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THE idea that there could be mean streets on the Upper East Side may seem, to some New Yorkers, akin to the suggestion that alligators swim in the sewers. But crime was in fact a problem on the streets of Yorkville in the early 1960s, according to Steven Zboinski, whose parents would whisk him away each summer to the sparsely settled and comparatively wholesome East Shore of Staten Island. "It was to make sure you were being brought up the right way," he said. Not that the area, which arcs below the Verrazano Bridge, was perfect. Pollution forced the closure of some beaches over the years, and a boardwalk along the shore fell apart. All the same, young Steven became forever charmed by its hushed streets, carefree vibe and sea air. So it was obvious where he would move, once old enough to make his own decisions: the East Shore, and in particular Dongan Hills, a two and a half square mile enclave (population about 25,000) that sweeps from Lower New York Bay to the base of Todt Hill. His timing has shown him to be in sync with the currents of real estate change. Over the last few decades, the waterside section of Dongan Hills, where Mr. Zboinski so often spent July as a child, has transitioned from a second home getaway to a year round community. So he was far from the only new arrival in 1989, when he bought a two bedroom vinyl sided wood frame house in an area where most properties are separated by narrow alleys. The home, which cost him 125,000, was appraised in 2007 for 410,000, though the recession has since further changed things, with the value dropping to 265,000 last year. Even so, it is clear to Mr. Zboinski, who works as a building painter for the College of Staten Island, that Dongan Hills is at the moment enjoying an upswing. City projects to revitalize the beach area and the adjacent wetlands will continue to improve property values, said Mr. Zboinski, who believes that magical feeling the landscape stirred in him as a child can be recaptured. "It feels great, fabulous to see it all come back," he said. Longtime ties to the community have also bred loyalty in Jerry Ruggiero, a retired electrician for the Staten Island Railway who lives in a 1960s brick ranch, near the train station to which he used to walk to work. Mr. Ruggiero, the second person ever to own his three bedroom property, paid 60,000 for it in 1981 and estimates it could sell for 400,000 today. Yet if his family history is any indication, he's not going anywhere. His mother and father live one street over, on the block where both grew up. Suggesting the gentleness of the ebbs and flows of life here, the agenda of the 40 member Dongan Hills United Civic Association, of which Mr. Ruggiero is president, is usually light. There are some worries about wild turkeys on lawns; potholes are also discussed. And heavy traffic on the commercial arteries of Richmond Road and Hylan Boulevard persistently generates complaints. But residents say the traffic has been a nuisance since 1964, when the Verrazano opened, uniting Staten Island and Brooklyn. Still, the group didn't oppose the Muslim American Society of Staten Island when it sought to open a mosque in a former Hindu temple on Burgher Avenue, after it was fiercely rebuffed next door in Midland Beach. Dongan Hills may be set in its ways, Mr. Ruggiero said, but that doesn't mean new faces aren't welcome. Dongan Hills has three sections, layered and stacked in a kind of cake. Attention seeking multimillion dollar mansions are found in the icing, in the Dongan Hills Colony, which is terraced above Richmond Road. But tucked amid these stucco sided houses with bulging bay windows are more modest two families, like the high ranch "regular house" that belongs to Carol Bruzzese, who lives three blocks from where she grew up. She said she had been "determined to stay in the neighborhood," which offers views of the Manhattan skyline. There are two family homes throughout Dongan Hills, but absentee landlords do not predominate, according to census figures; two thirds of all residents own their homes. In the middle layer, in the zone between Richmond and Hylan, streets like North Railroad Avenue are shaded by trees whose limbs meet in the middle. New houses, invariably bigger than their predecessors, turn up here, too. On Alter Avenue, a row of semidetached two families, with porticos perched on tall columns, stare down at 1920s colonials. The bottom layer stretches south of Hylan to Father Capodanno Boulevard, or "Father Cap," named for a Navy chaplain from Staten Island who died in the Vietnam War. Though closest to the beach, this area has the most affordable real estate: mostly peak roofed one story bungalows abutting lush wetlands. The lower values could reflect the fact that some of this area sits below sea level, so that flooding has been a problem. But the city and state have undertaken an ambitious effort, buying up undeveloped parcels in hopes of keeping them wild. The idea is that by replanting trees and keeping areas unpaved, they can provide a way to soak up rainwater and keep it from pooling on roads. Two family homes have sprouted here, though they have older company. Along Slater Boulevard, named for L. Roy Slater, an early developer, older houses have front doors of different colors side by side, creating almost a Mutt and Jeff look. Condominiums are few and found in one of two types of building: small two unit houses put up in the last several years, and larger complexes, like the seven story structure at 175 Zoe Street, which went up in the 1980s. The area is largely white and mostly Italian residents of Little Italys in Manhattan and the Bronx used to summer here. Russian and Chinese immigrants have relocated from Brooklyn in recent years, brokers say. In mid June there were 72 single family houses for sale, at an average of 677,565, according to data from the Staten Island Multiple Listing Service. They ranged from a three bedroom Cape on Hancock Street, close to the Dongan Hills station of the Staten Island Railway, listed at 260,000, to an eight bathroom mansion in the Colony with an entryway aquarium, listed at 3.8 million. Since the recession, prices in all categories have slipped. In 2007, at the peak of the market, there were 84 single family sales, at an average of 489,000, according to the listing service. In 2011 there were 66 sales, at an average of 437,000, for a decline of 11 percent. Two family homes fell about the same amount. In 2007 there were 39 sales, at an average of 608,000; in 2011 there were 33, at an average of 550,000, or a decline of 10 percent. The main reason prices haven't dropped 20 percent, as in other Staten Island neighborhoods, said Joseph Tsomik, an associate broker with Homes R Us Realty of New York, is proximity to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. "Most people who are moving here are from Brooklyn, and work in Manhattan, and they want easy access," he said. The well kept Franklin D. Roosevelt boardwalk, which west of Seaview Avenue becomes a concrete promenade, has people out strolling at all hours. The seafood restaurant Toto's, nearby on Father Cap, hosts horseshoes games on Wednesday nights in the summer. Improvements to the area include the ongoing construction of a 2,500 seat field house for track and field on Father Cap, and an expanded pavilion area at the end of Seaview Avenue, which is to be the new home of the Victory Diner, a local landmark.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Around 2002, the artist, illustrator and writer Maira Kalman came across a copy of William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White's "The Elements of Style" in a yard sale and decided that this legendary if sometimes contested guide to grammar and clear writing needed visual accompaniment. So she provided some, making 57 illustrations inspired by sentences and phrases selected from the book. All these images Ms. Kalman rendered in gouache in a delectably colored figurative style indebted to David Hockney and Florine Stettheimer. They were then sprinkled throughout a 2005 version of "Elements" based on its fourth edition, covered in exuberant red. Now all Ms. Kalman's illustrations can be seen together for the first time in New York in a smart, beguiling array at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea. Known to generations of American high school and college students as "the little book" or simply Strunk and White, "Elements" was originally written and, in 1919, self published by Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell University, for in house use. In 1959, the Macmillan company published a new edition revised and expanded by White, a former Strunk student and by then a prominent writer for The New Yorker, and he followed it with new editions in 1972 and 1979. The little book's rules have often raised hackles among grammarians, and in recent years its detractors have been increasingly vocal, especially on the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, in 2009. However you regard Strunk and White, Ms. Kalman's illustrations match, exaggerate or skew the bits of its language that caught her ear, bringing out the book's implicit wit while adding some of her own. Basically, she made visual illustrations of sentences that were themselves illustrations of different grammatical rules, with examples of both correct and incorrect usage. At every turn Ms. Kalman's pairings remind us that language is a free floating, malleable thing. They have aspects of Surrealism's exquisite corpses, Conceptual Art's deadpan humor and especially appropriation art's penchant for repurposing existing images and genres. Ms. Kalman's images are almost invariably based, to some degree, on photographs whether of art, events, accomplished people or famous monuments sometimes taken by Ms. Kalman herself. Some sources are clear, like the news photo of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, which accompanies the sentence "The ceremony was both long and tedious." Others may tease the brain. "Bread and butter was all she served," portrays two children and a woman in white, possibly their nanny, at a white clothed dinner table. It vaguely resembles one of Matisse's early familial interiors, but is in fact a Kalman variation. The prevailing whiteness brings to mind Ms. Kalman's installation piece, in collaboration with her son, Alex Kalman, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Sara Berman's Closet," a homage to the artist's mother, who wore primarily white clothes that she kept in a strikingly neat and beautiful closet (at the Met through Nov. 26). Ms. Berman appears in the small group of people and animals in the illustration for "Here today," but is absent from the nearly identical group of its companion, "gone tomorrow." As is a large hare. There are sly visual jokes and cross references. The illustration for the sentence "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" conjures Mr. Hockney's work, and is based on a well known photograph of the living room of Philip Johnson's Glass House. Whether on purpose or not, the shadows and reflections on a pale rug levitate the scene, giving the Glass House a glass floor. Ms. Kalman's affinity for scattering varieties of figures around a scene, as she does in "The temple of Isis," can suggest an admiration for the disjointed performances of Pina Bausch. And indeed, the picture titled "Do you mind my asking you a question?" is based on a photograph of Bausch, looking austerely formidable. One of the sweetest images is "Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in." The catastrophic possibilities are narrowed down by an image of a doleful basset hound, whose large ears form a kind of a cloak and whose mouth assumes a resigned curve that seems to say "Here we go again." "Susan" appears again in a photograph of William Strunk with his pet in his study, which Ms. Kalman recreates in the book's final pages, along with a portrait of White and a self portrait of the artist (both with dogs). In "The Elements of Style," the images coat the volume with a layer of capricious artistic intervention blind to regulation. At the gallery we see the images accompanied only by their titles, where they frequently evoke very oblique New Yorker cartoons and are larger and more luscious than in the book. You become more aware of Ms. Kalman as a miniaturist of action painting, especially in backgrounds and foregrounds. For example, there are the layers of pinks, yellows and oranges that shift about the feet of the 18th century landed couple based on Thomas Gainsborough's "Conversation in a Garden." The man is doing the talking, gesturing toward a lavish pink cake that Ms. Kalman added to accommodate the title: "Polly loves cake more than she loves me," which Strunk and White recommend as an alternative to the confusing "Polly loves cake more than me." Ms. Kalman's pairings range from the hilariously literal to the nearly abstract. (For the rule, "Keep related words together," Ms. Kalman created the Stettheimerish group of sophisticates with what looks like a murdered guest at a cocktail party: "He noticed a large stain right in the center of the rug." For abstract, the image of an artwork of nearly invisible elastic lines by the Minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback seems apt for the first rule of composition: "A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing." A gentle, slightly philosophical irreverence is the through line of Ms. Kalman's sensibility. It should shortly be evident in a dance theater work based in part on "The Principles of Uncertainty," her yearlong blog for The New York Times. The piece is a collaboration with the choreographer John Heginbotham and will debut at Jacob's Pillow in late August and have its New York premier at BAM Fisher in late September, with Ms. Kalman a performer playing herself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
In New York's most exclusive office towers, the pendulum of power has swung from landlords, who last year basked in rising rents and competition for prime buildings, to tenants, who are now being offered incentives like prebuilt offices to fill empty spaces. And the leverage held by tenants is likely to continue through this year, market experts say. "There is no question that during the second half of 2011 leasing velocity slowed in the premier properties," said Neil Goldmacher, a vice chairman at Newmark Knight Frank. "The fact is, there are a limited number of tenants who will pay three digits in this economic environment." At first glance, it appears the trophy office market which includes 9 West 57th Street, the Seagram's Building at 375 Park Avenue, 712 Fifth Avenue and a handful of others ended 2011 on an upswing. According to data from Cushman Wakefield, there were 46 leases with rents of 100 a square foot or greater in 33 separate buildings last year, compared with just 18 such leases in 13 buildings in 2010. The average starting rent in the trophy market also jumped, reaching 154.75 in 2011 compared with 114.80 in 2010, Cushman Wakefield reported. But a closer examination shows that the bulk of those leases, 28, came in the first half of 2011. In terms of the most deals per quarter, the second quarter peaked, with 16 deals with rents of 100 or greater. That fell to just nine leases in the fourth quarter, typically a strong time of year. And two expensive first quarter leases at 9 West 57th Street were largely responsible for driving up last year's overall starting rents: Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Company's 64,000 square foot lease at 147 a square foot and Apollo Management Holdings LP's 32,800 square foot lease at 160 and 165 a square foot an increase caused by a rent bump during the nine year lease term. "The message that the 100 deals are back is true, to a point," said Alan Desino, an executive managing director at Colliers International, who represents tenants. "There are more deals than in 2010 or 2009, but it is still a 40 percent drop from the peak in 2007." Several factors caused the slowdown in the second half of 2011, including the shifting employment in the financial services sector, which leases the bulk of the space at the trophy buildings. Wall Street added 8,210 jobs from December 2010 to April 2011. At the same time, pent up demand stemming from the recession was released, and more tenants entered the market. "There was real momentum in the market during the first half of the year," said Tara I. Stacom, a vice chairwoman at Cushman Wakefield. Landlords snubbed several tenants when larger deals came up; for example, the law firm WilmerHale was bumped from 825 Eighth Avenue in favor of Nomura Holdings America, and Wells Fargo was pushed out of 120 Park Avenue in favor of Bloomberg L.P. The expensive deals signed by K.K.R. and Apollo at 9 West 57th Street also set a high bar for rents. But from last April to November, the financial services sector shed 5,670 jobs. The sector's woes were compounded by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the stalemate in the federal government over the debt ceiling and the eruption of the European debt crisis. "The result of the negative news meant trading volumes dropped, leading to declining, or at best flat, revenues, and this created job losses on Wall Street," said Ken McCarthy, a senior economist and senior managing director at Cushman Wakefield. The Paramount Group, which owns 712 Fifth Avenue, a modern tower set back behind historic facades on an avenue that is home to hedge funds and private equity firms, began constructing prebuilt offices this summer in vacant spaces on lower floors. That allows tenants to move directly into a space without having to design and build it themselves. The strategy, which can cost landlords anywhere from 90 to 100 a square foot, can be a way to attract tenants without lowering rents. Now, for the first time, the Paramount Group will pursue this prebuilt strategy in two of the building's top floors, which have panoramic views of Central Park and the city skyline. "This is the first time we will be doing prebuilts for the tower floors," said Ted Koltis, a senior vice president at Paramount. "Given everything that went on this summer, in trophy buildings like ours there was a bit of a dropoff in the caliber of the tenant in the market we saw it quiet down." At 9 West 57th Street, owned by Sheldon Solow and perhaps Manhattan's most exclusive office address, the 49th floor will be carved up into smaller, prebuilt office space. The strategy is twofold, said Scott Panzer, a vice chairman at Jones Lang LaSalle who is in charge of leasing at 9 West 57th Street: "As owners of many buildings, our buying power for constructing units is much greater than it would be for smaller tenants," he said. "In addition, since we are bulk purchasing these higher end finishings, we can offer them at a much lower cost." Another reason prebuilt spaces make sense now is that many tenants are waiting until the last moment to commit to a lease because of the uncertain economy. But even with prebuilt offices, some landlords are still having trouble attracting tenants. At 510 Madison Avenue, which is roughly 55 percent vacant, the landlord Boston Properties is marketing prebuilt offices in the middle of the building. While it offers many luxury amenities, 510 Madison's views of Central Park are limited and its asking rent of 110 a square foot is a 10 to 20 percent premium over comparable buildings, brokers said. Mr. Goldmacher said it appeared the landlord had been committed to the leasing prices it planned to charge when it acquired the building in 2010, and was using prebuilt offices and other concessions to avoid lowering rents. Boston Properties declined to comment, citing a quiet period for the company, which is about to announce earnings. Other shifts in the market include an increasing number of short term renewals. "Right out of the gate tenants are looking for two to three year deals rather than five or 10 year leases," said Cynthia Wasserberger, a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
A year ago, The Times introduced a series of essays about the transformative year 1919, beginning with F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation, in his essay "The Crack Up," that a first rate intelligence could hold two opposed ideas at the same time. That seemed a fitting way to assess the United States at a pivotal moment, with half the country rushing headlong into the Jazz Age and the other half trying to turn back the clock toward simpler times. As it turned out, Fitzgerald did not crack up, at least for some time. As the 1920s got underway, the world was his oyster. He became the voice of "a new generation ... grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought." But for one of those gods Fitzgerald's fellow Princetonian Woodrow Wilson the world was indeed falling apart as the new decade began. A year earlier, Wilson had been the people's champion, striving to complete peace talks with Germany and make the world safe for democracy via "self determination." But the negotiations had been difficult, and the resulting Treaty of Versailles was an imperfect vehicle, favoring some peoples over others. To make matters worse, Wilson's own people rejected it, through a series of Senate votes. Even as the League of Nations was coming into existence, in the second week of January, Wilson was clinging to hopes that the Senate might reverse itself. It was not to be, in part because Wilson was no longer the bold leader he once was. The man who had done more than any other to evangelize for the new order was a shell of his former self. He had suffered a series of debilitating strokes during his fall campaign to raise support for the treaty. Afterward, inside the White House, he saw almost no one, barely able to speak, with the left side of his body paralyzed, his mouth slack. He had lost much of his vision and could barely read a sentence. A wheelchair was needed for even the simplest trip from one part of the house to another. A friend, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, described a visit in late November. "It was dreadful," he wrote, "a broken, ruined old man, shuffling along, his left arm inert, the fingers drawn up like a claw, the left side of his face sagging frightfully. His voice is not human: it gurgles in his throat, sounds like that of an automaton." If Wilson's body seemed to be struggling against itself, the same could be said of the country at large. Yet these facts were kept secret from the American people, a form of deception that did not exactly vindicate Wilson's vision of a new world of "open covenants, openly arrived at." His wife, Edith, became a gatekeeper to his sickroom, and in effect a co president during the final 16 months of his presidency. She may have wielded more power than any woman to that point in American history (or since), though that was not the way progress was supposed to happen. If Wilson's body seemed to be struggling against itself, the same could be said of the country at large, deeply divided as the new decade began. The long year of 1919 had unleashed a tremendous energy, as the doughboys came home and young people began to plot out their futures. But in spite of a universal patriotism, if often felt as if two different versions of America were jousting at each other. In the cities, particularly in the East, the Midwest and the Northwest, Americans embraced modernity. In the South, large sections of the West and rural areas, they resisted it. That created the strange spectacle of a country that was both for racial progress and against it; proud of America's enlarged role in the world and resentful of it; enlightened on the progress of women and determined to keep women in their place. Even when there were victories the 19th Amendment, for example, which granted female suffrage it was usually possible to blunt their impact. Mississippi finally ratified the amendment ... in 1984. Nor was The New York Times always on the right side of history. On Jan. 13, 1920, its editors issued a withering critique of the recent experiments in rocketry by Robert Goddard and predicted that it was foolish to think of someday reaching the moon. Fifty years later, after men had done just that, it would retract the error, with one of its all time most famous corrections. The '20s began with more of a whimper than a roar, to judge from January's headlines. Prohibition went into effect on Jan. 17, to the amazement of many, caught flat footed by such a radical experiment in social control. Wilson's secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, complained in his diary, "The whole world is skew jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse." By the end of the decade, the campaign against sin would have achieved none of its goals. Instead, as any reader of Fitzgerald knew, a tidal wave of cocktails was just beginning, along with the criminal syndicates ready to supply them. On Jan. 29, 1920, The New York Times reported that an influenza pandemic seemed to be spreading, only a year after the one that had killed roughly 50 million people around the world. In New York City alone, 5,589 cases were reported in a single day, with 67 dead from influenza and 118 from complications of pneumonia. Fortunately, this virus turned out to be a milder strain than its predecessor. But in other ways, the problems of 1919 lingered. To a degree, these divisions could be papered over as veterans raced to build the American Century, freed from wartime exigencies. Two young men who befriended each other in France were Walt Disney and Ray Kroc. A billion hamburgers later, it's obvious that something special was in the air as they returned to a country ready to embrace its appetites. As Disney understood, they were ready for new story lines as well. A specific way in which the military rules were relaxed related to the emerging technology of wireless communication. Both sides had quickly learned the effectiveness of radio, and in the United States, the Navy was especially visionary in pursuing new lines of research for ships and submarines seeking to communicate across long distances. But to protect this new domain, the government had restricted amateur activity. (Some historians have speculated that if radio had come along a few months earlier, it might have spared Woodrow Wilson the need to canvass across the country and perhaps spared his life as well.) For a time, the full extent of radio's power remained unclear, as various pioneers wandered in the ether. As 1920 began, that was all changing. After the restrictions were removed, thousands of amateur radio operators began to tinker at home with new sets, and a new company sprang into existence, ready to harness the wireless. On Jan. 5, The Times announced the creation of the Radio Corporation of America; within a few short years, radio would transform the country. Ironically, it would empower both sides of the cultural divide, from jazz listeners to fundamentalists, the latter quite adept at putting this modern tool to work in the fight against modernity. For a time, the full extent of radio's power remained unclear, as various pioneers wandered in the ether. A Times headline on Jan. 29 revealed that one of them, Guglielmo Marconi, was picking up strange signals and wondered if Mars was trying to communicate with Earth. In the utopian dawn, a leading American businessman and government official, Herbert Hoover, tried to argue that radio communication should be kept free of advertising, as a kind of public service. In 1922, he said it was "inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service ... to be drowned in advertising chatter." Later that year, the first radio ad ran, sponsored by a real estate developer. As thousands of Americans bought home sets, it became clear that this new device would transform politics as well. A pioneer station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, would be the first to cover a presidential election, in November 1920. Even in the dark days of winter, a hundred years ago, there were stirrings as both Democrats and Republicans schemed to replace the sick man in the White House. Wealthy men like William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford were said to have their eye on the grand residence, but most of the action was inside party circles, as B list candidates tried to step up their game. At the beginning of the year, one of the least likely was a Republican senator from Ohio, Warren Harding, who needed to run for higher office because of a strong chance that he would not be re elected to Congress. Harding's private life was a mess he had legions of affairs and had impregnated one of his girlfriends, a young woman named Nan Britton. When her daughter was born in 1919 (confirmed to be Harding's by DNA testing in 2015), it might have ended most presidential careers. But Harding had a talent for coming up with bland phrases that spoke to the country's desire to begin a new era, less complicated. One was "normalcy," an invented word that perfectly encapsulated what many Americans longed for. Another was "America First." 'Normalcy' turned out to mean an administration that would be ruined by scandal and greed, much of it tied to a powerful new force, Big Oil. Throughout 1920, this anti Wilson would rise up as the original wasted away. Still, commentators worried about what it meant to retreat so quickly from the world, with no plan. Harding seemed to have no ideas about anything. One of America's shrewdest observers was the journalist H.L. Mencken, the so called Sage of Baltimore. From that city, close to Washington but not of it, Mencken could ridicule both sides of the widening divide, and did, skewering fundamentalists and Eastern eggheads alike. But he worried about the transparent incapacity of a man like Harding. Mencken could be cruel and predicted that if the trend continued of electing candidates with no clear qualification, the White House would soon be "adorned by a complete moron." As it turned out, "normalcy" meant an administration that would be ruined by scandal and greed, much of it tied to another powerful new force, Big Oil, engorged with money and influence after helping the war effort. But there would always be boats against the current, as Fitzgerald put it; that is the nature of American politics. The excesses of one side inevitably lead to the rise of the other, and back again, with tidal regularity. As the Republican wave was cresting, a young Democrat was trying to position himself as a candidate for higher office, and on Feb. 1, he gave an immodest speech, boasting of his wartime achievements. In fact, they were considerable. Franklin Roosevelt had not served in the war, but as assistant secretary of the Navy, he had been quite close to the development of radio during the war; he would profit from the radio again, later in his career. It has been a long time since the winter of 1920, but the old fault lines are still visible, not only in the United States but around the world. In Turkey, neo Ottoman ambitions are emerging as the country seeks to enlarge its influence in Libya and everywhere else the sultans once held sway. In Russia, a new czar is all too happy to undermine the West's quaint belief in Wilsonian self determination. Should the United States try to solve these and all of the other vexing problems out there? It has become fashionable to denounce Wilson's idealism in the century since his crack up. Obviously, he tried too much, too fast and destroyed himself in the process. But to inhabit a world with no ideals of any kind seems like an invitation to a different kind of crack up and a return to the earlier history that we were delighted to escape from in 1919. In the long century since, Americans faced a dizzying array of problems, new and old. When they worked together, they generally solved them. When they retreated into ideological extremes, they generally did not. In "The Crack Up," Fitzgerald diagnosed the problem, then offered a formula. If enough readers could "see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise," then there was always a chance for a new decade to live up to its glittering potential.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
As states across the country relax stay at home orders and people return to more normal routines, some researchers worry about a spike in vaccine preventable diseases in addition to the coronavirus's spread. During the pandemic, the rates of childhood vaccinations have dropped significantly as many parents have been reluctant to schedule well child visits at their doctors' offices, for fear of contracting the coronavirus. As a result, children have fallen behind on vaccinations for diseases like measles and pertussis, better known as whooping cough. According to a new study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the vaccination rates in May for children under 2 years old in Michigan fell to alarming rates, including fewer than half of infants 5 months or younger. Angela Shen, a research scientist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the co author of the study, said the falling rates in Michigan were concerning and quite likely representative of trends throughout the country. "Now, you're not just dealing with Covid," she said, referring to Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. "Now you're contending with common vaccine preventable diseases." Over the past two months, the risk of infection for diseases like measles might have been mitigated because most people, following stay at home orders, were not in proximity to one another. Now that some states are easing restrictions and allowing people to move about in their communities, there is a fear of outbreaks for diseases like influenza and especially measles. "You are prone to potentially seeing measles outbreaks as communities and jurisdictions in Michigan and arguably in other parts of the country open up," said Dr. Shen, a retired captain in the U.S. Public Health Service. "This is a big week for opening up, and public health wants you to come in and get your shots." The study used data from the Michigan Care Improvement Registry, which tracks immunizations within the state. It compared vaccination rates for children 5 months or younger on a typical day in May from 2016 to 2019, with the same day this year. It showed that before the pandemic, roughly two thirds of children in that age group were up to date with their vaccinations; this year, the rate fell to 49.7 percent. The study also showed that Michigan children on Medicaid were even less likely to be current on their immunizations. The largest disparity was seen among those 7 months or younger. The researchers found that only 34.6 percent children on Medicaid were up to date, compared with 55 percent of children in Michigan who were not on Medicaid. Dr. Shen said the falling rates could jeopardize the herd immunity that communities have built up against a disease like measles. Public health officials estimate that a community vaccination rate from 93 percent to 95 percent is necessary to prevent a widespread outbreak of measles. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Recent measles outbreaks in the United States have raised fears that the disease could become endemic here again. It was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Dr. Matthew L. Boulton, a professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the University of Michigan, who did not take part in the Michigan study, said the results were not surprising considering the suspension in preventive care in recent weeks. People were not able, or did not want, to visit doctors for routine checkups. It is vital, though, that parents and guardians catch up on their children's vaccinations as soon as possible, he said, because these lapses can become magnified over time; with so many more children unprotected, outbreaks may occur. "I think the implications for childhood immunization are long term," he said, "because it will take a substantial amount of time to make up for this." Dr. Boulton said the problem was global, too. He said that he does immunization work and research in China, India and some African countries, and that his partners there had said they were seeing the same phenomenon. "It's a really scary thought," he said. "We've made tremendous progress around the world, especially in many low income countries. This literally could set us back years in our control of vaccine preventable diseases, in both high and low income countries."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
NEW DELHI When Bob Haygooni paid a midflight visit to a cockpit at his new employer, Air India, he was shocked. The pilots, he said, had completely covered the windows with newspaper to keep out the sun. "All you had in the cockpit was this yellowish glow, as the light permeated the newspaper," Mr. Haygooni recalled, saying it was a visibility hazard he had never seen before in 30 years of flying. But "this was a normal thing at Air India," said Mr. Haygooni, a former United Airlines pilot who flew for the Indian airline for 16 months. In April 2010, however, he decided that the paycheck was not worth his concerns over what he considered the government's haphazard approach to running its state owned airline. Interviews with more than a dozen experienced pilots hired in the last three years by Air India to work new international routes describe an airline with problems. But theirs are not the only complaints. Passengers have abandoned Air India in droves, shunning the airline because of its reputation for poor customer service and late flights. Formerly this nation's monopoly carrier, Air India has been surpassed by three commercial Indian airlines Jet Airways, Kingfisher and IndiGo among those that have sprung up since India deregulated the domestic industry nearly two decades ago. Air India now has less than 15 percent of India's domestic air travel market, with many empty seats on the flights that do take off. As a result, Air India lost more than 1 billion in taxpayer money in the last fiscal year. And now there is a growing public clamor for the government to get out of the airline business. "Instead of throwing good money after bad, the time has come to stand up and say: yes, Air India must be shut down," The Indian Express newspaper said in an editorial earlier this month. While few government airlines in the developing world have stellar reputations, the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a research group in Sydney, Australia, singled out Air India as an example of government mismanagement. "There are other state owned airlines in other emerging market countries that have similar problems, but I can't think of one as bad as Air India," said Peter Harbison, the center's executive chairman. Well run state airlines tend to be a product of "enlightened and intelligent leadership," Mr. Harbison said. He cited Indonesia's national carrier, Garuda, which once was an airline with heavy debts and a fleet of unsafe old planes that regulators in Europe refused to let land there. But under a businessman, Emirsyah Satar, who was named chief executive in 2005, Garuda Indonesia has been transformed into a profitable company that raised 350 million in a public offering this year. Spokesmen for Air India defend the airline as safe and say it is working to correct its problems. And the nation's new civil aviation minister, Vayalar Ravi, vowed in an interview Wednesday not to close or sell the airline. "There is no question of Air India being shut or privatized," he said. He said vested interests who "want to exploit the people for their own profit" were behind suggestions that India's government give the airline up. Still, Mr. Ravi said the airline had been mismanaged in the past including the merging in 2007 of India's domestic and international state run airlines. "Nothing positive came out of the merger," he said, and Air India has bought too many planes. But the airline does "not make any compromises with maintenance and security," Mr. Ravi said. Air India's image was not helped by a recent 10 day pilots' strike over salaries. It ended with a government pledge to raise pay but not before the work stoppage had caused cancellation of nearly 1,500 flights and added almost 50 million to Air India's mounting losses. Hoping to win back customers, Air India is slashing fares and planning to expand, even though it loses money on 95 percent of its flights. Analysts say the prospect of a fare war threatens to destabilize the entire Indian airline industry, and to erase the previous predictions by private carriers of profits this year. Mr. Singh said he used to fly Air India's business class regularly. But now he flies Continental's direct flight to Newark, or one of a host of European carriers that stop in Europe before going on to New York. 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. Even inside the company, some executives are quietly calling for the end of government control. But Air India is popular with India's central government because ministers and politicians can demand routes to connect their home states with the capital, New Delhi, even if they lose money. "I feel like a woman with 1,000 husbands," one male Air India executive complained, referring to the constant demands from government officials. As in many other emerging market countries, India had a severe pilot shortage about five years ago, as the number of passengers and airlines grew faster than the country could churn out new pilots. Airlines here responded to the pilot shortage by hiring expatriates, including hundreds from the United States, where until the rules changed in 2007 commercial pilots were forced to retire at age 60. In India, as most everywhere else, the retirement age has long been 65. For many of those who joined Air India, the culture clash has been severe. Dozens left before their three year contracts expired. Of the 186 foreign pilots hired since April 2007, Air India has just 36 left, the company said. Pilots interviewed for this article expressed safety concerns about basic operations at Air India particularly its training procedures, which many said were not adequate for teaching the hundreds of new pilots the airline needs for its expansion. Some, like Mr. Haygooni, spoke freely. Others insisted that their identities not be revealed because they said the industry did not reward whistle blowers. Air India is "just so far behind the ball I don't know how they will ever catch up," said Alexander Garmendia, 64, who joined Air India in 2009 after retiring from American Airlines. He trained at Air India's headquarters in Mumbai for six weeks, but said he left in part because he was worried about safety. One safety concern noted by the interviewed pilots was that veteran Air India captains often left cockpit doors unlocked a practice most carriers around the world abandoned after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. They also said captains tended to leave the cabin during flights, leaving co pilots alone for long periods. They said pilots' smoking in cockpits was also common. Mr. Rattan acknowledged that such things might occur, but "to say it was a trend would be to stretch things too far." Expatriate Air India pilots said they were most worried about an inadequate training system that they said created co pilots with excellent book knowledge but little real life flying experience. "The biggest problem is if I have a heart attack, this kid isn't going to be able to get the plane on the ground," said one current Air India pilot, who has more than 25 years of commercial airline experience. At Air India, some pilots say, young co pilots get few hands on opportunities in the cockpit. Veteran captains handle the landings and takeoffs, often leaving co pilots little to do but operate the radio and fill out paperwork. Most of the pilots interviewed for this article recalled incidents when they let young co pilots take the controls a common practice in America and Europe to give inexperienced pilots a chance to learn but then had to seize back command of the aircraft to prevent a disaster. An Air India spokesman in Mumbai, K. Swaminathan, said in an e mail that India's airline regulator did allow assisted takeoffs and landings by co pilots, when they were flying with commanders who were authorized to do such training. But "as the airline is in the midst of a fleet expansion, all commanders may not have the necessary experience to allow co pilots to conduct supervised takeoffs and landings," he said. Air India was free of major accidents for a decade until a May 2010 crash in Mangalore that killed 158 people. The captain, a Serbian, came into the landing too high, and did not abort it when he should have, the Indian government's investigation report said. The co pilot, the report found, "failed to challenge any of the captain's errors." Just four days later, Air India had another serious incident, when a co pilot, while adjusting his seat, accidentally knocked the controls off their settings as the captain was heading for the bathroom. The plane dropped 7,000 feet before the captain could return to the cockpit and right it. A government investigation concluded the co pilot "probably had no clue how to tackle this kind of emergency."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
With 1 Billion From Microsoft, an A.I. Lab Wants to Mimic the Brain SAN FRANCISCO As the waitress approached the table, Sam Altman held up his phone. That made it easier to see the dollar amount typed into an investment contract he had spent the last 30 days negotiating with Microsoft. The investment from Microsoft, signed early this month and announced on Monday, signals a new direction for Mr. Altman's research lab. In March, Mr. Altman stepped down from his daily duties as the head of Y Combinator, the start up "accelerator" that catapulted him into the Silicon Valley elite. Now, at 34, he is the chief executive of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab he helped create in 2015 with Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla. Mr. Musk left the lab last year to concentrate on his own A.I. ambitions at Tesla. Since then, Mr. Altman has remade OpenAI, founded as a nonprofit, into a for profit company so it could more aggressively pursue financing. Now he has landed a marquee investor to help it chase an outrageously lofty goal. He and his team of researchers hope to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. A.G.I. still has a whiff of science fiction. But in their agreement, Microsoft and OpenAI discuss the possibility with the same matter of fact language they might apply to any other technology they hope to build, whether it's a cloud computing service or a new kind of robotic arm. "My goal in running OpenAI is to successfully create broadly beneficial A.G.I.," Mr. Altman said in a recent interview. "And this partnership is the most important milestone so far on that path." In recent years, a small but fervent community of artificial intelligence researchers have set their sights on A.G.I., and they are backed by some of the wealthiest companies in the world. DeepMind, a top lab owned by Google's parent company, says it is chasing the same goal. In a joint phone interview with Mr. Altman, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, later compared A.G.I. to his company's efforts to build a quantum computer, a machine that would be exponentially faster than today's machines. "Whether it's our pursuit of quantum computing or it's a pursuit of A.G.I., I think you need these high ambition North Stars," he said. Mr. Altman's 100 employee company recently built a system that could beat the world's best players at a video game called Dota 2. Just a few years ago, this kind of thing did not seem possible. Dota 2 is a game in which each player must navigate a complex, three dimensional environment along with several other players, coordinating a careful balance between attack and defense. In other words, it requires old fashioned teamwork, and that is a difficult skill for machines to master. OpenAI mastered Dota 2 thanks to a mathematical technique called reinforcement learning, which allows machines to learn tasks by extreme trial and error. By playing the game over and over again, automated pieces of software, called agents, learned which strategies are successful. The agents learned those skills over the course of several months, racking up more than 45,000 years of game play. That required enormous amounts of raw computing power. OpenAI spent millions of dollars renting access to tens of thousands of computer chips inside cloud computing services run by companies like Google and Amazon. Eventually, Mr. Altman and his colleagues believe, they can build A.G.I. in a similar way. If they can gather enough data to describe everything humans deal with on a daily basis and if they have enough computing power to analyze all that data they believe they can rebuild human intelligence. Mr. Altman painted the deal with Microsoft as a step in this direction. As Microsoft invests in OpenAI, the tech giant will also work on building new kinds of computing systems that can help the lab analyze increasingly large amounts of information. "This is about really having that tight feedback cycle between a high ambition pursuit of A.G.I. and what is our core business, which is building the world's computer," Mr. Nadella said. That work will likely include computer chips designed specifically for training artificial intelligence systems. Like Google, Amazon and dozens of start ups across the globe, Microsoft is already exploring this new kind of chip. Most of that 1 billion, Mr. Altman said, will be spent on the computing power OpenAI needs to achieve its ambitions. And under the terms of the new contract, Microsoft will eventually become the lab's sole source of computing power. Mr. Nadella said Microsoft would not necessarily invest that billion dollars all at once. It could be doled out over the course of a decade or more. Microsoft is investing dollars that will be fed back into its own business, as OpenAI purchases computing power from the software giant, and the collaboration between the two companies could yield a wide array of technologies. Because A.G.I. is not yet possible, OpenAI is starting with narrower projects. It built a system recently that tries to understand natural language. The technology could feed everything from digital assistants like Alexa and Google Home to software that automatically analyzes documents inside law firms, hospitals and other businesses. The deal is also a way for these two companies to promote themselves. OpenAI needs computing power to fulfill its ambitions, but it must also attract the world's leading researchers, which is hard to do in today's market for talent. Microsoft is competing with Google and Amazon in cloud computing, where A.I. capabilities are increasingly important. The question is how seriously we should take the idea of artificial general intelligence. Like others in the tech industry, Mr. Altman often talks as if its future is inevitable. "I think that A.G.I. will be the most important technological development in human history," he said during the interview with Mr. Nadella. Mr. Altman alluded to concerns from people like Mr. Musk that A.G.I. could spin outside our control. "Figuring out a way to do that is going to be one of the most important societal challenges we face." But a game like Dota 2 is a far cry from the complexities of the real world. Artificial intelligence has improved in significant ways in recent years, thanks to many of the technologies cultivated at places like DeepMind and OpenAI. There are systems that can recognize images, identify spoken words, and translate between languages with an accuracy that was not possible just a few years ago. But this does not mean that A.G.I. is near or even that it is possible. "We are no closer to A.G.I. than we have ever been," said Oren Etzioni, the chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an influential research lab in Seattle. Geoffrey Hinton, the Google researcher who recently won the Turing Award often called the Nobel Prize of computing for his contributions to artificial intelligence over the past several years, was recently asked about the race to A.G.I. "It's too big a problem," he said. "I'd much rather focus on something where you can figure out how you might solve it." The other question with A.G.I., he added, is: Why do we need it?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
LOS ANGELES Multiple movie studios passed on the opportunity to make "Rocketman," an R rated musical fantasia about Elton John's hedonistic breakthrough years. Too gay. Too expensive. Too reliant on an unproven star. But one film company, the down on its luck Paramount Pictures, saw the audacious project as a chance to prove something to both Hollywood and Wall Street namely that, to borrow a reference from Sir Elton, it's still standing. Now comes the moment of truth. "Rocketman" will arrive in theaters on May 31 as perhaps the most ambitious movie of Hollywood's summer season, a four month period that typically accounts for 40 percent of annual ticket sales and relies overwhelmingly on franchises. Starring Taron Egerton and costing an estimated 120 million to make and market worldwide, "Rocketman" trails glitter a million Swarovski crystals adorn the costumes and eyewear and depicts gay sex, a first for a major studio. Mr. Egerton, 29, known for the "Kingsman" action comedies, did all of his own singing, reinterpreting classics like "The Bitch Is Back." There is intricate choreography (one stylized scene finds an entire London neighborhood dancing in formation) and an orgy musical number set to "Bennie and the Jets." Depending on its box office performance, "Rocketman" could have wide ripple effects. Paramount has delivered nine consecutive quarters of improved financial results for Viacom, its corporate owner, but a turnaround is still tenuous. A big hit and one that's not a sequel, spinoff or reboot, at that would provide a morale boost and send an important message to Hollywood's creative community and Viacom investors: that even in the age of Netflix and Marvel, Paramount can deliver. The stakes are also high for Mr. Egerton. His previous movie, Lionsgate's big budget "Robin Hood," was a critical and commercial bomb. If this one fizzles, Mr. Egerton's leading man opportunities may vanish. Dexter Fletcher, who directed "Rocketman," is also hoping for a career making moment. Mr. Fletcher, who also acts, has never had a breakout success as a filmmaker, although he earned points in Hollywood for finishing "Bohemian Rhapsody" after the credited director, Bryan Singer, was fired. In some ways, almost every major studio has something riding on "Rocketman." Movies built around song catalogs have become white hot in Hollywood. Baz Luhrmann is working on an Elvis Presley movie for Warner Bros. Sony recently bought the rights to "Once Upon a One More Time," described as a fairy tale fueled by Britney Spears songs. Universal is developing a Madonna biopic called "Blond Ambition." Celine Dion, David Bowie and Judy Garland films are on the way from smaller studios. Turnout for "Rocketman" could either heat up or cool down studio interest. Right now, film executives are dreaming of finding another "Bohemian Rhapsody." The Queen bio musical collected a jaw dropping 908 million worldwide last year and won four Academy Awards, including one for Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. "It will be interesting to see how broad the 'Rocketman' audience will be whether it bridges the gaps," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, which tracks box office data. Heterosexual men are typically the hardest audience for musicals to reach. "Bohemian Rhapsody" overcame that hurdle, but no one is exactly sure why. Some longtime movie marketers point out that Queen anthems like "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" are sporting event mainstays. "Or it could be that these movies are hitting on multiple levels: biopic, jukebox musical, an anchor performance, a little documentary even," Mr. Dergarabedian said. Paramount certainly seemed pleased. Publicists for the studio, which has placed last at the domestic box office for the last seven years, even as it found occasional hits like "A Quiet Place," sent out a news release that said in capital red letters, "We've been waiting a long, long time 'Rocketman' blasts off in Cannes!" Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen and Company, expects "Rocketman" to collect roughly 120 million in the United States and Canada and rank as one of the 12 biggest movies of the summer. Sequels and reboots will fill every other slot, Mr. Creutz predicted in a recent report, with one exception. He also has high hopes for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (Sony), a lavish 1969 set drama from Quentin Tarantino and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. 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. "Buzz for the film seems pretty solid," Mr. Creutz said of "Rocketman," which he described as "a counterprogramming alternative to younger audience targeted fare." Also arriving on May 31 is "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" (Warner/Legendary) and "Ma," a Universal Blumhouse horror movie. Still, success for "Rocketman" is far from guaranteed. How much clamor is there for Elton John music? There may be a great deal: Mr. John has spent the last decade performing sold out shows in Las Vegas and touring the world to similar results. On the other hand, Mr. John has spent the last decade performing. "Bohemian Rhapsody" benefited from pent up demand for Mercury, who died in 1991 of complications from AIDS. One of Paramount's biggest challenges involves the perception of success. If "Rocketman" sells even half the number of tickets as "Bohemian Rhapsody" it will be a runaway success. But try telling that to box office headline writers. There is no way for Paramount to avoid comparisons to "Bohemian Rhapsody," even though "Rocketman" is a sharper edged film that has a more auteur sensibility. Mr. Fletcher's film begins and ends with Mr. John in rehab, where he identifies himself as an alcoholic, with addictions to cocaine and sex. Gay imagery was largely underplayed in "Bohemian Rhapsody," to the dismay of people eager for Hollywood to become less timid about homosexuality. But the depiction of same sex relationships in "Rocketman" could limit interest in more conservative parts of the United States. The contemporary romantic comedy "Love, Simon" was a hard sell last year because it ventured a kiss between teenage boys. "Rocketman" is expected to generate enormous ticket sales in countries like England, but the film will not make it past Chinese censors without severe sanitization, something that Mr. John is likely to deem a nonstarter. "Even if the movie doesn't make one penny at the box office which will kill Jim Gianopulos it is the movie I wanted to make," Mr. John said from the stage after the Cannes premiere, referring to Paramount's chairman. To overcome any box office difficulties, Paramount has thrown all of its weight into marketing the film. Fans can upload photos of themselves to a Paramount website and find out what they would look like in flamboyant Elton John eyewear. (Tagline: "Show the world you were never ordinary.") To generate word of mouth, Paramount teamed up with Fandango to offer sneak peek screenings at 400 theaters on Saturday. Mr. Gianopulos even likened "Rocketman" to a superhero movie as part of a push for the movie at the most recent CinemaCon, a convention for theater owners. "If musicians were superheroes, Elton John would be Rocketman capable of escaping the gravity of the ordinary, fear and prejudice," Mr. Gianopulos said on stage at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where Mr. John performed 450 shows for 1.8 million fans from 2004 to 2018. Paramount then sent attendees home with sparkly "Rocketman" T shirts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
Q. Can I set up a vacation bounce message in Gmail? If so, do those replies go to everyone, including spammers looking for live addresses? A. Gmail, along with other free mail services like Outlook.com, allows you to set up an automatic reply to new messages that hit your inbox when you'd like to unplug for an extended period. And if you don't want the message to bounce back to everyone who sends you mail, you can limit who can receive your automated reply. To set up a vacation response message in the desktop version of Gmail, click the gear shaped icon in the upper right corner of the browser window and choose Settings from the menu. On the General tab of the Settings page, scroll down the page to the Vacation Responder section.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
