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LONDON New York may increasingly resemble a retail desert, with Barneys in seemingly never ending liquidation sales and Opening Ceremony closing its stores. But here the ultimate multibrand boutique, Browns, is still going strong at 50. Sprawling along South Molton Street in a series of connected townhouses, the boutique was run by Joan Burstein (commonly called Mrs. B) and her family until it was acquired by the luxury e platform Farfetch in 2015. Known as the first place to stock styles by the likes of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, the store has maintained its reputation for supporting new talent by, for example, collaborating on a capsule collection in 2018 with the London based American designer Michael Halpern. The new 9,580 square foot store is to have space for rotating collections, pop ups and a restaurant. (Its neighbors will be the swanky Claridge's hotel and Handel Hendrix in London, a museum that encompasses the home of the 18th century composer Georg Frideric Handel and an apartment where Jimi Hendrix lived in the late 1960s.) But before that shift, fashion world fans of Browns recalled why it mattered. And why it still does. (The interviews have been edited and condensed.) "The store had its own personality. It didn't look like a supermodern store. It had its own charm and I thought that was nice, because it was the charm of the family and the personality of the family." Osman Yousefzada, a London based designer who founded his Osman label in 2008 "Mrs. B was a retailer at the end of the day and a lot of it was really about getting stuff that no one really had, and bringing it to London. She opened a series of shops for Ralph Lauren before anyone had it." Simone Rocha, a London designer who sold her fall 2012 collection, her first solo show, to Browns. She is a daughter of the designer John Rocha. "When I used to go to my father's shows, I would always walk up to Browns and especially Browns Labels For Less, which is no longer there, because I was a teenager probably looking for knitwear and shoes. It always had this prestige, but in a way that it wasn't a department store. Browns was the quintessential English boutique at the time." "A few years back, maybe 10 years, I walked into the shop and saw some fun dolls made of fabric and rags. They were quirky and all different one from another. You weren't sure what they were for. It was Mrs. B going out of her way to do something different, something that you like, doing it in an amusing way, She wasn't for the obvious choices." Erdem Moralioglu, the London based Canadian designer who began his Erdem label in 2005 "She had a way of looking at the collection and looking at every single piece and being so kind of methodical." Ashish Gupta, founder of the Ashish label. His designs were first sold in Browns in 2001. "I made the wedding dress for Caroline Burstein, Mrs. B's daughter, and the mother of the bride's dress for Mrs. B. She was pretty specific about what she wanted. She knew what she wanted in her personal life and business life." Ms. Pucci, on discussing a new collection with Mrs. Burstein "But she really took the time to express her thoughts and keep me on board and to encourage me to do better. She had a terrific sense of humor, which is very English in a way. She was asking me to do more work in a terribly amusing way. She was giggling, so I was laughing, too, in the end. I've not come across someone who could give constructive comments in such a clever way." Mark Fast, creative director and founder of the London knitwear label that bears his name "I went to the Browns 40th anniversary dinner at Regent Lofts and Penthouses in May 2010. Lots of people were there. Sitting to my left was Mrs. B. Beside her was Sir Philip Green. Across from him was Oscar de la Renta. Then there was Hussein Chalayan and the other side of me was Sonia Rykiel's daughter, Nathalie. Mrs. B spoke with everyone and made everyone feel welcome. She was like the queen. She stood up at one point and everyone gave her a round of applause and standing ovation." "I came out at the end of my spring/summer 2017 show wearing a T shirt that said 'immigrant.' It was just after the Brexit vote had happened. A Browns buyer rang up wanting the T shirt. I didn't think of doing it for sales because I just thought it would be a political statement but we ended up making about 200 T shirts for them." Ida Petersson, Browns' men's and women's wear buying director, who joined the company in 2016 "There is more at stake today than in the past because the industry is so much bigger today even than it was five years ago. If you don't take risks or think outside the box, your company is never going to move on but you've got to play to win and take risks. Particularly if you stand for new designers. If you start to look at other people you lose momentum." Marine Serre, the French designer who won the 2017 LVMH Prize "I don't think you go to Browns if you just want the last trendy brand. You really want to go there, I feel, when you like garments and you like fashion." Mr. Gupta, on the key to Browns' success "It's having your finger on the pulse, isn't it? It's kind of knowing what people will want before they know they want it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Carolyn Roy, the owner of Biscuit Head, at her restaurant in Asheville, N.C. Despite low unemployment and higher wages, prices at businesses like Biscuit Head haven't risen much. The Economy Is Strong and Inflation Is Low. That's What Worries the Fed. WASHINGTON America's job market is booming and the economy is strong, but that combination is not raising prices the way it used to. Biscuit Head, a North Carolina restaurant chain serving up gravy flights and homemade jam, would be charging more if the previous economic relationships held up. At 3.3 percent, unemployment in Asheville, N.C., home to three of Biscuit Head's four locations, clocks in below the national average, and business is brisk. The owners, Carolyn and Jason Roy, have been lifting wages and offering new benefits as they seek to attract and retain staff. Yet they haven't raised prices on their giant buttermilk biscuits all that much. The stable pricing is sustainable partly because the Roys have gotten less picky about whom they hire. By looking at applicants with limited experience and even criminal records, they can find workers at wages that shrink but don't kill their profit margins. "It used to be that you'd look at resumes, and some things were an automatic disqualifier," Ms. Roy said. "Now there's really no disqualifier. Anyone who comes in, we'll interview them." Across the United States, a similar cocktail seems to be keeping inflation at bay: Employers are reluctant to charge more, unsure how consumers will react, and they've found an untapped supply of workers. It's partly great news. More Americans are getting jobs than policymakers once thought possible, and wages and prices aren't spinning out of control the way history would predict. But it is posing a big challenge for the Federal Reserve. Stubbornly low inflation is raising questions about whether the central bank can achieve one of its primary goals to keep prices growing slowly and steadily. By keeping interest rates low, it could also hinder the central bank's ability to steer the economy should another downturn occur. Inflation rose a scant 1.6 percent in the year ending in March, well short of the central bank's 2 percent target. The Fed's policymakers are worried about the continuing sluggishness, and President Trump has repeatedly cited low inflation as a reason for the central bank to start cutting interest rates. "We are doing very well at 3.2% GDP, but with our wonderfully low inflation, we could be setting major records , at the same time, make our National Debt start to look small!" Mr. Trump said in a recent tweet. While low inflation might sound great, a never ending shortfall might hurt the economy. Modest price increases can brighten the economic picture by allowing wages to rise without crushing profits. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's former chairwoman, often describes inflation as a lubricant on the wheels of the labor market: It keeps wages chugging along. "I am concerned that inflation is running lower than I would expect, especially considering that now we've had sub 4 percent unemployment for a long time, we've had growth that's surprised to the upside," James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said in an interview. "We're on the wrong side, and it's kind of going in the wrong direction." The breakdown leaves the Fed staring down an uncomfortable question. If officials can't get that old chain reaction to work 10 years into an economic expansion, against a backdrop of tax cuts and high government spending, and with exceptionally low joblessness, will they ever? The Fed's chairman, Jerome H. Powell, has called weak inflation "one of the major challenges of our time." In part to address it, he has led the Fed to embark on a yearlong review of its communications, tools and strategy. A major goal is determining what is reining in price gains and what can drive inflation back to the Fed's target in a sustainable way. Extra labor supply is one obvious culprit. Since 2016 at least some Fed officials have declared the labor market "at or near full employment." But the job market keeps surprising them. Prime age workers are hanging on to their positions for longer. That has provided an unexpected source of new employees, enabling brisk hiring to persist without a run up in wages and prices. Average hourly earnings have shown progress without rocketing up. Officials have repeatedly lowered their estimates of sustainable unemployment as a result, and Richard Clarida, the Fed's vice chairman, has suggested that the jobless rate is "not far below many estimates" at that revised level. Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, goes a step further. He thinks that the Fed, which has raised interest rates nine times since 2015, began doing so too early and that the economy remains below full employment. Premature tightening has convinced the public that inflation won't rise to 2 percent this business cycle, he thinks, and now consumers and businesses are acting accordingly. Beyond slack in the labor force and expectations, forces like technology and globalization may be restraining pricing power. Consumers with Amazon and Yelp in their pockets can easily avoid overpaying. "To the extent that businesses have price increases, they may very well be unable to pass them on," Robert S. Kaplan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in an interview. "I don't think that's changing. If anything, it may be intensifying." Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Regardless of its cause, the dilemma has a global flavor. Low inflation plagues central banks from Japan and New Zealand to the eurozone, threatening serious fallout. Falling inflation raises the risk that economies will slip into outright deflation if growth weakens, making downturns worse as consumers hoard their cash, knowing that prices will be lower tomorrow. It also means policymakers will have less room to ease policy come next recession, because interest rates count in price gains. John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has warned that could unleash a dangerous feedback loop. During a recession, central banks won't be able to cut rates by enough to ever coax inflation back up to target, and expectations will fall further with each passing business cycle. "The facts have changed," Mr. Williams said in a recent speech urging a global rethink of economic policy. As part of the Fed's strategy review this year, top officials will meet in Chicago next month to discuss how monetary policy works and how it should. Mr. Powell has described the goal as an evolution, rather than a revolution. Whatever approach they take to lifting inflation, officials will have to convince the public that they mean it. Inflation expectations are slipping among both economic forecasters and consumers, based on two recent Fed surveys. Just 56 percent of Fed watchers thought policymakers had the tools to achieve their target, down from 60 percent a year earlier, according to a survey run by the research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives. If price increases get stuck in low gear permanently, consequences could reverberate from the Fed's Marriner S. Eccles Building in Washington to the dining scene in Asheville. In inflation's absence, Ms. Roy from Biscuit Head is seeing her fellow restaurateurs make tough choices. They can't charge enough to cover higher wages, because their competitors are holding prices fairly steady. That leads to understaffing, and has caused some owners to give up the game altogether. "If you're perceived as being too expensive, people aren't going to want to come," Ms. Roy said. "It really is a balancing act."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The universe is a swirling cosmic cocktail of galaxies made up of specks of dust, and Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky are alive and writing poetry in it. The two poets, who are also best friends and creative collaborators, are always thinking about the stars. The first thing the pair ever talked about, when they met in a Brooklyn loft in 2010, while drinking cheap champagne at an after party for a poetry reading, was the movement of the constellations. "Alex walked up to me and told me he was a Sagittarius," said Ms. Lasky, 39. "And I knew, it was going to work. When a Sagittarius spots an Aries across a room, there's an immediate connection." "I used to tell everyone that Aries and Sagittarius are the strongest astrological match," said Mr. Dimitrov, 33. The poets were sitting across from me in a velvet banquette at the dark Temple Bar in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan. Mr. Dimitrov cut a sleek profile, wearing a black leather jacket and a nonchalant smudge of kohl eyeliner. Ms. Lasky wore piles of jewelry on every exposed surface of her body, and looked like a modern incarnation of the elegant mystic Madame Blavatsky. Together, under the light of the dim Edison bulbs, they looked like members of a long lost 1970s prog rock band. "Aries women just love me," Mr. Dimitrov went on. "I wish I could get married to an Aries woman, but alas, I like men. So this is the next best thing. I guess we are in a 'spiritual marriage.' I always refer to our Twitter as a marriage." The Twitter account he speaks of is Astro Poets, a feed of whimsical astrological musings that the two launched together in late November 2016 (their account is a Sagittarian) and that has grown exponentially in popularity since. The account now boasts more than 232,000 followers fans include the pop artists Lorde and Michelle Branch and the actor/writer Lena Dunham and a coveted book deal with Macmillan's Flatiron Books. (The book will be published in 2019.) The two recently hosted a sold out poetry reading for 500 fans in the New York Public Library's Celeste Bartos Forum. The beige auditorium was sardined with admirers average age somewhere between 18 and 25, many with unicorn hued, asymmetrical haircuts who came for a glimpse of their horoscope gurus. The Astro Poets idea was born over text message, late at night. Ms. Lasky and Mr. Dimitrov, who are both published poets (Ms. Lasky with four books, Mr. Dimitrov two), were up into the wee hours in November of 2016 chatting about their favorite subjects: romance and astrology. Mr. Dimitrov had double booked dates with two men, and he was waffling back and forth about which plans to cancel. He turned to a Twitter poll, and then directly to Ms. Lasky, for cosmic advice. "I was choosing between a Taurus and a Virgo," he said. "What's funny is, I didn't go on either date. But we did get the idea for the Twitter out of it," "Mr. Dimitrov said. "Every time we got dinner or drinks, we'd be talking about astrology the whole time. And we were like, let's take this to Twitter and see if people care." As it turned out, people did care. The first tweet the Astro Poets posted was "We've been born on this truest evening, November 26, 2016 in New York City. A Sagittarius babe we are we love our planet all the signs." Within three days, the account had amassed more than 4,000 followers. The mission of Astro Poets was simple: Use Twitter to write tiny poems about the star signs. Because Mr. Dimitrov and Ms. Lasky are creatures of the internet, they are as well versed in pop culture as they are in literary history. As a result, the account has a very specific, charming tone, one that unites zeitgeisty interests with ancient knowledge about the solar system. A typical tweet will list the star signs as emoji, or punctuation marks. Early on, the pair developed the idea of "the series," a quick list of 12 tweets describing all of the signs in terms of a single conceit. They described the signs in terms of Britney Spears songs, Virginia Woolf novels, adverbs and passive aggressive email signoffs. "I approach each series we do thinking about structure, really," Mr. Dimitrov said. "I like the fact that there are 12 signs. I like the fact that there are the four elements. If you think about it, those are poetic constraints." "If I write a series, it's between 12 and 14 lines, which is a sonnet, basically," Ms. Lasky said. "Being poets, we have skills in invoking the invisible," continued Ms. Lasky, whose fifth book, "Milk," will be published by Wave Books this year. "And I think one of the big misconceptions about poetry is that poems have to mean something. A poem has an infinite set of meanings. Anybody's star chart is like that too." "There is a long history connecting poets and the occult," said Mr. Dimitrov, whose latest book, "Together and By Ourselves," came out from Copper Canyon Press in April 2017. "I've definitely always been interested in conjuring." Ms. Lasky said that she first became interested in astrology as a child, poring over the reclusive poet Linda Goodman's best selling 1980s books on the subject. "I devoured Linda Goodman's 'Star Signs,' " she said. "I kept the book by my bed all the time and my lamp burned a hole in the book. I think as an adult I got into astrology by just being obsessed with people to date. It felt like knowing astrology gave me a knowledge about people that they may not even have about themselves, and I was captivated by that." Ms. Lasky said that she hopes the Astro Poets book will be a modern update of Goodman's work. "We want it to be more intersectional and less problematic about gender," she said. "Her book is more about men and women interacting and we want to make ours less binary." Mr. Dimitrov, whose parents are not only both Sagittarians, like himself, but share a birthday, gave him a pendant of the Sagittarius archer symbol when he was young. "I was super introverted, I was an only child," he said. "So for me astrology was kind of like Greek mythology, this other world where I already had an identity; I could participate in it. There were no definite rules, much like poetry." The instant identity that comes along with simply knowing where one's birthday falls on the zodiac may hold some clue to the Astro Poets phenomenon, and the broader rise in popularity of astrology among millennial readers. Noah Eaker, the book editor who signed Ms. Lasky and Mr. Dimitrov, told me that he had been searching for some time "to find the right authors for an astrological guide made for 21st century life." Astrology is not a science. It is not necessarily conclusive. And yet, Ms. Lasky said, knowing your chart can provide a kind of interpretive map with which to solve problems or understand larger forces at work on your life. "It's not just about your sun sign," she said. "It's all like a fingerprint, molding together. Your moon sign and rising sign all form part of the blueprint of the house. But there is no fate weaving the blanket of our lives. What you do with the house is up to you."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
SAN FRANCISCO More than a year after Uber's self driving trucks made their first commercial delivery 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer on a 120 mile hop in Colorado the company says it has taken its robot big rigs to the highways of Arizona. Uber said on Tuesday that its self driving trucks had been carrying cargo on highways in Arizona for commercial freight customers over the past few months. The trucks operate with a licensed truck driver at the wheel, ready to take over in the case of an emergency. But Uber said the eventual goal was to eliminate human drivers inside the cab. In a video, Uber laid out its vision for the future of trucking tapping autonomous systems to navigate long highway hauls and relying on human drivers to handle shorter drives, like the final few miles to a customer's loading dock. The ride hailing service is one of the first companies to begin commercializing self driving trucks, integrating albeit slowly the technology into its shipment booking service, Uber Freight. At the heart of Uber's vision are transfer hubs where trucks can pick up and drop off trailers. At those locations, autonomous trucks would grab trailers for long haul drives, while human drivers would grab ones earmarked for closer delivery with Uber's network meshing the supply and demand of both behind the scenes. Uber's self driving truck emerged from its 2016 acquisition of Otto, an autonomous trucking start up founded by a former Google engineer. The acquisition was at the heart of an intellectual property lawsuit against Uber that was brought by Waymo, the self driving car unit from Google's parent company, Alphabet. The two sides settled the case last month. While that legal case dragged out, the company continued to refine its driverless truck technology to find its place in an increasingly crowded field. Waymo has also said it is considering using its driverless car technology for trucks, while Tesla said it plans to introduce an electric truck with a self driving mode built in. Trucking is a natural target for automation. In theory, automated trucks can stay on the road longer than those with human drivers and, over time, are expected to be less prone to accidents because they don't get sleepy or distracted. Eventually, these factors are expected to make self driving trucks a cheaper alternative. "We think self driving technology has tremendous potential to solve some of the big problems that the trucking industry has today," said Alden Woodrow, the product manager for Uber's self driving truck unit. Uber launched Uber Freight, an app that matches truckers and trucking companies with loads to haul, in May 2017. In a business model that is similar to its ride hailing service, Uber doesn't actually handle the deliveries but works behind the scenes to create a marketplace for truckers and shippers. The company said it was working out of two primary transfer hubs in Arizona one in Sanders near the border with New Mexico and another in Topock near the California border. Uber isn't saying much about its self driving trucks. It won't disclose how many trucks it is using, how many miles they've driven or how often the human safety drivers had to intervene and assist the autonomous system. It is also not revealing many details about how the transfer hubs would work including what they would look like, where they would be located and how the company planned to roll them out. When it comes to the politically sensitive question of whether Uber's technology will eventually eliminate trucking jobs, the company walks a fine line. For now, Uber said it believed the introduction of self driving trucks would bring about more driving jobs, not fewer, in part because of greater demand as delivery costs fall. However, the nature of a trucker's job may change becoming something akin to a parcel delivery driver, shuttling trailers between the hub and local destinations. While autonomous systems may one day be able to do everything a human truck driver does, Uber said it was not training its trucks to do it all, like back up to a loading dock or navigate around a busy industrial area. "That is beyond the window of what we're looking at," Mr. Woodrow said. Uber is choosing to "focus the development of our technology on the highway only."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Storytelling is often the most underrated of a choreographer's gifts, but frequently it's the most crucial. The music for "The Firebird" (1910) the first classic composition by Igor Stravinsky is a masterpiece of musical narration. The narrative, though, changes with each choreographic interpreter. Yet the score retains the feeling of myth. Compelling and mysterious, the story Stravinsky tells is about magic, love, danger and liberation. The score has also prompted a wide range of remarkably picturesque stage designs. Next week the production by Alexei Ratmansky returns to American Ballet Theater repertory at the Metropolitan Opera House. One of its most marvelous features is Simon Pastukh's decor: The first exterior scene is a bizarre but poetic dreamscape in which forked objects, like fire tipped cactuses but changing in contour, emit puffs of smoke. Mr. Ratmansky's production features the same quartet of characters taken from Russian folklore as more traditional versions. The hero, Ivan, catches the Firebird and takes from her a magic feather that will summon her when he is in need. Soon he meets and falls in love with a Maiden, only to find she is in thrall to an evil sorcerer, Kaschei. Using the feather, he summons the Firebird, who helps him destroy Kaschei. Freed, Ivan and earlier victims of Kaschei's curses are reunited with the women they love. Stravinsky's score was composed in close collaboration with Michel Fokine, whose "Firebird" in repertory at the Royal Ballet in London and reconstructed at the Mariinsky in St. Petersburg remains the best example of the theatrical principles that made him the most influential ballet maker of the first half of the 20th century. Every character has a strikingly different movement idiom. His Firebird, a bravura role with jumps and turns, is the only dancer on point in the whole ballet. Her head movements are staccato; her arms are like powerful wings; her hands vibrate as if their fingers shake off sparks. Ivan, in contrast, is a pedestrian folk hero, a man of the people. His bride and her companions are demurely elegant beauties in heeled shoes. And Kaschei, amusingly and frighteningly grotesque, is an aged ghoul. Mr. Ratmansky transforms all four. His Firebird is just one of a flock of firebirds of both sexes. His Maiden and her friends are spiky, conflicted, impulsive, odd. And Kaschei is glamorous, lithe, vain, creepy. George Balanchine's staging, for New York City Ballet, follows the general shape of Fokine's drama, makes his title role a yet more full throttle example of dance power. She spins on point with one leg outstretched; she naturally and often moves off balance. Always a master of exits and entrances, Balanchine gives her an unforgettable final departure: In profile to us, she arches backward as if spreading her wings and mission accomplished slowly travels backward on point into the wings. Balanchine uses Stravinsky's "Firebird" suite, which cuts some 17 minutes of the original score. Though this makes the story more high concentrate, I always miss the music where Fokine stages the best kiss in all of choreography. In the moonlit garden, Ivan and his beloved join lips, while her companions all gaze in wonder. Then alarm bells sound: Kaschei's coming! The other girls grow agitated. The two lovers, however, hear and see nothing. They stand locked in the same kiss until the others tear them apart. Mr. Ratmansky's story is stranger and darker. Gradually it emerges that Kaschei's control over the Maiden and her friends is sexually possessive and abusive. To love Ivan, she must conquer complex inhibitions and fears. For Fokine and Balanchine, the "Firebird" tale has a political dimension. With Kaschei's fall, Ivan becomes sovereign of the realm. As the music's finale builds thrillingly to glory, Ivan's coronation reaches its climax: Almost nobody onstage moves. Mr. Ratmansky takes the opposite route: He uses that surging music to release all the human lovers' pent up energies in dance steps, jumps and lifts. So his story becomes one of sexual transformation. You should argue about it don't the Maidens lose their individuality when they turn into uniformly platinum blonde brides? but his production shows he's yet another master of the storyteller's art.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Cristina Verger, a wedding and event planner, arrived at the Hotel Boscolo in Milan eager to mix business with pleasure. With the hotel's room rates topping 2,000 a night, her expectations were high. But a series of small mistakes by the staff accumulated to nearly ruin what should have been a relaxing stay. It started when Ms. Verger, who was born in Italy but lives in New York, spoke in Italian at check in but the receptionist would answer only in English. The next morning, she ordered a cappuccino and a croissant to her room. The coffee "was lukewarm, brown water," she said, and the pastry was stale. One night at the hotel's rooftop bar, a friend asked a waiter for an iPhone charger. "He said, 'There's one at the front desk,'" Ms. Verger said. "I said: 'Excuse me, we're on the terrace. I'm not going to get one at the front desk.'" The breaking point was on her last day when she couldn't print her boarding pass; the hotel staff said the public printer was being repaired. "A printer costs, like, 80," she said. "Who sends it out to be fixed?" Such problems do not rise to the horror of bedbugs in the sheets. But with sky high room rates that promise five star comforts, amenities and services, high end hotels and restaurants need to be mindful of the reputational hit they can take when they fail to pamper their guests. In turn, those guests need to know how they can salvage an experience that isn't going the way they expected. To avoid bad memories, travel professionals and hotel employees say, guests should sound the alarm early. Mark Ellwood, a contributing editor at Conde Nast Traveler and the author of several travel books, said that going to the general manager with specifics such as an employee's name, where the problem occurred and when it happened gave credibility to a complaint. People should also think of what they want changed. "Complaining is never constructive when you say, 'I had a terrible night's sleep; make it better,'" he said. "But saying: 'I had a terrible night's sleep last night. Could you move me to a higher floor and pack me?' they'll do it." Mr. Ellwood also advised people to register for a hotel's loyalty program before going. It shows the guest is a frequent visitor, or has the potential to be. And the complaints of high end travelers are usually of the type that can be avoided and would seem easy to fix. What should travelers do, particularly when what they want is a great experience and not the free nights or drinks that get rolled out to make amends? Ms. Verger said that during her stay at the Hotel Boscolo, she sought out a manager to fix her problems and they were fixed. Most memorably, she said, the day after her disappointing breakfast, she got a cappuccino to her liking and fresh, tasty pastries. "When these problems were addressed politely and firmly I don't believe in yelling they were fixed," she said. "I'd go back and stay in that hotel." Ms. Verger's story struck a chord with me. It reminded me of similar hotel problems I'd had. Over Presidents' Day weekend, I was with my family at the Four Seasons in Baltimore, where rooms range from 350 a night to over 2,500. On the first night, we waited nearly an hour for ice and water to be brought up. On the second day, we returned to our room at 3 p.m., and it hadn't been cleaned. On the third day, we had to talk our way into brunch in the hotel restaurant even though we were staying there. There was another time, at the Ritz Carlton in Miami Beach, where my wife and I were celebrating a birthday without our children. Rooms with a view of the ocean hover around 1,000 a night in the winter. We had a beautiful beachfront room on a high floor. We also had a family with small, stampeding children next door. When we asked the front desk if it could move us, our only option was a room on a low floor overlooking noisy Collins Avenue. We declined. None of these mishaps ruined our trips, but they were frustrating and remain memorable. When asked about the shortcomings of my stay at the Four Seasons in Baltimore, Julien Carralero, the general manager, said that a guest with a problem, however small, should call a manager at once. "The fact that we get an early warning sign from the guest we like that," he said. "We're going to pay a little more attention to a guest who has rung the bell. I'm going to notify all the surrounding departments to make sure that guest gets the extra care." He said his hotel logged all complaints and discussed them internally to try to improve a guest's stay and learn for future visitors. (As if to prove this, he rattled off what time we had called the front desk and what we had complained about.) Setting expectations ahead of time also helps. Sase Gjorsovski, general manager of the Ritz Carlton hotels in Miami Beach and nearby Bal Harbour, said that people should call the hotel in advance to state their preferences. "This allows our guest relations team to best tailor and anticipate their needs, including anything from preferred room location to special celebrations or reservations," he said. But Mr. Ellwood said that people should not expect the royal treatment if they didn't pay for it. "If you've bought your room on an auction site and paid an astonishingly small amount for it, you should adjust your expectations," he said. "If you've paid 500 a night for a 3,000 suite, you're going to get the smallest room in that suite collection." Being calm when something goes wrong certainly helps. David Fox, a vascular surgeon in Manhattan, was relaxing over lunch during a medical conference at the Palazzo hotel in Las Vegas. He ordered a favorite dish linguine with clam sauce and a glass of wine. "I was in a totally different state of mind than my high stress surgeries," Dr. Fox said. "I see the waiter approaching with several dishes on his tray. He passed behind me. All of a sudden I feel a warm, wet sensation going down my back." That was the clam sauce from his lunch, soaking his blazer. Instead of standing up and yelling, Dr. Fox remained calm "No one was going to die here," he recalled and waited to see what the staff would do. "They took my jacket, tried to dry it, said they'd pay for the dry cleaning," he said. "I stayed nonplused because I was in Vegas. They brought me another clam linguine. They said the meal was on the house. Then they asked for my room number, which was a little strange." The next day he received a 500 gift certificate for Barneys New York to buy a new blazer. Dr. Fox never used it, he said, but the gesture stuck with him. "When I tell my friends, they say, 'Oh, didn't you yell and scream at the waiter?'" he said. "For me, it was about understanding that things happen. It's not anyone's fault. They'll make good on it." Not all restaurant mishaps have such happy endings. And restaurants themselves have different problems from hotels because most people are there for just a few hours, not a few days. Drew Nieporent, owner of the Myriad Restaurant Group, which includes Nobu, Tribeca Grill and Batard, says guests should sense early if the service or food isn't what they expect, and take action. For example, if they haven't received anything from their order in 20 minutes, they should say something. "Ask for the manager or the owner, and say, 'We want to have a good time here,' and then enumerate what went wrong," he said. "The manager will say some form of the following: 'From this point on, I'll make sure there are no more problems.' In the restaurant business, we want our guests not to suffer in silence." But he added that diners should be proactive. "The guest orchestrates his own good time in a restaurant," Mr. Nieporent said. "Survey the restaurant. If you see a lot of people, order right away so your order doesn't get stuck behind a party of eight." As for those who wait to the end to complain, there is little even a great restaurateur can do. "Then we just send them dessert," he said, "and it's too late."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The Trump administration relied on a misleadingly edited video from a contributor to the conspiracy site Infowars to help justify removing the credentials of CNN's chief White House correspondent, a striking escalation in President Trump's broadsides against the press. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, falsely accused Jim Acosta, the CNN journalist, of "placing his hands on a young woman," a White House intern, as Mr. Acosta asked questions that irked the president during a formal news conference on Wednesday. Television footage showed that Mr. Acosta and the intern made brief, benign contact "Pardon me, ma'am," the correspondent said as she tried to take a microphone away from him at Mr. Trump's behest. But Ms. Sanders posted a 15 second video clip on Twitter that misleadingly suggested Mr. Acosta had pushed the intern's upper arm. The clip was identical to one posted earlier by Paul Joseph Watson, an Infowars contributor, according to a forensic analysis by The New York Times. "We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video," Ms. Sanders wrote. Infowars, which has been banned by platforms like Twitter and Facebook, is known for spreading conspiracy theories, including one pushed by its founder, Alex Jones, that the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax. Ms. Sanders who once encouraged Americans to view the work of James O'Keefe, a right wing activist, "whether it's accurate or not" declined to say on Thursday why she had distributed the video from her official White House account. "The question is: Did the reporter make contact or not?" Ms. Sanders said in a statement. "The video is clear, he did." There is no evidence the video has been faked. But the editing, including zooming in and repeating several frames, exaggerated the contact between Mr. Acosta and the intern. The low quality of the video, which briefly freezes either deliberately or because of a glitch, adds to the ambiguity, the analysis showed. The removal of Mr. Acosta's credentials, which curbs his access to the West Wing and its staff, has little precedent in the modern White House. Past presidents have clashed with outspoken journalists like Sam Donaldson and Helen Thomas, but did not restrict their access. Still, the move against Mr. Acosta, a frequent antagonist known for challenging the president during news conferences, was not entirely a surprise. As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump barred journalists from Univision, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News and Politico from attending his rallies. As president, he has popularized the phrases "enemy of the people" and "fake news" and threatened to pull broadcast licenses and change libel laws to make it easier to sue. The daily White House press briefing has slowly vanished. In July, a CNN reporter was barred from a Rose Garden event because White House aides said she had asked questions too aggressively. Mr. Trump and his political team are no doubt aware that Mr. Acosta is a useful foil. "CNN sucks!" is a common chant at the president's rallies, and there is little political downside for the administration to restrict access to one of the network's star correspondents. The move is likely to rile Mr. Trump's opponents, buoy his supporters and have little or no effect on those occupying the nation's shrinking middle ground. 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. And, as with most things Trump, nothing was cut and dried. There was the timing: Mr. Acosta's credential was stripped hours after the president fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and had to explain away a difficult midterm election that handed his Democratic antagonists control of the House. Political strategists observed that a controversy over press rights, instigated by the White House, would make for a useful ploy to distract journalists and perhaps the public. Then there were the players: a showman president and an ambitious television correspondent in the spotlight. Mr. Acosta sometimes elicits eye rolls from others in the White House press corps, who wonder if his aggressive questions are meant less to draw out information from Mr. Trump than to create a camera ready spectacle. "Most of the people there were serious reporters asking serious questions," Chris Wallace, the "Fox News Sunday" moderator, said of Wednesday's news conference. "But Jim Acosta, I thought, embarrassed himself." Dozens of other journalists disagreed with that view, offering public support. The Washington Post's media columnist Margaret Sullivan, for one, advised CNN to sue the White House on First Amendment grounds. The move against Mr. Acosta also came shortly after a pipe bomb turned up at CNN's New York headquarters. The suspect arrested in the case, Cesar Sayoc Jr., had been photographed at a Trump rally holding an anti CNN sign, and the authorities found a "CNN Sucks" sticker on his van. At Infowars, the imprimatur of the White House was a welcome development. The site has lost a chunk of its audience since being banned by several major online platforms this summer, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Apple's App Store. Mr. Watson, who rose to prominence on the site, has kept his social media and YouTube accounts, providing one of the few remaining means for Mr. Jones to reach a mainstream audience. The video tweeted by Ms. Sanders makes it appear that Mr. Acosta is making forceful, sustained contact with the intern's arm. The Infowars video also has no sound, so that Mr. Acosta's "pardon me" is not heard. "If you look at original, higher quality videos from other vantage points, you can more clearly see that while there was some contact between the reporter and intern, he did not strike her as his hand comes down," said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth College who analyzed the clip for The Times. The news conference was broadcast on major cable outlets, including the public affairs network C SPAN, meaning that she had other options than to use a clip put together by a contributor to a notorious site. Infowars seized on the publicity that went with Ms. Sanders's use of the clip, posting incendiary items under headlines like "Did Jim Acosta Assault a Woman?" Mr. Jones did not respond to a message left on his cellphone. Mr. Watson, who is based in Britain, did not respond to requests for comment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
HOUSTON A few months after I got out of prison, a car pulled up outside my apartment. I panicked. It was white, with a dark stripe down the side: a patrol car. Surely, I thought, this was it. The police were here to arrest me. They'd call my parole officer, and he'd send me back to prison, to a world of handcuffs and isolation, a place of barren rooms and boredom. Never mind that this did not make any sense. I'd scrupulously followed all the rules of parole, from curfew to travel restrictions. I had no traffic tickets or warrants. But after having spent close to two years behind bars on a drug charge, I'd learned to stop discounting worst case scenarios just because they seemed impossible. Now, nearly eight years later, sheltering in place is what terrifies me. When I heard about the lockdowns in China, I winced. When I heard about them in Italy, I blanched. When I heard about it in the United States, I panicked. My heart raced, and gray spots of anxiety clouded my vision. There are millions of people across the country like me, people with felony convictions who served time. We are the products of a system in which so much does not make sense. You could go to solitary for having too many stamps. Or have your release date postponed because of an extra pair of earrings. We would do anything to avoid going back. Some of us think prison prepared us for the pandemic. But lots of us are trying not to freak out. For those of us in the latter group, our fears about sheltering in place aren't rational. I know that. Even if you're alone, locking down for a pandemic isn't the same as solitary confinement. It's not jail, it's not prison it's not even close. There are phones and clocks and friendly voices. There are colors and music and families and dogs and windows that open. And unlike solitary confinement, shelter in place serves a clear purpose for the public good. But the uncertainty, shifting rules and social disruption of Covid 19 "is a throwback to the total lack of control you feel in prison," Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., told me. He has studied the effects of prison conditions and solitary confinement on people behind bars. Self isolation is "a form of retraumatization," he said. "People feel hemmed in, and it reminds them all too gruesomely of their time in solitary confinement." I had a few brief spells in solitary, each time becoming a bit unglued. Of course, I understand that it's my fault I ended up in prison in the first place. And I understand that right now this enforced isolation is necessary to save people's lives. But in the moment, that doesn't always make it easier. I find myself doing all the things I did in prison, like rocking back and forth when I go to sleep. Once again, I'm stocking up on toilet paper, instant coffee and canned peas the commissary items I relied on to make it through. I'm running. I'm marking off days on a calendar. I'm doing crossword puzzles, looking for a place in the world where I know the answers. Last week, I texted my friend Stacy, whom I met in late 2011 in a prison in upstate New York. Stacy did a lot of time in solitary for nonviolent rules violations. The thought of lockdown incites panic in her. For the first time ever, she told me, she'd been prescribed Valium to handle the constant anxiety as she isolated herself inside her New York City apartment "that caged animal feeling." But some people who have been inside think that prison trained us perfectly for long term lockdown, even unrest and chaos. As little as incarceration did to prepare us to thrive in the free world when the sun shines, it did much to prepare us to survive when the world feels like it's falling apart. "Think about the dynamics of prison," my friend Paradise told me, as we messaged late at night. "It forces you to constantly conserve. Be aware. Ration. "Also creativity," she said. "It makes you use what you have to get to what you need." She's not wrong. Behind bars, we learned how to squirrel away necessities we couldn't get enough of, devising homemade tampons and concocting makeup out of FireBall candies and lip gloss. We figured out how to cook jailhouse Mexican food out of ramen and Doritos, and how to make tattoo guns out of gel pens, ashes and sharpened metal. We also learned how to survive in lockdown and how to keep getting up every day, even when we'd lost so many things that gave our lives meaning. The habits I developed to make it through prison aren't always helping now. There is a limit to how much I can run or how many crossword puzzles I can do. And when I scratch out days on the calendar, it doesn't mean anything: There's no end date to count down to. But I remind myself: I got it wrong when that car pulled up in front of my house at the tail end of 2012. When an hour passed and there was still no knock at the door, I crawled out of the tub. I saw my glasses on the table, and I realized: I'd been walking around blind. I slipped them on and crept to the sliding glass doors to peer out. The vehicle in the driveway was not a cop car; it was just a beat up Honda Civic with a giant rust stripe. This pandemic will be bad; it's likely there will be many days of isolation ahead, people I love will die, and the world will never be the same. But the only possibilities are not an apocalypse or a rusty Honda Civic. There are others in between; I need to put on my glasses and figure them out. Millions of former prisoners are having to do the same. Keri Blakinger, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, is working on a memoir. This article is published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. criminal justice system. 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
This Saturday, you have the gift of time. Feb. 29 is a leap day a calendar oddity that gives us an extra day. You probably know why: The time it takes Earth to rotate on its axis is called a day but it doesn't take an even number of days to complete a single loop around the sun, or one orbit. Instead it takes a messy 365.2422 spins. And yet the calendar year runs out after 365 days. That means that when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve, Earth hasn't quite circled all the way back to its starting point. "It's like being a quarter of a day behind at the end of every workday," said Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "After four days, you would need one full day to catch up on all your work. It's the same for the Earth's orbit and the calendar." So every four years, the month of February has 29 days instead of 28. But even that solution isn't perfect, because the year is not exactly 365.25 days. We have to make additional tweaks. If a year is divisible by 100, for example, there's no extra day unless the year is divisible by 400. In other words, the year 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 was not, nor will the year 2100 be one (its nearest leap years will be 2096 and 2104). These contortions are awkward, but they're fairly straightforward compared with the adjustments that would need to be made to the calendars of alien civilizations if they existed elsewhere in our solar system. On Mars, a year lasts 668.6 Martian days. Should the calendar year include only 668 days, it would quickly fall out of alignment with the Martian seasons. Luckily, astronomers, science fiction writers and enthusiastic hobbyists have presented several proposals for Martian calendars. "I daresay there have been more different proposals for Mars calendars than there are different calendars for the Earth," said Michael Allison, a retired NASA scientist. One of the most popular the Darian calendar was created in 1985 by Thomas Gangale, a space law expert. It breaks up the lengthy year into 24 months of 27 and 28 Martian days each of which alternates between Latin and Sanskrit names for constellations of the zodiac, like Virgo and its Sanskrit equivalent, Kanya. To keep the calendar in harmony with the Martian seasons, Dr. Gangale proposed that even numbered years have 668 Martian days (except those divisible by 10), and odd numbered years have 669 Martian days. That works out to an average of 668.6 the length of a Martian year. But it isn't the only way to reach that average. Dr. Allison has proposed another calendar "a whimsical exercise," he said. He thought it was important to maintain similarities to Earth's calendar, just in case future Martians wanted to celebrate major holidays. So he retained the 12 months we know and love, then added 10 extra months (each is 30 or 31 days) and named them after Johannes Kepler, Ray Bradbury and other famous astronomers, mathematicians and science fiction writers. In his calendar, Dr. Allison proposed that years divisible by five would have three leap days, for a total of 671 days. But all other years would have 668 days. While there have been many imaginative calendars suggested for Mars, none is in common use. "We count Martian days and Martian years," said John Callas, a project manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover project. "But we don't care right now that seasonal events may be drifting relative to calendar events." So scientists and engineers who work on surface missions on the red planet use two systems. One counts the number of Martian days that have elapsed since the start of a particular mission and the other marks the location of Mars within its orbit (and thus allows NASA to note the season). The two systems allow scientists to sidestep the complications that arise in trying to sync the two. "There may come a time if you have cultural civilizations that are living in this environment and you want to preserve the seasonal significance of a particular date on the calendar that you would likely introduce some sort of a leap system," Dr. Callas said. With so many proposals, we're certainly prepared. Calendars for other worlds in our solar system get exceedingly difficult to calculate. "On Jupiter, it would be hopeless," Dr. Binzel said. "It's a gas planet and different latitudes have different rotation periods. I think the Jovians would find themselves very confused." Then there's Venus where a single rotation of the planet takes longer than its entire year (it also spins upside down). No matter how you work the problem, that's never going to come out nice and even. Luckily, Venus doesn't have noticeable seasons, so you need not worry if your calendar doesn't sync up with the year. But there is one planet where the calendar would need zero finessing: Mercury. The small planet revolves exactly three times, or days, over the course of two years allowing its calendar to naturally align every other year. In that way, it may be like many other planets orbiting stars throughout our galaxy. Astronomers suspect that plenty of closer exoplanets revolve exactly once every year. These planets show only one face to their star, leaving the other side in perpetual darkness. And while that might make life on those worlds difficult, their calendars would always be in sync. But even if by some wild cosmic coincidence, a planet's orbit could be evenly divided into days, it likely wouldn't stay that way for long.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. In between the Toronto Raptors winning their first N.B.A. championship and Drake posting thirst traps on his Instagram to announce that he's been in "album mode" came this pair of songs, dubbed "The Best in the World Pack." Whether that's a reference to his beloved basketball team or to himself doesn't matter: a championship for one is a championship for all. "Money in the Grave" is Drake at his moody, petulant peak a morbid anthem for a hot summer. But the real sneers are on "Omerta," which is one long stretch verse, no chorus. Drake more or less free associates his boasts here, even leaning into a signature Biggie Smalls flow to emphasize his comfort. In the wake of his hometown's triumph, he's feeling as blustery as ever: "I wish that I was playing in a sport where we were getting rings/I wouldn't have space on either hand for anything." JON CARAMANICA This up with life synth pop remaking of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like a Hole" ("I'm on a roll/Riding so high/Achieving my goals") is sung by Miley Cyrus in her role as Ashley O, the pop megastar suffering under managerial cruelty in an episode of the new season of "Black Mirror." The real life "Black Mirror" is that it's the most effective Miley song of the past five or so years. CARAMANICA The new song on Spoon's hits collection, due in July, is "No Bullets Spent," which circles back toward the lean, guitar driven indie rock of the Texas band's first albums. The song arrives in a psychedelic vocal harmony haze but soon solidifies into a hard nosed sketch of a desperate situation. Over little more than than syncopated guitars and a drumbeat, Britt Daniel sings about a 22 year old saddled with a mortgage and the ominous return of a "master" at the door, wishing for some miraculous "escape from the mess." It won't be pretty: "What we need now's an accident/No one to blame and no bullets spent." JON PARELES Many of today's jazz innovators have as much in common with the funk and soul musicians of the 1970s and '80s as they do with the generation of jazz improvisers that directly preceded them. Philip Bailey the vocalist, percussionist and central member of Earth, Wind Fire became aware of this when he first heard the keyboardist Robert Glasper a few years ago. Glasper wound up producing many of the tracks on Bailey's new album, "Love Will Find a Way," and on this cover of Curtis Mayfield's "We're a Winner," the keyboardist's longtime collaborator Bilal joins in, fortifying Bailey's familiar falsetto with some lissome backing vocals ("Movin' on up!"). Underneath, Glasper traces out a sparkling reharmonization of the song's original chord pattern over a big, fathomless bed of bass from Derrick Hodge. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO There's a deep, primal quaver in Baby Rose's voice that makes it arresting from its first note. In "Mortal," she testifies to an overwhelming longing one that threatens to drown her in an eerie track that compounds both her need and her disorientation. Guitar chords outline a slow waltz; a backup choir joins her and sometimes wanders away from her; heard through headphones, phantom voices arise from behind and above. The song ends with her just as unmoored as she was when it began. PARELES The beat for "Shotta Flow" which has catapulted the young Memphis rapper NLE Choppa out of obscurity and into the maw of label bidding wars is an inebriated tinkle of a thing, part pounding and part meandering. For the last six months, it's stood out as one of the year's rowdiest and most infectious hip hop songs, thanks to the way NLE Choppa bounces on top the beat (and bounces his way through a variety of dance moves in the video). The song's official remix features Blueface, another of this year's viral lightning bolts, though in this context he's an elder. In the video, directed by Cole Bennett, the two yuk yuk it up at a backyard barbecue, careering between menacing threats and goofy dances, tough guys who are also kids on a lark. CARAMANICA The alto saxophonist Greg Ward and the bass clarinetist Jason Stein are two of Chicago's most entrancing woodwind players, each as brightly articulate as he is evasive and contrarian. They often find themselves on the same gigs, typically in other people's bands, but they recently decided to start Nature Work, a collective quartet of their own, with the indomitable Eric Revis on bass and the bushwhacking drummer Jim Black. On Stein's "Porch Time," from the band's self titled debut, a whispery convocation builds into nervous, reeling flurry; eventually the group establishes a freckly rhythm, horns dipping and dashing over a slanted bass pattern. Finally, Stein and Ward take turns blowing sparks over top. RUSSONELLO Devotees of Shabaka Hutchings will already be aware that there's a fleet of young South African musicians who have taken a renewed interest in the spiritual jazz sound of the 1970s, and are turning its tools into something fresh and deep. The new sextet Spaza includes two members of Shabaka and the Ancestors (the British saxophonist's collaboration with Mzansi musicians), plus other young vocalists and instrumentalists based in Johannesburg or Soweto. On "Sunlight, Glycerine, 2 Loose Draws," voices, electronics, acoustic instruments and percussion make a humid, sultry stew. Their cyclical patterns may call to mind the steady tread of an evening walk in the woods, the comforts of nature and the danger of darkness closing in around you. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The School of American Ballet held its annual Winter Ball on Monday night, and absolutely no one seemed to mind that it felt more like spring. In a cocktail area in the front of the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center, guests primped and posed in floor length gowns. Hair was sprayed to perfection, and many of the faces did not appear to move. A young crowd this was not. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the evening was that while David H. Koch and his wife, Julia, held court in one area of the lobby, Chelsea Clinton was in another. Ballet apparently makes for strange bedfellows. Mr. Koch, the conservative billionaire who oversees a well funded political network, said he has met the Clintons before, including at a benefit last year for the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Toward the end, this U.N. ambassador asked if I wanted to meet the Clintons," said Mr. Koch, who on this night wore a blue velvet tuxedo jacket and bow tie. "I said 'sure.' So I walked over to the next table, and Bill Clinton was there with Hillary and Chelsea. I started talking to them, and within three or four minutes, there must have been 30 people gathered around the table trying to hear my conversation with three Clintons." Moments later, Ms. Clinton returned the compliment. "I have tremendous respect for the Kochs' support of the arts," said Ms. Clinton, who was wearing a black dress from Chanel and arrived with her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. "We're standing in the Koch Theater, and I'm thrilled Julia Koch is a fellow board member. She joined the board a couple of years ago, so I've had the privilege of getting to know her." After the cocktail diplomacy, guests headed upstairs to their tables, where Glorious Food served smoked salmon with orange caviar, while images of dancers pirouetting and grand plie ing were projected onto the walls. A short film about this year's scholarship recipients was shown, and the ballet school's artistic director, Peter Martins, ascended to the lectern. "I say to people all the time it is probably the best ballet academy in the world, and I only put in probably because I try to sound polite," he said. "It is without a doubt the finest place to train dancers for classical ballet." Soon after, Ms. Koch said, "We have raised over 1.3 million," as waiters served short ribs and a group of young dancers performed a short, upbeat routine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The title of "Maineland," Miao Wang's new documentary, is a pun whose awkwardness seems deliberate. It combines a reference to the world's most populous country, the People's Republic of China, with the name of a sparsely peopled American state. The visual contrast between the two places is striking, and symbolic of the cultural differences that are the film's subject. The China that Ms. Wang depicts is a megalopolis of gleaming skyscrapers and breakneck economic growth. Maine moves at a slower pace. It's a landscape of woods and quiet lakes, with a few buildings nestled among the hills, notably the dormitories and classrooms of Fryeburg Academy, a private school founded in 1792. As the school's admissions director explains during a trip to China to interview applicants, Fryeburg, which has both boarding and day students, depends on the tuition paid by the parents of foreign students. In the past, those pupils (and that money) came mostly from Japan and South Korea, but since the end of the 2008 economic crisis, China has emerged as a leading exporter of ambitious teenagers from affluent families. Two of them Harry and Stella are the focus of Ms. Wang's astute and absorbing film. Their time at Fryeburg changes them in subtle ways. They adjust to some degree to life in America and to the individualistic ethos of American education, but the experience also affirms their sense of Chinese identity. They arrive carrying the baggage of parental expectations, and assert their own contrary desires and ambitions in a spirit of negotiation and compromise rather than rebellion. Ms. Wang, whose previous feature is the sensitive and elliptical "Beijing Taxi" (2010), is less interested in explaining than in listening and observing. "Maineland" takes up a large and complicated set of topics the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education and addresses them with understated delicacy. Harry and Stella and their friends may be part of an important social and demographic trend, but they're also kids: shy, smart, silly, thoughtful and self absorbed. Their interactions with the Mainers at Fryeburg are sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes comical, as efforts at cross cultural communications tend to be. It's sometimes hard to judge how successfully the Chinese students have been integrated into the daily life of the school. They tend to stick together, and to be regarded with a curiosity that sometimes verges on suspicion. A sign in a common area of one building declares it an English only zone, which could be interpreted both as an encouragement to develop social and language skills and as an alienating, hostile gesture. But good will and hard work are the prevailing values of "Maineland." The portmanteau title maps out a patch of common ground defined by the understanding that education is a path to worldly success. It can be more than that, of course, and the movie hints at complications that are all the more intriguing for remaining largely unstated. One of the dogmas of American schooling is the importance of critical thinking, a slogan dutifully cited by Chinese applicants to Fryeburg in their interviews. By the time they graduate, Harry and Stella have begun to question themselves and the world in ways neither their parents nor their teachers could necessarily have predicted. You might wish you had gotten to know them a little better Ms. Wang stops short of emotional or psychological intimacy but it is hard not to be curious about what will happen to them after Maine. I'll keep my fingers crossed for a sequel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The 5 year old and his family had traveled thousands of miles to escape. When they finally arrived on American soil, free from the marauders who had burned their house to the ground, the boy was placed in a holding pen with his brother and sisters, while immigration officials decided their fate. From this story, a classic piece of music emerged. The family, fleeing religious persecution in Russia in 1893, was soon reunited and allowed to enter the country. And that little boy, born Israel Beilin, would grow up to become Irving Berlin. Twenty five years after emigrating, the same year he became an American citizen, he composed "God Bless America." The song, which rings out with special fervor each Fourth of July as a kind of unofficial national anthem, is turning 100 this year, and at a fraught moment in America's relations with would be immigrants, it is worth remembering its origins. Berlin said he first heard the title phrase from his mother, who frequently spoke the words with an emotion he later said "was almost exaltation," despite their poverty. His daughter Mary Ellin Barrett later wrote that Berlin meant every word: "It was the land he loved. It was his home sweet home. He, the immigrant who had made good, was saying thank you." It was a desire to serve his adopted country during World War I that impelled the 30 year old Berlin, already a successful songwriter, to be naturalized as a citizen in February 1918. That May, he began his military service as an army private at Camp Upton in Yaphank, N.Y., where he was asked to write a soldier show as a fund raiser. "God Bless America" was originally conceived as the finale for the revue, "Yip, Yip, Yaphank," but Berlin ultimately decided not to include it. It was shelved and forgotten for 20 years, until he rediscovered the song and provided a revised version to the radio star Kate Smith, who sang it on Nov. 10, 1938, and reprised it weekly. Berlin's immigrant success story connected the song, in the period just after its premiere, to a burgeoning public appeal for tolerance in the face of the rise of Nazism in Europe. The first reference to the song in The New York Times describes a performance at a dinner sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, where religious leaders repudiated the "doctrine of race and hate" in totalitarian Europe and urged Americans not to let it happen within their own communities. Three months later, Berlin led a crowd in "God Bless America" after a speech against bigotry by Eleanor Roosevelt, in which she warned, "Fear arising from intolerance and injustice constitutes the chief danger to our country." The song also inspired anti Semitic and xenophobic rhetoric aimed at Berlin, a Jew who dared to ask God to bless America. At a joint rally of the Ku Klux Klan and the pro Nazi German American Bund in 1940, leaders called for a boycott of the song. A week later, an article mockingly titled "G A W D Bless A M E R I K E R!" appeared in the Bund's newspaper; the author derided the song as reflecting the "attitude of the refugee horde." (Berlin faced fire on the left, as well: Woody Guthrie's "God Blessed America For Me" was an angry protest against the complacency he found in Berlin's lyrics. Guthrie soon changed the chorus to "This Land Is Your Land.") Through the early 1960s, the chameleon like lyrics made it a vehicle for a wide range of messages, depending on which direction a given singer wanted the country to be "guided through the night." In the 1940s it was sung by anti Communist protesters as well as by striking laborers. Civil rights activists used the song frequently; it was sung by African American children at school segregation protests in Mississippi and Louisiana, and by participants in Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Detroit in 1963. But this multiplicity of meanings became largely unified during the cultural rifts that began in the mid 60s, as "God Bless America" increasingly became a symbol for a white, conservative worldview. Previously malleable meanings behind the lyrics became fixed, and gone was the song's pluralist subtext. Instead, there emerged a tacit understanding that the song represented a warning to those challenging the status quo, just as Woody Guthrie had felt all along. In dramatic contrast to the original connection with a message of tolerance, in the late '60s the segregationist politician Lester Maddox claimed the song as a personal anthem, and in the '70s it was used by right wing activists opposed to school integration and public housing. The song's rightward tilt persisted, but was temporarily suspended in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became a sonic emblem of unity and collective mourning sung at memorials both official and ad hoc, on the steps of the Capitol, at neighborhood candlelight vigils, at Broadway theaters and professional baseball games. And even as it was embraced as a conservative anthem, it has continued to be used as a symbol for the inclusion of immigrants in American culture, often sung during citizenship and naturalization ceremonies. In 2006, activists sang "God Bless America" at immigrants' rights rallies across the country. But the song's xenophobic edge has sadly persisted, as in the backlash to Marc Anthony's performance at the 2013 Major League Baseball All Star Game. Twitter exploded with outrage, with some questioning Mr. Anthony's right to perform the song on the basis of his perceived foreignness (despite the fact that he is an American citizen, born in New York of Puerto Rican heritage). If Irving Berlin's family had sought asylum in the United States today, they would likely have been deported deemed criminals just for landing on American soil in their flight from persecution. The 5 year old boy may have been kept in that holding pen, separated from his parents, until they were sent away to an unknown fate. As "God Bless America" celebrates its 100th birthday this summer, anyone who sings it should remember that it began as and at root will always be a love song to this country from an immigrant grateful to have been given a chance at a new life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
If the idea of renting out your home on Airbnb, HomeAway or similar vacation rental sites sounds intriguing, but the thought of posting photos, managing bookings and getting your apartment ready seems far too daunting, read on. Start ups with names like Guesty, Flatbook, onefinestay and proprly will do everything from greeting guests with the keys to swapping out your cowboy print polyester sheets for natural linens. Some allow you to book services like cleanings and key exchanges a la carte. Others take the entire rental process out of your hands, dealing with bookings, storing your belongings and cleaning up after the guests go home in exchange for as much as half of your revenue. A few will even dispatch a team of decorators to your apartment. "We make it completely seamless and hassle free for the owner and the guest as well," said Evan Frank, a founder of onefinestay, a five year old company offering end to end rental management for upscale homes in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London. Pamela Bell, who uses onefinestay to rent out her 1848 East Village townhouse for about 1,300 a night when she and her three children are away, vouches for the service. "I had a book turned on its side on a bench in front of my bed. It was exactly the same way when I got back," said Ms. Bell, a founding partner of the Kate Spade brand, who now runs Prinkshop, which designs advocacy campaigns and uses fashion to raise awareness and funds. The money she earns from her rental, billed as "bohemian bourgeoise" on the site, helps cover the upkeep of her home, which was once featured in The New York Times. Besides, Ms. Bell said, "I like the idea of sharing the house." Renting out your entire townhouse while you are away is one thing; renting out your entire apartment is another. Short term rentals in apartments, especially those sold through Airbnb, have been under scrutiny in New York City since the state's attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, released a report in October that said nearly three quarters of Airbnb rentals in the city were illegal. It is legal, however, to rent out a spare room in your apartment for less than 30 days, as long as you are present during your guest's entire stay. The law allows short term rentals of single family and two family homes whether the owners stick around or not. Onefinestay won't take on just any old place. You must apply to be accepted on its roster. If your abode is deemed worthy, the company will list it on its site, as well as on HomeAway, VRBO and other rental sites, handling reservations, collecting and remitting occupancy taxes and meeting guests for check in. For such high touch service, onefinestay takes anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent of the proceeds, depending on how often and for how long you plan to rent out the space. Flatbook, which started in Montreal in 2012 and is now in 33 cities including New York and Boston, casts a wider net. Apartments must meet "a minimum quality threshold," said Francis Davidson, a founder and the chief executive. "If it's a dirty crash pad we're not going to put our brand on that." Apartments with very high rents or those far outside the city are also rejected, as the return on investment is not worth the company's efforts. Last year, Mayce Makani, who rents a one bedroom in an apartment building in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, for 1,500 a month, decided to try out Flatbook after coming across it in a Facebook post. Ms. Makani, 29, a high school Spanish teacher, spends summers with her family in California and had previously let her boyfriend stay in the apartment free while she was away. But after getting the go ahead from her landlord, she decided to let Flatbook cover her rent and sublet the place. "I wasn't sure how I would feel about strangers staying in my apartment," Ms. Makani said. But upon her return, it seemed as if nothing had been moved or misplaced. "It made me feel comfortable walking back into my apartment," she said. "If someone had read through my book, they put it right back." In other words, she added, "It still felt like home." That's why she is kicking her boyfriend out once again this summer and turning the keys over to Flatbook. These leave the driving to us companies seek to help fill a gap in the growing short term rental market. Traditional property management firms typically serve large landlords with multiple buildings and focus on long term leases. And while real estate agents will occasionally handle sublets on behalf of a potential client, they tend not to make a habit of it without a sales commission in sight. "The nature of Airbnb is it's often last minute," said Randy Engler, who founded proprly in 2013, after finding it difficult to keep up with the demand and logistics for his West Village apartment on Airbnb. "You might get a booking request for Memorial Day weekend and you're out of town already and don't have anyone to give the key to a guest." Tel Aviv based Guesty, created by twin brothers from Israel, Amiad and Koby Soto, calls itself an "Airbnb management service." It does not have a staff on the ground. Rather, it facilitates short term rentals remotely, charging a 3 percent commission for each reservation it handles through Airbnb. After you create an account on Airbnb, Guesty will help increase your search ranking by closely monitoring your listing to boost visibility, as well as screen potential guests and respond to reservation requests. Once a booking is made, Guesty offers to schedule cleanings and coordinate key exchanges with third party contractors, like proprly or Keycafe, which places lockboxes in neighborhood cafes and shops for storage and pickup. A 24 hour guest hotline allows Guesty to respond quickly to guests so you don't have to, including answering common questions depicted in a playful YouTube video, such as what is the Wi Fi password or how late is checkout? While outsourcing vacation rental tasks can alleviate a lot of work, plenty of risk is still involved in opening your home to strangers. You should do due diligence by contacting the company to ask what, if anything, it will cover if a cleaner accidentally breaks something or a toilet overflows while you are away. Onefinestay has an insurance policy that provides coverage in case of loss, theft or damage (whether malicious or accidental). Flatbook extends a 10,000 damage protection policy to clients for a fee. Proprly waives all liability in its terms of service, but Mr. Engler said the company covers clients' homes in case of damage by cleaners. And before you rush to list your fifth floor walk up as a charming weekend getaway, be sure you understand the regulations involved. Most leases prohibit subleasing without the consent of the landlord. And many co op and condo boards restrict owners from renting out their units. But that's beginning to change. Onefinestay has started making deals with condominiums and co ops in New York to act as the exclusive home sharing partner for the buildings. In turn, the buildings a handful so far receive a portion of the rental proceeds. "In many cases condos and co ops aren't philosophically opposed to home sharing," Mr. Frank said. "What they need is accountability." Stan Kliszowski is the board treasurer of a seven unit condominium building on the Upper West Side that recently signed on with onefinestay. "Some of the owners of other apartments had heard about Airbnb and the kind of problems you can have with it," said Mr. Kliszowski, who owns a duplex with two terraces and travels for a good portion of the year for his job at a global management consultancy. "They were willing to rent their apartments but not really sure about how they wanted to do it. Now they have this support team." Last year, while Mr. Kliszowski was out of town, his terrace irrigation system sprang a leak. Onefinestay stepped in and had it fixed. Having a team to manage empty apartments while the owners are away, he said, "adds security to both my apartment and to the building." By focusing on details that rental hosts may not have the time or disposition for, the start ups aim to bring hotel standards to the online vacation rental market. Onefinestay requires each property in its portfolio to adhere to strict standards outlined in what Mr. Frank describes as an "inch thick" manual, from the number of wine glasses available for guests to the thickness of the mattress (at least five inches). Proprly spells out the duties of its cleaners, from the removal of cobwebs to vacuuming under couch cushions. Airbnb, which has been working on a blueprint for its own set of hospitality standards, has taken note. The company declined to comment on the fledging companies, but acknowledged that it has been testing an on demand cleaning start up, Handy, in New York, among other cities. Cathy Moore, who owns a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, decided to dip her toe into the Airbnb waters earlier this year after her downstairs tenant cut her lease short. Signing up for Handy through Airbnb seemed like a no brainer to Ms. Moore, 53, who designs and makes laptop covers out of her home for her line Fern. "I don't know why everyone doesn't do this," said Ms. Moore, who rents out the garden apartment for about 200 a night with a three night minimum and pays about 70 for cleanings, including laundered sheets, via Handy before each new guest arrives. "I don't have to do anything. I just say when I want them to come and what I want them to do. It is so simple."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
SEATTLE Amazon is back in the business of buying growth. The company has been investing heavily to keep its giant core businesses growing at the expense of profits. For its retail business, that means spending to ship items to customers in just one day, an expensive proposition that the company said had already kicked up more sales. "They are leaning into shipping because that is a lever that has worked for them in the past," said Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research. On Thursday, the company reported that it had 70 billion in sales in the latest quarter, up 24 percent from a year earlier, and 2.1 billion in profit, down 28 percent. Amazon had more sales but made less profit than analysts expected. It was the first year over year decline in profit since the middle of 2017. Shares fell about 8 percent in after hours trading. Shares of Twitter also fell Thursday, about 20 percent, as its earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations. For Amazon's cloud computing services, the company is spending to hire for sales and marketing, the types of work that Jeff Bezos, its founder, long eschewed but that have become necessary as Amazon looks to sign up bigger legacy businesses. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. The number of individual products that Amazon sells is a key measure of its retail business, and unit growth had started slowing about two years ago. In April, Amazon announced that it was moving to make one day shipping the default for its Prime members, a way to lift growth again. Brian Olsavsky, the company's finance chief, said the offering had increased sales to Prime customers. "They are buying more often, and they are buying more products," he said. Amazon expects to spend about 1.5 billion for one day delivery during this quarter, which includes the holiday season, Mr. Olsavsky said. That includes costs for faster shipping as well as other expenses, like the lost revenue from customers who used to pay extra to get something in one day. The one day offering lets Amazon get a bigger piece of consumers' wallets on products typically bought at grocery stores or pharmacies. A typical order for items shipped in two days or more is 23.33, and Amazon spends 5.08 to fulfill and ship the items, according to a Morgan Stanley analysis. But for one day shipping, the typical order is 8.32, and Amazon spends 10.59 to fulfill and ship it, meaning it loses money on many sales. Ms. Kodali, the Forrester analyst, pointed out that Amazon had said it would spend 800 million in the first quarter of one day shipping and that it later said the cost would be even higher. "For what? Is that necessary?" she asked. "Who needs Cheetos that fast?" As Amazon has shown before, consumers nonetheless respond. In the latest quarter, unit sales were up 22 percent, more than twice the growth rate at the start of the year, before the one day shipping initiative began. Amazon Web Services has been the leader in cloud computing, an approach to storing, computing and using data that the company pioneered. AWS grew with early, tech forward adopters like Netflix and start ups. Increasingly, Amazon is going after large corporations, which have far more complex processes to transform how they buy and use technology. This month, Amazon publicly celebrated as its own retail operations finally migrated off Oracle's databases, a not so subtle sign that large and complex organizations can operate on AWS. But Amazon faces growing competition, particularly from Microsoft, whose cloud products are catching up and benefit from Microsoft's decades of experience specializing in selling to large companies. "We are in a period where we are investing heavily in AWS," Mr. Olsavsky said. The costs include a bigger sales force "to service a larger customer base," the addition of new products and features, and an expansion to new geographical areas. "Most enterprise work flows have yet to move to the cloud, so there is still much adoption to come," he said. AWS had about 9 billion in sales in the quarter, up 35 percent, its slowest growth rate yet. Its operating margin fell to 25 percent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve on Thursday temporarily restricted shareholder payouts by the nation's biggest banks, barring them from buying back their own stocks or increasing dividend payments in the third quarter as regulators try to ensure banks remain strong enough to keep lending through the pandemic induced downturn. The decision to limit payouts is an admission by the Fed that large financial institutions, while far better off than they were in the financial crisis, remain vulnerable to an economic downturn unlike any other in modern history. With virus cases across the United States still surging and business activity subdued, it remains unclear when and how robustly the economy will recover. Some of the Fed's own loss projections for banks, in fact, suggest that the eventual hit to loans in a bad scenario could be far worse than in the aftermath of 2008. Still, the Fed stopped short of barring banks from paying dividends next quarter, as some lawmakers and former regulators have urged a decision that drew public criticism from one of the Fed's current governors, who said not taking stronger measures could "impair the recovery." The Fed, which devised its primary stress test scenarios before the virus tore through the economy, will require the 34 biggest banks to resubmit and update their capital plans later this year, something it has usually required only for banks that failed to pass. Those plans detail how the banks intend to proceed with share buybacks and dividend increases in light of the pandemic, and the Fed said that resubmitting them "will help firms reassess their capital needs." It will also allow the Fed to reserve the right to run additional analyses, and potentially restrict payouts further, down the road. "Today's actions by the board to preserve the high levels of capital in the U.S. banking system are an acknowledgment of both the strength of our largest banks as well as the high degree of uncertainty we face," Randal K. Quarles, the Fed's vice chairman of supervision, said in a statement. The central bank's annual stress tests assess how the banks would fare under dire scenarios that include high unemployment and severe market turbulence. While those tests are meant to be hypothetical, this year's scenarios were set before the pandemic, and some of the economic projections now look benign compared to reality. To compensate for that, the Fed ran an additional analysis to gauge how the banks would perform under coronavirus recessions of varying severity. The hypothetical scenarios included a sharp bounce back, an extended "U" shaped downturn, and a double dip "W" recession. In aggregate, under those severe analyses, loan losses for the 34 banks ranged from 560 billion to 700 billion, and overall capital ratios declined from 12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 to between 9.5 percent and 7.7 percent. The Fed did not release results for individual banks, as it does with the annual stress tests. But it did show that about a quarter of banks would nearly breach minimum capital ratios in a double dip recession scenario, based on the report. Given those results, the central bank will cap dividends to the amount paid in the second quarter, with an additional limitation based on recent earnings. While the eight largest banks had voluntarily suspended share buybacks through the second quarter, the Fed's move will broaden and extend that limitation. The Financial Services Forum, which represents the chief executives of the biggest U.S. banks, issued a muted statement saying that its members "appreciate the Federal Reserve's work to promote financial stability during such extraordinary economic uncertainty and understand its decision regarding capital returns through the third quarter." 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. Others felt that the Fed could have gone further to shore up the financial system. Officials could have placed formal restrictions on shareholder payouts earlier in the coronavirus crisis, and the decision to do so now is a sign that regulators believe the financial system could face threats if the downturn drags on. But the fact that the Fed's demands are not stricter could limit the amount of buffer that banks have on hand to absorb losses and make loans to households and companies should borrowers struggle to repay debts over the coming months. "A lot of this seems to be about preserving options," said Daniel Tarullo, a former Fed governor and the original architect of much of the stress testing regime who is now at Harvard. "That's inconsistent with the idea of acting early in response to a major shock." Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who was nominated and confirmed during the Obama administration, objected to the fact that banks are still allowed to pay out dividends in any fashion. "The payouts will amount to a depletion of loss absorbing capital," she wrote in a statement. "This is inconsistent with the purpose of the stress tests, which is to be forward looking by preserving resilience, not backward looking by authorizing payouts based on net income from past quarters that had already been paid out." Banks have been pushing the Fed to allow them to continue paying dividends, worried that restricting the regular payouts will hit their stock prices. But watchdog groups have been critical of the Fed's leniency, pointing out that in the 2008 financial crisis, officials allowed money to walk out the door by failing to curb payouts, worsening the financial situation for struggling banks that ultimately failed. For the largest banks, buybacks make up a bigger share of overall capital distributions while dividends are a smaller chunk. Of the 143 billion that the six biggest banks spent on capital distributions last year, 107 billion went to buybacks and 36 billion to dividends. Even without across the board dividend restrictions, the performance on the normal stress tests could hamper some banks' ability to continue payouts. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, the four largest banks in the United States, all came through the stress tests with sufficient capital, according to a New York Times analysis of the Fed's results. But capital at the fifth largest, Goldman Sachs, fell slightly below the required level, according to the analysis. The result could complicate any plans the Wall Street firm had for paying out capital to its shareholders if it doesn't rise to the required amount by late this year as part of a new regulatory framework. The Fed's stress tests were introduced after the 2008 financial crisis as a way of making sure regulators had an up to date grasp of the risks in the banking system something they lacked before the housing market crash. The exams focus on how much capital a bank would have left after the different stress scenarios. Capital is money banks don't have to pay back to creditors and depositors. The more capital they have, the more losses they can theoretically absorb.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every week for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... a Few Minutes, and I Like Triumph 'Take the Podium' When to watch: Now, on YouTube. This web series follows Olympians who are receiving retroactive medals after the athletes they initially lost to were disqualified for using performance enhancing drugs. Christine Girard, a Canadian weight lifter, placed fourth in 2008 and third in 2012 until new testing revealed that she should have won a bronze medal in Beijing and a gold in London. While the show is laughably vague about drug testing and corruption, the athletes themselves are forthcoming about their careers, their heartache and the surprising compassion they have toward their competitors. ... an Hour, and I Like Kindred Spirits	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Much of "Dollface" and its critique of contemporary womanhood is barely skin deep, but it has such a good skin care routine it's hard to mind. Beyond its festive magical realism, it has almost nothing to say it's a "rose all day" shirt come to life, a show where a desire to go to SantaCon is treated as normal and possibly good. The characters could should look at one another and ask, "Why are we friends?"; I should ask the show the same thing. In both cases the answer is, I don't know ... but we are. Kat Dennings ("2 Broke Girls") stars as Jules, who gets dumped within the first five minutes of the pilot and then has to board a bus of weepy women, driven by a humanoid cat who tells her she has neglected her female friendships and needs to rediscover them. It's the first fantasy the show engages in, and it's both appealingly imaginative and vaguely contemptuous. Other reality bending moments include a FOMO game show called "Should She Go Out?," a dealership for "new and pre owned dudes," a chasm opening under a brunch table and a full on "Wizard of Oz" episode. These surreal asides are fun and cheeky, and they sometimes skewer the dumb social constraints of being a woman. But they are also frustratingly imprecise, and when the show goes too long without one, the emotional blankness of Jules's world becomes too apparent. I devoured the first six episodes in a gleeful blitz, though the subsequent four slowed considerably. (The entire first season arrived Friday on Hulu.) It's a common affliction in the streaming age that becomes much more noticeable in shows that lack propulsive narratives, like "Dollface." Jules's boss is dippy, her ex boyfriend is worthless, her pets are named after "Entourage" characters. Psst, Jules: Maybe you should burn this all down and start fresh.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Googleagreed on Wednesday to pay a record 170 million fine and make changes to protect children's privacy on YouTube, as regulators said the video site had knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children and used it to profit by targeting them with ads. Critics denounced the agreement, dismissing the fine as paltry and the required changes as inadequate for protecting children's privacy. The penalty and changes were part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and New York's attorney general, which had accused YouTube of violating the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Regulators said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, had illegally gathered children's data including identification codes used to track web browsing over time without their parents' consent. The site also marketed itself to advertisers as a top destination for young children, even as it told some advertising firms that they did not have to comply with the children's privacy law because YouTube did not have viewers under 13. YouTube then made millions of dollars by using the information harvested from children to target them with ads, regulators said. To settle the charges, YouTube agreed to the 170 million penalty, with 136 million going to the trade commission and 34 million to New York State. It is the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the commission in a children's privacy case, dwarfing the previous record fine of 5.7 million against the owner of the social video sharing app TikTok this year. Under the settlement, which the F.T.C. approved in a 3 to 2 vote, YouTube also agreed to create a system that asks video channel owners to identify the children's content they post so that targeted ads are not placed in such videos. YouTube must also obtain consent from parents before collecting or sharing personal details like a child's name or photos, regulators said. The move is the latest enforcement action taken by regulators in the United States against technology companies for violating users' privacy, indicating the Trump administration's willingness to aggressively pursue the powerful corporations. It follows a 5 billion privacy settlement between the trade commission and Facebook in July over how the company collected and handled user data. "The F.T.C. let Google off the hook with a drop in the bucket fine and a set of new requirements that fall well short of what is needed to turn YouTube into a safe and healthy place for kids," Mr. Markey said in a statement. Children's advocates who lodged their own privacy complaint against YouTube with the F.T.C. last year said that Google had simply agreed to abide by a children's privacy law it was already obligated to comply with. COPPA prohibits operators of online services from collecting personal data, like home addresses, from children under 13 without a parent's verifiable permission. "Merely requiring Google to follow the law, that's a meaningless sanction," said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group whose efforts in the 1990s helped lead to the passage of the children's privacy law. "It's the equivalent of a cop pulling somebody over for speeding at 110 miles an hour, and they get off with a warning." The agreement split the trade commission along partisan lines, with the agency's three Republican commissioners voting to approve it and the two Democratic commissioners dissenting. 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. In a statement, two of the Republican commissioners, Joseph J. Simons, the agency's chairman, and Christine S. Wilson, said that the settlement "achieves a significant victory for the millions of parents whose children watch child directed content on YouTube." They said it was the first time a platform would have to ask its content producers to identify themselves as creators of children's material. The agreement, they added, "sends a strong message to children's content providers and to platforms about their obligation to comply with the COPPA rule." Although the settlement prohibits YouTube and Google from using or sharing children's data they have already obtained, Rohit Chopra, a Democratic commissioner, said that it did not hold company executives personally accountable for illegal mining of children's data. The other Democratic commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, said that the agreement did not go far enough by requiring YouTube itself to proactively identify children's videos on its platform. "No individual accountability, insufficient remedies to address the company's financial incentives and a fine that still allows the company to profit from its lawbreaking," Mr. Chopra wrote in his dissent. "The terms of the settlement were not even significant enough to make Google issue a warning to its investors." COPPA, the strongest federal consumer privacy statute in the United States, gives the trade commission the authority to level fines of up to 42,530 for each violation. Noah Phillips, a Republican member of the commission, argued that Congress should give the agency more guidance about how to levy fines. In a blog post on Wednesday about the settlement, YouTube's chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, said that "nothing is more important than protecting kids and their privacy." She added, "From its earliest days, YouTube has been a site for people over 13, but with a boom in family content and the rise of shared devices, the likelihood of children watching without supervision has increased." In addition to relying on reports from video creators, Ms. Wojcicki said that YouTube planned to use artificial intelligence to try to identify content that targeted young audiences, like videos featuring children's toys, games or characters. Under the settlement, YouTube must adopt the changes by early next year. The privacy case against YouTube began in 2016 after the New York attorney general's office, which has been active in enforcing the federal children's privacy law in the state, notified the trade commission about apparent violations of the law on the site. "Google and YouTube knowingly and illegally monitored, tracked and served targeted ads to young children just to keep advertising dollars rolling in," Letitia James, New York's attorney general, said in a statement on Wednesday. "These companies put children at risk and abused their power." Google has been forced to deal with privacy violations repeatedly in recent years. The company is subject to a 20 year federal consent order signed in 2011 for deceptive data mining related to Buzz, a now defunct social network. The order required Google to establish a comprehensive privacy program and prohibited it from misrepresenting how it handles personal data. In 2012, Google agreed to pay 22.5 million to settle trade commission charges that it had violated the 2011 order by deceiving users of Apple's Safari browser about its data mining practices. The company is also the subject of a lawsuit brought by Hector Balderas, New Mexico's attorney general, over accusations that it violated children's privacy. The suit says the company failed to ensure that children's apps available through its Google Play store complied with the children's privacy law. Google has asked that the case be dismissed. The settlement on Wednesday is likely to have implications beyond YouTube. The changes required under the agreement could limit how much video makers earn on the platform because while they still make money on some kinds of ads on children's videos, they no longer be able to profit from ads targeted at children. To offset some of the expected losses, YouTube said it would funnel 100 million to creators of children's content over the next three years. It said it would also heavily promote YouTube Kids, its child focused app, to shift parents away from using the main YouTube app when allowing their children to watch videos. The crackdown on creators of children's content could make it financially difficult to produce such videos, said Maureen Ohlhausen, a former acting chairwoman of the trade commission. "There is a lot of free content available for children," she said. "You want to be sure that you don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Poots and Eisenberg, who first appeared together a decade ago in Brian Koppelman's "Solitary Man," remain an appealing onscreen couple. Which is good, because for long stretches they are the only people in the movie. Just when you're wondering when another being might intrude on their anxiety, one does: a baby. One who grows into possibly the most relentlessly creepy child to ever blight a marriage, or a cinema screen. Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, from a script by Garret Shanley, "Vivarium" depicts Gemma and Tom becoming increasingly unglued, tormented by a tidy little boy who can speak in each of their voices. He has other irritating traits, too. The movie expands upon its echoes of the classic TV series "The Prisoner" with admirable purposefulness. And its commitment to the inexorable horrors of its story line is actually surprising. (The sci fi angle of the story is suggested by its title.) There's a consistent inventiveness and grim humor to this treatment of a seemingly well worn theme. Rated R for themes, language, a brief nightmare sexual depiction. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, a natural storyteller, has produced more evening length ballets in this century than most choreographers did in the 20th. Nearly all have narrative charm, vivid characterizations and marvelous designs. And most blend inventive fantasy with touching human intimacy. This week the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg, Russia, takes "The Little Humpbacked Horse," his adorably high spirited 2009 two act creation, to the Kennedy Center. Usually, this is the world's most beautifully stuffy and elegantly unspontaneous company; here, as when it danced this ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, it bubbles over with impish sweetness. It's as if Mr. Ratmansky had reinvented the Mariinsky though the metamorphosis remains exclusive to this ballet. "Humpbacked," a romp through Russian mythology, abounds in fantastic creatures: half magic horses, a flock of firebirds, sea people. There's also a foolish Tsar (echoes of Mr. Ratmansky's "The Golden Cockerel," staged in 2016 by American Ballet Theater), surrounded by absurd, cartoonish Boyars. Every character, keenly delineated in dance and movement, is marvelously alive. Best of all are the three central ones: Ivan the Fool (not so dumb); the title character (shrewd, magical, irresistibly energetic); and the beautiful Tsar Maiden, or Tsarevna, who seems to fall in love with Ivan less for his looks than for his playfulness. Though I wish I could see all three Kennedy Center casts, I'm happy to report that Tuesday's was led by Vladimir Shklyarov. In no other role is he so ebulliently, exuberantly fresh. On Tuesday, the Tsar Maiden was Anastasia Matvienko, playing the role with a screwball combination of beauty and tearaway impulsiveness. The title character was danced by the young Yaroslav Baibordin, intoxicatingly frisky.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Re "Industry Ties Pose Possible Conflicts for Scientist Leading Vaccine Team" (news article, May 21): Who would be more qualified to head a fast track effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine than someone who had run a major pharmaceutical company? It makes no sense to suggest that a person with that experience should be disqualified because of a potential conflict of interest. The theoretical possibility that a man, who is probably by now a multimillionaire, would subvert such an important program because of a theoretical financial interest is far outweighed by the benefits that his experience brings to the process of developing an essential vaccine. As one who has spent a career going in and out of government service, I have always questioned the wisdom of assuming that people who abandon lucrative careers in private industry because they perceive the importance of public service will somehow sell out their office in an effort to enhance some theoretical financial interest. The nation desperately needs the services of someone like Dr. Moncef Slaoui.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Emily Hardman said there were only two times she felt momentary anxiety: when she didn't have a dress, and when she couldn't quite figure out the flow of the reception program. "But then I decided to let it go, figuring it would work out, and that people couldn't really be disappointed with five days of wedding planning," she said. "It's amazing how fast you can actually plan a wedding." THURSDAY (New Year's Eve, 2015) Emily and Rob Reading were engaged while on vacation, hiking in the Sedona Verde Valley of Arizona. (Earlier that day, while buying groceries at Walmart for the adventure, he bought an 8.88 ring.) Once they hiked out of the valley and had cellphone reception, she started making calls. Her first call was to the Empire Room at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building in Salt Lake City to plan a luncheon reception. Her second call was to her parents. Then she called the Salt Lake Temple before contacting two of her closest friends, who agreed to be her photographer and to do her hair and makeup. After all this, she sent a flurry of texts to invite guests. FRIDAY (New Year's Day 2016) They found a 32 ring for Rob at a mall kiosk in Phoenix. Rob called a friend in California, with whom he was staying after recently being transferred from London to the Bay Area for work. Rob asked him to grab his nice shoes (most of his belongings were being shipped from London by boat) and bring them to Salt Lake City. "I had packed the suit in case we went to church," Rob said later. "I don't remember thinking it would be used in a wedding." Emily began searching for a dress. She also secured an M.C. and performers for the reception. Rob drove to St. George, Utah, to visit his best friend and have an impromptu bachelor's party. SATURDAY Emily searched for a dress again at malls and shops, eventually buying a 10 Charlotte Russe white lace top. She flew from Phoenix to Salt Lake City, planning the program on the plane. She sent wedding logistics to her guests, performers and M.C., and finished writing her speech.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Given his nonstop travel schedule, the Chinese classical pianist Lang Lang will tell you that he doesn't really have a home. "I'm on the road for work more than 300 days a year," he said. On the rare occasions when he does stay put, he likes to be in New York City, where he has an apartment near Carnegie Hall. In fact, his love for the city is the inspiration for his new album "New York Rhapsody," a collection of recomposed tunes that pay homage to New York, such as "Empire State of Mind" and "New York Morning." Mr. Lang, 34, also gets to promote the city by being its first "cultural tourism ambassador," a role that's meant to encourage more Chinese tourists to visit his adopted hometown and designated by NYC Company, New York City's official destination marketing organization. Below are edited excerpts from an interview with him. Q. What inspired you about New York to compose your new album? A. New York is a beautiful and unique city and truly the world's melting pot. I'm lucky to live here, and I thought it was a great choice to make it the center of the album. There's classical music on it, of course, but also blues, soul, jazz and hip hop.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Some richly attired New York City Ballet fans have taken to lying down on the floor at intermissions. Other well heeled patrons are making the climb from the orchestra to the Fourth Ring for a better view. And social media sites are beginning to fill up with odd images, including several that appear to show Sebastien Marcovici, a principal dancer, partnering perfect strangers. The catalyst for all these strange doings at City Ballet is in the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater, where the inlaid travertine marble floor has been covered with a 6,500 square foot vinyl photograph of more than 80 City Ballet dancers, roughly life size, who are arranged on a sea of crumpled white paper. From above, it becomes clear that the dancers form a gigantic eye. The eye is the work of J R, the French street artist, who is internationally known for mounting large scale public photography projects around the world, from the favelas of Brazil to Kenya to Times Square. He was commissioned to create it for the winter season as part of City Ballet's new art series, which aims to draw more art fans to ballet. J R, who once wheat pasted pictures on the streets of France, also wheat pasted enormous ballerinas' legs and toe shoes on the outside of the Koch Theater. But it is his floor photo inside that is generating buzz. "People are always more creative than I can even imagine," J R, who goes by his punctuation less initials, said in an interview. He said that he had been dazzled by the photographs people have posted on Instagram with hashtags including JRNYCBallet and NYCBArtSeries: of a man lying on the ground who looks as if he is lifting a ballerina, of women lying on the hands of supine dancers as if being lifted, of shadows of walkers draping the dancers. Shortly before Saturday's matinee, Paloma Bonnin, a 10 year old dance student from Paraguay, got down on the floor and posed for some pictures herself, mimicking the splits and poses of the City Ballet dancers. At intermission, Philip Schweitzer, a ballet fan from the Bronx, couldn't resist the temptation to bend down to touch the floor. "I told my wife, Esther, it feels like linoleum," he said. Grace Zhang, 24, who works in advertising, climbed from her seats in the First Ring to the Fourth Ring balcony for a better view. "It's like nothing I've ever seen," she said. "This is specifically incorporating ballet the beauty, the power, the vulnerability. It's pure and beautiful." J R, 30, said that he liked that his work was creating a reverse migration, where the patrons in the expensive seats were going up to the cheaper seats for the views. "Now you're inviting everyone to come up there," he said. "And I like that, that it breaks boundaries that anyone should be on any floor, it doesn't matter." The installation will be opened to the public free for several hours each day from Sunday through Feb. 9. Karen Girty, the company's senior director of marketing and media, said City Ballet had initially offered tickets to the thousands of people who follow J R on social media and followed up with targeted ad campaigns at subway stations on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn neighborhoods including Williamsburg and Greenpoint. At last year's installation, by the Brooklyn artist collective Faile, 70 percent of the people who went to the two special art theme performances were new to City Ballet. An unusually high number of those first timers came back to the ballet, she said: about 7 percent. The previous record for getting first time ballet audiences to return came when the company put on Tchaikovsky's "The Sleeping Beauty" soon after "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker," and about 5.8 percent of the "Nutcracker" novices were enticed back. Alexander M. Roth, 25, a film and theater producer, is not new to ballet, but he does make it a point to go to the Art Series performances regardless of what is on the program. "It was one of the hottest tickets in the city," he said. "Models, people from film, fashion, art everyone was there." Mr. Roth said that he enjoys collecting the limited edition pieces that the artists give the audiences on those nights a painted wooden block from Faile last year, and a pop up card of the theater showing J R's work both inside and outside of it this year. Faye Arthurs, a member of the corps de ballet who is in the retina of the eye, watched Luna Helm, 7, dance over her picture after Saturday's matinee. "She was just dancing up and down on our heads, then she was running, and making huge passes, and leaping right over the center," she said. "So brilliant." Ms. Arthurs especially enjoyed a photograph of her photograph that was posted on the Internet. "Someone had put a Birkin bag on my hands, like I was holding it up," she said. "Which I kind of loved. I wish they would just give me one in real life." Shortly before the Saturday matinee, J R, who said that he often draws inspiration from what people post about his work on social media, made a suggestion to Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief, about bringing the dancers back for a follow up. "You know what I would love to do is get them all back here, and do a photo from up there, reinteracting with the piece, where you lose what's real and what's not," he said. "Because I've been looking on social media, what people have been posting from just the last two nights they are so creative." "It's endless, that's the thing," J R said. "It's an endless process."