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The Trump administration formally declared its opposition to the entire Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, arguing in a federal appeals court filing that the signature Obama era legislation was unconstitutional and should be struck down. Such a decision could end health insurance for some 21 million Americans and affect many millions more who benefit from the law's protections for people with pre existing medical conditions and required coverage for pregnancy, prescription drugs and mental health. In filing the brief, the administration abandoned an earlier position that some portions of the law, including the provision allowing states to expand their Medicaid programs, should stand. The switch, which the administration disclosed in late March, has confounded many people in Washington, even within the Republican Party, who came to realize that health insurance and a commitment to protecting the A.C.A. were among the main issues that propelled Democrats to a majority in the House of Representatives last fall. The filing was made in a case challenging the law brought by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, and 17 other Republican led states. In December, a federal judge from the Northern District of Texas, Reed O'Connor, ruled that the law was unconstitutional. A group of 21 Democratic led states, headed by California, immediately appealed, and the case is now before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The House of Representatives has joined the case as well to defend the law. Democrats wasted no time responding to the filing Wednesday. Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, a Democrat, said: "The Trump administration chose to abandon ship in defending our national health care law and the hundreds of millions of Americans who depend on it for their medical care. Our legal coalition will vigorously defend the law and the Americans President Trump has abandoned." The government's brief did not shed light on why it had altered its earlier position, referring only to "further consideration and review of the district court's opinion." Oral arguments in the appeals court are expected in July, with a possible decision by the end of the year, as the 2020 presidential campaign gets going in earnest. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court. The Justice Department's request to expedite oral arguments, granted last month, suggests that the administration is eager for a final ruling. In its application, it said that "prompt resolution of this case will help reduce uncertainty in the health care sector, and other areas affected by the Affordable Care Act." Democrats, seizing on the health law's popularity and its decisive role in their winning the House last fall, are already using the case as a cudgel against President Trump as his re election campaign gets started. The law's guarantee of coverage for people with pre existing medical conditions, in particular, remains very popular with voters in both parties as well as independents. But Mr. Trump has appeared undaunted, tweeting in April that "Republicans will always support Pre Existing Conditions" and that a replacement plan "will be on full display during the Election as a much better less expensive alternative to Obamacare." Instead of providing specifics, though, Mr. Trump, members of his administration and other Republicans have focused on attacking the Medicare for All plans that some Democratic presidential candidates have sponsored or endorsed as a dangerous far left idea that would, as Mr. Trump tweeted, cause millions of Americans "to lose their beloved private health insurance." As the administration and Texas noted in their briefs, Judge O'Connor's ruling turned on the law's requirement that most people have health coverage or be subject to a tax penalty. But in the 2017 tax legislation, Congress reduced that penalty to zero, effectively eliminating it. Judge O'Connor, the plaintiff states, and now the Trump administration reasoned that, like a house of cards, when the tax penalty fell, the so called individual mandate became unconstitutional and unenforceable. Therefore, the entire law had to fall as well. Mr. Paxton, the Texas attorney general, whose office also filed a brief on Wednesday, said: "Congress meant for the individual mandate to be the centerpiece of Obamacare. Without the constitutional justification for the centerpiece, the law must go down." Whether that position will survive judicial scrutiny is another question. Nicholas Bagley, who teaches health law at the University of Michigan Law School, noted that only two lawyers signed the brief. That is highly unusual in a case with such a high profile, he said. "This is a testament to the outrageousness of the Justice Department position, that no reasonable argument could be made in the statute's defense," Mr. Bagley said. "It is a truly indefensible position. This is just partisan hardball." Many legal scholars have also said that even before appellate judges wade into the more obscure pools of legal reasoning, they could reach a decision by addressing the question of congressional intent. If Congress had meant the erasure of the tax penalty to wipe out the entire act, such an argument goes, it would have said so. If the Fifth Circuit overturns the O'Connor decision, there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court would take an appeal. The court has ruled on two earlier A.C.A. challenges, finding in favor of the act, although narrowing it. Of course, the composition of the Supreme Court has since changed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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In winter 2007, John V. Siebel, an oncologist with a busy office in San Mateo, Calif., was feeling restless. While Dr. Siebel, then 64, found satisfaction in helping cancer patients, he felt burdened by the endless administrative tasks that are a part of a modern medical practice. "It felt like it was time to retire," Dr. Siebel, now 74, recalls. "I wanted to do other things." But what? After announcing his retirement, the physician began sketching out a new life. Always athletic, he loved the outdoors, particularly in Alaska, where the land and culture fascinated him. One thing was certain: He wanted to keep on seeing patients, though part time. Dr. Siebel's answer was to become a kind of oncological "temp," covering for vacationing doctors with practices in interesting places including Alaska. In many respects, Dr. Siebel represents a new type of retiree, the professional who, late in life, deploys his or her training in some new way. In doing so, this person is blurring the lines between work and leisure, and redefining traditional ideas about the nature of retirement. For up to three months of every year the limitation is Dr. Siebel's choice a medical employment agency books him for short stints in remote parts of Alaska, California or Idaho. He will only accept assignments near wilderness areas. Weekdays, he sees patients. On weekends, he heads to the mountains and explores. "I work for doctors on vacation or maternity leave," Dr. Siebel said. "It's easy for people with my particular training to get these jobs. What oncologists do is more or less universal, so you can easily integrate into an ongoing practice." What's different now is how Dr. Siebel practices. "I have more time to find out about the patients' lives, which helps me clinically," he said. "I don't have to worry about 'the office,' which can be consuming. Now all I do is sit there and be with the patients, which is one of the beauties of the new situation." This type of work flexibility isn't possible for everyone. "You need in demand skills, good health and some financial security," Dr. Siebel said. Despite the caveats, a small but significant cohort of older Americans is experimenting with variations of a self designed retirement. According to a 2015 census study, 8 percent of Americans over 65 are full time workers. Another 12 percent work part time. Some do it because of financial need. Others find themselves liberated by their new pension checks, which they use to underwrite a redesigned work life. Joel Dreyfuss, a 71 year old Haitian American journalist and editor, had long sought to write a book about his family's 300 year involvement with Haiti's history. Mr. Dreyfuss (who is not a known relation to this writer) was born in Port au Prince, Haiti. Though the family is prominent there, he was aware of only fragments of his back story. