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LONDON After Facebook was hit on Friday with a fine of around 5 billion for privacy violations, critics immediately said it escaped largely unscathed: The settlement neither bruised its bottom line nor severely restricted its ability to collect people's data. Yet even if the Silicon Valley company dodged that bullet, its pain was just beginning. Regulators and lawmakers in Washington, Europe and in countries including Canada have already begun multiple investigations and proposing new restrictions against Facebook that will probably embroil it in policy debates and legal wrangling for years to come. And in some of these places, the authorities are increasingly coordinating to form a more united front against the company. In the United States, the potential for a federal antitrust investigation looms, several state attorneys general have initiated investigations of the company, and members of Congress are considering a federal privacy law and other restrictions. Not to mention that President Trump has turned up the heat on Facebook and other tech behemoths, including on Friday when he said that the platforms were "dishonest" and "crooked" and that "something is going to be done." That momentum will be on display this coming week on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust plans to hold a hearing featuring executives from Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google about the power of the firms. That same day, the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to hear from David Marcus, a top Facebook executive, on the company's new Libra cryptocurrency project, which lawmakers have criticized and questioned. In Europe, Facebook faces sanctions for breaking the region's strict privacy laws, and the European Commission is in the early stages of an antitrust investigation against the company. In Britain, where a parliamentary report this year labeled Facebook "digital gangsters," officials are writing new competition and social media laws, and regulators have started a broad antitrust inquiry targeted at Facebook and Google. France is also considering new penalties against the social network if hate speech and other harmful content is not removed within 24 hours. And Australia, Japan, India, New Zealand and Singapore are either considering or have passed new rules against big internet platforms. Since 2016, at least 43 countries have passed or introduced regulations targeting social media and the spread of misinformation, according to Oxford University researchers. "The debate has shifted," said Tommaso Valletti, a professor at Imperial College Business School and the chief economist for the European Commission's antitrust division. "The right question is not whether to intervene, but what kind of intervention do we need." For Facebook, these global fights could sting more than the F.T.C. decision and its 5 billion fine. While that amount would be a record penalty by the federal government against a technology company, it represents just a fraction of Facebook's 56 billion in annual revenue. And while the F.T.C. also moved to increase oversight of how Facebook handles user data, none of the conditions in the settlement would impose strict limits on the company's ability to collect and share data with third parties. Yet governments and regulators can still potentially force the social media company to change how it conducts business through new laws and restrictions a damaging outcome that Microsoft and other large companies have faced in the past. Already, Facebook has put huge amounts of time and resources into pushing back against tougher privacy, antitrust and hate speech rules, even as it has publicly expressed openness toward more regulation. Facebook said in a statement on Saturday that, "by updating the rules for the internet, we can preserve what's best about it." The company added, "We want to work with governments and policymakers to design the sort of smart regulation that fosters competition, encourages innovation and protects consumers." Facebook is the centerpiece of a broader reckoning facing the tech industry, with governments beginning to collaborate in their response. The European Commission has shared information with the F.T.C. and the Justice Department about its past investigations into Google. And this spring, Ireland's top privacy regulator, who has been investigating Facebook and Google, met with officials in Washington. 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 May, an annual meeting of antitrust regulators from around the world turned into a four day strategy session focused on the tech industry. Joseph Simons, the head of the F.T.C., and Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general overseeing antitrust at the Justice Department, were among those who attended the event in Colombia. "It's good news that the U.S. agencies are diving into this discussion," said Andreas Mundt, Germany's top antitrust enforcer, who helped organize the meeting and in February issued one of the first antitrust rulings against Facebook. "It's clear these are companies that are active worldwide and thus a worldwide approach is not a bad idea." Mr. Mundt and other regulators believe that actions against Facebook and its industry peers must go beyond fines. Instead, many authorities want to force structural changes to how the businesses operate like their collection of data and sale of digital advertising. After the F.T.C. decision, Facebook's next sanctions are expected to come from Europe, where the authorities have traditionally been more assertive against the tech industry than American regulators. Ireland's data protection office has 11 investigations underway against Facebook for violations of European privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R. (Ireland has jurisdiction over Facebook under the privacy law because the company's European headquarters is in Dublin.) At least two verdicts against the company are likely in the coming months. "Facebook has powers that were previously poorly understood," Helen Dixon, head of the Irish data commission, said in an interview. She declined to comment on specific Facebook cases, but said, "It's up to us as regulators to enforce where we see accountability hasn't been demonstrated." France is debating a sweeping new law that would require Facebook and other large internet platforms to prevent the spread of hate speech and other harmful content or risk fines. Germany has already enacted a similar law. In Britain, a similar measure is under consideration, as well as tougher competition rules that would create a new digital regulator and potentially require Facebook to make some of its data available to competitors. Some academics and free speech advocates have raised concerns that in a rush to limit Facebook's power, governments are drafting policies with unintended consequences. Human rights groups were alarmed by proposals in Singapore and India to give the government new powers to censor content on social media. "They are all very reactionary," said Samantha Bradshaw, a doctoral student and researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who has been tracking government actions against Facebook and others. "I haven't seen any proposals that really get to these systemic level challenges about the algorithms, the data collection, and the privacy." What specific policies Facebook will accept remains unclear. In many places, the company has fought back against the regulatory and legal onslaught. Ms. Dixon of the Irish data commission said Facebook has tried to stall her investigations by raising questions and challenges. The social network is "asking constantly for extensions," she said. "There have been quite a few testy exchanges. Once you have a law with a very big stick" that can be used "against a very big company, they are going to seek to protect their interests at every turn." In Germany, Facebook is appealing an antitrust ruling that would prevent it from sharing data with its other apps, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as websites that use the "like" and "share" buttons. It is simultaneously fighting elements of the French and British proposals regarding hate speech, saying they place too much responsibility on the company to judge what is acceptable online content.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Roger Cohen belongs in that fraternity of writers who see and hear with greater acuity and insight than the rest of us mortals. I will greatly miss the humanity of his narrative voice and his willingness to bear witness to the world as it is in all its beleaguered travail and valiant obstinacy and to discourse upon how it could be if we paid attention to the most vulnerable among us, driven by the imperatives of a heightened moral conscience. As he takes his leave to become the Paris bureau chief for The Times, he will continue, no doubt, to wear the "heart out after the unattainable" not a bad attribute for a bureau chief. I cried as I finished reading Roger Cohen's last column. Of course I wish him luck and success in Paris, but will miss his wit, soul, compassion and perspective. His insights have helped me travel through this difficult time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"We think privacy is for everyone not just for the few," Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said on Tuesday at an annual conference for Google developers. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Google, the company that may know the most about our digital lives, is now preaching the gospel of privacy. Speaking at an annual conference for developers on Tuesday, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, delivered a message that seemed cognizant of today's consumer privacy concerns but out of step with the company's history of intensive online data collection. "We think privacy is for everyone not just for the few," Mr. Pichai said. "We want to do more to stay ahead of constantly evolving user expectations." Google introduced a set of tools spanning a range of its products to provide users with more control over their data and make it more difficult to track their online activities. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Google plans to permit users to navigate its maps, watch videos on YouTube and search for information in "incognito mode," limiting the amount of information shared with the company. It will also allow users to delete web and app activity history automatically after three months or 18 months. The company also said it would make it easier for users to find and delete information they have shared with the company, including location data in maps. For its Android operating system, Google said a new update would simplify how to limit the sharing of location data with app providers. Last week, Facebook pushed a similar privacy theme at a company conference. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, declared that "the future is private" and announced a shift in its products to more intimate communications. Google and Facebook have become the dominant forces in online advertising, gobbling up information as their users move around their platforms and the internet at large. But their aggressive collection of user data laid bare by several embarrassing scandals in recent years has put the companies in the cross hairs of politicians and global regulators. While thousands of developers and journalists filed into an outdoor amphitheater where Mr. Pichai delivered his keynote, a plane flew overhead pulling a banner that read: "Google Control Is Not Privacy savelocalnews." "I suspect they saw the writing on the wall," said Fatemeh Khatibloo, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. "These are meaningful changes when it comes to the user's expectations of privacy, but I don't think this affects their business at all. So why shouldn't they do these things to give the impression of more privacy?" After the keynote speech, Google separately announced it would take steps to limit the use of tracking cookies on Chrome, the world's most popular browser with about a 60 percent market share. Cookies allow companies to monitor which websites people visit and what ads they have viewed or clicked on. They also are a way for a website to remember who you are so you don't have to log in every time you visit. Cookies level the playing field for smaller companies in the digital advertising world allowing them to collect information that helps refine ad targeting. The announcement is another example of a privacy measure that will most likely have a bigger impact on Google's competitors. The internet giant uses cookies but is not dependent on them. It already knows more valuable information such as what users search for, what videos they watch and what apps they've loaded on their phones. Even as it was addressing some of the perils of data collection, Google demonstrated how it was using information that people provide to the company to make its products more useful. Its next generation Assistant, powered by the company's artificial intelligence, can learn more about you to personalize reminders and tasks. It can remember your partner's birthday, for example, and remind you to buy a present a week beforehand. It can also help book car reservations on the web using emails and calendar information. It can also understand better what you are doing. Google's digital assistant will have a driving mode to help drivers play music, set map destinations or answer phone calls more easily without taking their hands off the wheel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When Andre Gide was once asked to name France's greatest poet, he said, "Hugo helas." Though the line has been both misquoted and misattributed, its central point should be unmistakable: an amalgam of admiration and regret. Those mixed feelings returned to mind this week at Diamond Anniversary season performances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the David H. Koch Theater. Mr. Taylor is our greatest living choreographer alas. You can't admire his excellences without observing his lapses. And this has been true for decades. At the center of his troupe's triple bill on Wednesday was the New York premiere of "American Dreamer." A thin, hokey and jokey evocation of small town society, set to Thomas Hampson's recordings of Stephen Foster songs, it looked even more bafflingly brief, incomplete and inconsequential than when it was new in Vail, Colo., last August. It looks as if Mr. Taylor had put less than a week's work into it, and as my companion (new to Taylor) immediately remarked, it's a waste of these wonderful dancers. Still, it was sandwiched by excellent performances of "Airs" (1978) and "Mercuric Tidings" (1982), both transporting in their danciness and moving in their response to music (Handel; Schubert). The company's gala performance on Thursday included three well known hits, notably two dissimilar and amazing masterpieces: "Cloven Kingdom" (1976) and "Sunset" (1983). It also featured a duet from "Airs," admirably danced by two New York City Ballet stars, Tiler Peck and Robert Fairchild. Unless you detest the final piece, "Piazzolla Caldera," from 1997 (I do, though I seem alone in this), and unless you object to taped music throughout (I do, and here I'm on the side of the angels), this was an unexceptionable program. I've praised many of Mr. Taylor's works in the past; I mean to go on doing so. Yet the overall Taylor picture leaves me with reservations larger than my previous points suggest. When I heave my "Taylor alas" sigh, even as I acknowledge his stature, I do so because a large number of his works exhibit too many aspects of the following: a bland cheesiness; an exaggeratedly ornery Americanness; a doggedly conventional boy meets girl conformism (pointedly overladen with romantic and sexual affection); an efficient, middle of the road mediocrity; and a recurrent, not quite sincere fakeyness. He's often very determined to appeal to people who don't like modern dance, and often very reluctant to give offense. Mr. Taylor's stage worlds certainly also include haunting examples of social satire, miseries, nightmares, freaks, loners, androgynes and an occasional same sex passing fancy. But he delivers such things with an insistently broad shouldered country club tolerance that ends up feeling not so very inclusive. After all he reminds us before changing the subject such things do happen: Aren't they sad and odd? Then he moves on. The way Mr. Taylor moves on, from one work to the next, is part of his virtuosity but also of his evasiveness. The ceremonious graciousness of "Airs"; the steamy, oversexed tango behavior of "Piazzolla Caldera"; the vast psychological gap between male bonding men and their pretty female sweethearts in "Sunset"; the bygone American folksiness of "American Dreamer"; the exuberant orchestral complexity of "Mercuric Tidings": You can see how Mr. Taylor gives himself the task of evoking one different society after another, as he does in the outgoing Depression plaintiveness of "Black Tuesday," the cartoon mating insect antics of "Gossamer Gallants" and many more. The range is, as people say, awesome. The trouble is, I don't believe in some of these worlds for a moment. Soon after the curtain rises on "Piazzolla Caldera," the women (on our left) and men (on our right), insistently eyeing one another, start to stroke their bodies and jut their pelvises with a lasciviousness that's wholly ludicrous. "American Dreamer" is (like some other recent Taylor works) so disappointingly short that you can't help feeling that Mr. Taylor himself lost interest in it. Let's see if the rest of the Taylor season which includes a world premiere, "Marathon Cadenzas" disproves these complaints. I hope so, because in Mr. Taylor's finest works we feel the wordless meeting of music and meaning, and we sense a singularly imaginative mind that loves to juxtapose seemingly unrelated ideas. Why is "Sunset," with its American soldiers and the American young women who join them, set to music by the so English Edward Elgar? When, if ever, are the beings of "Cloven Kingdom" dancing to the music Mr. Taylor allows us to hear? These results are deeply and inexplicably satisfying. The drama of "Sunset" keeps shifting: It starts with men only, and ends with only women. The most charged dance is a close quarters duet between two senior men (Michael Trusnovec and Robert Kleinendorst) who are embarrassed by their own intimacy: They shove hands in their pockets, they tie shoelaces, they never touch each other for long. The moment a pretty girl arrives, they both seamlessly turn all their energies toward her in a sustained trio: And, from then on, we're deep in the feeling of "Sunset," whose military men apply to women the affection they cannot release among themselves and whose women become their sweethearts, nurses, mourners, without ever experiencing real closeness with them. Just now I'm most moved by the fascinating ways Mr. Taylor responds to classical music in his all dance pieces "Airs" and "Mercuric Tidings," works that change my breathing while I watch. He never pins a dance phrase closely to a musical one or tries for any see the music constructions; he also never just uses his scores solely as film background atmosphere. These dances meet their music like added layers of harmony, with a structural and textural complexity of their own. "Mercuric Tidings" opens with a mass tableau whose separate groups then shift horizontally, like sliding screens, parallel but not linked to multiple layers in Schubert's orchestral writing the first of many irresistible moments in a knockout work. Here and in "Airs," the Taylor dancers' sculptural fullness of texture is deeply sensuous. They make transitions as engrossing as finished positions; as their muscles adjust during the course of a phrase, yours seem to move with them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
WITH deep tread tires and ample ground clearance, a rugged 4 wheel drive Hummer or Jeep might seem the best choice for navigating through the wrecked cities of northeastern Japan. The areas pummeled by the earthquake and tsunami in March would surely be inhospitable for an electric vehicle. Yet in the days and weeks after the horrific one two punch of natural disasters, wispy battery electric cars engineered for lightness and equipped with tires designed for minimal rolling resistance proved their mettle. These welterweight sedans, including models from Mitsubishi and Nissan, turned out to be the vehicles that got through not because of any special ability to claw their way over mountains of debris, but because they were able to "refuel" at common electrical outlets. With oil refineries out of commission and clogged roadways slowing deliveries, finding gasoline had become a challenge. Shortages were so acute that Japan's Self Defense Forces had to truck in gasoline; donations of diesel fuel were accepted from China. Yet in Sendai, about 250 miles northeast of Tokyo, and other cities ravaged by the earthquake, electricity returned within days. Taking stock of the situation, the president of Mitsubishi Motors, Osamu Masuko, offered dozens of his company's egg shaped i MiEV (pronounced "eye meeve") electric cars to affected cities. Despite their image as light duty runabouts best suited for trips to a nearby shopping mall, the electric vehicles were immediately put to use. They were pressed into service ferrying supplies to refugee centers, schools and hospitals, and taking doctors, city workers and volunteers on their rounds. While the i MiEVs could not help out with tasks like hauling building materials or towing stranded vehicles, the assistance from Mitsubishi was much appreciated. In all, 89 i MiEVs went to the recovery effort, including 34 to Miyagi Prefecture, 33 to Fukushima Prefecture and 18 to Iwate Prefecture. "There was almost no gas at the time, so I was extremely thankful when I heard about the offer," said Tetsuo Ishii, a division chief in the environmental department in Sendai, which also got four Nissan Leaf electric cars. "If we hadn't received the cars, it would have been very difficult to do what we needed to." Mr. Ishii and other officials in Sendai assigned the cars strategically. Two were used to bring food and supplies to the 23 remaining refugee centers in the city, while two others served doctors. Education officials have been using another two vehicles to inspect schools for structural damage. Others helped deliver supplies to kindergartens around the city or were loaned to volunteer groups. Once the most pressing needs are met, the city may use the cars to help in the cleanup of damaged homes, as fuel shortages still limit the availability of trucks. For now, though, the cars are driven an average of 30 to 45 miles each day, about half the distance that they can be driven on a full charge. "One charge is perfect for us, because it allows us to drive around during the day with no trouble," Mr. Ishii said. "We're not that big of a city." Most of the cars, he said, returned each night to city hall, where they were recharged at 200 volt outlets. Fast charging stations, which replenish batteries to 80 percent of capacity within 30 minutes, are used where available. Standard 100 volt outlets can also be used, but the recharge then takes more than 12 hours. Slightly over five feet high and less than five feet wide, the i MiEV is cozy, to say the least, and at just 2,400 pounds it is relatively light. Its battery, the size of a tatami mat and weighing about 400 pounds, is under the floor, which helps give the car a lower center of gravity. The cars' unexpected sturdiness and utility has pleased Mr. Masuko, who, like other automobile executives, has been battling skeptics who see electric vehicles as expensive and impractical. "I am most impressed when I hear the words, 'I felt electric vehicles were unreliable at first, but now, the vehicles are being integrated into daily life,' " he wrote in an e mail. "I am so glad I heard that our electric vehicles are contributing to the recovery of the affected areas." In addition to donations from automakers, others cities have loaned their E.V.'s to the relief effort. For instance, on March 15, Soichi Kataoka, the mayor of Soja, which is about 600 miles southwest of Sendai, lent one of the city's i MiEVs to the Association of Medical Doctors in Asia for their medical relief work in the Tohoku region. It took four days to get the car to Tohoku. The visibility of the E.V.'s around Tohoku may provide a ray of hope to automakers coping with far greater challenges. Japan's automakers are only just finishing repairs to damaged factories. The companies are also struggling to obtain key components, like computer chips, from suppliers whose factories were also affected. Some production resumed in April, but at much reduced levels as carmakers ration their parts inventories. Toyota said it did not expect to resume full production until the end of this year. Sales of E.V.'s were just starting to take hold before the crisis. In addition to other matters, consumers are concerned about cost. The i MiEV's suggested retail price in Japan before government subsidies is nearly four million yen, about 48,000. (The first deliveries to the United States, where the car will be called simply "i" and will start at about 28,000, are scheduled for January 2012.) The high price in Japan is partly offset by the low cost of recharging. At Nissan dealerships, it costs just 500 yen ( 6.02) for a 30 minute quick charge, and just 100 yen for a normal charge (typically overnight). A gallon of gasoline, by comparison, costs about 7. Complicating matters, much of the Tokyo region is bracing for rolling blackouts this summer to compensate for the loss of electricity from the downed nuclear reactors in Fukushima. Still, the profile of electric vehicles in the aftermath of the twin disasters may persuade city governments among the largest buyers of the cars to add more of them to their fleets. After all, the cars are typically driven during the day, when most of the blackouts are scheduled, and charged at night, when demand is lower. "We were also a little taken aback for the desire for electric vehicles in the disaster zone," said Toshitake Inoshita, a Nissan spokesman. "They can get power and there are outlets, even though gas has been in short supply."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Californians and companies like Tesla have migrated to Reno to take advantage of cheap land and comparatively low home prices.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times Californians and companies like Tesla have migrated to Reno to take advantage of cheap land and comparatively low home prices. RENO, Nev. A growing homelessness crisis. Complaints about traffic congestion. Worries that the economy is becoming dominated by a wealthy elite. Those sound like California's problems in a nutshell. But now they are also among California's leading exports. Just ask the citizens of this city, where growing numbers of Californians and companies like Tesla have migrated to take advantage of cheap land and comparatively low home prices. A four hour drive from Silicon Valley, across a mountain range and a state line, Reno is finding that imported growth is accompanied by imported problems. On a recent evening, Chance Reading, an electrician who has lived in the area for 15 years, went to the City Council chambers to speak against a proposed development near his home in Verdi, on Reno's outskirts. He was part of a standing room crowd that lined the back wall and spilled into the lobby. Neighbor after neighbor walked to the microphone to complain about clogged roads, overcrowded schools and a creeping sense that local residents were being overwhelmed by development. "Our big message tonight is really about the pace of growth and trying to have a sustainable growth pattern versus a cycle of boom and bust," Mr. Reading said before the meeting. And it's not just happening in Reno. Austin, Tex.; Boise, Idaho; Denver; Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; and Seattle have all seen a huge influx of home buyers from California, according to the real estate website Zillow. A common thread is that each of these cities faces a growing housing crisis that, while not as severe as California's, is setting off many of the same debates. In Washington State, the legislature considered, but ultimately killed, a bill that would let cities like Seattle impose rent control. Affordable housing has emerged as the top priority for voters in Denver, while groups in Boise are organizing to fight "irresponsible development." Such concerns are a far cry from those of even the recent past in Reno, where the economy has long been based on gambling and the city's status as a small, sedate northern answer to Las Vegas. A little under a decade ago, Reno was one of America's foreclosure capitals and the unemployment rate was just below 14 percent. The gambling industry was skidding, tax revenue was plunging and construction companies were either going out of business or shredding their payroll from several hundred employees to a few dozen. "Everybody was leaving and Reno was basically closing its doors," Lance Gilman, an industrial land broker, said in a recent interview while wearing a cowboy hat, several gold rings, a gold chain and a gold watch. (This being Nevada, he is also the proprietor of a prominent brothel, the Mustang Ranch.) As a result, the Reno housing market has gone from moribund to scorching. As of February, the median home price in the metropolitan area was about 340,000, more than double its recessionary trough of about 150,000, according to Zillow. The inventory of homes for sale was down 22 percent from a year earlier, according to Redfin, and sales were happening at a much faster clip. The typical home for sale was under contract in 55 days, 24 days faster than a year earlier. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In Reno and elsewhere, one distinguishing feature of the recent migration is that it is not limited to retirees who sold their home with plans to funnel the profits toward a cheaper and lower tax retirement. There is also an influx of young professionals like Brian Quon, a automation engineer at Tesla. Mr. Quon, 37, moved to Reno last year, mostly for professional reasons. He bought a house for 400,000, about a third of what his home in San Jose, Calif., was worth, and he said Reno was friendlier and had a slower pace. He said he was not really aware of the debate about growing pains, because he was extremely busy at work and almost no one he worked with was from Nevada. "As the kids grow up and go to school, I'm sure we'll be more involved in the community," said Mr. Quon, who is married and has two children under 3. In contrast to their counterparts in the Bay Area, where the term "gentrification" is used carefully and with regret, Reno boosters and real estate agents boast about how blocks of rundown weekly motels are just months away from gentrifying. Come back soon, the message goes, and all this stuff will be torn down and gone. Today the typical Reno rent is just under 1,700 a month, up about 30 percent from five years ago, according to Zillow. One result has been a surge in Reno's homeless population. The city's shelter, just a few blocks past a bus station, is overflowing with residents and recently added a propane heated tent to accommodate all the extra people. On a recent chilly morning, with a snowstorm bearing down, Aria Overli, went door to door through a motel just off the downtown strip. Ms. Overli, an organizer with Actionn, a housing advocacy group in Northern Nevada, passed the sounds of saws and renovations, knocking on doors. Many residents who answered said they were on the verge of being evicted. For the past year Actionn has been organizing tenants in Reno's weekly motels, many of whom are one step removed from homelessness. The group has been taking residents to City Council meetings, where they speak out against new local ordinances like a requirement that motel rooms have small kitchens that they fear will push rents higher. The group has also been pushing for financing for affordable housing and for requirements that developers include subsidized units in new projects. "This rapid economic growth has come with a housing crisis," said J. D. Klippenstein, Actionn's executive director. Mr. Gilman, the broker and brothel owner, has been at the center of Reno's evolution. He arrived in 1985 after reading a report titled "10 boomtowns you can count on for the '90s." He and a group of business partners went on to buy and sell various plots of land for housing and commercial development that was primarily marketed toward the kinds of retirees and second home owners who had sought out Reno in earlier migrations from California. Two decades ago, the group bought several hundred thousand acres outside town and, after adding roads and other infrastructure, turned it into a vast industrial park among buff colored mountains that was initially used mostly as a center for warehouse and logistics operations for big retailers like Walmart. The park expanded as consumers did more of their shopping online, but its growth took off three years ago as Reno started to rebrand as a technology hub, and Nevada offered a 1.3 billion incentive package to bring in Tesla's Gigafactory. As the park and its tenants have prospered, the Reno airport has added flights connecting it with tech hubs like Austin. Hotels are marketing themselves as smoke free and, in place of casinos, have added diversions like bocce courts and climbing walls. One newly revitalized retail strip has a yoga studio, a gastro pub, a marijuana dispensary and a bubble tea cafe on what was once a used car lot. Since helping to woo Tesla, Mr. Gilman has reached deals with various other tech companies, including Google and Switch, which runs data centers. A mysterious cryptocurrency company called Blockchains LLC recently bought about 67,000 acres, which was just about everything Mr. Gilman had left to sell. "I'm out of work," said Mr. Gilman, who noted that he had planned for it to take two decades for the park to sell out the rest of that land.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
When Ms. Ezarik became one of the first users of the now defunct livestreaming site Justin.tv in 2007, a New York Times reporter's response after watching her videos: "She left me wondering whether her show was a parody of lifecasting and whether she, like Stephen Colbert, never breaks character." When you meet Ms. Ezarik in person, it is not easy to spot the lines between her and iJustine. She is unfailingly enthusiastic and open. Her mood shifted to downbeat only briefly, when I asked about her problems with Internet stalking and the nasty nature of some online comments. You will be harassed. Yes, even if you are nice to everyone, as iJustine generally is, there can be trouble. Ms. Ezarik said that she and her fellow YouTube personalities don't like to talk about the problems they've had with online harassment, but said most people in the community have dealt with this problem at some point. Ms. Ezarik said that the authorities didn't take her complaints seriously. "I have so much documentation of someone who was harassing me for years, and I took it to the cops, and they actually laughed at me," she said. "They were like, 'he didn't say that he was going to kill you, he just wanted to kill you.' " So, while her greatest joy is mingling with fans at conventions and meetups, she does not consider attending without hiring security. Being a YouTube star can get lonely. A loner mentality is a trait shared by many successful YouTube stars, Ms. Ezarik said. She cannot even estimate how many hours a day she is by herself in her home, sitting and recording herself in front of a screen. Nor does she have a go to trick to disconnect. "I was going to say video games, but then I'm still in front of a screen."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The actress Lisa Bonet has been appearing on television screens for decades, memorably in her role as Denise Huxtable on "The Cosby Show" and "A Different World." This summer, she'll be the featured guest star on season four of "Ray Donovan," returning on June 26 on Showtime. Born in San Francisco, Ms. Bonet, 48, now lives in Los Angeles. She has a daughter, the actress Zoe Kravitz, 27, with the musician Lenny Kravitz, and a daughter, Lola, 8, and a son, Nakoa Wolf, 7, with the actor Jason Momoa. Here, she shares her health and beauty favorites. I use pretty active things at night to keep the cells turning over. I use a scrub by my facialist Dayle Breault a couple times a week. Or I'll use Derma Peel by Rhonda Allison. I alternate between the two. For cleansing, especially in the morning when I'm looking to sweep the dead cells away, I use Dayle's face soap or Rhonda Allison Pumpkin Cleanser. Then I'll use a couple of serums. I switch back and forth between Dayle's Truthful Serum or Le Mieux TGF B Booster. I change it according to whatever my skin is needing that day. Then I use Dayle's spritz just to push the serums in deeper. I owe a lot to Dayle for my sustained youthfulness. But I've always taken skin care very seriously from when I was a kid and would go to the drugstore and buy that Apricot Scrub. I also have really sensitive skin that requires a good amount of care. I'm not one of those people who can go to sleep with their makeup on and wake up and be fine. I use a tinted sunblock by Epicuren, and I add a squirt of Sorme liquid concealer and mix that together. Zoe has turned me on to this glowy highlighter. It's Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer Illuminating. I use Dr. Hauschka Tinted Day Cream on my eyes. It moisturizes lids and looks pretty. That's basically what I wear during the day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The main activity space of the imagiNATIONS Activity Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian includes a 26 foot long grass rope suspension bridge made by the Quechua of Peru, descendants of the Inca. This concept, so vital to modern math, was understood by the Maya, one of the first civilizations to use it. But that wasn't the only innovation of indigenous peoples. Consider snow goggles. Or chocolate. Or suspension bridges. Or, in a way, sneakers. "Native people did not invent Chuck Taylors," said Duane Blue Spruce, project manager for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, referring to the classic athletic shoe. "But," Mr. Blue Spruce added, "we are responsible for the chemical process of creating rubber." These discoveries and many more form the heart of the imagiNATIONS Activity Center, a permanent bilingual (English and Spanish) installation for youth and families that opened on Thursday in the museum's New York City branch. Part of an approximately 9 million renovation, whose cost includes vast new retail space as well as heating and ventilation, the 4,500 square foot center is the Lower Manhattan museum's largest design undertaking since its founding in 1994. Although the museum already has an imagiNATIONS center, for 4 to 8 year olds, in its Washington building, this one is for students in grades 4 through 12. It also has an entirely new direction. "The underlying theme in education about Native Americans is that these are people who used to be there, and they're gone now," he said. "We're saying, not only are they not gone, but their ancient accomplishments still influence our modern life." This message greets center visitors in the form of a large map of the Americas, studded with symbols of about 30 native innovations. The theme continues in sections on math, nutrition, medicine, engineering, physics and architecture that were all developed with Native American scientists. This weekend, more native experts will appear at the museum's annual Children's Festival, which will celebrate the center's opening. Designed by EwingCole, the space includes a classroom and a discovery room, where children can handle objects ranging from a toothpick made from a walrus whisker to a 10 pound ball used in the Aztec game ulama. "This is probably the oldest game that uses a rubber ball that is still played today," said Gaetana DeGennaro, the center's manager, who is of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and led me on a tour with Mr. Blue Spruce, who belongs to the Laguna Pueblo tribe. Visiting imagiNATIONS is a humbling experience, even for an adult. The math section offers problems in the Maya's symbols and numerical system based on the number 20 and culminates with a head scratcher of a "superchallenge." A computerized multiple choice quiz game tests general knowledge with frequently tough questions, like "Which tribe first bred the Appaloosa horse?" (Spoiler: the Nez Perce.) "Native people were genetically modifying food 7,000 to 10,000 years ago," Ms. DeGennaro said, pointing to corn exhibits in the nutrition section. Here, children can play Crop etition, a digital game involving early Native Americans' agricultural challenges. Planting virtual crops of beans, squash and corn varieties, competitors battle natural disasters and learn to farm. "The purpose of this game is to plant the correct mix," Mr. Blue Spruce said. He added with a laugh, "Kids quickly learn that if they plant all popcorn, they're not going to make it through the year." Young visitors can step into the role of Native American healers, too, using what is now known as the Codex de la Cruz Badiano. Compiled in 1552 as a gift to the Spanish king, it summarizes the Aztecs' plant based medicine. In an interactive exhibit, children choose a malady and try to select the codex's remedy. "We tried to choose things that were fun for kids, like intestinal worms," Mr. Blue Spruce said. A medicine cabinet with products like aspirin a precursor, salicin, is in native healers' willow bark shows the ancient knowledge still in use. The center also demonstrates that it was not unusual for Indian technology to trump European. To illustrate the strength of plant fiber suspension bridges a Peruvian example hangs overhead one of the engineering exhibits, "Make It, Shake It," invites visitors to build a model European style arch bridge next to a string suspension bridge. They then create an "earthquake" by pushing and pulling handles. Guess which bridge collapses first. Now many, including the George Washington, are steel suspension designs. Children will find other deceptively complex structures in the architecture section, where they can assemble a small model igloo. This "is not a semicircular dome, as most people think," Mr. Blue Spruce said. Employing what is known as a catenary arch, the Inuit give igloos resilience by building them on a spiral. The physics section offers more Arctic ingenuity, as well as pure fun. Children can try to stay balanced in a mechanized kayak model a kayak stays upright after capsizing that imitates a craft in rough waters. (I managed about four seconds.) Another display illustrates how Inuit hunters use the sound conductivity of water: Put your ear to the handle of a partly submerged oar, and you'll hear in this case, through technology a bearded seal's mating call. Mr. Gover said he hoped the center would help the museum become more of a destination for local families. Not to mention another benefit: "We hope it will turn them on to math and science."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Over the years, Jonathan Feldman and Lisa Lougee have bought and sold numerous houses. "We thought of ourselves as serial flippers," said Mr. Feldman, 52, the founding partner of the San Francisco based firm Feldman Architecture, where Ms. Lougee, 51, works as an interior designer. "It supplemented our struggling, fledging professional careers." But by 2011, Feldman Architecture had become more established and the couple had two daughters Sasha, now 14, and Summer, 11 and "we were tired of all the moving," he said. From the street, the Edwardian house looks the same as it did before. Now, though, it has a more modern interior and sustainable features. Matthew Millman for The New York Times That's when they heard about a remarkable property that was about to go on the market: a 1905 home on a quiet cul de sac terminating at the Presidio national park that sat on a 50 foot wide lot twice the width of most properties in the area. "That meant it had outdoor space," Mr. Feldman recalled. "We jokingly said we could have a farm in the city." The Edwardian house also offered an opportunity for Mr. Feldman to experiment with some of his ideas about weaving green building systems into an existing and, in this case, historic structure. "I'm always trying to convince my clients to push further in this way," he said. "So pushing on our own house was something I wanted to do." "I knew that our plans would include an all new foundation and all new electrical, plumbing and systems, so I wasn't too afraid of what we'd discover," Mr. Feldman said. "We made a pre emptive offer that was a little bit aggressive." The strategy worked, and they closed on the house for about 2.9 million that September. Then the couple toiled on the design for a year and a half, discovering in the process that they had different ideas about exactly what the house should become. "There was a debate about how modern to make it," said Mr. Feldman, who is a committed modernist, while his wife's aesthetic is a little more traditional. The new staircase at the center of the house is made from blackened steel and glass, and topped by skylights. Matthew Millman for The New York Times The biggest bone of contention, it turned out, was where to put the staircase. Like most homes of the period, this one had a staircase near the entrance. Mr. Feldman wanted to move the stairs toward the center of the house, where they could be illuminated with skylights. That way, the entire floor plan could be opened up, bringing in more light everywhere. "I had a hard time with that in an Edwardian house," Ms. Lougee said. "That set our project back several months. But eventually I came around, and I'm really glad I did." The new blackened steel and glass staircase is now one of her favorite features. "Once we worked out the stair," she said, "we were so relieved to have come to an agreement that we were both willing to compromise" on things like the furnishings, where they split the difference, blending modern and traditional pieces, from a sleek B B Italia sofa to antique bergeres. Mr. Feldman made several other significant changes to the house: He had the basement excavated so he could increase the ceiling there from six and a half feet to eight and a half feet. He converted the attic to a home office and put in a dormer. He added windows along the side of the house to let in more light. And he completely redesigned the back to accommodate an open kitchen and family room with French doors opening out to the garden, where he and Bernard Trainor, the founding principal of the landscape architecture firm Ground Studio, overhauled the yard, introducing a slope so the basement could have walkout access. Within the shell of the Edwardian structure, he also managed to create a 21st century space with enough sustainable materials and features to earn a LEED Platinum certification from the United States Green Building Council. Those features include a heat recovery ventilation system that provides fresh air while recycling heat; a hydronic radiant heating system that adds warmth underfoot and gets a boost from a roof mounted, solar hot water system; a large photovoltaic rooftop array that generates nearly as much electricity as the house consumes; and a Savant automation system that allows the couple to monitor energy capture and use. And to cut down on the amount of water they consume, Mr. Feldman installed a gray water collection system that filters and recycles water from showers, sinks and the laundry, using it for irrigation and after lengthy negotiations with the city's building inspector to gain permission flushing toilets. The contractors, Jeff King Company, completed construction on the five bedroom, 4,630 square foot home in about a year and a half, at a cost of roughly 650 a square foot, before the family moved in, in July 2014. The backyard has a firepit wrapped by a built in outdoor sofa. Matthew Millman for The New York Times Almost immediately, they felt it necessary to reveal some of the home's secrets to their new neighbors. "As soon as we moved in we had some bad drought years," Mr. Feldman said, "and we had this beautiful, lush garden, while everyone else was letting their lawns and gardens die. We had to put up signs that said, 'This is irrigated with recycled water,' so people wouldn't get mad at us." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Although "Another Day of Life" is coming to theaters from the animation distributor Gkids, it is in no way intended for children. Inspired by the book of the same title by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932 2007), the movie is a harrowing chronicle of his time covering the civil war in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, beginning in 1975. For ideological reasons, and because the country was rich in diamonds and oil, the conflict was drawn into Cold War geopolitics. The directors, Raul de la Fuente and Damian Nenow, tell the story mainly through motion capture animation, which is periodically punctuated by archival footage and present day interviews with survivors who knew Kapuscinski. Whatever the intent, the animation serves multiple purposes. It removes some of the visceral factor of seeing gunfire and bloodshed. (In the interviews about that period, the reporter Artur Queiroz , who accompanied Kapuscinski on some of his travels, speaks of seeing c orpses lining 40 or 50 kilometers of road.) The animation also allows for interludes of overt surrealism, complementing Kapuscinski's descriptions of the "confusao" of war (borrowing the Portuguese word for "confusion") . The celebrated Israeli animated feature "Waltz With Bashir," from 2008, took a similar approach, intermingling combat scenes and visual flights of fancy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
It's hard not to feel like a party crasher while watching the sloppy comedy "Wine Country," about a group of close friends on a getaway. You know the feeling: With a hopeful smile, you slide into a clubby, cheery gathering where revelers are grinning and regularly busting a gut, collectively riding the same giddy wave. You think you want in on the joke but then suddenly, desperately, you're looking for the nearest exit. Crammed with funny performers starting with Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch "Wine Country" looks like an easy, obvious win. Longtime friends, who decades earlier worked in the same pizzeria, travel to Napa, Calif., to celebrate a milestone birthday. Rebecca (Dratch) is about to turn 50, which has inspired the group celebration retreat. Abby Poehler, who also directed and helped come up with the story is the event's engineer and also the story's real fulcrum. She hasn't just hatched the itinerary, she's also created dossiers for her friends filled with precision timed commitments more suggestive of an armed invasion than a collegial reunion. The brisk opener is promising, with a series of quick introductions that sketch in each woman's identity and suggest the hurdle each will soon confront. Rebecca is a therapist with an inattentive husband; Naomi (Rudolph) is the overextended mother with no visible help. Abby is packing up her desk at work while making the final arrangements, so seems to have complications. The other friends played by Emily Spivey, Paula Pell and Ana Gasteyer also have identities and issues, most tinny or vague. And, unsurprisingly, Tina Fey pops in every so often as the owner of the McVilla that Abby rents, a sprawl that comes with its own driver and (inept) cook (Jason Schwartzman).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Rooms start at about 165 Canadian dollars (about 131 at 80 cents to the U.S. dollar). For her first hotel project, the Montreal property developer Marie Jeanne Rivard wanted to mix the coziness of homestays, the services of a hotel and the downtown feel of loft living. The result, open since last winter, is something new for Montreal: Twenty high ceilinged, clean lined rooms equipped like small apartments, complete with top end appliances, tableware and cutlery. Abstract photomontages of Montreal street life adorn the whitewashed walls. A sleek aesthetic extends through Boxotel's airy, poured concrete lobby and to 175B, a subterranean gallery showcasing Quebec and Canadian artists. On Boxotel's sixth floor, a tiny gym and sauna open to a sprawling outdoor terrace with panoramic downtown views. A reality TV star in Quebec she renovates and sells homes on the hit show "Flip a Fille" Ms. Rivard often checks guests in herself at Boxotel's tiny front desk, called "The Box Office." With shabby residential buildings nearby, Boxotel's block can feel bleak. But its Ontario Street location, a five minute stroll from buzzy Blvd. St Laurent to the east and the Quartiers des Spectacles zone of cultural attractions just south, makes Boxotel an ideal home base.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