Forget collaborations, those one off initiatives where a high end fashion brand hooks up with a hip underground or mass market name to the ironically mutual market opening benefit of both. That's so last season! Over, passe, a dead duck. Remo Ruffini, the chief executive of Moncler, the Italian puffer coat specialist, has a new idea and it's, well, genius. If he does say so himself. Which he does: "Genius" being the name of his latest fashion project, unveiled Tuesday night at what the brand dubbed the Moncler Genius Building (not to confused with the Apple Genius Bars, although if your mind just unconsciously makes that connection, O.K. then) to kick start the third leg of the women's wear collections. It was, as the show mission statement read, an entire "republic of imagination" in which Moncler was interpreted by eight designers in eight mini collections: the dystopian and cool (Craig Green, Palm Angels); the madly romantic (Simone Rocha, Kei Ninomiya of Noir); the grunge (Fragment by Hiroshi Fujiwara), and the haute (Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino), plus the hound (Poldo Dog Couture). The result, which replaces Moncler's Gamme Rouge and Gamme Bleu high fashion lines, was part art installation, part political opportunism, and all fashion sleight of hand. Eight enormous boxes draped in silver fabric were set up inside a cavernous warehouse, each housing a different scenario: Mr. Green's monochrome body swallowing sci fi spacesuits; Ms. Rocha's Victorian snow angels in pale pink florals; Mr. Piccioli's gorgeously austere puffer ball gowns, pale rose and empire waisted under a floor length taupe cape with bright green opera gloves, or with a cropped trapeze jacket. Even the relatively undramatic Moncler Grenoble line was given a conceptual edge: Models in boldly patterned cold weather gear lay on the floor under a giant tilted mirror that reflected them in a Spider Man like way on the vertical wall. The audience was visible at the top, frenetically Instagramming away. You can see the appeal for the designers, who were enabled to let their puffer dreams fly. As Mr. Piccioli said, "It's about creativity with freedom from the market" though he also said he deliberately chose the cheapest material, nylon, to make his gowns more accessible. As for Moncler, it got the halo of cool and couture, and proved to the world that, whatever you might want from your puffer, the brand now has it covered. The politically prescient tagline was "Multiplicity is our credo." Put another way, there's a little something for everyone including, for the company, the kind of unanticipated risk that can be associated with picking outside partners. See, the stylist Karl Templer had been announced as the curator of the more folksy Moncler 1952 section, at least until he was named in a sexual harassment investigation published last week by The Boston Globe. Mr. Templer denied "ever acting with any wrongful intent," but his name was removed from all publicity materials at the show; he was not present, and the brand had no comment about their relationship though in theory all the Genius partnerships are supposed to be continuing. Sometimes, it turns out, you can be too smart for your own good. In any case, if Mr. Ruffini is looking for another name to add to the mix, he might consider Arthur Arbesser, one of the members of the city's fashion New Gen. This season, Mr. Arbesser paid homage to the work of the Viennese painter Koloman Moser in syncopated combinations of stripes, dots and other geometrics woven into jacquard artists' smocks and free form suiting with an interesting, if not always flattering, kraftwerk edge. Clever, that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Recognize this guy? How about this one? Him? They all have something in common. They govern like autocrats. These leaders are rising in an age where technology can make their lives much easier. And leading the way is China. At home, they're pouring billions into the most sophisticated censorship and surveillance apparatus the world has ever known. I spent nearly a decade here. And halfway through that period, something changed. Xi Jinping took power, and cameras started appearing a lot of them. Now, the cameras are everywhere. They hang from traffic lights, intersections, crosswalks; on trees, fences, and subway cars; even inside your taxi or your apartment building. These are, in fact, government surveillance cameras, and there are over 200 million of them here. The government says the cameras are used to fight crime, squash protests and maintain control. It's all designed to make sure the Communist Party of China never loses power. Basically, they want to know what their citizens are doing all the time, and their actions are being judged. Most of the time, it's just police watching on the other end of these cameras. But the idea is that one day soon, artificial intelligence will be able to automate that job, analyzing the day to day lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. You might think, well, that's just China. But it's not only in China. See that? That camera is in Ecuador. This is Ecuador's emergency response system, which is known as ECU 911. The government peddles it as a crime fighting tool. Ecuador has around 4,000 national security cameras across the entire country. The cameras all feed into a few centralized rooms, like this. The system was not only made in China, but it was installed by Chinese companies and workers. The Chinese even trained the Ecuadoreans how to use it. Reporter: "They're telling the public that this is for safety. We went back, we can see what the surveillance looks like. So this is, what, 30 people in a room surveilling society." "Wow." Reporter: "Now my question, though, is: If you wanted to stop crime, would you have 30 people in a room? To me, that number, 30, does not seem like a lot of people." "So 30 people, perhaps monitoring a nationwide camera system might seem little, but it's the deterrent effect of the cameras which impact on people. It's them moderating their behavior based on the fact that they know that they might be being surveilled, and they don't know how that information might be being used." And that's the point. This might be able to fight crime. But just like in China, the cameras have potential for other use. "Surveillance technology exporting this kind of surveillance capabilities to a country like Ecuador makes money." This is Edin, a global surveillance expert in the U.K. I asked him, so what has China actually exported here? "Well it secures our diplomatic relationship with China, and it exports their model of internet governorship and how our security infrastructure is going to look like in the future." Chinese surveillance systems are increasingly showing up all around the world. Some of those countries have stronger government institutions to regulate than others, but they all need money to buy it. Turns out, the Chinese can help with that, too. We know it started at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Behind the scenes, China was selling its state of the art security setup to visiting delegations. This is where Ecuadorian officials first saw it. So, China and Ecuador made a deal. This is Martha, a former politician turned investigative journalist. This all happened under the former president Rafael Correa, who was widely seen as an autocrat. He rewrote Ecuador's Constitution. He erased term limits. He took control of the courts and silenced the press. Helping him each step of the way was money from China. So, China got Ecuador's oil and Ecuador got things like roads and hospitals. It also got a nationwide surveillance system. And this is what it looks like today. Rafael Correa has been out of office for more than two years now, and Lenin Moreno has taken the country back in a more democratic direction. But even after autocrats leave office, their legacies can live on. After all, there is a system in place with a sinister potential. It just depends how it's being used. Lidia lives in a high crime neighborhood on the city's mountainside. She says the police rarely respond to crimes that happen directly in front of cameras and that some of the most dangerous neighborhoods, like hers, don't have any cameras at all. While Lidia's neighborhood has none, there's unexpectedly one here, in a safe neighborhood. It's the only camera around, and it can see right into this man's house. Colonel Pazmino was a vocal critic of former president Rafael Correa, and he was often followed by government spies. He says when the Chinese camera system came in, the spies went home. In other words, Colonel Pazmino thinks the system is used for more than emergencies. He believes the state's intelligence unit uses it to track political dissidents like him. In China, authorities have also installed cameras outside of dissidents' homes. We brought this claim to Francisco Robayo, who was ECU 911's director at the time. He said, the system isn't for spying on or intimidating political opponents. He deflected, and so did the country's intelligence chief. We were in a secret, unmarked bunker outside of the capital, and we were not allowed to point our camera at anything outside of this single frame. We came to ask Mr. Costa if the intelligence agency uses the public security cameras to spy on citizens. Midway through our interview, we took a break. Remember how we were only allowed to take this one single frame? Well, that's because they didn't want us filming the background that's deliberately out of focus right now. But when not looking through the lens of the camera, we could still see it clearly. Once we pointed out the feeds from ECU 911, they admitted they also could access the public security cameras. Ecuador's officials maintain the system is a crime fighting tool. But why the system also feeds into the intelligence agency raises the same concerns that human rights advocates raise in China. These cameras are easier to abuse than use. It just depends what your goals are. And remember, China's goal is political control. That's what these systems were designed for. In effect, China is exporting more than cameras. They are exporting the way they use their cameras. And while other countries also offer systems, including the U.S., many say China is thought to be the most dangerous because it provides funding, even to known dictators, and provides them with a sinister model for how to use it. "We've seen cases where governments around the world have used surveillance technology to infiltrate and spy on dissidents, on activists, on lawyers, on opposition parties. So this actually, fundamentally undermines democracy." More and more leaders like Rafael Correa appear to be rising. Now they have access to technology, undreamt of even 20 years ago. And China seems willing to give them cheap loans to buy it. The more countries that install China's centralized surveillance technology, the more that China's very own autocratic use of it may be normalized. And like in Ecuador, the infrastructure for autocracy stays even as leaders come and go. "What the question for us now as people who are now more surveilled than ever, is how we want to live in this world, how we want to regulate that, and what kind of surveillance we want to be put under?" question asked in Spanish
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
The way states lifted social distancing restrictions imposed to fight the coronavirus sadly demonstrates our priorities. Officials let bars, restaurants and gyms open, despite warnings from public health experts that these environments pose the greatest risk for spreading the disease. Yet political leaders seem to have paid scant attention to safely reopening schools. The consequences of those backward priorities Covid 19 rampaging through states that reopened quickly make it even more vital that we extensively prepare to reopen classrooms as safely as possible this fall. Research suggests that the sudden switch to online instruction has cost some students a full year of academic progress. This harm disproportionately affects children in homes without computers and stable internet connections, deepening educational inequality and widening racial and economic divides. The disruption of learning can have lifetime effects on students' income and health. The school shutdowns left millions of children without access to meal programs and school based health services. Reports of child abuse slowed since school employees couldn't identify and notify the authorities about children they thought were being harmed. And the need for parents to supervise their children on school days or arrange child care has disrupted the economy and made it even harder for many families to get by. Would returning children to school be dangerous for them? The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that the harm to children from not having in person education outweighs the risk. Children are 24 percent of the American population but account for only 2 percent of Covid 19 cases. In the United States, school age children have been hospitalized at a rate of 0.1 per 100,000, compared with 7.4 per 100,000 for adults ages 50 to 64. Very few deaths among children have been reported. Children play less of a role in the spread of Covid 19 than in the spread of influenza. Early in the Covid 19 epidemic, Australia identified 18 infected youth in 15 schools; health officials traced 863 contacts of the students, only two of whom were found to have been infected. The Pasteur Institute in France found just three probable cases of Covid 19 in school age children among 510 students in a town that experienced a major outbreak; the children did not pass the infection to teachers or other students. However, less risk does not mean no risk. The true infection rate may not be well captured by studies conducted to date. And in rare cases, Covid 19 has been linked to serious illness in children, either directly as a consequence of the virus or through a post inflammatory syndrome related to the immune system. The syndrome remains rare, but still a concern. Schools need to take the risk of spread seriously, for children and staff members, even as they resume classroom instruction. Austria, Denmark, Germany and Norway have reopened schools without major outbreaks. These nations and others have taken a variety of measures to be safe, including opening slowly, limiting class size and adopting aggressive infection control practices. Israel experienced outbreaks in schools, but only after loosening limitations on class sizes. A responsible strategy for reopening school starts with controlling the community spread of Covid 19 through distancing and the use of face masks, as well as robust tracing, isolation and quarantining, as all countries that have opened schools without spikes in cases did before resuming instruction. Reopening businesses that pose a major risk of community spread should be a lower priority than reopening schools, for which continued closure carries far greater harm. Reopening schools supports the economy, so businesses should do their part in reducing community transmission by allowing employees to work from home and following strict in person social distancing. Meanwhile, all school districts should receive the financial support needed to accomplish several critical goals: First take care of those who would benefit the most. Young children, in particular, may require in person instruction and socialization. Special needs students need services provided by schools in person. Increase distance and focus on hygiene. For crowded schools, this could require finding other buildings and space where they could expand. Some countries in Europe are creating outdoor classrooms to allow for distancing and to take advantage of the reduced risk of transmission in the open air. Tents and other covered structures could be used to create outdoor classrooms in some areas. Urban school districts may need to lease space. Students and staff members should be checked for symptoms daily and required to wash hands or use hand sanitizer frequently. Masks should be required for all who can wear them, and schools will need extra masks on hand for students and staff members who do not bring their own. Create in school "bubbles." Elementary and middle schools should establish small groups of students who will learn, eat lunch and have recess together. Students and teachers in these groups will interact only with one another. Bubbles may not be feasible in high schools, where students typically move from room to room, so there should be strict requirements for masks, class size reduction and distances between desks. Plan for an outbreak. If a coronavirus infection is found, schools should follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which encourages schools to coordinate with local health authorities and to plan to dismiss students and staff members for two to five days. Refine online instruction. If cases are rising significantly in the area, schools may have to close until that outbreak is under control. They should be prepared by using curriculums that can be rapidly adapted for online instruction. Allow families and staff members to opt out. Families in households with much older relatives or people with health problems may fear sending their children to school, out of heightened concern that they may bring the virus home. For students in these circumstances, continued remote education should be made available. Staff members who are older or have chronic medical conditions and who want to be kept out of physical contact with students could teach online classes for those students who remain at home. Get creative with transportation. It doesn't make sense to practice distancing in school and then crowd students together for a long bus ride home. School districts should consider car pools and van rides for children in their bubbles. Schools can also increase the number of buses in service and employ staggered start times to transport fewer children at once. Each of these steps requires resources now. Congress has provided hundreds of billions of dollars of relief for small businesses, but early funding for schools has largely been spent on meals and laptops for remote learning. States should provide funding to school districts in advance of pending legislation in Congress that would provide 915 billion to state and local budgets.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Opinion
For four decades, the artist Robert Indiana lived in this old Victorian lodge hall on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine. Robert Indiana Had All but Vanished in Recent Years. Some Friends Wondered Why. VINALHAVEN, Me. For years before Robert Indiana died, his deepening isolation on this remote island, more than an hour's ferry ride off the Maine coast, had mystified some longtime friends and business associates. Mr. Indiana, whose career was made, and nearly consumed, by his creation of the sculpture "LOVE," had sought refuge here four decades ago, an exile from a New York art world he had come to resent, and settled into a rambling Victorian lodge hall overlooking Penobscot Bay, where he was, more or less, left alone to create his art. One friend, John Wilmerding, emeritus professor of American art at Princeton University, questioned why an "impenetrable wall" had been put up. "Not just to me, but to all of his old friends," he said. Read the New York Times obituary of Robert Indiana. In a federal lawsuit filed Friday, a day before Mr. Indiana's death at 89, a company that says it has long held the rights to several of Mr. Indiana's best known works proposed an answer, arguing in court papers that the caretaker and a New York art publisher had tucked the artist away while they churned out unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work. "They have isolated Indiana from his friends and supporters, forged some of Indiana's most recognizable works, exhibited the fraudulent works in museums, and sold the fraudulent works to unsuspecting collectors," said the lawsuit filed last week by Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Among the works cited in the suit were a series of silk screen prints that feature the lyrics of Bob Dylan, said to have been created in 2016 by Mr. Indiana and recently exhibited at several galleries and museums including the Bates College Museum of Art. The New York art publisher, Michael McKenzie, said in an interview Friday that Mr. Indiana had conceived and authorized all the recent art that bears his name and that his caretaker, Jamie L. Thomas, had only been following the artist's orders in limiting visitors. Mr. McKenzie accused the Morgan company of falsely suggesting it represents Mr. Indiana and of voiding any agreement with him by failing to make required royalty payments, both charges that the company denied. With Mr. Indiana's death, the dispute is likely to broaden now into questions of who controls Mr. Indiana's legacy and estate. Mr. Indiana never married, and he has few close relatives. Luke Nikas, the lawyer for Morgan Art Foundation, said that, as of 2016, the artist's will had called for his works and house to be transferred to a foundation to be overseen by a New York lawyer, Ronald D. Spencer. But Mr. Spencer was let go in 2016, he said, and Mr. Indiana that same year gave his power of attorney to Mr. Thomas, which gave him the authority to make decisions. Mr. McKenzie said the transfer of control to Mr. Thomas was part of an effort by Mr. Indiana to enlist help in battling Morgan and that Mr. Thomas had been carefully managing Mr. Indiana's legacy through a vehicle called the Star of Hope Foundation. Mr. McKenzie, whose art publishing business, American Image Art, lists a number of important artists as clients, said his relationship with Mr. Indiana goes back to the 1970s. In the 1990s he published two books that contained Indiana imagery. In 2008, he helped to promote Mr. Indiana's "HOPE" image, which the artist created to support the Obama campaign. But within New York art circles, it was Morgan Art Foundation and the company's adviser, Simon Salama Caro, who were better known as the representatives of Mr. Indiana. The Morgan company says it has served as Mr. Indiana's agent since the 1990s, when Mr. Salama Caro sought out the largely forgotten artist who had shut himself away on this island. He struck an agreement with Mr. Indiana under which, in exchange for royalties, the artist authorized Morgan to produce and sell limited editions of some of Mr. Indiana's most celebrated works, including "LOVE." The company and Mr. Salama Caro were later credited with helping to fuel a comeback for Mr. Indiana, whose profile rose with gallery shows and a major retrospective in 2013 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Salama Caro, who earns commissions on the sales, and his family have also started assembling a full catalog of Mr. Indiana's work. The lawsuit contends that the company's rights have been violated by some of the new work and that the artist's legacy and market values are threatened by what is described as its inauthenticity and proliferation. The lawsuit named Mr. Indiana as a defendant because he was party to the agreement that Morgan argues has been violated. Mr. Salama Caro said that among the troubling recent pieces was "WINE," a sculpture that mimics the monumental imagery of "LOVE." The magazine Wine Enthusiast featured the sculpture on its May cover and published an interview with Mr. Indiana, conducted by email, in which he described his long affection for wine and said he had created another work using malbec as a stain. Barbara Haskell, who curated the Whitney's Indiana retrospective, said she was surprised that Mr. Indiana had created a "WINE" sculpture. "Whatever four letter words he used, they were always psychologically charged," she said. What's more, Professor Wilmerding and several other friends said they had not known Mr. Indiana to be a wine drinker. Mr. McKenzie said that Mr. Indiana had indeed been a lover of wine and that it was offensive to suggest the artist was not entitled to explore new directions. The sculpture "WINE," credited to Mr. Indiana, was featured on a magazine cover and accompanied by an interview. Mr. Salama Caro said it was among the recent pieces that troubled him. Mr. Indiana's move to Vinalhaven came at a time when he was embittered by rampant copying, declining prices and a lack of appreciation of his other art beyond "LOVE." If it was Mr. Indiana's intention to vanish, it's difficult to completely disappear on Vinalhaven, a place of granite quarries and lobster boats, whose 1,200 year round residents know each other at a level familiar to anyone who has lived in a small town. And Mr. Indiana lived in perhaps the island's most remarkable building, a former chapter headquarters of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows on Main Street that is a landmark and has its own name, the Star of Hope. He used to open the house for tours, residents say, and eat breakfast down the road at a diner on the dock. But sightings of him had been rare in recent years, and those who have been able to visit him say that he had grown gaunt and spoken of health problems. The chief caretaker, Mr. Thomas, 53, who once operated a seafood business on the island, had served as Mr. Indiana's studio assistant for several years. He did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Dan Mills, director of the Bates museum, said the museum's 2016 Indiana show was arranged through Mr. McKenzie, who had helped organize the show's tour in conjunction with Landau Traveling Exhibitions. He said he did not speak with Mr. Indiana during that time but later traveled to Vinalhaven to see the artist and was told he was not available. Professor Wilmerding traveled to Bates, in Lewiston, Me., to tour the Indiana exhibit and said it felt odd, like being in a "twilight zone." He recognized many of the older works, he said, but found some of the newer ones unsettling. "It is Bob's vocabulary," he said, "but I wonder if it is his voice."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
WOODSTOCK, N.Y. When the first Woodstock music festival was held in 1969, bringing around 400,000 people to a muddy field in Bethel, N.Y., it focused the world's attention on pop music's power to shape the culture. Half a century later, in a music market already jammed with big ticket festivals, could another Woodstock muster the same impact? Michael Lang, one of the producers of the original event, is betting that it can. From Aug. 16 to 18 almost exactly 50 years after the first Woodstock he will present an official anniversary festival, Woodstock 50, in Watkins Glen, N.Y., with ambitions to not only attract a huge multigenerational audience but to rally those fans around a message of social activism. Mr. Lang, who at 74 still has some of the cherubic look seen in the 1970 documentary "Woodstock" though his curls are threaded with gray said in an interview at the festival office in Woodstock that he is still booking the acts for the new show; he is hoping for a mixture of legacy bands, current pop and rap stars and, possibly, some news making combinations. But his vision for Woodstock's 50th, he said, is clear: a large scale camping weekend combining music with a program of films, speakers and partnerships with organizations like Head count, which registers young voters. "Coachella's got its thing, as does Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza," Mr. Lang said. "But I think they're all missing an opportunity to make a difference in the world. They're all perfect places for social engagement and for fostering ideas, and I think that's lost." "We want this to be more than just coming to a concert," he added. "And hopefully a lot of the bands will become part of this effort to get people to stand up and make themselves heard, to get and out vote. And if they don't have a candidate that represents their feelings, to find one or to run themselves." Yet activism plays a significant part in a number of festivals. Environmental sustainability is central to Bonnaroo, for example, and this year Jay Z's Made in America Festival, in Philadelphia, has "Cause Village," with some 56 charitable and activist organizations represented. Woodstock 50 will be held in the fields surrounding the Watkins Glen International racetrack, where the Summer Jam in 1973 drew an estimated 600,000 people for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and the Band; more recently, it has been the site of two festivals by Phish. For Woodstock, three main stages will be supplemented by three smaller "neighborhoods," as Mr. Lang described them, with their own food and programming. Tickets? Mr. Lang and his team are still working on that. But they envision selling a maximum of around 100,000 three day passes, with most attendees camping on site. As with its other anniversary years, Woodstock's 50th will be widely celebrated and exploited in the media, with books, albums and a PBS documentary among the projects planned. But unlike the last Woodstock anniversary concerts, in 1994 and 1999, which Mr. Lang presented along with partners, the event now faces severe competition from large scale festivals around the country. Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, the three biggest, are now highly developed brand names, with the drawing power to sell out well in advance; tickets for Coachella's two weekends, for example, sold out in a matter of hours last week. There is even a competing Woodstock: the Bethel Woods Music and Culture Festival, over the same anniversary weekend which will also feature "TED style talks" will be held on the same grounds as the original, around 60 miles from the town of Woodstock. (The Watkins Glen site is further afield, about 30 miles west of Ithaca.) For many concertgoers, another issue is whether the Woodstock name itself was damaged by the 1999 festival, which was marred by fires, rioting and reports of sexual assault. "It's not tainted," Mr. Lang said. "'99 was more like an MTV event than a Woodstock event, really. I take some responsibility for that. It was also kind of an angry time in music." And then there is the corporate consolidation of the concert business, which has grown especially intense over the last few years as two companies, Live Nation and AEG, compete to book major tours. Live Nation is a partner in the Bethel Woods event. "The industry has completely changed since 1999," said John Scher, the veteran concert promoter who was a partner with Mr. Lang on Woodstock '94 and '99. "The entrepreneurial spirit of 1969 doesn't exist anymore." Mr. Lang declined to discuss the budget for Woodstock 50, but festivals of its size typically spend tens of millions on talent alone. "We paid 135,000 for all of our talent in 1969," Mr. Lang said. "Times have changed." The festival is being financed by the Dentsu Aegis Network, a unit of the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu; agencies within the Dentsu Aegis Network will be involved in marketing and selling sponsorships. One advantage for Woodstock 50 is that it is "official." Mr. Lang remains a partner in Woodstock Ventures, the company that controls the trademark rights, and licenses it for various products. The one Mr. Lang has been closest to is Woodstock Cannabis. "Cannabis has always been in our DNA," Mr. Lang said with a smile; his first commercial venture, in 1966, was a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. Of the other young men on the team that created Woodstock Joel Rosenman, John Roberts and Artie Kornfeld Rosenman is a partner in Woodstock Ventures, along with the family of Roberts, who died in 2001. Kornfeld will return as a consultant and "spiritual adviser," Mr. Lang said. Merchandise sales particularly featuring the original Woodstock bird and guitar logo provide one proxy for gauging the continuing appeal of the Woodstock brand. Dell Furano, the chief executive of Epic Rights, who has handled official Woodstock merchandise for 15 years, said that he is expecting over 100 million in retail sales of Woodstock licensed products in 2019 four or five times that of non anniversary years.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Peace has come to the land of the Redstones, at least for now. The family feud that had persisted even after a truce was declared last week in the fight over Sumner M. Redstone's 40 billion corporate empire appeared on Friday to be on its way to a resolution. Mr. Redstone has agreed to meet in person with Keryn Redstone, his 34 year old granddaughter, who joined his former confidants in the bitter legal battle challenging his competence. That meeting will be part of a broader resolution that includes clarifying her role as an equal beneficiary of the trust that will control Mr. Redstone's companies after he dies or is declared incompetent. The agreement paves the way for a conclusion to a vicious legal battle that has included court fights in Massachusetts, Delaware and California. Ms. Redstone had challenged the settlement reached last week that put an end to the battle for control of Viacom. Ms. Redstone agreed on Friday for the Massachusetts court to dismiss the claims brought by Philippe P. Dauman and George S. Abrams, two former directors of the trust, in a suit asserting that Mr. Redstone lacked the mental capacity to make decisions about his businesses.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
The Stanislaus County Jail in Modesto, Calif. The percentage of Americans behind bars has roughly tripled in the last 40 years. In the U.S., Punishment Comes Before the Crimes Few things are better at conveying what a nation really cares than how it spends its money. On that measure, Americans like to punish. The United States spent about 80 billion on its system of jails and prisons in 2010 about 260 for every resident of the nation. By contrast, its budget for food stamps was 227 a person. In 2012, 2.2 million Americans were in jail or prison, a larger share of the population than in any other country; and that is about five times the average for fellow industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The nation's unique strategy on crime underscores the distinct path followed by American social and economic institutions compared with the rest of the industrialized world. Scholars don't have a great handle on why crime fighting in the United States veered so decidedly toward mass incarceration. But the pivotal moment seems to have occurred four decades ago. In 1974, the criminologist Robert Martinson published "What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform." Efforts at rehabilitation, it concluded, were a waste of time. "With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism," he wrote. Standard rehabilitation strategies, he suggested, "cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendency for offenders to continue in criminal behavior." Crime was rising in the 1960s and 1970s, alarming the public and increasing the risk to politicians of appearing "soft" on crime. The decline in manufacturing employment, once the backbone of many urban economies, wasn't helping. Later, in the 1980s and '90s, crack cocaine became a scourge of the nation's inner cities. But as Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles, note in their book "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?," what drove up imprisonment rates was not crime but policy. If rehabilitation was out of reach, the thinking went, all that was left was to remove criminals from society and, through harsh sentencing, deter future crime. From 1975 through 2002, all 50 states adopted mandatory sentencing laws, specifying minimum sentences. Many also adopted "three strikes" laws to punish recidivists. Judges lost the power to offer shorter sentences. And the prison population surged. Four decades ago, the correctional population in the United States was not that dissimilar from the rest of the developed world. Less than 0.2 percent of the American population was in a correctional institution. By 2012, however, the share of Americans behind bars of one sort or another had more than tripled to 0.7 percent. Bruce Western of Harvard suggests a specific American motivation, which sprang to some degree from the victories of the civil rights movement. "The crime debate was racialized to an important degree," Professor Western told me. "The anxieties white voters felt were not just about crime but about fundamental social changes going on in American society." Today, a little under half the state and federal prison population is black. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a black boy born in 2001 had a 32.2 percent chance of doing time behind bars. Professor Raphael is wary of linking incarceration with income dynamics. Still, he agrees the trends are suspiciously similar. "In the 1970s, something changes," he told me. "The increasing concentration of income at the top follows the incarceration rate almost perfectly." Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. The United States had another singularity: a comparatively small welfare state that struggled to address social and economic dislocation. "The criminal justice system became the only effective institution that could bring order and manage urban communities," Professor Pager said. Prison, according to Professor Western, "became a last resort for a whole variety of social failures." Whether it is caused by problems with mental health, drug abuse or unemployment, he said, "all the people that slip through the safety net and end up in crime end up in the prison system." What did we get from this? Crime rates have fallen by almost half since 1990, to the lowest level since the early 1970s. But that may have little to do with mass incarceration. Demographic trends there are simply fewer young men around help explain much of the decline. Some states, like New York, have managed to reduce crime even while cutting the prison population through better policing. The United States still suffers higher rates of violent crimes than European countries that have lighter sentencing policies. In 2012, the United States had five intentional homicides for each 100,000 people. In Canada, the rate was 1.8. In Australia, 1.2. Mass imprisonment not only suffers from diminishing returns. After a certain point, it might actually increase crime. Indeed, a growing body of research has concluded that the costs of the strategy are much steeper than prisoners' room and board. Anna Aizer of Brown University and Joseph J. Doyle Jr. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that putting a minor in juvenile detention reduced his likelihood of graduating from high school by 13 percentage points and increased his odds of being incarcerated as an adult by 23 percentage points. The impact of incarceration on a former inmate's future life is difficult to disentangle. Still, a report by Mr. Western and Becky Pettit of the University of Washington suggested that serving time reduced men's hourly wage by 11 percent and annual employment by nine weeks. More than half of inmates have minor children. Their children are almost six times as likely to be expelled or suspended from school. Family incomes fall 22 percent during the years fathers are incarcerated. On Wednesday, the National Academy of Sciences is unveiling a report on the causes and consequences of American mass incarceration. On Thursday, the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project will present its evaluation, alongside an analysis by Mr. Raphael and Mr. Stoll, which suggests that less imprisonment might not produce more crime. California which had to release tens of thousands of prisoners in 2011 and 2012 to reduce prison crowding offers a perspective into what life might be with a more lenient approach. According to calculations by Professors Raphael and Stoll, there were 1.2 more auto thefts for every prison year not served. Violent crime wasn't affected at all. Extrapolating to a national scale, they estimated that reducing the imprisonment rate by 20 percent would lead to 121 new property crimes for every 100,000 Americans, a 5 percent increase over 2012.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
A glass sheathed three bedroom condominium with vistas in four directions, including 60 feet of direct views of Central Park, One 57, the Extell Development Company's 90 story Midtown tower at , sold for 34 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. The listing price was 36 million. The residence, No. 58A, holds the distinction of being the first apartment in the 94 unit skyscraper to be flipped. The monthly carrying costs are a manageable 7,363, thanks to a tax abatement that has proved extremely popular with buyers. Being the beneficiary of a bargain negotiated by the sponsor apparently causes a psychological uplift at closing. The 4,483 square foot apartment, which has nearly 12 foot ceilings and more than 120 windows, has interiors by Thomas Juul Hansen and a Smallbone of Devizes kitchen; each of the four and a half baths has a different stone finish, and the 24 by 16 foot master bedroom has dual marble baths and three walk in closets. Noble Black of the Corcoran Group handled the listing for SSO Enterprises, a limited liability company based in Chicago that paid 30.55 million for the apartment in May but ultimately decided not to retain it as a pied a terre. The buyer, also shielded by a limited liability company, One 57 Realty, was represented by David Benmen, Daniel Messing and Benjamin Benalloul of RLTY NYC, a new brokerage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Watching a ballet, you cannot help but marvel at the power of the movement, and the ability of the dancers to soar through the air, time and again, as if there were no limits to their stamina. And so it is well, almost with the market for high end properties, where the intensity of sales, at heights never seen before, defied gravity in 2012, whether it was in New York, London, Miami, Los Angeles or Hong Kong. Is there a day of reckoning on the horizon? Just how many more buyers will be willing to pay 88 million for an apartment in Manhattan, or 121 million for a 10,000 square foot Chelsea house like the one the developers Nick and Christian Candy bought in London in September? Or 117.5 million for a nearly nine acre estate in Woodside, Calif., in Silicon Valley, the highest price ever paid for a residence in the United States? The short answer is a lot. New reports out this week suggest that the residential luxury buying ballet is very likely poised for a sustained performance. The buying seems to draw traction from the fact that there will be so many more newly minted rich people hunting for properties. Over the next 10 years, some 95,000 more people around the world are expected to see their wealth grow to at least 30 million, according to a forecast by Knight Frank, a London based real estate company, which puts the current number of such people at 189,835. Then there are the global billionaires, a crowd with an almost insatiable appetite for trophy properties, like the penthouse at 15 Central Park West that the daughter of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian potash fertilizer billionaire, bought last year for 88 million, or 13,000 per square foot. The number of billionaires will grow by 85 percent over the next decade, to 4,076, Knight Frank forecasts. Europe and Asia, which have more billionaires than anywhere else, will still lead the way. New York City is emerging as a favorite. "There was a stage three to five years ago where London was quite clearly the main market for Russian and European super wealthy buyers, but New York is becoming so much more on the radar of these buyers," said Liam Bailey, head of research for Knight Frank. "Latin American wealth really isn't coming to London, it is going to Miami and New York." The buyers of luxurious penthouses, town houses and country estates are increasingly coming from the so called BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India and China where people are becoming very rich at a stunning rate. Even with inflation concerns in some of those countries, the combined annual G.N.P. growth of those four countries is equivalent to the creation of a new economy the size of Italy. Knight Frank said that through 2022 China would see its pool of billionaires grow by 214 percent, to 483; Brazil by 157 percent, to 136; and India by 84 percent, to 225. Consider, too, what is happening in Brazil, a country that has driven high end sales in Miami, and to some extent New York, more than any other of late. The number of Brazilians with at least 30 million in assets is expected to climb by nearly 140 percent over the next decade, according to Knight Frank. A growing middle class and production of natural resources are at the heart of the wealth creation. The Brazilians aren't focused on buying fancier properties at home, although they are doing that as well. They want second and third homes abroad, and they want them now. Knight Frank found that Web searches by South Americans in 2012 for luxury residential properties surged by 82 percent, although they tend to focus on the lower end of that market. It was the region of the world with the biggest uptick. (Africa was second, with 48 percent, followed by Europe.) Whether they know it or not, the global wealthy are facing stiffer competition from one another. Russians seemed to be everywhere scouring for trophy properties in 2012. They are facing increasing competition from Asian buyers, especially from China and Hong Kong, as well as from Latin America, Knight Frank said. The buyer of the 117.5 million home in Woodside, for example, was Japan's second richest man, Masayoshi Son, according to The Los Angeles Times. Forbes has estimated his wealth at 8.6 billion. Vladislav Doronin, the Moscow based real estate developer who dates the model Naomi Campbell, has spent more than 20 million to renovate a home on Star Island in Miami. He also has homes on the Spanish island of Ibiza, at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, and at One Hyde Park in London; the latter two have become billionaire dens. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. London, Miami and New York came to epitomize the so called safe haven market in 2012. Even with burgeoning demand from the wealthy for property as a safer and potentially more profitable investment than stock markets and other financial instruments the number of "desirable locations remains virtually static," Knight Frank said. So buyers continue to focus on these few "key hubs." But Knight Frank predicted that wealthy people this year would expand their searches to include European cities previously thought to be too economically distressed: Milan, Madrid, Barcelona and Dublin, which will join Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva and Vienna as "core European targets." Some governments, concerned about affordability, are challenging the buying spree, through efforts to tinker with the luxury property markets. Last March the British government, seeking to crack down on tax avoidance, bolstered its "stamp duty" by 40 percent on properties valued over PS2 million. Last month the Hong Kong government, concerned about a property bubble, raised stamp duties and tightened mortgage lending. But while the changes imposed in the United Kingdom have added revenue to government coffers, they have done little to slow the buying, Knight Frank said. Singapore also raised its stamp duty and made it tougher for foreigners to buy. In the end, the global luxury property market is functioning in its own universe, seemingly removed from general real estate trends. It "remains relatively impervious to these trends and more closely follows the luxury goods market," Christie's International Real Estate said in a study released this week. Cash is king. Buyers paid cash in every deal over 20 million brokered last year by Hilton Hyland Real Estate in Beverly Hills, Calif., which saw a 64 percent increase in year on year sales volume, to 1.8 billion, from 1.1 billion in 2011, said Jeffrey Hyland, a co owner. Banks in New York, at least, have begun to lend more for construction financing. But credit for home purchases remains tight in the broader United States real estate market.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
MADRID Officials across Europe scrambled on Friday to speed measures aimed at easing the fears of investors even as borrowing costs flirted with new highs in the euro zone's frailer countries. In Portugal, lawmakers approved a tough 2011 budget to help the country meet a pledge to cut the deficit to 4.6 percent of gross domestic product next year, from 9.3 percent in 2009. In Spain, the central bank demanded greater disclosure from banks. And it announced plans for new stress tests to show investors that financial institutions, particularly weaker savings banks, could absorb a "problematic exposure" of 180 billion euros ( 238 billion) to the country's collapsed construction and real estate sectors. Meanwhile, a team of European Union and International Monetary Fund specialists in Ireland was racing to complete terms of its financing package before markets reopened on Monday. The efforts came at the end of a week in which borrowing costs in all three countries soared, underlining the extent to which Ireland's financial crisis has wounded investor confidence, notably by undermining the credibility of stress tests carried out in July on Irish and other European banks. "We could end up with a problem, because in the markets expectations can become self fulfilling prophecies," Jose Luis Malo de Molina, chief economist at the Bank of Spain, said Thursday. He also urged the government to stick to its spending cuts because "the evolution of public finances will be the crucial touchstone to maintain confidence." Like other Spanish officials, Mr. Malo de Molina insisted that Spain's problems could not be compared to Ireland's. "The Bank of Spain is convinced that additional transparency efforts will help reduce the doubts and unfounded suspicions that spread in moments of market nervousness," he said. The Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, went a step further, telling a radio station that Spain would "absolutely" not seek outside help and predicting that "those who are taking short positions against Spain are going to be mistaken." Amid reports Friday that the European Central Bank was again buying Portuguese and Irish bonds, the price of Portugal's 10 year bonds rebounded slightly, pushing yields down nine hundredths of a percentage point, to 6.69 percent. That was almost two and a half times the yield on German bonds, the euro zone benchmark. The yield on 10 year Irish bonds climbed 0.11 percentage point, to 8.88 percent. And the cost of protecting debt sold by Irish banks set new highs after The Irish Times reported that the European Union I.M.F. mission to Dublin was examining ways in which senior bondholders could be compelled to pay some of the cost of rescuing Ireland's banks. Those banks were downgraded Friday by the Standard Poor's ratings firm. The spread, or differential, between the yields on Spanish 10 year government bonds and German bonds set a euro era record Friday, widening to 2.64 percentage points. It fell back to 2.43 percentage points on an announcement that Spain would sell less debt than initially planned before the end of the year as its financing needs were already covered. The euro, which traded above 1.40 as recently as Nov. 5, had fallen Friday to 1.3237, down 3.2 percent for the week. Meanwhile, European officials joined their Portuguese counterparts in rejecting reports that Portugal was being pressed by European partners to accept a bailout to help calm markets. "This is not the position of the ministry," said Bertrand Benoit, spokesman for the German finance ministry. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission and a former prime minister of Portugal, told reporters at a conference in Paris that "any reference to an aid plan" for Portugal was "absolutely false." He added, "It's being neither demanded nor has it been suggested by us." After the vote Friday in Portugal, the prime minister, Jose Socrates, said the country had "no alternative at all" to the belt tightening policy. "We must make this effort," Mr. Socrates was quoted as saying by The Associated Press. Under pressure from investors, Mr. Socrates presented an additional package of austerity measures in September that was initially rejected by the Social Democrat opposition because it contained tax increases. Mr. Socrates is in his second term in office but without a parliamentary majority. Portugal's two biggest parties eventually brokered a deal to avert a government collapse, which cleared the way for the vote Friday, in which Social Democrat lawmakers abstained. But that has failed to dispel concerns about the government's ability to control spending. Rather than falling, Portugal's deficit widened 2.3 percent, to 9.32 billion euros, in the first nine months of this year. Portuguese unions on Wednesday coordinated the country's first general strike in more than two decades to protest the austerity program. The concerns have spilled over into Spain, pushing up its borrowing costs even though the latest data suggests Madrid will meet its target of cutting its deficit this year to 9.3 percent of G.D.P., from 11.1 percent in 2009. An austerity package adopted last May has helped cut Spain's central government deficit 47 percent in the first 10 months of this year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
World TeamTennis, the coed professional tennis league that has operated in summers after Wimbledon since the 1970s, has chosen a site in West Virginia to conduct its entire 2020 season, according to several people familiar with the league's plans. Play on the men's and women's professional tennis tours has been suspended until at least Aug. 3, but World TeamTennis plans to stage a three week season featuring nine teams from July 12 to Aug. 1 at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The reigning Australian Open women's singles champion, Sofia Kenin; the 2017 United States Open women's singles champion, Sloane Stephens; and the most successful men's doubles team in the game's history, the twins Bob and Mike Bryan, are among the players who have committed to participate. With no tournaments available on either the ATP or the WTA tours for the next two months, World TeamTennis officials are expected to pursue other marquee signings before play begins. Carlos Silva, the league's chief executive, declined to comment on Saturday. In an interview last week with The Associated Press, Silva said World TeamTennis was "still on track for July 12" to open the season, adding that an announcement about site selection was imminent. The Greenbrier is owned by Jim Justice, the state's governor.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
As two museums devoted to the designer Yves Saint Laurent open this month, in Paris and Marrakesh, there has been plenty of chatter in fashion and cafe society (what's left of it) about the estate of Pierre Berge, the pugnacious business brain behind the original Yves Saint Laurent fashion empire. Mr. Berge died of myopathy at 86 last month. In March, he had married Madison Cox, a 59 year old American garden designer, in a private civil ceremony near Deauville, France, making Mr. Cox his presumptive legal heir. Whatever the fiscal strategy behind this union, Mr. Berge seemed determined to make one last symbolic point about their relationship, which lasted more than 35 years and had involved an operatic emotional triangle with Mr. Saint Laurent, who died in 2008. As weddings go, it was unusual in at least one respect: Mr. Cox has another partner of 11 years, Jaimal Odedra, a Bollywood costume designer and creator of home accessories. "They're both highly talented and accomplished gentlemen," Ms. Spear said. "They complement each other." Mr. Cox, the estate's executor, declined to be interviewed for this article. But many have been unable to resist making a quick mental inventory of Mr. Berge's holdings: the paintings, the furniture, the libraries and the cash; an auction of his and Mr. Saint Laurent's personal collection fetched hundreds of millions in 2009. (The interest Mr. Berge held in the French daily Le Monde has already been divested.) Those who pictured Mr. Cox shuttlingluxuriously among the homes Mr. Berge kept in Paris, Normandy, St. Remy de Provence, Marrakesh and Tangier will be disappointed, according to Quito Fierro, the chief administrative officer of the Jardin Majorelle Foundation. The foundation is a subsidiary of the Pierre Berge Yves Saint Laurent Foundation that operates, along with the museum in Marrakesh, the public Majorelle Garden and a museum of Berber culture there. The vacation house Mr. Berge built in Normandy was not his, Mr. Fierro said; he simply retained the right to use the house after selling it and Chateau Gabriel, on the same grounds, following Mr. Saint Laurent's death. And the other residences including Villa Mabrouka in Tangier, which has been on and off the market in recent years with an asking price of around 10 million will be sold to benefit the umbrella foundation, whose presidency has passed from Mr. Berge to Mr. Cox, Mr. Fierro said. No one should be worried about Mr. Cox's housing, however. Villa Oasis, the lavish Orientalist fantasy where Mr. Berge lived in Marrakesh, is part of the Majorelle Foundation, but is Mr. Cox's in all but name, a perk that comes with the guardianship of Mr. Saint Laurent's artistic legacy. For all the clucking and tallying, Mr. Cox and Mr. Berge's wedding was met with little more than a nod by those who track the movements of the forbidding and glamorous, if increasingly diminished, clan that surrounded Mr. Saint Laurent. Christopher Gibbs, a neighbor in Tangier, where Mr. Cox has a residence of his own, called him "a saintly figure, which could not be said of Pierre." Mr. Gibbs, a retired dealer in high bohemian antiques who dressed the sets for the Mick Jagger film "Performance," praised Mr. Cox for being "such a wonderful support to Pierre, through thick and thin, and for so many years. I weep for Madison having all this responsibility. It's beyond the call of duty." Jane Kramer, in her takedown of Mr. Berge in The New Yorker in 1994, put Mr. Berge's unsaintliness another way, writing, "He has a lugubrious, rather terrifying self regard." He appears "undisturbed by the tempering plain truths of self reflection," she wrote, noting that his wrath was "legendary." Mr. Berge had more than one "L'Amour Fou" (crazy love), the name he gave the 2010 documentary about him and Mr. Saint Laurent. In published letters he wrote to Mr. Saint Laurent after the designer died, he made Mr. Cox's place in the hierarchy of his heart clear. "With you, Madison remains the most important relationship of my life." He arrived "when alcohol and drugs had taken possession of you." "Thanks to Madison, probably, I weathered the storm," Mr. Berge continued. "He gave me what I needed: his youth, culture, courage, integrity, love." "You loved him, hated him, then loved him again." Maria Callas could not have sung the strangulated story of Mr. Berge, Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Cox any better. In 1976, nearly two decades after meeting, Mr. Berge broke romantically from Mr. Saint Laurent. Still, jealousy and possessiveness ran high, and the men remained business partners. Accounts of the Cox Berge introduction vary. Mr. Cox has placed it in Paris in 1978; Annabelle d'Huart, a jewelry designer and member of the old Saint Laurent tribe, puts their first meeting in New York a year earlier, when Mr. Cox was a student at Parsons. At the time, Mr. Berge was involved with Joel Le Bon, who was in charge of the music for the Saint Laurent shows and worked for Interview magazine in Paris. "I introduced Joel to Madison, they fell in love, and Madison followed Joel to Paris, transferring to Parsons there," Ms. d'Huart said. Mr. Berge got to know Mr. Cox better during a trip they took with her and Mr. Le Bon. to the Aeolian Islands the following summer. According to Mattia Bonetti, a furniture designer who knew Mr. Cox in Paris in the 1980s, "Madison was first with Joel, then Yves, then finally Pierre." After the holiday in the Aeolians, "Madison ascended quickly in the Saint Laurent clan," Ms. d'Huart said. "Joel no longer measured up and was dropped. The clan was like a tank that rolled over you, then moved on, laughing loudly and shrugging, 'Who cares?' Joel died of AIDS, forgotten." Mr. Bonetti said that in the beginning, Mr. Cox and Mr. Berge "saw each other, not in a hidden way, but separate from Yves, to avoid scenes." Over dinner one night when Mr. Cox had stepped away from the table, Mr. Bonetti said Mr. Berge asked him, "'What do I have to do to keep him?' I told him, 'You have to give Madison everything, and I don't mean materially, because otherwise he's going to leave.'" Mr. Berge felt obliged to engage someone else for the garden at Gabriel, because of the tension that using Mr. Cox would have created with Mr. Saint Laurent. The job fell to a Louis Benech, who would later turn his hand to the Tuileries. "I said to Pierre that I didn't see the point of my working at Gabriel when he could hire his friend," Mr. Benech recalled. "'Too complicated,'" he said. "'Period.'" Peter Dunham, a decorator in Los Angeles, met Mr. Cox in Paris during his early years with Mr. Berge. "Pierre really didn't allow Madison to have friends," Mr. Dunham said. "He lived a very controlled, gilded cage existence."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
In early 2008, William J. Rouhana Jr. closed a deal to buy Chicken Soup for the Soul, a company known for a series of inspirational books, with the goal of expanding the brand into a host of other products. The popular line of books was started by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen in 1993, but the company had also ventured successfully into calendars, greeting cards and even pet food. Today, Mr. Rouhana, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, can catalog the brand's attempted expansions even a line of soups, including chicken that have failed in the last nine years. The company tried different approaches in the digital space, where, Mr. Rouhana admitted, "we've had our most colossal failures." He added, "We thought a big motion picture would be helpful to the brand." Mr. Rouhana almost had a movie until the studio providing financial support backed out, citing losses from a blockbuster movie that cut into its budget for smaller films. Yet he has expanded the brand again, and is more optimistic this time. Entrepreneurs are idea generating machines, and the urge to extend a brand is natural. Yet even the biggest companies in the world regularly fail when adding new products. So what chance does an entrepreneur have? An entrepreneur has to be sure the brand tells consumers what to expect, said Kelly Goldsmith, associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. "Haagen Dazs tells you to expect high quality ice cream," she said. "It's a blessing and a curse. It sets expectations for quality and everyday luxury. But it limits you, because the ice cream association is always there." Imagine, she said, Heineken popcorn or Exxon ice cream. The dissonance between the brand and the new product is too strong to let the new product work. Some extensions work because they draw off a larger emotion associated with the brand, not a specific product. Ms. Newmark redesigned the books, keeping the company brand but giving them separate titles. Jules B. Kroll, who started his corporate intelligence service, Kroll Inc., in 1972, is credited with creating the industry of rooting out financial criminals around the world. He had the bona fides to prove it, finding money hidden by dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2004, Mr. Kroll sold Kroll Inc. to Marsh McLennan. Motivated by the bad job that bond rating agencies did during the financial crisis, he started Kroll Bond Rating Agency in 2010. The esoteric world of bond ratings, on the surface, would seem to have little in common with the glitter of international money laundering and corporate chicanery. But Jim Nadler, Mr. Kroll's co founder in the bond rating firm, said Mr. Kroll was trading on his reputation for integrity and tenacity. "It was Jules's reputation for getting the story straight and not stopping until he got it straight," Mr. Nadler said. "He was tenacious in evaluating the situation. I thought that's exactly what we need." Mr. Nadler said the firm was projected to report 90 million in revenue this year. "We've done so well," he said, "because we've connected with investors on this issue of transparency," an attribute that Mr. Kroll championed in his previous business. Not all ideas for brand extensions are good ones. In fact, most are bad, said Tatiana J. Whytelord, president and founder of Intelligent Brand Extension. "It's not just 'I've just launched a vodka and it's working very, very well, and now I'm going to go do a gin,'" she said. "Vodka and gin are very different worlds different consumers, different ways of production, very different images. The fact that you were successful in making a vodka doesn't mean you'll be successful in making a gin." In that example, she said, it may make more sense for the company to try branded barware instead of another spirit. "That requires knowing what the market is looking for at that particular moment," she said. Why Chicken Soup for the Soul struggled to sell soup would seem baffling, but the problem turned out to be a bad partnership. Mr. Rouhana said he had worked with a company, Daymon Worldwide, that made generic, white label products. The soup sold well, but not well enough. When problems arose with the partner, Mr. Rouhana said, he knew he could not continue the line on his own. "I didn't have the capital or the expertise to fix it," he said. But the pet food, which the company now produces itself, is thriving. "The pet food clearly succeeded because of their emotional message, which appeals to a segment of dog owners who think of their animal as their child," said Edward M. Tauber, president of Brand Extension Research. "In order to extend your brand, you have to have a brand first," Ms. Whytelord said. "It's not just that you trademarked a name. It's that you have an existing product or service that has good will in it and value and is selling in good volumes." One of the cautionary tales in rapid brand expansion is Pierre Cardin, the fashion designer who was once synonymous with French luxury style. But then he expanded the brand too quickly and broadly. What was once a prestigious name is now a mass market brand. It's better for entrepreneurs to go deeper into what they already do, brand consultants say. This is what Chicken Soup for the Soul has done with its books. Amy Newmark, publisher and editor in chief of the books and Mr. Rouhana's wife, said that there were about 180 titles when they bought the brand but that only 150 conformed to the series' format, containing 101 inspirational stories. As part of the acquisition of the brand, the company started publishing the books in house. Ms. Newmark redesigned the books it had, cut the ones that did not conform to the format and created new titles. The key to this, she said, was changing the titles of the books. Under Mr. Canfield and Mr. Hansen, the pattern was "Chicken Soup for the Fill in the Blank Soul." She simply branded the books Chicken Soup for the Soul at the top and then gave each book the appropriate title without the old constraints. The line now has 300 titles. "My experience in book selling was colored by my experience as a Wall Street portfolio manager," Ms. Newmark said. "I put my heart into these books, but if they're not selling, I cut my losses more quickly."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