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "I knew that my Jewish grandfather, Emmanuel Dreyfuss, was born in France and immigrated to Haiti in 1893," Mr. Dreyfuss said. "My grandfather was taciturn. He didn't tell the kids much about the past." An epiphany came in September 2011, while Mr. Dreyfuss was serving as managing editor of The Root, an online news site that covers black culture, and his 66th birthday rolled round. Suddenly, he realized, "the clock was ticking, and that there were things I still wanted to do like the book." In that moment, he decided to gather up his savings and retire. By February 2012, Mr. Dreyfuss and his wife, Veronica Pollard, had moved to Paris, where many key documents of Haitian history are stored. (The flat they purchased, in the Parc Monceau district, was in the very building where the author Graham Greene had once lived.) The last few years have proved a mix of pleasant strolls, fine dining and historical research. "What I do now is a lot like journalism," Mr. Dreyfuss said. "You're tracking down records, cross referencing them, figuring out the story behind the numbers." On the whole, he said, his time has been productive. "I've learned of a colonial ancestor who I've traced back to the early 1700s," Mr. Dreyfuss said. "His grandson was the only white signer of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804. I have one or more African ancestors. With one, I found a document from the 1770s saying he was born in Benin and sold into slavery in Haiti." Last winter, Mr. Dreyfuss finished a first draft of the still untitled work. In it, he shows how his family's multicultural story is linked to the larger story of the New World; he expects to send a final version to his literary agent by New Year's Day. "I couldn't have done it," Mr. Dreyfuss said, "if I hadn't retired, or rather, semiretired." Similarly, Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of Columbia University Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, isn't quite sure he can be defined as retired. Mr. Gerrard admits that taking early retirement was "an unusual move. A lot of people thought I was crazy. But, I'd done very well financially. The kids were out of college. Columbia's pay is fine, and I get to do some very interesting things. Last year, I went to a meeting with the pope!" And there's a bonus: "I don't have to fill out a time sheet every day, which I had done for 30 years."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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The easiest way to find Cathy Weis's loft, on Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets, is to use retail as your compass: Locate the signs for Guess and Lucky Brand Jeans. Tucked between those stores on the same block as Lacoste, Hugo Boss, Uniqlo, Club Monaco and Sephora is the much less conspicuous door to 537 Broadway. Since 2005, Ms. Weis, a choreographer and video artist, has lived and worked in that 148 year old building, a former garment factory that became an artists' cooperative in the 1970s. Walking up the creaky stairs and into her expansive studio, where she began rehearsing in the '90s, can feel like slipping back in time to a less densely commercial period of SoHo's evolution, closer to the one Ms. Weis encountered when she moved to New York in 1983. "There's history in the walls," she said recently at the loft, looking glamorous for a Monday morning with glitter dusted eyebrows (from an appearance with Circus Amok! the night before). "It's like they're giving you ideas from the past." Ms. Weis was discussing the coming season of her free weekly salon, Sundays on Broadway, which resumes Sunday, Oct. 2. The series, in its third year, is a grab bag of performances, film screenings, discussions and other events that reflect her desire to let artists (herself included) "try things out" in a low stakes setting. New York has other such opportunities for dance makers like Movement Research at Judson Church and gatherings hosted by the groups Aunts and Catch but none that combine intimacy and formality, and being attuned to the present and the past, quite like Sundays on Broadway. Ms. Weis's programming has featured everything from a Skype chat with the postmodern dance pioneer Steve Paxton to works in progress from a younger generation of innovators, like Jon Kinzel, Jodi Melnick and Yasuko Yokoshi. The place was packed not an empty chair, rug or throw pillow in the house for a conversation last fall between the modern dance luminaries Sara Rudner and Carolyn Brown. This season brings a lecture by the ever rebellious Yvonne Rainer; a presentation about Robert Rauschenberg performances by the filmmaker Julie Martin; and a duet by the look alike dancers Vicky Shick and Eva Karczag. Then there's Ms. Weis's work, which the choreographer Lisa Nelson, one of her longtime collaborators, aptly describes as both sober and carnivalesque. Ms. Weis learned she had multiple sclerosis in 1989, and since then she has been exploring relationships between technology and the body, how each can extend the other. She includes some of her own investigations in each season's lineup. "This very wide stretch of current work next to more historical works," Ms. Nelson said in a phone interview, "it's a very special meal she can prepare." Ms. Weis has developed a loyal audience of old friends and new faces, mostly artists and writers, large enough to make her 1,500 square foot studio, known as WeisAcres, feel full on a regular basis. A welcoming but not effusive host, she introduces most evenings with a short history of 537 Broadway, which stands on the site of P. T. Barnum's second American Museum. The current building went up after the museum burned down in 1868. In the late 1960s and early '70s, George Maciunas, the founder of the neo Dada artists' collective Fluxus, converted 16 of the neighborhood's neglected industrial buildings into artist co ops, or Fluxhouses. Among these were 537 Broadway and the adjacent 541, both of which had unusually wide dimensions and no pillars: ideal for dancing. Thus emerged an enclave of choreographers' lofts, occupied by experimentalists like Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn and David Gordon (at 541) and Frances Alenikoff, Elaine Summers and Simone Forti (at 537). It was Ms. Forti's loft that Ms. Weis bought in 2005. Many of those artists were part of Judson Dance Theater, the 1960s collective that imbued dance with a radically democratic ethos, breaking with the modern dance establishment. By their rules, or lack thereof, any space could be a stage and any movement could be dance, like the game of gestural telephone staged by Ms. Brown in "Roof Piece" (1971), which unfurled across a smattering of SoHo rooftops. "The history of this building is the history of the city and the history of the country," Ms. Weis said. "It's good to know what your bones are made of." Dance carries on at 537 541 Broadway beyond WeisAcres, at the studio Eden's Expressway and at Mr. Dunn's loft, where he hosts his own more intermittent salons. Mr. Dunn said he appreciated Ms. Weis's spirited, multigenerational audience and the casual tone she cultivates, which is similar to the atmosphere at his place. "It's like the old days more," he said, "where people just sat in the loft and watched what was there, and there's no attempt to make things fancy or theatrical." Yet he's wary of romanticizing that era. "It's not a nostalgia trip that she and I are involved in," he added. "These are our present lives, and we want to be as vital, even though we're tired, as we were when we were younger." Lately the building itself has become a character in Ms. Weis's multimedia installations. In "Time Travel With Madame Xenogamy" last spring, she led visitors through the rooms of her home, projecting footage from her vast video archive of New York's 1980s downtown dance scene. Inside a white tent, audience members could peer into a crystal ball and learn about the future by way of dance's past.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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But "Warrior" has competing agendas that keep distracting you from the action. One is completely understandable: the framework of racism and racial oppression, which is omnipresent from the opening scene when Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) gets off the boat in San Francisco and beats up three dockyard "bulls" who are pushing around the arriving Chinese. What's justified or necessary from a historical standpoint, though, can get monotonous in dramatic terms when it's presented in ham handed and obvious ways. ("Strange, the way you talk. If I closed my eyes, you could be anyone.") And there's a cognitive dissonance between the show's racial consciousness and some of its more Cinemax friendly attributes, like the constant nudity of Asian actresses. (Conveniently, one of the primary settings is a brothel.) Two female characters, Ah Toy (Olivia Cheng) and Mai Ling (Dianne Doan), have been empowered in ways far beyond anything the handful of Chinese women in 19th century San Francisco would have experienced. And yet every speaking role for a Chinese woman is a prostitute, a madam or a concubine, and even the lead actresses dutifully shed their clothes, as if paying a Cinemax tax. And the Cinemaxness of it all shouldn't be a surprise, since "Warrior" a project pushed by Lee's daughter, Shannon, and the director Justin Lin is primarily the work of the writer and producer Jonathan Tropper, whose previous series, the small town noir "Banshee," ran on the channel for four seasons. "Warrior" shares some of the propulsiveness and energy of that show but lacks its conviction and its sense of place, in part because of the artificiality of the antique San Francisco recreated on elaborate South African sets. You can see the broad, pulp fiction outlines of the story Tropper has set up. Ah Sahm and Mai Ling, star crossed brother and sister on opposite sides of the Tong war, will have an eventual reckoning, and Ah Sahm and Leary (Dean Jagger), the monstrous Irish labor agitator, will eventually square off. But the show is weighed down with subplots among its white characters in the police force and city hall one senator is trotted onscreen once in a while to make an ominous reference to the Chinese exclusion act he's sponsoring and characters we care about, like Cheng's formidable brothel owner Ah Toy, aren't given enough to do. Koji, an actor of Japanese and British descent who hasn't been seen much in America, is effective in the fight scenes, and there's a sense of humor in his reactions and inflections that grows on you as the season goes along. He's a little short on Lee like charisma, though, and that stands out, because one thing "Warrior" has no lack of is charismatic Asian actors: Hoon Lee as a Chinatown fixer, Jason Tobin of Lin's "Better Luck Tomorrow" as a tong heir and the action star Joe Taslim of "The Raid" as a leader of a rival gang.