had deleted them and pleaded with workers to write to the corporate offices in Seattle rather than vent online. Another poster wrote that her co workers were contemplating a walkout on Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving, and others said they were saddened to lose the sense of ownership that the stock compensation provided. Workers said the timing of the change, just as bonuses double for the holiday season, stings. Ms. Iber said a co worker had told her that he regretted paying down some credit card debt in anticipation of the extra holiday bonus. He worried that without the extra holiday pay, he won't be able to cover his regular monthly bills. She could sympathize. Last year, Ms. Iber used the holiday season bonuses to pay for insulation in her attic. She was going to get a new water heater this year, but now she's holding off. She said that she would wait for the heater to break, and that when it did, she'd put the repairs on a credit card.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Cleveland Brown has found his new voice: The actor Arif Zahir will take over the role of this friendly "Family Guy" neighbor on the Fox animated series. On Friday, 20th Television, the studio that produces "Family Guy," said that Zahir, a prolific YouTube performer, will succeed the actor Mike Henry in the part. Henry, who is white, said in June that he would no longer play Cleveland, a Black man who lives down the street from the show's lunkheaded protagonist, Peter Griffin. "I love this character, but persons of color should play characters of color," Henry said at the time. Zahir said in a statement on Friday: "When I heard that Mike Henry was stepping down from the role of Cleveland Brown my favorite cartoon character of all time I was shocked and saddened, assuming we'd never see him again. When I learned I would get to take over the role? Overabundant gratitude." Zahir also gave his thanks to Henry and the "Family Guy" producers, adding, for the show's fans: "I promise not to let you down."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Kerala, as they say, is "God's Own Country," a nod to its lush natural beauty, beguiling backwaters and wealth of spices that have been the Holy Grail for generations of seafarers. But the catchy tourism slogan could also be a tribute to the various religious traditions that have thrived there especially in the port city of Kochi for thousands of years. Kerala's unique geography hemmed in from the rest of India by the mountains to the east, but open to the world by the Arabian Sea to the west meant the state in southwest India was a cosmopolitan melting pot for far flung cultures. Hindus, Christians, Jews and Muslims lived side by side and traded with the Arabs and Chinese long before the Portuguese fumbled their way over (it was Kerala that Columbus was after in 1492 when he found himself in the Bahamas instead) and established the first European settlement in India at Cochin in 1500, kicking off successive waves of colonization by the Portuguese, Dutch and British. Today, Kochi, as Cochin has been renamed, is a popular cruise ship stop and layover for travelers en route to houseboats that cruise through the idyllic backwaters of nearby Alappuzha. But its complex history merits a longer stay. Spend a weekend exploring historic Fort Kochi, whose narrow lanes are lined with buildings that are a legacy of thousands of years of cultural intermingling. And if you're in the area between December 2020 and March 2021, you won't want to miss the Kochi Muziris Biennale, one of the world's most exciting contemporary art events. Fort Kochi is a bit of a misnomer the original Portuguese fort no longer stands; the name now refers to Kochi's historic section. A walk through the quarter helps uncover the layers of influences that have left their mark here. Start near the Chinese fishing nets strung across bamboo and teak poles: They have been there in some form since the 1400s. While they now mostly exist for tourist photo ops, you can see how fishermen hauled their catch here for centuries. Then cross Vasco da Gama Square toward St. Francis Church, one of the oldest European churches in India. Erected as a Catholic church by the Portuguese in 1503, it was rebuilt as a Protestant church by the Dutch, before being consecrated as an Anglican Church by the English. This is where Vasco da Gama was buried, before his remains were sent back to Lisbon. Historic Kochi was once divided into two sections: Fort Kochi, where the Christians lived, and Mattancherry, which was primarily home to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. Get going bright and early to explore Mattancherry, once a vibrant center of the spice trade. Start with breakfast at Mocha Art Cafe, a 300 year old spice warehouse. Try the appam with egg stew (230 rupees), banana, pineapple and nutella pancakes (200 to 250 rupees) or a keema cheese omelet (270 rupees), washed down with a mocha (190 rupees), of course. When you're done, take a few minutes to check out the exhibits by local artists adorning the brick walls. Mocha Art Cafe is just steps away from the 16th century Paradesi Synagogue, the oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth, with global influences in the form of blue hand painted tiles from China, chandeliers from Belgium and an Oriental rug that was a gift from the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I. There are only a handful of practicing Jews remaining in Kochi, and tourists are needed for a full congregation. From there, head to Mattancherry Palace also known as the Dutch Palace, though it was a gift from the Portuguese to the King of Cochin in 1555. It's an intriguing fusion of European and Indian styles, and houses elaborate, 16th century, temple style murals of scenes from the Hindu Ramayana epic. Then explore the markets of Jew Town, lined with everything from perfume bottles to embroidered umbrellas to mounds of paint in brilliant shades of fuchsia and cobalt. Nearby are the antiques emporium Ethnic Passage, the contemporary design shop Via Kerala and the fashion designer Joe Ikareth's boutique. Back in Fort Kochi, the Indian Oven restaurant at the Cochin Club is a relaxing setting for a languid lunch. There's a quiet garden, windows open to the water, whimsical murals on the wall, and colorful cushions scattered across cane chairs. Pull one up and tuck into Malabar Coast seafood dishes, like a Kerala style squid roast and karimeen pollichathu (pearl spot fish prepared in a banana leaf). Lunch for two is around 1,000 rupees. Two historic warehouses by the sea were joined to make the delightful Pepper House, an open air cafe, gallery and design shop that's one of the main venues come Biennale time. The crowd is a mix of creative types and tourists, all converging at the handful of tables scattered around a grassy courtyard. It's a great spot for breakfast: Fuel up for the day with the French toast with jaggery (unrefined cane sugar) and fresh fruit (250 rupees). Kochi has been nicknamed the Queen of the Arabian Sea, and the water is an intrinsic element of the city. You can book a tourist boat for a one hour spin around the harbor, but for a more local experience, take the public ferry (tickets are just 4 rupees). Board at the jetty off Calvathy Road alongside commuters and local families, and whiz past some of the islands that make up the city of Kochi Vypin, Willingdon, Vallarpadam and Bolgatty before landing 20 minutes later at the bustling mainland part of the city known as Ernakulam. There, take a quick stroll through the neatly manicured, sea facing Subhash Bose Park before heading back. Opened in 2016, the Ginger House Museum Hotel is a plush oasis in the heart of Mattancherry, situated above a sprawling antiques shop and restaurant. Each of the nine rooms is done up in rich, vintage embellishments, like 24 karat gold Art Deco tiles and a ceiling bedecked in teakwood framed mirrors. Doubles from 25,000 rupees.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
THE THIRTY YEAR GENOCIDE Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894 1924 By Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi Using the word "genocide" to describe an episode of mass killing has consequences. If the horrors are unfolding now, it invites other countries to intervene and punish the perpetrators. If the unspeakable events are in the past, the word's use can affect the way they are discussed, by historians or ordinary people. Once the term "genocide" has been established, it can seem tasteless or morally impossible to talk in much detail about the context in which mass murder occurred. Any speculation about precise motives or catalysts can sound like making excuses. But one merit of "The Thirty Year Genocide," about the agonies suffered by Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire immediately before and after its collapse, is that the authors overcome that problem. Their narrative offers a subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering. The book examines three episodes: first, the massacre of perhaps 200,000 Ottoman Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1896; then the much larger deportation and slaughter of Armenians that began in 1915 and has been widely recognized as genocide; and third, the destruction or deportation of the remaining Christians (mostly Greeks) during and after the conflict of 1919 22, which Turks call their War of Independence. The fate of Assyrian Christians, of whom 250,000 or more may have perished, is also examined, in less detail. Each of their chosen episodes occurred at a particular historical moment. The first unfolded in an Ottoman Empire that was at once modernizing and crumbling, while in chronic rivalry with the Russians. The second took place when the Turks were at war with three Christian powers (Britain, France and Russia) and were concerned about being overrun from west and east. During the third, Greek expeditionary forces had occupied the port of Izmir, with approval from their Western allies, and then marched inland. 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. An impressive chapter explains the buildup to the 1894 96 massacres. It describes the strain imposed on rural Anatolia by newcomers fleeing Russia's march through the Caucasus, and the transformation of the Armenians from a religious minority into a political community feared by the Ottomans. This story is told with a feeling for shading and nuance. Yet there is a paradox about the book. As diligent historians, Morris and Ze'evi acknowledge many differences between the three phases of history they recount. (For example, different regimes were involved: in the first case, the old guard of the empire; in the second, a shadowy clique of autocrats; in the third, a secular republic.) But their self imposed mission is to emphasize continuity. As they argue, the Armenian death marches of 1915 16 are by now well documented, and their status as a genocidal crime, with one million or more victims, well established. By contrast, they feel, things that happened at the beginning and end of their chosen 30 years need to be better known, so that all the travails of the Ottoman Christians over that time can be seen as a single sequence. Between 1894 and 1924, they write, between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Ottoman Christians perished; greater accuracy is impossible. Whatever the shifts in regime, all these killings were instigated by Muslim Turks who drew in other Muslims and invoked Islamic solidarity. As a result the Christian share of Anatolia's population fell from 20 percent to 2 percent. Well, all those statements are accurate as far as they go, and they reflect one aspect of the multiple tragedies that attended the region's lurch toward modernity. Yet it remains difficult to express the authors' core case in a single true or false proposition. Are they suggesting that Islam is intrinsically violent? No, they reject that view. Are they implying that a 30 year plan was formulated and then implemented, albeit by different regimes? At times, they hint at something like that. But their skill as historians holds them back from saying anything so crude. In one of their best passages, Morris and Ze'evi carefully discuss possible interpretations of the 1915 16 blood bath, and offer comparisons with debates about Hitler's Holocaust. As they note, historians have disputed how far in advance the mass annihilation of Jews was dreamed up. Regarding the Armenians, they say, there is no doubt that the death marches that began in April 1915 were centrally coordinated. But there have been reasonable arguments over how long in advance they were planned, and whether it was always intended that most victims would die. Sifting the evidence, Morris and Ze'evi conclude that the Ottoman inner circle began planning deadly mass deportations soon after a Russian victory in January 1915. However, Ottoman policy was also shaped and hardened by the battle of Van, in which Russians and Armenians fought successfully, starting in April 1915. These conclusions rest on careful analysis. But they are less confident about the fate of the Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire from 1919 to 1922. They document many horrifying incidents but these do not add up to a fluent story. Morris and Ze'evi vigorously challenge the Turkish argument that after World War I Greek separatism in the Black Sea region posed a danger to the emerging Turkish state requiring deportation. The authors maintain that agitation for a state on the Black Sea was never serious, and that Greeks in that region never offered much resistance to the Turkish regime. Neither of those statements is completely accurate. Greek Orthodox guerrillas held out in the Black Sea hinterland with tenacity. What is more, by challenging the Turkish justification for the Black Sea deportations, Morris and Ze'evi almost imply that if there had been a military threat in that region, the marches and deportations might have been morally right. This leads to a wider point about the book as a whole. The reader is left wondering what the authors ultimately feel about the treatment of civilians in situations of total war. Nothing in the United Nations conventions implies that military expediency can justify the removal, whether by ethnic cleansing, killing or both, of populations whose presence is inconvenient. But by weighing up arguments for and against certain acts of expulsion, Morris and Ze'evi seem at times to be taking a less purist view. There is no doubt that during the Ottoman collapse, millions of Christians died or suffered because humanitarian principles were grossly violated. But they were not the only victims. Consider the wars that drove most Muslims out of the Balkans, starting in the early 19th century and arguably culminating in the genocidal acts suffered by some Bosnian Muslims in 1995. Hundreds of thousands of Islam's followers were killed and millions displaced, often finding refuge in Turkey. If the era that gave birth to homogeneous post Ottoman states is to be told as a single narrative, it must surely look on both sides of the mirror.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
What to Do in San Francisco When You're Wealthy? Join a Private Club. SAN FRANCISCO On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in the main lounge of the Battery in San Francisco, with its soaring ceilings and provocative contemporary art, an African American woman sat on the edge of a sofa typing on her laptop. Nearby, two middle aged white men in dark blazers engaged a small group in business conversation. Across the room, an Asian man in his 20s perused his smartphone. Although it looked like an upscale hotel lobby, those assembled were actually handpicked: The Battery is an invitation only private social club. It is one of a burst of recently opened private clubs that have arrived with the city's latest tech fueled boom, further signaling San Francisco's transition from its flowers in the hair past to a community comfortable with velvet stanchions. But as the scene at the Battery revealed, these are not the mostly white, well to do gentlemen's clubs of yore. The new clubs welcome all genders and races, and one does not need to be extraordinarily wealthy to join. The Battery's dues are 2,400 a year, about the same as a high end gym membership. Rates are similar at other newer clubs. Michael Birch, the Battery's co founder, said that cultivating a diverse membership, both ethnically and culturally, had been a focus since opening in 2013. "We're getting better and better at bringing in members who add value," Mr. Birch said. The club's membership has grown to 4,800 today from an initial 1,400 in its 58,000 square foot converted warehouse space, he said, making it the largest of the newer clubs. Even though Mr. Birch made his fortune by selling his website Bebo to AOL for a reported 850 million in 2008, he and his wife, Xochi, reached beyond their circle of tech colleagues into the realms of art and music for the initial membership list, inspired, they said, by London's private social clubs. Now, existing members recommend who joins next, and applicants must go through several rounds of screening interviews. Other new clubs are more tech centric. Modernist opened last year in the 3,000 square foot space of a defunct restaurant near the Embarcadero waterfront, and the co founder Albert Chen said his initial members were friends, many of them working in technology, his former profession. The club's website describes the membership as a "Community of Accomplished Founders, C Level, Venture Industry and Friends." "San Francisco has a lot of tech people," Mr. Chen said. "If we were in L.A., it would be a lot of entertainment people." Members can work in the space during the afternoons, and events include talks on abstruse subjects like cryptocurrencies. But apparently, above all, the Modernist members enjoy imbibing the club employs a veteran mixologist, and the walls are lined with members' personal caches of liquors, some secured with biometric locks. Chen said that the club had 500 members and that it would open a second location near the city's Pyramid tower this year, two blocks from another in the new wave of clubs, Wingtip, a retail space and membership club that promotes itself as "not a bunch of guys in a steam room talking about what a raw deal Prohibition was." That quip is aimed at the city's old elite gentlemen's clubs, some dating from the Gold Rush places like the Bohemian Club and the Pacific Union Club. Charles Fracchia, a local historian and author, has studied the older clubs and calls them a classic example of "the associational principle." As cities expanded, he said, like minded people started clubs based on their shared interests. The Bohemian Club, for example, was created by journalists and artists. "People like to hang out together," Mr. Fracchia said. "We see this in every aspect of life." Over the decades, however, many of the older clubs evolved into bastions of privilege and exclusivity. To belong became "a feather in your cap," said Mr. Fracchia, putting status above the clubs' original missions. And while some of the new clubs might see themselves as an alterative to that elitism, the truth is that many of the newer clubs' members would not be readily accepted at the old if they wanted to join. Some of the older clubs still do not admit women, and many have few minorities, waiting lists that are years long, and fees that can be tens of thousands of dollars. Still, in a famously progressive city where millionaires often drive Priuses and flaunting money is frowned upon, some see little difference between the newer and older clubs it is just moneyed people excluding others. An essay in The New Yorker criticized the Battery as a troubling sign of the city's latest surge in wealth. "San Francisco itself is turning into a private, exclusive club," wrote Anisse Gross. Perhaps sensitive to this criticism, some newer clubs have embraced philanthropy. Mr. Birch said the Battery and its members had raised 10 million for charity in the past few years, including a recent fund raiser to benefit those affected by nearby wildfires. Other newer clubs unapologetically focus on a niche. The baseball themed Gotham Club is located at the Giants' ballpark, and the city's newest club, the Academy, is primarily for gay men. "Gay men are an interesting group because they belong to a club just because of who they are," said Nate Bourg, a co founder. Open since June, the 2,000 square foot club already has 150 of 300 expected members. Paul Miller, another co founder, said the space was meant to be an inviting alternative to bars. When new members arrive, they can opt to be personally introduced to others, and dues are as little as 99 per month. "It's not about how much money you have," Mr. Miller said. Being gay is not a requirement. On a recent Saturday night, dozens of gay men mostly in their 30s sipped cocktails and mingled upstairs, while downstairs in a speakeasy themed bar there was a private party of women in 1920s inspired attire. David Zisser, a doyen of the city's private social club scene and a member of the prestigious Olympic Club for more than 30 years, was there as a guest and called the Academy "a nice surprise." Mr. Zisser said he believed that the newer clubs filled a void for recent generations because they did not learn to cultivate social bonds in their childhoods, having grown up in an era when "organizations dedicated to camaraderie," like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, had fallen from favor. "There's a vacuum out there," he said. "It's nice to go to a place where it's a friendly atmosphere and you're part of something."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
"It tires me to talk to rich men," said Teddy Roosevelt, himself a product of wealth. "You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing. But as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own businesses." Had T.R. spent time with Bill Gates, the polymath who predicted the pandemic in a TED Talk, he likely would have made an exception. Gates is everywhere these days, a lavender sweatered Mister Rogers for the curious and quarantined. With the United States surrendering in the global war against a disease without borders, Gates has filled the void. The U.S. is isolated, pitied, scorned. Gates, by one measure, is the most admired man in the world. Beyond the 300 million that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given to blunt the spread of the virus, Gates has made himself a spokesman for science. It needs one. While President Trump spouts life threatening nonsense, Gates calmly explains how a spike protein of coronavirus fits into the urgent hunt for a vaccine. With the coronavirus, which Gates has called "the most dramatic thing ever in my lifetime by a lot," his approach is to inject a turbocharger of money at many different levels. The foundation calls it "catalytic philanthropy." To speed up the steps needed to get a vaccine to the world, for example, he's funding the construction of factories to manufacture seven possible coronavirus vaccines, even if most of them fail. Many tycoons tend to get miserly and coldhearted as they age. Gates has evolved in the opposite direction. Early on, the co founder of Microsoft was arrogant, insufferable, whiny and socially distant when that was considered offensive a monopoly capitalist without the imagination of his rival and friend Steve Jobs. His initial efforts at philanthropy giving computers away to underserved libraries and schools opened him up to criticism (largely unfair) that the donations were part of a scheme to expand the market for Microsoft products. Gates soldiered on, making himself an expert in infectious diseases. He helped to create a market for lifesaving drugs that are often ignored by Big Pharma. It's uncanny how spot on he was in that 2015 speech. The greatest threat to the world was "not missiles but microbes," he said. "You have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infected so they get on a plane," he said. The first major American outbreak, in a nursing home just 11 miles from Gates's house near Seattle, made him regret that he had not spoken out even more. He had warned Trump, just before he took office, of the seismic dangers of a pandemic. Now, of course, Gates is the boogeyman in the fevered minds of many a delusional Trumper. The global lunacy community anti vaxxers, science deniers, Russian agents has spread so many conspiracy theories regarding Gates that misinformation about him is now among the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods. The crackpots who have targeted Gates include Roger Stone, Laura Ingraham and the anti vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Would you get in a lifeboat with that trio?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The man who would be Blame was born Christopher Stuart Barnes on Feb. 12, 1960. He died Judy Blame, rechristened and reimagined in his own image, a magpie jewelry designer, fashion stylist and art director, who emerged from the creative ferment of London's 1980s club scene, on Feb. 20 in London. The cause was cancer. He was 58 years old. Mr. Blame was largely self taught and entirely sui generis: a handsome, strong nosed, gravel voiced charmer with a peripatetic country background who reinvented himself as a London dandy. ("It was a bit of a frisson, in those days," said his friend, the photographer Nick Knight, of a man moving through some of the dodgier parts of London in the 1980s and 1990s named and attired as he was.) Lured to London by the promise of punk on his second day in the city, he went straight for Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Seditionaries shop, where he bought a pair of bondage pants from Ms. Westwood herself he arrived in time for its decline and came into his own in the clubs of Soho, then a gritty neighborhood. Working as a coat check boy at the gay club Heaven in Charing Cross, he came to his adopted moniker. "Judy" was bestowed upon him by the glam rock designer Antony Price, in a camp homage to Judy Garland; and "Blame," as his friend Scarlett Cannon recalled, for his habit of giving patrons whichever of the coats in his care he thought would best suit them often not the ones they had come in with. "When there would be chaos, someone would say, 'Blame Judy,'" Ms. Cannon said. Reversed, it stuck. Mr. Blame was born in Leatherhead, in the county of Surrey in southeast England. His father, Peter Barnes, was an engineer and metallurgist, his mother, Patricia Barnes, kept house while her five children were young. (Mr. Blame was the second.) Mr. Barnes's work took the family to Spain for a few years when Mr. Blame was young. He credited his love of art to afternoons spent wandering alone at the Prado, while his mother did the family's shopping. Returning to England, they settled on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. From an early age, Mr. Blame was dramatic and flamboyant, his youngest sister, Jenny Forestell, remembered; and he always had, in his own recollection, an eye for fashion. ("Even from my Leatherhead days, I would be the one going, 'Oh, mother, not those shoes with that dress,'" he once said.) He papered the walls of his bedroom with posters of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, played his records till their grooves ran flat and escaped to London as soon as he could, at 17. Overwhelmed by the city, he retreated to Manchester for a few years, but returned to London in 1978. Punk was fading, but club culture was rising, with parties like Blitz its cotillions. They drew a diverse crowd: artists, musicians, filmmakers, drag queens, students at Central Saint Martins (the art and fashion college, which was next door). "It was like the final class, if you like," said John Galliano, who was studying at Saint Martins at the time. "It was like a collective of creatives, and of course we became friends. That energy influenced us all." It was for these nights and eventually the one he created with Ms. Cannon and Michael Hardy, called Cha Cha, held on Tuesdays in the back bar of Heaven that Mr. Blame began making jewelry out of beads and found bits. He realized, Ms. Cannon said, that by adding jewelry to a wardrobe staple a long chemise by David Holah, who later was a founder of the cult label BodyMap one outfit could become many. Soho was dicey in those days. "The pubs had sawdust on the floor still," Mr. Galliano said. "The working girls wore trench coats and little else. It was an exciting place, a dangerous place." And in the neighborhoods where Mr. Blame and his cohort lived, worked and played, being openly gay and wildly dressed could be dangerous. "I do remember him being set on more than once," Ms. Cannon said. So the community became all, and clubgoers became friends and collaborators. "We'd all left home," said John Maybury, a filmmaker and one of the so called Blitz Kids, who met Mr. Blame at the time. "We were living our invented lives. In many ways, we were strangers to our families. We reinvented ourselves enough that we had our own world, our own milieu." And within it, Mr. Maybury said, "Everyone was expected to bring something to the table." Many who would later become better known than Mr. Blame passed through the doors of those clubs, or the squats where they lived relatively rough nearby: Boy George, Mr. Galliano, the performance artist Leigh Bowery, the director Derek Jarman. But everyone lent a hand to another in a time of need. It was in this way that Mr. Blame began fashion styling. Friends like Ray Petri, the stylist ringleader of the Buffalo collective, whose heady pictures, mixing fashion, sportswear and the street, filled the pages of magazines such as Face and i D, began calling on him for jewelry for shoots. When Boy George rose to international fame, he called on Mr. Blame for occasional styling, too; in 1984, when Culture Club, his band, won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, Boy George accepted wearing a full complement of Judy Blame jewelry. (He had gone to Mr. Blame's studio to pick up several pieces, and, unable to choose, wore them all.) When Mr. Petri became ill with AIDS, he suggested Mr. Blame to some friends, like the singer Neneh Cherry. Ms. Cherry was finishing her debut album, "Raw Like Sushi," and filming a video for its single (and Buffalo's anthem), "Buffalo Stance." Mr. Blame stepped in to style it, beginning a long friendship. Ms. Cherry called him the closest collaborator of her life, apart from her husband, the producer Cameron McVey. "Judy always had an amazing sense of clarity of what something should go with," she said. "I felt, without a doubt, from the minute I got to know him, that he could see me." But like a fashion world Zelig, Mr. Blame was also involved with, and left traces on, many of the fashion moments and movements of the '80s and onward. He worked closely with the fashion designer Christopher Nemeth, whose cobbled together finery made of canvas from his own paintings or purloined mail sacks remains a cult fascination. He was deeply involved with the House of Beauty and Culture, the craft collective that made art out of found bits and industrial castoffs, and its shop, open for a few years in the late '80s, which kept irregular hours and was adored by those with the adventurousness to find it and the persistence to penetrate it. ("Even when you have found it, you might not know you are there," a reporter wrote in The New York Times of a visit in 1987.) Mr. Blame continued working with musicians on their looks, including Ms. Cherry, Kylie Minogue, Massive Attack and a young Bjork, who met him when she moved to London in 1992. "He came with me to a lot of these first things I did," she said. "Looking back on it, what I'm most grateful to him for is he made me really comforted. He told me that he loved my clothes, that he really liked my strange, idiosyncratic style. He gave me confidence to come to the fashion world, that I had the right to be just who I am." He went with her to Paris to shoot the cover of her first solo album, "Debut," and, when her luggage was lost, popped into Martin Margiela's studio to pick up new pieces for her to wear. Though he was funny and cutting and unsparing in skewering fools, he was devoted to those he supported, like Mr. Margiela, and the designers in whose work he took an early interest, like Helmut Lang. He took Edward Enninful, now the editor of British Vogue, under his wing during Mr. Enninful's earliest years as a young editor at i D Magazine, where Mr. Blame often worked, and put him up in the house where he was staying in Kensal Green. (It belonged to Ms. Cherry.) Mr. Blame met Kim Jones, later the men's artistic director at Louis Vuitton, at a club during Mr. Jones's college days. Growing up, Mr. Jones idolized Mr. Blame, pinning up pictures of him from The Face and i D. "There's that lovely quote, 'Never meet your heroes,' and I believe that a lot of times," Mr. Jones said. "But there are exceptions. I've still got a card that he gave me the first time with a land line phone number. I laminated it because I was so in awe." Mr. Jones later invited Mr. Blame to collaborate with him on a series of Louis Vuitton accessories using motifs from Mr. Nemeth. He drew a connection between the ad hoc nature of Mr. Blame's work, with its emphasis on reuse and recontextualization, and the early work of the so called Y.B.A.s the Young British Artists of the 1990s, including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas who practiced a similar sort of upcycling of everyday items, be they pharmacy cases, cigarettes or toilet bowls. Mr. Blame never got rich from his work, as did some of his contemporaries, but he never seemed terribly concerned on that point. "He was unwilling to compromise in the way that a lot of people fall into doing," Ms. Cherry said. "He lived his way, always turned slightly to the side. Obviously, it's not the easy way to live your life. I'm sure that he could have made more money and been more famous. Like he said, 'I am a legend and an icon.'" (Mr. Blame pronounced the word "legend" in a style all his own: "leg end," with a hard G.) Mr. Knight said: "There wasn't anybody else like Judy. These fashion eccentrics or originals or dandies whatever you want to call them they're the sort of people who make the fashion world go round."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The women's basketball program at Duke University will end its season early, the team announced Friday, because of mounting coronavirus concerns. It's the first Power Five basketball team to start and stop its season because of the pandemic. "The student athletes on the Duke women's basketball team have made the difficult decision to conclude their current season due to safety concerns," Michael Schoenfeld, the chief communications officer for the school in Durham, N.C., said in the announcement. All other Duke sports were expected to continue as usual, following recommend safety protocols, he added. The women's team, which had a 3 1 record, had initially suspended operations on Dec. 16 after two members of its traveling party tested positive for the virus, requiring contact tracing. The Blue Devils consequently postponed games against North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina Wilmington; the program had already postponed a game against the University of Miami because of contact tracing concerns. It was scheduled to play Louisville next week.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Credit...William Mullins, via Alamy Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly and threatening dozens of other species. NORTH FORK, Idaho The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, one of the wildest rivers in the contiguous United States, is prime fish habitat. Cold, clear waters from melting snow tumble out of the Salmon River Mountains and into the boulder strewn river, which is federally protected. The last of the spawning spring summer Chinook salmon arrived here in June after a herculean 800 mile upstream swim. Now the big fish which can weigh up to 30 pounds are finishing their courtship rituals. Next year there will be a new generation of Chinook. In spite of this pristine 112 mile long mountain refuge, the fish that have returned here to reproduce and then die for countless generations are in deep trouble. Some 45,000 to 50,000 spring summer Chinook spawned here in the 1950s. These days, the average is about 1,500 fish, and declining. And not just here: Native fish are in free fall throughout the Columbia River basin, a situation so dire that many groups are urging the removal of four large dams to keep the fish from being lost. "The Columbia River was once the most productive wild Chinook habitat in the world," said Russ Thurow, a fisheries research scientist with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station. Standing alongside the Salmon River in Idaho, Mr. Thurow considered the prospect that the fish he had spent most of his life studying could disappear. "It's hard to say, but now these fish have maybe four generations left before they are gone," he said. "Maybe 20 years." Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead trout are listed as threatened or endangered in the Columbia basin, an area that includes parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana and British Columbia. Salmon are a keystone species in this region, critical as a food source for animals from bears to eagles to insects. That group of beneficiaries includes an endangered population of orcas, or killer whales, along the West Coast that survive by eating Chinook in the winter and spring, up to 30 a day. "The best thing you could do to get more spring Chinook for the orcas is to remove those four lower dams," said Don Chapman, a retired fisheries scientist who worked as a consultant to the hydropower industry and defended the dams and mitigation efforts. He has since changed his mind about the dams: "They kill too many juveniles going downstream and some adults going back." Salmon are swimming in warming waters, with uncertain consequences, according to a recent study. Breaching the dams also would help keep water temperatures cooler as the climate changes, Dr. Chapman said. Chinook, or king salmon, are huge, powerful fish, the largest member of the salmon family in North America. Spring summer Chinook make an epic migration thousands of miles through the Columbia River to the waters surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands, and then back to the high elevations of the Rocky Mountains. Before the 20th century, some 10 million to 16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout are thought to have returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates. While farming, logging and especially the commercial harvest of salmon in the early 20th century all took a toll, the single greatest impact on wild fish comes from eight large dams four on the Columbia and four on the Snake River, a major tributary. The four Snake River dams are used primarily to create reservoirs for the barging of Idaho's wheat to ports. But the dams raise water temperatures and block travel migration routes, increasing fish mortality. Climate change also has raised both river and ocean water temperatures, which can be deadly to fish. In 2015, for example, unusually warm water killed an estimated 250,000 sockeye salmon. For decades, experts have tried to ameliorate the loss of the Columbia's wild fish by installing ladders that allow the fish to swim around the dams, and by placing them in barges and trucks for transport around the dams. The massive efforts have not stemmed the decline, despite the fact that more than 16 billion has been spent on recovery over the last several decades. Now most scientists come down on the side of removing the dams. Last fall, orca researchers urged Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington and the Southern Resident Orca Task Force, a state government panel, to begin removing the four dams on the Snake River to aid the starving whales. "Put simply, orca need more Chinook salmon available on a year round basis, as quickly as possible," they wrote, calling the removals "vital to ensure orca survival." Federal and state agencies have released untold numbers of hatchery reared fish to replace wild fish in the Columbia basin. But some experts believe that hatchery fish could adversely affect the genome of the remaining wild fish. In 2016, a study found that 723 genes were operating differently in the first generation of hatchery reared fish than in wild fish, affecting such functions as the immune system and wound healing, as hatchery reared fish adapted to crowded conditions. Traits that wild fish lose by mating with hatchery fish may one day be important for adaptation to climate change, Mr. Thurow said. The Middle Fork population, here in Idaho, is one of the few without genetic influences from hatchery reared fish. The extreme migration of the spring summer Chinook salmon is one of the natural world's great journeys. Before the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the fish born in the Middle Fork were swept by strong spring currents 800 miles to the sea. The rivers moved them rapidly along, from six to 10 miles per hour, and the young fish reached the brackish waters of the Columbia River estuary in a couple of weeks. As they travel, the parrs, or young freshwater salmon, undergo a profound transformation called smoltification, becoming smolts able to thrive in saltwater. After leaving the river, the fish turn north and travel to the North Pacific, near the Aleutian Islands. They spend up to four years feeding at sea, and then those that survive the seagoing journey return to the mouth of the Columbia. Their physiological changes are reversed as they move upstream, and they again become freshwater fish. Picking up the scent of their natal stream, they fight the current, foregoing food on the grueling trip, gaining about 6,500 feet in elevation, and overcoming physical barriers in what biologists describe as a heroic journey. "I've seen them jump an eight foot waterfall, and they are known to jump 12 feet," said Mr. Thurow. "They are the definition of persistence." Chinook are known as "high fidelity" spawners, not only returning to the stream where they were born, but also often to the same shallows. Then the game is afoot: In their waning days, as males battle for dominance, females excavate a redd, a depression in the gravel riverbed. The female releases clusters of eggs as the male sidles up, releasing its sperm at the same time. The current mixes them, resulting in fertilization. The eggs are adhesive and stick to the gravel after they fall. The female buries them in an egg pocket. The mating is repeated multiple times; all told, some 5,000 eggs may be released by a single female. "By the times she finishes, she's within a day or two of dying," Mr. Thurow said. The next spring, the offspring emerge and make their own journey to the sea. Always a gauntlet, the migration now is far more deadly. The eight large dams along the Snake and Columbia rivers created 325 miles of slack water in reservoirs. The average speed of the water flowing downstream has dropped to less than 1.5 miles per hour, and it takes the fish far longer to reach the sea. When the parrs reach a reservoir on the way, they must swim instead of being pushed by the current, and often become disoriented and are more susceptible to predators. Delayed, they may go through smoltification at the wrong time. The young salmon eat plankton and insects. But the waters of the Pacific along the West Coast have experienced unusual warming the so called blob which reduces the available food supply. Before the Snake River dams were built, three to six of every 100 fish that left their natal streams returned home, a ratio called smolt to adult return. Today that number is just under one. Biologists say it must reach four to rebuild the fisheries. It is not just orcas that are suffering because of the decline of salmon. An estimated 137 species rely on the surge of protein brought upriver by millions of fish each year. The salmon also provided phosphorous, nitrogen and other nutrients that nourish the great forests of the Northwest. Three quarters of the nutrients in some trees in Alaska and British Columbia are derived from salmon. The Middle Fork of Salmon River will be critical as the waters of the Columbia warm, Mr. Thurow said. High altitude streams are expected to warm less, and the Chinook here will find a cold water refuge and if they adapt, a base for repopulating other streams. "The outlook isn't good, but these fish are what give me hope," Mr. Thurow said. "Despite all of the obstacles, they are still here."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Hyundai is recalling about 419,000 vehicles in the United States in three separate actions for brake, electrical and suspension problems, according to reports the automaker posted Friday on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website. The largest recall covers about 225,000 Santa Fe crossovers from the 2001 6 model years. A rust problem could cause a front suspension coil to break, possibly puncturing a tire, according to the automaker's report. The recall will be regional, covering vehicles originally sold or registered in 20 states that use a lot of road salt in the winter: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia. Hyundai said it learned of the problem through warranty claims. Consumer advocates have complained for years that regional recalls save automakers money, but because people can move frequently, the recalls can easily miss vehicles. Automakers and N.H.T.S.A., which allows such recalls, say the practice makes sense. The second recall covers about 133,000 Sonatas from the 2011 model year because "an insufficient seal" may cause the brake lines to leak hydraulic fluid, according to the report the company filed with the safety agency. Such leakage could increase stopping distances, but the driver would be alerted by a warning light, either for the brakes or the electronic stability control, Hyundai said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Is Reese Witherspoon the new Oprah? Some people think so. Her Hello Sunshine production company, which aims to "create and discover content that celebrates women," has a popular online book club that's nudging both fiction and nonfiction onto the best seller list these days. Her May selection, "From Scratch" Tembi Locke's memoir of love, grief and the death of her husband debuts this week at No. 14. "I only knew that after five years of widowhood, I had a story inside that gnawed at me," Locke wrote. "And that, if I didn't commit it to the page, I would suffer another kind of grief." On the Hello Sunshine website, Witherspoon says, "This book gives me all the feels!" Witherspoon began the book club in June 2017. At first its impact was small, but over time it has amassed more clout: Her nine most recent picks have all become best sellers, and her September 2018 selection Delia Owens's debut novel, "Where the Crawdads Sing" has been in the top 10 ever since (it's at No. 1 this week). Sometimes Witherspoon anoints authors Curtis Sittenfeld, Celeste Ng who would have succeeded without her help. But she often chooses more obscure writers. Balli Kaur Jaswal, whose novel "Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows" was Witherspoon's March 2018 pick, recently told Forbes that over a year later, she's still feeling the effects: "Two young women came up to me after a reading and said, 'How did it feel to have Elle Woods reading your book?' I laughed because I hadn't really thought of it that way but I like to think the main character of 'Legally Blonde' would enjoy 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