From left, Matt Wilpers, Robin Arzon and Alex Toussaint at the Peloton studio in New York. Last year, Fred Klein spent a lot of time in group exercise classes in Manhattan, although replacing his love handles with rock hard obliques was not his objective. Mr. Klein is the chief content officer for Peloton Cycle, a boutique fitness studio. He was seeking instructors to poach and hire. For months Mr. Klein burned calories but came up empty in his talent search. No instructor had the qualities he was looking for. Then, at a rival studio, Flywheel Sports, he discovered Alex Toussaint. "Five minutes into the class, I knew it," Mr. Klein said in the dazzled tone a Hollywood casting agent might use to recall first meeting Denzel Washington. "I was, like, he's a really great Flywheel instructor. But also that voice. This guy could do commercial voice overs. What is he doing locked in a room with only 50 bikes?" Peloton started three years ago and has a single location in New York, on West 23rd Street in Chelsea. Riders take classes there, just as they would at any indoor cycling studio. But Peloton's main source of revenue comes from the black logo embossed stationary bikes it sells for 2,000 around the country. (The company says it has sold 80,000.) The physical studio, with cameras and lights placed amid the stationary bikes, is really the set where the company films classes, creating sleek videos that can be seen via live stream or downloaded on demand by Peloton bike owners for 39 a month. The instructors are encouraged to break the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera and talking to the at home riders, whose names and hometowns appear on a computer tablet affixed to their bikes and everyone else's. "Let's not think about it as a fitness facility with cameras," John Foley, a founder of Peloton and its chief executive, once told his staff. "Let's think about it as a television streaming facility filming fitness content." In a sense, each class taught is the show, with the 11 instructors as young, beautiful, racially diverse cast members: It's like "Real World: Peloton." If the Peloton cast has a leading woman, it's Robin Arzon, 35. She is the studio's head instructor and the company's vice president for fitness programming. She has, not incidentally, 86,000 followers on Instagram. One evening last month, Ms. Arzon arrived at the studio to lead a 6:30 class. As women and men changed into cycling shoes, Ms. Arzon swept by them and descended to a small basement dressing room. Sitting before a mirrored vanity like a Broadway actress, she sipped green juice from the gym's cafe and prepared her workout music. At the sound of a Lil Wayne remix by the D.J. Haterade, Ms. Arzon jumped up and started energetically dancing. "This drop is so sick! I just lose my mind," she said, overcome. A former lawyer, Ms. Arzon quit office life in 2012 to take a teaching job at a group fitness studio and build a coaching business as RobinNYC. None of that compares with what she is doing now for Peloton. "It's the difference between standing with a megaphone in Union Square and getting on the soundstage at the 'Today' show," she said. "You're up there on the stage, you obviously see the lights and the cameras and think, O.K., this is different," she added. "You're being counted down by a producer and you simultaneously have nearly 60 people in the room, and at home, 800 people sometimes." Ms. Arzon was dressed in a black spandex catsuit with maroon piping that she had worn to teach her afternoon class that day. It was part of her five piece capsule collection, which she helped design. The catsuit was carried in Peloton's boutique, before selling out. To not repeat outfits, she changed for her evening class into orange leggings, a black Peloton branded sports bra and an orange hat worn backward so it wouldn't cast a shadow across her face. "I almost always wear bright lipstick, too," said Ms. Arzon, who has discovered that bright colors pop on camera. "I don't tend to wear eye shadow because that would be a disaster waiting to happen. You'll look like a football player." Ms. Arzon runs 50 and 100 mile ultramarathons, and last year she published a motivational guide, "Shut Up and Run." After her afternoon class, she did a 10 mile sprint around the city. The evening class would be her third workout of the day. Though instructors care about their on camera appearance, fitness comes first. "It's not a dog and pony show," she said. When it was time to teach her 6:30 class, Ms. Arzon went upstairs to the studio to greet the live riders, then was cued in by a producer 3, 2, 1. The show began, and she gave an over the top performance, pounding her hand against the bike frame, cursing as she climbed imaginary mountains, barking out "20 more seconds!" to slackers, giving shout outs to home riders ("HP, I see you, baby, stay at the top"), dancing in the saddle to Kanye songs. Fame for instructors at studio franchises like SoulCycle is intense but tends to be hyperlocal. But Peloton's small cadre of instructors is reaching thousands of people across the world every week. For Peloton riders who live outside New York, of which there are tens of thousands, traveling to the city to take classes with favorite instructors is a special rite. Emma Stern of Ames, Iowa, bought a bike last fall. She used to live in Dallas and had enjoyed indoor cycling classes at Flywheel. Absent any similar boutique cycling studios in Ames, she went the Peloton route and says she loves it. She and her husband, Matthew, traveled from Iowa in late December to work out in the studio. "At first, there was definitely some shock and star struckness that we were taking Cody's class," Ms. Stern said, referring to Cody Rigsby. "Oh, my gosh. I've seen this person on TV."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times In a state lousy with world class waters the Yellowstone and the Gallatin, the Madison and the Ruby, the "Mighty Mo" and Norman Maclean's Big Blackfoot River the Smith River may be the river that Montanans love most. There is a good chance you have never heard of the Smith. The river lies far from Yellowstone's Technicolor excesses, in north central Montana, where the tourist maps don't point. It gathers itself in the Castle Mountains and flows north for 120 miles between the Big and Little Belt mountains, accumulating miles and grandeur as it cuts through limestone canyons and flows over brown trout and past black bears rooting in high meadows. A few miles south of Great Falls it merges with the Missouri River. The Smith is not the easiest river to float, which is one of its attractions. Between the boat launch at Camp Baker and the take out at Eden Bridge, 59 river miles downstream, there is no public entry or exit. You must surrender your outside life for the four or five days it takes to float down the Smith and give in to the river's moods and its rhythms. There is trouble on the Smith, however. A mining company has proposed a copper mine high in the Smith's watershed, not far from its major tributary. The mine's backers say the project would be a good neighbor, offering tax revenue and jobs. Opponents point to the state's devastating legacy of hard rock mining a legacy that includes dark touchstones like areas around the mining town of Butte and the downstream Clark Fork River, both now Superfund sites. They ask why Montanans should gamble with something so precious as the Smith. It is a question that is being asked in different ways around the nation. Even as many waterways have seen improved water quality in the last few decades, more than half are still considered impaired, according to the 2013 National Rivers and Streams Assessment. An ongoing challenge is degraded water quality from sources that include leaky septic systems and agricultural runoff, according to Ellen Gilinsky, senior adviser in the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water. And there are other threats. The Grand Canyon's Colorado River faces the prospect of a uranium mine and other development. A dam is proposed for the Gila River, New Mexico's last undammed river. In Alaska, a company wants to remove a portion of the salmon rich Chuitna River and replace it with the state's largest strip mine for coal, then rebuild the river habitat when mining is completed. As for the Smith, everyone agrees that it should not be harmed by the proposed copper mine. The question that no one can answer for certain is, Would it? But first, I needed to see a future hole in the ground. White Sulphur Springs, population 970, is a ranching town unburdened by stoplights at the foot of the Castle Mountains, 27 miles south of where boaters put in their rafts. The town has been in decline ever since the timber mill, a main source of jobs, was shuttered in the 1980s, residents say. Main Street is gaptoothed with empty storefronts. Jerry Zieg, vice president for exploration at Tintina Resources, a Vancouver, British Columbia, company, wants to turn around his hometown's fortunes. Tintina has proposed an underground mine to tap the nearby Johnny Lee Deposit, which is thought to contain more than 2 billion worth of copper. Tintina hopes to apply for a permit this fall. After state review the mine could open in early 2020. Once operating, the mine would employ about 200 people and perhaps spur other development. On a warm morning in May, I met up with Mr. Zieg, a 60 year old geologist who grew up on a ranch on the banks of the Smith. We drove outside of town, to the rolling green ranching country where the mine would appear. When the rock that holds copper is exposed to air and water, it often sets off a nasty chain reaction known as acid mine drainage leakage, which can kill waterways' insect and fish life. Mr. Zieg said the mine would use the latest techniques to prevent this drainage, including taking about half of the crushed waste rock created by the mining process, mixing it into a cement like paste and returning it to the tunnels, rendering it inert. The rest would be contained in a way yet to be determined, perhaps a tailings pond. Mr. Zieg also noted that the ore Tintina wants to remove is surrounded by limestone and dolomite that can help buffer any acid that's created. We drove on, past Sheep Creek, a major tributary of the Smith. Mr. Zieg scoffed at concerns that the mine, which would sit about one mile away, would reduce the creek's flow, or taint its water. "We can't screw up the water; we'd be shut down," he said, adding that he has no interest in soiling his home. We stopped the truck on a hilltop, and he pointed toward the river, hidden behind reclining hills. "In my mind this is going to be one of the more environmentally friendly mines in the world," he said. "The river should not even be an issue." The next morning the boat launch at Camp Baker was an Everest Base Camp chaos of preparation as boaters strapped dry bags and burly Yeti coolers to the frames of chubby river rafts and shoved off. "We're taking our friend on one last trip down the Smith," one man told me. I didn't know what he meant. Then he thumbed toward the container of ashes being lashed to the bow of a raft. "He loved the Smith River," Scott Seacat said of his friend, whose remains they were: Bruce Simon, a former Republican Montana state legislator. Mr. Simon's deathbed wish, Mr. Seacat said, was a final ride down the Smith. Once you get on the river, he said, "You'll understand." I did want to understand. So I had signed on to row downstream with a group of clients led by Joe Sowerby. Mr. Sowerby is the owner of Montana Flyfishing Connection, which specializes in higher end fly fishing float trips on several of Montana's marquee rivers. He has broad shoulders, straw colored hair and a large white cowboy hat to deflect the river's bright glare. I had sought out Mr. Sowerby not only because he is one of the largest of eight outfitters permitted to take clients down the Smith, but also because I'd heard he has thoughtful concerns about the mine proposal. Smith River State Park is a curiosity, a state park that contains few state lands. While the entire corridor from Camp Baker to Eden Bridge is considered a park, its shores are a patchwork of private ranches and national forest, with a few state lands sprinkled among them. Twenty eight campgrounds dot the shores of the river, which carries rafters through a mini tour of Montana's geography, from rolling ranchland to deep canyons to alpine meadows to prairie. Each day a maximum of just nine groups of up to 15 people are permitted to put in on the river. When floaters apply in winter for the lottery, they choose their preferred dates and then pray to Lady Luck. Mid June to early July is the peak time to float. Spring runoff has abated, Montana's fickle weather (usually) tempers and the fish mainly brown trout and rainbows are ravenous to feed on the healthy insect hatches of stoneflies, drakes and other aquatic bugs. Doubling the demand for the Smith is its short season: In a normal year the river is generally floatable from April only until the third week of July, when ranchers suck enough water from the river to irrigate alfalfa fields that it becomes too shallow to float. We pushed off in Mr. Sowerby's drift boat where Sheep Creek added its clear, cold voice to the tea colored Smith. Around us, high ranching country was stubbled with pines that pointed to a blue sky. Bank swallows were eating the last clumsy salmonflies over the river. Twenty minutes after pushing away from the bank, the chaos of activity was gone. We drifted completely alone. As he languidly rowed, Mr. Sowerby told his story: A Maine boy, he began to visit Montana with his father to hunt when he was young. He got his first job on the Smith at age 19 rowing a leaky cargo boat for a crusty old outfitter. "It was a formative moment, to be exposed to that kind of river trip at that age," he said. He has worked on the river every year since. Mr. Sowerby, 42, guessed he has been down the river 110 times. He bought out another outfitter in 2001 and started his own company. "It's still my favorite river in the state," he said. I pulled out my fly rod. The Smith is rated a "red ribbon" river by the state for its high value mix of quality recreation, animal habitat and trout fishing. The only downside for a fisherman? The catching can be so good, an angler can forget to lift his head, and miss long stretches of scrapbook views. Brought to the net, the fish was gorgeous 18 inches long, with a brownie's polka dots and a brush of blue black on its cheeks like an oil stain. It was a good start. As we drifted northward the landscape slowly knitted itself together. Low yellow limestone cliffs began to appear, half dressed in dark pines and spattered with red lichen. Inevitably talk drifted to the mine. "It's the questions that they can't answer that bother me," Mr. Sowerby said. What happens if caring locals like Jerry Zieg get pushed out of the company? he wondered. (An Australian mining company, Sandfire Resources, now owns 36 percent of the project.) What if they eventually want to expand the mine further? What if an accident happens? What if they can't control the acid drainage? Skepticism is not unwarranted. No state knows both mining's allure and its aftermath like Montana, a state so intertwined with mining that Helena, the state capital, rose atop a metals strike, and Montana's license plates still say "The Treasure State." But mining has left a horrific legacy. Today the state has thousands of abandoned hard rock sites. The names of many former mines and locations have become an ominous shorthand for all that can go wrong. Butte. Beal Mountain. Mike Horse. The disastrous Zortman Landusky gold mine, whose pollution was so severe that it spurred Montana voters to approve the nation's first statewide ban on cyanide mining. We shoved off the next morning to the empty belly rumble of distant thunder and dodged sprinkles all day long; encounters with Montana's ever changing meteorology from hot sun to snow are de rigueur for a trip on the Smith in spring. With each mile the river cut deeper through a limestone canyon that is the record of an ancient sea bottom. We rowed back through time itself, until the eons stacked 1,000 feet above us and fossils of clams sat within reach on the shore. Each turn of the river cut a new amphitheater of stone. From beneath another limestone undercut I teased a 19 inch brownie from its lair and was happy the rest of the day. Late in the afternoon we pulled to shore near "canyon depth," the deepest part of the Smith in its limestone bed. There we met Willie Rahr, whose family owns 3,000 acres along the river. We headed with Mr. Rahr to the canyon's rim and took in one of the best views in Montana, across the snaking bends of the Smith. "This is my favorite day of the trip," Mr. Sowerby said on the morning of Day 4. He brings a lot of people down this river who come from high stress jobs, he said. They take days to unclench, unplug. But by Day 4 "people fall into a sense of relaxation," he said. They surrender to ''river time.'' After River Depth, the high walls of the canyon gradually stepped back from the water still present but a bit more aloof, replaced by grassy meadows that rolled down to the water's edge. Sometimes, elk forage here. The Smith is a blend of many scenes, just like Montana: One moment a rafter feels as if he's in a depthless wilderness where he might vanish forever. Round another bend and the scene feels gentle, almost pastoral. A few minutes later, something like the Heaven on Earth Ranch appears, with its nine hole pitch n putt golf course. We drifted on. It was not a day of places but of colors: pale yellow limestone walls; dark pines pointing to blue skies where white clouds steadily coagulated into black moods before going their separate ways; pink woods' rose and primrose on the banks. Caves and cliff walls along the Smith are home to dozens of Native American pictographs red hand prints, figures with ears like bunnies and we pulled to shore and scrambled in search of them. A thunderstorm that had doubled the river's volume and turned its tea colored waters a Frappuccino brown finally began to recede, and when we stepped to shore with fly rods in hand to fish once more, the smell of wild mint rose underfoot: river aromatherapy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
If you haven't seen the lawyer Gloria Allred on television a distinct impossibility she now appears on movie screens in "Seeing Allred," a documentary that's remarkably engaging despite treating its rough and tumble hero with kid gloves. Ms. Allred, who specializes in women's rights cases, has represented many of those who have accused influential men (including Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski) of sexual assault, discrimination or other crimes. Though she also handles lower profile cases, she's best known for sitting with clients behind banks of microphones, or standing in front of cameras at protests and marches. Such images have given her a reputation as a grandstander and media manipulator. She counters that her methods hold powerful figures accountable and provide their often silenced victims with a voice, "even if they can't have justice in the conventional setting of a court of law."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Six trustees, among them the prominent designer David Rockwell, have resigned from the board of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to protest the removal of the museum's director, Caroline Baumann, following an investigation into issues including her 2018 wedding. Ms. Baumann was forced to resign on Feb. 7 after an investigation by the Smithsonian's inspector general into how Ms. Baumann procured her dress and the venue for the ceremony. It was unclear whether there were additional allegations. According to two people familiar with the Smithsonian's decision making, the inspector general found the appearance of a conflict of interest, but several board members said they believed the punishment was unwarranted. "I cannot stay on the board and just shrug my shoulders and move on," Ms. Zankel wrote. The museum's board, which included 27 people before the resignations, according to the Cooper Hewitt website, serves in an advisory role. Several trustees had asked Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Smithsonian's secretary and top official, to reconsider his decision and reinstate Ms. Baumann. Those trustees have argued that they should have been consulted before he made his decision and that their support of Ms. Baumann's performance should have been considered. "We all serve on the board because we share the principles of the institution and the values of its leadership," Mr. Rockwell said in his letter of resignation. "I cannot in good conscience continue on the board given how Caroline's dismissal was handled." The Smithsonian, which has declined to discuss the reasons for Ms. Baumann's dismissal, said it regretted the resignations. "We are sorry to hear this," said Linda St. Thomas, a spokeswoman, "but it is not unexpected as some board members indicated they did not support the decision." Though their power over museum operations is limited, the defection of a critical mass of board members could hurt the Cooper Hewitt's finances. It receives about half of the support, as a percentage of its budget, that the federal government gives the Smithsonian's other museums. As a result, the Cooper Hewitt relies more heavily on donations, including from board members like Ms. Zankel, a prominent philanthropist. It is the only Smithsonian museum to charge for admission. Another donor, Arlene Hirst, a design journalist who is not on the board, said she would remove the museum from her will. "I have willed a substantial amount of money to the museum not in the same league as the trustees, but a lot for me and I am angry enough at these trumped up charges to change the bequest," Ms. Hirst said. At the same time, a number of trustees have decided not to resign, even if they supported Ms. Baumann. "I think I can do more by staying on board and working for resolution," said the interior designer Agnes C. Bourne, a vice president of the board. Ms. Baumann, 53, had worked at the Cooper Hewitt since 2001 and was named director in 2013. She has not commented on her departure. The investigation into her conduct prompted by an unidentified staff member's complaint focused on her wedding in September 2018. The inspector general looked into the discrepancy between the 750 Ms. Baumann paid for her wedding dress and the 3,000 starting price for gowns listed on the website of the designer, Samantha Sleeper. Ms. Sleeper said that agents from the inspector general had asked her whether Ms. Baumann had promised to promote her work in exchange for a discount. Ms. Sleeper said that the price was fair because the dress was relatively simple and not a traditional wedding gown, and that Ms. Baumann had not promised any favors. The Smithsonian also took issue with the location of the ceremony at a property affiliated with a nonprofit LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, N.Y. which has a long association with the Cooper Hewitt. Ms. Baumann was not charged a fee for the wedding space, and she had allowed the nonprofit use of the Cooper Hewitt conference room, without charge, for board meetings. The Smithsonian, which was created by Congress and is partly funded by the federal government, has a conflict of interest policy that says "employees must not engage in private or personal activities that might conflict, or appear to conflict, with Smithsonian interests, such as using Smithsonian employment for private gain" or "giving preferential treatment to any person or company for any reason." In her resignation letter, Ms. Zankel wrote that "to say the punishment does not fit the crime is an understatement." She also asked whether there could be "a touch of misogyny here." "Can you imagine all this brouhaha about a dress and a wedding directed toward a man in the same position?" she wrote. "I think not." Along with Ms. Zankel, those who resigned from the board were Mr. Rockwell; Jon Kamen, the founding chairman and chief executive of RadicalMedia, a production company; Francine S. Kittredge, the founder of the Neuberger Berman Foundation, which helps at risk youth; Avi N. Reichental, a pioneer in 3 D printing; and the author Kurt Andersen. "I joined Cooper Hewitt because of Caroline's inspiring, transformative, visionary and infectious leadership," Mr. Reichental wrote in his resignation letter. "She is a kindred spirit that continues to remind me and rekindle in me the importance of design, creating and making in every part of our lives. "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Apple has taken another step toward becoming a power in the entertainment business by scooping up the rights for a TV project from Damien Chazelle, the Oscar winning writer and director of "La La Land," the unlikely critical and box office hit from 2016. The tech giant announced the new series on Thursday. It marks the latest television entry from Mr. Chazelle, who signed a deal with Netflix in September to make "The Eddy," an eight episode musical series set in Paris. Apple said that Mr. Chazelle would direct and write each episode of the new series' first season. His involvement in the Netflix show has him directing only its first two episodes. Another difference from the Netflix deal: Apple is being mum on the details. How many episodes will it be?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Susan Orlean, the New Yorker writer and book author, is currently on a five month, North American zigzag to promote "The Library Book," her newest best seller. And in between speaking engagements while she is idling in hotels or awaiting delayed flights she is teaching herself to play the ukulele, strumming under the tutelage of YouTube videos and ukulele apps. Her repertoire already includes the Grateful Dead's "Uncle John's Band" and "Ho Hey," by The Lumineers. "I'm not a great relaxer," she said over breakfast in a midtown Manhattan hotel on a late November morning, dismantling the impressive heap of pancakes that had been placed in front of her. "The Library Book" weaves together the stories of the 1986 arson fire of the Los Angeles Library, the history of libraries and Ms. Orlean's personal connection to these institutions. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Michael Lewis wrote, "Susan Orlean has once again found rich material where no one else has bothered to look for it." Ms. Orlean is also the author of "Rin Tin Tin," a biography of the canine movie star, and "The Orchid Thief." As Ms. Orlean travels to cities like Seattle and Dallas, she has shared on her Twitter feed (309,000 followers at last count) the highs and lows of months spent on the road. "Exit row with no one in the middle seat. In a past life I must have done something good," she wrote one day. "Lemme tell you, book tours aren't for sissies," she wrote two days before. Over an unhurried breakfast, Ms. Orlean , who, when she is not on the road, lives in Los Angeles with her husband, John Gillespie, and their son, discussed her travel strategies for doing laundry, staying calm during takeoff and the "transformational" foot rest she has discovered. This conversation has been edited for space and clarity. You travel. Do you enjoy it? I went through a period where I became afraid to fly. I was about to begin my "Orchid Thief" book tour and I thought, "I have to deal with this." So I went to a hypnotist. The first time I flew after I had gone through hypnotherapy as the plane was taking off, which had always been the moment I would be gripping the seat and nearly tearing it off the body of the plane I turned to my husband and said, "I think I'm going to get a pilot's license." And he said to me, "What did that guy do to you?" What do you bring with you on a fight? Noise canceling headphones. And this foot sling I just got, which is transformational. You attach it on your tray table and it becomes a foot rest. I can't recommend it enough. How do you pass the time on a flight? Sometimes I'll do tasks that are usually so tedious that I would never be able to do it at home. I'll spend an hour going through my contact list and update it. There is a lot of stuff I do on planes that I don't do anywhere else. I play this little silly game on my phone called "Bejeweled" and that I have never, ever, ever done on the Earth's surface. Similarly, I have never eaten a Biscoff cookie except at 35,000 feet. My husband taught me that bag checking is the work of the devil. How do you pack for a long trip using only a carry on? I have one outfit that I wear for all my public events, a backup in case anything should happen. Then I pack one pair of jeans and two tops. I hand wash my lingerie. That's the only challenge. If you only have one day in a particular city, stuff doesn't have time to dry. I'm always happy to be somewhere beautiful, but I'm always much more interested in a place where there is something cultural to do. It's the reporter in me. I think I do what I do professionally because it's just a reflection of the way I am in the world anyway. The way I travel for work is not that different from the way I travel for leisure. When you are on a book tour, do you ever get to see the places you are visiting? Yes. I had a few extra hours in Tulsa and so I got a Bird Scooter and I scooted around downtown and I discovered to my amazement that Tulsa has a beautiful collection of Art Deco buildings. I never would have imagined it and it was really one of the highlights of my whole trip. There was a church there called the Boston Avenue Church. I couldn't get into it, which drove me crazy and I'm determined to go back. It's an absolutely stunning building, Art Deco, and it turns out if has a really interesting history. It had always been attributed to this male architect, and years and years and years later it turned out it was designed by a woman. I thought, "What a great story." I feel as though we are going to read about this church in a future issue of The New Yorker. I know! It really is amazing. How many women architects were there in the 1920s? The story of how did it end up finally being attributed to her, I don't know. Yet. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Phylicia Rashad, center, as Titania in the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." For a long time after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cantor Fitzgerald curtailed corporate outings. When I arrived as a lawyer in 2002, things were still too raw, busy and fraught. But in 2003, our longtime outside lawyer invited our general counsel, my boss, to attend an event. He picked "Henry V" at Shakespeare in the Park. (I was always charmed by that decision. He could have gone to the U.S. Open, but he chose a free play.) The next year, those two lawyers invited their legal staffs. I organized 20 boxed dinners under a Central Park oak and smuggled in wine. And over the years I have somehow ended up producer and chief cheerleader for what has become our annual Shakespeare in the Park picnic. I started crafting silly invitations quoting the Bard. Soon we included the accounting, tax and human resources departments, and a few investment bankers. Let the record reflect that we always had a park permit. Over the years, the picnic grew. To an outsider, it appeared a routine summer outing. But it wasn't. Those who attended for years saw evidence of Cantor's renewal, perseverance and support of culture in a city that embraced us during our darkest hour. These growing gatherings felt magical and miraculous. For others, our spot near King Jagiello was just a lovely party venue. In 2008, we had to decide between the season's two shows, "Hair" and "Hamlet." Who could manage that? Cantor became a corporate supporter for both shows beginning that year. We allowed plus ones. Some co workers or guests attended their first Shakespeare play. Many, like me, brought our children. Box dinners were swapped for a Mexican restaurant searing chicken tinga under that same tree. Later, expert caterers toted chafing dishes of quesadillas, flatbreads and vegan meals. Cantor's chairman and his sister always attended. Ditto that outside lawyer, now retired. We worried constantly about rain. I bagged leftover s'mores, brownies and churros and passed them around at intermission just like my grandmother Mae in Louisville. Despite weeks of counting, we often had leftover sponsor seats. Some colleagues preferred to keep picnicking. Their tickets in hand, I headed to the Delacorte Theater for my favorite part of the evening sharing our bounty with strangers. Before the show, I scouted for targets. I could usually spot a serious theater lover on a bench soaking up the preshow bustle. I was partial to older couples. Maybe I was searching for my parents, now gone. But I tried to be democratic, sometimes selecting tourists, teenagers or families with children. To persuade those unfamiliar with Shakespeare in the Park to attend, I occasionally name dropped the boldface stars playing workaday roles, unfazed by the rigor, mosquitoes and humidity. The recipients' gratitude enchanted me. I dropped any remaining seats at the standby line. About 100 of us planned to attend "Richard II" and "As You Like It" this summer, before the pandemic upended Shakespeare, too. Alas, I really needed a frolic. Let me warm up my glue gun and craft flower headdresses as I did before "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Paging Jonathan Groff to hand me a daisy as he did during "Hair." I will most miss the moment when the sky turns amber and the ushers issue last call. That's when I would stop organizing and glide into my familiar seat. The atmosphere would be electric as I waited for a tempest to brew or lovers to spat. Then there lights would flood the set at a theater in Central Park, where this Kentucky girl always felt like a New Yorker. And where a New York company came to feel a little more whole. How now, oh Public Theater? Good morrow. Ho, we will see you hence. Caroline Koster is a New York City lawyer. She is writing a book about finding common ground, recipes and lessons from her Appalachian family reunion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The California Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Yelp, the local search and reviews site, did not need to remove negative comments posted by a user, in a case closely watched by the industry for its implications for online free speech. In a 4 to 3 opinion, the court said that federal law protected internet companies from liability for statements written by others. The decision to remove posts is at the company's discretion, the court said. Forcing a site to remove user generated posts "can impose substantial burdens" on the online company, Chief Justice Tani Cantil Sakauye wrote in the majority opinion. "Even if it would be mechanically simple to implement such an order, compliance still could interfere with and undermine the viability of an online platform." The role of moderating speech on online platforms has become a hotly contested topic, as the reach and influence of companies like Facebook and Google have grown. But the companies have long argued that the companies are not liable for posts published by others on their platform.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
From left, Sterling Jackson, Leo Jones, Aisa Blue Davis, Eddie Eads, Lyles Doughty and Tyrieck Davis Newton at the "Million Man March" in Columbia, S.C. on June 14. Thousands marched from the Five Points district to the statehouse.Credit...Sean Rayford for The New York Times From left, Sterling Jackson, Leo Jones, Aisa Blue Davis, Eddie Eads, Lyles Doughty and Tyrieck Davis Newton at the "Million Man March" in Columbia, S.C. on June 14. Thousands marched from the Five Points district to the statehouse. Amid all the marches and protests for social justice that took place over the weekend, as they have every day since George Floyd was killed while in police custody on May 25, two stood out: the thousands dressed in white who thronged Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn on Sunday in support of black trans lives; and, farther south, the thousands gathered in Columbia, S.C., "fully adorned in their Sunday best," according to one of the organizers of that city's Million Man March for racial justice. They wore suits in bright red, shell pink, dove gray and burgundy; jewel toned ties and plaid bow ties; striped button up shirts and crisp white ones. Sundresses and tulle dresses and sleeveless silk tops. And they were gussied up on purpose. From its inception, the march organizers had specified: "Come in dress attire please." The point being, said Leo Jones, who came up with the idea for Columbia's Million Man March, to "reframe the narrative and build a sense of joy in our community to see us looking so well, and marching with such pride." But the current moment, in part because of its extraordinary reach and multiracial, multinational dimensions, as well as the fact it has been organized largely over social media without a strategic centralized body, has been notably diffuse. As Robin Givhan wrote in The Washington Post, "There's no cohesion in the look of the marching multitudes." They have been resplendent in the uniform of no uniform. Richard Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School focused on civil rights and the author of the upcoming "Dress Codes: Crimes of Fashion and Laws of Attire," noted that "there's a tension in this moment reflected in questions around dress code, and to what extent do we want to tear down the system or to what extent do we want to reform it." Yet, said Eddie M. Eades Jr., another organizer of the South Carolina event, "iconography matters." And what both the march in Brooklyn and the march in South Carolina suggest is that the iconography of the current upheaval is beginning to evolve and coalesce. To be fair, against the backdrop of everything goes activism, attempts to pantomime a message through clothes can seem risible. This was never more true than when members of the House of Representatives took a knee amid the marble walls of Emancipation Hall to introduce the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 wearing matching kente cloth stoles provided by the Congressional Black Caucus. The impulse was clearly genuine, and with precedent in the halls of government. Caucus members wore a similar accessory at the State of the Union in 2018 in silent visual protest against President Trump's offensive statements about African countries, and the white suits now regularly worn by congresswomen to send a message are another example of unity through clothing that has been notably effective. But this time it fell flat. In the end it connected not to the heritage of the civil rights movement but rather to a different political tradition: the lawmaker in cultural costume. And like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's heavily embroidered gold sherwani worn on a state trip to India, which elicited comparisons to a bad Bollywood star, or the class photos taken during the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation forum featuring world leaders in local dress that came to be known as "silly shirts," the gesture was widely mocked. If you are going to use clothing to underscore a message, you'd better understand exactly what message you are sending. As the social justice movement enters its second phase, however, segueing from an eruption of sheer anguish and frustration to more specific demands and policy changes, the look is beginning to change, too. The organizers of the South Carolina march specifically used fashion to communicate a set of values and implicit references. Their aim was to connect to the civil rights leaders of the past and pay them homage; to repudiate old racial stereotypes and attempts by some media outlets and the far right to paint them as antifa (a movement that has its own all black dress code); to offer a silent riposte to the only other uniform otherwise on view: that of the National Guard and the police. Indeed, the militaristic look of law enforcement style has been a potent theme in the last few weeks, functioning as a perhaps unintended symbol of much of what the protests are about, including aggression against civilians and the use of unnecessary force. "I suspect it has inspired some of the outpouring of support in other countries that may not have our racial problems, but have their own history of authoritarianism," Mr. Ford said. "They recognize that image and what it represents." The Columbia march was not the first gathering to adopt more formal dress. On June 4, a demonstration in remembrance of George Floyd in Harlem was characterized by sharply tailored suits and ties in bright colors and ankara prints, worn both as a mark of respect for the life of the man they were honoring and to shape public understanding. But the South Carolina event took the idea a step further, using clothing not just to influence perception but also to reflect what the organizers see as a more specific agenda, which includes voter registration, census taking and singleness of principle. Columbia, which is about 40 percent African American, experienced its own shooting on April 8 when police killed a 17 year old, Joshua Dariandre Ruffin, a case currently being reviewed by local prosecutors. "For us this was a passing of the baton moment and a time to stand together in a nonmilitaristic way," Mr. Eades said. The idea began, said Mr. Jones, 27, the founder of a media agency, when he saw how a protest in Columbia on May 30 was covered by the media, with heavy emphasis on the riots at the end, conflating the abuses of a few with the actions and pain of the many. Perhaps this is why the idea of adopting a dressed up march dress code is spreading, even as summer and higher temperatures loom. Mr. Jackson said he and his fellow organizers have had inquiries about creating similar marches from Charlotte, N.C.; Richmond, Va; and Charleston, S.C. "I hope it does catch on," said Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin of Columbia, who spoke on Sunday. "I think optics like this will help move the ball down the field." To a point, Mr. Eades said, that it is "in the history books one day, and a young person may see it, as I once saw images from the civil rights movement, and say: 'This is who we are, and who we were.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
BRUSSELS Europeans have never been wild about the European Union. With the region sapped by the euro crisis, confidence in the institution and the benefits it was supposed to provide is flagging faster and further than ever before, according to an influential opinion survey released Monday. The results of an annual survey by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, show a deepening disillusionment with the union in major member countries. The results of the survey suggest that more citizens than ever could end up opposing the transfer of more power to European Union institutions that may be vital for transforming the euro into a viable currency over the long term. "The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis," according to a report that Pew published with the survey results. The title of the report summed it up: "The New Sick Man of Europe: the European Union." The poll pointedly noted that, "No European country is becoming more dispirited and disillusioned faster than France." Last year, 60 percent of the French surveyed said they had a favorable impression of the European Union. This year only 41 percent did, a decline of 19 percentage points that was the biggest annual drop among the countries surveyed. The results corresponded to some degree to the health of a nation's economy. Only Greeks and Italians professed less belief in the benefits of economic union than the French, according to Pew. In Germany, 60 percent held a favorable impression of the union. That could have everything to do with the listless economy in France, which is on the verge of joining much of Southern Europe in recession and has an unemployment rate of 11 percent. The German economy has fared better and has a relatively low unemployment rate of 5.4 percent. "French and the Germans differ so greatly over the challenges facing their economies that they look as if they live on different continents, not within a single European market," the authors of the Pew report wrote. As a result, the "French look less like Germans and a lot more like the Spanish, the Italians and the Greeks." The gloomy view is understandable given the economic crisis in Europe. "The limits of the European Union institutional architecture are perceived more directly by the citizens now," said Enzo Moavero Milanesi, Italy's minister for European affairs, in an interview. "They have always been known, but citizens expected a more rapid and efficient response to the crisis and ended up complaining about the lengthy procedures, the many meetings, the difficult discussions. "But it's a paradox," said Mr. Milanesi. "The E.U. has made great steps toward further integration and a strengthened monetary union. We even started discussing forms of possible political union, but people are still disappointed." One of the smallest declines in sentiment two percentage points, to 43 percent was in Britain. But the economic union has never been popular there. "We should try and renegotiate our relationship with the European Union," said William Drake, co founder of the investment advisory firm Lord North Street in London, expressing an opinion shared by many in his country. He added that many regulations were "not being properly discussed and debated by our own democratically elected Parliament. It sort of feels like we don't rule our own country anymore." Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. The polls were conducted during March in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic, by telephone or in person, with between 700 and 1,100 adults in each country. Each poll has a margin of sampling error of either three or four percentage points. Many opinions in Greece and Italy were harsher. One Italian interviewed Monday, Anna Nardi, said her country's high debt and economic recession indicated that Italy had "lost out" so far as a member of the union. "But now there are no alternatives," said Ms. Nardi, who is co chief executive, with her sister, of an outdoor furniture factory in Vicenza, which exports more than half of its goods to other countries in the union. The trouble, she said, was her own country's poor track record in sticking to laws and rules agreed to in Brussels. "The E.U. says do 'X' and you've got Germany, which applies it 1,000 percent, while countries like Italy or Spain try to find loopholes so that they can get around the issue," she said. "These discrepancies have to be overcome." Among the French, the Pew survey found a reluctance to provide financial assistance to other member states in trouble. "Since the euro, everything has all just gotten more expensive," Eric Holenreith, a 37 year old maintenance worker for the city of Paris, said Monday in an interview. "We were already overtaxed and now we are sending all this money to Brussels and to help the people in Greece or Spain or wherever," Mr. Holenreith said. "But now these people have no work because of the crisis and they are coming here looking for jobs. It has me worried because there are already not enough jobs for the French." One surprise in the Pew findings is that the German public might not be as opposed to providing financial aid to other European countries as the country's policy makers often suggest. Since the Greek debt crisis exploded three years ago, lawmakers in creditor nations like Germany have warned that their own taxpayers will not accept the mounting costs of bailouts. But among the richer nations surveyed, the Germans were most likely to be willing to extend such aid, though it was with the support of only 52 percent of the Pew respondents. And only in Germany among the countries surveyed did at least half the public say they supported giving more power to Brussels to deal with the economic crisis. The survey "contradicts oft repeated narratives about the Germans: that they are paranoid about inflation, disinclined to bail out their fellow Europeans and debt obsessed," the report said. That result could buoy some Europeans' hopes that after national elections in Germany in September the government could move more swiftly to adopt policies letting the country share more financial risks with other Union members, a step that many economists regard as the only way to overcome the crisis. In Germany, support for the euro remains strong, in part because the single currency helps Germany's export oriented economy. But there is also concern about the cost of the euro zone crisis and the lack of a strong system to ensure fiscal discipline among euro zone countries. "I am in favor of the euro if we get to fix its problems," Ulf Mark Schneider, chief executive of Fresenius, a health care company listed on Germany's blue chip DAX index, said Monday by e mail. "Ever larger bailouts or lower interest rates will not get the job done, structural reforms are needed. The core problem of the euro is that monetary policy is fully harmonized and fiscal policy is not." Mr. Schneider said the euro zone needed a better system for making decisions, rather than the ad hoc crisis management that existed now.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
On the second day of Bill Cosby's retrial on sexual assault charges his defense team told the jury that his encounter with Andrea Constand had been consensual. NORRISTOWN, Pa. Bill Cosby's lawyers began a combative defense of the entertainer at his retrial on sexual assault charges here Tuesday, portraying Mr. Cosby as the lonely victim of a desperate "con artist" with financial problems who was steadily working her famous mark for a big payday. Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., one of Mr. Cosby's lawyers, shredded any sense that the defense would be cowed by the MeToo moment. He presented Mr. Cosby's accuser, Andrea Constand, in his opening remarks to the jury as a willful, greedy woman who ran a "pyramid scheme" and took advantage of a man who had lost a son. "You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, 'What does she want from Bill Cosby?' And you already know the answer: 'Money, money and lots more money,'" he said. "She has a history of financial problems until she hits the jackpot with Bill Cosby," he added. Ms. Constand, 44, will present her very different version of events when she takes the stand in coming days. She has accused Mr. Cosby, now 80, of befriending her, winning her trust and plying her with gifts before finally drugging and sexually abusing her at his home near Philadelphia in 2004 when she was an employee of Temple University, his alma mater. Her account will be accompanied by testimony from five other women who say Mr. Cosby also drugged and sexually abused them, accusations so similar to Ms. Constand's that prosecutors says they demonstrate a predator's signature pattern of assault. One of the five, a former aspiring actress, Heidi Thomas, 58, told the jury Tuesday that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted her in 1984 at a house near Reno, Nev., where he had invited her over for acting lessons. She was 24. He was 46. Ms. Thomas, now a private music teacher, calmly recounted how "Mr. C," as she referred to him, asked her to perform acting roles, including that of an intoxicated person and gave her a glass of white wine. "He said, 'OK this is a prop. So sip on it,'" she said. "'Sip on it and see if you can relax and see if you can get more into the character."' After one sip, she said she lost consciousness and had only the barest of memories of the next few days including a moment when she woke up on a bed. "I have my clothes on and he did not," she said. "I was lying down and he was forcing himself in my mouth." She said she couldn't remember the flight home, didn't tell her agents or her parents what had happened and later flew to meet Mr. Cosby in St. Louis to question him about what had occurred. "I felt I must have said something that was misunderstood," she said, but indicated she was never able to talk to him alone. On cross examination, Mr. Cosby's lawyer, Kathleen Bliss, said Ms. Thomas was inconsistent in her accounts to police about when she was contacted by Mr. Cosby to fly to Reno. "If you said before in an interview with police you were contacted in April, you were wrong," Ms. Bliss said. In Mr. Cosby's first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Ms. Constand's. That trial, also at the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, ended with a hung jury. "He was lonely and troubled and he made a terrible mistake confiding in her what was going on in his life," Mr. Mesereau said. The defense plans to call as a witness a Temple University academic adviser who, Mr. Mesereau said, would testify that Ms. Constand told her several years ago that she could make money by falsely claiming she had been molested by a prominent person. The adviser, Marguerite Jackson, 56, was not allowed to speak at the first trial after Ms. Constand testified that she did not know her. But the defense has since brought forward two former Temple colleagues of Ms. Constand who said she and Ms. Jackson did know each other. Ms. Constand first reported an assault to the police in 2005, a year after her encounter with Mr. Cosby. When prosecutors declined to bring charges, she brought a lawsuit against him. Prosecutors in Montgomery County filed the current charges after reopening the investigation in 2015. On Monday, the opening day of the trial, prosecutors revealed that Mr. Cosby had paid Ms. Constand 3.38 million as part of a confidential settlement of the lawsuit in 2006. The amount had never been disclosed publicly, but Mr. Cosby agreed during pretrial discussions to reveal it. The defense argued that the large payment is not an admission of wrongdoing on Mr. Cosby's part, but evidence of Ms. Constand's financial incentive in pursuing charges against him, a perspective prosecutors vehemently deny. A lawyer who represented Ms. Constand in the civil case, Dolores M. Troiani, rejected Mr. Mesereau's characterization of her client, calling it a "disgrace" that the legal system permits such defenses which, she said, deter women from coming forward to report sexual assault.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Say it this time with feeling: The Knicks have lots to look forward to this coming season a stable management structure, talented young players to build around and a respected coach. OK, we said that last year, too. And the Knicks ended up among the worst teams in the league again. They cleaned house with most of management and fired their respected coach. So is there good reason to actually be bullish on the Knicks? Yes, with Patrick Ewing size caveats. The Knicks' basketball leadership, led by team President Leon Rose, General Manager Scott Perry (a holdover from last year) and Coach Tom Thibodeau, has crucial decisions to make this off season. The team pretty much has a blank slate, with lots of cap flexibility, few contracts beyond 2021 and some intriguing trade pieces. Of course, every team has important considerations. But for the Knicks, a poor trade, draft pick or free agent signing will hamper the team's credibility at a time when impatient fans are already tuning out. (Knicks attendance has declined steadily since 2016.) The team has not made the playoffs since 2013 and hasn't won a championship since "All In The Family" was in its prime. Free agency officially begins on Nov. 20, two days after the draft, where the Knicks, as a result of an unlucky lottery, will draft eighth. Right now, the Knicks do not have a single player who can be considered a surefire contributor to a championship team. This isn't ideal, but it's not terrible, either. It means the Knicks aren't closely tied to anyone, allowing for greater flexibility when it comes to trades. The closest to a cornerstone is RJ Barrett, who was drafted third in 2019. His rookie year was inconsistent, as he averaged 14.3 points, 5 rebounds and 2.6 assists while shooting about 40 percent. He did not make either of the two All N.B.A. rookie teams, but showed flashes of star potential. Here is a look at what the Knicks might be able to accomplish this off season. How much cap space do the Knicks have? A lot, and maybe even more than they expect. The N.B.A. announced this week that the league salary cap would be 109.1 million and the luxury tax level would be 132.6 million. The Knicks have approximately 82 million tied up in salary right now, not including their first round draft picks, leaving them as one of the few teams with substantial cap space (roughly between 20 million and 30 million). This is enough to acquire a player who commands a maximum level contract, either through trade or free agency. And that 82 million number is flexible, depending on what contracts the Knicks choose to guarantee next year. Surely some of that cap space will be used on the Knicks' current players. The Knicks have several players who are either under a team option or non guaranteed contracts for next season. They have team options on Bobby Portis's 15 million contract and on Theo Pinson's, which is slightly less than 2 million. Maurice Harkless and Damyean Dotson are both unrestricted free agents. Other players, like Elfrid Payton, Reggie Bullock, Wayne Ellington and Taj Gibson, have only a small portion of their contracts about 1 million guaranteed for next season. Bet on few, if any, of these players returning next season. (Gibson might return at a lesser salary, given his history with Thibodeau with the Bulls.) Aside from the eighth pick, the Knicks will pick again in the first round at No. 27, and again at No. 38 over all in the second round. They also have a bevy of future picks to offer in trade talks. This sounds promising. What do the Knicks need? Um, everything? The team needs more consistent playmaking, shooting and defense. That's mean. Surely, they have some reason for optimism beyond players they might get. The 22 year old Mitchell Robinson made some strides last season. He led the league in field goal percentage (74.2 percent) and remained an excellent defensive presence around the rim. The knock on him is he gets into foul trouble, which actually improved last year. He's also not much of an offensive threat beyond dunking. Robinson is entering the last year of his rookie contract, so don't be surprised if extension talks heat up soon. Other young players like Kevin Knox, Frank Ntilikina and Dennis Smith Jr. have just not shown any sort of meaningful consistency. So what should the Knicks do? That isn't something that owner James Dolan wants to hear, but this season will almost assuredly be a bridge year without a trip to the playoffs. In theory, this campaign will be more about installing good habits on the floor than wins and losses. It'll be about development and seeing whether any of the Knicks' young players are worth keeping long term. Do the Knicks have enough flexibility to sign a maximum contract superstar? Yes. Maybe even two. Should they? Absolutely not. This is a much different off season than last year, when stars like Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant were on the market. The best unrestricted free agents that will be available are Montrezl Harrell and Fred VanVleet. They'll want long term deals. Both have been bench players for the majority of their careers and are not going to make a team into a championship contender. Using cap space for the sake of using it is not sound team building. There are players with optouts, like Gordon Hayward and DeMar DeRozan, who might become available, both quality players on the wrong side of 30. What the Knicks do have is cap space, draft picks and young players with potential. Those three things combined make the Knicks an attractive trade partner for when a disgruntled star (or stars) makes his feelings known. Next year's free agent class is far more interesting, with names like Paul George, Kawhi Leonard and Giannis Antetokounmpo all potentially targets for the Knicks. They should do nothing then? Not quite. Signing a bunch of players to one or two year deals, like before the 2019 2020 season, actually was very smart. That's the way to go and see if someone sticks. Maybe Goran Dragic, Davis Bertans and Serge Ibaka (all unrestricted free agents) all can be had for pricey one or two year deals, allowing the team to keep its cap flexibility while also improving the team immediately. (This would complicate midseason trades, but that is probably fine.) Another possible use of cap space: Trading for players with bloated contracts that other teams don't want, provided they attach draft picks to add to the Knicks' bank. The Knicks are not going to win the championship in 2021. They are building for something beyond that. So being careful and measured with their moves as opposed to pulling panic moves to win now is the right path to take. Now it's on the team's fans (and its owner) to see that plan through and wait for the right time to cash in all the chips.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The Windows era at Microsoft, long in eclipse, is officially history. Microsoft said on Tuesday that it was splitting up its Windows engineering team and that the leader of its Windows business was leaving. The moves, analysts said, were part of a reorganization intended to accelerate Microsoft's emphasis on newer, faster growing businesses like cloud computing and data fueled artificial intelligence. That shift, they noted, has been underway since Satya Nadella became chief executive in 2014. In an email to employees, Mr. Nadella cited the central role of cloud computing and the advances in artificial intelligence and their potential across all the company's products. The organizational overhaul, Mr. Nadella wrote, "enables us to step up to this opportunity." Terry Myerson, 45, executive vice president of Microsoft's Windows and devices group, will be departing. In a separate email to employees, Mr. Myerson said that he supported the company's evolution under Mr. Nadella.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
There is now a vast army of young people ready and yearning to serve their country. There are college graduates emerging into a workplace that has few jobs for them. There are more high school graduates who suddenly can't afford college. There are college students who don't want to return to a college experience. This is a passionate, idealistic generation that sees the emergency, wants to serve those around them and groans to live up to this moment. Suddenly there is a wealth of work for them to do: contact tracing, sanitizing public places, bringing food to the hungry, supporting the elderly, taking temperatures at public gathering spots, supporting local government agencies, tutoring elementary school students so they can make up for lost time. Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said we will need as many as 300,000 contact tracers alone. The obvious imperative right now is to join workers with the work. It's to expand national service programs to meet the urgencies of this moment. There's a good bill winding its way through the Senate to do precisely that, led by Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware. Coons was born to service and came to maturity doing service. His dad grew up in Boston and said that he never really understood the fullness and meaning of America until he commanded troops from all over the country in the Army in the 1950s. As a young man, Coons launched one of the first AmeriCorps programs, leading 150 members in 15 cities who tutored students in inner city schools. Later, he created another AmeriCorps program with a local volunteer fire department in Delaware. "It was the most inspiring thing I've ever been a part of," Coons told me. His bill would double the current number of AmeriCorps volunteers in its first year, from 75,000 to 150,000. Then for years two and three it would double the number again, to 300,000. It would also increase AmeriCorps stipends, which are now as low as 15,000 a year, so the volunteers can have a living wage. The Coons bill is an excellent start. But it needs to be bigger and bipartisan. Under AmeriCorps, the federal government provides money for the volunteers, matched by private funding. State commissions supervise most programs, and the volunteers work through nonprofits and local agencies. The downside is that the big, well established nonprofits have a significant advantage when it comes to receiving AmeriCorps volunteers. There are a lot of great smaller organizations that just don't have the organizational infrastructure to take part. There are many parts of the country, especially in rural America, where volunteers are relatively thin on the ground. National service has never had confident bipartisan support because Republicans don't have constant contact with volunteers in their own districts. John Bridgeland, who ran George W. Bush's Domestic Policy Council, and Alan Khazei, who co founded the nonprofit City Year, suggest that the Coons bill be supplemented with a provision to create 250,000 "service year fellowships." Young people would get the fellowships directly and could serve in any nonprofit certified by their state commission. The fellows would have much more flexibility to choose local, community and faith based organizations, without the administrative burden that AmeriCorps entails. Service year fellowships, which were recently endorsed by a congressionally chartered commission, would give Republicans a piece of the bill to champion, so they're not just signing up for a Clinton initiative. It's the best way to quickly expand the volunteer force so that it's equal to the needs of this moment. There's no reason this shouldn't happen. Eighty eight percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans support voluntary national service. According to a Columbia University study, every dollar invested in national service produces about 4 in benefits. The number of young people who want to take part in national service always vastly exceeds the number of slots. And as we all know, the benefits of the program accrue not only to those being served but also to those doing the serving. What would it mean to the future social cohesion of this country if a large part of the rising generation had a common experience of shared sacrifice? What would it mean to our future politics if young people from Berkeley spent a year working side by side with young people from Boise, Birmingham and Baton Rouge? On the other hand, has any nation prospered that did not encourage in each new generation the habits of work, the taste for adventure, a sense of duty and a call to be of use to neighbors and the world? We Americans suck at regimentation and blindly following orders from the top down. But we're pretty good at local initiative, youthful dynamism and decentralized civic action. We need a Covid response that fits the kind of people we are. National service is an essential piece of that response. As my mentor William F. Buckley once put it, "Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight." We have a generation of knights in waiting. 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
Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, wrote by email that Trump has responded As a result, Walt continued, Trump "has gotten at most a minor bump in his approval ratings, far less than other presidents have received at moments of national emergency," which, in turn, In a March essay, "A World Less Open, Prosperous, and Free," Walt wrote: Other foreign policy experts have elaborated on this assessment of the Trump administration. Mira Rapp Hooper, senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was explicit in her critique of the American response under Trump, writing in a March 24 essay, "China, America, and the International Order after the Pandemic": In effect, Rapp Hooper contends, Trump opened the door to China, his claimed adversary: Trump's inability to fully capitalize on the pandemic politically lends a degree of credibility to those who argue that the electoral consequences of the current crisis may be relatively modest or at least are yet to be determined. Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, emailed that he and several colleagues, including Morris Fiorina and David Brady, both of at Stanford, and Sandy Maisel at Colby, regularly meet via Zoom to discuss politics. Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and author of the book "Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities," has a more optimistic take on the likely political consequences of the pandemic: "My view is that Covid 19 weakens national populism because it reduces cultural threat." It does so, Kaufmann observes, because it Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at Harvard, argues that short term developments notwithstanding, right wing populism will remain a force nationally and globally. He notes that in recent years, "aggregate Americans' attitudes toward immigrants and minorities have been shifting, on average, toward greater inclusion" and "there is no reason to expect these trends to reverse in the post Covid era." The future of conservative populism, in Bonikowski's view, will vary country by country: Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, foresees serious detrimental consequences. While there is evidence "that pathogen avoidance is linked to anti immigrant and other group centric attitudes and that would point to the pandemic stoking xenophobic attitudes," Enos wrote in an email, "these issues have been made so salient during the Trump administration, that there is probably much less room for any event to cause these attitudes to move." In the long term, in Enos's view, the consequences of the health care crisis will expose Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University and the author of "The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality" wrote me: The nature of the United States government's response has already dimmed the possibilities for new forms of social solidarity. Rather than create a universal program that nationalized payroll and avoided layoffs like Denmark, congressional acts have distributed loans and money to people through business owners and welfare. The White House has eschewed America's historic international leadership and suggested that every country is out for itself. It has divested from institutions of global governance that work across borders, like the United Nations and the multilateral effort to find a vaccine. The president has blamed foreigners for the proliferation of disease and suspended immigration. Finally, because many people of minority backgrounds work in essential jobs, live in high density neighborhoods, or lack access to health care, they have been disproportionately exposed to risk. The rhetoric of "We're all in this together" falls flat when not everyone is rescued by the government, when not everyone is protected, and when we insularly blame others rather than recognize the universality of this challenge. The conclusion drawn by Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, addresses the impact of the coronavirus on global power relations: "Covid 19 may well not alter much less reverse tendencies evident before the crisis. Neoliberalism will continue its slow death. Populist autocrats will become even more authoritarian," Rodrik wrote at Project Syndicate: Let's shift perspective for a moment. Judith Butler, a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, in response to an email I sent her, sent me an interview she did with a professor of philosophy at Emory, George Yancy, published April 30 at Truthout. I think she has captured something no purely political or economic analysis can. Yancy asked Butler to "speak to how you're thinking about vulnerability at this moment, especially in terms of how that vulnerability isn't equally distributed." Butler replied: On the one hand, the pandemic exposes a global vulnerability. Everyone is vulnerable to the virus because everyone is vulnerable to viral infection from surfaces or other human beings without establishing immunity. Vulnerability is not just the condition of being potentially harmed by another. It names the porous and interdependent character of our bodily and social lives. We are given over from the start to a world of others we never chose in order to become more or less singular beings. That dependency does not precisely end with adulthood. To survive, we take something in. We are impressed upon by the environment, social worlds and intimate contact. That impressionability and porosity define our embodied social lives. What another breathes out, I can breathe in, and something of my breath can find its way into yet another person. The human trace that someone leaves on an object may well be what I touch, pass along on another surface or absorb into my own body. Humans share the air with one another and with animals; they share the surfaces of the world. They touch what others have touched and they touch one another. These reciprocal and material modes of sharing describe a crucial dimension of our vulnerability, intertwinements and interdependence of our embodied social life. On the other hand, the public response to the pandemic has been to identify "vulnerable groups" those who are especially likely to suffer the virus as a ravaging and life threatening disease and to contrast them with those who are less at risk of losing their lives from the pathogen. The vulnerable include Black and Brown communities deprived of adequate health care throughout their lifetimes and the history of this nation. The vulnerable also include poor people, migrants, incarcerated people, people with disabilities, trans and queer people who struggle to achieve rights to health care, and all those with prior illnesses and enduring medical conditions. The pandemic exposes the heightened vulnerability to the illness of all those for whom health care is neither accessible nor affordable. Perhaps there are at least two lessons about vulnerability that follow: it describes a shared condition of social life, of interdependency, exposure and porosity; it names the greater likelihood of dying, understood as the fatal consequence of a pervasive social inequality. Although, the worst outcome the kind warned of by Jones, Inglehart and the New York Fed has not materialized, there is no guarantee that it won't. The more Trump feels cornered, the more dangerous he and his angry, frightened followers can become. 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
The doctors, researchers and advocates who have been paying close attention for years are appalled at the way the coronavirus has devastated the nation's nursing homes but they're not shocked. "Every geriatrician knew what was coming," said Dr. Mike Wasserman, a geriatrician and president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine. Robyn Grant, the director of public policy and advocacy for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long Term Care: "The sheer numbers are horrifying. The underlying factors that have contributed are no surprise; they've been issues of concern for a long time." A New York Times analysis as of May 21 showed that more than 34,000 deaths 37 percent of the nation's fatalities from Covid 19 occurred among residents and staff in long term care facilities. In 15 states, long term care accounted for more than half of all Covid 19 deaths. Because states report cases in varying ways, and some report few numbers at all, "all of this could be undercounted," said David Grabowski, a health care policy researcher at Harvard Medical School, noting that testing remains inadequate. Not until mid April did the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services announce a reporting system to track Covid 19 in nursing homes and funnel the data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But because nursing home care receives scant public attention even in better times, advocates like Ms. Grant see an opportunity, however grimly won. "People have been horrified by what's happening, and that's shining a light on the changes we need to see," she said. It's not hard to understand why the virus has streaked through nursing homes like "fire through dry grass," as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York put it. Dr. Philip Sloane, in a recent editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, compared them to cruise ships and prisons as incubators for disease. "All three have large numbers of people in relatively small spaces, so it's hard to do isolation," said Dr. Sloane, a geriatrician who co directs the Program on Aging, Disability and Long Term Care at the University of North Carolina. "They have congregant meals prepared in central kitchens, staff that have a lot of personal contacts with residents. They have activities that bring a lot of people together." Nursing home residents, of course, are frailer and sicker than cruisers and inmates. "These nursing homes are yesterday's hospitals," minus the on site medical staff, Dr. Wasserman said. Over the coming weeks, experts on nursing homes say, the top priority should be to greatly expand rapid testing and tracing for residents and staff, as some states have begun to require, and to acquire sufficient protective equipment. "We've basically locked nursing homes down, yet Covid is still spreading because we don't know who has it and we don't have the P.P.E. to protect the staff," Dr. Grabowski said. For this pandemic and beyond, researchers and advocates suggest several broad ideas for improvement. In 2016, Medicare began requiring each facility to employ an "infection preventionist" to oversee policies and train workers. But that is often a part time position. "The person in charge of infection control always has another job," Dr. Sloane said. "That person also doesn't have much clout." Last year, Medicare proposed relaxing that rule, so that the preventionist no longer needed to be an employee, but must log "sufficient hours," which Ms. Grant called "part of the deregulatory policy of this administration." She thinks the pandemic has instead spotlighted the need for mandatory, full time infection preventionists. American nursing homes have, on average, about 100 beds, in rooms flanking long corridors, with staff moving from one to another. Residents typically share a small room and bathroom an arrangement that many dislike, and one that provides excellent conditions for viral transmission. Assisted living complexes appear to have fared somewhat better during the pandemic, partly because individual apartments make isolation easier. "It's time to really focus on private rooms in nursing homes," said Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist and researcher at Cornell University. In the Green House model, for example, a dozen residents live in private rooms with homelike common spaces and assigned staff who know them well. This approach has gained ground very slowly, with 268 homes, of more than 15,000 nursing homes nationwide. But the Green House Project reports that as of May 21, in 245 homes with 2,653 residents, only nine have had Covid 19 cases, resulting in six deaths. With several small buildings on a campus instead of one large one, administrators could also more easily quarantine infected residents, Dr. Sloane pointed out. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Although new nursing homes offer private rooms, very few are being built. But renovation can create similar small households within older nursing homes, said Martin Siefering, a principal architect who co directs the senior living practice at Perkins Eastman. At the New Jewish Home's campus in Mamaroneck, N.Y., for instance, the firm converted 59 of 300 beds into five small house communities. It also retrofitted nonprofit nursing homes in Tulsa, Okla., and Ocean City, N.J., to create smaller households. "Older people's voices are missing from this discussion," Dr. Pillemer said. "They may want to make the decision to see family members, at their own risk." Making nursing homes better and safer serves not only a humanitarian purpose, he added. Governors issued stay at home orders to prevent the coronavirus from overwhelming health care systems, particularly hospitals. Nursing home residents were, disproportionately, the patients filling those intensive care units. "It's not the nail salons these deaths are in long term care," Dr. Pillemer said. "Stopping the virus in long term care, which is fully possible, is the key to reopening the country."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
After months of work, the Metropolitan Opera hopes it has improved the massive, temperamental and noisy set for Wagner's "Ring" cycle. One morning in August, Peter Gelb settled into a seat in the nearly empty auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera, where he is general manager, and waited for a run through of Wagner's "Die Walkure" to begin. The storm depicted in the prelude silently took shape onstage, with a huge array of upright planks forming a forest of trees. Video projections buffeted the set with swirling snow. Then the planks shifted, morphing seamlessly to form the inside of a forest dwelling. The "machine" is back. And, after spending months in the shop, it should be ready to go for another spin this spring, Met officials hope. But it could also be exasperating. Over the years, the machine produced clicks, clunks, groans and some Wagnerian scale mishaps. Projections of Brunnhilde's mountain were briefly replaced at one point with an all too recognizable Microsoft Windows logo. A mechanical glitch delayed the start of a performance of "Die Walkure" for 45 minutes as 175,000 impatient Wagnerites waited in cinemas around the world for a live simulcast to begin. Perhaps most infamous was the machine's first outing, for the premiere of "Das Rheingold" in 2010, when it froze during the finale before it could form the famous rainbow bridge to Valhalla forcing the gods to exit the stage anticlimactically. "Pound for pound, I think it's one of our best productions," Mr. Gelb said with a mischievous smile as he watched the refurbished machine put through its paces at a technical rehearsal on the Met's stage last month. He was referring to the sharply divided critical reaction to Mr. Lepage's effects laden production, which was perhaps most memorably eviscerated by Alex Ross's pronouncement in The New Yorker that "pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history." Here is a look at how the Met quieted and retooled its machine first over the course of several months in a cavernous soundstage in Middletown, N.Y., more than 65 miles north of the opera house, then this summer during tech rehearsals on the Met stage. Now the Met is pinning its hopes on another bit of hardware: its new custom fabricated hydraulic wrench. The wrench is the Met's secret weapon against the annoying clicking sound that could often be heard in past "Ring" performances. The machine has 24 rotating planks that spin around a long center axis stretching the width of the Met's stage. The axis is so long that it had to be built in three sections so it could fit on the trucks that take it to and from the opera house; they were then bolted together. But as the planks spun around the axis, they gradually loosened the custom made 4.5 inch nuts and bolts that held it together. The result? "Click, click." Engineers devised a pattern for tightening the nuts similar to way lug nuts are tightened in order on cars and recommended more tension, enough to require a hydraulic wrench. So, the Met had one custom made to tighten its custom made bolts. "What we're finding is that the axis can withstand the trials and tribulations of the machine a lot better than with what we were using before, which was hand wrenches," Jeff Mace, the Met's director of production operations, said backstage in August. "Instead of relying on as much strength as the guy can throw on the wrench, we can dial it in to 900 foot pounds of torque exactly." When the giant planks spun into new positions moving swiftly, say, to transform from the forest where the young hero Siegmund is being hunted to the fateful house where he seeks shelter a whooshing sound could sometimes be heard. Officials dubbed it the "rainstick effect." Mr. Mace said that the problem was created by cascading bits of metal slag that had accumulated inside the hollow planks when the set builders had drilled holes into them to attach their coverings. "The 'rainstick effect' was all of those little bits of slag, from thousands of holes, making really the most beautiful, ethereal noise," he said. "But it's not in the score, so it's got to go." The solution? Glue. Stagehands shook the planks to gather the slag at the bottom, drilled new holes into them, and sprayed in glue to try to keep all the tiny pieces of metal stuck firmly in one place. The 45 ton machine was so heavy that the Met had to reinforce its stage to bear the weight. The axis that the planks rotate around is suspended between two 26 foot towers, which can raise and lower it. A combination of hydraulics, pneumatics, gravity and plain old muscle power sometimes the planks are moved with ropers, as if they were puppets powers the machine. But the largest rotations had a habit of making a deep, unsettling "clunk" noise. "The entire machine structure shifts its weight, radically, and that used to cause this big clunking noise," Mr. Gelb explained. To fix it, Mr. Mace said, the Met installed shims to restrict the freedom of movement within the two towers, eliminating the clunks during weight shifts. The company also refurbished the mechanical elements, installing a new metal chain, wheels and pulleys lubricating it all carefully. No, not with WD 40: The Met used red lithium grease. When Mr. Lepage first began unveiling his high tech "Ring" operas, Apple had only recently released the iPhone 4. Technology from smartphones to the stage has changed quite a bit since then. So in some areas the "Ring" is updating. Many of the worst mishaps in the early outings of the cycle stemmed from a bug in the control system originally used to operate the machine. Mr. Mace, who was at the house for many of the performances he called the night of the frozen rainbow bridge "one of the worst nights of my career" said that every once in a while the old system would simply take too long to do its calculations, then stop. "All of this stuff fails safe," he said. "We'd have a stop, and you would have to reset manually." Now the Met is using its new house computer system to control the machine, which is faster, better integrated with the company's other technical systems, and much easier to control. That, officials believe, will improve reliability and create a safer environment. (The acrobats used as body doubles in the production are getting an upgrade, too: The cables that pull them up the planks will now be tugged by power winches instead of the old hand cranked winches.) But in some areas, the Met found, the Lepage "Ring" was still at the vanguard especially with its video. After determining that new video technologies were unlikely to surpass or even match some of the effects created in the production especially the depth and three dimensionality of "Siegfried" the Met decided to reinvest in its original video system, refurbishing the hardware to keep it running. For all the Met's efforts, the Lepage "Ring" is still dauntingly complex, its idiosyncrasies difficult to control. As Mr. Gelb looked on at that recent technical run through of "Die Walkure" last month, a low, worrisome rumbling noise emerged from the stage as things got underway. Mr. Gelb turned to John Sellars, the Met's assistant general manager for production, to ask what had happened. Mr. Sellars explained that the sounds had come from a rolling platform. "But that's something that is easily fixed," Mr. Gelb said. Mr. Sellars said, "It's something we have to contend with, certainly." They discussed various strategies to ease and quiet its path across the stage. "There's a lot of moving parts," Mr. Sellars said, as the planks turned again.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Lisa Kirchner, who lives in a rent stablized studio at the Windermere West End, takes in the sun on the rooftop garden, soon to be off limits to her. When a playroom opened in Michael Reilly's Upper West Side building two years ago, he asked the concierge for a key to the space so his toddler could play there. The concierge's answer stunned him: It was out of bounds to him and his child. Mr. Reilly's building, the Windermere West End, a luxury rental, is one of several in the city that prohibit rent regulated tenants from using new services like gyms, playrooms and rooftop gardens. Some co op and condo buildings have similar restrictions. Developers say amenities are a marketing tool to lure high paying tenants. And they say rent regulation rules make offering them to such tenants problematical. But advocates for tenants view the policies as ways to demoralize people who pay less than the going rate and to not too subtly encourage them to move elsewhere. Although there is no data on how widespread the practice is, both sides agree that it is on the rise. Now, lawmakers are pushing for legislation to curb the practice. "We were the only ones with a kid who was age appropriate and that was just mean," said Mr. Reilly, a personal trainer and actor who pays 1,250 a month for the studio apartment he shares with his wife and son. "But I've got stuff to do and a life to live, so I just laughed." New York City's disparities in wealth have long played out in the city's housing. It's not uncommon for a luxury tower to rise within throwing distance of a low income development. Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected on a platform that derided income inequality and the dwindling availability of affordable housing. His "tale of two cities" theme appears to also exist within buildings. In recent years, developers who have earned tax credits by promising to provide affordable housing have built luxury condos with separate entrances and lobbies for the affordable rental units. The so called "poor door" makes it easier to restrict who gets access to amenities. Last summer, 40 Riverside Boulevard, a luxury condo rising on the Upper West Side, drew criticism for a design in which low income tenants enter through a separate door and do not share amenities with owners. "The city has just begun to wake up and see that if we don't act, this is going to be an increasing problem," said Mark Levine, a member of the New York City Council who represents part of the Upper West Side. He is drafting legislation with Corey Johnson, another West Side council member, to expand the city's anti discrimination code to include rent regulated tenants. Last February, tenants gathered in the community room of Stonehenge Village, an Upper West Side rental complex, to hear about its new gym. Management explained that only market rate tenants fewer than 40 percent of the residents would have access, said Jean Green Dorsey, the president of the tenant association. Ms. Dorsey pays 1,107 a month for a two bedroom with a terrace and views of Harlem. Her front door is decorated with placards supporting President Obama and her living room is crammed with books and photographs. Ms. Dorsey, who is African American and retired, describes herself as an activist. Soon after that February meeting, she called a press conference to deride Stonehenge's decision. Sitting at her dining room table recently, a sketch of Malcolm X hanging behind her, she said, "Nobody makes me a second class citizen in my own home. I had thought that by the time I got to be classified as fragile elderly that I would not have to fight this fight." At 230 Riverside Drive, a condo conversion on the Upper West Side, rent regulated tenants cannot use the building's gym and have limited access to storage areas. "It's ridiculous to have a gym here that I can't use," said Sarah Denby, who lives in a rent controlled one bedroom with her husband, Walter Brotman, a building resident for 60 years. "At one point I got so mad: I can store the bike in the bike room but I can't have a key. I have to return it right away or the doormen freak out. They absolutely flip out. They just besiege me." Rent regulated tenants are likely to be elderly or minorities, particularly in Manhattan, according to data provided by the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. In 2011, 73.4 percent of market rate renters in Manhattan were white and nearly 77 percent of market rate owners were white. By comparison, only 47 percent of rent regulated tenants in Manhattan were white. While fewer than 5 percent of market rate tenants are seniors, nearly 20 percent of rent regulated tenants are age 65 or older. Rent regulated tenants also earn less. In 2011, the median annual income of a rent regulated tenant in Manhattan was 51,010 as opposed to 103,680 for a market rate tenant, according to the Furman Center. So, in a diverse building, the restrictions could create a gym that is largely available only to the younger, wealthier white tenants. "It's a subtle form of harassment. It sends a message: You're not as good as my tenants who pay more," said New York State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who introduced legislation requiring landlords to offer amenities to rent regulated tenants. Ms. Rosenthal described Stonehenge Village as "the tipping point" in a growing problem. "There's a slippery slope here," said Mark L. Joseph, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who has studied class tensions in mixed income developments in Chicago. "What if the next amenity to be created and kept exclusive is a snack bar, or a reading room, or a business and technology center?" Developers point to rules governing rent regulated leases as a reason for restrictions. If a developer offers a gym to a rent regulated tenant and later decides to remove it, the landlord would have to get permission from the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, the state agency that oversees rent rules. Otherwise, tenants could be entitled to a rent reduction and reinstatement of the service. Developers contend that they build amenities like gyms to lure new market rate renters, not to please existing rent regulated ones. Stonehenge Partners, the owner of Stonehenge Village, spent 5 million upgrading the building's systems and common areas. In a prepared statement issued in February, the developer said the new gym "is aimed specifically at new and prospective tenants who expect certain amenities and incentives that are commonly available to market rate renters." At the Windermere, tenants living in the nearly 140 rent regulated apartments have been barred from using the new spa with a pool, yoga studio and gym. As part of a 10 million renovation, Stellar Management is also adding a sky lounge, a bar and planters to the roof. Rent regulated tenants, who pay about 1,000 a month for a one bedroom, had socialized on the roof for years, but will no longer be allowed to use it when construction is complete. "We always had the roof," said Lisa Kirchner, a singer who lives at the Windermere in a studio apartment with no kitchen. She uses a hotplate in lieu of a stove and washes her dishes in the bathroom sink. Ms. Mac Rae moved in when the building was a residential hotel filled with artists, musicians and writers. "I don't understand why management needs to make someone who's lived here her whole life feel worse than other people," she said. "I get it, I understand it. It's about money. But where does that end?" The tenant association and Stellar Management are negotiating a settlement addressing amenities, rent and other issues. In a statement, Stellar Management wrote that it is "working diligently with the tenant association to resolve these issues and our dialogue is ongoing." For developers trying to maximize profits, the stakes are high. In 2011, the median rent for a rent regulated apartment in Manhattan was 1,321 a month, compared with 2,696 for a market rate apartment, according to the Furman Center. The payoff for a landlord if a tenant vacates a rent regulated apartment can be huge, especially in buildings like the Windermere, where a two bedroom was recently listed on Streeteasy for 7,177 a month. "The sponsor doesn't want the tenant to have access to additional luxury services," said Mark Zborovsky, a broker who sells bundles of rent regulated apartments to investors. "His goal is to get him out of the apartment." The high cost of construction means developers often rely on public financing and tax breaks to build new luxury housing, either as rentals or as condos. In exchange, as many as 20 percent of the apartments must be set aside as affordable housing. Despite the financial benefit, developers worry that well heeled buyers might be turned off by low income neighbors. "You could have people who are unwilling to buy in a situation like that. Their attorney could say, 'I don't know what this could do to your property value,' " said David Von Spreckelsen, the president of Toll Brothers City Living, which built Northside Piers in Brooklyn, a luxury condo that placed low income rentals in a separate building with no access to amenities. "The two populations don't mix at all. It really feels separate," he added. The policy was so successful that the company considered a similar plan at a development near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Although Toll Brothers ultimately backed away from that deal, Mr. Von Spreckelsen said he would consider the arrangement for future projects. And even withering criticism has not deterred Extell, the developer of 40 Riverside Boulevard. The current design still includes a separate entrance for the affordable units. "Nothing has changed since this issue arose during the political season last fall," George Arzt, an Extell spokesperson, said in a statement referring to the timing of the brouhaha, which occurred shortly before the mayoral election. Not all owners and tenants want to be separated from their rent regulated neighbors. When Royal York, an Upper East Side co op, built a gym in 2007, the co op board let rent regulated tenants use it for the same 375 annual fee. "We're all part of a community," said Robert A. Scaglion, the co op board president. "We all see each other every day." And Bruce E. Bernstein, a unit owner at 230 Riverside Drive, was dismayed when, last November, the condo's board concurred with the sponsor's policy that prohibited rent regulated tenants from using the gym. Board minutes show that members were concerned about limited gym space and the potential for tenant law suits. The Olnick Organization, the owner of the rent regulated units, declined comment, and board members did not respond to email requests for comment. "It's insulting. It's ridiculous," said Mr. Bernstein, 59, who was a rent stabilized tenant in the building before he bought his one bedroom in 2007. "If it's some special thing, then charge a fee. But don't damn them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In the pit for "Pelleas" is Yannick Nezet Seguin, the Met's new music director and an openly gay maestro whose appointment signifies a turning point in New York culture. As Zachary Woolfe writes in this revealing (and often touching) profile: While culture particularly high culture is indelibly associated with gay tastemakers, audiences and creators, it's a sign of how outmoded our conception of authority is that remarkably few major performing arts leaders have been openly gay. In classical music and opera, even New York, the city that gave rise to the modern gay rights movement with the Stonewall riots 50 years ago this June, has been dominated since then by two conductors: Leonard Bernstein and James Levine, who both kept sexual relationships with men hidden. What matters most, of course, is Mr. Nezet Seguin's artistry. And I'm happy to report that his conducting in "Pelleas" on Tuesday was brilliant. Teasing out inner, deep voices, he made a rich score even richer and inherently more Wagnerian, though you won't hear any objection from me on that front. (I'd be remiss to not also mention the bass baritone Kyle Ketelsen, a commanding and compelling Golaud.) Enjoy this clip of Mr. Nezet Seguin leading the ominous opening bars of the opera. JOSHUA BARONE When Columbia Records originally produced its "Black Composers Series" a nine LP set, released between 1974 and '78 some reviews gently pondered the question of why such a collection might be necessary in the first place. More than four decades later, the failure of mainstream classical music programming to incorporate works by composers of color has not changed drastically for the better. All of which makes Sony's reissue of the full "Black Composers Series," on CD and digital platforms this month, a welcome development. A stretch of one LP devoted to William Grant Still kicks off with his Symphony No. 1 (which the Los Angeles Philharmonic is scheduled to play, next month, as part of a Harlem Renaissance festival). But the album also includes two arias from "Highway 1, U.S.A.," Mr. Still's rarely heard opera. Here, alongside the conductor Paul Freeman and the London Symphony Orchestra, tenor William Brown delivered a suitably dramatic version of "What Does He Know of Dreams?," an aria for the opera's stingingly arrogant villain. (What would it have sounded like if these artists had been given a budget to record the entire work? The mind reels.) One of the most rewarding albums in Columbia's series was split between works by three composers including Adolphus Hailstork (who is still active, with a new commission set to debut at the Los Angeles Philharmonic's series in February). The punchy finale of George Walker's Piano Concerto, from that same album, gives a sense of the richness that Columbia's series made available to a wider audience. Two of the most moving depictions of aging kings in opera come in quite different works: Philip II in Verdi's "Don Carlo" and Arkel in Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande." The great Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto has long been acclaimed as Verdi's Philip, a monarch who, in a peacemaking political maneuver, marries the young French princess intended for his son and heir, Carlo. But this rash act reveals Philip as a hobbled and isolated leader threatened by his dreamy, idealistic son. In the Metropolitan Opera's 2010 production, conducted by Yannick Nezet Seguin, Mr. Furlanetto brought grave authority touched with unbearable anguish to the profound Act IV aria "Ella giammai m'amo," when Philip grieves over his loneliness as an unloved husband and as a king. Here he is singing the aria at the Met. And now, at 69, Mr. Furlanetto, working again with Mr. Nezet Seguin, is magnificent as Debussy's Arkel, the leader of a sullen, troubled royal family. Though nearly blind, this king sees clearly that we are all controlled by fates we can only guess at. The haunting "Pelleas," a revival of Jonathan Miller's production, is a highlight of this season. ANTHONY TOMMASINI	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Cadillac announced Wednesday that it would name its coming flagship rear wheel drive sedan the CT6. Cadillac says the high tech car is scheduled to be released at the end of next year. The car will feature "lightweight materials and new body construction techniques to reduce fuel consumption while enhancing driving dynamics and safety," the company said. CT6 will not be used to replace the name of an existing model, Cadillac said in a media release, adding that the new car will compete with other top end luxury sedans. The automaker says the CT naming convention, which is derived from Cadillac's strong selling CTS line, will be used on other Cadillac models as well. David Caldwell, a spokesman for Cadillac, said in an email that the new naming system would not into effect until new models introduced. "The name CT6 indicates that we will use the number to indicate relative position of models within a hierarchy," Mr. Caldwell said, adding that a similar naming strategy will be adopted for crossover models.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Like many Americans these days, Lisa M. Delmont is kept up at night by worry. But for Ms. Delmont, it's the empty grocery store shelves that bring on dread. Her 2 year old son, Benjamin, is severely allergic to milk, eggs, cashews, pistachios and bananas, so she has to be judicious about the items she brings home. Exposure to the wrong food could send Benjamin into anaphylactic shock, something that has happened three times since he was born. "I am way more terrified of taking him to an E.R. now than I've ever been," said Ms. Delmont, 35, of Jacksonville, N.C. The rush to stock up on food in response to the coronavirus pandemic has put an extra strain on the millions of Americans with food allergies who were already restricted in what they can safely eat. Ms. Delmont, a part time registered nurse, has gone to great lengths to find products that won't cause a reaction, researching ingredients, emailing manufacturers and cooking meals from scratch. Without access to certain brands Ms. Delmont said her local store was sold out of many foods her options are more limited than ever. For now, Benjamin will have to eat a lot of beans. "They might not be the most exciting of meals," she said, "but they won't kill him, either." Ms. Delmont isn't the only one hunting far and wide for harmless foods. After the pandemic began to spread in the United States, Kelley D. Lord, of Orlando, Fla., wasn't able to find the brand of pasta she makes for her 12 year old son, Mason, who is allergic to eggs. She asked a friend who lives nearly 400 miles away in Columbus, Ga. to check out a nearby shop. The friend found the pasta, confirmed it was the right one in a text message, and shipped it to Ms. Lord. "It's so scary when your child has an allergy, because it's literally a life or death situation," said Ms. Lord, 50, who runs a travel agency and is herself allergic to peanuts and onions. "You can't substitute something else." Even before the coronavirus outbreak, grocery shopping was stressful for people with food allergies. The federal government requires companies to tell consumers when particular ingredients are used. If something is made with one of eight types of foods milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and tree nuts the company must declare it on the label. This alerts people to potentially dangerous ingredients, but not all allergens are on that list. In addition, companies sometimes need to warn consumers about possible "cross contact" with allergens, telling them that something "may contain" peanuts, which can create more confusion. Alicia M. Ames, of Elbridge, N.Y., said her 4 year old son, Jackson, is allergic to sesame, eggs, peanuts and legumes. Sesame is not part of the Food and Drug Administration's labeling law, and its presence is sometimes hidden under obscure descriptions like "natural flavors" or "spices." More than one million children and adults are estimated to have a sesame allergy, and the F.D.A. is considering adding it to the list of allergens that manufacturers must include on packages. Ms. Ames bakes her own bread, but her supplies of safe flour and yeast are running low. "Our worry is that these foods aren't going to be available, and what are we going to feed our family?" said Ms. Ames, 32, a musician. Her unease is shared by others across the country. Recently, Elana D. Zimmerman put on gloves and a mask and ventured out to many grocery stores in her neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She did it again the next day. And the day after that. Ms. Zimmerman, 36, has a 1 year old daughter and a 2 year old son, both with severe allergies. Laura C. Schorn, of Aurora, Colo., has been going to stores at various times in the day, hoping to catch a lucky break and arrive after a restock. Ms. Schorn, who has an intolerance to wheat and soy, said she has left stores crying, feeling defeated. "My fear right now is less that I'm going to get the virus and more that if I do get it and I become quarantined, I'm not going to have enough food to get through it," said Ms. Schorn, 25, who works as a supervisor at a restaurant chain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
'TRIGGER: GENDER AS A TOOL AND A WEAPON,' at the New Museum (through Jan. 21, 2018). With transgender rights in the news, this big group show on the concepts of "trans" and "queer" in art is ideally timed. A difficulty is that queer, and to some extent trans, are hard to capture, institutionally. They don't sit still. Trans is defined by the idea that the boundaries of gender (and race, and class) are porous, and that crossings in any direction are negotiable. Queer is even more category averse. It's not so much a personal identity as a political impulse, a strategy for thwarting assimilation and sowing constructive chaos. Still, some excellent artists are on hand to tackle the subjects, which venture into trans species territory with the artist Nayland Blake's bearlike "fursona" named Gnomen. (Cotter) 212 219 1222/newmuseum.org 'CRISTOBAL DE VILLALPANDO: MEXICAN PAINTER OF THE BAROQUE' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (closes Oct. 15). In 1683, the leading painter of colonial Mexico painted a stupefying altarpiece for the cathedral of Puebla: a 26 foot showstopper that merged a radiant vision of Jesus' transfiguration into light with a grimmer narrative of Israelites attacked by snakes. Now, for the first time, Villalpando's altarpiece has left Mexico and stands alone in the Robert Lehman Collection wing of the Met, where you could spend days gaping at its churning collision of saints and mortals, and puzzling over the strange confluence of Old and New Testament visions. Compared with Baroque painting in Italy or Flanders, the Mexican version was lighter and less rigid, making use of bright color and free ornamentation. Ten other paintings by Villalpando, all but one from Mexican collections, round out the presentation, but it's the altarpiece that matters, here for your veneration into the fall. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Some two dozen opioid manufacturers, drug distributors and retailers are now being sued by states, counties, cities and tribes across the nation for their roles in the opioid crisis, yet Johnson Johnson, the corporate giant, wound up as the only company on trial in Oklahoma despite the fact that its drugs accounted for only about 1 percent of opioid sales in the state. On Monday, a district court judge in Norman, Okla., ruled against the company, ordering it to pay the state 572 million. Here's why Johnson Johnson was the only defendant on trial: None All the plaintiffs who filed opioid lawsuits have named drug manufacturers as defendants, largely based on which companies sold opioids on their turf. A smaller number of plaintiffs also have sued the giant distribution companies and a still smaller subset have also gone after retailers like CVS, Walmart and Rite Aid. Oklahoma was among the first states to file suit in an attempt to hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for its opioid epidemic, and it acted before the idea of also targeting distributors and retailers had been developed. None Oklahoma sued two other drug manufacturers, Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceuticals, in addition to Johnson Johnson. But they both settled with the state earlier this year Purdue for 270 million, Teva for 85 million without admitting wrongdoing. Purdue Pharma is widely seen as bearing a great deal of the responsibility for starting the epidemic with its aggressive marketing of OxyContin. But as the trial approached, Purdue began exploring filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, a step that could have insulated it from legal judgments. That gave the company greater leverage to push for a settlement with Oklahoma.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In 2012, Wayne W. Williams, an elder of the Tulalip Tribes, was donating material to the Hibulb Cultural Center on the tribal reservation in Washington State. He told Ms. Campbell, the museum's senior curator, that his donation included a dog wool blanket. Weavers examining it were unconvinced, suspecting it was mountain goat wool. But examination under an electron microscope at the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 2019 confirmed what Mr. Williams, who died in 2017, had said: The blanket, dated to about 1850, contained dog wool, lending credence to stories from the oral tradition of the Coast Salish Indigenous peoples of a special dog that was long kept and bred for its fleece. A study published last month in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology adds to the evidence for the industry that produced this dog wool, as well as its ancient roots. The analysis by Iain McKechnie, a zooarchaeologist with the Hakai Institute, and two co authors examined data collected over 55 years from over 16,000 specimens of the dog family across the Pacific Northwest. It suggests the vast majority of canid bones from 210 Pacific Coast archaeological sites, from Oregon to Alaska, were not from wild wolves, coyotes or foxes. Instead, they were domestic dogs, including small woolly ones that were kept for their fur. One of Dr. McKechnie's co authors, Susan Crockford, has studied dog bones in archaeology sites for many years. Starting in the 1990s, she noticed that Pacific Northwest domestic dog remains were of two distinct size categories large and small. But distinguishing domestic hounds from their wild cousins can be difficult, and most specimens from previous Northwest Pacific Coast zooarchaeological studies lacked species identification, said Madonna Moss, another co author from the University of Oregon. By going back over numerous earlier studies, the team discovered that British Columbia was a pre contact hot spot for domestic dogs. And on the south coast of British Columbia, smaller dogs that would have had woolly fur outnumbered larger hunting dogs, and "seemed to be a long term, persistent part of Indigenous community life for the last 5,000 years," Dr. McKechnie said. These knee high wool dogs weren't combed like modern pooches but sheared like sheep. Indeed, journal accounts from a Hudson's Bay Company fur trading post at Fort Langley, British Columbia, in the early 19th century described canoes from people of the Cowichan tribe that were filled with "dogs more resembling Cheviot Lambs shorn of their wool." The Cowichan peoples of eastern Vancouver Island are recognized to this day for their textiles. Lydia Hwitsum, a former elected Cowichan chief, said she learned traditional weaving from her mother, who explained to her daughter that dog wool was historically incorporated into yarn making "to make the fibers even stronger." But with colonization came imported textiles. Demand for wool from these small white dogs dropped, their numbers dwindled and the breed is believed to no longer exist. Detailed knowledge of the dog wool industry has long been lost. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests its use was once common. Caroline Solazzo, a researcher at the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute, has tested 11 ancient Coast Salish blankets for signatures of dog hair. She found them in seven of the specimens. And of 47 blankets microscopically analyzed by Elaine Humphrey at the University of Victoria, all but three contained dog wool. After "10 years of plodding" through data gleaned from merged piles of dog bone data, Dr. McKechnie said his team has found evidence of deep relationships between coastal Indigenous communities and domestic dogs, highlighting their 5,000 year old fashion industry that relied on woolly breeds of man's best friend. Carly Ameen, a bioarchaeologist and dog specialist at the University of Exeter in England who was not involved in Dr. McKechnie's study, said these new identifications of old bones are "hard to validate objectively." But she said the study makes an excellent case for mining the mountains of dog data already available.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In a year of endless viral outbreaks, the details of the Diamond Princess tragedy seem like ancient history. On Jan. 20, one infected passenger boarded the cruise ship; a month later, more than 700 of the 3,711 passengers and crew members had tested positive, with many falling seriously ill. The invader moved as swiftly and invisibly as the perpetrators on Agatha Christie's Orient Express, leaving doctors and health officials with only fragmentary evidence to sift through. Ever since, scientists have tried to pin down exactly how the coronavirus spread throughout the ship. And for good reason: The Diamond Princess' outbreak remains perhaps the most valuable case study available of coronavirus transmission an experiment in a bottle, rich in data, as well as a dark warning for what was to come in much of the world. Now, researchers are beginning to use macroscopic tools computer models, which have revealed patterns in the virus's global spread to clarify the much smaller scale questions that currently dominate public discussions of safety: How, exactly, does the virus move through a community, a building or a small group of people? Which modes of transmission should concern us most, and how might we stop them? In a new report, a research team based at Harvard and the Illinois Institute of Technology has tried to tease out the ways in which the virus passed from person to person in the staterooms, corridors and common areas of the Diamond Princess. It found that the virus spread most readily in microscopic droplets that were light enough to float in the air, for several minutes or much longer. The new findings add to an escalating debate among doctors, scientists and health officials about the primary routes of coronavirus transmission. Earlier this month, after pressure from more than 200 scientists, the World Health Organization acknowledged that the virus could linger in the air indoors, potentially causing new infections. Previously, it had emphasized only large droplets, as from coughing, and infected surfaces as the primary drivers of transmission. Many clinicians and epidemiologists continue to argue that these routes are central to disease progression. The new paper has been posted on a preprint server and submitted to a journal; it has not yet been peer reviewed, but it was shown by Times reporters to nearly a dozen experts in aerosols and infectious disease. The new findings, if confirmed, would have major implications for making indoor spaces safer and choosing among a panoply of personal protective gear. For example, ventilation systems that "turn over" or replace the air in a room or building as often as possible, preferably drawing on external air to do so, should make indoor spaces healthier. But good ventilation is not enough; the Diamond Princess was well ventilated and the air did not recirculate, the researchers noted. So wearing good quality masks standard surgical masks, or cloth masks with multiple layers rather than just one will most likely be needed as well, even in well ventilated spaces where people are keeping their distance. The computer modeling adds a new dimension of support to an accumulating body of evidence implicating small, airborne droplets in multiple outbreaks, including at a Chinese restaurant, a choir in Washington State, as well as a recent study at a Nebraska hospital to which 13 passengers from the Diamond Princess had been evacuated. One researcher not involved in the new work, Julian Tang, an honorary associate professor of respiratory sciences at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said the paper was "the first attempt, as far as I know, to formally compare the different routes of coronavirus transmission, especially of short versus long range aerosols." He characterized the distances and the kinds of particles involved with a simple analogy from everyday life: "If you can smell what I had for lunch, you're getting my air, and you can be getting virus particles as well." Another researcher, Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech who studies airborne transmission of viruses, had a more vivid description of the finding: the "garlic breath" effect. "As you're close to someone, you smell that garlic breath," Dr. Marr said. "As you're farther away, you don't smell it." The "garlic breath" effect would suggest that powerful ventilation in buildings primarily using outside air, or very well filtered could reduce the transmission of the virus. The study found that small particles also had some ability to spread it at longer distances, presumably beyond the range of breath odor. "We're getting surprises all the way along," Dr. Conly said. "This paper I find interesting, but it has a long way to go to be able to get into a line of credibility, in my mind." Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, was equally skeptical. He said that, outside of hospital settings, "large droplets in my mind account for the vast majority of cases. Aerosols transmission if you really run with that, it creates lots of dissonance. Are there situations where it could occur? Yeah maybe, but it's a tiny amount." Dr. Tang and other scientists strongly disagree. "If I'm talking to an infectious person for 15 or 20 minutes and inhaling some of their air," Dr. Tang said, "isn't that a much simpler way to explain transmission than touching an infected surface and touching your eyes? When you're talking about an outbreak, like at a restaurant, that latter seems like a torturous way to explain transmission." In the new analysis, a team led by Parham Azimi, an indoor air researcher at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, studied the outbreak on the Diamond Princess, where physical spaces and infections were well documented. It ran more than 20,000 simulations of how the virus might have spread throughout the ship. Each simulation made a variety of assumptions, about factors like patterns of social interaction how much time people spent in their cabins, on deck or in the cafeteria, on average and the amount of time the virus can live on surfaces. Each also factored in varying contributions of smaller, floating droplets, broadly defined as 10 microns or smaller; and larger droplets, which fall more quickly and infect surfaces or other people, by landing on their eyes, mouth or nose, say. About 130 of those simulations reproduced, to some extent, what actually happened on the Diamond Princess as the outbreak progressed. By analyzing these most "realistic" scenarios, the research team calculated the most likely contributions of each route of transmission. The researchers concluded that the smaller droplets predominated, and accounted for about 60 percent of new infections over all, both at close range, within a few yards of an infectious person, and at greater distances. "Many people have argued that airborne transmission is happening, but no one had numbers for it," Dr. Azimi said. "What is the contribution from these small droplets is it 5 percent, or 90 percent? In this paper, we provide the first real estimates for what that number could be, at least in the case of this cruise ship." The logic behind such transmission is straightforward, experts said. When a person is speaking, he or she emits a cloud of droplets, the vast majority of which are small enough to remain suspended in the air for a few minutes or longer. Through inhalation, that cloud of small droplets is more likely to reach a mucus membrane than larger ones soaring ballistically. The smaller droplets are also more likely to penetrate deeply into the respiratory system, down to the lungs. It may take a much smaller viral load fewer viruses to cause infection in the lungs than higher up, such as in the throat. This, at least, is the case for other respiratory viruses, like the flu. Brent Stephens, an engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and a co author on the paper, said the findings were important in shaping, for example, measures that should be taken as college students return to campus. The first, he said, should be "really enforcing mask policies." Another, he said, is to recognize that there is a "huge variability in mask quality," and material that actually stops small aerosols when someone is breathing, speaking, coughing or sneezing is crucial. Surgical masks are good, he said, but single ply fabrics often are not. As various transmission routes come into clearer focus, they will provide specific guidelines on how to reopen schools, offices, restaurants and other businesses. "The value of this model is that it allows for recommendations and guidance to be specific to each unique environment," said another co author, Joseph G. Allen, an expert in indoor air quality and an assistant professor at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Allen said those environments ranged from restaurants to dentist offices. In each case, he said, there are low cost solutions that sharply improve ventilation and filtration most buildings fall well short of optimal levels and in turn reduce the risks of airborne infection. "To me, this is an all in moment," Dr. Allen said. "We need better ventilation and better filtration, across the board, in all our buildings." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Aileen Passloff rehearsing in 2019 with her former student Arthur Aviles. "Aileen," he said, "used the body to understand life in a way that just kind of says hello to the world and celebrates all of what we can be." Aileen Passloff, whose career as a dancer, choreographer and broadly influential teacher spanned ballet, modern dance and postmodern dance, died on Nov. 3 in Manhattan. She was 89. Her death, in hospice care at N.Y.U. Langone Health, was caused by heart failure resulting from complications of lung cancer, which had been diagnosed five years ago, according to the dancer Charlotte Hendrickson, a friend. Ms. Passloff, a former member of the Judson Dance Theater, the experimental 1960s collective that led to postmodern dance, was devoted to all aspects of the form. "I don't remember not dancing," she said last year in an interview with The New York Times. "I would be set out in the backyard to play, and to play was to dance. For truth." "For truth" was her refrain in any conversation. Her thirst for truth and beauty in dance was vast: She was always searching for it through her own body and through her dancers' bodies. "Aileen used the body to understand life in a way that just kind of says hello to the world and celebrates all of what we can be," the dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles said in a phone interview. "She was helping us to understand our body in relationship to expression in relationship to nature, life, the earth, the sky." Like Mr. Aviles, Ms. Hendrickson was a student of Ms. Passloff's at Bard College, where Ms. Passloff was co chair of the dance and drama department from 1969 to 1990. Ms. Hendrickson, who went on to dance extensively in Ms. Passloff's works, said she had been insecure when she arrived at Bard's campus, in the Hudson Valley. Ms. Passloff changed that. "In Aileen's classes, there was room for everyone to be just who they were," she said. "She would always say that we're wonderfully well made like a sweet tiger or like a tree. She would create this environment where you were expected to do your best, of course, but you were also, more importantly, expected to, like, speak from your own point of view to have the courage to know yourself and to share that." Ms. Hendrickson was smitten with her as a choreographer as well. She recalled a performance at Bard in which Ms. Passloff presented her dance "Paseo," in which six dancers wear the bata de cola "the Spanish skirt that drags behind kind of like a wedding gown," Ms. Hendrickson said. Aileen Passloff was born on Oct. 21, 1931, in New York City to Morris and Flora Passloff. She grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. Her father was a milliner. Her sister, the painter Pat Passlof, was a member of the New York school of Abstract Expressionists. (She dropped the second "f" in her surname after finishing a painting and realizing that she didn't have room for it on the canvas.) As a girl, Ms. Passloff attended the School of American Ballet, an affiliate of New York City Ballet, and studied with the Russian teacher Anatole Oboukhov. "He taught me how to fly," Ms. Passloff said in 2019. Muriel Stuart, another revered faculty member English born, she had danced with Anna Pavlova auditioned Ms. Passloff for admission to the school. "She was important in my life," Ms. Passloff said of Ms. Stuart. "She had a wonderful lyricism and a musicality, and later she would come and see me dance." While studying at the school she met James Waring, the experimental choreographer and artist who at the time was a student in the level above hers. "He was a gift from God," she said. Neither of them having much money, he taught her how to sneak into ballet performances at City Center in Manhattan by climbing its fire escape. She made her debut in Mr. Waring's company in 1945 at age 14. She would go on to dance with, among others, Katherine Litz, Toby Armour and Remy Charlip, an original member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company who became known for writing and illustrating children's books. It was Mr. Waring who encouraged her to choreograph, even though she told him that she wasn't interested in it. She went on to make numerous works. She also acted in experimental plays by the Cuba American playwright Maria Irene Fornes. From 1949 to 1953, Ms. Passloff studied dance and social science at Bennington College in Vermont and went on to direct her own company in New York for 10 years. She also appeared in two films by Marta Renzi: "Her Magnum Opus" (2017), in which Ms. Passloff portrays the beloved teacher of a group of artists, and "Arthur Aileen" (2012), a short documentary featuring her and Mr. Aviles. Along with Ms. Hendrickson and Mr. Aviles, her students at Bard included many who would make a mark in contemporary dance, among them the theater and opera director Anne Bogart and the choreographers Dusan Tynek and David Parker. Entranced by flamenco dance, Ms. Passloff studied it under the master teachers Mercedes and Albano and introduced flamenco to the Bard curriculum.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Jeff Chiu/Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO We're in week four of sheltering in place here (it feels like week 40). It's a completely unfamiliar situation in so many ways. As someone who has lived in cities her whole adult life, for me it's especially strange to experience a time when all the things I love are no longer available. Nearly everything is closed restaurants and shops, libraries and museums, and of course all schools. All nonessential workers are under a mandatory work from home order. But these efforts to stem the spread of the coronavirus have also offered us a rare experiment: We can see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable. Throughout the world, the coronavirus has forced extreme changes in our behavior in just days. And we're already seeing the impact of those changes: On Monday, for example, Los Angeles had the cleanest air of any major city in the world. As bucolic as much of that sounds, it's also laying bare the stark reality of income inequality; higher income people are in a position to stay home while so many others are not. This is just one of the infinite truths that make Covid 19 so tragic. Everything about Covid 19 is depressing and tragic. But it's worth highlighting some clever MacGyvering that has been going on. Architecture firms and other 3 D printing experts are repurposing fabrication labs, 3 D printers and other technology to make respirators, face shields and masks. Countless crafts people have come together to sew homemade masks for health care workers facing shortages. Design is certainly not going to solve this crisis, but here are a few small interventions I've seen over the past few days that make a difference. Many of them are likely to become the new normal. Staying six feet apart to meet social distancing guidelines is nearly impossible on most sidewalks, which are typically only four feet wide. So some cities are warming up to the idea that they could temporarily close traffic lanes to accommodate pedestrians a fix that requires only some road cones or other cheap, easily obtainable barriers. Urban planners have long argued that more streets should close to make more livable spaces, but governments have always resisted, calling it impractical or impossible. They've just proved it can happen and they should keep it going after the crisis. If streets become so much safer, if air quality can change so much in just weeks, can we be more hopeful about our efforts to combat climate change? Though these are all relatively low cost and low tech, they are guiding us toward new behaviors. What will things look like in the future? How will we navigate our cities? Will we be able to wander in and out of stores and cafes as we do now? That remains to be seen: In China, information design has crossed over into surveillance, requiring citizens to use software on their smartphones that dictates whether they should be quarantined or allowed to go out in the world. Each individual is assigned a QR code based on a health assessment: A red QR code confines you to two weeks of self quarantine, a yellow one indicates one week, and a green code means that you can move around as you desire. Germany plans to introduce coronavirus "immunity certificates" to indicate who has recovered from the virus and is ready to re enter society. It is likely that similar ID'ing mechanisms will emerge here in the United States and elsewhere. Working to ensure that this sort of visual marking of health status doesn't devolve into profiling, discrimination or worse is essential.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Albert Lewin's gloriously Technicolor modern myth "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" is almost unique a staid yet outlandish star vehicle that is also an exercise in by the book surrealism. The movie, which stars Ava Gardner and James Mason in the title roles, is at the Quad Cinema, digitally restored to sensational effect. A more transgressive surrealist like Luis Bunuel might have found "Pandora" hilariously sanctimonious but it casts a spell just the same. Based on the legend that inspired Wagner's "Flying Dutchman," "Pandora" has the doomed to wander sea captain cast anchor off the coast of a picturesque Spanish town, circa 1930. On shore and mad with desire, the men of the expat community are metaphorically sipping champagne from the slipper of the Indiana born American singer, Pandora Reynolds (Gardner). One hapless suitor kills himself, another demonstrates his adoration by pushing a beloved racing car off a cliff. Moments after agreeing to marriage, Pandora spots the mysterious yacht and impetuously dives into the sea. Swimming nude to the boat, she discovers its sole occupant, a dourly enigmatic Dutchman (James Mason), painting her portrait.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