When the director Spike Jonze was preparing his first movie, "Being John Malkovich," 20 years ago, he couldn't stop listening to "The Rockafeller Skank," otherwise known as "The Funk Soul Brother," a hit song by Fatboy Slim. He had a vision of filming someone, maybe himself, dancing to it on a crowded sidewalk. As Mr. Jonze, 48, recounted it in a phone interview from Los Angeles, one night after work he gathered a boombox, some dorky clothes and hair gel, and drove with a cinematographer to Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. There, in front of a crowd of cinephiles waiting to watch a Stanley Kubrick retrospective, he showed off his moves on the Walk of Fame and spontaneously created a character. The fun might have ended there, but Mr. Jonze sent the footage to Fatboy Slim, who figured out that this goofball was the director whose credentials included standout music videos that are at once silly, clever and hip: Weezer's "Buddy Holly," the Beastie Boys's "Sabotage." Would Mr. Jonze repeat the sidewalk stunt in a video for Mr. Slim's next song, "Praise You"? Mr. Jonze pushed the idea further, giving his alter ego a name, Richard Koufey, and a fictional crew, the Torrance Community Dance Group. In the faux amateur video, they execute their awkward routines outside a movie theater, earning the disapproval of the management and the love of the crowd. At the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, the video won in three categories, including best choreography. Mr. Jonze accepted as Richard Koufey. "Being John Malkovich" was also a success, and soon Mr. Jonze would be accepting awards for it, on his way to becoming famous as a director of imaginative, oddball feature films like "Adaptation" (2002) and "Her" (2013). He might have left dance behind. But he keeps returning to it see this year's Apple HomePod ad, displaying the charming moves of FKA twigs not as a stunt but as serious play. It's no exaggeration to call his music videos and commercials some of the best dance films of recent decades. Which is why this year's Dance on Camera Festival (July 20 24, presented by the Dance Films Association and the Film Society of Lincoln Center) includes a 47 minute compilation of Mr. Jonze's work in dance, which he selected himself. Liz Wolff, a curator of the festival, said: "We like to celebrate an artist working in the genre in a different way. Spike is the perfect candidate because of the brilliant choreography he creates for the camera." The program, scheduled for Saturday evening, is called "Spike Jonze Is a Dancer." But aside from "Praise You," Mr. Jonze does most of his dancing behind the lens. When he was a teenager, he said, he was more inspired by music than by film. For him, the dance that mattered this was the 1980s was "obviously" in Michael Jackson videos. Also formative was the Talking Heads video for "Once in a Lifetime," the one where David Byrne works up a sweat doing kooky convulsions in a bow tie. "Wait, you can dance like that?" Mr. Jonze remembers thinking. As a filmmaker, he got his start making whimsical street skateboarding videos like "Video Days" (1991). That led to music videos for bands he loved, like Sonic Youth and the Breeders. But he didn't think about filming dance until he directed a video for Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" (1995). It's set in an auto body shop, and every time the music explodes with emotion, the people around Bjork start sliding and spinning as if they were in an old Hollywood musical. "It felt so natural," Mr. Jonze recalled. "Filming dance was like filming skateboarding. There's one place to put the camera to make a trick work. The camera and the skater or the dancer are collaborating and when you lock together, it's so emotionally satisfying. I got hooked." "It's Oh So Quiet" would prove characteristic of Mr. Jonze's work with dance. Although "Being John Malkovich" has a moody sequence called "Craig's Dance of Despair and Disillusionment," dance in the videos is usually an escape into liberating fantasy. These videos have an element of prankishness. Mr. Jonze is also a creator of the "Jackass" franchise. But not even "Praise You" qualifies as satire. "I never feel like I'm making fun of any character," Mr. Jonze said. Character is what moves him: "The character comes first and the choreography comes out of it." Much of the Kenzo ad grew out of Ms. Qualley's response to ideas that Mr. Jonze threw at her: Argue with your hand, skulk around and shoot people. But Mr. Jonze also brought in the choreographer Ryan Heffington, as in the earlier videos he had used the assistance of Michael Rooney. "I'm some kind of choreographer, but not quite an actual one," Mr. Jonze said. "I can come up with moves, but I can't really repeat them. I love having a real choreographer shape it with me." Why does he use dance in some projects but not others? "I'm always chasing after something that excites me," he said. "Sometimes dance seems appropriate, sometimes it's bad mustaches and wigs." And might he ever do a feature length dance film, like a musical? "When I have a story I love that needs to be told that way," he said. When making features, he noted, he almost never operates the camera. "But with dance," he said, "so much of what makes it correct is the camera moving when it's supposed to move, and by the time we film, I've been rehearsing that for weeks. Also, it's so fun, like doing a duet with the dancer." While selecting clips for the retrospective, Mr. Jonze said he was surprised to remember all the names of the dance moves invented for "Praise You." "That was me dancing as good as I can," he recalled, adding that he had to work really hard to get the other dancers down to his level. But as his work behind the camera shows, there are other ways to be a great dancer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
THE BUYER David A. McKnight made over a two bedroom on the Grand Concourse in the South Bronx, creating a place to suit his taste: "minimal but not bare." During his first decade in New York City, David A. McKnight lived in rentals downtown. But three years ago, when he was renting in the financial district, he decided to start saving to buy something. "It didn't make sense to pay more than 3,000 a month to rent in FiDi," said Mr. McKnight, whose business, McKnight Image Lab, offers image consulting, interior styling and life coaching. So he migrated north to Harlem, where he could not only lower his rent, but also "get to know the neighborhood and start eyeing places to buy." Mr. McKnight, 46, who is originally from Trenton, N.J., rented a one bedroom in a condominium building, paying 2,000 a month and planning to stay until he found the right place. A year later, his landlady unexpectedly put the unit on the market, asking 595,000. He could have bought it, but he didn't want to spend that much on a one bedroom that was just 600 square feet. So he moved again, this time to a two bedroom with 800 square feet in the Riverton Square complex in Harlem, where his rent was around 2,150 a month. He used the second bedroom as an office and a guest room for his many relatives. Last summer, Mr. McKnight began hunting for a place to buy with the help of a friend, Shalabh Sanger, an associate broker at Spire Group. He aimed, ideally, for a two bedroom in a co op building. "If I was going to buy something, I wanted it to be adult size," he said. And in Chicago, where he had previously lived, he had once faced a brick wall. "I vowed I would never face another brick building," he said. "I like to be able to look out and see humanity." But with a budget of up to 500,000, he was priced out of Harlem. "It was almost impossible to find what he wanted in the type of building he wanted, a newer building with modern finishes," Mr. Sanger said. Mr. McKnight considered Washington Heights and Inwood, but most of the housing stock was prewar and had no doorman. He was concerned, too, about trekking through the hilly terrain in ice and slush. When Mr. Sanger suggested the South Bronx, Mr. McKnight was intrigued. "It's been talked about as the new hot area," he said. His first Bronx visit was to a one bedroom for 229,000 in a walk up building on Walton Avenue. Maintenance was around 400 a month. The kitchen was peculiar: It consisted of appliances and cabinets lined up against one wall in the living room. He knew the apartment wasn't for him. But the neighborhood was. Mr. McKnight loved Executive Towers on the Grand Concourse. A one bedroom there was on a high floor, with sunny views to the south and east, listed for 199,000. Maintenance was around 800 a month. But it was an estate sale, and the place needed a gut renovation. And the two bedrooms in the building were too expensive, once he factored in the cost of renovation. Mr. Sanger asked the listing agent, Ariela Heilman, an associate broker at Halstead Property's Harlem office, if she knew of other available places. As it happened, Ms. Heilman was headed to another apartment on the Grand Concourse, not yet on the market. This one was a two bedroom with two bathrooms, for 399,000. Maintenance was about 1,300 a month. "I got excited because it was within my budget," Mr. McKnight said. So they all took a 10 minute walk south. Outside, the plantings were beautifully tended. "The entrance is landscaped on both sides," Ms. Heilman said. "It is like walking on a red carpet. You really feel you are arriving someplace." The building had a doorman and an elevator. The apartment was more than 1,000 square feet, and it had a dining room as well as exposures in both the front and back.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
WILMINGTON, Del. At the start of the 20th century, a Quaker cotton mill owner established the affordable housing community the Flats on the west side of this city. Its goal was to provide decent housing. And at the time, it distinguished itself by providing central heating and indoor plumbing. Today, some residents of the Flats are preparing to move away, though they will be back in a few years, in freshly constructed homes that will be less expensive to heat and cool. The development, which will eventually replace all 430 homes over the next decade, is expected to help revitalize the neighborhood first brought to life by the mill owner William Poole Bancroft, and bring more tax dollars to the city, said Jeff Flynn, acting director of economic development for Wilmington, Delaware's largest city. "The Flats is integral to the legacy of Mr. Bancroft in the City of Wilmington, and this neighborhood is part of Wilmington's urban fabric," Mr. Flynn said in an interview. "When we're trying to attract people to live in this city, we need to have strong neighborhoods." By continuing to provide affordable housing to working class families, the Flats will improve Wilmington's ability to sustain a wide cross section of residents, Mr. Flynn said. Jamear Jackson expects to move early next year from her two bedroom row home at the Flats that she shares with her husband and their 5 year old daughter. Ms. Jackson, 30, and her husband, Fred, together had an income of about 30,000 in 2013. While it may be disruptive to leave their home of the last four years, Ms. Jackson said that she had no objection and that she was looking forward to moving back to a bigger and more energy efficient home there in about two years. The family expects to pay a little more rent for the new house than their current 645 a month, but they are hoping that lower utility costs in the rebuilt home will result in smaller combined monthly bills. The Flats, overseen by the nonprofit Woodlawn Trustees, has been providing housing for "people of modest means" since it was constructed from 1902 to 1913 and is now home to about 1,750 people. The community, with its tree lined streets and shared lawns, was a pioneer in the United States in offering inexpensive rental accommodation to anyone, regardless of their affiliation with an employer, said Vernon J. Green, chief operating officer of Woodlawn, a real estate company that directs profits to the provision of affordable housing and the preservation of open space. While Woodlawn has imposed no strict income requirements on its residents, most earn 30 to 60 percent of average median income in New Castle County, which for a family of four is about 75,000 a year, Mr. Green said. Woodlawn hired Jonathan Rose Companies, a New York based real estate developer and consultant to affordable housing and other projects, to write a master plan for the 10 acre site, which is being developed by HDC MidAtlantic, a developer of affordable housing. Paul Freitag, director of real estate development for Jonathan Rose Companies, said the Flats had distinguished itself from some other affordable housing projects by focusing on common green areas. In addition, the redevelopment plan is unusual in its emphasis on environmental improvements like energy savings and water conservation, Mr. Freitag said. The Flats has been financially self sustaining for most of its lifetime, unlike many other affordable housing sites that are subsidized with tax credits or other government support. But the aging of its housing stock, with rising costs for maintenance, means it can no longer pay its own way. The redevelopment will depend on the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit and other financing sources. Backyards in the Flats. Deemed obsolete, the housing will be redeveloped. Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times The credit will pay for 60 percent of the 100 million to 120 million cost of rebuilding the complex in seven phases over the next 10 to 15 years, said Rodney A. Lambert, Woodlawn's president and chief executive. Additional help will come from sources including grants and funding from the Delaware State Housing Authority. The credit will mean that longtime tenants whose earnings have risen over the years will for the first time be subject to a check on their income when they reapply for the new housing. As a result, they may no longer be eligible to live in a community where two bedroom houses rent for an average of 780 a month and three bedroom houses cost about 890 a month. Rents in the complex are significantly cheaper than in the surrounding area of West Wilmington, where a two bedroom house costs an average of 975 a month and a three bedroom house typically costs 1,145. When construction is underway, residents will be housed in units that have been left vacant in anticipation of the redevelopment. Woodlawn will pay for them to move out and move back into newly developed homes. Ben Price, a neighbor of Ms. Jackson's and a resident of the Flats for the last 14 years, said he was looking forward to the changes. "It's a positive thing," he said. "It's going to keep me in the area." Mr. Price, 63 and retired from housekeeping at a hospital, said he pays about 600 a month in rent for his current house, and is hoping he will be able to afford the new rent. In the first phase, scheduled to begin early next year, 80 units will be torn down, and 170 people in 63 currently occupied units will be relocated. In place of the demolished structures, 72 units will be built. When all seven phases are complete, the Flats will have 450 new apartments or houses. Mr. Lambert of Woodlawn said officials considered renovating the existing structures, but concluded that they were too small and energy inefficient. In houses with little or no insulation, and rudimentary electric heating along baseboards, tenants pay 100 to 200 a month just for utilities, Mr. Lambert said. He estimated that residents would halve their energy bills in the new houses, and that combined rent and utility costs would be lower than at present. The project will also expand living spaces that may have been acceptable a century ago but are no longer desirable to residents, especially in the younger generation, which has shown more interest in renting homes than buying them. Master bedrooms in existing units typically measure eight feet by 10 feet; living rooms are often 10 feet by 11 feet; and bathtubs are only 42 inches long, Mr. Lambert said. "You can barely get a thigh and a leg in there." Officials considered building fewer rooms in the existing houses, but that would have converted, for example, a two bedroom to a one bedroom, and reduced the overall housing stock by as much as 30 percent. And the occupied buildings would still be obsolete, Mr. Green said. The agreed solution was to build anew, expanding each unit by 30 percent. The redeveloped complex will also offer social services like employment training for residents and the outside community. Jim Kelley, head of direct banking for Capital One, noted the bank's contributions to local revitalization projects and called the redevelopment an important step forward in revitalizing Wilmington's west side. "It will be a game changer for the residents and for the community," he said. When complete, the project will allow Woodlawn to perpetuate its provision of affordable housing. "This is our mission," Mr. Lambert said. "We want to do this for another 100 years."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Real Estate
Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors left behind the hunter gatherer lifestyle and started to settle down. They grew vegetables and grains for stews or porridge, kept cows for milk and turned it into cheese, and shaped clay into storage pots. Had they not done those things, would we speak the languages and make the sounds that we now hear today? Probably not, suggests a study published Thursday in Science. "Certain sounds like these 'f' sounds are recent, and we can say with fairly good confidence that 20,000 or 100,000 years ago, these sounds just simply didn't exist," said Balthasar Bickel, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the new research. The study concluded that the transition to eating softer foods changed how bites developed as people aged. The physical changes, the authors said, made it slightly easier for farmers to make certain sounds, like "f" and "v." Through various other processes that the study did not directly address, these sounds made their way into about half the languages used today. The study's authors called for greater consideration of biological factors in studying the development of human language. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. A number of linguists agreed that the findings are plausible, but others said the study's broader conclusions about agriculture's effect on language may be overstated. Some cautioned against interpretations that may unwittingly restate discredited ethnocentric or racist views that in the past have tarred the study of linguistics. Dr. Bickel and his colleagues revisited a question about the origins of language: Were some of the diverse sounds we hear today acquired only recently? While most linguists think language abilities are universal and haven't really changed over the course of human history, the new study suggested that over the past few thousand years, agriculture fostered the arrival of new sounds in human voices. In 1985, a linguist named Charles Hockett observed that "f" and "v" sounds appeared less frequently or were absent in the languages of some hunter gatherers. He proposed that dietary changes, promoted by the spread of agriculture, may have transformed teeth and jaws, making it easier for people to produce some sounds and more difficult to articulate others. But many criticized Dr. Hockett's idea, which he ultimately abandoned and that was even before linguists began favoring the brain's role in guiding language over social or physical influences. In the time since, however, researchers learned that through gradual processes, diet may shape human bite. But the connection to sounds we make remained unclear. In the new study, researchers pored over thousands of languages. With computer simulations of differently shaped mouths and other techniques gathered from paleoanthropology, linguistics, speech science and evolutionary biology, the scientists found that eating softer foods, associated with agriculture, changed adult bites. For those living on a hunter gatherer diet, overbites in the jaws and teeth in youth were often replaced in adulthood by what are called edge to edge bites , where front teeth sit atop one another. But with a softer diet, overbites may persist into adulthood. With an overbite, pronouncing sounds called labiodentals, which require moving the bottom lip against the top teeth think of the words "fava" or "fever" is about 30 percent easier. Over thousands of years, more of these sounds could have made their way into language. This scenario is more probable than not, the researchers said, although they concede it may not occur universally. "Some languages will develop labiodentals," said Steven Moran, a linguist at the University of Zurich. "Some languages don't." The findings challenge the idea that the sounds we make are more related to human evolution and how it shaped our brains, a subject the paper doesn't dwell on. Our hominin ancestors may have cooked food, for example , which made it softer. That contributed to changes in the shape of the skull and mandible, which made way for a more complex brain long before agriculture influenced diet, said Jordi Marce Nogue, who studies jaw evolution in primates at the University of Hamburg in Germany. "What came first?" he asked. "The changes in the speech, or the changes in the brain?" Ray Jackendoff, a linguist at Tufts University who was not involved in the study, said the group's finding that the ease of saying some sounds may vary with diet "is interesting but not earthshaking." That different cultures may have uttered certain sounds more often than others "doesn't say much about the deep history of language." Other cultural and social factors, like adopting sounds from neighbors, also may have contributed to changes in language, the study's authors said. For example, when hunter gatherer groups and agrarian groups mixed, so did their sounds . And others point out that labiodental sounds have even been found among hunter gatherers with edge to edge bites, like some Yanomami people of South America, who live mostly as isolated hunter gatherers, fishers and horticulturists. Other linguists also point out that the study rests on untested assumptions, like just how much these small bite changes might influence sounds, the types of errors they could produce, the age at which hunter gathers' teeth wear down, and the notion that agriculture is a useful proxy for diet. The role of cognitive factors, including neural control of speech organs, also goes unaddressed. The authors respond that they are not minimizing the roles played by culture, society or cognition in the development of language. But they say that physical differences between people deserve as much attention in the study of human language development as they do in research into the communication systems of animals. Some linguists worry that if not handled with extreme care, subsequent studies of the physical or biological differences of language could invigorate ethnocentric beliefs that have plagued linguistics in the past, especially if research is publicly interpreted as making value judgments of different groups' languages. "The risk here is a bias to focus on positive benefits or what is gained by individuals in agrarian societies, rather than also considering whatever benefits individuals in hunter gatherer societies might have," said Adam Albright, a linguist at M.I.T.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
MUMBAI, India Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co founder of Sun Microsystems, was already among the world's richest men when he invested a few years ago in SKS Microfinance, a lender to poor women in India. But the roaring success of SKS's recent initial public stock offering in Mumbai has made him richer by about 117 million money he says he plans to plow back into other ventures that aim to fight poverty while also trying to turn a profit. And he says he wants to challenge other rich Indians to do more to help their country's poor. An Indian transplant to Silicon Valley, Mr. Khosla plans to start a venture capital fund to invest in companies that focus on the poor in India, Africa and elsewhere by providing services like health, energy and education. By backing businesses that provide education loans or distribute solar panels in villages, he says, he wants to show that commercial entities can better help people in poverty than most nonprofit charitable organizations. "There needs to be more experiments in building sustainable businesses going after the market for the poor," he said in a telephone interview from his office in Menlo Park, Calif. "It has to be done in a sustainable way. There is not enough money to be given away in the world to make the poor well off." Mr. Khosla's advocacy of the bootstrap powers of capitalism is part of an increasingly popular school of thought: businesses, not governments or nonprofit groups, should lead the effort to eradicate global poverty. Some nonprofit experts say commercial social enterprises have significant limitations and pose conflicts of interest. But proponents like Mr. Khosla draw inspiration from the astounding global growth of microfinance the business of giving small loans to poor entrepreneurs, of which SKS Microfinance is a notable practitioner. Advocates also find intellectual support for the idea from the work of business management professors like the late C. K. Prahalad, who have argued that large corporations can do well and do good by aiming at people at the so called bottom of the pyramid. But Mr. Khosla, 55, who moved to the United States from India as a graduate student in 1976, has another motive, too. He wants to goad other rich Indians into giving away more of their wealth. India's torrid growth over the last decade has helped enrich many here Forbes estimates that India now has 69 billionaires, up from seven in 2000 but only a few have set up large charities, endowments or venture capital funds. "It surprises me that in India there is not a tradition of large scale giving and helping to solve social problems and set a social model," Mr. Khosla said. Mr. Khosla is not alone in worrying about the state of Indian philanthropy. Bill Gates, the Microsoft co founder, who was in China last week with the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett, said Thursday that he and Mr. Buffett might go to India as part of their campaign to get the very rich to give away half their wealth. Charitable activities and venture capital investing have been a mainstay for some Indian business families like the Tatas and for technology entrepreneurs like Aziz Premji of Wipro, the Bangalore outsourcing firm. But many others have given very little. A recent Bain Company study estimated that Indians give much less as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product than Americans. Moreover, individual and corporate donations account for just 10 percent of the charitable giving in India, compared with 75 percent in the United States and 34 percent in Britain. The balance comes from the government and foreign organizations. Rich Indians "are more into temple building and things like that," said Samit Ghosh, the chief executive of Ujjivan Financial, a microlender based in Bangalore, "rather than putting their money into real programs, which will have real impact on poverty alleviation." Mr. Khosla said his experience with microfinance had helped shape his views on the best way to tackle poverty. He has invested in commercial microfinance lenders and has donated to nonprofit ones, and he said that moneymaking versions had grown much faster and reached many more needy borrowers. He said he wanted to help create a new generation of companies like SKS, which started lending as a commercial company in 2006. It now has 6.8 million customers and a loan portfolio of 43 billion rupees ( 940 million). By contrast, CashPor, a nonprofit Indian lender to which Mr. Khosla has also given money, has 417,000 borrowers and a portfolio of 2.7 billion rupees ( 58 million) even though it started operations in 1996. Besides growing faster, SKS, India's largest microfinance company, has become a stock market darling. The company floated its shares on India's stock exchanges in mid August, and they have risen 40 percent since then. At current prices, Mr. Khosla's 6 percent stake in SKS is worth about 120 million, about 37 times what he invested in the firm in 2006 and 2007. (Shares of SKS fell 7 percent on Monday after the company said it had fired its chief executive, Suresh Gurumani. An SKS spokesman, Atul Takle, declined to answer questions.) Mr. Khosla said it might take at least a year to set up his new venture fund. He intends to finance it from his SKS profits and then return to the fund any profits from subsequent ventures it backs. Mr. Khosla has already been investing in companies that he says fit his model of profitable poverty alleviation. One is MokshaYug Access, which sets up milk collection and chilling plants in India to help dairy farmers. The company says it helps farmers reduce transportation costs and get higher prices for their milk than they can with local distributors. Philanthropy experts say commercial companies play an important role in combating poverty by creating jobs. But they say these "social enterprises," as they are sometimes known, cannot be solely relied upon to address the many entrenched causes of poverty. Moreover, as the fallout from the global financial crisis has made clear, the profit maximizing tendencies of businesses can hurt society, said Phil Buchanan, president for the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a research organization based in Cambridge, Mass. Nonprofits are effective because they can "take issue with the unbridled pursuit of profit at the expense of people's lives," Mr. Buchanan said. "I think some of that gets lost in all of the hype around social enterprise." Mr. Khosla says that he is not completely opposed to charities that his fund may even donate to some nonprofit entities. But he says he is generally skeptical that nongovernmental organizations can accomplish much because they tend to drift away from what their donors wanted them to do. "I am relatively negative on most N.G.O.'s and their effectiveness," he said. "I am not negative on their intentions."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
Christie's has not divulged the precise nature of the damage to "Le Marin," but following the mishap, the auction house said in an email that Picasso's 1964 painting "Femme au chat assise dans un fauteuil" ("Woman With a Cat Seated in an Armchair"), estimated at 22 million to 28 million, has also been withdrawn from the sale. This second Picasso had also been identified as being offered by Mr. Wynn. Like "Le Marin," it had been guaranteed to sell courtesy of a third party. Andy Warhol's 1963 "Double Elvis (Ferus Type)," estimated at 30 million identified by Bloomberg as Mr. Wynn's third big ticket consignment will be sold by Christie's, as scheduled, in its Thursday night contemporary sale, the auction house added in its email. "These things happen," Guillaume Cerutti, Christie's chief executive, said with a resigned smile, at Sunday's depleted exhibition of Impressionist and Modern works. He declined to make any further comment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
When the C.E.O., Already Facing a Crisis, Gets the Coronavirus It was late February, and the coronavirus was spreading. Mr. Fogel, the chief executive of Booking Holdings, the online travel giant that owns brands like Priceline.com, OpenTable and Kayak, was spending nearly every waking moment at his computer as a tsunami of travel cancellations poured in. He quickly paused marketing, halted stock buybacks, froze hiring and raised 4 billion in debt. "The job, it's just expanded exponentially," he said. Then the virus that ravaged his business got him, too. His wife became sick, and his daughter, a college student who had returned home, started to cough. On March 25, Mr. Fogel, 58, who lives just outside New York City, developed a headache and a 101 degree fever. He was among a wave of leaders at publicly traded companies who tested positive for the coronavirus. At least half a dozen chief executives have contracted it in the past three months, according to a tally by The New York Times, including the heads of NBCUniversal; the real estate investment firm Kimco Realty; Becle, which makes Jose Cuervo tequila; and the security company ADT. In April, Morgan Stanley's chief, James Gorman, told employees that he had tested positive and recovered. Mr. Fogel's illness was relatively mild, but it complicated navigating the lockdown and shoring up a business in free fall. And it put him on the hook to properly disclose the situation to shareholders. Publicly traded companies are obligated to divulge events that may be considered "material" to investors. Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said companies faced risks if news of a top executive's illness leaked before a disclosure. Apple famously concealed the health conditions of its chief, Steve Jobs, before he died in 2011, prompting criticism and an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. "You don't want to lose the P.R. battle that the company hid this," Mr. Cappelli said. Mr. Fogel kept working. Before taking a drive through test for the virus on March 26 near his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., he did a CNN interview over Skype. On April 1, Booking Holdings filed a regulatory document laying out his condition. Mr. Fogel, an energetic storyteller, said his attitude was, "Let's let everybody know so everyone's informed, so there's no question." Steve Hafner, who heads OpenTable and Kayak and reports to Mr. Fogel, estimated that he had gotten more messages on Slack and video calls from his boss while he was sick than when he was healthy. "Son of a gun worked right through it," Mr. Hafner said. Mr. Fogel, who was previously a trader and an investment banker, joined Booking in February 2000 as a young manager. At the time, the company, which began in 1997, was known as Priceline.com. Two weeks later, the stock market peaked and the dot com bubble burst. Soon after, the Sept. 11 attacks happened, hampering people's desire to travel. But the company forged ahead, focusing on hotels, expanding in Europe and on making acquisitions. In 2005, it bought a small Dutch start up, Booking.com, which people use to book lodging. Booking.com became the largest division in the company, which took its name. Mr. Fogel rose through the ranks, eventually overseeing acquisitions and strategic alliances. In 2017, he was appointed chief executive after his predecessor resigned over an affair with an employee. To prepare for disruptive events, Booking conducted crisis management drills. Executives practiced for situations like natural disasters, political coups, data breaches and ransomware attacks. But there was no drill for a pandemic. "All the others together, they're nowhere near what has happened now," Mr. Fogel said. When the extent of the pandemic became clear to Mr. Fogel and his lieutenants in early March, their first move was to set up customer service workers at home to field an avalanche of cancellations from travelers. He and his executives also tried to quickly figure out how to balance the inherent conflicts among hoteliers, who risked going bankrupt if they refunded everyone; customers, who stood to lose money on nonrefundable bookings; customer service workers, who were under pressure while working from home with their families; and shareholders, who argued that Booking was not legally obligated to offer refunds. The pressure was intense. Booking paid customers 63 million in refunds on nonrefundable reservations for the first three months of the year, which it does not expect to recover. Mr. Fogel said the company would try to get some money back from the hotels eventually, but that requires helping them stay afloat now. OpenTable later waived fees on its restaurant reservation system for the rest of the year. "You want to build the reputation that you are there," Mr. Fogel said. By then, he was feeling ill, and his wife and daughter had become sick. After initially testing negative for the coronavirus, his high school age son developed a cough and fever, too. Leslie Cafferty, Booking's head of communications, said Mr. Fogel's first instinct had been to call in the lawyers to understand disclosure requirements and "minimize any risk he was hiding information." They made plans to announce his test results in a S.E.C. filing. After Mr. Fogel got positive test results for the virus on March 31, Booking pulled the trigger on the filing the next day. In it, Booking said that he continued to perform as chief executive and that the company had succession plans, including a temporary delegation of responsibilities, for all of its senior executives. By then, Mr. Fogel's fever had faded, and he felt recovered, he said. His family recovered quickly as well. But the announcement prompted more than 1,000 emails and messages from employees, partners and friends. As he dealt with a cratering business, it took him more than a month to respond to the notes. Mr. Fogel said he had created a system of responses: People who had sent a short "Get well soon" got a thumbs up emoji. Those who had also had the virus got a more thoughtful response. "And then there were others that knew somebody that had lost their fight, and those were hard to read," he said. Work piled up as the travel industry underwent more pain. In April, newly booked rooms through Booking's various sites plunged 85 percent from a year earlier. That led to cost cuts. In the last month, Booking, which has 26,000 employees, has laid off 1,900 people at Kayak, OpenTable and Agoda, its subsidiary in Singapore. It also furloughed 1,800 workers in Britain under the country's relief plan and applied for aid from the Netherlands. The company which has seven crisis management teams, including one that manages the other crisis management teams also increased the frequency of its video question and answer sessions with Mr. Fogel and other internal communications. On May 7, Booking said it had lost 699 million in the first quarter, compared with a profit of 765 million a year earlier. It wrote down the values of OpenTable and Kayak by 489 million, citing the pandemic. Its stock price has fallen 21 percent this year. Mr. Fogel and his team are now figuring out how to emerge from quarantine to an altered travel market. OpenTable has started offering reservations to bars and stores that are reopening with social distancing measures. Kayak has begun featuring rental cars on its home page instead of flights. "In the past, we were doing six million flight queries a day, and a fraction of that was rental cars," said Mr. Hafner, the head of both brands. "Now it's the inverse." Mr. Fogel's health remains top of mind. In a recent meeting with Booking's board of directors, they stopped Mr. Fogel in the middle of a crisis management presentation to check on his health. "He's going 100 miles an hour," said Tim Armstrong, the former chief executive of AOL and a member of Booking's board since 2013. "The board was conscious of making sure he was taking care of himself." Before the pandemic, Mr. Fogel commuted weekly to headquarters in Amsterdam. He also made frequent trips to Booking's offices in Singapore and Bangkok. He said he was eager to travel again, but appreciated one silver lining of sheltering in place.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
More no frills carriers as well as major airlines are offering deals on international flights. Just book ahead and be wary of ancillary fees they can really add up. Turbulence in the budget airline industry continues to be expected. But for savvy leisure travelers looking for international flights , there are more ups than downs right now. First, the downs. Norwegian Air threw a wrench into cheap trans Atlantic flight options this summer by announcing the cancellation of six routes between Ireland and North America. The decision, effective Sept. 15, was blamed on the worldwide grounding of the Boeing 737 Max after two deadly crashes involving the aircraft. According to a news release, 18 of the discount carrier's fleet were affected, making the Ireland routes "no longer commercially viable." Earlier this year another budget airline, WOW Air, went bankrupt. (An American company, USAerospace Associates, recently purchased its assets and will attempt to relaunch the airline, initially as a freight only carrier.) And yet, "it's the golden age of cheap flights," said Scott Keyes, who by his estimation has visited 48 countries. He co founded Scott's Cheap Flights, a travel site that alerts members when deals pop up. "We regularly find 300 round trip flights to Europe, which did not exist five years ago," Mr. Keyes, 32, said. The Barcelona based carrier Level, for instance, recently showed flight deals on its website from Newark to Paris on select dates in October for 149 one way. Round trip from Boston to Barcelona featured a promotional price of 350. The two year old, low cost brand is owned by International Airlines Group and flights are mostly operated by Iberia. More major airlines are getting in on the act. Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) recently introduced SAS Go fares for travel to Europe. In August, the company ran a sale on round trip routes from several cities in the United States to Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm for under 400. A recent search showed a low price calendar with dates listing flights in November from Newark to Oslo for 340 round trip, a meal included. Depending on the airline, return flights are sometimes pricier, an extra 30 or more. Ancillary fees are where it can really add up on no frills carriers. Concerning luggage, Read the fine print on weight restrictions and maximum dimensions. One personal item and a carry on bag might be included in the price, but in some cases can't weigh more than 8 kilograms (about 17 and a half pounds). With economy fares, a checked bag can cost upward of 40 to 60 and double that if you pay at the airport. Also expect charges for seat selection, headsets, pillows, food and water. Print out your boarding passes since there can be a charge for that, too. And don't expect a refund if you have to cancel your flight. Eurowings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, is headquartered in Cologne, Germany, and currently flies from Germany to airports in Newark, New York City, Miami, Fort Myers, Fla., and Las Vegas. A recent search on its website turned up a one way basic fare in November from Newark to Dusseldorf, Germany, for 229.99. In December, Miami to Dresden, Germany, is advertised for 267.55 one way. Next summer, the Lufthansa Group is expanding its long haul routes. Phoenix and Anchorage will connect with Frankfurt, Germany's largest hub. Seattle, Detroit and Orlando, Fla., will have bargain flights to Munich. Another budget conscious airline greasing the wheels on the runways for overseas flights is JetBlue, which plans in 2021 to usher in multiple daily connections between New York City, Boston and London. More European destinations are likely. A news release in June announced that the company had purchased 13 fuel efficient Airbus A321XLR aircraft to expand trans Atlantic options. And while Norwegian Air is retreating on its routes across the Atlantic, the company recently filed a request to operate flights between the United States and Argentina. Low cost trans Pacific travel via AirAsia X is expanding as well. "A bit of a beachhead is forming in Hawaii, and we've seen flights from Honolulu to Osaka for 199 round trip," said Mr. Keyes of Scott's Cheap Flights. Jetstar, a subsidiary of Qantas, is flying between Honolulu and Sydney for as low as 286 round trip, he said. Interested in heading to Latin America ? Sample fares on Interjet, a Mexican airline, recently included New York City to Mexico City from 129 one way, and Dallas to Lima from 177 one way. To compete with budget carriers, Delta, American and United have their own stripped down fares. American Airlines recently offered an economy fare from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Barcelona for 307 round trip in October. It had a long layover in Helsinki on the return flight, but frugal travelers might be willing to make sacrifices for a price like that. None The main money hack is to book as far ahead as possible. None Comparison shopping on Kayak, Google Flights, Expedia and other sites tend to yield similar results since they pull from the same data sources. None Besides Scott's Cheap Flights, Gary Leff's travel blog, View From The Wing, is another valuable resource for deals and news. None Budget airlines don't always fly to certain destinations daily, so if you miss your flight, or if it's canceled, it can be a disaster. Stranded passengers may not be accommodated on allied airlines as they would be on legacy carriers. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
English Village Becomes Climate Leader by Quietly Cleaning Up Its Own Patch ASHTON HAYES, England This small village of about 1,000 people looks like any other nestled in the countryside. But Ashton Hayes is different in an important way when it comes to one of the world's most pressing issues: climate change. Hundreds of residents have banded together to cut greenhouse emissions they use clotheslines instead of dryers, take fewer flights, install solar panels and glaze windows to better insulate their homes. The effort, reaching its 10th anniversary this year, has led to a 24 percent cut in emissions, according to surveys by a professor of environmental sustainability who lives here. But what makes Ashton Hayes unusual is its approach the residents have done it themselves, without prodding from government. About 200 towns, cities and counties around the world including Notteroy, Norway; Upper Saddle River, N.J.; and Changhua County, Taiwan have reached out to learn how the villagers here did it. As climate science has become more accepted, and the effects of a warming planet are becoming increasingly clear, Ashton Hayes is a case study for the next phase of battling climate change: getting people to change their habits. "We just think everyone should try to clean up their patch," said Rosemary Dossett, a resident of the village. "And rather than going out and shouting about it, we just do it." One of their secrets, it seems, is that the people of Ashton Hayes feel in charge, rather than following government policies. When the member of Parliament who represents the village showed up at their first public meeting in January 2006, he was told he could not make any speeches. "We said, 'This is not about you tonight, this is about us, and you can listen to what we've got to say for a change,'" said Kate Harrison, a resident and early member of the group. No politician has been allowed to address the group since. The village has kept the effort separate from party politics, which residents thought would only divide them along ideological lines. The project was started by Garry Charnock, a former journalist who trained as a hydrologist and has lived in the village for about 30 years. He got the idea a little more than a decade ago after attending a lecture about climate change at the Hay Festival, an annual literary gathering in Wales. He decided to try to get Ashton Hayes to become, as he put it, "Britain's first carbon neutral village." "But even if we don't," he recalls thinking at the time, "let's try to have a little fun." Sometimes, efforts to reduce greenhouse gases involve guilt tripping or doomsday scenarios that make people feel as if the problem is too overwhelming to tackle. In Ashton Hayes about 25 miles southeast of Liverpool, with a 19th century Anglican church and a community owned shop that doubles as a post office the villagers have lightened the mood. They hold public wine and cheese meetings in the biggest houses in town, "so everyone can have a look around," and see how the wealthier people live, said Mr. Charnock, the executive director of RSK, an environmental consulting company. "We don't ever finger wag in Ashton Hayes." About 650 people more than half of the village's residents showed up to the first meeting, Mr. Charnock said. Some in the village were less keen, but little by little, they began to participate. Some have gone further. When they were looking to build their energy efficient home and heard about Ashton Hayes's carbon neutral project, Ms. Dossett and her husband, Ian, thought it might be the perfect village for them. They moved from nearby South Warrington and found two old farm cottages, which they converted into a two story brick house, and installed huge triple glazed windows, photovoltaic cells on the roof, a geothermal heat pump that heats the home and its water, and an underground cistern to hold rainwater for toilets and the garden. "I wouldn't want anyone to think we live in a mud hut," Ms. Dossett said, sitting on a couch in her warm, well lit living room. The Dossetts also have a vegetable garden, grow grapes for wine, brew beer and keep two cows, which mow the lawn and may also eventually become food in a few years. They pay about 500 pounds (about 650) a year for electricity and heating. The success of the carbon neutral project seems to have inspired other community efforts in Ashton Hayes. The residents, for example, have built a new playing field with a solar powered pavilion, which is the home of a community cafe three days a week. They have also put photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of the primary school. Other towns and cities around the world hope to copy Ashton Hayes. Their representatives have contacted the project's leaders, asking for help in setting up similar initiatives, according to the diary the Ashton Hayes group keeps about the project, chronicling almost everything they have done over the past 10 years. Eden Mills, a small community in Ontario, Canada, is one of them. Charles Simon traveled to Ashton Hayes in 2007 to learn how to translate their approach to his town, adopting the apolitical, voluntary, fun method. "Some of the changes are so easy," Mr. Simon said. "Just put on a sweater instead of turning on the heat." Eden Mills has cut emissions by about 14 percent, Mr. Simon said, and has plans to do more. Residents have been working with experts from the nearby University of Guelph, planting trees in the village forest to help absorb the carbon dioxide the town emits, Mr. Simon said. Janet Gullvaag, a councilwoman in Notteroy, Norway, an island municipality of about 21,000 people, reached out to Ashton Hayes about nine years ago after her political party decided to include reducing carbon dioxide emissions in its platform. "I think that the idea that Ashton Hayes had to make caring for the environment fun, without pointing fingers was quite revolutionary," Ms. Gullvaag said. Though her community's approach is decidedly more political, Ms. Gullvaag said that adopting Ashton Hayes's mantra of fun had paid dividends: She has seen changes in her community, she said, as people buy more electric cars and bicycles, and convert their home heating from oil to more environmentally friendly sources. "Whatever you're trying to do, if you can create enthusiasm and spread knowledge, normally, people will react in a positive way," she added. Though deep cuts across the globe are still required to make broader progress, actions to reduce emissions, even by small towns, are a step in the right direction, say experts who study community action on climate change. "The community building element of all this has been as important as the environmental impact so far," said Sarah Darby, a researcher at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute. She added that Ashton Hayes was in a good position to take on these kinds of projects it is a small village of well off and well educated people, so simply taking fewer flights each year can have a big effect. Residents were able to cut emissions by about 20 percent in the first year alone, according to surveys used to calculate carbon footprints that were developed by Roy Alexander, a local professor, and his students. Some have had even more significant reductions: Households that participated in surveys in both the first and 10th years shrank their energy use by about 40 percent. Mr. Charnock said he thought the village could get the cuts in its 2006 carbon footprint to 80 percent in the next few years with the help of grant money to buy and install solar panels on the local school and other buildings. The next thing they have to do, he said, is to get the county government to be as committed to cutting emissions as Ashton Hayes is. "There's so much apathy," Mr. Charnock said. "We need to squeeze that layer of apathy jelly and get it out."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
SEATTLE In the five years since Satya Nadella became Microsoft's chief executive, he has transformed the company into a cloud computing leader. The quarter ending in March provided further evidence that the turnaround he has helmed shows little signs of abating. With its quarterly earnings released on Wednesday, Microsoft delivered a clean sweep for investors, beating almost every performance expectation. It had 30.6 billion in revenue, up 14 percent over a year ago, and profit rose 19 percent, to 8.8 billion. "This is a press release Nadella should print out and frame in his office," said Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities. Shares in the company were up more than 5 percent in aftermarket trading, and they continued trading higher on Thursday, helping to briefly push the company to 1 trillion in market capitalization. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Microsoft has already been through the painful early phases of its cloud push, when it spent heavily to build data centers worldwide before making meaningful sales, said Dan Romanoff, who covers Microsoft for the investment research firm Morningstar. Azure, Microsoft's flagship cloud offering, continues to add to its already large user base, with sales up 73 percent last quarter. "You don't really get revenue growth unless you have a usage growth, so this is customers deploying and using Azure," said Amy Hood, the company's chief financial officer. Amazon essentially created the industry of cloud computing, giving it years of advantage. Microsoft has been racing to catch up, using its own advantage the many businesses that already use Microsoft's non cloud offerings. "It's not a giant leap to take a bunch of Microsoft products from your server closet to a Microsoft Azure world," Mr. Romanoff said. Microsoft has notched particular success with what is known as a hybrid cloud approach, which lets companies use one set of tools to manage what they store both on their own servers and on shared space in remote data centers. That has helped ease in more customers, including those that have regulatory or proprietary reasons for wanting to house some of their own data. Revenue for Microsoft's server products and cloud services, a proxy for its hybrid products, grew 27 percent, beating forecasts from both the company and Wall Street. Microsoft has signed some enormous deals with customers like Walgreens Boots Alliance that typically package together Azure cloud and artificial intelligence offerings with its cloud based subscriptions to Office, security and other features like Teams, an internal chat application like Slack. Mr. Nadella said 91 of the Fortune 100 companies used Teams. These deals illustrate what Mr. Nadella has called an increase in the "tech intensity" of companies as they evolve. "Digital technology today is not about tech companies doing innovation. It is about the rest of the world doing innovation with technology," Mr. Nadella said in a call with analysts on Wednesday. There is one downside to the cloud: Analysts say such offerings tend to be less profitable. For example, Citi estimates that traditional product licenses have 90 percent gross profit margins, versus 40 to 45 percent margins for Azure. The long term growth in profit will need to come from selling more services and products to customers essentially Microsoft gaining a bigger share of how much companies and agencies spend on technology over all. Microsoft had other bright points. LinkedIn revenue grew 27 percent, as recruiters and job seekers use the service more, and the Surface line of tablets and computers grew 21 percent, with a balance between consumer and corporate demand, Ms. Hood said. Microsoft had seen strong growth in its gaming business for more than a year in part because of the blockbuster game Fortnite. Gaming grew just 5 percent in the latest quarter, in part because people didn't buy as many consoles and make as many in game purchases as Microsoft had expected.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
THE ENEMY WITHIN 10 p.m. on NBC. Faced with the ultimatum of saving her daughter's life or leaking the names of four fellow agents, a steely C.I.A. operative named Erica Shepherd (Jennifer Carpenter) chose family a decision that put her behind bars and made her the United States' greatest traitor. The pilot of this new spy series opens three years after her arrest, when an F.B.I. agent, Will Keaton (Morris Chestnut), desperate to prevent an impending attack, reluctantly enlists Erica for her unmatched code breaking skills. The job becomes a chance for Erica to prove how valuable she is, right her wrongs and see her daughter again. But that all hangs on her ability to prove that she can be trusted. THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. The blind auditions of Season 16 kick off as John Legend joins the previous coaches Kelly Clarkson, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton. BIOGRAPHY: THE TRUMP DYNASTY 9 p.m. on A E. This six hour documentary series, broadcast over three consecutive nights, chronicles how three generations of the Trump family rose to power. It weaves archival footage with firsthand accounts from journalists, media personalities and others close to the 45th president to trace how he landed in the White House.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Three weeks ago, a student run newspaper with ties to New York University got a new editorial adviser: Kenna Griffin, a former reporter and editor who had taught journalism at Oklahoma City University for 16 years. She started advising the paper, Washington Square News, remotely from Oklahoma. On Monday, 43 of its student journalists all but four people on staff resigned. The tensions at Washington Square News, a journalistic training ground for N.Y.U. undergraduates since 1973, began when its editor in chief was "fired without warning" by Dr. Griffin soon after the adviser started, the students wrote in a post that appeared on the publication's website Monday. "Dr. Griffin was increasingly rude and disrespectful to the staff, despite being repeatedly reminded that her words had a negative effect on staff morale," the post said. "Dr. Griffin was unnecessarily harsh, and when confronted about her behavior, would defend it by arguing that WSN's staff is too immature to accept critique." Dr. Griffin did not immediately reply to requests for comment. According to the post, the working relationship between the students and the adviser worsened after a dispute over the use of the word "murder" to describe the death of Breonna Taylor in a Sept. 24 article about protests in New York prompted by a Kentucky grand jury's decision not to charge police officers in her killing. Many news organizations use the word "murder" only after there has been a murder conviction in a court of law.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