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. When to watch: Friday at 11 p.m., on HBO Season 4 of TV's most wistful show is here, bringing tenderness and brief mercies along with its weed deliveries. Ben Sinclair returns as "The Guy," biking around New York City and thus crossing paths or almost crossing paths with all kinds of interesting folks. In the season premiere, that includes the staff of "This American Life," which feels both overdue and somehow redundant. If you like either of those shows, there's a 99 percent chance you will like the other one. This isn't my favorite episode of "High Maintenance," but it is always fun to put radio names with actual faces.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"There was no clear explanation of why they wouldn't approve it," Richard Clemmer, chief executive of NXP Semiconductors, said of Chinese officials' denial of the firm's merger with Qualcomm. SAN FRANCISCO The finger pointing over the scuttled 44 billion transaction between the chip makers Qualcomm and NXP Semiconductors has begun. Richard Clemmer, chief executive of NXP, had some harsh words on Thursday for officials in China over the deal's collapse amid a trade war between Washington and Beijing. The acquisition was terminated after it failed to secure regulatory approval from Chinese authorities before a deadline set by the companies at midnight Eastern time on Wednesday. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Clemmer said Chinese authorities gave no explanation for withholding approval for the transaction. He said that there were no government requirements or regulations that the deal did not meet, adding that Qualcomm and NXP had both agreed to undisclosed concessions to address antitrust concerns raised by Chinese authorities. "For the issues they raised, remedies were provided and they agreed on those remedies," Mr. Clemmer said of Chinese officials. "There was no clear explanation of why they wouldn't approve it." Mr. Clemmer and NXP had tried for nearly two years to get the deal done. In 2016, Qualcomm and NXP had struck an agreement to combine. But the transaction could not be completed until it had obtained regulatory approval from nine jurisdictions. Eight of those, including the United States, had approved the deal; China had been the lone holdout. The situation was complicated by the Trump administration's recent trade moves, including placing tariffs on numerous Chinese goods. Trade experts said Chinese authorities appeared to be withholding approval of the Qualcomm and NXP deal to gain negotiating leverage in retaliation. With the deal's failure, NXP said it would receive a 2 billion termination fee from Qualcomm, while Qualcomm said it would buy back up to 30 billion of its stock. On Friday, China's antitrust regulator said it had "maintained good communication," with Qualcomm, but that the company's proposed remedies to antitrust concerns didn't resolve them. A day earlier, a spokesman for the Chinese Commerce Ministry had said trade tensions had nothing to do with the end of the deal. Mr. Clemmer said Thursday that NXP assumed until the last minute that Chinese officials "would come to reason and it would be approved." The fact they did not, he said, suggested that international politics rather than antitrust issues were solely to blame for the deal's collapse a worrying sign for others contemplating cross border transactions. "It's really concerning," Mr. Clemmer said. Steve Mollenkopf, Qualcomm's chief executive, has shied away from singling out Chinese officials but has also blamed the trade war for the deal's collapse. Mr. Clemmer said top American officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, actively communicated with Chinese officials in support of the deal. Mr. Mnuchin, in an interview with CNBC on Thursday, said he was very disappointed that the deal was not approved. "We're just looking for U.S. companies to be treated fairly," he said. Even with the deal's collapse, Mr. Clemmer said he was confident in NXP's path. The Dutch company, the descendant of chip operations that were once part of Philips and Motorola, on Thursday reported quarterly earnings that included a 4 percent increase in total corporate revenue and roughly flat profits. NXP is the largest supplier of chips used in cars, a position that Qualcomm hoped to exploit to broaden beyond communications chips for smartphones. Mr. Clemmer said NXP's position is particularly strong in radar technology that will become important in the development of self driving vehicles. While rivals like Nvidia have an edge in chips that act as the brain in autonomous cars, NXP sells other processors and communications chips for cars that will be sold in higher volume, Mr. Clemmer said. Like Qualcomm, NXP announced a large stock buyback to help lift its share price after the transaction's failure. The company said Thursday that it would spend up to 5 billion in repurchasing its shares.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
No one wants hassles on vacation, so this fall my wife and I accepted the offer of a rental car agent in San Francisco who suggested there was a fast, easy way to pay any tolls we might encounter. We were in California to see friends on a trip that took us north into Sonoma County and then down the sumptuous Pacific Coast Highway to San Diego. A lot of driving and, we thought, a lot of tolls. So the deal, 80.43 to use a PlatePass electronic toll transponder for seven days ( 11.49 a day), seemed decent. (After all, as New Yorkers, we know one can spend 16, and much too much of your life, just to struggle across the George Washington Bridge once.) But, as it turned out, over the course of our 600 mile trip up to the wine country, back down to San Francisco, through Pacifica and Carmel and Big Sur and Santa Barbara to San Diego we encountered exactly one toll, at the Golden Gate Bridge. It cost 8.20 roughly 10 percent of what we had paid for the pass. I felt silly, but discovered I'm in good and sizable company. Despite years of regulatory actions, class action suits and fee rollbacks by companies, there is still confusion over the way some rental car companies deal with electronic tolls. As cashless tolls become more prevalent, drivers without transponders those windshield mounted devices that many call E Z Passes can find themselves on roads where they have no immediate option to pay. Instead they often receive a mailing based on an image of their plate taken at the toll. In the case of rental cars, the notification goes to the company. If you don't sign up for an electronic toll pass, some companies tack on an administrative fee as much as 15 for each cashless toll encountered. And if you do, some companies charge a daily fee of 12 or more for the pass, even on the days when you never hit a toll. Advantage pointed out that its fee was fully disclosed on the rental agreement he signed. Mr. Bauman argued that he didn't notice it among the fine print and that it went otherwise unmentioned. "There's no way we would have ever paid a fee like that," he said. Adequate disclosure has been the crux of the issue as it has played out in litigation and regulatory actions. And travelers at the head of a line, at a rental desk, on a timetable, can be harried, vulnerable, undiscriminating consumers. "Often they are not in their home jurisdictions," said Bruce Greenberg, a lawyer who has represented drivers in two class action suits, "so they are not familiar with how tolling works there." The companies say the fees cover things like the cost of maintaining fleets of transponders and coordinating payments with local authorities. Greg Scott, a spokesman for the American Rental Car Association, said its members find "themselves in a challenging position: making sure tolling authorities who use different transponders, payment and accounting systems receive the payments they are expecting, while also making sure rental car customers receive disclosure and transparency about those tolls and fines." The Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group has prevailed in two suits where judges agreed the fees were appropriately outlined in rental agreements that drivers signed. But last year the company settled a lawsuit brought by the Florida Attorney General by agreeing to put 330,000 toward possible refunds and pledging to provide adequate disclosure about fees and about how drivers can avoid the charges. Hertz agreed last year to pay 3.65 million to San Francisco to settle a 2017 lawsuit in which the city accused it of deceiving customers about the fees they could face for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. Hertz acknowledged no wrongdoing. It revised its toll policy nationwide in 2018 and now charges a 5.95 daily fee for use of a transponder, but only on the days when tolls are actually encountered. Though that policy addressed the criticism, Charles Leocha, the president of Travelers United, an advocacy group, pointed out that Thrifty, which is owned by Hertz, still typically charges higher daily fees for every day of a rental, regardless of whether a toll is encountered. "They are just seeing how far they can go with the different standards," he said. Hertz responded in a statement: "Our brands have different business models, service options and pricing to serve a range of customers and their unique needs." Some things to think about to avoid problems: Try to learn the company policy before you hit the counter. Remember toll fees are only part of the price. If a company offers a cheaper rental rate, it may be worth paying more for toll fees. Can you use your own transponder? Maybe. Check with your provider to see if you can bring it from home and use it in a rental car. Plan your itinerary. If I'd done my homework, I would have seen that I'd only encounter one toll on my trip. I should have skipped the PlatePass and just paid an administrative fee of 15 for the one Golden Gate Bridge toll. (And I could have avoided any fee by paying the bridge fee online within two days of crossing.) Complain. That's what Mr. Bauman did, patiently and nicely, over a period of weeks. Advantage did not acknowledge any error, but as a sign of good faith reimbursed him for everything but his 9.96 toll bill. "Being an elementary schoolteacher," he said, "I know from teaching the kids, the world works better when you're respectful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
If you ended the week hoping that President Trump's impeachment trial would go on longer, this weekend's opening "Saturday Night Live" sketch imagined just such a scenario: a parade of self serving witnesses that wasn't necessarily an improvement. This week's episode, hosted by J.J. Watt of the Houston Texans and featuring the musical guest Luke Combs, began with a voice over lamenting that the president's trial "wound up consisting of two weeks of dry debate and posturing, and will conclude without any witness testimony or new evidence." Instead, the sketch promised "the trial you wish had happened." The scene opened with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. (Mikey Day) vowing that he would conduct the trial with "complete disinterest" only to be replaced by the reality TV host Judge Mathis (Kenan Thompson), who brought his own gavel with him. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (Kate McKinnon) also advocated for the president. When Thompson asked her if she was worried about how history might judge her, McKinnon replied, "Where I come from, we have our own history books, and on the cover, a T. rex is handing a Confederate flag to Jesus." Thompson then called for the testimony of several witnesses, beginning with John R. Bolton (Cecily Strong), the former national security adviser. Strong said the president's actions left her "deeply worried about the future of democracy," but when Thompson asked her to elaborate on the contents of a forthcoming memoir, she said: "No, no, sorry, judge, no more free spoilers. But you can pre order the book now. It's called 'Harry Potter and the Room Where It Happened.'" Pete Davidson appeared as Hunter Biden, entering the courtroom on a hoverboard scooter and explaining that he now sat on "the board of a Brazilian money laundering company called Nepotismo." Alec Baldwin at last turned up in his recurring role as President Trump, entering the trial with the assistance of a walker. "Your honor, I'm a very sick old man," Baldwin said. "How could I withhold aid from the Ukraine? I can barely get around the house" Thompson asked him, "Are you trying to Weinstein me right now?" Baldwin replied: "In which sense? Because Harvey and I overlap in a few areas." There were further appearances from Alex Moffat as Representative Adam Schiff and Kyle Mooney as Joe Pesci's title character from "My Cousin Vinny." ("That is too dumb, even for this," Thompson observed.) Baldwin gave a closing statement in which he said, "Ladies and gentlemen of this government place, what I've learned from this trial is that clearly nothing I do or say has any consequence." Thompson nonetheless found him guilty, fined him 10,000 and ordered him to say one nice thing about Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As you might expect in an episode hosted by an N.F.L. player on the night before the Super Bowl, there were a few sketches in this episode that dealt with football, including a fake ad for Oil of Olay eye black ("Oil of BrOlay") and a segment that found Watt in an unusual recording session for a football video game. Still, we'll give the edge to this filmed sketch called "Robbie," which models itself on inspirational sports movies like "Rudy." It features Chris Redd as the title character, a spunky member of his college team's practice squad who has never gotten to suit up for an actual game, and Day, Moffat and Mooney as his well intentioned teammates, all of whom are willing to give up their spots so that Robbie can finally play. Then there's Watt as another fellow player, who makes it painfully clear why Redd should not be permitted anywhere near the field. Over at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors, Colin Jost and Michael Che, continued to riff on the impeachment trial of President Trump. ... is a sentence I could have said two weeks ago when the trial began. We didn't even get to hear any witnesses in this trial. And by the way, look at the witnesses we could have had. Shows pictures of Lev Parnas and John Bolton. You don't want to hear anything from these guys? They look like the two characters in a video game who give you the best information. My questions for them aren't even about Trump. My questions are like: "What's your deal? Walk us through a typical day. What kind of food do you eat? Is it human food?" It was reported that President Trump pushed for the vote to be on Tuesday so that he could boast about his acquittal during the State of the Union. But now experts are saying that Trump might strike a more humble tone. And we actually have an advance copy of his speech: Plays an animation of President Trump dancing to MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This." Che, shaking his head, picked up the thread: What better way to start Black History Month than to be failed by the justice system. Why was this impeachment ever a good idea? We would have been better off just yelling, "Citizen's arrest!" And why didn't we get Alan Dershowitz? This dude was amazing. He somehow convinced the court that a president should be allowed to break the law as long as it's good for the country. That's like telling your girl you only cheated to practice being good at sex for her. You know what? That's it, I'm a Republican now. I'm tired of losing. I can't be a Democrat and a Knicks fan. It's too much heartbreak, man. Ego Nwodim appeared at the Weekend Update desk as Dr. Angie Hynes, a professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University, who said that she wanted to spotlight figures who were not as well known as, say, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. Instead, Nwodim began by singling out a woman named Cynthia Woods, who she said "showed up at my wedding wearing all white." Nwodim added, "She is black and she is history to me." She similarly called out an ex colleague who had sent her inappropriate photographs; her twin sister, Angel, who may or may not have cheated with her husband; and the drugstore chain Duane Reade, which Nwodim called "black Walgreens" but dismissed for "locking up the lotion." "Duane Reade, you black, and you history," she said. "CVS, welcome to the cookout, baby."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Ms. Adams considered the sharing of her experience to be both therapeutic and altruistic, to satisfy her own need for expression and to shed light on coping with cancer. Showing her determination to battle the disease and its concomitant pain with all the medical tools available to her and infused with a gutsy optimism, her postings described a patient determined to survive. The posts included medical and mood updates, aching accounts of difficult conversations about her condition with her three children, and reflections on the nature of living with the discomfort and the trying reality of a debilitating illness. About her treatment, she was often harshly specific and vivid: "Finishing up a 9 hour emergency trip in to urgent care center," she wrote on Facebook in February. "Got platelets, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and THEN drained almost 3 liters of fluid from my abdomen." Sometimes she gave voice to her innermost fears in poetry, as she did in a blog post last November, when she wrote, in part: Wish to believe the best days are over. Know if the adventures have ended, Want to believe that it can be true that they are. But even on the days I don't... Somewhere inside I know I must The openness of her work attracted the attention of Ms. Keller, whose column questioning the seemliness of publicly tracing one's own decline via Twitter "Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies?" she wrote was widely criticized as unseemly itself. The Guardian removed the column from its website five days later, on the same day that a column by Mr. Keller appeared in The Times. Mr. Keller, a former executive editor of The Times, used Ms. Adams's work to discuss end of life care and whether fighting doggedly to stay alive as opposed to accepting the inevitability of death gracefully, as his father in law had, was the more dignified and admirable course.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna for emergency use, allowing the shipment of millions more doses across the nation and intensifying the debate over who will be next in line to get inoculated. The move will make Moderna's vaccine the second to reach the American public, after the one by Pfizer and BioNTech, which was authorized just one week ago. The F.D.A.'s decision sets the stage for a weekend spectacle of trucks rolling out as expert committees begin a new round of discussions weighing whether the next wave of vaccinations should go to essential workers, or to people 65 and older, and people with conditions that increase their risk of becoming severely ill from Covid 19. Jockeying for the next shots in January and February has already begun, even though there is still not enough of the two vaccines for all the health care workers and nursing home staff members and residents given first priority. Uber drivers, restaurant employees, morticians and barbers are among those lobbying states to include them in the next round along with those in the more traditional categories of the nation's 80 million essential workers, like teachers and bus drivers. The rapid progress from lab to human trials to public inoculation has been almost revolutionary, spurred by the nation's urgent need to blunt the pandemic that has broken record after record in U.S. deaths, hospitalizations and economic losses. In the last week alone, there has been an average of 213,165 cases per day, an increase of 18 percent from the average two weeks earlier. And the daily death toll in recent days has surpassed 3,200. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said in an interview Friday evening that the advent of two vaccines was "an historic moment." "This to me is a triumph of multiyear investment in biomedical research that culminated in something that was not only done in record time, in the sense of never before has anybody even imagined you would get vaccines to people in less than a year from the time that the sequence was made known," Dr. Fauci said. "This is an example of government working. It worked really well," he added. Moderna, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., worked with Dr. Fauci's agency at the National Institutes of Health to create a vaccine that, along with Pfizer BioNTech's, shepherds in a new technology based on genetic material called messenger RNA or mRNA. In clinical trials in tens of thousands of volunteers, the vaccines proved 94 to 95 percent effective. Each requires two shots. Both products are reaching an anxious public before vaccines made with traditional approaches, and have become even more critical as other companies' efforts have faltered in recent months. The emergency authorization kicks off a swift and complex drive to distribute some 5.9 million doses of the Moderna vaccine around the country, with shipping to begin on Sunday and deliveries starting on Monday. The first Moderna vaccinations could then be given hours later. Because Moderna's vaccine, unlike Pfizer BioNTech's, does not need extreme cold storage and is delivered in smaller batches, states are hoping to provide it to less populated areas, reaching rural hospitals, local health departments and community health centers that were not at the top of the distribution list. Three places that did not receive the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau will receive the Moderna vaccine for that reason, according to a federal health official familiar with the government's distribution plans. And in contrast to Pfizer's rollout last week, the Moderna vaccine deliveries will be managed by the federal government under the funding of Operation Warp Speed, the administration's program to develop and distribute vaccines as fast as possible. Supplies of a second vaccine cannot come soon enough. Several governors and state health officials said on Friday that they were dismayed to learn they would be getting less of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine next week than the federal government had promised. Dr. Mark Levine, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Health, said in a Friday briefing: "All my colleagues in the region are reporting a 25 to 35 percent decrease in their allocation for next week. As we were walking in, I learned as many as 975 doses out of an expected 5,850 doses would not be coming in when we expected. That doesn't mean we won't be getting all of those doses. It just means they won't be coming in when we expected." He added, "What everyone around the country is upset about, in addition to just the number, is there's been no communication, so there's no understanding of what this really means." Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts said on Friday, "We're certainly frustrated," referring to the reduced number of Pfizer BioNTech doses his state would receive next week 42,900 instead of 59,000. Demand for the vaccine is high. "So far, hospitals are reporting overwhelming acceptance from doctors, nurses and other workers who are eligible to be vaccinated," he said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Pointing out how hard hit Wisconsin has been, Gov. Tony Evers complained that the state was receiving significantly less of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine than it had been promised 35,100 doses instead of 49,725. In a statement on Friday, he said, "We call on the federal government to send us more vaccine without delay." Because Moderna's vaccine requires two doses, federal officials are holding another 5.9 million doses for shipment four weeks after the first wave, as the doses are spaced a month apart. The federal government also plans to reserve more than 500,000 doses in case of problems with the initial shipment. Officials expect to inform states next week the number of doses they plan to send in the second wave of shipments. The emergency authorization Friday was the product of an F.D.A. review process that compressed an extraordinary amount of work into weeks, and occurred at the same time regulators were poring over materials for the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The overlap led to a grueling schedule for the reviewers. Large teams organized into specialties epidemiology, statistics and manufacturing among them and reviewed Moderna's application day and night once the company submitted its data in late November. Among the review's components were teams that examined company production facilities and clinical trial sites to affirm that records corresponded to the materials Moderna had submitted to federal regulators. Looming over the F.D.A. in recent weeks has been the prospect of political influence on the agency's review of both vaccines. President Trump has publicly ridiculed and pressured Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to speed authorization. Dr. Hahn on Friday tried to distance the agency from any perceived meddling. "We worked quickly, based on the urgency of this global pandemic, not because of any external pressure," he said in a news briefing shortly after the authorization was announced. "We have not cut corners, but rather have cut through regulatory red tape that can sometimes slow down the process." Dr. Marks said that it was "dangerous" for him to speculate about the cause of the reactions, but mentioned a possible link between rare allergic responses and polyethylene glycol, an ingredient in both vaccines but in different formulations. The reactions have occurred in people who got the Pfizer vaccine in its first weeks of a public rollout. The F.D.A.'s authorization also represented a capstone to a sprawling government led effort that began in January, when scientists at N.I.H. and Moderna designed the vaccine within two days of China's releasing the genetic sequence of the new virus. The company had never brought a product to market, giving it an underdog status as its vaccine was tested on the same timetable as Pfizer BioNTech's. Moderna enjoyed an unusually intimate relationship with Operation Warp Speed, which has monitored its supply on an almost hourly basis this year. The company benefited from nearly 2.5 billion in federal funds used to buy raw materials, expand its factory and enlarge its work force by 50 percent. Public health experts and federal officials still estimate that it will be at least six months, if not longer, before most Americans can be vaccinated. And that depends on whether other vaccines in trials are successful and receive emergency approval. The federal government is counting on building supplies from vaccines under development by several others one from Johnson Johnson, one from Sanofi of France and GlaxoSmithKline of Britain, and another from the British Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. On Saturday and Sunday, experts advising the C.D.C. will take up Moderna's vaccine and ultimately vote on the next tiers of people who should get the vaccines. The committee vote on Sunday will most likely set off a frenzy of difficult decision making at the state level that could be further complicated by bumps in the vaccine production process. Behind the scenes is McKesson, based in Irving, Texas, one of the country's largest distributors of drugs and medical supplies. The company has a long history of distributing vaccines and is the largest distributor of the seasonal flu vaccine in the United States.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Dr. Ian Williams, a Welsh born physician, started publishing comics under a pseudonym in 2007, the year he began a website devoted to so called graphic medicine. Currently located in Brighton, Williams is now one of the primary creators of what has become a rich field combining comics and health care, broadly conceived. A group of artists, academics and medical professionals now maintain a resource rich version of the website (graphicmedicine.org), sponsor an annual international conference and oversee a book series. In 2015 they issued the "Graphic Medicine Manifesto," a part prose, part comics title this paper reviewed favorably. Williams, one of the manifesto's authors, is now out with his second book of graphic fiction, THE LADY DOCTOR (Penn State University, 24.95), which, like his first, "The Bad Doctor," is set in a small town in Wales and offers the engrossing perspective of a hard working and fallible physician. Lois Pritchard, 40, single and a secret smoker, wears a sharp black bob and pointy high heeled boots. A general practitioner, she also works part time at the local Genitourinary Medicine clinic, treating various problems of genital and urinary origins that the book selectively illustrates, including numerous S.T.D.s ("muck in the fuel pipe," as one man puts it). Although Lois is an appealingly fleshed out character, the plot points of "The Lady Doctor" are nothing special: Lois's mother, who abandoned the family when Lois was small, now wants Lois to help her with a liver transplant; Lois and her journalist buddy take psilocybin mushrooms, in an almost skippable section; there are standard romantic ups and downs. Instead, what makes this book fascinating is its sensitive portrayal of Lois's interactions with a range of patients. In recurrent, wordless pages throughout, with his clean and fluid black line art,, Williams illustrates the rhythm of Lois's professional routine through whom and what she encounters: an assortment of faces, body parts and affects streaming by in an even staccato. While in an early scene Lois and a fellow doctor wonder about their ability to achieve empathy with patients, "The Lady Doctor" itself illuminates something just as profound: her coolheaded receptivity to nominally depressing and gross manifestations of humanity, her rejection of the judgmental in the service of tending to the body. In one scene she removes a curtain finial lodged deep in a patient's vagina; in another she vomits, in private, after examining a man's feet; and there are plenty of drawings of genital procedures that may make the reader squirm but that Lois treats calmly and clinically. Lois is human "Please God, kill me now," she thinks after the foot episode but Williams reveals, in his careful attention to her work as a doctor, how seriously she understands her profession and how open she is to patients.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The chief executive of Netflix fired the company's chief communications officer on Friday after he "showed unacceptably low racial awareness and sensitivity" in using a racial epithet at least twice in the workplace, according to a company memo. The chief executive, Reed Hastings, credited the communications officer, Jonathan Friedland, with helping to strengthen Netflix's brand around the world and making it successful. But those accomplishments were not enough to outweigh his workplace behavior. "Unfortunately, his lack of judgment in this area was too big for him to remain," Mr. Hastings wrote. Mr. Friedland, who was named chief communications officer in January 2012, could not be reached to comment on Friday night. On Twitter, he said, "Leaders have to be beyond reproach in the example we set and unfortunately I fell short of that standard when I was insensitive in speaking to my team about words that offend in comedy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SAN FRANCISCO Snap, the maker of the disappearing message app Snapchat, is continuing to struggle. The social media company said on Thursday that it lost two million daily active users over the past three months after shedding three million over the summer, knocking its total down to 186 million. While that number was up from a year earlier, the consecutive quarterly losses were troubling for a company that has not been dealing with the problems of disinformation and bias that have put other social media firms under scrutiny. Snap also continued to lose money. While the company said its revenue rose 43 percent to a record 298 million in the third quarter from a year earlier, its net loss totaled 325 million. The loss was narrower than a year ago. The company's stock, which has lost almost half its value since the beginning of the year, fell 11 percent in after hours trading after closing at 6.99 at the end of regular trading. Snap has faced difficulties retaining its users recently, in part because of an unpopular redesign that effectively separated social and media into two parts of its app last year. Snap rolled back some of the redesign after people revolted, but it has been slow to win users back and gain new ones.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Law school applications are headed for a 30 year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation. As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000. Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all. "We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books," said William D. Henderson, a professor of law at Indiana University, who has written extensively on the issue. "Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken." Responding to the new environment, schools are planning cutbacks and accepting students they would not have admitted before. A few schools, like the Vermont Law School, have started layoffs and buyouts of staff. Others, like at the University of Illinois, have offered across the board tuition discounts to keep up enrollments. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School, who runs a blog on the topic, said he expected as many as 10 schools to close over the coming decade, and half to three quarters of all schools to reduce class size, faculty and staff. After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of "Failing Law Schools." The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market. Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge based professions, namely the growth of the Internet. Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas. In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer's to fill them out. "Students are doing the math," said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York School of Law. "Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the prospect of attaining a six figure income job is limited." Mr. Tamanaha of Washington University said the rise in tuition and debt was central to the decrease in applications. In 2001, he said, the average tuition for private law school was 23,000; in 2012 it was 40,500 (for public law schools the figures were 8,500 and 23,600). He said that 90 percent of law students finance their education by taking on debt. And among private law school graduates, the average debt in 2001 was 70,000; in 2011 it was 125,000. "We have been sharply increasing tuition during a low inflation period," he said of law schools collectively, noting that a year at a New York City law school can run to more than 80,000 including lodging and food. "And we have been maximizing our revenue. There is no other way to describe it. We will continue to need lawyers, but we need to bring the price down." Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself a failure to keep up with the profession's needs. "We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply," said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. "It's not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones." She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see as the overly academic training at elite law schools. The drop in law school applications is unlike what is happening in almost any other graduate or professional training, except perhaps to veterinarians. Medical school applications have been rising steadily for the past decade. Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said first time enrollments to master of business degree programs were steady a 0.8 percent increase among Americans in 2011 after a decade of substantial growth. But growth in first time foreign student enrollments 13 percent over the same period made up the difference, something from which law schools cannot benefit, since foreigners have less interest in American legal training. In the legal academy, there has been discussion about how to make training less costly and more relevant, with special emphasis on the last year of law school. A number of schools, including elite ones like Stanford, have increased their attention to clinics, where students get hands on training. Northeastern Law School in Boston, which has long emphasized in the field training, has had one of the smallest decreases in its applicant pool this year, according to Jeremy R. Paul, the new dean. There is also discussion about permitting students to take the bar after only two years rather than three, a decision that would have to be made by the highest officials of a state court system. In New York, the proposal is under active consideration largely because of a desire to reduce student debt. Some, including Professor Hadfield of the University of Southern California, have called for one or two year training programs to create nonlawyer specialists for many tasks currently done by lawyers. Whether or not such changes occur, for now the decline is creating what many see as a cultural shift. "In the '80s and '90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn't know what to do went to law school," Professor Henderson of Indiana said. "Now you get 120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won't have the bodies we need to meet the payroll."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
30 FOR 30: BE WATER 9 p.m. on ESPN and ESPN2. The latest installment of ESPN's documentary series explores the life and career of Bruce Lee, who, before his death at the age of 32, was an accomplished martial artist, international film star and philosopher. The film, directed by Bao Nguyen, chronicles Lee's early years, his Hollywood aspirations and the discrimination he faced as an Asian American entertainer. The documentary focuses on the final years of Lee's life, when he left Hollywood for Hong Kong to complete the feature length films that would define his career, and includes interviews from his family, friends and collaborators, including his wife, Linda, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. HOLLYWOOD GAME NIGHT 7 p.m. on NBC. Jane Lynch's celebrity centric game show returns for a new season. Famous contestants, including Laverne Cox, Sasheer Zamata, Joel McHale and D'Arcy Carden, will head to a beach house where they'll compete in a series of summer themed party games for the chance to win up to 25,000. And Lynch, the host, has a few new games up her sleeve, including one called Jane's Pool Jamz, which involves identifying a remixed song and wading through a ball pit, and What's the Scoop, where teammates are tasked with stacking oversized ice cream scoops onto a giant cone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
If you belong to that minority of Americans who will follow the World Cup this summer, you will hear national anthems sung before each game, and see the players in white England shirts mouthing "Send her victorious / Happy and glorious / Long to reign over us / God save the Queen!" Our present queen has reigned so long that she broke the record of her predecessor for most of the period covered by Sir David Cannadine's admirable new book, whose name makes "19th century" almost synonymous with "Victorian." And "victorious"? Any serious historian of Cannadine's (and my) country in that epoch has a tricky balance sheet of profit and loss to compile. There were military victories, against Napoleon, the Russians and the Boers, not to mention numerous often defenseless peoples in Asia and Africa. There was astonishing material progress. Reformers won slow but steady political victory, so that from the time "Victorious Century" opens, when only a fraction of Englishmen could vote for a corrupt Parliament, by the time it ends six out of 10 men though still only men were enfranchised. More than that, it was also an age of astonishing literary fecundity and intellectual vitality, scarcely surpassed since. On the other side, the mass of the people led wretched lives, and short ones, worked to death in the cramped, disease ridden, filthy new industrial cities. And that was in England. Cannadine, the Dodge professor of history at Princeton University, takes his terminal dates from the 1800 Act of Union, which created "the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland," and the Liberal landslide at the general election of 1906, which finally led to the passing of Home Rule for Ireland and began the breakup of that United Kingdom. As William Gladstone said toward the end of the century, that Union had been maintained "not by moral agency but through the agency of force," and the utter horror of the Great Irish Famine in the 1840s left a legacy of bitterness that no subsequent remedies could assuage. For all the triumphs of Trafalgar and Waterloo, the following years saw unrest and bloodshed, political agitation and howls of distress from the desperately poor, who often resorted to violent resistance to change as their old livelihoods were swept away by new technologies. The great majority of the populace still labored on the land; at midcentury the roughly two million agricultural workers were the largest employment group, followed by more than a million domestic servants, mostly women, although England would become one of the most urbanized countries in Europe well before the century was out. But those forces contended with a long period of political reaction until the first cracks in the edifice of the "Old Corruption" came with Catholic Emancipation in 1829; the next year King George IV died (at which The Times of London bluntly said that "there never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures"), and two years after that the Reform Bill was passed, significant not so much for what it did in modestly extending the franchise as for what it portended. 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. Much of the narrative frame concerns high politics, and rightly so. A book like this one is particularly valuable in an age when history undergraduates often startle their teachers by their ignorance of basic facts. So it's good to be reminded of the personal as well as principled conflicts among Wellington, Melbourne, Peel, Aberdeen, Disraeli and Gladstone, all of whom, one may say, seem towering figures by today's dismal standards. Against the reforming spirit of the age there were contrary forces, the neoreactionaries of "Young England" and the high church revival of the Oxford movement. That meant little to the victims of the "Hungry Forties," with severe recession throughout the country, and catastrophe in Ireland. Sir Robert Peel was converted to free trade and the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, with not much immediate effect on "the condition of England" about which Thomas Carlyle and many others wrote. Toward the end of the century, Sir John Seeley said with smug facetiousness that the British had acquired an empire, which by then extended over much of the globe, in "a fit of absence of mind." What was true was the reluctance of successive governments for either war or expansion. Prime ministers found themselves Lord Aberdeen in the Crimea and Lord Salisbury with the Boers dragged into conflicts they didn't much want. And there was continual tension between the British government and distant settlers from South Africa to Australia, with London trying to restrain the settlers and making at least a pretense of safeguarding the interests of the indigenous peoples. And yet there was an underlying imperialist savagery, seen in the bloody suppression of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, combined with cynicism. The English did not endear themselves to others by combining rapacity with seeming high mindedness. If the governor of Hong Kong, who claimed that "Jesus Christ is free trade, and free trade is Jesus Christ," was an extreme case, there was nothing "free" about the monstrous way China was forced to buy opium by the British. As in that case, much of British commercial success had nothing to do with formal empire. By midcentury, "1,500 British mercantile houses were trading around the world, and nearly two thirds of them were based outside the European mainland, with 41 in Buenos Aires alone." As Cannadine says, the British had found the secret by which they could "operate as a global hegemon on the cheap." At the book's "halftime," which Cannadine marks with the triumphant Great Exhibition of 1851, visited in Hyde Park by an astonishing six million people, "the world was at peace, and England prosperous at home and honored abroad," according to one complacent contemporary. In some ways it actually was a generous country. Around and about Soho at the time could be found dissidents and revolutionists from half the countries of Europe Louis Blanc, Karl Marx, Giuseppe Mazzini, Lajos Kossuth and Alexander Herzen. The Times boasted that "this country is the asylum of nations," a contrast indeed to today. After the very unsettled period in domestic politics from the 1840s to the 1860s, a modern party structure took shape, the franchise was widened twice more, and a secret ballot was introduced in 1872, dramatically affecting Ireland. Gladstone tried but failed to pass Home Rule and, as Cannadine grimly says, "the 'Irish question' was back, and it would not go away for the rest of the 19th century or, indeed, for the whole of the 20th century and beyond." While the empire grew apace, so did production of the coal and ships that ensured British naval supremacy. And yet by the end of the century, a new boastful imperialism was qualified by a mood of apprehension, expressed by the bard of Empire himself. Kipling warned "lest we forget," and imagined the day when "all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!" Besides these alarms there was astonishing scientific advance, a steady decline in religion and also something wonderful. The "condescension of posterity" would be exceptionally misplaced for literature. During the one decade 1811 20 not only were Byron, Keats and Shelley writing and Jane Austen's novels published, but Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot were all born. Maybe our vaunted contemporary writers will one day be rated as highly. We'll see. In Cannadine's lucid account there is the occasional slip (the 1833 Irish Church Temporalities Act suppressed 10 bishoprics, not 18). And there's one subject that he deals with cursorily at the very end, but that was of the greatest importance in the second part of the century: the growth of organized games. He mentions the publication of Mill's "Utilitarianism" in 1863, but not another and surely more important event that year, the meeting at a London pub that drew up a common code for association football. As A. J. P. Taylor said, "By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished" words that may be given further force this summer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. As the coronavirus rages out of control across much of the United States, Americans are acting curiously helpless. If we had been this passive in 1776, we would still be part of Britain. Yet even as we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July, we don't seem willing to assert independence from a virus that in four months has killed more Americans than the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars did over 70 years. Here's the simplest of steps we could take: Wear a face mask. In the United States, mask wearing lags, particularly among men, compared with some other countries. A poll finds that many American men regard the wearing of face masks as "a sign of weakness," and President Trump's refusal to wear them has suggested that he perceives that masks are for wimps. Trump may now be switching gears, for he told Fox Business on Wednesday that he's "all for masks" and would wear one if he were "in a tight situation with people." He shouldn't waste time: He should tweet a photo of himself in a mask and call on supporters to wear masks as well. Refusing to cover one's face is reckless, selfish behavior that imperils the economy and can kill or endanger innocent people. A review of 172 studies in The Lancet medical journal found that "face mask use could result in a large reduction in risk of infection." An article in Health Affairs found that state mask mandates, which cover about half the population, may have averted more than 230,000 coronavirus infections. For one study this year, reported in Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers placed hamsters with the coronavirus in cages next to those without the virus, and found that when surgical masks were used as a barrier between the cages infections plunged by more than half. Or take a lesson from East Asian countries, where mask wearing is more common as a sign of courtesy, that have managed to contain the virus. Dr. Kwok Yung Yuen, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Hong Kong, told me that a crucial reason for Hong Kong's success against Covid 19 (less than one death per million inhabitants, compared with 385 per million in the United States) is that 97 percent of Hong Kong residents wear masks. "Masking is a sign of responsible civility," Yuen told me. Hong Kong, like some Asian countries, distributes masks free. The United States should do the same, for the cost is negligible compared with hospitalization. A University of Washington computer model suggests that 33,000 American lives could be saved from Covid 19 between now and Oct. 1 if more people wore masks. The implication is that inconsiderate Americans unwilling to wear them could in the next few months kill thousands of their neighbors. "We need to do everything we can to increase mask usage," said Kate Grabowski, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But she added: "People shouldn't see masks as a silver bullet. They're not going to be 100 percent effective at preventing transmission." So even with masks, we also need distancing, hand washing, contact tracing and bans on large assemblies. I'm also a big believer in more widespread sewage testing to provide an early warning that the virus is in the neighborhood. To be sure, we need more research, and masks vary in effectiveness. N95 respirators work very well so much so that they make breathing difficult. Disposable surgical masks are more comfortable though less protective, and cloth masks are reusable but less effective. Masks protect your neighbors, but a new Goldman Sachs report finds that expanding mask mandates could also help the American economy. "A national face mask mandate could potentially substitute for renewed lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5 percent from G.D.P.," Goldman Sachs said. "The economic benefit from a face mask mandate and increased face mask usage could be sizable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In the desperation to save lives in the coronavirus pandemic, we have already begun to relax scientific standards in the hope of finding a treatment without waiting to prove that it works. Bioethicists have proposed risky human challenge trials which expose volunteers to the virus to speed coronavirus vaccine development, and the Trump administration has already let one vaccine maker skip the usual requirement for animal safety trials before injecting an unproven vaccine into the arms of human volunteers. The World Health Organization has funded a trial of new drug therapies that shockingly has no placebo control arm. And, of course, the experimental and potentially dangerous use of hydroxychloroquine in Covid 19 patients already boasts the presidential seal of approval and has become commonplace in American hospitals. The next scientific corner to cut is clear. Influential authors from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations recently wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine that "in a high mortality situation, populations may not accept randomized, controlled trials with placebo groups." While placebo controlled multivaccine trials may be one solution, they wrote, another would be to skip the placebo. Questions surrounding the Covid 19 vaccine and its rollout. If Covid 19 isn't going away, how do we live with it? Katherine Eban writes that a clear eyed view is required to organize long term against an endemic virus. Why should we vaccinate kids against Covid 19? The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics explains how vaccinating kids will protect them (and everyone else). Jessica Grose spoke with experts to find out what an off ramp to masking in schools might look like. Who are the unvaccinated? Zeynep Tufekci writes that many preconceptions about unvaccinated people may be wrong, and that could be a good thing. This wouldn't be the first time doctors took a chance on an unproven vaccine on a mammoth scale. More than a million American schoolchildren were given an experimental polio vaccine that had never been subjected to the current gold standard of randomized placebo controlled clinical trials. It was 1954 and children all across the country were losing the ability to walk. Or to breathe. It was an emergency, and faith in American scientific ingenuity was high. Sixty years later, public expectations of the level of scientific evidence required to use vaccines and other treatments had increased but then Ebola exploded out of jungles in West Africa. People were dying in droves, and the local public health infrastructure was in tatters. Investigators plucked an unproven Ebola vaccine candidate called rVSV ZEBOV from the shadows of scientific obscurity and tested it on thousands of Ebola exposed human volunteers. There was no placebo control arm of the trial because some thought that desperation made placebos unethical. Ultimately the Ebola vaccine probably worked. At risk volunteers who received the experimental vaccine early demonstrated less risk of contracting Ebola than later recipients. There was no placebo control arm of the study, so certainty isn't possible. As the Covid 19 death toll mounts, it will be tempting to take our chances on another unproven vaccine. Yet there are life threatening reasons we should not. Unproven vaccines have real risks. The 1976 swine flu vaccine was linked to a rare paralytic neurological illness called Guillain Barre syndrome, arguably fueling vaccine mistrust that persists to this day. One novel H.I.V. trial was stopped early because certain vaccine recipients became more likely to be infected than placebo recipients. In trials of a vaccine against the syncytial respiratory virus, children who received the vaccine experienced enhanced disease that even lead to deaths. In each case, the immune response stimulated by the experimental vaccine was probably more harmful than helpful. There is good reason to worry a coronavirus vaccine could elicit harmful immune responses too. Feline cousins of the coronavirus that causes Covid 19 are known to generate immune responses that can make infection worse. A vaccine that triggers unhealthy immune responses and converts people with mild Covid 19 into people who can't breathe would be catastrophic. Already overflowing intensive care units would be even more overwhelmed, and shaky public trust in proven vaccines would surely be on life support as well. I admire the brave volunteers who have already received experimental coronavirus vaccines. Like doctors and nurses, these volunteers are heroes who put their safety on the line for all of us. If given that opportunity, I hope I will have the same courage. To honor their sacrifice, and to keep all of us safe, scientists must conduct large, placebo controlled coronavirus vaccine trials. Decades from now, when we remember the age of Covid 19, we'll look back with pride on our grit and solidarity. We'll tell stories of innovation and our mobilization, not for war, but for good. I hope we can also remember that we found our way through the darkness with science that people can trust. Tim Lahey is an infectious disease physician and vaccine researcher who leads the ethics program at the University of Vermont Medical Center. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Will it be easier to get black led movies made over the next decade? When I talked to Lena Waithe for my project about the future of movies, she praised studios for greenlighting projects like her upcoming "Queen Slim," but noted that famous actors of color could be doing more to support small films. "You can make a very well done independent black movie for three million bucks, and that's a drop in the bucket for what some of these black stars make per movie," said Waithe. Here are edited excerpts. "Queen Slim" is a dramatic thriller with a first time feature director, Melina Matsoukas, distributed by a major studio, Universal. In a time when big studios are making fewer movies like that, what can people learn from how you were able to push it through the system? I really appreciate the way you crafted that question, because it's one that's not being asked. For "Queen Slim," it's a bit of a perfect storm: If "Moonlight" didn't win best picture and "Get Out" didn't do what it did at the box office, I'm not sure "Queen Slim" would have garnered as much attention as it did. Really, what we're looking at is the rebirth of the black auteur. It's sent a ripple effect through our industry. I really do believe if I had written that movie five years ago, maybe A24 would have released it on a couple screens. I don't think it would have been looked at as a movie that's bankable. Initially, we thought small: we were going to finance it independently and then sell it for a lot of money. It's very black. It's risky. But I think studios were excited by that. They were excited by Melina, they were excited by Daniel Kaluuya being in it. But we're definitely not out there to make a nice black movie for white people. This is a strong, relentless movie made by black people for black people, and if white people enjoy it, that's fine. The rebels are in positions of power, and the studio heads know that this is what people want. It feels like part righteousness, part revenue. It reminds me of what you did to get "Dear White People" produced: The director, Justin Simien, shot a concept trailer for the film that led to an eye popping amount of donations on Indiegogo. It was a way of saying, "There's no movie out there like this, but the numbers prove that people want a movie like this." True, and that took an eternity. I'm not trying to gas Jordan Peele up more than he needs to be gassed, but "Get Out" changed things. It just did! It changed the business. And "Black Panther" changed things, but in a different way, because that movie was almost set up for success through Marvel. "Get Out" was a surprise, a shock to the system. And the industry couldn't ignore the numbers for that. I think black people in this industry are making art that is so specific and unique and good that the studio heads have no choice but to throw money at us. They're saying, "How can we support you and stand next to you?" The tricky part is that they want to be allies and they want to be inclusive, but they also want to make money. They can read the tea leaves. They want to be there if this goes right. But we had a black man run this country, and we still have yet to have a black man run a major studio. That tells you a lot about where we're at as an industry, we're still trying to play catch up. And don't get me started on black financiers! How many of those do we have? I'm not going to name names because I know better, but there are some very big black movie stars out there, and they could pay for two or three or even five small independent movies to get made by black directors and black writers. Let me give you two movies that are very important to the black community: "Moonlight" and "12 Years a Slave." Whose production company put those out? Wasn't Denzel. Wasn't Will Smith. You won't catch me making 20 million a movie and not paying for at least four or five independent movies a year. I do give credit to Ava DuVernay for trying to build something that hasn't been built before, but that's a lot on Ava's back. I'm over here trying to build a community, and I don't see other people doing it. I really do feel like there's a way for us to change the movie business from the inside out, but we're all in our own silos doing our own thing. We're definitely in the middle of a renaissance, make no mistake. In 20 years, people are going to be writing about what you're writing about. But for me, I want more. What other issues concern you about the way things are headed? I feel like we don't have film criticism anymore, in a real way. A lot of bad black movies get good reviews because white critics are afraid to pan them. I love what Chris Rock had to say, that black people haven't overcome until we're allowed to fail. We still feel this guilt of, "Go support this movie because there's black folks in it." In the next few years, when you're putting together a movie package, how important do you think theatrical distribution will be to you? I kind of have a dog in both fights. I'm excited about "Queen Slim" coming out in theaters. People like to hire a babysitter and buy popcorn, because that's very romantic. And we deserve to be on big screens. But also, I know there are people who can't afford to go to big movies. Some people live in small towns where the theater doesn't play "Moonlight" or "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty." I think Netflix is important so that people, and particularly brown people, have access to images of themselves that we won't see in "Avengers: Endgame." I think there are certain movies that should be enjoyed in your living room and certain movies that are best on the big screen. I'm not a fan of people saying movie theaters are going to be dead in 10 years. To me, it's as American as apple pie, and we should preserve that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
DEMOCRACY MAY NOT EXIST, BUT WE'LL MISS IT WHEN IT'S GONE By Astra Taylor Dismay over recent electoral outcomes including the victory of Donald Trump in the United States, the choice of Brexit in the United Kingdom and the selection of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has occasioned a torrent of commentary about the state of democracy in the world. Some observers fear that these developments represent not simply troublesome episodes but harbingers of tendencies that will overwhelm or corrupt key features of good democratic governance: an independent judiciary whose decisions are enforced; institutions such as schools and news media that enable voters to have access to accurate, pertinent information; fair electoral processes; and sensible, decent policies. An impressive contribution to this anxious re examination of political assumptions and practices is Astra Taylor's "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone," an idiosyncratic rumination on problems associated with popular self government. "For most of my life," she writes, "the word democracy didn't hold much appeal. ... Words such as justice, equality, freedom, solidarity, socialism and revolution resonated more deeply." A big part of the problem is a definitional vacuum that leaves "democracy" vulnerable to the sloganeering of just about anyone. After all, notes Taylor, a Canadian documentary filmmaker and author, the horrendously dictatorial regime of North Korea calls itself a "Democratic People's Republic." She sets out to impart some coherence and substance to the term in order to rescue it from ignorance and obfuscation. Her book, she declares, "is an invitation to think about the word democracy from various angles, looking back through history and reflecting on the philosophy and practice of self rule in hopes that a more contemplative view will shed useful light on our present predicament." Taylor manages to avoid the complacencies inculcated by the unceasingly propounded message that American methods of "democracy" are, of course, the best ones. Recall that President Bill Clinton withdrew the nomination of Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department because she had the temerity to argue that winner take all majoritarianism a staple American practice is, in important respects, anti democratic inasmuch as it negates the influence of minorities. Today, the most consequential manifestation of American political narcissism is the extent to which the United States Constitution is exempted from critique. Many observers rightly condemned Trump's demagogic charge that Barack Obama was ineligible for the presidency because, supposedly, he was born abroad. All too few went on to question the constitutional provision on which the "birther" allegation parasitically hung the provision that reserves the presidency for "natural born" citizens, thereby excluding from eligibility for no good reason millions of naturalized citizens. Progressives like Bernie Sanders call for "revolution," yet say nothing about a Constitution that, left unchanged, makes their aspirations unattainable. Rightly questioning fundamental governing arrangements for example the uniformity of state representation in the Senate (a blatant rejection of majoritarianism) Taylor notes that a "scant 2 percent of Americans, residing in the nine smallest states, hold the same power in the Senate as the 51 percent who reside in the nine largest; some votes literally weigh up to 66 times more than others, and urban migration trends mean that this problem will only become more extreme." The University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson has been trying for a decade to stir discontent with what he calls "our undemocratic Constitution." Taylor's book suggests that a new generation of activist intellectuals might be more inclined to press the Levinsonian attack. Taylor displays considerable intellectual nimbleness. She abhors the anti tax revolt in California that culminated in 1978 with Proposition 13, the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. But she admires the skill with which tax revolt organizers managed public perceptions and manipulated the working of government to effectuate their aims. She urges her camp the champions of feminist, working class, multicultural progressivism to be more attentive to the limits of protest. The illegal blocking of intersections and occupation of public squares, she writes, can sometimes be essential, "but compelling bursts of civil disobedience can also mask the fact that the left is not yet strong, strategic or patient enough to transform expressions of discontent into a force that can pull political and economic structures in a more democratic direction." Taylor is similarly realistic in recognizing the limits of electoral reforms such as referendums or recall initiatives which are subject to misuse depending on the aims to which they are deployed. She recommends systems of proportional representation, seeing them as generally superior to systems based on winner take all majoritarianism. She notes, though, that there is no panacea for all of the problems that beset electoral arrangements. Even modified versions of proportional representation, she writes, "make it possible for fringe parties to become influential power brokers within unstable coalition governments, a pathology most visible in Israel and Italy." Several deficiencies weaken Taylor's book. She does not seriously attempt to answer her first question: "What is democracy? ... What are we really referring to when we talk about a system in which the people rule themselves?" She says that she was prompted to address this question because "democracy" is typically left undefined in our conversations. The term's meaning, she complains, "is rarely given much serious consideration. Though the headlines tell us democracy is in 'crisis,' we don't have a clear conception of what it is that is at risk." Initially, then, it seems that Taylor is on a mission of clarification that will better enable us to understand one another at this volatile, polarized moment. Clarification, however, would require charting the many ways in which people use the term "democracy" and then positing and defending a preferred definition. Taylor is too impatient for that. All too quickly she abandons her aim of defining democracy in order to make it more than an empty slogan. Instead, she embraces the ambiguity that characterizes usage of the term, maintaining that its "disorienting vagueness" is a "source of strength." Vagueness might be good for political actors wishing to deploy "democracy" to further their aims. It's not good for analysts wishing to demystify political jargon. Taylor also avoids confronting the intellectual tradition that holds a skeptical view of the ability of "the people" to rule themselves well as Joseph Schumpeter reflected when he asserted that "the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field." Taylor is certainly aware of this tradition; periodically she casts aspersions on it and its most influential spokesman, Plato. Marginally, she notes its force, writing that "the idea of empowering ordinary people can seem terrifying today because there is so much stupidity on display" and that "if the people are willing to vote racist huckster demagogues into office, perhaps they can't be trusted." But those are throwaway lines. For the most part she stays safely within the confines of what Jason Brennan, in his excellent book "Against Democracy" (2016), calls "democratic triumphalism," the belief that "democracy and widespread political participation are valuable, justified and required by justice." Taylor is sentimentally deferential to "ordinary people." When they stray, in her analysis, it is always at the hands of some dastardly oppressive or seductive elite. Hence she insists that "ordinary people have struggled defiantly ... banding together against the odds to form a philosophical public, a public that may not have all the answers but that is unafraid to ask questions, learn and rebel." A good book, "Democracy May Not Exist" would have been even better had Taylor let go of her idealization of "the people" and responded systematically to those who repudiate the assumption that broader, more active political participation by ordinary folk is a prescription for a more decent world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Priya Kim Prasad and James Francis Bowe III were married April 7 at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral in New York. Msgr. Donald Sakano performed the ceremony. The bride, 30, works in interest rates in New York City for Citadel Securities. She graduated from Yale and received an M.B.A. from Columbia. She is also a chartered financial analyst. She is the daughter of InSook Y. Prasad and Bipin K. Prasad of New York. The bride's father is a self employed software engineer in New York. The groom, 29, was until last month a treasury bond trader in New York for Nomura Securities. He graduated from Colby College.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Stretching across 800 square miles of bucolic hills, Britain's Cotswolds region includes countless charming villages in five counties that personify the enduring appeal of the English countryside. Medieval wool merchants built stately manor houses and remarkable, timeless churches that have been lovingly preserved. And Britain's largest designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty is blessed with an abundance of Roman sites, abbeys, gardens and castles. A host of celebrities own homes in the Cotswolds and some of the region's towns have a decidedly upper crust vibe, leaving those who lack quality driving gloves and a fancy hat worthy of Kentucky Derby Day feeling a shade out of place. But anyone, regardless of accent or horseback riding ability, can enjoy the thrill of driving down a quiet narrow country lane in the shadows of towering hedges toward one of the lost in time country hamlets that make this slice of south central England one of Europe's most rewarding destinations. Ask the knowledgeable and gregarious docents to show you the Brito, a magnificent dictionary of theological words that was handwritten by scribes in the 1300s. If the place seems eerily familiar, you may have seen it before the abbey was a stand in for Hogwarts in two Harry Potter films. Make time to stroll the village's quiet streets and then make the 20 minute drive north to Castle Combe, an inviting village on the banks of the Bybrook River. (adults PS13.40, or about 18; free with National Trust membership). Snag a table before 7 p.m. at the Cirencester branch of Cote Brasserie, a popular chain that serves authentic yet affordable French cuisine, and you can feast on a three course meal for just PS13.50. A superb recent meal here included mussels cooked in white wine, coq au vin and decadently rich chocolate mousse. Cirencester is a walker's paradise, so you can work off the calories on the atmospheric streets. This was the largest city in Britain after London in Roman times, and though its population is now just 19,000, Cirencester is still one of the best preserved towns in the Cotswolds. On the banks of the River Windrush, Bourton on the Water is a quintessentially pretty Cotswolds village. But it's no secret, so arrive early before the tour bus crowds and make a beeline for Bakery on the Water, a family run establishment that serves up fabulous breads, baked goods and nourishing breakfast and lunch items. Everything here is delicious but the almond croissants and the scones are particularly memorable. After breakfast, rent a bike from Hartwells (PS10 for up to three hours), the village ironmonger, and take a moderately taxing, but scenic spin to The Slaughters (Upper and Lower), a pair of photogenic villages full of old stone cottages and low slung bridges. It's hard not to fall in love with Stow on the Wold, a market town that invites exploration. This is a town that is so trusting and friendly that the public library in the historic Market Square allows visitors to borrow books and DVDs. Meander around the square and its environs, visit St. Edward's Church, with its Tolkienesque north door, browse at the cozy Borzoi Bookshop, which has a surprisingly comprehensive selection of travel books, and then repair to the Huffkins Bakery Tea Room for lunch. There are hundreds of manor houses in Britain, but few reflect the personalities of their owners more precisely than the delightful Snowshill Manor and Garden, a medieval estate that was transformed by Charles Wade, an architect and collector. The home, which Henry VIII once gave to Katherine Parr, was purchased by Wade in 1919; he spent more than 30 years turning the grand manor into his own personal doll house. Wade packed Snowshill with some 22,000 collectibles everything from life size samurai to Balinese masks to suits of armor while he lived in a tiny cottage with no electricity behind the estate. Each room reveals a different element of his quirky personality and the engaging docents are full of stories (adults PS11.60, free with National Trust membership). Start your Sunday at The Broadway Deli, with their appropriately named Big Breakfast pork sausage, bacon, roasted tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms, black pudding, baked beans, scrambled eggs and extra buttered toast (PS11.95). You'll need the calories for your next adventure: a circular four mile walk along the scenic Cotswold Way. The hike will take you along Broadway's High Street, past imposing mansions and spectacular countryside on your way to the Broadway Tower, where you'll have a panoramic view of up to 16 counties from the top. The castle like tower, which had a nuclear bunker next to it during the Cold War, was built in 1798 as a folly project for the wife of an earl who wanted to know if a beacon light lit at the tower could be seen from her home 22 miles away. (It could.) Anne Boleyn may have been Henry VIII's most famous wife, but Henry's sixth wife, Katherine Parr, may have been his most interesting partner. The best place to learn about her is at the magnificent Sudeley Castle and Gardens. Parr lived here with her dashing but somewhat unscrupulous husband, Thomas Seymour, whom she married a few months after Henry died. She died seven days after giving birth; Seymour was executed for treason six months later. The great Tudor palace fell into ruins in the 1640s during the English Civil War, and some local women stumbled across Parr's grave on the premises in 1782. Parr supposedly still had her hair, teeth and nails, and her skin was in remarkably good condition. Locks of her hair and a mounted, blackened tooth are on display in the Long Room. Among the many exhibits is Queen Parr's privy, which has a velvet canopy and a seat of crimson velvet for the royal posterior (adults PS16.50; 20 percent discount with National Trust membership). The Sunday roast is an integral part of British culture and a great excuse to wrap up your weekend in a gastronomic orgy of meat and potatoes. The tradition dates back to at least the reign of King Henry VII, who established the Yeoman Warders as the royal bodyguard in 1485. They were said to have feasted on roast beef every Sunday after church, and soon came to be known as beefeaters. There are few better places to tuck into a traditional Sunday roast then The Plough Inn at Ford, a child friendly, 16th century country pub that's also a bed and breakfast. Get the Scotch roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding or the roast breast of chicken with stuffing and bread sauce, and ask for a gravy boat. Expect to pay from about PS12.95 to PS18.95 for main courses. There are two historic inns in the heart of beautiful Stow on Wold that are smart choices for travelers. The Porch House has 13 rooms, each full of character, and claims to be the oldest inn in England. (Bed and breakfast from PS110.) The Kings Arms has seven comfortable rooms in a 500 year old building, along with a nice pub. Bed and breakfast, from PS120.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A poor sense of smell may indicate an increased risk for dementia, a new study has found. Researchers recruited 2,906 men and women ages 57 to 85, testing their ability to identify five odors orange, leather, peppermint, rose and fish. Five years later, 4.1 percent of them had dementia. Of all the factors the researchers measured age, sex, race, ethnicity, education, other diseases the subjects may have had only cognitive ability at the start of the study and poorer performance on the "smell test" were associated with an increased risk for dementia. The study is in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The risk went up steadily with the number of odors they failed to recognize, and over all, compared with those with no olfactory impairment, those with smelling difficulties had more than twice the likelihood of developing dementia. Even among those who initially tested within the normal range for mental ability, a poor sense of smell more than doubled the risk for dementia five years later. "This is not a simple, single variable test for the risk of dementia," said the lead author, Dr. Jayant M. Pinto, a specialist in sinus and nasal diseases at the University of Chicago. "But sensory function is an indicator of brain function. When sensory function declines, it can be a signal to have a more detailed examination to see if everything's O.K."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
A decade after the Great Recession released its grip on the American economy, the job market shows no sign of falling into another slump. Weak hiring in May had given rise to fears that the long running expansion was foundering in the face of trade tensions and cooling growth overseas. But job growth rebounded sharply in June, the Labor Department reported Friday. Employers added 224,000 jobs, a larger figure than expected. And manufacturers, which are bearing the brunt of President Trump's trade war, added jobs at the fastest pace since January. That resilience is good news for workers, who are benefiting from what is now, at least unofficially, the longest economic expansion on record. And it is a boon to Mr. Trump, who is expected to make the economy's strength a centerpiece of his re election campaign. "Our country's doing unbelievably well economically," he told reporters Friday. Yet even as Mr. Trump celebrated the robust hiring numbers, he called again for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates a step that would ordinarily suggest worries about the economy's direction. Growth "would be like a rocket ship" if the Fed acted, he declared. The job market has lost some momentum since last year, when tax cuts and increased government spending gave the economy a jolt. Employers have added an average of 171,000 jobs over the past three months, down from 223,000 per month last year. Wage growth, which picked up late last year, appears to have stalled again average hourly earnings were up 3.1 percent in June from a year earlier, a pace that has barely budged in months. The unemployment rate rose slightly, although at 3.7 percent it remains near a multidecade low. Over all, Friday's figures indicated that the economy is gradually cooling, not headed for a deep freeze. Separate data from the Institute for Supply Management this week showed that both the manufacturing and services sectors grew in June by a variety of measures, though more slowly than in May. The housing market has shown signs of weakness, but that hasn't yet discouraged consumers from spending money, perhaps because layoffs are near record lows. The strength of the United States economy stands in stark contrast to weakness overseas. Data released Friday showed that German factory orders fell sharply in May, the latest sign of trouble in Europe's largest economy. The European Central Bank is widely expected to take action to stimulate the economy when it meets this month. China's manufacturing sector has likewise been struggling, in part because of tariffs imposed by the United States. The conflicting signals being sent by the domestic and global economies are complicating the Fed's decision on interest rates when its policymaking group meets on July 30 and 31. Investors had been expecting a cut of as much as half a percentage point, but "that's probably off the agenda," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. They are also worried about the trade war and its effect on global output. In a report to Congress on Friday, the Fed said it was seeing signs that uncertainty surrounding trade policy was leading companies to delay investment decisions, which could in turn slow economic growth. 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. At Taco Metals, a Miami based manufacturer of equipment for the recreational marine industry, tariffs have meant higher costs for the raw materials and parts it imports from China and other countries. That has added to fears from boat builders and dealers about how long the good times can last in an industry that is highly sensitive to the broader economy. "The tariffs just kind of forced people to think twice about is this going to continue," said Bill Kushner , a vice president at the company. "There's starting to be more hesitation on both the manufacturing side and the dealer side." As customers pull back, Mr. Kushner's company, which employs about 150 workers in Florida and Tennessee, is doing the same. It is holding off on some equipment purchases and waiting to fill some positions. "It's just caused us to take a little step back and reassess some of the direction and make sure we're not jumping the gun," Mr. Kushner said. "It's like, 'Well, are we sure we're going to need to do this, or should we try to outsource?'" So far there is little evidence that those concerns are spreading beyond manufacturing to the broader economy. Hiring in the much larger services sector bounced back in June after unexpected weakness in May, and consumer confidence remains high. Tariffs were barely a topic of conversation at a big gathering of internet retailers in Chicago last week, said Jason Guggisberg , vice president for national accounts for Adecco, a staffing company. "They're very optimistic about a very great second half of this year," he said. "They're going to ride this economic wave as long as they can." June marked the 10th anniversary of the official end of the Great Recession. Unless a recession has already begun, something economists often don't know for several months, the current expansion is the longest on record. Perhaps inevitably, that milestone has prompted questions about when the good times will end. Economists say a recession will come eventually, but research has found that periods of economic growth do not simply peter out some outside force has to cause them. "There's lots of talk about uncertainty, and maybe that's going to lend itself to a weakening in hiring, but we haven't actually seen it happen yet," said Michelle Meyer, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The streak has been more remarkable for its durability than for its strength. Hiring has been slower than in many past recoveries, and wage growth has been anemic through much of the decade. Only recently have the economic gains filtered down to black and Hispanic workers, those with less education, and others who face discrimination or other barriers to employment. "A slowdown is worrisome because you do still have these groups and these workers who have not fully benefited by the recovery," said Martha Gimbel, an economist at the job search site Indeed. "For a lot of people, just not going into a recession may not be good enough." The recent period of very low unemployment has started to help a broader group of workers, as companies have had to search for new sources of talent. Mr. Guggisberg said his clients, which include warehouse and logistics companies, were dropping educational requirements, training workers who lack experience and easing up on drug testing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
LAS VEGAS Medical staff had barely begun wiping the blood from Donald Cerrone's busted nose when other fighters started making it known they want to face Conor McGregor, who beat Cerrone in 40 seconds in the main event at U.F.C. 246. Some of those who want the next shot served notice on Twitter. "Weak," veteran U.F.C. fighter Nate Diaz tweeted with an expletive, implying that, if given a third fight with McGregor, he would perform better than Cerrone had. The rugged welterweight contender Jorge Masvidal sat prominently near the octagon at T Mobile Arena on Saturday night, after telling reporters earlier in the week that he would rather face the Irish star McGregor than fight for a world title. "Saw what I needed to see," Masvidal tweeted Sunday, hinting that he had spotted flaws in McGregor's performance that he could exploit. Whether or not those fighters believe they can beat McGregor, they know they can make significant money facing him. Cerrone earned a career high 200,000 for his loss, and the brief bout generated 11.1 million in ticket sales, the second best figure ever for a mixed martial arts event in Nevada. If McGregor, who returned Saturday night after a 15 month layoff, can stay in the octagon and out of legal trouble, he gives the U.F.C. a bankable star with mainstream profile, and gives fighters in two sports a chance at career defining paydays. McGregor's win over Cerrone gives him options more than three years after he became the simultaneous champion of two divisions. "I'm going to have a look at the calendar and see where we're at," McGregor said after the fight on Saturday. "I'll be ready." McGregor suggested that he could return as quickly as March 7, for U.F.C. 248 in Las Vegas, and he told reporters that he planned to resume training on Monday. Before Saturday, McGregor had last competed in October 2018, when he was neck cranked into submission by Russian wrestling ace Khabib Nurmagomedov in a championship grudge match that ignited a post fight brawl. The melee earned McGregor a fine and a six month suspension from Nevada regulators, and the fighter's time off featured a series of legal issues. McGregor pleaded guilty to smashing a tourist's camera in Miami, and to punching a bar patron in Ireland. During fight week, McGregor and his backers at the U.F.C. unveiled a rebranded version of the fighter's persona. The trash talking heel who grew into the promotion's biggest star renewed himself as a congenial sportsman who, with most of his legal issues settled, could focus on becoming the best fighter possible. In the octagon, McGregor appeared to be the same fast, accurate striker who won titles in two weight classes, even if he opened the fight by missing Cerrone with a wild left hand. "Fifteen months outside of the octagon, a little eager," McGregor said. The near sellout indicated that McGregor's time off didn't damage his ability to sell tickets, and the U.F.C. had already bet on McGregor's marketability by guaranteeing him 3 million for the Cerrone bout. He will receive an undisclosed portion of the event's pay per view revenue, and earned a 50,000 bonus for his spectacular knockout. While McGregor's initial payout was the largest on Saturday's card everyone else's guarantees totaled just under 1.5 million it was far less than the 30 million he made up front for his 2017 boxing match with Mayweather. Those dollar figures help explain why, when questioned about McGregor's future bouts, U.F.C. president Dana White focused on fights with mainstream appeal, and the potential to break revenue records. He acknowledged that boxing matches with Mayweather, who is retired, and Pacquiao, who is still active, remain long shots. But White said Saturday that a rematch between McGregor and the undefeated Nurmagomedov could fill football stadiums. He mentioned AT T Stadium in Dallas and London's O2 arena among several potential destinations for that bout. "This is a massive fight with global appeal," White said. They also require the fighter to stay out of trouble. McGregor was silent on Wednesday when asked directly about two sexual assault investigations in his home country of Ireland, though he told ESPN in response to a general question about "allegations" that he denied them and that "time will reveal all." The New York Times reported on Wednesday that he had not been charged, and the existence of the investigations does not imply that McGregor is guilty of any crime.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE' at the Vineyard Theater (in previews; opens on May 23). John Marcher is convinced that something lies in wait for him. Could it be a new Off Broadway show? The composer John Kander, the playwright David Thompson and the director and choreographer Susan Stroman have transformed Henry James's novella into a play centered on dance. The stage version stars Tony Yazbeck and Irina Dvorovenko. 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.org 'DEVIL OF CHOICE' at the Cherry Lane Theater (previews start on May 23; opens on May 28). A love triangle with a Faustian twist, this play from Maggie Diaz Bofill centers on a college professor, his wife, the woman they meet and the bargains they make. Elizabeth Canavan, Florencia Lozano and David Zayas star in a play about demons, mostly the internal kind. Shira Lee Shalit directs. 866 811 4111, labtheater.org 'THE GREAT LEAP' at Atlantic Stage 2 (previews start on May 23; opens on June 4). In Lauren Yee's play, improving Sino American relations is not precisely a slam dunk. Inspired by her father's sportsmanship, Ms. Yee, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, has written a play about a college basketball team that travels to China. Taibi Magar directs. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