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The public has learned that the president's daily intelligence briefings in January and February repeatedly warned of the likelihood that the coronavirus would enter and spread within the United States but that the president did not take any action. He may not even have read the briefings. I cannot understand why all those who were responsible for informing the president did not take it upon themselves to alert the whole nation about the dangers the country faced. How is it possible that they did not get together as a group and shout from the rooftops about the calamity that seemed to be heading our way? One staple of radio entertainment in the 1940s was a show titled "It Pays to Be Ignorant," a parody of authoritative panel shows that featured discourse on serious questions. Panelists addressed questions like "What town in Massachusetts held the Boston Tea Party?" Invariably, answers were long winded, ill informed, unresponsive and funny. In many respects President Trump's briefings remind me of this radio program. His responses are rambling, inaccurate, evasive and, unfortunately, ludicrous at times. When Mr. Trump, the self proclaimed expert on Korea, overestimated the population of Seoul by approximately 28 million people last month, Republicans simply smiled forgivingly. However, when he suggested ingesting or injecting disinfectants as possible cures for Covid 19, even loyal backers realized that his ignorance is no longer a laughing matter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Mel Baggs at home in Burlington, Vt., in 2008. One of Mx. Baggs's blog themes was that humanness is a spectrum, not something that can be reduced to a normal/abnormal dichotomy. Mel Baggs, whose forthright writings and films about being a nonverbal person with autism made an impact in the fields of neurodiversity and disability rights, died on April 11 in Burlington, Vt., at age 39. Anna Baggs, Mx. Baggs's mother, said the cause was believed to be respiratory failure, though numerous health problems may also have played a part. Mx. Baggs, a vigorous blogger, used the term "genderless" as a self description. "I like that it just means lack of gender, and has no spoken or unspoken secondary meaning," read a 2018 entry on the blog "Cussin' and Discussin': Mel being human in a world that says I'm not." Many friends and admirers posting about Mx. Baggs's death on social media used gender neutral pronouns, while others used the traditional feminine ones. Gender issues, though, were not Mx. Baggs's major concern. Of more urgency was conveying that people who think and communicate in nontraditional ways are fully human, and that humanness is a spectrum, not something that can be reduced to a normal/abnormal dichotomy. Many people were introduced to these ideas through Mx. Baggs's short film "In My Language," posted on the internet in 2007 and given wide exposure through coverage on CNN. For three minutes it shows Mx. Baggs fiddling with the knob on a dresser drawer, rubbing against a book and more. Then it offers "a translation," as the film puts it. "The previous part of this video was in my native language," a synthesized voice says. "Many people have assumed that when I talk about this being my language, that means that each part of the video must have a particular symbolic message within it designed for the human mind to interpret. But my language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment." By the time "In My Language" was posted, Mx. Baggs had already drawn considerable attention in the autism world for creating the website "Getting the Truth Out," a response to an awareness campaign by the Autism Society of America called "Getting the Word Out," which Mx. Baggs thought made autistic people objects of pity. Part of that attention was skepticism about Mx. Baggs's claims. Autism online forums can be caustic, with sharp divisions among various factions, and the harshest detractors have accused Mx. Baggs of being a fake. But certainly the writings and films that appeared under the Baggs name challenged a lot of conventional thinking. "There are many important parts of autistic culture that trace back to Mel's writing and influence," Ari Ne'eman, a disability rights activist and author, said by email, "but one of the most important is hir insistence that the neurodiversity and autistic self advocacy movements include all autistic people, not just those who could talk." "In the early days (and sometimes still now)," he added, "there were lots of people who argued for advocacy only for certain kinds of autistic people, leaving people who couldn't talk or who had the wrong diagnosis behind. Mel was one of the most powerful voices contradicting that." Mx. Baggs, who lived independently in Burlington until about a year ago, died at the home of Laura Tisoncik, an autism activist whom Anna Baggs described as Mel's "second mother" and who had taken Mx. Baggs in as cascading health issues and problems with home health services made living independently impossible. Ms. Tisoncik (who emphatically rejected the idea that Mx. Baggs was faking anything), summed up Mx. Baggs's core idea in a phone interview. "There are no unimportant people," she said. Amanda Melissa Baggs was born on Aug. 15, 1980, in Mountain View, Calif., to Anna Marie (Lynch) Baggs, a respiratory practitioner, and Ronald Baggs, an electronics engineer. Childhood was spent in La Honda, Calif., about 45 miles south of San Francisco, where the redwood forests made an impression that was reflected in the poetry Mel wrote as an adult, Anna Baggs said. Mx. Baggs, who later adopted the name Amelia Evelyn Voicy Baggs and became known as Mel, for a time attended De Anza College in California and Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Mass. "I grew up sometimes able to speak and sometimes not," Mx. Baggs wrote on another blog, ballastexistenz, "and with a complicated relationship to speech and receptive language." As an adult Mx. Baggs increasingly came to use a communication device, employing both a keyboard and picture symbols, and posted frequently. The topics addressed ranged far and wide. Mx. Baggs was concerned that autism awareness had become a trendy catchphrase, "whether it's parent groups who throw the word 'autism acceptance' around to sound current but don't actually accept the slightest thing about their autistic children, or whether it's autistic people who've fallen in love with the words and forgotten the meaning." There were blog posts about hir father's death, hir cats and the "snake words" used in the disabilities services industry that sounded helpful to clients but, Mx. Baggs said, were actually harmful. ("Apologies to actual snakes," one of these entries noted.) Anne Corwin, a friend for 15 years, said one thread was that the world's idea of normal is precarious. "A major theme running through many of Mel's writings (especially the ones describing harrowing experiences with abuse, institutional settings, and medical neglect) was: this could happen to any of us," she said by email "It could happen to you, to your loved ones, and it will keep happening until we decide as a civilization to do better." In addition to Anna Baggs, Mx. Baggs is survived by a grandmother, Elizabeth Lynch, and two brothers, Jeremy and Shane. Mx. Baggs took the name of the ballastexistenz blog from "ballast existence," a concept employed in Nazi propaganda to justify killing people with disabilities. "Mel was treated as life unworthy of life," Ms. Tisoncik said. "Except she was very worthy of life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In "She," described as a "choreoplay" by the dancer and choreographer Jinah Parker, four women detail their experience of sexual violence as female dancers swirl around them in gestures of support and assault. With a script influenced by "The Vagina Monologues" and "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf," "She" feels urgent in its aims, if less assured in its execution. At the back of the stage at Here are four bedrooms, each inhabited by a woman who steps out to tell a story of abuse, monologues that Ms. Parker compiled from interviews with survivors of rape, trial accounts and personal experience. Each story is harrowing. Dance entwines throughout, set to an emotive, eclectic soundtrack of mostly female artists, from Mahalia Jackson to Amy Winehouse, Missy Elliott to Laura Nyro. The most successful dances show women's physical freedom transformed into something far more jagged. But abstraction is less helpful in capturing violence through language. One monologue, in which a woman describes an assault by her ex husband, is forceful in the horrors of its specificity. But others rely on unhelpful similes, such as when a woman says of a partner, "He treated me like a Dumpster, jamming his contaminated waste into me." And the show is strangely apolitical in the solutions it proposes: self help and therapy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When it comes to school closings, the arguments may make sense on paper, but the reality is much messier. At University City High in Philadelphia on Friday, staff members and students were trying to absorb the decision by a state commission to close the school along with 22 others in the city. At an often heated and sometimes tearful hearing on Thursday night where 19 protesters, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, were arrested, school district officials said they needed to shut down schools to close a gaping budget hole. "In my heart, I didn't want to accept it," said Glen Casey, 18, a senior, at the end of the school day Friday. "It broke my heart, it hit me hard." Wrenching though the decision was, William R. Hite Jr., the superintendent, said it was simply a matter of math in a district where more than a quarter of the schools' 195,000 seats are now empty. Dr. Hite said in an interview that at University City, with low academic performance and only 20 percent of its seats filled, "it's just not a sound fiscal decision to have those students remain in that program." Over all, the district said the school closings in Philadelphia would ease a budget deficit of 1.35 billion over five years. Around the country, districts including Chicago, Newark and Washington have been echoing that rationale, with officials citing budget gaps as they draw up lists of schools to close at the end of the school year. District officials also say they need to close underperforming schools so that students can move to schools where they have a better chance of succeeding. But critics say that while the spreadsheets or test scores might say one thing, even lower performing, underused schools can serve as refuges in communities that have little else. "The school is one of the foundations of the community," said Rosemarie Hatcher, president of the Philadelphia Home and School Council, which represents local home and school associations. "It's like a village. The schools know our kids and they look out for our kids." In emotional speeches on Thursday night to Philadelphia's School Reform Commission, more than 30 teachers, students and parents said that children at schools scheduled for closing would have to walk long distances through dangerous neighborhoods to reach their new schools, some of which have poor records on academics, discipline and safety. "There is no need to penalize the families in Germantown," said Dr. George Schuler, a 1963 graduate of Germantown High School in northwest Philadelphia. "Students need to be able to attend a local school." The commission voted 4 to 1 to close the school. School closings fall disproportionately on poor and minority neighborhoods. "These school closings have been happening in communities that were already destabilized by the dismantling of public housing, by gentrification and effects of the economic crisis," said Pauline Lipman, professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, where about 100 schools have been closed since 2001, Professor Lipman said that all but two were in low income communities, and that 88 percent of the students affected were African American. Advocacy groups in a number of cities have made similar complaints. According to Daren Briscoe, a spokesman for the Department of Education, the department's Office of Civil Rights is investigating 33 complaints related to school closings in 29 districts across 22 states. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, districts closed 1,929 schools in 2010 11, the last year for which data is available. Mr. Briscoe said that since October 2010, when the Office of Civil Rights first started tracking school closing cases separately, the department has completed 27 investigations without finding any violations. In Chicago, a commission set up to evaluate school closings said this week that the district could close or overhaul up to 80 schools next year. Becky Carroll, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Schools, said that even without a projected 1 billion deficit for the 2013 14 school year, "we can no longer afford to keep throwing money at half empty dilapidated buildings as it's stretching our resources too thin." Underused schools "are often deprived of the resources they need to provide children with a high quality education," Ms. Carroll said. "By combining schools we can redirect resources to all schools so they can use the dollars to invest in supports that can help children thrive in the classroom: computer labs, libraries, specialized individual support, art and music," she said. At Willa Cather Elementary School in the Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, the principal, Hattie B. King, said that the school's second floor was now empty and that 250 students filled about half of the school's available seats. "We have to focus all of our dollars on the bare necessities," Ms. King said. "Whereas if we had additional dollars coming in we could pick up some of the things like after school programs that focus on the arts and music." But Ms. King said that part of the reason enrollment had declined at the half century old school was that charter schools had been sprouting up in the neighborhood and siphoning students away, even though Willa Cather is a school where more than 80 percent of students achieved an above proficient level on end of year state tests in reading, math and science last year. Competition from charter schools is part of the story in many cities. In Philadelphia, for example, 23 percent of students were attending charter schools in the 2011 12 school year, up from 12 percent in 2004 5, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Nathan Saunders, president of the teachers' union in Washington, where the district has announced plans to close 15 schools by the end of the 2013 14 year, said, "What appears to be lack of interest in traditional neighborhood public education is in fact the result of new options being offered." He said there was little evidence that charter schools performed better than traditional schools.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
CHICAGO A shop vacuum became a lover; suction was involved. Feet turned into faces. A great fanged creature appeared with a man inside. Ghostly villagers assembled, silent and wreathed with smoke as their buildings burned and burned. It was a puppet invasion all part of the 11 day Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival and the latest proof that puppetry, a delicate and mysterious art so often restricted in this country to the children's table, or relegated to fringe productions, has claimed a spot closer to the center. In an age when we seek relief from the relentless barrage of technology, this low fi, handmade form provides it. A city where the dominant stage aesthetic for years was a kind of red meat realism think Steppenwolf Theater Company, which unleashed John Malkovich on the world might not seem to be a place where puppetry would flourish. Yet the very existence of last month's festival, and the eagerness with which dozens of institutions across Chicago have embraced it since its start in 2015, is emblematic of a development long in the making on American stages. It's not so much that puppetry is having an evanescent moment as that it has reached critical mass and settled in, cherished by grown up audiences raised on "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show" who have had their hunger stoked by landmark puppet productions on Broadway: "The Lion King," "Avenue Q," "War Horse," with its magnificent steeds. "Infiltration is welcome," said the puppeteer Blair Thomas, the festival's founder and artistic director, who made a dog puppet for Patti LuPone's character in the Broadway bound musical "War Paint" when it ran in Chicago last summer. "The doors have been opened." And the puppets are marching right through. Catching Up With the World You can see the shift in The New York Times, with mention of puppets now commonplace in theater reviews. But then, New York is the puppetry capital of America, where boundary pushing directors like Lee Breuer and Julie Taymor have spent decades harnessing that hybrid art part visual, part performance to create fantastical worlds heavily influenced by foreign traditions. The best shows I saw over a weekend at the Chicago festival did come from other countries. One was the Norwegian director Yngvild Aspeli's "Cendres," a haunted, mesmerizing piece about arson and internal torment, full of life size puppets and miniature blazing buildings, from the French Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. Unfortunately for American audiences, it has already headed back to Europe. The other was "Chiflon, El Silencio del Carbon" ("Chiflon, Silence of the Coal"), by the Chilean collective Silencio Blanco, whose artists manipulate sublimely crude looking puppets with tender precision to tell a wordless story of coal mining, set partly deep beneath the earth. That production, which continues its United States tour through early March, will stop in New York this month. But the abundant homegrown puppetry in "Mr. and Mrs. Pennyworth," a nouveau Victorian play by Doug Hara at Lookingglass Theater Company, was on par with those imports both the shadow puppetry by the young Chicago collective Manual Cinema, which has won raves in its recent forays to New York, and a menagerie of gorgeous beasts (a cuddly pig, a shaggy wolf, an enormous boar) by Mr. Thomas, who built them all in his Wisconsin barn. Exposing Chicago artists to international work is part of the impetus for the festival. Mr. Thomas, 54, intends to fill some of the void left by the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater, which ran in New York from 1992 to 2000, and the International Theater Festival of Chicago, which in the late 1980s ignited his love of puppetry with a visit from a Barcelona company. That event changed Chicago, Mr. Thomas said, by showing artists and audiences what the standard was elsewhere. He laments the advantage that European puppet artists have in the sheer opportunities for their productions to be staged. But Cheryl Henson a daughter of the Muppets' creator, Jim Henson, and the president of the Jim Henson Foundation, a major force in contemporary puppet theater said that American puppeteers had caught up to the European standard of the craft. "They're not second class anymore," she said from Britain, where she was attending the London International Mime Festival, which routinely also includes puppetry. On my Sunday morning in Chicago, I went to the Instituto Cervantes for a children's show by the Italian company Teatro dei Piedi and watched Veronica Gonzalez, a virtuoso of the form, create a succession of joyous vignettes starring puppets made from her own costumed feet. It is astonishing how expressive toes can be. I was the age of the children in that audience when my own love of puppetry was nurtured by "Sesame Street," though I hadn't thought much about it until an exhibition of the show's Muppets two years ago at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I was surprised at how moved I was to see the Count. And when, in a corner at the back of the gallery, I spotted the bashful Mr. Snuffleupagus, it was like coming upon a mythical creature. Still, my enduring fondness is nothing compared with the childhood fandom that Sarah Fornace, one of the artistic directors of Manual Cinema, described: a devotion to the Muppets and to Jim Henson movies like "The Dark Crystal" (1982) and "Labyrinth" (1986) so impassioned that in eighth grade she wrote a report about her ambition to be a Muppeteer. "All of that was really important to my cultural identity growing up," she said. Now 31, she has worked at Redmoon Theater, which Mr. Thomas co founded, and has been a member of his troupe Blair Thomas Co. She extolled the Chicago scene, noting "a plethora of young companies who either explicitly do puppetry" or use puppetry and object work "to create moments of spectacle" and effects that aren't possible to achieve onstage with human bodies. That defiance of realism, of course, is part of puppets' potency. The figures embrace metaphor, and we fill in the blanks with our willingness to believe. The night before I flew to Chicago, I went to Wakka Wakka's "Made in China" at 59E59 Theaters. It's a puppet show aimed at grown ups (there's puppet nudity almost immediately), but I was surprised anyway as I looked at the crowd. Nearly everyone was middle aged or older, normal for a Midtown Manhattan theater but still surprising for a production of pure puppetry: no actors, just puppets and puppeteers. Puppeteers with "Made in China" joined us for a chat on Facebook Live Pure puppetry is the ideal for people in the puppet world. That is the sticking point in any argument about the art form being on the rise because, however many gains it makes inside other disciplines, puppets are rarely the point of the show. One exception on the horizon: "Top Puppet," a reality competition special that NBC recently ordered from the Jim Henson Company and a producer of "The Voice." Ms. Henson did point out, though, that more artists are working in the form these days, and that, thanks to "Avenue Q" and "War Horse," many actors have gained experience as puppeteers. (She also named the top American cities for puppet theater after New York: Atlanta, Chicago and Minneapolis.) Last year, when the Henson Foundation raised its grant levels, applications rose about 80 percent. Meanwhile, Ms. Henson said, puppeteers have a better shot at getting financial support from general arts funders and at being included in performance festivals than they used to. All of that suggests a heightened respect and a sturdier infrastructure, as does the 2015 MacArthur Fellowship for the puppeteer Basil Twist who, Ms. Henson noted, "is doing the Oompa Loompas" for this spring's Broadway production of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." When I went there, I ran into Mr. Twist, who cheerfully showed me around, filling me in on Mr. Anton, an avant garde puppeteer who died in 1984. Mr. Anton's puppets, some of which Mr. Twist lent to the show, are tiny objects with minutely detailed faces one evidently modeled on Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa, where Mr. Anton did much of his work. Mr. Anton performed his puppet plays for no more than 18 people at once and did not allow them to be filmed or photographed. His art is the purest of pure, and there is something sacred and beautiful about it. But also, in its hermeticism, a tinge of sadness. Because in Mr. Anton's time, in America, puppetry for grown ups wasn't on the margins entirely by choice. There wasn't much call for it center stage. "Puppetry's kind of an underdog," Mr. Thomas told me. "We've always existed on the periphery of the dominant culture. In some ways that's our strength." Is it, though? Not everything has to be a popular art. Not everything can be. But sophisticated puppetry appears to be moving swiftly in that direction. So far, it's gaining power as it goes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The New York Times won three Pulitzer Prizes, and The New York Daily News and ProPublica shared the prize for public service, as journalism presented its highest honors on Monday at a time of steep financial challenges for the industry and unabashed antagonism from a new presidential administration. The Daily News ProPublica joint effort won for a series on the New York Police Department's widespread abuse of a decades old law to force people from their homes and businesses over alleged illegal activity. The investigation, which involved the examination of more than 1,100 nuisance abatement cases, found that the Police Department almost exclusively targeted households and shops in minority neighborhoods. The reporting drove New York City to re examine the nuisance law and pass sweeping reforms. Lynn Nottage's play "Sweat," about the American working class, was awarded the prize for drama. And the drama critic Hilton Als of The New Yorker won for criticism. The Pulitzers this year come as financial pressure drains many news organizations of the resources to pursue top flight journalism. They also come in the face of a combative stance from President Trump, who has called the news media "the enemy of the American people." But for one day, at least, newsrooms came together in celebration, and the journalism industry's focus was on its accomplishments and purpose, rather than its woes. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and The Miami Herald shared the prize for explanatory reporting for their coverage of millions of leaked documents known as the Panama Papers. (The Herald also won in another category Jim Morin was awarded the prize for editorial cartooning.) Eric Eyre of The Charleston Gazette Mail won the investigative reporting prize for coverage that laid bare the relentless flow of opioids into West Virginia counties with the highest rate of overdose deaths in the country. The East Bay Times of Oakland, Calif., won the breaking news reporting prize for its coverage of the "Ghost Ship" fire in December that killed 36 people at a warehouse party, chronicling the city's failures that led to the tragedy. The prize for editorial writing was awarded to Art Cullen of The Storm Lake Times, a twice weekly newspaper in Iowa with a circulation of 3,000, for editorials that held corporate agricultural interests accountable. The Times is owned by Mr. Cullen and his older brother.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
'HUMA BHABHA: WE COME IN PEACE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Oct. 28). This spare and unsettling sculptural installation for the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden Commission includes two figures: one that is somewhat humanoid but with a ferocious mask face and that visually dwarfs the jagged Manhattan skyline behind it, and another bowing in supplication or prayer, with long cartoonish human hands and a scraggly tail emerging from its shiny, black drapery. The title is a variant on the line an alien uttered to an anxious crowd in the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," but it ripples with other associations: colonization, invasion, imperialism or missionaries and other foreigners whose intentions were not always innocent. The installation also feels like an extension of the complex, cross cultural conversation going on downstairs, inside a museum packed with 5,000 years of art history. (Martha Schwendener) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE FACE OF DYNASTY: ROYAL CRESTS FROM WESTERN CAMEROON' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 3). In the African wing, a show of just four commanding wooden crowns constitutes a blockbuster in its own right. These massive wooden crests in the form of stylized human faces with vast vertical brows served as markers of royal power among the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroonian grasslands, and the Met's recent acquisition of an 18th century specimen is joined here by three later examples, each featuring sharply protruding cheeks, broadly smiling mouths and brows incised with involute geometric patterns. Ritual objects like these were decisive for the development of Western modernist painting, and a Cameroonian crest was even shown at MoMA in the 1930s, as a "sculpture" divorced from ethnography. But these crests had legal and diplomatic significance as well as aesthetic appeal, and their anonymous African creators had a political understanding of art not so far from our own. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'HEAVENLY BODIES: FASHION AND THE CATHOLIC IMAGINATION' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters (through Oct. 8). Let us pray. After last year's stark exhibition of Rei Kawakubo's irregular apparel, the Met Costume Institute is back in blockbuster mode with this three part blowout on the influence of Catholicism on haute couture of the last century. The trinity of fashion begins downstairs at the Met with the exceptional loans of vestments from the Vatican; upstairs are gowns fit for angels in heaven (by Lanvin, Thierry Mugler, Rodarte) or angels fallen to earth (such as slinky Versace sheaths garlanded with crosses). The scenography at the Met is willfully operatic spotlights, choir music which militates against serious thinking about fashion and religion, but up at the Cloisters, by far the strongest third of the show, you can commune more peacefully with an immaculate Balenciaga wedding gown or a divine Valentino gown embroidered with Cranac's Adam and Eve. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU: CARNE Y ARENA' at 1611 Benning Road NE, Washington (through Aug. 31, 9 a.m. 9 p.m.). Perhaps the most technically accomplished endeavor yet in virtual reality but closer in form to immersive live theater, created by a two time Oscar winner has arrived at a former church in Washington after outings in Cannes, Milan, Los Angeles and Mexico City. In "Carne y Arena" ("Flesh and Sand"), you explore the exhibition on your own with a motion sensitive headset that transports you to Mexico's border with the United States; brutal encounters with border guards interweave with surreal dream sequences, which you can perceive in three dimensions. The characters are computer renderings of the bodies of actual migrants; the landscapes are photographed by Mr. Inarritu's brilliant longtime cinematographer, Emmanuel (Chivo) Lubezki. It remains too early to say whether virtual reality will reshape art institutions, but this is a rare achievement, and not only for its political urgency. Tickets will be released only on the website at 8 a.m. Eastern time on the 1st and 15th of each month of the exhibition's duration. (Farago) carneyarenadc.com 'THE INCOMPLETE ARAKI' at the Museum of Sex (through Aug. 31). It remains a bit of a tourist trap, but the for profit Museum of Sex is making its most serious bid yet for artistic credibility with a two floor exhibition of Japan's most prominent and controversial photographer. Nobuyoshi Araki has spent decades shooting Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, notably, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku bi, or "the beauty of tight binding." Given the venue, it's natural that this show concentrates on the erotic side of his art, but less lustful visitors can discover an ambitious cross section of Mr. Araki's omnivorous photography, including his lastingly moving "Sentimental Journey," picturing his beloved wife, Yoko, from honeymoon to funeral. (Farago) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR AND THE BODY (1300 TO NOW)' at the Met Breuer (through July 22). Taking a second run at the splashy theme show extravaganza, the Met Breuer has greater success. This one is certainly more coherent since it centers entirely on the body and its role in art, science, religion and entertainment. It gathers together some 120 sculptures, dolls, artist's dummies, effigies, crucifixes and automatons. Many are rarely lent and may not return anytime soon. (Roberta Smith) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'MILLENNIUM: LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE 1990S' at the Skyscraper Museum (through June 24). This plucky Battery Park institution transports us back to the years of Rudy Giuliani, Lauryn Hill and 128 kilobit modems to reveal the enduring urban legacy of a decade bookended by recession and terror. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, landlords in the financial district rezoned their old skyscrapers for residential occupancy, and more than 20 towers were declared landmarks, including the ornate Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway and the home of Delmonico's at 56 Beaver Street. Battery Park City flowered; yuppies priced out of TriBeCa came down to Wall Street; a new Guggenheim, designed by a fresh from Bilbao Frank Gehry, nearly arose by South Street Seaport. From this distance, the 1990s can seem almost like a golden age, not least given that, more than 16 years after Sept. 11, construction at the underwhelming new World Trade Center is still not finished. (Farago) skyscraper.org 'GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: VISIONS OF HAWAI'I' at the New York Botanical Garden (through Oct. 28). Finding out Georgia O'Keeffe had a Hawaiian period is kind of like finding out Brian Wilson had a desert period. But here it is: 17 eye popping paradisal paintings, produced in a nine week visit in 1939. The paintings, and their almost psychedelic palette, are as fleshlike and physical as O'Keeffe's New Mexican work is stripped and metaphysical. The other star of the show, fittingly, is Hawaii, and the garden has mounted a living display of the subjects depicted in the artwork. As much as they might look like the products of an artist's imagination, the plants and flowers in the Enid Haupt Conservatory are boastfully real. On Aloha Nights every Saturday in June and every other Saturday in July and August, the garden is staging a cultural complement of activities, including lei making, hula lessons and ukulele performances. (William L. Hamilton) 718 817 8700, nybg.org 'ALBERTO SAVINIO' at the Center for Italian Modern Art (through June 23). The paintings of this Italian polymath have long been overshadowed by the brilliant work of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico. This show of more than 20 canvases from the late 1920s to the mid 30s may not change that, but the mix of landscapes with bright patterns and several eerie portraits based on family photographs are surprisingly of the moment. (Smith) 646 370 3596, italianmodernart.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilletantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THE SENSES: DESIGN BEYOND VISION' at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (through Oct. 28). There's a serious, timely big idea at this exhibition: As social media, smartphones and virtual reality make us ever more "ocularcentric," we have taken leave of our nonvisual senses and need to get back in touch, literally. Thus "The Senses" features multisensory adventures such as a portable speaker size contraption that emits odors, with titles like "Surfside" and "Einstein," in timed combinations; hand painted scratch and sniff wallpaper (think Warhol's patterned cows but with cherries cherry scented, naturally); and a device that projects ultrasonic waves to simulate the touch and feel of virtual objects. The show also presents commissions, videos, products and prototypes from more than 65 designers and teams, some of which address sensory disabilities like blindness and deafness, including Vibeat, which can be worn as a bracelet, brooch or necklace and translates music into vibrations. And if you bring the kids, they will likely bliss out stroking a wavy, fur lined installation that makes music as you rub it. (Michael Kimmelman) 212 849 8400, cooperhewitt.org 'CHAIM SOUTINE: FLESH' at the Jewish Museum (through Sept. 16). The Russian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine (1893 1943), who spent most of his life in Paris, is best known for bloody, ecstatic paintings of beef carcasses. But it wasn't death that interested him it was the immaterial life force of the material world. Along with an instructive lineup of naked fowl, silver herring and popeyed sardines, this indispensable tribute to the transcendent but still undervalued painter centers on a stupendous 1925 "Carcass of Beef," glistening scarlet, streaked with orange fat and straddling a starry sky. (Will Heinrich) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of New York City (through Oct. 28). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics that he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctors appointment, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TARSILA DO AMARAL: INVENTING MODERN ART IN BRAZIL' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 3). The subtitle is no overstatement: In the early 1920s, first in Paris and then back home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this painter really did lay the groundwork for the coming of modernism in Latin America's most populous nation. Tired of the European pretenders in Brazil's art academies, Tarsila (who was always called by her first name) began to intermingle Western, African and indigenous motifs into flowing, biomorphic paintings, and to theorize a new national culture fueled by the principle of antropofagia, or "cannibalism." Along with spare, assured drawings of Rio and the Brazilian countryside, this belated but very welcome show assembles Tarsila's three most important paintings, including the classic "Abaporu" (1928): a semi human nude with a spindly nose and a comically swollen foot. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'ZOE LEONARD: SURVEY' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). Some shows cast a spell. Zoe Leonard's reverberant retrospective does. Physically ultra austere, all white walls with a fiercely edited selection of objects photographs of clouds taken from airplane windows; a mural collaged from vintage postcards; a scattering of empty fruit skins, each stitched closed with needle and thread it's an extended essay about travel, time passing, political passion and the ineffable daily beauty of the world. (Holland Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'GRANT WOOD: AMERICAN GOTHIC AND OTHER FABLES' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). This well done survey begins with the American Regionalist's little known efforts as an Arts and Crafts designer and touches just about every base. It includes his mural studies, book illustrations and most of his best known paintings including "American Gothic" and "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." Best of all are Wood's smooth undulant landscapes with their plowmen and spongy trees and infectious serenity. (Smith) 212 570 3600, whitney.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LONDON The Bank of England raised interest rates on Thursday to their highest levels in nearly a decade as it seeks to tamp down inflation and make preparations for a potential economic downturn as Britain exits the European Union. Policymakers at the central bank voted unanimously to raise the benchmark interest rate a quarter of a percentage point on Thursday, to 0.75 percent, the highest it has been since February 2009. Before the decision, they voiced concern about inflation, which, at 2.4 percent, is above the bank's 2 percent target. And while wage growth appears to be relatively weak, the bank nevertheless anticipates an acceleration in price rises because the lowest levels of unemployment since 1975 will probably force employers to pay more to retain staff. A public sector raise announced at the end of July could also bolster wages and, by extension, inflation. In its quarterly inflation report, which accompanied the rate setting meeting, the Bank of England said inflation was most likely to fall slowly to about 2.1 percent in a couple of years.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
BARCELONA, Spain For years, almost nobody paid attention to the sky is falling alarms of Edward Hugh, a gregarious British blogger and self taught economist who repeatedly predicted that the euro zone could not survive. Living a largely hand to mouth existence here on his part time teacher's salary, he sent one post after another into the Internet wilderness. It was the height of policy folly, he warned, to think that aging, penny pinching Germans could successfully coexist under one currency umbrella with the more youthful, credit card wielding Irish, Greeks and Spaniards who shared the euro with them. But now that the European sovereign debt crisis is rattling world markets, driving the euro lower almost every day and raising doubts about the future of the monetary union, his voluminous musings have become a must read for an influential and growing global audience, including policy makers in the White House. He has even been courted by the International Monetary Fund, which recently asked him to fly to Madrid to assist in its analysis of the Spanish economy. "It's quite nice, actually," Mr. Hugh, 61, said with amusement as he leaned back in a plush town car that was taking him to his latest speaking engagement organized by the Circulo de Economia, an influential business lobbying group in Barcelona. "I am meeting all sorts of interesting people and they are paying me to have lunch with them." But in other ways, his life has changed very little. Last week, in fact, he even had to borrow money from friends to buy clothes presentable enough to allow him to address the conference of Spanish politicians and business executives. He still mostly supports himself by teaching English to locals here, where he has lived for two decades. "I guess I am countercyclical," he said with a laugh. "For all the years during the boom when everyone was doing well here, I wasn't doing anything. Now I am a household name in Catalonia." Well, not quite. The idea of the economist as a pop celebrity in the mold of a Nouriel Roubini, whose early prediction that the United States housing market would collapse later brought him fame and a worldwide consulting brand, or a Paul Krugman, the Nobel winning economist who writes an Op Ed Page column for The New York Times, is still unformed in Europe and in particular in Spain. But as questions rise over how European governments can escape their debt trap and resume growth, Mr. Hugh, who has been pondering this topic for years, is for the first time being turned to for insights and wisdom. His bleak message, in newspaper columns, local television and radio appearances, and in meetings with officials, is almost always the same: since Spain and other struggling countries of the euro zone like Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy cannot devalue their common currency unilaterally, they have little choice but to endure what would essentially be a 20 percent internal devaluation instead. That means their public and private sector wages need to fall by roughly that amount if those countries are ever to restore competitiveness, lift exports and bring in the cash needed to pay down their debts. "Why haven't these countries converged" with the rest of Europe? he asks. "It's demographics. As populations age, there are fewer people in their 20s to 40s to buy new houses, so they save more. The younger a country is, the more dependent it is on credit to get growth." Germany, where the average age is 45 and rising even as the population is beginning to shrink, is a nation of savers, and public policy has encouraged keeping wages under control and building up export industries. By contrast, the younger Greeks, Irish and Spaniards went on borrowing binges, driven in particular by rising demands for new homes and consumer goods that, in several cases, turned into housing bubbles before going bust. Wages were pushed up, encouraging spending but soon making it all but impossible for their industries to compete with the thrifty Germans, Dutch and other Northern Europeans. The head of Instagram agrees to testify as Congress probes the app's effects on young people. Today in On Tech: A fix it job for government tech. Most economists, beholden as they are to their "promiscuous but essentially useless" economic models, Mr. Hugh rails, missed what he considers an easily predictable outcome. And that, he adds, "is why we are in such a big mess now." On Tuesday, demonstrators in Seville, Spain, protested government budget cuts that are intended to rein in a deficit that has rattled global financial markets. Mr. Hugh's demographic thesis is not airtight: in fact, it was Italy, not Greece, that attracted his early attacks. But Italy, perhaps because its overall debt level was already so high and its population was older, pursued a policy of greater fiscal rectitude than its neighbors and avoided a real estate bubble. And Mr. Hugh's main policy proposal that Germany leave the euro, which would almost immediately push the value of the currency down sharply, improving competitiveness for the weaker countries that remained behind reads better as a provocative blog post than as a practical solution. Still, the sudden vulnerability of the euro zone and the search far and wide for answers by policy makers, investors and economists have caused his once obscure ramblings to go viral. "He is an information channel that I value a lot," said Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was a United States Treasury official in the administration of President Bill Clinton and a prominent blogger in his own right. Mr. Hugh has also attracted a cult following among financial analysts. "Edward was writing very clearly about the imbalances in Europe and the likelihood of a crisis long before it was even on the radar screen of economists or analysts," said Jonathan Tepper of Variant Perception, a London research firm that caters to hedge funds and wealthy investors. "He is a thinking machine." At the same time, Mr. Hugh is determined to resist some of the newfound temptations that have lately come his way. He said he had turned down lucrative offers from hedge funds to provide exclusive research because he did not want his views monopolized by any one entity although he said he was considering an offer to join the stable of contributors who work for Mr. Roubini. And when the Milken Institute financed by Michael Milken, a felon who managed to hang on to a fortune even after having to pay a 550 million fine for his actions during the junk bond boom of the 1980s paid him 3,000 for a short report he did in a day on Eastern Europe, Mr. Hugh gave the money to a friend who was having trouble paying her mortgage, he said. "I don't want to take a check from Michael Milken, thank you very much," he said. Born in Liverpool, Mr. Hugh studied at the London School of Economics but was drawn more to philosophy, science, sociology and literature. His eclectic intellectual pursuits kept him not only from getting his doctorate but also prevented him from landing a full time professor's job. "I was once described by my departmental professor as a 'thief' for accepting my doctoral grant while continuing to spend my time reading the books and attending the courses that I chose to read and that I chose to attend," he said. Seeing himself more as a European than an Englishman, he moved to Barcelona in 1990. His blog posts reflect his varied interests, often citing Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski, Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche and even the sociable behavior of his beloved bonobos, the primate species that is the closest relative to humans in the animal kingdom. Mr. Hugh cultivates the pale and shabby look of someone who has spent 12 to 14 hours a day sitting in front of a computer for the last 10 years. But he is no recluse. His merry, convivial spirit and his religious adherence to the principles of reciprocity and exchange have made him a social networker par excellence. His embrace of the mores of Barcelona (he speaks fluent Catalan) has given him his own support network of middle aged housewives as well, some of whom have provided him a place to live as he moves from abode to abode. He currently lives in a farmhouse in a village of 60 people in northern Spain, where he writes for a suite of blogs including A Fistful of Euros, Global Economy Matters and a number of country specific blogs that focus on the Japanese, Hungarian, Latvian and Greek economies. More than anything, though, he still mostly reads and thinks. He also maintains a vibrant Facebook page "In the Middle Ages, curiosity in excess was regarded as a sin," he said with yet another laugh. "But with the Internet, I feel that I can do what I like. This makes me feel that I can really do something."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Watching is The New York Times's newsletter for film and TV recommendations. Sign up here. Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus have arrived to shovel even more series and films into the overstuffed maw of the TV viewing public, the first of several giant new streaming services entering a marketplace currently dominated by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. While the main draw for the Disney service, especially, is access to the company's deep archive of films, both it and Apple are also introducing plenty of original series. But are any of them any good? Well, like most programming slates, the initial lineups are pretty hit and miss. But here are a few of the new shows that are worth checking out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
To call "The Highwaymen" revisionist or even reactionary would be an understatement. This retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not content to posit that those two Depression era outlaws got what they deserved when they died in a hail of bullets on a Louisiana back road. It has a sackful of bones to pick with the modern world as a whole. Violent criminals are a problem, yes, but so are movies, airplanes, car radios, women in politics, newspapers you name it. If Grandpa Simpson could figure out how to get himself a Netflix subscription, this movie would be the whole algorithm. I'm here to say I didn't entirely hate it. As Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow rampage across a half dozen states, the governor of Texas, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates), is persuaded by her head law enforcement honcho, Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to bring a couple of old Texas Rangers out of retirement. The governor has disbanded the Rangers and brags about raising taxes to replace them with a more up to date police force. J. Edgar Hoover is doing the same thing at the federal level, and while we never see Hoover's face we do hear him called a "high flying sissy" by one of our heroes. Hoover's men are smug, citified so and sos in trim suits who set great store by fancy crime fighting techniques like fingerprint analysis, wiretaps, two way radios and aerial surveillance. The ex Rangers, reclassified as highway patrolmen for their new mission, prefer to rely on horse sense and cowboy folk wisdom. "Outlaws and mustangs always come home," says Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner), the older, gruffer one. He reckons that Bonnie and Clyde will circle back to the Dallas neighborhood where they grew up. He's mostly right, but the feds and other busybodies keep getting in the way. The plan is not to take the fugitives alive. Before he sets out in pursuit and before he's joined by his erstwhile partner, Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) Frank purchases a small arsenal at a Lubbock gun shop. Even though he's a bit rusty on the draw, Frank is a professional, and he takes the job personally. Barrow and Parker's slaughter of police officers enrages him, and he's disgusted by the aura of Robin Hood chic that has gathered around them. Graffiti on a rural water tower reads "Go Bonnie and Clyde!" Young women sport berets in imitation of Bonnie's signature look. "Coldblooded killers who are more adored than movie stars" is Lee Simmons's assessment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Al Latif is one of the many names of Allah; it means "the Subtle One." That inspired the title of a new work by the choreographer Ronald K. Brown that is receiving its world premiere in the first of two Brown programs that are running Tuesday through June 8 at the Joyce Theater. The music comes from the jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, who, at 35 (four years ago), was granted a MacArthur Fellowship for his daring blend of classical jazz and blues with the groove of funk, the urgency of hip hop (Public Enemy is a big influence) and the audacity of rock. In other words, he's something of a kindred spirit for Mr. Brown, who has concocted his own signature style over the past 30 years from a generous sampling of classical, contemporary and African dance. Add in that splash of spirituality, and "The Subtle One" should be vintage Brown. Other works from Mr. Brown's substantial repertoire flesh out the programs. (175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