ORLANDO, Fla. Even after his stunning victory at last year's Masters, Tiger Woods warned he would remain ever cautious with his surgically repaired back for the rest of his career. In that context, as Woods played only 12 tournaments in 2019, the decision was viewed as sensible and raised few eyebrows. Less than three months into a new golf year, however, it is clear that Woods's balky back is genuinely inhibiting him. On Friday, Woods pulled out of next week's Players Championship, the PGA Tour's flagship event, which has golf's strongest field and largest prize money payout 15 million. "Back just not ready," Mark Steinberg, Woods's agent, told ESPN in a text message on Friday, the last day that Woods had to commit to the Players Championship. Steinberg added: "Not concerning long term, just not ready." Steinberg gave a similar explanation for Woods's decision not to enter this week's Arnold Palmer Invitational. Woods later posted on Twitter that he regretted not being able to attend the Players Championship. "I have to listen to my body and properly rest when needed," his tweet said. "My back is simply just not ready for play next week." The withdrawal from the Players Championship, which Woods has won twice, means that he will go roughly a month without playing competitively and that's if he enters the Valspar Championship outside Tampa, which begins March 19. The Masters, which Woods has won five times, starts April 9. There have been signs for weeks that Woods's back, which has undergone four operations, was troubling him. Woods, 44, admitted to feeling back stiffness three weeks ago at the Genesis Invitational in Southern California, and more tellingly, he played progressively worse through the conclusion of the event. Woods opened with a first round 69, then had rounds of 73, 76 and 77 to finish last among the players who made the cut. He also did not play practice rounds early in the week of the Genesis. At the time, Woods attributed some of his back issues to his daylong responsibilities as the host of the tournament. Likewise, he set off few alarms by skipping the World Golf Championship event in Mexico in late February and last week's Honda Classic; it seemed as if he was simply resting his body, as he had in 2019. But missing this week's Palmer Invitational was a surprise since Woods has won the tournament eight times. And spurning the Players will raise concerns about Woods's capacity to properly prepare for the Masters, which begins April 9. In addition to the Valspar Championship, Woods could enter two other events before the Masters: the WGC Dell Technologies in Austin, Texas, a match play competition, and the Valero Texas Open in San Antonio. "I feel stiff, but I have weeks like that, especially in the cold mornings, like it was the other day," Woods said after the third round of the Genesis. "I don't quite move as well, and that's just kind of how it's going to go." Woods began this year in apparently good form. He finished tied for ninth at the Farmers Insurance Open in late January. That result followed a successful stretch in the fall of 2019 when Woods won the Zozo Championship for his 82nd PGA Tour victory, went undefeated in three matches at the Presidents Cup and finished fourth at the Hero World Championship. At the Genesis event, Woods was almost philosophical about the challenges of managing his back problems. Smiling, he said: "That's the fun part of trying to figure this whole comeback how much do I play, when do I play, do I listen to the body or do I fight through it? There are some things I can push and some things I can't. There is a physical toll, and I want to stay out here for just a little bit longer."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
WASHINGTON Few companies have been as intimately tied to the Democratic Party in recent years as Google. So now that Donald J. Trump is president, the giant company, in Silicon Valley parlance, is having to pivot. The shift was evident a day after Congress began its new session this month. That evening, about 70 lawmakers, a majority of them Republicans, were feted at the stately Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, where they clinked champagne and bourbon glasses and posed for selfies with the 600 guests assembled in their honor. The event's main host was not from the Republican establishment. Instead, the party was primarily financed and anchored by Google. "We've partnered with Google on events before, but nothing like this party," said Alex Skatell, founder of The Independent Journal Review, a news start up with a right leaning millennial audience, which also helped host the event. The event was emblematic of an about face by Google. Over the last eight years, the company was closely associated with former President Barack Obama. Google employees overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama's presidential campaigns, and some later took roles in his administration. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, advised the Obama White House. And last year, Google employees gave 1.3 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign to succeed Mr. Obama, compared with 26,000 to the Trump campaign, according to federal filings. Now, the tech giant is scrambling to forge ties with Mr. Trump's new administration and to strengthen its relationship with a Republican dominated Congress. Most important, Google is trying to change the perception that it is a Democratic stronghold. That has led to events like the party at the Smithsonian, which the institution said had cost at least 50,000. Mr. Schmidt has embarked on an East Coast charm offensive of Republican political leaders, including twice visiting Mr. Trump and his advisers at Trump Tower. Last month, Google also posted an opening to fill a position for a "conservative outreach" employee in its Washington office. "Google has a target on its back because it is fundamentally viewed as a Democratic company," said Gigi Sohn, a former senior adviser to Tom Wheeler, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "Even though it has reached out to Republicans, it can't shake the image." Google said it had long had Republican lobbyists and had not changed its strategy. "We've worked with both Republicans and Democrats for over a decade, advocating policies to encourage economic growth, innovation and entrepreneurialism," the company said in a statement. "We'll continue to do exactly that." Other Silicon Valley tech companies, like Facebook, are in a similar predicament. The perception is that they lean left and their executives backed Mrs. Clinton. Many are now also pledging to work with Mr. Trump and paid court to the new president at a December tech summit meeting. One week into the administration, Google and other tech companies began to push back, criticizing Mr. Trump's executive order on immigration bans. The company said an estimated 187 employees were affected by the order and it urged any of those employees who were abroad to work with the company to return safely to the United States. "It's painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues," Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said in a memo to employees over the weekend. "We've always made our views on immigration issues known publicly and will continue to do so." Google has much at stake as it repositions itself. During the Obama years, Google avoided American antitrust charges, even as European regulators accused the firm of antitrust violations in search and in its mobile business. Google also successfully pushed a policy agenda that included the creation of net neutrality rules in 2015 and the defeat of online piracy laws in 2012. Now warning shots against Google have been fired by those in Mr. Trump's circle. Some of the president's advisers have debated whether the tech behemoth deserves more antitrust scrutiny, according to two people briefed by the new administration's transition team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump transition adviser, also compared the power that Google had under Mr. Obama to that which the oil giant Exxon Mobil had under President George W. Bush. Under President Bush, the administration largely agreed with Exxon's skeptical stance on climate change policy. Mr. Trump's team is particularly wary of one Google executive Mr. Schmidt who has been allied with Democrats. During last year's presidential campaign, Mr. Schmidt counseled Mrs. Clinton on strategy. A photo of him wearing a staff badge at her election night party circulated widely in the conservative media. Mr. Trump's advisers, including his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, have complained about Mr. Schmidt's funding of a start up called the Groundwork, which provided data and other technology for Mrs. Clinton's campaign. They also suspected Google was skewing search results in favor of Mrs. Clinton, said Barry Bennett, a former senior adviser for Mr. Trump's campaign. "Mr. Schmidt spent millions and millions of his personal money to defeat Donald Trump," Mr. Bennett said. "It takes a particular amount of gumption to pretend that never happened." Google has denied it tweaked its search results, which are determined by algorithms, and the company declined to comment on Mr. Schmidt. White House officials did not respond to a request for comment. For many years, Google's support of Democrats was plain. Google's political action committee and employees ranked third in all donations to Mr. Obama's 2012 campaign at 804,240, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2008, Google's PAC and employees were sixth with 817,855. The company did not rank in the top 20 for donations to Mr. Obama's Republican opponents in either of those elections. In 2011, Google hired Stewart Jeffries, a former member of the House Judiciary Committee, to lobby Republicans on Capitol Hill. That same year, it quadrupled its number of outside lobbying firms including many with Republican lobbyists to 24, from six in 2010. In 2012, Google named a former Republican congresswoman, Susan Molinari of New York, to lead its Washington office. Google also sponsored conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The company has hosted Republican lawmakers including the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, and Darrell Issa of California at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google's Washington office is now roughly split between Republican and Democrats. The company spent 15.43 million in lobbying in 2016, according to federal lobbying documents, making it among the top dozen firms in lobbying spending last year. For the first time last year, Google's PAC gave more to Republican congressional candidates than to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Even so, Google's Republican ties got little notice because of the company's strong relationship with Democrats. Several Google employees joined the Obama administration while dozens of government bureaucrats were employed by the tech company. Google's head of global public policy, Caroline Atkinson, was Mr. Obama's former national security adviser. A former Google executive, Megan Smith, became the nation's chief technology officer. During his presidency, Mr. Obama also repeatedly supported proposals backed by Google, including net neutrality in 2015 and cable set top box reforms last year. "Google was very much treated as the golden child by the Obama administration," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which has been critical of Google for privacy policies. Since the election, Google has accelerated efforts to win over the Republican White House and Congress. Before his visits to Trump Tower, Mr. Schmidt met with Mr. McCarthy and Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, who is chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Days after Mr. Trump's victory, Google also contacted The Independent Journal Review, which it had worked with on events during the Republican campaign debates. Google told the news start up that it would provide the main funding for the party at the Smithsonian. Google said the event was open to both parties. But pairing with the conservative site sent a clear message to attendees. "We definitely helped draw Republicans and people from across the spectrum," said the site's founder, Mr. Skatell. At the party, several Republican lawmakers were positive about their tech host, brushing off questions about the company's heft and power. "When I think of technology and Google, I don't think of dominance," said Representative Bradley Byrne, a Republican from Alabama. "I think of innovation."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
STAMFORD, CONN. "So this is it," Dennis Wuchiski says as he opens the door to what is possibly the cleanest garage this side of the McLaren Formula One racecar operation in Britain. To call it just a garage is to damn it with faint praise, because like countless others across the country, this is the home of his hopes and dreams, the display case for his two hot rods and an atelier for the hobby he has pursued since he was 7. A passion for tuning, restoring, customizing and collecting cars or competing in some form of automotive activity draws people of all sorts, a following that expanded greatly when Henry Ford made the automobile affordable with the introduction of the Model T in 1908. Among the ranks of car enthusiasts, Mr. Wuchiski falls nearer to the modest end of a broad spectrum that ranges from the few with car collections totaling 100 or more to the multitudes who have one or two and spend a great deal if not all of their spare time with their automobiles. For the truly devoted, no matter the extent of their fleet, cars are more than a hobby. They are a way of life. That is evident from the moment Mr. Wuchiski lifts the door, because this 61 year old hot rodder has turned his garage into a showplace. Its 20 by 27 foot space, in addition to his two Fords and 81 trophies of varying shapes and sizes, holds enough machinery for several body shops. He has been fabricating parts for automobiles since his preteen years. Mr. Wuchiski's hot rod Fords are customized, which means that if you didn't know what they were at birth, you might not recognize them now, stripped of fenders and with rooflines lowered. One is a 1932 three window coupe, the other a 1931 two door sedan. He's had the '32 for 32 years, 18 of them spent getting it ready to show and the last 14 collecting trophies. Mr. Wuchiski is a carpenter, and his wife, Cathy, runs a day care center, so progress is made when the budget permits one reason that the '32 Ford took so long to build. Even so, for hot rodders, the process can be as much fun as the end result. The exquisitely detailed and immaculately kept '32, with its replica fiberglass body finished in candy apple red, is a model of modern day hot rodding. The popular appeal of the hobby has given rise to an industry that reproduces nearly every part a builder might need. The car is powered by a small block Chevrolet V8 that, Mr. Wuchiski said, produces 425 horsepower. "A nice little motor, a mild one," he said. For Ford, 1932 was a watershed year, with the bold introduction of a mass market V8 and styling that was a bit sleeker. After World War II, the Deuce, as it came to be known, became the iconic hot rod. Much like Ford's change of direction during the Depression, Mr. Wuchiski's work in progress '31 sedan signals a rethought approach. With this car found in White Plains, a few miles from his home, through the classic "guy who knew a guy" he is shifting from buying mostly reproduction parts to going "old school" and working with the original metal. "This one is the real deal," he said. "I bought this one as an original car. "This one is going to be built like a hot rod was built in the '60s," he said. "I have a '67 Corvette motor that I'm going to do six carburetors, the setup on the bench over there." Part of that process involved sending the '31 off to Virginia "to a guy up in Woodstock," Mr. Wuchiski mentioned casually who did extensive metalwork on the body. Getting that "guy," Craig Naff, to work on your car is the customizer's equivalent of commissioning Rembrandt to do your family portrait. Mr. Naff is one of a handful of sheet metal artists in this country who can create a complete car body from flat steel sheets, according to Ken Gross, an author and curator of museum exhibitions around the country. Mr. Naff, who works alone in his Shenandoah Valley shop, spent a stretch of his early career in California, where he sculpted body panels for CadZZilla, the landmark custom 1948 Cadillac that Boyd Coddington produced for Billy Gibbons, the ZZ Top guitarist. That car is widely agreed to have set a new standard for custom car design when it was finished in 1989. Cars that Mr. Naff has either modified or created entirely have won the America's Most Beautiful Roadster award at the Grand National Roadster Show, now held in Pomona, Calif., hot rodding's equivalent of Best in Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance. Mr. Wuchiski had to wait 18 months before the work could start, then another 18 months before it was done. Barely pausing during a tour of the car's details, he points to some detail work on the rear of the cabin. It is the recessed area designed to hold the license plate, appearing to a casual observer as if it had been stamped by a giant press at the Ford factory. It was, in fact, built by hand in Mr. Naff's Woodstock shop to make the license plate mounting more attractive. A minor item, but indicative of the talent residing within that one man operation. "I try, when I take pictures of the car, not to show the license plate because I don't want anybody seeing it before the car is finished," Mr. Wuchiski said, knowing that it will impress fellow members of the hot rod fraternity. "Everybody who comes in here flips when they see that. "The interior is not going to be upholstered," he continued. "I'm going to show off all the metalwork that's inside this car. I chose to keep the wood floors, to keep them just like Henry Ford did them it's going to look different." Mr. Wuchiski's cars are surrounded by his tools. There is a milling machine that he bought for 500 and restored to a show quality polish his alternative to paying 12,000 for a new one as well as a buffer, a lathe, a drill press, two belt sanders, two band saws, an air compressor and the welding equipment that he bought when he was 12 to build his first car. The oversize tool chest, which sparkles like new, has been there since the 1970s. Mr. Wuchiski's life has been bound up with automobiles since his father bought him his first go kart. Pieces of that kart are hanging on the wall; he doesn't throw things away. He bought his first car a 1940 Plymouth coupe from a neighbor for 15 when he was 12 and rebuilt it so well that it still looks good, he says. It remains in Stamford, but has passed through three owners. The welding equipment Mr. Wuchiski organized to handle that first big job stands in a corner. The impetus for the second Ford came from Cathy. "You know what my wife told me? She said, 'Your car's all done, you've got all these machines in here, you need something to do.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
After a period of confusion on last week's Billboard album chart, when the top position largely came down to the validity of merchandise bundles, things have settled down a bit, and Billie Eilish returns the top spot for a third time with her debut album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" (Interscope). Songs from "When We All Fall Asleep" were streamed almost 65 million times in the United States last week, and 13,000 copies of the full album were sold, according to Nielsen. That gave Eilish the equivalent of 62,000 album sales, according to the formula that Nielsen and Billboard now use to compare the various means of music consumption. In a slow week, that was enough for "When We All Fall Asleep" to rise two spots and notch its third No. 1 in nine weeks. Last week's official chart was delayed by several days while Billboard studied the deals used by the top contenders to promote their albums: Tyler, the Creator offered copies of "Igor" with T shirts and lawn signs that he sold through his website, while DJ Khaled used energy drinks and supplements to push "Father of Asahd." Tyler's album or maybe just his bundles? won out. If there is a race for second place, DJ Khaled won it this week, while "Igor" fell to No. 3. The Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo opened at No. 4 with "43va Heartless," and Khalid is in fifth place with "Free Spirit."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Anthony Marino set his mobile phone to "Do Not Disturb" before going to bed, but he sensed it flicker in the dark. The next morning, he saw he had missed roughly 30 calls: at 4:15 a.m., 4:34, 4:45, 5:08 and 5:12, and for two hours after that. Most appeared as "Lithuania" on his caller ID, although they could have come from anywhere. "I hate to say it, but I don't pick up the phone anymore, which is crazy," said Mr. Marino, 37, a real estate agent in Brooklyn. "I have missed calls from attorneys and other agents I am doing deals with." The seemingly endless stream of robocalls reached a new monthly high of 5.23 billion nationwide in March, according to the call blocking service YouMail. Some were spammy pitches for unwanted vehicle warranties or debt relief services. Nearly half were straight up scams. And there was often one common thread: They frequently came from somewhere other than they said they did. New technology is providing a glimmer of hope that, someday, you might be able to safely pick up your phone again. Mostly, you'll now be more likely to know callers are who they say they are. Many of the larger carriers are finally testing and adopting technical standards intended to ensure callers are using legitimate phone numbers. Currently, scammers often display bogus numbers sometimes spoofing official or local numbers meant to inspire trust, or faraway ones meant to play on your curiosity. (The ostensibly Lithuanian callers that Mr. Marino encountered typically hang up before the targets can answer, aiming to bill them, like a 900 number, when they call back. It's known as a wangiri scam Japanese for "one ring and cut.") Anti spoofing technology won't end spam, experts said, but it should help. "It means I know where the number is coming from it doesn't mean it's not a spam call," said Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, an association that focuses on industrywide problems. "But once we know the caller ID is accurate, we can begin to address the problem." T Mobile was the first to install the new standard known by the acronym Stir/Shaken, a tortured reference to James Bond and martini preparation in January, although it's currently compatible only with certain devices. AT T and Comcast have worked together to verify calls across their networks, and Verizon said it expected to finish rolling out the standard within the next few months. For the new approach to be most effective, the vast majority of the industry, from cable landlines to mobile providers, must use the new protocol. That way, both ends of a call a Verizon customer calling, say, a Comcast customer can be verified. Gaps would still exist, however. Most older landlines, the kind found more often in rural areas, cannot adopt the new protocol. And international calls cannot yet be fully traced, so scams originating overseas using a spoofed domestic number could slip through. But experts said the new standard would still make it easier to more quickly identify schemes coming from overseas and other calls that couldn't be fully authenticated if the industry's biggest companies adopted it. "We believe that we will begin to see value once a critical mass of deployment has taken place, a bit like vaccinations, and the top dozen or so carriers should get us to that point," Mr. McEachern said. While the Federal Communications Commission has said robocalls are a top priority, critics have long complained that the industry and its regulators have been slow to address the problem. The industry has been working on the new protocol since at least 2013, and the F.C.C. has been criticized for not requiring a firmer deadline for its adoption. A Senate bill that would establish a deadline has gained bipartisan traction. The Traced Act, introduced by Senators John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, and Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, passed a committee vote this month. Along with stiffening penalties and giving the F.C.C. more time to punish perpetrators, the bill would require all voice service providers including those over the internet, such as Skype and Google Voice to adopt call authentication technology within 18 months of the bill's enactment. "The phone companies say they are working toward this, but we really think it's important to be required to implement this by a certain deadline," said Maureen Mahoney, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports. Authentic caller ID information isn't a cure all. The new standard hasn't yet been rolled out, and there are already cheap and easy ways to circumvent it. Scammers who can't hide behind spoofed numbers can just buy real ones for 1 a month or less and make tens of thousands of calls from each of them. "Many such services today require only a credit card, so that a robocaller can easily acquire a number, use it for robocalls until the number makes its way onto too many blacklists to be useful and then pick a new one," said Henning Schulzrinne, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who was a chief technology officer at the F.C.C. from 2012 to 2014 and again in 2017. Even fraudulent callers using real numbers should be easier to ferret out, however, because their calls will, in a sense, have fingerprints. Attempts to weed out bogus calls have also spawned a movement to verify the calls you might want to pick up. Many businesses and governments use bulk calling services to provide critical information: credit card fraud alerts from banks, product recalls and even alerts to crime victims that an offender has been released from custody. Such calls have been mislabeled as scams or even mistakenly blocked by apps after being reported as spam, experts said. A company called Numeracle is working with the industry to ensure that such calls get through by vetting and registering businesses and other organizations, then sharing their numbers with the industry. "If we accidentally start to catch good calls, there can be serious consequences," said Rebekah Johnson, the founder and chief executive officer of Numeracle. Regulators have made headway against illegal calls: The F.C.C. has issued fines for spoofing, and the Federal Trade Commission recently shut down four companies that made billions of illegal calls. But consumer advocates are concerned that regulators could add to the volume of robocalls that are legally permitted. The F.C.C. is working on a new definition of auto dialers the systems that make robocalls to clarify what technology it covers. The previous interpretation was struck down by a federal court in a case brought by ACA International, a trade group for the credit and debt collection industries. Consumer advocates fear the F.C.C., under the business friendly Trump administration, will narrow the definition. That could make it easier for robocallers from telemarketers to debt collectors to call without consumer consent, which is currently required when calls are made using an auto dialer or a prerecorded voice. "If they define auto dialer the way the industry wants it defined, it will be so narrow it won't cover any of the auto dialers out there," said Margot Saunders, senior counsel at the National Consumer Law Center. "The scourge of robocalls will skyrocket." The F.C.C. said those concerns were speculative. The agency has solicited public comments on the issue twice last year, but declined to say how long it might take to come up with a new definition. A spokesman said the commission "will continue to combat all illegal robocalls with every tool we have." Consumers, meanwhile, just want to be able to pick up their phones again. Matt Kumagai of Los Angeles recently received a barrage of calls purporting to be from Honduras, Belarus and Lithuania. "I just ignore calls that are not a contact in my phone, because it has become so overwhelming," Mr. Kumagai, 27, said. After receiving a dozen spam calls in two days, he vented on Twitter: "If I get 1 more call from Belarus I'm gonna lose it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
CARLOS URRUTIA'S job is to fly a private jet. But when he is on board the Bombardier Challenger 300, which he has flown for tens of thousands of hours, he does much more than that. He welcomes the passengers on board. He stows their luggage. He offers each passenger a drink before takeoff, anything from water to coffee to a cocktail that he will mix. If someone can't figure out how to work one of the eight seats that swivel, or close the lavatory door, he'll walk back while his co pilot takes over and explain how it works. Mr. Urrutia's plane will also arrive at the destination faster and with less frustration than any first class traveler on a commercial airline could dream of. It's a nice way to travel if you can afford the 10,000 an hour for the trip. This is the world of private aviation. But even in that world, there are degrees of convenience, comfort and, to many, excess. Still, the lure of flying private can get the best of people and end up being a costly mistake. "Sometimes people don't know the difference between their needs and wants," said Kevin O'Leary, president of Jet Advisors, which offers advice on private aviation options. "We help them analyze their need first and then look at services." Those services break down into four categories: chartering a jet, buying a set number of hours in a jet program, getting a fractional interest in a plane or putting down tens of millions of dollars for your own aircraft. Each one has its defenders and its detractors. But Mr. O'Leary says what matters the most is how a private plane is to be used, whether by just one person or several executives. Chartering a jet works best for those who can plan their trips in advance and are less concerned with the type of aircraft they get. "Charter is the most flexible," said Mark H. Lefever, president and chief operating officer of Avjet, a broker and adviser. "You have no monthly bills. You make up how much you want to spend per year and how many trips you want to do." The downside of chartering is that it is a different plane each time, and the condition of the plane may vary. A bigger concern could be with safety. While the plane itself may be perfectly sound, the pilot may not have a lot of experience flying that particular plane. Anthony Tivnan, co founder and president of Magellan Jets, a private aviation consultant, said his firm ran background checks on the pilots 24 hours before a charter flight. "You want the pilots making instinctive decisions," Mr. Tivnan said. "You'll see a pilot has 10,000 hours on a Delta 757. That's not the same as the cockpit in a Gulfstream 450." His company requires that pilots have at least 300 hours of experience in that specific plane. The next step up is an hours program, commonly called a jet card. VistaJet allows people to fix their costs by buying the hours they think they'll need, and adding more if they go over. The company has 50 Bombardier jets in two sizes one for flights up to a cross country trip and another for trans Atlantic travel and it is trying to appeal to a global audience with a service branded like a luxury hotel, said Thomas Flohr, VistaJet's chairman and founder. For the longer range Bombardier Global, the cost is 16,000 an hour, meaning 200 hours a year would cost 3.2 million. Over five years, that works out to be about as much as the upfront cost of a quarter share of the same plane, which would be about 14 million, but any share program has additional membership fees and fuel surcharges. But consumers need to match the hours program to their usage. XOJet, another card program, flies two types of aircraft the Cessna Citation X, known for its speed, and the Bombardier Challenger 300 that hold the same number of people and have the same range, which is a cross country flight. XOJet differentiates itself in its Preferred Access program by charging different rates depending on the demand. (One complaint consumers have about many of these programs is the hours are all priced the same, no matter when someone needs a plane.) "We charge more on high demand days to protect our inventory, and we charge less per hour the longer you fly," said Brad Stewart, president and chief executive of XOJet. He said the price could be as low as 5,000 an hour for an off peak flight lasting five to six hours, and run up to 12,000 an hour for a short flight during peak time. But once that price is set, it doesn't change. "If you pay 21,000 for the trip, we'll get there whether it takes three hours or five hours," he said. But those costs are still less than fractional ownership, where the minimum to enter is several million dollars and the operators are few. NetJets, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, is an industry leader. Then, there is Flexjet which Mr. Urrutia flies for and Flight Options, both owned by Directional Aviation. In an attempt to stand out, Flexjet received two new Gulfstream G450s this week and has agreed to buy 48 more Gulfstream aircraft in various sizes, all customized with upholstery and finishes that differentiate them from the typical grays and tans of private jets. With its Gulfstream fleet, it plans to limit the number of fractional owners per plane to 10. "If you want a premium experience, you need to have some level of programmatic commitment as opposed to buying it in blocks of 25 hours at a time," said Michael Silvestro, chief executive of Flexjet. "We walk out and we're there. It's a convenience and a time saver." Fractional owners get to depreciate the price of their investment, but that money is still tied up for a period of time. In the case of Flexjet, the maximum contract is for five years, but people can sell their stakes back to the company after two to three years. The criticism of fractional jets is that the companies, not the market, set the prices for everything, including what someone's share is going to be worth after the five year contract is up. There is no other market to sell an eighth of a plane but back to the company that has sold the other seven eighths of it. People who buy their own plane are rarely going to use the 800 to 1,000 hours a plane can fly a year. They just want their own jet. The Gulfstream G450s that Flexjet received this week cost 34 million each. To have the right to 200 hours of flying per year or 15 cross country round trip flights, or 30 flights from New York to Miami and back would cost 8 million a year for five years plus membership dues and assorted fuel and flight costs. The Bombardier Global Express that VistaJet flies costs about 56 million. But often, the owners realize after the purchase just how expensive owning a jet that sits there can be. Mr. O'Leary, the president of Jet Advisors, said annual costs started at 750,000 for a smaller jet and can run over 4 million for larger, long range planes. One of his customers just paid 9 million to refurbish the engines on a plane that is probably worth 12 million, he said. Like large yacht owners, jet owners may then look for help in offsetting the costs. Of the 40 jets in Avjet's charter fleet, 38 are owned by individuals, many of whom work in the entertainment industry, Mr. Lefever said. "The majority of these guys use it 150 to 200 hours a year, so their planes are underutilized," Mr. Lefever said. "We can lower their operating costs by 1 million instead of having the plane just sit there." But as he tells his clients who wonder if the jet was a good purchase, "You own a 20,000 square foot house in Bel Air. Did you need that space?" When they say no, he tells them: "The airplane is the same thing. Buy it because you can afford it and you want it."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Your Money
Directed, with more efficiency than novelty, by Matt Bettinelli Olpin and Tyler Gillett (two thirds of the collective known as Radio Silence), "Ready or Not" turns the home invasion thriller inside out. Relentless and thoroughly preposterous, Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy 's script hews to its own batty logic, its frantic pacing peppered with morbid humor. Alex's coke fueled sister keeps accidentally killing the help, and a wicked Andie MacDowell, as Grace's implacably murderous mother in law, is clearly having a blast with that ancient bow and arrow. But it's Weaving who gives this blunt satire of class warfare a heart. Surrounded by cartoon villains, she's easy to applaud: There's no side to Grace, just a fearless decency and school of hard knocks scrappiness that's never diluted with a nudge or a wink. Her performance like the tormented way that Adam Brody, playing Alex's vaguely dissipated brother, delivers his too few lines reminds us that extreme wealth is often paid for by the suffering of others. Her deconstructed wedding dress, on the other hand, simply screams that women should think twice before asking for that ring. Rated R for ubiquitous splatter and satanic invocations. Running time: 1 hour and 35 minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Decade of Job Growth Comes to an End, Undone by a Pandemic The longest stretch of American job creation on record came to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, another reflection of the coronavirus pandemic that has brought the economy to a virtual standstill. Compared with the astounding numbers of people recently applying for unemployment benefits nearly 10 million in the previous two weeks the figure announced Friday was less striking: a loss of 701,000 jobs. But the data was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay at home orders began to cover much of the nation. With that, what had been a drip drip drip of job losses turned into a deluge. "As bad as this report is, next month will be many orders of magnitude worse," said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays. "This is the initial slippage of the labor market." He said the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to 13 percent in April. The decline in employment last month was the biggest monthly drop since the depths of the Great Recession in 2008 9. It was paced by a net loss of 459,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector. The near decade of resurgent hiring more than recouped the 8.7 million jobs wiped out in the recession that came just before. For corporations, the last 10 years were a golden age. With interest rates low, many companies binged on debt even as they used excess cash to buy back stock. For workers, the results were mixed, with only modest increases in wages, especially for those in lower paid jobs. In the last few years, monthly hiring picked up, pushing the unemployment rate to a half century low, including a 3.5 percent reading in February. The coronavirus pandemic changed all that. The closing of everything from restaurants and barbershops to retail stores and movie theaters eliminated broad swaths of employment in one blow, a loss only partly mitigated by vast government aid programs hurriedly enacted last month. Hiring virtually stopped in March, and nonessential businesses laid off staff as stay at home orders spread throughout the country. If anything, the picture has grown bleaker since the Labor Department collected the March data. "April will be markedly worse," said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. "Job losses will be in the millions and will make March's losses look tiny." She expects the unemployment rate to peak at 16.4 percent in May, the highest level since the Labor Department began keeping track after the Great Depression. The record is 10.8 percent in November and December 1982. Ms. Zentner expects the unemployment rate to begin coming down in June but said the recovery would be slow. "The unemployment rate went up by elevator and will come down by escalator," she said. During the long expansion, corporations were confident enough to run their operations with low inventories, lots of debt, little cash and supply lines that stretched across the globe. Without that cash cushion and that confidence, getting back to robust employment levels will not be easy, said Stephanie Pomboy, president of the independent research firm MacroMavens. "Companies saved nothing for a rainy day," she said. "They will have a much more conservative approach to running their businesses in the future." With most workplaces shut down, laid off workers confront a bleak landscape, with little prospect of being hired until the pandemic lifts. 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. One exception is in shipping and delivery, where companies are staffing up to get goods to millions of customers who can't leave home. Amazon is in the midst of hiring 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers, and said Thursday that it had already added 80,000. Walmart and Lowe's are filling tens of thousands of new positions. But those are rare opportunities in an economy largely frozen. "We're in a delicate period in which a mild recession could turn into something more damaging," said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist for Northern Trust. "Government policy must continue to be aggressive if we hope to put a floor under the current economic retreat." The March report "represents the interruption of a very long winning streak, and sadder still, this is only the tip of the iceberg," he said. "It's clear from the data that those with more modest levels of education remain the most vulnerable members of our labor force. They are often the first to be laid off and often take a long time to get back to work." The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for workers without a high school diploma rose to 6.8 percent in March from 5.7 percent in February, according to the Labor Department. Among those with at least a bachelor's degree, joblessness rose to 2.5 percent from 1.9 percent. Mr. Tannenbaum noted that restaurants and other food service establishments, which rely more heavily on less educated workers, were among the businesses hit hardest as the shutdown progressed. What's more, many of those workers can't afford an interruption in their paychecks. For workers like Jane Bunting, March was a transitional month between employment and unemployment. A member of the national touring company of "Come From Away," a Broadway musical, she watched as one venue after another canceled show dates as March wore on. She received her last payment on Thursday and has been trying to file for unemployment benefits this week, only to see the website crash on every attempt. Ms. Bunting gave up her apartment in New York City when the show's tour began a year and a half ago and is holed up in a rental place in upstate New York. "I've been saving really aggressively, so I feel comfortable," she said. "I haven't had to dip into savings yet. But the longer this goes on, I definitely will." "I'm a cancer survivor, so all of a sudden to be without my benefits is very scary," she said. Ms. Chase is supposed to undergo checks every six months to make sure she is still in remission. As soon as she heard the layoff news, she called to reschedule one scan for this week, but was not able to get an appointment. "It's very scary as a single person," Ms. Chase said. One of 300 people at her firm who were laid off, she has to wait until after her last day of work to file for unemployment benefits. "I realized I'm actually grieving the loss of my jobs, the loss of my benefits and it's not anything that I did," she said. As bad as the layoffs have been, some executives are trying their best to avoid staff reductions. Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing firm, is forgoing his salary through the second quarter of the year and potentially longer, he said. Business is down 25 percent, and he anticipates that it could ultimately be off 35 percent. He has been holding all hands meetings with his employees at 10 a.m. daily with the online conferencing app Zoom. The market for permanent positions is very weak, he said, but the temporary staffing business is holding up a bit better. "There are no profits right now," Mr. Gimbel said. "But we've avoided layoffs so far."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Economy
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Stephen Colbert admitted that he's happy to see President Trump and Congress apparently nearing a border security deal, which would help avert a government shutdown. But he said that he wished he could press reset on the political conversation. "We're supposed to care whether Trump won and Nancy lost, or Trump caved and Nancy's dancing in the end zone," he said. "But nothing nothing that has happened in government in 2019 has affected anyone. Where's the infrastructure bill? Where's the immigration bill? Where's the fix on health care? We are celebrating or supposed to be celebrating that they're close to a deal to achieve the absolute minimum: having a government!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
SOME cars just make sense. But that doesn't mean Americans will like them. For instance, Americans have largely dismissed the station wagon, preferring taller riding crossovers by as much as 10 to 1. But the compact van known in much of the world as an M.P.V. for multipurpose vehicle can't even claim the Brady Bunch nostalgia of the station wagon. In Europe, where gasoline averages about 7 a gallon, M.P.V.'s like the Renault Scenic, the Opel Zafira from General Motors and the Ford Focus C Max are the ubiquitous answer to this basic question: How can I afford to move my family around without drilling for oil in my backyard? But here, measured against hulking "minivans," the rare M.P.V.'s have been seen as scrawny and suspiciously "euro" the way soccer players are dismissed by rabid N.F.L. fans. If that's not challenge enough, the Mazda 5 the only pure M.P.V. (with sliding doors) on the market is still a minivan, writ small but no less boxy. Social monitors in the neighborhood might view the Mazda as carrying all the minivan's suburban square baggage, while simultaneously announcing that you couldn't afford a real one. But that would be unfair. First, there are signs that the big crushes all mentality, once as secure as an armored Hummer, is just one gas price spike away from being shattered forever. Second, all it takes is a whip around the neighborhood to make you realize that Mazda's mouse is sportier than its elephantine rivals. There is good reason for this: at barely 15 feet long, with an unloaded weight of less than 3,500 pounds, the Mazda is nearly two feet shorter and a half ton lighter than a Honda Odyssey. And the Mazda is just a smart family car, because it combines the good parts of a minivan three rows of seats, easy entering and exiting, unimpeded views with the exterior footprint, maneuverability and price of a compact. For all the cavernous virtues of an Odyssey or a Toyota Sienna, those minivans can top 40,000, on par with luxury sedans. The Mazda starts at less than half that: 19,260 with a 5 speed manual transmission. The midlevel Touring version that I tested, with an automatic transmission, goes out the door for 22,235. The priciest Grand Touring model starts at 23,755 and tops 27,000 when equipped with options like a navigation system and DVD player. One cannot help but admire a machine that combines sporty and utilitarian virtues at such a reasonable price. Yet there's no denying that this cute vanlet is a niche vehicle that faces stiff competition, not just from larger vans, but from wagons and from compact crossovers like the Honda CR V or Toyota RAV4. (The Mazda's most direct rival is the Kia Rondo, which has conventional hinged rear doors.) The 5 may undercut the big minivans by 10,000 or more, but it isn't as plush, powerful or quiet. And while the Mazda can haul six people to the movies, you can forget packing that sextet for a trip to the Grand Canyon unless you strap a few children to the roof. The Mazda's interior is straightforward and well finished. There's a whiff of economy car in the plastics and fabrics, offset by nicer touches like sporty gauges and a leather wrapped automatic shifter that protrudes from the dashboard. Fold the third row flat, and there's a generous 44.4 cubic feet of cargo space. With the second row down, the space expands to nearly 90 cubic feet. Both figures trump any compact crossover. But if six people are spread across the Mazda's seats, there's only 11.7 cubic feet of storage behind the third row. That space is on par with the three row RAV4. Yet here, the tale of the tape doesn't lie: if you are putting bodies in every seat, the Odyssey, Dodge Grand Caravan and other likesize vans can pack roughly three times as much cargo behind the rearmost row. That is one reason why Mazda executives see the 5 as ideally suited to families with one or two children. When opened, those manual doors also hug the vehicle's sides more than the electric portals of other minivans. Throw in a body that's eight inches narrower than the Odyssey's, and the Mazda is especially easy to load or off load in tight parking slots or garages. At the rear, the liftgate opens just high enough for a six footer to stow gear without having to duck below it. To get everyone to fit, the Mazda takes a socialist approach to resource sharing. The front seats are normal, except for their captain's chair folding armrests (which are so stubby only a T Rex might find them useful). But the second and third row seats are subtly shrunken to maximize the space and allow all that magical flat folding. When I sat in the second row, the top of the seatback ended at my shoulder blades. And in the third row, taller riders need to slide the headrest up some 10 inches to get support for their heads. The second row has three inches less legroom than the CR V or RAV4, though you can slide the seat back nearly four inches to expand the space. A theater seating layout, with each row positioned slightly higher than the one ahead, helps to stave off claustrophobia. That's combined with the Mazda's fantastic outward views, aided by pleasingly low window sills and enormous vistas of glass. Some car critics have complained that the Mazda's third row is strictly for children, and it is true that knee space and foot room are tight back there. But when I was forced into the way back space, with my 3 year old daughter sitting ahead of me (thrilled at seeing Dad relegated to the cheap seats), I found that a lone adult rider can fully stretch his legs down the center aisle, making the journey surprisingly comfortable. Motivation comes from a 2.3 liter 4 cylinder with 153 horsepower and 148 pound feet of torque. Even without a load, the 5 is on the slow side, running from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 9.7 seconds. With passengers aboard while climbing steep foothills north of New York City, the Mazda sweated a bit to make speed. While the Mazda engine is one of the smoother 4 bangers around, no magic of balance shafts or engine mounts can make it as quiet and vibration free as a 6 or 8 cylinder. Still, the Mazda will still cruise effortlessly at 80 m.p.h. And if there's not much of Mazda's signature "zoom zoom" in the acceleration, there's plenty elsewhere. Despite noticeable body roll on turns, the steering and suspension are joyfully sharp, sensitive and fun you just have to work at it. Once I pledged to keep that little motor on full boil, working the shifter's manual function like mad, the 5 responded in kind. It's hard to say how many family owners want to carve turns in a minivan, but with the 5 it can be done. And for 2010, the 5 gets electronic stability control a valuable safety feature as standard equipment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
After years of resistance, European leaders agreed Thursday to reduce Greece's debt burden in a last ditch effort to preserve the euro and stem a broader financial panic. The pact, negotiated in Brussels, is part of a rescue package of 109 billion euros, or 157 billion, for Greece, the most troubled economy in the euro zone. It will force many investors in Greek debt to accept some losses on their bonds. The deal would also provide substantial debt relief for Ireland and Portugal. And by giving the main European rescue fund increased powers to assist countries that have not been bailed out like Spain and Italy leaders are betting that the program, described by some as a new Marshall Plan for Europe, will serve as a firebreak against the contagion that has threatened to engulf some of the region's largest economies. Officials have long shunned proposals that would make banks and other creditors share some losses on Greek debt. But European leaders are taking the calculated risk that they can avoid spooking investors by expanding the aid package to include other troubled countries on Europe's periphery. The fear had been that a failure by Greece to pay its debt in full could lead to panicked selling of other European bonds. That could make it impossible for other countries to borrow at a reasonable interest rate and finance themselves. The lack of a solution to Greece had also rattled financial markets, ultimately forcing European leaders to act this week. On the eve of the summit meeting, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Angela Merkel of Germany met in Berlin, along with the president of the European Central Bank, and came to a general agreement that euro zone taxpayers would have to cover the rescue costs to preserve the integrity of the single European currency. How German and French citizens will react to the proposal is unclear. Financial markets in Europe and the United States rallied Thursday on news that a broad agreement was imminent, one that would end the piecemeal approach that has brought only temporary relief in the last couple of years. Most economists had deemed Greece incapable of repaying its debt mountain, which amounts to 150 percent of its gross domestic product. Separately, officials said that the terms of the aid package from Europe to Greece would be eased, with maturities lengthened to 15 years from 7.5 years, at an interest rate of a quite low 3.5 percent. The euro zone leaders would give wide ranging new powers to the region's rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, by allowing it to buy government bonds on the secondary market and to help recapitalize banks which might be needed when they write down the value of their Greek bonds. The new powers would effectively turn the facility into a prototype European monetary fund a move that has long been resisted by Germany, the euro zone's richest nation, but that has drawn the support of economists and government officials outside Europe. Together, the various measures are intended to show that the euro zone's leaders are committed to taking forceful policy measures just as the United States and Britain did during the 2008 crisis that will stem the spread of contagion. "This is a move in the right direction," said Peter Bofinger, an economist in Germany who is a member of an economic panel that advises the German government. "The important thing is that they have agreed on a more flexible role for the E.F.S.F. that should help in reducing tensions." But the true test will most likely come in the months ahead, when nations like Portugal, Ireland and Spain, which are struggling to impose unpopular austerity measures on their people, confront the difficulty of cutting budget deficits in the face of brutal recessions. While the agreement to increase the powers of the euro bailout fund did not come easily, the debt deal was perhaps harder to secure. The move will be deemed a selective default by the credit ratings agencies, something the European Central Bank had previously said was unacceptable. Jean Claude Trichet, whose term as president of the European Central Bank will end in October, had argued forcefully that a Greek default, selective or otherwise, would cause contagion to spread as bondholders in other countries unloaded their Irish, Portuguese and even Spanish and Italian bonds. But as fears in Brussels mounted over a bond market rout in Italy the euro zone's third largest economy the risk seemed worth taking by many of Europe's leaders. Germany, which is paying the biggest portion of the bill to bail out Greece, has long pushed for a debt swap to keep bondholders committed to Greece with longer term bonds. Since 2009, foreign banks have reduced their Greek holdings to 45.5 billion euros from 68 billion euros, while taxpayers in Europe (with Germany way out in front) have seen their exposure to Greece go to 120 billion euros from zero and that exposure is expected to grow. And while bondholders will not need to take a big haircut now an important element for capital thin banks in France and Germany that are the biggest holders of Greek debt they might certainly take one in the future. "This will take maturing bonds out of the equation, and it keeps the bondholders in the game and ultimately will make them share in the pain," said Lee C. Buchheit, a lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb Steen Hamilton who has worked on similar debt deals in Latin America. "Everyone knows that something more drastic is coming, but when it comes, you want it to be the bondholders who pay, not the taxpayer." European officials said on Thursday that financial institutions that own Greek bonds would effectively contribute 54 billion euros through 2014, largely by accepting reduced interest payments, and will stretch their maturities to as long as 30 years. In a statement, the Institute of International Finance, a bankers' group, said that the deal would reduce Greece's debt burden by 13.5 billion euros, and potentially more since the European rescue facility will be able to purchase bonds at a discount in the open market. That reduction is relatively small, though, relative to the country's total debt of 350 billion euros, or 496 billion. Still, the deal does represent the first concrete agreement between Greece and its bondholders, and its champions point to the success Uruguay had in 2003 when it initiated a similar program. Critics have countered that Uruguay suffered from a short term liquidity crisis, not a solvency problem rooted in a nearly bankrupt state, as is the case with Greece. But the near collapse in Italian bonds last week pushed Europe to consider proposals that just months ago were unthinkable. For example, a panel of German economists that advise the government last week recommended what economists call a hard restructuring of Greek debt, which would have resulted in an immediate 50 percent loss to bondholders. In the face of such a prospect, a maturity extension and the risk that comes from being in selective default may well be an acceptable alternative, for Europe, Greece and the bondholders themselves.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
New York Fashion Week came to an end in 2001 with a Marc Jacobs show because of tragedy: The morning after his extravaganza on Pier 54, complete with disappearing walls to access the after party and Donald Trump in the audience, the planes hit the Twin Towers and the world changed. And New York Fashion Week came to an end this season with a Marc Jacobs show that acknowledged that moment: A paean to lost optimism and lost friends, and a bouquet of memory. "It has been 18 years and a day we will never forget," read the show notes left on every one of the vintage white rattan fan chairs and iron park benches and wicker garden party seats arrayed sparingly at one end of the cavernous space, like little clouds. "This show, like that show, is a celebration of life." It was also about, wrote Mr. Jacobs, who dedicated the show to a friend who died in the Towers, how "we continue to learn from our past." They swirled past the audience en masse like a kaleidoscope of butterflies, and then reappeared one by one, each a singular character of Mr. Jacobs's imagination: a woman in a long, golden bias cut gown; in a short explosion of petals; in a perfectly cut gray trouser suit, fedora perched jauntily on her head. A woman in newsboy stripes and a feather boa; in gangster plaid; in a knit lunch suit covered in sequins. At the end came a long navy dress with white lace at the cuffs and high neck and inset at the back, down to the curve of the spine. It was an homage to Marina Schiano, the fashion editor and YSL muse turned businesswoman whose death was announced earlier this week , and one of her most famous photos: facing away from the camera, in a black Yves Saint Laurent gown with a piano shaped lace inset at the back. "Dream a Little Dream of Me" played on the soundtrack. It was lovely. Although the spring/summer shows (if that is what we are still calling them) and the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack always coincide, it's strangely rare for a designer to acknowledge that fact. That Mr. Jacobs did, and did so with such grace and beauty, is admirable. And it also reflects an awareness that things are different now. Not just because the path of the city and the country was altered in 2001 and the world order shifted, but because suddenly the fashion order is shifting, too. Once upon a time once upon that nascent 21st century time Mr. Jacobs was the favored son of New York, its Wizard of Oz and boy wonder wrapped into one. He built the biggest sets, had the best celebrity guests and the most egregious wait times; made clothes that made everyone think, 'Yeah! That's who I want to be next.' Now the sets are gone, the waiting time is normal and Mr. Jacobs has become, if not exactly an elder statesman (he's still too unpredictable and ornery for that; leave that role to Tom Ford), then a sort of kooky, beloved uncle. And after years of constriction in which the big brands that once defined New York Calvin Klein, Donna Karan disappeared, and the next generation never quite reached its expected potential, despite an almost seasonal litany of "Woe is us, no one cares, New York Fashion is irrelevant," something new and interesting has begun to emerge in the vacuum. Their allegiance is not to the old consumers by the side of the runway the ladies who lunch, the philanthropists, the wives of Wall Street, the gallerists of Chelsea (though those consumers still exist and there are plenty of designers who dress them). It is to a new society, one exponentially more diverse by birthright, that extends far beyond the geography of Midtown/Downtown and dresses to be heard, and seen. It is not to the old form of show, where models strode straightforwardly down a catwalk in a big white tent, the better for store buyers and editors to see product. In fact, it's not necessarily about any product at all. It is about an idea of what a product stands for; about a creative form that connects to music and film and written words and action and layers it all together into community.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