CANNES, France Forget Nicole Kidman in an Alexander McQueen sheer peach lace halter dress; forget Elle Fanning in a Rodarte lavender tulle ball gown and Tilda Swinton in a sparkling black Chanel jumpsuit. It is possible that the most jaw dropping fashion spectacle in Cannes this week took place not on the film festival's red carpet, but high in the hills above the Riviera, where the German goth rock designer Philipp Plein showed his 2018 men's and women's cruise collections, the better to take advantage of the critical mass of celebrities and models that had descended on the Cote d'Azur. Which included Paris Hilton in a black silk negligee gown with plunging lace decollete and black suede thigh high lace up stiletto boots. Along with the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a white crocodile motorcycle jacket speckled with colorful winged dollar bills, and black motorcycle pants. And the American felon turned model Jeremy Meeks, a.k.a. the Blue Eyed Bandit, shirtless, wearing a black jean jacket and matching pants, his Philipp Plein emblazoned underwear rising high above the waistband. "We had to fight with the embassy to get him here," Mr. Plein said before the show, lounging in his silver and white living room, wearing a Philipp Plein white T shirt with a neon green dollar sign as the logo, drooping faded Philipp Plein jeans and white Philipp Plein sneakers tagged by the graffiti artist Alec Monopoly. Mr. Plein was speaking almost entirely in exclamation points, his preferred mode. Still, his own style was relatively tame compared with what appeared on his raspberry red runway: faded denim bikinis with patch pockets on the derriere; gold sequined pajama pants; crystal embedded booty shorts; snakeskin stiletto boots; and his signature vintage German army jackets embroidered with Swarovski crystal roses and skulls. The show concluded with the model Winnie Harlow in a long white jean skirt and oversize white T shirt strolling barefoot to "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N' Roses, as Mr. Monopoly, wearing a Lone Ranger mask, spray painted her clothes with Day Glo tags. The crowd erupted in cheers, and several crystal champagne flutes shattered on the limestone terrace. Even with Mr. Monopoly's performance, compared with past Plein shows that have included roller coasters and monster trucks, the event was almost subdued in part because it was held in Mr. Plein's home as opposed to, say, the New York Public Library, where his fall 2017 show took place. As it turned out, Mr. Plein had originally wanted to go back to New York (where he has another house; he has four) with this show, and stage it before the Met Gala in early May, but the clothes were not going to be ready in time. So he decided on Cannes, the next best glitterati thing, and his own home as inspiration. He is not the first designer to see the synergies in the sud. Over the years, fashion has piggybacked on the film festival's draw of the shiny and photogenic numerous times, be it for store openings, Victoria's Secret fashion shows or Naomi Campbell's annual Fashion for Relief fund raiser, held last Sunday in a hangar at the nearby private jet airport. In that tradition, Mr. Plein transported his team of 20 designers from his three brands Philipp Plein, Philipp Plein Sport and Billionaire to his house (they had to share the bedrooms), and they cooked up the collection. The show also publicly kicked off the company's coming retail expansion. It has 100 stores worldwide, and Roberto Magnani, the new head of global sales recruited from Tod's Group said that by year's end that figure would double. Mr. Plein said: "The company should be up to 300 million in turnover, with no debt and no investors; not one cent owned to one bank in the world. It's a self driving business."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"I can't quite believe I'm involved in this," said Charles Finch, standing before a shelf of imported olive oils at Dean DeLuca in SoHo on a recent evening. He had the beaming face of a kid in a candy store. Or rather, a kid who runs the candy store. "It's such a joyous thing to walk in here because it feels happy," he said. As grocery stores go, the flagship of the fine food chain was undeniably festive on this night. Several hundred people, many of them movers and shakers in the food world, had been invited by Mr. Finch to eat and drink among the cheese and pastry counters and aisles of expensive and colorfully packaged gourmet foods. There was a five piece jazz band playing and a tower made of madeleines in the center of the store and white smocked chefs whipping up snacks like seared scallops with ramp puree. The reason for the party was ostensibly the introduction of Prince Street, a new food themed podcast produced by Dean DeLuca. But more broadly, it was part of Mr. Finch's effort to "reinvigorate and re energize" a foodie institution that was once a place where chefs came to get new ideas but has lost some of its prestige and market share to upstarts like Eataly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"The Joffrey Ballet's collection already feels at home at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where many of Robert Joffrey's papers and the footage of the company are already housed and enjoyed by researchers, dancers, students and the public," Greg Cameron, the company's executive director, said in a statement. Mr. Joffrey and Mr. Arpino founded the group in 1956 in New York with a repertory that included modern ballet and revivals of classics by visionary choreographers like Frederick Ashton, Michel Fokine and Leonide Massine. In the '60s, the company staged a landmark revival of Kurt Jooss's political masterpiece "The Green Table." Amid financial hardship and local competition from major companies like American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet, the Joffrey moved to Chicago in 1995, where it is based today. Processing the archive will take at least a year, the library said, after which time it would become available for research and could provide materials for the library's exhibitions at Lincoln Center.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A pathbreaking composer and saxophonist, a radio host and organizer, a storied bassist, and arguably the most distinguished vocal talent of his generation: These four figures will make up the 2020 class of National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters, the agency announced on Tuesday. Jazz's highest public honor will go to Roscoe Mitchell, Dorthaan Kirk, Reggie Workman and Bobby McFerrin at a ceremony in April 2020. Held at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco, it will be the first Jazz Masters gala in California since 2005. Awardees receive cash prizes of up to 25,000. In the mid 1960s, Mr. Mitchell became an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Chicago organization that fosters onward looking black composers and improvisers. Around the same time, he founded what would become the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a performance troupe as much as a jazz outfit, and a band of particular significance to the avant garde. Mr. Mitchell has written extensively for everything from solo saxophone to orchestra, and he taught for many years at Mills College, where for a decade he was the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BIG IVY, N.C. I live in Appalachia, and on Sunday mornings I hike the Appalachian Trail across the mountains I call home. It is my church. I drink from its springs and rest in the shade of its ancient forests. For decades, the trail has been my refuge. I have run for miles through tunnels of rhododendron, crossed paths with bears and camped with my children beneath starry skies. A few years ago, however, the 600 mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline broke ground, and crews began clear cutting a scar across the mountains to move fracked natural gas from West Virginia to customers in Virginia and North Carolina. On my trail treks in Virginia, I watched the bulldozers creep closer. Then suddenly, on a crisp fall morning in 2018, the bulldozers stopped. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated a permit allowing the pipeline to cross the trail deep beneath the ground. Now the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Monday on what will happen to the 8 billion project. It's a showdown between some of the country's leading fossil fuel utilities and an environmental group, the Cowpasture River Preservation Association. The outcome could upend pipeline construction here and elsewhere in the country, should a planned pipeline cross one of the nation's 11 national scenic trails. Stretching 2,192 miles from Maine to Georgia, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail is the longest and most popular hiking only footpath in the world. Quite unexpectedly, it also has become a formidable and possibly final dirt line of defense against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The Supreme Court case boils down to this: Energy companies received a permit from the U.S. Forest Service allowing pipeline construction through national forests that the agency oversees. But the Appalachian Trail is a unit of the national park system, which the Forest Service does not manage. The National Park Service does. Moreover, federal law prohibits any federal agency from authorizing a pipeline in the national park system. Pipeline protests have erupted across the country, especially here in Appalachia, and it's not just crunchy hikers and tree huggers rallying to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Many conservative rural landowners oppose the pipelines, which they say would cross their property and threaten public safety. Pipelines are dangerous: From January 2010 to November 2018, fossil fuel pipelines in the United States have resulted in more than 5,500 accidents, 800 fires, 300 explosions, 600 injuries and 125 fatalities, according to a 2019 analysis by nonprofit group FracTracker. That's an explosion every 11 days and a fatality every 26 days, the group said. "The pipeline would be more than just an eyesore and environmental risk," says my friend Jennifer Pharr Davis, who once held the speed record for completing the trail, finishing in 46 days, 11 hours and 20 minutes. "There is something woven into our national identity that relates to undisturbed mountains meeting the horizon. When you cut through that with a pipeline, you limit our ability to explore our thoughts, our land and our potential." Ultimately, the collision between supporters of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and those who want to protect the Appalachian Trail is a clash between two visions for our country: a fossil fueled future, or a more sustainable economy based on renewables. For more than a century, fossil fuel industries have won these battles, especially in places like Appalachia. Now, as the Supreme Court case suggests, a beloved dirt path can have powerful political and economic muscle. Outdoor recreation contributed 412 billion, or 2 percent, to the nation's gross domestic product in 2016, more than oil and gas extraction, according to the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis. The number of jobs tied to outdoor recreation vastly outstrips those in coal, oil and natural gas combined. The Appalachian Trail and scenic trails like it have become important to many rural economies. Over 144 million Americans more than a third of the nation's population participated in an outdoor activity in 2017. Where I live in rural Appalachia, communities abandoned by fossil fuel industries are reinventing themselves to attract rapidly growing numbers of outdoor enthusiasts. We already have 300,000 miles of pipeline in this country, more than enough to meet our current and future energy needs. We should be investing in a renewable energy infrastructure instead of pipelines carrying fracked natural gas that leak, spill, pollute, explode and kill. Will it be the route of the pipeline or the path through the forest? Changing course won't be easy. But there is hope: A trail and its supporters are standing their ground against fossil fuels' dominion and pointing another way forward. Will Harlan is a journalist and author of "Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island." 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Lin Manuel Miranda's relationship with Disney started inauspiciously. He wrote a song on spec for a holiday show. The company rejected it. "It was a holiday song, called 'Holidays at Our House,' and I will never play it for you," he recalled recently. "It was not very good." But in the years since, the partnership has blossomed, so much that Miranda recently joked about the idea that Robert A. Iger, the company's executive chairman, might burst into his house if he talked too much about an upcoming project. The company and the composer have a mutual fandom. Miranda named his firstborn son Sebastian, partly in honor of the crab in "The Little Mermaid." And Iger said that among the reasons he was interested in acquiring the live capture film of "Hamilton" was that "I wanted to strengthen the partnership we have with him." On the night that the filmmaker J.J. Abrams saw "Hamilton," Miranda introduced himself. According to both men, Miranda just blurted out an offer to write music for "Star Wars," which Disney had acquired in 2012 as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm. Miranda "comes up to me ... and he says, 'Hey if you need music for the cantina, I'll write it,' and he walks off," Abrams said in an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Miranda wound up contributing to two "Star Wars" sequels, co writing with Abrams the songs "Jabba Flow" for "The Force Awakens" (2015) and the song "Lido Hey" (above) for "The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He also made an uncredited cameo as a pilot in the latter film. "I was working in Wales, and visited J.J.," Miranda recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times. "I was just there intending to visit, and he said, 'Do you want to put on a suit?'" The week Miranda found out he was about to become a father, he was hired by Disney to write songs for "Moana." He won a Grammy for one of them, "How Far I'll Go." "I feel very grateful that we managed to create a Disney heroine who isn't looking for a boyfriend," he told The Los Angeles Times. "She's saving her family, she's saving her island, she's saving the world." He voiced Gizmoduck and his alter ego, Fenton Crackshell Cabrera, in Disney's "DuckTales" reboot. "We looked at the original character, as we do with all of our updates, and thought, 'Well OK, he talks a mile a minute, he's got 100 plans at once, he's impossibly earnest, and he wants to do what's right'," Francisco Angones, one of the show's writers, told Entertainment Weekly. "So we said, 'Oh, that's Lin Manuel Miranda.'" 2018: He Kicks Up His Heels in 'Mary Poppins Returns' Miranda starred in "Mary Poppins Returns" as a Cockney lamplighter, an old friend of the title nanny, dancing and singing in several numbers, most memorably "Trip a Little Light Fantastic." "As a child, of course, you're just dazzled by the fantasy of this umbrella wielding nanny and the world that she conjures," he told Vogue, "but as an adult, you realize that the narrative is a modern day fable about the importance of family above all else, particularly in times of hardship." 2020: He Looks Back on His Rap Improv Years "We Are Freestyle Love Supreme," an 82 minute documentary about the improvisational rap troupe Miranda co founded, is to be streamed by the Disney owned Hulu starting July 17. (The premiere was delayed in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.) The filmmaker, Andrew Fried, began following the group in 2005; the troupe had a run on Broadway last fall and winter. "Freestyle Love Supreme probably has shaped my writing more than any other creative endeavor I've been a part of," Miranda told The Times in 2018, "because it's writing in real time in front of an audience with nothing but your brain and your friends." Still to come: Songs set in Atlantica, and South America Miranda has two major Disney films in his future. He is collaborating with the composer Alan Menken on new songs for a live action remake of "The Little Mermaid." The film, which Miranda is co producing, is to star Halle Bailey as Ariel, and the cast includes Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs. And, working with some of the alumni of "Zootopia," Miranda is co writing a new animated musical film, still untitled but set in Colombia, for Walt Disney Animation Studios.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The pool at the Andaz Scottsdale Resort Bungalows, in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the author went off season. To celebrate my daughter's college graduation in May, I wanted to treat her to a luxurious getaway with my sister. We initially eyed a spa weekend in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but got sticker shock from the prices, which averaged 2,000 per person for the weekend. My sister, a seasoned traveler, got an idea. If it was luxury we craved, why not stay at an upscale resort in a place that's eager to attract tourists in the summer? We decided on a long weekend in July at Andaz Scottsdale Resort Bungalows in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the temperatures ranged from 90 to 110 degrees. The resort's "Heat It Up in Scottsdale" summer package starts at 189 a night and includes two cocktails per person per day, a waived resort fee (usually a 39 a day charge), a full breakfast for each person, served until 3 p.m., and 25 percent off spa services. Compare that to peak season rates, which start at 349 a night, without any of the inclusions. The 185 room resort, redeveloped in 2016, consists of exquisite, midcentur y mo dern, single story bungalows with their own entrances and patios. We upgraded to a 750 square foot suite for 344 a night, which, in our case, included two roomy bathrooms with 40 square foot showers. The upgrade came with a private, poolside cabana with a plush couch, table and chairs, a ceiling fan and a flat screen television. Other perks and amenities were a "libation exploration" class, where visitors are instructed on how to make their favorite cocktails; a free early morning yoga class by the pool with Camelback Mountain as the backdrop, and complimentary homemade potato chips, chocolates and salt water taffy in the room. Vacationing in this type of heat takes strategic planning. We typically rose by 6 a.m. or so to hike in the nearby mountains or sit poolside with our coffee. Afternoons were spent in the pool, sipping cocktails while perched in comfy floats. We found containers of ice water, along with sunscreen and aloe pump bottles, strategically placed throughout the resort. Besides cheaper rates, sweltering temperatures kept the crowds down; on a weekday, we had the giant pool nearly to ourselves. The Andaz is one of several desert destinations offering a taste of luxury at bargain rates in the summer. Here's a glimpse at a few others. The amenities: Stellar views of the McDowell Mountains and an amazing water scene, which by itself is dazzling, provide ample opportunities to stay cool. There are 10 swimming pools including one for adults 20 fountains, 45 waterfalls and a 30 foot, three story, high speed water slide, as well as a man made beach with a 5,000 square foot sandy beach area. For 15 an hour per child, children ages 3 to 12 can attend the resort's activity filled Camp Hyatt. There's also a spa, a golf course and eight restaurants. The deal: With "Summer Made Simple," children 12 and under get a free dinner each day from the children's menu in two of the restaurants, as long as at least one adult is paying for a full price meal. Children 18 and under play one round of golf free per day with a paying adult. Rates start at 139 per night, not including the 40 plus tax resort fee, which covers self parking and bicycle rentals. Peak season rates start at 450 a night. The amenities: Situated in the Santa Catalina Mountains, Miraval Arizona is a premier wellness spa. The all inclusive resort, where no tipping is allowed, features casita style accommodations. There are more than 120 complimentary wellness activities, lectures and fitness classes weekly, along with three pools and 24 hour access to a newly renovated Body Mindfulness Fitness Center. The deal: Summer rates start at 399 per person per night, compared to 699 in the winter. Rates include: a 175 nightly resort credit per person that can be used toward spa services; classes like beekeeping and cooking or private sessions for services like personalized nutrition counseling; fitness classes; all meals, as well as snacks, smoothies and nonalcoholic beverages; and shared shuttle transfers from Tucson International Airport. Beating the heat: Most of the outdoor programs take place early in the morning. Miraval hosts a series of full moon programs each summer, including Celestial Yoga and Twilight Zipline. The deal: The Rowan offers a global summer sale: Rates start at 147 a night for midweek stays (compared to 289 during high season), and at 225 for weekends (compared to 289 during high season). Its "100 days of Rose" package, offered for stays through Sept. 20 to those 21 and over, includes two cans of rose a day and a 2 p.m. late checkout. Rates start at 200 a night, compared to 289 for the high season rate. Beating the heat: Guests can watch the summer's meteor showers from the hotel rooftop. The amenities: Though it's on the famed Las Vegas Strip, the Four Seasons has a nonsmoking, nongaming atmosphere in a resort setting. In addition to the resort's private pool, guests can use the pool complex at the adjacent Mandalay Bay Resort Casino. Guests also have access via a "secret" door to the casino level entrance at Mandalay Bay. The deal: Summer rates start at 220 per night versus 300 during peak season. Guests can also book the "Experience More" package, with rates starting at 280 per night, based on a two night stay. This includes a 100 hotel credit that can be used for the spa or to book a private poolside cabana. Deals can be found here. Beating the heat: The resort offers complimentary amenities poolside, including Evian spritzes, chilled fruit and oshibori towels. The deals: Guests who stay three nights can receive the fourth night free. An ocean view junior suite is 674 a night, compared to 1,125 in the winter. The "More Rosewood" offer includes breakfast for two daily and an in room tequila welcome. Beating the heat: A team of pool butlers are available to massage your feet, clean your sunglasses, mist you with cold Evian spray to keep you cool and bring you complimentary seasonal Popsicles, sorbets and lemonade. A floating breakfast tray allows you to eat breakfast in the pool. Amenities: Nestled against the Santa Rosa Mountains in the greater Palm Springs area, this is an 11 acre resort with its own citrus and herb garden that the chef uses to prepare food. There are three pools. Complimentary yoga sessions are held every Saturday morning. The deal: The resort has a variety of vacation specials, including "Summer Chill" where you stay two nights and get the third night free. Summer rates start at 109 a night, plus a 35 resort fee; the starting rate at peak season is 211. Kids eat free all summer. For "Kick Off Summer," you can stay three nights and get a 100 resort credit for use in the Citrus Palm restaurant, Tavern or Well Spa. Offers can be found here. Beating the heat: The Starlight Sip Swim is a cabana rental program from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights through the end of summer. It includes a pitcher of sangria or margaritas. Cost is 100. Guests can also watch complimentary movies on Friday and Saturday at dusk.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Though there have been protests at airports across the country, the actual routine of daily tourism seems to be largely unaffected by President Trump's executive order banning people of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Citizens of the affected countries Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are a relatively small segment of the inbound traffic to the United States, and a handful of airlines swiftly responded with a raft of fee waivers and refunds as the president's policy continued to evolve. But domestic carriers and airports did not report significant disruptions to their operations. Etihad Airways, based in Abu Dhabi, is among the carriers offering flight changes or refunds to affected customers. "A number of our passengers have been affected, and we are continuing to assist them to identify issues before they fly to the U.S.A.," Katie Connell, a spokeswoman for the airlines, said in an email. "Where permitted, the airline has offered changes or refunds and rebooked passengers, as per our updated policy." British Airways and the Dubai based Emirates said they would be offering rebooking and refund options to affected passengers as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
On Christmas of last year , the singer Alicia Keys, wearing red bauble earrings, posted a video on Instagram, in which one of her sons instructed her not to scream when she saw her present. But Ms. Keys danced and shrieked anyway, so much was her joy upon seeing a sleek 52 inch rectangular Mirror mounted on her wall. When turned on, the otherwise unassuming looking bit of home decor morphs like "Through the Looking Glass" gone athleisure into a gym portal, offering screenings of some 70 live fitness classes per week, including boxing, dance cardio, high intensity interval training (H.I.I.T.) and yoga. Users are face to face with the instructor; you can see your entire body as well as a shrunken down image of the instructor's . The device is controlled by an app, so as to avoid fingerprints on the reflection. All the usual caveats about data collection apply. Ms. Keys is one of the most vocal in a wave of high profile early adopters of the Mirror, which first came on the market in September. Reese Witherspoon also recently posted a video to Instagram: using the device, which retails for 1,495, to take a boxing class. Ellen DeGeneres referred to hers as the "Magic Mirror" on her television show. Allison Williams works out with hers daily, according to her publicist, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston ordered theirs after seeing it at friends' houses. Kate Hudson talked about trying one in People magazine. Last week, a revered comic actress in her 60s was spotted in Mirror's pop up shop in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, buying two, though her publicist said "her name should not be used in association with it." Almost every boutique gym has its celebrity followers, but not since SoulCycle's heyday five to seven years ago, when Lady Gaga, Lena Dunham and Oprah Winfrey threw their birthday parties at the spinning studio and the designer Betsey Johnson wore SoulCycle leggings to the opening of a CFDA exhibit, has one fitness method attracted so many famous practitioners. (Lady Gaga bought a Mirror for her parents for Christmas.) In this case, it seems to reflect, as it were, their need for both privacy and in the age of the selfie carefully maintained social media display. Brynn Putnam, Mirror's inventor and a Harvard educated former New York City Ballet dancer, said: "I think I knew we built something special, but I don't think I expected this." Ms. Putnam, 35, does Google those who have bought the Mirror, just as she used to with first time clients at Refine Method, the eight year old boutique gym she founded. But often she only finds out whom the purchase is for when the company arrives at the customer's home to install it, or when her company receives questions about putting the device on a very high security Wi Fi network. "That's how we found out about Leslie Mann and Judd Apatow," Ms. Putnam said, referring to the firewall issue. Her company, whose offices are in the NoMad neighborhood of New York and has raised 38 million in funding from investors including Spark Capital (Foursquare, Warby Parker) and First Round Capital (Uber, Blue Apron), is selling 1 million of the 1.4 inch thick Mirrors per month, she said. There are buyers in all 50 states, with California, perhaps not surprisingly, the top market. Luxury hotels have begun installing Mirrors in suites and, in the case of the Mark, its 75,000 per night penthouse. (Not all customers are 1 percenters, Ms. Putnam stressed; roughly 20 percent request financing.) Ms. Putnam is refreshingly new to the courting of celebrity, and speaks of influencers (she gave Mirrors to Sara and Erin Foster, who have a lot of famous friends) and "public clips" (those Instagram videos) with the delight and faint ostentation of someone who has just learned a foreign language. Previously, she had little patience for workout fads. A decade ago, as an instructor at various barre method gyms, she was scolded for substituting in moves, such as lunges, that she considered more effective. She created Refine (which has a devoted, though not boldfaced, following) after a year spent grilling sports scientists and professional athletes' trainers about what got results. Mike Boyle, whose clients include N.F.L. players and other elite athletes, told her she was right about the lunges. At the time, the only studio Ms. Putnam could afford was a 500 square foot ground floor space on the Upper East Side that she had to give back to the church that owned it every Sunday for services. She designed a cable tower made of weighted sailing pulleys and tracks for strength exercises that could easily be taken down and remounted. ( Her husband, Lowell Putnam, a founder and the C.E.O. of Quovo, a financial technology company, had grown up sailing.) But in the spring of 2016, newly pregnant, Ms. Putnam found herself in the strange position of being the owner of a gym with an optimized down to the minute workout she could not face doing. She didn't like treadmills or exercise bikes enough to buy one, and when she tried to stream workouts, she couldn't figure out where to set up her computer or phone so she could see it while moving. Around that time, she also conducted a Refine members survey about improvements she had implemented, including new class times, trainers and custom made equipment. Turned out, simple mirrors she'd put in at the last minute were by far Refiners' favorite change: They liked the instant feedback. "I almost missed it," Ms. Putnam said. "Mirrors were something I took for granted because my entire career I worked out in front of them." She spoke sitting on the sofa at the company's Flatiron store, sipping a hot chocolate after six hours of interviewing potential Mirror hires. Occasionally, she stretched a leg above her in a perfect line, as if executing a tendu. On her feet were gray Allbirds, the only shoe she can tolerate after the Chanel ballet flats she bought (on a stylist's advice) to "look like an adult" while promoting Mirror made her lose her toenails. "It's the greatest irony of the world," she said with a laugh. "One of the biggest things I was excited about when I stopped dancing was that I could keep my toenails going forward." But What Does It Cost? Mirror's required 39 per month subscription, on top of the outlay for the equipment, offers four levels of classes, absolute beginner to expert, and all can be modified according to injury or pregnancy (each instructor films substitute moves, which pop up on screen according to user preferences.) There is also a library of hundreds of on demand classes, so in theory this cost can be amortized. Lindsey Bradley, an actress who lives in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, says the workouts are as good a sweat as the boutique studios she used to attend as a ClassPass user. And as a bonus, she no longer has to stand on a chair to get a view of her outfit in a cabinet mirror. "I legit use it as my full length mirror," Ms. Bradley said. "You would never in a thousand years know it was a piece of workout equipment." Ms. Bradley used to own an elliptical machine; it now functions as her mother in law's clothing rack, she said. Next up for Mirror is personal training, which will start at 40 per session; the device has a camera, and yes, a lens cap, lest you be concerned about privacy issues. Also sports prep for children, because the Mirror is averaging 2.2 users per household, according to company figures. Later will come treadmill and spin workouts, like those offered by Peloton, a six year old company now valued at 4 billion that was recently mocked in a merciless Twitter thread. The Mirror company has ambitious plans for the device to be users' third screen, after their phone and computer, with the capacity for everything from photo organizing to chat. Currently, users can shop through the Mirror, buying fitness gear and other instructor favorites. Ms. Putnam years ago turned up to a Physique 57 instructor audition wearing a T shirt that hung to her knees and black track pants with a yellow stripe she borrowed from her mother (she still got the job), and so to handle this part of the business she hired Karla Welch, a celebrity stylist. Ms. Welch, Mirror's creative director, has also helped spread the word to her clients: Olivia Wilde and Karlie Kloss are Mirror users. One challenge for Ms. Welch: No trainers can wear black, because it doesn't show up against the background. For now, she is enjoying buying "trippy acid wash tights" and leopard print sneakers. "When I go to SoulCycle, I like my instructor dressing crazy," Ms. Welch said. To the disappointment of Mirror's sales staff, Ms. Welch recently decreed that APL sneakers, not the 300 Yeezy Boosts she originally selected, should be worn in the store. Ms. Putnam surprised them with the Yeezys anyway.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The author Noel Ignatiev in an undated photo. His book "How the Irish Became White," published in 1995, was foundational to what became known as whiteness studies. Noel Ignatiev, a provocative scholar who argued that the idea of a white race is a false construct that society would be better off without, died on Nov. 9 in Tucson, Ariz., where he was visiting a family member. He was 78. His son, John , said the cause was complications of a chronic illness . Dr. Ignatiev who came to the academic world after two decades as a factory worker made a splash in 1995 with his book "How the Irish Became White," which looked at the assimilation of the Irish Catholics who emigrated to the United States in the 1800s. Ill treated in their home country, they started out at the bottom of the economic ladder in the United States as well, competing with free black laborers for the worst jobs in the North and, in the South, being relegated to work deemed too dangerous to risk the life of a valuable slave. "This book looks at how one group of people became white," Dr. Ignatiev wrote in the introduction. "Put another way, it asks how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America." Beneath the case study was an idea that Dr. Ignatiev had long been exploring, including in Race Traitor, a journal that he and John Garvey founded in 1992. The publication's aim, Dr. Ignatiev once put it, was "to explore how people who had been brought up as white might become unwhite" that is, renounce the privileges that came with the label "white," like favored access to good jobs and neighborhoods. "How the Irish Became White" is among a group of books that have been foundational to what became known as whiteness studies, a field that examines the structures that produce white privilege. "Many academics today study whiteness," Adam Sabra, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a longtime friend, said by email. "Noel Ignatiev wanted to abolish it." But, as Dr. Ignatiev always felt compelled to point out, he was not advocating some sort of mass extermination, just a change in presumptions. "There is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture," Dr. Ignatiev said at a 1997 conference at the University of California, Berkeley. "Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet ." When interviewers would ask why he, a white man, was seeming to argue for canceling his own race, he would rebel at the very label. "That's not a term I like to have applied to myself," he told CNN in 2002. "I want to get rid of it, because I think that the price that it extracts from us is greater than the benefit it brings." His book, Dr. Ignatiev wrote, "asks how the Catholic Irish, an oppressed race in Ireland, became part of an oppressing race in America." Noel Saul Ignatin was born on Dec. 27, 1940, in Philadelphia. (John Ignatiev said the family had changed its last name before his father was born; his father, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, changed it back to something closer to the original name when he reached adulthood.) His father, Irv, delivered newspapers, and his mother, Carrie, was a homemaker; later they ran a housewares store together. His parents, intellectuals despite their humble circumstances and Communists, were committed to bridging the racial divide, something Noel saw in practice when helping his father with his newspaper deliveries before he went off to school. "The route was in a mostly black neighborhood," he said last month on the podcast "It's Going Down," "My father used to say there was not another white man in the city who could have handled it. Many of the customers would stop and tell me what a fine man my father was." Dr. Ignatiev graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania, but after his third year there he dropped out because, as he told The Boston Globe in 2000, the student life felt sterile. He worked in steel mills and other factories, mostly in Chicago, "while trying to promote a proletarian revolution," his son said. He rejected any opportunity to become a supervisor. "I wanted to be a worker because I thought they had something to teach me," he told The Globe. "I gained an appreciation for their knowledge, sense of realism and capabilities." He was involved in various leftist and revolutionary groups in this period, including Students for a Democratic Society and the Sojourner Truth Organization, which was focused on workplace issues and their relation to race. In 1967 he and Ted Allen wrote an influential, much reproduced paper, "The White Blindspot," which laid out many of the ideas that Dr. Ignatiev would explore more fully in the 1990s. After he was laid off from his mill job in 1984, Dr. Ignatiev applied to the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University and, despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, was accepted. He earned his master's degree there in 1985. He became a lecturer at Harvard while working toward his Ph.D. in American studies, which he received in 1994. He taught at several institutions over the years, including the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Dr. Ignatiev and Mr. Garvey continued to publish Race Traitor until 2005. In 1996 they edited a book of essays from the journal, also called "Race Traitor." They called their approach "race treason" and on the journal used the motto "Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." "The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender or any other interests they hold," they wrote in the book. "The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse." Dr. Ignatiev was probably not surprised that this had not yet happened. "He would always say that all our efforts are failures until they're not," Geert Dhondt , an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said in a telephone interview. He had worked with Dr. Ignatiev on Hard Crackers, a journal that Dr. Ignatiev started in 2016. Dr. Ignatiev lived in Connecticut at his death. In addition to his son, his survivors include a brother, Wendell Ignatin; a sister, Amy Sanders; a daughter, Rachel Edwards; and three grandchildren. Just a month ago, Dr. Ignatiev began the "It's Going Down" podcast by introducing himself. "I worked for 23 years in industry and for 33 years in the academy," he said, "while pursuing my real career as a revolutionary."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
You've surely seen before, and often enough that you may be surprised at where you'll be able to see him this Saturday night. Mr. Kravits is one of those Everyman actors who are all over television in supporting roles, and when he's not on TV he might be on a Broadway or Off Broadway stage. Even if you haven't absorbed the name, you know the face "Oh, yeah, that guy," you might say if he were pointed out to you. Well, that guy, despite the steady supply of decent paying jobs, can also be found now and again in the intimate performance space upstairs at the Duplex in Greenwich Village, working a small crowd in a hilarious show he calls "Off the Top!" that is best described as improv cabaret. "I think I just wanted to do something scary," Mr. Kravits, 50, said over lunch this week, describing how the cabaret show came about. "At a certain point you want to do something that you don't have in your vest pocket." "Off the Top!," which he has been honing for a year and a half, starts out with a variation on a time honored improvisational gimmick, suggestions from the audience. Before Mr. Kravits takes the stage, audience members fill out a questionnaire with entries like "A Place," "A Thing," "A Short Phrase," "Words to Live By" and "The Last Text Message You Sent or Received." The questionnaires go into a bowl, and Mr. Kravits spends the show pulling one after another out, using what's written there to tell a musical biographical story of a character he's inventing on the spot. The improvising begins even before he comes out, with an M.C. bestowing a name and hometown on the fictional character based on call outs from the audience. Mr. Kravits, who is generally backed by a three piece band, takes it from there. "I'm really telling the life story of the most famous person you've never heard of," he explained. But the show isn't merely a string of improvised gags. It's also a serial homage to various cabaret and Broadway stylings. Mr. Kravits might channel Frank Sinatra for a number or two, or come up with a song that Stephen Sondheim could have written while sleep deprived. "I really started digging into the format of a song, what makes a song work," Mr. Kravits said of his preparation. "And also what makes a cabaret work." Mr. Kravits does a fair amount of theater he was in the "Encores!" revisiting of "The Golden Apple" last month at City Center, the original Broadway cast of "The Drowsy Chaperone" and more and he'll sometimes bring a theater friend onstage to help his character along. He once dragooned Alexander Gemignani, who has played Jean Valjean in "Les Miserables," into doing a song called "Sometimes You're the Pigeon, Sometimes You're the Statue," a title taken off one of those questionnaires. Improv has always been part of Mr. Kravits's resume, but he's far better known for traditional character actor sorts of roles on "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," "The Practice" (where he had a long run as the assistant district attorney Richard Bay) and many others. He has that kind of face. "If you look at my credits in television, you're going to see a lot of doctors and lawyers and a few psychiatrists," he said. "But," he clarified in self deprecating fashion, "a range of lawyers." Saturday's show is the last before he has a run in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" at the Muny in St. Louis (a theater with about 11,000 more seats than the Duplex Cabaret), and then takes "Off the Top!" to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland this summer. If improvising an entire show off questionnaires full of place names and such filled out by Americans is challenging, doing so in Edinburgh is going to be downright frightening. "I'm thinking about it already," Mr. Kravits said. "I'm studying up on Scotland."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Now, all of this may sound like old history. But the raw racism of postwar housing policy cast a long shadow over our society. For the 20 or so years that followed World War II represented a unique opportunity for the middle class to solidify its position an opportunity that was denied to Black people. You see, the '50s and '60s were an era both of relatively good pay for ordinary workers and of relatively cheap suburban housing. Wages were fairly high, in part because America still had a strong union movement, and houses were affordable, as long as you had access to those federal housing programs. So millions of Americans got a chance to build some wealth. Then the window of opportunity closed. Wages, adjusted for inflation, stagnated. Housing prices soared, in part because building restrictions in many suburbs banned multifamily units. And Black families, who were shut out of a rising market at a time when many other Americans were sharing in the fruits of a housing boom, found the financial barriers to homeownership especially daunting. So Trump's Suburban Lifestyle Dream is basically a walled village that the government built for whites, whose gates were slammed shut when others tried to enter. What is Biden proposing to remedy at least some of these injustices? Reasonable, significant, but hardly revolutionary stuff things like expanding rental vouchers while cracking down on redlining and exclusionary zoning. Trump may claim that such policies would "destroy suburbia," but that only makes sense if you believe that the only alternative to bloody anarchy is a community that looks exactly like Levittown in 1955. And it's very important to understand that none of the scare talk about a war on the suburbs has anything to do with the usual conservative rhetoric about "freedom" and not having the government tell Americans what to do. Individual choices and free markets aren't what made America such a segregated, unequal society. Discrimination was a statist policy, involving the exercise of political power to deny people free choice. And it still goes on. What the Black Lives Matter movement has done is to reveal to many white Americans that we're still a long way from being a society in which everyone is treated equally by the law, whatever the skin color. (Black Americans already knew that very well.) But the big difference between the parties now is that Biden and Harris are trying to make things better, trying to make us more like the country we're supposed to be. Trump and Mike Pence, by contrast, are basically trying to make open racism great again. 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LOS ANGELES The embattled Weinstein Company on Monday secured a financial lifeline and possible new owner from an investor with experience in distressed Hollywood assets. But the fate of the studio, including whether its co founder Bob Weinstein would stay involved, remained far from resolved. Tarak Ben Ammar, one of three remaining Weinstein Company board members, said in a statement on Monday that the studio, reeling from sexual harassment allegations made against the company's other co founder, Harvey Weinstein, had reached a preliminary agreement with Colony Capital for an "immediate" cash infusion. The amount was undisclosed. Mr. Ammar also said that Colony, which rescued Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch from foreclosure in 2008, had entered negotiations to buy all or most of the Weinstein Company's movie and television holdings. Thomas J. Barrack Jr., founder of Colony Capital, said in a statement that he believed the sullied studio "has substantial value and growth potential." A deal is expected to take three weeks or more to complete. Not mentioned by the Weinstein Company on Monday: Bob Weinstein, who insisted on Friday that speculation about a sale was "untrue." Harvey Weinstein was fired by the company last week. Bob Weinstein is fighting to remain at the studio, but some stakeholders believe he must leave, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Bob Weinstein, who told The Hollywood Reporter on Saturday that he did not know "the extent" of his brother's actions, did not respond to a request for comment. In turning to Colony, the Weinstein Company and its advisers at the investment bank Moelis Company are reaching out to a firm with experience in Hollywood. But some longtime media investors, noting the seriousness of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, questioned what could be done with such a toxic asset. "I don't think you can sell this company with all the litigation you're looking at," said Amir Malin, the founder of Qualia Capital, a media investment firm. Mr. Malin was referring to both pre existing commercial lawsuits and the vast number of potential lawsuits related to Harvey Weinstein's sexual behavior. Work has been underway in Hollywood to end partnerships with the studio. Amazon pulled the plug late Friday on a major television deal. At the same time, agents say they have been pressing the Weinstein Company to sell finished or near finished films like "The Upside," a comedy starring Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman, and "Mary Magdalene" starring Rooney Mara; many of the stars involved with those projects want nothing to do with the Weinsteins. The Weinstein Company, already struggling in recent years because of box office misfires, has been imploding since investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein going back decades. Over the last week and a half, more than 30 women have come forward publicly with harrowing stories of encounters with him. Police in New York and London have started looking into some claims against Mr. Weinstein, who has denied "any allegations of nonconsensual sex." Four board members have resigned in recent days, leaving only Mr. Ammar, Bob Weinstein and Lance Maerov. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. As a private company the brothers each own about 23 percent the Weinstein Company has never been particularly forthcoming about its revenue or debt load. In recent years, as talk of unpaid bills and an inability to finance marketing campaigns has occasionally surfaced, the Weinsteins insisted their company was, in fact, rolling in money. But certain financial problems surfaced that Harvey Weinstein was unable to refute. Facing bankruptcy in 2010, for instance, the Weinstein Company sold rights to 200 older films to Goldman Sachs and an insurance company, Assured Guaranty. The exact titles that were sold are not publicly known. Goldman, in turn, sold its portion to AMC Networks in 2015. The Weinstein Company now has assets that fall into three groups: the remaining library of old movies, upcoming films and television. All three are problematic. Given the 2010 sale, much of the value of the library has "already been extracted," Mr. Malin said. The Weinstein Company has seven completed movies, but some of those are art films with limited box office potential, especially without Harvey Weinstein's hard knuckled efforts to strengthen audience interest through awards campaigns. Others are potentially tainted by the scandal that has settled over the studio. One movie on the Weinstein Company's release schedule is "Paddington 2," for instance. The first "Paddington" took in a solid 76.3 million in North America in 2015. But marketing a family movie is going to be hard for a company associated with harassment allegations. Anchored by "Project Runway," the Weinstein Company's television unit has been a bright spot recently. Upcoming series include three projects for the Paramount Network, the Viacom owned channel formerly known as Spike. (A Paramount spokesman confirmed on Monday that those were moving forward.) But other television projects have died over the last week as networks have scrambled to sever ties with the studio. "The question is whether the television division is a going concern or a liquidation," Mr. Malin said. "Some will argue that the major asset of the television division was Harvey Weinstein's ability to be a rainmaker to line up deals." Colony Capital is the private equity arm of Colony NorthStar, an investment firm that controls 56 billion in assets. Mr. Barrack, its chairman, has gained attention recently for his longtime friendship with President Trump. Mr. Barrack was a fund raiser for Mr. Trump's presidential campaign and served as chairman of his inaugural committee. Mr. Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants who owned a grocery store in the suburbs of Los Angeles, made his money by betting on out of favor assets. In the 1990s, Colony Capital bought bad loans during the savings and loan crisis and bet on Asian assets after the Asian currency crisis. The same strategy was used following the 2008 financial crisis. Colony Capital acquired billions of dollars of distressed commercial and residential property mortgages and loans that had been seized from failed banks by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But Colony has also made a number of investments in distressed entertainment assets. In the spring of 2008, Colony bailed out Michael Jackson, who was on the verge of default over a 24.5 million mortgage for Neverland Ranch, his 2,500 acre playground in Santa Ynez, Calif. When Jackson died in 2009, the ranch wound up in Colony's hands. Renamed Sycamore Valley Ranch, the property was relisted this year for 67 million. That's down from the 100 million original listing price two years ago. In 2010, Colony acquired the debt of the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz after she was unable to make payments on a 24 million loan. Colony's biggest play in the entertainment industry also came in 2010, when it was part of a consortium that acquired Miramax Films and its 700 film library for 660 million. The Weinstein brothers founded Miramax in 1979 and sold it to Disney in 1993. Ironically, Colony was then a Weinstein foe: Harvey Weinstein desperately wanted Miramax back, and Mr. Barrack's group outbid him. The Miramax deal was criticized as exorbitant, but Mr. Barrack benefited from the unexpectedly fast rise of streaming services like Netflix, which licensed old Miramax films like "Pulp Fiction" and "Chicago." "We have made more money than we ever imagined," Mr. Barrack told The New York Times in 2013 about the deal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When the composer Joan Tower went to Bennington College to study music, her teachers told her she needed to compose something. "So I wrote a piece," she recalled recently, laughing, "and it was a disaster from beginning to end. I said, 'I know I can do better than that.' So I did that for the next 40 years, trying to create a piece that wasn't a disaster." Over the decades long process of trying to avoid disaster composition was, she said, "a very, very slow moving juggernaut" she became a force in contemporary music. She turned 80 in September, a birthday which will be celebrated on Sunday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Her widest reaching project, the 2004 symphonic poem "Made in America," has been performed by more than 65 orchestras in all 50 states. And Ms. Tower has recently been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a new work to debut in a future season. She is, in short, of comparable stature to the major octogenarians of her generation, such as Steve Reich, Charles Wuorinen and John Corigliano. Unlike some of those major octogenarians, however, Ms. Tower is remarkably self deprecating. In a recent phone conversation from her home in Red Hook, N.Y., she talked about why. Here are edited excerpts. How does it feel to reach the milestone of 80? Composing is not an easy activity. For others, it's easier, but for me it's a very challenging activity. But as life goes on, the rewards come in. The credentials, like winning certain prizes, are very nice, but the important rewards are that your music gets picked up and played a lot. That's what makes your life in music, not necessarily where you went to school, who you studied with, or what awards you got. Could you talk about some of your influences? Growing up in South America, I developed a love for percussion. My babysitter used to take me to these festivals. She would drop me off at the bandstand, so she could go and have fun. The band people would throw me a maraca or some kind of castanet or drum. That was where I started to develop a love of percussion and also dance. My music is basically about rhythm. It's all about timing for me. But I also was studying piano at the time. I got very involved with Chopin, Beethoven, all the dead white European composers, who I loved. Beethoven was a huge influence on me, in terms of rhythm, pacing, juggling architectural narrative. Then I married a jazz musician, and I heard all the jazz greats. We went to all the clubs. Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans all of them I got to hear live. That influence was more harmonic: I learned juicier chord progressions. You did graduate studies at Columbia University during the heyday of 12 tone music, but shifted toward a more tonal idiom. What prompted the change? What changed all that was Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." I had never heard anything like this. It was colorful, it was direct, it was very slow at points. Oh my God, there was so much in that music that I was just blown away by. It came out of the sky. And then George Crumb's "Voice of the Whale." I was like, "Whoa, this is so consonant, and so beautiful, and so colorful." So I started to pull away from the 12 tone group, and I started to develop my own voice. As you developed this new language, you also starting writing orchestral music, with "Sequoia" in 1981. The American Composers Orchestra was commissioning new works, and they asked me, and I said no, because I wasn't ready. Francis Thorne, the lead energy behind that group, said, "You are ready, and I'm going to ask you again." I wrote the piece kicking and screaming, and close to being tortured. The conductor Leonard Slatkin heard this piece and he loved it, and said, "I want you to be composer in residence with St. Louis." I said, "No, I'm not ready for this. I only have one piece." What was it that made you feel that you weren't ready? I've always had a low opinion of myself. I think it's a female thing, in a way. For women, in a field like composition, which has been male dominated for years and years and years, it's a hard thing to walk into and feel that you are as empowered as your male colleagues are. That's a very superficial answer to the question. I did, and that continued for a long time. Until the last few years, actually. I got older laughs . And I got more confident, and more accepting of who I am, and what I can do. And you became more conscious of how women have been underrepresented in composition. The knowledge of this history started to build my confidence more and more, because I started to see what was going on. I started to see the rarity of women. All of the sudden, my eyes started opening to: "Are there any women on this recording? Are there any women on this panel?" I started to become more and more aware of the paucity of women in the infrastructure. I started taking stands and becoming an advocate. How has your style has changed in recent years? I'm not sure one has much control over that. My goal is to keep learning. There's so much still to learn the bass, the piccolo, I'm still working on, and the horn. Those are weak areas for me. I'm going to get there with those instruments at some point. What you try to do is write the best piece you can at whatever level of experience and voice that you are at. I know that if I take more risks, I'll get there. It's in the risks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