How Big Do You Want Your Nest Egg to Be? Twenty million dollars. That's how much Julien Mellon needs to live the life he wants. With that kind of cash, Mr. Mellon, a 32 year old tour guide, could buy a "beautiful" home with enough left over to spend 100,000 a year ("in 2017 dollars") until the day he dies. That same number would also work for Celeste Hilling, the founder, chief and product formulator at Skin Authority. Twenty million would allow her to put her 17 year old daughter through college, "give to philanthropy especially women's and children's causes start another company, and travel as part of work combined with personal pursuits," said Ms. Hilling, 58. And then there is Susan Sosnow, a real estate investor and landlord. All Ms. Sosnow, 49, needs to feel secure is 36,000 a year. Really. She nets a fraction of that as a landlord. Explaining the relatively low figure, she said: "I'm not interested in traveling; I'm interested in creating paradise at home, Candyland. I'm still driving the '99 Ford Escort wagon I bought for 3,200 cash in 2004. But sometimes it sits in my driveway for a week and I just ride my bike around." Money may not buy happiness, but it can certainly buy freedom and security, which contribute mightily to happiness. It also helps alleviate sadness, as a 2015 paper found. In the study, researchers examined data from over 12,000 Americans. Wealthier individuals did not experience greater feelings of happiness on a day to day basis, but they did experience reduced feelings of sadness. "We argue that this reduction in sadness occurs because money provides a sense of perceived control," said Elizabeth W. Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and a co author of the paper. She also co authored the book "Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending." Jill Falcon, 46, a single stay at home mother of a 4 year old, agrees. While she does not believe there is a number to buy happiness, "Money buys safety, convenience, luxury," she said. "It can reduce worries and stress. I would love the freedom money would bring." At a time when the ranks of the ultrawealthy millionaires and even billionaires are on the rise, the magic number for many people is surprisingly modest. Celeste Hilling would like 20 million. The founder, chief and product formulator at Skin Authority, Ms. Hilling would put her 17 year old daughter through college, support causes for women and children, start another company and travel. Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times So how much is "enough"? Clearly, the definition of enough depends on where you live and your responsibilities. Ms. Sosnow is single and lives in Gainesville, Fla., which is significantly less expensive than San Diego, where Ms. Hilling lives with her husband and daughter, or Brooklyn, where Mr. Mellon resides. For Ms. Falcon, "enough" is somewhere between 8 million and 10 million, so she could give her daughter "the best of everything," as she put it: "Private school, college, money for an advanced degree at an Ivy League university, two homes, unlimited vacations. Retirement. Cars, gas, food, shelter, extras. I'd also like to make sure my mom is set for life not having to worry about money." But it's not pure hedonism. Ms. Falcon also wants to contribute to charity. So does Andrea Todd. Her number hovers around 65 million. With that she would travel with her family. But "I see that as an educational experience more than a luxury item purchased with a windfall," said Ms. Todd, 51, a writer and teacher in Sacramento who is married with three children. "We'd travel cheap and dirty, with immersion in mind." But she would also buy a farm for animals, as Jon Stewart and his wife, Tracey, did. While Ms. Todd would continue teaching at Cristo Rey, a Catholic high school in Sacramento, she would not take a salary. She would also give money to all her alma maters that would be used for tuition. "I worked my way through Catholic school and college," she said. "It would make me very happy to ensure other students were relieved of that stress." "We have a half mil in the bank, and I panic all the time about not having enough," Ms. Todd said. In addition to her parents and in laws, all of whom are in their 90s "with two pension plans possibly running out," her two children will be heading to college in the next five years. She also has a 500,000 home with 400,000 still owed on it and a retirement fund that did not begin until 2002, when her husband graduated from law school. Others would like enough money to allow them to pursue other interests. Valerie Smaldone, a media personality and brand strategist in New York, who declined to give her age, said she could make it work with a monthly stipend of 10,000 for the rest of her life. She'd like a minimum of 250,000 in retirement income on top of that, which would continue to appreciate yearly. She doesn't plan to ever stop working, but if she had "stupid money" to live off, she said, she would "produce a film or a play, or provide funding to animals who are abused. Learn something I always wanted to learn. Take a serious wine course, or do something in the food industry." Melissa Soalt, the founder of global self defense programs for women, would be set with a cool 5 million. "Being self employed often means having to 'sing for my supper,'" said Ms. Soalt, 61, of Amherst, Mass. "This would take some of the pressure off. It would not only make my life more secure I would purchase a modest home but allow me to do more to help the world." "Without the actual money, things remain realistically out of reach," she added. Kendall Rush, 47 and a grandfather, knows exactly how he would allocate his fantasy 6 million: He would take 2 million to pay off debts for himself and his immediate family, secure housing and transportation, and set up a communal trust fund with the rest for emergencies and medical. "The third million would go toward relocation of myself and my household," Mr. Rush, a help desk administrator for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority in Buffalo, wrote in an email. "Half a million for educational trust fund for kids and family. Half a million in personal accounts for day to day expenses. One million for investments stocks/bonds. One million to invest in small, local businesses." As he got older and made money, he felt the need to show off all the trappings of his rich life. "I remember buying a Porsche and then a Bentley because it looked better," he said. He has also owned a Ferrari. He got rid of them (now he collects motorcycles he has nine), but he is fond of his lifestyle. So if for some reason he could no longer work, he would like 10 million. "Ten million dollars wouldn't affect my lifestyle and allow me to continue it," which includes zipping around the world at a moment's notice, he said. Lynne Dewhurst McBurney, 50, who manages litigation for a financial services company and lives with her husband and son in Ridgewood, N.J., would not quit her job if she got her 6 million. But she might retire earlier. "Maybe it's a secret homage to Lee Majors," she said, referring to the actor who played the lead in "The Six Million Dollar Man," a 1970s television show. "But it's more like, own my home plus a pied a terre in Paris, and a cottage in Maine, and live off interest income from the 4 million we'd have left," she said. Mr. Mellon has a more visceral reason for how he arrived at his 20 million number. "The real story for me personally is how bad it hurts that I don't believe I will ever be able to own a home in the place where I grew up," said Mr. Mellon, who was raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The actress Michelle Williams "bought the house I grew up dreaming of" in the Victorian Flatbush Historic District, said Mr. Mellon. If housing weren't an issue, he would need very little: just enough to invest so he would never need to work again. "If I assume that I can own it outright, I imagine having enough to replace the boiler and fix the roof and keep up with my membership at MoMA," he said. As for Ms. Sosnow, her life is simple and straightforward. "If I wanted more money, I could pursue it, but why?" she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The lights are down barely three seconds before mayhem breaks loose at the Public Theater's production of "Ain't No Mo'." That's when the regular recorded welcome from Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, gets rudely and hilariously hijacked by Peaches, an airport gate attendant making a preboarding announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen" and that's as much as I can quote, because Peaches, who is also the play's author, Jordan E. Cooper, has quite the vocabulary. But the gist is this: Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy night. Yes, "Ain't No Mo'," which opened on Wednesday, is bumpy. It's also thrilling, bewildering, campy, shrewd, mortifying, scary, devastating and deep. What Mr. Cooper has attempted, and the director Stevie Walker Webb has brought close to fruition, is nothing less than a spiritual portrait of black American life right now, with all its terrors, hopes and contradictions. But this is no naturalistic living room drama. To bring his jumble of feelings to life, Mr. Cooper grabs every genre he can. Satire, allegory, minstrelsy and speculative fiction all come into it. The result is an anthology of loosely linked bits built on a shocking premise: What if at some point in the "beyond now," in order to solve the problem of racism in America without whites having to do anything, the government offered all black citizens descended from slaves one way airfare back to Africa? And what if almost all of them took up the offer? Certainly Peaches plans to go; it's a good deal with a lousy alternative. "If you stay here," she says, "you only got two choices for guaranteed housing, and that's either a cell or a coffin." What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter As it turns out, Peaches is the sole check in agent for African American Airlines flight 1619. (The number isn't random.) Dressed in a pink faux alligator skin suit, with a model airplane perched in her matching pink wig, she has the brilliant patter but not quite the patience to get the job done. You might say the same of the play, which alternates between scenes with Peaches that are reliably effective and others, in various styles, that sometimes land and sometimes crash. And sometimes soar. The first, set on Nov. 4, 2008, is an orgiastically over the top funeral for Brother "Righttocomplain" an allegorical figure representing centuries of justifiable black grievance. ("He had many mothers and fathers, and too many children with too many mothers to even begin to count.") With the election that night of President Barack Obama, and thus the end of "our suffering as people in this wretched land," he is finally being laid to rest. The result is a twofold destruction of souls and bodies. In a segment called "Circle of Life," set at the "Sister Girl We Slay All Day Cause Beyonce Say Community Center," Trisha (Fedna Jacquet) waits for an abortion, unwilling to give birth to another victim. She is No. 73,545 in a line of millions. In "Real Baby Mamas of the Southside," a parody of the Real Housewives franchise, black women enact scripts that portray them as tacky "bitches" and "hos." Even stranger, and funnier until it isn't, is that white women want to enact those scripts, too. One of the Baby Mamas Rachonda, nee Rachel (Simone Recasner) resents her "transphobic" castmates for mocking her journey to blackness, which involves a regimen of daily doses of Hennessy and "The Color Purple." The enjambment of outrage and outrageousness electrifies these scenes. But as the exodus approaches and the material grows darker, the show sometimes loses its edge. "Green," about rich black families who have literally buried their blackness, doesn't really mesh with the play's superstructure. And Peaches' final scene, as the flight to Africa departs with millions on it, eventually buckles under the weight of its needing to end the play with a bang. "Ain't No Mo'" is no less rich for that. Despite its big laughs and no you didn't surprises, it builds a trenchant argument. Mr. Cooper is asking whether racism is so hopelessly intertwined with black life and black life so integral to American identity that separation, even if desirable, is impossible. What do the emigres leave behind when they board that plane? What does America lose in the process? I will not give away how Mr. Cooper literalizes these questions with a powerful piece of luggage called Miss Bag. Nor why, in a beautiful scene, a guard (Ebony Marshall Oliver) must beg the last inmate of a women's prison (Crystal Lucas Perry) to take her freedom. I will only say that the best parts of "Ain't No Mo'" master a complicated trick: pulling wrenching drama out of a party hat of borrowed theatrical attitudes. Quite an achievement for a 24 year old playwright who was in middle school when Mr. Obama was elected and is making his professional debut. But Mr. Cooper isn't starting from zero. The play's overall structure owes a big debt (acknowledged prominently) to "The Colored Museum" by George C. Wolfe, which in 1984 set out to blow up the previous 30 years of black representation in American culture. Peaches is in some ways a curtsy to Miss Pat, that play's pink clad stewardess character, who advises the passengers on a "celebrity slave ship" to fasten their shackles. Mr. Cooper has a lot more to blow up now than even Mr. Wolfe did. (He started writing the play after the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in the summer of 2016.) The play is not, in that sense, easy. It is scathing about whites but also about blacks. And, finally, happiest laughing about both. It helps that Mr. Walker Webb, directing his first Off Broadway production, has brought the play to such vivid, headlong comic life. The fabulous costumes by Montana Levi Blanco do a lot of that work but so do Kimie Nishikawa's sets, Adam Honore's lighting, Emily Auciello's sound and, obviously, Cookie Jordan's wigs. As good satire must, "Ain't No Mo'" has a tightly unified aesthetic. But to the extent it is not just satire, it makes unusual demands on its actors. The five so called passengers, who play many characters in a broad range of styles, all shine, and Mr. Cooper as Peaches nearly explodes. But then, America is a bumpy flight. For some Americans it has been relentlessly so for 400 years. In trying to carve out new forms to explore that, Mr. Cooper like other young black playwrights writing so expressively right now is continuing the work of "The Colored Museum," which asked, as Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times, how black men and women could "at once honor and escape the legacy of suffering that is the baggage of their past."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING What's Different Now About the Left By John B. Judis "Henry James once said that being an American is a complex fate," the critic Irving Howe wrote in "Socialism and America" (1985), one of the most penetrating essay collections on the subject. "We American socialists could add 'He didn't know the half of it.'" The word "socialist," which signifies deep egalitarian commitments, was encumbered in the 20th century by many disasters done in its name, particularly Stalinism. Howe felt that socialists could not simply shed those "burdens." He hoped for "friends of tomorrow" who would have "so completely absorbed the lessons" of what went wrong that they wouldn't need to repeat them. After all, he added, "yearning for a better mode of life ... will reappear." Is that tomorrow now? Are the lessons learned? Conservatives vexed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez fret that tomorrow is here. Anti socialist bluster riddled the 2020 Republican convention, even though the Democratic Socialists of America, the country's largest socialist group, refused to endorse Joe Biden against Donald Trump (Sanders did the opposite). In "The Socialist Awakening," the journalist John B. Judis proposes that a new socialism is emerging among the young and educated. He builds on his earlier volumes on nationalism and populism, collectivist ideas that have surged because of a "breakdown" of the "consensus on the virtues of the free market and of globalization."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A rapidly tightening labor market is forcing companies across the country to consider workers they once would have turned away. That is providing opportunities to people who have long faced barriers to employment, such as criminal records, disabilities or prolonged bouts of joblessness. In Dane County, Wis., where the unemployment rate was just 2 percent in November, demand for workers has grown so intense that manufacturers are taking their recruiting a step further: hiring inmates at full wages to work in factories even while they serve their prison sentences. These companies were not part of traditional work release programs that are far less generous and rarely lead to jobs after release. "When the unemployment rate is high, you can afford to not hire anyone who has a criminal record, you can afford to not hire someone who's been out of work for two years," said Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist and former Treasury secretary. "When the unemployment rate is lower, employers will adapt to people rather than asking people to adapt to them." The American economy hasn't experienced this kind of fierce competition for workers since the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time the unemployment rate currently 4.1 percent was this low. The tight job market hasn't yet translated into strong wage growth for American workers. But there are tentative signs that, too, could be changing particularly for lower paid workers who were largely left out of the early stages of the economic recovery. Walmart on Thursday said it would raise pay for entry level workers beginning in February; its rival Target announced a similar move last fall. Employers are also becoming more flexible in other ways. Burning Glass Technologies, a Boston based software company that analyzes job market data, has found an increase in postings open to people without experience. And unemployment rates have fallen sharply in recent years for people with disabilities or without a high school diploma. Until recently, someone like Jordan Forseth might have struggled to find work. Mr. Forseth, 28, was released from prison in November after serving a 26 month sentence for burglary and firearm possession. Mr. Forseth, however, had a job even before he walked out of the Oregon Correction Center a free man. Nearly every weekday morning for much of last year, Mr. Forseth would board a van at the minimum security prison outside Madison, Wis., and ride to Stoughton Trailers, where he and more than a dozen other inmates earned 14 an hour wiring taillights and building sidewalls for the company's line of semitrailers. After he was released, Mr. Forseth kept right on working at Stoughton. But instead of riding in the prison van, he drives to work in the 2015 Ford Fusion he bought with the money he saved while incarcerated. Meghen Yeadon, a recruiter for Stoughton, found part of the solution: a Wisconsin Department of Corrections work release program for minimum security inmates. Work release programs have often been criticized for exploiting inmates by forcing them to work grueling jobs for pay that is often well below minimum wage. But the Wisconsin program is voluntary, and inmates are paid market wages. State officials say the program gives inmates a chance to build up some savings, learn vocational skills and prepare for life after prison. 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. Ms. Yeadon initially encountered skepticism from supervisors. But as the local labor pool kept shrinking, it became harder to rule out a group of potential albeit unconventional workers. Other companies are making similar choices. Officials in Wisconsin and other states with similar inmate programs say demand for their workers has risen sharply in the past year. And while most companies may not be ready to turn to inmate labor, there are signs they are increasingly willing to consider candidates with criminal records, who have long faced trouble finding jobs. The government doesn't regularly collect data on employment for people with criminal records. But private sector sources suggest that companies have become more willing to consider hiring them. Data from Burning Glass showed that 7.9 percent of online job postings indicated that a criminal background check was required, down from 8.9 percent in 2014. Mike Wynne has seen the change in employer mind set firsthand. Mr. Wynne runs Emerge Community Development, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps people with criminal records or other difficulties find jobs. In the past, Mr. Wynne said, companies saw working with Emerge mostly as a form of public relations. But with the unemployment rate in the Minneapolis area at 2.1 percent, companies have increasingly turned to Emerge as a source of labor. "We see employers really knocking on the door of our organization in a way that we haven't seen in probably 20 years," Mr. Wynne said. As employers dip deeper into the pool of available labor, workers are coming off the economy's sidelines. The participation rate for what economists call prime age workers those ages 25 to 54 hit a seven year high in December. Employment gains have been especially strong for groups that often face discrimination unemployment for African Americans fell to 6.8 percent in November, the lowest rate on record. Amy Glaser, a senior vice president for Adecco, a staffing firm, said that especially during the recent holiday season, there was a surge in demand for warehouse workers, creating opportunities for people who might have struggled to find work earlier in the economic recovery. Two years ago, Ms. Glaser said, companies required warehouse workers to have high school diplomas and experience with the scanners used to track merchandise. Now, increasingly, they require neither, she said. "We've seen an extreme escalation in the past 12 months," Ms. Glaser said. "If someone applies for a job and you don't get to them within 24 hours, that person will already have taken another job." Even during the strong economy that accompanied the housing boom of the mid 2000s, the unemployment rate never dropped below 4.4 percent, and the United States has never reached the point at which everyone who wanted a job could get one. Perhaps as a result, incomes were stagnant for many middle class families, and many groups that have historically faced discrimination or other disadvantages in the labor market never experienced the full benefits of the strong economy. Many economists say the recovery still has a ways to go before rivaling that of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The unemployment rate has fallen nearly as far as it did in 2000, when it hit 3.8 percent. But millions of Americans still have part time or temporary jobs, or are out of the labor force entirely. And parts of the country still bear the scars of the recession that officially ended nearly a decade ago. "I think of the late '90s as having been a very healthy labor market," said Narayana Kocherlakota, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "When I look at the United States today, I think it has some room to grow in terms of achieving that kind of health." Still, household incomes have risen rapidly in the past two years, with the strongest gains coming for those in the poorest families. And there are signs that the tightening labor market is at last beginning to shift bargaining power from companies to workers. Ahu Yildirmaz, an economist who helps lead the research arm of the payroll processing company ADP, said her firm's data showed more people switching jobs, and getting bigger bumps in pay for doing so. For Mr. Forseth, the job at Stoughton Trailers was an opportunity to save money and prove his value. He even earned the Employee of the Month award although, because he was still incarcerated, he couldn't take advantage of the parking spot that came with it. Now, however, he is thinking bigger. Other jobs in the area pay higher wages, and his freedom has opened up more options. He has been talking to another local company, which is interested in training him to become an estimator a salaried job that would pay more and offer room for advancement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
With a lefty forehand that crackles like a campfire, a stunning one hand backhand and a backward baseball cap that dips to just above his eyebrows, Denis Shapovalov is a stirring reminder of the swaggering, swashbuckling days of Andre Agassi. Shapovalov, 21, of Canada pumps his fist and bellows when he wins points, as he did when he upset David Goffin, who was ranked No. 10 at the time, to reach the quarterfinals of the United States Open in September, his best result at a major. It was enough to propel him into the world's top 10 for the first time. He followed that up by reaching the semifinals at the Italian Open and the semifinals of the ATP tournament in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he beat Stan Wawrinka before losing to Andrey Rublev. A little over a year ago, Shapovalov was ranked outside the top 30, but then hired the former pro Mikhail Youzhny as his traveling coach. By the end of 2019, Shapovalov had won his first tour title in Stockholm and reached the final at the Paris Masters, before losing to Novak Djokovic. Shapovalov also sings. He serenaded the crowd with his rap music after a match at the BNP Paribas Open in 2019. Just before this year's U.S. Open, he debuted his rap song, "Night Train," with the help of the fellow pro Corentin Moutet. The following conversation has been edited and condensed. How did all this rap stuff start, and who's your rap influence? My rap influence is G Eazy. I've been listening to his music for years. During the lockdown I had time to write some lyrics and put together some songs. Laughing That's just a little flexing, or whatever, like in rap. But I feel like I've got a lot of fans that love me. People dress like me, grow their hair out, imitate my walk. In the beginning I was like, "What's going on? Why are they copying me?" But it's pretty cool. You're pretty creative and energetic on the court. Is there a blur between playing tennis and entertaining? Honestly, it comes together. Off court, I'm really laid back, but on the court I'm definitely not chill. I like to roar, like a wolf. When I'm on court, I want to beat the other player, show him my teeth. I've been working a lot with my psychologist to mature into that wolf. That's exactly who I try to be every time I step on the court. Your mother coached you from the beginning, the same way Andy Murray's mother did. What does she bring to the table? She put a racket in my hand, knows my game as good as me, if not better. And she always keeps me levelheaded and puts me right back in my place when I'm not feeling good. Three years ago, when you were just 18, you beat Rafael Nadal to reach the semifinals at the Canadian Open, your home tournament. What was that like? I was staying with Felix Auger Aliassime at his house, and I woke up the morning of the match and there was a poster of Rafa right there. I made a joke and said, "It's gotta go." When I came home after the match Felix had taken it off the wall. A little bit of bromance began right there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Speculate no more. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the co hosts of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC whose off air relationship had been the source of rumors, are now engaged. An MSNBC spokeswoman confirmed the engagement. In an interview in Vanity Fair, the couple described how their relationship evolved. "Over the past year and a half, I realized I had to face these feelings and that it was time to stop putting them in a box," Ms. Brzezinski told the magazine. "It was not an easy process and it was not an easy set of decisions for either of us. It was something I couldn't deny anymore." Mr. Scarborough, who has been married twice before, told Vanity Fair he thought he would "never, ever do this again in a million years."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When Equifax's recently retired chief executive, Richard F. Smith, appeared before a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday, he held himself out as a changed man. After decades of maintaining high walls between the credit data that his company collects and the citizens like you and me who simply want to know what it says and means, he claimed that he and his former company now want to put us in control. We should have the ability to lock any new creditor out of our credit files, he said, and the forthcoming service that makes it possible will be free forever. Then, he threw down a gauntlet of sorts. "I would encourage TransUnion and Experian to do the same," he said, referring to Equifax's primary competitors. "It's time we change the paradigm and give the power back to the consumer to control who accesses his or her credit." Experian's response came about six hours later: Go pound sand. "We are looking at broader solutions that can help consumers effectively and securely operate in the credit economy, but it shouldn't be done based on crisis mode responses from Equifax," Michael Troncale, an Experian spokesman, said in an emailed statement. This intramural spat that broke out late Tuesday is centered on what the best remedies are in the wake of the Equifax breach and what they should cost, if anything. Earlier this year, thieves pried loose as many as 145.5 million Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other personal information. Equifax's biggest peace offering so far has been what it refers to as a credit lock. Credit locks work the same way as credit freezes, which have existed for more than a decade: In either case, you tell Equifax, Experian and TransUnion to flip a switch, after which no new creditor can see your credit report. Because companies won't open an account without checking up on you first, this has the effect of blocking thieves who try to impersonate you using stolen information to take out new loans in your name. Locks and freezes only work, however, if you block access to your files at all three bureaus, which you have to do separately; if you only close off access to your Equifax file, someone might use information from the Equifax breach or some other data theft to open a credit card in your name at a bank that only checks an Experian report. Freezes came into widespread existence only because of pressure from consumer advocates and state legislators, who eventually passed so many laws that the credit bureaus gave in and offered freezes nationwide about a decade ago. More recently, they've added credit locks, which accomplish the same thing but are not subject to state regulation. Locks can differ in other ways as well. Equifax has confused consumers by discussing two different lock processes in the past month. You can turn the first on and off from a browser; it made this available along with the TrustedID Premier package of credit monitoring it offered free to every American after it announced its breach. There is a convenience angle here, too. Credit freezes require the use of a PIN, which you must supply to temporarily lift or permanently cancel a freeze. If you lose it, you won't be able to unfreeze your credit file instantly. Canceling credit locks is supposed to be instant, too, which is crucial if you want to apply spontaneously for a credit card at a store counter or if you forget to unlock your file before going car shopping. But even Equifax's communications team seems confused on how quickly the process works. Its own website says, incorrectly, that unlocking can take 24 to 48 hours. I pointed this out to the company several days ago, and it admitted its error. But it still hasn't fixed the website. TransUnion has a locking product as well, which it includes as part of a service called TrueIdentity. It is free, but you must submit to offers of credit from third parties in order to use it, which helps TransUnion make money. It also comes with mandatory arbitration and class action lawsuit waivers. "The arbitration agreement helps us to provide TrueIdentity to consumers at no charge," said David Blumberg, a company spokesman, in a statement. Before Mr. Smith's congressional testimony Tuesday, Experian had been charging money for its credit lock. To get the lock, you have to sign up for a monthly credit monitoring service, which can cost 9.99 to 24.99 a month. This will always cost more than what they charge to simply freeze your credit file and thawing it occasionally when you need to apply for credit. When I asked Experian whether it would change its policy on this, it declined to commit to anything. "We will continue to review this issue in light of the other alternatives available and engage with consumers and other stakeholders to ensure consumer centric solutions are available that enable consumers to be safe in the credit economy," it said in its statement. Like TransUnion, Experian forces people to sign away legal rights, which probably isn't the best way to help people feel safe. Experian said that this was "consistent with the industry standard for consumer terms and conditions." Arbitration agreements represent "a simple and convenient dispute resolution mechanism that helps ensure claims are resolved quickly and to the parties' satisfaction." For an alternative view, see my colleagues' series of articles about how these clauses actually work in practice. Why might Experian be taking such a hard line? There could be a cold political calculation at work. Sure, making its locks free might head off any federal legislation forcing free locks or freezes on the companies. But given the dysfunction in Washington, perhaps its lobbyists are telling executives that any new laws are unlikely. Meanwhile, as John Breyault, vice president of public policy, telecommunications and fraud at the National Consumers League, said to me in an interview, making freezes and locks cumbersome and expensive creates a competitive advantage for Experian. After all, if Experian has fewer blocked credit files than Equifax or TransUnion, it will be easier for Experian to ultimately sell access to more files than its competitors. Which is not to say that Experian doesn't believe what Mr. Smith of Equifax is saying. It knows that people should shut down access to their credit file as a matter of basic financial hygiene. In a podcast on its website, where the host made the radically misleading statement that a credit freeze can take "weeks or whatever it is," a guest, Michelle Felice Steele, endorsed the locking concept heartily. "Basically people lock things that are valuable to them, and your credit is also valuable," said Ms. Felice Steele, Experian's director of product management in its consumer services group. "They value that information not getting into identity thieves' hands." So cutting off access to your credit report is an excellent idea, and Experian knows it, even if it might cause problems for the banks and others who keep it in business. Experian simply wants to stick us all with the bill for its freezes and locks. We'll see how long it continues to get away with it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
One of the more surreal First Amendment trials in American history started this week in Florida. The wrestler Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, is demanding a 100 million settlement from Gawker, the news website, over an excerpt from a video it published, of Mr. Bollea having sex with the wife of a friend, a radio shock jock known as Bubba the Love Sponge. He argues that Gawker violated his privacy in publishing the excerpt. And that is where, unexpectedly, we veer into a legal, moral and philosophical question that involves the very nature of who we are, or at least who Mr. Bollea actually is. Part of Mr. Bollea's testimony has been positively Cartesian. It has rested on when exactly he is Mr. Bollea, a 62 year old man who by his own admission has trouble making friends, and when he is Hulk Hogan, the wrestling champion, in which guise, he testified Monday, he has claimed to have "body slammed Moby Dick and pulled a bumper off a Cadillac." Mr. Bollea, who has appeared in court in a black version of his signature bandanna, his mustache apparently trimmed for the occasion, says that the video was filmed by Bubba the Love Sponge (who has legally changed his name from Todd Clem) without his knowledge, and that he has not seen it. That would seem to be an important element in his claim that his privacy was violated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
These Athletes Had the Coronavirus. Will They Ever Be the Same? It was the end of March, and Josh Fiske, a urologist from Livingston, N.J., was in the hospital fighting an uphill battle against the coronavirus. Just a week earlier, he had easily jogged a five mile route around his neighborhood. But his body was failing him now. His oxygen levels dipped dangerously low, and his fever rocketed to a worrying 104 degrees. Shifting his body in bed exhausted him. Walking a few steps felt like "hiking in thin air." Opening a bottle of iced tea was "a huge task." Fiske kept fighting, though, and eventually, with the help of his doctors, he turned a corner. Yet even as he did, even as he seemed assured of avoiding the worst outcomes of the virus, a different sort of anxiety consumed him. "I started to think, 'Am I going to be able to run again? Am I going to be able to walk the golf course?'" said Fiske, 46, who does a marathon or half marathon every year. "These are things I love to do." The coronavirus has infected millions of people around the world. Athletes tend to view themselves as perhaps better equipped than the general population to avoid the worst consequences of the disease the virus causes, Covid 19. Yet interviews with athletes who have contracted the virus from professionals to college athletes to weekend hobbyists revealed their surprise at the potency of its symptoms, struggles to reestablish workout regimens, lingering battles with lung issues and muscle weakness, and unsettling bouts of anxiety about whether they would be able to match their physical peaks. And with sports leagues around the world scrambling to restart play, more athletes could soon be taking on a significant amount of risk. "It definitely shook me up a bit it was very surreal, you know?" Von Miller, a linebacker for the Denver Broncos who contracted the virus, said in an interview. "My biggest takeaway from this experience is that no matter how great of shape you are in physically, no matter what your age is, that you're not immune from things like this." Experts warn that the virus does not discriminate. That was the lesson Andrew Boselli, an offensive lineman at Florida State, learned as members of his family including his father, Tony, 47, a former N.F.L. lineman began showing symptoms in March. "I knew I was young and healthy," said Boselli, 22, who moved home to Jacksonville, Fla., after the university closed its doors. "I play Division 1 football, and I've been training my butt off all winter and spring. I thought I had no worries. I wasn't going to get it." That bullish attitude faded days later, when he awoke feeling sluggish and short of breath. That night, his body temperature climbed to 104. "It was the sickest I've ever felt," said Boselli, who continued to feel shortness of breath and fatigue for about week and a half. "I would try to train and was short of breath after five or 10 minutes," Dybala said in an interview with the Argentine Football Association, "and we realized something was not right." Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonary physician and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, said that, like much about the disease, the long term consequences for athletes who contract it are not fully understood. Athletes, though, represent interesting case studies for doctors, given their generally good baseline health and nuanced awareness of their own bodies. "Patients who are athletes, I love them, because they will pick up subtle changes sometimes way before even the tests identify a disease," Galiatsatos said. More Asian countries slowly reopen their borders and welcome vaccinated travelers. Galiatsatos singled out three complications from Covid 19 that could be of particular concern to athletes. First, coronavirus patients, like anyone with a serious respiratory infection, were at risk for long term lung issues. He often saw patients "who three months ago had a bad virus and still can't get their breathing back to normal." "Sometimes a bad virus creates an airway disease similar to an asthma," he said. "They can ravage the lungs, where the lungs were rebuilt, but not well, and patients are stuck with an asthmalike reactive airway disease situation." Another complication that Galiatsatos considered particularly concerning to athletes, and one that experts were still trying to wrap their heads around, was the high incidence of blood clots that doctors were seeing in coronavirus patients. People diagnosed with blood clots, and prescribed blood thinners, are typically discouraged from participating in contact sports. Finally, Galiatsatos said people unfortunate enough to be placed in intensive care could deal with "I.C.U. acquired weakness." Patients placed on ventilators and confined to a bed often lost between 2 and 10 percent of their muscle mass per day, he said. Ben O'Donnell, a triathlete who lives in Anoka County, Minn., lost 45 pounds during a four week hospital stay during which he was placed on a ventilator and a short term life support machine. O'Donnell, 38, a former college football player who completed an Ironman race a couple of years ago and was planning on doing another this fall, said he was pulled back from the brink of death after struggling with dangerously low levels of oxygen and kidney and liver failure in the intensive care unit. Back at home after his harrowing month in the hospital, O'Donnell has set his sights on competing in an Ironman race in Arizona this fall. He acknowledged it was a lofty goal. "They're not sure if I'll ever get full lung capacity back," he said. "I may or may not." Had he not contracted the virus, O'Donnell, an executive at a chemical company, would be doing three runs, three swims and three bicycle workouts per week at this point in his training cycle. But the virus derailed his life plans. After returning home, he needed a walker just to go out to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. In his first attempt to exercise, two days after he left the hospital, he walked for seven minutes at a speed of 1.2 miles per hour using supplemental oxygen. He has been trying to add a minute of time, and a bit of speed, each day. O'Donnell said he was struggling with "a fair amount of doubt" about his ability to get back in shape for the race. But he has motivated himself with the secondary goal of raising money for coronavirus relief, and he has been repeating the same mantra ever since he was struggling in his hospital bed: "Don't stop. Don't quit. Keep moving forward." This mentality has helped other athletes who have been hit with serious symptoms. The 29 days Tsang Yee ting spent in the hospital were the most she had been away from a karate mat since being introduced to the sport at age 6. A member of the Hong Kong national team, Tsang, 27, contracted the coronavirus in March while preparing to qualify for the Summer Olympics. For the next month, she battled a range of symptoms, the worst a searing pain that engulfed the lower half of her body. Walking was a struggle. Lying down offered no relief. As she fought a virus that doctors were still learning about, "all sorts of thoughts" about her body and about her future spiraled through her mind, she said. "Of course I was worried," Tsang said. "Karate is my life." But even as the virus and isolation from her family levied an "emotional toll" on her, Tsang resolved to stay as active as possible to keep herself sane. She acquired elastic bands and, on days when her body felt strong enough, completed mini workouts in the tight confines of her hospital room. "Battling the virus was like training for a competition," said Tsang, who said she now felt normal again and has been training with her teammates over video. Fiske, the urologist, has been working, very slowly, to get back into shape after his weeklong I.C.U. stay in March. Joshua Fiske has attacked his recovery from Covid 19 like a punishing, long training run. Fiske said he found himself relying on the same mental calisthenics he might have used to get through a punishing long distance run "when you're having a tough time, and you decide to do another mile or two to see if you can break through it" to stave off negative thoughts about his recovery. Since returning home, his focus has been on regaining lung strength. He could not walk up the stairs without becoming "totally gassed." He could not hold a conversation. But it pained him to think that he might not be able to run, to golf or to exercise with his two teenage sons. So he has persisted with breathing exercises and laboring jogs through his neighborhood. Recently, he was able to finish his old five mile route albeit at a different pace. "They're slow," he said of the miles. "But they're there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Dr. Libby Torchia's pandemic breaking point came one morning in May, when she and her boss got into an argument over whether staff members should wear masks at the Columbus, Ohio, clinic where they worked. ("We should!" said Dr. Torchia, 32, a veterinarian.) Her colleagues knew just how to comfort her: Blast the Spice Girls' hit song "Wannabe." From the surgical suite where they were about to spay a dog, they broke into a dance party. "It really helped to bring my focus back, and made me feel a lot happier and just kind of let go of all of the conflict," Dr. Torchia said. Some people swear by silent breakfasts. Others recommend breathing exercises. For another group of people, the ultimate coping mechanism for political angst and the pandemic is escaping into a world of yesteryear listening to 1990s hits, watching old films and playing 16 bit video games. When everything has turned upside down, why not go back to a time when the world seemed simpler? These throwbacks have not had much competition, admittedly, since many major movie studios have delayed releases until next year or later. But people are harking back to old favorites not just because there is nothing else to watch or do. These films and songs offer solace and predictability in a time when each week seems to bring unpleasant surprises. Research shows that conjuring nostalgia by watching old movies or taking up old hobbies is an effective way to cope with stress and anxiety. It can lift people into better moods, boost confidence and inspire a sense of optimism, said Dr. Wing Yee Cheung, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Winchester in England who studies nostalgia. "We feel that we have lost footing at the present time, and we gain some comfort by taking a step back and revisiting something that reminds us of a time that we used to feel more connected with other people," Dr. Cheung said. "It gives you energy to cope with what is going on now and move forward." Dr. Torchia, who now works at a different veterinary clinic, said that during the pandemic, she has spent hours listening to the Spice Girls and Britney Spears, favorites from elementary and middle school, because they remind her of times when she felt more hopeful and less isolated from her family. She has also watched about 10 classic Disney movies, including "Mulan" (both the 1998 version and the 2020 remake), and on election night she watched the romantic comedy "Easy A" (2010) to calm her as the results started rolling in. Dr. Lasana Harris, an assistant professor of psychology at University College London, said that the psychological benefits of getting lost in the plot of an old, favorite TV show or movie can last anywhere from a few minutes to a day. "It changes the narrative you're constantly telling yourself reminding yourself you do have people who love and care for you even if you haven't had a hug in a while," Dr. Harris said. Dr. Harris found that he, too, sought familiarity, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. Each morning, for a half hour before work, he would mix music on his computer something he had not done in decades. "We need to be distracted from time to time," he said. Distraction has been key for Anna Townsend, a recruiter living in Athens, Ga. Overwhelmed with anxiety about the coronavirus, protests in Atlanta, the election and her husband recently losing his job, she decided to watch less TV news and more vintage comedies. She said she's seen about 40 movies since March, including "Casper" (1995), "The Addams Family" (1991), "Halloweentown" (1998), "Dumb and Dumber" (1994) and "Hocus Pocus." In Jalandhar, a city in northwest India, Banvinder Singh said he has gotten through lockdown by watching 1960s and '70s Bollywood movies and listening to decades old Punjabi songs. They have lifted the spirits of his 82 year old grandmother, who had not been able to go to temple every day because of coronavirus risks. "We try to make her busy with old movies," said Mr. Singh, 29, an auditor at Ernst Young, who said his family gathers in front of their TV set in the living room to watch films. "It just made her more positive." Chris Mazurek, who lives outside of Melbourne, Australia, which until last month had one of the world's longest and most severe lockdowns, said that in July, when it looked as if there was no end in sight to the lockdown, he started listening to the Foo Fighters album "There Is Nothing Left to Lose." The 1999 album brought him back to his high school days and motivated him to reconnect over Facebook with several high school friends with whom he had not been in touch in a decade. Mr. Mazurek, 36, and his wife had to get creative to keep their three young children entertained through what was ultimately 111 days of lockdown. When they watched movies, his children would draw handmade movie tickets and Mr. Mazurek would make popcorn and hot chocolate their usual snacks when, before the pandemic, they would go to the movie theater. At home, they watched multiple times "The Mighty Ducks" (1992), "Back to the Future" (1985), "Home Alone" (1990) and "The Goonies," some of his favorites from his childhood. "It took me back to a time that was a little bit simpler," said Mr. Mazurek, a director at Accenture Consulting.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
As New York neighborhoods get sliced and diced like onions into increasingly small sections, a scrap of Lower Manhattan has now become the "Northwest East Village" that is, if one is to believe the developers of a condominium there called the Jefferson. It is at 211 East 13th Street comfortably inside the purported new neighborhood, which, according to a map on the condo's Web site, runs from about East 11th to East 14th Street, from Avenue A to Third Avenue. For the rest of us, the generally accepted boundaries of the East Village are East 14th, East Houston, Third Avenue and Avenue D. With the new name, the team building the Jefferson may be trying to freshen the image of the area, which is lined with aged brick tenements and has been more gentrification proof than other East Village enclaves. Or, like other marketing tactics, the renaming could serve no more serious purpose than to draw attention to the building. "We were being a little funny, because we know it's never going to catch on," said Michael Barry, the president of the Ironstate Development Company in Hoboken, N.J., which is working with SK Development and CB Developers on the project. The tone of the marketing materials for the Jefferson, which itself is named for a vaudeville theater that used to stand at the site, is similarly tongue in cheek, employing the hypercharged phrasing of old movie posters, like "Everything works!" and "Central air conditioning!" The 82 unit condo, which is to be completed next spring, offers everything from studios to three bedrooms, in a size range of 550 to 1,650 square feet. The units will have oak floors and nine foot ceilings; their large windows are to have electronic blinds similar to those found at the Urban Glass House at 330 Spring Street in SoHo, a 2006 condo built by SK and CB along with Matrix Development. Basaltina, a gray stone, is being used for tiles in master baths, and reclaimed barn siding will hang on the walls of powder rooms and the lobby. While the facade will be streamlined and modernistic, the natural materials for the interior are in "keeping with the older East Village mentality we are going for," said Scott Shnay, a principal of SK, which is based in SoHo. A part of the theater, which was razed in 2000, may also be incorporated in the design; its mosaic tile floor was discovered under a layer of dirt at the site and has been set aside, Mr. Shnay added. But the feature attraction, according to brokers unaffiliated with the project, is pricing. Apartments start at 1,600 a square foot, which puts them quite a bit lower than many other new downtown condos. At the Witkoff Group's 150 Charles Street in the West Village, units start at 3,000 a square foot. Buyers have taken notice. Since sales began in late April, 56 of the 82 units have gone into contract, developers say. "In this day and age," said Henry Hershkowitz, a broker with Douglas Elliman, "the Jefferson's prices are actually considered reasonable." Mr. Hershkowitz has lived around the corner on Second Avenue for two decades and frequently works in the East Village. In fact he was the sales director for one of the area's first luxury condos, 123 Third Avenue, at East 14th, a 48 unit tower completed in 2009. Even then, he recalled, there was discussion about what to call the area. (Developers finally settled on "East Union Square," which didn't stick either.) Whatever the moniker, the market has improved with time. At first, prices at 123 Third averaged 1,200 a foot, but a two bedroom currently listed at 1.895 million, or about 1,600 a foot, is about to sell for "significantly over the asking price," said Mr. Hershkowitz, who is involved in the deal and declined to comment on it further. Nearby condos that have shown strength include 110 Third Avenue across the street, a green and blue glass 2007 offering from Toll Brothers. A two bedroom there is listed at 2.75 million, or about 1,500 a foot.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A new study suggests that powerful storm surges are responsible for pushing giant boulders to the tops of cliffs in western Ireland. On a flat peninsula in western Ireland bordered by shallow cliffs that rise from the Atlantic Ocean sits a field of boulders. Some weigh nearly four times more than a school bus. Now scientists have figured out how these boulders reached their high perches. A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that powerful storm surges swept the boulders inward. The findings might help scientists better understand the dangers of coastal storms, which climate scientists predict are bound to increase in our warming world. Scientists have long debated whether these mighty boulders were deposited on the Irish coast by violent storm waves or powerful tsunamis. To settle the question, John Dewey, a retired professor of geology at Oxford University, and Paul Ryan, a retired geologist at the National University of Ireland, dug into historic records, oceanographic data and field measurements. Both lighthouse records and measurements from offshore buoys point toward a landscape that is commonly ravaged by large storm waves. And some of those waves can reach enormous heights. Take a storm in 1861, which sent waves crashing over an approximately 220 feet tall lighthouse near the boulder site. The waves broke the glass and flooded the lighthouse. Its keepers, unable to push the door open against the water, had to drill a hole in the door to release the buckets of water before they could assess the damage. "Think of the power of a wave crashing on the shore that high," Dr. Dewey says. A single cubic meter of water weighs roughly a metric ton, or about 2,200 pounds, which is roughly the weight of a giraffe. "If you're throwing a wall of water, say 30 or 40 meters high over a large area, the volume of water is enormous and the crushing force is tremendous," Dr. Dewey says. To confirm their suspicions, the team added historical and oceanographic data into a computer model. They found that the waves are powerful enough to wash massive boulders that originate beneath the ocean's surface hundreds of feet inland exactly where they're found in western Ireland. Those waves can even rip the boulders from the faces of surrounding cliffs. Then with each successive storm, other waves can pick them up and wash them farther inland. Adrian Hall, a geomorphologist at Stockholm University who was not involved in the study, said the work adds to the evidence that storm surges are able to move stones like these ones. "We're pretty secure that on some coasts at least, the boulders are moving in storms," he says. The same can't be said farther afield on New Zealand's North Island, which is littered with boulders heavier than 150 tons. These were likely deposited by a tsunami, Dr. Ryan and Dr. Dewey say, because sandstone and broken shells are embedded between the boulders sediment that must have originated on the ocean floor. By comparing the two sites, the team found perhaps counterintuitively that storm surges can sometimes be just as fierce as tsunamis. In fact, their calculations show that a 65 feet tall storm surge can rip the same size boulder from a cliff as a 16 feet tall tsunami. And in western Ireland, such tall storm waves are common, perhaps occurring 30 times every year. "We all know tsunamis are frightening I think it's less well appreciated how frightening storms can be," Dr. Ryan says. And given that these storms are predicted to increase in both number and intensity in the future, "then obviously a full understanding of the power of waves and their effect on coastal communities is really, really important," Dr. Ryan says.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
It was estimated to sell on Thursday in Toulouse, France, for at least 110 million, the highest auction price ever achieved for any artwork in Europe. Then on Tuesday came the announcement that the auction of "Judith and Holofernes," an early 17th century canvas billed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Caravaggio, had been canceled. The painting had been sold privately to a collector outside France, the auctioneers Marc Labarbe and Eric Turquin said in a statement. Both the identity of the buyer and the purchase price were covered by a confidentiality clause, the statement said. The painting will "soon be exhibited in an important museum" where it will "finally come into the light for all to see," it added. In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Turquin, a Paris based expert and dealer in old master paintings, declined to name the museum. Mr. Turquin has spent five years researching and marketing the painting after its discovery by Mr. Labarbe in the attic of a house in Toulouse in April 2014. He said the price accepted by the owners was more than the minimum bid level of EUR30 million, or about 34 million, that had been planned for the auction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
This is an article from Turning Points, a special section that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. Turning Point: The spread of Covid 19 in 2020 led to dramatic reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions, with one study finding that emissions fell by roughly 1.5 billion metric tons during the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2019 the largest half year decline in recorded history. "No ocean, no life." Being a Cousteau, this message was practically written into my DNA. And it's one I've tried to share with the world through my many years of work as an environmental advocate. Unfortunately, given the dire state of our oceans today, it's clear that the message hasn't gotten through to most people. As we reflect on 2020 one of the most socially and scientifically difficult years in recent memory and look for ways to move forward, it's crucial that we understand this simple fact: Without a healthy ocean we will not have a healthy future. Many of us have experienced the magic and beauty of the ocean. Yet its vital connection to our daily lives the ways in which it supplies the oxygen we breathe and nourishes the crops we eat remains far less understood. I've had the challenge and the privilege of spending 31 continuous days living in an underwater habitat, which has given me a unique perspective on the intrinsic value of the ocean as our primary life support system. The truth, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, is that our planet would more appropriately be called Ocean, not Earth. Without our water, Earth would be just one of billions of lifeless rocks floating in the inky black void of space. How can we change our perspective on the ocean as it relates to our planet? We can start by heeding the lessons of 2020. While the coronavirus has caused great suffering and tragedy, it has also shed light on some of the invisible structures that underpin our daily lives, from racial injustice to the extreme disparities in wealth that burden our communities. While these realities have always been plain to some, it took the seismic shifts created by the pandemic for many of us to wake up to them. The pandemic has also served to remind us of the beauty of nature. As Covid 19 spread across the globe in the spring, prompting nation upon nation to impose strict lockdown measures, the natural world briefly reasserted itself: Cloudy Venetian canals grew clearer. The smog dissipated over the Hollywood Hills. Cars vanished from the roads, leading to a significant, though temporary, drop in carbon dioxide emissions. These developments were encouraging, suggesting that dramatic change was possible, and that there was hope for a greener future after all. Both environmental pollution and the pandemic share an unnerving trait: The mechanisms and processes that underlie them remain largely invisible to the naked eye. We can't see the microplastic contaminants we may be ingesting when we eat food from the sea today, just like we can't see the respiratory droplets of the coronavirus as they pass from person to person. This fact can make these threats feel particularly overwhelming. But we aren't alone in these fights. None of us are naturally immune to the virus, or to the effects of pollution and climate change. And we can create real change if we act collectively. The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them? What should our leaders be doing? Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency. What are the worst climate risks in your country? Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces. Where are Americans suffering most? Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S. What does climate devastation look like? In Sept. 2020, Michael Benson studied detailed satellite imagery. Here's the earth that he saw and the one he wants to see. Seemingly small, everyday actions can help combat both pollution and the virus. For example, wearing a washable and reusable mask is an easy way to protect your neighbor's health and assure that less plastic ends up in the ocean. To protect our waterways further, we should avoid buying consumer goods wrapped in plastic, which will in turn lower the demand for such products. We live in a closed loop system. We can't actually throw things "away." The plastic we toss in the garbage often just ends up inside the bodies of marine animals, before finding its way back inside of us. Like my grandfather, Jacques Yves Cousteau, I believe that we protect what we love, and love what we understand. We have the ability to dictate the magnitude of the coronavirus and climate crises if we can simply absorb the lessons of science, including the hard truth that devastation awaits if we act too late. We must learn that to be on nature's side is to be on humanity's side. Now, more than ever, we need hope. But we can't just wait around for it; we have to create it. One way I'm building toward a more hopeful future and contributing to the effort to find solutions to the pressing problems that confront us is through the creation of Proteus, intended to be the world's most advanced underwater research station and habitat. The first in a projected network of Proteus habitats will be located 60 feet below the surface of the Caribbean Sea off the island of Curacao, and will serve, essentially, as an international space station for ocean exploration, allowing scientists and observers from around the world to live under the sea for weeks or potentially months on end. As they do, they'll unlock more of the ocean's secrets. With only roughly 5 percent of Earth's oceans explored thus far, there is an urgent need, and an ideal opportunity, to better understand how the ocean affects climate change, and what it can teach us about clean energy and food sustainability. And, of course, there's the ocean's astonishing biodiversity. What medical breakthroughs might we stumble upon through the discovery of new species? The first Proteus habitat, slated for completion in 2023, will feature a video production studio, intended to allow millions of people around the globe a chance to experience the wonders of life under the sea. Through Proteus, more will come to understand the power of our simple message: No ocean, no life. Every day that we fail to find solutions to the climate crisis is a day that we come closer to losing another species to the ravages of a warming planet. Climate change isn't going to slow down so that our own priorities can catch up. Yet I have hope. A research station like Proteus is essential to protecting our waters and to assuring our future: I believe the marine environment may well contain natural compounds that could help ease this pandemic or the next one. Historically, in times of extreme crisis, humanity has come together to share ideas, put in place bold solutions and find new ways to survive. Now is the time for similar action. As we look to 2021 and beyond, we must finally take the steps necessary to protect our oceans, relying on science and the power of human ingenuity. Our lives depend on it. Fabien Cousteau, an aquanaut and environmentalist, is the founder of the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning 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 and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Some of the most memorable moments of a family vacation are also the most awkward. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because what great photos they make! We're asking you to dig through your archives, and your smart phones, to find and share with us your uncomfortable vacation photos. Why keep these hilarious memories to yourself? Post yours to Instagram using the hashtag awkwardfamilytravels and we may use them as part of a future project.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