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The conditions inside, which are inhumane, are now a threat to any American with a jail in their county meaning just about everyone. If you think a cruise ship is a dangerous place to be during a pandemic, consider America's jails and prisons. The new coronavirus spreads at its quickest in closed environments. And places like nursing homes in affected areas have begun to take precautions at the behest of families and experts. As this new disease spreads, it has become equally important for all of us to ask what steps are being taken to protect the health of people in jails and prisons, and the staff who work in them. The American criminal legal system holds almost 2.3 million people in prisons, jails, detention centers and psychiatric hospitals. And they do not live under quarantine: jails experience a daily influx of correctional staff, vendors, health care workers, educators and visitors all of whom carry viral conditions at the prison back to their homes and communities and return the next day packing the germs from back home. How will we prevent incarcerated people and those who work in these institutions from becoming ill and spreading the virus? This week, the Harris County Juvenile Court in Houston announced that the court wing will be fully closed to all until further notice, after officials reported that a person who had been in the court may test positive for coronavirus. And an employee at a correctional facility in Pennsylvania also tested positive for Covid 19. Thirty four inmates and staffers there are now in quarantine. On Friday, the Federal Department of Correction announced that incarcerated people at all 122 federal correctional facilities across the country will not be allowed visits from family, friends or attorneys for 30 days, in response to the threat of the coronavirus. But this ethical sacrifice raises more questions than it answers about the broader set of changes that will be required to limit this contagion while protecting the rights of incarcerated people. In America's jails and prisons, people share bathrooms, laundry and eating areas. The toilets in their cells rarely have lids. The toilet tank doubles as the sink for hand washing, tooth brushing and other hygiene. People bunked in the same cell often as many as four share these toilets and sinks. Meanwhile, hand sanitizer is not allowed in most prisons because of its alcohol content. Air circulation is nearly always poor. Windows rarely open; soap may only be available if you can pay for it from the commissary. These deficiencies, inhumane in and of themselves, now represent a threat to anyone with a jail in their community and there is a jail in almost every county in the United States. According to health experts, it is not a matter of if, but when, this virus breaks out in jails and prisons. People are constantly churning through jail and prison facilities, being ushered to court hearings, and then being released to their communities nearly 11 million every year. "We should recall that we have 5,000 jails and prisons full of people with high rates of health problems, and where health services are often inadequate and disconnected from the community systems directing the coronavirus response," said Dr. Homer Venters, former chief medical officer of the New York City jail system. "Coronavirus in these settings will dramatically increase the epidemic curve, not flatten it, and disproportionately for people of color." Jails are particularly frightening in this pandemic because of their massive turnover. While over 600,000 people enter prison gates annually, there are about 612,000 people in jail on any given day. More than half of the people in jail are only in there for two to three days. In some communities, the county jail or prison is a major employer. Jail staff members are also notoriously underpaid, may not have paid sick leave and are more likely to live in apartments, in close and frequent contact with neighbors. They return home daily to aging parents, pregnant partners or family members with chronic conditions. Our penal system should have received more comprehensive guidance and material support from the Department of Justice, far earlier in this crisis. Like much of the federal level response, it is falling short. Encouragingly, others have taken the lead. The San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, together with the public defender, Manohar Raju, were the first to take proactive steps to release as many people as safely possible who are at heightened risk from coronavirus. Mr. Boudin directed his prosecutors not to oppose release motions for misdemeanor or nonviolent felony pretrial detainees where the person poses no threat to public safety. "We are trying to absorb information from countries who have experienced the Covid 19 pandemic before us," said Dr. Alysse Wurcel, an infectious diseases physician at Tufts Medical Center and at six county jails in eastern Massachusetts. "But since the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, it is difficult to extrapolate the potential impact." American officials can learn from the harrowing story of South Korea's Daenam Hospital. In late February, South Korea had already reported more than 3,150 confirmed cases, and of these, 101 were from patients in the Daenam psychiatric ward. Seven of these patients have now died. All but two patients in the ward contracted Covid 19. The ward was put on lockdown, in an attempt to confine the spread of the virus. Instead, the lockdown issued was a death sentence to many inside. Across the United States, activists for prisoners' rights have repeatedly requested plans to protect against an outbreak in prisons. Still, only a few jurisdictions have released plans. Some make good sense one from the New York City Department of Correction includes screening people for flulike symptoms before placing them in group holding cells, and sending people who have flulike symptoms to a communicable diseases unit for treatment. But those steps do not go far enough, nor do they affirmatively indicate an understanding of the ways this virus spreads: Will the incarcerated laborers now creating "NYS Clean," the New York State government manufactured hand sanitizer, be wearing N95 masks and gloves? The plan indicates that people incarcerated in dormitories on Rikers Island are being asked to sleep head to toe and three feet apart in the bunks, as if this short distance could prevent the spread of the virus if it's present. It won't. There are yet more reasons to be concerned. With about 40 percent of incarcerated people suffering from a chronic health condition, the overall health profile of people in jails and prisons is abysmal. And the older prison population is among the most vulnerable to severe complications from Covid 19. There are 274,000 people aged 50 or older in state and federal prisons in the United States. If this group were separated from the rest of the U.S. prison population, they would be the seventh largest prison system in the world. Aging people who are released after serving long sentences have a recidivism rate close to zero. Governors and other public officials should consider a one time review of all elderly or infirm people in prisons, providing immediate medical furloughs or compassionate release to as many of them as possible.