This article was published in 2020 and was updated on June 18 to reflect President Biden's signing of a bill that made Juneteenth a federal holiday. When Opal Lee was growing up in Texas, she would spend Juneteenth picnicking with her family, first in Marshall, where she was born, then in Sycamore Park in Fort Worth, near the home she moved into at age 10. She and her family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. When Mrs. Lee was 12, a mob of 500 white supremacists set fire to her home and vandalized it. The structure was destroyed, and no arrests were made. Experiencing that hate crime pushed Mrs. Lee into a life of teaching, activism and, eventually, campaigning. In 2016, at the age of 89, she decided to walk from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday. She traveled two and a half miles each day to symbolize the two and a half years that Black Texans waited between when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on Jan. 1, 1863, abolishing slavery, and the day that message arrived in Galveston, where Black people were still enslaved, on June 19, 1865. This year, as Black Lives Matter protests continue across the country, many companies have decided to make Juneteenth a day off for employees. New York and Virginia have announced that they plan to make Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees, and Mrs. Lee's vision is closer than ever to its realization. On June 17, 2020, The New York Times spoke to Mrs. Lee about what makes this year different and what she hopes will come of this moment. A year later, Mrs. Lee appeared at the White House to watch President Biden sign a bill that made June 19 a national holiday. What is your first memory of celebrating Juneteenth? It was in Marshall, Texas, where I was born. We'd go to the fairgrounds to celebrate. It was like going to Christmas or Thanksgiving, we had such a good time. Some people still compare Independence Day to Juneteenth. How would you explain the type of freedom and community that comes from celebrating Juneteenth? The difference between Juneteenth and the 4th of July? Woo, girl! The fact is none of us are free till we're all free. Knowing that slaves didn't get the word for two and a half years after the emancipation, can't you imagine how those people felt? They'd been watching that's what they call Watch Night services every New Year's, thinking freedom was coming. And then to find out they were free, even two and a half years after everybody else. So, the 4th of July? Slaves weren't free. You know that, don't you? And so we just celebrate the hell out of the 4th of July, so I suggest that if we're going to do some celebrating of freedom, that we have our festival, our educational components, our music, from June the 19 Juneteenth to the 4th of July. Now that would be celebrating freedom. How do you think the protests for Black lives that are happening around the country have shaped the way that people understand Juneteenth? We have simply got to make people aware that none of us are free until we're all free, and we aren't free yet. There's so many disparities. You know, we need some decent education and some decent jobs that pay money, and we need health care and all kinds of things and if people would just get together and address these disparities, we'd be well on our way to being the greatest country in the world. Right now lots of companies are making Juneteenth an official holiday. How does it feel to see your vision coming to fruition? Ooh girl, I could do a holy dance. I'm so happy to see things coming to fruition and the fact that we are almost there making it a holiday. We started out talking about 100,000 signatures and now we're saying let's take a million signatures to Congress to let them know that it's not just one little old lady in tennis shoes. I hope they understand that we're talking about a holiday like Presidents' Day or Flag Day. We're not talking about a paid holiday. However, I'm delighted to have the big companies give their employees the day off with pay. What changes do you hope to see in our country beyond having Juneteenth recognized on a national level? If we would unify, if we would get together and do something about homelessness, and do something about people having decent housing, and decent food, and they would have not only a place to stay but a decent education. If we could just love one another, you know? If you could get past the color of my skin and love me like you do that boy next door to you.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
When I wrote about fending off math anxiety last month I learned both from the experts I interviewed and from people to whom I happened to mention the topic that math anxiety is found across all lines of gender, ethnicity and educational background. There are plenty of men and women out there, including the highly educated and the professionally aggressive (professors and corporate lawyers, say), who proudly or shamefacedly wave the math anxiety flag. Oh yes, that's me, I don't have a math brain though the whole idea of a math brain is frowned on by those who study this topic. There is a general assumption that women are affected more than men, and that math and math anxiety contribute to the barriers that keep women underrepresented in the STEM fields. In my own familial experiment, I have two sons and a daughter, and though everyone managed O.K. in math, the daughter was, without question, the math kid though the very idea of "math kids" is considered part of the problem. My daughter, who majored in math in college, feels that the key is that she attended an all girls school from fifth grade through 12th grade, and isn't sure she would have stayed with math if she'd gone to a coed school. I believe her though the research literature doesn't necessarily support her, from a statistical point of view. That's one of the interesting things about trying to think about girls and math: It involves questioning some of your assumptions about how children learn, and about what makes some topics harder or less accessible to lots of people. And then trying to look at research that tells you that your own perceptions and experience may not be reliable. As far as math anxiety, "many many more girls and women than men are anxious," said Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford, "and we know anxiety holds people back there are still messages out there that math is for boys and not for girls." Some of the anxiety, she said, may be transmitted by elementary school teachers, who are likely to be female, and are often themselves anxious about math. "We know that girls identify with their elementary teachers," she said, and are more likely than boys to be affected by the teacher's math anxiety, if it is present, contributing to what she called "the cycle by which this continues." Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, pointed to the pressure created by the stereotype that girls aren't good at math. "They come in feeling pressure that could affect their performance," she said. "That can rob people of the cognitive horsepower they would have to perform at their best." And this can be worst for the best students, she said. "Girls who come in with the most ability to work at a high level are most impacted." Andrei Cimpian, an associate professor of psychology at New York University who studies children's ideas on gender and ability, said that there is lots of variability in the distribution of men and women across fields in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. One key, he said, is whether it is perceived that in order to work in a certain field, a person needs to be brilliant, to have, even, a spark of genius. "When we surveyed academics across disciplines, in fields whose members said, yes, there is something innate, inborn, required for success," he said, "it was particularly in those fields where we saw women underrepresented, also African Americans." And what about this whole idea of math brain and math kid? "Metaphors like math brain can create their own reality," Dr. Cimpian warned. "We all fall on a certain continuum," he said. Dr. Boaler, the author of the book "Mathematical Mindsets," said: "The message to all kids, girls and boys, is there's no such thing as a math person." And what about my daughter's belief that she owes a lot to being in math classes with no boys in them? Erin Pahlke, an assistant professor of psychology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., said, "often the girls in the single sex schools have higher math achievement, better attitudes, lower levels of math anxiety, they often have better hopes for the future of wanting to take higher level math," she said. "You say, this is incredible, single sex schooling is the answer!" But she was the first author of a 2014 meta analysis representing the testing of 1.6 million students from 21 countries that found that among the high quality studies, the differences could be explained by looking at such factors as the different socioeconomic status of those choosing single sex education, and at the pretest scores before the girls entered the single sex schools as well as measures of school quality and resources. Dr. Pahlke said that people tell her all the time, "my daughter or my niece went to a single sex school and it was incredible I would say to them, yes, I agree, you do see that, but the question is whether or not it's due to the single sex environment." Instead, she said, "it's due to being around girls who came in with higher math scores, or teacher quality differences, that's what the research suggests." She said the popular idea that boys and girls learn differently is "not supported by the neuroscientific literature." "Most of the things that parents and kids believe about math learning are wrong," said Dr. Boaler, who is the co founder of Youcubed, a website that argues for a revolution in math teaching for all children, and offers resources to teachers, students and parents. In fact, maybe what everyone needs girls and boys both is a different kind of math teaching, with much less emphasis on timed tests, and more attention to teaching math as a visual subject, and as a place for creativity. "The lovely thing is when you change math education and make it more about deep conceptual understanding, the gender differences disappear," Dr. Boaler said. "Boys and girls both do well."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Credit...Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times In the late 1980s, Bruckner Boulevard was a forbidding stretch of asphalt strung with disused factories, dim tattoo parlors and fast food depots. The thoroughfare, blisteringly sketched by Tom Wolfe in his satirical novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities," was part of the wasteland that was the South Bronx "entire blocks of the city," as he wrote, "without a building left standing." Flash forward three decades, and this once shattered swath of New York's northernmost borough has undergone an image transplant. Neighborhoods like Mott Haven, Port Morris and Melrose are still poor and plagued by various urban ills. But no mistake: The South Bronx, the area that gave rise to hip hop, is being celebrated some would say appropriated by a clutch of entrepreneurs, real estate developers and, inevitably, the fashion tribes. Earlier this year, Gucci, wise to the borough's rich cultural heritage, cast its prefall 2017 ad campaign with black models vamping and break dancing at a 1970s style "Soul Train" party. "We've felt a little like outcasts," said Henry Obispo, an entrepreneur who is set to open a cold pressed juice bar and green rooftop for yoga and meditation. Still, the prospect of gentrification rattles. Alarming to some is the seven tower, 400 million residential and retail complex rising along the former industrial waterfront in the Port Morris section. Keith Rubenstein, a founder of the real estate investment company Somerset Partners, which is developing the property with the Chetrit Group, is predicting strong demand for some 1,300 units, mostly by young professionals in search of upscale amenities and sweeping waterfront views. A couple of years ago, Mr. Rubenstein incited a backlash by throwing a "Bronx Is Burning" one night art show attended by more than 2,500 people Adrien Brody, Naomi Campbell, Kendall Jenner and Carmelo Anthony, among them sipping Dom Perignon and Patron tequila. The event drew the ire of Melissa Mark Viverito, the City Council speaker, who charged that it exploited the South Bronx's troubled history for entertainment. Further stoking the controversy was a Somerset billboard touting the area as "the Piano District." Other speculators were quick to chime in, proclaiming the Bronx as the new Brooklyn. "We don't need another Brooklyn," said Roselyn Grullon, a partner in Bronx Native, an apparel company. "We don't want developers to push out the locals and flatten our beautiful, diverse culture." But she is not averse to efforts by Bronx artists and merchants to spruce up the area. In the last year alone, the formerly forbidding Mott Haven neighborhood has welcomed La Grata, an upscale restaurant and pizzeria; Filtered Coffee, a low key Third Avenue gathering spot; Cross Gallery, showcasing art, technology and design; and 9J, a boutique on Bruckner Boulevard that is a magnet to locals and music world luminaries. These businesses and others are ambassadors of Bronx culture at large, said Jerome LaMaar, 9J's dapper owner. "And what's a brand without the right ambassador to push it?" Here, a look at some of those South Bronx ambassadors and their pioneering efforts in this new frontier. At 32, Mr. LaMaar, a Bronx bred former designer, has a similarly lofty goal: to turn his boutique 9J into a fashionable anchor on Bruckner Boulevard. Today the shop attracts locals and high profile outsiders like Tina Knowles and Jennifer Lopez's lively entourage, their implicit endorsement fueling Mr. LaMaar's ambition. "At first, I wanted to tap into the local culture that's home," he said. Now he envisions his store as a club, one that draws a heady amalgam of local artists and borough bigwigs along with deep pocketed sightseers and businesspeople. Not that he would neglect his assorted friends. "They're skaters, drag queens and young professionals of all ages and colors," Mr. LaMaar said. "This is a place where they can feel like themselves and not be judged or ostracized." On a practical level, it's a place where they can shop. The store is a tidy bazaar stocked with kimonos and embroidered peasant smocks, jewelry, T shirts and pastel tone sneakers, the prices varying from about 3 for an adult friendly toy, say, to 3,000 or more for substantial, and colorful, home furnishings. He hopes to take his vision, loosely modeled on the fabled Parisian concept store Colette, global. Yet his roots remain in the Bronx. A production of the "The Wiz" that he saw as a boy, formed his aesthetic and is still informing his fantasies. Flora Montes, 52, started Bronx Fashion Week three years ago with her last 200 unemployment check and gumption to spare. "I have to believe that somewhere along the line I was meant to be the vessel that brought it to life," she said. Fashion enthralled this Bronx born single mother of two from the time she saw her first runway show in Manhattan, in 2014. "That was a Saturday," she recalled, "and on Sunday I started to get the legal paperwork together and reach out to my small network of supporters. I thought, 'The other boroughs have their fashion week, and now it's time for the Bronx to step up.'" Her first event, stretched over three nights in September of that year, drew close to 1,000 visitors who watched models of diverse races, ages and body types strut the work of local designers and others. Some designers were short on cash. "But I don't turn my back on anyone," Ms. Montes said. "I don't have the heart to say, 'No, you can't show because you can't pay a fee.'" For Ms. Montes, a poet and chef, the show's success seemed surreal. "I had no connection to the industry," she said. "I'm no fashionista. My daughter used to tease me: 'Mom, you used to walk around the house in sweats and a ponytail. When did you become a fashion thing?'" Sure, the Bronx is raw. But the Blox TV, a media company with an online channel and companion website, doesn't shy away from capturing the sordid bits along with the sublime. Marco Shalma, a founder, with Gillian Todd, thinks big. "We try to represent our borough's people with things that matter," he said. In his quest, few topics are off limits. A recent video segment enjoins viewers to call for a cleanup of the needle and condom littered Third Avenue Bridge; it also advises how to cope with immigration sweeps. "Know your rights, stay cool and polite," various speakers urge. "And remember: The best defense against injustice is a strong community." Readers of the site may also learn that Bronx born artists like A Boogie and Romeo Santos are "all the way up on the music charts," as Mr. Shalma writes, and, on a more satirical note, that Mon Amour Cafe Wine on West 238th Street, is among the borough's five top spots "to dump your summer love." Tart humor will alway have a place in the Bronx, Mr. Shalma said: "We're interested in shaking things up." Savvy New Yorkers may know Devon Rodriguez by his soulful oil portraits of subjects caught unaware as they travel the No. 6 train between the Bronx and Manhattan. But Mr. Rodriguez, a 21 year old graduate of the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, has yet to come up with a catchy way to describe his works, many of them influenced by traditional 19th century European portraiture, but with an edge. "This is the new punk," he said. "Yeah, I've never heard that. I'm going to use it." Propped in the corner of a makeshift studio at his grandmother's apartment on East 139th Street, his canvases possess the kind of pomp and depth that prompted a roster of characters, some local, some not, to commission portraits. "One guy, he's like a drug dealer," Mr. Rodriguez said. "He told me, 'Get my tattoos right, get my Jordans right,'" referring to his gold toe sneakers. "He paid me in, like, a Cuban link chain." Mr. Rubenstein, the developer, is another enthusiast, commissioning a 30 by 40 inch portrait, for 6,000. It wasn't business as usual for Mr. Rodriguez, who was abandoned by his father as a youngster and left in the care of his grandmother by his troubled mother. "Who needed all that craziness?" he said. "I always thought the Bronx was too rough." He likes rough edges to a point. "But any change going on here, I'm happy for it," he said. And he's enjoying the shift in his luck. At Filtered, a Bronx coffee shop that draws a strenuously self effacing crowd, Diego Leon, suited up the other day in a natty blazer and tartan Bonobos, was hard to miss. That's the way he likes it. A onetime preschool teacher, he is the creative force behind Dandy in the Bronx, a men's blog focused on fashion and a cohort of peacocking pacesetters, many who, like Mr. Leon, grew up in the Bronx. A native of Hunts Point, he started his blog about three years ago. "It was my resume, my love letter to home," he said. His mission these days is to bring awareness to the south end of New York's northernmost borough as an enclave hospitable to the fashion tribes. It has been an uphill struggle. "Everyone gives the side eye to the Bronx," he said. As a student at the State University of New York at Fredonia, his background raised eyebrows. "I'd get, 'Are you in a gang? Do you live in a ghetto? Do you own a gun?'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Elwyn L. Simons, an intrepid scientist known as the father of modern primate paleontology for his discovery of some of humankind's earliest antecedents, died on March 6 in Peoria, Ariz. He was 85. His death was announced by Duke University, where he was an emeritus professor of evolutionary anthropology. Though Dr. Simons's career took in myriad fossils, including whales' feet (in the distant past in which his professional life was lived, the footed whale was no oxymoron), he was concerned in particular with the earliest primates. "Elwyn made an enormous and really incomparable contribution to the science of human origins, particularly at the very early end of the scale the background out of which our hominid lineage emerged," Ian Tattersall, an emeritus curator in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Dr. Simons was equal parts scientist and adventurer: In leading more than 90 expeditions to Egypt, India, Iran, Libya, Madagascar, Wyoming and elsewhere he braved badlands, weathered sandstorms, dodged unexploded World War II land mines and crawled through limestone caves in pursuit of his venerable quarry. "He was an indefatigable fossil finder," Dr. Tattersall said. "He probably has found, in his career, more fossils bearing on primate evolution than anybody of his generation." Dr. Simons did not so much dig as divine. "He had the golden touch for finding fossils," Dr. Tattersall said. "In the kind of paleontology that Elwyn did, you don't really dig. What you do is you scour the landscape to see what is eroding up from below or being carried down along the slope from above." He added: "He would go to the places where the fossils were and that is an extraordinary thing, because you don't know where the fossils are to begin with. But he had an unerring sense of where the fossils ought to be." Dr. Simons carried out much of his work in the Fayum region of Egypt, some 60 miles southwest of Cairo. Today a desert, it was, many millions of years ago, a forested swamp teeming with early primates. "Tracing human ancestry is sort of like tracing your family tree," Dr. Simons told United Press International in 1990. "Once you find out who your great grandfather was, then you want to know who his father was." His most seminal find, made in the Fayum in the mid 1960s, was the skull of a cat size, tree dwelling primate he called Aegyptopithecus. The creature about 33 million years old was, on its discovery, the earliest known common forebear of apes, monkeys and man. As David R. Pilbeam, the Henry Ford II professor of human evolution at Harvard, said on Tuesday: "Aegyptopithecus is probably the best known example of a fossil primate that predates the split between the hominoids that's that group containing the living apes and humans and the cercopithecoids: the Old World monkeys. It's not clear at the moment exactly when those two groups split, but probably about 25 to 30 million years ago." Dr. Simons and his team later turned up more Aegyptopithecus skulls finds that suggested the creature was no towering intellectual. "What was astonishing is how small this brain is," Dr. Simons told a consortium of Australian newspapers in 2007. "You can also see it's a pretty darn primitive brain. It would be small for a monkey or an ape. So it's telling us that the speed of achievement of brain enlargement in primates was a little slower than perhaps we thought." "He was thinking of a very broad picture for understanding the origins of primates by looking at the ones that are alive today that are the most ancient," Patricia Wright, a distinguished professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, said on Tuesday. "Tarsiers are very ancient primates; lemurs are very ancient primates." Dr. Simons helped establish Parc Ivoloina, a conservation center in eastern Madagascar for lemurs and other native species. In recognition of his work there, he was made a knight of the National Order of the Republic of Madagascar. While it is atypical for a paleontologist to have a second career in wildlife conservation, for Dr. Simons the two trades dovetailed seamlessly. "He wanted to see those fossils alive!" Dr. Wright, who did postdoctoral work with him at the Duke center, explained. "And so he wanted to know everything about them. Those bones can be frustrating: They can teach you a lot, but they can't always teach you what you want to know." Elwyn LaVerne Simons, whose most immediate lineal forebears were Verne Simons and the former Verna Cuddeback, was born on July 14, 1930, in Lawrence, Kan., and reared in Houston. Visiting an exhibition as a young child, he saw a reconstituted dinosaur and promptly burst into tears. But fascination soon overcame fright, and the tears turned to howls of protest when his father tried to lead him away.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Over the past few years, there's been an interloper in the dog days of summer, a period when the concert season slows to a trickle . The Time Spans festival, put on since 2015 by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, has filled a bare corner of the New York calendar not with seasonal pops, but with contemporary music of the most dense, bristly and brilliant variety. This year's festival has been the most expansive yet, extending to Battery Park City; an outdoor walk with headphones designed to amplify electromagnetic fields; and to the Goethe Institut near Union Square, where the pianist Marino Formenti is in residence, literally he's living there while performing for 12 hours a day. Mr. Formenti's marathon continues through Aug. 28, but the final concert on the festival's main series was Wednesday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Midtown , featuring the piano percussion quartet Yarn/Wire and the Talea Ensemble in music by composers with ties to Canada, a theme of this year's Time Spans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In the past five years, New York's blue chip galleries have produced a surge of exhibitions of abstract, monochromatic oil painting from South Korea's dansaekhwa school, by artists like Park Seo bo, Ha Chong hyun, Yun Hyong keun, Chung Chang sup and Chung Sang hwa. Grateful though I've been to see so much Korean painting here, the dansaekhwa vogue has left me suspicious as it's the Asian style that most resembles Western minimal abstraction, and therefore can demand the highest prices. So the first New York show for the ink painter Suh Se Ok, at Lehmann Maupin, is doubly significant: not only as a belated Western discovery of a Korean trailblazer, but also as an essential step toward a more plural view of Korean abstraction. (The gallery has a branch in Seoul and also represents Mr. Suh's son, the Korean American installation artist Do Ho Suh.) Suh Se Ok, 89, uses a traditional ink brush to paint heavily blotted calligraphic abstractions, some composed of just a few strokes, on knobby mulberry paper. (Postwar Korean art schools, following the Japanese tradition, strictly divided oil painting from ink painting, which Mr. Suh studied.) The majority of the 16 paintings here come from his "People" series, dating from 1978 to the early 2000s, and each suggests, but never properly represents, human forms through a few bravura strokes: two crisscrossed curves topped by a sagging ellipse, or a sequence of ribbons darting up and looping back down. His "people" are not people at all but signs and this calligraphic approach places these abstract ink paintings within a centuries long tradition of Asian literati painting, in which verisimilitude has less importance than personal expression and philosophical insight. Now in her mid 60s, the painter Kyle Staver has lately had several impressive shows, but her display of new work at Zurcher exceeds its predecessors in confidence, ease and even a kind of perfection. And for the first time, the artist is also showing the small, incredibly deft clay studies for some of the canvases here. Ms. Staver is a late blooming member of the generation of appropriation artists and Neo Expressionist painters that dominated the early 1980s. In many ways, she uses their various interests in existing narratives and images, gender stereotypes and irreverent painting making to revive older traditions. Her scenes from Greek mythology and occasionally the Bible unfold with a combination of visual humor, fast, toothy brushwork and a complex allure that is new and entices you to look and look again, thinking through what's happening, in paint, compositions and story. Her figures, which are nearly life size or bigger, are usually seen in midair where the gods mostly dwell and their levitation itself is exciting, often tinged with lust. For example, Cupid plucks Psyche from the fires of hell intimated by the orange undersides of the fluffy little clouds that also imply another kind of heat. In "Sailors and Sirens," from 2017, we have to parse three sizes of figures either on the tilting boat and in the swath of sea to understand the vertiginous angle of view, depth of space and the men's fixation. Ms. Staver's figures often are framed against a Titian blue sky, or by the rays of a bright sun that is itself blocked by their bodies. This happens in "Swan Flight" (2017), where an unnamed goddess, revving her large white fowl as if it were a motorcycle, speeds through a burst of light among the clouds that, up close, turn out to be airy scribbles of pink and white, like Twombly cotton candy. In this century's resurgence of figurative painting, Ms. Staver is a significant precedent. ROBERTA SMITH Trisha Baga's brand of weirdness draws from science fiction, spiritualism and contemporary oracles like Wikipedia and Alexa, the digital personal assistant. As art, it takes the form of a psychedelic 3 D video installation, ceramic sculptures in various sizes and paintings on lenticular photographs in the show "Mollusca the Pelvic Floor" at Greene Naftali. The key to the exhibition, according the gallery, is knowing that Alexa also responded to Ms. Baga using the name "Mollusca." This verbal slippage, between Alexa and Mollusca, serves as a trap door to thinking about language, time, history and human consciousness. "Mollusca the Pelvic Floor" (2018), a colorful and spasmodically disorienting 3 D video installation that you watch with specially programmed glasses, spins the slippage out into vertical layers of images. The video is cribbed from sources like the sci fi film "Contact" (1997), documentary footage from Ms. Baga's family's native Philippines, interviews with people on outer body experiences, and the Wikipedia entry for World Contact Day calling on humans to bond together to communicate with aliens. After watching the 37 minute video, the amiable ceramic sculptures placed around the gallery feel more like relics. A ceramic drum kit occupies one corner; portraits of Ms. Baga and the drag star RuPaul flank the entrance to the video. Elvis Presley's brain, pyramid shaped dog heads and Nicole Kidman in "The Hours" also appear in glazed and fired clay. Throughout the show, the sci fi nature of our times that is, constantly shifting, difficult to grasp and filled with previously unthinkable occurrences is brought into focus. Embracing the chaos, Ms. Baga suggests that the only way out is through. Donning your programmed glasses and plunging into the sights, sounds and sensations of contemporary life is, itself, to experience science fiction in its purest form. MARTHA SCHWENDENER The same overstuffed delicacy characterizes the show as a whole. Three untitled recent sculptures, five foot cubic wooden frames draped with socks, plastic shopping bags, and a Home Depot yardstick, though they're an interesting take on what it means to occupy space, may be a little too clever. But eight installations from 1987 are extraordinary: Each starts with a humble object like a cheese grater, colander or found chunk of concrete meander sitting on the floor on another modest little wooden platform. Looming over it on the wall is an enormous, close up black and white photo portrait in the overbearing style of early fascist propaganda. At first they'd seem to be jokes about photography and its capacity to fictionalize and mislead. But the melodramatic photos look no less real, in their way, than any view you can find with your own eyes, making them much deeper and more unsettling jokes about truth and the nature of perception. WILL HEINRICH Richard Stankiewicz's sculpture resists abbreviation. The 11 untitled assemblies of found steel beams and machine parts in "Richard Stankiewicz: Sculpture From the 1950s 1970s" at Washburn Gallery vary enormously: A vertically mounted speaker component dangling two braided tresses of wire looks like a fetish object. A rectangular frame onto which this scrap metal pioneer welded a few objects a triangle in the shape of a waving pennant, the heel of a pipe is self conscious and austere. An 18 inch high knot of twisted I beams looks very much, from one side, like a goat, complete with bolts and a pocket of pebble speckled concrete to suggest its hairy haunches. A large pipe with a cutaway to an intricate interior of smaller pipes and machinery is a didactic diagram of the artist's function: to slice the surface off reality and expose its strange internal mechanism. But they all shift and recede under your eyes in the same disconcerting way. Part of it is the surfaces. Too irregular to register simply as orange or brown but too muted to form clear patterns, the deep layer of rust that covers every one of Stankiewicz's sculptures softens corners, pits planes and makes even the most stolid shape look about as permanent as a dune. Mostly it's the delicate way he put his pieces together, carefully getting right up to the edge of a recognizable shape but never quite crossing the line. WILL HEINRICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The actor Taye Diggs didn't want to. On a scarf snapping fall day, Mr. Diggs had arrived at Steps on Broadway, a dance studio on the Upper West Side where he used to study. His publicist had suggested that he'd want to peek into a couple of classes and maybe dance some steps on the side. But Mr. Diggs was adamant. "Do you want to do a warm up?" Patricia Klausner, the director of marketing, said when he arrived. "I am not dancing," Mr. Diggs said firmly. Inside the theater dance class, the teacher, Chet Walker, demonstrated a jazzy, Bob Fosse like number set to "Me and My Shadow." Mr. Diggs, 46, is a veteran of Broadway musicals, from his breakout role in the original company of "Rent" to a recent glam rock stint in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." He knows how to articulate a hip and swivel a shoulder. Mr. Diggs had just wrapped the current season of "Empire" in Chicago, in which he plays Angelo Dubois, the disgraced politician, jilted lover and frequent punching bag. He had then flown into New York to lead a couple of industry readings for "Thoughts of a Colored Man on a Day When the Sun Set Too Early," a choreopoem he hopes to direct. He hadn't been to Steps in years, but he'd told his publicist that he wanted to walk the halls he used to sweep as a work study student in the early 1990s, reminiscing about his early days in New York. Tiptoeing out of the theater class, he met up with Suzy Norton DiCerto, an assistant managing director at Steps and another former work study kid. Peering down the main hallway, dancer strewn and sweat perfumed, Mr. Diggs recalled that "as a black man with pride, the last thing I wanted to be seen doing was sweeping, so I picked the late night shift when nobody would see me." Ms. Norton DiCerto mentioned that he used to work that late night shift in "booty shorts." "They weren't called booty shorts then," Mr. Diggs said. He was wearing a lot more clothing now, a black vest over gray pants and a waffle knit thermal shirt, a tan hat set at a rakish tilt. Earrings sparkled in his ears, silver chains circled his neck. On one wrist he wore a skull bracelet, on the other a dignified Panerai diving watch. "Whenever I'm feeling down, I caress it," he said. "This is heaven for us," one young man said. "Come back and take a class with us." The young man offered to arrange a Pilates session before the class and an elastic stretch sequence after. "That way when you get home you'll still be able to walk," he said brightly. As he moved toward the exit, a woman working in the studio's cafe presented him with a Steps T shirt. It was black, a good color on him. Does Mr. Diggs have any bad colors? "No, I do not," he said. Even though he hadn't really had a workout, he still felt he deserved a post workout drink. With the elevator broken, Mr. Diggs skipped down several flights of stairs and over to the Beacon Bar, where he picked a banquette near the front windows. (When you have been on Broadway as often as Mr. Diggs has, you know how to find your light.) While tourists doubled back to snap his picture, he sipped a glass of sangria and looked across the street at Steps. "Jesus," he said. "That really took me back." Tagged by casting agents early on as "a singer who can move well," he said, he spent his post college years studying at Steps and hosting at Pizzeria Uno. He joined the ensemble of "Carousel," then booked the part of the landlord baddie Benny in "Rent," opposite the actress Idina Menzel. The couple married in 2003 and divorced in 2014. Hollywood wanted him, first as the boy toy, then as the lady killer, but always, he said, "the black one. In the black movies." Having played leads and love interests in shows including "Kevin Hill," "Private Practice" and "Murder in the First," Mr. Diggs is no longer typecast as a singer who can move. He is eager to see what else he can do, especially now that an anti anxiety prescription has straightened out his stage fright. He and Ms. Menzel and their 8 year old son, Walker, have settled into what he calls "the best worst case scenario," and he is developing a comedy "based loosely on my divorce, my life, my kid," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