For people in the market for a used car, the "certified pre owned" designation has long been the gold standard, an indication that a qualified mechanic has vouched for the car and that a buyer can expect a vehicle that is hopefully almost as good as new. But the Takata airbag recall, which is the biggest in history, has upended all of that. Now the certified designation known in the auto trade as C.P.O. will no longer necessarily have the same meaning. For one thing, last month the Federal Trade Commission made it easier for cars to be billed as "certified," even if they were under recall and hadn't been fixed yet. And just as significantly, Ford with the F.T.C. settlement for cover told its dealers this week that they could sell recalled vehicles and certify them too, so long as they did not advertise them as "safe" and required buyers to sign forms acknowledging that they were aware of the problem. Against this backdrop, one dealer in Florida has refused to sell recalled vehicles that he cannot get fixed, letting 100 or so pile up on a lot miles from his main showroom. He even sued a rival who he believes is selling recalled cars without disclosing that they have not been fixed yet. Given that situation, the Federal Trade Commission told General Motors and two dealers in December that it was just fine to advertise used vehicles as certified even if their airbags were under recall and had not been fixed. Just disclose it, the agency said (in a complaint that has sent jaws dropping throughout the auto industry). Until early this week, every major car company had said that they forbade their dealers from selling certified used vehicles with any open recalls, including ones for Takata airbags. On Monday, however, Ford broke ranks, issuing an update to dealers on its "enhanced" recall process and giving them permission to certify used vehicles that had open recalls after all. There are conditions for the dealers, including these: They must note the recall in two different places and have buyers initial a form. When parts arrive, they have to contact buyers to schedule a replacement. And no advertisements may make claims about "safety" or "safety inspections." So does Ford believe there is no competitive advantage to be gained from fixing all recalled cars before selling them? "It's very difficult to answer that," Sara Tatchio, a Ford spokeswoman, said. "We absolutely put safety first and fix everything we can." All the chaos, conflict and changing policies leave consumers in a frustrating position, trying to sort out who's still selling cars that federal regulators have ordered to be fixed and just how much any seller is disclosing. While federal law prevents dealers from selling new cars with an open recall, no federal law forbids them from selling used ones that way, even if some state consumer protection laws might help an injured owner's case. In the complex used car ecosystem of trade ins and with wholesalers and sellers of various sorts, this has created a number of challenges and a wide range of responses, including some prominent companies that have changed their policies 180 degrees. Whatever policies they set, automakers have only so much control, given that people who work at dealerships occasionally go rogue. Moreover, dealers sometimes certify a car as clean and put it up for sale and then it's recalled right after that. If the dealer does not catch it and pull the car out of the sales inventory, it is violating the automaker's rules (and could attract the attention of the F.T.C.). Buyers who wonder how safe it is to drive with a recalled Takata airbag and check the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website will learn the following: "The vast majority of Takata airbags will perform as expected." Oh, but: "Lives have been lost due to this defect." Reaction in the industry to Ford's move was somewhat muted. Audi, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mazda and Subaru said they had no plans to follow Ford's move. The used car chain CarMax has taken a similar approach to Ford's. While it too had a recent run in with the F.T.C. over disclosure issues, the company says that it is transparent as possible, from its online listings to its in person interactions. But why sell cars with open recalls at all, thus putting the onus on consumers to sort out the repair? In a statement on its website, CarMax, which cannot repair recalled vehicles itself, states that "customers are in the best position to act on recall information." How can that be? Well, CarMax explains that dealers who are authorized to do recall repairs are more likely to repair cars quickly when working with an individual. If CarMax showed up with dozens of cars, those dealers might shun it because it competes with that dealer's used car operation. Does this sound like an extremely useful conspiracy theory designed to dump all the hassle on consumers, who have the least knowledge of how the system works? Would CarMax at least call out said manufacturers by name, to help get to the bottom of this? No, it would not. "Some manufacturers have provided guidance to their dealers that they should remediate recalls for dealer customers first," a CarMax spokeswoman, Catherine M. Gryp, said in an email message. "Across the country, we have been put in the back of the line for recall repairs." AutoNation took a different approach, at least at first. In 2015, its chief executive, Mike Jackson, told Automotive News that the recall situation was "a dysfunctional nightmare that the industry should be ashamed of." The company pledged to sell no cars with open recalls, period. By last year, it was costing the company dearly, to the tune of 6 cents per share of its earnings in the third quarter. In November, it gave up and began selling some cars with open recalls (and full disclosures). The lack of Takata airbag replacements, the F.T.C.'s decision and other anticipated regulatory rollbacks proved to be too much. "We are proud of the efforts we made, but sometimes the system beats you down," Marc Cannon, the company's chief marketing officer, said. Sounds kind of like what it feels like to be a consumer in the middle of all this. If you're about to start shopping for a used car, begin at safercar.gov. There, you can look up cars even the vehicle identification number of a specific car you're considering to see what recalls are in effect. A report from Carfax can help you figure out whether a recalled car has been fixed. But don't stop there. Ask the dealer about any open recalls, as well as any proof they might have that they have gotten the recall fixed. Trust, but verify. (Actually? Don't trust too much, and verify twice.) Worried about a car that you already have? You should be, both about future Takata recalls and others that we don't know about yet. Rosemary Shahan of the Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety suggests registering your vehicle both with your car's manufacturer and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration so that you get a notice if your airbag or anything else comes up for recall. Run the vehicle identification number through some checks yourself from time to time too, just to make sure you're not missing anything. You might also hope that more dealers act out in the same way as Earl Stewart of Lake Park, Fla. He refuses to sell used cars with open recalls, but he doesn't want to turn away people who are trading in cars with recalled Takata airbags that they have not been able to get fixed yet. This trade in policy isn't just good customer service; if he can't take their trade, they might not buy another vehicle from him at the same time that they turn their old one in. As a result, however, he has 100 or so cars sitting in a lot waiting for repair. And when he sent secret shoppers into competing dealers to see how much disclosure they were doing about recalled cars they were selling, he was outraged at what he found. "Maybe this is unique to South Florida, but they are all extremely devious and proactively trying to sell recalled cars by saying there is no recall," Mr. Stewart said. So he filed a lawsuit to try to swing others over to his way of doing things. "I don't want the money I just want to stop the practice," he said. "We're going to keep filing suits until they throw the towel in."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The coronavirus pandemic scuttled South by Southwest and delayed the Cannes Film Festival. Niche releases never got a chance to play across the country and the theaters they would have played at face an uncertain future. But several festivals, theaters and art house distributors have tried to offer online substitutes. This list should be considered a small sampling. Originally scheduled for April, Tribeca has been postponed until further notice. But since March 17, the festival has posted one short each day on its website under the rubric "A Short Film a Day Keeps the Anxiety Away." Most of the shorts are made by Tribeca Film Festival alumni, and they tend to allude to the current state of isolation and uncertainty. "Let's Not Panic," from 2015, stars Lyle Friedman as a woman with a crush on her therapist a crush that he assures her could only come to anything in the event of a complete breakdown of societal norms. Cue an asteroid, hurtling toward Earth. The email marketing service Mailchimp and the film distributor Oscilloscope have started a web page where viewers can for free watch shorts that would have been shown at South by Southwest. Even without an event in Austin this year, the festival handed out awards, and the streaming titles include some of the winners, like "No Crying at the Dinner Table" and "Regret." Go to mailchimp.com/presents/SXSW. This annual festival shows movies that raise awareness of the perspectives of the disabled, like "Code of the Freaks," a documentary examining representation in Hollywood movies, and "25 Prospect Street," about a Ridgefield, Conn., theater that hires people with disabilities. The festival will take place on its original dates, March 31 to April 6, but it has moved online at reelabilities.org. Screenings can be watched at their scheduled times or for 24 hours afterward, and Q. and A.s will be available as well. After canceling its annual Hollywood based festival of vintage films, Turner Classic Movies will instead run a kind of simulated festival on television from April 16 through 19. The lineup "A Star Is Born" (1954), "North by Northwest," "Lawrence of Arabia" might not sound all that different from ordinary TCM programming, but interviews from past festivals will be interspersed with the movies. This Connecticut festival, which was scheduled to start in late April, will instead unfold as an online event May 1 3, with a selection of films and interviews. (Certain live events have been postponed for the fall.) The virtual lineup includes a program of Connecticut related shorts and a sampling of documentaries and fiction features, like the Argentine film "High Tide," shown at Sundance, about an affluent woman who endures a string of Bunuelian complications after she has a fling with a contractor. Go to greenwichfilm.org for more information. The distributor Kino Lorber began an innovative partnership to keep art houses in business. If you want to see the wild, acclaimed Brazilian feature "Bacurau," Kino's most recent theatrical release, simply go to kinolorber.com/film/bacurau and select the cinema you would like to "see" it at. (Pay attention to the dates it's playing there.) A 12 admission gets you five days of streaming, and the theater you've chosen gets a share of the virtual ticket price. More than 100 theaters stand to benefit, ranging from Film at Lincoln Center in New York to the Austin Film Society in Texas, the Olympia Film Society in Washington and Alamo Drafthouse locations. (You can also see Ken Loach's take on the gig economy, "Sorry We Missed You," which benefits Film Forum in New York.) This works more or less the same way as Kino Marquee but for a different distributor, Film Movement, which otherwise would have had five movies in theaters. They are: the kinetic Chinese noir "The Wild Goose Lake"; the Polish Oscar nominee "Corpus Christi"; Bertrand Bonello's "Zombi Child," an intellectual horror riff that cuts between present day France and Haiti beginning in 1962; and two revivals, Bruno Barreto's "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" (1978) and Luchino Visconti's "L'Innocente" (belatedly released in the United States in 1979). Go to filmmovement.com, select the movie you want to watch, then pick the theater that you want to benefit. The partners include BAM Rose Cinemas in New York, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and the Loft Cinema in Tucson. Music Box Films follows Kino Lorber and Film Movement's lead with its own theater streaming partnership. The service begins Friday with the Georgian feature "And Then We Danced," about a dancer who finds himself attracted to a male newcomer in his troupe an attraction that could jeopardize his position with the homophobic company. The cinemas splitting profits with Music Box include the Little Theater in Rochester, N.Y., and the Belcourt in Nashville. Go to musicboxfilms.com/streamlocal for more information. The distributor Oscilloscope Labs is holding off on putting the new releases "Saint Frances" (which opened last month) and "The Infiltrators" (which was scheduled to open March 27) online for now, but it is offering 10 digital downloads for 49.99, and giving 10 from each package to the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund, a crowdfunding initiative to support out of work New York City theater employees. Go to store.oscilloscope.net and on the Circle of Quarantine page, there are instructions on how to sign up along with a lengthy list of available films, including "Meek's Cutoff," from Kelly Reichardt, whose "First Cow" was one of the casualties of the coronavirus theater closures.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When did you acquire this new set of ears? You're watching a play you thought you knew better than you know your best friend, and yet suddenly it sounds different. It's clearer, truer and more comprehensible than it's ever been before, as if it had always been operating on a frequency that you've only now been given access to. Such experiences happen seldom to even the most devoted theatergoers. Which is why I'm still shivery, teary eyed and stunned from seeing Richard Nelson's devastatingly intimate production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," which opened on Sunday night at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College. I've attended at least a dozen versions of "Uncle Vanya: Scenes From Country Life in Four Acts" (to use its full, deceptively straightforward title), performed by the some of the starriest casts ever assembled in the name of Chekhov. A few of them most recently, one from the Sydney Theater Company, with Cate Blanchett were thrilling. But none felt as immediately personal or as emotionally coherent as this Hunter Theater Project production, which features Jay O. Sanders in the title role, giving a career high performance. Directed by Mr. Nelson from his limpid, streamlined (105 minute) adaptation with the veteran translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky this is as naked and fully human an "Uncle Vanya" as we're likely to see. Read Richard Nelson's account of translating with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Mr. Nelson's impeccably balanced ensemble doesn't seem to be so much interpreting the script as living it. There's very little Acting, with a capital A, which means few of the flamboyant displays of the eccentricities for which Chekhov's characters are famed. These are performances that dare to be as ordinary "trite" is a much used word as the people they are portraying fear they are. Each one is as humdrum, and specifically individual, as you or I. Everything has the shimmer of unmediated transparency, as if the performers were conduits for thought made visible. This is surely the most willfully modest "Uncle Vanya" on record, and it speaks, for the most part, in a self effacing murmur, which invites you to lean in and eavesdrop. You not only want to listen to what's being said; you also feel it's somehow a moral imperative. After all, those unhappy, unfulfilled inhabitants of an isolated estate in 19th century Russia must be heard and understood by someone, anyone. And it's not a service they're about to provide for one another. As both playwright and director, Mr. Nelson has made a highly refined art of drama as privileged eavesdropping. It's an effect he has achieved most memorably in his two multipart cycles, "The Apple Family Plays" and "The Gabriels," in which family members discussed the state of their lives and their nation in real time. The cast members file on in contemporary work clothes (Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss did the costumes), to arrange these discrete pieces, accessorizing them with dishes and foodstuffs. As in the Apple and Gabriel plays, food is an anchor, grounding abstract and fanciful talk in the reality of subsistence. The performers are creating the environment for the lives to be lived here, which makes the characters feel quite literally like the architects of their own destinies. Not that this is how they regard themselves. Not Vanya, the steward of his late sister's estate (played with defiant, abject rawness by a brilliant Mr. Sanders); or his niece and fellow manager, Sonya (Yvonne Woods, pinched with care); or her imperious father, Alexander Serebryakov (an elegant, fatuous Mr. DeVries), an aging professor in residence with his new, beautiful young wife, Elena (Celeste Arias, giving a traditionally glamorous part a homespun naivete). These people who are visited by a dashing, but increasingly weary country doctor, Mikhail Astrov (a quietly sexy and damningly perceptive Jesse Pennington) tend to speak of themselves as helpless, passive beings, pushed into place by circumstance and more extreme personalities. Don't believe them. What emerges so clearly here as they snipe, quarrel, make up and haplessly pursue love affairs that are never going to happen is that they've all made their own beds, for reasons of convenience or for quixotic ideals that don't look so fine anymore. (On the other hand, Astrov's worries about the forests his country is destroying sound newly relevant.) They may all see themselves as misfits, to use a word that Mr. Nelson has said was central to his approach to this adaptation. But feeling like a misfit turns out to make no one special; it is the universal human condition. As they keep talking, occasionally directly to us (which feels fully earned here), and with increasing frustration at the lack of a receptive audience among their nearest and dearest, these fretful souls begin to acknowledge the extent to which they have set their own traps. When the big emotional explosions come, hard and heartbreaking, they feel as inevitable as they do startling. If you've been paying close attention through all the sotto voce conversation, you'll have observed the increasing friction that comes from people in close quarters tiptoeing carefully around one another's sensitivities. (You may find it reminds you of overcrowded family vacations you've known.) Each of the cast which also includes Kate Kearney Patch as the clan's former (and forever) nanny and Alice Cannon as Vanya's unloving mother, both excellent provides a seemingly effortless study in passive aggression. The performances are so self effacing, you won't at first realize how thorough and completely felt they are. By the end, you will have come to understand and to identify with each of them, whether you've wanted to or not. When Mr. Sanders's Vanya finally erupts into a violent denunciation of not just those around him but of everything he once believed, the vicarious pain feels almost too immediate to bear. Such is the price you pay for the privilege of crawling beneath the skin of a Chekhov masterwork.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Doctors and nurses are finally volunteering to fight the Ebola virus in West Africa after a long period of paralyzing fear in which almost none stepped forward. But, experts say, even though money is now pouring in from the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and elsewhere, and the United States Army is to start erecting field hospitals soon, there is likely to be a long gap before those hospitals can be fully staffed to care for the growing numbers of people with Ebola. "As a result, thousands of people will die," said Dr. Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, which treats more patients than any other entity. "I can't say the exact figure because we don't know how many unreported cases there are. But thousands for sure." Because months went by this summer in which almost no volunteers could be found, and because it takes time to train them and get them to Africa, there remains a yawning gap between the number of medical professionals needed and those in place to do the work. Each 100 bed hospital needs a staff of 400, about 40 of whom are foreign doctors or nurses. Meanwhile, about 600 Ebola cases are being recorded every week, according to the World Health Organization, and that number doubles every three weeks. The first American troops with orders to build 17 100 bed hospitals are arriving in Liberia now. Other countries, particularly Britain and France, are under pressure to do the same in Sierra Leone and Guinea. But the American military now plans to staff only one 25 bed hospital for infected health workers with members of the quasi military Public Health Service. "Who will staff the rest?" asked Dr. Liu, whose organization is known by its French initials, M.S.F. "It needs to be hands on. You have to chip in and expose yourself." Ebola field hospitals ideally contain three separate tents for confirmed, probable and suspected cases; separate toilet and washing facilities for each; and a double fence outside so relatives can talk without touching. They also contain separate dressing and undressing rooms for staff members wearing protective gear, and possibly laboratory and kitchen tents. The few medical charities that do the risky work of treating patients have scoured their rosters of veterans and asked them to recommend colleagues. A month ago, those agencies including Doctors Without Borders and the International Medical Corps had almost no volunteers. The corps had only seven responses to its first appeal. Four years ago, after the earthquake in Haiti, it got 2,000. Now they with the recent addition of Partners in Health, the medical charity run by Dr. Paul Farmer at Harvard Medical School each have more than 100 professionals expressing interest. More than 1,600 others have signed up through the United States Agency for International Development. "It really turned around in the last two weeks," said Dr. Ariel Pablos Mendez, the development agency's assistant administrator for global health. More media coverage, appeals by President Obama, and radio and TV appearances by the U.S.A.I.D. administrator, Dr. Rajiv Shah, mentioning the website for volunteers all helped, he said. But the agency is still granting access to its list slowly, through a subcontractor, and the charities are winnowing their own lists, looking first for those who have worked in disaster areas or now work in hospital wards with the meticulous protection measures needed to prevent Ebola transmission. There is no time to teach beginners the basics or worry about newcomers who might have panic attacks, the agencies said. "Once the first group comes back safe and sound, we hope that will encourage recruitment," said Rabih Torbay, head of international operations for the International Medical Corps. For the corps and for Doctors Without Borders, that training involves at least three days in Brussels. Then they get five to seven days in West Africa, working on patients under supervision. The American military said it would train 500 health workers a week in Africa. But like other experts working there, Dr. Liu is skeptical, saying her agency, which has trained over 2,000 local people since March, was having trouble recruiting more. A big problem, she said, is that many local hires cannot go home at night because their families are afraid. They will eventually need housing. Doctors Without Borders now has 239 international volunteers, with enough veterans in the pipeline to fill its next round of six week commitments. It operates six facilities with a total of 532 beds in the three countries, and plans to add only 35 more beds.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Shepard Smith doesn't have a bad word to say about Fox News. Did the network betray you? "They never interfered with what I was doing." Is it different from when it started? "Well, I think every network has evolved since 1996." Did you leave because you were fed up? "You know, it was time." Mr. Smith, the former Fox News chief news anchor with an easy Mississippi lilt, abruptly left his television home of 23 years last October after clashing with one of the channel's conservative stars and relentless taunts from President Trump, who denounced Mr. Smith for his skeptical coverage. In the end, it was Mr. Smith's decision to step away. Colleagues were stunned, but friends said he had grown disillusioned by the direction of the network a frustration compounded when the Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson mocked him on air and the disconnect between its pro Trump punditry and the reporting generated by its newsroom. Speaking recently from his Hamptons summer home, Mr. Smith, who returns to television on Wednesday as the host of a nightly newscast on CNBC, declared a renewed focus on "the facts, the truth, the news," adding, "It's a complicated time with so much information and along with it, disinformation, and we just want to just cut through the noise." His comments might be interpreted as a subtweet of his former employer. But out of good manners or legal necessity Mr. Smith's representatives declined to say if the anchor was bound by a nondisclosure or non disparagement clause he stayed circumspect whenever the subject of Fox News arose. "I watch a lot of news," Mr. Smith, 56, said when asked if he had watched the network since departing. "I don't really watch much opinion programming." The message: Mr. Smith is ready to move on. Still, after a career defined by his time at Fox News, which he joined at its inception in 1996, it was startling to see Mr. Smith appear on a Zoom call in a CNBC baseball cap like a veteran star player who had joined a crosstown rival. Now viewers will decide if they'll migrate with him. "The News with Shepard Smith," whose marketing campaign features a black and white portrait of Mr. Smith in Serious News Mode and an all caps slogan ("THE FACTS. THE TRUTH."), is built on the just the facts ma'am reputation he burnished as a straight talking outlier to Fox News's Trump ier programming ranks. Mr. Smith who has quarantined on Long Island since March with his partner, Gio Graziano, and Lucia, their lagotto Romagnolo, an Italian truffle hunting dog said his new show has a strict "no pundits" rule. 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. "We're not interested in helping you know how to think about something," he said. "We're interested in giving you the information, so that you can make your decisions and form your opinions with good, solid information. I've never felt like anybody's very interested in my opinion, and on an evening newscast I'm not going to share it." "Good, solid information" is a journalistic virtue but not necessarily a formula for good television ratings, and Mr. Smith has his work cut out for him. The 7 p.m. audience for CNBC is a fraction of the roughly 2.5 million viewers who watch Fox News at that hour. Before he left Fox News, Mr. Smith averaged about 1.3 million viewers in his 3 p.m. time slot, outranking CNN and MSNBC. It could be a while before he commands a similar audience. His arrival at CNBC coincides with a shake up of the business focused cable network, best known for daytime stock market coverage and oddities like Olympic curling. Evenings are typically devoted to marathons of reality programs like "Shark Tank," but Jeff Shell, the new chief executive of NBCUniversal, has signaled his intent to rethink the network's prime time. Mr. Smith said he "is not here to reinvent the wheel," and CNBC executives say there is pent up demand for the anchor's bland by design style of news. Audiences have spiked for the 6:30 p.m. newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC, which up until recently had been dismissed as relics. For a while this summer, "World News Tonight" on ABC was the top rated show across all of television.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Aaswath Raman was driving through a village in Sierra Leone in 2013 when an idea came to him as suddenly as, perhaps, a light bulb switching on. The village was not equipped with electricity, and Dr. Raman, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, was unaware he was in a village until he heard the voices of shadowed human figures. "It took us about five minutes to realize we were passing through a town, because it was completely dark," Dr. Raman said. "There wasn't a single light on." Dr. Raman wondered whether he could use all that darkness to make something to light it up, not unlike the way that solar panels generate electricity from the sun's heat and light. He did. In new research published on Thursday in the journal Joule, Dr. Raman demonstrated a way to harness a dark night sky to power a light bulb. His prototype device employs radiative cooling, the phenomenon that makes buildings and parks feel cooler than the surrounding air after sunset. As Dr. Raman's device releases heat, it does so unevenly, the top side cooling more than the bottom . It then converts the difference in heat into electricity. In the paper, Dr. Raman described how the device, when connected to a voltage converter, was able to power a white LED. "The core enabling feature of this device is that it can cool down," Dr. Raman said. Jeffrey C. Grossman, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies passive cooling and solar technology, said the work was "quite exciting" and showed promise for the development of low power applications at night. "They have suggested reasonable paths for increasing the performance of their device," Dr. Grossman said. "But there is definitely a long way to go if they want to use it as an alternative to adding battery storage for solar cells." Everything emits heat, according to the laws of thermodynamics. At night, when one side of Earth turns away from the sun, its buildings, streets and jacket less people cool off. If no clouds are present to trap warmth, objects on the Earth can lose so much heat that they reach a lower temperature than the air surrounding them. This is why blades of grass may be glazed in frost on clear fall mornings, even when the air temperature is above freezing. The cloudless atmosphere becomes a porthole to the void, through which warmth flows like air through a porch screen. Humans have taken advantage of this effect for millenniums. Six thousand years ago, people in what are now Iran and Afghanistan constructed enormous beehive shaped structures called yakhchal, which used this passive cooling effect to create and store ice in the desert. Modern scientists have studied how to harness energy from Earth's day night swings in temperature, but that work has mostly remained theoretical. In 2014, researchers led by Federico Capasso, an electrical engineering professor at Harvard, calculated that at best only about 4 watts of energy can be extracted from a square meter of cold space. By contrast, a photovoltaic panel, the most common type of solar panel, generates about 200 watts per square meter in direct sunlight. Nonetheless, a device that could produce any amount of electricity at night would be valuable; after the sun sets, solar cells don't work and winds often die down, even as demand for lighting peaks. Shanhui Fan, an electrical engineer at Stanford and an author on Dr. Raman's study, has been at the vanguard of this research. Last fall, Dr. Fan's team described a device that can generate electricity with solar panels during the day, then use the passive cooling effect to chill a building at night. Earlier this year, they also tested an infrared photodiode, similar to the technology used in most solar cells but which uses warmth, not sunlight, to generate wisps of electricity in the darkness. The prototype built by Dr. Raman resembles a hockey puck set inside a chafing dish. The puck is a polystyrene disk coated in black paint and covered with a wind shield. At its heart is an off the shelf gadget called a thermoelectric generator, which uses the difference in temperature between opposite sides of the device to generate a current. A similar device powers NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars; its thermoelectric generator derives heat from plutonium radiation. Usually, the temperature difference in these generators is stark, and they are carefully engineered to separate hot and cold. Dr. Raman's device instead uses the atmosphere's ambient temperature as the heat source. The shift from warm to cool is very slight, meaning the device can't produce much power. His puck in a dish is elevated on aluminum legs, enabling air to flow around it. As the dark puck loses warmth to the night sky, the side facing the stars grows colder than the side facing the air warmed tabletop. This slight difference in temperature generates a flow of electricity. When paired with a voltage converter, the prototype produced 25 milliwatts of power per square meter. That is about three orders of magnitude lower than what a typical solar panel produces, and well short of even the roughly 4 watt maximum efficiency for such devices. Still, several experts said the prototype was an important contribution to a new and relatively unusual space in the renewable energy sector. "This is a neat combination of radiative cooling a technique where Raman has pioneered real working devices with thermoelectric materials that generate electricity if one side is hotter than the other side," said Ellen D. Williams, a physics professor at the University of Maryland and a former director of the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy. "Both technologies are proven and practical, but I haven't seen them combined like this. They did this with inexpensive materials, suggesting it could be made into useful products for the developing world." One challenge will be improving the device's efficiency without raising its costs, said Lance Wheeler, a materials scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. Although thermoelectric devices are less efficient and more expensive than photovoltaic cells, they can be more durable. "You could call this a long play," he said. "It is just a piece of metal with spray paint on it. It could last for a super long time, and its rivals, photovoltaic cells and batteries, don't. It can enhance any thermoelectric device as long as it's outside facing the stars." Conceivably, Dr. Raman said, thermoelectric devices could complement solar powered lights in areas where changing batteries is a challenge, like on street lamps or in remote areas far from electrical grids.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In a pre coronavirus world, hundreds of editors, clients, stylists and celebrities would have converged on Paris this weekend, clacking over the cobblestones in their kitten heels for the couture shows. Those singular displays of fashion art handmade clothes custom ordered by the very few represent equal parts creative laboratory, artisanal expertise and visual extravaganza. For many, they are also a major employment opportunity. You may see models in gowns on Instagram, and hear of the famous names responsible for the updos and cat eyes, but making that perfect 20 minutes happen also demands an army of independent contractors, largely unknown. And, now that the shows have gone digital, largely unemployed. Here, a scattering of these men and women describe their lives in the absence of shows. They are but a fraction of the lighting technicians, manicurists, photographers, caterers, florists, drivers, security guards, seamstresses, dressers and musicians whose labor creates the dream. These interviews have been edited. "I've worked with the hairstylist Sam McKnight as part of his freelancer team for 13 years. Usually I'm a director for a group of hair salons in and around London, but whenever Sam has been booked for a fashion show, then off I go to that city, be it for cruise, couture or ready to wear. There are probably around 40 stylists on Sam's backstage team at a fashion show. We come from all over the world to work in Paris for couture. Often, for the biggest shows, you work in pairs on one model with a stylist and a 'watcher,' who makes sure the look is absolutely perfect and to the specifications of Sam or the brand. Until you reach the very top, you don't do it to make money. You do it for career experience with Sam and out of love for the theater of fashion and being a part of it all. It is only after you establish yourself over many years that you make any cash. But for me it has been worth it for the experiences I've had. I still pinch myself. We do all the Chanel couture shows, of course, which are always very special. And last July, for the Fendi couture show in Rome that paid tribute to Karl Lagerfeld, we color coordinated wigs to each of the clothes for the finale, which just looked spectacular. But this year, there is nothing at all. In what would have been couture, I'll be thinking about what might happen in terms of physical shows in September. For whatever events take place, security and maintenance of new safety regulations will be more important than ever before. Whatever happens, we will do what we always do: Get the job done." "I have worked with Stephane for 20 years. We are known for our large, extravagant bouquets. We usually work with around 10 to 12 people, although during show time, that usually goes up to 25 to 30. Fashion weeks together are a huge part of our year. Maybe 40 to 45 percent of our annual business if you put all six together. For us, couture week is very intense. We could be doing the flowers in Mademoiselle Chanel's apartment in the morning, then for the Lutetia hotel, then a dinner for a brand. Or Chanel calls and says they want 100 bouquets of flowers delivered to clients who are coming to their show in the next 24 hours. And maybe they want only white roses one season. Or another brand wants only pink roses. I will normally start my day at 4 a.m. at the market, buying the flowers. How long have you been doing makeup? I started in 2003. Then, in 2005, I got very lucky and met Pat McGrath, and she brought me along to do the makeup for a Galliano show. It was so creative, such an exciting time. Then I started doing shows for Milan and Paris fashion weeks, and that led to me getting an agent. How big a part of your business are the shows? I do ad campaigns and magazine shoots, but the shows are such a big thing here in Paris. Because it's not just the catwalks, it's also all the V.I.P.s that fly in for them. During couture, I might have three clients call me in a single day to do their makeup to go to a show, or an event after a show, and then the next day I will be backstage for the couture. I also get last minute calls to fill in for other makeup artists, and then I just hop on my scooter, and the next thing, I am on the other side of Paris, getting Cindy Bruna, the French model, ready for an after party, or Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian French actress. I generally work with Peter Philips now during show time. In January, we did Dior and Viktor Rolf. How does this compare to your normal professional life? My work is generally up and down I don't work every day, but during shows I do. For some shows, I might have to arrive at 5 a.m. to get the models ready, and then that night, I might have to get a private client ready for a dinner. The only other time that's remotely comparable, where I might have four jobs in one day, is the Cannes Film Festival. For three months, everything stopped. I was lucky, because as a self employed person, I qualified for the government assistance. They gave everyone 1,500 euros about 1,700 if they had lost 70 percent of their income, and I lost 100 percent. Ad campaigns that were postponed during lockdown are happening, and since no one can fly in, they are asking local teams. And we are lucky, in that clients have not used the excuse of Covid to lower the rates. I had an option on a video that one of the brands was going to do instead of a couture show, but it didn't work out. The problem with the videos is they involve very small teams. They really only need one artist, or maybe one and an assistant, whereas a show like Dior might use up to 40 makeup artists. So it's a big loss for my income. And also my creativity. What do you mean, creativity? What I miss most, I think, is watching the creative process of a show, because that inspires me a lot, especially when it comes to trends for the next season. And I miss my colleagues. "I had a cleaning company with my wife for 20 years, but at the end of last year we split up, and I founded an eco cleaning company. We are responsible for cleaning the whole venue wherever a show is held: floors, windows, walls. Everything. And because so many shows are in strange, industrial places, or building sites under construction, it can be very dirty, very dusty and very complicated. With my wife, we used to do Chanel in the Grand Palais, and we would start two weeks before the show, with two people cleaning. On the day of the show we would have up to 12. In January, for my first season on my own, we did Dior, YSL, where the whole set was an enormous white rug I made about 80,000 about 90,000 euros that season, and I was budgeting 120,000 to 150,000 euros for men's and couture in July, assuming we would do seven or eight shows in each week. We are still getting a little work because some brands are doing photography or video, and also because everyone is very scared about safety, but it is much, much less. So now I am planning for only 15,000 to 20,000 euros this season. I feel lucky because I only have one person on staff. Otherwise we would really be in trouble." You help create invitations for some of the biggest shows. But this summer, there are no shows. It's a nightmare. Because it's not even the shows you have all the parties and all the buyers' presents, and all the events. Normally how many invitations do you address in one day? It depends on the material, the papers or I can have the leather used by Rick Owens, and that's super hard, or the glass used at Margiela. So it depends, but you can have something like 2,000 in one day. I have around 60,000 by fashion week. We are waiting for the buyers. If we do not have any buyers, fashion shows cannot be done. At the same time, all the communications directors for the maisons are super confident. They call and tell me: 'You're part of the family.' That's why I'm still positive. Usually, this time of year would be so busy. I would pattern cut at least three looks for the collection and complete at least one of those dresses myself. In January, I made a mousseline green plisse gown that looked simple, but every stitch was so technically challenging. I am not complaining, though. I love what I do. I still remember walking into the Dior atelier for the very first time. It was like a dream come true. Some people dream of Chanel, others of Givenchy, but not me. It was always Dior. Some of my friends have been working at Chanel on a very reduced couture collection and on client orders made in January. Now, all those pieces are ready for fittings. But none of the clients are able to travel. I have some money saved, but I am taking stock now. I have always loved the flexibility of being a freelancer. I have turned down studio jobs and fixed contracts at other houses as generally you don't make as much money. But if things don't change in another few months, I may have to reconsider if there are even jobs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
BOSTON The Boston School Committee, once synonymous with fierce resistance to racial integration, took a historic step Wednesday night and threw off the last remnants of a busing system first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order. Instead of busing children across town to achieve integration, the plan adopted by the committee is intended to allow more students to attend schools closer to home. That was the objective sought by Mayor Thomas Menino, who appointed a special advisory group last year to overhaul the system. He said that keeping students closer to home would encourage more parental involvement, develop neighborhood cohesion and ultimately improve the schools. "Tonight's historic vote marks a new day for every child in the city of Boston," the mayor said in a statement. But numerous parents and activists complained during a hearing before the committee's deliberations that the new system would leave some children mostly black and Hispanic in the lowest performing schools. "No way we can stand around the playground and say, 'Yeah, we're all getting a fair shake,' " one father testified. They were angry, too, that the committee had not tackled what many agree is the district's fundamental problem the scarcity of good schools. The plan, adopted by a vote of 6 to 1, wipes out the division of the district into three vast geographical zones. An algorithm will produce a list of at least six schools from which parents can choose; at least four must be of high or medium quality, as determined by standardized test scores. The new system, affecting 40,000 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, will be put in place in fall 2014. Eventually, officials said, the average distance that children will travel will be cut by about 40 percent. Before the vote, many parents beseeched the committee to reject at least one component known as the "walk zone priority," which reserves half the seats in each school for students who live within a mile. It is perceived to benefit those who live near good schools, although research suggests any advantage is minimal. The committee did reject it, after some soul searching and after Carol R. Johnson, the district's superintendent, urged them to do so in a letter to the committee. She was not able to attend because her husband died on Monday. "Many before us have struggled to develop a solution to a problem that has challenged our community for generations," she wrote. She said the walk zone priority was no longer necessary, "because under this plan, all children will live nearby or dramatically closer to school." Not everyone was pleased about its removal, including John Connolly, a Democratic city councilor running for mayor this year. His campaign so far has been a critique of the school system under Mr. Menino, who has not said whether he will seek re election. The final plan was based on a model developed by Peng Shi, 24, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Shi, who watched the five hour proceedings intently, was asked afterward if he felt a sense of accomplishment. "No," he said. "I won't feel anything is accomplished until these parents feel better about their schools."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
While the coronavirus pandemic is affecting us all differently depending on where we live, our financial situation and our basic health, one universal is the difficulty finding toilet paper. Panic buying of toilet paper has spread around the globe as rapidly as the virus, even though there have been no disruptions in supply and the symptoms of Covid 19 are primarily respiratory, not gastrointestinal. In many stores, you can still readily find food, but nothing to wipe yourself once it's fully digested. This is all the more puzzling when you consider that toilet paper is an antiquated technology that infectious disease and colorectal specialists say is neither efficient nor hygienic. Indeed, it dates back at least as far as the sixth century, when a Chinese scholar wrote that he "dared not" use paper from certain classical texts for "toilet purposes." Before paper was invented, or readily available, people used leaves, seashells, fur pelts and corn cobs. The ancient Greeks and Romans used small ceramic disks and also sponges on the ends of sticks, which were then plunged into a bucket of vinegar or salt water for the next person to use. We know this thanks to Philippe Charlier, a forensic anthropologist and archaeologist at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. His 2012 treatise, "Toilet Hygiene in the Classical Era," published in the British Medical Journal, is perhaps the most widely cited text on the topic. Dr. Charlier's specialty is microscopically analyzing coprolite, fossilized feces. "It's not sexy," he said, "but when you study poo from 2000 B.C. you can get a lot of information about alimentation, digestion, health, genetics and migration of populations." You also find out what people used to clean their posteriors. Archaeologists examining coprolite from this year centuries hence might be perplexed to find remnants of magazines and newspapers, which people have reportedly been using during the current toilet paper shortage. Most toilet paper historians (there are more than you would think) credit Seth Wheeler with inventing modern toilet paper, perforated and on a roll, an idea he patented in 1891. The diagram on the patent application should put to rest any arguments about how to load the roll: The flap comes over the top and down the front. While manufacturers might have added dyes, prints, perfumes and soothing aloe, toilet paper has remained pretty much the same ever since. That is, unless you count the introduction of wet wipes. Originally intended for babies, they are now marketed aggressively to adults with gender specific brands like Dude Wipes and Queen V. Sales reached 1.1 billion worldwide last year, up 35 percent from five years ago, according to Euromonitor International. The unfortunate result is that the wipes have begun to coalesce with grease in city sewer systems to form blockages the size of airliners. All this when experts agree that rinsing yourself with water is infinitely more sanitary and environmentally sound. Dr. H. Randolph Bailey, a colorectal surgeon at the University of Texas McGovern Medical School in Houston, recommended bidets or toilet attachments, such as the Washlet or Tushy. "A lot of people who come to see me have fairly significant irritation of their bottoms," he said. "Most of the time it has to do with overzealous cleaning" wiping too vigorously with toilet paper or using wipes, which often contain harsh fragrances and chemicals. Moreover, he said, you're just never going to get as clean as rinsing with water. Cleanliness matters, since you can get seriously ill from diseases transmitted via feces. Cholera, hepatitis, and E. coli and urinary tract infections are prime examples. Recent studies have found coronavirus in feces, as well. But while the majority of households in Japan have high tech toilets capable of cleansing users with precisely directed temperature controlled streams of water, the rest of the world has been slow to follow. Blame prudishness and puritanism, at least in part: Bidets, once ubiquitous in France, became associated with hedonism and licentiousness. Marie Antoinette had a red trimmed bidet in her prison cell while awaiting the guillotine. And during World War II, American soldiers first saw bidets in French brothels, which made them think they were naughty. An often told joke was that a wealthy American tourist in Paris assumed the bidet in her hotel room was for washing babies in, until the maid told her, "No, madame, this is to wash the babies out." But even in France, toilet paper has taken over. "Now, when constructing a new flat, nobody puts a bidet in it," Dr. Charlier said. "There's not room for it, particularly in Paris." Although, when the bidet is incorporated in the toilet, as modern versions are, space is a nonissue. "Maybe there are also psychological reasons we do not embrace the newer technology," he said. Which brings us back to the panic buying of toilet paper. Psychologists say it's more than a little Freudian, what with the anal personality being tied to a need for order, hoarding and fear of contamination. "The characteristics align with obsessive compulsive tendencies, which get triggered when people feel threatened," said Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and the author of "Psychology in the Bathroom." Many people are low level paper hoarders even in the best of times stuffing takeout menus in kitchen drawers and piling months old magazines on coffee tables. The pandemic may have just kicked this tendency into high gear, and people are likely latching onto toilet paper because it's subconsciously associated with controlling filth and disease. "There's also some evidence that animals hoard nesting materials," Dr. Haslam said. "So maybe toilet paper has some sort of nesting component as we're forced into our homes." It could also be that, having given up so much of our freedom, some feel, albeit subconsciously, that going without toilet paper would be an indignity too far a "Mad Max" descent into the realm of the uncivilized. And so, stockpiling of Charmin and Angel Soft will likely continue, even though there are far better ways to clean ourselves and despite environmental groups' warnings that we're flushing away our forests. No one wants to get caught without a roll within reach. Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston who contributes frequently to The New York Times and the author of "You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters." 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