There's a "previously on" introduction to Season 2 of Amazon's "Fleabag," which you may need given that Season 1 appeared nearly three years ago. But you could also let the title character (Phoebe Waller Bridge) catch you up, in her usual rapid fire mode, as she explains to a therapist (Fiona Shaw) why her father asked her to seek counseling: "I think because my mother died and he can't talk about it and my sister and I didn't speak for a year because she thinks I tried to sleep with her husband and because I spent most of my adult life using sex to deflect from the screaming void inside my empty heart." She looks to the camera and grins. "I'm good at this!" She's remarkably good: good at charm, at lacerating honesty and at artful concealment. (There are, in fact, secrets she won't tell even her therapist, though she'll confide them to us.) And the new, evidently final, season of "Fleabag," arriving Friday, demonstrates that Waller Bridge, as a writer, observer and nimble performer, is flipping terrific at this even better than the last time. You may know Waller Bridge's work more recently from "Killing Eve," the effervescently bloody pas de deux about an international assassin and the investigator pursuing her. But even in the more overtly comic "Fleabag," she carries a stiletto in her pen hand. The first season was a transgressive, smutty tour de force, its self destructive, chatty protagonist propelling us through sexual adventures, familial passive aggression and the gradual revelation of her secret torment: the death of her best friend (Jenny Rainsford), who stepped into traffic after Fleabag slept with her boyfriend. Breaking the fourth wall can be a crutch, but in "Fleabag" the device shows as much as it tells. It's an expression of the character's dragonfly mind, darting from one subject to another, hyper alert, constantly self assessing, interrupting a cathartic rant to interject, "I can't believe how well this is coming out!" as she builds adjectival steam. It helps, no doubt, that Waller Bridge writes her own dialogue. She's like a composer whose pieces are best written for her own instrument; she knows just the spaces to add a riff or shoot a disarming, conspiratorial glance. But she can also play plangent solos, and the first season as Fleabag realized she couldn't laugh or fornicate her bad memories away built to an ending of catharsis. How "Fleabag" sold thousands of jumpsuits and made religion sexy. The new season another fleet six episodes picks up a year and change later, at a family dinner to celebrate the engagement of her stuffy father (Bill Paterson) and her free spirit godmother (Olivia Colman). The family's blend of repression and oversharing, a collision of English hot and cold fronts, leads to the evening ending with her in an elegant washroom, cleaning up a bloody nose and informing us: "This is a love story." That story involves, in part, the Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) attached to perform the wedding. He's handsome, unpious and as ribaldly earnest as Fleabag is raunchily sarcastic. Their budding attraction is potentially disastrous for both of them, if in different ways. She threatens his vow of celibacy (a concept she Googles agitatedly after meeting him); he threatens her defense mechanism of detached hedonism. Their connection, both spiritually sincere and hot, builds in the fourth episode to one of the richest, most powerful TV scenes of the year even if we may all go to hell for watching it. The priest, incidentally, is credited as "The Priest." Her dad is "Dad." A former lover (Ben Aldridge) is named for his particular sexual predilection; a new attraction (Ray Fearon) earns the title "Hot Misogynist." Relatively few characters in the series get proper names. Instead, they're identified by their stations in the protagonist's life, as if this were a medieval morality play, or amorality play. ("Fleabag," presumably a nickname, isn't uttered or explained.) One of the named characters, notably, is her sister, Claire (the outstanding Sian Clifford), who's so reserved that her family members don't even know what she does for a living. They're opposites bound by shared history with their mother dead and their father absent, they're all each other have and Clifford makes her feeling of stifled resentment deeply sympathetic. The new season feels immediately confident, if inevitably less groundbreaking. Yet it continues to push its form. Fleabag's asides to the viewer become an actual plot element I don't want to reveal too much about how, but it fascinatingly complicates her narration and spotlights her discomfort with being too closely read and understood by another person. It's fine for Fleabag to confide to us, you eventually realize; we'll never talk back. Are we just an audience, or her enablers? Either way, it's a spellbinding performance. But Waller Bridge also writes generously for her gifted cast. Even Claire's skeevy, selfish husband, Martin (Brett Gelman, who has a Ph.D. in skeeve) has a moment of late clarity. "Fleabag" is especially attuned to the voices of women, even bit characters like a charismatic businesswoman played by Kristin Scott Thomas, who delivers what could be the "Fleabag" manifesto: "Women are born with pain built in," she says. "We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don't. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty." A guiltier story one shamed by bodies and temptation might say that what Fleabag is wrestling with is a built in moral pain, a form of original sin. This show has more complicated and empathetic notions about sin. But it remains an original.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A group of experts in medicine, law and ethics has issued a blistering report that accuses the United States government of directing doctors, nurses and psychologists, among others, to ignore their professional codes of ethics and participate in the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The report was published Monday by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession, an ethics group based at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the Open Society Foundations, a pro democracy network founded by the billionaire George Soros. The authors were part of a 19 member task force that based its findings on a two year review of public information. The sources included documents released by the government, news reports, and books and articles from professional journals. Among the abuses cited in the report are doctors' force feeding of hunger strikers by pushing feeding tubes into their noses and down their throats. The task force also suggested that medical personnel ignored their duty to report evidence of beatings or torture of detainees, and that the Defense Department "improperly designated licensed health professionals to use their professional skills to interrogate detainees as military combatants, a status incompatible with licensing." The panel, the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers, is not the first to protest what it said were violations of medical ethics at detention sites. Other groups that have described abuses include Physicians for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department dismissed the new report as unsubstantiated and incorrect. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said in an email: "Task Force Guantanamo routinely provides comprehensive and humane medical care to the detainees held at Guantanamo. They are consummate professionals working under incredibly stressful conditions." Colonel Breasseale defended the force feeding of hunger strikers via nasal tubes, which he referred to as "enteral feeding," as legal and necessary to prevent them from committing suicide by starvation. As of Monday, there were "14 detainees refusing to eat on a regular basis, and each is approved for enteral feeding," he said. "While detainees may be on the enteral feed list, they do not always require the tube feeding frequently they will drink the supplement or eat a meal out of sight of their peers." Dean Boyd, a C.I.A. spokesman, said in an email: "It's important to underscore that the C.I.A. does not have any detainees in its custody and President Obama terminated the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program by executive order in 2009. The task force report contains serious inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions. The agency is proud of its medical staff, who uphold the highest standards of their profession in the work they perform." "We'd also like to see the association acknowledge what is already widely known about psychologists' participation in interrogations, and use those as examples of what psychologists cannot and should not do," he said. The association's members have been debating its ethics guidelines regarding interrogation for years. In 2008, in documents alleging abuse, lawyers for a detainee at Guantanamo Bay singled out a psychologist as a critical player. At the time, the guidelines stated that it was "consistent with the A.P.A. ethics code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information gathering processes for national security related purposes" as long as the interrogation did not involve any of 19 coercive procedures, including the use of hoods, waterboarding and physical assault. Later that year, the membership voted to prohibit any consultation in interrogations at Guantanamo or other so called black sites run by the C.I.A. But the association has not gone as far as the new report urges: It has not prohibited psychologists from assisting in all interrogations. Psychologists are divided over the wisdom of such a blanket prohibition, with some arguing that it would only reduce the level of accountability during interrogations. Whether a blanket prohibition would alter military protocols is hard to say. Like most professional groups, the psychological association has little direct authority over its members. In a statement released on Monday, the association said it supported many of the recommendations in the report, including ethics training for psychologists working with the military and intelligence services. But, it added, the association has already issued repeated statements that "have forbidden psychologists from perpetrating or supporting torture; obligated psychologists to report torture and abuse; and prohibited specific enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Home sharing services like Airbnb can be great money savers. But the greatest money savers tend to require skipping common hotel amenities like fitness centers, spas, pools and room service. Now, naturally, there's an app for that. Make that apps, plural, including the following new ones that offer non hotel guests access to hotel services. At the beach and craving a burger but don't want to leave your patch of paradise? Bring up EazyO on your phone. The service delivers restaurant food to your beach chair at a touch of the screen using stored payment information and GPS location technology. Currently only available in South Florida, and only available for the iPhone, EazyO lists menus from major hotels like the Fontainebleau Miami Beach and area beach concessions. Dayuse offers users the opportunity to book hotels during daylight hours, usually with the provision that day users arrive after 9 a.m. and check out in the late afternoon. With over 4,000 hotel listings in 24 countries, the service touts itself as a place to check in before your accommodations allow with particular appeal to jet lagged fliers and a way to gain access to hotel pools, gyms, spas and meeting space. The app is free, and available for the iPhone and Google Android devices.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
"Germany is an anatomical oddity," Kurt Tucholsky once wrote. "It writes with its left hand and acts with its right." He would have known. As the most prominent columnist of the Weimar Republic, he skewered the fashions and follies of the newly ascendant right wing in reams of satirical essays, poems and cabaret songs under five different bylines. In his day, he was as famous as the kings of American late night comedy are now and just as powerless to affect elections. With hindsight, some critics wondered if his sendups of Nazi bigwigs and fascist foot soldiers hadn't been a little too funny, like the poem "Joebbels," which in thick Berlin dialect deflates the Fuhrer's diminutive propaganda minister, or a spoof Hitler Youth essay weighing who was the greater German, Goethe or Hitler. Maybe such antics helped make the Nazis look harmless. In any case readers laughed. And Hitler still won. By then Tucholsky had already chosen a life in exile, first in Paris, then in Sweden. Bitterly aware of his own impotence, he stopped writing and fell into depression. But in 1931, two years before members of the Hitler Youth hurled his books onto a bonfire, and four years before overdosing on sleeping pills, Tucholsky wrote a love story as light as a summer breeze. Not much happens in CASTLE GRIPSHOLM, which New York Review Books has just reissued in a sympathetic translation by Michael Hofmann, though there is enough witty banter, fresh air and sex to propel the story along. The lingering power of this deceptively slight novel comes from the shiver of foreboding that courses through it. A writer (named Tucholsky) and his girlfriend, Lydia, both hard bitten city dwellers, vacation in the Swedish countryside. Nothing mars their idyll not even pompous fellow tourists and overpriced booze until they discover a girl who is being tyrannized in a nearby boarding school. Reluctant at first, they soon find that they cannot turn their backs on her suffering. But will they be able to make much of a difference? Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. By the time Tucholsky wrote "Castle Gripsholm" in Sweden, that question had become painfully personal. Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin, he quickly showed talent as a polemicist. (While still in school he published a mock fairy tale poking fun at Kaiser Wilhelm's taste in art.) Tucholsky studied law and served on the Eastern Front in World War I, an experience that forged his lifelong pacifism. Though the targets of his satire included the class bias of the Weimar legal system, puffed up writing and the vacuity of popular music, most of his efforts were directed at the boorishness of the nascent Third Reich. "A satirist," Tucholsky once wrote, "is an offended idealist." In "Castle Gripsholm" that idealism comes out to play once more, in a bucolic setting of "blue skies and gray skies, sun, sea breath, fish and whiskey." Kurt (whom Lydia calls Peter) and Lydia (whom he calls Princess) are at the sweet spot of a relationship. They are already "intimate, but not bored; new, but not too new; fresh, but not strange." Their relationship is buoyed more by breezy tenderness than ardor. Then Lydia's friend Billie shows up and a crossword puzzle at bedtime sparks passions that surprise all of them. Meanwhile, they can't get out of their minds the girl they saw, visibly terrified, on an outing with her classmates. Her school and its sadistic German matron become a symbol of all that is wrong with the Weimar Republic in its death throes. When the vacationers step in to extract the girl from her ordeal, they do so knowing full well that they are leaving no dent in the institution of oppression. According to one Jewish proverb, a man who saves one life saves the whole world. Tucholsky was too much of a realist to subscribe to that view. Yet he let nobody off the hook. Consider this passage about the "quiet, thoughtful" craftsmen who built the boarding school that harbors so much suffering: "When it was finished, they plastered the walls, and some of the rooms were painted, many more were papered, all differently, and according to their instructions. Then they had gone away phlegmatically. The house was finished; it didn't matter what happened in it now. That wasn't their affair, they were only the builders. The courtroom where people are tortured was, to begin with, a rectangle of brick walls, smooth and whitewashed. A painter had stood on his ladder and whistled cheerfully as he painted a gray stripe right round the room, as he had been told to; as far as he was concerned, it was a piece of craftsmanship." Tucholsky's verdict on his own ability to change things with his pen was devastating. In 1923 he wrote, "I have success, but no impact whatsoever." But outside politics his impact on his contemporaries was profound. Some of his quips remain in circulation to this day. His mix of snark and forensic social observation defined a certain brand of cool for the interwar generation. And, long before Lydia, he defined as a feminine ideal a woman who was outwardly capricious and ditsy, yet levelheaded, warm and fiercely independent. The prototype was Claire, the protagonist of the illustrated novella "Rheinsberg," which Tucholsky published in 1912 when he was barely 22. It prefigures "Castle Gripsholm," featuring a young couple vacationing in the countryside where they bicker in a patois of their own devising, make love and poke fun at bourgeois mores. The book was a runaway success. For a while, Tucholsky and the book's illustrator ran a pop up store in Berlin where customers were served a shot of schnapps with each purchase. German couples adopted Claire's droll mix of colloquial dialect and hapless High German, as their private language. In both "Rheinsberg" and "Castle Gripsholm" Tucholsky uses patois to heighten the daffy sex appeal of his female characters. In "Castle Gripsholm," it is Lydia's use of Missingsch, a customizable blend of High German and the earthy Platt dialect of northern Germany, that reveals her no nonsense character. As the narrator describes Missingsch, "it slithers about on the carefully wax polished stairs of German grammar, before falling flat on its face in its beloved Platt." In this translation, Hofmann forgoes any attempt at finding an English equivalent. In his introduction he writes that trying to render Missingsch using a "'corresponding' dialect" in English would be "distracting, paradoxical, absurd." He cites Tucholsky's own disdain for a German translation of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" that had Mellors speaking in a "'Bavarian mountain dialect.'" Instead, Hofmann alerts us when a character is speaking Platt and then gives a straightforward translation. (It's the same strategy that Elena Ferrante used in her Neapolitan novels, where she tells, but never shows, the reader when one of her characters speaks in dialect.) In any case Tucholsky doesn't resort to dialect for the fun of it. Rather, he does so out of a strong allergy to nationalist pathos. To the narrator of "Castle Gripsholm," the remaining pockets of Platt speakers are like "a dream world of eccentricity, kindness and music, inhabited by an assortment of people like rare beetles, each one of them unique." In this work, written shortly before Tucholsky slipped into self imposed silence, he fashions a dream world for his idealized characters. He creates a language like a hamlet. Population: two. "Anyone can manage to be happy for a brief time," the narrator says near the end as he and Lydia head to the night ferry that will take them through the darkness and back toward Germany. "A brief happiness: None other is conceivable, here on earth." He raises a glass to Martje Flor, a heroine of North German folklore. A peasant girl, she silenced a horde of ransacking mercenaries with a raised glass and defiant toast. That was during the Thirty Years' War, which to an exiled writer in 1931 was still likely the darkest chapter of German history. "To long life and happiness!" Martje shouted at the plunderers. In Platt, of course.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
FRANKFURT The European Central Bank acted on Tuesday to prevent a potential collapse of the Greek banking system after the country was declared by a large ratings agency to be in "selective default," making Greek bonds ineligible as collateral for loans from the central bank. Standard Poor's issued the most recent downgrade late Monday because of the debt reduction deal reached last week with Greece's private sector creditors. Greece will pay back less than half the face value of its bonds under the agreement, which is ostensibly voluntary. The central bank did not specifically mention the S. P. downgrade on Tuesday, but it said in a news release that the agreement with creditors meant that Greek bonds could no longer be used as collateral to obtain cash from the central bank.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
NORTON, Mass. Dustin Johnson had just missed a straightforward six foot birdie putt on the ninth hole at the Northern Trust golf tournament Sunday, squandering a chance to extend his commanding lead in the event's final round. Then, walking across a street to the 10th tee, he tripped and stumbled before regaining his footing. The proverbial bump in the road? Two hiccups that might derail, or unnerve the famously tranquil Johnson? Not a chance. Johnson hammered an iron shot 267 yards into the middle of the 10th fairway then made a comfortable par. Two holes later, he expanded his lead to nine strokes over his closest competitor, Harris English. The rout continued, interrupted only by a 75 minute thunderstorm delay, but in the end, Johnson had his 22nd PGA Tour victory and took the lead after the opening event of the 2020 FedEx Cup playoffs. Johnson's final round 63 at the Northern Trust, coupled with a career low 60 on Friday and two other rounds in the 60s, left him 30 under par for the tournament. English, who shot 69 on Sunday, was second at 19 under par. It was Johnson's second victory since the PGA Tour resumed in mid June after a three month layoff because of the Covid 19 pandemic and his third time winning the Northern Trust. "My ball striking was unbelievable; I found something on Wednesday," Johnson said. "I was swinging really good but something clicked on Wednesday." Johnson began the day with a five stroke lead and quickly made a statement to the rest of the field on the second hole when he rolled in a six foot eagle putt. From there, Johnson only stomped on the accelerator, with birdies in four of his next six holes. It was an impressive stretch, although not nearly as striking as Friday's round when Johnson was 11 under par through his first 11 holes a performance built on accurate, powerful tee shots, deft iron play and confident, precise putting. As English, who also had four rounds in the 60s during the tournament, said of Johnson in a television interview during the rain delay: "Dustin hasn't missed a shot and he's putting really well. That's a tough combination." For Johnson, this month has been a remarkable revival from a dreadful July when he shot 80 in back to back rounds at the Memorial Tournament and missed the cut. At his next tournament, he opened with a 78 and promptly withdrew. But the respite led to a turnaround in August which has seen Johnson record 12 successive rounds in the 60s, including at the P.G.A. Championship when he finished tied for second. With Sunday's victory, Johnson also becomes the No. 1 ranked player in men's golf as the PGA Tour nears the close of its truncated 2020 season. "Obviously, I've got myself into a really good position," Johnson said of the FedEx Cup playoffs, which he has never won. "It's just something that I would really like to have on my resume when I'm done playing golf. It's a big title. It means a lot to all the guys out here." Unfortunately for Woods, his rally may not be enough to keep alive a bid for a third FedEx Cup title. Woods will play in next week's BMW Championship at the Olympia Fields Country Club in Illinois, but he will need a stellar outing to advance to the final round of the FedEx Cup playoffs. Woods's finish Sunday left him in 57th place in the FedEx Cup standings. Only the top 30 golfers will qualify for the final event of the playoffs, the Tour Championship at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Sept. 4 to 7. Woods knew the math after his round Sunday, and had one solution for getting into the top 30: win the BMW Championship. "I don't know what the number will be for me to move on to East Lake, but obviously a 'W' definitely gets it done," he said. Overall, Woods said he felt fit after the four rounds of the Northern Trust, which potentially could be the first of four tournaments he plays in five weeks. He said his surgically repaired back, which has hampered him periodically this season, did not factor into his play. "My body feels pretty good," Woods said. "You know, this is going to be a long haul either way. Hopefully, I get into the Tour Championship and that helps me get ready for the U.S. Open." The United States Open is scheduled for Sept. 17 to 20 at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Woods played on Sunday with Rory McIlroy, who also finished near the bottom of the leaderboard. Afterward, McIlroy admitted that he continued to be disquieted by the eerie silence of professional golf's fan less environment, a necessary, if unpopular, condition of the tour since it resumed on June 11. McIlroy, who has had an uneven summer with six finishes outside the top 30 in his last seven events, said he misses the energy and motivation that thousands of fans brought to tournaments. It is more than an absence of cheering: there is a sameness to each tournament without the quirks and eccentricities that fans from different regions bring to a sporting event. "This is going to sound really bad, but I feel like the last few weeks, I've just been going through the motions," said McIlroy, who shot 69 on Sunday to finish 28 strokes behind Johnson. "I want to get an intensity and some sort of fire, but I just haven't been able to. And look, that's partly to do with the atmosphere and partly to do with how I'm playing. I'm not inspiring myself and I'm trying to get inspiration from outside sources to get something going."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN FRANCISCO Two Google employees, Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker, helped organize a 20,000 person walkout from the company last November. Now they say they have paid a price for their actions. In a letter shared internally with co workers on Monday and reviewed by The New York Times, Ms. Stapleton, a marketing manager at YouTube, said Google had demoted her after she urged colleagues to walk out from the company last year over its treatment of sexual harassment. Ms. Whittaker, an artificial intelligence researcher, said in the letter that she had also been "informed my role would be changed dramatically." In addition to the demotion, Ms. Stapleton said, Google instructed her to take medical leave even though she was not sick, according to the letter. And Ms. Whittaker said she had been told to abandon her external work at New York University, where she runs research on artificial intelligence and ethics for the university's A.I. Now Institute. Ms. Stapleton said she had hired a lawyer and reversed the demotion. Ms. Whittaker did not address whether her role had ultimately changed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
China's leaders sometimes seem 10 feet tall, presiding over a political and economic juggernaut that has founded universities at a rate of one a week and that recently used more cement in three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century. President Trump has hailed China's president, Xi Jinping, as a "brilliant leader," and Michael Bloomberg says Xi is "not a dictator." But we're now seeing the dangers of Xi's authoritarian model, for China and the world. The first known coronavirus infection in the city of Wuhan presented symptoms beginning on Dec. 1, and by late December there was alarm in Wuhan's medical circles. That would have been the moment for the authorities to act decisively. And act decisively they did not against the virus, but against whistle blowers who were trying to call attention to the public health threat. A doctor who told a WeChat group about the virus was disciplined by the Communist Party and forced to admit wrongdoing. The police reported giving "education" and "criticism" to eight front line doctors for "rumormongering" about the epidemic; instead of punishing these doctors, Xi should have listened to them. China informed the World Health Organization of the virus on Dec. 31 but kept its own citizens in the dark; as other countries reported infections even as China pretended that it had confined the outbreak to Wuhan, Chinese joked grimly about a "patriotic" virus that only struck foreigners. Wuhan's mayor said he wasn't authorized to discuss the virus until late this month. In that time, people traveled to and from Wuhan and didn't take precautions. The government finally ordered a lockdown on Jan. 23 that effectively quarantined people in Wuhan. But by then, according to the mayor, five million people had already fled the city. Partly because the government covered up the epidemic in the early stages, hospitals were not able to gather supplies, and there are now major shortages of testing kits, masks and protective gear. Some doctors were reduced to making goggles out of plastic folders. One reason for the early cover up is that Xi's China has systematically gutted institutions like journalism, social media, nongovernmental organizations, the legal profession and others that might provide accountability. These institutions were never very robust in China, but on and off they were tolerated until Xi came along. I conducted a series of experiments on Chinese blogs over the years beginning in 2003 and was sometimes surprised by what I could get away with but no longer. Xi has dragged China backward in terms of civil society, crushing almost every wisp of freedom and oversight. For the same reason that Xi's increasingly authoritarian China bungled the coronavirus outbreak, it also mishandled a swine fever virus that since 2018 has devastated China's hog industry and killed almost one quarter of the world's pigs. Dictators often make poor decisions because they don't get accurate information: When you squelch independent voices you end up getting just flattery and optimism from those around you. Senior Chinese officials have told me that they are routinely lied to on trips to meet local officials and must dispatch their drivers and secretaries to assess the truth and gauge the real mood. For this or other reasons, Xi has made a series of mistakes. He mishandled and inflamed the political crisis in Hong Kong, he inadvertently assured the re election of his nemesis as president of Taiwan, and he has presided over worsening relations with the United States and many other countries. The coronavirus has already reached the Xinjiang region in the Far West of China, and one risk is that it will spread in the internment camps where China is confining about one million Muslims with poor sanitation and limited health care. Viruses are challenges for any country, and it's only fair to note that China does a better job protecting its people from measles than the U.S. does. It's a credit to China's system that a baby born in Beijing today has a longer life expectancy than a baby born in Washington, D.C. More broadly, the United States, which has several impoverished counties with lower life expectancy than Cambodia or Bangladesh, is in no position to lecture anyone about health. But, with a dose of humility, let's get over any misplaced admiration some Americans have for Xi's authoritarian model. The Chinese social contract has been that citizens will not get ballots but will live steadily better lives, yet China's economy is now as weak as it has been in three decades and the coronavirus will sap growth further. Xi is not living up to his end of the bargain, and this is seen in the anger emerging on Chinese social media despite the best efforts of censors. I don't know if Xi is in political trouble for his misrule, but he should be. He's a preening dictator, and with this outbreak some citizens are paying a price.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LIFE OF A KLANSMAN A Family History in White Supremacy By Edward Ball When his mother died in 2003, the writer Edward Ball went to New Orleans, where her family had lived for generations, to bury her and sort through her belongings. Among her papers were documents that had been collected by her late aunt, including tales about the man who was known in the family as "our Klansman." Ball had already written, in 1998, a deeply reported National Book Award winning history, "Slaves in the Family," for which he tracked down descendants of those who had once been enslaved by his South Carolina ancestors on his father's side. In his new book, "Life of a Klansman," he follows a similar course, taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great great grandfather on his mother's side. The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment bred demons that are all too present in our society today. "This is a family story," he writes. "Yet it is not a family story wrapped in sugar, the way some people like to serve them." The family is not just his, it's our nation's. Read an excerpt from "Life of a Klansman." Lecorgne, born in 1832, was raised in a New Orleans that was, as it has been throughout its history, very complex racially and ethnically. About a quarter of the population were French speaking whites, a quarter were English speaking whites, a quarter were free mixed race Creoles and a quarter were slaves. The Lecorgnes were in the first category, but they rented a home from a free French speaking woman of color. Because he has few documents, Ball indulges in a lot of surmises and speculations, perhaps a bit too many for my taste. He pictures the young boy Lecorgne walking with his family the four blocks to Congo Square, where the slaves were allowed to drum and dance on Sunday afternoons. There is a sexual tension that the boy finds both attractive and appalling. "I think I can begin to see, in Congo Square, a script and a stage, a place where Blackness and whiteness meet," Ball writes. "Complications ensue. They move apart. Eventually the script calls for a crescendo. Blackness and whiteness collide, and the ending, for our Klansman, is an explosion." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Lecorgne is the unsuccessful and unpopular middle child of a large family. He tries to make a living as a carpenter, but he descends into what is known in the local parlance as petits blancs, the poor working class whites. Resentments accrue. When he marries, his wife's family gives him a household slave as a dowry, but he has to sell her for 500 to afford a home. The Civil War offers Lecorgne an outlet for his resentments and a chance to finally earn a little respect from his family and neighbors. But even there he fails. After joining one of Louisiana's militias as a captain, he is demoted to a second lieutenant. On a train trip to Virginia he gets into a melee and, along with much of his unit, is court martialed. At a public ceremony, he and his comrades have one half of their scalps shaved and are cashiered. Lecorgne heads back to New Orleans in disgrace. Under Reconstruction, the city becomes integrated. Blacks can vote, testify against whites in court and sit where they want on the streetcars; a few even attend integrated schools. Lecorgne's neighborhood in uptown New Orleans, around where Napoleon Avenue meets the river (which is where I grew up), becomes mixed, with Creoles, Germans, Irish, Blacks and mulattoes all living on the same blocks. It's nice to think what the city, and our nation, might have been had that progression continued. But among the whites, especially the petits blancs, resentments built. The clubhouses for resentful poor whites are the neighborhood firehouses. Lecorgne joined one just off Napoleon Avenue, the Home Hook Ladder Company, housed in a Romanesque building with a first floor facade clad in stone and a second in red brick. Its membership suddenly swelled during Reconstruction to 85 men, far more than were necessary to fight off the neighborhood's house fires. Instead, as Ball writes, "the firehouses play a big part in the tale of the Ku klux," which is what the loose knit confederation of white supremacist organizations came to be called. Lecorgne was a minor player in this movement. But for that reason his tale is valuable, both for understanding his times and for understanding our own; he allows us a glimpse of who becomes one of the mass of followers of racist movements, and why. His one recorded inglorious moment came in early 1873. With Black support, a Republican was elected governor, and the local white militias took up arms to resist his rule. Lecorgne and a group of armed men gathered with the goal of taking over their neighborhood police precinct station, hoping it would spark a wider white uprising. Although the newspapers referred to them as "Ku Kluxers," the rebel raiders most likely did not wear robes and hoods. That practice was mainly for rural marauders. They were successful, but the following night the police staged a counterattack. As Lecorgne hid in a staircase, his cousin was wounded and a friend was killed. Lecorgne surrendered and was carried away to the city jail. In the indictment, which misspelled his name, he is accused of treason and violating federal law for having "unlawfully maliciously and traitorously conspired" to attack state authorities. But a local judge quickly dismissed all the charges. That low point was the high point of his life. Near the end of his book, Ball makes a fascinating digression. It involves a prominent person of color who lived in New Orleans at the same time as Lecorgne. Louis Charles Roudanez was a medical doctor, trained in France and at Dartmouth, who published The New Orleans Tribune, a daily newspaper for the Black community. An homme de couleur libre, Roudanez married a free woman of color. While researching his own family, Ball decided to look for the descendants of the Roudanez family. He finds one of the physician publisher's great great grandchildren, named Mark Roudane, living in a leafy subdivision of St. Paul, Minn. "He was raised white, and he appears white," Ball writes of Roudane. "In middle age he learned that according to the one drop rule of blackness, he was not white." Roudane did not know the tale of his father's ancestors, or even the Roudanez spelling of his family name, until he stumbled across some family documents when he was 55. As happened with Ball, the discovery of a bit of family history leads Roudane on a quest. "When my father died, in 2005, I was going through his papers and throwing stuff away, and I found an unmarked binder," Roudane tells Ball. It contained papers showing how his father, who was designated as "colored" on his birth certificate, had forsaken his distinguished roots, changed the spelling of his name as a young man, gone to Tulane by passing as white and then moved to the Midwest. Despite this history, or perhaps because of it, he became a resentful white racist. "When it came to talking about Black people," Mark Roudane told Ball, "all this venom would come out. I thought, 'Why is my dad being ugly?' I didn't understand it." The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball's entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance. In Ball's retelling of his family saga, the sins and stains of the past are still very much with us, not something we can dismiss by blaming them on misguided ancestors who died long ago. "It is not a distortion to say that Constant's rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible to measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now not just for me and for his 50 or 60 descendants, but for whites in general," Ball writes. "I am an heir to Constant's acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In "The Last Stone," Bowden focuses on 21 months of questioning by a revolving cast of detectives, telling a stirring, suspenseful, thoughtful story that, miraculously, neither oversimplifies the details nor gets lost in the thicket of a four decade case file. This is a cat and mouse tale, told beautifully. But like all great true crime, "The Last Stone" finds its power not by leaning into cliche but by resisting it pushing for something more realistic, more evocative of a deeper truth. In this case, Bowden shows how even the most exquisitely pulled off interrogations are a messy business, in which exhaustive strategizing is followed by game time gut decisions and endless second guessing and soul searching. An interrogator's most important job like a journalist's is to keep the subject talking. "The problem was to convince him that it was in his best interests to reveal what he knew," Bowden writes, "even though it manifestly was not." Dave Davis, the detective who spends the most time in the room with Welch, has the softest touch. "Criminals saw the man, not the badge," Bowden writes; Davis uses empathy as a tactic, even if being empathetic around Welch "meant donning moral blinders." As another detective with a nurturing style, Katie Leggett, puts it: "We had to endure the 'friendship' and go through the crap to get as many of the answers as we could." Readers will probably recognize a tried and true strategy here: good cop/bad cop. When Leggett loses her temper with Welch, still another detective steps in to smooth things over, saying, "I actually think you are still the nice person we thought you were." Read our review of Bowden's "Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War." Their interrogation target, is, in Bowden's telling, an audacious foil, not to mention a colossal narcissist "natively bright but deeply ignorant and cocky beyond all reason." Welch seems driven to keep tabs on what the police know. So rather than shut them down entirely, he plays a riskier game, admitting just enough to keep them coming back, but not so much that he could be charged with another crime. His capacity to lie is bottomless, and the lies themselves are rather ingeniously "built around the known facts." Each time new information contradicts him, Welch alters his story just enough to make sense; each new set of facts resets the cones on the slalom course, and off he glides again, as if on skis. "The ease with which Lloyd made these shifts never ceased to amaze," Bowden writes. "He acted as if he had never told the story differently." Bowden is very good at showing how both sides in this protracted interrogation are lying. Deceit and trickery are tools of the trade for the police, at least in American interrogations. But they are perilous tools. "Once you get into the really interesting stuff," Bowden writes, "you descend, by necessity, a moral ladder onto slippery ground." At worst, forcing a narrative onto a suspect can lead to false confessions, as, for example, the wrongly convicted men in the Central Park Five case can attest. And so for a time, we are in a weird area with this book, where the only evidence is what people say, decades later, and the persuasiveness of that evidence depends entirely on whether what those people say can be believed. The more Welch talks, the more the detectives wonder if everything he is saying is simply catering to their own biases. Hours of tall tales, "then five minutes of half truth," Bowden writes. "Were the detectives zeroing in on the truth, or was Lloyd just desperately inventing?" This self doubt this perpetual self scrutiny is what separates these detectives from, say, the one in Netflix's "Making a Murderer" who, on video, spoon feeds a confession to poor Brendan Dassey, a teenage boy so intimidated that he gurgles back what was said to him. (Dassey's conviction was eventually tossed out, only to be reinstated on appeal to the federal Seventh Circuit.) The best interrogators, Bowden explains, "are connoisseurs of untruth." Again, Bowden the reporter feels a kinship with them: They, too, must assemble a cogent narrative from a morass of chaos. "What we call history," Bowden writes, is at best "artful, informed, honest speculation." The detectives are, in the end, writing a story. Hopefully a true one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
War plays were big on Broadway in the fall of 1918. With the nation sending soldiers to Europe to fight in World War I, spectacles like the "Ziegfeld Follies" wrapped themselves in patriotism. The runaway hit of the season, though, was the kind of distraction that people relish in troubled times. They flocked to see a play called "Lightnin': A Live Wire American Comedy" at the Gaiety Theater, on the edge of Times Square. Even as a lethal influenza pandemic took hold of the city, audiences came. Settled into the seats, they must have laughed and laughed. Sounds dangerous to us now, right? It sounded dangerous even then. As the flu spread that year and the next, eventually killing about 675,000 people across the United States, city after city raced to contain the threat by shuttering theaters and other places of public amusement. Hollywood vowed to release no more films until the flu subsided. "Gotham Refuses to Get Scared," an early October headline declared in The Baltimore Sun, which noted that despite 2,070 new cases of flu and 283 of pneumonia in the previous 24 hours in New York City, its health department had announced "that the epidemic has not reached an alarming stage." Its brief, steep spike was about to start. But quelling dismay was part of the city's strategy an effort to keep the public's spirits up. Amid our own pandemic, which since March has disrupted American life and largely paralyzed live performance, it sounds almost unreal that New York theater in 1918 simply carried on. When I mentioned that history to Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, she asked, "Are you sure?" "It seems nuts," she said, adding that the industry's response to the coronavirus had been unhesitating. "We didn't even think about it a minute. Once it became clear that this was here, the first case we got on Broadway, we shut that night. Literally that night." Royal S. Copeland, the powerful health commissioner of New York City when the Spanish flu crept in, looked askance at pandemic responses elsewhere. While the nation's surgeon general, Rupert Blue, encouraged localities to close theaters as a preventive measure, Copeland was philosophically disinclined to intrude much on ordinary life. He also didn't want to freak people out. "My aim was to prevent panic, hysteria, mental disturbance," he said later, "and thus to protect the public from the condition of mind that in itself predisposes to physical ills." Howard Markel, the director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan, said Copeland "had the faith of the people" as he steered the city through the outbreak shuttering almost nothing, including the schools. Without a ban on public gatherings, New York was "a big outlier" among sizable American cities, Markel said. Instead of closing theaters, Copeland staggered their curtain times, assigning each to a group. The Hippodrome, for example, started at 8 p.m., the Winter Garden at 8:15, the Lyric at 8:30, the Booth at 8:45 and the Belasco at 9. In a pre television, pre talkies age, theater was a more everyday pleasure. Soldiers on leave flocked to live shows; free tickets for them were seen as a necessity. "War Service Director Says No Soldier Should Lack Food, Shelter, and Entertainment," read one headline in The New York Times. Neighborhood theaters and vaudeville houses were scattered through the city. That fall, the number of "first class houses" had reached a high of 45. But while the virus lurked, some changes were needed. At theaters and cinemas, standing room tickets were no longer allowed; smoking wasn't, either. Masks were not mandated, but Copeland was ruthless about the need to "eliminate the sneezers, coughers and spitters" from the audience. Using performances as opportunities for health education, he ordered theater managers to make preshow announcements explaining the danger of infection and detailing the new prohibitions. He told them "to instruct their ushers and attendants to escort from their theaters those who violate the department rules, and to use force if necessary." "We will back them up," Copeland promised, ominously. Those ushers and attendants were to boot sneezers, coughers and spitters right out. Copeland's militancy on that point anticipated a worry that 21st century theatergoers cited in a survey this spring about what would keep them from returning to Broadway once it reopens: "a lack of trust that others in the audience will adhere to safety protocols." But as J. Alexander Navarro, a historian and an editor of the online Influenza Encyclopedia, pointed out, the pull together spirit of wartime helped coax Americans in 1918 to alter their behavior. "It's hard to measure," he said in a phone interview, "but I think there was definitely a much higher sense of civic duty and nationalism and patriotism, compared to today." The few theaters that Copeland did shut down, quietly, were what he called "hole in the wall moving picture shows," judged to risk infection with unhealthy air. In "the big modern sanitary theaters," he said, he was confident of the ventilation. How misplaced his faith was is unclear; probably, Navarro said, some people did come away infected. It would be interesting, he mused, to re create the conditions of a typical theater, to see how far from a given seat a person's breath would have spread back then. Which is just the sort of thought that flashes through people's minds these days when they think about sitting in an audience again. Before the flu started wreaking its havoc, producers' biggest worry had been the proposed doubling of a hefty war tax on theater tickets a move they tried to shame senators out of by reminding them that the enemy, the German kaiser, had at least one positive feature: his staunch support of the stage. It wasn't until late September that The Times's Sunday drama column, What News on the Rialto?, mentioned the flu. The worry was not about bustling Broadway but about poor Boston, one of the first American cities hit by the virus's deadly second wave. Its theaters had just been closed, leaving touring companies to languish. Only two weeks later, though, "theatrical men" were blaming a dent in some New York shows' box office on twin factors: the latest war bond drive, which they had loudly dreaded, and the flu, which sneaked up on them. A week after that, the industry news was almost uniformly grim, with New York and San Francisco the rare "communities of consequence" with stages still open for business. "The condition, of course, is one unprecedented in the theater world," The Times's column opined. "The slump in New York reached its high mark or low mark during the last six days, and even the most substantial successes had empty seats." Then, abruptly, the crisis was over in New York. By early November, as the war ended, the virus loosened its hold on the city. By the middle of the month, with emergency rules rescinded, ticket sales headed up again, and Actors' Equity reached a new contract agreement with theater managers. (It is a curious fact that actors worked through the flu outbreak, but contemporary Equity declined to discuss it for this article.) As the December holidays approached, the city's box office revenues returned to glowing health. "The same hardly applies to the remainder of the country," What News on the Rialto? added darkly, "particularly the West, where the renascent influenza germ is again beginning to play havoc." What Copeland did right, Navarro said, was to act early, employing stringent isolation and quarantine measures for the infected, enforced by what he called "a very well funded, very efficient, well run, longstanding public health department." Still, more than 20,000 New Yorkers died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 about the same number who have died in the city so far from the coronavirus. Yet Copeland's unorthodox approach resulted in New York having a lower death rate from the flu than any other large city on the East Coast, Markel said. "I would have closed the theaters, absolutely," said Markel, a physician and historian who edits the Influenza Encyclopedia with Navarro. "So it was kind of a bold move. But he was a very bold guy, and a very opinionated guy." Had New York shuttered businesses and schools, Navarro speculated, it would have fared even better. "But given that they didn't bring the city's economy to a halt," he said, "what they did was very effective." None of this is to suggest that present day New York should have acted any differently than it has in response to Covid 19. As Navarro pointed out, coronavirus carriers can be asymptomatic while the 1918 flu, though less contagious, ravaged its victims so severely that they were more likely to be home suffering than out mingling. Copeland, a politically savvy homeopath who later became a Democratic senator for New York, had his own sense of what was essential to the public health. To him, it was of prime importance that people be able to "go about their business without constant fear and hysterical sense of calamity." And in 1918, keeping playhouses open was a way of maintaining calm. In 2020 New York, keeping them open likely would have done the opposite. Reopening them too soon could do that, too. "We'd love to be back tomorrow," St. Martin, the Broadway League president, said. "But we will never put our casts, crew and audience in harm's way if we can help it." "If we come back," she added, "we will be back because we believe that we've done everything we can, and that those people are safe." Given the brutal damage current pandemic has wrought, Gotham for now is OK with being scared.