MANTEL PIECES Royal Bodies and Other Writing From The London Review of Books By Hilary Mantel The person we meet at the beginning of Hilary Mantel's collection of essays is 35 and has already published two novels. She's immensely ambitious, but she's had some obstacles to literary success: She's female; she's the daughter of Irish Catholic millworkers; she comes from a village in England's industrial North; she has had to support herself as a barmaid, medical social worker and department store assistant; she is married to the boy she met at 16 and has followed him to postings in Africa and the Middle East; she's dogged by a chronic illness. And finally, most damning: Her chosen genre, historical fiction, is considered down market. All of which means it will take her a bit longer to become herself or rather, to persuade the world of her prodigious powers. She's still a long way from becoming Dame Hilary, internationally renowned author of the "Wolf Hall" trilogy. "Mantel Pieces," which includes nearly 30 years of Mantel's essays for The London Review of Books, accompanied by facsimiles of her correspondence with its editors, is the story of an outsider finding her literary home. When the book opens, it's 1987, and Mantel, with exaggerated self deprecation, is offering her services to a magazine she considers the finest in Europe. "I was in awe of my paymasters," she confesses in her introduction, and had decided to say "'yes' to anything, especially if it frightened me." Fear is a running theme and essential motive in Mantel's makeup. The chosen subjects of her novels and essays are frankly hair raising: child murders, ghosts, the French Revolution and the Tudor monarchy a period, as she writes, that signifies "terror in the name of the church and torture in the name of the state." As a child, "I was often very frightened and the imprint of that fear stays with me," she has said in an interview. Fear alternates with a formidable though somewhat specialized curiosity throughout this collection, as if knowledge the child's need to decode the system of "pipes and drains, culverts and sewers" beneath her feet is the only thing that will keep her alive. In the early pieces, we see a working critic accepting assignments that don't so much frighten as bore her. Her riffs on Madonna and "The Hite Report" offer the kind of acid one liners English critics can reel out in their sleep, whereas what we need her to do is explain the world to us. Her true province is history, and it's only once Mantel as reviewer digs down hard into its rich soil, delving into biographies of Tudor aristocrats or Danton or Robespierre or Marie Antoinette fortune's darlings who end up headless in the Tower or the Tuileries that she truly warms up, moving into a prose whose rhythmic and allusive range, whose nonchalance, bite and wayward erudition are always surprising, often thrilling. A Mantel essay will take you from the Children's Crusade of 1212 to the Liverpool supermarket where a toddler is lured to his death. Is the author teasing us? Is such magic legal? 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. A good third of "Mantel Pieces" is devoted to kings and queens and courtiers, another third to the revolutionaries who are out to string them up. It's clear where Mantel's sympathies lie: Royals are mythic, archaic, "both gods and beasts," but it's their assassins the stiff backed, lawyerly, provincial fanatics whom she loves. (It's revealing that in her "Wolf Hall" trilogy she manages to spin her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, not as courtier but as revolutionary: radical Protestant, protocapitalist numbers cruncher.) "Mantel Pieces" includes the author's most celebrated essay, "Royal Bodies." When The London Review published it in 2013, there were death threats, practically, from Britain's right wing press. Mantel's offense was to compare Kate Middleton, Prince William's wife, to a plastic doll. But actually the essay's most incendiary moment is when Mantel, at a Buckingham Palace reception, finds herself staring at the queen: "I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones." "The force of my devouring curiosity," she writes, was enough to make Elizabeth II look back over her shoulder with an expression of "hurt bewilderment." Mantel doesn't hate the queen; she's just curious about the hole in her center, the fact that monarchy has made her "a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed." This anti institutional bent is what drives Mantel's imaginative intelligence, flaming out in unexpected places. It drives her to describe the Virgin Mary statuettes that haunt her Catholic girlhood, perched in niches like CCTV cameras, watching her every move with "painted eyes of policeman blue." It drives her in "The Hair Shirt Sisterhood," a brilliant disquisition on eating disorders, sainthood and the church's misogyny, to a defense of young girls who choose anorexia: "It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self. ... For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time." The origins of her resistance to institutional power, her sympathy for the unsympathetic, Mantel has examined in an earlier memoir, "Giving Up the Ghost." She describes the first day of school in her industrial Derbyshire village: "I thought that I had come among lunatics; and the teachers, malign and stupid, seemed to me like the lunatics' keepers. I knew you must not give in to them." Education is the traditional leg up for clever children from rackety working class backgrounds like hers. Mantel, however, from her first glimpse of a classroom, recognized "the need to resist what I found there." She might say the same of her experience of the medical establishment, as glanced at in "Meeting the Devil," an essay in "Mantel Pieces." Riven since puberty by agonizing period pains and torrential bleeding, Mantel is gaslighted for decades by (male) doctors who palm her off with antidepressants and, yes, antipsychotics. Even after she has correctly diagnosed her own endometriosis and undergone an operation removing her ovaries and uterus, as well as part of her bladder and bowels, the pain and exhaustion are unrelenting. The drugs Mantel will need to take for the rest of her life cause gargantuan weight gain. The author of these essays, you are reminded, is someone in chronic pain, someone whose own body has become unrecognizable to her. What she's left with is the ferociously lucid mind, the unruly delight of her mocking and self mocking humor. My favorite sentence in this book is uncharacteristically quiet, almost plaintive, let fall sotto voce in the middle of a hospital bed memory: "I wonder, though, if there is a little saint you can apply to, if you are a person with holes in them?" I suspect we all are people with holes in them, and there are many saints to apply to. For those who feel compelled to examine not just their own "perforations" but the world's, St. Hilary is your woman.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Iceman is having his comeback moment: Marvel Entertainment announced this month that the superhero, also known as Bobby Drake, would be getting a new solo series in September. His previous series had been canceled in March. Then something curious happened. Collected editions of Iceman were "selling really well on the book market," its writer, Sina Grace, recalled his editor telling him. So plans were made for the hero who truly stepped into the spotlight in 2015, when he was revealed to be gay to return, with the announcement, fittingly, coming during Pride Month. Iceman, who was first introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in issue No. 1 of X Men in July 1963, made the leap to TV animation in 1966 (in "The Marvel Super Heroes") and film in 2000 (as part of the "X Men" franchise). Thanks to the magic of comics, in his coming out story of 2015, a younger version of Bobby traveled to the present and was outed by Jean Grey, his telepathic teammate. During a meeting of the two Bobbies, the older version unveiled his truth. "I put all my energy into being a mutant and an X Man and putting my life in danger every 10 minutes for everyone else," the older Bobby says. "Can I just have part of my life that I'm not being persecuted for?" Though that Iceman story was written by Brian Michael Bendis, who is straight, his solo series is being written by Mr. Grace, who is gay. The 2017 and 2018 issues dealt with the hero's coming out to his parents (who barely accepted his superhero life), his attempts at dating (he learned how to "Netflix and chill") and his fighting villains like the Juggernaut. Issue No. 1 sold just over 32,000 copies to comic book stores in the United States; but sales were slowing, and issue No. 11, the last, dwindled to just over 10,000. Mr. Grace answered some questions about his experience with Iceman, this surprising return, fan reaction (which wasn't all positive) and what the next chapter in the hero's life will bring. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What is the difference in audience between comic and book stores? Iceman is speaking to both millennial and Gen Z consumers. And the way they are buying comics is not the way the typical Wednesday comic customer is buying comics. They will go into a shop once a month or once a quarter. They are not going to come in every week. Iceman is reaching a younger consumer and an emerging consumer. Why do you think there has been so much negative reaction to Iceman's being gay? People were talking about the character's sexuality change, but I didn't do that. It was done by folks who did not identify as gay men. When Marvel asked me if I was interested in the character, I tried to think of experiences that were true to Bobby Drake. There are true life narratives about men who could not handle this truth until later in their lives. It worked so perfectly with this character who for decades has been told he was one of the most powerful mutants if only he would recognize it himself. What was the reaction on social media to your writing Iceman? Social media is a funny thing. I was at this Pacific Pride conference with a roomful of beautiful, glorious queer youth kids. One of them asked me a question about social media and what do you do when you encounter bullying. I was certainly exposed to some of that with Iceman. It was not "chill." It's not cool when people use negative language to communicate a point or attack your body or your lifestyle to attack the work. I had to recalibrate what could filter through to my heart and my brain. I don't let it bring me down. It's not worth it for me to engage. I'm really excited that we're coming back with a new No. 1. This is going to be a great way to invite readers to celebrate with us. Iceman is going to be thinking about how he can help other people and use his mutant power to be the best he can be. He's going to be up against some pretty big bad guys. In the first issue he's preventing the next "Mutant Massacre" with Bishop, another X Man. We're also going to see a lot of the previous cast but played out in different ways. Bobby's relationship with his parents will not be as fraught. He reached a level of peace that you can get to even with parents like his. We're going to see his dating life. It's just going to be such a breath of fresh air to see him really stretch his arms out and have fun. You mentioned there would be some community outreach too. The reason I love X Men books is that they speak so much to people who identify as other. We're going to be seeing Bobby trying to figure out how he can be a shining beacon to the gay community. That's where me and Bobby Drake are alike: How do you take this platform and try to do something meaningful? That's something I want all readers to think about: How can you make a difference in your world? I feel super proud of the story I've crafted with all those things in mind. Which artists will you be working with? For this arc, we have Nathan Stockman. He has this ability to do action and humor and drama, and it all blends perfectly with his style. He really understands what this book is and how, even though it is a funny character, it is a not a funny book. It's an X Men book: a lot of action and drama. I can let my imagination go wild and they're able to do it. I draw comics too and I could not do half the stuff I assign these guys!	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Dr. Gayatri Devi's patient, a 55 year old former headmistress, had good reason to be distraught. The woman had a yearlong history of progressive memory loss and behavioral problems and was referred to Dr. Devi, a neurologist, with a possible diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia. As Dr. Devi recounted in the journal Obstetrics Gynecology, the woman's once prodigious memory had seriously deteriorated and she'd become increasingly irritable. She had difficulty organizing tasks, keeping track of belongings, setting goals, making plans and seeing them through. Yet the results of medical and neurological tests and brain scans were normal. Noting that the woman had gone through menopause a year earlier, Dr. Devi traced her symptoms to the decline in estrogen stimulation of the brain that occurs in all women at menopause with varying effects. Some are more sensitive to falling estrogen levels than others. With a likely diagnosis of menopause related cognitive impairment, the doctor prescribed hormone replacement therapy. Within 15 months, the woman's behavioral symptoms had disappeared and her learning ability and memory were back to normal. She was able to complete a demanding graduate program and assume a new leadership position in education. This woman's case was admittedly extreme, but Dr. Devi told me that "60 percent of women go through menopause related cognitive impairment" that, when serious enough to be brought to medical attention, is too often misdiagnosed as "mild cognitive impairment," a precursor to dementia. Menopause related cognitive symptoms are very similar to "chemo brain," a common complaint among women treated for breast cancer and in some men treated for prostate cancer. Treatment of both diseases often results in an abrupt drop in estrogen levels. People with so called brain fog following cancer treatment "have trouble with short term memory, multitasking, coming up with words and putting cogent thoughts together," said Dr. Devi, an attending neurologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and clinical professor of neurology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. "Menopause related cognitive impairment happens to women in their 40s and 50s, women in the prime of life who suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them," she said. Yet, she believes, the correct diagnosis is missed more often than not. "Women with menopause related cognitive impairment are afraid they're developing some form of dementia, but if they go to a memory disorder specialist, they may not get the right diagnosis," Dr. Devi said in an interview. Internists may check for thyroid disease, a vitamin deficiency or infection, but rarely connect the woman's menstrual history to her cognitive symptoms, she said. Dr. Devi chose to publish her report in the obstetric journal because many women in midlife use their gynecologist as their primary care physician "and I want them to know this condition exists and often responds to short term treatment with estrogen to tide the brain over." In an accompanying editorial, Pauline M. Maki, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, noted that "not only do women more frequently report cognitive difficulties as they transition from premenopause to perimenopause to postmenopause, but they also perform more poorly on standardized neuropsychological tests, particularly tests of verbal memory, aspects of executive function, and processing speed." Women often describe these deficits as "brain fog," and they and their doctors may blame the sleep deprivation associated with hot flashes and night sweats, which are definitely "taxing to the brain," Dr. Maki said. But while these common menopausal symptoms can add to the severity of memory problems, they are not the primary cause of cognitive issues in these women, she said. A six year study of 1,903 women who were at midlife found that menopause related symptoms like depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance and hot flashes did not account for declines in memory, learning and how fast the brain processes information during the menopause transition. "The most helpful thing we can do is to normalize these experiences for women who are transitioning through the menopause and let them know that women's brains are sensitive to fluctuating levels of estrogen, both in terms of cognitive ability and mood," Dr. Maki said. In fact, symptoms similar to those in menopausal women affect many women premenstrually, when there is a short lived drop in circulating estrogen. But unlike a normal menstrual cycle, the transition through menopause is gradual and typically takes months and sometimes years, making it harder to recognize its link to cognitive problems. Estrogen levels usually start to decline around age 45, but a woman may not become postmenopausal until age 50 or later, when menstrual bleeding stops for at least a year and very little estrogen is released by her ovaries. The other critically important fact that all women transitioning through menopause should know is that the brain and mood effects are temporary, said Dr. Gail A. Greendale, a specialist in geriatrics and women's health at the David Geffen School of Medicine and the University of California, Los Angeles. The postmenopausal brain, it seems, adjusts to having little or no estrogen on board. In a study Dr. Greendale directed that followed 2,362 women for four years, declines in memory and learning ability that characterized their transition through menopause rebounded postmenopausally, "suggesting that menopause transition related cognitive difficulties may be time limited," she and colleagues concluded. "The brain fog when women's brains seem not to be hitting on all eight cylinders is temporary," Dr. Greendale said in an interview. "During the menopause transition, a woman's brain may feel a little off, a little muddy, but when the transition passes, the clouds clear and the fog lifts. Sometimes all a woman needs to know is that this too shall pass." However, for women unwilling or unable to ride out the transition, Dr. Maki said treatment options, in addition to hormone replacement, include following a Mediterranean diet, brisk walking and minimizing alcohol consumption. Those who can safely take estrogen should know that participants in the Women's Health Initiative, a large government study of postmenopausal women, who were randomized to take hormone replacements starting in their 50s had a lower mortality rate and were less likely to die of Alzheimer's disease during an 18 year follow up. In 2015, the North American Menopause Society reviewed nonhormonal treatments for hot flashes, several of which may also relieve cognitive symptoms. One is a low dose of the antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil). Another is gabapentin, an anticonvulsant and pain reliever that hooks onto estrogen receptors in the brain. The critical message, Dr. Maki said, is that menopause related cognitive issues "need not compromise a woman's quality of life," though women may have to be proactive for the condition to be properly diagnosed and treated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The MMSphere, a ring of LED lights, casts a red glow over my face. It sits adjacent to my laptop so that as I write, research and procrastinate , I can simultaneously calm a fiery constellation of acne on my left cheek. Red light's anti inflammatory and collagen building effects on the skin are well documented. But this hands free device, designed by Ellen Marmur , a dermatologist in New York, has settings for blue, green, amber and purple light too. "It has just enough variety that people stay excited to use it," Dr. Marmur said. I, too, begin cocktailing. I bathe my face in blue light to kill acne bacteria while watching reruns, and immediately follow up with a FaceTime call to my mother, my face lit up in a bright green light to fight hyperpigmentation. Skin care efficacy lives and dies by patient compliance. Most at home LED skin care devices are small and hand held, requiring time set aside to treat the entire face. People eventually stop using them. Even with persistent acne as a motivator, I've always had trouble following LED protocols. The MMSphere ( 495) is a big deal for me because it harnesses a powerful fix everything while doing nothing ease that makes it almost addictive. You actually want to use it. "It makes people feel good, like they're taking care of themselves," Dr. Marmur said. "You can treat your skin while doing other things, so it's easier to form the habit of doing it every day." Because, really, if we're just sitting around talking, eating, working shouldn't we be fixing our skin, too? So how does LED work? First, LED therapy is not the same as a laser treatment, which creates controlled damage to the skin to promote healing. The easiest way to understand the light as skin care concept is to think of skin friendly visible light as ultraviolet light's benevolent counterpart. In a process called photobiomodulation, light alters biological material; for example, UV rays from the sun change our skin in ways that can catalyze cancer and aging. But some wavelengths of visible light alter our skin for the better, and light emitting diodes (LED) are a source that delivers that energy. Jared Jagdeo is an associate professor of dermatology and director of the Center for Phototherapy, SUNY Downstate Health Science University, where he studies LED therapy. "You can alter the skin through photo damaging with lasers, or photobiomodulation, which is a much more gentle way of changing the way the skin functions," Dr. Jagdeo said. Red and blue light are the heavy hitters. He explained why red light in particular works so well. "There's a specific receptor in the mitochondria of the skin cells that red light specifically acts upon," he said. "And that's why red light is an ideal wavelength for changing the way the skin functions." Red light penetrates the skin deeper than other visible light and stimulates the mitochondria, which has an anti inflammatory and rejuvenating effect. Collagen is built in the dermis, the skin is calmed, and wrinkles eventually fade. Blue light doesn't penetrate the skin as deeply but zaps acne causing bacteria on the surface. The science on green light isn't as solid, but in theory, it targets melanocytes, discouraging excess melanin production. Rigorous independent studies have yet to be conducted, but Dr. Marmur did a very small clinical trial on green light for the MMSphere in which subjects self reported a 32 percent decrease in "brown spots" after a week of green light treatment. And what about those other colors? The MMSphere emits five different colors of light and shuts off after a 20 minute session. Its violet is a combination of red and blue light, so you get both colors in one treatment. MMSphere's last color, amber, doesn't have much of a skin care benefit, but it may be a mood booster, and is sometimes used to treat seasonal affective disorder. Is all of this light O.K. for my eyes? Eye safety is a valid concern, particularly because earlier this year Neutrogena recalled its LED mask over fears that it could cause eye injuries. Brian S. Biesman, an assistant clinical professor of ophthalmology, dermatology and ENT at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, said that most home devices aren't powerful enough damage the eyes. The MMSphere comes with opaque goggles, but, Dr. Biesman said, the device is low energy, so it should be safe to use without them. "Just normal blinking and eye movements should be sufficient to protect the eyes," he said. "But never stare at a bright light source." How do I know if my LED light is working? This is where things get more complicated. Even though LED devices are everywhere, the science to establish standards for at home use is nascent. Buy only devices cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, but think of that clearance as a testament to their safety, not their efficacy. "As far as the F.D.A. is concerned, if I use CO2 laser resurfacing, it better work because of the amount of risk involved," said Suzanne Kilmer, a clinical professor of dermatology at the UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento and director of the Laser and Skin Surgery Medical Group. "Compare that to a home device," Dr. Kilmer said. If it doesn't kill you, blind you or make things much worse, it's probably going to get approved. So it's actually more incumbent upon the people selling home devices to show efficacy. You have to trust the people who are selling them." "LED is real, but it's probably not optimized yet," Dr. Kilmer said. Many factors determine the amount of light your skin needs and receives: the strength of the light, the distance from source to skin, how long the light is used, and your skin color. "Some of these lights on the market are very weak, and they may not have enough energy output to actually have a biological effect," Dr. Jagdeo said. "Imagine a glow stick. It produces a color. But you could shine it on your face all day, and it's not going to change the way your skin works. "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Dr. Marianne S. Goodman, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Integrated Service Network in the Bronx. "The fact is, we can't rely on trained medical experts to identify people who are truly at high risk," she said. At a recent visit to the Veterans Affairs clinic in the Bronx, Barry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, learned that he belonged to a very exclusive club. According to a new A.I. assisted algorithm, he was one of several hundred V.A. patients nationwide, of six million total, deemed at imminent risk of suicide. The news did not take him entirely off guard. Barry, 69, who was badly wounded in the 1968 Tet offensive, had already made two previous attempts on his life. "I don't like this idea of a list, to tell you the truth a computer telling me something like this," Barry, a retired postal worker, said in a phone interview. He asked that his surname be omitted for privacy. "But I thought about it," Barry said. "I decided, you know, OK if it's going to get me more support that I need, then I'm OK with it." For more than a decade, health officials have watched in vain as suicide rates climbed steadily by 30 percent nationally since 2000 and rates in the V.A. system have been higher than in the general population. The trends have defied easy explanation and driven investment in blind analysis: machine learning, or A.I. assisted algorithms that search medical and other records for patterns historically associated with suicides or attempts in large clinical populations. Doctors have traditionally gauged patients' risks by looking at past mental health diagnoses and incidents of substance abuse, and by drawing on experience and medical instinct. But these evaluations fall well short of predictive, and the artificially intelligent programs explore many more factors, like employment and marital status, physical ailments, prescription history and hospital visits. These algorithms are black boxes: They flag a person as at high risk of suicide, without providing any rationale. But human intelligence isn't necessarily better at the task. "The fact is, we can't rely on trained medical experts to identify people who are truly at high risk," said Dr. Marianne S. Goodman, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Integrated Service Network in the Bronx, and a clinical professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "We're no good at it." Deploying A.I. in this way is not new; researchers have been gathering data on suicides through the National Health Service in Britain since 1996. The U.S. Army, Kaiser Permanente and Massachusetts General Hospital each has separately developed a algorithm intended to predict suicide risk. But the V.A.'s program, called Reach Vet, which identified Barry as at high risk, is the first of the new U.S. systems to be used in daily clinical practice, and it is being watched closely. How these systems perform whether they save lives and at what cost, socially and financially will help determine if digital medicine can deliver on its promise. "It is a critical test for these big data systems," said Alex John London, the director of the Center for Ethics and Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "If these things have a high rate of false positives, for instance, that marks a lot people at high risk who are not and the stigma associated with that could be harmful indeed downstream. We need to be sure these risk flags lead to people getting better or more help, not somehow being punished." The V.A.'s algorithm updates continually, generating a new list of high risk veterans each month. Some names stay on the list for months, others fall off. When a person is flagged, his or her name shows up on the computer dashboard of the local clinic's Reach Vet coordinator, who calls to arrange an appointment. The veteran's doctor explains what the high risk designation means it is a warning sign, not a prognosis and makes sure the person has a suicide safety plan: that any guns and ammunition are stored separately; that photos of loved ones are visible; and that phone numbers of friends, social workers and suicide hotlines are on hand. Doctors who have worked with Reach Vet say that the system produces unexpected results, both in whom it flags and whom it does not. To some of his therapists, Chris, 36, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, looked very much like someone who should be on the radar. He had been a Marine rifleman and saw combat in three of his four tours, taking and returning heavy fire in multiple skirmishes. In 2008, a roadside bomb injured several of his friends but left him unscathed. After the attack he had persistent nightmares about it and received a diagnosis of post traumatic stress. In 2016, he had a suicidal episode; he asked that his last name be omitted to protect his privacy. "I remember going to the shower, coming out and grabbing my gun," he said in an interview at his home near New York City. "I had a Glock 9 millimeter. For me, I love guns, they're like a safety blanket. Next thing I know, I'm waking up in cold water, sitting in the tub, the gun is sitting right there, out of the holster. I blacked out. I mean, I have no idea what happened. There were no bullets in the gun, it turned out." The strongest risk factor for suicide is a previous attempt, especially one with a gun. Yet Chris's name has not turned up on the high risk list compiled by A.I., and he does not think it ever will. "At the time, in 2016, I was going to school for a master's, working full time," he said. "Our two kids were toddlers; I was sleeping no more than a few hours a night, if that. It was too much. I was sleep deprived all the time. I had never been suicidal, never had suicidal thoughts; it was a totally impulsive thing." The A.I. behind Reach Vet seems to home in on other risk factors, Dr. Goodman said: "The things this program picks up wouldn't necessarily be the ones I thought about. The analytics are beginning to change our understanding of who's at greatest risk." The algorithm is built on an analysis of thousands of previous suicides in the V.A.'s database, dating to 2008. The computer mixes and shuffles scores of facts from the medical records age, marital status, diagnoses, prescriptions and settles on the factors that together are most strongly associated with suicide risk. The V.A. model integrates 61 factors in all, including some that are not obvious, like arthritis and statin use, and produces a composite score for each person. Those who score at the very top of the range the top 0.1 percentage are flagged as high risk. "The risk concentration for people in the top 0.1 percent on this score was about 40 times," said John McCarthy, the director of data and surveillance, in Suicide Prevention in the VA Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. "That is, they were 40 times more likely to die of suicide" than the average person. Bridget Matarazzo, the director of clinical services at the Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center for Veteran Suicide Prevention, said of Reach Vet. "My impression is that it's identifying some folks who were previously on providers' radar, but also others who were not." Late in 2018, a V.A. team led by Dr. McCarthy presented the first results of the Reach Vet system. Over a six month period, with Reach Vet in place, high risk veterans more than doubled their use of V.A. services. By contrast, in a comparison group tracked for six months before Reach Vet was installed, the use of V.A. services stayed roughly the same. The Reach Vet group also had a lower mortality rate over that time although it was an overall rate, including any cause of death. The analysis did not detect a difference in suicides, at least up to that stage. "It's encouraging, but we've got much more to do to see if we're having the impact we want," Dr. McCarthy said. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care and policy at Harvard Medical School, said: "Right now, this and other models predict who's at highest risk. What they don't tell you is who is most likely to profit from an intervention. If you don't know that, you don't know where to put your resources." For doctors using the system, however, it has already prompted some rethinking of how to assess risk. "You end up with a lot of older men who are really struggling with medical problems," Dr. Goodman said. "They're quietly miserable, in pain, often alone, with financial problems, and you don't see them because they're not coming in."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
INDIAN WELLS, Calif. Back on the march as the best player in men's tennis, Novak Djokovic stumbled in the desert sunlight on Tuesday on his favorite surface. Djokovic flubbed some forehands and returns he normally makes in his third round match at the BNP Paribas Open and cracked a racket in frustration. But he also ran into an inspired opponent in Philipp Kohlschreiber, a 35 year old German who had lost seven straight matches to Djokovic but has long savored the memory of surprising Djokovic in the fourth round of the 2009 French Open. Now, nearly a decade later, Kohlschreiber has another upset tale to tell. No, Djokovic was not at his precise and predatory best, but Kohlschreiber still had to summon plenty of quality shot making and decision making under pressure to finish him off, 6 4, 6 4. "Of course you always need the No. 1 not playing his best tennis to beat him, but I'm very happy with my performance," Kohlschreiber said. It was a rough day all around for No. 1s. Naomi Osaka, the top player in the women's game, was more soundly beaten. She lost, 6 3, 6 1, in the fourth round to Belinda Bencic in just 66 minutes. Osaka has won the last two Grand Slam singles titles, yet Tuesday's result was no shock. Bencic, who just turned 22, is yet another great talent from Switzerland, land of Roger Federer and Martina Hingis. Bencic broke into the top 10 as a teenager in 2016 before left wrist surgery stopped her ascent. She broke Osaka's powerful serve five times in this brief encounter and proved more steady from the baseline, as well. She is now on a 11 match winning streak after winning the title in Dubai and has five victories over top 10 players in the last month. "My injury just changed my perspective," said Bencic, the No. 23 seed. "I learned so much from this time, and I'm really enjoying to be on the court." Hardcourts remain Djokovic's happiest hunting ground. Ten of his 15 Grand Slam singles titles have come on the surface that suits his elastic athleticism best. He also has won five singles titles at Indian Wells, but after winning three straight times here in 2015, 2016 and 2017, he has run into early round trouble. Last year, in the midst of a deep funk and still recovering from elbow surgery, he made 58 unforced errors in an opening match defeat to Taro Daniel, a Japanese qualifier. But this year, Djokovic arrived on an undeniable roll after sweeping to victory at the Australian Open, manhandling Rafael Nadal in the final. Djokovic has won three straight Grand Slam singles titles and will hold all four for the second time if he can prevail at the French Open in June and complete another so called "Djoker Slam." He is still in the doubles here after reaching the semifinals with partner Fabio Fognini later on Tuesday, but only the tournaments ahead will show if Djokovic's singles performance was a blip or a harbinger of more struggles. "I had to get over it in an hour, because I played doubles," Djokovic said. "I must admit I was thinking about it. When I hit a good return, I was wondering why this didn't happen in singles. But it is, I guess, part of the world that we are, the world of tennis. It's part of our world, and we just have to bounce back very quickly." Djokovic said competing in the doubles gave him "a chance to rectify the wrongs," but that his singles performance would not affect him in the long run. "I know what I'm capable of," he said. "I know the quality of my tennis. It's just one of those days. You just have to congratulate your opponent and move on." The timing was intriguing, coming after a week replete with tennis politicking. Djokovic, as president of the ATP Player Council, spent the days before the tournament in meetings and debate, and the ATP's board of directors ultimately voted last Thursday not to renew the contract of Chris Kermode, the tour's chairman and chief executive. There has been plenty of pushback on the decision, with Nadal and Federer both pointing out that they were not consulted by Djokovic or council members in the run up to the Kermode decision. Federer said he had reached out directly to Djokovic who had been unable to find time on his schedule for a discussion. But then neither Nadal nor Federer are on the council at this stage, although both have served in the past. Federer, a former president, has acknowledged that the role can be draining, particularly in fraught times, and Djokovic spoke about that challenge on Sunday after defeating American Bjorn Fratangelo in his opening match. "I care about the current generation and also the future generation and future of this sport," Djokovic said. "I think that the sport is doing well, but it can also do better and better, you know, as we go along. And if I, with my status and with my position in the world of sport and tennis, can influence that positively, then why not? Yes, it takes away in energy and time, but I know I do it from the right place in my heart and with the right intent, and then I also receive a lot of energy for that." He has received some criticism, too, but appears intent on trying to push for structural reforms on the ATP Tour, which could include dividing Kermode's role into two separate positions, or changing the size or composition of the board. Success is far from guaranteed considering the internal tensions that exist in the ATP: an organization that is a long running and often uneasy partnership between the players and those who own and operate the tournaments. It would be all too easy to get distracted. But some rejected any such speculation on Tuesday and emphasized Kohlschreiber's performance. Among them: Nick Kyrgios, the unpredictable and intermittently committed Australian who won a hardcourt title in Mexico last week in style but was beaten, 6 4, 6 4, by Kohlschreiber in the second round here. "Something has to be wrong with him right?" Kyrgios tweeted on Tuesday, referring to Djokovic. "I lose to Kholi and get absolutely shredded 'same old kyrgios' how about the guy is just good? And he knows how to win matches? Hate this, why we always gotta kiss these guys when they lose?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Q. How do "indoor" maps work? I thought GPS had a hard time getting signals if your phone wasn't outdoors in a clear area. A. The United States Global Positioning System (GPS) currently uses a system of 31 operational satellites transmitting radio signals to receivers on the ground. Once the GPS device on the ground receives signals from four or more satellites, it can use geometry to calculate its three dimensional position on the earth's surface. According to the federal GPS.gov website, GPS enabled smartphones are typically accurate within a 16 foot radius under open skies but that precision falls off if the phone is near bridges, tall structures and trees. Signal blockage from being inside a building or underground (in a subterranean parking garage, for instance) can also prevent a map app from pinpointing your location. Some indoor maps are simply static floor plans of the building for easy reference, much like a directory map at a shopping mall; flight tracker apps, for example, often include airport guides for travelers. For maps that do provide fairly accurate positioning indoors, information from your phone's Wi Fi network data, special Bluetooth beacons and radio frequency identification systems or even dedicated hardware installed by the place you are visiting can help mark your spot.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The death of Roger Ailes on Thursday was always fated to be channeled through partisan filters. He was the man most responsible for building Fox News into a powerhouse conservative network, before he was ousted last summer amid accusations of sexual harassment. Commentary on his legacy was particularly split on social media, where intense criticism of Mr. Ailes began simultaneously with the reports of his death. Many condemned Mr. Ailes and his network, pointing in particular to the manifold accusations against him, which he had always denied. But numbers of conservatives celebrated him as an inventive giant who fundamentally transformed television, a medium that he had understood instinctually since childhood.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When Ilana Ozernoy was a young girl growing up in the Soviet Union, her father, Leonid Ozernoy, a prominent astrophysicist in Moscow, bought her a telescope. Ms. Ozernoy and her father, who was a scientist at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, along with her older sister and mother, would spend summers in the Baltics. They visited observatories in ancient Estonian cities like Parnu and Tartu, where Dr. Ozernoy would research astronomical phenomena like quasars and black holes. "I still remember how it would feel when the dome opened up to reveal an amazing sea of stars," Ms. Ozernoy said. "I was so small that my dad would have to prop me up on a seat so I could see the constellations through the giant telescope. He taught me all about the stars and the planets and the constellations. It really was a memorable experience." In what both women feel was their destiny, Ms. Ozernoy, 42, and Ms. Mouritzen, 40, each arrived in New York City in 2000. They spent the next two decades frequenting the same Thai restaurant in NoLIta, drinking the same cheap red wine at Chelsea gallery openings, and going to some of the same downtown parties, crossing paths perhaps hundreds of times without ever meeting. But along came an algorithm that finally brought them together, inside a dimly lit Williamsburg wine bar, where the couple hit it off. "There was something about Ilana that felt very much like home," Ms. Mouritzen said. "We both made it very clear to each other when we first met that we were very independent women, but somehow, all of that went out the window when we started dating, because all we wanted to do was just keep hanging out, and that feeling has never left us." Ms. Ozernoy was feeling much the same. "It felt like we just picked up in the middle of a conversation and I did not want to stop talking to this person," she said. "I never really understood what people meant when they said, 'I'm dating my best friend,'" she added. "To me that always sounded like those people just settled, like it was not passionate, it's just your friend. But then I met Nina, who is my best friend and the love of my life, and then I totally understood what that meant." In the ensuing days, Ms. Ozernoy and Ms. Mouritzen discovered the kind of love was meant to be sign that would make Cupid blush. They realized that had they not matched on Tinder, they would have likely met anyway at St. Ann's Warehouse, a 1,500 seat theater in Downtown Brooklyn, where both held tickets to side by side seats for the same show, same time, and same day, making it clear to the couple that the stars Ms. Ozernoy knew so well as a child had returned, shining brighter now with Ms. Mouritzen's name written on them. "There was no doubt at that point that we were destined to meet," Ms. Ozernoy said. "The universe was determined to give Nina to me as a gift." Ms. Ozernoy, 42, is a senior vice president for public affairs at Blackstone in New York. She was until June the global head of communications at Bloomberg Media in New York. Ms. Mouritzen 40, is the director of postproduction at Bespoke Digital, a postproduction studio in Manhattan specializing in fashion and beauty photography. Each has had equally fascinating stories to share about the roads they had taken to where they are now and to each other beginning some 20 years ago. Ms. Ozernoy immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1986, at the height of the Cold War, when she was 8 years old. Her father's renowned research had led to an offer of a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1979. However, the Soviet Union refused to let him travel. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Moving to the United States also afforded Ms. Ozernoy many opportunities, and she took full advantage of them. In 1998 she served as an intern in the press room at the White House, and in 2001, she covered the war in Afghanistan as a freelance reporter for The Boston Globe. In February 2002, her father died at age 62 of cancer. In a New York Times obituary, Stuart L. Shapiro, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, noted that Dr. Ozernoy had written some of the earliest papers on quasars, or distant starlike objects, and also produced influential papers on the formation of black holes, magnetic stars and pulsars. From 2003 to 2005, Ms. Ozernoy, who graduated from George Washington University, covered the war in Iraq as a freelance journalist for U.S. News and World Report, during which she served as its Baghdad bureau chief. She was also a journalism professor at Stony Brook University from 2011 2014, and from 2014 2016 worked in various roles in New York city hall, including as chief of staff to the mayor's counsel. Ms. Mouritzen's parents had made a name for themselves in the fashion and music industries in Copenhagen in the 1980s and '90s. Her mother, Elsebeth Mouritzen, was a fashion writer at the newspaper Ekstra Bladet, and also worked as a fashion editor at ALT for Damerne, a weekly women's magazine. Her father, Bent Mouritzen, was an executive at CBS (later Sony Music) in the 1980s and with Warner Music in the 1990s. Through the years, Ms. Mouritzen, who also immigrated to the United States, had worked for the photographers Patrick Demarchelier and Mary Ellen Mark, and shot cultural notables like Kate Moss, Ellen Page, and other artists and musicians for the pages of Nylon, Dazed and Confused, Wallpaper and Elle. Her work has also been exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and the Alvarez Bravo Photographic Center in Oaxaca, Mexico. One job that does not appear on her resume, "World's Greatest Griller," was a title jokingly given to Ms. Mouritzen by Ms. Ozernoy. "I do the cooking, she does the grilling," Ms. Ozernoy said. "And I mean, man, everything she grills turns out great." Ms. Mouritzen said that their shared cooking/grilling responsibilities is a microcosm of a "true partnership we have in every possible way."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is recalling about 907,000 vehicles for electrical problems in two separate actions. The larger of the two recalls covers 470,000 vehicles equipped with power steering and 3.6 liter V6 engines, including 2011 14 Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger sedans, Dodge Challenger coupes and Dodge Durango sport utility vehicles, and 2012 14 Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V.s. Chrysler said in a statement that defective alternators in those vehicles could lead to "loss of electrical power, which may increase steering effort, decrease brake effectiveness, cause stability control deactivation, stalling and in the most severe case initiate fire at the alternator." The automaker said it was not aware of any fires or injuries related to the defect, although it said there was an accident that might have been related to the problem.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
When Joe Longo bought a new 2003 Dodge Ram 2500 he figured, even with a heavy duty pickup, normal wear and tear would cause some parts to fail. But something happened that he had never imagined. About three years ago, he saw a crack on the dashboard and figured it was a freak occurrence. "The last thing I ever thought would go bad on a vehicle would be the dashboard," said Mr. Longo of Norwalk, Conn. "I was pretty ticked off. I thought that maybe something fell on it." Then he searched the Internet and found other reports of disintegrating dashes. And it seemed that Chrysler was often refusing to pay for repairs. Mr. Longo is one of about 150 owners who have filed Ram dashboard complaints with the Center for Auto Safety. Michael Wickenden, who operates the site CarComplaints.com, which tracks owners' gripes about their cars, called the Ram dashboards "definitely one of the top problems right now, mainly in model years from 1999 to 2003, all across the Dodge Ram model line from the 1500 all the way up to the 3500." Mr. Wickenden said he had received almost 1,700 complaints for the 1998 2007 model years, with the heaviest concentration in 2003 models. He said some people reported cracks, while others said chunks of their dashboards had fallen off. In an e mail, a Chrysler spokeswoman, Ann Smith, wrote that the automaker was "aware of some dashboard complaints that are generally isolated to older vehicles outside of the warranty period." She added, "There are a variety of environmental factors which may impact the long term performance of the dashboard, but it is difficult to identify common factors on 10 year old vehicles." A review of files on the Web site of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found about 200 complaints from owners of 2003 models alone. One owner wrote: "The entire dashboard was separated from the vehicle, causing the wires to shorten. As a result, the horn and exterior lighting failed intermittently. The air bag was also exposed." Another owner described driving with the windows down and having "part of the cracked dashboard to fly up and hit my face." The writer added that "it caused me to lose control for a second." Other Ram owners described jagged and sharp plastic edges and wondered what might happen in a crash. Allan Kam, a safety consultant in Bethesda, Md., who was once the senior enforcement lawyer for the traffic safety administration, said the summaries suggested conditions that should be investigated as a possible safety issue. Another former agency official, Michael Brownlee, who had headed the office of defect investigations and was associate administrator for enforcement when he retired in 1997, said an agency review was warranted by the reports of flying debris, sharp edges and concerns about whether an air bag might properly deploy. A N.H.T.S.A. spokeswoman, Karen Aldana, said the agency "is aware of the condition and is reviewing consumer complaints" but "sees no basis on which to open a safety defect investigation." She added, "As always, we will continue to monitor the issue." There is a precedent for a dash related recall, said Clarence Ditlow, the executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit advocacy group. In 1977, Ford recalled 252,000 of its 1975 77 Econoline vans because the plastic on the dash could fracture if struck and the sharp pieces "could contribute to occupant injury." Mr. Ditlow said the situation with Rams was worse, because the dashboards were already broken. Mr. Wickenden of CarComplaints.com said the agency's failure to require a recall was a sore point with owners. "A lot of people are frustrated because they feel it is a safety issue because of the jagged edges," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
THE promise of an airplane parked in every driveway, for decades a fantasy of suburban commuters and a staple of men's magazines, resurfaced this month in Manhattan. On display at the New York auto show was the Terrafugia Transition, an airplane with folding wings and a drive system that enabled it to be used on the road. The prototype that drew all the attention with regular wing stowing demonstrations was no mock up assembled for a cover shoot; just a week earlier this drivable airplane had completed the first of 75 test flights it will make to verify its airworthiness for the Federal Aviation Administration. Amplifying the buzz was the news that a potential competitor from the Netherlands, the Personal Air and Land Vehicle, or PAL V, had in recent days made a proof of concept flight. Executives from both companies promise that their Jetson like creations will be fully certified and ready to roll into the garages of customers within a year for the 279,000 Terrafugia. PAL V estimates a price of 300,000. But there can be many delays along the road from concept to certification. For instance, government officials and the designers have had to determine which regulations aircraft or automotive take precedence when the vehicle in question is both. In the United States, development of the flying car was given some breathing room eight years ago when the F.A.A. created a new classification, the light sport category, to encourage the design of small, easy to fly aircraft. To meet the light sport definition, the aircraft must have a single engine and an unpressurized cabin, have one or two seats and weigh no more than 1,320 pounds; maximum air speed is limited to 138 miles per hour. Cliff Allen, vice president for sales at Terrafugia, which is based in Woburn, Mass., said that the designers of the Transition asked federal regulators in 2008 if they would consider a road ready vehicle under the light sport aircraft rules. "Before they made the investment of time and effort they wanted to know that F.A.A. would be supportive," Mr. Allen said. The response was positive, but there were few precedents for flying cars. In 1956, the Civil Aeronautics Administration approved the Taylor Aerocar. Six were built before Moulton Taylor's company failed, according to the F.A.A. In 2010, the 94,000 Maverick, a rudimentary buggy that takes to the air under a powered parachute, earned certification as a light sport aircraft. Troy Townsend, design manager and chief test pilot for the company, based in Dunnellon, Fla., said he spent spent nearly all of his time over the course of three years working through the bureaucratic snags. "There was a lot of red tape," Mr. Townsend said. "The certification process went all the way to Oklahoma and Washington, D.C." At Terrafugia, engineers decided to classify the car side of the Transition as a multipurpose vehicle. Compliance with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash standards will be done by submitting the results of computer based simulations showing how the seat belts, crumple zones and crash structure performed. Terrafugia sought waivers from N.H.T.S.A. on two requirements. It obtained permission to use motorcycle tires and wheels, rather than truck rated parts, to save weight, and it received approval to use polycarbonate plastics for the windows, rather than automotive glass, which could be shattered by a bird strike. "The F.A.A. coordinated with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration for the Terrafugia to determine the clear responsibility between the requirements for road operations and air operations," the F.A.A. said. Even though the Transition "meets the regulatory definition of a motor vehicle," its 4 cylinder Rotax engine is not required to comply with federal emissions or fuel economy standards. The Environmental Protection Agency decided to treat flying cars as aircraft, though it may reconsider if they "become commonplace." Test pilots must successfully fly the Transition to demonstrate its durability in dives and spins and its ability to recover from unexpected events in flight. Then regulators will determine if it can be easily handled by pilots with light sport licenses, which can be obtained with as little as 20 hours of instruction. Obtaining road certification for the Dutch PAL V ought to be straightforward. The on road duties of the 1,500 pound, two seat gyrocopter are based on a three wheel chassis that leans into turns, cornering like a motorcycle. With three wheels, it is classified as a motorcycle by N.H.T.S.A "and subject to federal motor vehicle safety standards that are applicable to motorcycles," according to the agency. The same is true in Europe, said Robert Dingemanse, PAL V's co founder and chief executive. While meeting motorcycle safety rules is less demanding, the main benefit of using the so called Carver tilt technology was that it accommodated the PAL V's high center of gravity. For a gyrocopter the PAL V gets its lift from an overhead rotor and forward thrust from a propeller mounted at the rear of the cabin the high center of gravity was a seemingly insurmountable problem, at least until the tilting Carver design came along. In the PAL V, the center of gravity is around the height of the seated driver's shoulders, which would make the plane prone to tumbling over in turns if it did not tilt. "It stays stable in all situations," Mr. Dingemanse said. "You can run it like a sports car." Having achieved road certification in Europe, the next challenge is airworthiness. Mr. Dingemanse said the team he had hired to help get aviation approval was optimistic after the proof of concept flight. The PAL V's approval by the European Aviation Safety Agency would not automatically qualify it in the United States. But, Mr. Dingemanse says, once European authorities certify the airplane, other nations should not present significant challenges. PAL V executives predict that they will start producing flying cars in Europe in 2014. Whether or not these sell by dates prove realistic, the Terrafugia, PAL V and Maverick are prodding a new line of thinking that could at last unleash flying cars from the realm of science fiction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