Credit...Jake Dockins for The New York Times Charee Mobley, who teaches middle school in Fort Worth, Texas, had just 166 to get herself and her 17 year old daughter through the last two weeks of August. But that money disappeared when Ms. Mobley, 37, ran into an issue with Square's Cash App, an instant payments app that she was using in the coronavirus pandemic to pay her bills and do her banking. After seeing an errant online shopping charge on her Cash App, Ms. Mobley called what she thought was a help line for it. But the line had been set up by someone who asked her to download some software, which then took control of the app and drained her account. "I didn't have gas money and I couldn't pay my daughter's senior dues," Ms. Mobley said. "We basically just had to stick it out until I got paid the following week." In the pandemic, people have flocked to instant payment apps like Cash App, PayPal's Venmo and Zelle as they have wanted to avoid retail bank branches and online commerce has become more ingrained. To encourage that shift, the payment apps have added services like debit cards and routing numbers so that they work more like traditional banks. But many people are unaware of how vulnerable they can be to losses when they use these services in place of banks. Payment apps have long had fraud rates that are three to four times higher than traditional payment methods such as credit and debit cards, according to data from the security firms Sift and Chargeback Gurus. The fraud appears to have surged in recent months as more people use the apps. At Venmo, daily users have grown by 26 percent since last year, while the number of customer reviews mentioning the words fraud or scam has risen nearly four times as fast, according to a New York Times analysis of data from Apptopia, a firm that tracks mobile services. Driving the surge is the apps' ease of use. People need just an email address to create a Cash App account and a phone number to make a Venmo account. That simplicity has made it seamless for thieves to set up accounts and to send requests for money to other users, something that was not possible with traditional bank payments. The apps' instantaneous transactions compared to the two or three days needed for a standard bank transfer have also meant that Venmo and Cash App have less time to detect whether a transaction is fraudulent. "Fast payments equals fast fraud," said Frank McKenna, the chief fraud strategist for the security firm PointPredictive. The apps, which are sometimes known as peer to peer payments services, "are super convenient for customers but that also makes them ripe targets," he said. Square, PayPal and Zelle do not disclose the rate of fraud on their apps. PayPal takes steps to "limit potential fraudulent activity and mitigate any customer impact," a spokeswoman said, but she did not address whether it had seen more cases of fraud. Zelle, which was founded by a coalition of banks, appears to have experienced less fraud because it has more robust authentication for new users and more legal protections in case of loss, security experts said. "Protecting consumers from abusive scams and fraud is a top priority for Zelle," said Meghan Fintland, a spokeswoman for Early Warning, the company that runs the app. Of all the payment apps, fraud issues have been particularly acute for Square's Cash App. As the number of people using the app daily has grown 59 percent over the last year, the number of reviews about it that mention the words fraud or scam has risen 165 percent, according to Apptopia. Lena Anderson, a spokeswoman for Square, said the company was "aware that there has been a recent rise in scammers trying to take advantage of customers using financial products, including Cash App. We've taken a number of proactive steps and made it our top priority." Square, which is led by Jack Dorsey, who is also chief executive of Twitter, introduced Cash App in 2013. While the San Francisco company was founded as a payments platform for small businesses, Cash App has become its largest source of revenue. In the second quarter, the app generated 1.2 billion of Square's 1.9 billion in revenue. But Cash App has been more vulnerable to fraud partly because of how it handles customers, security experts said. Square has until recently offered only email support for the app, not a phone number for its customers to call. That led some customers to fall for fake help line numbers, like the kind that Ms. Mobley confronted. Venmo, in contrast, has a chat line on its app that customers can use for a quick response. Ms. Anderson said Square began rolling out a phone line for certain customers on Oct. 6. It plans to make the phone line available to all customers over time. Cash App also appears to be more prone to fraud because of how Square has built the business, industry analysts said. In 2017, Square began a marketing campaign called "Cash App Fridays," which gives money to Twitter users who post their so called Cashtag or username. The campaign, security experts said, provided fraudsters with a phone book of potential victims. Emily Bradford, an unemployed 21 year old in Washington, said she lost 75 last month after getting a message through Twitter offering her 3,000 through Cash App if she paid an initial "clearance" payment. When she sent the money, the person who messaged her disappeared. She reached out to Cash App's support email, but hasn't heard back, she said. "I figured since they were dealing with money, especially others' money, they'd have a very good security system and customer service," she said of Square. Ms. Anderson, the Square spokeswoman, said the company had recently added warnings about copycats on its messages about Cash App Fridays. In 2018, Square also introduced the ability for people to transact in Bitcoin on Cash App. That has made it easier to move illicit gains off the app because Bitcoin can be sent to anonymous addresses that are much harder to trace or reverse than traditional financial transactions. Venmo and Zelle don't offer Bitcoin. Ashley Tolley, 31, a mother of three in Travelers Rest, S.C., recently experienced the criminal activity on Cash App firsthand. In August, she said, she received requests on the app from addresses that appeared to be legitimate, but with a letter or two changed. While some of the transactions were rejected by Square, one went ahead without her approval. The thief took 560, which was a month of child support payments from the father of her two youngest children, from her account. Square told Ms. Tolley that she could ask the fraudster to send the money back to her. But the person had already deleted their Cash App account. "I'm the sole provider in my household," she said. "For that to be gone I broke down, I was in tears."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. This week, it was reported that Rudy Giuliani had asked to be paid 20,000 a day for his work managing President Trump's court challenges to his loss in the election. That would have made Giuliani among the most highly compensated lawyers anywhere, even as Mr. Trump's lawsuits fail one after another. "Wow, he's the gift that keeps on grifting, isn't he?" Jimmy Kimmel joked Tuesday night.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Elsa Joubert belonged to a group of dissident writers in Afrikaans who called themselves "Die Sestigers" (the Sixtyers, or writers of the 1960s). This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here. Elsa Joubert, one of South Africa's best known writers in the Afrikaans language, whose apartheid era novel "The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena" opened the eyes of many white South Africans to the harsh treatment that the black majority had been enduring largely out of their sight, died on June 14 in Cape Town. She was 97. She had received a diagnosis of Covid 19, her son, Nico Steytler, told South African news media. Ms. Joubert belonged to a group of dissident writers in Afrikaans a language derived from the 17th century Dutch spoken by South Arica's first white settlers who called themselves "Die Sestigers" (the Sixtyers, or writers of the 1960s). Her work ranged from novels to autobiography to travelogues, but among her books it was "Poppie Nongena" that struck the most resounding chord in South Africa. First published in 1978 in Afrikaans as "Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena," the novel tells of a black woman's struggle to keep her family together in the face of oppressive apartheid laws intended to control the lives of the black majority from cradle to grave. As the writer and fellow Die Sestiger Andre Brink put it in an essay, quoted in her obituary in The Johannesburg Review of Books, the novel, based on the life of an actual South African woman, "caused a furor in Afrikaner circles." He added, "It would not be an overstatement to say that, in this fictionalized biography, Elsa Joubert has done for Afrikaners what Paton's 'Cry, the Beloved Country' did for white readers" 30 years earlier in arousing world opinion against apartheid. "Poppie Nongena" was translated into 13 languages and won a host of South African literary awards. Ms. Joubert's novel "The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena" was translated from Afrikaans into 13 languages. It won a host of South African literary awards. Elsabe Antoinette Murray Joubert was born on Oct. 19, 1922, in the Cape settlement of Paarl, which was closely associated with the Afrikaners' campaign for official recognition of their language. She was educated in a racially segregated system that pre dated apartheid. Before becoming an author, Ms. Joubert was a teacher in the remote Eastern Cape town of Cradock, which would later be a crucible of black resistance. She married Klaas Steytler, a writer, in 1950 and had three children with him, Elsabe, Henriette and Nico. Mr. Steytler died in 1998. (Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.) In preparing to write "Poppie Nongena" Ms. Joubert had long conversations with the woman on whom she based the title character. Ms. Joubert said that only the woman's name in the book, Poppie Nongena, was an invention. Ms. Joubert trod a fine line as a white woman seeking to articulate the plight of a black protagonist at a time when many white South Africans displayed scant curiosity about the lives of black people, who most often occupied the most menial of positions. The gulf between the Sestigers and many other Afrikaners produced what Mr. Brink, who died in 2015, called a "cultural schizophrenia." In their early work, he said, "they could not reconcile their cosmopolitan outlook with the laager mentality of Afrikanerdom," referring to a circle the wagons defensiveness. They "finally resolved the conflicts within themselves by 'coming home' to Africa in the fullest sense of the word," he added, coming to see their identity as part of a common African heritage. "Poppie Nongena" appears on a list of the best 100 African books of the 20th century, as compiled in 2002 by the African Studies Center at Leiden University in the Netherlands. It inspired a play, adapted by Ms. Joubert and Sandra Kotze (it had its New York premiere Off Broadway in 1982), and a South African movie in 2019. Ms. Joubert was awarded high honors by the post apartheid government in the early 1990s.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Books
Just as lightning can strike the same target more than once in a given storm, hip fractures can and do happen again to the same person. Yet, more often than not, people who fracture a hip do not get follow up treatment that could prevent another fracture. Studies have shown that after a hip fracture is repaired, patients often fall through the cracks, leaving them at risk of a recurrence. The surgeon's job ends with fixing or, more likely, replacing the broken hip. It's then up to the patient's personal physician to recommend and prescribe measures to help prevent a second fracture. However, the typical 15 minute office visit is often focused on current medical issues, like diabetes and high blood pressure, rather than on a possible future problem, albeit one that can be life threatening. In many cases, experts say, practicing physicians don't even know which of their patients have had a hip fracture. Anyone who breaks a hip, unless from a severe trauma like a car accident, is considered at high risk for further fractures, including breaking the other hip. To reduce the risk, orthopedic experts recommend that following a fracture, patients should have a bone density test, evaluation of calcium and vitamin D levels and, in nearly all cases, medication to protect against further bone loss. Even without a bone density test, Dr. Douglas C. Bauer, internist at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an editorial in JAMA Geriatrics last July, "There is almost universal agreement that individuals with documented hip or vertebral fracture have established osteoporosis, indicating that they are at high risk of future fracture, and appropriate drug therapy should be routinely offered." In an interview he said, "Every patient with a reasonable life expectancy who has a hip fracture should be offered treatment." Dr. Bauer was reacting to what he called "really depressing, shocking data" revealing that only a small and steadily declining fraction of hip fracture patients are being treated with medication that might forestall future broken bones. "Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse, despite the fact that there are quite a large number of treatments that have been proven effective and are now inexpensive," he said. The distressing evidence comes from a national study of 97,169 patients who fractured a hip from 2004 through 2015. Published in JAMA Geriatrics, the study, by Dr. Rishi J. Desai, epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and co authors showed a continuous decline in patients who started taking osteoporotic medications after the fracture, from 9.8 percent of patients in 2004 to a dismal 3.3 percent in 2015. The decline in initiating treatment with any of the many medications known to reduce fracture risk is widely attributed to the outsize publicity given to the very rare risk of jaw necrosis and an uncommon fracture of the femur among patients who take bone drugs for many years. Yet the risk of a second hip fracture is far greater than either of these side effects, Dr. Bauer said. (The Food and Drug Administration just approved a new and different drug, Evenity, which builds bone, but it may have its own risks, this time a small increase in the chances of having a heart attack or stroke. Also, it is very expensive and may not be covered by insurance, and licensed only for postmenopausal women with a high risk of fracture.) Read more about a new osteoporosis drug that builds bone. In Dr. Desai's study, treatment rates among those who broke a hip were even lower for men than for women, although men are nearly as likely to break another bone, including the other hip. In general, without preventive treatment, 15 percent to 25 percent of patients who suffer an osteoporotic fracture will experience another one within 10 years. And with people living longer, hip fractures are increasingly likely. A report, published last year in the journal Osteoporosis International, revealed that, after a decade of declining rates of hip fractures, since 2012 the rates have plateaued in the United States, most likely because so many older adults, and their doctors, have turned their backs on bone protecting medication. Among people enrolled in Medicare alone, Dr. Desai and co authors wrote, this plateau "may have resulted in more than 11,000 additional estimated hip fractures between 2012 and 2015." The side effects associated with bone drugs "have gotten more hype than they should have," Dr. Desai said in an interview. "People worry about them and with preventive therapy, they don't see the benefits right away." However, Dr. Bauer wrote, "hip fractures represent only the tip of the iceberg; timely evaluation and consideration of drug treatment are appropriate for many other individuals at high risk of fracture." Many people at risk of breaking a bone because of osteoporosis are reluctant even to take vitamin D and calcium, nutrients critical to forming healthy bones. In a new national study reported recently by Dr. Spencer Summers, orthopedic surgeon at the University of Miami, to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, fewer than one person in five known to have osteoporosis met the daily recommended intake of both vitamin D and calcium. More than 10 million Americans have osteoporosis, and another 44 million are at increased risk of developing it. Osteoporosis, which means porous bones, is a chronic, progressive disease of increasingly fragile bones that can break from a relatively minor insult, like falling from a standing height. Sooner or later, osteoporosis results in half of white women and 20 percent of white men breaking a bone (the risk is significantly lower in African American and Hispanic adults); when that bone is a hip, the outcome too often is a tragic decline in quality of life, permanent disability or even death. Among elderly patients who break a hip, the mortality rate within a year is as high as 36 percent. In a blog post last August, Dr. Farah Naz Khan bemoaned the fact that her grandparents' primary care doctor "never bothered to do bone density scans to see if they had osteoporosis." Dr. Khan's grandfather, then 89, fell in his home and broke his hip, which led to his death. Less than a year later, her grandmother fell in the same place at home, fractured her arm in three places and lost her ability to live independently. I admit that, after taking the bone drug Fosamax for five years decades ago, I too resisted having my bones tested because I was reluctant to take another drug. But finally, in my mid 70s, I decided I should know how my bones were doing, and lo and behold, my left hip was on the cusp of osteoporosis. The examining doctor, a specialist in this all too common disease among older people, said, "I don't want to see you back here with a broken hip." So I took her advice. I've now had three annual infusions of zoledronic acid (Reclast) and my bone density has stabilized. Hopefully, that will be all I need, but I will have annual bone density tests from now on to be sure.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Well
Cameos! Cameos! Cameos everywhere! Billy Porter, Woody Harrelson and Lin Manuel Miranda all showed up in this week's "Saturday Night Live" cold open, which sent up this week's CNN town hall on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues featuring Democratic presidential candidates. Porter played an M.C. of sorts who introduced the candidates with his typical energy. The first to take the stage was Chris Redd, who portrayed Senator Cory Booker, the Democrat from New Jersey, who told the audience, "My girlfriend was in 'Rent' so yeah, I get it," a reference to Booker's significant other, the actress Rosario Dawson. The forum went quickly, with each candidate getting a moment or two the rare merging of speed dating, comedy and politics. The next to get lampooned was Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Ind. Buttigieg was again played by Colin Jost, who rarely appears in sketches. In response to an audience member who asked about being "gay in the right way," Jost said, "There's no wrong way to be gay. Unless you're Ellen this week." This reference was to the daytime television host, Ellen DeGeneres, who recently received flak after being spotted at a football game with the former president George W. Bush. The highlight of the sketch came when Kate McKinnon reprised her role as Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat of Massachusetts. She recreated a viral moment from the forum parodying how Warren would handle someone opposed to same sex marriage. (At the forum, Warren had a snappy answer: "Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that. And I'm going to say, then just marry one woman. I'm cool with that. Assuming you can find one." McKinnon had more comebacks at the ready: "I would say, sir, 'Tell me your bus stop, because I want to know where you get off.' What else? 'If someone doesn't want to serve gay people at their small business, I bet that's not the only thing that's small.'" There was more where that came from. Miranda showed up to play Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio. (This came after an outcry over a previous "S.N.L." sketch about the Democratic field, in which Castro was left out.) Miranda, a former "S.N.L." host, started his cameo with, "Well, first of all, gracias. As a Democrat, I want to apologize for not being gay, but I promise to do better in the future." The sketch was capped off by Harrelson returning to play the former vice president Joe Biden, as he did when he hosted the season premiere two weeks ago. Harrelson sent up Biden's, let's say, questionable recent attempts at recall on the campaign trail in response to an audience member's inquiry: "I'm glad you asked that question and let me answer by telling you a false memory." A Gritty 'Sesame Street'? No, Thank You. "S.N.L." trained its sights on the recent dust up over the new Todd Phillips film, "Joker," which tells the origin story of Batman's most famous archnemesis. In this case, the show reimagined Phillips telling the origin story of another beloved misanthrope: Oscar the Grouch, as in, the one from "Sesame Street." David Harbour, this week's host and one of the stars of Netflix's "Stranger Things," played Oscar, a down on his luck garbage man who just wants to live in a can, man. There were several brilliant details in this digital short: Bowen Yang playing Guy Smiley of "ABCDEFG News." Mr. Snuffleupagus, portrayed by Kenan Thompson, who apparently runs a prostitution ring on Sesame Street. Bert (Alex Moffat) and Ernie (Mikey Day) being mugged over a rubber duckie. All good stuff. Jost and Michael Che, the hosts of "Weekend Update," took their usual aim at President Trump, and particularly focused on the arrests of two associates of Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, this week. But they found some time to tee off on other topics as well. "Giuliani's two associates are also very successful entrepreneurs. Igor, the handsome one, owns a club in Ukraine that's called Mafia Rave, which I think counts as a full confession." Jost "First of all, bravo to the casting agency that found these two thumb breakers. They look like they use vodka as cologne. These guys have definitely worn track suits to their daughter's wedding. I know these are easy jokes but I'm surprised these guys were helping the president and not I don't know helping George Costanza get that Frogger machine across the street." Che "Trump then explained withdrawing troops from northern Syria, saying that we didn't need to defend our Kurdish allies because 'They didn't help us in World War II.' But with World War II, it's kind of hard to know who Trump means by 'us.'" Jost "Joe Biden for the first time called for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office after he realized finally that the 'Joe Biden' Trump keeps attacking was him." Jost "The owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars announced that he will be a majority investor in a new 24 hour news network aimed at African American viewers. Unfortunately they've named it CNN Word." Che Gosh, the last sketch of the night had everything: a solid premise "Dog Court." A great lead character with Cecily Strong playing a Judge Judy type, presiding over a courtroom that adjudicates canine cases. Lots of cute dogs. The works. And finally, unexpected bit of live TV mayhem, when at one point, Strong held on unruly pug in her hands that didn't seem to want to be held.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
If you've ever had milk, you're probably familiar with the work of Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French chemist and biologist. He prevented diseases, developing a process widely known as pasteurization for killing microbes in milk and wine. He also created vaccines for rabies and anthrax. And his ideas led to the acceptance of germ theory, the notion that tiny organisms caused diseases like cholera. Pasteur even helped us brew better beer. "He's considered the benefactor of mankind," said Joseph Gal, a chemist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado. But before all that, Pasteur was an artist. And without his early creative explorations, he may not have made one of his most monumental, but least talked about, discoveries in science, one with far reaching implications. In a paper published last month in Nature Chemistry, Dr. Gal explains how a young Pasteur fought against the odds to articulate the existence of chirality, or the way that some molecules exist in mirror image forms capable of producing very different effects. Today we see chirality's effects in light, in chemistry and in the body even in the drugs we take. And we might not know a thing about them if it weren't for the little known artistic experience of Louis Pasteur, says Dr. Gal. Pasteur was born in 1822 to a French family of modest means. His dad was a soldier in Napoleon's army and a tanner. As a teenager, Pasteur made portraits of his friends, family and dignitaries. But after his father urged him to pursue a more serious profession one that would feed him he became a scientist. At the age of 24 he discovered chirality. To understand chirality, consider two objects held up before a mirror: a white cue ball from a pool table and your hand. The reflection of the ball is exactly like the original. If you could reach into that mirror, pull out the reflection and cram it inside the original, they'd match up point for point. But if you tried the same thing with your hand, no matter how much you tried, the mirror image would never fit into the original. During winemaking, a chemical called tartaric acid builds up on vat walls. In the 18th and 19th centuries, makers of medicine and dyes used this acid. In 1819, factory workers boiled wine too long and accidentally produced paratartaric acid, which had unique properties that intrigued scientists like Pasteur. The study of the acid was related to the study of crystal structures, which at the time seemed like a way to help solve the mystery of how molecules were built. Observing the various ways crystals interacted with light gave scientists clues about their properties. Earlier in the 19th century, Jean Baptiste Biot, a French physicist, discovered that tartaric acid was optically active. That is, when Biot shined polarized light (which moves out in only one direction, say vertically or horizontally, rather than all directions) through tartaric acid crystals in a solution, they rotated the light clockwise or counterclockwise. But no one knew how the crystals did it. When studying the paratartaric acid, Pasteur found that it produced two kinds of crystals one like those found in tartaric acid and another that was the mirror opposite. The crystals were handed, or what the Greeks call chiral (kheir) for hand. And they were not optically active, like the tartaric acid. Pasteur concluded that the mirror image crystals, together as a 50/50 mix in the solution, canceled out each other's ability to rotate polarized light. And without even knowing how a molecule was built, just eight months after receiving his doctorate, he said that their molecular structure was chiral, too. Chemistry changed forever. So why did this young, inexperienced chemist get it right? Dr. Gal thinks the answer might lie in the artistic passions of Pasteur's youth. Even as a scientist, Pasteur remained closely connected to art. He taught classes on how chemistry could be used in fine art and attended salons. He even carried around a notebook, jotting down 1 4 ratings of artwork he visited. And then Dr. Gal stumbled upon a letter Pasteur had written to his parents about a lithographic portrait he had made of a friend. Lithography back then involved etching a drawing onto a limestone slab with wax or oil and acid, and pressing a white piece of paper on top of it. The resulting picture was transposed, like a mirror image of the drawing left on the slab. "I think I have not previously produced anything as well drawn and having as good a resemblance. All who have seen it find it striking. But I greatly fear one thing, that is, that on the paper the portrait will not be as good as on the stone; this is what always happens." Eureka. "Isn't this the explanation of how he saw the handedness on the crystals because he was sensitized to that as an artist?" Dr. Gal proposed. For various reasons, Pasteur eventually turned to biology. Perhaps he recognized that chirality could play a big role in it, some suggest. We now know that many drugs contain molecules that exist in two chiral forms, and that the two forms can react differently in the body. The most tragic example occurred in the 1950s and '60s, when doctors prescribed Thalidomide, a drug for morning sickness and other ailments, to pregnant women. The drug also contained a chiral molecule that caused disastrous side effects in many babies.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
A statue of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, which adorns one of the cathedral's 135 spires, is also to undergo restoration. Mother Cabrini was born in Lombardy, the region of which Milan is the capital. She lived and worked in New York beginning in 1889, sent by Pope Leo XIII to help Italian immigrants. She died in 1917 in Chicago, and in 1946 became the first American citizen to be canonized. The restoration of Mother Cabrini's statue is the centerpiece of a crowdfunding campaign by the International Patrons of Duomo di Milano, a United States charity created in 2014 that works with the Fabbrica to raise funds for maintenance of the cathedral. Called Save the Saint, the campaign was launched in conjunction with ForItaly.org, which works to preserve Italian cultural heritage. The group met its 150,000 target for the Cabrini spire before the Expo began on May 1, and has a fund raising goal of 1 million through 2017, the 100th anniversary year of the saint's death. Donors' names will be placed on a plaque on the restored Cabrini spire. Alessandra Pellegrini, chief development officer for the Patrons, said 23 percent of Duomo visitors are from the United States, which is why the Italian born American saint was chosen for the campaign. She added that by visiting the cathedral, "Americans can understand how deep and rich is the culture and history around Milano. Everyone knows it for business, design, for fashion, but it is a town rich with unbelievable cultural heritage, with secret gardens, secret palaces, secret collections of art, including private collections, with unbelievable museums, and a lot of sites of Leonardo da Vinci." Leonardo's "Last Supper" can be seen at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, a Unesco World Heritage site. He also designed canals to transport the Candoglia marble to the city center for the construction of the Duomo; although the canals no longer exist, a replica of a Renaissance era barge that carried the stones will be displayed near the Duomo during the Expo. The cost of Expo preparation prompted the fund raising efforts, Ms. Pelligrini said. The Fabbrica budget is around 25 million euros (about the same in dollars) annually, she said, with 50 percent dedicated to restoration. She added that more than 35 million additional euros have gone into Duomo renovations in the last few years, including money for improved audio, lighting and security systems to upgrade it for the expected increase in visitors. To raise awareness of the restoration, the statue of St. Lucia and gargoyles from one of the Duomo's spires are displayed inside the Eataly food complex in New York City. Dino Borri, an Eataly partner, said the company donated 100,000 to the Patrons for the Duomo project.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
The Giants at the Heart of the Opioid Crisis There are the Sacklers, the family that controls Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. There are the doctors who ran pill mills, and the rogue pharmacists who churned out opioid orders by the thousands. But the daunting financial muscle that has driven the spread of prescription opioids in the United States comes from the distributors companies that act as middlemen, trucking medications of all kinds from vast warehouses to hospitals, clinics and drugstores. The industry's giants, Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen, are all among the 15 largest American companies by revenue. Together, they distribute more than 90 percent of the nation's drug and medical supplies. New civil suits from the attorneys general in New York, Vermont and Washington State accuse distributors of brazenly devising systems to evade regulators. They allege that the companies warned many pharmacies at risk of being reported to the Drug Enforcement Administration, helped others to increase and circumvent limits on how many opioids they were allowed to buy, and often gave advance notice on the rare occasions they performed audits. Now, in what could be a test case, the United States attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the D.E.A. are wrapping up an investigation that appears likely to result in the first criminal case involving a major opioid distributor, Rochester Drug Cooperative, one of the 10 largest, people familiar with the matter said. The investigation began with an examination of possible crimes including wire and mail fraud and various drug violations, according to three people with knowledge of a federal grand jury subpoena served on Rochester in 2017, but it remains unclear what charges might be brought. The state lawsuits also present evidence that government at all levels has been ineffective at policing the distributors. For the first decade of the crisis, the three largest companies did not even have meaningful programs to monitor suspicious orders, despite being required by federal law to track narcotics and to look out for spikes in orders and cash payments. Since then they have promised and failed to build robust systems to prevent widespread opioid abuse. The distributors rebutted the new allegations. "We reject the state's suggestion that our employees circumvented safeguards to increase sales," Kristin Chasen, a spokeswoman for McKesson, said in a statement. Cardinal, in its statement, said it had "developed and implemented a constantly adaptive and rigorous system to combat controlled substance diversion." Amerisource put the onus on the D.E.A., which it said receives data on all orders shipped and notifications of suspicious ones. "It defies common sense for distributors such as AmerisourceBergen to be singled out," the company said in a statement. In the two decades since OxyContin was introduced in 1996, there have been nearly 218,000 overdose deaths related to prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While overdose deaths continue to rise, the number of opioid prescriptions has been falling since 2012. But that is mostly because of a classification change that made drugs like Vicodin (which mix opioids with milder drugs) Schedule II narcotics, which placed more restrictions on prescribing them. Oxycodone, the powerful narcotic that is the main ingredient in OxyContin, was already a Schedule II drug and its sales have continued to rise, according to figures compiled by Iqvia, a health data provider. The three largest distributors sold 1.6 billion oxycodone pills in New York alone between 2010 and 2018. It was distributors, said the office of Attorney General Letitia James of New York, who "jammed open the floodgates." For most businesses, 150 million would be a lot of money. At McKesson, it was less than the 159 million retirement package the company granted its longtime chief executive, John H. Hammergren, in 2013. (After a public backlash a Forbes headline asked if it was "The World's Most Outrageous Pension Deal?" the company later reduced the package to 114 million.) It was among a string of settlements, and others came far cheaper. In 2008, McKesson, which supplies Walmart, paid 13.25 million and Cardinal, the main CVS supplier, paid 34 million to settle federal claims that they had been filling suspicious orders. Before 2007, only two of Cardinal's roughly 40,000 employees were dedicated to addressing the problem, according to court filings. One McKesson compliance officer complained that asking for resources was like "asking for a Ferrari," according to New York's lawsuit. More settlements followed, but little changed. Cardinal paid a total of 64 million in settlements with the Justice Department in 2012, 2016 and 2017, with similar agreements struck by its rivals. The policing of opioid sales continued to be largely delegated by law to the distributors. The companies created order volume thresholds for different drugs that would trigger reporting to the D.E.A., but some were so lofty that they resulted in relatively few such reports, the complaints said. Or they worked around them. In one industry practice, known as "cutting," Cardinal canceled pharmacy orders "that exceeded a threshold" and allowed "a subsequent, often smaller order," Vermont's complaint said. Egregious moves spurred limited responses, according to the complaints. McKesson allowed one pharmacy a fivefold oxycodone increase over six months, then refused another request for an 80 percent increase. The company continued shipping to the pharmacy anyway, even after a rival stopped. McKesson, in its statement, said it was continuing "to enhance and evolve" its compliance efforts. By last year, executives were summoned by Congress. Both Mr. Hammergren, of McKesson, and George Barrett, the executive chairman of Cardinal at the time and its former chief executive, played down their roles in the supply chain. During the hearings, Representative Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, picked out a single drugstore in rural West Virginia that had been swamped with opioids 4,000 pills a day at one point from Cardinal, 5,000 from McKesson. "Don't you take responsibility?" she asked, adding, "You saw that paying the penalties on your settlement agreements was a cost worth paying because you were making so much money?" "I wish we had moved earlier to stop shipping to that pharmacy," Mr. Barrett said at the hearing. Mr. Hammergren echoed that, saying, "I would have liked to have made a decision faster." Ms. Castor was not satisfied. "This was the opposite of due diligence," she said. There was little enthusiasm for policing opioids at Rochester Drug Cooperative, New York's complaint alleges. For years, only two people at Rochester were assigned to compliance, and one had other responsibilities. Amid discussions about hiring a compliance consultant, Laurence F. Doud III wrote in an email when he was the company's chief executive that it was "making me ill as to how much this is going to cost." Mr. Doud is now suing Rochester, claiming wrongful termination and contending it conspired to blame him for conduct that the D.E.A. and federal prosecutors in New York are investigating in the criminal inquiry. (His suit was previously reported by The Democrat and Chronicle of the city of Rochester.) The current chief executive, Joseph Brennan, is on leave. Rochester is a cooperative of pharmacies, so monitoring suspicious orders meant monitoring its own members. But it had practices that were similar to those of its larger rivals. Rochester's upper limits on how many pills pharmacies could buy were "invariably so high that customers could not reach them unless their order volumes tripled from their historical purchasing patterns, rendering the system virtually useless," New York alleges. Sales were brisk. Between 2010 and 2018, Rochester sold 143 million oxycodone pills in New York. The company added a Queens pharmacy with numerous cash buyers as a customer in 2016. The pharmacy was also filling prescriptions from out of state doctors and one who had been arrested over oxycodone prescribing practices, the complaint says. In 2013, Rochester continued shipping to a pharmacy run by a pediatrician who had surfaced in headlines as running a pill mill, according to the complaint. In an email, one Rochester consultant called the situation "a stick of dynamite waiting for the D.E.A. to light the fuse." The shipments continued. In a 360,000 settlement in 2015, Rochester admitted that it had failed to report thousands of opioid transactions over five years. The subsequent criminal inquiry sought records including loans and lines of credit that Rochester had extended to its customers, according to people with knowledge of the 2017 subpoena. The D.E.A. and the office of Geoffrey S. Berman, United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment on the inquiry. Jeff Eller, a Rochester spokesman, declined to answer specific questions, citing the investigation, but he said that Rochester's compliance department is more than six times larger than it was in 2013 and that the company "will continue to make a significant investment." He allegedly left wrappers around the office, which was a bad idea, since he was a senior investigator for the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, a branch of the New York State Department of Health that monitors opioid sales. Mr. Crisafi's fentanyl use was noticed at work by several other investigators and was among the topics of a 2008 report issued by the state inspector general that raised concerns about the bureau, where many investigators reported to a pharmacist. (Mr. Crisafi, who left the bureau at the time, said he had a legal prescription and never used opioids on the job.) States have had trouble policing opioid use even among their own. Like similar agencies elsewhere, the New York narcotics bureau was ill equipped, with fewer than 20 investigators overseeing distributors and manufacturers, along with the state's 5,586 pharmacies and more than 120,000 prescribers. In a statement, the D.E.A. said investigations are presented to federal prosecutors, who choose "the appropriate litigation strategy." Distributors have marshaled lobbyists, contributing 1.5 million to sponsors and co sponsors of a 2016 law thwarting the D.E.A.'s efforts to freeze suspicious drug shipments. Distributors have also lined up lobbyists with ties to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, where lawmakers included 100 million in opioid taxes or surcharges in two consecutive budgets, though last year's measure is tied up in court. They have hired two firms founded or co founded by onetime aides to former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo as well as Mercury Group, whose executives include former advisers to the current governor. For now, distributors remain largely in control. "It's not a good system," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an addiction expert. "It's the fox guarding the henhouse."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
David Bossie, the former deputy campaign manager for President Trump and a veteran conservative activist, apologized on Sunday after he told a black guest on Fox News, "You're out of your cotton picking mind." Mr. Bossie made the remark during an on air discussion on Sunday morning with Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist and frequent Fox guest, who fumed at Mr. Bossie afterward, telling him: "I got some relatives who picked cotton. And I'm not going to sit here and allow you to attack me like that." Mr. Bossie's words prompted a rare on air repudiation from Ed Henry, the host of the program on which the men appeared, and from the network itself. A Fox News spokeswoman released a statement on Sunday that called Mr. Bossie's outburst "deeply offensive and wholly inappropriate." "His remarks do not reflect the sentiments of Fox News and we do not in any way condone them," the statement added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media
SAN FRANCISCO The headlines are eye catching. Melania Trump is leaving the White House! Home renovation cable star Joanna Gaines has abandoned her HGTV show and husband Chip Gaines! Televangelist Joel Osteen is leaving his wife! None of the stories were true. Yet as recently as late last week, they were being promoted with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact and Snopes, fact checking sites created precisely to dispel such falsehoods. According to an examination by The New York Times, the enticing headlines served as bait to draw readers to fraudulent sites that masqueraded as mainstream news sites, such as People and Vogue. The fake news ads all worked the same way: They would display headlines at the top of the fact checking sites that, once clicked, took readers to sites that mimicked the logos and page designs of legitimate publications. The fake stories began with headlines and large photos of the celebrities in question, but after a few sentences, they transitioned into an ad for an anti aging skin cream. The fake publishers used Google's AdWords system to place the advertisements on websites that fit their broad parameters, though it's unclear if they specifically targeted the fact checking sites. But that Google's systems were able to place fake news ads on websites dedicated to truth squadding reflects how the internet search giant continues to be used to spread misinformation. The issue has been in the spotlight for many internet companies, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all under scrutiny for how their automated ad systems may have been harnessed by Russians to spread divisive, false and inflammatory messages. The Snopes and PolitiFact ads show how broad the problem of online misinformation can be, said David Letzler, research scientist at Impact Radius, a digital marketing intelligence firm. "Even websites whose mission is to promote accountability can inadvertently wind up getting used by snake oil salesmen," he said. Google declined to explain the specifics of how the fake news ads appeared on the fact checking sites. The accounts that advertised on Snopes and PolitiFact were terminated from Google's ad platform after The Times asked about them, according to a person with knowledge of the sites who asked to remain anonymous because the details were confidential. When alerted to the ads promoting untrue stories on their sites, Snopes and PolitiFact said there was little they could do. Google's AdSense, which is used by web publishers to sell display advertising on their sites, works through automated tools. Often, advertisers are unsure where their ads are running sometimes next to inappropriate or offensive content and site owners don't know which ads will appear on their pages. Vinny Green, Snopes's co owner and vice president, said it had tried to filter out misleading advertisements from the 150 million ads it displayed on its site last month. But that goes only so far. "We have little direct oversight or control over what is being done to filter out fake news ads being served on our site," he said in an email. He added that the online ad ecosystem was complicit in disseminating and profiting off of misinformation, and that "these ad quality problems are systemic." Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact, said it was working with Google to remove the "questionable text ads" from its site. "The revenue those advertisements provide is critical to funding a website like ours, but it's equally important that we do everything we can to make sure the advertisements appearing on our site are not deceptive or intentionally misleading," he said. Google, which sells more online advertising than any other technology firm, has struggled to prevent fraudulent websites from making money off the spread of false stories. Earlier this year, it touted its efforts to crack down on misinformation sites by kicking 340 websites and 200 publishers off its AdSense platform. Most of those publishers had created websites to peddle eye catching but untrue political stories, and loaded up the pages to get a cut of advertising revenue from Google. But the websites that advertised on Snopes and PolitiFact took a different approach. Those publishers paid Google to promote their content on legitimate websites to draw traffic for an ad pretending to be a news story, often carrying the banner of a mainstream news publication. Google has called the process "tabloid cloaking." It has said these types of scammers use timely topics and ads made to look like new website headlines. Google said it suspended more than 1,300 advertiser accounts in 2016 for tabloid cloaking. This month, Google said it had introduced additional controls to help publishers filter out sensational or tabloid ads. The ad heralding the untrue story about Mrs. Trump's decision to leave Washington and the White House appeared at the top of PolitiFact last Friday. The display ad led to a fake Vogue news article claiming that the story was also featured on Yahoo, Vanity Fair and Time, among other publications. On another PolitiFact page, there was another display ad promoting a false story about Mr. Osteen, the leader of Lakewood Church, a Houston based megachurch, leaving his wife because she had said too much on TV. When clicked, the ad went to a fake Us Weekly page about how Mrs. Osteen was leaving the church to focus on her skin cream company. The publisher of the fake Us Weekly site also bought a Google search ad, so that a query for the headline of the story "Sad News For Lakewood Church" linked to that same fake story. In the case of the HGTV stars Joanna and Chip Gaines, the ad about the couple that ran on Snopes last week promoted a report that had been refuted already by the fact checking site in an article a month earlier. PolitiFact and Snopes are among the most influential and most popular fact checking websites. Snopes was created in 1994 to debunk urban legends but has since evolved into a 16 person operation that also assesses political spin. PolitiFact, launched in 2007 as a service of the Tampa Bay Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for its work during the 2008 presidential election and has 14 state chapters in addition to a national operation.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
This is the way they were. Maybe. The responsibility of remembering weighs heavily on Nkechi, the narrator of "Good Grief," Ngozi Anyanwu's tender play about loss at an early age, which opened on Tuesday at the Vineyard Theater. Nkechi has sworn never to forget the boy she will always (probably, maybe) love more than anyone else in the world. But why is it so hard for her to see him now in her mind's eye? Portrayed in a flux of waxing and waning certainty by Ms. Anyanwu, Nkechi keeps reframing scenes from her relationship with the charismatic MJ (Ian Quinlan), sometimes through a cold lens of regret, sometimes through the magnifying glass of myth. And as the images shift and change, she thinks: "Maybe I'm remembering something or someone else. Maybe I'm mixing him up with another love or person or feeling or time." Nkechi (who is usually called N) concludes hopefully, "But maybe he did exist." The very youthful profundity of such thoughts saturates this lyrical production, directed as a flickering string of moments by Awoye Timpo. "Good Grief" is shaped by the existential self consciousness that grips adolescents dealing with the cold fact of mortality. It dares to be as fanciful, histrionic, awkward and downright terrified as young people are in that period when the hormones kick in and emotions seesaw between extremes. It's a time when your own incandescent vitality makes death seem both impossible and irresistible. Death, accordingly, comes up often in the playful but absolutely serious conversations of N, the daughter of Nigerian Americans in suburban Pennsylvania, and her classmate MJ. What does it feel like to die? What happens after? And not just to the dead people, but to those who are left behind. Such talk is delivered in fragments in "Good Grief," which takes place between 1992 and 2005, or rather in an indefinite present in which N restlessly recalls that period. The script jumps almost haphazardly among those years, from the day N meets MJ in elementary school to the shadowed months of her life that stretch into seeming endlessness after he is killed in a car crash. What was once a teasing abstraction has become an implacable reality. And N finds herself forever reliving, and rewriting, those days when she and MJ her best friend and almost lover would talk and talk and talk about who they were, and how they might be remembered. This experimental aspect shouldn't put off the teenagers who would seem to be the ideal audience for this heartbroken story, nor the adults who occasionally like to revisit past days of angst and ecstasy. In a way, "Good Grief" is a quieter, more meditative equivalent to the Broadway bound "Be More Chill," the hard charging, smash musical about the dangers of high school popularity. Personally, I prefer the lower volume alternative from Ms. Anyanwu, whose earlier works include the warmly received "The Homecoming Queen," about a young woman returning to her native Nigeria from the United States. (Then again, just so you know, I'm also a fan of the teen romance Netflix movie "To All the Boys I've Loved Before.") "Good Grief" could benefit from a more poetic set than the tiered black box provided by Jason Ardizzone West, with often cold lighting by Oona Curley. I appreciate that everything is occurring in N's stark midnight of the imagination. But the look doesn't always match Ms. Anyanwu's language, which reaches for the stars within the darkness. The script could use more consistency and cadence in its fantasy sequences to achieve the fugue like effect I presume Ms. Anyanwu is aspiring to. Presenting the scene in which N learns about MJ's death as a television wrestling match makes sense. But in tone, it's a one off riff that doesn't rest comfortably in context. "Good Grief" still registers throughout as an affecting study of the ambivalence of bereavement. And it is acted by a sensitive cast that finds the authentic emotion within even the most stylized scenes. Oberon K.A. Adjepong and Patrice Johnson Chevannes deftly combine brusqueness and gentleness as N's helpless parents, who apply scraps of the lore and philosophy of their Nigerian culture in dealing with their bereaved and unresponsive daughter. ("Did you just African proverb me?" N asks her mother in exasperation.) Nnamdi Asomugha, as her jovially supportive but also grief stunned brother, and Hunter Parrish, as a high school hunk with unexpected depths, are also spot on. But it's the relationship between the assertive N and the dashing, good bad boy MJ that gives the play its most haunting emotional substance. In a presumably autobiographical role, Ms. Anyanwu makes it clear that N's strident, take charge confidence is a shield with plenty of cracks. And Mr. Quinlan's MJ manages to embody both a young woman's dream and a young man's rudderlessness. Even though they have known each other for most of their lives, N and MJ haven't quite figured out who and what they are going to be to each other. They do know they feel less lonely and better understood when they're together than when they're with anyone else. This makes the possibility of a sexual connection seem both natural and perhaps ruinous. This is one of those young friendships that you could imagine evolving into adulthood with endless permutations, like the one so persuasively rendered in the Irish writer Sally Rooney's new novel, "Normal People." For N, such an evolution can only be conjectural. That void is both the setting for and the raison d'etre of this sweet and sorrowful play.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
PARIS Well, that threw everyone for a loop. Not the shows, nor even the snow (snow!) that covered Paris on Thursday morning but rather the news that Riccardo Tisci had been appointed chief creative officer of Burberry. In all the speculation about who would get the job after Christopher Bailey announced last October that he was stepping down, Mr. Tisci's name never came up (we were all thinking too local). As the various fashion folk sat, checking their social feeds and waiting for the Chloe show to start, the surprise choice was all anyone could talk, or tweet, about. Mostly, people were intrigued by what Mr. Tisci might make of the brand that Britishness built. After all, unexpected combinations are part of the guiding principle of fashion, whether you're talking about human resources or clothes. The seeming oxymoron of extravagant ease has long been, for example, a basic precept of Dries Van Noten, for whom dressing for comfort is an inalienable right, and the tension between apparent opposites is what keeps things interesting. So on Wednesday he filled the gilded, mirrored halls of the Hotel de Ville, Paris's city hall, with the scratchy howls of Deep Purple, and amid it all focused on ... doodles: hand drawn pen and ink sketches by his studio that consisted mostly of feathers and plant fronds, with the occasional peacock eye winking in for good measure, reproduced in what seemed to be their original Bic shades. They were like better versions of the scratches made in school notebooks or on briefing documents during meetings; the sort that often seem to demonstrate a lack of attention but, in fact, can be the best way to keep focus. Then he gave them a little oomph. Inspired, Mr. Van Noten said in a video about the collection, by art brut, the mid 20th century term coined by Jean Dubuffet for art made outside the confines of the establishment, the drawings were printed on skinny suits and matching boots, gloves and parkas; mixed in with faux Mongolian lamb, metallic floral brocade, jewels and iridescent raffia fringe. Drawstring raincoats had the sweeping length of ball gowns and a satin sheen, though they were actually nylon; picnic check pencil skirts were bisected by ostrich feathers swaying on the curve; tops had lavishly shirred sleeves; and all of it had the optic effect of an attenuated Escher drawing with a touch of gleam and the slouch of an old sweatsuit. It wasn't a transcendent Van Noten collection; like almost every show this season, it was far too long, and at a certain point it was hard not to want to doodle, too, at least for those journalists who still use pens as opposed to only iPhones. But it was a good one as was the second runway effort from Natacha Ramsay Levi at Chloe. Starting from the idea of the shirtdress, the rust and brown palette of the 1970s, and the emotional landscape of films like Luis Bunuel's 1972 work "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and John Huston's 1969 "A Walk with Love and Death," Ms. Ramsay Levi dropped the waist and plunged the neckline. She added folds and pleats to skirts and sometimes cutouts at the hip to create a loose, motile silhouette that shifted on the body, exposing glimpses of underpinnings like body con turtlenecks cropped just under the bust. Trousers were pleated with a jodhpur curve at the thigh and secured with elastic at the ankle, while safari shorts were cross fertilized with ribbed knit leggings. Silk skirts had tiers of monkey fur trim, and metallic Lurex sweaters with puffy shoulders were trapped by arm bands at the biceps to create an almost medieval line, atop liquid jersey flares.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John's young friend Joseph listens in horror, Beecham butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim's chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer's bedroom, Sara opens a heart shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs many more, it's clear, than the known victims could have provided. It's an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B movie prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What's more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims' cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has. But before we turn to next week's finale and close the book on the killer, let's return to his primary hunter. Kreizler is more intriguing in his absence from the plot than he has been in person and for quite some time. It's hard to think of a more effective way to establish the bone deep truth of his affection for Mary, for example, than the way it's portrayed in the funeral scene that opens in the episode: Laszlo, in close up profile, staring at the grave without really seeing or hearing the mourners who approach him one by one to pay their respects, hovering just out of focus. (Cinematically, it's a simple technique, but all the stronger for it.) The show plays similar tricks with blurred visibility to convey Kreizler's despair and isolation when his friend and colleague John Moore comes calling at his house to share the latest news of the investigation: Both men can only see each other through the semi opaque panes of glass in Laszlo's doorway just enough for the doctor to recognize his visitor, and for his visitor to recognize that the doctor has chosen not to let him in. Finally, we get closer than ever to the truth of Kreizler's traumatic past when, while drinking alone, he stares at a family portrait taken when he was a youngster his injured right harm hidden carefully behind his posing parents. "Was I too loud, Papi?" he asks his father's image, in reference, no doubt, to his youthful passion for piano and perhaps to some punishment that incurred. "You were right," he continues. "I'm just a little impostor." He toasts his father with his working arm, then smashes the glass and jabs the broken stem into his damaged limb.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
In "Straight Up," a comedy from the writer director James Sweeney, the 20 something Todd (Sweeney) develops a theory: Maybe he isn't gay, as he has always thought. Maybe others' presumptions of his gayness became a self fulfilling prophecy. His friends scoff at the idea that he might be attracted to women. His therapist (Tracie Thoms) appears vaguely skeptical. But Todd gets to test the notion when he encounters Rory (Katie Findlay), an aspiring actress. They hit it off with the sort of effortless, hours spanning conversation that could only happen with soul mates (or, you know, really good friends).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Until recently, downtown Ottawa's ByWard Market the name for both one of Canada's oldest farmers' markets and the roughly four block neighborhood that encompasses it suffered from a common capital city affliction: After hours, it turned notoriously sleepy. Lately, however, numerous chefs and entrepreneurs have reimagined and reinvigorated the area, ushering in a new era of one of a kind shopping, hybrid establishments and must try bars and restaurants. Neighborhood wine shops are rare in Ontario, where alcohol is sold almost exclusively through government franchised retail emporiums. At the boutique size Wine Rack, which opened in June 2013, customers looking for varietals to pair with ByWard Market provisions find a number of food friendly cabernet franc, gewurztraminer, pinot noir and riesling vintages all locally grown, as well as an array of Canada's signature ice wines and ciders. Ottawa's first outpost of this renowned Calgary based chocolatier, which opened in January 2013, is also the first to offer house made flavors of hot chocolate (5 dollars), like peanut butter or ginger and orange. But the biggest lure may be the rosemary or oregano "chocolate fusion" bars spiked with habanero infused sea salt (13 dollars each), to be paired at home with charcuterie style meats and cheeses. This longtime tenant of Dalhousie Street, founded by the local designers Christina Ballhorn and Bridget Remai, reopened last February with a new layout. Now customers can observe designers in action, with new space for sewing, silk screening and jewelry making.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