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In the late 1960s, D.D. and Leslie Tillett worked with designers in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on some historically significant prints. Now the project is being reintroduced to a new generation. Update: Jan. 22, 2021. After this article's initial publication, two sons of D.D. and Leslie Tillett, Seth Tillett and Dek Tillett, objected to some of the descriptions of their parents' work and its legacy, and raised doubts about the history of the textiles being reissued. The article has been updated to include additional context supplied by them. The party that introduced the Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant textile collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall of 1971 drew quite a crowd. Ethel Kennedy was in attendance along with Babe Paley, the socialite; so were Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue, and Bunny Mellon, the philanthropist and horticulturalist. The guest who got the most attention that evening, as guests perused the array of textiles featuring African motifs in bold colorways, was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. "It was a very glamorous evening," said Hermine Mariaux, 87, the homes editor for House and Garden at the time, who attended the gala and recalled the Senegalese dancers that performed. "It was the very first party like that held at the Met. Prior to then, the museum never would have engaged in commercial activities, but they agreed to it, because Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant was important to Jackie." In 1969, inspired by her brother in law's efforts, Mrs. Onassis helped create Design Works to amplify the talents of artists living in Bedford Stuyvesant. She asked her friends D.D. and Leslie Tillett, a husband and wife design team, to collaborate. The couple's vivid, large scale, screen printed fabrics created by hand in their small Manhattan based printing operation were favored by top designers and influential figures, including Mrs. Onassis, who used the textiles for upholstery and draperies in the living quarters of The White House. The Tilletts had invested in communities outside the United States, said their grandson Patrick McBride, 48, who owns and operates Tillett Textiles; Leslie died in 1992, D.D. in 2008. (Tillett Textiles, which has been run by Mr. McBride since 2016, is a separate company from the original one formed by Leslie and D.D., which opened in Manhattan in 1946 and closed in 2009.) Leslie and D.D. Tillett taught printing and design techniques to South Korean producers of raw silk and helped bring their products to the United States, and consulted with emerging businesses in China, Lesotho and Peru. "Jackie suggested to my grandparents that they turn their attention to helping groups in hard hit areas of this country, and they loved the idea," Mr. McBride said. "They were very enthusiastic about inspiring talent and design in Bedford Stuyvesant and to teaching members of the community their intensive hand production processes." The Tilletts did outreach to find residents who were interested in learning the craft. Carlos Ortiz was 22 and about to graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology when a professor introduced him to Leslie Tillett. "He went on to be a great mentor to me," said Mr. Ortiz, now 72, who was with Design Works from its inception and soon became its chief colorist. "Leslie told me: 'You will learn how to do it all. And he followed through. They taught me everything from design to mixing colors and pigment to printing."' The fabrics created by Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant were designed by members of the community, led first by Calister Thomas and then Sherl Nero (both now deceased), and drawn from African history, Mr. McBride said. Motifs included abstract fish scales, zebra stripes, oversize banana leaves, roosters and cowrie shells, along with bold geometric prints and stylized abstracts. "The colors were incredibly saturated," he said. Mr. McBride's company, Tillett Textiles, has its headquarters in Sheffield, Mass. With views of the Berkshire mountain range, the Tillett screen printing facility's pastoral setting feels more like a small artist colony than a fabric manufacturer with clients all over the globe. Mr. McBride travels between there and New York City; his mother, Kathleen Tillett, who works in the business alongside him, lives on the property full time. Mr. McBride's way of telling the tale now is to reintroduce four fabrics from the archive that he said were labeled "Design Works Bedford Stuyvesant," with a portion of the profits to be donated to the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club. Those patterns, in three colorways, have recently become available to the trade. Tote bags, throw pillows and face masks in the patterns may be ordered through the company Instagram account. After further research, "we'll release other patterns from Design Works gradually," said Mr. McBride, noting that the fabrics are made of Belgian linen, which is more modern and luxurious than what was available during the 1970s. "There has been a resurgence of using vibrant, rich colors in interiors," he said. "People are feeling excited about color. Releasing these fabrics in their original saturated rich, tones is authentic to history and lends itself to what's going on in the design world today." That reintroduction is not without dissent, however. Seth Tillett and Dek Tillett, two sons of D.D. and Leslie, contacted The New York Times after this article was published and disputed that the designs were by Design Works. Selling what they called "banal textiles" that were not reflective of the quality of Sherl Nero, Calister Thomas and others' work "to benefit a glamorous Manhattan charity leaves us speechless." They said that what Mr. McBride is calling a reintroduction ignored "the motifs and sources that drove the aesthetic" of Design Works Bedford Stuyvesant, and that he was using their work and name to enrich his own company. Three of the four patterns Mr. McBride is reintroducing are not Design Works patterns, they said, and the remaining one, originally known as Fish Scale, was licensed to Schumacher by Design Works in the late 1970s, and is now sold there under the name Zimba. Dek Tillett said he himself was the designer, more than 30 years ago, of one of the patterns: alternating black and beige zigzag stripes. Mr. McBride said he thought this was possible but also maintained that the textile was in a group labeled "Bedford Stuyvesant." Before it shut down in 1979, Design Works was housed in a five story building in Bedford Stuyvesant with a ground floor boutique and later, a smaller building on Taaffe Place, near the Pratt Institute. In addition to decorative fabrics, the initiative also produced ready to wear fashion, stoneware and jewelry in limited quantities. The textiles, which were distributed by Connaissance Fabrics throughout the country, however, became the prime focus. "It was a vertical operation, we designed, mixed colors, printed and cured the fabric on site, and handled shipping. It was rare for all of that to happen in one location back then," said Mr. Ortiz, who will bring his own collection to market next spring. Mrs. Onassis incorporated Design Works fabrics into the Fifth Avenue apartment she shared with her husband, Aristotle. The rooms were featured in the November 1971 issue of House Beautiful. In a photo of the library, the sofa is upholstered in Large Feather, an abstract print that strikes a whimsical note among the French antiques, a rare needlepoint rug and 19th century volumes in the floor to ceiling bookcases. Ms. Mariaux also used textiles from Design Works in her Manhattan apartment during the early 1970s. "I loved the patterns. They were pretty dramatic for the time. My favorite was a natural canvas ground cloth printed with espresso brown cowrie shells," she said. "The collection was very well received, not just because people really wanted to support the community of Bedford Stuyvesant which they did but because the fabrics Design Works created were especially unique and beautiful," Ms. Mariaux said. "It's nice to know they will be available once again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Technocrats in Brussels will readily say that what is now keeping them up at night is Spain. They are trying to see beyond the tools that so far have kept a true crisis at bay: the two rounds of low cost loans that the European Central Bank extended to commercial banks late last year and earlier this one, and the EUR780 billion bailout fund. One potential new tool, according to Mr. Deo, would be for Europe to guarantee the bank deposits of at risk countries like Spain. This would be similar to the way the U.S. government increased deposit insurance during the financial crisis in 2008 to head off a bank run. It would be an expensive undertaking, to be sure, and one that would have to be bankrolled largely by parsimonious Germany. But such a drastic step might steel the shaky nerves of Spanish depositors. Just such a step was briefly considered by European policy makers last year. But it was shelved on the assumption that North European taxpayers would not be inclined to back the banking system in Spain or in Italy, whose own banks have still not regained a solid footing, or in other euro zone convalescents. And without an allocation of new money, there could be no new guarantees for depositors. The total banking deposits in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland are EUR5.5 trillion, or seven times the size of the main European rescue vehicle, the European Financial Stability Facility. The other problem is that a deposit guarantee does little good if the citizens of the country in question become convinced that their nation might soon abandon the euro for another currency as seems to be the case in Greece, where more than EUR60 billion in deposits have fled banks since the crisis began. Those account holders fear having euros in the bank that could overnight become drachmas with half the value or less. So far in Spain, there has been little sign of mass flight of deposits, perhaps, in part, because no one is seriously talking right now about a Spanish exit from the euro. What has been happening, though, Spanish bankers say, is that deposits have been moving from riskier savings banks like Bankia to safer institutions like Santander and BBVA, both of which benefit from having substantial international operations. Bankia is deemed to be so close to the brink that Spain's government has seized control of it. But there is no question that the Spanish problem with bad loans is growing worse by the month. Last week, official statistics disclosed that nonperforming loans through March were 8.37 percent of the total loans the highest level since 1994, long before the adoption of the euro.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Bruce Jay Friedman, whose early novels, short stories and plays were pioneering examples of modern American black humor, making dark but giggle inducing sport of the deep, if not pathological, insecurities of his white, male, middle class and often Jewish protagonists, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 90. His son Josh said that the cause had not been determined, but that his father had had neuropathy. Mr. Friedman, who also wrote the screenplays for the hit film comedies "Stir Crazy" and "Splash," was an unusual case in American letters: an essentially comic writer whose work skipped back and forth between literature and pop culture and who, after an early decade of literary stardom, seemed almost to vanish in plain sight. Like his contemporaries Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, he wrote what came to be called black humor, largely because of an anthology by that name that he edited in 1965. His first two novels, "Stern" (1962) and the best selling "A Mother's Kisses" (1964) tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs and his first play, the 1967 Off Broadway hit "Scuba Duba," a sendup of race relations that is set in motion when a Jewish man fears his wife is having an affair with a black spear fisherman, made him widely celebrated. The New York Times Magazine in 1968 declared Mr. Friedman "The Hottest Writer of the Year." A deadpan prose stylist with a keen ear for the absurdly self involved dialogue that emanates from neurosis, Mr. Friedman was, at his best, a savage social satirist. He took advantage of the social upheaval he lived through in the 1960s and '70s to write about race and gender relations from the suddenly uncertain perspective of men like, well, himself, gleefully tweaking the white male psyche's tenderest spots. In "Black Angels," a short story often cited as emblematic of his early and most literary work, the main character, Stefano, is a white man left alone, despairing and struggling to keep up the maintenance on his house after his wife takes their young child and runs off with another man, "an assistant director of daytime TV" (a typically arch Friedmanesque detail). He finds salvation in the form of a team of black yard workers, led by a man named Cotten, who labor for bargain prices. The story, which takes place almost entirely in Stefano's fevered and guilt ridden mind, ends when he invites Cotten in for a beer, begins confessing his problems and places the gardener in the role of a shrink a service, Cotten says, for which he charges 400 an hour. In his novel "Stern," an Air Force veteran moves his family from the city to the suburbs, where a brief anti Semitic and sexually charged encounter between his wife and a neighbor unleashes a virulent stream of neuroses. "In the Air Force, Stern, recently married and swiftly packing on hip fat, felt isolated, a nonflying officer in a flying service, at a time when jets were coming in and there was no escaping them," Mr. Friedman wrote. "The air," he continued, "was full of strange new jet sounds and the ground reverberated with the throb of them. Somehow Stern connected his nonflying status with his Jewishness, as though flying were a golden, crew cut, gentile thing while Jewishness was a cautious and scholarly quality that crept into engines and prevented planes from lurching off the ground with recklessness." "Stern" was almost universally praised as a shrewd and humorous take on the psychic terrors of seemingly serene suburbia. "A Mother's Kisses" could be thought of as something of a prequel, the story of a 17 year old Brooklyn boy whose bulldozing mother arranges his admission to an agricultural college in Kansas and then follows him out there. Mr. Friedman's novel "A Mother's Kisses" (1964) was a best seller and introduced readers to a character one critic called "the most unforgettable mother since Medea." "A Mother's Kisses" was adapted into a stage musical that nearly made it to Broadway (it closed out of town). It introduced readers not only to Joseph, Mr. Friedman's portrait of a lonely, perplexed Jew as a young man, but also to the indomitable Meg, a woman whom Haskel Frankel, writing in The New York Times Book Review and sparing no hyperbole, called "the most unforgettable mother since Medea." Mr. Friedman followed up with two novels that changed milieus, imbuing both an urban detective (in "The Dick," 1970) and a cocaine addled screenwriter ("About Harry Towns," 1974) with the signature qualities of bafflement and self questioning. And he continued to write short stories, including "A Change of Plan," a comic tale about brutal selfishness in which a young man goes on a Florida honeymoon, meets another woman at the hotel pool and ditches his new wife for her. Adapted by Mr. Simon, the story became, as the women's movement was taking hold in 1972, a highly provocative film, "The Heartbreak Kid," starring Mr. Grodin, Cybill Shepherd and Jeannie Berlin, whose mother, Elaine May, directed. (A 2007 remake, starring Ben Stiller, was directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly.) "It hit some kind of chord," Mr. Friedman said to a Key West, Fla., audience in 2005 after reading the story aloud. "I guess maybe it's not unusual when people are walking down the aisle for an instant to flash on the possibility that maybe they're making a mistake. Maybe there's someone else. I know it happened to me. "People ask where do stories come from," he continued. "Well, they come from a lot of places. Very often it's your life, and then you extrapolate from a personal experience. In my case, yeah, OK, I got married, went down to Florida, we were exhausted, my wife fell asleep, I went down to the pool and I saw a very pretty girl. And I said, 'Oh, God.' And I did tell her I was a little married, and she just splashed some water at me. That pretty much ended it. I went back into the marriage, had three children. And then got divorced. "But that's how a story will happen. You have a fragment of an experience and ask yourself, 'What if?'" Bruce Jay Friedman was born on April 26, 1930, and grew up, along with his sister, Dollie, in a three room apartment in the Bronx, much like the crowded one in Brooklyn he described in "A Mother's Kisses." His father, Irving, worked for a women's apparel company; his mother, Molly, a confident woman with a feisty patter and a devoted theatergoer who was described by a friend of Bruce's as "someone looking like a middle aged Jewish Rita Hayworth," was evidently the model for Meg. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School and, like Joseph, failing to get into Columbia University, he went to the University of Missouri, where he studied journalism. He spent two years in the Air Force, during which he wrote for a military publication called Air Training. Shortly after returning to the Bronx, Mr. Friedman sold his first short story, "Wonderful Golden Rule Days," about a boy making his discomforting way in a new school, to The New Yorker. He took a job with a company called Magazine Management and rose to become editor of somewhat cheesy men's adventure publications with names like Male, Men's World, Men and True Action. "The truth is, I tortured myself by moving back and forth, from one to the other," he wrote in "Lucky Bruce," in which he also acknowledged the career arc that started at the top and declined. "Stories, quite a few of them, got written and published," he wrote of the later years of his writing life. "If they lacked energy (were less frantic?) I assured myself they were more 'dimensional.' Once I discovered that comforting description, I clung to it like life itself. There were a few books, some plays that still need attention. And quite a few pieces about me in the literary journals, wondering what had happened to me. "Where had I gone? I began to feel like the most (fondly) remembered forgotten writer in America."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Spanning the late 1930s to late 1950s, the story follows Jim McNeely (a flavorless Lane Garrison), from penniless store clerk to amoral oil tycoon. Toughened up by caricature bullies at his first oil company job, he saves his salary, steals a co worker's wife (Ali Cobrin) and heads west to seek his fortune. As his hats and wallet swell, so does his gut, and flashbacks to his hometown honey in Fort Worth (Hassie Harrison) prepare us for romantic strife to come. Were he not such an arrogant jerk, we might even care when, en route to an ending much kinder than he deserves, challenges like swamp gas and a friend's suicide temporarily slow his roll. In this adaptation of Edmund Pendleton Van Zandt, Jr.'s 1966 novel of the same name, the director, Ty Roberts, slaves over the visuals to the clear detriment of everything else. The dialogue (by Roberts and Gerry De Leon) is dire, the drama negligible and McNeely has more chemistry with his rigs and immaculate vintage cars than with either of his women. That leaves us with Mathieu Plainfosse's rich cinematography, and sometimes it's enough: His windblown plains and steely skies, throbbing sunsets and soaring derricks have a resonance and nobility that McNeely's sorry struggles will never possess.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
5 Ways to Value Your Collection, Whether It's Fine Wine or Shrunken Heads Bentley Meeker had amassed 4,500 bottles of wine by 2009 when the recession began to affect his lighting and event business. So, as painful as it was to part with some of the finest wines in his collection, he began selling them. "I had to liquidate all of my good stuff," he said, estimating he sold some 1,500 bottles. But he has no regrets. "What started out as a passion project kept my company afloat for easily a year," he said, estimating that he netted 200,000 to 300,000. "We raised the cushion we needed to get through the recession, and I held on to key staff." Collectible assets include wine, spirits, coins, trading cards as well as more unusual items, like lighters, belt buckles and even shrunken heads. These collections cost money and time to assemble and certainly have a value to their owners, but can they be considered legitimate investments? That depends on the market. For many collectors, the only option to buy, sell or even value these assets is through online auction platforms like eBay or enthusiast sites, but for others, their possessions are treated as fine art. But the market for collectibles, which are often valued in the millions of dollars, may not always be so easy to weather. It can experience sudden surges that put desired items out of the reach of true collectors or it can collapse, wiping out the gains speculators thought they had made. In an economic slowdown, how these investments are treated depends on supply and demand as well as unpredictable forces like fashion and popularity. This is the third column in a series on how owners of passion investments those in which investors follow their heart as well as their wallet should consider those assets when the economy softens. Previous columns looked at art and cars, and the next two will look at private equity and real estate. Collectibles can be broken into categories determined by provenance, rarity and even a moment in time. Here are five issues to consider when weighing the investment potential of your collection. Whisky has had a solid run since the 2008 recession, according to auction reports, but one of the top brands is Macallan, a single malt whisky from the Speyside region of Scotland. A bottle of 60 year old Macallan sold last year at auction for 1.1 million; it was priced at 27,000 after it was bottled in 1986. "The Macallan has seen steep growth that levels out," said Isabel Graham Yooll, auction and private client director at Whiskey Auction. "Each time there's a raised eyebrow and questions about whether it's sustainable. And then it goes up again." Macallan is a known, high end whisky for sure, but like the Ferraris I wrote about last week, it is well marketed and managed by the distillery. But stars aren't limited to spirits. This week, a trading card featuring the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady from his 2000 rookie season sold for 401,000. The sale set a record for a football trading card and beat last year's 250,000 price paid for a similar Brady card from the same set, said Brent Huigens, chief executive of PWCC, a marketplace that maintains an index of trading card values. The Brady card is an outlier in the indexes that PWCC has created, which are typically led by baseball cards. Other exceptionally rare cards include a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner that has been in a private collection since 2007 when it sold for 2.8 million. Still, Mr. Huigens pointed to a steady increase of the PWCC 500, a diversified portfolio of the 500 best cards that trade frequently. The index is up 165 percent since January 2008, while the S P 500 is up 71 percent. Nick Fiorella, who owns an insurance company in Stuart, Fla., won the Brady card at auction, but it wasn't even his biggest card purchase that week. He also bought a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle for 450,000. Mr. Fiorella said he considered cards like that as long term investments. He buys newer cards to turn a quick profit, using an approach similar to a portfolio strategy. For example, he paid 50,000 for a set of cards depicting Ronald Acuna Jr., the Atlanta Braves outfielder named 2018 rookie of the year. "I could sell that for five times right now, but if he breaks his leg in spring training and never plays again, I've just lost 50,000," he said. The same is true for other collectibles, like whisky. Ms. Graham Yooll said bottles from distilleries that had closed could jump in value. The lower supply creates greater demand. But there are risks: The whisky might not be that great in the first place or the distillery might not have been able to afford the best casks to age the whisky. "You could say, 'Yes, it's worth buying,' but what price is it worth buying at?" she said. Not all collectibles are investments Colored gemstones have dominated the auction market for jewelry. A vivid pink diamond of nearly 19 carats sold for 50 million last year, topping all jewelry sold at auction. A pearl owned by Marie Antoinette came in second, at 36 million. Mr. Meeker said his collection of wine was probably worth close to 1 million at its peak but had fallen to 400,000 by the time he started selling it off. After that experience, he lost interest in collecting and now just enjoys the wine he has left. Mr. Fiorella said he would look at trading cards as if they were any other asset if a recession hit his business and he needed to sell. He said he would assess the collection over all, as he would any portfolio, with an eye on keeping the ones that were likely to rebound. "The legacy of Jackie Robinson isn't changing," he said. "There are only so many 1948 rookie cards out there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Credit...Campbell Addy for The New York Times LONDON Few individuals can get the great and the good of the fashion world to put aside the gossip, rivalries and angst of runway show season. But on Tuesday night, many will dress up and mount the steps of the Victoria Albert Museum to celebrate Tim Walker, responsible for some of the most instantly recognizable and ambitious fashion imagery of the last quarter century, and the opening of "Tim Walker: Wonderful Things," the largest solo exhibition of his photography. "Tim is a dream catcher," said Amanda Harlech , a fashion consultant and longtime collaborator with Mr. Walker, who is expected to join FKA Twigs , Edie Campbell and the British Vogue editor in chief Edward Enninful for the opening. "His photographs harness a sense of possibility. He creates strange and beautiful creatures in parallel universes that open you up onto other worlds. He deserves to be celebrated." Since his arrival on the scene in the mid 1990s when he assisted Richard Avedon in New York and shot his first Vogue story at age 25 Mr. Walker's extravagant fairytale themed dreamscapes, fantastical tableaux with hints of contemporary reality and muses like Kate Moss, Karen Elson and Tilda Swinton have made him one of the best known names in the business. That last shot is among those shown in the new V A show, which will run from Saturday through March 8. But it is a series of major recent works that lie at the heart of the exhibition: Ten photographic projects, presented in room sets designed by Shona Heath , inspired by Mr. Walker's monthslong search through the museum's permanent collection of more than two million objects and 145 public galleries in London . It had been, Mr. Walker said as he stood in his sun dappled East London headquarters earlier this month , a two year labor of love that distracted him from heartbreak after the end of a 15 year relationship. "This project really saved me. I was able to have an incredible transformation through the things I've seen and the conversations I've had," said Mr. Walker, 48, as he leafed through prints of the 10 shoots. "The whole process was an enormous privilege and I feel very at peace with what we've created." Among the objects that inspired him were a 16th century German stained glass window of a sleeping couple on their wedding night; a black ink print by the 19th century English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley ; a 17th century treasure box that took a young girl five years to make, and a series of vivid South Asian miniature paintings from 1590. Although Mr. Walker has always stressed that he avoids being influenced by client demands or commercial constraints "they are annoying, and I'm not at all motivated by the wheel of fashion and commerce," he said during the interview many of the object inspired photographs feature luxury brand clothing and have appeared in glossy magazines. "We had a certain budget but it wasn't going to be enough for all I had envisioned and the right caliber of crew. So I went to some magazine editors, who really let me run with the ideas though I didn't explain that I was doing it for the museum as it would have got complicated," Mr. Walker said. Mr. Enninful, who published a shoot inspired by the South Asian paintings last year , noted in an email that "Every shoot he does is always distinctly Tim, he never compromises on his vision. He pushes the narrative one step further, every time, to a place of real wonder." According to Mr. Walker, the V A staff, and particularly its curator of photographs, Susanna Brown , gave him "total free rein." "I was particularly interested in whether nudity and homosexuality was taboo in the V A, partly in the wake of the Mario Testino and Bruce Weber allegations but also at a time when fashion has become quite buttoned up and worried about expressing sensuality," Mr. Walker said. "But it is rife in the V A; there are beautiful statues of men everywhere. It was reassuring to see how long artists have been expressing beauty for, and that it's all been done before." Exploring, challenging and even subverting ideas of beauty has always been at the heart of Mr. Walker's body of work, from his 1990s coming of age studies set against a backdrop of the supermodels and grunge to his 2017 Pirelli calendar reimagining of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" with an all black celebrity cast. Today, although the fashion establishment has been clamoring about commitment to diversity and positive social change, Mr. Walker said he felt it still lagged behind wider culture and society. "There are still so many rules and subtleties and powers and parameters that prevent people from being free in the industry," he said. "That said, things are moving in the right direction. Anything that turns up the volume and includes those who have been cut out of the story until now is good as far as I'm concerned." Less good, he said, has been the impact of social media on fashion. While the arrival of more democratic platforms for aspiring creatives has been positive, Mr. Walker said, he is troubled by what he termed the "vanity and incessant showing off."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A group of high profile pop musicians and estates sued the Universal Music Group on Friday over a 2008 fire that destroyed thousands of archived recordings but, according to the lawsuit, was never disclosed to the artists. The suit was filed in Los Angeles by the rock bands Soundgarden and Hole, the singer songwriter Steve Earle, the estate of Tupac Shakur and a former wife of Tom Petty. It is the first legal fallout from a New York Times Magazine investigation that found that the fire, at a back lot warehouse at Universal Studios Hollywood, had destroyed over 100,000 audio recordings that contained as many as 500,000 songs. According to the article, published this month, the lost assets included many master tapes the original recordings from which albums and singles are made by some of the most famous names in music history, from Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Elton John to the Police, Nirvana and the Roots. The suit accuses Universal, the biggest record company in the world, of breaching its contracts with artists by failing to properly protect the tapes. It also argues that Universal had a duty to share any income received as settlements from the fire, including an insurance payment and a legal settlement from NBCUniversal, the parent company of Universal Studios at the time. The claim seeks damages in excess of 100 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SpaceIL's Beresheet spacecraft, with technicians and the company's C.E.O., Ido Anteby, second left, in December. How Israel's Moon Lander Got to the Launchpad It started in 2010 with a Facebook post. "Who wants to go to the moon?" wrote Yariv Bash, a computer engineer. A couple of friends, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub responded, and the three met at a bar in Holon, a city south of Tel Aviv. At 30, Mr. Bash was the oldest. "As the alcohol levels in our blood increased, we became more determined," Mr. Winetraub recalled. They formed a nonprofit, SpaceIL, to undertake the task. More than eight years later, the product of their dreams, a small spacecraft called Beresheet, blasted off on Thursday night atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The original goal was to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, which was offering a 20 million grand prize for the first privately financed venture to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. The founders initially envisioned a tiny lander that would weigh only a dozen pounds, cost just 10 million and make the trip by the end of 2012. The challenge turned out to be much harder and much more expensive. "We didn't imagine, I think, how much time and effort it would take," Mr. Damari said. "This is our bigger vision," Mr. Damari said. SpaceIL would build the first Israeli spaceship to travel far from Earth, but for today's students, "It's their job to build the next one," he said. As part of SpaceIL's parsimonious approach, Beresheet, which means "Genesis" or "in the beginning" in Hebrew, tagged along aboard the SpaceX rocket with an Indonesian communications satellite as well as a small experimental satellite for the United States Air Force. Beresheet will not take the quick, direct path to the moon. That would require a fuel guzzling firing of a large engine to break out of Earth orbit and then another to slow down at the moon. Instead, with several engine firings, the spacecraft will slowly adjust its orbit, stretching to the outermost point until the moon's gravity pulls it into lunar orbit. That is a long and winding, four million mile long journey to reach a destination that is a quarter million miles away. In April, it is to land at a lava plain named Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of Serenity. An instrument built by the Weizmann Institute of Science will measure the moon's magnetic fields as it approaches, and that data could help give clear hints about the moon's iron core. Beresheet is also carrying a durable backup of humanity's knowledge in the form of a disc provided by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing 30 million pages of information, as well as a time capsule with Israeli cultural symbols and a Bible. Within a few days of its landing, Beresheet is expected to succumb to the heat of lunar noon. Then, its mission will end. The United States and the former Soviet Union sent robotic landers to the moon beginning in 1966, part of the space race that culminated with the Apollo 11 astronauts stepping foot on the moon in 1969. In 2013, China became the third nation to send a spacecraft to the moon, and this year, it became the first to land one on the moon's far side. Back in November 2010, it was a rush for the SpaceIL founders just to get to the starting line. The Google competition had been announced three years earlier. About 30 teams had already entered, and the deadline for submissions was the end of the year. From friends and family, Mr. Bash, Mr. Damari and Mr. Winetraub scrounged 50,000 for the entry fee, and on Dec. 31, they sent in the money and the paperwork with less than two hours to spare. From the beginning, their pitch was geared to philanthropists, not venture capitalists. "It's a very different story than a commercial company trying to explain how they're going to return the investment of the investors," Mr. Bash said. "It's one of the best decisions we made in the beginning." One of the people who heard their presentation was Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications billionaire. "I gave them 100,000, no questions asked," Mr. Kahn said, "and I said, 'Start.'" Mr. Kahn said at the beginning he just wanted to help. "Eventually, not only I got sucked in, I sucked myself in," he said. "I got excited by this project." Mr. Kahn became president of SpaceIL and recruited other investors including Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino billionaire and major donor to the Republican Party in the United States. As a nonprofit, SpaceIL also tapped the energy of volunteers. "If you were interested in space and wanted to do something beyond your day job, you could volunteer and give some of your time," Mr. Winetraub said . As full fledged development started, Mr. Kahn brought in Eran Privman, who had been an executive at his companies, to run the organization. But as the 2018 Lunar X Prize deadline approached, the effort appeared doomed. SpaceIL still needed 30 million more. In late 2017, Mr. Kahn resigned. A fund raising plea by Mr. Privman at the end of that year fell short. A few months later, Mr. Kahn returned, replacing Mr. Privman with Ido Anteby, a longtime manager at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, to shepherd the final construction and testing of Beresheet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Just as they began a season unlike any other, Major League Baseball and the players' union announced on Thursday they had agreed on an expanded playoff system in which 16 of the league's 30 teams will qualify for the postseason. The new format which covers only the 2020 season will eliminate the wild card play in games, which had been held since 2012, when the playoff field was expanded to 10 teams from eight. Now, M.L.B. will begin the postseason with eight best of three matchups (four in each league), before the usual best of five division series and best of seven league championship and World Series rounds. Under the plan, the World Series would still end in October, which had been a priority for the league as it tries to squeeze in a season as quickly as possible amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic. If every series goes the distance, M.L.B. would play 65 postseason games in all, up from a maximum of 43 under the previous format. "The opportunity to add playoff games in this already abbreviated season makes sense for fans, the league and players," Tony Clark, the head of the players' union, said in a statement. "We hope it will result in highly competitive pennant races as well as exciting additional playoff games to the benefit of the industry and all involved heading into next year." The eight playoff teams per league will include the three division leaders, the three second place teams in each division and the two teams with the next best records. In the best of three first round series, which begin Sept. 29, all three games will be hosted by the higher seed. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. With only 60 regular season games this year and teams unable to sell tickets, at least initially owners had a strong interest in generating additional revenue by adding more postseason games to sell to networks. The players, whose postseason bonuses ordinarily come from ticket sales, will get a 50 million pool to divide under the new plan. The sides had agreed to expand the playoffs during their contentious negotiations on the ground rules for the new season earlier this year. But when those talks fell apart forcing Commissioner Rob Manfred to unilaterally impose a season the expanded postseason format fizzled. The union must approve any changes to the playoffs, so they retained that bargaining chip for future negotiations when Manfred implemented the season. Because Thursday's agreement covers only 2020, the players still hold the expanded playoffs option as leverage for talks on the next collective bargaining agreement after the current one expires following the 2021 season. Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich, whose team won a wild card berth last season, said he liked the changes. "It's a different kind of year, it's a shortened year, and I think it'd be a great way to keep fan bases engaged throughout the entire season," Yelich told reporters. "If you had eight teams from each league making it, you'd have a really tight race all the way down to the last day of the season. I think there would be a lot of teams in it, within a game or two, all the way down to the last day." Manager Joe Girardi of the Philadelphia Phillies who have not reached the playoffs since 2011 said the expanded field made sense because it would follow an unusual regular season schedule in which teams did not play outside their geographic regions. "I think what really every organization and team asks for is, if you're going to have wild cards, there's some fairness to it," Girardi told reporters. "And with only East playing East, Central playing Central and West playing West, there's no crossover. So we're not going to see any teams in the National League besides the teams in our division. So I think it is fair." There is precedent for expanding the playoffs on a temporary basis. When a strike shut down the league for nearly two months in 1981, M.L.B. split the season into halves, doubling the playoff field from four to eight teams. The league reverted to a four team playoff format in 1982 and did not stage another division series until 1995. The new format increases the likelihood of a losing team making the playoffs. If it had been in place last season, for example, the American League field would have included the Yankees, Minnesota and Houston, who won their divisions; Tampa Bay, Cleveland and Oakland, who finished second; plus Boston and Texas. Under that scenario, the Rangers (78 84) would have been the first losing team in the postseason since 1981, when Kansas City finished 50 53 overall but won the second half title in its division. Baseball has long had the most exclusive playoff field, but with 16 of 30 teams now qualifying, it now matches the N.B.A.'s usual setup. In the N.F.L., 14 of 32 teams make the playoffs, and 16 of 31 teams qualify in the N.H.L.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE CASABLANCA The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie By Noah Isenberg Illustrated. 334 pp. W.W. Norton Company. 27.95. HIGH NOON The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic By Glenn Frankel Illustrated. 379 pp. Bloomsbury. 28. It's a strange but serendipitous coincidence that two books devoted to Hollywood classics, "Casablanca" and "High Noon," are being published at the same time. The films, released a scant 10 years apart in 1942 and 1952 respectively, are perfect bookends, spot on reflections of the times in which they were made, and therefore dramatically different. And in the era of the Trump presidency, these books are charged by an immediacy they otherwise might not enjoy. "Casablanca" arrived just short of a year after the United States declared war on Germany. In it, Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, whose mantra is "I stick my neck out for nobody," famously does just that, shrugging off the neutrality that had been American policy until Pearl Harbor, and helping his former flame Ingrid Bergman and the Czech resistance hero Paul Henreid escape the Nazis. The film also includes a memorably inspirational episode of collective defiance, as the refugees, con men and adventurers in Rick's place join in a rousing rendition of the "Marseillaise," drowning out German officers who are singing "Die Wacht am Rhein." "High Noon," on the other hand, is a profile in collective cowardice. The United States was in the grip of the Red Scare, and the marshal, Will Kane (Gary Cooper), can't find a single good man in the dusty Western town of Hadleyville to help him confront the Miller brothers and their gang, who have sworn to kill him. Coop prevails, naturally, but his triumph fails to dispel the toxic fog of betrayal and disillusion that shrouds the story. "We'll Always Have Casablanca" was written by Noah Isenberg, the director of screen studies at the New School, and probably best known for a biography of Edgar G. Ulmer, a B film director much beloved by cineastes. Here, Isenberg gives us the soup to nuts on "Casablanca," dutifully making his way through script, casting, production and reception, to the inevitable squabbling over credit, all the while trying to account for its enduring popularity. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "Casablanca" was rooted in a trip that the aspiring playwright Murray Burnett and his wife took to Vienna in the summer of 1938, just after they were married. Austria had overwhelmingly voted to serve itself up to the German Anschluss that March, and was busy implementing the notorious Nuremberg Laws. Burnett quickly discovered that it was not the best place for Jews on their honeymoon. But getting out of Vienna was considerably harder than getting in, especially since Burnett, wearing diamond rings on every finger, and his wife, wearing a fur coat in August, were smuggling out valuables belonging to relatives. When they reached the South of France, they stopped at a cafe full of refugees and army officers. Burnett said to his wife, "What a setting for a play." Burnett developed his play with his writing partner, Joan Alison, but could not get it produced. He did, however, manage to sell it to Warner Brothers, generally known for its progressive pictures, and in particular a series of anti Nazi films like "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," released in 1939, when other studios were still trying to protect their German assets. Nobody involved with "Casablanca" had high expectations for the picture, although it was written by the colorful Epstein twins, Julius and Philip, and Howard Koch. The Epsteins were widely admired for their witty dialogue, on and off screen. Of the film, Julius once said, "There wasn't one moment of reality in 'Casablanca.' We weren't making art. We were making a living." Nevertheless, when it was released, it became an instant hit, and won three Oscars, including best picture. It's all in Isenberg's account, and "Casablanca" fans will find it to be a treasure trove of facts and anecdotes. "High Noon" is a far deeper dig into the background and historical context of its subject; that is, the sorry history of the blacklist, instituted by the studios after the House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) put a gun to their collective heads in 1947. Despite the voluminous literature on the subject, surprisingly little has been written about "High Noon." For many years, Billy Wilder's unfriendly words about the so called Unfriendly Ten who refused to answer questions before HUAC "Only two of them have talent. The rest are just unfriendly" passed for the conventional wisdom. Even though Carl Foreman, who hatched the story and wrote the script, had more and better credits than most of his blacklisted confreres, unlike them he didn't live to finish writing his memoirs. The director, Fred Zinnemann, never made it into the film critic Andrew Sarris's famous Pantheon, and the producer, Stanley Kramer, was condescended to by intellectuals for his message movies. Glenn Frankel comes to his subject with a widely praised book about John Ford's "The Searchers" and an impressive resume in journalism, including a Pulitzer Prize. Although much of Frankel's material is familiar, the blacklist is a gift that keeps on giving. There always seems to be something new to chew on, in this case the transcripts of HUAC's secret executive sessions. Besides, it's a story that bears retelling because Hollywood, not to mention the rest of the country, is haunted by ghosts that won't go away (witness Newt Gingrich's recent call for a resurrection of HUAC, now to be wielded against ISIS, not Communists). At first HUAC was considered something of a joke, but as time passed, the committee's antics became more scary than risible. Like much of the Hollywood left, Humphrey Bogart supported the 19 "unfriendly" screenwriters initially called before the committee. He had backed Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 presidential campaign, and when he was attacked by the right, he struck a defiant note in The Saturday Evening Post. Alluding to his role in "Casablanca," he wrote, "I'm going to keep right on sticking my neck out, without worrying about its possible effect upon my career." But a brief three years later, when the right turned up the heat, he published an abject apologia in Photoplay magazine entitled, "I'm No Communist," in which he distanced himself from the Ten. Likewise, Jack Warner, whose studio had invented the anti fascist genre, gave HUAC the names of 16 screenwriters, including those of the Epstein twins, of whom he said, "Those boys are always on the side of the underdog." Foreman didn't intend his script to be the blacklist parable it became, but as he watched his friends fall around him, it was almost inevitable. Foreman felt like the Gary Cooper character. He regarded "High Noon" as a picture about "conscience" versus "compromise." Surprisingly, it is Gary Cooper, a card carrying conservative, who emerges as one of the few heroes of this story. Called before HUAC in the middle of production, Foreman gave his star the opportunity to leave the picture guilt by association was de rigueur in those days but Cooper refused. Foreman declined to name names, and Kramer fired him. In "Casablanca," the so called refugee trail led from Europe to America. During the witch hunt years, it went the other way. Moving to London, Foreman said goodbye to his country, his livelihood and, eventually, his marriage. Cooper tried to help him by buying stock in his new company, but bullied by the likes of John Wayne and Hedda Hopper, he eventually pulled out, albeit cordially. If Foreman had thought that art was imitating life in "High Noon," once Cooper caved it seemed clear that at least in his life, unlike Marshal Will Kane's, there were no happy endings. Frankel narrates this story well. He has a sure ear for the telling anecdote, and a good eye for detail. (Parnell Thomas chaired the HUAC hearings sitting on a phone book covered by a red cushion to compensate for his diminutive stature.) The era has been labeled "the plague years," but Frankel is forgiving of those caught up in its tangle of principle and expediency, courage and cowardice. He adopts the verdict of Dalton Trumbo, another of the Unfriendly Ten: "There were only victims."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
After she lost her job, Angela Rivers found herself in need of some quick cash. Instead of heading to her bank, she delved into her Brooklyn closet. An avid shoe and handbag collector, she took out her cherished chocolate brown Birkin and went across the river to Manhattan, where she had an appointment in the chaotic diamond district at a pawnshop called New York Loan Company. On West 47th Street, New York Loan Company visitors edge past fast talking gold hawkers, jewelry hustlers, murmurs of Yiddish slang and ever present police to enter the gleaming 35 story International Gem Tower, where the pawnshop is on the third floor. There Ms. Rivers planned to use her handbag for a loan. "As soon as I walked into the beautiful building, I knew there was going to be no hanky panky," said Ms. Rivers, who was initially skeptical about her visit. In the marble lobby, visitors are fingerprinted and pass through an X ray scanner before ascending in a highly secured elevator. "I walked into that office, and I thought, this is the real deal," Ms. Rivers said. "The level of sophistication was totally different from what I expected." Jordan Tabach Bank, the chief executive of New York Loan Company, picked the location because of its grand setting and high level of security. A few floors up from his pawnshop is the Gemological Institute of America, where gems are rated and future gemologists learn the trade, which explains the Fort Knox level of security. Pawnshops, of course, aren't simply for selling goods for a quick buck. They also allow customers to use their valuables, including something like Ms. Rivers's Birkin, which is valued at several thousand dollars, as collateral in exchange for an on the spot loan. When a client pays back the loan, with interest, the valuables are returned. If the loan is not repaid, the pawnshop owns the goods, and can sell them. Mr. Tabach Bank is a third generation pawnbroker. He modeled his New York outpost after his Beverly Loan Company in Beverly Hills, Calif., which has been family owned and operated since 1938. His grandfather dealt mostly in fine jewelry, his mother computerized the business, and he has an entrepreneurial streak. "I've expanded the business to two locations, and we also do a ton of art now, and we do flatware, we do wine and handbags," Mr. Tabach Bank said in his California shop, a few blocks away from Rodeo Drive. He is finalizing plans for a third location, in Chicago. Mr. Tabach Bank finds that his New York clients are more likely to be businesspeople than those in Beverly Hills. "We get a lot of women in the financial community as well as men who bring in their wife's or significant other's handbags," he said. In California, the pawnshop draws in the Hollywood set with actors, producers and screenwriters looking for fast cash. "We get socialites and a lot more divorcees in Beverly Hills than New York for some reason," he said. Mr. Tabach Bank said it's not uncommon for people to take their Birkins, or other valuables, in and out of the pawnshop, using them like a credit card, whether it's for an investment opportunity, for paying off business fees or simply because they are hard up for cash. "We pride ourselves on acting quickly," he said. "People often call and ask: 'What percentage can you pay on the retail of an Hermes handbag?'" Condition is everything, he said. Does it come with a box? Does it have the dust bag? Does it have the clochette and the key? "That's very important," he said. "And what color is it? Some people like the staples the beiges, the browns, the blacks. And then here in Beverly Hills yellow, chartreuse, purple they do very well." Mr. Tabach Bank, whose sister, Lauren, works at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, will loan against pristine Chanels as well but prefers Birkins and Kellys (the Birkin's little sister named for Grace Kelly). They are worth roughly 4,000 to as much as six figures for hard to find models, and have a high resale value. (According to a 2016 research study by baghunter.com, an online marketplace for high end handbags, Birkins have gone up in value by 500 percent in the last 35 years a figure that outpaced the price of gold.) Considering their covetable, and rare, status, it's not surprising that there has been a spike in high quality counterfeit bags. "I bought a fake, and if you haven't bought a fake, you haven't been dealing in enough bags as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Tabach Bank said. Now he is extra cautious. He examines the stitching, and he identifies specific stamps and can often tell a real from a fake simply from the weight of the bag, which he emphasized is heavier than it looks. Ms. Rivers didn't risk buying a fake. She picked up her Birkin at an Hermes shop in Paris as a gift to herself for her 50th birthday. And it's a gift she's not letting go of. "That bag was my pride and joy," she said. "In the next couple weeks I absolutely plan to retrieve it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
This is the first in a series of interviews with religious scholars from several faiths and one atheist on the meaning of death. This month's conversation is with , a Tibetan Buddhist monk who began his Buddhist studies in 1977 at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India, and went on to earn the prestigious Geshe Lharampa degree in 1992 at Drepung Loseling Monastic University, South India. He also holds a master's degree in English Literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. He is currently with the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion Based Ethics, Emory University. This interview was conducted by email. George Yancy George Yancy: I was about 20 years old when I first became intrigued by Eastern thought, especially Buddhism. It was the transformation of Siddhartha Gautama to the Buddha that fascinated me, especially the sense of calmness when faced with competing desires and fears. For so many, death is one of those fears. Can you say why, from a Buddhist perspective, we humans fear death? Dadul Namgyal: We fear death because we love life, but a little too much, and often look at just the preferred side of it. That is, we cling to a fantasized life, seeing it with colors brighter than it has. Particularly, we insist on seeing life in its incomplete form without death, its inalienable flip side. It's not that we think death will not come someday, but that it will not happen today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on. This biased, selective and incomplete image of life gradually builds in us a strong wish, hope, or even belief in a life with no death associated with it, at least in the foreseeable future. However, reality contradicts this belief. So it is natural for us, as long as we succumb to those inner fragilities, to have this fear of death, to not want to think of it or see it as something that will rip life apart. Yancy: You point out that most of us embrace life, but fail or refuse to see that death is part of the existential cards dealt, so to speak. It would seem then that our failure to accept the link between life and death is at the root of this fear. Namgyal: Yes, it is. We fail to see and accept reality as it is with life in death and death in life. In addition, the habits of self obsession, the attitude of self importance and the insistence on a distinct self identity separate us from the whole of which we are an inalienable part. Yancy: I really like how you link the idea of self centeredness with our fear of death. It would seem that part of dealing with death is getting out of the way of ourselves, which is linked, I imagine, to ways of facing death with a peaceful mind. Namgyal: We can reflect on and contemplate the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it as a part of the gift of life. If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything, including the mountains, stars, and even the universe itself undergoing continual change and renewal. This points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment. Yancy: That is a beautiful description. Can you say more about how we achieve a peaceful mind? Namgyal: Try first to gain an unmistaken recognition of what disturbs your mental stability, how those elements of disturbance operate and what fuels them. Then, wonder if something can be done to address them. If the answer to this is no, then what other option do you have than to endure this with acceptance? There is no use for worrying. If, on the other hand, the answer is yes, you may seek those methods and apply them. Again, there is no need for worry. Obviously, some ways to calm and quiet the mind at the outset will come in handy. Based on that stability or calmness, above all, deepen the insight into the ways things are connected and mutually affect one another, both in negative and positive senses, and integrate them accordingly into your life. We should recognize the destructive elements within us our afflictive emotions and distorted perspectives and understand them thoroughly. When do they arise? What measures would counteract them? We should also understand the constructive elements or their potentials within us and strive to learn ways to tap them and enhance them. Yancy: What do you think that we lose when we fail to look at death for what it is? Namgyal: When we fail to look at death for what it is as an inseparable part of life and do not live our lives accordingly, our thoughts and actions become disconnected from reality and full of conflicting elements, which create unnecessary friction in their wake. We could mess up this wondrous gift or else settle for very shortsighted goals and trivial purposes, which would ultimately mean nothing to us. Eventually we would meet death as though we have never lived in the first place, with no clue as to what life is and how to deal with it. Yancy: I'm curious about what you called the "gift of life." In what way is life a gift? And given the link that you've described between death and life, might death also be a kind of gift? Namgyal: I spoke of life as a gift because this is what almost all of us agree on without any second thought, though we may differ in exactly what that gift means for each one of us. I meant to use it as an anchor, a starting point for appreciating life in its wholeness, with death being an inalienable part of it. Yancy: You also said that we fear death because of our uncertainty about what follows it. As you know, in Plato's "Apology," Socrates suggests that death is a kind of blessing that involves either a "dreamless sleep" or the transmigration of the soul to another place. As a Tibetan Buddhist, do you believe that there is anything after death? Namgyal: In the Buddhist tradition, particularly at the Vajrayana level, we believe in the continuity of subtle mind and subtle energy into the next life, and the next after that, and so on without end. This subtle mind energy is eternal; it knows no creation or destruction. For us ordinary beings, this way of transitioning into a new life happens not by choice but under the influence of our past virtuous and non virtuous actions. This includes the possibility of being born into many forms of life. Yancy: As a child I would incessantly ask my mother about a possible afterlife. What might we tell our children when they express fear of the afterlife? Namgyal: We might tell them that an afterlife would be a continuation of themselves, and that their actions in this life, either good or bad, will bear fruit. So if they cultivate compassion and insight in this life by training in positive thinking and properly relating to others, then one would carry those qualities and their potential into the next. They would help them take every situation, including death itself, in stride. So, the sure way to address fear of the afterlife is to live the present life compassionately and wisely which, by the way, also helps us have a happy and meaningful life in the present.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