ANI CORDERO at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center (Jan. 31, 7:30 p.m.). The New York based singer and instrumentalist uses music to tap into her Puerto Rican heritage, performing traditional music from the island, as well as from around Latin America (she's worked with the Brazilian ensemble Os Mutantes, among others). Specifically, on her debut solo release in 2014, "Recordar," Cordero paid tribute to Latin American music's history of protest songs, offering her rendition of compositions by artists like Mexico's Chavela Vargas and Chile's Violeta Parra. This concert is free, and the Puerto Rican pop singer JOATA will open. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org RYAN HURD at Bowery Ballroom (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). Like many artists working to break through in Nashville, Hurd has an impressive roster of songs that he's co written for country stars: Darius Rucker, Dierks Bentley, Florida Georgia Line and Tim McGraw. While writing "Last Turn Home" for McGraw, Hurd met his wife, Maren Morris; now he's guest starring in her music videos. The songs he writes for himself are charmingly romantic, painting pictures of understated, easy affection. On "Love in a Bar" (which, naturally, is about Morris) he sings about falling hard for someone while sharing a few beers; his latest single, "To a T," is an ode to a cozy night in. Both show his flair for believable love songs that aren't cloyingly sweet. 212 260 4700, boweryballroom.com LES SAVY FAV at Junction (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.) and Elsewhere (Jan. 26, 7 p.m.). On Friday and Saturday, this art punk quintet will perform their first local shows in more than two years. The band members have been experimenting with noise, pop and punk music for over two decades, but at this point nearly nine years after their last new album, and with two members locked into a regular gig on "Late Night With Seth Meyers" Les Savy Fav's raucous, unpredictable live shows remain their calling card. Their gig at Junction in Long Beach, N.Y., is a benefit for Tommy Brull Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping people with special needs on Long Island; the band's set at Elsewhere is sold out, but tickets are available through resellers. 516 889 1680, junction11561.com elsewherebrooklyn.com KACEY MUSGRAVES at the Beacon Theater (Jan. 25 26, 8 p.m.). A young country singer selling out two nights at one of New York City's biggest theaters is newsworthy in and of itself; the fact that said country singer, Musgraves, is a woman working at a moment when country radio seems to be hostile to female artists only adds to the significance of this success. Long a critical darling, Musgraves took a pop oriented swing with her mellow, sweet 2018 release, "Golden Hour," and with its Grammy nomination for album of the year, she appears to have hit a home run. Tickets for both shows are available on the resale market. 212 465 6000, beacontheatre.com WU TANG CLAN at Terminal 5 (Jan. 26 27, 8 p.m.). As part of the extended 25th anniversary celebration for their seminal 1993 debut, "Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers)," this Staten Island bred rap group is performing two rare New York shows. Many of Wu Tang's nine founding members, including GZA, RZA, Method Man, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon, have found substantial success outside the group; "36 Chambers," though, still holds importance. RZA recently told Complex of the release that "each of our lyrics are potent and become more substantiated as time goes on." Both shows are sold out, but tickets are available through resellers. 212 582 6600, terminal5nyc.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. YOUNG DOLPH at Gramercy Theater (Jan. 31, 7 p.m.). Succeeding in rap without first rising through the ranks in one of its hubs New York, Chicago, Atlanta or Los Angeles is challenging. Yet Young Dolph's commitment to representing his hometown, Memphis, remains steadfast. He's also stayed independent, another unlikely choice for an M.C. who trades in catchy trap beats and streetwise lyrics just slightly more hard edged than the current trends on commercial rap radio. Fresh off his biggest solo success to date with the single "Major," though, Dolph is starting to reap some rewards. The show is sold out, but tickets are available on the resale market. 212 614 6932, thegramercytheatre.com NATALIE WEINER BRAXTON COOK at Baby's All Right (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). A gifted young alto saxophonist and vocalist, Cook is both a graduate of Juilliard's notoriously traditionalist jazz program and a veteran of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah's genre bending ensembles. In his increasingly acclaimed solo projects, Cook builds a contemporary, jazz pop identity that draws from 1970s fusion, '80s R B and contemporary Los Angeles hip hop. Through it all, he finds a way to let his bebop rooted saxophone improvisations shine. At this concert, featuring a guest appearance from the trumpeter Theo Croker, he will draw material from "No Doubt," an album he released late last year. babysallright.com ANTONIO HART QUINTET at Smoke (Jan. 25 26, 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). Hart, a stellar alto saxophonist who burst onto the New York scene alongside Roy Hargrove in the early 1990s as part of the Young Lions generation, has always worn his debt to Cannonball Adderley on his cuffs. Here he presents a tribute to Adderley, an iconic hard bop saxophonist, in a quintet that features Freddie Hendrix on trumpet, Caili O'Doherty on piano, Alex Ayala on bass and Cory Cox on drums. 212 864 6662, smokejazz.com VIJAY IYER at Jazz Standard (through Jan. 27, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Iyer's sextet has been one of the hottest commodities in jazz since the release of its debut, "Far From Over," in 2017. A version of that band will play on Friday and Saturday, presenting Iyer's beaming, rhythmically interleaved original music. Then on Sunday, Iyer will perform with a newer group that features some of his colleagues and students at Harvard University, where he teaches. (He's also a MacArthur fellow.) That band is called the Ritual Ensemble, and it features Ganavya Doraiswamy on vocals, Yosvany Terry on saxophones and Rajna Swaminathan on mridangam, an Indian percussion instrument. 212 576 2232, jazzstandard.com AVA MENDOZA ET AL. at H0L0 (Jan. 31, 7 p.m.). A conclave of young avant garde improvisers will descend on this darkened basement in Ridgewood, Queens, for a night of free playing. It's hard to know where things will go; if you go, steel yourself for a wide variety of musical textures and temperaments, most of them liberated from standard time and harmony. The performers include the thrashing, post metal guitarist Ava Mendoza; the pensive tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock; and the bassist Brandon Lopez, who uses his instrument in a variety of nontraditional ways. h0l0.nyc 'THE MUSIC OF ANTHONY BRAXTON' at Roulette (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). One of the premier and most prolific living American composers, Braxton continues to release reams of new music, typically drawing on improvisation and built around his own complex musical systems. On Friday his 12 disc collection titled "GTM (Syntax) 2017," featuring his Tri Centric Vocal Ensemble, comes out. Here an 11 person version of that group performs in celebration of the record's release. Afterward, the electronic musician Carl Testa and the pianist Cory Smythe will play music from a different part of Braxton's repertoire, using a compositional system of his called Echo Echo Mirror House Music. 917 267 0368, roulette.org WADADA LEO SMITH at the Appel Room (Jan. 26, 7 and 9:30 p.m.). Every recording Smith releases feels apt to be called a "landmark." It's the awe inspiring, wide screen breadth of his trumpet sound, the slowly accruing power of his compositions, and his way of making even small ensembles sound spacious and ancient. "America's National Parks," his widely acclaimed 2016 release celebrating the natural wonders of North America, stands out in particular for its tumultuous melodic beauty and the bristling, mutating forms of its compositions. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Smith presents the New York City debut of this work, joined by the personnel from the album: the pianist Anthony Davis, the cellist Ashley Walters, the bassist John Lindberg and the drummer Pheeroan akLaff. 212 721 6500, jazz.org GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
It's rarely dull when artists take their careers into their own hands. In the 1950s and early 1960s, between the waning of Abstract Expressionism and the canonization of Pop Art and Minimalism, younger artists decided to stop waiting for attention from uptown galleries and began opening artist run cooperatives and alternative spaces downtown, on or near East 10th Street in the East Village. More open to experimentation (and women) than dealer run galleries, the "10th Street Scene" accommodated the formation of installation art and happenings, early glimmers of Pop Art and Minimalism, as well as the persistence of painterly figuration. The elaborate history of 14 of these galleries will be told in exciting new depth in "Inventing Downtown: Artist Run Galleries in New York City, 1952 1965," which opens Tuesday, Jan. 10, at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, accompanied by an extensive catalog. The show will present more than 200 often raucous works of art by scores of artists, both established and forgotten. Be prepared to feel the history of postwar art in New York expand before your eyes. (Through April 1; 212 998 6780, greyartgallery.nyu.edu.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Gov. Kate Brown recently negotiated an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to remove federal agents in stages and have them replaced by Oregon State Police. The governor acknowledged that this might not be the end of the violence. I hope she is wrong. Portland is a beautiful and vibrant city with smart, progressive people, and I am hopeful we can come together to move beyond the unrest and refocus on critical issues. The Portland Police Bureau remains committed to protecting life and responding to events as appropriate. I am proud of our efforts in extreme circumstances few in the country have faced. During these events, our agency has responded to assaults, stabbings, shootings, people with guns and the stockpiling of explosives. Shooting off commercial grade fireworks and mortars is not peaceful protest. We are fortunate that no one has been killed. There are those who say the Portland police have not done enough to quell violence. I ask them to come speak with our officers, who have been responding for two months to protests. They have served with professionalism, courage and resiliency through an extraordinary time. Many have been injured and some have received threats of violence to themselves or their families. They would prefer to return to regular patrol and investigative duties and see peace in our community. The voices of victims are not heard as well. Because of the protests, officers have not been able to respond to 911 calls or have been delayed for hours. Investigators' cases lie on their desks as they work nights to process arrests. We have seen an alarming increase in shootings and homicides. We need to redirect our focus to preventing and solving these crimes that are taking a hugely disproportionate number of minority lives. I have said frequently that the Portland Police Bureau is committed to reform. We are a progressive agency and have demonstrated our willingness to change over the past eight years. Working with the Department of Justice, we have made significant changes to our policies and training. The Portland Police Bureau's policy on the use of deadly force is more restrictive than state and federal law.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
People throughout the sports world, from athletes to arena staff members, tell The New York Times how their lives have changed during the coronavirus pandemic. Bridget Pettis said she has always chosen her next move based on what's in her heart, from the basketball court to the coach's chair to her new nonprofit geared toward growing healthy food for people who don't have access to it. "If I see someone hungry, I am to feed them," she said. Before she decided to pivot her focus to food education, Pettis was an assistant coach for the Chicago Sky in the W.N.B.A. Her career began in 1997 with the Phoenix Mercury, which selected her seventh over all in the league's inaugural draft. She played guard for the Mercury and the Indiana Fever before she switched to coaching. Pettis opted out of joining the Sky for the W.N.B.A. season, which began last week, citing concerns about the health and safety precautions in the so called bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., as one reason for stepping aside. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Q: What brought you into basketball? Pettis: I grew up in the inner city of East Chicago, Ind.; in the projects, the basketball court was the thing that attracted everybody. And I remember seeing all the boys out there playing, and one day I just went out there and wanted to try it for myself, and it was just love at first sight. Just the challenge of it. When I first went out there, all the boys were saying, "Girls don't do this." So that motivated me. What brought you to the W.N.B.A.? At the time when the W.N.B.A. came about, I was already a four year professional in Europe. But I had heard about the W.N.B.A. and was just so excited. I got selected through the Phoenix team and kind of went from there. Do you have any words of advice for W.N.B.A. players who are going to compete in the bubble? And do you have any advice for how to effectively promote social change while competing? Now that my W.N.B.A. sisters are there, I would push for them to do whatever their hearts are holding for them on the platform that is there for them. I love them and want for them all to be safe. Now I'm a woman of faith, so I don't know how God is going to work through that ultimate change. I just know that we could do something, make a shift. And I see that there is a strong attention to planting conscious seeds in people of the messages that are being said, socially, for us to change. Maybe they're going to do different fund raisers and to use those resources to make change. But the attention that they get, I think that's a good idea. Could you tell me more about your decision to take this season off as well as what you're going to be doing with your nonprofit? My decision was, I felt it was time to move. When I feel like it's time to move, I speak with my heart and I do that. I have encouraged all the people around me, all my life, to do that. And I'm going to focus now on my nonprofit that I feel like it can help. And I call it this is my "growmotion" instead of promotion to get it out there, to grow food and make the difference of providing healthy food. Being a part of and making accessibility of healthier ways to provide food; removing food deserts from areas where our people are, where people who are struggling financially are. In this world today, everybody should be able to have food. When did you start gardening? For years since I had my house, I had been growing little things. All of my life I have always wanted plants and flowers around me. It starts with a tomato: You take your chances on tomatoes, and when you see a tomato grow, it just kind of went from there. I became a part of a community garden about three years ago and that's when I connected in that area and got so much benefit from it. What do you eat mainly? During your athletic career and now? For the most part, I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I just keep it simple. I eat a lot of the things that I would grow back in Phoenix zucchini, squash, onions, garlic all those vegetables and different fruits. We planted fruit trees, so we eat a lot of things that come off the trees. Every now and then I still mess with some fish, but for the most part, I eat the things that come out of the ground. What kind of struggles have you seen in your community, in Arizona, during the pandemic with food accessibility and where help lies? The government? Supporting more nonprofits? I'm definitely a believer of people coming out and supporting nonprofits. This is my first year of being a part of a nonprofit. And I know my intention and I know the drive that it takes and the work that it takes to do something like this. I've seen the change, the impact that it has made very fast and I just think that this is a good way for us to take more control of what it is we would like to be done. And not worrying about putting all of our eggs in one basket for a governmental change. That's just not where my heart is. My heart is really in the people and in the care of ourselves. What do you like to do in your free time when you're not in the garden or on the court? Now I'm helping others play. I train a lot of younger players. I work out with players. My nephews are playing basketball right now, so I've been working with them. That's kind of what I do in my downtime. I'm also looking for more community gardens. I go out and see where people are starting to garden and I like to take pictures and see what's going on in the world, as far as the interests in growing food. But most of my days, it's mostly me getting information and enjoying life right now. It's been 23 years of basketball and I'm just enjoying the fruits of that labor a little bit and relaxing, and giving back to basketball in a different way with my family and in the community out here in Gary, Ind.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
CHRISTIANSTED, V.I. Warren Mosler is a card carrying member of the 1 percent. A deeply tanned, tennis lean hedge fund executive, Mr. Mosler lives on this run down but jewel toned Caribbean island for tax reasons. Transitioning into an active retirement, he recently designed and had built an 850,000 catamaran called Knot My Problem. He whizzes around St. Croix in a white, low slung sports car he created himself, too. But his prescriptions for economic policy make him sound like a warrior for the 99 percent. When the recession hit, Mr. Mosler said, the government should have spent and spent until unemployment came down to a comfortable level. Forget saving the banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Washington should have eliminated the payroll tax, given every state 500 per resident and offered a basic job to anyone who wanted one. "There would have been no recession," Mr. Mosler, 63, said over a salad at a hole in the wall seaside cafe called Rum Runners. Washington's debts would have soared, of course. But Mr. Mosler sees no problem with that. A failed Senate candidate in Connecticut with unorthodox but attention grabbing economic theories, he says he believes the United States should be running much bigger deficits and that the last thing the government needs to worry about is balancing its budget. Mr. Mosler's ideas, which go under the label of "modern monetary theory," or M.M.T., are clearly on the fringe, drawing skeptical reactions even from many liberal Keynesian economists who agree with some of his arguments. But they have attracted a growing following, flourishing on the Internet and in a handful of academic outposts, as he and others who share his thinking have made the case that austerity budgeting in the United States and in Europe is doing irreparable harm. Like many Keynesian economists, Mr. Mosler and other modern monetary theorists are particularly disturbed by the longstanding campaign articulated and financed by Peter G. Peterson, a former commerce secretary who co founded the Blackstone Group private equity fund, to reduce the deficit or else. "There's a whole deficit lobby of Peterson funded groups arguing we're turning into Greece," said James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. "They're blowing smoke and the M.M.T. group has patiently explained why." Still, even for those with some knowledge of economics, the tenets of the modern monetary theory can make your head spin. The government does not tax its citizens to pay for federal spending. It taxes them to ensure they use the dollar and to help to regulate demand. Since the government prints the dollar, it can never run out of money and it need never balance its budget, not even to prevent the crowding out of private investment when the economy is humming along. What about inflation? "What about it?" Mr. Mosler replied. "How can the United States have 16 trillion in debt and still be on the verge of deflation, even when Chairman Bernanke's using every alphabet soup trick in his book?" To mainstream economists, Mr. Mosler and his adherents represent something of a counterpoint to the handful of academics on the right who believe the United States should return to the gold standard because the government is supposedly going bankrupt and the Federal Reserve under Ben S. Bernanke is debasing the currency. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. "They deny the fact that the government use of real resources can drive the real interest rate up," said Mark Thoma, an economics professor and widely followed blogger who teaches at the University of Oregon. After delving into the technical details of modern monetary theory for a few minutes, he paused, then added, "I think it's just nuts." But just as a return to the gold standard has attracted a popular following including many supporters of Ron Paul, the charismatic former Texas congressman so has modern monetary theory, which has been spread on the great stage of the Web. A thriving academic blogosphere brings ideas up and knocks them down, and popular sites like Business Insider and Naked Capitalism have given modern monetary theorists a platform to join in. "These ideas definitely aren't disseminated through published academic journals," said Stephanie Kelton, an economist at University of Missouri Kansas City, who coined the term "deficit owls" to distinguish modern monetary theorists from "deficit hawks." "It's all on the Internet." Mr. Mosler has played a pivotal role in promoting the theory, and unlike many economists he has the resources to do so. He runs a popular blog called the Center of the Universe, a sly joke, perhaps, given that tiny, tropical St. Croix, which is about 1,200 miles from Miami, is the easternmost point in the United States. He eagerly appears on radio programs and on television. Recently, he went on a tour of Italy to promote his anti austerity ideas. There were also a few self financed political campaigns, including some fruitless races in the Virgin Islands. In his 2012 run, Mr. Mosler said he believed the voting was rigged. He made a vanity run for Senate in Connecticut in 2010 as an independent, making waves by offering to use 100 million of his own money to pay down the deficit if any member of Congress could prove that government spending was actually constrained by tax revenue. He came in third, with about 1 percent of the vote. "It was a mistake," Mr. Mosler said of running in Connecticut. "It did get the ideas out there, though." Mr. Mosler started his career at a small bank in Connecticut, and eventually became a Wall Street trader. It was there, he said, that he developed an intuitive understanding of how the economy works one very different from that of policy makers in Washington and the vast bulk of academics. "All debt management is, is debiting and crediting different accounts," Mr. Mosler said, recalling seeing numbers appear and disappear from his computer at Bankers Trust in New York in the 1970s. "Can the federal government run out of dollars? No, because the Fed could pipe in a bigger number. That number doesn't come from anywhere. It's like when a player scores a field goal at a stadium. Three points just appear. The government is just the scorekeeper for the dollar." In the early 1980s, he left Wall Street and along with a partner, Clifford Viner, who is now the owner of the Florida Panthers hockey team, founded a hedge fund in Boca Raton, Fla. The fund made relatively few, relatively complicated financial bets, said Michael Reger, a partner of Mr. Mosler's for the last 20 years. "He's an urban myth," Mr. Reger said of the affable, talkative and bookish Mr. Mosler. Mr. Mosler's fund has made a number of bets informed by his theory. For instance, Mr. Reger said, when the Treasury was paying down the United States debt during the Clinton years, many bond traders thought that prices would spike because of increasing scarcity. But Mr. Mosler predicted that no such scarcity would ever materialize, and shorted the bonds. That trade panned out, though others have not. The business lost hundreds of millions of dollars betting that Russia would not default on its debts. That country's fixed exchange rate spurred it to go belly up, Mr. Mosler said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
What does it take to get a dog into a no pet building? The question is becoming a hot topic in New York City. Because depending on whom you ask, the answer is A) a legitimate disability or B) a dubious note from a doctor or therapist. Most people know that federal, state and city laws require building owners and landlords to accommodate tenants who have disabilities for instance, by waiving a no pet rule for a blind resident's guide dog. But word apparently is spreading about how broadly these laws define a disability, allowing people with a wide range of physical and mental conditions to seek waivers for their dogs. Serious depression, chronic pain, AIDS, autism, dementia, cancer and heart disease are just some of the illnesses lawyers say can qualify as disabilities. And as New Yorkers trade advice about this topic in dog parks, elevators and online pet forums, the number of people applying for waivers is increasing "enormously," said Darryl Vernon, a partner in the law firm Vernon Ginsburg. Mr. Vernon, who specializes in pet and housing law, cautioned that making your case to a landlord or co op board takes more than just copying a doctor's note someone posted online. "You need to show two things," he said. "One, that you really have a disability within the meaning of the law, not just seasonal depression or the economy is bad. And two, that there's a connection between the dog and your disability, that the dog is medically helpful." That still leaves landlords, co op boards and their legal representatives a lot of gray area in determining what constitutes a legitimate disability, and whether a dog (or other animal) truly helps alleviate it. No pet buildings worry that granting too many waivers will encourage other tenants to line up with their own doctors' notes. And buildings must consider the sentiments of residents who chose a dog free building because of allergies or a bad experience with an unruly animal. But denying a request for a disability accommodation can have negative consequences, too. "No one wants to be held liable for discriminatory conduct," said Adam Leitman Bailey, a lawyer who represents rental buildings, co ops and condos. "Most boards leave it up to their attorneys to make these decisions." Mr. Bailey says he reviews at least one request a month for a waiver of a no pet rule to allow for a service or emotional support animal usually a dog, although other animals, like birds, may qualify. He recommends approving about half of these requests, suggesting a denial if the documentation is thin. "We require a lot of information," Mr. Bailey said, "and often they can't provide it." As an example, he shared a letter from a doctor, submitted on behalf of a patient (whose name was redacted) with Type 2 diabetes and unspecified "chronic medical conditions." The six sentence letter mentioned the health benefits of walking a dog ("great exercise") and the patient's observation that "spending time with his dog had greatly improved his mood," but the reasons were deemed insufficient to justify a waiver. A big challenge for building owners, lawyers say, is determining what proof they can ask for in order to establish how a dog helps with a disability, especially when the condition in question is not an obvious physical impairment. The relevant statutes are the federal Fair Housing Act (which defines a disability as a mental or physical condition that "substantially limits" a major life activity), the New York State Human Rights Law and the New York City Human Rights Law. The city law is generally considered the broadest of the three, covering "physical, medical, mental or psychological" impairments which opens the door to a wide range of requests. One woman in a no dog building who received a waiver illustrates the complexity of some of these cases. Describing her situation on the condition that her name not be published, she listed a succession of challenges that left her depressed: she lost her job; her father died; her mother had to move into an assisted living facility; and the fate of her father's dog was up in the air. A neighbor recommended a lawyer with a disability waiver track record. The lawyer referred her to a therapist, who wrote a lengthy letter describing her anxiety and outlining her family history, ultimately recommending that she be allowed an emotional support animal her father's now ownerless dog. She secured a second letter from her primary care physician, who based his note on a sample letter she gave him. "Everything that the two notes said is actually true," she said, explaining that the dog helps get her out of the house, alleviates her loneliness and eases her depression. Still, she acknowledged that she probably would not have taken on a dog if she hadn't inherited her father's pet. "I couldn't bring her to a shelter because I couldn't allow her to be killed," she said. "I was trying to do the right thing by keeping her." She continued seeing the therapist, and estimated that she spent about 3,000 in legal fees in order to get the waiver approved. Other cases, however, involve blatantly fraudulent attempts to evade the no dog rule. "Somebody asked for a dog to help them because they weren't very stable on their feet," said Dennis H. Greenstein, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw who represents co op and condominium boards. "The board found out from other residents that they saw that person jogging fairly regularly in Central Park without the dog." Mr. Greenstein says he's seeing more requests for service or emotional support animals, and estimates that "a tad more are accepted than rejected," especially when the dog performs a specific task, like reminding the owner to take medication. "I think boards are generally interested in trying to do the right thing," he said. "They just want to make sure this is not a backdoor way to get a pet in." To discourage bogus requests, some buildings are drafting rules outlining the conditions for which waivers are granted. Typically, the application includes a note from a doctor or therapist, and proof that the dog has a license from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (and in some cases that it has been registered as a service dog). As part of the approval process, building owners and boards are allowed to ask questions about the materials submitted, so there may be some back and forth before a request is acted upon. "It's not unreasonable for a landlord to make some additional inquiries about the case," said Karen Copeland, a lawyer who has represented dozens of clients seeking such waivers. Among them: a woman with lung cancer whose dog helped prevent her from smoking cigarettes ("It provided her with a distraction"); someone with Parkinson's disease ("It was able to diminish his symptoms, like trembling"); and a recovering alcoholic ("The dog gave her social things to do she could go to a dog park and make friends"). Ms. Copeland also represents Betty Cohen, the owner of a no dog condominium unit at the Bay Club in Bayside, Queens. Ms. Cohen, who says she suffers from depression, acquired two West Highland terriers and requested a disability accommodation for them. After she submitted letters from her doctors attesting to her condition, the Bay Club said yes to one dog, but notified her that she had to remove the second from the premises by Sept. 30. "I can't live without both dogs," Ms. Cohen said. "No matter what it costs or what I have to do, I have to have them." Barbara Morley, the president of the Bay Club's board of managers, explained the building's decision in an e mail, noting that the documentation Ms. Cohen submitted, which was reviewed by legal counsel, "did not support a need for two dogs." "Over the last decade we have extended ourselves to accommodate people with special needs who request permission to keep an emotional support dog," Ms. Morley wrote, adding that the increase in "comfort dogs" in the building had increased the number of complaints from other residents about dogs barking and soiling carpets. "Many have purchased apartments here because of the no dog policy," she said, "and so it is the responsibility of the Board of Managers to consider the concerns and needs of all residents." As of last week, Ms. Cohen had not decided what she was going to do, but Ms. Copeland said one option would be to submit a discrimination complaint to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Other cases are filed with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which investigates complaints about housing discrimination, including claims that an owner or landlord refuses to provide a reasonable accommodation for a disabled individual. The commission can levy penalties and award damages. "If someone comes to us with a service animal issue," said Cliff Mulqueen, deputy commissioner and general counselor for the human rights commission, "they've stated a claim of discrimination and we have to take the case." Mr. Mulqueen says that although housing providers may challenge the medical documentation submitted by the resident, they should be careful about adopting rules about service animals once a dog has been approved. "If you start requiring extra insurance or you start penalizing people," he said, "you're going to risk running into other issues of discrimination. That's a really tricky road." But housing providers do have the right to remove a service dog or an emotional support animal if it becomes a nuisance for instance, by barking incessantly or soiling common areas. Kody Keplinger, who is legally blind, had reservations about getting a service dog before deciding to take the plunge earlier this year. One of her concerns was how her building, which doesn't allow dogs, would deal with her request; another was whether she could handle the responsibility of owning a pet. The trainer from the agency that matched her with a German shepherd named Corey helped ease the transition on both fronts, accompanying her when she spoke with her landlord and emphasizing the training that service dogs receive. "A legitimate concern my landlord did have was whether there would be any peeing in the apartment," Ms. Keplinger recalled. Describing Corey, she added: "That is something she's been trained for she actually goes on command. I take her to a spot and tell her when she should go." Although Ms. Keplinger's landlord didn't challenge her need for a service dog, people at movie theaters and in other public places have accused her of faking her disability. She worries that dishonest requests for service or support animals will have negative repercussions for people who really need them. "Frankly," she said, "I would rather a few people slip through the cracks and cheat the system than have the regulations made harder on people who need service dogs. It is a very complicated issue, and I understand it's frustrating for landlords and co ops. "Unfortunately, there is no perfect solution."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Its vitality as a tourist center is largely built on memories of the days when the Vanderbilts and the Astors summered at seaside mansions awash in servants and when a party might feature swans in the fountains or monkeys in the trees. The Gilded Age is long over, but this city still works to protect its past by preserving the mansions that attract tourists. Central to that effort has been the Preservation Society of Newport County, a well heeled group that spends a robust 22 million a year showcasing the city's history of extravagance. So it's a bit surprising that the latest contretemps there involves accusations that the society stuffed votes to win a smallish 25,000 preservation prize. The grant, in 2011, went to help fix up the Breakers, the 70 room "cottage" once owned by the Vanderbilts. The society won the contest, held by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, by producing the most emails demonstrating public support. But another group, the Friends of Newport Preservation, has charged that the Preservation Society of Newport County won by strong arming its staff members to vote multiple times, by creating extra email accounts for them to use and by pushing tourists to turn over their email addresses. "The result of all this pressure and manipulation was that one person could equal several votes," the Friends group, which includes three Vanderbilt descendants, said in a letter of complaint to the Preservation Society last fall. "It appears that the Society got the 25,000 award using unethical means." In interviews, two former staff members said that they felt guilty that their organization had beaten out other projects that lacked deep pockets, including preservationists working to refurbish a historic but downtrodden section of Cincinnati. "There were just places that would have benefited so much by the unexpected gift of 25,000," said Caroline Considine, who oversaw development for the Preservation Society at the time. "We could have gone to a single donor. Instead, it became this convoluted approach to being dishonest about where the votes came from." "We used every opportunity to promote and energize this contest within the rules," said John G. Rodman, the Preservation Society's director of museum experience. In a country where ward bosses have dug up votes in cemeteries and All Star ballot stuffing is a baseball tradition, a little zealotry in pursuit of preservation can hardly be considered a sin. The National Trust says the Preservation Society played within its rules: that staff, and others, could vote more than once. But the National Trust said it had since tightened the rules on voting to tackle a different issue, one not involved here, to prevent use of automated bots. Even those who were beaten are being good sports about it. "I say, 'Good on you,'" said W. Kevin Pape, board president of the Over the Rhine Foundation of Cincinnati, which came in third. His organization received 5,000 to help revitalize a frayed historic neighborhood there. Mr. Pape acknowledged, though, being a bit surprised that they had lost. "We had the whole community here," he said, "and somehow this historic house got enough votes." The voting dispute is just one skirmish in a wider war between the Preservation Society of Newport County and the closely named but antagonistic Friends of Newport Preservation. They have fought over issues of management and transparency in how the society is run. The bloodiest battle has been fought for years over a new visitor center planned for the Breakers' grounds. The Preservation Society says the center is necessary to accommodate 400,000 annual visitors to the mansion. Critics say it will be an eyesore better located in a nearby parking lot. "The leaders of the Preservation Society of Newport County are motivated by greed and money, 'the root of all evil,'" Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper wrote in a letter to The Providence Journal this month in which she bemoaned the center plan. "They are showing little interest in preserving a part of our national heritage." The visitor center plan has survived several legal challenges, though, and the Preservation Society says ground will be broken soon. It said that it had investigated a variety of issues raised by the Friends whom William R. Landry, the society's lawyer, described as the "small but energetic opposition" and found them to be without merit. He described the voting dispute as just another flanking maneuver in the larger fight, and noted that the contest for the grant ended some six years ago. "They are throwing things against the wall to see if something might stick now that every other argument has been rejected," he said. The Preservation Society fully acknowledges that the contest fueled its competitive spirit. Yes, email addresses were created for employees who didn't use computers at work. Of course there was a broad effort to win votes from visitors, organization members and local businesses. The historic Ritz Theater in Wellington, Tex., the second place winner in a preservation grant contest. "Everyone we contacted was told they could vote with both their work email addresses and any personal email addresses," Mr. Rodman said. The Boston Globe even joined the fight, urging readers to "rally around Newport" to keep New England from being bested by Cincinnati. When the voting finished, the Breakers had tallied more than the Ritz Theater in Wellington, Tex., population about 2,000, which won the 10,000 second prize. The group's chief executive, Trudy Coxe, proclaimed victory in a news release and posed alongside others with a huge mock up of the 25,000 check. "The depth and breadth of support we received in this endeavor was breathtaking," Ms. Coxe said in the release. "We literally received votes from around the world." But Ellen Sadlier, who worked as a part time tour guide for 11 years, said the voting tactics were one reason she left the job shortly after the contest. People who had never had Preservation Society email addresses, like groundskeepers, were given them so they could vote, she said. Visitors were corralled, she added, to lend their email addresses to the effort. "It was more of a game in the beginning and then it got really scary," Ms. Sadlier said. "They came up with buttons and bumper stickers. It was like it was a political campaign." Mary Joan Hoene, a New York lawyer and Friends member, said that her group first complained about the 2011 voting behavior in 2014. She said the Friends are finally making their objections broadly public because their initial complaints to the Preservation Society had been brushed aside. "We are trying to expose some of that and make them feel the pressure," she said. The Ritz Theater and the Cincinnati foundation said that they had tried hard to win the contest, too, but that they had not coached anyone into voting multiple times. Melanie Baumgardner, who was president of the theater board at the time, said they were thrilled just to come in second. The 10,000 grant was a lifeboat to an organization simply trying to stay afloat. And she remembered how the Newport group reached out afterward, so graciously, to congratulate the Ritz on its second place finish. "We got a nice letter," she said, "saying how amazed they were that we fought so hard and that we came from such a small place."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Mark Zuckerberg said this week that Facebook would shift toward a "privacy focused platform," but the business model for such a change remained unclear. Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi. I'm Jamie Condliffe; greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news. You can't have missed it: Facebook plans to shift people toward private messaging and away from the public broadcasting on which its business was built. Think encrypted communications among smaller groups of people, and ephemeral messages that can be deleted. In theory, that change could help the company overcome some of the problems it has faced. But Facebook has promised privacy features before that have never appeared something skeptics were quick to point out after the plan was revealed on Thursday. "I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy focused platform," Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, wrote in a 3,200 word manifesto describing the shift. If we are to assume he means it, there's still a huge problem: He lacks a business model. A shift to a private Facebook would crimp its current revenue streams. Most of its profits come from targeted ads enabled by the open sharing of content. In the encrypted future that Mr. Zuckerberg imagines, that will be hard. The company would also effectively rule out expansion into big potential markets like Russia and China, because it won't run servers in countries with authoritarian governments. So how can it make money? Mr. Zuckerberg mentions commerce and payments, which fits with reports that Facebook is building a cryptocurrency. But that's all he says, really. Mr. Zuckerberg seems O.K. with the lack of a plan. "The basic way that we've approached things is first to focus on building the consumer service that people really want," he said to Wired. "That will be the foundation. If we do that well, the business will be fine." Of course, a trick for monetizing private messaging may be hidden in his back pocket. If it isn't, his critics' skepticism may be proved right. Earlier in the week, Representative David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who leads the House antitrust subcommittee, proposed an idea to curb Big Tech's dominance. During the Great Depression, the Glass Steagall Act forced banks to separate commercial and investment banking operations. Mr. Cicilline told the Financial Times that something similar could apply to tech. "It's an interesting idea whether there would be a way to think about separating what platforms do versus people who are selling products and information," he said. Sadly, this feels like a nonstarter. Splitting the operations of banks was relatively straightforward; the data sales and platform components of companies like Google and Facebook are (whatever Mr. Zuckerberg says) deeply intertwined. Still, it's probably one of many options. "There aren't easy answers" to Big Tech antitrust questions, Mr. Cicilline said to Bloomberg Opinion in January. "We're not going to approach this, like, 'Here's my solution.'" Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. He has the wind at his back. Congressional hearings with Facebook and others last year revealed that lawmakers in both parties have antitrust concerns about tech companies. And the Federal Trade Commission recently announced a task force of 17 lawyers dedicated to "monitoring competition in U.S. technology markets." The commission's director of competition, Bruce Hoffman, said some companies could be forced to "spin off" previous acquisitions. How far these efforts will go and how quickly remains unclear. It may be difficult to prove violation of federal antitrust law until the laws are updated to better apply to technology companies. And splitting a company like Facebook or Google would require costly, lengthy legal battles that the government may yet balk at. Arizona prosecutors said Tuesday that they wouldn't charge Uber with a crime after one of its autonomous cars hit and killed a pedestrian last year. Instead, they said investigators should look into what the safety driver "would or should have seen that night." One interesting point about the news was raised by Frank Douma, a researcher at the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies: "It's a very conventional way of thinking to say we can expect and we should expect people to sit and monitor technology that is otherwise doing all the decision making." The "handoff problem" that humans are too easily distracted to safely retake control of an autonomous vehicle in an emergency is well documented. The Uber accident provided a first glimpse of how the law would deal with that issue. It suggests that, for now, the onus remains on the "driver." Huawei is angry. Maybe too angry. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei sued the United States government on Wednesday over a ban that prevents government agencies from using the company's products because they may violate national security. Days earlier, Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer, sued the Canadian authorities for arresting her. Huawei is aggrieved by the Trump administration's hardware ban and its lobbying of other governments to shun the company's products when building 5G wireless data networks. The lawsuits are just one response: A defensive advertising campaign and outspoken interviews were already in play. Those more conventional lobbying approaches may have been working: Countries like Britain and Germany, which have considered the White House's pleas, have wavered and may ultimately use Huawei hardware. But the lawsuits make Huawei look rash and aggressive. Is that the kind of company a government wants to help build critical infrastructure? And some stories you shouldn't miss The National Security Agency stopped its controversial phone spying. The system, which analyzed logs of Americans' domestic calls and texts and was introduced to surveil conspirators in Al Qaeda, has been scrapped. Google said it was paying male workers too little. It gave 9.7 million in additional compensation to level things up for 10,677 employees, about 69 percent of them men. But the survey that led to the raises did not address a critical question: Are women hired at a pay grade below their qualifications?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