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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GIVEN an unforeseen economic slump, an overblown unintended acceleration drama and an unimaginable earthquake in Japan, it's clear that the recent wounds suffered by Lexus and its parent, Toyota, weren't all self inflicted. But while external factors and random disasters partly explain how Lexus lost its crown in 2011 after 11 consecutive years as America's best selling luxury nameplate the brand's managers can't merely shake their fists at the heavens. Well before the tsunami, what ailed Lexus (and Toyota) was the calm before the storm: a by the book conservatism shaded into complacency, seemingly born of the belief that bulletproof reliability would always carry the day and set these brands apart. That quasi religious belief, of course, helped Toyota to conquer the world. But as the company now recognizes, such a belief blinded it to customers' desire for cars that speak to the heart as well as the brain. That's especially true for models bought as a splurge. Zestier models from BMW and Mercedes have been dusting Lexus's sales even as Audi, once an underdog, has become the toast of industry tastemakers. Akio Toyoda himself, the race driving chairman who is a grandson of Toyota's founder, has vowed to restore passion to his brands, which Internet provocateurs have dismissed as "beige." Mr. Toyoda formed a new Global Lexus Division, separate from Toyota, with handpicked leaders who report directly to him. And last August in Pebble Beach, Calif., Mr. Toyoda introduced the redesigned GS 350 sport sedan. He heralded the car's signature "spindle grille" previewed on the outrageous LF Gh concept car seen at the New York auto show last year as "the new face of Lexus." Grimacing and glowering, it's a face that induced deja vu: where had I seen that mug, and those mandibles, before? Then it hit me: it was in the Central American jungle, in '87. Mr. Toyoda may not realize it, but the new face of Lexus is a dead ringer for the Predator of sci fi movie fame. Mr. Toyoda has revealed that he initially opposed the styling, but he now thanks his team for fighting him until he gave the project a green light. And there's certainly no denying the passion of a creature, however repulsive it may appear, that skins its victims and keeps their skulls as trophies. Yet the 2013 GS 350 isn't ugly, just mildly odd and alien, and you cannot order one in Slime Green. But because I enjoyed driving the car so much, I declared a truce with the styling. Still, I need to take issue with the huge gaps between the wheel wells and the tires that make the sport sedan appear less hunkered down than it should. More important, the fourth generation GS is the most entertaining midrange Lexus sedan in memory. Most unexpectedly, it defies the current midrange trend in which carmakers are prioritizing luxury over performance. Even the BMW 5 Series, the benchmark for action oriented sedans, has gone softer; the latest model is built on the chassis of the larger 7 Series. How's this for a Hollywood shocker: this Lexus not only has a more overtly aggressive demeanor than the 5 Series, the Audi A6 or the Mercedes E Class, but its steering also feels more lively and connected. Power is no issue. With 306 horses from a 3.5 liter direct injection V 6, the rear drive Lexus manages a 5.7 second sprint from 0 to 60 miles per hour, the company says, in line with the car's main rivals. The all wheel drive model is just a bit slower, at 6 seconds. While most of my passengers were ambivalent or tactful about the exterior styling, the contemporary cabin drew universal applause. The interior feels spacious, yet intimate, with expensive looking surfaces and a tasteful mix of modern and traditional elements. Like its competitors, the Lexus seeks to justify its 50,000 ish price with what I'll call the disconnect of connectivity: the GS wants occupants to feel cocooned in safety and protected from distracted drivers. It has ubiquitous, watchful monitors for blind spots, for drifting out of the lane and for impending collisions. Yet Lexus also insists that technology will free its own drivers to be entertained and informed with no threat to others. For Lexus, as with BMW's original, groundbreaking iDrive, the solution looks good on paper except that you don't read the paper while you're driving. And in automotive terms, the GS's combination of a touchy joystick and a large 12.3 inch screen is like trying to paint an illuminated text while bouncing down a cobblestone street. To prove it, I drove down my cobblestone Brooklyn street. Here and elsewhere, Lexus's leather padded console joystick and wrist rest felt beautifully designed for a driver's hand. To help keep eyes on the road, Lexus developed a "snap to" function, a bit of haptic feedback through the joystick that draws the cursor to screen icons and freezes it there. And yes, it works fine when you're at the curb. But when you're trying to make sense of New Jersey road signs, there are just too many icons, windows and choices, spread across that Pacific sized screen like an archipelago. Your tiny boat, the onscreen cursor, has an annoying tendency to slip its moorings if you don't row it with precision. Having a left handed passenger aboard works great, but the system requires too much of a driver's limited attention. Lexus, we await version 3.0. The car's new smartphone based Enform system does allow voice control of apps including Pandora Radio and Open Table's reservations system, or to check in on Facebook. But the dirty secret of voice commands, whether for phones or cars, is how rarely anyone actually uses them. Using the Lexus Link system, I connected with a live operator who promptly sent navigation instructions into the car, letting me focus on the road. That focus we all remember driving, right? is where the Lexus scored its best points, including some surprising aces. The GS isn't the fastest car in its class, and it can't claim a fancy dual clutch transmission. But the car does something more important, something that's the antithesis of the usual Lexus. It loves to go fast, rather than isolate and hypnotize its occupants. The car remains whisper quiet and comfortable, but it really encourages its driver to come out and play. So play I did. Over an exhilarating four hours in rural Connecticut, I ended up getting just 17 m.p.g. a testament to how lustily I hammered the gas pedal. I did better on highways, but still averaged only about 23 m.p.g. And with a smallish 17 gallon tank, that consumption resulted in a stingy driving range of barely 350 miles. I tested the most performance oriented GS, with the F Sport package that adds 5,695 to the 50,325 base price of the all wheel drive model. (The rear drive GS starts at 47,775.) F Sport features include smoky graphite 19 inch alloy wheels, a driver selectable suspension (including slick onscreen graphics that highlight components within an X ray transparency of the car), a 16 way sport driver's seat, aluminum cabin trim, racier body panels and more. If buyers do make peace with the new corporate look, the GS could end up being the Lexus analog to the BMW 7 Series that made the designer Chris Bangle a household name. That love it or hate it sedan outraged traditionalists in 2002. Yet looking back, that car presaged a bold new era at BMW and began a winning streak that carried the brand to the American luxury sales title for the first time in 2011. Regarding their entire lineups, if Toyota and Lexus ever succeed in melding the emotional and practical sides of their brain, they may unleash a monster, like the fearsome Toyota of old, that could conquer America all over again. INSIDE TRACK: Signs of new life and life forms at Lexus.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Wise readers! I'm Raymond Zhong, a Times reporter in China where, I contend, something is unfolding right now that carries higher stakes than any other tech story on the planet. I know, I'm biased. But hear me out. China detained another Canadian citizen this week, the third to have been snatched up in the country this month. Beijing denies it, but most people in China see the detentions as retaliation for Canada's arrest of Meng Wanzhou, a top executive at the Chinese tech giant Huawei. The United States has accused Ms. Meng of fraud, and is seeking her extradition. She remains in Canada under round the clock surveillance. In other words, the United States and China's contest for technological supremacy has now left four lives hanging in the balance hostages to something much larger than themselves.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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What to Know About the Fight Between Hollywood's Writers and Agents LOS ANGELES An unusual labor fight is shaking up Hollywood. The unions representing television and film writers have taken on the talent agencies, rather than the studios that employ them, as they did in previous disputes. Before the two sides can make peace, the entertainment industry may have to undergo structural changes. On Friday afternoon, negotiations collapsed between union leaders for television and movie writers and representatives of the talent agencies. The issues underlying the dispute are many stranded, but the short version is this: The Writers Guild of America believes that talent agents are putting their own interests ahead of those of their clients. In the writers' view, the agents are not fulfilling their legally bound fiduciary duties. The agents firmly disagree. While they offered a counterproposal during talks last week, they shunned the writers' call for deep changes to the way business has been done for decades. During talks, the writers asked the agents to sign a new code of conduct that would replace a formal deal that had been in place since 1976. While some agents from minor agencies agreed to the code, the great majority, including the agents at the most powerful agencies, refused to sign on. After the failed talks, union leaders informed their members to break ties with any agency that had not signed the code. Who