As the coronavirus pandemic raged around the world, cruise ship companies continued to allow their crews to attend social gatherings, work out at gyms and share buffet style meals, violating basic protocols designed to stop the spread of the highly transmissible virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a scathing 20 page order, released Thursday, that extended the suspension of cruise operations until Sept. 30. In a rebuke of the cruise ship companies, Robert R. Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., blamed them for widespread transmission of the virus. The C.D.C. said there were 99 outbreaks aboard 123 cruise ships in United States waters alone, the agency said in the statement. From March 1 until July 10, 80 percent of the ships in the C.D.C.'s jurisdiction were affected by the coronavirus. The agency said there had been nearly 3,000 suspected and confirmed cases and 34 deaths on ships in U.S. waters. As of July 3, nine ships still had ongoing or resolving outbreaks. The C.D.C. spent at least 38,000 hours managing the crisis, the order said. Public health authorities had to do contact tracing for some 11,000 passengers, more than the number of contacts identified from airplane flights since the beginning of the pandemic, the C.D.C. said. The cruise industry has struggled to manage the coronavirus pandemic since the start, when the Diamond Princess, part of the cruise giant Carnival Corporation, moored in the Japanese harbor of Yokohama, Japan, amid an outbreak that eventually infected 712 people and killed nine of them. Even as warnings were issued about the dangers of cruise ship travel, passengers kept boarding and ships kept sailing. Though more and more cruise passengers fell ill, companies continued their voyages, offering entertainment that included live music and pool parties. The industry ultimately suspended operations in mid March, but as ships made their way to port, many passengers and crew were stranded around the world, as countries refused the ships entry. One ship arrived in Fort Lauderdale with four dead passengers on board. Many of those passengers who were allowed to disembark from contaminated ships "traversed international airports, boarded planes and returned to their homes," the C.D.C. said, potentially spreading the virus further. The cruise industry had already voluntarily suspended operations until Sept. 15, and many companies withdrew their ships from United States waters, removing them from the C.D.C.'s jurisdiction. But the order from Dr. Redfield underscores the gap between the industry and the public health agency. The companies cannot begin to sail again until they come up with cohesive plans for prevention and mitigation of the illness. One company, Norwegian Cruise Lines, said it felt it had exceeded recommended C.D.C. guidance, because crew members were not just asked but "encouraged" to wear face coverings, the order said. Disney acknowledged that some of its asymptomatic infected crew members had not quarantined until after the results of shipwide testing came in. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. The companies created a task force to come up with recommendations on how to safely sail, but according to the C.D.C., the group will not produce its findings for several months. If unrestricted cruise ship passenger operations were permitted to resume, it would put "substantial unnecessary risk" on communities, health care workers, port personnel and federal employees, the order said, as well as placing passengers and crew members at increased risk. The agency's previous no sail order was set to expire July 24. Disney said only one of its four ships, the Disney Wonder, had an outbreak on board but only after passengers had disembarked. The company tested every crew member on board and isolated non essential crew to their cabins for three weeks in April. Half the 174 crew who tested positive had no symptoms, the company said. The ship has not had a positive case since May 8, Disney said. Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line, whose failures were specifically cited in the C.D.C. document, released statements in response to the order that did not specifically address the allegations. Norwegian said it canceled trips through September, as well as cruises embarking from or calling on ports in Canada in October. "We continue to partner with the C.D.C. and other authorities to mitigate the impact of COVID 19 by prioritizing the health and safety of our passengers and crew," the company said. Royal Caribbean said it would suspend operations through September to comply with the order. "The health and safety of our guests, crew and the communities we visit is our top priority," the company said. Carnival Cruises said that it had already extended its suspension through September. But the company plans three voyages in Germany next month through a European line, and Italy trips are also expected soon, a spokesman said. Bari Golin Blaugrund, a spokeswoman for the Cruise Line Industry Association, a trade organization that represents most of the major cruise companies, released a statement that did not address the C.D.C. criticisms. "As we continue to work towards the development of enhanced protocols to support the safe resumption of cruise operations around the world, we look forward to timely and productive dialogue with the C.D.C. to determine measures that will be appropriate for ocean going cruise operations to resume in the United States when the time is right," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Quick action by President Obama and Congress could still help the economy escape the full impact of hundreds of billions in tax increases and automatic spending cuts set to take effect shortly after the last minutes of 2012 tick away next week. But if the deadlock in Washington persists much longer than a few weeks, the consequences will quickly mount, economists warn. Until late last week, most observers had expected the president and Congressional Republicans to come up with at least a short term compromise before the year end deadline. But the failure of Speaker John A. Boehner to win support for tax increases on the wealthiest Americans from fellow House Republicans has forced many economic observers to reconsider what might happen if political leaders remain deadlocked into 2013. Wall Street is still betting on a quick deal, but that confidence is misplaced, said Julia Coronado, chief North American economist at BNP Paribas. "Markets have been incredibly complacent about this," she said. If a compromise cannot be found by Jan. 1, she said, "the markets will take that hard." Some hits like a two percentage point increase in payroll taxes and the end of unemployment benefits for more than two million jobless Americans would be felt right away. But other effects, like tens of billions in automatic spending cuts, to include both military and other programs, would be spread out between now and the end of the 2013 fiscal year in September. These could quickly be reversed if a compromise is found. Similarly, the expiration of Bush era tax cuts on Jan. 1 would not have a major impact on consumers if Congress quickly agreed to extend them for all but the wealthiest Americans in early 2013, as is widely expected. Other probable changes, like a jump in taxes on capital gains and dividends, would most likely be felt over a broader period rather than as an immediate blow to the economy. In the meantime, more observers are contemplating what the impact will be if Washington ignores the year end deadline and waits until January or February to act. "It's still possible they will work something out by the end of the year, but the probability seems reasonably high that we may go into January with no agreement," said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. "But the longer this goes on, the more nervous I get about first quarter growth. If negotiations were to linger into March, then the first quarter could be much weaker." If the impasse lasted even longer and the full force of more than 500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts hit the economy, the Congressional Budget Office predicts the country would slip into recession in the first half of 2013, with unemployment rising to 9.1 percent by the fourth quarter of 2013. But for all the pessimism recently, most observers still think a compromise will be reached, even if it takes a few more weeks. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Negotiations are set to resume in the coming days, following a break for Christmas, although hopes for a so called grand bargain have faded. Instead, President Obama is pushing for a scaled back plan that would extend the Bush era tax cuts on incomes below 250,000, while suspending the automatic spending cuts and extending unemployment benefits. Michelle Meyer, senior United States economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said there is a 40 percent chance of what she calls a "bungee jump over the fiscal cliff," with Congress failing to act until after Jan. 1 but eventually averting the full package of tax increases and spending cuts by mid January. If that were to happen, she predicts a steep sell off on Wall Street, which would quickly force political leaders to compromise. Over all, Ms. Meyer estimates that the economy will grow by just 1 percent in the first quarter of 2013, well below the 3.1 percent pace recorded in the third quarter of 2012. What's worrisome, she added, is that consumer anxiety about the fiscal impasse has begun to mount, catching up with business leaders who have been warning of economic danger since summer. "What's been missing in this recovery has been confidence," she said. "We'd see a healthy recovery if it weren't for this uncertainty and the potential shock from Washington." Indeed, the economy has been showing signs of life recently. Unemployment in November sank to 7.7 percent, a four year low. Consumer spending has been picking up, and the housing market has continued to recover in many parts of the country. Overseas worries like slowing growth in China and recession in Europe have also faded. Those trends have encouraged some observers, like Steve Blitz, chief economist at ITG Investment Research. He estimates that the economy will grow by nearly 2.5 percent in the first quarter if Washington comes up with even a modest compromise. In the absence of a deal, the pace of growth would be more like 1 percent, he said. "I don't think that not having a deal going into the new year is all that critical," Mr. Blitz said. "It doesn't mean you will immediately go into a recession."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Elizabeth Azen, a co owner of the clothing line Dynasty emphasis on the last two syllables has designs on dressing the women who turn out to protest at the Women's March on Washington. A few days before the event, she was busy filling online orders for bright hats inscribed with the phrase "Already Great." Other hats, bright red beanies, just feature a boldface "NO." The accessories are, she said, "a typographic gut reaction" to the results of the November election, an enduring symbol of which was President elect Donald J. Trump's red "Make America Great Again" hat. "Who gets to own a color?" the Brooklyn based designer mused. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of women are expected to visit the nation's capital to march against the new administration of Mr. Trump. There will be plenty of signs and, presumably, plenty of shouts but the clothes and accessories that the marchers wear, from bright red beanies to peace pins to cat eared knit hats, may also do some talking. Though there is an official Women's March hoodie, created by Bob Bland, a fashion designer in New York and the event's co chairman, and sold through the march's website for 55, a number of other designers and craftswomen have been inspired to shape their own forms of wearable protest since the organizing began. "We really need that right now," she said. For American women, clothing has always provided a means of visual resistance, beginning with those who believed in dress reform, or the right to wear pants, in the 1800s. At the 1963 March on Washington, hundreds of black women opted for denim, overalls and natural hair, resisting sartorial protocol and rejecting expectations. When women showed up at the polls in pantsuits last November, they were not only referring to activists of the past but expressing their support for the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major party. This march will not be about pantsuits, nor have there been many calls to wear white, the suffragists' signature. Instead, more literal sartorial messaging seems to be in style. In the past, textiles alone denim, plaid, leather were most often used to telegraph a woman's politics and reject notions of what femininity should look like, according to Tanisha Ford, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware and the author of "Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul." Now text based protest apparel, from Dior's "We Should All Be Feminist" shirts to 2 "Nasty Woman" pins on Etsy, is on the rise, she said. We live in a digital culture, she noted. Words photograph well. "I think one of the benefits of using clothing as a sign of one's politics is that it allows other people who may not get to places like Washington, D.C., to show that they are in solidarity" with a movement like the Women's March, Ms. Ford said. Can what you wear be a form of substantive activism? Ms. Azen thinks so. She thinks people have always used the clothing they wear to send a message about who they are and what they believe. "You can choose to wear Levi's on your pocket or Michael Kors on your bag," Ms. Azen said. She paused: "Or you can choose to make a statement." Literally. In an election season some say was ruled by sound bites "Nasty Woman" and "Bad Hombres" any enterprising observer could turn off the cuff utterances into words of marketable protest. Still, one of the most conspicuous accessories at the march may be wordless. The Pussyhat Project, an online collective of knitters, is trying to crowdsource 1.1 million bright pink cat eared hats for people attending the march to wear. The hat is a pointed play on Mr. Trump's past comments, which became public in a leaked "Access Hollywood" recording, about grabbing women by their genitals. With more than 60,000 knitted so far, Jayna Zweiman, a founder of the project, said she wants women in bright pink hats to be a strong visual signal on the day of the march. "We thought about that drone view from above," Ms. Zweiman, 38, said in an interview. Then there are those accessories that prioritize American unity over statements of subversion. Kate Lind and Nate Stevens created the website Pincause to sell 5 pins for the march. They live in Ann Arbor, Mich., where they often run into people who voted for Mr. Trump. Their pin, which showcases the American sign language symbol for "I Love You," is meant to symbolize a desire to heal the gulf between those with opposing beliefs. Over 10,000 have been sold. "People are very excited to be able to gather around something positive," Ms. Lind said. She added that she has been hearing from customers who "don't have this desire to, like, scream and yell at people." Unity may be easier said than worn. Plans for the Women's March have been fraught with discussions about race and the need for a brand of feminism that reaches women of all backgrounds. What women choose to wear to communicate their myriad beliefs on the day of the march is likely to be as multifaceted as the issues involved. "I don't think that there is one symbol that can hold that diversity of political thought," Ms. Ford, the author, said. "I don't think there should have to be."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Are the wolves of Yellowstone National Park the first line of defense against a terrible disease that preys on herds of wildlife? That's the question for a research project underway in the park, and preliminary results suggest that the answer is yes. Researchers are studying what is known as the predator cleansing effect, which occurs when a predator sustains the health of a prey population by killing the sickest animals. If the idea holds, it could mean that wolves have a role to play in limiting the spread of chronic wasting disease, which is infecting deer and similar animals across the country and around the world. Experts fear that it could one day jump to humans. "There is no management tool that is effective" for controlling the disease, said Ellen Brandell, a doctoral student in wildlife ecology at Penn State University who is leading the project in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service. "There is no vaccine. Can predators potentially be the solution?" Many biologists and conservationists say that more research would strengthen the case that reintroducing more wolves in certain parts of the United States could help manage wildlife diseases, although the idea is sure to face pushback from hunters, ranchers and others concerned about competition from wolves. Chronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disease, is so unusual that some experts call it a "disease from outer space." First discovered among wild deer in 1981, it leads to deterioration of brain tissue in cervids, mostly deer but also elk, moose and caribou, with symptoms such as listlessness, drooling, staggering, emaciation and death. It is caused by an abnormal version of a cell protein called a prion, which functions very differently than bacteria or viruses. The disease has spread across wild cervid populations and is now found in 26 states and several Canadian provinces, as well as South Korea and Scandinavia. The disease is part of a group called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, the most famous of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease. Mad cow in humans causes a variant of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, and there was an outbreak among people in the 1990s in Britain from eating tainted meat. Cooking does not kill the prions, and experts fear that chronic wasting disease could spread to humans who hunt and consume deer or other animals that are infected with it. Unless, perhaps, the park's 10 packs of wolves, which altogether contain about 100 individuals, preyed on and consumed diseased animals that were easier to pick off because of their illness (the disease does not appear to infect wolves). "Wolves have really been touted as the best type of animal to remove infected deer, because they are cursorial they chase their prey and they look for the weak ones," said Ms. Brandell. By this logic, diseased deer and other animals would be the most likely to be eliminated by wolves. Preliminary results in Yellowstone have shown that wolves can delay outbreaks of chronic wasting disease in their prey species and can decrease outbreak size, Ms. Brandell said. There is little published research on "predator cleansing," and this study aims to add support for the use of predators to manage disease. A prime concern about the spread of chronic wasting disease in the Yellowstone region is the fact that Wyoming maintains 22 state sponsored feeding grounds that concentrate large numbers of elk unnaturally in the Yellowstone region. And just south of Grand Teton National Park lies the National Elk Refuge, where thousands of animals, displaced by cattle ranches, are fed each winter to satisfy elk hunters and tourists. Many wildlife biologists say concentrating the animals in such small areas is a recipe for the rapid spread of chronic wasting disease. When cases of the disease among deer ranged from 5 to 50 percent in Wisconsin and Colorado, those states were considered hot spots. But if the disease gets into game farms like the ones in Wyoming, "prevalence rates skyrocket to 90 or 100 percent," said Mark Zabel, associate director of the Prion Research Center at Colorado State University. Prions are especially deadly. Unlike bacteria and viruses, prions can persist in soil for 10 years or more and endure on vegetation. Even if a herd dies out or is culled, new animals moving in can become infected. The origin of the disease is unknown. Andrew P. Dobson, a professor of ecology and epidemiology at Princeton who has studied predator cleansing, believes the illness is largely the result of ecosystems with too few predators and scavengers. He speculates that the disease may have come from deer living in proximity to sheep in Colorado or Wyoming, where it was first identified. Sheep have carried scrapie effectively mad cow disease for sheep for centuries. Dr. Dobson has theorized that after a contaminated animal died, it may have lain on the ground for a while in the absence of predators and scavengers, which would usually clean up carcasses. Elk and deer must have calcium, he said, and they may have eaten the bones of a contaminated animal and spread the disease. The absence of wolves throughout much of the West may also have allowed the disease to take off. "Taking the sick and weak removes chronic wasting disease from the population, because any animal showing any signs of it will get killed and eaten by the wolves," Dr. Dobson said. "The rest of the carcass gets cleaned up by the coyotes, the bald eagles, ravens and bears." "Without predators and scavengers on the landscape, animal components last much longer, and that can definitely have an impact on the spread of disease," Ms. Brandell said. Restoring the population of predators in national parks and wild lands would go a long way toward healthier ecosystems with less disease, Dr. Dobson said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
"Good morning, dancers! Let's get creative today," Dwana Smallwood, with a bright and reassuring smile, told her students in a video posted to Instagram on March 20. Her dance studio, in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, had just closed for what she thought might be a few weeks. While her students were stuck at home, she was helping them stay active, inviting them to make their own 30 second dances with everyday objects like pillows and chairs. "Make sure you get up and use your bodies," she said in the video. "Use the skills you have. Remember what I say: If you don't use it, you lose it." Eight months later, Ms. Smallwood, a former star of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, still has not returned to teaching in person. After planning an online fall semester, she canceled it when only 20 students, less than a quarter of her usual enrollment, signed up. Her income has plummeted, but rent is still due: about 8,000 a month for the space she founded in the neighborhood where she grew up, which she calls "still one of the most underserved communities in Brooklyn." In September, she announced on Instagram that her school, whose students are mostly Black girls and young women, was on the brink of closing for good. Across the city, dance studio owners face similar situations, struggling to keep their businesses afloat as the coronavirus pandemic stretches on. While Ms. Smallwood's operation is relatively small, even owners of larger, more established studios have found themselves in precarious positions, frustrated by a lack of clear reopening guidance from the city and state. It's an uphill battle, but Ms. Smallwood and others are pressing forward: raising money, joining forces to strategize and, in some cases, forging ahead with reopening as safely as they can. Dance studios are integral to the city's performing arts ecosystem; their survival has implications beyond the walls of any one business. Small schools like Ms. Smallwood's, for instance, often give children an entry point into dance training, in environments where they might not otherwise encounter it. "We are the people who plant the seeds into these huge organizations and teach and mentor our kids to aspire to American Ballet Theater, to New York City Ballet, to Ailey," Ms. Smallwood said in a phone interview. "We are the ones on the ground, finding and cultivating those children, providing them with confidence and brain stimulation and letting them know there is something to aspire to besides the four corners of your block." As businesses like restaurants and gyms have been allowed to reopen with restrictions, dance studio owners say they have been overlooked. Pavan Thimmaiah, the director of PMT House of Dance in Manhattan, reopened his studio with precautions in place like limited class sizes, a mask requirement and high quality air filters as soon as the city's Phase 4 of reopening began in late July. He says that under the state's New York Forward plan, his business falls under "fine arts schools," which are listed as "permitted to operate with restrictions." Over the past few months, he has led the formation of the Dance Studio Alliance, a network of 16 studios ranging from high profile hubs like Broadway Dance Center in Midtown to smaller spaces like Sweet Water Dance Yoga in the South Bronx. On a recent Zoom call, members of the alliance expressed frustration with the vagueness of existing guidelines, in particular the conflation of dance studios with gyms, which currently cannot hold indoor classes. (In a separate category, dance classes are permitted at colleges and conservatories, like the Juilliard School.) One studio owner received clearance to reopen; another called the department of health and was told she couldn't; another reopened and was shut down by the city sheriff's office. The dance advocacy organization Dance/NYC has been working with several partners, including Gibney in Lower Manhattan, to draft their own comprehensive reopening guidelines for dance studios. They plan to propose these to city officials, though perhaps at a time when the city is not bracing for another potential shutdown. "We've come to a point where if we don't do it for ourselves, no one will do it for us," said Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, Dance/NYC's executive director, noting that the city's arts advisory council for reopening included no dance representatives. Lucy Sexton, the executive director of New Yorkers for Culture Arts, pointed out that in recent months, the dance field has been having "wonderful conversations about antiracism and racial equity." But to have any real impact, these must translate into action, even especially at the level of small businesses. "The people who are starting to close are the smaller organizations that are run by and for people of color," she said. "Are we going to allow that to happen? Are we going to come out at the end of this with a whiter and more centralized ecosystem than we had going into it? I think we need to be very conscious and act accordingly." In the meantime, studio owners are doing what they can to get by without shuttering entirely. The Dwana Smallwood Performing Arts Center has received some grant and loan money, but not enough to cover all its expenses, Ms. Smallwood said. She has started a fund raising campaign with the goal of reopening in January, and so far has raised over 100,000. Ms. Smallwood founded her school in 2013, having returned to her hometown after several years in South Africa, where she developed a dance program at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. (A gift of 1 million from Ms. Winfrey allowed her to open the school.) She deliberately sought out a space in a part of Bedford Stuyvesant that she describes as "a cultural desert," with few other arts offerings. "It's a hidden gem," said Judith Best, a longtime neighborhood resident whose daughter attended the school. "It needs to remain where it is." Ms. Smallwood said her landlord has offered to let her break her lease with no penalty, but she doesn't want to abandon what she has built, especially in a community hit hard by Covid 19. (A survey she sent to her staff and students found that 70 percent had lost someone they knew to the virus.) Dance, she said, can "revitalize people's level of hope and healing and balance and sense of self, in a system that feels hopeless." She sees it as a form of sustenance, a necessity. Ms. Jay, who grew up in Brooklyn and toured as a performer with "STOMP," has also opened up her space for rentals, another source of income. "I could not stay unopened for another six months," she said. "I was watching the news, and there was this pizzeria owner, and the reporter was asking, 'You reopened how do you feel about that?' And he's like, 'I feel like I have to pay my rent.' Period." (She pays about 10,000 a month in rent and utilities.) But her decision to cautiously and partially reopen was not just financial. "For what we're going through mentally, emotionally, physically, we need an outlet," she said. "We need someplace where we can feel a sense of connectivity."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The casting of this war movie, set in Afghanistan in 2009, has novelty appeal. Two members of the ensemble, Scott Eastwood and Milo Gibson, are sons of famous actor directors (Clint and Mel) who have made their own war films. Another player, Will Attenborough, is the grandson of Richard, a star of the World War II drama "The Great Escape." And James Jagger's father, Mick, while more a stage than screen figure, sometimes still sings of riding a tank and holding a general's rank. In a lesser film such family ties and resemblances could be a distraction, but in this well crafted, fact based tragedy of errors, they provide added value. When Eastwood's character, the real life Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha, is briefed on rules of engagement, he says of the general who ordered them, "Someone tell McChrystal that we're not selling Popsicles out here, sir." His line reading redefines "chip off the old block."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WITHIN a month of taking over as editor of The Hatchet, George Washington University's student newspaper, Cory Weinberg knew that something had to change. Advertising dollars had been steadily declining. Printing costs continued to rise. At the same time, visits to the website were up. The number of students reading articles on their mobile devices had doubled. Traffic from Twitter had increased 300 percent in the last year. In June, he and the general manager outlined a plan for the paper's board of directors to eliminate one of two weekly editions and invest more heavily in online coverage and ways to reach students through mobile and social media. At first, Mr. Weinberg worried that the board, made up mostly of Hatchet alumni, journalism professionals and professors, would balk. "There's been tension elsewhere over cutting editions," said Mr. Weinberg, a senior majoring in economics and journalism. "And, honestly, I expected some resistance, especially when you are talking about changing an organization that people love. But they got it." The board's decision was unanimous. Becoming a weekly is just one of the efforts to help ensure the future of this 109 year old newspaper. The Hatchet, which is independent of G.W.U., pays 4,520 in monthly rent to the university. And so an alumni group called Home for The Hatchet bought it a townhouse. To bolster its 2 million fund raising drive, the group is offering "naming opportunities." Donors have pledged 50,000 each for engraved plaques outside the offices of the editor in chief and business manager. The newsroom will be sponsored for 50,000 by Berl Brechner, a longtime television executive and 1967 Hatchet editor in chief, who fondly remembers covering the tumult of the Vietnam protests there. Naming opportunities are still available for the sports and opinion offices and staff lounge. The entire building can be had for a 750,000 pledge. THE HATCHET, like many college newspapers with long traditions, has until recently managed to stave off industry challenges that have forced professional news organizations to make deep budget cuts. When print advertising revenue fell 9 percent for commercial newspapers in 2007, college newspapers enjoyed a 15 percent increase. But the student media landscape has been shaken in the last two years by plummeting revenues and changing reading patterns. "In the last year in particular, we have seen a contraction in the marketplace," said Tammy Nelson, vice president for marketing and research for the marketing company re:fuel. "The measures a lot of college newspapers took in recent years, maybe cutting editions from five days a week to four days a week, trimming sections now and then, got them through the downturn. But they are having to look at other ways now to be profitable." At the University of California, Berkeley, the 142 year old Daily Californian is in the midst of an ambitious fund raising campaign after a single anonymous donor who had been helping fill growing budget gaps pulled out this summer. Former staff members have helped The Daily Illini, the student run newspaper at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, begin to pay down its 250,000 debt. Roger Ebert, the late film critic and D.I. editor in chief, had appealed to fellow newspaper alumni in a widely circulated letter on Facebook that helped drive donations. "Many, including myself, would say that they owe their careers at least in part to their experience at Illini Media," he wrote. "It's now time to give back." The Daily Illini is among several financially independent campus news organizations that have asked students to support small fee increases. Beginning this semester, Illinois students pay a media fee of 1.85, which is expected to cover 9 percent of this year's budget. A 3 fee was approved last April at the University of California, Irvine. The student body at Western Michigan University initiated and voted for a 10 annual fee to support the newspaper as well as radio and broadcast station. Students at the University of Connecticut balked at a 6 increase for its student newspaper, but noting that voter turnout on the issue was small, the trustees approved the fee for this academic year, putting off the debate for another year. The University of Georgia's Red and Black and the University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily have recently cut back the number of days they publish print editions. Ms. Nelson warns that college papers that eliminate too many of their print editions do so at their peril. Re:fuel research shows that students still enjoy picking up copies, free and convenient as they are, stacked in the student union and dorm lounges. In 2011, 60 percent of students read their college paper a testament, if you will, to its importance as an outlet for student concerns, from tuition increases to the quality of food in the cafeteria. Of those readers, 60 percent preferred print, while 16 percent preferred to get their college news online. That disparity may be because many student papers have heretofore simply posted their print articles online. Now, faced with harsh economic realities and the need to train young journalists in multimedia storytelling student publications have begun to beef up their digital coverage, attracting a new audience in the process. "Student media seems to be finally getting with the program," said Daniel R. Reimold, a college media scholar and professor of journalism at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "A lot of innovation is happening right now. There are finally significant attempts to re brand online and, in a few cases, on mobile." Mr. Reimold, whose blog, College Media Matters, chronicles developments on the scene, cites the transformation of The Oregon Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon. "After 112 years as The Daily Emerald, they saw the tidal wave of change," he said. "They re branded themselves from a daily student newspaper into a multiplatform student media company." It was not financial worries alone that prompted Ryan Frank, its publisher, to announce the decision in 2012 to print two instead of five days a week, and to develop a more robust online, mobile and social media presence. In an open letter to campus, Mr. Frank pointed to Pew Research Center studies showing overall print newspaper readership declines among 18 to 24 year olds. He also said that focusing on digital journalism would help the staff gain relevant experience for their job searches. "This is about delivering on our mission to serve our community and prepare our student staff for the professional world," he said. The idea of dropping the five day a week tradition made some student staff members nervous, he acknowledged: "Though they had literally grown up on Facebook, ink still coursed through their veins. They liked the tradition. But the more we looked at the facts, the more students started to see the benefits of a major change." Mr. Reimold is also closely watching George Mason University's Fourth Estate, a new campus news organization. This fall, the university's 52 year old student paper, Broadside, merged with Connect2Mason, a digital journalism site. "I think this is the perfect example that change can be achieved," he said. "I hope they will serve as a role model for the future of student media." In 2008, frustrated that the paper was slow to embrace digital media, former Broadside editors on the Fairfax, Va., campus had created Connect2Mason, which carried news as well as serving as a digital hub of student publications and radio broadcasts. It was among a handful of ambitious student journalism start ups, including Penn State's Onward State, which drew national attention for its coverage of the scandal that led to the ouster of the football coach Joe Paterno. When Frank Muraca, a junior majoring in economics, took over as executive editor of Connect2Mason last spring, there were 48 staff members publishing content online daily. At Broadside, 12 regular staff members and more than 100 student contributors produced a weekly mix of news, features, reviews and in depth reporting on issues; that content was also posted online. Staff members regularly bumped into one another on stories and worked side by side in a warren of cubicles inside the Student Media Center, but they rarely collaborated. "Born out of a conflict, there was always competition between the two," said Colleen Wilson, who joined Broadside as a sophomore and became editor in chief earlier this year. "They had their meetings. We had our meetings." Then, at a journalism conference last April in Norfolk, Va., Ms. Wilson and Mr. Muraca began talking about integrating operations. "And the more we really started talking about it, the more it made sense," Mr. Muraca said. "Each organization had its strengths. It didn't make sense to have these two separate organizations fighting over resources and story topics when we were both trying to achieve the same goal of informing the Mason community." Over the summer, they worked on a new organizational structure, with the two as co editors. The Office of Student Media supported the idea and helped with administrative details. (Broadside and Connect2Mason received university funds though maintained editorial independence.) Ms. Wilson and Mr. Muraca also redesigned the newspaper so that it would read more like a magazine, and the website. For the first time this September, students did not have to choose between working for print or for digital media. Ms. Wilson and Mr. Muraca also wanted a name change so that neither organization would feel absorbed by the other. They embraced Fourth Estate, given its historical reference to the important role a free press plays in a democracy, as the fourth seat in the system of governmental checks and balances. Their new media organization would serve the same role on campus. "We thought that was really great and had a special tie to George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights," Mr. Muraca said. It was Mason who wrote in 1776: "Freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
WARREN, N.H. Buick's image is so ingrained in the national consciousness that the name has become shorthand for an American road barge with ample proportions. That moose, someone may say, "is as big as a Buick." But since Buick survived the brand massacre that accompanied General Motors' bankruptcy and reorganization living on even as Hummer, Pontiac and Saturn were laid to rest the division and its products have slimmed down and shaped up. And with its new Encore, Buick is bravely venturing into barely charted terrain at the small end of the utility market, where the mini Buick, along with the BMW X1 and Mini Countryman, is blazing an upscale trail that other brands will soon follow with their own small scale, yet upscale, crossovers. What's as small as this diminutive new Buick? Among crossovers, not much. In overall length, the 2013 Encore is the shortest Buick since the Model 34 runabout of 1912; at 168.5 inches long, the Encore is about 10 inches shorter than a Honda CR V and eight inches less than a BMW X1. Despite the Encore's dimunitive size, Buick marketers envision a big opportunity in an emerging market category. They expect annual United States sales of submidsize crossovers, including luxury models, to reach 360,000 by 2015. But while the Encore has carved out its own little corner of the crossover kingdom, even Buick executives have a hard time pinning down the competition. They mention the X1, though that vehicle, the smallest BMW on four wheels, is more sporty and more expensive. The target customers are similar to those of the Volkswagen Tiquan, which is a bit larger and less fuel efficient. The Encore is about half a foot longer than the Nissan Juke and Mini Countryman, but the Juke is more raucous and lacks the Encore's amenities. The Countryman, like the Juke, has a more adventurous design. Fuel economy is a big part of the sales pitch. The front drive Encore has a federal rating of 25 miles per gallon in the city, 33 on the highway and 28 in combined driving. The all wheel drive version is rated at 23 city, 30 highway and 26 combined. I nearly matched the highway rating on a trip from hilly northern New Hampshire to the flatlands of Springfield, Mass., with the cruise control set at 65. Buick says the Encore has the highest fuel economy of any front drive crossover offered by a Detroit automaker, which seems like a lot of caveats. (Lest anyone begin waving the American flag, the Encore is assembled in South Korea.) Still, several compact crossovers that are somewhat larger and heavier manage to get comparable fuel economy ratings. And somewhat surprisingly, the midsize Subaru Outback, a much larger and heavier car, has a similar mileage rating (24 city/30 highway/26 combined). The Outback's price range is also similar, and the Subaru is assembled in Indiana. The Encore is enjoyable enough to drive, especially given the challenges to ride comfort posed by a relatively short wheelbase and tall body. On smooth pavement, there is no issue, but on rough patches occupants are sometimes subjected to a fair amount of up and down jiggling. The electric power steering is something Buick can brag about; it is tight on center, linear and predictable in the turns. Like most electric steering systems, however, it doesn't convey much road feel to the driver. With its tidy dimensions, the Encore changes direction quickly and demonstrates Buick's newfound commitment to making cars that are satisfying even if not downright sporty to drive. The only engine is a 1.4 liter Ecotec 4 cylinder rated at 138 horsepower and 148 pound feet of torque. This turbocharged motor is mated to a 6 speed automatic transmission. For a small 4 cylinder engine, there wasn't much vibration or noise and indeed, in normal driving, the power plant doesn't seem so small. But flooring the accelerator produces some undignified noises, and the 3,309 pound all wheel drive model goes nowhere fast. A tall sixth gear lets the Encore cruise at 65 m.p.h. at a fairly relaxed engine speed of 2,300 r.p.m. Although it has been widely reported that the Encore is based on the Chevrolet Sonic economy car, its chief engineer, Jim Danahy, said that was not quite correct. While both cars are part of G.M.'s Gamma platform family, Mr. Danahy said there were three different architectures within that family. While the Sonic is built on the Gamma's car architecture, the Encore is based on a small crossover variant. "The only thing we share between the two vehicles is the front seat frames, the front dash and the engine," he said. The two vehicles also have their transmission in common. The Encore continues to follow Buick's philosophy of no noise is good noise. It is surprisingly hushed inside the cozy wagon, helped in part by Buick's first application of active noise cancellation, which counters unwanted ambient sounds by producing "antinoise" soundwaves. The Encore stuffs a lot into a very short, fairly tall package, and it borrows a few styling cues from the big LaCrosse sedan and Enclave S.U.V. Still, the proportions could be described as awkward. The pint size interior is handsome and plush, at least in the leather trimmed Premium version that I tested. Still, even with the driver and passenger sitting almost elbow to elbow, the cabin seems open and airy. That's because headroom is ample, the windows are deep and the windshield is raked forward. The closeness of the occupants makes the separate but unequal virtues of the Buick's dual temperature controls rather superfluous. I had my control set at 74 degrees, and my passenger's was set at 60, but the whole interior was very warm. The front seats were comfortable for a three hour stretch, even for a 6 foot 4 passenger. But it seems incongruous, in what's supposed to be a premium product, to adjust the front seatbacks with a manual lever rather than a power control. Buick calls the Encore a five passenger vehicle, but five people could ride comfortably only if those in the rear are tiny or the trip is short. Of course, the Encore is really intended for young couples and for empty nesters, not for family use. There is 18.8 cubic feet of space behind the second row of seats, enough for weekly shopping trips or four medium suitcases. You can flip the back seatbacks down to open up a cargo area of 48.4 cubic feet. Lowering the rear seats flat has unintended consequences. The folded seatbacks force the front seats so far forward that I had to sit uncomfortably near the steering wheel and unsafely close to the air bag. The Encore's standard safety systems include 10 air bags, with knee bags for the front occupants and thorax bags even for the outer rear seating positions. Electronic crash avoidance technologies are also offered, though only with Premium trim, the most expensive version: forward collision alert provides a warning when sensors detect an impending crash, and lane departure warning sounds an alert if you start to drift out of lane. Atop the instrument panel there's a seven inch color display for the IntelliLink voice activated infotainment system, which integrates audio services like Pandora and Sirius XM Satellite Radio through the Bose Premium sound system. My test car had a navigation system, a 795 option. My editor, who drove a different Encore, reported a 100 percent failure rate when trying to use voice recognition to make calls or set destinations. The Encore comes in four trim levels with prices for front wheel drive models from 24,950 to 28,940; all wheel drive costs another 1,500. My test model the top of the line Premium with all wheel drive and a few options came to 32,425. The only other options, a sunroof and chromed aluminum wheels, would have pushed the price above 34,000. The Encore is a bold move from a brand once known for cautious conservatism, and for now it has a niche small, but likely to grow mostly to itself. As the competition grows, the Buick's relatively high price and comparatively unimpressive mileage may work against it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel has put the future of Gawker Media in doubt by secretly funding a successful lawsuit that threatens to undermine the media company's finances. To do it, Mr. Thiel, a co founder of PayPal, adopted tactics from a strategy used by investment firms and others who are increasingly underwriting lawsuits in the hope of turning a profit on their outcomes. Over the last decade, the types of lawsuits that have attracted outside money range from product liability claims brought by consumers against manufacturers to lawsuits filed by one business against a competitor over commercial issues like copyright violation. But Mr. Thiel has also turned the model of third party lawsuit funding on its head. Instead of looking for profits, the entrepreneur had a personal goal: extracting revenge against Gawker and warning others who adopted the website's ethos that they could face similar legal attacks. Now, the question running through many media circles is whether other wealthy people upset with news accounts will decide to follow Mr. Thiel's example and go after other organizations. And if so, to what extent those suits could hurt the financial future of media companies and stifle free speech. But legal experts said that a lawsuit, regardless of who is funding it, will ultimately succeed or fall based on its merits. "This case is unusual," said Michael McDonald, an assistant professor of finance at Fairfield University in Connecticut who also works as a consultant to lawsuit investors. Mr. Thiel said he was irate that a website owned by Gawker had, among other things, outed him and several of his friends as gay, solely to be prurient. And an instrument used to channel his outrage was a lawsuit filed by the retired wrestler Hulk Hogan against Gawker that the entrepreneur financed with about 10 million. The former wrestler, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, sued Gawker Media for invasion of privacy after it published a video of him having sex, and a Florida jury recently awarded him 140 million. "I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people," Mr. Thiel said in an interview this week. Experts like Mr. McDonald said they were hard pressed to find other examples in which someone financed a lawsuit in the hope of settling a score. One exception appears to be a libel action brought in 1990s against James B. Stewart over his book "Den of Thieves," which examined a series of Wall Street scandals including one involving Michael Milken, the junk bond king. That lawsuit, which was brought by a minor character in the book, was financed by Mr. Milken's brother, according to a 2002 article in Legal Affairs, a magazine. The case against Mr. Stewart, who is now a columnist for The New York Times, was dismissed, but not before millions of dollars in legal fees were spent. The case involving Mr. Thiel has raised questions about whether media companies may face other such costly cases in the future. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Marcus Brauchli, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter Thursday that Mr. Thiel's actions set a "lousy precedent." Lawsuits financed by third parties are legal. But as the legal financing industry has grown, business groups have claimed that outside investing helps fuel frivolous litigation. Other experts, however, see the involvement of outside funders as a boon that helps plaintiffs without resources take on deep pocketed defendants. "Many academics fully embrace third party litigation funding as leveling the playing field," said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School. The precise nature of the relationship between Mr. Thiel and Mr. Bollea's lawyer is unclear. However, legal experts like Ms. Engstrom that say lawyers who accept funds from people who are not parties to a case face certain obligations, like not disclosing confidential information obtained during a lawsuit to an investor or placing an investor's interests ahead of those of a client. Roy D. Simon, a professor emeritus of legal ethics at Hofstra University School of Law, said the interplay among an investor, a lawyer and a plaintiff could get tricky. While most firms that invest in litigation are happy to settle a case for the right price, an aggrieved individual who doesn't need money might be more interested in driving a case to judgment. Gawker Media made several settlement offers. "The ordinary investor would not have an ax to grind," Mr. Simon said. For a plaintiff, significant legal hurdles exist for a lawsuit against a media organization to be successful. In addition, many states have adopted laws intended to deter lawsuits filed by companies and others seeking to chill advocacy on public policy issues. Such actions are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapp suits. Anthony Sebok, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, said parties in a case were not normally required to disclose whether outside investors were funding a lawsuit. But the issue has come to the attention of Congress. Last year, two Republican Senators, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and John Cornyn of Texas, sent a letter to three of this country's largest litigation financing firms, asking about the types of cases they funded, the financial arrangements and their return on investment. "Third party litigation financing pumps millions of dollars into our justice system," Senator Cornyn wrote at the time, "and the current lack of oversight makes it difficult to track this money's influence."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Henry James's 1898 horror novella "The Turn of the Screw" has been adapted into many forms since it was published, including in opera, ballet and theater some of them great works in their own right. The story, about a young governess who is hired to tend to two orphans at a spooky country estate, has been perfect adaptation fodder because of its characters' shadowy back stories and its central ambiguity: Are the ghosts in the story real, or are they only in the mind of the governess? Perhaps nowhere has James's story proved more fertile than onscreen mostly in movies, although versions of the story have appeared in TV shows like "Star Trek: Voyager" and the 1960s and '70s horror soap "Dark Shadows." On Friday, Netflix will debut the latest such offering, "The Haunting of Bly Manor," a stand alone follow up to "The Haunting of Hill House." Here's a look at some of the most compelling screen versions so far and how they put their own spin on the material. With a screenplay by Truman Capote, "The Innocents" remains the most acclaimed adaptation, partly because of how faithful it is to the original. It depicts all of James's narrative beats, as the governess (Deborah Kerr) enjoys an idyllic life bonding with a housekeeper, Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins), and the two children, Flora and Miles that is, until she begins to believe that the ghosts of a previous governess, Miss Jessel, and a valet, Peter Quint are possessing the children. The film is beautifully shot, genuinely terrifying, and few actresses have walked the story's tightrope of ambiguity as well as Kerr. A prequel starring Marlon Brando (with a terrible Lucky Charms style Irish accent), "The Nightcomers" backfills the novella's rough sketches of the lives of Quint (Brando) and Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham), their relationship and their corrupting influence on the children. Empowered by the more sexually open filmmaking of the 1970s, here the adults are given a sadomasochistic relationship that Miles and Flora (older here) spy on and begin to imitate. But it's Quint's philosophies on death that risk turning the children into the characters of bad seed films like "Village of the Damned." A Spanish American production, "Presence of Mind" moves the story to an island off the Spanish coast, gives us a there and gone Harvey Keitel as the children's uncle and an almost campy Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Grose (renamed Mado Remei here). It seems to want the distinction of being the most uncomfortable "Screw" adaptation. Favoring the horror committed by humans over ghosts, it twists James's characters into unsettling territory, including a revelation that the governess (Sadie Frost) was physically and sexually abused by her father and a squirm inducing pseudo romance between her and Miles. The specter of James's novella looms over "The Others," which is not a direct adaptation (it's set in the aftermath of World War II and features a mother instead of a governess) but uses familiar narrative building blocks: A woman (Nicole Kidman) watches over her two children in an isolated country estate, inhabited only by servants, which appears to be haunted by ghosts. Its tone, however, is where "The Others" most echoes James and "The Innocents," spooking audiences with a similar slow burn dread and an uneasy uncertainty about what exactly is going bump in the night. Distinguished mostly by being the rare "Turn" adaptation in a contemporary setting, "In a Dark Place" makes bargain bin creative choices that appear to be attempts at titillation but are tasteless in execution. Particularly crass are the ways in which it handles the sexual abuse experienced by its governess (Leelee Sobieski) as a child, along with its choice to introduce a gratuitous lesbian relationship between Mrs. Grose (here Miss Gose) and Miss Jessel (Tara Fitzgerald and Gintare Parulyte), and another between Miss Grose and the governess. Featuring a pre "Downton Abbey" Michelle Dockery, the BBC's made for TV take on James remains mostly loyal to the source material with some notable exceptions. It moves events forward to the 1920s and offers a higher body count (a maid falls off a roof, possibly pushed by Quint), and gives its heroine (Dockery) a sexual fantasy or two. The film also opens in a sanitarium, where the governess is being interviewed by a psychiatrist, seeding doubts into what we're about to witness at Bly Manor. A Brazilian film that relocates the ghost story to a remote coffee plantation, "Through the Shadow" does something rare with the source material: It gives room to the oft ignored staff at Bly Manor, allowing viewers to see all the work that goes into creating enough leisure time for rich people to worry about ghosts. The film adds racial dynamics, too (the family is Hispanic, and all the servants are Black), augmenting the tension in an already uncomfortable situation. Set in 1994 for no clear reason, "The Turning" makes other choices that feel like change for the sake of it. Its nanny (Mackenzie Davis) is given a mother who is mentally ill (not cinema's most subtle foreshadowing), it makes the children (Finn Wolfhard, Brooklynn Prince) more sadistic, and it recasts Quint as a rapist (his relationship with Miss Jessel is consensual in most adaptations). The film also aspires to turn James's subtle dread into "The Conjuring" level terror, but the scares don't rise above those of most B movies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Boise derived from the French word for wooded, but a name that also reflects a confluence of frontier myth and speculation sits below the Rocky Mountains on a verdant plain known as Treasure Valley. Boise (BOY see, if you're a local; BOY zee if you're not), once a gritty stop along the Oregon Trail, is Idaho's capital and, with a population of 223,000, its most populous city. It is a place that offers frontier charm, easy access to expansive wilderness, a reverence for modern art and creative restaurants (not to mention goats known for their landscaping skills). It is also a place where visitors will find Basque culture the most concentrated in the country throughout the city, especially in the Basque Block neighborhood. The culture is an integral part of Boise, where children can take Basque dance lessons and adults can drink calimotxo, a red wine and Coke libation. Get sweeping views of downtown Boise and learn something about falconry, when you venture into the lowlands, a 20 minute drive outside the city. There, on a plateau that more than a half dozen falcons and other birds of prey call home, the World Center for Birds of Prey (also the headquarters of the Peregrine Fund) offers live raptor presentations and one of the world's most thorough falconry archives. There are displays on raptor diets and migration patterns, and an astonishingly in depth exhibition that details how Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the former president of the United Arab Emirates, devoted much of his life to preserving the culture of falconry. General admission is 10. A festival each summer commemorates Basque immigrants who settled throughout the rural areas in the 19th century, where they were miners and later shepherds. Evidence of the Basque diaspora is everywhere: a large mural of children playing pelota (similar to handball) overlooks downtown's Basque Block, where utility boxes display images related to Basque dance, paella, bocadillos and tapas at the Basque Market, and an artzainak (Basque for shepherd) exhibition at the Basque Museum. Cocktails at The Modern Hotel and Bar downtown offers Basque inspired cocktails such as the Barbarella (Hacienda de Chihuahua sotol, Bozal Tobasiche mezcal, rhubarb shrub and fresh ginger, 10). After a drink, explore the nearby Julia Davis Rose Garden, which holds more than 2,000 rose bushes inside a 43 acre park. Helmed by the chef Christian Phernetton, State and Lemp sources Pacific Northwest and Idaho meats, cheeses and vegetables. The prix fixe menu, about 200 for two, changes frequently. On a recent visit, the menu included smoked sturgeon, octopus and fiddleheads, pork with rhubarb and a creme fraiche panna cotta. The venue is essentially an intimate art gallery with kinetic sculptures and other local artwork for sale. Reserve in advance. If French cuisine is more in line with your tastes, Le Coq d'Or, in nearby Eagle (part of the metropolitan sprawl surrounding Boise), offers a menu that includes a tempura avocado crab boat (Dungeness crab with mango, cilantro and habanero ginger aioli, 14) and free range chicken with "truffle spinach" and goat cheese risotto ( 31). Heed the call to an amazing breakfast at Wildroot Cafe and Market, tucked behind an unassuming facade and decorated with bright green furniture. You can delve into a plate of Wagyu steak and eggs (served with sweet potato hash and asparagus, 16) or migas (a queso fresco and green onion omelette like dish, with chorizo, house made avocado salsa verde, pinto beans and crispy tortillas, 10). For a taste of Basque cuisine, go to Txikiteo (Basque for pub crawl), which opened in March. For breakfast, indulge in the Gateau Basque (a fluffy cake topped with a cherry, 5) and the jamon serrano and manchego breakfast sandwich ( 7). Less than an hour's drive from downtown is the city of Horseshoe Bend and the fantastical woodlands that surround it. Some of the best river rafting anywhere may be had on the Payette River ( 60 for half day trips). Or hike along the Wildlife Canyon Scenic Byway and spy on mountain goats and elk at various overlooks. Idaho Mountain Touring offers mountain bicycle rentals ( 15 to 60 for up to four hour rentals, depending on bike model); check out the Bogus Basin, a year round skiing and biking enclave with verdant trails once used for gold mining. Rent a car to drive through the Sawtooth Mountain range (a roughly three hour picturesque drive) for an overnight in the Sun Valley wilderness. Central Idaho is the only certified dark sky preserve in the country designated in 2017, it is one of 12 worldwide. (Though the designation applies to 1,416 square miles of craggy backcountry, anywhere outside of downtown Boise will do.) Set up your base camp in the town of Ketchum (try The Tamarack Lodge, where rooms start at 125), the final resting place of Hemingway. You'll find his grave in the Ketchum cemetery. It's the one adorned with pens and bottles of whiskey. Recover from your drive with a flight of local craft beer specials, a house baked pretzel ( made with duck fat, rosemary and saison beer cheese, 8) and the butcher's cut steak (market prices vary) at Warfield. Then explore the Sawtooths by kayak (Backwoods Mountain Sports, daytrips from 30, depending on model) or join a Salmon River float fishing trip (White Otter Outdoor Adventures, 350 a person). You'll wend past gold mining ghost towns and hot springs while navigating the same rich waters that the fur trader Alexander Ross and the Hudson's Bay Company did in the 19th century. Have a drink at Michel's Christiania in Ketchum, where Hemingway spent his last night with his wife, Mary, and where you can enjoy the carpaccio de boeuf ( 14) and escargots bourguignon ( 15). Or save your appetite and go to the Town Square Tavern where you will find something like a Fifth Avenue vibe served alongside lamb burgers ( 12), duck confit tacos ( 13) and tapas ( 6 to 12). Order a slice of Turkish coffee mud pie ( 6) and then, as you head home, bask in the brightness of a blanket of stars. No trip to Idaho is complete without potatoes. Frites come as sides with most everything. But there is only one Ice Cream Potato. Back in downtown Boise, enter Westside Drive In, a throwback complete with pink neon sign. O.K., the ice cream isn't actually made with potatoes. Rather it is frozen ice cream compressed into the shape of a russet potato then rolled in cocoa powder and slit down the middle. Filled with rich whipped cream, it's the perfect alt snack in a place famed for its spuds. When in the Gem State, do as the miners did: Head for the hills and the gold, which may or may not be there. Either way, appreciate the abundance of natural resources at the Idaho Museum of Mining Geology (free), and then stroll through the Old Idaho Penitentiary ( 6) next door, which offers a good introduction to Western prison history . There are several trailheads nearby, so hike into the rolling desert landscape, a vestige of what frontier remains. Once a ramshackle motel, the Modern Hotel and Bar (1314 West Grove Street, themodernhotel.com; queen rooms start at around 130) is now a chic boutique inn with reasonable rates and excellent cocktails. Built into the foothills overlooking the north of the city, the delightful Boise Hillside Suites (4480 North Kitsap Way, boisehillsidesuites.com; from 85) is roughly five minutes from downtown, and features landscaping stones from the Boise City Hall. Looking for camp and kitsch? The Anniversary Inn (1575 South Lusk Place, anniversaryinn.com; from 159) has been a stalwart in Boise for years and is part of a larger Midwestern chain, with rooms such as the Treasure Island suite, the Sleeping Beauty's suite and a Swiss Family Robinson style treehouse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