One of the great success stories of the 20th century was the decline in poverty among the elderly. That story, however, is starting to change. A typical American worker in the middle rung of the earnings ladder whose career pay averaged out at about 46,000 a year in today's money could retire this year at age 65 with a Social Security benefit worth 39 percent of the career average. But unless something is done to replenish Social Security's shrinking trust funds, by 2035 the first pension check for such a worker might amount to as little as 27.5 percent of her career wage, according to calculations published last year by the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration. This is not merely an American trend. A preliminary analysis by economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the official research and policy arm of the world's advanced industrial nations, suggests that the gross replacement rates of public pension systems in a number of European countries are likely to decline over the next half century or so. Though there are big differences among nations, according to Stefano Scarpetta, director of employment labor and social affairs at the O.E.C.D., "in a majority of countries, the replacement rate probably will be lower than the one people have experienced so far." It is a consequence, of course, of a broad, inexorable trend: aging. That has raised the dependency rate across industrial societies. In 1950 there were 14 people aged 65 and over in O.E.C.D. countries for every 100 people of working age. Today there are 28. The trend is expected to continue for at least the next 50 years. On average, men and women are spending seven more years in retirement than they did in 1970. Much as this represents yet another great social achievement, it has also strained the finances of public pension systems, which largely rely on current taxes to pay for retirement benefits. Public spending on old age pensions and survivors' benefits in the O.E.C.D. rose from 6.2 to 7.9 percent of overall economic output, on average, between 1990 and 2011. As governments of most industrial nations try to restore long term financial stability to their pension systems raising the retirement age, linking benefits more closely to workers' contributions and the like there is a growing risk, as the O.E.C.D.'s secretary general, Jose Angel Gurria, put it, "that future pensions will not be sufficient." This is hardly a shock: Demographics, like ocean liners, move slowly and can be spotted from afar. On top of that, the lackluster growth and high unemployment experienced across much of the Western world in the last few years is going to make it much harder for young workers who expect to retire around midcentury from accumulating enough money to sustain a decent living standard in old age. That all raises a question that seems to be studiously avoided in polite policy conversations: Is old age poverty going to pick up again? While the prescription may seem obvious policies that delay retirement and encourage working until later ages it is far from infallible. Indeed, it is hardly certain that elderly workers could stay longer in the work force even if they wanted to. The O.E.C.D. devised some estimates of what to expect from pension systems. The analysis underscores just how uncertain life may become for the old. 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. A low wage worker entering the job market today at age 20, earning half the average wage over her career, can expect a public pension equivalent to 53 percent of her wages upon retirement if, and this is a big if, she stays in the labor market uninterruptedly until the normal retirement age. That is (a) not a lot of money a quarter of the average wage and (b) somewhat unrealistic, given the odds of parenthood, unemployment and so many other things that might temporarily knock anyone out of a job. According to the analysis, it gets even worse if a worker enters the labor market at age 25 rather than 20. For the record, people in the O.E.C.D. today start working, on average, at 23. Fortunately, public pensions are not retirees' only source of support. Social Security, for example, is still understood as one leg in a three legged stool supported by a private pension and retirement savings, too. Adding up these other bits would lift the retirement income of a typical low wage American retiree to 88 percent of her average lifetime wage, or 90 percent after accounting for her lower tax rate on retirement. This is a big improvement on the 44 percent of her lifetime wage, 54 percent after taxes, that she would get from Social Security alone. But today fewer than half of workers in the United States are covered by a private pension, and that is getting worse, too. A study by the Government Accountability Office estimated that fewer than one in five retirees among the bottom 20 percent had a defined benefit pension that pays a guaranteed monthly income and fewer than one in 10 have any retirement savings. What are the options to combat elderly poverty in the future? The challenge is particularly dire in the United States, despite a large young immigrant population, which reduces the demographic pressure: 21.5 percent of Americans 65 and older make less than half the nation's median income, almost double the O.E.C.D. average. A plausible strategy would be to increase the resources of public pension systems. In the United States, in fact, modest increases in payroll taxes, targeted on higher income workers, could prevent the depletion of Social Security's trust funds. That poses challenges for most European countries, where taxes are relatively high, and seems politically dead on arrival in Washington even though the tax burden is much lower in the United States as long as tax averse Republicans control Congress. The other alternative which most industrialized countries see as the key to overcome their demographic stress amounts to more work. While this is not an unreasonable proposition, it may not amount to the fix everyone is hoping for.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Chameleons snack by shooting out their impressive tongues, zapping a meal as far as two body lengths away. But no one has figured out how those tongues latch onto the prey and snap it back into the animal's mouth. Researchers now have the explanation: Amucus secreted by the animal's tongue pads makes for very sticky spit. Scientists collected chameleon saliva and tested it for adhesiveness. The stuff is 400 times as viscous as human saliva, they found, and sticky enough to trap not only insects but even large prey birds, lizards or small mammals without the aid of suction or any other mechanism.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A Good Day in New York for a Former TV Anchor At first glance, it seemed as if Greg Kelly soared into Judith Grey's world straight from the colorful panels of a comic book series. When they met for a first date in December 2015, Mr. Kelly was already a millionaire playboy with an alter ego a broadcast journalist with a fighter pilot's past that would make a superhero blush. He was also at the beck and call of a police commissioner, who happened to be his father, in a place known as Gotham City, and Mr. Kelly had a reputation for fighting bad guys. "His sense of humor is off the charts, and he has an uncanny knowledge of things about New York that you would never expect," said Ms. Scotto, who now anchors "Good Day New York" with Lori Stokes. "Those are some of the things that made him a superstar." Despite his celebrity, Mr. Kelly was nary a blip on Ms. Grey's radar screen when they were first made aware of each other by a mutual friend who had sent them an introductory email in September 2015. "I had never heard of Greg, but then I Googled him and saw this gorgeous guy, with gorgeous green eyes," said Ms. Grey, a 47 year old freelance creative director in advertising from Melbourne, Australia. "I was like, 'Yeah, set me up, let's do this,' " she said. But Ms. Grey, by all accounts a rock star in her industry, was given short shrift by a lifelong bachelor whose television career had given him a good measure of fame and fortune, and a predominantly female fan club to go with it. "He didn't call," she said with a sigh, "but I kind of knew why." She noted that the introductory email, albeit well intentioned, provided a fairly "underwhelming" profile of herself. Mr. Kelly, 48, who said that the email "really undersold Judith to me and did not do her justice," ran into another mutual friend three months later who offered a much brighter endorsement of Ms. Grey. This time he did call, and soon after they were on a first date at the Park, a restaurant in Manhattan. "I sat there and watched this beautiful, stunning woman in a charcoal gray dress walk through the door, she looked amazing," Mr. Kelly recalled. "We started talking and I realized how sweet and intelligent she was, and we had a lot in common." Ms. Grey was equally impressed when she saw Mr. Kelly, who was wearing a gray pinstriped double breasted suit. "I liked the way he looked," she said. "We just sat there talking for hours, easily going from topic to topic, about politics, literature, just about anything, and we understood all of each other's references." "It was this easygoing, wonderful, vibrant evening that you just didn't want to end," she said. "And yet I'm thinking, 'Doesn't he have to get up at 4 a.m.?' " Two days later, they went for drinks at another Manhattan restaurant, the Red Cat, where they continued moving easily from topic to topic, all the while learning the things that ultimately put them on the road to each other. Her career began as an artist in Melbourne, where her oil paintings were displayed and sold. She transitioned into the world of advertising, which took her from Sydney to Hong Kong and to New York in 1997, where she became the architect of numerous campaigns for various companies, including Pfizer, Hong Kong Bank and Georgia Pacific. (She was also a writer, contributing to the Daily Beast and Business Insider, and she wrote and directed the 2003 award winning documentary "Sin Embargo: Never the Less," on the resilience of the Cuban people.) "Judith is simply brilliant," said Jennifer Pybus, a friend and business partner. "In the world of advertising, she is formidable, she's the real deal," Ms. Pybus said. "She's elevated and reinvented so many brands for some of the best agencies in the world. She somehow knows what people want before they even know they want it." Ms. Grey, who no longer had a need to look up Mr. Kelly online, learned firsthand that he was the son of Veronica and Raymond W. Kelly and had grown up in Garden City, N.Y. His father, also a former Marine, served two stints as New York City police commissioner. Mr. Kelly graduated from Fordham University with a bachelor's degree in political science and went on to serve nine years as an attack pilot in the United States Marine Corps, specializing in flying the AV 8B Harrier jet. During his service, Mr. Kelly amassed 158 aircraft carrier landings and flew over Iraq in Operation Southern Watch, enforcing the United Nations imposed no fly zone. "Greg was a bit of a maverick back then," said Ossen D'Haiti, a fellow Marine pilot and longtime friend who served with Mr. Kelly in the early 1990s. "He's the kind of guy you want in your squadron. He doesn't get too uptight, and finds levity in everything he does." Ms. Grey and Mr. Kelly turned a serious corner on their third date, when he took her to a brunch in West Point, N.Y., then surprised her by driving to his family's 40 person Christmas party in Breezy Point, N.Y., where she met his parents, as well as his brother, Jim Kelly. "She couldn't believe he took her to meet his family so early in their relationship, and she absolutely loved his parents," Ms. Pybus said. "That's when she told me, 'This is different, this is it.' That's when she knew." The former police commissioner, who, at times, playfully interrogated his son about settling down, had a hunch that Ms. Grey was in their lives to stay. "Judith is a beautiful, amazing, multitalented individual," said the elder Mr. Kelly, who served as New York's top cop from 1992 to 1994 under Mr. Dinkins, and again, from 2002 to 2013, under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "She spent a lot of time with us this past summer and we really got to know her and realized that she and Greg are in perfect sync with one another, two hard working people with a great sense of humor," he said. "As far as Veronica and I are concerned, she's the daughter we never had." Greg Kelly said that as his relationship with Ms. Grey deepened, he would often asked himself, "Why haven't I met this person before?" As it turned out, he almost had. "After much triangulation, I eventually realized I had actually seen Judith months before being introduced to her," Mr. Kelly said. "I was in Sag Harbor, and I noticed this beautiful woman stretching and jogging at the dock, but she was wearing earphones, which I took as a sign that she didn't want to be bothered." "I had just finished working out at a gym there and was standing some distance away, but it was definitely Judith, who has a place out in Sag Harbor," Mr. Kelly said. "I actually went back the next day to see if I would see her again, but she wasn't there." Though he eventually caught up to her, Mr. Kelly would lose Ms. Grey again in March of this year. They split up that month. The inevitable talk of marriage put a strain on their relationship. "He was nervous about committing," Ms. Grey said. "There was some pressure, certainly a little bit of 'Am I ready?' that sort of thing," he said. "But there were other things going on at the time, it was complex." After nearly seven months apart, they began talking through some issues and came to realize that they were meant to be. "Judith is the love of my life," Mr. Kelly said. "From the first time we met, I knew she was good for me. "She is brilliant, beautiful and giving," he added. "She has taken care of me and brought real stability to my life." They reunited, and were engaged on Labor Day. "Our getting back together was our engagement," Ms. Grey said. "When I look at him, I still see a man constantly grappling with how to be a better person, but he's very warm and caring, and he has an encyclopedic mind and a real sense of consciousness." They were married at the University Club of New York on Nov. 12, where the cocktail reception was also held. Mr. Dinkins led the ceremony, a first marriage for both, which did not include religious traditions (the bride is Jewish and the groom is Roman Catholic). "You must always remember that it is rarely the great things that destroy a home, it is more often the small things," Mr. Dinkins told the couple and their 200 guests, including Francois Delattre, the permanent representative of France to the United Nations in New York, John Catsimatidis of supermarket fame and Rhona Graff, President Trump's longtime executive assistant. "So that each of you take care of the small things," Mr. Dinkins said, "then together you can defend your home against the great things." When asked what kind of man Ms. Grey had exchanged vows with, Ms. Scotto said without hesitation: "Judith is marrying a man who was like a brother to me, a man who brought sunshine, laughter and just the unexpected to my world every morning for almost 10 years, a man I really miss." But she doesn't miss taking calls about him. "My phone would ring constantly with women asking about Greg," she said. "All I kept hearing was 'Is Greg available?' Is Greg still single?' "Now I can happily say, 'He's off the market ladies, back off.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It's impossible to say that any particular scientific development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we'd opt for these unforgettable events and findings. (Find the year in climate change news here.) We learned that nothing brings people together like the sun hiding behind the moon. A Times reporter, Denise Grady, went inside an operating room to observe an experimental technique to treat severe spina bifida in a 24 week old fetus. The doctors performing the surgery hope it will result in superior outcomes for children born with the disorder. Their first 28 surgeries have seen good results so far. Jan. 14 is the due date for the mother who was the subject of the article. We learned about the power of human ingenuity in our solar system's deep reaches. The Cassini spacecraft has been sending home images of Saturn, its rings and its moons since arriving at the gas giant in 2004. The mission ended in September with a planned fiery crash into Saturn's atmosphere. While it studied the planet, Cassini explored moons Titan and Enceladus that could be home to extraterrestrial life. The probe also gave us great insight into our solar system, and will continue to do so for years as scientists pore over the data it collected. We learned that animals may make choices based on aesthetics. Major pharmaceutical companies, working with the American Cancer Society, will steeply discount cancer drugs for patients in African countries. Cancer kills 450,000 people across the continent each year, but many types here are among the most treatable: breast, cervical and prostate tumors. The new initiative to provide medication is modeled on efforts to bring cheap AIDS drugs to Africa, but the effort also aims to help overcome the shortage of oncologists there. We learned about the causes and consequences of rising obesity around the world. Late last year, the World Health Organization declared that Zika virus was no longer a global emergency. But the disease's effects on babies who may live for decades are only beginning to be understood. In northeastern Brazil, where links between the virus and birth defects like microcephaly were first detected, families struggle to give the best lives possible to stricken babies. Researchers hope to find clues about the virus's effects on the fetus by studying pairs of twins in Brazil in which one was born with birth defects and the other was not. We learned that we could see a source of ripples in space time. In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the number of babies born dependent on drugs, especially opioids. Such babies are often taken from their mothers, who struggle to visit them as they wrestle with their addictions. But a growing body of evidence suggests that separating these babies from their mothers slows the infants' recovery. The difficulties of one mother in Kentucky, Jamie Clay, underscored the complicated balance of recovery for both mother and child in America's epidemic of opioid addiction. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Are you a man who plays dress up with your daughter? Do you enjoy bowling, and are you terrible at it? Do you have hopes and dreams and insecurities and flaws and a belly that looks more like baked alaska than Hawaiian rolls? You, sir, could be an underwear model. A number of ads for briefs, boxers and other products aimed at men have lately turned away from old notions of square jawed masculinity. In a Hanes commercial that made its debut last month, "Every Bod," a wide range of men perform an elaborate musical number in their skivvies. A recent Jockey commercial focused on a man getting emotional as he described his battle with alcohol and drugs. The underwear brand Pair of Thieves made a hilariously awkward "cool dad" the star of a commercial for socks. Other clothing companies have also turned away from the stereotypical imagery once common in underwear ads. Campaigns from Play Out Apparel and GFW Clothing show models of unclear gender, while a diverse crew appears in a promotion for TomboyX that includes hashtags like " genderless" and " androgyny." "There are male brands and women brands," said Katie Martell, a marketing consultant. "But progressive brands see that the future is on the spectrum." The emphasis on men with ordinary bodies and others who don't fit tired stereotypes seems like progress for an industry that, a decade ago, featured a shirtless hunk scented with Old Spice. These days, more and more advertisers are telling men they don't need to be the buffest or most interesting man in the world, just themselves. "The possibility of change begins with this sort of foundation," said Scott A. Lukas, a professor who created the Gender Ads Project, which examines advertising imagery with an eye toward what it says about notions of gender. While that 1:49 second spot had its fans, it also inspired a backlash, receiving criticism from the Fox News show "Fox Friends," the media personality Piers Morgan, the actor James Woods and thousands of others who clicked the thumbs down icon on YouTube. A watch company, Egard Watches, went so far as to counter Gillette's message with an ad of its own that said, "We see the good in men." The late night host Stephen Colbert came down somewhere in the middle, saying that, while he was "sincerely moved" by the Gillette commercial, he was wary of the tendency among corporations to sell products through "moral lessons."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In his 2005 novel, "Saturday," the acclaimed writer Ian McEwan describes what his protagonist, Henry Perowne, sees when he visits a London seafood market to buy ingredients for a fish stew: crates of crabs and lobsters, still moving, and marble slabs arrayed with "bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms." While there, he ponders reports of recent scientific research demonstrating that fish can feel pain. It is a good thing that sea creatures "have no voice," Perowne thinks. "Otherwise there'd be howling from those crates." Perowne's thoughts may have been fictional, but the reports were real. They were written by Victoria Braithwaite, then a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, who died on Sept. 30 at her home in Boalsburg, Pa. She was 52. Her death, from pancreatic cancer, was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Penn State University, where she had been a professor of fisheries and biology since 2007. In two papers, one published in Proceedings of the Royal Society and the other in The Journal of Pain, Dr. Braithwaite and her colleagues attracted public attention with their reports that fish had neural cells called nociceptors, analogous to cells in humans that transmit pain; that these cells react to injuries; and that fish exposed to unpleasant stimuli vinegar added to their water, for example acted differently from fish not similarly exposed. In the book "Do Fish Feel Pain?" (2010), she discussed these findings and argued that fish should be accorded the same protections commonly applied to birds and mammals, like humane slaughter. Animal rights activists praised her work and publicized it on social media. But many neuroscientists and fish biologists responded to Dr. Braithwaite's findings with skepticism, and even disdain. In 2013, a team of seven scientists from Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States assessed research on pain in fish and concluded that fish do not have the neurophysiological capacity for conscious feelings of pain. For example, they said in the journal Fish and Fisheries, the fish brain lacks a neocortex, which in mammals is involved in brain functions like sensory perception. Fish may respond to unpleasant stimuli, they concluded, but they would feel pain only if they had consciousness which, they said, Dr. Braithwaite's work did not demonstrate. One of those scientists, Robert Arlinghaus, an expert on fish and fisheries with appointments at Humboldt University and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, both in Berlin, said in an email that Dr. Braithwaite was "an outstanding fish behavior scientist," but that "her work on pain I do not find convincing." Still, he and the other researchers noted in their report that people are morally responsible for justifying their use of fish, and for minimizing stress and other harm to the creatures. Dr. Braithwaite had been appointed to head the Leibniz Institute when she received her cancer diagnosis. Neuroscientists note that much is unknown about brain function, whether mammalian, avian, reptilian or piscine. Pain, too, remains mysterious, and highly subjective. Carl Saab, a neuroscientist at Brown University, said that researchers are still seeking to identify measurable substances, or biomarkers, that are indications of pain. "What do we mean when we say a rat or a human has pain," he asked, "and how to measure that pain objectively?" Victoria Anne Braithwaite was born on July 19, 1967, in Halifax, Yorkshire, England, the sixth of seven children of Alan and June (Pickles) Braithwaite. Her father was a textile executive, her mother a magistrate. She studied zoology as both an undergraduate and graduate student at Oxford, where she wrote a doctoral dissertation on navigation by pigeons. She took a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Glasgow, where she began her work on cognition in fish. She was on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh from 1995 until joining Penn State in 2007. She was also a visiting professor of biology at the University of Bergen, Norway, for several years. In 1992 she married Andrew Read, a researcher on infectious diseases, who also joined the faculty of Penn State; they divorced in 2015. She is survived by two sons, James and Matthew, and two grandchildren. In recent years, Dr. Braithwaite had begun researching the effect of environmental stimulation that fish experience in tanks. She concluded that they did better when their surroundings varied and contained things like plants. In a 2014 television interview for the BBC program "Newsnight," Dr. Braithwaite discussed the treatment of wild caught and farmed fish with Bertie Armstrong, who was the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation at the time. Dr. Braithwaite said that she felt worse for farmed fish, which she said were often raised in overcrowded, disease ridden pens, and that regulators should insist on more humane treatment for them. By contrast, she said, fish caught in the wild may have lived a full life, and their suffering upon capture was relatively short though she praised fishers in Denmark and Norway, who, she said, put their hauls of fish, like mackerel, into saltwater tanks on their boats. Mr. Armstrong did not address her assertions that fish feel pain. Instead, he noted that fish are an important source of protein for the world. "It is just not possible to catch that volume of fish and handle them individually," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
YouTube this week cracked down on the videos of some prominent far right actors and conspiracy theorists, continuing an effort that has become more visible since the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last month caused a torrent of misinformation to be featured prominently on the site. A week after the shooting, many of the videos on YouTube's "Trending" list contained misinformation about the teenage survivors of the shooting. The top video on the list for some time falsely claimed that a student at the school, David Hogg, was a paid actor. That video and others like it led to intense criticism of the site. Since then, many prominent right wing personalities have reported that YouTube has issued them strikes, which the site uses to enforce its community guidelines. If a channel receives three strikes within three months, YouTube terminates it. The company's guidelines prohibit "videos that contain nudity or sexual content, violent or graphic content, harmful or dangerous content, hateful content, threats, spam, misleading metadata, or scams." Mike Cernovich, the right wing agitator and conspiracy theorist, said Wednesday that his channel, which has more than 66,000 subscribers, had been given a strike. (Mr. Cernovich said Saturday that YouTube had reversed the strike and that the video that had been banned was again available on the site.) Infowars, the conspiracy theory outlet headed by Alex Jones, said Tuesday that it had received a second strike in two weeks, both for videos about the Parkland shooting. (Infowars, which has more than 2.2 million YouTube subscribers, later said the second strike had been removed.) Infowars' Washington bureau chief, Jerome Corsi, said on Twitter that his YouTube channel had been terminated without notice or explanation. News outlets including The Outline and Breitbart have pointed to more than a dozen other right wing or right leaning accounts that have been disciplined, claiming they have either received strikes or been banned outright in the past several weeks. They include the violent neo Nazi group Atomwaffen (banned for hate speech) and the YouTube star Carl Benjamin, known by his username Sargon of Akkad, who criticizes feminism and identity politics. Mr. Benjamin posted a screenshot on Facebook on Thursday that said he had been locked out of his Google account because "it looked like it was being used in a way that violated Google's policies." YouTube said it was not aware of any prominent accounts that had falsely reported strikes, though it did say that Mr. Benjamin had violated its policy on copyright infringement. YouTube denied that the deletions and other actions were ideologically driven. It said accounts that had been disciplined or banned were only the most prominent, and vocal, of many across the ideological spectrum who had seen their videos taken down for violating the site's rules. But critics said YouTube was reacting haphazardly in an attempt to purge actors who have garnered it negative attention. They questioned whether the site was prepared to substantively address the problem of the conspiracy theories that flourish on its platform. And some of the right wing YouTube stars and conspiracists who were affected saw the disciplinary action as a result of what they say is left wing ideology flourishing inside Google, of which YouTube is a subsidiary. Mr. Benjamin told Breitbart that the company was "riddled with a far left ideological orthodoxy that has taken hold to a radical degree." A YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement that its "reviewers remove content according to our policies, not according to politics or ideology, and we use quality control measures to ensure they are applying our policies without bias." The company is in the middle of hiring a large influx of moderators, and it attributed some of its recent enforcement actions to a group who are still learning to apply its rules. "With the volume of videos on our platform, sometimes we make mistakes and when this is brought to our attention we reinstate videos or channels that were incorrectly removed," the company's statement said. The moderation efforts of YouTube, like those of Facebook and Twitter, have begun to receive more attention in the last year as academics and journalists have focused on how misinformation like that sown by Russia during the 2016 presidential election is spread. In a December blog post, YouTube announced it would add many people to its work force in 2018, hoping eventually to have 10,000 working to moderate or otherwise address content that has violated its rules. The company is in the process of hiring many of those people. A spokeswoman said that applying the company's standards to any given video required training, and that new moderators were bound to make some mistakes. It said that some of the strikes that had been handed out since the Parkland shooting had been mistaken, though it did not specify which. Jonathan Albright, the research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and an expert on how misinformation thrives on social media, said YouTube has long been inconsistent in its enforcement of its guidelines. "If these accounts are getting deleted at the last minute because people are angry and news organizations are digging into this, should these accounts have existed in the first place?" he asked. Negative news media attention results in more users flagging videos of right wing conspiracy theorists, leading to a feedback loop in which channels promoting those views are disciplined. The effect is that its disciplinary process is reactive, and relies on users to flag content they find troublesome. A YouTube spokeswoman said the company planned to release a transparency report in the spring that it says will show the full range of videos that have been taken down.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Lang Lang, at the piano, playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra led by Andris Nelsons, in black at the Tanglewood Music Festival on Friday. LENOX, Mass. Let's just get this out of the way: There was no sign that Lang Lang, the superstar pianist and patron saint of sold out gala concerts, was in pain on Friday night as he sailed through his first major performance since injuring his left hand over a year ago. You could even say he seemed like a new man as he for the most part eschewed his trademark flamboyance in favor of a gentle, controlled performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra to open its Tanglewood season here, on a program that included the "Magic Flute" overture and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Mr. Lang's return, in front of thousands of people at Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed, was being watched by orchestras and music industry insiders everywhere. The endlessly bankable star injured himself in April 2017 while preparing Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand; since then, he has been largely out of commission. He has still maintained an active presence on his personal YouTube channel, where he posts informal, upbeat messages about his recovery. Friday's program was originally meant to feature Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, not the Mozart. And it's hard to resist reading into that change: The Tchaikovsky is taxing on any player, with hammered chords, dizzying runs and grand, Romantic flourishes. It would have been perfectly on brand for Mr. Lang in better days. Fortunately for him, Mozart's concerto places the burden on the right hand, which is tasked with runs and rhythmic complexity while the left often sets the mood with chords placed neatly on the beat. But that doesn't mean the piece is any less difficult. Where Tchaikovsky's concerto dazzles with surface level pyrotechnics, Mozart's calls for more understated virtuosity. The C minor concerto is one of Mozart's most dramatic; yet its angst and gloom mostly simmer, only rarely coming to a boil. This is where the piece becomes a challenge for Mr. Lang, whose theatricality is out of place amid gently gliding runs played at a near pianissimo. But, from the moment he made his solo entrance in the first movement, it was clear this wasn't a typical Lang Lang performance; nor was it the same jab happy interpretation he brought to his recording of the concerto in 2014. Now, he was playing with such softness and unpretentious delicacy that I could barely hear him over the wind rustling through the trees and I mean this as a compliment. I wish I could say the same for the rest of the concerto. Habits are hard to break, and Mr. Lang's crept into the performance as the piece progressed. The second movement opens with a naively pure theme ripe for interpretation; instead, Mr. Lang infused it with drama, sinking heavily into the keys while playing a melody with the simplicity of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Mr. Lang was most animated in the finale, at one point practically dancing in place. So I decided to close my eyes, which is when I noticed a disconnect between the sight and sound of his performance. What I heard was dynamic and inquisitive, by turns capable of grandiosity and suspenseful quiet; but when I opened my eyes again, his right hand was a full foot above the keyboard. He received an uproarious ovation, which came to a halt when he returned for an encore: Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in C sharp minor haunting at barely more than a whisper, though he couldn't help but occasionally exaggerate his movement when an inward style would have been even more riveting. Not that this seemed to matter to his fans. From the start, the teenage girls in my row had planned to rush the stage, which they did before and after the Chopin. And, as Mr. Lang exited after his final bow, he threw his handkerchief into the crowd. "That," I heard a woman behind me say, "is star power, honey."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
One of the highlights of the week is Christie's quirky auction Tuesday called "La Menagerie," featuring animal sculptures. It includes this welded hippo by Francois Xavier Lalanne from 1969 that folds out to reveal a sink, vanity, and full bathtub. New York's biannual billion dollar "gigaweek" of sales, whose latest series starts on Monday, is the glittering pinnacle of the auction market for Impressionist, modern and contemporary art. But is instability in the wider world taking off some of that shine? The week's various auctions at Christie's, Phillips and Sotheby's (which in June returned to private ownership) are estimated to raise at least 1.2 billion. But the world's wealthy will have to be in a free spending mood to match the 2 billion raised in May at the equivalent spring sales, when Jeff Koons's stainless steel "Rabbit" sculpture fetched 91.1 million, an auction high for any work by a living artist. This time around, there are few museum quality works by the most famous artists to tempt billionaires no painting or sculpture is estimated to sell for more than 45 million. "First, there isn't a major estate this cycle doesn't have a Rockefeller," said Diana Wierbicki, global head of art law at Withers Bergman LLP, referring to Christie's 2018 record setting auction of the Peggy and David Rockefeller collection. Second, she pointed out, sellers and buyers are confronting the global economic uncertainty from a looming Presidential election in the United States, riots in Hong Kong and a Brexit traumatized Britain. And owners who could sell are thinking twice about offering trophy works at auction because President Trump in 2017 removed art from the assets eligible for 1031 exchanges the strategy that allows investors to defer paying capital gains tax on property when it is sold, as long as a similar property is purchased for the same amount. "Now people are asking, 'Does it make sense to sell if I'm facing a federal capital gains tax of 28 percent?'" Ms. Wierbicki said. A report by the French database Artprice that global auction sales were down 17.4 percent in the first half of 2019, as well as the closure in July of Pace gallery's branch in Beijing, have also sobered the mood. Yet there could be a silver lining for buyers with a more modest amount to spend on younger artists and representative pieces by established names. "For most buyers, there's comfort in a season lacking superlatives," said Doug Woodham, managing partner at Art Fiduciary Advisors, based in New York. "Inexplicable prices can diminish the confidence of some collectors." This week about 2,050 works will come under the hammer at the three auction houses, the biggest such offering in New York since Nov. 2015, according to data supplied by Artnet . "These are low risk auctions. There won't be the fireworks we've seen in the past," warned Helly Nahmad, a New York gallerist specializing in high end Impressionist, modern and contemporary art. But Mr. Nahmad said that dealers offering new works had sold well at the recent Frieze London and FIAC art fairs. "The art market is always one auction away from being on fire," he added. After decades of intense trading, there are few Impressionist and Modern masterpieces still in private hands. Surrealism is one area where collectors and their advisers feel there is still quality and value to be found. (Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, has been an enthusiastic buyer of Magritte). Its conceptual content has also crossover appeal to buyers of contemporary art. "It's been somewhat overlooked," said Suzanne Gyorgy, global head of art advisory and finance at Citi Private Bank in New York. "We do a lot of work with clients in Asia, and there is real interest in Surrealism there." At Christie's on Monday night, Rene Magritte's typically enigmatic 1959 canvas, "Le Sabbat," showing a still life painting hanging upside down in an evening landscape, is certain to sell for at least 8 million, thanks to a pre auction guarantee from Christie's. Sotheby's and Christie's Impressionism and Modern art sales increasingly rely on outstanding pieces by less well known names. On Tuesday night Sotheby's will be offering the much exhibited 1884 portrait, "Richard Gallo et son chien Dick, au Petit Gennevilliers," by Gustave Caillebotte, showing a journalist friend of the artist strolling with his black poodle beside a sunlit river Seine. A fringe member of the Impressionist circle, Caillebotte was a gifted painter in a more Realist manner. Never offered at auction before, this particular work has been on loan to the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is estimated to sell for at least 18 million and has been guaranteed by Sotheby's. Ever keen to give a fresh twist to its "20th Century Week" series, Christie's will hold a day sale of sculpture and design inspired by animals. "La Menagerie," the 31 lot auction, will include this singular welded brass and copper "Hippopotame I" which unfolds to reveal a sink, vanity, and full bathtub. it was made by Francois Xavier Lalanne, husband of the fellow French designer, Claude Lalanne. The quirky creations of "Les Lalanne," melding art and design, have since the 1960s been collected by such influential tastemakers as Gunter Sachs, Yves Saint Laurent, Peter Marino and Tom Ford. Last month at Sotheby's in Paris, the Lalannes' private collection proved a 100 million sellout. Christie's hippo bath, made in 1969, was acquired by its East Coast owner at auction in 2006 for 169,000. It is now estimated at 1 million to 1.5 million. For many, the one out and out trophy of the season is David Hockney's rediscovered acrylic on canvas, "Sur la Terrasse," offered at Christie's Wednesday night postwar and contemporary auction. The 25 million to 45 million estimate makes it the most highly valued lot of the week. (At the time of writing, it hadn't been guaranteed.) The luminous, nine foot high composition, suffused with sunlight and a melancholy sense of a fading relationship, depicts Mr. Hockney's then lover, Peter Schlesinger, on the balcony of the couple's room at the Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakesh in 1971. They broke up later that year. This little known work has emerged from an unnamed European private collection and was last exhibited in public in 1973. The 90.3 million achieved at Christie's last November for Mr. Hockney's 1972 "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" which also featured Mr. Schlesinger has encouraged owners to part with major works by Britain's most expensive living artist at auction. "I knew of its existence, but this is the first time I've seen it," said Offer Waterman, a London based dealer in modern and contemporary art, who in 2015 sold "Peter on the Balcony," a crayon on paper study for the latest Hockney trophy. "Obviously it's a very ambitious painting," added Mr. Waterman. ''There's no question it's a great work." Earlier on Wednesday, Phillips will hold its day sale of contemporary art, which tends to be the week's clearest indicator of which younger artists are most in demand. It will include a five foot high panel painting from 2014 by the Harlem based artist Derek Fordjour. A nocturne showing two male figures standing at the edge of a circus ring, the painting had been acquired directly from the artist and is estimated to sell for between 50,000 to 70,000. That valuation reflects the 40,000 to 90,000 asked for Mr. Fordjour's latest paintings at a sell out show at the Josh Lilley gallery in London during Frieze Week. Many buyers are looking to auctions to acquire Mr. Fordjour's works, and resale "secondary" market prices are rising steeply. Last month, a 2017 painting sold at Phillips in London for 169,000. "The auctions reflect where the speculation is," said Candace Worth, an art adviser based in New York. "There is a clutch of younger artists that have become flash points," added Ms. Worth, who singled out Mr. Fordjour, Julie Curtiss , Tschabalala Self and Loie Hollowell. Sotheby's 51 lot evening sale of contemporary art contains impressive large scale abstracts by Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning that are each estimated to raise at least 25 million. The auction also includes a full length Francis Bacon "Pope" painting from about 1958, sold by the Brooklyn Museum in order to "support museum collections." The work had been donated to the museum in 1981 by the American businesswoman and collector, Olga H. Knoepke. It is certain to sell for at least 6 million, courtesy of a guarantee from Sotheby's.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design

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