Galen Gilbert knows just what he will do with the check he gets from Washington as part of the pandemic relief package, whatever the amount: put it in the bank. "I've got more clients than I can handle right now and I've made more money than I usually do," said Mr. Gilbert, a 71 year old lawyer who lives in a Boston suburb. "So I'm not really suffering financially." Cheryl K. Smith, an author and editor who lives in Low Pass, Ore., isn't in a rush to spend the money, either. She plans to save a portion, too, while donating the rest to a local food bank. "I'm actually saving money right now," Ms. Smith said. President Trump's demand to increase the already approved 600 individual payment to 2,000, with backing from congressional Democrats, has dominated events in Washington this week and redefined the debate for more stimulus during the pandemic. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said on Wednesday he would not allow a vote on a standalone bill increasing the checks to 2,000, dooming the effort, at least for now. Whatever the amount, the reality is that most Americans right now are much more likely to save the money they receive. Of course, the money will be a lifesaver for the roughly 20 million people collecting unemployment benefits and others who are working reduced hours or earning less than they used to. Yet, for the majority of the estimated 160 million individuals and families who will receive it, spending the money is expected not to be a high priority. After an earlier round of 1,200 stimulus checks went out in the spring, the saving rate skyrocketed and remains at a nearly 40 year high. That largely reflects the lopsided nature of the pandemic recession that has put some Americans in dire straits while leaving many others untouched. Many experts said a truly stimulative package would have earmarked the payments for those who need it most the unemployed. "We know where the pockets of need are," said Greg Daco, chief economist at Oxford Economics. "Putting it there would be a much more efficient use of the stimulus." And because the money will immediately be put to work the jobless don't have the luxury of saving it it would also have a much bigger impact on the overall economy, through what experts refer to as the multiplier effect. In essence, each dollar given to a person in need is likely to benefit the economy more because it would be used to pay for, say, groceries or rent. "Providing 2,400 to a family of four in the same financial situation as they were at the end of 2019 doesn't do much to boost the overall economy right now," Mr. Daco said. "It's not whether it's a positive or not. It's their potency that's in question." Individuals with an adjusted gross income in 2019 of up to 75,000 will receive the 600 payment, and couples earning up to 150,000 a year will get twice that amount. There is also a 600 payment for each child in families that meet those income requirements. People making more than those limits will receive partial payments up to certain income thresholds. A more effective approach, experts say, would have raised unemployment insurance benefits to the jobless by 600 a week, matching the supplement under the stimulus package Congress passed last spring, rather than the 300 weekly subsidy the new legislation provides. Democrats had pushed for larger payments to the jobless and included it in legislation that passed the House, which they control. But the measure met stiff resistance from Republicans, who control the Senate, and was not included in the final compromise bill. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The money could also have been used to extend two key unemployment programs for much longer than the 11 weeks provided for in the new bill. The current extension runs only until mid March, well before mass vaccinations are expected later in the spring and summer and the economy begins to return to normal. "The economy is going to remain limited by the pandemic for the next six to nine months," said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. Roughly 20 million Americans are collecting unemployment benefits and the jobless rate stands at 6.7 percent. One year ago, it was 3.5 percent, a half century low. And there are signs with the economy sputtering, more Americans are giving up more than half a million people stopped looking for work and dropped out of the labor force just last month, meaning they are no longer counted among the unemployed. To be sure, the money from Washington will be welcomed by most Americans, even if they are financially secure. Besides saving it, others will use it to pay down debt, or invest it. A study released in August by three economists, Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Michael Weber, found that recipients of the 1,200 payments sent out under the CARES Act last spring largely held off on spending the money. Only 15 percent of people said they had spent it, or planned to spend it. Most said they would save the cash or use it to pay down debt. Of course, some of the money flowing into the economy could soon reach those who need it most. And it will provide a financial cushion even for middle class families who are secure by most measures but remain on edge from the turbulence of 2020. But in terms of the multiplier effect, it's likely to pale in comparison to the impact in the spring, when the unemployment rate was much higher and there were real fears the country could experience a second Great Depression. "The more you hit the stimulus button, the less impact you see," said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. And the hardest hit sectors dining, entertainment and travel are unlikely to see much of a boost now, since consumers are wary of going out or live in states like California and New York where restaurant dining and other activities are restricted. Mr. Anderson said the stimulus could heighten some of the inequality that has become evident during the past year. Many white collar employees are working from home and have largely been spared layoffs the unemployment rate for college graduates is now just 4.2 percent. But lower paid service workers have been hit hard and the jobless rate stands at 7.7 percent for people with just a high school diploma. Better off households, Mr. Anderson said, might spend the money on stocks or put it toward a home purchase, which could "aggravate a bubble forming in some assets like equities and housing." Julia Bald, a librarian who lives in Beverly, Mass., isn't looking to bet on the stock market but she plans to put her stimulus check in the bank as a precaution. If the virus surges again and the library has to close down, she fears that she could be laid off. Ms. Bald also has 10,000 in outstanding student loans, and is trying to save as much money as she can. "I haven't had much financial difficulty, it's not like I have to worry about back rent or anything," said Ms. Bald, 30. "But my nervousness about where the economy could go from here makes me want to save it just in case." Dennis Helmstetter of Frederick, Md., also plans to save the 600 payment. He has managed to keep not one, but three jobs during the pandemic as a real estate agent, a clerk at Fort Detrick and as a supervisor of the bar and restaurant at his local Elks Lodge. Because he hasn't been spending on travel, dining out or entertainment, he has been able to save more money than usual: putting away about 1,000 each month. While he's glad to see the extra boost to his savings, Mr. Helmstetter, 65, believes that Congress should have targeted the most needy people more directly. "I think they're barking up the wrong tree," he said. "The money should go to the people who are unemployed right now." Others who feel similarly to Mr. Helmstetter are taking it upon themselves to redistribute their payments to those facing financial hardship. Serena Cooper, 26, plans to donate all of her stimulus check to someone who is unemployed. Ms. Cooper, a public relations assistant in Los Angeles, said she feels "blessed" to have kept her job during the pandemic, despite her own financial worries. At 32,000 a year, her salary has left her struggling to pay rent and other bills. "In no way am I rich," she said. "But I feel like my 600 would make a bigger impact on someone who has been dealing with struggles far worse than I have during this pandemic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
From there, as Beth (now played by Anya Taylor Joy) is adopted out of the orphanage and her prowess gradually gains public notice, "Gambit" proceeds straightforwardly through her teenage years, showing us how she becomes the glamorous but troubled chess pro of that opening scene. It follows the beats of a sports tale, like a classic Hollywood boxing film, but it's also a coming of age story about a woman succeeding in a male dominated world, and a restrained spin on an addiction saga, as Beth rises in the chess hierarchy on a steady diet of alcohol and downers. Frank wraps it all up in a package that's smart, smooth and snappy throughout, like finely tailored goods. The production has a canny combination of retro Rat Pack style, in its decors and music choices, with a creamy texture, in its performances and cinematography, that is reminiscent of another Netflix period piece, "The Crown." (This connection is reinforced by the abundance of British actors playing the American roles, including Taylor Joy and, as three mentors and competitors for Beth's affection, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Jacob Fortune Lloyd and Harry Melling.) "Gambit" never quite gets back to the charm of its Dickensian opening chapter, though, and it gets thinner as it goes along. Frank pulls off his combination of themes with a lot of old Hollywood style skill, but in the mix, neither the sports nor the personal demons story line hits the levels of visceral excitement or emotional payoff that you might want. In the end, it was an admirable package that I wanted to love more than I did. That may have had something to do with the construct around which the story is built. Beth finds a refuge in chess it's a predictable place where she feels safe and in control. And we're shown why she needs a refuge, beginning with flashbacks to life with her brilliant, troubled biological mother (Chloe Pirrie) and continuing through her teen years with her alcoholic, depressed adoptive mom (an excellent Marielle Heller, who directed the female coming of age film "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"). Both of those elements make sense. But the question that becomes the central theme of the series whether Beth can overcome, or even survive, the obsessiveness that powers her success and the anger that's reflected in her superaggressive style of play is primarily melodramatic, a fact reflected in the show's unsatisfying conclusion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
BANGOR, Me. Joseph Zydlewski, a research biologist with the Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit of the United States Geological Survey, drifted in a boat on the Penobscot River, listening to a crackling radio receiver. The staccato clicks told him that one of the shad that his team had outfitted with a transmitter was swimming somewhere below. Shad, alewives, blueback herring and other migratory fish once were plentiful on the Penobscot. "Seven thousand shad and one hundred barrels of alewives were taken at one haul of the seine," in May 1827, according to one historian. Three enormous dams erected in the Penobscot, starting in the 1830s, changed all that, preventing migratory fish from reaching their breeding grounds. The populations all but collapsed. But two of the dams were razed in 2012 and 2013, and since then, fish have been rushing back into the Penobscot, Maine's largest river. "Now all of a sudden you are pulling the cork plug and giving shad access to a truckload of good habitat," Dr. Zydlewski said. Nearly 8,000 shad have swum upstream this year and it's not just shad. More than 500 Atlantic salmon have made the trip, along with nearly two million alewives, countless baby eels, thousands of mature sea lamprey and dozens of white perch and brook trout. Striped bass are feeding a dozen miles above Bangor in waters closed to them for more than a century. Nationwide, dam removals are gaining traction. Four dams are slated for removal from the Klamath River alone in California and Oregon by 2020. Just a few of these removals have occurred on such large rivers, which play an outsize role in coastal ecosystems. But the lessons are the same everywhere: Unplug the rivers, and the fish will return. "Once you remove these dams, migratory fish will probe into the watersheds," Mr. Duda said. And there are more subtle changes. The migratory salmon quickly began enriching the food web of the Elwha River with oceanic nutrients. A year after the Elwha Dam came down, Mr. Duda and his colleagues found chemical signs of marine derived nutrients in the blood of American dippers, small aquatic songbirds that forage in rivers. But the turnout has rarely been as vast as it has on the Penobscot. Like other large coastal rivers, the Penobscot once funneled millions of pounds of fish inland from the ocean each spring. But fish populations suffered in the 1800s as fishing pressure increased, water quality diminished and, most consequential, dams blocked the fish from their spawning grounds. Until 2013, fish ran a gantlet of three large dams in the first 10 miles of the Penobscot above head of tide, near Bangor. The Penobscot River Restoration Project, a consortium of government and tribal agencies, conservation groups and hydropower companies, spent 60 million to remove the first two dams and to install a fish lift at the next dam upstream. In June, the group dedicated the last piece of the project, a bypass channel around a dam on an upriver tributary. Before the dams came out, biologists began studying the river's fish to better understand the baseline conditions. "We asked the question, 'Who's knocking at the door?'" Dr. Zydlewski said. Shad were so diminished that fewer than 20 had passed the fishway of the former Veazie Dam over several decades. But Dr. Zydlewski and his colleagues, using sonar, documented a small population that persisted below the dam. Everything changed with the removal of the Veazie and Great Works dams, Dr. Zydlewski said. This year, precisely 7,846 shad ventured upriver, past the two demolished dams and through the fish lift at Milford Dam, which is now the first obstacle fish reach. Other shad, like those Dr. Zydlewski was tracking beneath the boat, stayed downstream; he and his colleagues say they are not sure why. Another research team, led by the University of Maine's Michael Kinnison and Gayle Zydlewski (who is married to Joe Zydlewski), discovered a previously unknown population of the endangered shortnose sturgeon in the Penobscot, near Bangor. Since the dams have come down, some of the sturgeon have nosed upstream into the newly free flowing river. The Penobscot also hosts the nation's largest run of Atlantic salmon, another endangered species. Historically, salmon runs may have numbered 60,000, but recent returns fell to less than 1,000, and as low as 250 in 2014. Among the salmon's challenges is changing climate, bringing warmer waters and unfavorable conditions at sea. In predam days, salmon were far outnumbered by shad and their smaller cousins, alewives and blueback herring, also known as river herring. In anticipation of the dam removals, state biologists in 2010 began stocking lakes in the Penobscot watershed with the herring; fish that swam up the Penobscot this year are their progeny. This strategy proved effective on the neighboring Kennebec River, where the Edwards Dam was removed in 1999. There, river herring now return by the millions and support a commercial fishery. John Banks, the director of the Penobscot Indian Nation Department of Natural Resources, said his tribe long relied on migrating fish like salmon and shad for sustenance, and used river herring to fertilize their gardens. "It's just fantastic to see the river coming back to life so quickly after the dams have been removed," Mr. Banks said. "And the alewives are so key to this. They are the keystone species that helps drive the whole river ecosystem." River herring are prey for everything from ground fish to seals. And because they are so numerous, they serve an ecological role as prey buffers. Juvenile Atlantic salmon, for example, are more likely to avoid predators when migrating seaward through schools of river herring, which allow them to sneak out through the crowd. Much of the Penobscot's recovery has been subtle, but some indicators of the river's link to the ocean are quite conspicuous. Recently, seals showed up in the river, miles above the old Veazie Dam. Dr. Zydlewski sees the annual migratory cycle as a grand spectacle of predators and prey. "You don't see the fish, but it's hard to miss the eagles and osprey. Just like striped bass, they follow the food," he said. "It's a shadow of what it once was, but it's exciting to see how it might come back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Every Mother's Day, Maggie Nelson, her husband Mike, and their three young children head to the cemetery to take a family photo at the grave of their daughter, Emily. She was stillborn in 2010, but her twin, Mikey, now 7, survived. "People say, 'That's kind of sad,' but I can say, 'I'm a proud mom of four. Here I am with all of them,'" Ms. Nelson, 39, said of the photos of her and the kids gathered on the grass by Emily's stone plaque. A Bloomington, Ill., kindergarten teacher, she is a member of an unofficial sorority of women who experienced acute grief while postpartum. The grief of fathers, adoptive mothers and other relatives after a family death is no less real, but postpartum women in mourning endure a particularly complicated blend of physical and emotional duress. First, there are factors that can affect any new mother: the physical discomfort of childbirth, the lack of sleep and anxiety about the baby. After giving birth, a new mother experiences rapid drops in levels of estrogen and progesterone and steep increases in prolactin. This can result in strong feelings of fatigue, irritability, insomnia and sadness known as the baby blues, which the National Institute of Mental Health says affects up to 80 percent of women. This is not the same as the more intense, ongoing postpartum depression, which doesn't reveal itself immediately, says Christiane Manzella, a senior psychologist who specializes in bereavement at the Seleni Institute, a women's counseling center in New York. Grief disrupts the body in different ways, with effects that can include a weakened immune system, a perilous situation for a new mother. "I was a mess, to put it in a nutshell," said Gayle Brandeis, 50, a Nevada writer whose mother committed suicide in 2009, days after Ms. Brandeis gave birth to a son. She experienced bouts of dizziness and had difficulty catching her breath. "I was really worried that my milk would dry out. I had a lot of stitches and walking was very painful," she said. "I felt so disoriented in my body." Bereaved new mothers need people to remind them that there are no wrong feelings. "It feels incredibly isolating because you're supposed to be happy," said a Boston area 47 year old mother of two who works in marketing and asked to be identified only by her first name, Susan. In 2012, when Susan was on bed rest with a high risk pregnancy while living overseas, her mother died unexpectedly. She could not travel for the funeral and was able to attend only via Skype. When Susan eventually gave birth to a daughter, her relationship to her baby was not what she expected. Her daughter had acid reflux, screamed a lot and slept little. "I thought there would be this bond that I wouldn't want to break because she was somehow my mom incarnate. It wasn't that at all." Throughout this experience, Susan, like most grieving new mothers, wondered, "Is this normal?" Pediatricians are on the front lines of spotting signs of postpartum depression in new mothers, since they see babies and mothers sooner and more frequently than obstetricians. Dr. Dafna Ahdoot, a Los Angeles pediatrician, has helped grieving new mothers who were anxious about their surviving baby's health, concerned over whether they could take their newborn to an out of town funeral, or worried that their grief would negatively affect the baby. She advises grieving new mothers to prioritize their own eating and sleeping by securing help with night feedings and switching to formula feeding as needed if breast feeding is too difficult. Many therapists specialize in postpartum depression or grief and can address both. "It's so hard to tease those symptoms apart," says Juli Fraga, a San Francisco psychologist who specializes in postpartum depression. A woman may think: "'Why wouldn't I be crying? I'm not sleeping.'" She helps her patients try meditation or breathing exercises to reduce levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and then discuss, as needed, next steps like seeing a psychiatrist or integrative medical options. Not all women have access to or even desire professional support. With initiatives like Therapy for Black Girls, the mental health community is working to build a bridge to African American women who may mistrust medical institutions. "African American women are at higher risk for premature birth, and so we are losing our babies," says Keisha Wells, a counselor in Columbus, Ga. "If you're dealing with that and you don't have anybody to talk to and you're a person of color, that's added sorrow." Ms. Wells did not have access to this type of mental health care 11 years ago when her twin sons, born prematurely, both died. But she said she found comfort in faith based support. In the first weeks after a birth paired with a death, close loved ones can lighten a new mother's load by making thoughtful executive decisions. Ms. Nelson's twins' room was painted half pink and half blue, and set up with two cribs. Friends repainted it and removed Emily's crib. "Nobody asked," Ms. Nelson said. "I didn't know if I wanted to be asked. It had to happen, and friends and family had to take care of it." More than anything, most grieving new mothers need to express their grief. After Ms. Nelson took Mikey home, a friend brought over a picnic dinner. "She put the basket on the counter, took both my hands in her hands and said 'Tell me about Emily,'" Ms. Nelson recalled. She said she appreciated that opportunity. Other well intentioned people misunderstood and said, "I didn't mean to make you sad," when she'd start to cry. She said she wanted to tell them: "Emily's death makes me sad. You talking about her makes me hope filled, it makes me proud. The tears are going to come, but let me do that." Many grieving mothers find solace in the stories of others, be they in books, online or in groups. Ms. Nelson was intrigued by the show "This Is Us," in which the main characters lose one of their triplets at birth and impulsively decide to adopt an abandoned baby. "The first episode made me angry that they were like, 'We'll just take this baby home instead,' but when they later showed the raw emotions that she had, I was a little more on board," Ms. Nelson said. Mourning new mothers eventually find a way to honor both their lost loved one and their child using what is known as a continuing bond grief paradigm. Dr. Manzella said that it can be compatible with the ongoing waves of grief many mothers who have gone through loss experience, and that the thinking about grief has evolved from the "accept and let go" ideas in the classic "five stages of grief" model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross. "Why not continue loving in absence and getting solace from the sense of love?" she said. Sometimes, finding a way to mark the loss can help. Each year, Ms. Nelson and her family honor Emily's birthday a day before Mikey's, since her heart stopped beating the day before he was born. "I have my day to be sad," Ms. Nelson says. "We go to the cemetery with balloons. The kids are fully involved. Then the next day is all about Mikey."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
In an American Alliance of Museums survey published Wednesday, 16 percent of American museum directors who responded to it said there was a high risk that their museums could close in the next 16 months if they do not find additional funding. Another 17 percent said they did not know if they would survive without further financial help from governments and private donors, according to the survey. "Museum revenue disappeared overnight when the pandemic closed all cultural institutions, and sadly, many will never recover," Laura Lott, the alliance's president and chief executive, said in a news release. "Even with a partial reopening in the coming months, costs will outweigh revenue and there is no financial safety net for many museums." The country's museums have been casualties of the coronavirus, incurring steep financial hits. Museums in the United States are vulnerable because they rely heavily on earned income and philanthropy, and they receive fewer government subsidies than European institutions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
As festivals go, Drive East is like a tiny jewel box. Its gems, though, are dazzling. For the fourth iteration of this intimate Indian performing arts event, the organization Navatman brings an impressive week of music and dance to the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa in the East Village. As usual, there will be an array of classical Indian dance styles on display, from the brisk footwork of Kathak to the sensuous swirl of Mohiniattam. The festival begins on Monday with a solo harmonium concert by Kedar Naphade and, later that night, a Bharatanatyam performance by the glamorous dancer and actress Rukmini Vijayakumar. Each evening features an abundance of offerings. Following is a closer look at four styles Bharatanatyam, Kuchipudi, Kathak and Mohiniattam and their practitioners at Drive East. Ms. Vijayakumar, an actress who is accomplished in ballet and modern dance, began studying Bharatanatyam at 6. "The linear and angular movements of Bharatanatyam have developed over the course of the years and have very distinct, clear, precise and direct movements that form the building blocks of dance sequences," she explained in an email. "Momentum and the weight of body parts are rarely used, as movement initiation is largely led by the focus of the eyes." "Though the face expresses emotion, and the dancer tells stories, the expression in Bharatanatyam is subtle and almost colloquial at times," she said. "Most of the other classical Indian dance forms have extremely stylized expressions." Kuchipudi, a dance drama form from the Telugu culture of southern India, was originally performed by men. Distinguished by abhinaya, or expressive mime, Kuchipudi is a theatrical style, which, as she explained in an email, "is all about the dancer carrying grace." "It is a very feminine dance form," she continued, "though it is one of the most appropriate dance forms to portray vigor. Grace does not look very challenging to the spectator's eye, but to master grace is not at all an easy task." At Drive East, Ms. Kalluri, who is only 18, will offer a traditional Kuchipudi repertory program featuring five pieces, including works based on tales of the Hindu gods Shiva and Krishna; she closes with an exuberant dance illustrating nritta, or the expression of rhythm through movement. In it, she said, "The dancer also gets the opportunity to execute various kinds of nritta at a catchy pace. It is a beautiful piece where the dance should be able to execute the divinity of goddess Saraswathi, as well as the devotion of the devotee." In other words, it's like becoming the lord and the living at once. For its Drive East presentation, the Bangalore based Nadam, or the Narthan Academy of Dance and Music, brings five of its 27 members to perform six works. In Kathak, stories revolve around the god Krishna and the goddess Radha; what you'll see is a tapestry of intricate footwork, fast pirouettes and statuesque poses. The company, formed by Nandini K. Mehta and Murali Mohan Kalvakalva in 1997, is exemplary. In an email, Mr. Kalvakalva said that what distinguished Kathak "is its spontaneity, improvisation and simple mime." In "Dhamar," a technical pure dance piece with no story that is included in the Drive East program, the cast weaves rhythmic patterns to percussion accompaniment. Within cycles of 14 beats, Mr. Kalvakalva explained, the dancers must execute the movements and arrive with a flourish on the first beat of each cycle. "The turns in Kathak are a speciality to bring vigor and drama to the nritta, or pure dance," he said. "However, if turns are used in a mime piece, it shows change of character." Considered a master performer of Mohiniattam, a style from the Kerala region in southwestern India, Ms. Nair didn't begin learning the form until late when she was a student at the University of Mumbai though she had studied classical Indian dance as a child. (Her focus then was Bharatanatyam.) For Ms. Nair, Mohiniattam embodies more than simply grace, but that is its main perfume as dancers, with a gentle sensuality, link movements with fluidity. There are no breaks. "Mohiniattam lets a woman express her feelings and emotions through dance," she explained in an interview. "It has a lot of grounded movements, and its physical movements are not jerky they flow beautifully from one end to the other, and they all seem really interlocked. You will not see a sudden movement starting somewhere; they're always connected to the previous one." This video shows the deep bends, the movement and the flow, which Ms. Nair likens to "little waves that slowly merge in the ocean."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The former tennis pro Mary Carillo, second from left, giving tips to the actors Zoe Winters, Wilson Bethel and Alex Mickiewicz of "The Last Match." They Can Act. But Can They Serve? On a practice court at the U.S.T.A. Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, two men were playing some pretty ugly tennis. It was the Monday morning after the United States Open and as the subway rumbled by and workers unstrung banners and logos, Wilson Bethel and Alex Mickiewicz faced each other across the sunstruck acrylic turf. Mr. Bethel, wearing maroon warm up gear and a backward baseball cap, lolloped easy volleys to Mr. Mickiewicz, who was dressed all in black like a sporty supervillain. Mr. Mickiewicz sent some of those balls back over the net. Others thudded straight into it. "These courts have never really seen play like this before," his castmate, the actress Zoe Winters, deadpanned. The actors had gathered at the foot of Arthur Ashe Stadium as part of rehearsals for "The Last Match," a play by Anna Ziegler that begins previews at the Roundabout's Laura Pels Theater on Sept. 28 Joined by Ms. Ziegler, who was clomping around in a boot cast (on her most recent opening night, she really did break a leg), and the play's director, Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the two posed for still photos and sat for promotional videos. They also participated in a training session with Mary Carillo, the broadcaster and former professional tennis player. A lively meditation on mortality and time, "The Last Match" takes place in the minds of two players during a hard fought United States Open semifinal. Mr. Bethel plays Tim, an aging American contemplating retirement. Mr. Mickiewicz plays Sergei, his volatile Russian challenger. Ms. Upchurch has decided that while neither actor will need to try an ace or even hold a racket onstage, but both have to look like they could. In the interests of authenticity, Ms. Carillo, resplendent in a Billie Jean King T shirt and baseball jacket, gathered the actors together and taught them a few tricks. She showed them how to test the tension of the racket by hitting it against the palm, how to swat a ground ball and make it leap into your hand, how to strut back to the baseline after a successful point. "You give them a little attitude," she said. "It's a ritual." She also showed them a delaying technique Maria Sharapova uses. "Pick at your strings," she said, "that's a good one." Though Ms. Carillo won the 1977 mixed doubles title at the French Open, partnered by her childhood pal John McEnroe, she was quick to downplay her expertise. "I didn't play long and I wasn't that good," she said. "I grew up playing on the same courts as McEnroe. He was doing things I'd never seen anybody do." She remembered when she was 12 and he was 10, sitting him down and telling him, "You are going to be the greatest player in the world someday." "And he looked at me and said, 'Shut up, you don't know what you're talking about.'" The actors seemed a lot less skeptical. Throughout the morning they toggled between eagerness and mild embarrassment as they quizzed Ms. Carillo about the life of a pro and practiced her techniques. Natalia Payne, who plays Sergei's fiancee, Galina, and who had never held a racket before, seemed a little overwhelmed. "As a first time player on a court at the United States Open, start high, get Mary Carillo to train you, those would be my tips," she said. Then she hung her head. Mr. Bethel, best known as the bad boy bartender on the CW comedy "Hart of Dixie," seemed the more confident of the two, probably because he played competitive tennis as a teenager and has worked as a coach. Until fairly recently, he had secretly hoped to turn pro. Throughout the morning, he harbored a fantasy that maybe Rafael Nadal had somehow hung around after winning the men's title the day before. "I'd be like, 'Hey, do you want a hitting partner?' And he was going to be like, 'Yeah!'" Mr. Bethel confessed. But even with Mr. Nadal a no show, Mr. Bethel appeared delighted, even awe struck by his surroundings. He described this courtside rehearsal as "the most bizarre convergence of two separate dreams. I'm having to pinch myself pretty regularly." Maybe those dreams aren't so separate. At least that's what Ms. Carillo insisted. She drew multiple parallels between theater and athletics, insisting that tennis is "very creative" and that success in either athletics or acting requires total dedication. Ms. Carillo can speak with some authority, having appeared in the 2004 romantic comedy "Wimbledon." "I was fabulous," said Ms. Carillo. "My two scenes saved that film. Just kidding." (On that set, she took time out to help the actress Kirsten Dunst with her serve. "She wasn't even bending her knees," Ms. Carillo said.) Though Ms. Carillo hasn't played a tournament since Wimbledon in 1980, she said that she still woke up in a sweat thinking she had to prepare for a match. To play tennis, she said, "you put it on the line. You've got to be committed. You've got to be focused. It's the same thing onstage: You're up there. It's on you. You can't fake it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Jane Goodall is in isolation these days along with everyone else, since a fund raising tour was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. She is staying at her family home in England, not in Tanzania, her primary home when not on the road. Dr. Goodall changed the way the world views chimpanzees with research that began when she first went to Africa 60 years ago this July, a young woman without a college degree, to observe chimpanzees in the wild at what is now the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania. She later became a tireless advocate for chimps in captivity. When she began her work, chimps were routinely used in medical research, a practice Dr. Goodall and other advocates helped stop in the U.S. Today, the Jane Goodall Institute supports the continuation of the research she started at the Gombe Stream Research Centre as well as programs in community involvement in conservation, and education. With international travel just about shut down, the institute, which is active in 30 countries, recently held a virtual global meeting. "It worked so much better than I thought," she said. "I was really impressed. I called Dr. Goodall on Thursday and spoke to her for about a half hour on the subject of humans, animals, the coronavirus pandemic, and what gives her hope. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Well, I started off being unbelievably frustrated that I was grounded. And then I thought, well, OK, that's, that's not helpful. So I began thinking of all the different ways that I could stay out in the public without being there, so to speak. And then I thought, well, goodness, I've got a backlog of about four years of emails. I can start on that. And I've also got about eight or nine years of piles of stuff, stuff off the lecture tour that got dumped with no time to sort it out before I was off again. So I've started that. It's crazy. So this pause has let you step back a bit? It's catching up, you know. But there are some things that are so unbelievably worrying. In the U.S. you have people who can apply for unemployment or something. But what about in Tanzania, for example? The people running the bars, the restaurants, selling food at the side of the road all banned now. And they make just enough to keep alive for a week and pay the rent and there's no social security, nothing for them. I think about it all the time. I've thought about it ever since I saw secretly filmed footage of these social beings in medical research labs in 5 foot by 5 foot cages. The first time I went into one of those labs. It was horrendous. And solitary confinement. As you say, it's bad enough for us, but we have all these other ways of distracting. And what about these animals who have nothing? But you know the other thing is, if you're trying to look for silver linings in this horrible time. It has reactivated the discussion about animal trafficking, selling wild animals for food or for medicine. Everybody's pointing fingers at China, but already the government's made a total ban on the markets, selling animals for food and on trafficking, importing wild animals. So we just have to hope that because of the magnitude of this pandemic they will keep that ban. At the moment it's temporary, but let's hope they enforce it forever, and close down the market for animals used in traditional medicine. Are there particular achievements of yours that stand out in terms of their future impact? I was the eighth person in the history of Cambridge to come in without an undergraduate degree. And I was really scared. You can imagine. And of course didn't help when the professors told me I'd done everything wrong. I shouldn't have named the chimps, they should have been numbered. And I couldn't talk about personality, mind or emotion because those were unique to us. But luckily my dog had taught me otherwise as a child. So I could stand up to them, not in an aggressive way. I just calmly, you know, went on talking about it that way. And I remember the first scientific paper I wrote was for Nature and it was about tool using I think. And so I described the chimpanzees, I gave them names and they left the names. But when I got the article back, they made corrections and they crossed out everywhere I put he or she. I mean, one thing is very clear, the difference between the sexes. But animals were "its." So I angrily crossed out the "its" and they left it. So that was the first breakthrough. And I think because the chimps had been found to be so biologically like us, along with the behavior shown in Hugo van Lawick's films and photographs, that really pushed science into thinking in a less reductionist way. We are not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom, we're part of it. Gradually that's gone more and more mainstream. So that's one thing, helping people understand that animals have personalities, minds and emotions, and now you can study those things. My stance is that ultimately there will be a time with no animal experimentation. What pleased me about the chimp situation is that I was in it from the ethical point of view, but the fact that the chimps were put in sanctuaries because the research was not useful was a far better outcome than if it had been done on ethical grounds. It's like fossil fuel. People say we want to stop using fossil fuel now. Well that's clearly impossible. You can't just suddenly stop something. And this medical research on animals won't suddenly stop, although I wish it would. The trouble is that people working on alternatives just don't get the right support. Back to our current situation. What is it like where you are now? It's a family home. We came here in the war. It was my grandmother's. I'm looking out at the window at the tree I climbed as a child and I'm looking over at all the books I read as a child, my Dr. Doolittles and my Tarzans, and me and my dog, Rusty. There's a big picture of him opposite me, the dog who taught me about animals, that of course they have minds and personalities and emotions. Any personal advice on what might help with isolation? A sense of humor. There's all this nonsense about loo paper. There's two very funny videos. Apparently one is of a man sitting on his loo and a dog comes in and steals the loo roll. And then there's another of a different man sitting on another loo and the dog comes and grabs one end of the roll and you follow him. He goes down the stairs and the man on the loo is sitting watching as his loo paper is reeling away in front of him. The dog takes it to another man. During all of this we have to keep a sense of humor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
MUMBAI, India The Orbit Grand, a block size complex designed to have at least 26 floors of elegant apartments, an extensive array of ground floor stores and abundant parking for the chauffeured cars of residents and shoppers, was supposed to be a diadem of India's real estate market. Now it is turning into a symbol of the slumping fortunes of property developers and owners in a once promising emerging economy. Construction of the Orbit Grand has almost completely stalled at the 10th floor, the tower crane at the site seldom moves and the builder has defaulted on its loan. "There's no real work going on right now. There's just a minimum number of workers coming in to do small things," said Alam Sheikh, an electrician who is one of just 14 builders left at the site. The real estate market in cities across India is crumbling as the Indian economy slows. The rupee has dropped nearly 20 percent against the dollar since early May, scaring away foreign investors. The Reserve Bank of India, the country's central bank, raised a key short term interest rate for commercial banks' borrowing by two full percentage points in mid July, to 10.25 percent, mainly to prevent further declines in the rupee. To put a brake on the flow of money leaving the country, the central bank followed up last month with a regulation banning Indians from transferring money overseas for real estate purchases. Rising financing costs are all the more painful because India's real estate developments take a long time to build because of a vast and often corrupt regulatory apparatus. Publicly traded real estate investment groups in India are heavily in debt, so they struggle to make interest payments and are not in a position to bankroll further projects. That combination has produced almost unanimous bearishness about the short term prospects for residential, commercial and industrial real estate prices in India. Sanjay Dutt, the executive managing director for South Asia at Cushman Wakefield, the world's largest privately held commercial real estate company, predicted that prices would fall 10 percent in big Indian cities and 15 percent on the outskirts of large cities, where many speculative projects have been built. He said, "Given the universal sentiment of the market, there could be a sharp correction between now and Gudi Padwa," an annual festival next March that has long been considered in India an auspicious time to buy real estate. "If they drop prices, investors will panic and it will be a self fulfilling prophecy," causing further declines in prices, said Siddharth Yog, a co founder and managing partner of the Xander Group, a large international real estate investment firm started in 2005. That was the year India began allowing foreign institutional investors into its real estate market. But with sellers refusing to cut prices, many potential buyers are losing interest. Devkinandan Agarwal, a Mumbai broker with three quarters of his business in residential real estate and the rest in commercial real estate, said that until the last few months, he had at least three or four separate meetings each day with genuine, interested buyers; now he has only one a day. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. "There are now only actual users in the market, there is hardly anyone buying real estate as an investment," he said. One longstanding complaint about business practices in India is that the country's banks lend heavily to a wealthy elite who often put very little of their own money into deals. These developers rely on minority investors and bank loans for most of the financing. India's debt tribunals, for companies unable to repay what they have borrowed, have tended to move slowly. They are reluctant to force founders of companies to incur large losses even in corporate reorganizations in which creditors and minority investors lose heavily. Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of the Reserve Bank of India, said at his inaugural news conference last Wednesday that he would try to change this. "Promoters do not have a divine right to stay in charge regardless of how badly they mismanage an enterprise, nor do they have the right to use the banking system to recapitalize their failed ventures," he said. Bimal Jalan, a former chief economic adviser to the Indian government who was also the governor of the central bank from 1997 to 2003, said in a telephone interview from New Delhi that the broader Indian economy could escape serious harm even if real estate prices did decline. India has low rates of homeownership, so families are less likely to be worried about falling home prices and cut household spending. The construction of the Orbit Grand here illustrates many of the issues in Indian real estate, including costly regulatory delays. The Orbit Corporation, a publicly traded Mumbai developer, began building the complex and several others in western India with a 62 million loan in 2008 from LIC Housing Finance Ltd., based in Mumbai. But a combination of litigation over whether Orbit had full title to the entire site, which Orbit did not win until last March, together with a new set of municipal real estate regulations introduced in late 2010, slowed the pace of construction and prevented Orbit from preselling apartments. The company actually had to erect two separate buildings, with plans to join them together later, because the litigation, a chronic problem in Indian real estate, delayed construction on the 30 percent of the site's acreage that was in question. "This led to a severe cash crunch at the company and resulted in the stalling construction of the project," said Ramashrya Yadav, the chief financial officer at Orbit. Orbit defaulted on the LIC loan at the end of last year with a little more than a third of the original balance not yet repaid. LIC put the Orbit Grand into receivership in early August. But as often happens in India, Orbit has kept control of the sites. Mr. Yadav said that Orbit had now raised the money to finish the projects, and it received the needed environmental clearances four weeks ago. The Orbit Grand stalled with 10 stories completed out of 26, although the firm is seeking regulatory approval to extend the building up to 36 stories. Another project, less than a mile away, Orbit Terraces, stalled with 40 of 60 floors built. Orbit requires the permission of LIC to sell units, and any sales must go toward the defaulted loan. Mr. Yadav predicted that Orbit would be able to repay the defaulted loan within seven months, while acknowledging that the company faced a tough market for selling apartments. "As liquidity dries up, a price fall is also imminent," he said. LIC declined to comment. While foreign investors in Indian real estate are licking their wounds after the 17.5 percent fall in the rupee against the dollar since the start of May, they do have one consolation. The longstanding shortage of space in many Indian cities because of regulatory barriers to new construction translates into high occupancy rates and steady rental incomes for commercial and residential real estate, at least in rupee terms. "In terms of the underlying portfolio, tenant demand has been very good there has been limited construction in the last few years because of tight credit, and that has slowed the supply of new offices," said Christopher Heady, the Blackstone partner overseeing Asian real estate investments. The asset management firm Blackstone has invested 600 million in Indian real estate, mainly office complexes in Bangalore, a center of the information technology and outsourcing industries in southern India. These sectors have a lot of multinationals and big Indian companies that are reliable renters, Mr. Heady said, adding that these clients are "continuing to grow pretty rapidly." But leaving aside a few exporters of services like computer software, most of the economy is struggling. Manish Jain moved his jewelry store last January into retail space at the base of the unfinished Orbit Grand, but has found that customers are more interested in pawning jewelry they already have and the people doing the pawning are increasingly those wearing suits, not just shirts or saris. "They are going through a tough financial crisis," he said. "At first, we only saw people from the service class, lower income people, but now we are seeing business people, too."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Visitors waiting to be admitted into James Cohan, which is showing "Observations at Night," an exhibition of new work by Josiah McElheny. The gallery hosted performances by the Sun Ra Arkestra, part of a performance series curated by Blank Forms, during the Tribeca Gallery Walk on Saturday. With the decline of retail, storefronts in the Triangle Below Canal Street are filling with galleries it's New York City's most unlikely new art scene. When the artists started moving in, five decades ago, TriBeCa was a winsome village of empty warehouses and forsaken loading docks. A few artists, like my own sculptor father, are still in their lofts, making work. But the neighborhood has long since transformed into a bustling hive of boutique hotels and high priced condos. So it's strange, and a little magical, to see it suddenly filling up with galleries with three more opening in just the last two weeks and about a dozen participating in last week's Tribeca Gallery Walk, a biannual tour experience and mini festival founded by the art fair Independent New York. Andrew Kreps and James Cohan have just moved down from Chelsea, joining the earlier transplants Bortolami, Alexander and Bonin and Postmasters, with PPOW scheduled to follow in the spring. Canada and the newcomer Denny Dimin have moved from the Lower East Side, along with Kerry Schuss, returning to his original Leonard Street location. Ales Ortuzar is introducing New Yorkers to artists who've made impacts in other parts of the world at Ortuzar Projects on White Street, and the Journal Gallery, formerly based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been mounting a new show every week just down the block. Kaufmann Repetto of Milan, in partnership with Kreps and Bortolami, is now operating a space on Walker Street, and the tiny independents Page and Queer Thoughts are running consistently interesting programming out of a couple of office buildings on Broadway. Rent hikes in Chelsea are one reason for the migration. Online shopping is another. The decline of in person retail has left the Triangle Below Canal Street studded with expansive storefronts that are often cheaper, per square foot, than elsewhere in Manhattan. But as Lucas Page, of Page gallery, puts it, the neighborhood is also a "sweet spot," with a "rich history of art" and subway trains "feeding from every borough." And unlike Chelsea, which sprawls to the far West Side, Andrew Kreps says, TriBeCa "feels like it's part of the city." A Heinz ketchup bottle, in a contemporary art context, must always refer to Andy Warhol, that son of Pittsburgh who famously appropriated his hometown company's "57" logo. White asparagus brings to mind Dutch still life, as well as pointing to the intractable ambiguity of even the crispest photograph, since it's so hard not to read these particular examples as French fries. The whole thing looks so much like an argument, about the artistry of advertisements, the mercenary quality of the art world, or the difficulty of telling them apart. But the more I think about it, the more the work's self consciousness seems like just another aesthetic choice, just one more tool, like color or composition, that Mr. Ethridge can use to make a beautiful picture. Xylor Jane starts her paintings with numbers. To set up the formulas that govern her complex concatenations of colored dots and triangles, the California born artist might draw on alchemy, the I Ching, or higher order primes or she might not. The thousands of tiny, nipple shaped dollops of paint in the pink and blue oil "No More Tears" depict nothing more complicated than a table of whole numerals from 1 to 99. Unlike a pointillist's dots, though, or the pixels on a computer screen, Ms. Jane's careful marks refuse to fully subsume themselves into the overall pattern. More striking than the table of numerals itself is the vibrant glow of its chromatic dissonance. You're reminded that any visual synthesis you think you're seeing is only in your head but in the very same thought, you're assured that that doesn't make the vision any less remarkable. Moki Cherry made all kinds of art, most famously the colorful backdrops for performances by her husband, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. But she spent the years 1992 to 1997 at Greenwich House Pottery, in the West Village, making motley animal shaped vessels, vessel shaped animals, and ceramic demon masks nearly all of which are included in "Moki Cherry Ceramics Collages," organized by Bob Nickas at Kerry Schuss. In the masks, especially, an inspired combination of precision and roughness lays bare the constant contest between an artist's idea and the strange, chaotic resistance of her material. Details like an adeptly shaped canine tooth, or adobe colored teardrops, come to have a supernatural charge, as if they'd thrown themselves into existence fully formed. Teeth folded out like tabs of paper, or eyes slit open like hot cross buns, direct that same charge outward, making a viewer suddenly conscious of how weird and miraculous it is to experience the world in a body. A self taught artist who spent the 1960s in Paris and the rest of his life (he died in 2000) in Japan, Key Hiraga liked to paint an electric mauve menagerie of vulvic eyeballs, googly eyed sperm, cartoonish bowler hats, and serpentine penises with teeth. It sounds like dorm room depravity, and in some smaller pieces in his show "Works 1958 1993," it does come across that way. In larger paintings, though, the sexual monomania transcends itself and flips over into an enthralling, almost innocent exuberance. I tried to count the split and doubled faces, and splayed open carnal conjunctions, in "The Elegant Life of Mr. H," but their sheer quantity overwhelmed me: All I could do was marvel at the piece's bright colors and explosive sense of motion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the coastal city of Lima, street art is plastered on many of the weathered colonial buildings in the bohemian barrio of Barranco, the neighborhood where the celebrated chef Virgilio Martinez reopened his world famous Central restaurant last June. How coveted is a table at Central? Some people build their trips around a reservation there. "It has this artistic sensibility," Mr. Martinez said of the district once known as a seaside retreat for the Limeno aristocracy. "It looks like a small town where things are happening, but you also see old houses very well preserved." In relocating Central from the Miraflores neighborhood, he opened a multilevel complex that also houses the cocktail bar Mayo and the modern Peruvian restaurant Kjolle, run by his wife, Pia Leon. They live with their 3 year old son, Cristobal, above their establishments on Pedro de Osma, the area's ficus lined main thoroughfare. "There are no big businesses here," Mr. Martinez said. "You see independent owners doing everything from designing to cooking. People who really belong to a neighborhood." Here, he dishes on five favorite spots in Barranco.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