are the main players? The Writers Guild of America comprises two affiliated unions, the W.G.A. West, based in Los Angeles, and the W.G.A. East, based in New York. They represent roughly 13,000 writers. The Association of Talent Agents is representing the interests of the agents. The association's main constituents are the big four agencies: William Morris Endeavor, Creative Artists Agency, United Talent Agency and ICM Partners. Will the writers really go through with firing their agents? It looks that way. If they don't, they will not be abiding by W.G.A. Working Rule 23, which bars members from working with agents who have not agreed to the new code of conduct. A number of writers have already broken with their representatives. Mike Schur, the co creator of "Parks and Recreation" and "Brooklyn Nine Nine," tweeted at the end of talks: "WGA Members: What happens now? We stick together." (Mr. Schur was one of the participants in the negotiations.) What does an agent do, anyway? The main job for writers' representatives is to help the writers find employment and negotiate the highest possible compensation on their behalf. By law, agents must act in the best financial interest of their clients. They must also inform them of any possible conflicts of interest in a given deal. There are all kinds of agents. The ideal version is a fierce advocate who may also act as an occupational therapist. At the other end of the spectrum is the one who doesn't call you back. These days, the writers say, even the most assiduous agents can work against their clients' interests, because the system itself is broken. Can't a lawyer or manager do the same things an agent does? On this, the writers and agents strongly disagree. The W.G.A. unions say that they are the writers' exclusive bargaining representatives. As such, they can delegate who gets to negotiate on behalf of their members, and they have not hesitated to signal to managers and lawyers that they may effectively take on the duties of agents on the writers' behalf. But Latham Watkins, the law firm working for the agents, sent a letter to the W.G.A. on Friday saying that, if managers or lawyers function as agents, they would be breaking the law. The firm pointed to the California Talent Agency Act and New York's General Business law. No one may assume agenting duties without having an agent's license, Latham Watkins said in the letter, which went on to threaten that the agents would "take appropriate action as needed, against any person engaged in unfair competition." The writers countered that, with the legal letter, the agents were "attempting to intimidate attorneys and managers to stop them from performing work they routinely do." What was the old deal between the writers and agents, and how did the writers want to change it? In 1976, writers and agents signed the Artists' Managers Basic Agreement, which regulated how talent agents represented writers. The 43 year old arrangement had fallen woefully out of date, in the W.G.A.'s view. With the proposed new code of conduct, the writers demanded that agencies rid themselves of packaging fees and get out of the production business. What is packaging and what are packaging fees? Packaging is a decades old practice under which agencies may team writers with other clients from their stables for a given project. With packaging fees, an agent forgoes the usual 10 percent commission fee paid to them by individual clients; in its place, they are paid directly by the studio. What is the difference between how the writers and agents view packaging and packaging fees? The two sides are miles apart on this question. Agents say the writers do not fundamentally understand packaging and the fees that go with it. The writers say they understand it just fine they just find it to be corrupt. The writers argue that agencies violate their fiduciary obligations to their clients when they make money from studios instead of from the people they are representing. The practice of accepting packaging fees, the writers say, allows the agencies to enrich themselves at the writers' expense when they should be using their leverage to get more money for writer clients. The agencies say they don't buy that argument. To bolster the agents' position, United Talent Agency conducted an analysis meant to show that writers earned more from packaged shows than non packaged shows. With packaging, the agencies argue, the interests of agents and writers are directly aligned. Because agencies don't make money on failed shows, the agents argue, they have the same motivation as writers in creating hits. Did the agencies consider getting rid of packaging fees during talks? No. The Association of Talent Agents offered a counterproposal under which the agents would have handed over 1 percent of packaging fee profits to writers from successful series. The W.G.A. said this was "not a serious proposal." How does the agencies' entry into the production business play into the dispute? There are agency affiliated companies that have moved into the production business and this does not sit well with the writers unions. W.M.E., for instance, has an affiliate company called Endeavor Content. It was formed in 2017 and is a distributor of the show "Killing Eve," as well as a producer of an epic drama coming from Apple TV Plus called "See." C.A.A. also has an affiliate: Wiip. It is a producer of "Dickinson," a comedy series that is also part of the Apple rollout scheduled for the fall. United Talent Agency is also getting in on production, with an affiliate called Civic Center Media. It has teamed up with M.R.C., the producer of "House of Cards," to make new shows. The agencies have argued that these affiliates are artist friendly studios that will help writers, because they add to the number of potential buyers which means more competition for writers' services and bigger paychecks. The writers have said that agencies have a conflict of interest when they act as studios. How, they ask, can an agent represent you and also be your boss? Have the agencies considered getting out of the production business? Nope. They offered to meet with the writers unions four times a year in an effort to demonstrate that the affiliated studios were benefiting their members. The W.G.A. called this arrangement "unacceptable." What does all this have to do with Peak TV? With the rise of streaming, there are more shows than ever before, a phenomenon often called Peak TV. Writers say their pay has not reflected the boom. Weekly earnings for television writers declined 23 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to W.G.A. figures. And pay on a per episode basis, when adjusted for inflation, has also declined since the 1990s, the W.G.A. said. The agencies have questioned the W.G.A.'s calculations. An analysis by William Morris Endeavor determined that compensation for its writers went up by an average of 9 percent each year between 2016 and 2018. The agents have conceded that Peak TV may have its downsides but only because studios and streaming services are getting more powerful. In this atmosphere, the agents argue that their services are needed more than ever. Nobody knows. The agencies may wait to see if the writers fracture in the days to come. Likewise, the writers may wait to see if more agencies cave and sign the new code of conduct. Other than the minor agencies that have signed the code and the small number of W.G.A. members who voted against the idea of firing their agents, each side has presented a united front. Many bystanders producers, studio executives expect the W.G.A. to file a lawsuit and let the courts decide who is right and who is wrong.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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When researchers reported earlier this year that colorectal cancer rates were rising in adults as young as their 20s and 30s, some scientists were skeptical. The spike in figures, they suggested, might not reflect a real increase in disease incidence but earlier detection, which can be a good thing. Now a sobering new study has found that younger Americans aren't just getting cancer diagnoses earlier. They are dying of colorectal cancer at slightly higher rates than in previous decades, and no one really knows why. "This is real," said Rebecca L. Siegel, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society and the lead author of the current study, published as a research letter in JAMA, as well as of the earlier report. "It's a small increase, and it is a trend that emerged only in the past decade, but I don't think it's a blip. The burden of disease is shifting to younger people." The study found that even though the risk of dying from colon and rectal cancers has been declining in the population over all, death rates among adults aged 20 to 54 had increased slightly, to 4.