FIFA ethics investigators have asked the top soccer official in Africa to explain why he agreed to revise a television contract in a way that appeared to benefit a commercial partner over his own organization the latest ethical concern for a governing body that was subject to direct FIFA oversight as recently as February. The official, Ahmad Ahmad, the president of the Confederation of African Football and a FIFA vice president, and Constant Omari, CAF's powerful vice president, have been asked by FIFA to provide details about amendments to a television contract with the marketing company, Lagardere Sports. The changes to the deal, which covers all of the region's top club and international competitions, have the potential to move millions of dollars in losses from Lagardere Sports onto the books of the African soccer body, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. The new investigation is just the latest problem for Ahmad, who was briefly detained last year by French authorities investigating allegations of embezzlement and who faces a separate FIFA ethics probe involving complaints of sexual harassment by several female employees and consultants. It also comes at a pivotal time for African soccer, which has lurched from crisis to crisis under his leadership: Ahmad is seeking a new four year term early next year, and sanctions related to any of the open cases could disqualify him from running. At the heart of FIFA's new investigation was the decision by CAF, after discussions led by Omari and approved by Ahmad, to change the terms of a long term contract with Lagardere Sports in a way that allowed the France based company to reduce the minimum amount it guaranteed for CAF's television rights and at the same time shed its responsibility to collect almost 20 million in unpaid fees from a sub licenser.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Each of these two solo shows catches up with an artist of a certain age whose latest work reminds us that art is ultimately not a young person's game and that late success often feels the most solid. Margot Bergman, now in her mid 80s, started exhibiting in Chicago, her hometown, in 1970. She didn't make her New York debut until 2016, at the Anton Kern Gallery, where she is now showing again. Mrs. Bergman's exclusive subject continues to be the human face, usually female, and the way emotions can ripple subtly across it. Her faces fill their canvases, whether large or small. Her style is ostensibly expressionist, loosely and sometimes sketchily painted but almost always given a weird specificity, thanks to an eye or mouth rendered with photo realistic precision. These torque the faces and contribute to their tentative, changing expressions. Ms. Bergman's newest pieces are photographs of the faces of dolls and puppets she has collected over the years; she adds more images then photographs them again. She seems to be living in her own private 1980s, combining neo Expressionism and photo appropriation. More power to her. Nathalie Du Pasquier was the youngest and also the only female member of Memphis, the high spirited group that rocked the design world in the 1980s. She was known especially for assertively patterned textiles, but she has painted since the late 1980s. Now 62, she may be embarking on her best work. Her paintings benefit from casual presentation; oil on paper and cardboard pinned directly to the wall. Their colorful, geometric compositions wittily conjure flags, signs, building facades and furniture, especially bookshelves or cabinets. They owe something to the interwar Purist paintings of Amedee Ozenfant, Le Corbusier and Fernand Leger, as does Memphis. Ms. Du Pasquier's painting might be described as Memphis flattened, which may ultimately be the best kind. ROBERTA SMITH With colors and patterns exploding against the red painted walls in the Ford Foundation Gallery, almost every piece in this jam packed show demands your attention, yet the artworks manage to coexist without competing. "Radical Love" is the second exhibition in a trilogy focusing on justice. The first examined inequality; this one centers on practices of care, affirmation and celebration. For Baseera Khan and Thania Petersen, that means turning prayer rugs into objects of intimate expression. Sue Austin' s and Jah Grey' s videos treat the liberation of oppressed bodies with an ethereal touch. A few artists create opulent works from ordinary materials, among them Raul de Nieves, whose kneeling figures represent his mother. Others revise historical scripts to put the important roles of black people front and center. The team of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, for example, contributed a wall size installation of images of protesters arrested during the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. In the 1960s and '70s, Harald Szeemann (1933 2005) was a groundbreaking curator who helped redefine contemporary art. But he wasn't opposed to making art himself, as "Grandfather: A Pioneer Like Us," originally from 1974 and now recreated at the Swiss Institute, shows. This wild and (literally) hairy installation focuses on the life of his grandfather, Etienne Szeemann, a Hungarian immigrant to Switzerland who became a successful hairstylist, wig maker and inventor. It includes 1,200 curious objects, most from the grandfather's collection. The elder Szeemann, it becomes quickly apparent, was a character. He collected combs and emergency currency (circulated after World War II), loved Chihuahuas (a stuffed one is here) and his adopted nation (a Swiss cross emblem made with the hair of his clients is proudly displayed). He also invented a permanent wave machine for hair it looks more like a torture device or a Dadaist sculpture and attended every exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern when his grandson was its director and curator. This show is reminiscent of absurd surrealist exhibitions or Marcel Broodthaers's "Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles" (1968 72), which was originally mounted in the artist's own home , like this one. This installation also argues that anything can be art and anyone can be an artist; it's just a matter of context and definition. In Harald Szeemann's hands, his grandfather became a maker and a pioneer and ultimately, an artist. MARTHA SCHWENDENER Don't believe that a predilection for the art of classical Greece and Rome suggests rigidity; the last time neo Classical artists got serious, they inspired the French Revolution. The two dozen artists and designers in this show dryly named, a text informs us, for the urbane Italian writer Mario Praz are neo Classicists of many stripes, turning to the past as moral example and aesthetic ideal, but also as domestic inspiration and fashion statement. It was organized by the architects of the young firm Charlap Hyman Herrero, who have also draped the walls of the gallery in creamy muslin. It all looks like the set of a Horst P. Horst midcentury photo shoot, or maybe the country mansion of some Edith Wharton heroine, packed up for winter. There are stalwarts like Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer and Candida Hofer, the last of whom is represented by two customarily austere photographs of the Neues Museum in Berlin: a neo Classical building wears that wears its war scars as a post reunification fashion statement. They share the floor with designers like Pierre Jeanneret and Mario Ceroli, whose high backed plywood chair from 1972 recalls a temple throne. Contributions from the younger contingent are shakier, though the best is by Milano Chow of Los Angeles, a standout at the current Whitney Biennial. She impresses again here with a delicately worked drawing of a New York townhouse facade, its doors and windows trimmed with campy neo Classical patterns that owe as much to Lanvin as to Lysippos. JASON FARAGO
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
Yvette Chauvire, one of the 20th century's outstanding ballerinas and the most lustrous star of French ballet from the 1940s through the 1960s, died on Wednesday at her home in Paris. She was 99. Originally a child prodigy at the Paris Opera Ballet, Ms. Chauvire (pronounced shaw vih RAY) was acclaimed as a national symbol of French culture by an adoring public and by the French government, which bestowed its highest honors on her. Although she belonged to a generation of gifted ballerinas at the Paris Opera, she was set apart by a mesmerizing elegance that was never confused with chic. Critics at home and abroad defined her dancing as "velvet and steel," a warm lyricism coating a virtuoso technique and perfect classical form. Early in her career, in the 1930s and '40s, she was identified mainly with experimental works by Serge Lifar, the controversial director of the Paris Opera Ballet whose choreography dominated its repertoire. Yet she also made the 19th century classic "Giselle," in which she danced the title role, her signature piece. In 1988, when the Paris Opera Ballet presented a gala in New York in honor of Rudolf Nureyev, its director at the time, he took his curtain call at the Metropolitan Opera House flanked by two carefully chosen ballerinas: Margot Fonteyn and Yvette Chauvire. Fonteyn was his longtime partner in Britain's Royal Ballet. Ms. Chauvire was the idol he admired from afar. After his defection from the Soviet Union in Paris in 1961, he asked if he could partner her in a scheduled appearance at the Paris Opera. The French government, however, bowed to Soviet protests and canceled the performance. Undeterred, Ms. Chauvire often danced with Nureyev in Paris and London and on tour later in the 1960s, with especially memorable performances as a tender Giselle opposite Nureyev as her Albrecht, the nobleman who betrays the peasant heroine. Ms. Chauvire had achieved another form of international fame at 20 when she acted in "La Mort du Cygne" ("The Death of the Swan"), Jean Benoit Levy's haunting 1937 feature film about backstage ballet intrigue. (It was released in the United States in 1938 as "Ballerina.") Her youthful beauty and the depth of her acting stunned a new generation of Americans when the film was rediscovered and screened in New York in 1998. Ms. Chauvire was on hand to discuss it. Ms. Chauvire studied at the Paris Opera Ballet's school, and for that reason she was often regarded as a product of specifically French training. Yet her performing career was actually molded by Russian influences. One was Lifar himself. A former star of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, he was the Paris company's director, star dancer and choreographer from 1930 to 1945 and also choreographer in the 1950s. It was Lifar who encouraged Ms. Chauvire to retrain herself with two Russian emigre teachers, Victor Gsovsky and especially Boris Kniaseff, who softened the academic side of her schooling, gave her an elongated line and developed the lyricism that distinguished her style. In Ms. Chauvire's view, the Paris Opera school was more Italian than French because of its Italian teachers. As she told her biographer, Gerard Mannoni, the inheritors of the true French style transferred to St. Petersburg by French choreographers were the Russians. "Serge Lifar would show us all the difference," she said. Yvette Chauvire was born in Paris on April 22, 1917, and entered the Paris Opera Ballet school in 1927. She was 13 when she joined the opera's ballet company in 1931. At 12, she had already come to notice in "L'Eventail de Jeanne" ("Jeanne's Fan"), a children's ballet that earned a lasting place in 20th century music because of its score by 10 avant garde French composers, including Ravel and Poulenc. Rising rapidly to principal dancer in 1937, Ms. Chauvire was named to the highest rank, etoile, in 1941, right after she astonished audiences with an 18 minute solo as a fertility goddess in Lifar's "Istar." She was one of three ballerinas seen regularly in Lifar's premieres; the others were Solange Schwarz and Lycette Darsonval. In 1943, all three led his "Suite en Blanc," a pioneering work in the plotless neo Classical genre being developed at the same time by George Balanchine in New York. The third Lifar ballet always associated with her was "Les Mirages," an allegorical fantasy in which she was the Shadow, or conscience, of a questing hero. "Les Mirages" had its premiere in 1947 the year Ms. Chauvire and Lifar returned to the company after leaving it, for different reasons, after World War II. Lifar had been accused of collaborating with the Germans and was ousted from the Paris Opera in 1945. Ms. Chauvire left voluntarily in 1946 to join Lifar in another company, the Nouveau Ballet de Monte Carlo, where he created three ballets for her. Ms. Chauvire's loyalty to her mentor was evident in her departure from the Paris Opera Ballet, but she also knew that the company was by then bereft of a resident choreographer. Future young stars like Roland Petit and Jean Babilee also left for the Nouveau Ballet before forming new troupes. The Paris Opera administration tried to fill a creative gap by inviting guest choreographers, including Balanchine for eight months. The dancers, however, petitioned for Lifar, and he was called back, initially as a choreographer. With postwar passions still running high, Lifar's partial reinstatement provoked protests. In one episode right after his return, the dancers were already in costume when stagehands blocked their performance by refusing to raise the fire curtain onstage. In response, Ms. Chauvire, in a tiara and tutu, led the dancers 90 in all down the opera house's interior grand staircase. Lifar's presence also drew protests when pickets gathered outside City Center during the Paris Opera Ballet's New York debut in 1948. Ms. Chauvire, an audience favorite, took Lifar by the hand one evening and thrust him forward for a curtain call. Ms. Chauvire, in the meantime, began to explore other opportunities. She appeared as a guest with Petit's Ballets des Champs Elysees, where Gsovsky, her former teacher, choreographed a highly difficult showpiece for her, "Grand Pas Classique," with which she later toured the world. The guest appearance led the Paris Opera to suspend her in a contract dispute over her desire to freelance, and in 1949 she left the company for the second time. But she returned in 1953, when a new administration gave her a more flexible contract permitting her to make guest appearances elsewhere. She went on to perform with major companies in Europe, the United States, South Africa and Latin America. With expanded opportunities, she extended her range to full length 19th Russian classics, including "The Sleeping Beauty" and "The Nutcracker," then absent from the Paris Opera repertoire. She retired as a member of the company in 1956 but continued to appear with it as a guest, both at home and abroad, until her farewell performance at the Paris Opera in 1972 (although she appeared in mime roles with Nureyev after he became its artistic director in 1983). She also choreographed short ballets with stage designs by her husband, the Russian emigre artist Constantin Nepo. He died in 1976. No immediate family members survive.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
"An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist ... a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness ..." Jamaica Kincaid in "A Small Place" The air was heavy with mist when the lights were finally trained on the stage, illuminating a set that looked as if it had been transported from a low frills scuba diving resort. Dancers wearing short shorts known locally as batty riders ground their hips with mechanical precision. Typical Carnival fare. Until Dennis Roberts entered stage right in a wet suit, jutting out his rotund belly to emphasize his seal like silhouette. Mr. Roberts, known as Menace, glanced at the crowd through a snorkel mask, mouthpiece in place. The mere sight of this character the clueless tourist brought out howls of laughter. Soon he broke into his monster hit "Sand to the Beach," a song about people who are as clueless as many of the Americans and Europeans who come to this island every year. There was no better way to explain it than to evoke the type of supremely confident yet flawed interloper whom Jamaica Kincaid scolds in "A Small Place," a slender work of nonfiction about her native country, Antigua and Barbuda. The book, released in 1988, a mere seven years after the nation's independence, positioned Antigua's tourism industry as a vestige of colonial rule. The 100 square mile island has seen waves of settlers, from the Arawaks to the Caribs to the English, who brought kidnapped Africans to work the sugar cane fields. In Ms. Kincaid's book, the Lebanese and Syrians were moving in. Now a new wave is sweeping through: developers and hospitality companies from China, the United States and Canada. The author Jamaica Kincaid is a native of Antigua. Ann Summa for The New York Times I explored Antigua last summer with my husband, whose family roots lie there, and my daughter, curious to get a sense of the humanity in Ms. Kincaid's books that is largely absent in Antigua's tourism marketing. When you arrive in Antigua, Ms. Kincaid wrote, "The road on which you are traveling is a very bad road ... You are feeling wonderful, so you say, 'Oh, what a marvelous change these bad roads are from the splendid highways I am used to in North America.' (Or, worse, Europe.)" But anyone traveling from New York City to St. John's, Antigua, knows that some of the rutted roads to Kennedy Airport these days are worse than those in even the most sparsely populated corners of Antigua. The first thing you'll notice aren't the roads, which are evenly paved, but the hulking cream stucco structure beyond the roundabout near the airport exit. This is the former headquarters of the Stanford International Bank, named for its American founder, R. Allen Stanford, who is serving time for running the bank as a Ponzi scheme. Just down the road, to use an Antiguan directional, is a cricket stadium also erected by Mr. Stanford that overlooks a dusty gray field that was empty each time we passed it. The stadium stands like a great ruin on an island pock marked with the detritus of abandoned dreams. There are crumbling sugar mills, rusted cars and buildings subsumed by growth that was lush even during a drought. I glimpsed one man who had transformed a piece of rolling luggage into a stroller that held a napping child, and motorcycle riders who had wrapped their heads in scarves, presumably as protection against the dust. But there was also abundance. Mangoes too ripe for trees to hold rotted in the gutters near a village called John Hughes. (When my nephew Amir, an Antiguan expat, told a friend that we'd bought some from a market, she said it pained her that we'd actually paid for them and then presented him with two dozen.) And brightly painted homes of concrete a material Ms. Kincaid associated with Lebanese and Syrian property owners now outnumber the modest clapboard houses in many parts of the island. Another round of change is on its way. The Yida International Investment Group, a Chinese company, plans to open a 740 million resort on the main island's northeast corner and nearby islands. A 400 million Royalton property is slated to open in Deep Bay. And Robert De Niro and a partner are building a 250 million resort on Antigua's sister island, Barbuda. Those projects will add 3,000 hotel rooms within the next five years, the government estimates. Luxury, of course, is nothing new here. The moneyed set stays at places like the private Mill Reef Club. (In her book, she reserves a particularly sharp wrath for the place, which is effectively a stand in for colonial rulers.) Mill Reef is so exclusive that its managers refused to give a tour during its off season. So to sample the luxury on offer I went to Jumby Bay, A Rosewood Resort, known as much for its celebrity roster (Paul McCartney, Kevin Spacey and Hilary Swank) as its old money clientele. A starfish on the beach at Jumby Bay resort. Robert Rausch for The New York Times To get there, skip the road and land your private jet near Beachcomber Dock, where you can board a ferry to a private island off Antigua's northeast coast. Rather than taking a jet, I got a ride with Amir, who left for the United States two decades before our trip and had not returned until our visit. He dropped me off with his wife, Amma, and my sister in law, Katherine. After the brief ferry ride, we were greeted by a smiling, cat eyed woman named Melanie Fletcher, the guest relations manager at the resort. As we walked toward the covered bar, I saw a flash of color: a lush green lawn beneath the spray of a sprinkler. Jumby Bay, which started as a villa owners' collective, takes up just over a quarter of the 300 acre Long Island. Though the capacity of the resort is about 400 guests and it was 98 percent full, according to Ms. Fletcher, all we felt was a stillness in the air. There are no cars, only bikes and golf carts, and villas with enough space between them that you could have a conversation without being overheard by your neighbors. Its literature says that "jumby" means "playful spirit," but some Antiguans say it really means an evil one. The sugar mill in the middle of the resort was a reminder that the inhabitants had once been slaves and left us wondering about the spirits who roamed there. After lunch, we talked about family history and lost track of time and place. "What do you think about the history of this place?" Katherine asked, eyeing a beautiful tree whose limbs seemed sturdy enough to hold the weight borne by a noose. There is no record of lynchings on Long Island, and Jumby does not market itself as a plantation resort. Yet there was the inescapable fact that the staff was largely brown skinned and the guests weren't, a vestige of slavery throughout the Americas and a reminder of the system of apartheid that Ms. Kincaid derides in "A Small Place." There, as elsewhere on the island, though, I saw something I hadn't seen in "A Small Place": upward mobility. Some of the 500 people who worked there had managed to trade up jobs. They seemed less interested in laughing at tourists than in simply having a stable means of supporting themselves and their families. In the resort's boutique we fingered pricey coverups. Somehow we managed to miss the ferry though we were a five minute walk away. We settled in near the bar, staring at the water "three shades of blue," Ms. Kincaid writes in the novel "Lucy" and nearly missed the next ferry. The tension that we'd accumulated in our daily lives seemed to float into the distance. We could have stayed forever. Antigua can do that, Ms. Kincaid wrote. For all the drama of its history, she writes that the beauty of the place, the very thing that bewitches its tourists, renders it a time capsule to its residents. "They have nothing to compare this incredible constant with, no big historical moment to compare the way they are now to the way they used to be," she wrote, and in a later passage: "The unreal way in which it is beautiful now is the unreal way in which it was always beautiful." Her characters often flee the idyll for places where seasons change and there is hope of transformation, following the path of Ms. Kincaid and countless other immigrants from the Caribbean. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in 1949 in St. John's. Her novels detail her biography: that her mother is an Afro Indian from Dominica ("The Autobiography of My Mother"); that her father, an Antiguan cabdriver, abandoned the family ("Mr. Potter"); that Ms. Kincaid left Antigua in 1965 to work as a nanny ("Annie John," "Lucy"). After establishing a successful literary career in the States, Ms. Kincaid returned home in 1986 for her first visit in two decades. But her tone in "A Small Place" led to the banning of the book there, and a self exile as she feared for her safety. Now, though, Ms. Kincaid is enough of an expat to long for her childhood home. She regularly took her two children, Annie and Harold, to Antigua "I like them to see normal, boring black people going about their normal, boring lives," she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1996 and was there last summer for an academic conference that coincided with Carnival. She was part of what has become an exodus of Antiguans to the United States, Britain and Canada. Every summer, many return for Carnival. And that is where I caught my best glimpses of Ms. Kincaid's Antigua. One day, I finally found the potholed road to paradise. Rendezvous Bay was one of the closest beaches to our Airbnb in Falmouth. My husband, daughter and I set off in one car, and my nephew and his martial arts instructor in another. Our rented sedan couldn't make it over the final hill, so we piled into the instructor's truck. "Rendezvous is my favorite beach," he said. We could see why. A pristine beach that sloped into a gentle crescent was all ours save for a single local family. We splashed in the turquoise water and considered a sign promising a resort on the site, which falls within a national park. It seemed nonsensical. Until I realized that immigration to Antigua isn't only for Antiguan retirees descended from the West Africans and Europeans who lived on the island for centuries. The country recently launched a program allowing people who buy properties of 400,000 or more to become citizens. It seems that Ms. Kincaid's description of Antigua, of a nation run by foreign landed gentry, may not be so dated after all. If you want to find her country, her vibrant characters, here is how you do it: Book a trip for Carnival, in late July, hurricane season. Find a place that is not on a beach. Keep an eye out for holes in the yard where tarantulas burrow, and if you find them, close your windows when it rains. Rent a car, which you will quickly learn to drive on the wrong side of the road, and head to a little bakery for a bun butter and cheese sandwich. Then drive to St. John's during Carnival for a battle of the bands. Press to the front of the line. Don't worry about anybody stealing your wallet; you left your credit cards and trappings of being a tourist back in that home that you (thank God) remembered to seal off from the spiders as rain begins to fall. You laugh when the emcee peppers her monologue with words like "stush" for "stuck up" and when someone onstage apes a tourist, because that's not you. Look around you won't find many examples of Lucy or Annie John here because they weren't allowed to come they are at home sneaking a chance to read books after bedtime. But you will find the world that they, and Jamaica Kincaid's characters, left, the one that keeps pulling her back to revisit in her elusive fictional universe.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
SPECIAL Stream on Netflix. The writer Ryan O'Connell made a name for himself blogging on the pop culture lifestyle site Thought Catalog, then released a memoir, "I'm Special, and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves," about his experiences as a disabled gay 20 something. That book provides the basis for this new dark comedy series, which stars O'Connell (a first time actor) playing a version of himself, with roughly 15 minute long episodes. The series's overarching joke "is on people who aren't disabled, and how they view disabled people," he recently told The Times. O'Connell said that "giving them a show like 'Special,' which is funny and I'm the one making the jokes and I'm the one writing them I think it makes them feel at ease. They're like 'Oh O.K., this isn't some scary thing. Disabled people are just like me!' I don't know why this a revolutionary concept. I just think they don't know what to do with us at all." STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE (2015) Stream on Hulu and Netflix; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The filmmaker Alex Gibney anatomizes the legend of Steve Jobs in this ambitious documentary, which charts the Apple leader's rise and dissects his image as both businessman and transformer of culture, with one eyebrow firmly raised. In his review for The Times, Nicolas Rapold wrote that Gibney's film "is a chunky mix, with a little too proudly rolled out pop songs." But, he noted, "even if this isn't the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
Within this framework, Kirsch plays all the greatest hits: Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel and Anne Frank, as well as the Nobel laureates S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel and Saul Bellow. The concluding section on theology contains some likely less familiar names Hermann Cohen, Joseph Soloveitchik, Judith Plaskow but I'm here with my Ph.D. to tell you that they would raise no eyebrows on an "Introduction to Jewish Studies" syllabus. Kirsch's essays are expertly made, each one deftly including just enough historical context, healthy portions of summary and exposition, and the lightest sprinkling of interpretation and evaluation. He says just enough to make the value of a book clear, without too many spoilers, and he doesn't go on too long or belabor his points. The essays could serve as models for anyone asked to write the introduction for a new paperback edition of a well worn text. Along the way, Kirsch covers major topics and concepts in modern Jewish history, anti Semitism and exile and immigration and genocide and so on, and he quotes an anthology's worth of key lines and slogans. "Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested" (Kafka); "My heart, stained crimson with murder, squeaked and overflowed" (Babel's "My First Goose"); "If you will it, it is no dream" (Theodor Herzl); "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart" (Anne Frank); "I am an American, Chicago born" (Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March"). In some cases, Kirsch adds an important gloss Frank's line "in context ... sounds almost desperate, something she says not because it's true but because she needs to believe it," Kirsch insightfully notes but often he's simply recalling for his audience a quotable quote. Kirsch offers for each book a crystal clear and eloquently phrased summation that no intelligent reader could disagree with. What Wiesel's "Night" "wants to communicate about the Holocaust" is that "afterward ... the world can never be the same." For Anzia Yezierska, author of the classic novel "Bread Givers" (1925), "the Jewish past" is "a combination of inspiration and burden." Amos Oz's early stories about kibbutz residents suggest that "the qualities of toughness and overbearing confidence that built up the State of Israel might also end up dooming it." Yes, yes, it's all true who would argue? Readers who will appreciate the accessibility and clarity of these essays will also be relieved to discover that Kirsch has kept at bay any trappings of academic literary scholarship (citations, notes). Experts, on the other hand, might notice that Kirsch often errs when he says something was the "first" of its kind. They might be peeved when he promulgates a myth, thoroughly debunked by the historian Hasia Diner, that the Holocaust was, for a decade and a half after the end of World War II, an "unprocessed trauma," and that "it took American Jewry a generation to begin to come to terms with it." Speakers of many languages who may notice that of the famous lines above, only one was composed in English might also be annoyed that while Kirsch acknowledges Jews' literary multilingualism, he never delves into the complexities of translating from Russian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and other languages.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Books
Colin Kaepernick and the Walt Disney Company announced a production deal Monday that will see the activist quarterback produce "scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice and the quest for equity" for the media giant's various platforms, including ESPN. Work has already begun on a documentary series that will explore the last five years of Kaepernick's life, as he began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before N.F.L. games to protest racism and police brutality, and later accused team owners of colluding to keep him out of the league. It is a first look deal, meaning Disney has the right of first refusal over projects that Ra Vision Media, Kaepernick's company, comes up with. The deal is just one of many Kaepernick has signed in the last year to produce media about himself and the topics he cares about, even as he has remained silent publicly. He has started a publishing company and plans to release a memoir. He partnered with the writer director Ava DuVernay for a Netflix series about his teenage years. He has a shoe with Nike. He plans to write pieces and conduct interviews for Medium, a blogging platform, and joined its board of directors. Since the killing of George Floyd in police custody in May and the renewed national conversation about racism and police brutality that followed, Kaepernick's kneeling protest has taken on new life. Joined by only a few dozen athletes across all sports in kneeling in 2016 and 2017, the last month has seen hundreds of European soccer players, Formula One drivers, tennis players and many other professional athletes take a knee. In some sports now, it is choosing not to kneel during "The Star Spangled Banner" that stands out. Still, even during a cultural sea change in how Americans view police behavior and the Black Lives Matter movement, Kaepernick's partnership with ESPN signals a shift for the network. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the announcement was the identity of a producer on the documentary series: Jemele Hill, who left ESPN in 2018. Hill's career has become very much entwined with Kaeperick's. She was employed by ESPN for 12 years, and in 2017 she began hosting the 6 p.m. Eastern edition of ESPN's highest profile show, "SportsCenter." Alongside co host Michael Smith, their version of "SportsCenter" unapologetically celebrated Black culture in a way that was rarely seen on ESPN previously. The show immediately encountered both internal and external pushback, with ESPN being accused of being "too political." In September 2017, days before President Trump demanded that N.F.L. owners fire those who protested during the national anthem, using an expletive to describe the players, Hill tweeted that the president was a white supremacist. Hill was rebuked by the White House, which set off a firestorm both within ESPN and across sports media. Six months later, she was off the air, and ESPN later bought her out of her contract despite still owing millions. "There's been a big debate about whether ESPN should be focused more on what happens on the field of sport than what happens in terms of where sports is societally or politically," said Bob Iger, who was Disney's chief executive, in 2018. Iger said that Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN's president, "felt that the pendulum may have swung a little bit too far away from the field. And I happen to believe he was right." Since the death of Floyd and no doubt influenced by the limited number of live sporting events taking place because of the coronavirus pandemic ESPN has covered stories of race and police brutality with a vigor that would have been hard to imagine when Iger made his comments. It also would have been hard to imagine Hill working with her former employer so soon. After the deal was announced, Hill alluded to her history with ESPN. She wrote on Twitter that Kaepernick "was adamant that his work be surrounded by Black and brown voices. It also was important for me to use my influence to elevate these voices, particularly inside of ESPN." As for Iger, who two years ago thought ESPN's coverage had strayed too far from games? On Monday, he said that Kaepernick's "experience gives him a unique perspective on the intersection of sports, culture and race, which will undoubtedly create compelling stories that will educate, enlighten and entertain."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Whatever It Is, It's Probably Not Hair Dye Rudolph W. Giuliani gave a news conference on Thursday in which, as he continued to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election, it appeared he was starting to melt. Late night hosts take a closer look at what went wrong with Rudy Giuliani's hair. Speaking from the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, Mr. Giuliani grew increasingly agitated as he expanded on the debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud that he has pursued since the election was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month. About 40 minutes into his statement, his sweat began to drip in color. By the time Mr. Giuliani began to take questions from reporters, the dark rivulets of liquid streaking down his face had become impossible to ignore, even as he pleaded with those present not to make light of his claims, for which he has yet to present evidence. Many online commenters assumed that Mr. Giuliani was the victim of a bad dye job that was now seeping out under the bright lights of television. But several Manhattan hairdressers said that what was dripping down the face of the president's lawyer was likely not hair dye. "Hair dye doesn't drip like that, unless it's just been applied," said David Kholdorov of the Men's Lounge Barbershop and Spa, on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He explained that hair dye is typically mixed with peroxide during the dyeing process, and that once the solution oxidizes, the color adheres to the hair. No one would leave the solution in place in its raw form, he said, because the solution would irritate the scalp and could burn the hair or cause it to fall out. "Sideburns are more gray than the rest of the head," he said. "You can apply mascara to touch the gray side up a bit so it looks more natural." He said that anyone wishing to avoid what happened to Mr. Giuliani should avoid hot weather, and wait for the makeup to dry completely. "In the picture, it looks really heavy," Mr. Vergani said, referring to a photograph of Mr. Giuliani during the news conference. "I'm sure they put too much product and that's why it started to bleed." Not everyone agreed. Gene Sarcinello, a stylist and colorist at Takamichi Hair, said that the streaks could have been caused by hair dye. "If it's not washed out properly, that's what's going to happen," he said, adding that the dye could be spray on. "Not knowing exactly what he has on his hair, it's hair color related definitely." "In some of the pictures I'm seeing, it looks glossy," he said. "Which looks like a product in his hair." Mr. Giuliani's hair has long been the subject of public discussion. When, in 2002, he abandoned what had been a signature comb over, The Washington Post's fashion critic, Robin Givhan, commended the move. "Giuliani's comb over had reached mythic proportions as it was memorialized in comedy bits on virtually every television network and in countless caricatures," she wrote. "One can only assume that its disappearance will send shock waves ricocheting from the studios of 'Saturday Night Live' to the corner barbershop." Thursday's event was the latest in an unusual series of public appearances for Mr. Giuliani. On Nov. 7, he delivered remarks from the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a Philadelphia landscaping company close to a crematory and a pornography shop. Several weeks before the election he was compelled to deny he had done anything wrong after his appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" sequel. Mr. Giuliani, who has served as Mr. Trump's personal lawyer for several years, has been one of the president's closest allies in Mr. Trump's continued attempts to subvert the Electoral College process that delivered the presidency to Mr. Biden. Chris Krebs, the senior cybersecurity official who countered several of Mr. Trump's false claims about the election and was subsequently fired by the president, tweeted Thursday that Mr. Giuliani's conference was "the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest." "If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're lucky," Mr. Krebs added. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Mr. Giuliani had asked Mr. Trump's campaign to pay him 20,000 a day for his work overseeing the White House's legal effort to overturn the election results. (Mr. Giuliani denied the report.) Thus far, his legal team has suffered a string of defeats in court. Mr. Giuliani did not immediately return a request for comment.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Style
An area in the windy waters off Long Island has been designated as a possible site for a wind farm, the federal government announced on Wednesday. New Yorkers will not be seeing offshore turbines anytime soon, however. The Interior Department and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said they were moving toward auctioning a lease for the site, about 11 nautical miles off the coast of Long Beach and stretching about 26 nautical miles to the southeast. The process of planning the wind farm, which could take several years, involves environmental assessment, an auction, further assessments of the site and construction plans, and an environmental impact report. Much of the planning is also submitted to the public for comment. This site, about 127 square miles, was chosen after the New York Power Authority, a state agency, submitted a proposal to the ocean energy bureau to build wind turbines there in 2011. The agency's regulations required that it make the proposal public to determine if other entities were interested in building a wind farm in that area. According to the ocean energy bureau, five private companies, Fishermen's Energy, Energy Management, Deepwater Wind, EDF Renewable Energy and Sea Breeze Energy, have expressed interest in developing the site. Thus far, the federal government has issued 11 leases for wind farms on the East Coast from Virginia to Massachusetts. The country's first offshore wind farm, in the waters off Block Island, R.I., is under construction. The plan to auction a lease for the site follows a surprising decision by President Obama this week not to allow oil or gas drilling off the southeastern Atlantic coast, a victory for environmental advocates and coastal communities who had opposed a previous plan that would have permitted it. In a statement on Wednesday, Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, said, "New York has tremendous offshore wind potential, and today's milestone marks another important step in the president's strategy to tap clean, renewable energy from the nation's vast wind and solar resources." In its proposal, the Power Authority said the site could host 194 wind turbines, each generating 3.6 megawatts for a total possible yield of 700 megawatts or, by some estimates, enough to provide electricity to nearly 300,000 homes. This project is not the first offshore wind farm proposed in the New York area. Other proposed locations have included the former landfill on Staten Island that is now Freshkills Park, and New York Harbor. Leases for two so called wind energy areas were recently awarded for the waters off Atlantic City. And last year, the first turbine arrived on the shores of Brooklyn. Offshore wind farms have previously been the subject of intense debate notably, the Cape Wind project in the Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod. While the lease for that site has been awarded, the turbines have yet to be built, largely because of funding troubles, though the project also faced considerable opposition from residents, fishermen and business owners. If a wind farm is developed off the southern shore of Long Island, it may inspire more muted protests from homeowners, if any, in part because it is far from the shore at its eastern end. Perhaps in anticipation of some of those arguments, the ocean energy bureau has created video simulations of the turbines from several spots in New York Fire Island, Jones Beach, Jacob Riis Park and from Sandy Hook and Asbury Park in New Jersey. Kit Kennedy, the director of energy and transportation for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said public opinion about offshore wind is different from what it was at the height of the fight over Cape Wind. The federal government has since streamlined the process of building offshore wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean, as part of the "Smart From the Start" initiative. Ms. Kennedy said the prospects for broader embrace of renewable energy projects, reinforced by the president's announcement this week, were encouraging. "We've come a long way," Ms. Kennedy said. "It's a new day for offshore wind."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
A star crossed mission nearly 20 years in the making that was intended to seek an answer to the most burning, baffling question in astronomy and perhaps elucidate the fate of the universe is in danger of being canceled. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or Wfirst, was being designed to investigate the mysterious force dubbed dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe and search out planets around other stars. In 2010, a blue ribbon panel from the National Academy of Sciences charged with charting the future of space based astronomy gave the mission the highest priority for the next decade. Under the plan, it could have launched in mid 2020s with a price tag of 3.2 billion. But it was zeroed out in the NASA budget proposed by President Trump last week. In a statement accompanying the budget, Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., the agency's acting administrator, called the deletion "one hard decision," citing the need to divert resources to "other agency priorities." NASA is shifting its focus back to the moon. The proposed cancellation drew an outcry from astronomers, who warned that stepping back from the mission would be stepping back from the kind of science that made America great and would endanger future projects that, like this one, require international help. It drew comparisons to the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider that ended American supremacy in particle physics. David Spergel, former chairman of the academy's Space Study Board, noted that in planning their own programs, other countries depended on the United States to follow the advice of the National Academy. "A handful of people within the bureaucracy" and outside of NASA, he went on, "have overturned decades of community driven processes and tried to set the direction for space astronomy." Astronomers have hungered for a space mission to investigate dark energy ever since 1998, when observations of the exploding stars known as supernovae indicated that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, the distant galaxies were shooting away faster and faster from us as cosmic time went on. It is as if, when you dropped your car keys, they shot up to the ceiling. The discovery won three American astronomers the Nobel Prize. The fate of the universe, as well as the nature of physics, scientists say, depends on the nature of this dark energy. Physicists have one ready made explanation for this behavior, but it is a cure that many of them think is worse than the disease: a fudge factor invented by Einstein in 1917 called the cosmological constant. He suggested, and quantum theory has subsequently confirmed, that empty space could exert a repulsive force, an anti gravity, blowing things apart. If so, as the universe grows, it will expand faster and faster and run away from itself. Eventually other galaxies would be flying away so fast that we couldn't see them. The universe would become dark and cold. The cosmologist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State once described this as "the worst possible universe." If on the other hand, some previously unsuspected force field is tinkering with the galaxies and space time, the effect could shut off or even reverse over the eons. Or maybe we just don't understand gravity. Dark energy, said Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "is the most mysterious fact in all of physical science, the fact with the greatest potential to rock the foundations." The astronomers who made this discovery were using the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic distance markers to track the expansion rate of the universe. Since then, other tools have emerged by which astronomers can also gauge dark energy by how it retards the growth of galaxies and other structures in the universe. Way back in 1999, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of dark energy's discoverers, proposed a space mission known as SNAP (Supernova Acceleration Probe) to do just that. In 2008, NASA and the Energy Department budgeted 600 million, not including launching costs, for a mission and the call went out for proposals. But NASA and the Energy Department found it hard to collaborate and a working group of dark energy scientists could not come up with a design that would fit in the budget. In 2010, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences cobbled together several competing proposals that would do the trick. Paul Schechter, an M.I.T. astronomer involved in the work called it Wfirst, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The acronym had a double meaning: "W" is the name for a crucial parameter that measures the virulence of dark energy. But the telescope would also search for exoplanets planets beyond our solar system. In its report, "New Worlds, New Horizons," the committee gave this mission the highest priority in space science for the next decade. But NASA would have no money to start on this project until it finished building the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope. Shortly after the academy's deliberations, the space agency admitted that the Webb project had been mismanaged. The telescope, which had been set for a 2014 launching, would require at least another 1.6 billion and several more years to finish. The Webb will search out the first stars and galaxies to have formed in the universe, but is not designed for dark energy. It is now on course to be launched next year. Wfirst would have to wait. To take up the slack until 2025 or whenever the American mission can finally fly the space agency bought a share in a European dark energy mission known as Euclid, now scheduled to launch in 2021. But Euclid is not as comprehensive as Wfirst would be; it will not use supernovas, for example. The story took another dramatic twist in June 2012, capturing headlines when the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites, offered NASA a leftover telescope, essentially a close relative of the Hubble, that had been designed to look down instead of up. It had a wide field of view, which could enable inspecting large areas of the heavens for supernovae. Its primary mirror like the Hubble 94 inches in diameter is twice as big as the one that was being contemplated for Wfirst, giving it four times the light gathering power and a deep reach into the cosmos. The gift would save them the cost of fashioning a whole new telescope, but it was not without strings. As several astronomers pointed out, using a bigger telescope would mean a bigger, more expensive camera and more complicated back end optics would have to be built. Nevertheless, the Academy bought into the idea.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Science
Regis Philbin, the talk and game show host who regaled America over morning coffee with Kathie Lee Gifford and Kelly Ripa for decades, and who made television history in 1999 by introducing the runaway hit "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," died on Friday night. He was 88. His death was announced by his family in a statement. The statement did not say where he died or specify the cause. In a world of annoyances, Mr. Philbin was the indignant Everyman, under siege from all sides by the damned computers, the horrible traffic, the inconsiderate people who were always late. There was no soap in the men's room. Hailing a cab was hopeless. Losing a wallet in a rental car? Fuhgeddaboudit! Even his own family was down on him for buying a chain saw! And was it possible, he wondered, to ask ever so softly in a crowded pharmacy where to find the Fleet enemas without the clerk practically shouting: "Whaddaya want, buddy? A Fleet enema?" "Aggravation is an art form in his hands," wrote Bill Zehme, the co author of two Philbin memoirs. "Annoyance stokes him, sends him forth, gives him purpose. Ruffled, he becomes electric, full of play and possibility. There is magnificence in his every irritation." From faceless days as a studio stagehand when television was barely a decade old, to years of struggle as a news writer, TV actor and sidekick to Joey Bishop, Mr. Philbin, with patience, determination and folksy, spontaneous wit, climbed to pre eminence relatively late in life on talk and game shows. Regis, as he was universally known, was a television personality for nearly six decades and an ABC superstar since 1988, when his New York talk show went national. But he also wrote five books, appeared in movies, made records as a singer, gave concerts and was a one man industry of spinoffs, from shirts and ties to medical advice and computer games. By almost any measure ubiquity, longevity, versatility, popularity he succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of a stickball playing kid from the Bronx. Near the end of his career, Forbes put his net worth at 150 million, and Guinness World Records said he was the most watched person in television history, with more than 17,000 hours of airtime equivalent to two full years, night and day. (The previous holder of that record, Hugh Downs, died this month.) Unlike most late show monologues, Mr. Philbin's were personal: self mocking accounts of life's woes and misadventures. The rest of the show might be anything: Ms. Gifford talking about her pregnancies or her dogs, Chardonnay and Chablis; Regis dancing with Chippendale hunks, unable to get his pants off over his shoes, hopping about in his underwear. Mr. Philbin and Ms. Gifford often exchanged barbed put downs he chided her for being late; she called him a jerk but they rarely drew blood, even when the topics were the infidelities of her husband, the sportscaster Frank Gifford, or allegations that child labor was being exploited in Honduras to make the Kathie Lee clothing line for Walmart. (She denied knowledge of sweatshop conditions and campaigned to protect children from them.) Along with homemaking advice, cooking demonstrations and celebrity interviews, Mr. Philbin had a predilection for sports guests. A Notre Dame alumnus, he talked football, boxing and basketball like the teammate he had never been. He worked out in a gym regularly, but he also shamelessly exaggerated his own prowess. He once put on wrestling togs and skull and crossbones tattoos for a WrestleMania skit. "Our show is Reege living out his jock dreams by racing across Columbus Avenue in traffic to catch passes from Joe Namath and Terry Bradshaw," Ms. Gifford wrote in a memoir. "It's Reege mussing up wrestling manager Freddie Blassie's hair and getting a chair tossed at him; shadowboxing with Razor Ruddock; weight lifting with Joe Piscopo; jousting with American Gladiators Lace and Gemini." After Ms. Gifford's departure and an interregnum with no regular co host, Ms. Ripa joined the show in 2001 and was judged a refreshing change: sprightly, irreverent, clever at playing the chatterbox sidekick to the irascible Mr. Philbin. He often made a joke of looking bored while she rattled on. In one episode, the "American Idol" star Clay Aiken playfully put a hand over her mouth to shut her up. "That's a no no," she snapped, complaining that she had no idea where his hand had been. While still doing his morning show, Mr. Philbin in 1999 became host of the original American version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." Modeled after a highly successful British quiz show, it soared to popularity overnight as the highest rated prime time game show in television history. At a time when game shows were often seen as disreputable ghosts of the past, an astonishing 30 million viewers tuned in for each broadcast when it was airing three nights a week. The show, whose concept was so emphatic that its creators put no question mark in the title, single handedly lifted ABC to first place from third among the networks; made Mr. Philbin ABC's biggest star; raised the stock value of the network's parent company, Disney; and revolutionized ideas about what constituted a prime time hit. A tournament style show in which contestants answered consecutive multiple choice questions for cash sums rising to 1 million, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was addictive. It was designed around relentlessly rising tension, with throbbing music, flashing strobe lights, a loudly ticking clock and Mr. Philbin, the inquisitor, posing questions on a scale of silly to impossible and then demanding, "Is that your final answer?" "To sit in the audience, with the lights underneath the Plexiglas floor swiveling in all directions and a huge camera boom sweeping overhead, is to feel as if one were inside a giant pinball machine," Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker in 2000. As ratings skyrocketed, other networks scrambled to develop comparable game shows Fox called its version "Greed" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was credited with reviving the game show genre and paving the way for reality shows as a cornerstone of television programming. A surge of unscripted, competitive reality shows, including "Survivor," "American Idol" and "Big Brother," followed in its wake. Mr. Philbin hosted "Millionaire" from 1999 to 2002, sometimes five nights a week, as its popularity rose, and, perhaps inevitably, faded. Critics said overexposure led the public to tire of it. Meredith Vieira replaced him on a retooled syndicated daytime version of the show in 2002 and remained its host until 2013. The show has had several hosts since then; it was recently revived for a limited run on ABC featuring Jimmy Kimmel as host and celebrity contestants. In 2004, Mr. Philbin returned for 12 episodes of "Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire," offering prizes up to 10 million, and in 2009, on the 10th anniversary of the first broadcast, he hosted an 11 night prime time reincarnation. Regis Francis Xavier Philbin was born in Manhattan on Aug. 25, 1931, to Francis and Filomena Boscia Philbin. His father, a personnel director, settled the family in the Bronx. Regis, named for a Roman Catholic high school in Manhattan that his father had attended, was long believed to be an only child, but he revealed in 2007 that a brother 20 years younger had died. "I never talked about him because he was a very private guy," Mr. Philbin said in 2007 on "Live! With Regis and Kelly." "I've respected that all these years." Regis, a skinny boy who took up weight lifting, graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1949 and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1953. After two years in the Navy, he began his career as a stagehand at KCOP TV in Los Angeles. He soon became a news writer. In 1957, he married Catherine Faylen. They had two children, Amy and Danny, and were divorced in 1968. In 1970, he married Joy Senese, who was Joey Bishop's assistant. The couple had two children, Joanna and Jennifer, known as J.J. Mr. Philbin is survived by his wife, his daughters and four grandchildren. Danny Philbin, who worked for the Defense Department, died in 2014. From 1967 to 1969, he was the announcer and sidekick on "The Joey Bishop Show," one of ABC's many attempts to challenge the ratings dominance of Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show" on NBC. In the early '70s he hosted "Regis Philbin's Saturday Night in St. Louis" on KMOX, a CBS affiliate there. From 1975 to 1981 he co hosted "A.M. Los Angeles," a top rated show on KABC, first with Sarah Purcell and then with Cyndy Garvey. In 1983, Mr. Philbin teamed with Ms. Garvey in New York on WABC's "The Morning Show." Two years later, Kathie Lee Johnson she became Gifford after a divorce and remarriage replaced Ms. Garvey as his co host. The show went into national syndication in 1988 and became "Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee." From 1982 to 1987, he also hosted "Regis Philbin's Lifestyles," a magazine show on Lifetime that addressed health, diets, exercise and beauty. Throughout the '80s and '90s he was a professional whirlwind, with appearances on sitcoms, talk and game shows, dramas, comedies, variety shows, Miss America pageants and specials for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve. He also appeared in a number of films, usually as himself. Mr. Philbin, who lived in Manhattan near the ABC studios and in Greenwich, Conn., was showered with awards, including Daytime Emmys for "Live! With Regis" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" in 2001, for lifetime achievement in 2008 and for "Live! With Regis and Kelly" in 2011. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 2006. Among those paying tribute to Mr. Philbin on social media was President Trump. In a post on Twitter, he called Mr. Philbin "one of the greats in the history of television" and added, "He kept telling me to run for president." Mr. Philbin co wrote "Cooking With Regis and Kathie Lee" (1993) and "Entertaining With Regis and Kathie Lee" (1994) and wrote three memoirs: "I'm Only One Man!" (1995) and "Who Wants to Be Me?" (2000), both with Mr. Zehme, and "How I Got This Way" (2011). In his last book, he recalled going on the "Late Show With David Letterman" after announcing his departure from daytime television. The two old friends talked airily of retiring together and riding off into the sunset. Paul Shaffer's band struck up a galloping cowboy rhythm, complete with harmonica. "So you and I are on the horses," Mr. Letterman said. "We're slumped in the saddles, and we ride down Broadway. And then we get a kid to come out on Broadway. And we have him saying, 'Shane! Come back, Shane! Shane, come back!' And then we ride right out the door and right down to Times Square." "Right out the door," Mr. Philbin said. "I love it. Will we be singing 'Memories ...'?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