It's not exactly beach reading, but "Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls" (Ugly Duckling Presse) is one of the strangest and most beautiful dance books to come along in a while, though it's not exactly a dance book either. The slender volume contains notations of "Costume en Face," a 1976 work by Tatsumi Hijikata, who created the Japanese performance art Butoh. The note taker was the lead performer, Moe Yamamoto; his record of Hijikata's words, in Japanese, alternates with Sawako Nakayasu's English translation, spattered with hand drawn sketches and symbols. Every choreographer, to some extent, relies on language to transfigure ideas into movement, and Hijikata's was singularly surreal, encrypting both dreamy and sickening images. One page offers these: "Angel of burns," "lady in plaster," "spinal decay of the blind." Somewhere between score and poem, the notebook takes on a kinetic life of its own, about as close to dancing as words on a page can get. (uglyducklingpresse.org.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO Google and Facebook have been taking steps to curb the number of false news articles propagated across their sites. On Wednesday, the Silicon Valley companies showed that they were still in the early stages of their battle to limit misinformation online. In a blog post, Google said it had permanently banned nearly 200 publishers from its AdSense advertising network near the end of last year, after putting into effect a policy in November to choke off websites that try to deceive users from its online ad service. On the same day, Facebook introduced changes to its Trending Topics feature a part of the social network that some have blamed for spreading false information to better promote reliable news articles. Yet taken together, the efforts showed how the fight against fake news remains a work in progress. Google's bans were a drop in the bucket compared with the almost two million publishers that use AdSense. Facebook's new measures were part of a continuing series of small experiments by the company to find out what worked best in displaying news to its users. "We genuinely asked Google and Facebook for 'moonshots,'" said Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, an online publishing industry group. "We appreciate the work, but based on the numbers, that's hardly even running in place." Google and Facebook have been in something of a no win situation in recent months when it comes to fake news. Both companies have been grappling with a widespread backlash over how their sites may have spread rumors on a vast scale, and how little responsibility they take for any of the content that appears on their platforms. The issue came to a head after the American presidential election, when commentators accused Facebook in particular of swaying voters to President Trump through misleading and untrue news articles. In response, both companies have tried various measures to limit fake news. Google in November said it would ban sites that spread misinformation from AdSense as a way to impair how such sites make money. That same month, Facebook updated some of its policy language, which already said it would not display ads on sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites. Facebook has since introduced other changes, including consulting third party news organizations like The Associated Press and ABC News about the accuracy of articles that users report as being false. Google's blog post on Wednesday was the first time the company explained the results of its moves against publishers that spread misinformation. The search giant said it reviewed 550 sites "suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations" in November and December. It took action against 340 of those sites and kicked nearly 200 publishers off its network permanently. Google was careful not to say that these were fake news sites, only sites that deceive users by misrepresenting themselves or their content. This month, Media Matters noted that Google changed the language of its advertising policy, removing the words "fake news." Google said the language change noted by Media Matters involved examples that help explain its policy but were not changes to the actual policy. Google declined to identify the sites or publishers it banned. Before taking steps to thwart fake news publishers, Google had an existing policy that outlawed publishers of "misrepresentative content," such as websites peddling weight loss schemes or counterfeit goods. It expanded this policy to include sites impersonating news organizations. Google was pulled into the fake news debate when Mediaite reported that, in the days after the election, the top result on a Google search for "final election vote count 2016" was a link to an article that incorrectly stated that Mr. Trump, who won the Electoral College, was ahead of his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, in the popular vote. Google said that its search algorithms fell short but that the company would continue to work to improve its results. The AdSense system is a major revenue driver for independent web publishers who rely on the network to deliver display advertising on their sites. The publishers are paid when a reader views or clicks on those ads, with a portion of the proceeds going to Google. AdSense is one of the largest advertising networks on the web with nearly two million publishers using the system. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the number of sites it has banned since November. Trending Topics is a feature on the social network that tells people what popular topics are being discussed on the site. Apart from more transparency around headlines, the changes to the feature on Wednesday included identifying popular topics through the number of publishers posting articles on Facebook about a piece of news, rather than engagement around a single article. "Today's update may also help prevent hoaxes and fake news from appearing in Trending because the updated system identifies groups of articles shared on Facebook instead of relying solely on mentions of a topic," the company said in a blog post. Still, industry watchers remain skeptical about the efficacy of these moves. "Nothing drives clicks better than when the headline is exactly what people want to hear or believe," Ian Schafer, the chief executive and founder of Deep Focus, a digital advertising agency, referring specifically to Google. Mr. Schafer said that without significant changes to the economics and technology of online ads, banning individual sites would not produce change in the long run.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A family joins hands across a driveway in "Us," a film that uses the event Hands Across America in sinister ways. On May 25, 1986, something happened in the United States that in this divisive American moment sounds utterly bonkers. It was a Sunday, around 3 p.m. on the East Coast, when millions of people held hands with strangers for 15 minutes in a human chain that was meant to stretch from New York to California. It was an effort to raise money for organizations fighting hunger and homelessness, and it was called Hands Across America. A Washington Post headline later suggested that it "might have been the most Eighties thing to happen in the 1980s." Hands Across America has largely been stored in the Gen X memory box along with its feel good, cheese ball music video, which features cameos by Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams and other celebrities. Toto was the backing band. Memories of the occasion are now resurfacing through a sinister lens thanks to "Us," the new hit horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Read our interview with Jordan Peele, who is also relaunching a version of "The Twilight Zone," here. In the movie, Lupita Nyong'o plays a mother haunted by a traumatic encounter she had as a girl in 1986. Her life is violently upended when a wicked version of her family shows up to hatch plans that, according to Peele, imagine "the dark side of Hands Across America." The family first appears standing hand in hand like paper dolls, as did Hands Across America's participants. That formation is a motif in the film's advertising and a recurring, nefarious force in the story. Peele "draws a line between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, suggesting that we were, and remain, one nation profoundly divisible," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. For Katy Shrout, 9 at the time and now a 42 year old eighth grade English teacher in Atlanta, Hands Across America was a joyful moment "of epic significance." With a mixtape booming in her boombox, Shrout joined hands with her parents, sister and her sister's Cabbage Patch Kid, Iva, along a roadway in St. Louis. "I was really pumped about it," said Shrout. "I thought that when we were holding hands, I was holding hands with people in California and New York." (The line actually had gaps in some areas; states not on the route organized their own similar events.) In an interview, Peele said that as he was writing "Us" he stumbled across a commercial for the event and "got this really eerie feeling." A Hands Across America commercial of the director's own making plays at the beginning of the film. "There's something cultlike about the imagery that makes me think of the Manson family singing folk songs as they leave the courtroom," said Peele, who was 7 when the nationwide gathering happened. "There's like an insistence that as long as we have each other, we can walk blindly past the ugliness and evil that we may be a part of." By infusing Hands Across America with malevolent power, Peele is cinematizing one of the main criticisms it faced in 1986: that it was "a superficial gesture that offered no long term solution to poverty in the United States," as The Times described homeless advocates' objections in a front page article the day after the event. Eventually, the initiative distributed about 15 million to various charities, lower than its target of at least 50 million. In his "satirical poke" at Hands Across America, Peele said he wasn't calling into question the "well intentioned, good people" behind it. "I don't think the notion is an evil one," he explained. Yet as he reflected on it these years later, Peele said it struck him as an event "more for the people who are holding hands to cure hunger than for the people who are hungry themselves." There is no dark side to Hands Across America for Ken Kragen. A former talent manager whose clients included Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie, Kragen was the event's main organizer. Now 82 and a business consultant in Los Angeles, he considers it the "biggest accomplishment" of his professional life. That's in addition to his role as president of U.S.A. for Africa, the organization behind the song "We Are the World," a 1985 hit featuring Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and other megastars that, according to Rolling Stone, raised over 63 million in humanitarian aid for organizations in Africa and the United States. Kragen said he wasn't aware that Hands Across America was featured in "Us." Not a horror movie fan, he remarked: "My wife's going to see it." He said he was "delighted" that the film might encourage a new generation to learn more about an event that, while it may not have solved the issue of hunger, "made a difference." "Putting 5.5 million people across the country was completely impossible, and we did it without the benefit of the internet," he said. "That's one of the most amazing things. The more younger people are aware that we pulled this off, the more likely they may create something that will help pull the country back together." Could Hands Across America happen again? Would a theme song with the lines "See those people over there/They're my sister and brother" last a second without being annihilated by Twitter? Not likely, said Abby Aronson, who was 16 when she participated in Hands Across America in New Jersey.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Hi, I'm James Gray. I'm the co writer and director of 'Ad Astra.' We had thought for a while about what the moon might be like in the next 50 to 100 years and what it would take to settle the moon and how we probably wouldn't be able to settle the moon in certain parts. So we tried to conceive of a sequence, which illustrated the chaos of what it might mean to adhere to treaties about certain parts you couldn't go to the moon, and if that would mean lunar pirates. Probably, it would. And so we created an action scene around that concept. The goal for the scene was really twofold, I'll say. One was to have it play as a very subjective experience the strangeness of being on the moon to sell the kind of one sixth gravitational pull, but also to illustrate what it means when there's a total lack of order. And that was really the ambition." "Roy?" "Yes, Colonel." "Look at this, the big blue marble. It never ceases to amaze me." "But it was really our attempt to extrapolate, to think about essentially what it would mean to settle territory and who gets to own what. And that has never resolved itself peacefully in the entire history of the human race. So why it would be different on the moon? We have no idea." "Lieutenant, you clocking this?" "In an ordinary action sequence, the issues are how to shoot a stunt safely and superbly with a lot of impact. But this represented some very weird, difficult challenges, one of which was how to simulate one/sixth gravitational pull. Additionally, how to make sure that it looked like the moon. So my first idea, which of course is always wrong, was we're going to shoot in the desert. And we will then figure out a way to color time the sky that's blue, a jet black. And then we'll take the color out of the sand, and we've got it. Well, what we wound up doing was shooting the sequence in the desert. And it presented huge and almost impossible logistical challenges. The first was, of course, well, the desert does have life. So all of the surfaces turned out to be useless. The second was that the sky, sometimes had clouds and sometimes had gradations. So even though we shot it in part with an infrared camera, which would turn the blue to black, it still didn't turn it all the way black. So the sequence had to be almost like visual effects, heavily augmenting the practical stunts that we did. And then, of course, there was the attempt to simulate one sixth gravity. And that was a lengthy trial where we experimented the different frame rates for the film. And ultimately, we decided between 32 and 36 frames per second as opposed to the usual 24 frames per second simulated for some reason what our experiences of what one sixth gravity would look like. And may I say that the strange fact of the scene is that when we had to replace all of the surface and get rid of the desert, get rid of the vegetation, we found ourselves using the very high quality Hasselblad photographs that were taken on the moon in the Apollo missions. With a computer. And you cut out around the wheels, and you cut around the shape of the Rover itself. And you replace the ground. And the replacement background was the photographs of the moon that were taken over a 20 to 30 year period. And so when they're driving, what's zooming past the wheels is a series of lunar photographs. And so the actual surface you're seeing is the lunar surface." HEAVY BREATHING	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
BERLIN Jurgen Klinsmann, the former United States men's national soccer team coach, resigned as manager of the Bundesliga club Hertha Berlin on Tuesday, abruptly abandoning his project to transform the German club into a powerhouse after only 76 days in charge. Klinsmann, 55, was hired in November, his first job since he was fired as the United States coach in 2017 amid an ultimately failed bid to qualify for the World Cup. In returning to club coaching, he all but promised to turn Hertha Berlin into a European power within years. But 10 weeks later, and with only three wins in his 10 games, he shocked both Hertha's fans and the club by resigning months before the end of the season. Hertha Berlin lost, 3 1, to lowly Mainz on Saturday, and the prospect of the club's facing a humiliating and potentially financially ruinous relegation out of the Bundesliga, Germany's top division, is now a distinct possibility. In both a personal Facebook post announcing his departure and in an interview later in the day with the tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung, Klinsmann implied that he did not feel he had enough support from the club's leadership to continue in his post. "There were simply different ways of thinking and, above all, different cultures," Klinsmann told Bild. In particular, he lamented not having more control over player transfers. "Too much energy is spent on things that happen off the field," he said in the interview. Hertha was 3 3 3 in league play under Klinsmann, leaving it marginally higher on the league table but still in danger of demotion to a lower league. Hertha currently sits in 14th place in the 18 team division, but it is only six points two wins out of the relegation zone. The team's recent results are far from the turnaround Klinsmann had predicted when he took charge. Hertha spent a record 83 million on four new young players in the short winter transfer window, and Klinsmann's reputation as a former star striker for Germany and a host of top clubs, not to mention his unwavering optimism, produced plenty of positive headlines for a club not used to being noticed. In an interview with The New York Times in January, he laid out a timeline that would have quickly returned Hertha to the top half of the standings and into European competitions. "This season we want to avoid relegation," Klinsmann said then. "Next season we want to be in the upper half of the table, with the goal of making the Europa league. And then, who knows." A couple of hours after Klinsmann resigned, the club confirmed that one of his assistants, Alexander Nouri, would take over in the short term. It was clear Klinsmann's resignation had come as a surprise to the club, its fans and its investors. "I deeply regret the decision made by Jurgen Klinsmann," Lars Windhorst, a German businessman who made a major investment in the team last summer, wrote to The Times. Windhorst was credited with helping to bring Klinsmann aboard and supplying him with the funds to restructure the lagging team. Windhorst made an initial investment of 244 million and an implicit promise of more to come. Although it has remained in the Bundesliga since 2013, Hertha, nicknamed the Old Lady, has long fought a reputation as a stale underachiever, especially for a capital city of its size. "The city has become a global brand," Windhorst said. "And one would expect such a city to have a soccer club that is leading in Europe or at least Germany." But Hertha Berlin has been far from that. Its home games, in drafty Olympic Stadium in Berlin, reach capacity only when more prominent teams visit, as was the case on Jan. 19 when Bayern Munich was in town (and beat Hertha handily, 4 0). "In some parts of the city you can find more Dortmund Borussia pubs than Hertha fans," said Lucas Vogelsang, a Hertha fan and host of the popular podcast Fussball MML. Klinsmann had hoped to take Hertha to prominence. But the fact that he announced his resignation with a Facebook post and not a more official channel underscored the tension he felt with the club's leadership, though he said he would return to Hertha's supervisory board, a post he held before agreeing to coach. "Unity, cohesion and focus on the essentials are important elements, especially in a relegation battle," Klinsmann wrote. "If that is not guaranteed, I cannot exploit my potential as a trainer and therefore cannot live up to my responsibility." As Klinsmann was attempting to turn the team around aggressively, Michael Preetz, the team's sporting director, suggested he had to rein in the manager's ambitions a bit. "Perhaps my job is to step on the brakes from time to time," Preetz told Bild last month. "But that doesn't mean we are not rowing in the same direction." But the club continued to see mixed results. After an extra time loss to Schalke in the German Cup a week ago, Hertha lost on Saturday to Mainz, one of its main rivals in the battle to avoid relegation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
One of the pioneers of a 5K that was actually a party was Travis Snyder, 37, a fitness entrepreneur. He got the idea for such races from a nighttime show at the Disney California Adventure park, where visitors are dazzled by colorful fog, mist, lights, fire and lasers. Though he was living in Salt Lake City at the time, he chose the Phoenix area for the first Color Run, in 2012, because he thought it would be a good place for a messy 5K fun run where participants would be showered with colored powder. He went there to plan and market the event, distributing fliers and talking to students on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe. They told their friends, and soon 6,000 had signed up. "It was the first time I knew we had something," Mr. Snyder said. "There was this whole dormant part of the population that wanted to go and do stuff but felt threatened." Since then, Mr. Snyder, who lives in Hermosa Beach, Calif., has organized about 250 runs worldwide, including in Paris, where last April 25,000 people ran along the Seine and finished at the Eiffel Tower. "People find a lot of value in coming together and doing something memorable and fun and health based," he said. In addition to the Color Run, Mr. Snyder also operates the Electric Run, where participants don costumes like furry bear suits and run with laser light shows above their heads while giving one another high fives and hugs. The runs have also become a business, with runners paying 50 to participate. Mr. Snyder's company, the Color Run, has offices in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City with 70 full time employees. Mr. Snyder added that 60 percent of participants in the Color Run have never run a 5K race before, "so the idea that three million people globally went out and ran a 5K for their first time is pretty awesome to me," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The traditional ethnic hymns, chants and dances that the Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff collected around the turn of the 20th century, and later transcribed with the help of the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, are among the most entrancing works ever written for piano. Many are simple : a slender melodic line, curled here and there into arabesques, above a prayer bead string of repeated notes in the bass. Each piece is brief the length of a pop song and powerfully hypnotic. And yet the last thing Gurdjieff wanted was to put listeners in a trance. The worldview of this enigmatic seeker, who died in Paris in 1949 The New York Times said he was 83, but he may have been over a decade younger was that too many people went about their lives like automatons. They needed to bring their emotional, physical and mental intelligences into balance, and wake up. This month, a group of Armenian musicians will present concerts in Chicago (Sept. 25), New York (Sept. 27) and Pasadena, Calif. (Sept. 29), that cast Gurdjieff's music in a bold new light. By playing his works on the traditional instruments of their regions of origin, juxtaposed with piano versions, the Gurdjieff Ensemble offers listeners a chance to hear the music in a way that is ethnically specific, and in jolting bright color. Levon Eskenian, who founded the ensemble and arranged the music, spoke in a Skype interview about the work that went into identifying the musical background of each piano miniature. In his youth, Gurdjieff had traveled throughout the Caucasus, Middle East and North Africa collecting melodies: shepherd tunes and songs for plowing, liturgical chants and funerary rites. "These are real pieces that passed through Gurdjieff," said Mr. Eskenian. "Music for work, for different rituals, for mourning. You can still find some of them transmitted orally in certain places." One reason the piano pieces sound so concentrated and pure is that they are the result of a double process of sublimation. First they were filtered through Gurdjieff's memory, then through de Hartmann's transcriptions. A 2011 recording on the ECM label gives a flavor of how the music is altered through Mr. Eskenian's reverse transcriptions. A Kurdish shepherd melody takes on new wildness when it's played with gusty exuberance on a ney (a Middle Eastern flute). Dances spin to life with the addition of nervy frame drums. Mr. Eskenian thinks that Gurdjieff chose the piano as the repository for his music collection for practical reasons. But in the course of his research, Mr. Eskenian came across a document from later in Gurdjieff's life, when he lived and taught in Paris, that speaks of plans for a performance on traditional instruments. "At one of his concerts it was announced that the following year they would perform the music of Gurdjieff on 40 instruments that he had collected on his journeys," said Mr. Eskenian, adding that the project never materialized. But he saw it as a sign that Gurdjieff himself intended to reconnect the melodies to the colors with which he had first heard them. Doing justice to the geographic specificity of Gurdjieff's music also led to an unusual recording project by the pianist Frederic Chiu. In a phone interview, Mr. Chiu said he first encountered Gurdjieff through his writings, before becoming fascinated by the works for piano. Reconciling the natural limitations of the piano's fixed pitches with the rich variety of tuning systems that underlie Middle Eastern music became an obsession. "It's not so much that this music came out of this particular region," Mr. Chiu said. "Rather, there was a purity to it that pushed me to explore temperaments" tunings "something I had never even been sensitive to until that point." With the help of an expert in Arabic music, Mr. Chiu identified particular Gurdjieff melodies as, for example, Egyptian or Syrian, and created custom tunings for each. This means that certain key intervals, like fifths, ring out with crystalline clarity. Mr. Chiu has more recently performed this program on a Yamaha TransAcoustic piano, which connects the instrument's natural soundboard to a digital processor. This new technology allows him to create the illusion that the piano changes tuning for each piece in the concert. On his 2016 album, "Hymns and Dervishes," Mr. Chiu juxtaposes melodies inflected with Eastern and Western tunings in a way that echoes Mr. Eskenian's efforts to highlight the ethnic diversity of the Gurdjieff canon. "I wanted to point out that even within the Gurdjieff work there is a meeting of cultures," Mr. Chiu said. He added that his play with the intonation of the normally fixed piano was one way to stop the listener from mindlessly blissing out. "It's constantly changing the ground underneath you," he said. "It's like walking on those shoes that have the rounded sole: you're never able to just stay there and relax." Tours to Chicago, New York and Pasadena, Calif., this month; gurdjieffensemble.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Facebook's weak privacy protections exposed the personal data of millions of users, a serious failing that the company has acknowledged but refused to fix, Canadian regulators said on Thursday. An investigation by the privacy commissioner of Canada and the information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia found that Facebook violated national and local laws in allowing third parties access to private user information through "superficial and ineffective safeguards and consent mechanisms." But Facebook has disputed the watchdogs' findings, even after its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, apologized last year for what he called a "major breach of trust" in the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, the regulators said. The company ignored recommendations, some issued a decade ago, for how to prevent future exposure, they said. "There's a significant gap between what they say and what they do," said Daniel Therrien, who heads the federal privacy watchdog, at a news conference in Ottawa on Thursday. The regulators, who have limited power to force Facebook's compliance, plan to take the company to a Canadian federal court. The court, which focuses on regulatory issues and lawsuits against the government, may impose fines. But Mr. Therrien said that "historically there have been very small penalties in the tens of thousands of dollars." He pushed for stronger privacy laws in Canada and more authority for regulators to inspect and penalize companies. "They told us outright that they do not agree with our legal findings," Mr. Therrien said. "I find that absolutely untenable that a company can tell a regulator that it does not respect its findings." Canada passed its first digital privacy legislation in 2000, later updating it with stricter consent rules, but regulators never adopted the stiff fines and investigative powers authorized by their European counterparts. "The problem in Canada is that there is no deterrent whatsoever," said Michael McEvoy, who runs the privacy regulator in British Columbia. Officials said Facebook refused to allow audits of its privacy procedures. But in a statement, the company said it had "proactively taken important steps towards tackling a number of issues raised in the report" and had offered to enter a compliance agreement with Mr. Therrien's office. "After many months of good faith cooperation and lengthy negotiations, we are disappointed" that regulators consider the issues raised in this report unresolved, the company said. Pressure is increasing on Facebook from regulators in a number of countries. On Thursday, Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it had opened an investigation into Facebook after the company told it that hundreds of millions of user passwords were stored in plain text format on its internal servers. On Wednesday, Facebook said it expected to be fined up to 5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. In Canada, Mr. Therrien called for new laws that would allow his office to regularly examine the privacy practices of Facebook and other social media companies without waiting for a public complaint. Other Canadian officials have complained about inaction from social media companies over election interference, although a federal election scheduled for October makes it unlikely that any new laws will appear until at least next year. The complexity of Facebook's systems and the company's general opaqueness, Mr. Therrien said, make it likely that users are unaware that the company is violating their privacy or breaking Canadian laws. The Canadian investigation began after reports last year that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump's 2016 election campaign, gained access to personal data on up to 87 million Facebook users. Some 622,000 Canadians may have been affected, according to the regulators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Whenever a W.N.B.A. team steps on the floor during the 2020 season, Angel McCoughtry's influence is there. Each player wears Breonna Taylor's name on the back of her jersey, an idea that came from McCoughtry. Taylor, a 26 year old Black woman, was shot and killed by the police in Louisville, Ky. "It's a lot deeper than just the jersey," said McCoughtry, who played basketball at the University of Louisville. "But I think that's a great start." McCoughtry's activism carries weight in part because of her stature as one of the W.N.B.A.'s premier players for more than a decade. She is a five time All Star, two time scoring champion, seven time all defensive performer and two time Olympian. This season, the 33 year old is reinventing herself on a new team, two years removed from major knee surgery. She is now the savvy veteran for the ultra talented Las Vegas Aces, who are vying for a championship inside the league's bubble in Bradenton, Fla. On Friday, after the W.N.B.A. postponed two days of games as players joined N.B.A. players in protesting racism and police brutality, McCoughtry expressed pride in the W.N.B.A. players' unity. On a video conference with reporters, she said that change did not happen overnight, "but we continue to fight because it will happen." But she also called the past few days "draining," and added, "You guys should be drained, as well, watching this stuff and seeing this stuff over and over." "As an American, us as people, I'm tired of living in the most racist country in the world," McCoughtry said. "Who wants to live in a world like that?" McCoughtry was joined on the video conference by her Aces teammate A'ja Wilson. They are a powerful pair on the court as well; McCoughtry is the Aces' second leading scorer behind the All Star Wilson, unleashing efficient yet explosive play on both ends of the court. McCoughtry wonders why outsiders are surprised by her successful comeback. "What was I supposed to look like?" she said. "In my mind, all my tools were already still there. Your skills don't leave because you have a bump in the road or because you have a knee injury. A few months ago, McCoughtry was still walking with a slight limp and still struggling to run, jump and move laterally while playing overseas in Russia. She initially tore the anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments in her left knee in an August 2018 game against, coincidentally, Las Vegas. Moriah Jefferson, then an Aces guard, dived for the ball off a rebound and inadvertently collided with McCoughtry's leg. It was McCoughtry's first serious injury. After missing the 2019 season, she called her doctor from Russia and was assured that her recovery was on track. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit just as she felt she was back to "smooth sailing" physically, sending her home to trade game action for park workouts as a means of strengthening her leg. "Maybe this is a blessing in disguise," she said she thought then. It was a fraught time: McCoughtry was preparing to play for a new W.N.B.A. team for the first time after a decade with the Atlanta Dream. As the league's wild free agency period began last winter, McCoughtry said she felt "pushed out" by Atlanta. She said she had to get past the initial shock that she would not finish her career with the franchise she helped lead to three W.N.B.A. finals. Then, she made a list of priorities for her next destination: championship contender, great coach and on court fit. Las Vegas Coach Bill Laimbeer made his pitch to McCoughtry over dinner in Louisville. He candidly shared that the Aces would continue to be anchored by Wilson, the third year forward who is already one of the league's biggest stars and a front runner for the Most Valuable Player Award this year. But Las Vegas needed a seasoned small forward who could create her own shot and help a young group make a deep playoff run. "They're hungry to get there. They want it," McCoughtry said she thought at the time. "And I'm going to add some veteran leadership. It's like, 'This is the perfect place for me to be.'" Laimbeer's bluntness has not wavered since that first meeting, a quality McCoughtry said she had always "craved" in a coach. She said Laimbeer's direct style most reminded her of Jeff Walz, her college coach at Louisville, and the legendary Connecticut Coach Geno Auriemma, whom McCoughtry has played for with Team U.S.A. "When she's not engaged at the mental level or the physical level I think she should be, I will tell her in front of everybody else," Laimbeer said. Yet Laimbeer is also quick to praise. The coach said McCoughtry was striking the right balance between imparting knowledge without being overbearing. She has taken a particular mentoring interest in Jackie Young, the No. 1 overall draft pick in 2019, who plays the same position and is a spark off the Aces' bench. "As soon as she got here, she's really just been someone that I can count on to just talk to," Young said. "Somebody that motivates me. Somebody that's just been in the league for a really long time and understands the game. So any time I have any questions or if I'm getting down or just whatever it is, she's just always there to help me." McCoughtry's off court approach with teammates is translating to games. Laimbeer compared it with last year when the Aces acquired Liz Cambage, whom he said once had a reputation, like McCoughtry, as someone who too often took over games in a way that was detrimental to the team. Both have changed minds with their play in Las Vegas, he said. Yet the first thing Laimbeer mentioned when asked what has most surprised him about McCoughtry's game is that "she makes the best vision passes of anybody we have by far." "Before I got her, I just thought she was an overwhelming talent," Laimbeer said. "But the way she sees the game and the game goes so slowly for her which is a compliment that's what I didn't know." But before McCoughtry was wowing the W.N.B.A. with her veteran game this season, she was having a social impact on the league. It began with a mid July photo of her holding up an Aces jersey with Taylor's name printed under hers. Shortly after, the W.N.B.A.'s players' union helped organize a video conference with more than 100 participants and Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, which McCoughtry called "emotional" and "inspiring." McCoughtry hopes that, once it is safe to gather at sporting events again, she can invite Palmer to an Aces game. "It's just really an honor that our ideas are in the forefront," McCoughtry said. "People are listening to us and they're coming to fruition. With this jersey idea, I feel like this is just the beginning." The Aces will be even more star studded in 2021, when Cambage returns after opting out of this season and Kelsey Plum, a former No. 1 overall draft pick, is expected to be healthy after tearing her Achilles' tendon. Laimbeer was transparent that, given McCoughtry's age and the Aces' salary cap future, she is a shorter term answer for the win now franchise. It's the perfect comeback stage for one of the league's best. "I feel like I'm in the right place," McCoughtry said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think," dozens of news anchors said last month, reading from a script provided by Sinclair Broadcast Group. On local news stations across the United States last month, dozens of anchors gave the same speech to their combined millions of viewers. It included a warning about fake news, a promise to report fairly and accurately and a request that viewers go to the station's website and comment "if you believe our coverage is unfair." It may not have seemed strange to individual viewers. But Timothy Burke, the video director at Deadspin, had read a report last month from CNN, which quoted local station anchors who were uncomfortable with the speech. Mr. Burke tracked down the stations and found when each had aired what he called a "forced read." Then he stitched together the various broadcasts to create a supercut of anchors eerily echoing the same lines: "The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media." Piggybacking on the attention, House Democrats resurfaced a letter, dated March 22 and signed by 38 lawmakers, that called for the Tribune merger to be rejected. President Trump responded to scrutiny of the broadcaster on Monday in a tweet. "So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased," he said. How Theranos changed tech coverage: 'You can't just buy what they're selling.' One meme stock lawsuit against Robinhood is dismissed, but others loom. "We aren't sure of the motivation for the criticism, but find it curious that we would be attacked for asking our news people to remind their audiences that unsubstantiated stories exist on social media, which result in an ill informed public with potentially dangerous consequences," he said. A union that represents news anchors did not respond immediately to requests for comment on Monday. Dave Twedell of the International Cinematographers Guild, who is a business representative for photojournalists (but not anchors) at KOMO in Seattle and KATU in Portland, Ore., said Sinclair told journalists at those stations not to discuss the company with outside news media. Although it is the country's largest broadcaster, Sinclair is not a household name and viewers may be unaware of who owns their local news station. Critics have accused the company of using its stations to advance a mostly right leaning agenda. "We work very hard to be objective and fair and be in the middle," Mr. Livingston told The New York Times last year. "I think maybe some other news organizations may be to the left of center, and we work very hard to be in the center." Sinclair regularly sends video segments to the stations it owns. These are referred to as "must runs," and they can include content like terrorism news updates, commentators speaking in support of President Trump or speeches from company executives like the one from Mr. Livingston last year. But asking newscasters to present the material themselves is not something that Kirstin Pellizzaro, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, remembered from her experience as a producer at a Sinclair owned news station in Kalamazoo, Mich., from 2014 to 2015. The station had to air "must run" segments that came from Sinclair, which is based outside Baltimore. "Some of them were a little slanted, a little biased," Ms. Pellizzaro said. "Packages of this nature can make journalists uncomfortable." Sinclair representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. But Mr. Livingston told The Baltimore Sun that the script was meant to demonstrate Sinclair's "commitment to reporting facts," adding that false stories "can result in dangerous consequences," referring to the Pizzagate conspiracy as an example. "We are focused on fact based reporting," Mr. Livingston continued. "That's our commitment to our communities. That's the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
PARIS The kids will be all right. Hedi Slimane will see to that. The designer who almost single handedly altered the shape of men's wear when, in the early years of the century, he introduced the skinny suit at Dior Homme and who afterward rescued Saint Laurent from the slag heap of market irrelevance with an adoring Gallic skew on Hollywood glamour and Los Angeles youth culture, introduced his first stand alone collection for Celine on Sunday. The show was held in a specially constructed, glass windowed box facing the storied Place de la Concorde, at whose center rises the 3000 year old Luxor Obelisk. There was no evident reason for the choice of setting, except perhaps as a display of corporate might (Celine is owned by the luxury goods colossus LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton) and the fact that, as a phallic symbols go, it is hard to top a gold tipped, 75 foot granite erection. And this was unambiguously a show of men's clothing for males, cis gendered but also questioning. That is a segment of the market that the sweats and hoodies proponents have missed. Part of the success Mr. Slimane enjoyed during his previous design stints owed to how easy it was for women to wear the stuff he intended for the scrawny starvelings he favors. Fairly early in his career, Mr. Slimane became an adoptive member of the cultlike clan that continued to surround Yves Saint Laurent well into his dotage. Now, as then, the person that often comes to mind when thinking of Mr. Slimane's clothes is not a man but Betty Catroux. It so happens that Ms. Catroux, the chicly tough septuagenarian wife of the decorator Francois Catroux and otherwise someone with no professional portfolio (she makes a point in interviews of saying she is lazy and has accomplished remarkably little in life) features in a new ad campaign for Saint Laurent. This inconvenience has in no way prevented Mr. Slimane from continuing to riff on the image of a person who sometimes seems to have dressed herself at the little boy's department of the Leather Man. Like some of Mr. Slimane's other style idols (like Courtney Love, seated beside Carine Roitfeld in the front row), Ms. Catroux reaches into history's closet and grabs what she likes. It's an instinctive process, not overthought, and a highly personal one. Though Mr. Slimane's men's wear debut at Celine had clearly been deliberated, it was not done by committee or corporate fiat. Success has either earned him that right, or else he arrogated it to himself. And it worked. All designers are now scrambling to dress a generation of men unafraid to embrace fashion though ignorant of its rules. There is Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton; Kim Jones at Dior Men; Jonathan Anderson at Loewe; Kris Van Assche at Berluti to name just those in the LVMH stable alone. Somehow Mr. Slimane manages to stand apart, not necessarily because he is the most skilled designer (that would be Mr. Jones) but because he possesses a cultural divining wand. The suit is dead, as we are constantly being told. That is, until it is not. And Mr. Slimane made it his business to tune out the death knell of tailoring, opening with a black double breasted suit with cropped trousers, a white shirt, a skinny black tie and sunglasses that you would certainly have seen, once upon a time, on that most stylish of New Wave musicians, James Chance (a.k.a. James White of James White and the Blacks.) From there he engaged in a game of theme and variation, black leather bombers playing off ironically worn retirement home tweeds, blinding glitter jackets in tiger prints followed by sedate drape coats, pleated woolen trousers offset by skinny leather jeans worn by a model with shoe black bangs and who was scrawnier and even homelier than Joey Ramone. And what seemed most radical at Celine, in a season when almost every designer is chasing the runaway success that Demna Gvasalia achieved at Balenciaga with the pneumatic and ostentatiously ugly 900 Triple S trainers, is that there was not a sneaker in sight. Remember boots and shoes? Hedi Slimane plans to bring them back.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The layoffs, changed job functions and planned budget cuts of almost 40 percent were first reported by The Forward. The museum, which describes itself as "a living memorial to the Holocaust," was formed with the aim of "educating diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust." An audio recording of the Zoom meeting that was obtained by The New York Times included questions from employees. One asked: "What, if any pay cuts, were implemented at the executive and senior management level?" There were no pay reductions for executive and senior managers, Mr. Kliger responded. The layoffs came as an especially severe blow at the museum given the accolades it has received for its Auschwitz exhibition, which went up in 2019 and drew more visitors than ever before to the institution. Mr. Kliger said in the Zoom call that "as soon as we closed on March 15, we knew we would face financial hardship and began preparing for the possibility of layoffs," according to the museum's record, but added that the museum held off on layoffs as long as it could and would extend health benefits to those who were being laid off through Sept. 30, which was as long as the budget would allow. The museum was not planning further staff reductions, he told the employees. Mr. Kliger said that the museum had taken steps to shore up its finances, starting a campaign to raise money and obtaining a grant from the New York Community Trust and a loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Though not common, 136 injuries similar to this toothpick case study have been reported in medical journals, and nearly 10 percent were fatal. He Swallowed a Toothpick. It Could Have Killed Him. A young man nearly lost his life to a toothpick he didn't even know he had swallowed, according to a harrowing report published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The three inch wood pick, from a sandwich, traveled through most of his digestive tract without doing any harm. But then it poked through the intestinal wall and pierced an artery, creating a conduit for bacteria to invade his bloodstream and damaging the artery enough to cause serious bleeding. For nearly three weeks, his symptoms abdominal pain, fever, distressing gut trouble mystified doctors. By the time they figured out what was wrong, he had a potentially fatal infection. It took extensive surgery to save him. Injuries like this are not common, but cases have been reported in medical journals over the years. Toothpicks are everywhere, jabbed into sliders, wraps, club sandwiches and cocktail garnishes. Often, people have no idea they swallowed one, maybe because they were distracted or eating in a hurry. The picks unscathed by stomach acid or digestive enzymes have been found in the stomach and both small and large intestines. In a few cases they have worked their way into other organs, including the liver, pancreas, lung, kidney and even a coronary artery. They can be difficult or impossible to see on scans. An analysis of 136 cases that were serious enough to be reported in medical journals found that nearly 10 percent were fatal. For the young man in the new report, the first hint of trouble was a fever and pain in the right lower part of his abdomen, then nausea and diarrhea. He was 18, a professional athlete on the road with his team for training. His identity is being kept confidential by his doctors. He went to an emergency room, where blood tests and a CT scan were normal. Doctors were stumped. After keeping him five hours for observation, they sent him back to his hotel, with no diagnosis. Over the next two weeks, the pain lessened and he felt better, except for mild nausea. But then, on a trip to a different city, the pain returned. His bowel movements contained blood, and his temperature shot up to more than 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Again, he sought help at an emergency room. This time, doctors ordered an M.R.I. scan in addition to the usual array of blood tests. But they still could not determine what was wrong. They gave him intravenous fluids and medicine for the fever. At the urging of his team's internist, he headed back home to New England. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Two days later, he saw the team doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was still sick and in pain. The internist ordered a colonoscopy for the next day, to examine the inside of his intestines. Next morning, the young man called the team doctor and said he was sicker feverish, passing more blood, and with worsening pain. The doctor told him to head to the Massachusetts General emergency room. There, doctors found that he was lightheaded and feeling ill. They drew blood for cultures to look for infection, ran other tests for viral and bacterial illnesses and ordered a CT scan. The cultures found bacteria in his bloodstream, but doctors could not see anything abnormal on the scan. He continued to worsen, with a racing pulse, a fever of 104 degrees, mental confusion and rapid breathing signs of sepsis, a deadly response to an infection. After receiving antibiotics, intravenous fluids and medicine for fever, he seemed to improve. But the next day, his temperature shot up to 105 degrees. Doctors performed a colonoscopy. They still did not know what they were looking for, and suspected an unusual inflammatory disease, said Dr. Fabian J. Scheid, part of the medical team. So they were stunned to find the toothpick, Dr. Scheid said. The doctors had not seen it on the scans. And the patient hadn't remembered any odd sensations while eating, when doctors had taken his history. This is the toothpick retrieved from the patient's body. As soon as the doctors removed the toothpick, blood began to spurt from the artery. It was life threatening, and they could not stop it. Several operations would be needed to save the young man's life. They rushed him into another operating room, to repair the intestine and the artery. The toothpick had done so much damage that they had to cut out a 1.2 inch segment of the artery. Then, to replace that segment, they had to remove a vein from the patient's thigh and splice it into the artery. Finally, because swelling from the procedures could cut off the circulation to his leg, surgeons made a series of large incisions in his calf to relieve pressure by opening the fascia, a sheet of connective tissue that wraps tightly around muscle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The luxury hotel market, once concentrated in only the largest cities, has surged over the last decade. Jay Stein, the chief executive at the Dream Hotel Group, has taken advantage of the demand, shining a light on a company that helped cultivate one of the most popular trends in modern upscale lodging. "We started the rooftop bar craze," Mr. Stein said, referring to the 2003 opening of the former Ava Lounge at the Dream Midtown that brought a certain hipness to the usual outdoor drinks scene. "There were others that started to catch on, but we've been an early player with luxury boutique hotels." The company, which includes the Chatwal New York and Time Hotels, currently operates 18 properties. There are plans for 30 additional hotels internationally over the next four years, from a Dream hotel in Belize to boutique oriented Unscripted hotels in Birmingham, England, and Tulum, Mexico. Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Stein in Manhattan. How has Dream influenced the growth within the New York luxury market? What changes have you seen in this market over the last five years?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The first requests that upended Seesaw, a popular classroom app, came in January from teachers and education officials abroad. Their schools were shutting down because of the coronavirus, and they urgently wanted the app adjusted for remote learning. The company figured it could do that with a single short hackathon project. "We were so naive," said Emily Voigtlander Seliger, a Seesaw product manager. Weeks later, reality hit: The virus spread to the United States, where more of the app's users are. Seesaw had been designed for students in a classroom to submit an audio comment or a digital drawing after a lesson. But thousands of teachers suddenly wanted it to work as a full featured home learning tool. Rather than using Seesaw for a couple of assignments a week, they were using it for hours each day. It seemed like every start up's dream: racing to keep up with demand from people desperate for your app. And in many ways, that has worked out well for Seesaw, a San Francisco company. The number of student posts on its app increased tenfold from February to May, Seesaw says, and the paid customer base has tripled from last year. The app is now used in more than three quarters of American schools, including big districts like Dallas and Los Angeles. "In a matter of two days the world flipped upside down," said Victoria Lawyer, global sales manager at Seesaw. Seesaw usually pitched large districts for six months or so before one signed up. Suddenly, she said, those districts were saying: "We need to get set up by tomorrow. What can you do?" But Seesaw's experience also shows the kinds of hurdles that a company must jump in such extreme circumstances, going through years' worth of growing pains in a few months. Other digital education products, like Zoom and Google Classroom, experienced similar growth spurts and ran into their own problems such as unwelcome strangers who dropped into those early weeks of Zoom school. But they are public companies with resources to spare. Seesaw had just 60 employees in February, when the coronavirus hit the United States, and was trying to prove that it deserved a tryout for the big leagues. Small issues that the company knew about but hadn't addressed before the pandemic became significant problems. Teachers begged for app reliability, but some changes Seesaw made for at home use didn't always work smoothly. While Seesaw executives wanted the app to be interesting for students, it had to be streamlined enough for frazzled parents suddenly running at home school. "We're going through what everyone else is going through in terms of balancing child care and home schooling and working from home," Carl Sjogreen, one of the company's founders, said. "The intensity of the growth in our business at the same time is a challenge and a struggle." Mr. Sjogreen, 42, and Seesaw's other founder, Adrian Graham, 41, first met at Google in the early 2000s. They left, founded a travel advice start up and moved to Facebook as product managers when it acquired their company. In 2012, they left Facebook and started Shadow Puppet, an app that lets people make videos by adding voice overs to photos and other social media. They thought Shadow Puppet was almost embarrassingly simple. But the app proved popular with teachers, and it led to the idea for Seesaw. In the fall of 2014, teachers trying out an early version of Seesaw reported back with comments that surprised the founders, Mr. Graham said. Some students opened up once they had an audio recorder, the teachers said, and some who might not be great writers and didn't seem that engaged as a result made lively videos or digital drawings once those became an option. In January 2015, Seesaw released the app to the public. It's free for individual teachers, with a features added version for schools and districts for 5.50 per student per year. The founders took seed funding when starting the company, and 8 million more from investors in 2017. Mr. Sjogreen declined to give valuation or revenue figures, but said the company would be profitable this year. And it's been a year. In February, Mr. Sjogreen was mapping out long term projects from Seesaw's downtown San Francisco office. Come March, he was working from his Noe Valley house, juggling home school duties for his 9 and 12 year old children, just like many of the employees, and Seesaw was in "rapid response mode," as he put it. Teachers like Sharmeen Moosa, a first grade teacher at an international school in Bahrain, decided Seesaw would be their remote learning platform. "Prior to Covid, I used it as just a digital portfolio for kids," an online collection of their drawings and recordings, Ms. Moosa said, but when her school closed in February, her use "transformed massively." She used the app for morning messages and daily lessons, adding audio or video clips, posting additional resources, and creating student assignments along with communicating with families. Many other teachers used the app in similar ways, exposing shortfalls that the company had to race to fix. The app, designed to work with iPads and Chromebooks, had hardly been used with Android tablets. But now parents were logging on with Amazon Fire or Samsung devices running Android. Numerous students didn't have email addresses and needed a different way to log in from home. Teachers, who could no longer look over students' shoulders while they worked on an assignment, wanted to comment on saved drafts before students submitted a final version. Notification delays grew from a couple of seconds to hours. The company's servers sometimes slowed to a crawl. Those issues meant teachers, families and schools all fired questions at Seesaw for help. Mr. Sjogreen, who prided himself on getting back to customers almost immediately, found that just wasn't possible. "I'm sad that during a time where they were so stressed out, we were not as responsive as we would like to be," he said. Internally, the company had to figure out how to handle a remote work force that was also, in many cases, dealing with added responsibilities at home. Many employees needed time off at peak hours to handle their children. While being interviewed for this article, Mr. Graham bounced his baby girl in a Snugli, while Mr. Sjogreen was interrupted by his son, who asked for permission to go on YouTube. (Mr. Sjogreen nodded, resigned.) Seesaw tried to accommodate employees' schedules and child care demands, and even added a remote yoga session on Tuesday mornings to clear heads, "but I'd be lying if I said it was easy," Mr. Sjogreen said. Mr. Sjogreen said he had gotten a good idea for Seesaw from his 9 year old, who uses it at his school. While working from home, Mr. Sjogreen heard "tears, frustration" from his son, who had accidentally deleted work completed on the app. The company added a button to confirm deletion Mr. Sjogreen suggested an icon of a crying child to accompany it. Whether Seesaw can hold on to customers when schools, many of them facing new budget pressures, return to in person learning is an open question. Kelly Calhoun Williams, an education analyst at the research company Gartner, said that while other ed tech companies got nervous watching school budgets shrink, Seesaw was well placed because of its users' "I want to keep Seesaw because now it's part of my day" attitude. Mr. Sjogreen said he was just looking for a chance to get back to some long term planning. "I never thought I'd say this as a start up founder," he said, "but I'm not worried about growth anymore."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