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014, up from 3.9 per 100,000 in 2004. "This is not merely a phenomenon of picking up more small cancers," said Dr.Thomas Weber, who was not involved in the study but is a member of the steering committee of the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable. "There is something else going on that's truly important." No one knows what underlying lifestyle, environmental or genetic factors may be driving the rise in cases. While rates of cancers tied to human papillomavirus, or HPV, have been rising in recent years, that virus causes cancers mainly of the cervix, back of the throat and anus, and scientists do not believe sexual behaviors or HPV are driving the increase in colon or rectal cancer (anal and rectal cancers are distinct). Obesity, a diet high in red or processed meats and lack of physical activity are among the factors tied to increased risk, but new research is looking at other possible causes. One recent study found, for example, that prolonged use of antibiotics during adulthood was associated with a greater risk of developing precancerous polyps, possibly because antibiotics can alter the makeup of the gut microbiome. Scientists are also exploring whether the colorectal cancers emerging in younger adults are different from those seen in older people and whether they can be detected and treated with the same tools. There is some evidence that young people are more likely to have precancerous polyps that are harder to see and remove during a colonoscopy because of their location in the colon or because they are flat rather than tubular, according to Dr. Otis Brawley, who is chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. The findings add to the urgency to find reliable ways to detect colorectal cancer early in young people. Most medical groups have for years recommended people start routine screening only at age 50 unless they have specific risk factors, like a family history of the disease or chronic conditions like inflammatory bowel disease that raise the risk. One organization, the American College of Gastroenterology, recommends that African Americans start routine screening at 45 because they are at higher risk for colorectal cancer than whites. Any proposal to expand universal screening, however, will be both controversial and potentially costly, since the vast majority of colorectal cancer deaths still occur among older adults. "I don't know that this very small uptick in mortality means we ought to start doing colonoscopies on 20 year olds as a routine matter," said Dr. Michael Potter, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. More lives would be saved by increasing screening at age 50, he said, adding, "It's worth doing research in this area to determine whether lowering the age of colorectal cancer screening would yield more benefits than harms. These are not risk free procedures." Screening tests are also expensive, though cost is not the driving issue. Looking for colon cancer in young people is like looking for a needle in a haystack you'd have to screen a lot of people to detect even a small number of cancers or precancerous polyps. Most young people would go through the process for no good reason, and some would sustain injuries or other harms. Complications from colonoscopy, considered the gold standard test, are fairly frequent. A study of over 300,000 healthy Medicare patients who had colonoscopies found that nearly 2 percent wound up in an emergency room or hospital within a week of the procedure because of complications such as tears in the wall of the colon or rectum, which can be life threatening. But while some organizations specifically state that colonoscopy is the preferred screening method, the United States Preventive Services Task Force endorses a variety of screening tests, including some that are less expensive or noninvasive, though they may not be as effective in finding and preventing cancers. Stool tests that examine fecal samples for microscopic amounts of blood and DNA changes, for example, can indicate the presence of a tumor or polyp, but such tests need to be done more frequently and may have to be followed up with a colonoscopy if the result is positive. All of the testing options have pros and cons, and some may yield a false positive test, subjecting someone to additional testing for no reason, or a falsely reassuring negative result. But Dr. Brawley said there is good scientific data to show that stool sample tests save lives, and added that some patients may be better served by these noninvasive tests. "In the U.S., we have all gravitated toward the new high tech screening methods, and we may be leaving old technology that is still very good," he said. Screening guidelines aside, people concerned about colorectal cancer at any age should talk to their doctor, said Dr. Douglas Owens, vice chairman of the Preventive Services Task Force. "There are always circumstances in which individual decision making is appropriate," he said. Many physicians may be reluctant to order screening tests for younger adults, because they are also unaccustomed to seeing this cancer in younger people, Dr. Weber said. He said efforts are being made to raise awareness in physicians as well as patients, adding, "We need to set the trigger much lower to investigate these symptoms and rule out malignancy." Warning signs of colorectal cancer include rectal bleeding, bloody stools, unexplained weight loss, fatigue and digestive complaints, or persistent changes in bathroom behavior. Anemia in men is also a warning sign and should be explored further, and while many doctors typically attribute anemia in a premenopausal woman to menstruation, experts say that if a woman is experiencing any other symptoms, doctors should assess her for colon cancer. Make sure you know your family's medical history including not only whether any close relatives had colorectal cancer, but whether they had benign polyps, which can be precancerous. Tell your physician of any medical conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease, that may increase your risk. Doctors say you may be able to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer if you maintain a healthy weight, get a lot of physical activity, eat a healthy diet, don't smoke and avoid excessive use of alcohol.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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"Imagine summer camp for off roading die hards," said Emily Benzie, half of the Jeep Thrills team in last year's Rebelle Rally. Over 10 days, they will drive across 1,600 grueling, off road miles in the Nevada and California deserts, where the afternoons can reach 100 degrees and the nights can dip to 15. On their hunt for just under 200 hidden checkpoints, they will rely on map and compass skills, as well as driving prowess, physical stamina and more. They are the roughly 100 women who will compete in the annual Rebelle Rally starting next week, armed with analog navigation tools: a map, a compass and a road book, but no cellphones or GPS devices. Last year, Emily Benzie and her mother made up the Jeep Thrills team. "It was an amazing experience that tested my skills under sleep deprivation and long, dusty hours," Ms. Benzie said. "Imagine summer camp for off roading die hards, where every day you drive an insane obstacle course and every night you camp around a fire hearing stories from the most hard core women you envision that's Rebelle." Ms. Benzie, a genetic immunologist in San Francisco, drove, and her mother, Christine Benzie, navigated. "Being the navigator is like solving hundreds of puzzles for 10 hours per day, for eight days straight," said the elder Ms. Benzie, an aerospace engineer and company founder in San Diego. Behind the wheel on 'Death Canal Road' It's October 2018, and I'm headed down the worst off pavement road I've ever driven: my body tossed around like a rag doll inside my pickup, my fingers sore and hands throbbing from gripping the steering wheel. The bumps finally give way to a road that appears to dart straight toward the horizon. This dirt trail is well elevated, above a dried up canal. My relief at a simple drive quickly flips, as the road reveals its numerous crevasses large enough to swallow my tires. This road Coachella Road in California's Sonoran Desert, which several teams nicknamed Death Canal Road becomes my nemesis. I breathe deeply, take a moment and carry on. Miles later, large white signs near the middle of the road state: "DO NOT ENTER. This area is a bombing range." It's all a grind for the organizers, as well. "It's extremely challenging," said Ms. Miller, who has nearly 70 people helping her put on the event. "We have a rally ourselves, with longer days, longer nights, and the hard work to ensure that problems are kept to a minimum, our public lands are respected, and competitors and staff are safe." The logistics can be daunting. The organizers must haul to the middle of nowhere enough potable water for staff and competitors, as well as food and fuel. And unexpected situations, like mechanical problems or safety issues, can arise. They keep Team Rebelle on its toes. The organizers must make sure the route is responsibly maintained, said Jimmy Lewis, the rally's course director. "Off road motorized recreation often comes with a stigma and preconceived idea that is not typically positive," Mr. Lewis said. But Rebelle Rally has pushed to change that stigma, working closely with organizations like the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service to comply with all laws. Competitors tread lightly and obey all speed regulations, and there are