When Okwui Okpokwasili first performed her one woman show "Bronx Gothic" in 2014, it demanded to be seen again. A haunting, unflinching exploration of black female adolescence, this dense work mined movement, text and song from Ms. Okpokwasili's memories of growing up in the Bronx, blurring the real with the imagined and leaving us to contend with its uncertainties. Beginning on Wednesday, July 12, at Film Forum, "Bronx Gothic," a new documentary by Andrew Rossi, affords the closer look that the piece deserves. The film follows Ms. Okpokwasili as she prepares for her final performance of the work not far from her childhood home. Mr. Rossi honors the fullness of her live performances, showing long stretches intact, while illuminating the relationships, in particular between daughters and mothers, that orbit her process. The urgency of seeing and being seen crosses generations. As she says of being onstage: "I'm not just a brown body subject to your gaze. It's always clear that I'm watching you." (filmforum.org)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
The English songwriter Lianne La Havas has always been an outlier, working a decidedly personal amalgam of rock, pop and R B. Her music revolves around the lithe interplay of her syncopated guitar patterns and her freewheeling voice, which leaps and curls and wriggles with an insouciant vibrato. Her guitar parts echo and rival the ambiguous, unresolved chords and supple rhythmic games of Joni Mitchell and Radiohead, while her voice moves from low, sultry insinuations to open throated declarations. At a time when so much pop speaks of constriction with narrow singsong melodies, metronomic beats and desiccated instrumental tones La Havas is determinedly expansive, and anything but mechanical. She makes her trickiest musical stratagems sound effortless, even playful. Her third album, "Lianne La Havas," traces the course of a romance, from blissful beginnings to a bruised ending. Its sequencing suggests that the experience is cyclical; the album both starts and ends with the breakup. The opener, "Bittersweet," uses a plush, pinging Isaac Hayes sample to ground the song in vintage R B seduction. But that's deceptive; the song announces a separation with sorrow and relief. "Bittersweet summer rain/I'm born again," La Havas sings, twice in each chorus. The first time is low and disconsolate, continuing with the words "all my broken pieces"; the second is higher, a cry of pain turning to wordless release before she exults, "No more hanging around."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
IDEA MAN Josef Ganz sitting in his Maikafer, or May bug, prototype. He eventually had to flee Germany. THE tale is intriguing: a Jewish engineer and journalist, whose designs and published work in the 1930s laid out the basics for the Volkswagen Beetle championed by Hitler, was arrested, chased from Germany and nearly airbrushed out of history. The story of Josef Ganz is the result of more than five years of research by Paul Schilperoord, a Dutch technology journalist who is studying industrial design in Italy. The trove of documents and photographs he assembled form the basis of "The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz: The Jewish Engineer Behind Hitler's Volkswagen" (RVP Publishers, 2011). The book provides a picture of the automotive culture in Germany between the wars, with many small, struggling companies. Published in English for the first time in November, the work had previously been available in Dutch, Portuguese and German. In a telephone interview, Mr. Schilperoord addressed the book's challenge to the standard history that Hitler hired Ferdinand Porsche, who was known as one of Germany's most successful automobile engineers from his work on military vehicles during World War I, to design and build his Strength Through Joy car. The Strength Through Joy movement was a Nazi enterprise that organized worker recreation programs, sponsoring sports and vacations. Mr. Schilperoord said that before World War II the word Volkswagen was so common as to be a cliche. "People's car" in Germany in the 1930s was like "personal computer" in the United States in the 1980s. Inspired by Henry Ford, many young engineers sought to build transportation for the many. Ganz was one. Ganz wrote for the magazine Motor Kritik, which faulted German cars as antiquated and often unsafe, while he also consulted on engineering matters for automakers. He held a number of patents for suspension, steering and other systems. Ganz advocated a people's car with an air cooled engine placed at the rear, based on a backbone type frame and using independent suspension at both ends. He was a friend of Paul Jaray, an aeronautical pioneer, and pushed for Jaray's streamlined body designs whose shape resembled what is now known as the Beetle. Ganz promoted these ideas as a journalist. As part of the press gaggle covering the new chancellor's visit, Mr. Schilperoord said, "He probably stood a few meters from Hitler at the 1933 Berlin auto show." But little more than a year later, according to Mr. Schilperoord, Ganz was arrested by the Gestapo, removed from his magazine job because he was Jewish and driven from the country. Ganz felt his life was in danger in Germany and Switzerland, where he settled. "Yes, it is a slightly strange position," Mr. Schilperoord said. "How can you be a consultant and also be the critic? But I believe he honestly wanted to see progress in car design." At the time, Mr. Schilperoord said, Ganz was the only one arguing for a combination of tubular chassis, rear engine, streamlined body and independent suspension a formula that would produce a light, affordable family car. The Ganz story even has a villain worthy of a period thriller, Paul Ehrhardt, a former colleague at Motor Kritik. The two had a falling out, and it is thought that Ehrhardt probably denounced Ganz to the Nazis. After fleeing Germany, Ganz tried to develop a people's car for Switzerland. In 1951, he moved to Australia and went to work for Holden, the General Motors subsidiary. In 1965 he told his story to Australian Motor Sports and Automobiles magazine under the headline "How I Invented the Volkswagen." Ganz died in 1967. Perhaps because it is hard to accept that a feel good car like the Beetle could be so closely linked to the evils of Nazi Germany, people have long been captivated by stories of alternative origins. Ganz is just one of several engineers considered to have a rightful claim to being the Beetle's creator. The Automotive Hall of Fame in Detroit, among other groups, supports the position that key ideas came from Bela Barenyi, the genius engineer from Daimler Benz who invented the crumple zone and other safety features. Hans Ledwinka, of the Czech automaker Tatra, may have the strongest case; Hitler and Ganz saw the impressive Tatra 77 at the 1934 Berlin auto show. After the war, a German court agreed on Ledwinka's role in creating the Beetle and ordered a payment of three million marks. Whether the readers of Mr. Schilperoord's book will accept the thesis that without Ganz the Volkswagen would not have existed is less certain. Ganz's ideas showed up in models he helped develop, like the Standard Superior and in his Maikafer, or May bug, prototype. But there were many similar cars: the rear engine Mercedes 140, 150 and 170H models, the small Tatra 11, even the oddball Bungartz Butz. Porsche himself designed two VW like models, in 1931 32, one for Zundapp, the motorcycle maker, and another for NSU. "The Beetle was an accumulation from many ideas and from so many people that it is impossible to say one person was the originator of it," Mr. Schilperoord said. But the Beetle was more than a collection of technical innovations. To build cars for a whole people, as Henry Ford showed, required the creation of a huge manufacturing, sales and distribution enterprise. In a country as economically desperate as Germany was between the wars, only an ego driven tyrant would have undertaken such an enterprise. But as history proved, the sound principles underlying the Beetle's design enabled it to outlive the reign of the murderous dictator who made the project possible.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
Over the last 40 years, the writer performer John Kelly has explored the life and work of several wondrous real life artists, both in raucous East Village clubs and in such temples of high art as Lincoln Center or the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There were the cross dressing trapezist Barbette ("Light Shall Lift Them") and the painter Egon Schiele ("Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte"). Mr. Kelly has channeled Joni Mitchell on a regular basis, and she was the subject of his evening length piece "Paved Paradise." As for the grand diva Dagmar Onassis, this renegade daughter of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis was fictional but deserved to be real. If the protean Mr. Kelly has had one recurring theme through the years, it is the shaping of the self through art. In his new show at La MaMa, "Time No Line," the subject is himself but then, hasn't it always been, even when refracted through the creations of others? "Time No Line," which Mr. Kelly describes as a "live memoir," draws from the diary he has been keeping since 1976. The narrative alternates between first and third person, with Mr. Kelly occasionally referring to himself as "the artist," as if he were looking at his own past from a cool, outside standpoint. But as quiet as it is, this visually elegant show is anything but dispassionate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Adrienne Warren, as Tina Turner, gets the audience to sing along in the post curtain call celebration that ends "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical." Forget the finale. After the curtain call now comes the megamix, the last dance, the group hymn whatever it takes to turn an entertainment into an event. The Show Must Go On, and On, and On "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical" ends on a scene of hard fought triumph. It is 1988 and Turner (Adrienne Warren), in a leather mini the color of a bloodied candy apple, has just taken the stage in Rio de Janeiro, singing "Simply the Best" to an 180,000 person crowd. When the song finishes, the company takes a bow and the crowd answers with a standing ovation. Then a mic stand rises up from the floor. "Hey, everybody," Warren says. "Y'all have a good time tonight?" "Tina" it seems, isn't done with us yet. And other shows are lingering beyond the bows, too. The curtain call as we know it today became formalized in the early 19th century. Its elements are simple: A show concludes, performers bow, spectators applaud a "ritual form of acknowledgment," in the words of Derek Miller, a professor of theater at Harvard University. Over time, curtain calls grew to include underscoring, bits of comic business or a brief reprise of a beloved song. Stars like Al Jolson, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis, Jr. would often come to forestage after a show had finished and do a few of the numbers they had made famous strategies to extort a standing ovation and goose word of mouth. These days, when standing ovations are de rigueur and box office records break weekly, many still want in on the post curtain action. Reprises have given way to glossy remixes and confetti cannons. Remember that old theory that you should leave them wanting more? This is more like leave them wanting to post an Instagram story. "It's a value added extra," said Laurence Maslon, an arts professor at New York University and a historian of the Broadway musical. "It's a goody bag for audiences on their way out." These post curtain moments have less to do with telling the story and more with telling the audience how to feel about the story they have just seen and what they should tell their friends. As someone who loves a Broadway musical, but is often ready to scurry up the aisle once that musical nears the three hour mark, I spoke to some of the creators behind eight current musicals to discover how and why each of them had built in an encore. Not every show has a happy ending and not every happy ending is especially upbeat. Shows like "Tootsie" (he has defrauded the woman he loves), "Moulin Rouge! The Musical" (she dies), and even "Tina" (she triumphs, but only after years of struggle and abuse) use post curtain songs to perk up an audience without selling out a show's story. The curtain call, which falls just after and outside the story, provides one last, ecstatic chance for emotional manipulation. In Chicago, during the out of town tryout for "Tootsie," the show ended with Michael (Santino Fontana), an actor who rose to fame by impersonating a woman, silently sharing a park bench with Julie (Lilli Cooper), his former co star. "Then the discussion became, 'Well, how can we bring back some of the razzle dazzle?'" the show's director, Scott Ellis said. He also wanted to find a way to bring back Dorothy, the woman Michael masquerades as. Now, after Fontana takes a bow as Michael, he hurries offstage, back to his Dorothy costume. As the chorus reprises the first act closer, a wigged and corseted Fontana rises up from beneath the stage to perform a triumphant tap number. "I mean, there are nights when my dresser Lauren basically has to push me onto that platform because I'm almost comatose," he said. "But it feels great to leave everyone on a high." That same impulse wanting to have an honest emotional moment and eat it, too inspired the megamix that concludes "Moulin Rouge." After the death of the courtesan Satine, the company takes a bow in silence, then the club M.C., Zidler, flips a circuit breaker. Lights flare and the band plays "Lady Marmalade." "We didn't want to leave the audience on a low note," Justin Levine, the music supervisor said. The megamix, which takes its cues from the musical numbers that conclude Bollywood movies, reprises previous songs and integrates a new one, OutKast's "Hey Ya." "It feels like an after party," said Sonya Tayeh, the show's choreographer. If "Tina" ends, the first time, with a feeling of what the director Phyllida Lloyd calls "hard won joy," the post curtain number feels less hard won. Lloyd and Anthony Van Laast, the choreographer, wanted to give the audience a taste of what it felt like to see Tina Turner performing in her prime. During the show itself, Turner's songs work to heighten emotion or drive narrative. In the coda which segues from "Nutbush City Limits" into "Proud Mary" and includes the full cast and one last delirious costume change for its star they simply entertain, providing, Lloyd said, "a kind of euphoria." Make Me Part of Something Bigger Other shows seek a more meditative conclusion, one that emphasizes shared humanity rather than virtuosity. At the close of "A Christmas Carol," after Scrooge (Campbell Scott) renounces his miserly ways and serves dinner, the company takes a bow and takes up a collection for a local charity. Then the cast performs "Silent Night," wordlessly and with hand bells, with the last note given to the actor playing Tiny Tim. Matthew Warchus developed this encore three years ago, when he first staged the piece at London's Old Vic. "It's very counterintuitive," he said. "You normally send people out on the absolute noisiest high you can." But he is a preacher's son and he wanted to provide "one prayerful, but not specifically religious moment," he said. Hand bell ringing is harder than it looks and Warchus had to teach the cast to overcome what he calls, "bell ringer's face" an expression of rigidity and terror which works against the mood he means the carol to create: peace, humility, generosity of spirit. "People love to be part of this communal feeling," Scott said. "I always wonder, 'Is it too much? Are we laying it on too thick?' And the answer that keeps coming back is, 'Not really.'" Anais Mitchell, the composer of "Hadestown," the folk musical based on the Orpheus myth, had similar worries. "If I play a show, I want to feel that the encore is earned. There's nothing worse than going out there and feeling like people didn't really desire or expect it," she said. So when the show's penultimate number "Road to Hell II" evolved into a new finale, she suggested cutting the former finale "We Raise Our Cups." But Rachel Chavkin, the director of "Hadestown" argued for keeping it as a post curtain coda. The audience, Chavkin thought, needed catharsis, a way to move past the story's tragedy. "We Raise Our Cups," which asks that we honor Orpheus's attempt to rescue his beloved rather than mourn his failure, could provide it. After bows, the cast stands still and performs the song unamplified, which feels, as the actress Amber Gray said, like "a very vulnerable thing to do, very raw." But the song itself provides a kind of salve. "It confirms that even in the face of sorrow we persist, we raise a glass, we find fellowship with each other and we choose still to try," Chavkin said. Sometimes, particularly in a jukebox musical, a post curtain number just wants to roll you and rock you and sing you what you want to hear fan service with harmonies. "Jersey Boys," the 2005 biomusical of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, which incited the jukebox craze and has since moved Off Broadway, has already played "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)" by the time the curtain falls. But as the cast bows, they reprise it "a way for the audience to celebrate the show," said its director, Des McAnuff. In David Byrne's theatricalized concert, "American Utopia," Byrne added "Road to Nowhere" as an encore, because, he said, "We didn't have a good place for it and it was a lot of fun to do." The show proper ends with the protest anthem "Hell You Talmbout" and an a cappella version of "One Fine Day." "Then we give them something really enjoyable and kind of joyous," Byrne said. The heavy metal jukebox musical "Rock of Ages," which has joined "Jersey Boys" Off Broadway, waits until the very end to give the people what they want, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," the song that inspired the show. It cues the bows, then continues in a post curtain jam with the actors running into the aisles and encouraging audience members to join in. "The party doesn't just stop with the curtain call," the show's director, Kristin Hanggi, said. She was speaking from Los Angeles, where she is rehearsing an even more interactive version of the show.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Apple is still primarily a smartphone company. And despite sitting on 246 billion in cash and marketable securities, it insists it has no short term plans to directly challenge streaming video giants like Netflix and Amazon, which are increasingly commissioning high quality original shows to attract and retain subscribers. "We're not out to buy a bunch of shows," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for software and services, said during an onstage interview at the Code Media technology conference Monday night. But Apple does intend to use original video to help distinguish Apple Music, which began in June 2015 and has attracted than 20 million subscribers, from competitors like Spotify. "We're trying to do things that are unique and cultural," Mr. Cue said. Much like MTV did in its heyday, that means going beyond music. Apple aired a trailer for the first show, "Carpool Karaoke," at the Grammy Awards on Sunday. The series, a spinoff of James Corden's running sketch on "The Late Late Show," will be available to Apple Music subscribers in April. The second program, "Planet of the Apps," is a reality TV series about iPhone app developers competing to build the next great app. In the show, developers will make 60 second pitches, receive mentoring from the musician Will.i.am, the actors Jessica Alba or Gwyneth Paltrow, or the social media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk to develop their ideas, and then try to persuade a venture capital fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, to invest in them. The winners will get prime billing in Apple's App Store.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
"Fiddler on the Roof" is about balance. The idea is there in the title image and at the start of the show, when the dairyman protagonist, Tevye, explains that the people of his shtetl maintain their balance by relying on tradition. Much of the plot challenges him to keep his footing while adapting to new ways. Anyone staging a revival of "Fiddler," especially on Broadway, faces a similar test: how to offer a fresh take without tilting too far from what audiences know and love. For the "Fiddler" now playing at the Broadway Theater, one of the bolder decisions taken by the director, Bartlett Sher, was to hire someone to update the choreography made by the show's original director, Jerome Robbins. On the one hand, Mr. Sher's choice, Hofesh Shechter, is an outsider who had never choreographed a Broadway show. He runs an acclaimed dance company in London, where in recent months a series of performances billed as Hofest has spread his aggressive and cheeky aesthetic across multiple theaters, including the Brixton Academy (home to rock and pop music) and the Royal Opera House. His company has performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has choreographed for the Royal Ballet, and his works are in the repertory of major European dance troupes and American ones like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. On the other hand, Mr. Shechter was born and raised in Israel, and the first dances he learned were Jewish folk dances. "That's the DNA of my dance education," he explained recently in the lobby of the Broadway Theater. "I have been to Orthodox weddings," he said. "I know how it looks like, how it has to feel. I didn't have to research. My life is the research." Mr. Shechter had previously passed on several offers to choreograph musicals. But he had worked on Mr. Sher's 2013 production of Nico Muhly's "Two Boys" at the Metropolitan Opera House, and his own connection to "Fiddler" made it seem like the right fit especially, he said, after Mr. Sher told him, "I want it to be real." For the current revival of "The King and I," Mr. Sher asked the choreographer Christopher Gattelli to hew closely to the original Jerome Robbins dances. But in "Fiddler," Mr. Sher said, "the dances grow out of real situations, so I thought it would be more fun to reinvestigate them." Since Mr. Shechter had "grown up in that universe," Mr. Sher said, "I thought the conversation between him and Robbins would be interesting." It isn't the first time that the Jerome Robbins Foundation has allowed alterations. Christopher Pennington, director of the foundation and the Robbins Rights Trust, explained in an email that "while the right to use Jerome Robbins's choreography and direction are included in licenses, such use is not necessarily required." He added, "We felt that both Bart and Hofesh could be trusted to serve the material appropriately and deserved the opportunity to do so." Mr. Shechter said his mandate from Mr. Sher was, "You have to base it on the Jerome Robbins choreography, but you're free to do whatever you want." Grinning, he added, "I didn't know exactly what that meant." For what is probably the most famous dance moment in the show, the wedding scene in which bearded men place bottles on their black hats and link hands, Mr. Shechter has created what he called "a 2.0 version," because, he said, "we're more skillful now." Whereas in the original the men climatically bent down to slide a bit on their knees, he has two men assist a third in much faster gliding, an effect close to floor skimming flight. Such low riding is characteristic of Mr. Shechter's style. The dancers in his own company often slink like vehicles with dropped suspensions, their posture concave and their knees bent low. Their hands would graze the ground, were their fingers not grabbing at the air in front of them or stretched heavenward. In his "Fiddler" choreography, hands are again prominent fingers splayed not openly, as in the "jazz hands" of Broadway convention, but twisted. Even the puppets in Tevye's invented dream hold their hands like that, with their grotesquely long fingers exaggerating the effect. What is the significance of this physicality? "We can speak about the meaning it carries," Mr. Shechter said, "and we can find a lot: The arms are up, the head is down. We try to reach, but there's an oppressive feel." He said he was most loyal to the original choreography in the bottle dance. About the rest of the Robbins material, he said, "For my taste, it was not energetic enough." Yet in making it more energetic, he had to take care that the dancers, drawn both from Broadway and from concert dance, not appear too skillful. "During rehearsals, we made things that are more complex, but we took them out," he said. "What they do now is not nothing, but you can get away with the feeling that it's a group of guys in the shtetl that worked on it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Dance
Q. Tell me how you founded Gutsy Traveler. A. It was a continuation of my 1996 book "Gutsy Women" and dialogues with travelers that began during national book tours and speaking at travel conferences. I responded to women travelers who, with more money, time and freedom, feel more empowered to do and see what they want. My readers want up to date travel information, inspiration and advice about safety, adventure escapes, family bonding, solo travel, packing, best apps, best organized tours. GutsyTraveler.com spotlights women who have done extraordinary things, such as a 90 year old woman ending female slavery in Nepal. What's your philosophy for staying together as a family through so much travel? My husband and I both have curiosity, love of travel and the exotic. With children, start when they're young so they see how you handle things. As a travel writer, I often traveled with my girls to show them the world, including third world countries, poverty, things outside the comfortable suburbs. I taught them how to read a map, ride a public bus, handle a canceled flight, how to navigate a city, talk to strangers, stay in people's homes and live with the locals. What makes women an important force in the travel industry? The numbers and power of women travelers explain it. From women traveling on business to how women plan family travel, I'd say 80 percent of all travel decisions are made by women regardless of who travels, where you go or who pays. Talk to women who have been there and do your research online before you go. Trust your instincts. Pack lightly so you can move quickly. Don't be a target distracted, walking down the street, by electronics, your cellphone. Nowhere is 100 percent safe, as a woman, but if you have lived in an urban environment in the United States, you have probably developed good instincts and safety skills. Don't leave them at home just because you're on vacation. Women travelers need to be better informed regarding precautions they can take, like avoiding walking in streets after dark or taking public transportation or rickshaws. Don't hail a street cab, call a radio cab. What are your favorite places to visit? Hard to pick one. For adventure, I recently kayaked in Antarctica, tracked wolves in Yellowstone and rode camels in Australia's Outback. For history, I cruised the Rhine, then danced in Porto and Paris. Culinary: South Africa, Vietnam and France. Mountains: I love the Himalayas, Canadian Rockies. And wildlife: Africa, Galapagos, the Grand Tetons. I love our national parks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Travel
The bacteria on your feet can say a lot about you including who your partner is. New research finds that people who live together significantly influence the microbial communities on each other's skin. Couples who live together share a lot of things: beds, bathrooms, food, toiletries. But one thing they might not expect to share? Skin bacteria. In a study published Thursday in mSystems, an open access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers studied the skin microbiomes of 10 sexually active, heterosexual couples living together. A microbiome is a mini ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microorganisms living on and in the body. Each square centimeter of skin hosts between one million and one billion microorganisms, according to the study. After analyzing 330 skin swabs collected from 17 parts of the body on each participant, the researchers found that each person significantly influenced the microbial communities on a lover's skin. In fact, computer algorithms relying on microbial data were able to accurately match couples with up to 86 percent accuracy. "The most surprising aspect of the study was that we could identify a microbial fingerprint common to cohabiting couples," Josh Neufeld, co author and a biologist at University of Waterloo, wrote in an email. And the part of the body most likely to host a microbial community shared by a couple: the feet. The study didn't examine causality, but the researchers say it's likely microbes are picked up from skin and bacteria in the home. Humans shed over one million biological particles every hour, and it's particularly easy to pick up new microbes on the feet in the shower shared with a partner, for instance, or walking barefoot around the home. "The more we know about factors that influence the human microbiome, including microbes coating our skin, the more we understand about the barriers that protect our bodies from disease, train our immune system and connect to the environments that we inhabit," Dr. Neufeld wrote. Other factors, like gender, influence a person's microbiome even more than proximity to a partner, researchers said. A sample taken from one part of a person's body will match a sample from another part of her body more closely than it will matches her partner's. But a lover still plays an important role in shaping your microbial profile, said Ashley Ross, co author of the new study and a master's student in biology at the University of Waterloo. "It's not the main influence, but it's one more piece of the puzzle." In addition to the feet, sexual partners share similar microbial communities on the torso, navel and eyelids, the study showed. Some of that exchange might occur from sleeping in the same bed and sharing sheets, Ms. Ross said. She and her colleagues also found that the microbial communities on a person's inner thigh were specific to gender. Computer algorithms were able to differentiate between men and women with 100 percent accuracy by analyzing these samples alone. It may have to do with the fact that the bacteria on women's inner thighs are influenced by the vaginal microbiome, Ms. Ross said. Given the small sample size of 20 participants, it's difficult to generalize the results to all populations, she and her colleagues said. It would be useful to study same sex couples in the future, as well as couples of various ethnicities and races. Eventually, Dr. Neufeld said, the findings may have practical applications for the design of public and shared spaces to reduce the spread of pathogens between individuals.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
The Michael Jackson musical has found its King of Pop. Ephraim Sykes, a limber legged, scene stealing, Tony nominated performer in "Ain't Too Proud," will jump from one jukebox musical to another when he stars in "MJ the Musical," which is scheduled to open on Broadway next summer. Sykes, a 34 year old from St. Petersburg, Fla., is a gifted dancer who was trained at the Alvin Ailey/Fordham University B.F.A. program, toured with the Ailey II company for two years, and this year was named the outstanding male dancer in a Broadway show at the Chita Rivera Awards, which honor dance in theater and film. He has appeared in six Broadway musicals, beginning as a replacement member of the ensemble in "The Little Mermaid," and he was a member of the original Broadway cast of "Hamilton." In "Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations" he has his first major role, portraying David Ruffin, who was one of the group's lead singers. "MJ the Musical" arrives at a challenging time for the pop singer's legacy, which has been tarnished by renewed allegations that he sexually abused young boys. But he remains acknowledged as one of the greatest American pop artists ever; his songs continue to be ubiquitous and his fan base intense, and the musical's producers, after canceling a pre Broadway run in Chicago, have determinedly pushed toward a Broadway opening.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
Winning four championships consecutively is something only two others have done. Schumacher, the all time Formula One winner with 91 race victories and seven championships, had a five straight streak from 2000 to 2004. The other was Fangio, who claimed the title from 1954 to 1957. Vettel is getting ready to move into a neighborhood that has few other inhabitants. A win on Sunday would give him 36 victories in 117 starts, fourth on the career list, though it must be assumed that most of his career is still ahead of him. Schumacher's record is a long way off, and Fangio, who entered Formula One at age 40 and retired at 48, drove only 52 races in an era when as few as seven a year counted for the title. He won 24 of his starts, the best winning percentage of all. Prost is second on the career victory list with 51 in 202 starts, and Ayrton Senna of Brazil is third with 41 in 162. Schumacher won his 91 in 249 starts from 1992 through 2006, first with Benetton and then with Ferrari, where he had his greatest success. He retired after the 2006 season, trieda comeback with Mercedes Benz in the 2010 12 seasons and demonstrated that that either the cars weren't competitive or he had lost his edge, or both. There were 58 starts, no wins. Successful second acts in auto racing are a rarity. Vettel has much to look forward to, but first there is the matter of India. To get to seven championships, much less eight, you first have to pass four. He has what is generally considered to be the fastest car, designed by Adrian Newey, acknowledged to be the best designer of this era. There is an excellent supporting cast assembled by the Austrian Dietrich Mateschitz, who has turned his Red Bull energy drink into a worldwide brand. In the competition for the constructor's championship, Red Bull, which makes no roadgoing vehicles, only Formula One entries, has won that title the last three years and is about to do it again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
LONDON BP has sued the United States government to overturn the suspension of most BP entities, including its exploration arm, from federal contracts. The suit, filed on Tuesday in federal court in Texas, seeks to overturn a ban imposed in November by the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency cited BP for "lack of business integrity" as demonstrated by its role in the disastrous oil spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. The agency said the suspension would be in force "until the company can provide sufficient evidence to E.P.A. that it meets federal business standards." The ban's most significant impact is that it prevents BP from gaining new oil and gas leases in the United States. That suspension, for instance, is likely to be hampering the company's activities in the Gulf of Mexico. The company is the leader in deepwater gulf leases with 719, it says. BP's output in the Gulf of Mexico, a crucial profit center, has dropped sharply to 219,000 barrels a day in 2012, from about 338,000 in 2010, because it divested itself of oil and gas fields there, as well as the temporary moratorium on drilling that was imposed after the spill. Robert W. Dudley, BP's chief executive, said that although BP had enough leases in the gulf, not being able to bid on new ones limited its ability to maneuver and keep pace with rivals like Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron. The E.P.A. also disqualified BP's exploration and production unit from federal contracts in February 2013. BP's complaint names Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, and Richard A. Pelletier, the agency's official in charge of such suspensions, or "debarment," as well as the agency as defendants. "We believe that the E.P.A.'s action here is inappropriate and unjustified as a matter of law and policy, and we are pursuing our right to seek relief in federal court," BP said in a statement. "At the same time, we remain open to a reasonable settlement with the E.P.A." In an e mail, Wyn Hornbuckle, a spokesman for the United States Department of Justice, declined to comment. Taking the United States government to court is part of a shift to a tougher approach by the oil giant, which is based in London. BP executives think the company has already paid a very stiff price for the spill in addition to the penalties paid, it has set aside 42.4 billion in reserve for costs and claims related to the spill and they are frustrated that new issues and claims for more money continue to arise. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The company's chief financial officer, Brian Gilvary, said on July 30 that BP wanted to obtain closure on the episode. BP executives appear to have concluded that their conciliatory approach did not work as well as they had hoped. The E.P.A. move came after BP reached an agreement with the Justice Department in November to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay 4.5 billion in penalties. Some BP executives say the November agreement should have precluded the suspension by the E.P.A., although there was no formal agreement to that effect. Civil claims against BP are also mounting despite the company's efforts to settle them. BP said that administrators of the settlement had made excessive payments to businesses, including some that did not suffer damage. BP originally estimated that the settlement would cost 7.8 billion, but it increased that estimate on July 30 to 9.6 billion, and it said the final cost would most likely be "significantly higher." "We want everyone to know that we are digging in and are well prepared for the long haul on legal matters," Mr. Dudley said. Whether BP's new approach will succeed is open to question. Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer in New York, worried that BP risked a further backlash. "You need to be aggressive but not too aggressive," he said. "The regulators will put you in the penalty box." BP's legal brief against the E.P.A. is a remarkable catalog of the company's grievances. BP called the suspension and disqualification of the exploration unit "punitive, arbitrary and capricious" and said the court should declare the bans "null, void and unenforceable." The company said it had done business with the federal government for two and a half years after the 2010 oil spill. It also said that federal regulators "publicly expressed their confidence in BP as a safe and reliable operator" after the disaster, allowing it to win dozens of leases in the Gulf of Mexico and issuing drilling permits to the company. BP also noted that it had received 84 licenses for drilling in 12 countries since 2010. BP asserted that it had been "a longstanding business partner" of the United States government and employed more than 20,000 people in the United States. It said it had invested 52 billion on energy development in America 20 billion more than its nearest competitor. The brief includes statements from United States officials, including Michael R. Bromwich, the official responsible for awarding drilling licenses, saying that BP had demonstrated that it was a safe operator. "BP has met all of the enhanced safety requirements that we have implemented and applied consistently over the past year," Mr. Bromwich said after approving a drilling permit for BP in 2011.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Global Business
LONDON Two of Britain's boldest and wealthiest entrepreneurs are trying to break into a very tough league. James Dyson, best known for innovative vacuum cleaners, said recently that he was preparing to introduce a new electric car and had 400 people working on the project. And Jim Ratcliffe, a billionaire petrochemical executive, is so upset about Jaguar Land Rover deciding to end production of the Defender that he said he would put a healthy slice of his fortune into producing what he calls "a spiritual successor" to the classic vehicle of explorers and safaris. These new projects, announced within a couple weeks of each other, sent a burst of excitement through the British car industry, which has been worried about the fallout from Britain's plans to leave the European Union trading bloc. The Daily Mail, a large circulation tabloid, even said that Dyson's plans "would pose a threat to the Silicon Valley giant Tesla." But breaking into the car business is far more complex than it might appear at first glance. A new carmaker must design the vehicle and figure out how to manufacture it and that is only the beginning. Success requires a number of to dos: effective marketing, a dealer network and, perhaps, arranging buyer financing. "There is a huge list," said Peter Wells, a professor at Cardiff Business School in Wales. "That has been one of the reasons why the barriers to entry in the automotive industry have been relatively high." Still, Mr. Wells said that the car industry is "at a very important pivot point in its history now, where a combination of factors are radically altering what is possible." And Mr. Dyson, 70, and Mr. Ratcliffe, 65, could be in a position to take advantage. New technologies like electric and autonomously driven vehicles are forcing major changes while the center of gravity in the car business is shifting toward Asia. "There is a lot of fluidity in the entire industry space, which is what these players see," Mr. Wells said. In an interview at a pub called The Grenadier in London, Mr. Ratcliffe explained that terminating the much loved Defender would create demand for a replacement because it "had left quite a hole in the marketplace." He criticized the many SUVs still being sold as "jelly molds" that all look alike. Mr. Ratcliffe owns two versions of the Defender one from 1955 and a so called Heritage model made near the end of its production run. He said he wants to preserve the Defender's boxy, military style ruggedness. Toby Ecuyer, a yacht designer, has the job of turning Mr. Ratcliffe's ideas into drawings. "What we are trying to design is something extremely utilitarian," not a luxury vehicle, he said. Mr. Ratcliffe conceded that the new vehicle will need updates to meet global safety and emission standards, including in the United States, where its sales stopped in 1997. He said he planned to make about 25,000 vehicles a year about the number of Defenders sold in 2015, the year before its production was halted. Jaguar Land Rover, which is owned by Tata, an India based conglomerate, has found success with luxury models like the Range Rover. The company said in a statement that it had plans for the Defender and would pay close attention to any actions regarding its "proprietary rights." Mr. Ratcliffe built a 40 billion per year petrochemical empire called Ineos by buying chemical plants that other companies wanted to discard and then running them more efficiently. He said he can also find cheaper ways to operate a car company as well. According to his team, for instance, European manufacturers had already expressed an interest in either building his car on contract or selling him a fully equipped plant. Either way, that would help limit upfront investment and risk. He said he did not want to put in more than 600 million pounds less than the 1 billion analysts estimate that development and production of a new model typically costs. Ferdinand Dudenhoffer, director of the CAR center at the University of Duisburg Essen in Germany, said he doubted that an updated version of an old concept would have appeal beyond a dwindling group of enthusiasts. A few would buy Mr. Ratcliffe's car, he said, but it would "become a niche which gets smaller over time." He has reached that point. Mr. Dyson has purchased a World War II era airfield near his company's headquarters in Malmesbury, in southern England, where the development work will continue. He said the new vehicle will offer a "radical" electric motor design that he said would be more efficient than those available on the market now. Mr. Dyson has proved himself a dogged inventor, designing high end vacuum cleaners and other products like hair dryers. His technological savvy gives him a chance of scoring a hit in the much more complex and costly global car industry, analysts said. In 2015, he bought Sakti3, an American start up that is working with solid state batteries. Mr. Dyson said he could be on track to commercializing a so called solid state battery, which analysts say might be more powerful and safer than the lithium ion devices now used in electric cars and cellphones. He said both the start up and his own team were working on the project. "The edge that Dyson have if they do have an edge is to possibly be ahead of the game in solid state batteries," said Philippe Houchois, an auto analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank. As nascent as they are, the plans Mr. Dyson has laid out will be expensive, particularly for a medium size company like Dyson. Mr. Dyson said he would spend PS1 billion on the car and another PS1 billion on the battery a lot of money for a company that reported PS2.5 billion in revenue last year. He may need to spend more. Tesla, for instance, has already spent about 6 billion, according to analysts' estimates.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
FERRARA, Italy The paths that lead designers to their destinies or even just to their studios are long and winding, and difficult to predict. It would have been hard to divine at the outset, or at any critical juncture along the way, that Matthew Williams, a one semester college dropout from Pismo Beach, Calif., onetime creative director and paramour of Lady Gaga, collaborator of Kanye West, skate rat turned club kid turned D.J. turned designer, would wind up newly installed here in Ferrara, north of Bologna, where the Renaissance court of the Este once patronized Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca. But on a hot June day nearly a year into his residence in Ferrara, when a procession of nuns and priests began their march through the cobbled center of the city, a snaking train of holiness, Mr. Williams did as all the local Ferrarese do: shrugged and stepped out of their path. (His own contribution to the city's Roman Catholic life is more or less isolated to the enormous black cross tattooed from the nape of his neck to the back of his skull.) Mr. Williams, the founder and designer of Alyx, the label he began in 2015, has been steadily collecting fans and accolades. Bella Hadid, the fledgling supermodel, has taken to wearing it out and about. The pashas of LVMH (Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, et al.) have assessed his achievement, and in 2016 he was named a finalist for the company's young designer LVMH Prize. Picky shops around the world have lined up to carry it. It has been an adjustment for the entire family Mr. Williams; his wife, Jennifer, who oversees the label's sales; Alyx and her new baby sister, Valetta, who arrived in June to adapt to their new home, where they moved to be closer to Mr. Williams's business partner, the Italian streetwear distributor Luca Benini, and to work more closely with the factories that produce his collections. (Cairo, 8, his son from an earlier relationship, visits.) They live in an apartment in the city center and commute, in a borrowed Land Rover, to the factories where their clothes are made. They are learning to live without the 24/7 creature comforts of New York: little ethnic food, no takeout, hummus at only one grocery store across town. The language barrier remains difficult. Of the family, Alyx, 3, is the most fluent. He went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to study art but dropped out after one semester. He was more interested spending summers in Los Angeles, helping a friend oversee production of his denim collection. It was there he met Ms. Williams, out at a club one night. She was celebrating her 23rd birthday; he was technically underage. "I was working at Maxfield at the time," Ms. Williams said, meaning the high fashion Los Angeles boutique. (It now carries Alyx.) "I spent all of my paycheck on a Dries Van Noten shirt and shoes. He was like, 'Those are Dries, right?' I was like: 'You know what this is? Oh my God, who are you?'" On their first official date, he was carded and rejected at the door. Within three months, they decided to move together to New York, despite the fact that Mr. Williams's application to the fashion program at Parsons had been declined. In New York, Mr. and Ms. Williams eventually (and, as it turned out, temporarily) split up. Mr. Williams, a self confessed club kid, spent every night out. He began both collaborating with, and dating, Lady Gaga, working on videos, stage shows and costumes for onstage and off. Through his work with Lady Gaga, he met Nick Knight, the English photographer who worked with generations of fashion talent, including Yohji Yamamoto and Alexander McQueen. After working for a time with both Lady Gaga and Kanye West, who were at one point planning a joint tour, Mr. Williams eventually moved on from Lady Gaga's team, reunited with Ms. Williams and went to work for Mr. West exclusively, serving as an art director on his touring productions and album designs. There, Mr. Williams met Virgil Abloh, a creative director for Mr. West, in the years before Mr. Abloh founded his own Off White label. Mr. Williams and Mr. Abloh spent long days and nights traveling the country, consumed by their own ambitions to create something new. With a few friends, they founded Been Trill, a loosely defined collective that at various points issued mixtapes, gave parties and released, somewhat irregularly, clothing. "It was an inside joke," Mr. Abloh said. "It was us being creative, burning off excess ideas." But Been Trill turned, briefly, into a cult phenomenon, and a launching pad. "It taught us a lot," Mr. Abloh said. "It gave us confidence to believe in our own ideas. I remember telling Matt, 'Dude, you have more to give than this whole collective project.'" Mr. West's fanatical drive impressed Mr. Williams. "From the experience, I learned a work ethic," he said. "He worked nonstop but with such self belief. He gave me the power to really believe in myself and put it into action, to will the things I wanted to create into existence." But the strain of travel and the pace of following Mr. West's show around the world took a toll. "I had been on the road for, whatever it was, six or eight years," Mr. Williams said. "Jenn and I had gotten married. We had just had Alyx. I was wanting to begin my dream, which was having my own fashion brand and making the clothes that I had always wanted to make." He found a partner in Mr. Benini, who personally invested in Alyx. With his company Slam Jam, Mr. Benini had introduced California surf and skate brands like Stussy to Italy but had never produced a line of his own. He hadn't been searching for a partner, exactly, but when Mr. Williams arrived, Mr. Benini decided he was the man he hadn't been looking for. Mr. Williams has a fan's passion for fashion and its demigods a partial list of his mononymic enthusiasms includes Hedi, Margiela, Helmut, Raf, Rick, Rei, Yohji but no formal training. Mr. Benini was undeterred: Mr. Williams had an art director's sense of context and culture, references in art, music and fashion history. "Today, the art director is very important," Mr. Benini said. "I feel it's much more important to understand not only the traditional approach to fashion, but also what there is behind it." About 10 kilometers southeast of Ferrara's city center, a 20 minute rumble by Land Rover, the Mary Fashion factory makes garments for some of Italy's biggest luxury brands. Founded 30 years ago, Mary Fashion once specialized in ladies' undergarments. It has since expanded its offerings. Mr. Williams, whose designs may incorporate metal cigarette lighter caps or looping wire, whose fabrics may be plasticized or reflective or technical, often pushes them even further. "Matthew's collection has nothing in common with the products we've been producing for more than 20 years," said Alessio Bonora, Mary Fashion's general manager. We paused by a sewing table where a woman was working on a garment in one of Mr. Williams's custom prints, an inky blot developed from a bloody napkin salvaged after one of his stick and poke tattoos. The Alyx style, Mr. Williams said, is less a strict credo than a feeling, or maybe more accurately a mix of feelings, since it draws equally from street smart aggression, Gothic grimness and military polish. Lest it seem too humorless, one of the collection's signature and durable details is a heavy metal buckle that he discovered and then sourced after a trip to Six Flags. St. Marks Place, one of the historic landmarks of New York City punk rock, is printed on every label. The first Alyx studio was on the block, and Mr. Williams hopes the first Alyx store will be, too. But that is in the future. For now, Alyx is advancing by stages. Men's wear arrived this season, though Japanese stores often bought the women's collections with an eye to interested male shoppers. It is in the word of mouth phase of its life, one helped by the affection of women like Ms. Hadid and Molly Bair, the elfin runway model who has become something of a muse to Mr. Williams, working with him and Mr. Knight on Alyx shoots. Ms. Bair loves her Alyx bomber jacket, she gushed, and wore it all winter. Reached by phone in New York, she happened to be wearing her Alyx designed Vans. (Mr. Williams has a continuing partnership with Vans, the sneakers of his California youth.) "Oh, I have these purple bell bottoms that I was wearing constantly," she added. "I get so many compliments on them." Mr. Williams needs such evangelists. Ferrara is outside of fashion's usual ports of call. He is working to add accessories, experimenting with sustainable basics. Back on the factory floor, the seamstresses beamed as Mr. Williams sauntered by. One tittered in Italian to Mr. Bonora.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Fashion & Style
On June 2, as Black Lives Matter protesters swarmed America's streets demanding an end to the racist vestiges of America's troubled past, a teenager from a San Diego suburb posted eight words on Twitter that would soon ignite a less visible, though perhaps just as powerful, movement. "Going to an HBCU wouldn't be too bad," he wrote. The person behind the Twitter post, which quickly went viral, is one of the most sought after college basketball recruits of the Class of 2023: 16 year old Mikey Williams. If he were to attend a historically Black college or university, Williams would become one of the highest rated athletes to do so post integration. Williams's post came as a surprise to college sports recruiters and fans who pore over social media for clues about which schools an athlete might be favoring. To land a recruit like Williams would all but guarantee a team's success and ensure prime TV placement for their games. As more top Black athletes express interest in an H.B.C.U. movement, they are signaling that Power 5 institutions may no longer hold the same allure. "All it takes is one person to change history," the N.B.A. star Carmelo Anthony wrote on Instagram, referencing Williams's comments. Days after Williams's post, Nate Tabor, a top basketball player from Queens withdrew his commitment from St. John's to sign with Norfolk State, a small Black college. On July 3, Makur Maker, a 6 foot 11 power forward, said he was forgoing offers from U.C.L.A. and Kentucky to attend Howard University, becoming the highest ranked player in more than a decade to choose an H.B.C.U. "I want to inspire the youth to be able to lead in whichever way they can. I'm doing it by taking this step," Maker said in a phone interview. "Hopefully in one or two years from now we'll see H.B.C.U.s as power schools." Hours after Maker's announcement, Daniel Ingram, a star quarterback from Ohio who had signed a letter of intent in February to attend the University of Cincinnati, said in a Twitter post that he would de commit and instead attend the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, another H.B.C.U. A single star football player can increase revenue to a school's athletic department by more than 500,000, according to a 2020 study by Ohio State University. In what is known as the Flutie Effect, a successful college sports team can uplift not only the athletic department, but the entire school (the phenomenon is named for Doug Flutie, a quarterback who was credited for prompting applications to Boston College after throwing a winning touchdown in a 1984 game against Miami). When Norfolk State upset Missouri at the 2012 N.C.A.A. men's tournament, becoming the fifth 15 seed ever to beat a No. 2 seed, revenue from the men's basketball team spiked by more than 220,000 a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Enrollment jumped 4 percent. Assuming those new students paid full tuition and fees, they would have collectively brought an additional 2 million to 4 million to the university that year. "Athletics is like the front porch of a university," said Robert Jones, the head coach of Norfolk's men's basketball. "If athletics does well, the university does well as a whole." Attending H.B.C.U.s used to be the norm for top notch Black athletes who, before college sports gradually desegregated through the 1960s, had little other choice. Over time, Black students have shifted toward predominantly white institutions: The percentage of Black college students attending H.B.C.U.s fell from 17 percent in 1990 to 9 percent in 2016, according to a study by the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California. The report attributes the decline to poorly resourced admissions departments and a negative perception of Black colleges among African American students a view spawned in part by H.B.C.U. finance and accreditation woes and exacerbated by intermittent cuts in federal funding. Star athletes moving en masse to return the spotlight to historically Black universities could provide a needed economic boost for the schools and provide an environment that predominantly white institutions cannot. A 2015 Gallup study found that Black students who graduated from H.B.C.U.s were twice as likely as Black graduates from non H.B.C.U.s to have experienced supportive professors and mentors, and are more likely to strongly agree that their university prepared them well for life outside of college. "H.B.C.U.s are the one place where you're not a minority," said Gurley, who swam for North Carolina A T, an H.B.C.U. "I encourage kids to go where you're loved. Go where you're going to be taken care of. Go where you're more than just the revenue dollars you're going to bring in." Black students at predominantly white schools often experience racial microaggressions and stereotypes, said Keneshia Grant, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University. Particularly after the 2016 election, Grant said many freshmen, as well as students who transferred from predominantly white institutions, expressed concerns over safety. "Students are asking themselves: 'Where can I go and not have to worry about falling asleep in the library and having the police called on me? Where can I not have to wonder if people are questioning my presence because of some affirmative action policy?'" she said. "I for sure would have gotten drafted earlier had I gone to a P.W.I." Of the 450 players on N.B.A. rosters, just two attended H.B.C.U.s. The N.F.L. boasts a similar ratio, with just 32 H.B.C.U. alumni among the league's 1,800 players. The slow rate of matriculation from Black colleges to the pros owes in part to a disparity in exposure. Big name institutions offer not only first class facilities and well connected coaching staffs, but also the opportunity to play on TV in front of millions of fans and, importantly, scouts. "I for sure would have gotten drafted earlier had I gone to a P.W.I.," said Antoine Bethea, referring to predominately white institutions. Bethea, a defensive back, has played 14 seasons in the N.F.L. after being drafted out of Howard in 2006 by the Indianapolis Colts. "Exposure is everything. So this is us filling that gap," said Troy Vincent, the N.F.L.'s executive vice president of football operations, and its highest ranking African American official. "If the talent is there, we'll find you." That may prove more difficult than usual this year, as the Mid Eastern and Southwest athletic conferences announced they would postpone their football seasons indefinitely because of the virus outbreak. The MEAC and SWAC are primarily comprised by H.B.C.U. teams. Social media could help fill the exposure void now and once sports return. Williams and Maker each have Instagram followings of 2.3 million and 90,000, respectively, and with recent moves toward revising N.C.A.A. rules, which have long prohibited athletes from profiting off their celebrity, players could potentially leverage their movement to consider Black colleges to generate endorsements. "We're at a critical point in our country as far as policy, empowerment and how we're going to deal with social injustice," said Kali Jones, the head football coach at Withrow High School, who encouraged Ingram to withdraw his commitment from Cincinnati and choose an H.B.C.U. Jones said he has always pushed his players to consider H.B.C.U.s, but excitement over the idea swelled after Ingram announced his decision. He anticipates many of his athletes will follow. "This is a beautiful thing. This is a beautiful moment," he said. "We are living in a paradigm shift."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Part thriller, part coming of age story, "The Thing With Feathers" is about chickens coming home to roost. The play fatally falls apart at the end, but Mr. Organ keeps us entertained for a good long while before that, making us guess and guess again about what, exactly, is going on here. At the start, Anna and her mother, Beth (DeAnna Lenhart), are thriving. On their own since Anna was little, they are unusually close. They seem to skirt the prickly confrontations that come with adolescence though Anna is, in the way of so many teenagers, a master of casually if affectionately withering condescension. Beth, a real estate agent, has finally found a truly good man, a cop named Tim (Robert Manning Jr.) who is calm, dependable, strong and, she's certain, about to propose. Eric (Zachary Booth) has romantic intentions, too, but he is a far more damaged creature. When he shows up uninvited at their house, forcing a face to face meeting with Anna, what he wants and what kind of danger he poses are unclear. He has precisely calculated the detonating impact he intends to have. About that title, though. "The Thing With Feathers" is also a Dickinson reference, and Mr. Organ is mistaken in clinging to it. The later sections of the play feel contrived in a way that nothing that comes before does; he is determined to let a concept the allusion to hope in that poem's title rule the action. But the characters, sprung to life, have long since taken over.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Theater