"I'm getting tired of the novelty of the first female governor of this state, the first female African American mayor of this city. When is it going to become the norm instead of the exception?" she said, adding: "We don't have enough female role models. We don't have enough visible women leaders. We don't have enough women in power." And as she spoke of young women coming of age, she described the world they were coming into. "Men run the world. Men have the power. Men make the decisions. It's always the man that is the stronger one," McGraw said, her voice rising. If McGraw had long felt that way, seeing how many fewer career opportunities there are for women than men in college athletics, that speech seemed to have awakened something in her. Or at least the reaction did. She heard from women in a broad variety of professions, as well as from many men with young daughters. "I was a little amazed that my speech just kept on going," McGraw said Wednesday in a news conference held through videoconferencing because of the coronavirus pandemic. "I don't really know where it started from, but it was something that I think I needed to get out, and I was really happy with the response across the country." It was shortly after, when Notre Dame lost its bid for back to back championships with a defeat in the N.C.A.A. final, that McGraw began to consider stepping away from the game. She decided to stay because she knew that, with five of her players exiting for the W.N.B.A., the 2019 20 season would be grim. Indeed, the Fighting Irish were 13 18 and would have seen their 24 year N.C.A.A. tournament qualifying streak come to an end had the event not been canceled. But with a strong recruiting class for next season, she felt much better about stepping away now, she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
No other living artist is more closely identified with an American theater company than James McMullan. For 30 years, his painterly posters for Lincoln Center Theater have been turned into collectibles that are more than advertising: They're synonymous with the shows themselves. It's hard to think of "Carousel" without recalling his artwork for the 1994 revival that depicts a brooding Billy Bigelow, vividly illuminated from below, atop wooden horses that rear beneath an angry sky. To commemorate Mr. McMullan's artistic tenure with Lincoln Center, a permanent exhibition of some of his best known works was recently installed in the lobby of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. For playwrights, having Mr. McMullan, 82, spend so much time considering and visualizing their created world is like having Picasso paint their child's portrait. "Often contemporary theater posters seem to be made by someone in the marketing department and resemble clip art from the 1980s," said the playwright Sarah Ruhl, who has had several Lincoln Center plays promoted with posters by Mr. McMullan, including her latest, "How to Transcend a Happy Marriage," which starts performances on Feb. 23. "I don't mean to point any fingers at any particular theater when I say this. But they often are not really held together by artistry. There is no one else like Jim." When it's time for Lincoln Center Theater to approve a poster, Mr. McMullan doesn't turn in crude line drawings. Working mainly in watercolor, not with computers, he turns in a finished painting. If it's rejected, he creates another one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
It takes audacity to recreate the circumstances behind a movie whose stature is sacred. "CasablancaBox" a production at Here, a downtown locus of experimental theater is a brave, almost foolhardy undertaking, presenting the backstage drama during the making of "Casablanca," and daring its audience to compare its cast members to the actors in what many believe to be the finest Hollywood movie of all time. And it delves into the factors that informed a classic: World War II geopolitics, a hothouse studio system environment, assorted colorful personal histories and a series of happy accidents. "CasablancaBox" was written by Sara Farrington and directed by her husband, Reid Farrington, a specialist in blending video with live performance. (Earlier productions have paid tribute to Hitchcock's "Rope" and screen renditions of "A Christmas Carol.") The new show makes effective use of scrims on which scenes from "Casablanca" are projected (the actors onstage recite their lines behind them), but most of the action takes place offscreen. The many players onstage each, it seems, have a story to tell. (Respect to the choreographer, Laura K. Nicoll, and stage manager, Alex B. West, for keeping the performers from colliding with one another.) The play opens with extras and crew members in newsboy caps milling about, toting lights and boom mikes, before a radio announcer (Stephanie Regina, who doubles as Irene, a studio messenger) describes the storm clouds of World War II and Michael Curtiz (Kevin R. Free), the movie's director, calls "action!" Amid the movie passages are thumbnail portraits, often in broad strokes, of the film's players and their loved ones, with multiple roles inhabited by the play's cast members. Mr. Free's Curtiz is comically harried and frustrated, not the severe autocrat Curtiz actually was; Erin Treadway's Mayo Methot, Humphrey Bogart's alcoholic wife at the time, is more a nuisance than deeply troubled; Zac Hoogendyk alternating in one scene as Ingrid Bergman's first husband, the future surgeon Petter Lindstrom, and her second, the director Roberto Rossellini toggles between blandness and caricature.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Tech companies have slowly grown more comfortable with President Trump, who was initially a target of Silicon Valley criticism. Chief executives including Apple's Tim Cook, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amazon's Jeff Bezos met with the president in June. SAN FRANCISCO Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election, executives at Google consoled their employees in an all staff meeting broadcast around the world. "There is a lot of fear within Google," said Sundar Pichai, the company's chief executive, according to a video of the meeting viewed by The New York Times. When asked by an employee if there was any silver lining to Mr. Trump's election, the Google co founder Sergey Brin said, "Boy, that's a really tough one right now." Ruth Porat, the finance chief, said Mr. Trump's victory felt "like a ton of bricks dropped on my chest." Then she instructed members of the audience to hug the person next to them. Sixteen months later, Google's parent company, Alphabet, has most likely saved billions of dollars in taxes on its overseas cash under a new tax law signed by Mr. Trump. Alphabet also stands to benefit from the Trump administration's looser regulations for self driving cars and delivery drones, as well as from proposed changes to the trade pact with Mexico and Canada that would limit Google's liability for user content on its sites. Once one of Mr. Trump's most vocal opponents, Silicon Valley's technology industry has increasingly found common ground with the White House. When Mr. Trump was elected, tech executives were largely up in arms over a leader who espoused policies on immigration and other issues that were antithetical to their companies' values. Now, many of the industry's executives are growing more comfortable with the president and how his economic agenda furthers their business interests, even as many of their employees continue to disagree with Mr. Trump on social issues. The relationship remains bumpy. Mr. Trump lashed out at Amazon on Twitter on Thursday, accusing the e commerce giant of evading taxes. (Amazon said it had saved 789 million under the tax law Mr. Trump signed.) The president is also expected to sign legislation, passed by the Senate last week, that would strengthen policing of sex trafficking online a bill that internet companies once opposed because they worried it would make them liable for content posted by their users. Yet quietly, the tech industry has warmed to the White House, especially as companies including Alphabet, Apple and Intel have benefited from the Trump administration's policies. Those include lowering corporate taxes, encouraging development of new wireless technology like 5G and, so far, ignoring calls to break up the tech giants. Mr. Trump's tougher stance on China may also help ward off industry rivals, with the president squashing a hostile bid to acquire the chip maker Qualcomm this month. And Mr. Trump let die an Obama era rule that required many tech start ups to give some workers more overtime pay. Mr. Trump "has been great for business and really, really good for tech," said Gary Shapiro, who leads the Consumer Technology Association, the largest American tech trade group, with more than 2,200 members including Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. "This isn't Hitler or Mussolini here," Mr. Shapiro said. And even though the president's new tariffs on steel and aluminum could hurt American businesses and consumers, "disagreement in one area does not mean we cannot work together in others," Mr. Shapiro said. "Everyone who is married knows that." Mr. Trump himself has taken to naming tech companies he says are on his side. After Apple took advantage of the new tax law in January to bring back most of the 252 billion cash hoard that it had parked overseas, the company said it would make a 350 billion "contribution to the U.S. economy" over the next five years. That prompted Mr. Trump to suggest he had made good on a campaign pledge to get Apple to bring jobs back to the United States. "You know, for 350 million, you could build a beautiful plant. But for 350 billion, they're going to build a lot of plants," the president told members of Congress last month. Mr. Trump said he had called Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, to personally thank him. In fact, Apple has no plans to build a plant in the United States. The company is uneasy with Mr. Trump's invoking it to signify how his policies are working, according to a person close to Apple who was not authorized to speak publicly. Apple has not, however, publicly corrected the president. Mr. Trump has also stayed quiet on the controversy engulfing Facebook over user privacy, while other politicians have called for more regulations after revelations that the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the information of 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used that data to aid Mr. Trump's campaign. Michael Kratsios, the White House's deputy chief technology officer, said in an interview that while Mr. Trump and Silicon Valley had their differences, "in places where we do see eye to eye, I think we're achieving extraordinary success." Some tech executives have since disagreed with Mr. Trump on social issues. Mr. Cook emailed staff last June to say he had unsuccessfully lobbied the president to remain in the Paris climate accords. In November, Microsoft sued the administration to protect a law that blocks deportation of young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. More than 100 companies, including Google, Facebook and Uber, filed a brief supporting California's lawsuit on that issue. Even so, tech executives worked to build a relationship with the president, with some meeting him at Trump Tower before his inauguration and again at the White House in June. While in Washington for the second meeting, Mr. Cook and Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, also dined with Jared Kushner, the president's senior adviser and son in law, and Ivanka Trump at the couple's Washington home, according to a person briefed on the meeting who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about it. This month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin visited Apple's headquarters. Silicon Valley has found plenty to like about the Trump presidency. In September, tech giants including Facebook and Microsoft teamed up with the administration to pledge 500 million to computer science education. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are also eyeing the administration as a potential customer as Mr. Trump pushes to modernize the government's digital infrastructure. But Silicon Valley's favorite thing about Mr. Trump is almost certainly his new tax code. Many tech companies lobbied for corporate tax reform for years before Mr. Trump signed the new tax bill. Tech giants immediately reaped the benefits. Under the new rules, Apple saved 43.7 billion in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan research group. Apple then announced the 350 billion "contribution" to the economy over five years. Most of the tally was previously planned spending with American suppliers and a 38 billion tax payment on its overseas cash. But Apple also said it planned to hire 20,000 new workers, invest in new data centers and another domestic campus, and increase a fund for innovative American manufacturers to 5 billion from 1 billion. It also gave employees 2,500 bonuses. The president was quick to tweet the news.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The costume designer Ruth E. Carter said she didn't know much about the Marvel universe but "I really wanted this movie."Credit...Clement Pascal for The New York Times The costume designer Ruth E. Carter said she didn't know much about the Marvel universe but "I really wanted this movie." How do you outfit an African queen? For Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for "Black Panther," it involved a Zulu hat and a 3 D printer. In her 30 years in film, Ms. Carter has made her career putting images of African American history and contemporary culture onscreen, from Spike Lee's canon to "Selma" and the recent remake of "Roots." For the Marvel blockbuster "Black Panther," she got to envision a futuristic African alternate reality made up of diverse tribes and untouched by colonizers. "I really wanted this movie," Ms. Carter, 57, said. She didn't know much about the Marvel universe when she met with the director and co writer, Ryan Coogler, but she liked the comic books' portrayal. "You saw people with little kufis," she said. "You saw a tribal council happening and someone was sitting there in a suit, and then they'd have a big Maasai headdress." To imagine the fictional African nation of Wakanda, without the influence of the Dutch, the British and other colonizers, Ms. Carter borrowed from indigenous people across the continent. During six months of preproduction, she had shoppers scouring the globe for authentic African designs, like the traditional stacked neck rings worn by the Ndebele women of South Africa. Textiles were sourced to Ghana, but many African fabrics are now printed in Holland; Ms. Carter rejected those. "I wanted to create the fabrics, and I wanted them to feel very superhero like," she said. There was a strict color palette, drafted by Mr. Coogler: Chadwick Boseman, who plays T'Challa, the Wakanda royal who is also the Black Panther, wears black; Danai Gurira, as the warrior Okoye, and her band of female fighters, the Dora Milaje, are in vibrant red; and Lupita Nyong'o, as the spy Nakia, part of the river tribe, is in shades of green. (Black, red and green are also the colors of the Pan African flag.) For Mr. Coogler, blue "represented the police and authority." She dressed Michael B. Jordan, as Black Panther's rival, Erik Killmonger, in it. She also leaned on a visual bible created by Hannah Beachler, the production designer, which laid out the districts and culture of Wakanda. The merchant tribe is inspired by the Tuareg, ethnic Berbers of the Sahara, Ms. Carter said. The mining tribe resembles the Himba of Namibia, known for their red ocher body paint and leather headpieces. And for the artsy Step Town district, she scoured looks from an Afropunk festival in Atlanta, where "Black Panther" was shot. "She has everything you want in a collaborator," Mr. Coogler said. "She's experienced but still youthful and energetic, still curious and open to trying new things." Ms. Carter said this was not the most complex production she'd ever done; "Malcolm X," set across several eras, was even more involved. But the chance to explore Afrofuturism with "Black Panther" was meaningful to her. "It is the reason why we have a sense of pride as African Americans," she said. The movie "connects everything that I've done about slavery and about how Africans came to this country, and what happened to their culture," she said. Here, she discusses the inspiration and design of several looks from the film. Ryan Meinerding at Marvel designs all of its superhero suits, but Ms. Carter put her stamp on the three versions made for this movie, adding a raised triangle motif. "It has a little bit of a sheen to it," she said. She calls the triangle "the sacred geometry of Africa, and it makes him not only a superhero, but a king, an African king." The Black Panther first appeared onscreen in "Captain America: Civil War" in 2016, and when Mr. Boseman donned that suit and helmet for her, "we were, like, wow." "It was majestic. The superhero thing really is something mystical," Ms. Carter said. "And then he was doing moves and he was telling us, you know, 'I can't raise my arm, and I can't breathe out of my nose.' And we're like, oh, O.K., that's bad, Mr. Black Panther. We'll change that." For the headgear worn by T'Challa's mother, Queen Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett), "we found a traditional Zulu married woman's hat, complete with the ocher that makes it red, and like a hairy, furry, texture on it. It was giant, and I really wanted to see that beautiful cylindrical shape, because I've always seen the ones that you get in the tourist trade," which don't always resemble archival images. "I didn't believe that the origins of its shape were real until I saw a real one." The hat was the model for Ms. Bassett's crown, which was 3 D printed, with help from the designer Julia Korner, who specializes in wearable plastics. A rounded shoulder mantle, with a bit of African lace, was also 3 D printed. It took six months, Ms. Carter said, to get the design right. The costuming for Nakia, played by Ms. Nyong'o, made the broadest leaps, Ms. Carter said. The spy's river tribe was based partly on the Suri of Ethiopia, so her traditional look was made of shells, beads and leaves. "That cultural specificity was very, very helpful," Ms. Nyong'o said. "I looked at images of those people and their particular way of life. It's another layer of character development." But she also has a high wattage fight scene in a casino in South Korea, for which she wears a striking green, high neck, open shoulder dress. Ms. Carter and her team designed the fabric and had it 3 D printed. They started with a kente cloth, "extracted the line work and created a pattern, hand painted it," she said. It's covered with Wakandan text boxes with slashes inside and it's sexy but not revealing. "It was her Bond Girl moment," Ms. Carter said, "but also, she could fight and move in it, and it wasn't constricting." Nakia's civilian clothes were the real challenge. "It's hard to figure out what a person's casual looks are when they're a war dog, a C.I.A. operative, a casino girl," she said. "We were trying things on all the time in the fitting room."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In "Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment," the artist uses offensiveness as a form of resistance in paintings portraying Ronald Reagan (top right), Donald Trump (bottom right) and even George Washington.Credit...Peter Saul/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Winnie Au for The New York Times In "Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment," the artist uses offensiveness as a form of resistance in paintings portraying Ronald Reagan (top right), Donald Trump (bottom right) and even George Washington. Politically, 2020 has been, so far, a gonzo variety show of executive howlers and hissy fits; prayer breakfasts and Iowa pratfalls; split "victories" and revenge firings. The weirdness overload has almost seemed staged to distract from other American realities: migrant detention centers, corporate land grabs, climate catastrophe and the cruelties of poverty and racism. All of which makes the arrival at the New Museum of "Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment," a critically acidic dirty bomb of a show, well timed. The 61 works in this exhibition, installed on the museum's third and fourth floors, span the career of an American painter whose art has, for more than half a century, both diagnosed national maladies and been shaped by them. The result is work that's virtuosically bizarre in style (Tiepolo meets Mad magazine) and ecumenically offensive in content. Whatever your ethnic, sexual or political persuasion, there is something here to give you ethical pause, to bring out an inner censor you didn't know was there. Born in San Francisco in 1934, Mr. Saul had, by his own account, a materially privileged but punishing childhood, first as the offspring of hyper censorious parents, then as a student at a boarding school where physical beatings were not considered abuse. In both environments, making art offered an area of psychological safety and freedom, a place from which he could look out at the world, including, later, the art world, with a critical combination of fear, fascination and scorn. After studying painting in college he moved to Europe for several years. There he began as an abstract painter but soon, influenced by Surrealism, began to introduce images from the comic books and magazine ads that had been his primary visual resources as a kid. Some of the earliest paintings in the New Museum show include figures of Mickey Mouse and Superman; others refer to the American consumerism he'd left behind. "Ice Box Number 1" (1960) is a still life interior of an open refrigerator crammed with slabs of meats, brand name canned goods and detached penises. That year, in Paris, he met the New York dealer Allan Frumkin, who gave him his first American solo two years later ("Ice Box Number 1" was in it) and represented him until 1997. And by the time Mr. Saul returned from Europe to California in 1964, he was clear on what he wanted, and didn't want, from art. He didn't want the pretensions the ego, the angst left over from Abstract Expressionism. And he didn't want the social trappings associated with a mainstream career. (He has referred to himself as being "fairly communistic" at the time.) What he did want was to be able to paint what he pleased and to have his work noticed. And one way to get people looking was to take subjects from a source they cared about: the news. Back home, he found that anger over the Vietnam War, which he shared, had reached high boil. And the paintings he made in response to it seven are in one gallery on the third floor are among the most powerful antiwar works of that era. He had, by then, traded in rough and ready brushwork and modulated colors for graphic crispness and a high keyed palette. His once loose compositions had become airtight linear tangles. Tubular figures twist and stretch in a cartoon version of Mannerist serpentinata. The formal elegance momentarily stops you, holds your eye. A beat later, content starts to come through. It's strong stuff. The monumental 1967 painting "Saigon" is a phantasmagoria of erotic violence so complex you almost can't, at first, decipher it. A label painted in faux Chinese characters clues you in: "White boys torturing and raping the people of Saigon." Indeed that's exactly what the scene portrays, a nightmare that is American policy in action. In the 1970 painting "Pinkville," the last of the Vietnam series, violence is the subject again, but the actions are clearer. The picture was done a year after the story of the slaughter at My Lai Pinkville was a military nickname for the village was made public. Mr. Saul reduces the American troops to a single giant multilimbed G.I. who shoots three bound nude women while sexually assaulting a fourth. Much of the impact of both pictures lies in the fact that the women depicted, with their bright yellow skin and slanted eyes, conform to Western stereotypes of Asians. The setting they're in may be self consciously critical. (Mr. Saul said in a 1967 interview that he intended his Vietnam paintings to be seen as "treasonable.") But the figures remain racial and misogynistic caricatures. The artist is playing a risky role here, that of double agent. He's giving us his own condemnatory view of the war, but also the view of Americans who saw it through the filter of racism and supported it. He uses the same strategy, less securely, in two paintings of the American political activist and professor Angela Davis. Both date from the early 1970s, when Ms. Davis, having been convicted of conspiracy to murder in the Marin County Civic Center case where four people died, including a judge spent more than a year in prison. (In 1972 she was acquitted of the charges and released.) In both pictures one is titled "The Crucifixion of Angela Davis" she is shown as a victim: nude, prone, helpless under assault. The idea of injustice is conveyed, but in a sexualized image that, with its overtones of sadism, reads uncomfortably in the MeToo present. Time and history change art. Identity politics of the past several decades have changed the ways "racial" images are received. In particular, the question of who owns identity who has a right to depict whom, and how has sharpened in the past few years. Mr. Saul's Angela Davis need to be revisited in this light, as does his mural size 1979 "Subway I," with its image of mixed race mayhem. In that case, at least, stereotyping is an equal opportunities affair. Everybody takes a hit. The show's second half, on the museum's 4th floor, is an exuberant free for all: 30 paintings hung in two rows, salon style, in one big room. They range in date from 1973 ("Custer's Last Stand 1") to 2017 ("Donald Trump in Florida"). There are remakes of historical classics like Emmanuel Leutze's 1851 "Washington Crosses the Delaware," and several presidential portraits, all of Republican sitters. If Ronald Reagan is clearly the POTUS Mr. Saul most loves to hate, his image of a smiley George W. Bush tormenting an Abu Ghraib inmate is the most effective takedown. Three separate likenesses of Donald Trump are bland, soft, but perhaps understandably so. Mr. Trump may be all but unsendupable. The self portraits, many of them a lot freakier than this one, hint at what so many young artists over the decades have loved about Mr. Saul: his pictorial inventiveness; his persistence (at 85, he's still hard at work); and his anti authoritarian chutzpah. Through a long career he has used offensiveness as a form of resistance political, personal and just by doing so given everyone permission to do the same. You won't hear him acknowledge that though. More and more, in interviews in recent years, he has taken to insisting that all he's ever really been interested in was opportunistically grabbing attention by being outrageous. Saying this may be his way of slipping out of the categorizing grip of art history, preventing it from getting a handle on him. Anyway, I don't believe him. His art is the work of a brilliant showman who is also a canny ethicist, one who knows about the damage power can do and who, tossing incendiary matter around as he goes, refuses to let it have its way. That's the artist his admirers should pay very close attention to, especially today. Through May 31 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Bird's eye view:Ms. Bergen, pictured in the Pacific Palisades, is starring with Meryl Streep and Dianne Wiest in Steven Soderbergh's new extemporaneous movie, "Let Them All Talk."Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Bird's eye view:Ms. Bergen, pictured in the Pacific Palisades, is starring with Meryl Streep and Dianne Wiest in Steven Soderbergh's new extemporaneous movie, "Let Them All Talk." "The passengers were really overweight," Ms. Bergen recalled with a mischievous smile. "They were good little eaters on this incredibly elegant ship." As we started our nearly three hour Zoom interview, she walked with her iPad to the window to show me the view from her "tiny" house in Pacific Palisades, high above the ocean. "The neighborhood is very comforting because it's just lovely little houses," she said. "A couple of big ones have come crashing in." She had come to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving with her younger brother, Kris. Usually, she can be found at the posh Fifth Avenue apartment she shares with Marshall Rose, a widowed real estate developer and philanthropist she married in 2000. He "has been facing health challenges with grace and elegance for the past few years," she said. Ms. Bergen had difficult caretaking duties with her first husband, Louis Malle, the French director. Their marriage lasted 15 years, until Mr. Malle died in 1995 after an agonizing battle with lymphoma. When she was single, Ms. Bergen lived in another little house in Los Angeles that was once occupied by Katharine Hepburn and, before that, by John Barrymore's birds. "I found fantastic paintings of men with plumes in their turbans and fantastic birds with elaborate plumage," she said of the Barrymore aviary turned guesthouse. "It was like a little tiny chapel. There were stained glass windows in the cupola. One showed he and Dolores Costello in a scene from 'The Sea Beast.' Nobody wanted the house. There was no garage. It was just useless. But it was heaven." Bruce, half Saint Bernard and half poodle, was by Ms. Bergen's side. She was wearing a striped T shirt and shoes made out of African indigo cotton by Ibu, an online group of women's cooperatives from around the world, which features designs by her old friend, Ali MacGraw. (Ms. Bergen also sells bags and other merch online featuring her whimsical artwork, all for charity.) "When I go to get my makeup done, the woman who does it says, when she is finished, 'Now you look like Candice Bergen again.' Because when I start, it's like, 'Uh, what a wreck.' Stuff goes." Ms. Bergen has always been blunt about not starving herself or doing extreme procedures to preserve her looks. She declared in her second memoir "A Fine Romance," published in 2015: "I am a champion eater. No carb is safe no fat either." She told me, "I was never a good dieter," adding brightly: "I ate an entire pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, all by myself in my kitchen. Without the crust, but the entire filling of the pie." Her daughter, Chloe Malle, a writer and contributing editor at Vogue, said that Ms. Bergen's lack of vanity is an extension of her I don't give a damn attitude, which can be both stressful and refreshing. "She really doesn't care and would rather eat the cookie," Ms. Malle said. "She has eaten mocha ice cream and Cheetos for her entire dinner. Most of quarantine, she has been strolling through Central Park with Bruce in her pajamas and the coat she got on Amazon, her hair sticking up, going into a Big Edie and Little Edie vibe." Ms. Malle continued: "I grew up with my friends' dads saying 'Oh, my God, I remember when your mom was young. She was a knockout.' I think she had great insecurity around the fact that people have always focused on that. It can be quite a burden. There's something freeing about her beauty not being the only thing people are focused on." Ms. Bergen writes perceptively in her two memoirs about the phenomenon of beauty creating its own rules of conduct. "It's often the elephant in the room and you're the elephant handler," as she put it. After her 1967 Vogue cover in her modeling days and her movie debut in "The Group" in 1966, where she played the risky role of Lakey, a lesbian "People saw posters of me in gay bars after that," she said, pleased Ms. Bergen's perfect nose spurred a flood of plastic surgeries. "Doctors used to come up to me and say could they take a cast of my nose," she said. "I said, 'Go away.' My nose was very important to people. I never even thought about it. It's strange." When she gave birth to her daughter, she mused about whether it would be better if Chloe were not beautiful. "Obviously, I don't deal with it anymore," the actress told me. When she thinks back, Ms. Bergen said, the problem is "that's all you are to people is what you look like. No one tries to find out if there's anyone home. It works against your own self development, because it's hard to find out what you think about things and what your opinions are because nobody cares. You don't have to engage your brain for any reason. I think that's why I went off and photographed and wrote pieces, just to get out of the line of fire." Ms. Bergen has seen this happen to the opposite sex as well. "You're semi glorified but you're also negated. You really have to make an effort to become someone more than what your presentation is." Her new movie is about three women who go to college together, fall out of touch and reunite when Alice, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist played by Ms. Streep, invites the other two on a crossing to London. It turns out that Alice learned about an affair that Ms. Bergen's character, Roberta, had, which caused her rich husband to divorce her, stranding her to a life selling lingerie at a high end department store and then appropriated this plotline for a book. Unlike Ms. Bergen, Roberta is pinched and bruised by grievances. At one point, Roberta wonders if men will want her given that she's "old rotten meat." It's startling, more so knowing Ms. Bergen improvised the line. In her big confrontation scene with Ms. Streep's character on the boat, Ms. Bergen was jittery. As they sat down to shoot a scene, they received an outline from Deborah Eisenberg, the short story writer and Columbia professor (and Wallace Shawn's longtime companion). "They tell you what the nub of the scene is, and then you just have to flail around," Ms. Bergen said. She did do research. "Candy told us she actually flew to Houston to see oil rigs as preparation for her role," Ms. Wiest said, adding that Ms. Bergen conjured a character who "was so poor as a child, her only pet was a snake and her single mother worked as a housekeeper. I thought, 'Wow, Hollywood royalty does deep research!' She dressed herself like a real Texas babe. I sat across the table from her in the film and thought, she's doing nothing obvious and yet I'd swear she sprang from Texas dirt." Ms. Streep said she was surprised when Ms. Bergen, whom she did not know previously, was standoffish. "I thought, 'She hates me.'" Then she realized that Ms. Bergen was using a "method y" approach. Ms. Bergen's most important relationship is with her daughter. "The birth of my daughter was the greatest event in my life," she said. Some would argue, Ms. Malle said wryly, that the umbilical cord is still not severed. Ms. Bergen raised Chloe mostly on her own in Los Angeles, where she lived for the 10 years of "Murphy Brown." After Louis Malle lost the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for the 1987 film "Au Revoir Les Enfants," his dislike of Los Angeles deepened and he went back to France to work. "I was very happy being married to Louis," Ms. Bergen said. "He was really a great love of my life and we had a great time together, but you're pulled in different directions and then you have a child and they become the love of your life and that's hard." She added, "The distance was very hard on the marriage and then the balance of power was in question," referring to her growing fame with "Murphy Brown." Now she is focused on her 6 month old grandson, Artie. "He's just the dumpling," she said. "He's just the best arrival of joy in one's life. I'm crying. I'm just looking forward to the future with Artie." She asked her daughter if she could take over a dilapidated barn, one of two on the land that Chloe and her husband, Graham Albert, a financier, bought in Connecticut. "That's all I need," mother told daughter. "That's where I'm going to retire." Now, said an amused Ms. Malle, "she has built a Gil Schafer mini manse on the site. She said it's the smallest project he's ever taken on." I ask Ms. Bergen what she thought of Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," released last year. "The feeling of it," she said, "was very close." In the late 1960s, she and her boyfriend at the time, Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of Doris Day, had lived in the house on Cielo Drive before Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. It has been said that a reason Manson targeted that house was because he was angry Mr. Melcher didn't give him a record contract. "Terry was very stupid and he went out there to record Manson's group singing," Ms. Bergen said. "He knew it was very loaded, and one of Manson's people came to the door once when I was at the house. Then one day, Terry just said, 'We're moving.' I said, 'When?' He said, 'Tomorrow.' His mother had a house in Malibu that became David Geffen's house where we went. Then they took the telescope off our balcony at the beach house. It was like Manson saying, 'Don't try to hide from me.'" And about that famous date with Donald Trump, when she was at the University of Pennsylvania? He was shy, quiet and introspective, one presumes? "Yes, in fact his knowledge of philosophy goes way beyond," she said, laughing. "We went to, I think, a steakhouse but he picked me up from school in a limousine, which was unusual, and it was a burgundy limousine and he was wearing a burgundy suit and burgundy patent leather boots. I just thought, this guy can color coordinate with the best of them. I think I was home by 9. I remember it being just very slow going and heavy lifting, it was just like pulling a sledge. And then I was home early." There was another renowned date in the 1970s, with Henry Kissinger, arranged by family friends. Ms. Bergen went ahead with it at the puckish urging of her counterculture boyfriend, Bert Schneider, and his pal, Abbie Hoffman, who wanted intel on the Vietnam War. Putting words in her mouth? No, just a holiday round of Confirm or Deny. Maureen Dowd: You would have loved to work with Alfred Hitchcock. Candice Bergen: Yes. I would have been a Hitchcock blonde. I did have lunch with Grace and Prince Rainier at David Niven Jr.'s house in the South of France. David and I had grown up together. The Rainiers came for lunch, and we talked about this and that. It was fantastic. She was lovely. And afterward, an interviewer said, "Who will be the next Grace Kelly?" She said, "Perhaps it's Candice Bergen." You used to figure out who you wanted to date with the help of a shoe code. If you wanted to place really high on the board, Italian loafers. Any kind of loafer basically got you in the door, or sneakers. But no cordovans, no wingtips. All right, all right, all right. No. You love listening to the podcast "Call Her Daddy." Here's the thing. I've never listened to a podcast because I don't know how. I know there's a podcast app someplace, so I'm going to do that. I have to find my earphones first. You have James Bond's old couch. Yes, Roger Moore's because I once bought his house. My daughter has it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Over the past several years as police violence has become more visible, one of the key goals of people fighting for change has been to shift how the public views prosecutors and how prosecutors do their jobs. But the district attorneys elected to carry out progressive policies over the last five years have been met with resistance from police departments and unions, as well as from judges, lawmakers and even some corporations. They have used their power to prevent these prosecutors from doing their jobs. While the pushback may seem rooted in the local realities of politics and crime, the national pattern is clear: Conservative media outlets, interest groups and politicians are all playing their part to stymie reforms. Philadelphia's public defenders and its district attorney, Larry Krasner, asked the local courts in March to reduce jail populations to stem the spread of the coronavirus. What did the judges do? They dragged their feet as the infection rate soared in the city's jails and then blamed Mr. Krasner for the delay. The judges eventually released a small fraction of the jail population. The chief prosecutor in St. Louis, Kimberly Gardner, has made a host of changes expanding diversion programs, dropping low level drug cases and refusing cases that rely on untrustworthy police officers, among others. But after what The Times described as pushback "in a manner that is virtually unheard of for an elected prosecutor," now Ms. Gardner is suing her own city, citing "a racially motivated conspiracy to deny the civil rights of racial minorities" by making it harder for her to make the reforms she was elected to make. Her lawsuit is supported by an organization that represents police officers, a majority of whom are black, along with civil rights law firms and many other progressive prosecutors. If a progressive prosecutor is a black woman like Ms. Gardner, the ploys used by conservatives are shamelessly vicious. Still, no matter how loudly or often police union leaders, and their political allies stoke fear about an impending crime apocalypse if prosecutors carry out reforms, it never comes to pass. In Chicago for example, since Kim Foxx took office in late 2016, there has been a decline in prison sentences along with a decrease in overall crime. But last year, along with white nationalist organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police staged a protest at her office in which police officers rubbed photos of her over their genitals and crudely heckled her. The police group also organized white police chiefs from the suburbs to denounce Ms. Foxx at a news conference. At the same time, supporters of the police forced a member of her staff to go on leave by harassing her with phone calls, berating her as an "N word whore." Local officials have tried to stall progressive policies by trying to yank financing from prosecutors' offices, in the case of Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Wesley Bell, Ms. Gardner's counterpart in St. Louis County. Governors, state attorneys general and state legislators have tried to hobble prosecutors by limiting their cases, blocking retrials, stripping them of authority, pressuring the media to criticize them or pushing for extraordinary and paralyzing levels of oversight. Rachael Rollins in Boston is a perfect example of how a focused opposition campaign can undermine reform by focusing on undermining the reformer. Before she took office, a police organization filed an ethical complaint against her for pledging to handle certain low level crimes less harshly and more in line with national trends, which the association claimed essentially violated rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Given the frivolous nature of the complaint, the state agency in charge of disciplining lawyers never opened an investigation. She has even been undermined by judges. For example, a local judge challenged her discretion to dismiss disorderly conduct charges against a protester, the kind of discretion which district attorneys have exercised for more than a century. Ms. Rollins filed an emergency petition with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled in her favor. What motivates this resistance? In some cases, judges do not want their legacy questioned, the police do not want their overtime reduced and towns dependent on a prison economy do not want mass incarceration to end. Just as much, police unions do not want someone highlighting their efforts to pressure a city to treat domestic violence cases involving officers with more lenience. Or to expose how often officers fired for misconduct will often wind up back on the job as a result of a rigged arbitration system their union helped establish, which is what Larry Krasner has done. In many cases, however, the struggle is clearly political, not only in terms of corporate political contributions or police and corrections union patronage, but also in terms of racial politics and struggles over who deserves power. Police associations, in particular, take the position that prosecutors should serve the police, rather than both prosecutors and the police serving justice. Whatever the reason for such reprehensible attacks on reform and reformers, it is not about public safety. The likely cumulative effect of this harassment of progressive prosecutors will be to impede the most important reforms and push these prosecutors out of office. That happened to Aramis Ayala, Florida's first black state attorney, who declined to run for another term. All this should be a spur for those who care about reform to vote for progressive prosecutors, sheriffs and judges in November.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Here is what I remember about Luke Perry: He played a bad boy who read poetry. A loner whom every girl wanted to make less lonely. A surfer who rarely seemed to get his hair wet. Probably free verse wasn't really Perry's thing, and who knows if he surfed on his own time. But through most of the 1990s, he played Dylan McKay on "Beverly Hills, 90210," a role that stuck to him like teen idol Super Glue. Of course he wasn't really a teenager then; he only played one on TV. But if you were a tween and then a teen, as I was in the '90s, living in neighborhoods that were almost close to Beverly Hills, he was the stuff of notebook doodles and collage walls. I'm older now, and I know what a disaster men like that can be. (The poetry he read was Charles Bukowski, O.K.?) But back then, if I'd met him outside some lucky starred frozen yogurt shop, I probably would have passed out. He taught a generation of us, wrongly, that difficult, damaged men were only waiting for you to fix them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
For the first time in 87 years, the show at Radio City Music Hall won't go on, the owner of the venue said Tuesday. "We regret that the 2020 production of the 'Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes'" has been canceled, Madison Square Garden Entertainment said in a statement, citing "uncertainty associated with the Covid 19 pandemic." According to the Rockettes' website, more than 75 million people have seen the dancers perform since the Christmas show began in 1933. During a typical busy season, each of the 80 Rockettes may perform up to four shows a day, with each one kicking up to 650 times. As the news broke, several of the dancers posted their own statements on Instagram. "Christmas has officially been cancelled," wrote Samantha Berger, who has been performing with the Rockettes for 15 seasons. "Until Next year," she added with two broken heart emojis. "Please Wear a Mask."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SAN FRANCISCO The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, has called Bitcoin a fraud and made it clear that he will not allow his bank to begin trading the virtual currency any time soon. But that has not stopped a growing wave of big Wall Street investors many of them hedge funds from pouring their money into Bitcoin, helping extend an eight month spike in its price. The price of a single Bitcoin climbed from below 6,000 two weeks ago to above 7,400 on Monday, more than it moved in the virtual currency's first seven years in existence. Since the beginning of the year, the value of Bitcoin has jumped over 600 percent, putting the combined value of all Bitcoin at about 120 billion, or more than many of the largest banks in the world. The rise has been fueled by several factors, including the sudden interest in virtual currencies from small investors in Japan and South Korea. Now market watchers say a significant amount of the new money is coming from large institutional investors, many of them hedge funds looking to capitalize on the skyrocketing price. Many of the hedge funds were set up over the last year to invest exclusively in virtual currencies. The research firm Autonomous Next has said the number of such hedge funds has risen from around 30 to nearly 130 this year alone. More general purpose hedge funds have also been buying up Bitcoin, like one run by Bill Miller, a well known mutual fund manager who spent most of his career with Legg Mason. Even more big investors are looking at the space after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced last week that it would launch a Bitcoin futures contract in the next few months. The contract will make it easier for financial institutions plugged into the exchange to get involved with the Bitcoin market without having to worry about holding Bitcoin itself. The entrance of these big investors creates new risks for Bitcoin. Kevin Zhou, a longtime trader in the space, said that hedge funds were more likely than small investors to pull out a lot of money at once, and that Bitcoin was still small enough that a single fund's cashing out could cause the price to drop sharply. "You could get a possible run on the bank if one large investor withdraws and that causes the price to tank," said Mr. Zhou, a co founder of the trading firm Galois Capital. "That could cause a cascade of withdrawals." The rising importance of Wall Street is an unexpected turn for a virtual currency that was invented in 2008 by an anonymous creator known as Satoshi Nakamoto and designed to operate outside the traditional financial system. The lack of backing from any government or established institution has concerned many large banks. The chief executive of Credit Suisse, Tidjane Thiam, said last week that he saw no inherent value in Bitcoin, joining the list of bankers who have called the market a bubble. But some financial leaders, including Goldman Sachs's chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, and Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, have defended the idea that virtual currencies could one day play a role in the global financial system because they can be obtained by anyone with internet access. The debate about Bitcoin has been part of a broader explosion of interest this year in the various technological concepts introduced by the virtual currency. Many banks, including JPMorgan, have been trying to find ways to create their own decentralized databases, like the Bitcoin blockchain, that could provide a more reliable and secure way to track information. In the technology industry, there has been a rush this year of so called initial coin offerings, a way for entrepreneurs to raise money by creating and selling their own custom virtual currencies. Initial coin offerings have taken over 3 billion from investors this year after attracting almost no interest before. These coin offerings have created their own demand for Bitcoin because the new coins generally have to be bought with an existing virtual currency like Bitcoin. The interest in Bitcoin could be dampened in the coming weeks, however, by a debate among Bitcoin followers. Bitcoin start ups and programmers have been fighting for nearly three years about the best way to update the software that governs the currency and the network on which it lives. The battle is expected to come to a head this month when new Bitcoin software, backed by many of the biggest virtual currency start ups, is released. The new software aims to double the number of transactions flowing through the network. Currently, the computers processing Bitcoin transactions are limited to about five transactions per second. Most of the programmers who maintain the Bitcoin software have opposed the changes because they say it would make it harder for individuals to track their own Bitcoins. Some of the computers on the network are likely to update to the new software while others stay with the existing rules, creating a split, or fork, in the network that would result in two separate Bitcoins. A Bitcoin fork could prove disruptive and drive away investors. But several signals suggest that the proposed rule changes are not likely to win enough support to survive for long, which would leave the status quo in place. Bitcoin has already survived past attempts to fork the software and create imitators. In August, a group of former Bitcoin supporters created Bitcoin Cash, a totally separate virtual currency that makes it easier to do small transactions, like paying for a cup of coffee. The price of Bitcoin temporarily wavered before Bitcoin Cash was introduced. All previous holders of Bitcoin were automatically granted the same number of Bitcoin Cash, and the value of those has also been rising, essentially doubling in the last month. Chris Burniske, a co author of a book on virtual currency investing, "Cryptoassets," said most of the new investors weren't too concerned about the exact design of Bitcoin or the current debates. "I don't think a lot of the new buyers are overly concerned about the long term technical aspects of Bitcoin," he said. They are "simply approaching it as a financial instrument."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT Stream on Netflix. Spike Lee's 1986 debut about a Brooklyn artist juggling lovers got an update in this Netflix series, which debuted in 2017. Directed by Lee and counting the playwright Eisa Davis among its writers, the first season introduced a new Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise) and a feminist lens. "More expansive than interior, more defiant than dreamy, it's a vibrant if uneven work in heated conversation with itself," James Poniewozik wrote in his review of the first season for The New York Times. The second season, which debuts Friday, also makes time for episodes in Puerto Rico and on Martha's Vineyard , in addition to its native Brooklyn. Anthony Ramos ("Hamilton") returns as Mars Blackmon, the lover of Nola's who was played by Lee in 1986. "At the end of Season 1, we knew who everybody was," Lee said recently in an interview with the website Blackfilm. " Season 2 is 'now what?'" THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. For this World War I documentary, the director Peter Jackson was given a challenge: make a movie for the centennial of the Armistice using original footage, in an original way. Jackson, in keeping with his reputation for visual splendor, went a painstaking route. He and his team worked to restore the footage and colorize it. The resulting movie, made up of film shot on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 paired with archival voice overs from veterans, is a unique encapsulation of the lives of British soldiers who fought in the trenches. "This footage has been around for 100 years and these men had been buried behind a fog of damage, a mask of grain and jerkiness and sped up film," Jackson said in an interview with The Times last year. "Once restored, it's the human aspect that you gain the most." WHAT / IF Stream on Netflix. Renee Zellweger plays a notorious San Francisco venture capitalist in this new anthology series from Mike Kelley, the creator of the early 2010s ABC thriller "Revenge." The melodramatic plot involves Zellweger's character, Anne Montgomery, disrupting the relationship of two newlyweds. STAR WARS: EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) 8 p.m. on TNT. Some things are best not to revisit. Whether this first installment in George Lucas's "Star Wars" prequel movies is one of them is a matter of opinion it was famously derided by critics when it was released. But in a recent article for The Times, Scott Tobias wrote that "Lucas's obsession with world building in 'The Phantom Menace' proved a more lasting contribution to film and television in the 21st century than it might have seemed at the time." The movie turned 20 this week.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Since October, advertisers have been riveted by an anonymous Instagram account called Diet Madison Avenue, which solicited reports of sexual misconduct in the ad industry and published the names of alleged harassers. But now, the account has been deleted and its creators' names could be made public through a defamation lawsuit brought by a man who claims Diet Madison Avenue posted false allegations about him that cost him his job. The suit has put a spotlight on the new digital forums, like Instagram accounts and Google spreadsheets, that have been used to surface allegations of harassment in the MeToo era and have highlighted the precariousness of maintaining anonymity online. Diet Madison Avenue, which said it was run by 17 people, urged those who worked in advertising to send their stories of harassment, promising anonymity and offering resources to victims. Through Instagram Stories, which disappear after 24 hours, the account called out agencies and published the names of more than a dozen alleged harassers. Several agencies dismissed men whose names appeared on Diet Madison Avenue. The account's snarky tone photos of some the accused were manipulated so that the men appeared to have pigs' noses had a polarizing effect. Many people, particularly younger workers in the advertising industry, lauded the account for exposing the misdeeds of powerful men, but others said it was tantamount to trial by social media. The account had more than 20,000 followers before it was deleted last month. (Another version has since been created but it has only 1,200 followers.) The lawsuit was brought in May by Ralph Watson, the former chief creative officer of the Boulder, Colo., office of the Crispin Porter Bogusky advertising agency. Mr. Watson, 50, said that the agency unfairly dismissed him in February and that he had been unable to find work after Diet Madison Avenue called him a sexual "predator" and alleged that he had harassed multiple young women he worked with. The account called him an "unrepentant serial predator" and suggested that if Crispin Porter truly supported the MeToo movement, it would fire him. Mr. Watson was dismissed for cause days later. "Many high level people in the industry have told him that he will never work again unless he can publicly clear his name," said Michael Ayotte, a lawyer in Hermosa Beach, Calif., who is representing Mr. Watson. Mr. Ayotte said that there were industry peers who believed that Mr. Watson was innocent but feared there would be a backlash if they hired him, including the risk of "being seen as unsympathetic to the MeToo movement." Mr. Watson said in an open letter on Mr. Ayotte's website that he had never sexually harassed anyone but that his "career and reputation were erased overnight." He said that his goal was to bring the operators of Diet Madison Avenue into a public forum to state their claims and evidence against him, contending that the group would not be able to do that. The operators of Diet Madison Avenue did not respond to requests for comment through Instagram or a GoFundMe page created for its legal defense, where it has raised about 2,000 in the last month. The operators have said in the past that allegations were independently researched and supporting documents obtained before names were posted on the account. Mr. Watson filed a separate lawsuit on Friday against Crispin Porter, which is owned by MDC Partners, for wrongful termination and other charges including age discrimination. He claimed that the agency fired him based on Diet Madison Avenue's posts without conducting a proper investigation, specifying claims against him or naming his accusers. In a joint statement with MDC, Crispin Porter said that it stood by its decision to "terminate Mr. Watson's employment," and both companies said they intended to "vigorously defend themselves and their employees" against the lawsuit brought by Mr. Watson. 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 Diet Madison Avenue suit, filed in Los Angeles, named the account and a string of Jane and John Does, representing dozens of people it believed were associated with the account. Their identities could be revealed if Instagram is subpoenaed and ordered to turn over subscriber information. The court could grant the subpoena depending on how it interprets Mr. Watson's defamation claim, said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the book "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "What the court's going to do in a searching way, realizing free speech and anonymous speech is on the line, is ask: Is there a real lawsuit here?" she said. If it decides that Mr. Watson has a solid defamation case based on the facts alleged in his complaint, she said, then Instagram could be subpoenaed. Instagram could refuse to comply, but the decision is likely to come down to how the posts were phrased, said Nate Cardozo, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization. "The situation where Instagram would push back would be if the statements were not actually capable of being defamation," Mr. Cardozo said. That could include opinions, he said, like: "I've heard a lot of bad things about Ralph Watson and I believe the women who are accusing him." But, he said, the posts by Diet Madison Avenue stated as fact that Mr. Watson was a predator who "targeted and groomed women." Instagram, which declined to comment on Mr. Watson's suit, says online that it may share basic subscriber information when it is "indispensable to a case and not within a party's possession upon personal service of a valid subpoena or court order." That could include names, email addresses and I.P. addresses tied to recent logins a significant detail given that many people appeared to be using the account. Internet service providers can then tie names to I.P. addresses. Instagram notifies account holders before sharing the data. Ms. Citron said that the lawsuit underscored the risk of creating anonymous forums like Diet Madison Avenue rather than bringing allegations to the news media, civil rights groups or human resources departments. "If what they've written is true, then they've got to get a lawyer and defend themselves it's expensive and time consuming and they may very well not have any liability, but it's brutal getting there," she said. "I imagine these folks don't have a huge amount of resources. They're already vulnerable as it is, given they're writing about being harassed, and they're probably young women at work. I wish they hadn't done it." There are issues for the other side, too. "This trial is not going to be easy on the plaintiff because he's going to be deposed and cross examined and his H.R. history from the first day of his first job ever to now is all going to be exposed," Mr. Cardozo said. "So he better be real sure that these are false; otherwise, suing was an absolutely terrible idea." Kat Gordon, the founder of the 3% Movement, which promotes the role of women in creative leadership in advertising, said that she found it implausible that the account "would concoct something totally fake and that an agency that had knowledge of this employee would just blindly fire him." Still, she said, "if you are going to lose your job, you are entitled to know what was said about you and by whom and have a chance to defend yourself." There is also the question of whether messages about harassment that were sent to the account could be exposed through the lawsuit. Private parties cannot obtain such content from Instagram by law, Mr. Cardozo said, but lawyers could try to get the court to order Diet Madison Avenue to turn over that content. If the group refused to comply, then they could be held in contempt, he said. Emma Llanso, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy Technology, said the case was an interesting example of "the roles these tech companies play in facilitating people's speech." The decision that the court will make will be challenging, she said. "The reason that people are making these sorts of accounts anonymously is because of the fear of reprisal that they face that's a key part of why we have a First Amendment right to anonymous speech," Ms. Llanso said. "On the other hand, defamation and untrue statements that are damaging to people's reputations are also something our laws protect against."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