PERKINS COUNTY, S.D. I live on a ranch. When I stand on the gravel road that runs along the section line by my house I can look in any direction across the waving grass and, other than the modest huddle of buildings and fencing that compose our ranch, see little evidence of human development. To say it is remote is like saying water is wet. We aren't Iowa remote or Wisconsin remote. This is the American steppe, where the population density is one person per square mile. Four hundred miles to the southeast, Smithfield, a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, has become the fastest growing coronavirus hot spot in the nation. Racial inequality, an unstable food supply chain and corporate greed exacerbated the spread of the virus. But though we share state borders, Smithfield is as far from our reality as the outbreak in New York City. Smithfield is near the end of the food supply chain; we are where it begins. On our drought prone side of the state, where ruminants outnumber humans, there are no processing plants, just grass vast, luminous expanses of grass with intricate root structures that grow thick and deep. There are still custom butcher shops scattered across the hundreds of miles of open pasture, small mom and pop operations, remnants of a system that used to connect rural economies to the food they were producing. Now nearly all animals raised here are shipped elsewhere to feedlots to be grain fattened, and then to gargantuan facilities like Smithfield to be slaughtered.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
If there's one thing comics want besides laughs, it's to avoid being hack , which means, essentially, cliche. But defining hack can be tricky. It varies from room to room and changes with the times, a moving target that requires vigilance and alertness to track. No one dodges it with as much persistence as Gary Gulman . His stand up has long found creative ways to ridicule well worn expressions ("I can't even begin to tell you; I'll begin to tell you," went one digression), and he delights in playing devil's advocate (see his remarkably persuasive case for Vanilla Ice). Another time, when he started a hypothetical about going to prison, he said, "If I didn't have a boyfriend, I would get one soon," pausing to let the countless cheap jokes about jailhouse sex set expectations, before heading in the other direction: "Because I'm a good listener." Gulman, 49, doesn't just avoid hack comedy. He sees it as an opportunity, a tool to stand out. His riveting new special, "The Great Depresh," which debuts Saturday on HBO, displays his signature contrarianism while also being a departure, since its darkly confessional style is firmly in keeping with what's in vogue in the comedy special today. "I grew up in a time where the definition of manhood was so narrow," he says. "You were either Clint Eastwood or you were Richard Simmons . There was nothing in between. There were no Paul Rudd s. No kind eyed Mark Ruffalo s." Gulman has been a meticulous joke writer for years, a reliable killer on late night shows, if not a star in the larger culture. In part, that's because his finest jokes don't hit you in the gut so much as tickle your brain. They have a literary quality, a rhythm and an ear for language that leads him to favor unexpected words ("cretin") and phrases ("limit your quench"). As David Letterman used to do in his late night monologues, Gulman savors a colloquial term, repeating it until the mundane starts to sound odd. "Millennials take so much flak, so much guff," he says, enjoying articulation, spitting out sounds with gusto. "Flak as well as guff. I don't know what irritates me more, the flak or the guff." He doesn't overexplain punch lines, which can sometimes put him ahead of the audience. In "Depresh," one joke about how drinking Sprite in the 1970s could raise questions about your masculinity assumes a bit of knowledge of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." In his last special, "It's About Time" in 2016, Gulman expanded his ambition, earning a big comic payoff by fitting jokes into longer set pieces including the digression rich epic on state abbreviations that is probably his most famous joke and one of the finest bits of the decade. Patton Oswalt has said he would steal it if he could get away with it. As respected as it was among comedy fans and Gulman has enough stature among comedians to give out daily advice on Twitter, which has become a window into the craft of jokes this joke did not make him famous, or happy. He sank into a paralyzing depression, the central subject of the new special, which blends stand up with footage from his life, including scenes with his mother, wife and therapist. These elements are juggled confidently by the director Michael Bonfiglio , who opens with a vignette that evokes a 1970s sitcom . "Depresh" is produced by Judd Apatow , whose track record ("Knocked Up," "Trainwreck," "Girls") reveals a knack for building mainstream vehicles to rocket comics up a level of stardom (Next up: Pete Davidson). While Gulman's previous output has been standard hours of loosely connected material, this special is slicker, more vulnerable and thematically integrated. It has the entertaining pace of a Hollywood movie about a comic, but one in which the story supports the stand up as opposed to the other way around. A tall, athletic guy with long hair, Gulman does not look like the stereotype of an insecure outsider, but he establishes himself quickly as a gentle giant. Once the applause quiets down, he says with a pointed excess of earnestness: "You came!" He later sums up his childhood economically: "Picture Charlie Brown, had Snoopy died." We see a clip of him bombing in a club after his last special, then hear him describe dropping out of comedy and moving home with his mother. He talks about crying jags and biting his lip until it bleeds. His story gets increasingly harrowing, as he checks into a psychiatric hospital, and sometimes the darkness pops up in the twist of a joke. "I really feel in some ways my aversion to essays has saved my life again and again," he says, "because any time I contemplated suicide, I think: You 've got to leave a note." A scene of him talking about his illness juxtaposed with his mother describing his childhood as happy go lucky is affecting in a way that telling jokes will never be. It's a moving special, one that says explicitly what is only in the subtext of his previous work. (His last special's opening, in which he talks about his laziness, now reads differently). And yet, a comic digging into mental illness to both normalize it and find laughs has been done before by, among others, Maria Bamford and Chris Gethard . In fact, documentary about the relationship between comedy and depression, "Laughing Matters," premieres on October 10. "The Great Depresh" is not Gulman's funniest special, though it has some great jokes, including an inspired bit about water fountains, but it's the one that will probably appeal to the largest number of people. It has far too many fresh takes and idiosyncratic elements to be called hack. But it is a reminder that whatever you think about it, there is no denying that sometimes, the familiar works.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
U.S. Soccer has invited South America's 10 soccer federations to bring their national teams to the United States in 2020 for a new intercontinental championship that would run concurrently with that summer's European Championship. The offer, a package that includes almost 200 million in guarantees to the invited teams and their governing bodies, was made Tuesday in a letter from U.S. Soccer's president, Carlos Cordeiro, to his counterparts at the 10 South American federations. For the past year, soccer officials across the Americas have held discussions about creating a quadrennial tournament involving national teams from both continents, but with no agreement in sight, U.S. Soccer, eager to fill a gap in the global soccer calendar and bearing an enticing nine figure offer, is now proposing to establish its own. In the letter, Cordeiro said U.S. Soccer was offering to underwrite the new event and guarantee each nation and both confederations millions of dollars in appearance fees, subsidized travel and bonuses for each point earned. The champions could take home a prize of more than 11 million. Cordeiro has invited the South Americans to a meeting to discuss the proposal next week in Miami. The proposed 16 team tournament would resemble, in structure though most likely not in name, the 2016 Copa America Centenario. That tournament, a relocated version of the South American championship expanded to celebrate the event's 100th anniversary brought the 10 members of the South American confederation, Conmebol, to the United States for a month to face off not only against one another, but also a half dozen opponents from Concacaf, the regional confederation made up of North and Central America and the Caribbean. That tournament was considered a sporting and perhaps more important a financial success, and was won by Chile, which beat Argentina in a penalty kick shootout in the final in East Rutherford, N.J. The new event would take place in June and July next year. The proposed 2020 tournament would again include all 10 South American teams, plus six from Concacaf, and would most likely feature a group stage and then a knockout round to determine a champion. U.S. Soccer's role in the offer, and Concacaf's consent, would be critical to making the event happen, since both would have to approve any plans to hold such an event in the United States. Concacaf released a statement Tuesday night acknowledging receipt of Cordeiro's overture and expressing support for its broad strokes: "We view this opportunity positively as it is not intended to replace or substitute any future editions of the Concacaf Gold Cup and it complements our vision to continue providing opportunities for our Member Associations to play competitive football at the highest level." In his letter, a draft of which was seen by The New York Times, Cordeiro took pains to emphasize that the new event would be a singular tournament, and not meant to replace existing events like the Copa America or the Gold Cup, which would continue separately. Conmebol, which will contest this year's Copa in June and July in Brazil, said last year that it was planning to shift the Copa America to a quadrennial schedule starting in 2020, to coincide with UEFA's European Championship. Concacaf holds its own regional championship, the Gold Cup, in odd numbered years; this year's Gold Cup matches will be played in the United States, Costa Rica and at least one Caribbean nation. For next summer, though, Cordeiro is proposing a larger, intercontinental event in the United States. The event could fill a gap in the global soccer calendar at the moment, the Euros are the only major championship scheduled for that summer but despite the millions being offered, it is unclear how South American and Conmebol officials will react to a tournament that would conflict with their Copa America plans. The Copa America has included guest teams for years; Mexico and the United States have participated in it several times, and this year it will include Japan and Qatar. For the United States, though, the event could have several positives. FIFA is expected to choose the dozen or so host cities for the 2026 World Cup in the next two years, so the tournament could be a chance for the 17 finalists to make their case for inclusion. It also would offer meaningful competition for the United States men's national team as it heads into qualifying for the 2022 World Cup; that process began later than hoped because the search for the team's head coach, Gregg Berhalter, was delayed, first by the World Cup bid and then by the search for a general manager to run the national team program. Hired in December, Berhalter has coached only two friendlies to date as he prepares for this summer's Gold Cup. If the proposed tournament with Conmebol does not come to fruition, U.S. Soccer could still press ahead with a new event, possibly a scaled down tournament involving teams from other continents.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Fuzzy and enveloping, cuddly and adorable, the MaxMara Teddy Bear coat is like a Snuggie with buttons. With its dropped shoulders, cozy pockets and blend of alpaca and mohair, it is the outerwear version of that cute animal at the foot of the bed. Unprepossessing in design terms, it has also proved to be that rarity:a retailing monster that since being introduced on a MaxMara runway at a 2013 fashion show has sold more than 17,000 and generated over 50 million in revenues, according to a company spokesman. "I remembered a certain type of coat in the '80s made from rich, deep pile, and I had a feeling that kind of coat was missing and would tap into the zeitgeist," Ian Griffiths, the coat's designer, said recently when asked about the origins of the design. It experienced a modest burst of popularity in its first season, thanks mostly to street style shots posted to social media of the French fashion editor Carine Roitfeld wrapped in a borrowed Teddy Bear coat. "That image of Carine wearing it in cold Milan went viral, and sales popped," Mr. Griffiths said. "Then they went a little bit quiet." This time, consumer reaction had a force few designers will experience. Even before Julia Roberts was photographed on a New York street in late 2018 enveloped in a big white Teddy Bear coat, MaxMara had sold 1,500 of them, notwithstanding a daunting 3,500 price tag. "Then the Teddy Bear sort of blew up," Mr. Griffiths said, understating the case. Within a year of its appearance on the 2017 runway, sales of the Teddy Bear coat had ballooned past 15,000 and dozens of copycat coats had appeared in versions both high and low. While a 5,600 shearling Balenciaga variant that Kim Kardashian West was photographed wearing atop a hot pink sports bra and sweatpants on Valentine's Day last year may not have been a line for line reproduction, it had the visual effect of being an unusually stark example of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery. Not to be left out, men's wear labels as disparate as Asos, Todd Snyder and Ralph Lauren introduced their own iterations. For his fall 2019 presentation in Milan, Mr. Lauren previewed a Cuddle Coat said to have been inspired by the cozy dusters men can be seen wearing as they stroll the decks of ocean liners in photographs from the 1930s. The Lauren coat is made from fabric produced by Schulte, the German company that has supplied Steiff with its teddy bear fur since Bear 55BP was introduced at the Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. "It's very hard to be premeditated," Milton Pedraza, the chief executive of the Luxury Group consultancy, said of fashion bonanzas. "It's like the butterfly effect in complexity theory," Mr. Pedraza said, referring to the physics principle that theorizes that small gestures can produce distant repercussions. "The butterfly flapping its wings here can cause a typhoon in Malaysia." One indication of the Teddy Bear coat's impact has been the difficulty consumers encountered when trying to obtain one. "I'd been eyeing it for years, but every time I would go into Bergdorf, it was always sold out," Nicky Hilton Rothschild, the socialite and designer, said last week by telephone from Courchevel, the ski resort in the French Alps. Before scoring her tan Teddy Bear coat last fall, Ms. Rothschild made do with a 150 model from Topshop. "It's gotten so you can't walk a city block now without seeing two or three of them," Ms. Rothschild said, adding that it is also a challenge to open a fashion magazine without spotting the coat on the likes of Karlie Kloss or Hailey Baldwin or Heidi Klum. "I've never seen this happen with something this expensive," Ms. Rothschild said. "This is not a Von Dutch trucker hat we're talking about." The actress January Jones considers her red Teddy Bear coat as much soft armor as mere outerwear, she wrote by email, equally a security blanket and a "chic and enviable" way to stay warm. "It's where I cocoon myself in a trailer at work, how I stay cozy when I travel and where I hide when I need space. In that sense the coat offers fuzzy counterbalance to another well publicized MaxMara design, the emphatic red so called power coat that Nancy Pelosi, now the speaker of the House, wore to a December meeting with President Trump. "Big Coat Energy," The Boston Globe wrote of a coat that had the unanticipated, if temporary, effect of making overclothes the talk of Washington. That coat had a message to deliver, as Vogue.com wrote: "Don't mess with me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A sales prospecting feature on Zoom allowed certain users to have access to other people's LinkedIn profiles during a meeting without notifying them. For Americans sheltering at home during the coronavirus pandemic, the Zoom videoconferencing platform has become a lifeline, enabling millions of people to easily keep in touch with family members, friends, students, teachers and work colleagues. But what many people may not know is that, until Thursday, a data mining feature on Zoom allowed some participants to surreptitiously have access to LinkedIn profile data about other users without Zoom asking for their permission during the meeting or even notifying them that someone else was snooping on them. The undisclosed data mining adds to growing concerns about Zoom's business practices at a moment when public schools, health providers, employers, fitness trainers, prime ministers and queer dance parties are embracing the platform. An analysis by The New York Times found that when people signed in to a meeting, Zoom's software automatically sent their names and email addresses to a company system it used to match them with their LinkedIn profiles. The data mining feature was available to Zoom users who subscribed to a LinkedIn service for sales prospecting, called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Once a Zoom user enabled the feature, that person could quickly and covertly view LinkedIn profile data like locations, employer names and job titles for people in the Zoom meeting by clicking on a LinkedIn icon next to their names. The system did not simply automate the manual process of one user looking up the name of another participant on LinkedIn during a Zoom meeting. In tests conducted last week, The Times found that even when a reporter signed in to a Zoom meeting under pseudonyms "Anonymous" and "I am not here" the data mining tool was able to instantly match him to his LinkedIn profile. In doing so, Zoom disclosed the reporter's real name to another user, overriding his efforts to keep it private. Reporters also found that Zoom automatically sent participants' personal information to its data mining tool even when no one in a meeting had activated it. This week, for instance, as high school students in Colorado signed in to a mandatory video meeting for a class, Zoom readied the full names and email addresses of at least six students and their teacher for possible use by its LinkedIn profile matching tool, according to a Times analysis of the data traffic that Zoom sent to a student's account. The discoveries about Zoom's data mining feature echo what users have learned about the surveillance practices of other popular tech platforms over the last few years. The video meeting platform that has offered a welcome window on American resiliency during the coronavirus providing a virtual peek into colleagues' living rooms, classmates' kitchens and friends' birthday celebrations can reveal more about its users than they may realize. "People don't know this is happening, and that's just completely unfair and deceptive," Josh Golin, the executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, a nonprofit group in Boston, said of the data mining feature. He added that storing the personal details of schoolchildren for nonschool purposes, without alerting them or obtaining a parent's permission, was particularly troubling. Early Thursday, after Times reporters contacted Zoom and LinkedIn with their findings on the profile matching feature, the companies said they would disable the service. In a statement, Zoom said it took users' privacy "extremely seriously" and was "removing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to disable the feature on our platform entirely." In a related blog post, Eric S. Yuan, the chief executive of Zoom, wrote that the company had removed the data mining feature "after identifying unnecessary data disclosure." He also said Zoom would freeze all new features for the next 90 days to concentrate on data security and privacy issues. In a separate statement, LinkedIn said it worked "to make it easy for members to understand their choices over what information they share" and would suspend the profile matching feature on Zoom "while we investigate this further." The Times's findings add to an avalanche of reports about privacy and security issues with Zoom, which has quickly emerged as the go to business and social platform during the pandemic. Zoom's cloud meetings service is currently the top free app in the Apple App Store in 64 countries including the United States, France and Russia, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile app research firm. As the videoconferencing service's popularity has surged, however, the company has scrambled to handle software design choices and security flaws that have made users vulnerable to harassment and privacy invasions. On Monday, for instance, the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning saying that it had received multiple reports from Massachusetts schools about trolls hijacking Zoom meetings with displays of pornography, white supremacist imagery and threatening language malicious attacks known as "zoombombing." Privacy experts said the company seemed to value ease of use and fast growth over instituting default user protections. "It's a combination of sloppy engineering and prioritizing growth," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. "It's very clear that they have not prioritized privacy and security in the way they should have, which is obviously more than a little concerning." In response to news reports on its problems, Zoom recently announced that it had stopped using software in its iPhone app that sent users' data to Facebook; updated its privacy policy to clarify how it handles user data; and conceded that it had overstated the kind of encryption it used for video and phone meetings. Although profiling consumers and prospecting for corporate clients are standard practices in sales and customer relations management, privacy experts criticized Zoom for making the data mining tools available during meetings without alerting participants as they were being subjected to them. One service, called "attention tracking," which Zoom also said it was removing on Thursday after reporters' inquiries, displayed an icon "next to the name of any participant who does not have Zoom in focus for more than 30 seconds," according to the company's site. In 2018, Zoom introduced the LinkedIn profile matching feature to help sales representatives better profile and target sales prospects attending Zoom meetings. "Instantly gain insights about your meeting participants," a Zoom video promoting the service said. "Once signed in, you'll be able to match participants to their LinkedIn profile information and view their recent activity."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Nobody believed him. His family told him to get help. But Timothy Trespas, an out of work recording engineer in his early 40s, was sure he was being stalked, and not by just one person, but dozens of them. He would see the operatives, he said, disguised as ordinary people, lurking around his Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said. "Now you see how it works," they would say. At first, Mr. Trespas wondered if it was all in his head. Then he encountered a large community of like minded people on the internet who call themselves "targeted individuals," or T.I.s, who described going through precisely the same thing. Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what's happening to them. The community, conservatively estimated to exceed 10,000 members, has proliferated since 9/11, cradled by the internet and fed by genuine concerns over government surveillance. A large number appear to have delusional disorder or schizophrenia, psychiatrists say. For the few specialists who have looked closely, these individuals represent an alarming development in the history of mental illness: thousands of sick people, banded together and demanding recognition on the basis of shared paranoias. They raise money, hold awareness campaigns, host international conferences and fight for their causes in courts and legislatures. Perhaps their biggest victory came last year, when believers in Richmond, Calif., persuaded the City Council to pass a resolution banning space based weapons that they believe could be used for mind control. A similar lobbying effort is underway in Tucson. Dr. Lorraine Sheridan, who is co author of perhaps the only study of gang stalking, said the community poses a danger that sets it apart from other groups promoting troubling ideas, such as anorexia or suicide. On those topics, the internet abounds with medical information and treatment options. An internet search for "gang stalking," however, turns up page after page of results that regard it as fact. "What's scary for me is that there are no counter sites that try and convince targeted individuals that they are delusional," Dr. Sheridan said. "They end up in a closed ideology echo chamber," she said. In instructional tracts online, veterans of the movement explain the ropes to rookies: Do not engage with the voices in your head. If your relatives tell you you're imagining things, they could be in on it. The tribe cuts across all classes and professions, and includes lawyers, soldiers, artists and engineers. In Facebook forums and call in support groups, they commiserate over the skepticism of their loved ones and share stories of black vans that circle the block or co workers conscripted into the campaign. A T.I. subgenre has blossomed on Amazon. Left, the cover of John Hall's "Guinea Pigs: Technologies of Control," and Robert Duncan's "How to Tame a Demon." They have self published dozens of e books, with titles like "Tortured in America" and "My Life Changed Forever." In hundreds of YouTube videos they offer testimonials and try to document evidence of their stalking, even confronting unsuspecting strangers. "They wanted to basically destroy me, and they did," a young mother in Phoenix says in one video, choking back tears. She lost custody of her daughter and was sent to a behavioral health hospital, says the woman, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy. "But I am going to fight back for the rest of my life." She adds, "And guess what, I'm not crazy." Dr. Sheridan's study, written with Dr. David James, a forensic psychiatrist, examined 128 cases of reported gang stalking. It found all the subjects were most likely delusional. "One has to think of the T.I. phenomenon in terms of people with paranoid symptoms who have hit upon the gang stalking idea as an explanation of what is happening to them," Dr. James said. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the community is divided over the contours of the conspiracy. Some believe the financial elite is behind it. Others blame aliens, their neighbors, Freemasons or some combination. The movement's most prominent voices, however, tend to believe the surveillance is part of a mind control field test done in preparation for global domination. The military establishment, the theory goes, never gave up on the ambitions of MK Ultra, the C.I.A.'s infamous program to control the mind in the 1950s and '60s. A leading proponent of that view is an anesthesiologist from San Antonio named John Hall. In his 2009 book, "A New Breed: Satellite Terrorism in America," Dr. Hall gave his own account of being targeted. Agents bleached his water, he wrote, and bombarded him with voices making murderous threats. The book made a splash because of the messenger: a licensed member of the medical establishment who was telling those who feel targeted that psychiatrists were misleading them. A janitor knows as much about the human mind, he wrote. Dr. Hall, 51, was invited for an interview on "Coast to Coast AM," a conspiracy minded radio show based in California that is said to reach millions of listeners. After that, he said, "I had probably three or 4,000 emails from people saying: 'It's happening to me in this state.' 'It's happening to me in Florida.' 'It's happening to me in California.' " The similarities of the cases spoke to a wide ranging campaign, he said. "If the psychiatrists want to say that this is schizophrenia or delusional disorder, that's fine," he said. "But every one of these victims have the same story." Laying out his case, he describes an episode at a gas station where he believed somebody in dark glasses was mimicking his movements. "It was really creepy," he said. "Everything I did, he did." Later in the video, he prays for forgiveness for his future sins. "Father," he says, "right now I ask that you look down on all the targeted individuals across the globe. Help them to cope with this madness." On Nov. 20, 2014, Mr. May walked into a library at Florida State University, where he had graduated in 2005, and shot three people, leaving one paralyzed. He dared the police to kill him, then fired in their direction before being fatally shot, officials said. He was 31. Officers standing over the body of Myron May on Nov. 20, 2014, after the shooting at Florida State University. The vast majority of people with psychosis never resort to violence. Still, studies suggest that a small number of those experiencing psychotic episodes especially paranoid thoughts, accompanied by voices making commands are more likely to act on hostile urges than people without a mental illness. Many in the T.I. community, as anyone would, have repudiated the shootings by Mr. Alexis and Mr. May. But some also harbor troubling views about their perceived oppressors. They question how people could be so cruel. Karen Stewart of Tallahassee, Fla., believes large numbers of regular people have been brainwashed by the National Security Agency into thinking that she is a traitor or terrorist. Wherever she goes, she says to church, to the grocery store, to the doctor's office they are there, watching. It baffles her, she said. But worse, "It makes me angry to see how many people in this country are sociopaths. They are absolute groupthink drones," she said. "I don't even consider them human anymore." Susan Clancy, a Harvard trained psychologist who has researched people who believe they've been abducted by aliens, said it could be extremely difficult to dissuade patients who have latched onto beliefs that they think explain their delusions. "I think it's a need for meaning and a need to understand your life and the problems you're having," she said. "You're not some meaningless nobody. You're being followed by the C.I.A." In that way, Dr. Clancy said, the behavior shares a trait with religious belief: To abandon it would be life upending. Paula Trespas, Mr. Trespas's mother, said she avoided debating with him. "It wasn't something that he was making up," she said. "He really felt the way he felt and experienced what he experienced. I got to the point where I was just finally saying to him: 'I'm very, very sad that you have to go through this. I wish that there was something that I could do.' " The big hope is that society will wake up to what's happening and put a stop to it, those who feel targeted say. In some cases, they do seek psychiatric help. In others, the delusions subside. For the rest, the prognosis isn't good, psychiatrists say. Many contemplate suicide. Mr. Trespas, now 49, says he went so far as to prepare a rope. Sitting at a coffee shop in Brooklyn last month, he says the stalking has thankfully quieted down. But he says his harassers have also been seeding his body with Morgellons, a painful, insectlike infestation of the skin that many doctors say is psychosomatic. He is gaunt, with weary, sad eyes. It's been eight years since it all began, he says. He can't hold a job. His friends have drifted away. The online community has been a crucial support, he says. "But we don't know exactly what's happening," he says. "Maybe we're believing the wrong thing. I don't know. That's why I try to keep my mind open about who and what and why and how." One thing he is certain of though, he says: He's not crazy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
FRANKFURT Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, argued Friday that currency undervaluation by China and other emerging markets was at the root of "persistent imbalances" in trade that "represent a growing financial and economic risk." Mr. Bernanke, in a speech at a European Central Bank conference in Frankfurt, warned that a "two speed global recovery," with the richest countries lagging behind fast growing emerging markets like China and India, was hampering the cooperation the worldwide recovery needs, echoing a main point the Obama administration made with limited success when leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers gathered last week in South Korea. Emerging countries with flexible exchange rates, like Brazil, Turkey or South Africa are "carrying a double burden," Mr. Bernanke added. They suffer disproportionately from the imbalances created by export countries with undervalued currencies. "The emerging market vs. emergency market dichotomy is one that I think requires a lot more attention," Mr. Bernanke said during a panel discussion led by Jean Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank. While the mood of the conference, filled with central bankers and economists, was amiable, there was a hint of tension when Agustin Carstens, governor of the Bank of Mexico, asked what the United States would do to reduce its trade deficit. "Deficit countries have to do their part," Mr. Bernanke conceded. He said that the United States needs to raise its savings rate further and cut government borrowing. He added that a cheaper dollar will not be enough. "It would be difficult for exchange rates by themselves to restore balance," he said. For the last two weeks, the Fed has been criticized for its Nov. 3 decision to inject 600 billion into the banking system through next June, resuming an effort to lower long term interest rates. Those attacks continued Thursday. Speakers at a conference in Washington, organized by the libertarian Cato Institute, warned that the Fed's monetary policy could lead to asset price bubbles like the housing boom that crashed in 2007. Defending the policies Friday before an audience of central bankers and economists in Frankfurt, Mr. Bernanke said "there is considerable evidence" that securities purchases by the Fed have achieved their goal of raising asset prices. "We don't want to overpromise," he said during a question and answer session. "The effects are moderate meaningful, but moderate." Mr. Bernanke's speech argued that unemployment in the United States is at "unacceptable" levels, and gingerly waded into the fiscal policy debate roiling Washington. "In general terms, a fiscal program that combines near term measures to enhance growth and strong, confidence inducing steps to reduce longer term structural deficits would be an important complement to the policies of the Federal Reserve," Mr. Bernanke said. He did not, however, express a view on extending the Bush era tax cuts, the most contentious fiscal policy choice facing the White House and the lame duck Congress. Even so, by defending the Fed's actions, calling for global rebalancing and hinting that more fiscal stimulus might be needed, Mr. Bernanke's remarks amount to an endorsement of crucial elements of President Obama's economic approach. But that endorsement, in turn, could further stoke criticism by Congressional Republicans, who say the Fed is defying voters' skepticism about large scale government intervention in the economy and setting the stage for inflation later, and by foreign officials, who fear the Fed is trying to weaken the dollar to make American exports more competitive. Though Europe suffers from a stronger dollar, Mr. Trichet spoke warmly of Mr. Bernanke and made no criticism of United States policy. "We strongly share the view that a strong dollar, credible vis a vis the other major floating currencies, is very important," Mr. Trichet said. Mr. Bernanke, a Republican economist first appointed by George W. Bush, reiterated his argument that the Fed felt compelled to act because inflation is so low (about half of the Fed's target of roughly 2 percent) and unemployment so high (stuck at nearly 10 percent for the last 18 months or so). "In sum, on its current economic trajectory the United States runs the risk of seeing millions of workers unemployed or underemployed for many years," he will say. "As a society, we should find that outcome unacceptable." Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed's first, 1.7 trillion round of asset purchases, which lasted from December 2008 to last March, helped stabilize the economy. By resuming the purchases, the Fed "seeks to support the economic recovery, promote a faster pace of job creation and reduce the risk of a further decline in inflation that would prove damaging to the recovery." The speech included indirect responses to domestic and overseas critics. He also argued that the Fed "remains unwaveringly committed to price stability" and that buttressing growth was "the best way to continue to deliver the strong economic fundamentals that underpin the value of the dollar." The speech addresses the anxieties of Brazil, Thailand and other emerging economies, which fear that a surge of foreign capital will drive up prices and interest rates. Henrique Meirelles, governor of the Central Bank of Brazil, said at the Frankfurt conference that "it's simply a fact that there are global imbalances we have these kinds of capital inflows which create distortions." "We should work toward global coordination and so forth," Mr. Meirelles said during the panel discussion with Mr. Bernanke. "At the same time every jurisdiction has to be very clear about protecting its own economy from these imbalances." If exchange rates were allowed to move freely, Mr. Bernanke argued, emerging markets would raise interest rates and allow their currencies to appreciate even as advanced economies like the United States maintained expansionary monetary policies. That would curb the emerging markets' trade surpluses and shift demand toward domestic consumption and away from export led growth. Instead, Mr. Bernanke said, currency undervaluation in big surplus economies has led to unbalanced growth and "uneven burdens of adjustment." Since "the ultimate purpose of economic growth is to deliver higher living standards at home," the speech stated, surplus countries should satisfy domestic needs instead of focusing mainly on exports. Without naming China explicitly, Mr. Bernanke warned that its "pursuit of export led growth cannot ultimately succeed if the implications of that strategy for global growth and stability are not taken into account." Dominique Strauss Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, expressed concern that achieving international agreement could be more difficult now that the worst of the financial crisis seemed to be over, "This willingness to try to work together and have a cooperative approach is not as strong as it has been." He added later, though, that he thought at least some people in the Chinese government "have in mind they need to move in the right direction." Before Mr. Bernanke departed for Frankfurt, other Fed officials rallied to the central bank's defense. In a speech at Case Western Reserve University, Sandra Pianalto, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, defended the asset purchases, saying that the recovery had been "exceptionally gradual " and that she did not expect unemployment to fall below 8 percent before 2013. Even so, she tried to reassure inflation fearing skeptics, saying: "The main variable the Federal Reserve can control over time is the price level. Ensuring price stability is our job." At a speech in Chicago, Narayana R. Kocherlakota, president of the Minneapolis Fed, also defended quantitative easing. He said that in normal times, if the Fed let banks create more money, that could spur inflation. But, he said, that "this basic logic isn't valid in current circumstances" because banks were sitting on nearly 1 trillion in excess reserves held at the Fed. "This means that they are not using a lot of their existing licenses to create money," he said. "Q.E. gives them 600 billion of new licenses to create money, but I do not see why they would suddenly start to use the new ones if they weren't using the old ones." Still, he said the effects of the Fed's new policy "are likely to be relatively modest."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Many airlines provide meals in their front cabins designed by celebrity chefs. But a charter flight this Thursday from Los Angeles to the Pebble Beach Food Wine festival will carry several, including Michael Voltaggio and Neal Fraser, along with guests attending the March 31 to April 3 event. The 30 passenger flight will include small bites designed by the chefs along with rare wines served during the roughly hourlong trip. Tickets cost 5,000 and include a four day pass to the event with access to private parties. Extending chef exposure, the luxury travel company Belmond has announced a train trip from Singapore to Bangkok on the Eastern Oriental Express with the Australian chef and restaurateur Luke Mangan next fall. The three day trip, departing Oct. 28, will include a chef led tour of a food market in Singapore followed by meals onboard prepared by Mr. Mangan and a cookbook signing reception with him. The train carries 82 passengers, and prices start from 2,820. The airfare prediction app and website Hopper is forecasting that flights to Cuba, currently averaging 717 from the United States if traveling through a foreign country like Mexico or Canada, a practice that is illegal, will drop almost 50 percent, to an average of 364, once commercial American carriers are allowed to operate. Major U.S. carriers filed permits to operate commercial flights to Cuba earlier this month, though it is unknown when they will be approved or begin. Current regulations require a visa for travel under 12 eligible circumstances, including family visits and people to people travel, and travelers must book through a charter flight service, considered more expensive than flights competing in the open market. Hopper looked at airfares to destinations around Cuba, including the Bahamas, Cayman Islands and Cancun, Mexico, from airports in the United States and direct flights to Cuba from Canadian cities to make its analysis, including projecting that nonstop service from Miami will cost 275 round trip. Hopper says flight searches between airports in the United States and Cuba have jumped 500 percent in the last year. The culturally focused Peter Sommer Travels, run by the archaeologist and eponymous BBC documentarian, has added a new small ship itinerary in Croatia this fall. Guided by a university professor who specializes in art, architecture and history, the eight day trip aboard a 12 passenger wooden gullet departs Sept. 17 from Split and travels down the Adriatic coast. The itinerary explores a Roman palace, ancient Greek colony, the region's tallest mountain and the islands of Hvar and Korcula en route to the ancient walled city of Dubrovnik. Rates start around 3,900 a person, double occupancy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In the middling dance movie "Work It," now on Netflix, Quinn (Sabrina Carpenter) is a straight A senior desperate to attend her dream university, Duke. So desperate, in fact, that when her college interviewer expresses an appreciation for dance, Quinn pretends it's her passion, too. To keep up the ruse, she cobbles together a ragtag hip hop troupe and starts to train. She's a quick learner; how hard can it be to keep a rhythm? This silly, predictable setup which hinges on an elaborate misunderstanding of how college admissions work grows less important as the story wears on and the dancing takes center stage. Our stars in this regard are Quinn's best friend Jas (Liza Koshy), who heads the impromptu crew, and Jake (Jordan Fisher), a cute hotshot who becomes Quinn's private instructor and, inevitably, her crush. As Quinn freestyles with Jas or twirls with Jake, they find dance floors in improvised, outdoor spaces, giving the performances an off the cuff look. Both Koshy and Fisher are accomplished professional dancers, and the movie doesn't skimp on showcasing their gifts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MONTCLAIR, N.J. Even though Gandini Juggling owes much to many other artists, this British group's work feels like a whole new genre. Here, juggling becomes flights of inspired poetry, musical choreography with strong dance elements, crazy comedy surrealism, breathtakingly dexterous virtuosity, darkly absurdist drama. Gandini opens windows in the mind. I discovered this troupe in 2016, when it played a vital part in Phelim McDermott's spellbinding English National Opera production of Philip Glass's "Akhnaten," which is coming to the Metropolitan Opera next year. Why didn't I know of Gandini before? Gandini Juggling was founded in 1992 by Sean Gandini and Kati Yla Hokkala "to filter juggling through a dance aesthetic." With "Smashed" (2010), an enchanting and dumbfounding hourlong production, the troupe makes its American debut, in the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University. Mr. Gandini, the troupe's director, and Ms. Yla Hokkala, the assistant director, are among the nine "Smashed" performers (seven men, two women). Mr. Gandini has said that the death of Pina Bausch, in 2009, inspired this show; and yes, Bauschian elements proliferate here from first to last. Yet the larger mind set in this show, with its love of rhythmic subtlety and geometric intricacy, is entirely un Bauschian. The Gandini directors are also said to be fans of Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown; I hope we get to see Gandini works inspired by those two.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
At Hudson Yards, Thomas Heatherwick gave New York an endless staircase. Now, the creative British designer is set to deliver a complete building. At 515 West 18th Street in Manhattan, Mr. Heatherwick, who is best known to New Yorkers as the creator of the Vessel, the 150 foot tall, Instagram friendly basket of stairs at the heart of Hudson Yards, has designed Lantern House, a 181 unit condominium. The project comprises two towers that flank the High Line. One tower, on the eastern side of the elevated park, is 10 stories tall; the other, on the western side, is 22 stories tall. Both have a gridded structure of textured brick holding enormous bubbles of glass and bronze colored aluminum that recall the curved shades of hurricane oil lanterns. Mr. Heatherwick said he was initially inspired by the bay windows found in Victorian houses across the United Kingdom and wondered whether they could be translated to condo towers. Of course, Mr. Heatherwick, a designer who has long delighted in shunning convention, wasn't content to add just any bay window. He developed floor to ceiling, curved compositions of flat glass panels that have as much in common with the transparent capsules of the London Eye as they do Victorian windows. "The ones I'm particularly excited about are the corner ones, where they really swing right around and get these panoramic views," he said. The building's brick, meanwhile, is a riff on Manhattan's old industrial warehouses. "I felt there was a role for not being too shiny, and having materials connected to a New York vernacular," Mr. Heatherwick said. Most of the lantern shaped windows straddle two floors to enclose two apartments one on the bottom with glass angling down; and one on top, with glass angling up. Smaller single story lanterns enclose penthouses, as well as apartments on the 10th floor of the west tower. The two towers are connected by a glass lobby with a sinuous metal roof that sweeps below the High Line. On the ground floor, amenity spaces including a library lounge, an event suite with catering kitchen, a co working lounge and a game room are organized around a private garden designed by Hollander Design Landscape Architects under the High Line. A 75 foot long swimming pool, cold plunge pool, hot tub and saunas are on the second floor, and a fitness center, yoga studio and children's playroom are on the third floor. Related Companies, the developer, had previously partnered with Mr. Heatherwick on the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and expected he would conceive a similarly attention grabbing design for this project. "Everyone at this point in time expects great, unique architecture to sprout out of the sites in and around the High Line," said Jordan Sasson, a vice president at Related. "With Thomas, we knew we would get something unique. There's no question about that." The interiors are designed by March White, which aimed to create modern rooms that nevertheless recall the handcraftsmanship and rich materiality of the past. "We thought there was a real opportunity to produce a crafted interior that responded to what Thomas was doing on the outside of the building with the brickwork and detailing of the windows," said Elliot March, one of the firm's partners.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Deserved or not, the first weekend of M.L.B. brought some familiar, comforting scenes as well as plenty of bizarre ones. I sent a text to my high school English teacher the other day. He loves baseball, so I knew he would appreciate a photo of the Mets Braves game at Citi Field, from my seat in the press box. He replied that he hadn't expected to care much about a 60 game season, and yet there he was, on his couch, riveted to every pitch. Then he watched another game that night. We might not deserve baseball's return. We have not slowed the spread of the raging coronavirus, so the ballpark gates remain closed to fans. Yet Major League Baseball is beaming all 30 teams into our televisions, from ballparks all over the country, and what a joy it is to watch. For months, we clung to live games from South Korea or replays from the past. But the old song is true: Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby. At home on Saturday, I gorged on the game. From Yu Darvish's first pitch in Chicago to Kirby Yates's last pitch in San Diego, I spent over 11 hours peeking in at all 15 games in the majors. Heaven is a Fire TV Stick. Fenway Park, Boston, third inning: J.D. Martinez comes to bat for the Red Sox, who are down early to the Orioles. Martinez has a habit of brushing his thumb against his nose before every pitch, which I can't un see. He does it again, of course, and from the side, you can see a giant canopy that serves as an auxiliary dugout for social distancing. The play by play man, Dave O'Brien, recalls that the park in Vero Beach, Fla., where the Dodgers used to train, had no dugouts, which leads to a charming story about Vin Scully. (Yes, all stories about Scully are charming.) Guaranteed Rate Field, Chicago, fifth inning: Steve Cishek is pitching for the White Sox, and his sidewinding delivery is typically mesmerizing. Here he faces the Twins' Nelson Cruz with two men on, and I wonder if Cruz nickname: Boomstick will hit the first home run of his 40s. He does, but the White Sox will go deep five times in an easy win. Busch Stadium, St. Louis, fifth inning: I don't know how Paul Goldschmidt, the Cardinals' slugger, hits the way he does. Goldschmidt starts with his hands above his head and his bat on an exaggerated downward angle, as if he needs to scratch an itch on his lower back. He's always ready for the pitch, of course, but while he homered earlier off the Pirates' Trevor Williams, he grounds out here. Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia, second inning: Miami's Caleb Smith is struggling with his control, walking three in the inning after a leadoff homer by Didi Gregorius, the Phillies' masked shortstop. Smith is wearing the Marlins' preferred jersey, which is black with black script, making it close to impossible to read the team name. You know what is perfectly visible? The white Nike swoosh, now standard on all jersey fronts. Sigh. Globe Life Field, Arlington, Texas, sixth inning: Cardboard versions of President George W. Bush, his wife, Laura, and the Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez sit together at field level, just to the first base side of home plate at the Rangers' new ballpark. The Rockies' Daniel Bard is not distracted by the cutouts or his own thoughts. Bard, pitching in the majors for the first time in seven years after a mental block from throwing strikes, works out of a jam and earns the victory. Twenty of his 25 pitches are strikes. Minute Maid Park, Houston, sixth inning: It's nice to see the Astros' Lance McCullers back on the mound. He always keeps you guessing he has a terrific curveball and changeup, and few starters throw fastballs so infrequently. He has been out for 21 months because of Tommy John surgery and the pandemic, and while he gives up a homer to the Mariners rookie Kyle Lewis who also homered in the opener McCullers looks sharp in a 7 2 win. Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, seventh inning: The A's are losing to the Angels, but the rookie left hander Jesus Luzardo, who tested positive for the coronavirus during training camp, looks impressive for three scoreless innings. Also impressive: the Athletics' idea to ask bleacher fans for some of the signs they would normally carry to the ballpark. The usual array of bedsheets and flags is a welcome sight along the railings above the outfield. Progressive Field, Cleveland, fifth inning: The Royals' Brady Singer, a highly touted right hander, finishes his strong major league debut with his seventh strikeout, zipping a fastball past Cleveland's Jose Ramirez. The Royals promoted Singer without manipulating his service time, another sign of their trust in traditional methods. They show their trust again in the 10th inning, which now starts with a runner on second to speed games along. A bunt moves the runner to third, a sacrifice fly scores him, and the Indians are left to grouse about the new rule. Pitcher Mike Clevinger tweets that it is the wackiest thing he has ever seen, adding: "do you have any idea how hard it is to get a runner to second off the back end of a bullpen?! ThisIsntTravelBall MakeThemEarnIt" Great American Ballpark, Cincinnati, seventh inning: Someone with "B. Garcia" on his back is pitching for the Tigers against the Reds. His first name is Bryan, and I'm not familiar with him, nor with the other Garcia on the team, Rony, also a right handed pitcher. In my defense, there were 150 more players on 2020 opening day rosters than there were in 2019, when teams carried 25 players each. Now they carry 30.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
China is forging ahead in the search for treatments for people sickened by the new coronavirus that has infected more than 28,000 people in a countrywide epidemic, killed more than 500 and seeded smaller outbreaks in 24 other nations. The need is urgent: There are no approved treatments for illnesses caused by coronaviruses. On Thursday, China began enrolling patients in a clinical trial of remdesivir, an antiviral medicine made by Gilead, the American pharmaceutical giant. The drug has to be given intravenously, is experimental and not yet approved for any use, and has not been studied in patients with any coronavirus disease. But studies of infected mice and monkeys have suggested that remdesivir can fight coronaviruses. And it appears to be safe. It was tested without ill effects in Ebola patients, although it did not work well against that virus, which is in a different family from coronaviruses. Doctors in Washington State gave remdesivir to the first coronavirus patient in the United States last week after his condition worsened and pneumonia developed when he'd been in the hospital for a week. His symptoms improved the next day. A single case cannot determine whether a drug works, but a report on the Washington patient, in The New England Journal of Medicine, has nonetheless sparked excitement about the drug. Another report published on Tuesday by scientists in China added to the enthusiasm, showing that remdesivir blocked the new coronavirus, officially known as 2019 nCoV, from infecting cells grown in the lab. "It is important to keep in mind that this is an experimental medicine that has only been used in a small number of patients with 2019 nCoV to date, so we do not have an appropriately robust understanding of the effect of this drug to warrant broad use at this time," Ryan McKeel, a Gilead spokesman, said in an email.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health

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