ESSEN, Germany Most American vintage car enthusiasts are familiar with the big annual gatherings commonly known as Pebble Beach, Barrett Jackson and Fall Hershey. In recent years, growing numbers of well heeled gearheads have found room on their schedules for overseas events like Retromobile in Paris and the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England. But the Techno Classica show, held each spring at the Messe Essen exposition center here, is a relative secret. Though vast, it is little known in the United States. Techno Classica, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, combines dealer exhibits with car club displays and a classic car auction by Coys, along with hundreds of vendors selling new and used parts, accessories, clothing, die cast model cars, literature and manuals. Techno Classica may be the closest thing the classic car world has to an all encompassing trade show. Consider the numbers: 2,500 cars on display, 234 participating clubs, 1,250 vendors and 1.3 million square feet of display space. Nearly 200,000 people attended over five days in mid April. Essen is in northwest Germany just 30 minutes by cab or train from the Dusseldorf airport. And while it's not Paris, Essen has its charms even though little of the old city survived Allied bombing in World War II. (The next Techno Classica is scheduled for March 26 30, 2014.) Some of the larger American shows, like the concours at Pebble Beach in California and Amelia Island in Florida, feature enthusiastic participation by new car manufacturers. But at Techno Classica, automakers' involvement is positively off the charts, with a strong presence by Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, BMW, Citroen, Ferrari, Ford, Jaguar, Mercedes Benz, Mini, Opel, Peugeot, Porsche, Volkswagen and Volvo. The companies' lavish displays suggested that they were all aware of the equity in their heritage. BMW's display was particularly impressive, celebrating the history of the "M" cars from its Motorsports division and the 90th anniversary of BMW motorcycles. And just to remind everyone of what country they were in, a giant beer tap was set up in the trunk of a BMW 502 sedan from the 1950s. The tap seemed to be in service nonstop from the 9 a.m. opening until the 6 p.m. close. Club displays ranged from the Spartan a few cars with owners and club members sitting nearby to the elaborate and often incomprehensible like a Borgward Isabella sitting in a large makeshift bathtub. The more humble displays tended to showcase autos, like the Trabant and Wartburg, from the former East Germany. A great deal of what was on display would have been wholly unfamiliar to all but the most knowledgeable American enthusiasts, including the Borgward along with its companion Lloyd and Hansa marques and the cars of Glas and Bitter. The profusion of never seen in America models from familiar marques like BMW, Volkswagen and Opel would hold the attention of a curious American enthusiast nearly indefinitely or at least as long as one could stare at a display of tiny Volkswagen Polo GTis and unfamiliar versions of the BMW 2002, like the Turbo and the Touring hatchback. The number of vendors was remarkable even if some of the wares were rather standard swap meet fare. Every car show on the planet seems to have a guy selling a miracle metal polish that will make an empty soda can shine like a mirror. As one might imagine, given the location, Techno Classica was short on '57 Chevy grilles and long on Karmann Ghia bumpers and taillamps. One could pass the time staring into seas of red and amber taillamp lenses and puzzling over what cars they fit. One vendor specializing in rebuilt vintage radios claimed to have virtually every type of postwar Blaupunkt unit, with prices starting at a lofty 392 for a basic unit that appeared to have come from an old VW Beetle. Steering wheels, carburetors, interior fabrics and leathers were common. Aside from wares for popular German marques, quite a few British vendors offered parts and accessories for MGs, Triumphs and Austin Healeys. Die cast cars were available for nearly every make and model imaginable at prices ranging from 6.50 Chinese made show specials to more than 1,300 for a meticulously handmade Auto Union Grand Prix car from the 1930s. The swap meet included a few rather chilling reminders of Germany's Nazi past. Hiding in plain sight among a group of innocuous grille badges from the 1950s and '60s was an enamel door plaque denoting that the occupant was an "Ortsgruppenleiter der NSDAP" a municipal leader of the Nazi party. The Nazi Reichsadler, or eagle, was affixed to the top of the plaque but a price tag of 80 euros strategically obscured the swastika in the eagle's talons. While it is generally illegal in Germany to display the swastika and other bits of Nazi iconography, this fact was apparently lost on the model aircraft seller who on the first day of the show displayed a large scale replica of a Messerschmitt Me 109 fighter plane with a swastika on the tail. By the second day, the offending symbol had been covered up. Shawn Dougan, the vice president for sales at Hyman Ltd., a St. Louis based classic car dealer, was one of a handful of Americans in attendance this year, and his company was the only American dealer with a major exhibit. "I can't figure out why this show is still such a well kept secret in the U.S.," he said. "It's the biggest and best car show on the planet, and one of the few opportunities we have to meet face to face with a lot of our European clientele. There really is nothing like it at home." Mr. Dougan noted that the American collector car hobby was fragmented into niches and subniches like hot rods, customs and restomods, "and the various groups don't often have a lot in common." Also, he said, Americans are more resistant to transporting cars and exhibits for long distances. "Europe is a lot more compact," he said. "A show like Essen can draw exhibitors from France, Belgium, Holland and the U.K. it's just a day's drive for most of them."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Automobiles
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. NEIGHBORING SCENES: NEW LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Feb. 22 26). The most dogged of cinephiles will be willing to miss the Oscars to spend Sunday night watching "Our Time," the new film from the Mexican provocateur Carlos Reygadas ("Post Tenebras Lux") and the centerpiece of this year's Neighboring Scenes. It charts a marriage disrupted when the wife (Natalia Lopez) of a rancher and poet (Reygadas) has a fling with a hired hand an affair that she believes her husband condones. That Lopez and Reygadas are married in real life gives the film a riveting voyeuristic tension. Other titles screening include "Buy Me a Gun" (on Saturday), a Mexican Colombian production billed as a cross between "Huckleberry Finn" and "Mad Max." 212 875 5601, filmlinc.org '1900' at Film Forum (Feb. 22 28). After "Last Tango in Paris," Bernardo Bertolucci, who died in November, made what is either the most misguided folly or the least appreciated epic of 1970s cinema. It tells the story of two men born directly after Verdi's death in 1901: Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the scion of an Italian landowning family, and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), a bastard born to a clan of farmers in the landowners' employ. They remain friends through World War II, despite Olmo's Marxist skepticism of Alfredo and Alfredo's fecklessness in the face of Fascists. (Donald Sutherland and Laura Betti play a couple attracted to the movement's sadistic side.) As in Bertolucci films great ("The Conformist") and terrible ("Luna"), the competing personal, operatic and social realist impulses can be frustrating. Still, the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro didn't shoot a dull frame in this full length, 316 minute cut, which is screening with its Italian dialogue track. 212 727 8110, filmforum.org 'WINTER KEPT US WARM' at the Quad Cinema (Feb. 26, 7 p.m.). The title may only be familiar because of T. S. Eliot, but this low budget, black and white debut feature, directed by David Secter, has its champions, who cite it as a landmark of Canadian low budget cinema. Centered on the unvoiced yearning of two male students a freshman and a senior at the University of Toronto, the film is getting a rare screening in the Quad's recurring Coming Out Again series. The noted Toronto filmmaker David Cronenberg is said to be a fan. 212 255 2243, quadcinema.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
They are slapped and pinched during labor, yelled at, denied pain medicine, neglected and forced to share beds with other women who just gave birth. And that is just a partial list of the abuses and humiliations inflicted on women around the world as their babies are born. A new report based on information from 34 countries, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, finds that "many women globally experience poor treatment during childbirth, including abusive, neglectful or disrespectful care." This kind of mistreatment can drive women away from hospitals and undermine international goals of reducing deaths during childbirth now about 300,000 a year. Most maternal deaths are preventable: They are caused by problems that can be treated, like bleeding, infection and high blood pressure. Often, to save the woman's life, the care must be quick and expert. Health officials say the key to reducing maternal mortality is to increase the proportion of women who give birth in hospitals rather than at home. But women will avoid hospitals if they fear being abused when they are most vulnerable. "To imagine that women are mistreated during this very special time is truly devastating," said Meghan A. Bohren, a research consultant at the World Health Organization and the first author of the new report. The W.H.O. had already expressed concern about the issue in a 2014 statement that mentioned many forms of abuse, such as women's being forced into medical procedures, including sterilization, and mothers' and infants' being held in detention in medical facilities for inability to pay. A commentary in The Lancet in 2014 by researchers from Columbia University said the problem of abusive treatment "runs wide and deep within the maternity services of many countries." Ms. Bohren said she had worked on women's health issues in Ghana, Sudan, Uganda, Guinea and Nigeria, and had heard shocking accounts of mistreatment from women, as well as encountering such reports in studies by other researchers. She said that although many of the abuses occurred on a personal, one to one level between health workers and patients, some of the fault also lay with hospitals and health systems. Insufficient staffing, poor training and lack of supervision can all contribute, as can the lack of supplies, water and electricity. A more fundamental problem is the low status of and lack of respect for women in many cultures. The PLOS article compiles information from 65 studies but does not provide new data or give global measurements of how commonly abuses occur. It cites several studies that do provide estimates based on groups of several hundred to nearly 2,000 women. For instance, a study in Nigeria found that 98 percent of 446 women reported some form of mistreatment. In another study, based on 593 women in Tanzania, the figure was 28 percent. One goal of the article, Ms. Bohren said, was to categorize the types of problems that women encounter, to aid further studies and to develop ways to stop the abuse. There were seven categories of abuse: physical, sexual, verbal, stigma and discrimination, failure to meet professional standards of care, poor rapport between women and providers, and problems with health systems. The research was paid for by the United States Agency for International Development. Ms. Bohren said researchers wanted to know, "What do people mean when they say they're mistreated by health workers?" Nearly all of the 300,000 women a year who die from complications of pregnancy or birth live in low and middle income countries. In poorer countries, about a third of women give birth without what experts call a skilled birth attendant, meaning someone with medical training like a professional midwife, doctor or nurse. The maternal death rate has dropped in recent years, but not as much as the United Nations hoped in 2000 when it set a millennium development goal of a 75 percent reduction from the 1990 rate by 2015. In 1990, there were 380 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, so a 75 percent reduction would have lowered it to 95 per 100,000. But in 2013, the figure was still 210 per 100,000.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Health
DEFENDING JACOB Stream on AppleTV Plus. A chilling case upends a Massachusetts family's quiet life in this new mini series, adapted from William Landay's novel of the same name. Chris Evans and Michelle Dockery play Andy and Laurie Barber, whose teenage son, Jacob (Jaeden Martell), is accused of killing a classmate. The parents are horrified at the thought and ready to stand by their son. But over the course of eight, slow episodes, their doubts come to the fore, revealing their own long held secrets. MET OPERA AT HOME GALA 1 p.m. on metopera.org. This week, the Metropolitan Opera's performances take on a new format. A virtual gala features more than 40 artists from around the world performing over Skype, straight from their living rooms. The Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, and music director, Yannick Nezet Seguin, will host from their homes in New York and Montreal. Classical fans may miss the acoustics of concert halls, but unlike a lot of in person performances, this one is free. It will be available to stream on the Met's website until 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Television
The songwriter Allee Willis at her home in Valley Village, Calif., in 2018. "I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away," she said. Allee Willis, one of the music industry's most colorful figures, whose eclectic credits as a writer and co writer included Earth, Wind Fire's "September" and the "Friends" theme song, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 72. The cause was cardiac arrest, her publicist, Ellyn Solis, said. The animator and producer Prudence Fenton, Ms. Willis's partner of 27 years, posted a photo on Instagram with the caption: "Rest in Boogie Wonderland," referring to the Earth, Wind Fire disco hit that Ms. Willis wrote with Jon Lind. Ms. Willis, who grew up in Detroit, never learned to play music. But she was drawn to Motown as a child, and said she learned how to become a songwriter by sitting on the lawn outside the record company's studios and listening to the rhythms seeping through the building's walls. "A lot of times I would learn a bass line and then I'd hear the records and I'd go, Oh, that was 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,'" she told The New York Times last year. She attributed her career to her love of Motown. "I'm so insanely attached to Motown and all the music that was coming out of Detroit, and it gave me a love for that kind of music," she told The Detroit Free Press last year. "There's no question: Had I grown up anywhere else, I would not ever have been a songwriter. Because I certainly don't have the skills to be it." She started her career writing advertising copy and liner notes, and while her first foray into making her own music an album called "Childstar" didn't get far, it brought her to the attention of Bonnie Raitt, who asked Ms. Willis to collaborate. (Ms. Willis and David Lasley wrote Ms. Raitt's 1974 song "Got You on My Mind.") "September," released in 1978, was an instant smash and went on to become a staple at wedding receptions, with its driving beat and its opening lines, "Do you remember/The 21st night of September?," all but guaranteed to propel people onto the dance floor. She told NPR in 2014 that while she was working on the song with Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind Fire, she was annoyed by the recurring nonsense phrase he had written, "Ba dee ya." She asked Mr. White what it meant, and he said, "Who cares?" That led her to a revelation: "I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove." Later songs included Top 10 hits for the Pointer Sisters ("Neutron Dance") and the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield ("What Have I Done to Deserve This?"), as well as tracks for Ray Charles, Sister Sledge, Cyndi Lauper, Nona Hendryx, Taylor Dayne and Toni Basil. "I, very thankfully, have a few songs that will not go away," she told The Times of her successes, "but they're schlepping along 900 others." Ms. Willis won her first Grammy in 1986 for writing (with Danny Sembello) Patti LaBelle's "Stir It Up" for the soundtrack to "Beverly Hills Cop." In 1995 she was nominated for an Emmy for "I'll Be There for You," performed by the Rembrandts, best known as the theme song for the sitcom "Friends." She lost to the main title theme music from "Star Trek: Voyager." But "I'll Be There for You" was arguably more indelible in the culture, as it played during the opening credits of "Friends" for 10 seasons plus years of reruns over images of the cast frolicking in a water fountain. The lyrics also captured the angst of their lives: "So no one told you life was gonna be this way/Your job's a joke, you're broke/Your love life's D.O.A." In 2018 she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. But songwriting was far from her only passion. She was well known as a collector of kitsch, and her pink 1937 Los Angeles home housed her collection of candy colored ephemera, cataloged online at her Museum of Kitsch. Her passions also included making art (the walls of her home are lined with works by Bubbles the Artist, her alter ego), the internet (in the '90s she developed her own social network of sorts, called Willisville), and hosting wild parties that drew a fascinating cross section of Hollywood. Last year she told The Times that putting together parties was "my No. 1 skill." She explained: "I always had a music career, an art career, set designer, film and video, technology. The parties really became the only place I could combine everything." Allee Willis was born on Nov. 10, 1947, in Detroit, where she was raised. Her father, Nathan, was a scrapyard dealer; her mother, Rose, was a schoolteacher. Her mother died suddenly in 1964, when Allee was a teenager. In addition to Ms. Fenton, Ms. Willis's survivors include her brother, Kent, and her sister, Marlen Frost. Ms. Willis went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she majored in journalism and graduated in 1969. The upheaval of the 1960s transformed her, she told the university's alumni magazine this year. "I started off a sorority girl," she said, "and ended up marching and demonstrating." After college, she moved to New York City. Within a month of starting as a secretary at Columbia Records, she was promoted to the advertising department, where she worked with artists she idolized, among then Barbra Streisand, Laura Nyro and Janis Joplin. "Childstar," Ms. Willis's first and only album as an artist, was a disappointment. She realized she hated performing, and Columbia dropped her. For nearly four years, Ms. Willis checked hats at a comedy club and hung posters for a cabaret. At the beginning of 1978, she was living on food stamps. But then she met Mr. White of Earth, Wind Fire, and she helped him write the lyrics to "September." It reached No. 1 on the Billboard R B singles chart and No. 8 on the pop chart. By the end of the year it had sold 10 million records. In recent years, she shifted gears to performing one woman shows and curating her museum home, known as Willis Wonderland. She never lost her curiosity and ambition to do as much as possible. "I want to do more things that involve everything I do: the music, the art, the technology, the social aspect of things," she said last year. "Life is too short, and I am too tired!" Of all of her hits, Ms. Willis seemed most awed by the enduring power of "September." "I'm someone that absolutely loves writing very joyful music," she told the website Songfacts in 2008. When people learn she co wrote "September," she said, "they just go, 'Oh my God,' and then tell me in some form how happy that song makes them every time they hear it. For me, that's it." She added: "I literally have never been to a wedding, a bar mitzvah, anything, where I have not heard that song play. So I know it's carrying on and doing what it was meant to do."
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Yayoi Kusama's balloon, "Love Flies Up to the Sky," on a test flight before the Thanksgiving Day Parade. The project was a collaboration between the artist's studio, which conceived the work, and Macy's specialists, who built it. Amid the polka dots, mirrors and pumpkins of her artwork, Yayoi Kusama has lately been incorporating poetic messages, like the one featured in the exhibition that opens Saturday at David Zwirner, which includes the line, "With the challenge of creating new art, I work as if dying; these works are my everything." And there is undeniable poetry or perhaps poetic justice in what is happening to Ms. Kusama's career, given that she recently turned 90. As a young artist who moved from her native Matsumoto, Japan, to New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Kusama often struggled to be taken seriously by the art world. (In 1966 she sold her mirror balls for 2 each outside the Venice Biennale like a street peddler both a critique of art's commodification and a cry for attention.) But this year alone, in addition to the Zwirner exhibition which is expecting 100,000 visitors there have been no fewer than 18 versions of Kusama's "Infinity Mirror Room" worldwide, including currently at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (where timed tickets are sold out through November); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.; and the Broad in Los Angeles (where two are on view). Another one will open at the Aspen Art Museum Dec 20. The New York Botanical Garden recently announced a show in May 2020 that it is calling "the first ever large scale exploration of the artist's profound engagement with nature." And Macy's will feature its first Kusama balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade: a tentacled, polka dot face of a sun. The phenomenon is global: Next year, three European institutions will jointly present a Kusama retrospective, starting in Germany at the Gropius Bau in Berlin and then the Museum Ludwig in Cologne before traveling to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. "It's a great vindication, a great validation," said Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim Museum, who is a longtime expert on Kusama. "It's been a steady rise." Some attribute the Kusama craze to the Instagram generation, with young people lining up to take selfies in the artist's "Infinity" rooms of mirrors, colors and lights. Others say her compelling personal story as an Asian woman who first traveled alone to the United States and has openly battled her demons (she lives in a Tokyo psychiatric institution) is resonating amid today's heightened sensitivity to issues around identity politics, immigration and mental health. "It's easy to build affection around her narrative," said Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA Boston (who added that the artist's orange hair also helps). Whatever the reason for Kusama's popularity, she is reaching a whole new pool of wide eyed art fans, as well as art aficionados. And museums are hoping that her "Infinity" rooms will whet the public's appetite for more art in general. "Since we started showing Kusama, our audience has grown much more diverse and much younger," said Mr. Zwirner, who added that his exhibition will be open to school groups on Mondays, when the gallery is typically closed. "It's no longer an elite art world gathering, it's people interested in all kinds of culture." Macy's wants to introduce Kusama to a broader population by hoisting the first balloon by a female artist in its series of art balloons. "We're trying to bring something that might live in one community out to 50 million viewers," said Susan Tercero, the executive producer of the parade. "You're talking about millions of people from 2 to 92 who may not get to have access to this type of art." Ms. Kusama herself said she was pleased that her work was having an impact. "I make works with all my thoughts and the deep messages I've sent out on life and death, peace and love, hoping that my art will reach out to many people," she said in an email. She added, however, "I hope people will see my art with their own eyes, and not the images." Skeptics suggest that the art world is looking to cash in on Kusama, or at least to crassly draw hordes of visitors. The "Infinity" rooms often require paid tickets with timed entries. (Scalpers are hawking them for the ICA Boston.) People wait hours to get their glimpse (paying 15 for a minute's view in Kusama's glowing pumpkin room at the ICA Miami). The art market has reinforced the frenzy. The Saudi prince who paid 450 million for a Leonardo da Vinci painting two years ago recently purchased that pumpkin room, according to Bloomberg. And Ms. Kusama's 1959 canvas, Interminable Net 4, set a new high for the artist at Sotheby's Hong Kong last spring when it sold for 8 million. Some dismiss Ms. Kusama's renown as a creative construct. "It's largely her doing," said the outspoken critic and curator Robert Storr. "She has a huge, albeit profoundly damaged, ego. From the start, she mounted a campaign to conquer the art world and she has triumphed. It's a lifelong devotion to her own self mythologizing." But Mr. Zwirner, who began representing Ms. Kusama in 2013 (her other galleries are Victoria Miro in London and Ota Fine Arts in Tokyo), said that the artist's mass appeal does not negate her art historical heft. "With her early work, she planted a flag in Minimalism before we knew that term she made those fields of white," he said, referring to her early "Infinity Net" monochromatic paintings. "There is not a single major museum that doesn't own a Kusama or wouldn't want to own one." Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Tate Gallery, among others. More than 4,700 people contributed to a crowdfunding campaign by the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, to purchase Canada's first permanent "Infinity Mirror Room," which opened in May. And two years ago, Ms. Kusama opened her own museum in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. She has also become a powerful symbol of perseverance; despite the personal darkness she has staved off over the years (including at least one suicide attempt), and her advanced age, Ms. Kusama continues to make art almost every day: All 45 paintings in the Zwirner exhibition are new and, while her rooms are fabricated by craftspeople, she conceives every single detail. "Kusama's work makes people happy," Mr. Zwirner said. "People stand in line to have that experience."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Art & Design
MIAMI The 26 young men and women, seated in alphabetical order, were nearly silent as they waited for their high school graduation to start. No giggles. No buzz. No camaraderie. And no wonder: they had met just once before, at the rehearsal two weeks earlier where they got their caps and gowns. They had come on this muggy June evening to the Miami Zoo, past the flamingos and the tiger, for an hourlong ceremony that Grace Rodriguez, the organizer, proudly called "the very first South Florida home school graduation ever created." Ms. Rodriguez's "home school class of 2011" had no prom, no yearbook, no valedictorian. Still, for these students who had sidestepped a traditional education and especially for their parents there was "Pomp and Circumstance" and shiny turquoise tassels to shift from one side of a cap to the other. "I was getting all down when I didn't think he'd have a graduation," said Rebecca Doby, whose son, Hunter Fagan, was among the graduates. "I wanted to see him walk and have the cap and gown and the pictures." As home schooling has grown to reach about two million children or 3 percent of the school age population, up from 850,000 in 1999 it has become more mainstream. And just as more home school families now join co ops offering weekly field trips and chemistry labs or use the local public school for sports, band or a class, so too do many of them embrace all the trappings of graduation season. Jostens, an academic supplier, has a "home school graduation headquarters" where families can order customized caps and gowns, tassels and class rings. Several small Web based businesses also offer graduation gear like honor cords and stoles, even "Proud of Our 2011 Home School Graduate" yard signs. "It used to be the only way to celebrate a home school graduation was at home on your own," said Sonnie Woodruff, a Cincinnati home schooling mother who, a year ago, started offering the yard signs for 16.95. "But now, with so many more home school co ops and support groups, most people seem to do some kind of group graduation." Many large statewide home school groups with Christian roots now hold graduation at their annual conventions. Over Memorial Day weekend, the Florida Parent Educator Association's convention in Kissimmee offered a Saturday night dance, a Sunday ceremony where the governor spoke and a post graduation luncheon buffet for 259 graduates. The same weekend as the Miami ceremony, the Home Educators Association of Virginia graduated 206 in Richmond. "The parents line up so they are parallel with the graduates," said Yvonne Bunn of the Virginia association. "And then the parents come up on the left side of the stage and the kids on the right, and the parents give their child a diploma, and the graduate gives back a yellow rose." Deborah Butler of Silverton, Ore., has home schooled five children, the oldest now 31. "For our first child, we just did a little thing at the church," she said. "But for the fifth, coming up this month, we're doing the statewide graduation ceremony with cap and gown. There wasn't anything like that until the last few years." Ms. Rodriguez, 41, who has been home schooling for 15 years and runs a consulting business, Florida HomeSchoolHelp, saw a need for a local ceremony open to any home schooling family. So she lined up the zoo, had the Miami Dade public schools' home education registrar spread the word that families could participate for 75 a graduate, plus 9.99 a guest, and quickly signed up the 200 people the zoo could accommodate. With an "Amazon and Beyond" mural behind her, Ms. Rodriguez called up each graduate and read a description of the student's interests and college plans. Her son David handed each a Certificate of Completion, then posed for the crucial handshake photo. Her daughter, Taylor Marie, had made the programs, which were black with turquoise binding to match the tassels. There were brief speeches from Ms. Rodriguez ("From this day forward, every decision you make should be a decision to honor your parent.") and from Valery Neal, the zoo's group sales coordinator ("Trust in yourself. Work hard to earn your keep."). Nine of the graduates also said a few words, one reading an original poem and another a deep voiced version of "The Reading Mother" by Strickland Gillian. "What a voice!" said Ms. Rodriguez, whose easy warmth smoothed the ceremony's rough edges. When Linoshka Suarez broke down at the rostrum, Ms. Rodriguez gave a quick hug, asked if she wanted help and read out her thank yous. Many of the students shrugged off the graduation. But the parents freely confessed that, for them, it was huge. "My daughter, Vanessa, really didn't want to do it, because it was all strangers, and she didn't think it was a big deal," Brenda Orr said. "But I thought she was incorrect, so I convinced her. I imagined her walking across the stage just like I did at my graduation, and I didn't want her to feel she'd missed out on something." After all the caps had been tossed into the air, the graduates admitted that it had been meaningful. "I didn't expect it to be so nice," said Connie Giffuni, 18, who graduated along with her 16 year old sister, Cinndy. Their parents opposed the idea two years ago when the girls proposed home schooling, but now they are converts. "We see how beneficial it is," Soraya Giffuni said. "Once they started home schooling, the girls said they couldn't believe how much time they'd wasted in school." Some of the graduates had been home schooled for a year, others all their lives. Some had chosen the path for religious reasons, others to flee bullying, peer pressure or boring classes, and still others for the flexibility to pursue a golf or tennis career. While some studied almost exclusively with a parent, others took classes or an entire curriculum over the Internet. One family's graduation announcement captured the landscape. "With great pride, we announce the graduation of our daughter Jessica Jeanine Foster from the following places. A Beka Academy (academics), Barbara Goleman Senior High (arts), Dade Christian School (sports) and Miami Dade College (Japanese)." The other side had Jessica's artwork sandwiched between "Class of 2011" and "Boris Foster High School" (Boris Foster is her father). Jonathan Blackstone, a Miami graduate who was home schooled from the start, played on the Homestead High School baseball team for four years; a left handed pitcher, he was this year's most valuable player. "I was the only home schooler on the team, so there were a lot of jokes," he said. "Like 'Home School who's your mascot?' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Education
Contemporary fame is a function of mind share. Talent helps, but it's not necessarily a prerequisite. The ability to cause conversation, to stir pots, to cause tizzies is far more crucial. By that metric, there is no more effective performer than 6ix9ine. Trolls seek attention by any means, but 6ix9ine is more sophisticated than that he is somehow both popular insider and aggrieved outsider, agitator and victim. He is a rapper, but his real skill is seeking out loose threads and yanking on them until whole personas come undone. (Those of others, not his own that always stays intact.) 6ix9ine's relationship to social media is fluent and triumphant and almost hard to fathom it's a match of artist and medium on par with Tom Cruise in the 1980s, the Beatles in the 1960s, Babe Ruth in the 1920s. He's a chaos agent, spewing toxic missives from his phone to people who feel compelled to respond, almost none of whom can match his savvy or his LOL shrug nihilism. His music is good, sometimes very good, but his slippery way into other people's psyches promises to make him indelible. Such has been the case in the almost two weeks since he released a new single, "Gooba," and went live on his Instagram to announce his return following about a year and a half in federal prison. At one point, over two million people tuned in, the largest number ever for an Instagram livestream. It was a majestically funny, self aggrandizing performance, full of seething hostility and blithe boasts. 6ix9ine, also known as Tekashi69, danced to "Bad Boys," the theme from "Cops," while swinging a pair of handcuffs. (In April, a judge granted him compassionate release because of the coronavirus; he's completing his sentence under home confinement.) He emulated his enemies' weeping over his success. He taunted rappers who claimed to have a firmer grip on New York than he does: "If you don't got this watch right here, you a little boy to me. I'll kiss you on your forehead." (The watch, he said, cost 1 million.) Most crucially and controversially, he defended his decision to testify against his former associates, the gang members in the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods who rode along with him early in his career and helped him establish credibility before turning on him and subjecting him to various travails, financial, emotional and violent. Dominos began falling almost immediately, especially from hip hop's older generation, for whom 6ix9ine's success can still seem curious, or even dangerous. Meek Mill unleashed two strings of tweets critical of 6ix9ine's defiance of the code of silence: "I gotta crush you for the culture you chump!" 6ix9ine responded in a comment: "Imagine having a new born baby come into the world be pressed about a Mexican with rainbow hair." (Meek did not fare well in a prior attempt to take down a meme fluent rising rapper Drake with a complaint rooted in the ethics of an earlier time.) Snoop Dogg chimed in, and 6ix9ine accused him of having snitched on Suge Knight, posting a video of himself watching an interview with Knight where he makes the same allegation. Snoop took the bait, replying with a rant: "Better leave the Dogg alone. Go find you a cat." But there is vanity at stake here too, as was clear when 6ix9ine took on his next antagonist, Billboard, accusing the trade publication of chicanery in tabulating its charts. "Gooba" debuted at No. 3 on the Hot 100 this week, and 6ix9ine wanted answers, or at least to suggest that there were worthwhile questions that needed to be asked. He posted two videos in which he suggested that Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber's "Stuck With U" had catapulted to No. 1 through a combination of illicit sales numbers and Billboard's dismissing millions of YouTube plays of "Gooba." Again, it worked Bieber replied to defend the integrity of the song's sales. Then Grande responded with her now familiar brand of elegant shade, expressing extreme gratitude for her success and addressing 6ix9ine, not by name but by chart position. "i ask u to take a moment to humble yourself. be grateful you're even here. that people want to listen to u at all. it's a blessed position to be in," she wrote on Instagram. "congratulations to all my talented ass peers in the top ten this week. even number 3." More bait, more to nibble on. 6ix9ine reacted in a video where he emphasized the challenged circumstances in which he grew up in "My mom used to collect cans, right, on the street. I used to bus tables, be a dishwasher" before cutting to video of Grande when she was a Nickelodeon child star. It felt like a "Daily Show" bit. Finally, he came for Billboard itself. "You can buy No. 1s on Billboard. I want that to register in your head," he griped, even name dropping Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard's senior vice president of charts and data development. Billboard replied with an unusually detailed statement delineating how it had arrived at its chart data. 6ix9ine posted a photo of himself on Instagram holding a fistful of credit cards, promising to buy enough copies of his song next time to reach No. 1. All of these have become uproarious story lines that 6ix9ine can extend ad nauseam. Attempted chart manipulation, overt and subtle alike, does happen, and is a persistent thorn in Billboard's side. But misinformation can travel fast and wide online, and friction is far stickier than courtesy. It's asymmetric warfare the button pusher with oodles of free time and an understanding that the louder he rattles, the more people he'll reach, will thrive even if his specific complaints lack merit. The internet rewards persistence more than fact. This is a moment in which the famous have largely essayed to spread joy and calm (even if their methods are sometimes constitutionally flawed). There is maybe no better time to sow chaos. Defenses are down. People are leaning into sincerity. Those who are eager to please, to be seen as beacons of integrity and hope, are ripe for unmooring. 6ix9ine's ability to do so while still presenting as the victim is his most efficient sleight of hand. To his supporters, he's a disrupter, and moreover, proof that disruption is a justifiable mode. To his antagonists, many of whom didn't realize that's what they were until he targeted them, he is a nuisance, but a provocative one who's just informed enough that he can't be ignored. Certainly, no one has ignored him, and that's where he draws his power from. "IM BACK AND THEY MAD," reads his Instagram bio. Mission accomplished.
0
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Music
Apple, facing growing antitrust scrutiny over what it charges other companies for access to its App Store, said on Wednesday that it would cut in half the fee it took from the smallest app developers. Developers that brought in 1 million or less from their apps in the previous year will pay a 15 percent commission on those app sales starting next year, down from 30 percent, the company said. The move, which will have little impact on Apple's bottom line, is an abrupt change from the company's public intransigence over its fees. For 12 years, the App Store has helped fuel Apple's remarkable growth, and the company has appeared reluctant to do anything to tamper with it. Even when its fee policy emerged as the focus of antitrust complaints, Apple aggressively defended it. Now Apple appears to have found a way to earn good will from thousands of developers and give its executives ammunition for defending its commission to regulators and journalists, all without costing the company much. The change will affect roughly 98 percent of the companies that pay Apple a commission, according to estimates from Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. But those developers accounted for less than 5 percent of App Store revenues last year, Sensor Tower said. Apple said the new rate would affect the "vast majority" of its developers, but declined to offer specific numbers. Apple said in a statement that it had made the change because 2020 was a difficult year for many small companies. "We're launching this program to help small business owners write the next chapter of creativity and prosperity on the App Store, and to build the kind of quality apps our customers love," Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in a news release. The smaller commission will help "developers fund their small businesses, take risks on new ideas, expand their teams, and continue to make apps that enrich people's lives," he said. The fee cut probably won't calm the waters between Apple and the larger app developers that have long protested the fee most loudly, and could just be a sop to state and federal regulators. Epic Games, maker of the popular game Fortnite, sued Apple in August over its fee. A month later, 13 companies and groups, including Spotify and Match Group, formed the nonprofit Coalition for App Fairness to fight the "app tax." And American and European regulators are investigating Apple for anticompetitive behavior, partly because of its commission. "The only good thing about this cynical, Machiavellian ploy by Apple to split developers with selective handouts is that it shows they're sweating," said David Heinemeier Hansson, a prominent software developer whose company, Basecamp, will still have to pay the 30 percent commission. Tim Sweeney, Epic's chief executive and another of Apple's toughest critics, also accused Apple of trying to divide developers. By charging smaller companies less, "Apple is hoping to remove enough critics that they can get away with their blockade on competition and 30 percent tax on most in app purchases," he said in a statement. "But consumers will still pay inflated prices marked up by the Apple tax." In its news release, Apple included comment from several smaller companies that welcomed its change and that said it would help them reinvest in their businesses or offer more free features to users. Apple introduced its 30 percent commission in 2008 with its App Store, which had just 500 offerings. Now the App Store is one of the world's largest centers of commerce, facilitating half a trillion dollars in sales in 2019. That has made the commission the biggest driver of Apple's internet services business, which brought in more than 53 billion over the past year. Apple charges 30 percent of all sales of "digital goods and services" in an app, such as a virtual item in a game or a subscription to a music, TV, news or dating app. (In the second year of a subscription, Apple's cut drops to 15 percent.) Apple doesn't take a cut of physical goods or services, such as an Uber ride or shoes bought in the Amazon app. With the world's migration online, particularly during the pandemic, the App Store has become an increasingly crucial gateway to customers for companies of all sizes. Apple's growing power has prompted both lawmakers and developers to call its 30 percent cut "highway robbery."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Technology
How to watch: 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Tennis Channel; streaming on the Tennis Channel app. Novak Djokovic, the No. 1 men's singles player, is cast as an unlikely underdog at the French Open. With both Rafael Nadal and Dominic Thiem, the 2020 United States Open winner, having featured in the last two French Open finals, the weight of expectations is not entirely on his shoulders. But neither Nadal nor Thiem is in Djokovic's half of the draw, and on Thursday, against 66th ranked Ricardas Berankis, he will continue on his relatively easy path toward a potential appearance in the final. Around the grounds, there are plenty of tougher matchups to watch out for. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Tsitsipas, the fifth seed, has had a packed clay court season. On Sunday, he lost in the final of the Hamburg European Open and then needed to report to the French Open early on Monday to be tested for the coronavirus before his first round match on Tuesday. Against Jaume Munar, Tsitsipas struggled to get into a groove early, losing the first two sets before coming back and winning the next three. Cuevas, a French Open doubles champion in 2008, has never been past the third round of the singles draw even though, as a clay court specialist, he has been ranked as high as 19th in the world. All six of his ATP titles have come on clay courts, but the latest was at the Brasil Open in 2017, and there's uncertainty around whether he can continue grinding away through long matches on the punishingly slow courts of Roland Garros. Tsitsipas, of Greece, and Cuevas, of Uruguay, have met on three occasions, and Tsitsipas has yet to lose a set. But in their matchup last week in Hamburg, Cuevas was clearly not far off the mark, losing, 7 5, 6 4. If Cuevas can use his clay expertise to move Tsitsipas around the court well, Tsitsipas's packed schedule may come back to haunt him. Pliskova, the second seed, retired from the final of the Italian Open after struggling with pain in a leg and her lower back. In her first round match against Mayar Sherif, there were clearly some nerves at the outset as she failed to convert eight set points before losing the first set in a tiebreaker. However, she quickly reset between sets and overpowered her opponent quite easily. A former world No. 1, Pliskova has yet to win a Grand Slam tournament, and in Ostapenko, she will face a clay court expert with enough experience not to be intimidated by Plilskova's flat, powerful baseline shots. Ostapenko, the 2017 French Open champion, has had mixed results leading up to this year's tournament. She lost in the first round of the Italian Open but then looked dominant in her first round victory at Roland Garros over Madison Brengle, dropping only three games. In 2018 and 2019, Ostapenko lost in the first round of the French Open. Having passed that stage this time, she will now have a very tough challenge. Ostapenko plays a high risk game that can create a lot of errors in exchange for short points punctuated with winners. That is likely to play to the benefit of Pliskova, for whom short baseline rallies are familiar and favored. Expect an electrifying match full of big hitting. Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, struggled in her first round match at Roland Garros against Ludmilla Samsonova. Especially during the second set, her groundstrokes seemed to fall shorter on the court than she had intended, and her usually impeccable drop shots seemed to hang in the air just a foot higher, giving her opponent the opportunity to chase them down. After a disappointing exit in the round of 16 at the U.S. Open, Kenin lost to Viktoria Azarenka, 6 0, 6 0, in the first round of the Italian Open, a shock to any player's confidence. Kenin will be hoping to build confidence as the tournament continues and to make it to the quarterfinals of Roland Garros for the first time. Bogdan, ranked 93rd, pulled out of the second round of the Prague Open in August because of an injury. In her first round victory over Timea Babos at Roland Garros, she seemed untroubled, accelerating well through her shots and finishing many points with powerful topspin forehands. Kenin is a much more difficult opponent to bully off the court, but if Bogdan can exploit Kenin's hesitations, there is a chance for an upset here. Berrettini, the seventh seed, sailed past Vasek Pospisil in the first round, losing only seven games in just under two hours. Having lost in the second round at last year's French Open, Berrettini will be trying to secure some additional points for his ranking in a relatively easy section of the draw. Two of Berrettini's three ATP titles have come on clay, with his compact topspin forehands allowing him to move players around the backcourt without expending much energy. In 2019, he shone most notably at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, but his game is not limited to the faster surfaces, and he should be favored through to the quarterfinals of Roland Garros. Harris, 23, has had a breakout year, reaching his first ATP final at the Adelaide International in Australia in January. His successes on the lower levels of the professional circuit have been only on hardcourts, and he withdrew from the semifinal of a challenger event preparing for the French Open. Harris's refuge will need to be his consistent returning of serves. If he can neutralize Berrettini's flat corner serves and body kicks, he may have a chance of disrupting the Italian's rhythm to secure an upset.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Sports
Humans ruined everything. They bred too much and choked the life out of the land, air and sea. And so they must be vaporized by half, or attacked by towering monsters, or vanquished by irate dwellers from the oceans' polluted depths. Barring that, they face hardscrabble, desperate lives on a once verdant Earth now consumed by ice or drought. That is how many recent superhero and sci fi movies among them the latest Avengers and Godzilla pictures as well as "Aquaman," "Snowpiercer," "Blade Runner 2049," "Interstellar" and "Mad Max: Fury Road" have invoked the climate crisis. They imagine postapocalyptic futures or dystopias where ecological collapse is inevitable, environmentalists are criminals, and eco mindedness is the driving force of villains. But these takes are defeatist, critics say, and a growing chorus of voices is urging the entertainment industry to tell more stories that show humans adapting and reforming to ward off the worst climate threats. "More than ever, they're missing the mark, often in the same way ," said Michael Svoboda, a writing professor at George Washington University and author at the multimedia site Yale Climate Connections. "Almost none of these films depict a successful transformation of society." In "Avengers: Infinity War," the archnemesis, Thanos, opts to head off environmental collapse by reducing humanity along with all living beings by half. In "Godzilla: King of the Monsters," eco terrorists unleash predatory beasts to forestall mass extinction and keep the human population in check. In "Aquaman," King Orm, the leader of an undersea kingdom, concludes that the only way to prevent earthly destruction is to wage war on humans. David Leslie Johnson McGoldrick, one of the writers of "Aquaman," said using pollution as a motivator made Orm more relatable and less "mustache twirly," and added, "It gave him some nuance." But Svoboda sees Orm as part of a trend that moves the climate crisis into emotionally familiar and comfortable territory. The villain is defeated and the audience feels relief, he said, not least because they have been let off the hook: People may be doing real harm, but the alternatives are worse. The trend of linking environmentalism to eco terrorism is not confined to superhero and genre flicks, Svoboda said. In the 2017 indie "First Reformed," Ethan Hawke plays a radicalized pastor who plots to blow himself up at a church service attended by a polluting industrialist. In a contrarian piece for The Washington Post, the film journalist Sonny Bunch said as much himself, opining that environmentalists made for ideal bad guys because they want to make our lives worse by banning straws, large families, plane travel and red meat. More sober takes on the subject, at least on the silver screen, have largely been confined to documentaries, which, with the exception of the 2006 Al Gore hit, "An Inconvenient Truth," audiences and buyers mostly shunned. (On the small screen, docuseries and other shows often address the issue, but rarely break through in this age of peak TV.) O ne big studio feature that tackled climate change, "The Day After Tomorrow," in which subzero superstorms envelop half the globe, was released 15 years ago. More recent efforts have foundered, like Alexander Payne's "Downsizing" (2017), which imagined humans shrinking to the size of chipmunks to reduce their carbon footprint while still living large. Svoboda pointed to "Young Ones," a 2014 film starring Michael Shannon as a father eking out an existence in a drought ravaged world, as the rare film that showed humans adapting to global warming, but it barely made a blip. The actor and director Fisher Stevens, who has made several documentaries about environmental issues, including two with Leonardo DiCaprio, said he found it deeply frustrating that Hollywood had not taken Big Oil to task onscreen in a significant way. "We need a pop culture 'Forrest Gump' movie now to wake people up," Stevens said, "because the fossil fuel industry is doing everything to stop us in America from believing that fossil fuels are causing climate change." (DiCaprio, a committed environmentalist who has a foundation that tackles climate change, did not respond to a request for comment). So why aren't there more realistic, or semi realistic, or, dare it be suggested, hopeful films about climate change? Because, several directors said, it is hard to find financing for movies that risk being real downers and challenge audiences to change their ways. Because mass extinction is soul crushing and people seek out entertainment to escape. Because, said Roland Emmerich, the writer and director of "The Day After Tomorrow," it is not easy to find a story that franchise addicted studios will release. "We don't do a good job," he said, "And I'm constantly trying to figure out what could be another way to show it." "Is any of this enough? No way," McKay wrote in an email. "It seems like there's no such things as 'enough' with global warming." On both sides of the Atlantic, there are efforts to change that and to infuse narratives with hope. Along with detailing how projects can reduce their carbon footprint during production, the Producers Guild of America, and, more emphatically, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, are showing content creators how to incorporate green themes into their films and shows. On the Producers Guild's Green Production Guide site, a report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that promotes sustainability, lays out ways renewables can be portrayed onscreen. Some suggested plotlines come with a wink, ranging from showing characters who go off the grid to philanderers who fall for their solar panel installers. The point, said Jacob Corvidae, one of the report's authors, is to relay how robust the clean energy sector is, and also to sow hope. "We do need depictions that things could be O.K. because people worked at it," he said. This spring, BAFTA released a study showing how many times ecological terms appeared on British television in one year (the report did not include film). "Climate change," for example, appeared more than "zombie" but trailed "gravy," and was utterly trounced by "queen" and "tea." The academy also started an initiative, Planet Placement, exhorting film and television content creators to help "make positive environmental behaviors mainstream." With screen industries' massive reach, they said, "it's a chance to shape society's response to climate change." "The past 25 years of the environmental narrative is about sacrifice and doom and not doing what you want and not getting what you want," said Aaron Matthews, head of industry sustainability at BAFTA. "We don't think that's the right tone to get people over the line."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Movies
Way back on Friday, President Trump declared that several news organizations ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The New York Times were "the enemy of the American people." You know who's not the enemy, in his book? Mr. Jones, in case you aren't aware, is the conspiracy theorizing, flame throwing nationalistic radio and internet star who's best known for suggesting that Sept. 11 was an inside job, that the Sandy Hook school shooting was "completely fake" and that the phony Clinton child sex trafficking scandal known as Pizzagate warranted serious investigation (which one Facebook fan took upon himself to do, armed with an AR 15). Mr. Jones, 43, has been around for a while. Like every media outfit in the Trump era, his platforms have gotten record traffic and, he told me last week, seen increases in revenue, with ads for water purification systems and for supplements to enhance "brain force" and virility. But he is apparently taking on a new role as occasional information source and validator for the president of the United States, with whom, Mr. Jones says, he sometimes speaks on the phone. Millions of listeners and viewers tune in to Mr. Jones on his websites (Infowars chief among them), on Facebook and through old fashioned radio, and their loyalty partly explains how Mr. Trump maintains a hard core faithful who don't believe a word they read about him in a newspaper like this one. His audience, Mr. Jones told me, is "the teeth of the Trump organization on the ground the information warfare, organic internal resistance." Sure enough, on Saturday the journalist McKay Coppins of The Atlantic tweeted from Florida, "Spotted at Trump rally: More than one InfoWars t shirt." Mr. Jones said that conversation had taken place earlier in the campaign, not on the phone call immediately after the election that my colleague Maggie Haberman reported on, in which Mr. Jones said the president had thanked him for his support. Mr. Jones told me that he had spoken with Mr. Trump since that call, though an aide to the president, communicating on the condition of anonymity, played down the frequency of their contact. Either way, Mr. Jones is hoping his organization will qualify for a coveted White House press credential. He says it's not something he's pining for or needs, but he doesn't see why Infowars shouldn't get one when "Trump's calling CNN fake." The White House said it had yet to receive a proper application from Infowars and therefore could not comment on whether it would get one. Mr. Jones said the delay might be related to a bureaucratic snag. "They say it's going to get rectified," he said. One ally in his corner is Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative and informal adviser to Mr. Trump, whose matchmaking brought them together and led to the 2015 Infowars interview during which Mr. Trump told Mr. Jones that "you have an amazing reputation." Mr. Stone said in an interview, "They are reaching millions of people, and these people are steadfast and loyal Trump supporters." Two of the major internet tracking companies, Quantcast and Alexa, reported that in January Infowars had an average of around eight million (Quantcast) or 8.7 million (Alexa) global visitors, who viewed its pages nearly 50 million times. As of Sunday Quantcast ranked its traffic above that of the fact checking site Politifact.com. Those numbers miss the audiences for his national radio show and his team's videos on YouTube, where the biggest of his 18 channels has 1.2 billion views, and on Facebook, where they draw many millions of views. (One, by his editor at large, Paul Joseph Watson, lists 18.1 million views.) Mr. Jones's growth has astounded those who have followed a progression that began on cable access in Austin, Tex., in the early 1990s, moved to radio and then to the bigger national footprint he began building online. "When I was first dealing with Alex, he had a staff of three people and was broadcasting his apocalyptic messages from" a spare bedroom "with choo choo wallpaper," said the author Jon Ronson, who wrote about Mr. Jones in his 2002 book, "Them," and revisited him in "The Elephant in the Room" last year. "In the summer, he had a staff of between 50 and 75 people in this huge industrial space as big as a mainstream TV network." Mr. Jones says it's hardly CNN size (and, for the record, he says, he believes Sandy Hook may have happened). Last week, Mr. Jones's conspiracy workshop was busy making the case that the leaks that forced Michael T. Flynn's resignation as Mr. Trump's national security adviser were part of a "counter coup" by what he has called "criminal, corporate elements inside the C.I.A." working "to basically overthrow Trump." It's the sort of message that resonates with his segment of Trump voters because, Mr. Jones said, "the public doesn't have any trust in the system." "They believe the social contract is broken," he continued, "and they're able to interact with the new diverse pantheon of the internet based media." In other words, with people like him. It makes you wonder: If Watergate had broken in this media environment, would President Richard Nixon have had to resign? Would enough people have believed it? I put the question to Bob Woodward, who broke that scandal for The Washington Post with Carl Bernstein. He said it would have turned out the same. "The evidence was so strong, because of the tapes these things turn on the facts," he said. "It would be: Can you get information and sources and testimony from witnesses and documents that show what happened." Given that no alternative reality was strong enough to save Mr. Flynn's job, for instance, I'd have to agree. That said, if you live in Mr. Jones's world, Mr. Flynn's ouster would seem to be the height of injustice, delivered by the news media on behalf of those "criminal, corporate elements inside the C.I.A." So, yes, you would see the press as the enemy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
Media