After a succession of political setbacks in onetime strongholds and a landmark defeat in the Supreme Court, organized labor has notched a hard won victory as Missouri voters overrode a legislative move to curb union power. A measure on the ballot on Tuesday asked voters to pass judgment on a prospective law barring private sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from workers who choose not to become members. The law was rejected by a 2 to 1 margin. The Supreme Court in June struck down such fees for public sector employees, achieving a longstanding goal of conservative groups and overruling a four decade precedent. Labor leaders argued that the rare opportunity for voters to weigh in directly on a so called right to work measure which several states have passed in recent years revealed how little public support the policy has, at least once voters get beyond the anodyne branding. "It shows how out of touch those institutions are," said Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L. C.I.O. "How out of touch the Republican legislature in Missouri is, how out of touch the Supreme Court is." But Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies unions at Washington University in St. Louis, cautioned against overstating the victory. A mere 8.7 percent of workers in Missouri were union members last year, below the national average and down from more than 13 percent a decade and a half ago. "A 'win' just returns the situation to the status quo," Mr. Rosenfeld said by email, though he acknowledged that it was "a huge morale boost to a beleaguered movement." The examples of Michigan and Indiana, where right to work laws took effect earlier this decade, suggest that the legislation could have cost unions thousands of members and millions in revenue. One question is the extent to which the victory could reverberate beyond Missouri. "I think this will build momentum and send a message to all legislators," Mr. Trumka said, "that if you vote against the people, go against the will of the vast majority of working Americans, it's going to cost you." But it was not immediately clear that the forces driving the impressive showing for labor in Missouri could be reproduced elsewhere. One reason is that Republican voters who buck their party on a ballot measure, as many appeared to do in Missouri, may be unwilling to vote against Republican candidates in a general election, even when those candidates are hostile to labor. "There's a big difference between overturning the law itself and defeating legislators who supported it," said Jonathon Prouty, a Missouri political consultant and former executive director of the state's Republican Party. "It's a lot easier for unions to energize their base around the issue, which is right to work, rather than against candidates." 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. T. J. Berry, a Republican state representative whose district includes some outer suburbs of Kansas City, said that many of his constituents were proud union members who opposed right to work but nonetheless voted Republican because they were conservative on issues like abortion and guns. Labor also appeared to enjoy a significant financial advantage in Missouri that is unlikely to recur in other states where Republicans have the wherewithal to pass right to work bills. According to state financial filings, the union funded We Are Missouri coalition had spent just over 15 million on its ballot campaign as of late July, about three times what the four leading groups supporting the right to work legislation spent over the same period. A key factor behind this disparity was the leadership vacuum that the former Republican governor, Eric Greitens, left when he resigned amid scandal in May. "He was going to be the champion, then he was embroiled in controversy the whole year," Mr. Berry said. "If you don't have a leader, it's pretty hard to rally the troops." Even so, Mr. Prouty acknowledged that the momentum against the right to work effort was more than a function of labor's spending. "It's like nothing I've ever seen," he said. "There is energy out there." Mr. Greitens had signed a right to work bill into law after the legislature passed it in early 2017. Supporters argued that the measure was essential to the state's economic competitiveness. "Companies that have a choice of expanding or choosing where they locate to begin with, they will generally choose especially in the manufacturing sector a right to work state," said Daniel Mehan, president and chief executive of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He cited the manufacturing boom in the South in recent decades as a key data point. But shortly after the law's passage, unions and their allies in the state started a campaign to keep it from taking effect. They submitted about three times the roughly 100,000 required signatures by last August, setting up the statewide ballot vote, then began aggressively campaigning this spring for a "no" vote that is, a reversal of the legislative move. "I've been out knocking on doors, walking, since the middle of May," said Mark Staffne, an electrical construction mechanic and union member, who lives in St. Charles County, which is heavily Republican. "I met both Republican voters who voted for Trump and labor Democrats who voted for Trump," he said. "By a vast majority, a huge amount of people I talked to said they're voting no." Labor groups characterized right to work laws as an attack on workers' livelihoods, because, they said, they undermine unions' ability to negotiate wages and benefits. A 2015 report by the liberal Economic Policy Institute found that the typical full time worker, not just the typical union member, earned about 1,500 per year more in states where mandatory union fees are allowed than in right to work states. If union fees are not mandatory, workers can enjoy the benefits of union representation without having to chip in for unions' work on their behalf, often known as the "free rider" problem. These arguments appeared to resonate in Missouri, but Janice Fine, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, wondered whether the tendency of many unions to define their relationship with workers in narrow economic terms may be accelerating labor's decline over the long run. An overly transactional relationship might prove less compelling if workers feel they can spend their money better elsewhere say, by joining a bowling league or a gym. The alternative would be to cultivate more of a philosophical commitment, making unions more akin to evangelical churches, albeit in the secular realm. "I feel so ambivalent about that whole argument," Ms. Fine said, referring to the free rider case against right to work laws. Any union that thought of itself primarily as providing benefits to members, she added, "had a very thin notion of what solidarity was."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
MUPPETS NOW Stream on Disney . Jim Henson's furry brainchildren get a jolt of internet energy in more ways than one in this new streaming series, in which Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and company perform sketches that spoof online video formats. The show is the latest attempt to modernize the Muppets after "The Muppets," an ABC sitcom with the characters, struggled to recapture viewers' hearts in 2015. This new show may have better luck. "'Muppets Now' improves on the ABC sitcom because it understands what the Muppets are and why we love them," James Poniewozik wrote in a recent article in The New York Times. "They're not mopey stand ins for us but wild, demonic imaginings of ourselves, unburdened by impulse control and the laws of physics." ABOMINABLE (2019) Stream on Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. If you or your children prefer your cute creatures computer animated, skip Kermit and consider this movie instead. A creation of DreamWorks Animation and the Chinese production company Pearl Studio, written and directed by Jill Culton, "Abominable" tells the story of Yi, a girl (voiced by Chloe Bennet) who goes on a journey with a magical yeti named Everest. It is, Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times, "an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Week in Tech: Why Californians Have Better Privacy Protections Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Greetings from New York Times HQ in Midtown Manhattan. I'm Natasha Singer, a tech reporter covering privacy, and I'm bringing you the week's tech news. While many eyes were focused on the impeachment saga playing out in Washington, one person in San Francisco was taking on the entire tech industry. Again. In 2017, Alastair Mactaggart, a wealthy real estate developer, founded and started financing a push for data rights for Californians. The effort led California lawmakers to enact the nation's most comprehensive state consumer privacy law last year. Ever since then, tech companies and industry groups have maneuvered to water down its consumer protections. Now Mr. Mactaggart is back with a new campaign. He's starting a ballot initiative that would amend the new law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, which takes effect on Jan. 1. He wants broader data control rights for Californians and new requirements on companies. Among other things, his amendments would triple the law's fines for violations of children's privacy. The ballot initiative also has a political component. It would require companies that profited from using Californians' personal data for election influence campaigns to disclose their practices to consumers and the state authorities. When it comes to privacy protections, it seems, Californians have a big advantage over many other Americans. And not just because California was the first state to pass laws requiring companies to disclose data breaches and the first to grant minors the right to erase their online posts and photos. The United States Constitution, for instance, does not explicitly grant an inalienable right to privacy. Although the Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizure, it does not safeguard us against intrusive and ubiquitous snooping by tech giants and other corporations. The Constitution of California, however, grants a right to privacy putting it on equal footing with the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The Charter of European Union goes even further. It recognizes privacy and, separately, the protection of personal data as fundamental human rights. 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. "If you think about our other fundamental rights as a country, no one is spending millions and millions of dollars trying to undermine the First Amendment or the freedom of religion," Mr. Mactaggart told me. "But people are actually spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to undermine privacy because there's so much money in it for corporations." For more practical tips on protecting your privacy, read my colleague Brian X. Chen's new column on how to use Apple's new privacy tools. Limiting the right to be forgotten While Mr. Mactaggart was working to expand the right to privacy in California, Europe's highest court issued landmark decisions narrowing it. The rulings involved a law, popularly known as the "right to be forgotten," which gives people in the European Union a legal means to delete certain personal information about them online. In practical terms, that means Europeans can use their right to be forgotten to require Google and other search engines to delete links to news articles or sites containing personal details about them that are outdated, inaccurate or not in the public interest. But on Tuesday, as my colleague Adam Satariano reported from London, the European Court of Justice ruled that the right to be forgotten does not apply outside the European Union. The court also said the right to delete certain personal data must be balanced against the public's right to know. The ruling was a victory for Google and other search engines, Adam wrote. It means that the tech giant will not be required to take down links outside the European Union. It may also give Google and other companies more leeway to refuse certain deletion requests in the name of the public interest. But defending the public's right to know can also have intended consequences. In a riveting article, Adam profiled a journalist in Italy, Alessandro Biancardi, who lost a legal battle to preserve an article about a pair of brawling brothers. The story covered the stabbing of one brother by another at a seaside restaurant. The brother who was stabbed wanted the article about the incident deleted and sued the journalist, citing his right to be forgotten, Adam reported. The journalist, however, refused to take down the article. The European court's new ruling limiting the right to be forgotten may help local publications in the European Union defend and preserve such news coverage. But for Mr. Biancardi, it is too late. The journalist lost the lawsuit over the article about the brawling brothers. Faced with many other privacy and article deletion demands, including 40 lawsuits, Mr. Biancardi shut down his news site last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
PARIS The Foals keyboardist Edwin Congreave met Yannis Philippakis, his future frontman, at an ice cream shop in the English town of Oxford. Congreave had just been hired, while Philippakis was cheekily returning to a scene of a crime: He'd been fired a few weeks earlier for incinerating the shop's mascot, a polystyrene toy cow, in a toaster oven, to impress a girl. Both also briefly matriculated at Oxford University. "I dropped out because I was an idiot," Congreave said. "But with Yannis, it was clear he was supposed to be a superstar of some sort." Foals a brawny, dancey, heartfelt rock band came up in the late 2000s playing hometown house parties and South London squats built out of abandoned hostels. "Chaos," said Philippakis, 33, gleaming eyed when asked what he remembered from those days. "And a kind of beautiful naivete. And, like, I never felt tired." He smiled. "There was one gig where a whole wall got demolished by fire extinguishers and everyone was on ketamine." Philippakis recalled this, over many cigarettes and one sparkling water, on the roof of a Paris venue overlooking the Notre Dame cathedral, a few hours before a recent Foals show. Last week, the band released the second half of a two part album, "Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost," that explores the apocalypse by way, abstractedly, of the climate crisis. "The hedges are on fire in the country lanes," Philippakis broods over spare piano and synths on "I'm Done With the World ( It's Done With Me)," "and all I want to do is get out of the rain." They didn't always seem destined for wider audiences. For their 2008 debut, "Antidotes," Philippakis said he wanted to make techno with guitars: "I almost set out a manifesto. No chords, everything played staccato, really clean." The result was a wonderfully strange collection of stop start bangers. Back then, he sang with the microphone facing stage right. Finally, a manager intervened: "You've got to start expletive facing the crowd.'" But looking back now, the band always had ambitions. "I was really worried that we were going to have a taste of it and it was going to be taken away," Philippakis said. "We'd seen a lot of bands in the U.K. get pumped up by the NME and then implode." By their second album two years later, "Total Life Forever," they'd moved away from the obliqueness of their debut and smoothed out the staccato. Soon enough, Philippakis said, "I felt like we couldn't be erased." Albums in 2013 and 2015 followed, before this year's double release. Now they're gunning for the top slot at the Glastonbury festival. (SkyBet has them as a 7/4 favorite, alongside Paul McCartney and Fleetwood Mac, to headline next year.) Their live show is purposefully boozy and shambolic. Philippakis likes to clamber onto balconies and other high rise structures, or to float his way to the bar and slug a shot. "It needs to be almost shamanic," he said. "The show is a chase: We're chasing that transcendent moment. You're getting yourself to the edge of yourself and then, ideally, losing yourself." The guitarist Jimmy Smith, 35, explained how they get there. "Yannis drummed it into us from a really early stage: Play every show like it's your last," he said. There have been times, the 34 year old drummer Jack Bevan said, that the show got so out of hand, he stopped playing altogether: "I felt like, 'If I keep four to the floor, he's going to kill someone.'" Congreave, 35, said their frontman can even wander away from the song: "Sometimes Yannis is doing a solo and he's kind of in another world. He's playing cosmically. And he's playing the wrong notes." In the last few years, Philippakis's climate change anxiety has started to keep him up nights. Channeling that into the music, he explained, was about trying to engage beyond the immediate concerns of his romantic or filial relationships, the stuff that powered the previous albums. Philippakis wrote the lyrics for these new albums in a furious month and a half, almost entirely in pubs. He wanted the lyrics to pour out of him. He hoped to archive, naturally, "the insecurities and perils" of what it feels like to be alive today. Congreave, the band's in house cynic, said he's glad Foals are talking about climate change but added, "We should be running around screaming, not having conversations." Philippakis, though, said he tries to avoid nihilism and "oh dear ism.": "I'm always looking to convert life into music." And it's true; someone has to write the songs that people listen to while they feel bad that the world is falling apart. Both the double album and the overtures to the climate crisis can also be seen another way: as a grander statement, a shot at a wider relevance. Peter Mensch, a co founder of Q Prime, has worked with stadium rock bands since the 1970s, and is candid about the band's place in the firmament. "We're standing on the SS Her Majesty's Ship the Album and we're bailing water as fast as we can!" he shouted over the phone. And while he doesn't want Foals to change, he believes they can still access a bigger audience. "There's a whole bunch of people who are obsessed by Foals," Mensch said, "and there's a whole bunch of people who don't know who they are." He said he'd love for Philippakis to write a hit. "Chances are that it won't happen ," he added. But he wants the band to reach megastardom, "And I will literally die trying." The Paris show, an underplay to a 700 capacity room, was packed full of young people. Some were, consciously or otherwise, cosplaying as Philippakis, in loud, short sleeved button ups and thin gold chains. They shouted along with him and followed all his commands, including one to crouch down to the floor mid breakdown on "Inhaler," then pogo back up. At the end of the set, Philippakis abandoned his guitar and waded into the crowd. With one hand he held his microphone; with the other he clasped hands with a fan. From between the crush of bodies it was hard to tell if it was for balance, or for that extra oomph of communion.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Six months into their budding relationship, Peter Travers sat beside Caroline Walradt on a sofa at her home in South Brunswick, N.J. "I have something to say to you," Mr. Travers, a father of four who was going through a divorce, announced on that spring day in 2014. Ms. Walradt, a widow whose friendship with Mr. Travers seemed to be turning a romantic corner, was fixed on his every word. "Peter had turned toward me in a very serious manner," she recalled. "So I'm sitting there and thinking to myself, 'Oh wow, what could this be.'" When his intense stare gave way to a soft smile, Ms. Walradt began to wonder if Mr. Travers might be poised to use the "L word," which had not yet come up in conversation. Ms. Walradt, now 64, and Mr. Travers, 63, laughed as they recalled that wacky moment, one of many fond memories shared in what she described as "this miraculous second chance at love that both of us have been blessed with." Their road to each other, a 17 year stretch paved with friendship, mutual respect and patience, began in July 2002, when Ms. Walradt's family moved to West Windsor, N.J., from Hong Kong shortly after her husband, Ron Walradt, an international banker with Citibank, was transferred to Manhattan. The Walradts and their two young children, Jessica, then 14, and Trent, 11, soon became parishioners at All Saints' Church in Princeton, N.J., where Mr. Travers was entrenched as a member of its vestry. In June 2013, Mr. Travers first came to notice Ms. Walradt as something more than a longtime church acquaintance after a fund raiser at a Princeton bar, where they chatted, albeit briefly. The following month, she made a huge impression on him at a thank you dinner party he hosted for volunteers after a seven day, five state cycling fund raiser. During that dinner, they spoke at length, learning a great deal about each other, including the fact that they were the children of career military men, and had traveled extensively around the globe with their now deceased parents. "Peter seated me right next to him at the dinner table, and we spent a few hours getting to know each other a bit," Ms. Walradt said. "I liked him right away, I thought he was sweet and smart and very handsome, and the way he was using playful language around me got me thinking that perhaps he had an interest in me, though I wasn't sure." Their commonality included a combined four cats. Sophie and Jasper, who belong to Ms. Walradt, and Red Cloud and Geronimo, who belong to Mr. Travers, would also eventually meet at their church during a blessing ceremony for the pets of parishioners. Since that dinner, Mr. Travers said, "the thought of possibly getting together with Caroline had been running around in the back of my mind. But I didn't know if she had an interest in me, or if there was anyone else in her life, and to be honest, I was just coming out of a very terrible situation in terms of my marriage failing, and was really running around in a fog." In October 2013, Ms. Walradt took the initiative to organize a relief project sponsored by All Saints' Church to support an Episcopal parish in Toms River, N.J., after Hurricane Sandy had devastated that community. He was later uncorking a bottle of wine when the Rev. Dr. Hugh E. Brown III, the All Saints' rector, picked up a microphone and began thanking the people who had helped organize the event. In praising Ms. Walradt, he mentioned that she had been "widowed unexpectedly," prompting a parishioner from Toms River to say to Mr. Travers. "You mean to tell me that woman is not married?" Mr. Travers said he spent the remainder of the evening in "observatory mode," unable to slow down the thought of getting together with Ms. Walradt. "As I'm standing there watching Caroline bounce around, helping one person after another, it occurred to me what a really fine human being she was," Mr. Travers said. "She was just a good hearted, energetic person who genuinely cared about people, and I admired that." The fog was beginning to lift, and three weeks later, on Halloween, Ms. Walradt and Mr. Travers went on their first official date, to see a play at Princeton's McCarter Theater. "Here was this wonderful person that I had known for years," said Mr. Travers, who had been separated from his wife for a year and a half before he began dating Ms. Walradt. "I was sort of remembering that there was a world out there, and I was trying to get my house in order and finish my divorce to basically be in the frame of mind to be able to pay attention to someone like Caroline." (His divorce did not become official until earlier this year.) They began dating steadily and would soon enjoy many shared passions, including a love of travel, and have since visited Paris (twice), England and Switzerland. While Ms. Walradt has not become the kind of baseball fan that Mr. Travers had hoped for, she doesn't mind taking in an occasional game. "Being together, that's what makes watching baseball, or doing anything else, so much more enjoyable," she said. "Today we celebrate Caroline and Peter," he said. "Their story is God's story. It's a story of new life and new hope, of a resurrection." The couple sealed their exchange of vows and rings with a long kiss, drawing thunderous applause and putting huge smiles on the faces of the tuxedo clad groomsmen, among them the groom's two sons, Nicholas and Peter Travers, as well as his two daughters, Georgia and Mary Travers, who served as bridesmaids, and the bride's daughter, Jessica Walradt, her maid of honor. "They help make each other better people," Jessica Walradt said shortly after the bride and groom walked hand in hand out of the church and into a classic white 1961 Bentley. "My mom is just so happy, just so giddy with excitement. She deserves all of this happiness." As the guests poured out of the church, many boarded shuttle buses provided by the couple that whisked them off to the reception, which was held at the groom's spacious home in nearby Hopewell, N.J., where Champagne flowed and the groom greeted his guests, and treated his new bride, to his own rendition of Frank Sinatra's, "The Way You Look Tonight." "When Peter first met Caroline he was sort of feeling down and going through some tough times," said Adam Hartmann, the groom's half brother, who lives in Gainesville, Fla. "I love Peter, so to see the wonderful change in him since he and Caroline have been dating is like seeing the sun come out." The bride, who moved to South Brunswick from West Windsor in 2010, will move into the groom's home, along with Sophie and Jasper, upon their return from a honeymoon in Paris and Venice, Italy. "Living together will be a great experience," the groom said. "I think it's going to be an opportunity for us to do all sorts of adventurous things that we like to do, whether it's travel or go to baseball games or get involved in good works." That long stretch of road between them no more, the bride was eager to begin a new journey. "It will be nice to see Peter every night before he goes to sleep, and again in the morning when he awakes," she said. "That may sound trite, but to me it's both a comfort and a blessing, and a constant reminder that I'm now in the place where I'm supposed to be."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Adrian Villar Rojas's installation "The Theater of Disappearance" opens Friday in the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Oct. 29. Two pitfalls lie in wait for artists who win the prestigious commission to create works for the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The obvious risk is the view, onto Central Park and the skylines of Midtown and the West Side, that can minimize or overshadow the art on display. (Cornelia Parker, the British sculptor who erected a Hitchcockian house facade, fell into that trap last year.) The other, stealthier risk is the museum below. When you are literally standing on top of five millenniums of art history, even the most assured artist can be spooked. I suspect that's what happened to Adrian Villar Rojas, the hyperproductive Argentine who is the youngest artist to exhibit up here since the museum opened its roof garden 30 years ago. Mr. Villar Rojas, 37, is an ambitious sculptor and installation artist, with a sci fi writer's imagination and an ecologist's anxieties. His best works, often large in scale, appear as future ruins of a posthuman society that has breached its organic limits. For the Met, though, he has shifted gears to remix the museum's own collection, absorbing well known objects from the galleries downstairs into mashed up totems and table displays. He's produced a decorous and unexpectedly slight show, with the apocalyptic smudges scrubbed away for summer. "The Theater of Disappearance," as the rooftop project is called, features seven vertical sculptures, all uniform black, which unite multiple figures Met statues in some cases, human models in others into bizarre totems. A bearded man in a puffer vest has a Hellenistic statue sitting on one shoulder and a Mesoamerican one on the other, in a museological riff on the old gag of the shoulder perched angel and devil. A kissing couple stand atop an African lidded vessel; a smiling woman straddles a statue of an Egyptian scribe and holds a bust of Tutankhamen aloft. Instead of the unfired, fossil like blend of clay and cement the artist usually employs, these toneless statues are of urethane foam coated with licks of matte industrial paint. Less painstaking than Charles Ray's latter day effigies, less unnerving than Katharina Fritsch's animals and saints, the sculptures here look dismayingly like oversize Disney figurines. For this mashup, an Egyptian scribe is straddled by a woman who holds a bust of Tutankhamen aloft. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times The statues are arrayed amid nine banquet tables, all white, which also have figures seated or lying on them, and which are supported by the kind of tiffany chairs you know from a thousand weddings and bar mitzvahs. (You can't sit down; the tables, chairs and objects on them are all components of the art, designed to the millimeter.) As he often does, the artist has also rejiggered the floor, overlaying the Met's roof and even the bar with white, gray and black tiles. Nearly 100 objects from the Met's collection, from the Near Eastern and African departments to the arms and armor holdings, have been sucked into this sculptural salmagundi. In a catalog essay, the show's curator, Beatrice Galilee, explains that the works were digitized with photogrammetry software and laser scanners. The artist then resized and reconstituted them, along with the models, into single sculptures that were milled or 3 D printed. Some of these agglutinations have a satisfying outlandishness about them: That smooching pair, for example, are wearing huge masks from the Bamana people of West Africa on their heads. A youth with torn jeans lies on one of the tables, embedded with the form of a woman personifying victory in a 19th century American war monument. More often, though, the sculptures and banquet tables amount to little more than a collection quiz. Met habitues will clock a few classics the full lipped bust fragment of an Egyptian queen, say, or the recumbent "Mexican Girl Dying," a bit larger than the real thing in the American Wing forecourt but they look cut rate in these circumstances, and the Noh mask large enough to enclose a life size sleeping woman is too weird for words. However new the tech, it is a bare and belated project to mash up the art of the past only to remind us that collecting objects from all the world's cultures can be a bit peculiar. The 1970s and '80s witnessed endless museum critiquing projects, and Modernist collage, too, undertook similar collisions of life and art. Mr. Villar Rojas usually plays for bigger stakes than this and usually does so more disruptively converting galleries into tombs or thanatoriums, in which his artworks appear as mysterious leftovers from a last age of humankind. (I'd also have expected more pugnacity given the title of this show, the first in a sequence of projects called "The Theater of Disappearance." That last word is not an idle one in Argentina; the estimated 30,000 citizens abducted and murdered by the military dictatorship of 1976 83 are known as los desaparecidos.) For both the 2011 Venice Biennale, in which he represented Argentina at just 31, and the 2012 edition of Documenta, Mr. Villar Rojas produced strange and wonderful sculptures, anatomical and industrialized at once, at towering scale; the cracked clay and busted concrete gave them the quality of relics. Later, at MoMA PS1, his gallery filling concrete staircases served as the public programming agora of the eco warrior show "Expo 1: New York." In a masterly exhibition two years ago at Marian Goodman, crepuscular galleries whose tiles were embedded with glass shards and iPods led onto an oversize "David," his genitals missing, propped up on blocks like a broken car. Yet Mr. Villar Rojas has impressed at smaller gauges, too. My favorite exhibition of his took place two years ago, at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where a panoply of little curiosities, from concrete balls to ruptured sneakers, was carefully arrayed on a tall plinth lit from below. Many of Mr. Villar Rojas's fragile clay and concrete works were destroyed after exhibition, but these new works are here to stay though maybe not for as long as the Egyptian vessels or Melanesian house posts he's appropriated. I'll allow that "The Theater of Disappearance" may look quite different later this summer, when the nights get hot, and couples on first dates or raucous groups of friends orbit these banquet tables while necking beers and sipping cocktails at the custom fitted rooftop bar. But at large scale or small, inside or outdoors, I prefer Mr. Villar Rojas when he shows some grit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE (2017) Stream on Hulu and Netflix; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The Church of Scientology is a notoriously difficult subject to capture. Its power and penchant for secrecy and aggression can stymie even the most dogged chronicler. Louis Theroux, a journalist and filmmaker, and his director, John Dower, turned their lack of access to the group's leadership and active members to their advantage for this documentary. In place of interviews, the creators used actors to recreate the church's practices as they've been described by defectors and whistle blowers like Marty Rathbun. In her review for The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis described the film an "offbeat attempt to illuminate the church's psychological grip on its members" that "relies on a shaggy, meandering charm." CMA BEST OF FEST 8 p.m. on ABC. Like so much else, the Country Music Association's annual music festival in Nashville was canceled because of the coronavirus. Luckily the organizers had a wealth of recordings from previous years to stitch together for this three hour special. More than 25 performances from the last 16 years will be included. Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton and other contemporary stars are well represented in the lineup, but veterans and newer voices will also be featured. Luke Bryan, whose forthcoming album was pushed back to August, will host and perform with Darius Rucker.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Guests at the 11 acre Vista Collina Resort in Napa, Calif., can step into the shoes of a vintner with the Crush Camp package for 284 per night (compared to 359 per night). The rate includes a two hour vintner experience that features evaluating grapes, de stemming, learning about fermentation and a guided tasting of wines at different levels of maturity. The Hudson Valley Getaway promotion at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York offers up to 20 percent discount on midweek stays ( 584 per night based on double occupancy compared to 730 per night). The rate includes three farm to table meals per day, fitness classes and lake activities such as paddleboarding. The hotel recently launched a collection of Hudson Valley Excursions ( 65 per person) providing round trip transportation to places like DuBois Farms to pick your own apples and snack on apple cider doughnuts, or a visit to Whitecliff Vineyard for a behind the scenes tour and tasting. At the Kentucky Grand Hotel and Spa in Bowling Green, Kentucky, discounts are available on suites through November 30th. A one night suite stay includes a couple's massage and bottle of champagne for 400 (package value is 560). Nearby Jackson's Orchard offers autumnal activities including apple picking ( 2 per pound), pumpkin patches and hay rides ( 4 per person, free for children under 3). The hotel can arrange transfers for the 10 minute drive to the orchard. Dine on (and with) grapes in Oregon Anna Maria Ponzi, the president of Ponzi Vineyards that sits on top of the rolling Chehalem Mountains in Oregon's Willamette Valley, has seen a rise in visitors during harvest. "For most of the year there is nothing to see," she said. "But during harvest you can drive into the vineyard and you can see the fruit on the vine for a change. You can smell the fruit being crushed. It's very visual for people. There is activity." In response to this growing interest, she launched a lunch series this year which takes place select Sundays from now until October 21. For 125, guests are guided around the vineyard by a winemaker and shown what goes into harvesting grapes. "You will get an idea of how hard it is to make wine," Ms. Ponzi said. Then guests sit down for an extravagant lunch, complete with wine pairing, in the heart of the vineyard.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Huang Jieli, who ran a Chinese ride sharing business called Hitch, was invited to a wedding in March. One of her drivers was getting married to a woman who had once been his passenger. Thanks, the invitation said, for getting them hitched. Didi Chuxing, Hitch's corporate parent and one of the world's most successful and valuable start ups, once cheered these stories of young love. Like so many other Chinese internet companies, Didi explored all kinds of ways to bring in new users, including social networking. So through suggestive ads hinting at hookups through driving, Didi pushed Hitch's romantic possibilities. In a 2015 interview with the Chinese online portal NetEase, Ms. Huang compared Hitch cars to cafes and bars. "It's a very futuristic and very sexy scenario," she told NetEase. Today, that attitude looks careless and incompetent. Two female Hitch passengers in the past three months have been raped and killed by their Hitch drivers, according to the police. Now Ms. Huang is out of a job, Didi is pledging to overhaul its business, Chinese consumers are calling for a boycott and the internet industry is getting a much needed reminder of the consequences of its actions. It's a rare moment of self reflection in China's internet industry, which has grown to rival Silicon Valley in both size and influence. Two Chinese companies, Tencent and Alibaba, rank among the top 10 publicly listed companies in the world in valuation. Four of the 10 most valuable start ups are from China, according to CBInsights. One of them is Didi, which ranks second only to Uber. The problems aren't unique to China. Uber has grappled with its own safety issues, while Facebook has belatedly come to terms with how its reach can be misused and abused. But the potential for abuse in China is severe. Corporations are subject to little scrutiny from state controlled media until problems spin out of control. Spotty enforcement and slow lawmaking leave the public less protected from exploitation. Chinese people are fixated on their phones, spending four more hours on average a week online than Americans. The industry's extreme growth the number of internet users has doubled, to 800 million, in eight short years has created a culture in which companies prize money over users' well being. Didi itself admitted this week that it had lost its way. In a statement on Tuesday, it said it would stop using scale and growth to measure its success. "In the past few years we forged ahead wildly, riding on aggressive business strategies and the power of capital," the company said in the statement from Cheng Wei, its chief executive, and Jean Liu, its president. In the face of lost lives, the statement said, "the whole company started to question whether we have the right value system." The Chinese public has asked similar questions. In the aftermath of the two assaults, Chinese media has uncovered dozens of others over the years. It also found past advertisements for Hitch that featured lewd double entendres and other language that could suggest a female passenger might welcome an advance from her male driver. "Truly disgusting, despicable marketing for Didi Hitch that's all sexual innuendo and all about 'picking up' girls," said Rui Ma, a technology investor who works in both Silicon Valley and China, on Twitter. She added, "Didi are you running a service for sexual predators or a ride hailing app?!" While it wasn't obvious to female passengers that their drivers might want to hook up, the drivers knew. Until Didi deactivated Hitch, the car pooling service allowed drivers to share comments with other drivers on the looks of their passengers, leading some male drivers to seek out the ones others had declared attractive. The problem goes well beyond Didi. China has grown so fast that many facets of life shopping, online banking, transportation lack the sort of established incumbents common in the West. Tech companies can swoop in and become dominant in those areas. That makes Chinese companies appealing to investors. It also makes them potentially dangerous. Didi Chuxing marketing material that reads, "Destined for you." Drivers for Hitch, Didi's car pooling service, were able to share comments about passengers' looks. My conversations with Chinese tech companies and their investors, including some from the United States, revolve around user growth and the amount of time they can keep users glued to apps. On occasion I asked why they lent their technology to the government for surveillance, or what they thought the social impact might be from the videos, games and endless feeds of mind numbing information they send to the public. They either gave me blank stares or said their technologies were merely neutral tools. Some in China are comparing Didi's problems to Baidu's. Sometimes known as the Google of China, Baidu dominates the search business in the country. Two years ago the company was harshly criticized for foisting ads for fake medical treatments on the public. Baidu apologized after each incident came to light, but some Chinese users are still angry at the company. "No matter how we complain or criticize, bad companies, be it Didi or Baidu, simply won't change," Ye Ying, editor of The Art Newspaper China, wrote on her WeChat timeline. "I've stopped using Baidu long time ago. Should I delete the Didi app as well?" The scandal also exposes a wider industry problem with sexism. Tencent apologized last year after a video emerged of a corporate event that featured female employees trying to open water bottles tucked between men's legs. Two years ago, Alibaba's finance affiliate, Ant Financial, pulled a new social feature on its app that led to women posting suggestive photos of themselves to attract rich men. Some tech companies have posted job ads only for men. One of them was Didi. Even with women in top jobs, the industry can't seem to shake the attitude. Ms. Liu is probably China's most prominent female technology executive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Nick Tosches was part of a group of music writers labeled "the Noise Boys" for their wild, energetic prose. A critic once wrote, "Reading Tosches is like being mugged." Nick Tosches, who started out in the late 1960s as a brash music writer with a taste for the fringes of rock and country, then bent his eclectic style to biographies of figures like Dean Martin and Sonny Liston and to hard to classify novels , died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 69. The exact cause has not been determined, but he had been ill, a friend, James Marshall, said. Mr. Tosches (pronounced TOSH ez ) and his fellow music writers Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs were labeled "the Noise Boys" for their wild, energetic prose, a world away from fan magazines like Tiger Beat. Interviewing Debbie Harry of the band Blondie in 1979 for Creem magazine, he thought nothing of asking whether she shaved or waxed her legs. Neither, it turned out; she told him she plucked them, one hair at a time. "We speak for many minutes of legs and their lore," he wrote. "Each of us learns a great deal from the other. A mutual respect is born." Mr. Tosches' first book, "Country," published in 1977, was a well researched look at some of country music's lesser known and often roguish figures. "Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll" followed in 1984, with chapters on Ella Mae Morse, Skeets McDonald and many more. But by then he had already begun to branch out. His first biography, "Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story," came out in 1982, and in 1986 he ventured beyond music with "Power on Earth: Michele Sindona's Explosive Story," about an Italian financier who was involved in assorted scandals. One of his most attention getting biographies was "Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams" (1992), about Dean Martin. "Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob culture Renaissance man," Mr. Tosches wrote of Martin . "And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be." For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin died in 1995 at 78.) "I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age," Mr. Tosches told Karen Schoemer for a 1992 profile of him in The New York Times. "Life is a racket," he added. "Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything's a racket." Mr. Tosches was born on Oct. 23, 1949, in Newark to Nick and Muriel Ann (Wynn) Tosches. "The things I wanted to be when I was a kid were an archaeologist, because of dinosaur bones; a garbage man, because they got to ride on the side of the trucks; and a writer," he told The Times. "If I had become a garbage man, I could have retired by now." His father owned a bar, and working there as a boy, as Mr. Tosche often said, provided him with the type of street smart education that mattered. College was never a consideration; instead he held what he described to The Boston Globe in 2000 as "a bunch of strange jobs, both legitimate and illegitimate." He liked to tell of the few weeks he spent as a snake hunter for the Miami Serpentarium, which collected venom for research, even though he was afraid of snakes. "You'd smoke out rattlesnakes by pouring gasoline down their holes and the fumes would drive them out," he told Salon in 1999. "I did not make it too far in that job. Part of the con was anyone who brought in a rattlesnake over six feet would get a thousand bucks, and the thing is, there's never been a rattlesnake over six feet. It's a myth." (Some experts contend that six foot rattlesnakes, though rare, do exist.) At 19 he was living in New York and, as he often related, working for an underwear company on Madison Avenue. "I was doing back then, in the days before computers, what they called paste ups and mechanicals," he told Vanity Fair in 2011. "You have a glue pot, a T square, a razor blade, and you physically put together advertisements." Ed Sanders, who was a member of the underground rock band the Fugs and operated the Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village in Manhattan, a counterculture hangout, befriended Mr. Tosches and gave him encouraging words about some poetry Mr. Tosches had written, nudging along his budding interest in becoming a writer. He sold his first article , to Fusion, a Boston magazine, in 1969. Through the 1970s and into the '80s he wrote for Fusion as well as for Rolling Stone, Creem and other publications, practicing a free ranging brand of journalism that fell under the label "gonzo." Although his music related books were obsessively researched, he didn't always take his magazine writing so seriously, especially early on, when he was known to do things like review nonexistent albums. "I was just using it as a rubric to get away with things in print, things that probably would be impossible to get away with now," he told The Times. "Like making records up, which I've done. Reviewing records without even opening the shrink wrap." Mr. Tosches published his first novel, "Cut Numbers," about a small time loan shark, in 1988. Another, "Trinities," about the international heroin trade, appeared in 1994. In 1996 he became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and an article he wrote for the magazine on the boxer Sonny Liston became the 2000 biography "The Devil and Sonny Liston." That same year, he published "The Nick Tosches Reader," a collection drawn from his three decades' worth of work. His most acclaimed and most audacious work of fiction, "In the Hand of Dante," was published in 2002. The story centered on a previously unknown manuscript of Dante's masterwork, "The Divine Comedy," and a more or less fictional character named Nick Tosches who is called upon to authenticate it. "'In the Hand of Dante' weaves together the life of Dante with the life of a character named Nick Tosches,'" Will Blythe wrote in a review in The Times. "Fortunately, it's not quite as postmodern as it sounds. In fact, it's kind of a mess, but a splendid, passionate mess, with a moral fervor far exceeding most novels of better grooming." In his review in The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Dennis Chute delivered a considerably more backhanded compliment . "I think Tosches is a puffed up buffoon whose bio is a pile of horse manure," he wrote. "Let me tell you that he also has a prose style made up of pretty phrases that mean nothing, a fixation with the word dark, and a love for obscure words he doesn't understand how to use. So why do I think this is a must read book? Because Tosches is one of the few writers you can experience on a visceral level. Reading Tosches is like being mugged ." "Me and the Devil" featured a character named Nick who bore similarities to the author. "Me and the Devil" (2012) also featured a character named Nick who bore similarities to the author, though one hopes not too many. This Nick enjoyed vampiric sex with young women. The book was not well received. In The Denver Post, John Broening called it "a series of self aggrandizing pornographic daydreams intended to prop up the sagging legend of its author as an icon of below 14th Street duende." If his writing fell somewhat out of fashion, in late midlife Mr. Tosches cut a distinctive figure in that below 14th Street world, his natty dress inevitably commented upon by interviewers. One focused on his leopard skin loafers, another on his silk homburg. "I always felt that that was one of the rewards of being 50," he said. "You could wear a homburg." An early marriage , in 1972, was brief. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. In 2006 the British publication Observer Music Monthly named the 50 greatest music books ever written. Mr. Tosches' Jerry Lee Lewis biography, " Hellfire ," was No. 1. He sat for a question and answer session in conjunction with the honor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
William Gaines, an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune who shared two Pulitzer Prizes for exposing corruption in Chicago and was a finalist for a third, died on Wednesday in Munster, Ind. He was 82. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his daughter, Michelle Gaines, said. Mr. Gaines, who joined The Tribune in 1963 and uncovered malfeasance for most of his tenure, until he retired in 2001, won his first Pulitzer in 1976 for local investigative specialized reporting on a newspaper team that exposed mortgage abuse in federal housing programs and horrific conditions at two private hospitals including one where, while working undercover as a janitor, he was enlisted to assist during surgery. "The experience was frightening to me; it was depressing," he wrote in a Tribune column in 1975, "for I knew that it was not just a fluke that I, a janitor, had been called on to do the work of trained orderlies and nurses' aides." He shared his second Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, with Dean Baquet, now the executive editor of The New York Times, and Ann Marie Lipinski, now the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The prize recognized a series of articles that uncovered waste and self dealing in the Chicago City Council. The Pulitzer board called the series "a model of municipal reporting."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
HOP in the new Fiat 500 Abarth, start the engine, stab the throttle and revel in the burbling growl of its exhaust. That subversively flatulent tailpipe emanation is an attention getter, as bracing as a slap in the face, and proof that Abarth engineers have worked their mischief on the otherwise mild mannered little Fiat. Besides some fancy stripes, attractive wheels and scorpion logos, the Abarth treatment gives the basic Fiat 500 a welcome jolt of performance enhancement: a 59 percent increase in horsepower, a 73 percent gain in torque, a track worthy suspension, grippy Pirelli 195/45R16 performance tires and fade resistant metallic brakes. A nicely bolstered sport seat keeps the driver well positioned to preside over this little atomic bomblet of fun. The Abarth name derives from a shop founded in 1949 by Carlo Abarth (pronounced ah BART) that built racecars and tuned road cars for high performance, breathing new life into wheezing, underpowered Fiat engines. Eventually, it built its own engines and sports cars, using bodies from coachbuilders like Bertone and Pininfarina. Fiat bought Abarth in 1971 and turned it into the in house racing operation. After Carlo died in 1979, the name faded out of use until it was revived in 2007 as a division of Fiat Automobiles. The Abarth badge the scorpion mascot alludes to Carlo's astrological sign is now applied to Fiats that get the division's hot rod treatment. The dose of performance is so potent, and so potentially daunting to the unskilled, that Fiat throws in a day of performance driving training, on a track, for Abarth buyers. Abarth performance tuning also adds at least 6,500 to the 16,200 base price of a 500. The premium can be padded by 10,000 or more by checking every box on the order form; unfortunately, a cabrio version is not available. A loaded 500 Abarth is priced in the same neighborhood as a Mini Cooper S, although it falls a few ponies short of the Mini on power. But for Fiat fanatics and they are out there every extra dollar is money well spent. My test drive in the Americanized Abarth, along several hundred miles of Southern California roads, came immediately after I took the European version through Italy. To my surprise, the stateside spec Abarth significantly outperformed the European model. In my experience of testing Euro spec offerings from most automakers, the reverse is almost always true. Americans get a turbocharged 160 horsepower version of Fiat's 1.4 liter MultiAir 4 cylinder engine. This power output is comparable to a European Abarth special edition called the Essesse, although it has a different engine. The base Euro Abarth produces a noticeably less lively 135 horsepower. The performance of the Euro car I drove was further hampered by a wheezy Dualogic gearbox, a "robotized manual" that shifts automatically but somnambulantly without a clutch pedal. The only transmission currently available for the American Abarth is a 5 speed manual. Extra bracing needed for American crash test standards created a packaging issue that precluded offering the automatic transmission, which is larger. The manual may limit the car's appeal, because so few Americans know how to drive a manual any longer. But in speaking with the types of folks who might buy an Abarth, I found that they regarded the automatic as more of a deal breaker than a deal maker. The manual is essential, in my view, for wringing every ounce of performance potential out of this package. All 160 horsepower is available, all of the time, but pressing the Sport button gives access the engine's full 170 pound feet of torque. This tiered delivery of grunt a sprint from zero to 60 miles per hour happens in about seven seconds keeps the Abarth a little more tractable in everyday driving. It also helps to deliver fuel economy ratings of 28 miles per gallon in the city and 34 on the highway. (The basic 500 gets 30/38 with a manual and 27/34 with an automatic.) In conservative driving not the reason one buys an Abarth, is it? I found it possible to average as high as 40 m.p.g. Premium 91 octane unleaded is recommended. "A substantial amount of work went into making the U.S. version of the Abarth," Joe Grace, the project's chief engineer, said in an interview. "We tried to create a track car. We wanted it to be real neutral." Achieving that neutrality was a tall order in a front drive car with nearly two thirds of its weight up front. The ride height was lowered, the suspension was tightened, Koni shocks were added for high speed damping and torsional stiffness was maximized. The wheel tugging known as torque steer, almost a given in powerful front drive cars, has been nearly dialed out of the equation. On the track, the result is a hoot. The car dives into corners, its Pirelli tires grabbing tight and refusing to let go. It shoots out onto the straightaways as if it were bolted to rails. But the quicker Sport steering rate, satisfyingly responsive in competition, seemed a bit too nervous for the average Interstate commute. The enhanced brakes improve on the stock 500's, but fall short of the stopping power of, say, the Cooper S. Though so much of the Abarth is geared toward the enthusiast and potential track day use, Mr. Grace said that "less than half, maybe as little as 25 percent of buyers" would use the cars in that manner. "It's a little like the Jeep buyer demographic," he said. "They want that capability, whether they are going to use it that way or not." He said a sizable American community of Fiat enthusiasts exists and that the brand was planning to tap into that by offering performance driving opportunities. Interest in the Abarth's recent North American introduction was also inflamed by a saucy, sassy Super Bowl ad featuring the Romanian supermodel Catrinel Menghia. "That attracted a new level of interest and intrigue, to what we believe is a credible product," Mr. Grace said. "It helped make a performance statement about the fact this is a 22,000 Italian performance car. You just don't see anything else like that in North America." Nor are you likely to hear anything else like it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles

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