penalties if they don't. The organizers pack up all the garbage to take away, leaving the base camps cleaner than before the crowds roared through. Trophies are awarded in a number of classes, including overall winners in the 4 by 4 and Crossover vehicle categories. Christine Benzie read an article about Rebelle last year. Six months later, she and her daughter were crossing the finish line. The Benzies expected the event to be fun and mentally demanding, but they didn't know the level of camaraderie and number of amazing, like minded women they would meet. Laura Hardesty Butcher, who lives near Sacramento, was the driver of Team Locos Mocos. She said the rally was a great way to step outside her comfort zone. "It gave me a purpose," Ms. Hardesty Butcher said. "I forgot how great that can feel." She said the rally was one of the toughest things any woman could ever sign up for. "The highs can be some of your highest, and the lows can be some of your lowest," she said. "At the end of it, you realize how awesome you feel about yourself." Kirsten Tiegen, the event's media director, said she had noticed changes in the women afterward: gaining the confidence to ask for a promotion, traveling alone to exotic locales or even working on vehicles themselves. "It's rewarding to see the transformations take place in their lives," she said. Channel Williams, a mother of three and a lung cancer survivor, did last year's rally in a 2005 Land Rover LR3 with her partner, Marie Campbell. Since her diagnosis in 2013, Ms. Williams has had half of one lung removed, four months of aggressive chemotherapy and five brain operations to remove tumors. "I had folks telling me I wasn't healthy enough to do the Rebelle," she said. "I had been in the hospital the week prior to starting the adventure with bilateral pneumonia. They were afraid I'd have a medical emergency and not be able to receive help." She continued: "There were times in the midst of the rally I'd tell myself they were right and I should quit and head home. I'd remind myself I got lung cancer at 41 while being in the best shape of my life, and also I had never been a smoker." But Ms. Williams was no longer willing to let cancer steal anything else from her. At the end of the rally, she said, "I felt so alive and no longer a sick cancer patient." "I was back," she added. "I was living again, not just surviving." Ms. Williams and Ms. Campbell were given the Team Spirit award, a major acknowledgment from fellow competitors. The Rebelle is about community, confidence and competence. Even with capable vehicles and the know how to drive them, finding checkpoints can be exceedingly difficult. Checkpoints 8 and 9 from Day 2 still haunt me. Sandy landscapes and open skies gave way to a gradual hill climb and twisting trails. Darkened earth hugged our modified 2012 Toyota Tacoma as we searched for checkpoints. Seconds turned into minutes, minutes into eternity. Glittery black onyx littered the ground as we hopped out to review our topographical map and plotted points, which had been completed early in the morning. We knew we were close but not close enough. We decided to throw that opportunity away; too much time was wasted, placing us in danger of missing mandatory future checkpoints. We had to move on. Competitors get dirty, worn out, fatigued. They laugh, they focus, they may even throw their helmets or break down emotionally. Sheer determination is needed to finish. Passion, inner "fight" and dedication to cross that line will set us up for success. (Since the Rebelle Rally, I've bought my own 4x4 vehicle to work on with my husband, Andy. Next year's plan? A 5,000 mile time speed distance competition.) Ms. Miller said this pushed women and exposed their weaknesses and strengths, and gave them an opportunity to improve their driving and navigational skills. But, more profound, is how they decide to communicate, organize, and handle the stress and challenges the 10 day rally presents. It's a highly communicative and helpful atmosphere. No matter their team, the women are there to help one another. Ms. Miller said it best: "It's great to see so many people from diverse backgrounds come together and work together to get to the finish line forming unbreakable bonds along the way."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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TOKYO Japan's economy grew more strongly than expected in the second quarter, extending the longest streak of uninterrupted growth in 11 years, government data showed on Monday. And the really good news: Much of the growth was local. Japan's government has been trying to spur the economy with a stimulus program known as Abenomics, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The strategy has helped Japan's exporters but has done little to increase domestic income or spending. That may be changing. Spending by Japanese consumers and businesses contributed more to the latest expansion than trade with the rest of the world did, the data showed, in a positive sign for the outlook of the world's third largest economy, after the United States and China. Japanese gross domestic product increased by 4 percent in annualized terms in the three months through June, the government's Cabinet Office said in a preliminary estimate on Monday. The economy has now expanded for six consecutive quarters, the first time it has gone that long without a contraction since the 2005 6 period.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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WASHINGTON President Obama will ask Congress to scrub the corporate tax code of dozens of loopholes and subsidies to reduce the top rate to 28 percent, down from 35 percent, while giving preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent, a senior administration official said on Tuesday. Mr. Obama also would establish a minimum tax on multinational corporations' foreign earnings, the official said, to discourage "accounting games to shift profits abroad" or actual relocation of production overseas. With the framework for changes that the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, will outline on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will enter an election year debate with Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race who seek even lower taxes for businesses. But an overhaul of the corporate code is unlikely this year, given that political backdrop and the complexity of an undertaking that would generate a lobbying frenzy as businesses vie to defend old tax breaks or win new ones. The campaign of Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate for president, signalled that he would outline on Wednesday an expanded version of his own tax proposals, which he said on Tuesday would call for a "flatter, fairer, broader based tax system" that would do more to encourage economic growth. The various Republican candidates, who are scheduled to debate on Wednesday night, have called for cutting the corporate income tax, differing somewhat in the details. The administration plan to revamp a corporate code that is widely derided as inefficient and anticompetitive has been in the works at Treasury for two years, and is a priority of Mr. Geithner. Yet he has been preoccupied with crisis management, and is unlikely to see the project through since he plans to leave office after this year. The proposed overhaul "will help level the playing field for businesses and allow the government to collect needed revenue while promoting economic growth," Mr. Geithner told a Congressional committee last week, without details. Republicans and business groups complain that the 35 percent corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world, leaving American companies at a competitive disadvantage. They typically seek a 25 percent rate, with many of them saying that the current tax breaks should be kept in place as well. Nonpartisan tax analysts consistently find that corporations here on average pay just slightly more than their competitors in other developed countries after exploiting the many tax breaks and loopholes. Recent news accounts have highlighted the low effective rates paid by companies like Google, Boeing and General Electric. One analysis concluded that 115 of the 500 companies in the Standard and Poor's stock index paid a total corporate tax rate federal and otherwise of less than 20 percent over a five year period. A study by the Government Accountability Office in 2008 found that 55 percent of American companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven year period it studied. "Under the current tax system, the United States will soon have the highest statutory corporate tax rate among developed countries, within a system that features a large number of tax expenditures for special interests," said a senior administration official, who did not want to speak ahead of Mr. Geithner except on condition of anonymity. "This puts American businesses especially those in areas like manufacturing that are subject to more intense international competition at a disadvantage. And this system is also unnecessarily complicated for America's small businesses." Earlier this year, Mr. Obama proposed to end tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas and to create new breaks for those that bring jobs back. Corporate taxes make up an increasingly small share of the federal government's revenue, in part because of tax avoidance maneuvers by businesses. Mr. Obama is proposing that the simplification of the corporate code should not add to the deficit, and that most or all revenue raised by closing tax breaks should be used to lower rates or offset the cost of new or existing tax breaks favoring manufacturing, clean energy, and research and development activities, according to administration officials. Mr. Obama is not proposing to overhaul the tax code for individuals, though he has spoken of it as a goal. Both codes were last revamped a quarter century ago and the accretion of tax breaks in recent years has given rise to widespread calls, including from Mr. Obama's 2010 Bowles Simpson fiscal commission, to overhaul the tax systems in a way that raises enough revenue to both lower rates and reduce annual budget deficits. But every tax break has its defenders, from homeowners who want their mortgage interest deduction to corporations protective of depreciation tax breaks. In October, Dave Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed a 25 percent corporate rate without saying how he would offset the sizable revenue loss. An analysis in November from Congress's nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which was requested by House Democrats, reported that even if every corporate tax break were scrapped, the 35 percent corporate rate could not be reduced below 28 percent without adding to deficits. Republicans disputed that, citing a group of relatively obscure tax breaks that the Congressional analysts did not count. Even so, the administration and Congress would have a political and mathematical challenge in eliminating or reducing tax breaks enough to lower corporate rates as they propose to do without adding to deficits. Underscoring the difficulty, just two popular tax breaks for accelerated depreciation of businesses' capital investments and write offs of research and experimentation costs account for the bulk of the revenue the government foregoes to benefit corporations. Not only are those two provisions unlikely to be repealed; the Obama administration and both parties in Congress also support making a separate research credit permanent. While Mr. Obama has emphasized federal policies to help manufacturers since he took office at the height of the recession most prominently by rescuing the auto industry his attention has become even more pronounced as he seeks re election in battleground states like those in the Midwest where manufacturing is a mainstay. For tax purposes, however, the administration would have a challenge in defining manufacturing to determine what companies would benefit from a lower rate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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RICHMOND, Va. On Saturday, under a candy colored proscenium arch, Louis C.K. told a story about the day he learned "all the bad words." He was 7 when an elderly stranger with one dark tooth approached him and listed obscenities like a fairy tale version of George Carlin. Louis C.K. described vibrating with excitement. Then he went to school and put this information to work, cursing at his teacher. She cried and the students laughed. "I liked both," he said, with a half embarrassed shrug. In the context of the return of Louis C.K., this anecdote has the feel of a twisted origin story. And this defiantly perverse new set, whose jokes come with so much baggage they threaten to obscure the performer, will inspire heated, divisive reactions. It's been two years since The New York Times published an article about the sexual misconduct of Louis C.K., which he subsequently confirmed. He said he would "step back and take a long time to listen," then returned to clubs nine months later, performing intermittently. Last weekend, he began a new phase in his comeback, a theater tour starting with two shows in Richmond, Va., on Saturday and taking him across the world. Returning to his old uniform of blue jeans and black shirt, he began both shows with oblique jokes about his pariah status. He didn't so much play the sad sack as the guy strenuously trying to put a happy face on what a sad sack he is. "It's good to start over at 52," he said with a strained smile. "So much energy." Those looking for any apologetic notes or reckoning with the damage he has done will be disappointed. He is not aiming for redemption onstage. If anything, he's doubling down on the comedic value of saying the wrong thing. "That's the point of this," he said, motioning to himself onstage. He didn't repeat the now cliche comedian complaints about generational sensitivities or snowflakes, but the central theme of the night was the cathartic release of transgression. His subjects (Sept. 11, slavery, pedophilia, the Holocaust) made the case. He turned his new reputation in the MeToo era into a springboard for jokes. "Wait until they find those pictures of me in blackface," he said. The audience, which gave him standing ovations, roared. Then he pushed further, saying he has done blackface for years. "I didn't do it to be funny," he added. "I liked it. Felt good. I do it for bedtime." Comedy criticism is never objective, but there is nothing more subjective than how funny you find Louis C.K. in 2019. That's what makes writing this review difficult, and being transparent about my point of view necessary. Over the past decade, no comic had a greater impact on me than Louis C.K. While my relationship with his old work has changed I can't laugh at his rape jokes anymore, and the story lines on his FX show that touched on assault now seem like obscene rationalizations I still regularly think about Louis C.K. punch lines and chuckle. His jokes about technology and parenting are so lodged in my subconscious that no amount of cultural shame can remove them. And while I agree with the critics who have rejected the idea that we must separate the art from the artist, I have a high tolerance for enjoying art from morally suspect places. Given that, Louis C.K.'s new show made me laugh very hard. It's also uncomfortable in ways he seems in control of and ways he does not. It has a few characteristically ingenious riffs, particularly about religion: one imagining if God gave a quick, explanatory news conference ("Mormons, no.") and another picturing the God of jihadis on his way to gather the 72 virgins for a suicide bomber, rubbing his head in confusion at how he got here. And Louis C.K. remains exceptionally skilled at body horror comedy (likening his chest to the ceiling of a cave) and herky jerky pivots that blend the sexual and the profane. In the most jarring part of the show, he discussed the death of his mother in June in a remarkably unsentimental aside. Interrupting a mundane story about visiting a cemetery with his French girlfriend, he detoured into the details of his mother's cremation (mixing in a few sex jokes for good measure). "She was a practical woman who didn't care about the pageantry of death," he said, before describing her body being taken away in a gray van, a half filled Gatorade bottle rattling around with her. In the past, Louis C.K. has questioned the value of life, mocking its sanctity and downplaying its importance, but this grim image goes just as far in undercutting the solemnity of death. Last December, one of his early post return club sets leaked online and several of the jokes, including a particularly nasty one about the Parkland students, earned widespread condemnation. He has cut that joke and a few other controversial ones though he has a dopey new punch line comparing vegans to gay people that seems intended to bait. His stage show is leaner than that December set, more deliberate, with fewer attempts at ingratiation. (There's no talk of the millions of dollars he lost when his show business deals were canceled.) After hearing that rough draft of a set, many concluded that Louis C.K. had rebranded himself a cranky right wing comic. And there was (and is) a new edge to his comedy that bristles at offense taken easily. There's a lame joke about cultural appropriation. But the truth is that the comedy of Louis C.K. hasn't changed as much as the context surrounding it. Louis C.K. has long found humor in following the logic of immoral thoughts, while somehow not just keeping the audience on his side, but convincing them of an enlightened intent. It's partly why people were not just disturbed by his behavior, they felt betrayed. He did sharp, empathetic material about the hurt of gay slurs. He told jokes about rape and violence against women that were considered feminist. It's hard to remember, but there was a time not long ago when no comic got the benefit of the doubt more than Louis C.K. That is ancient history now. And context, as people always say when defending an offensive joke, matters. We know too much about his transgressions to see jokes that transgress in the same way. Instead of adjusting, or offering a more reflective, soul searching show, as some had hoped, Louis C.K. has stuck to his old tactics. And as such, some of his jokes will fall flat with a huge part of his former audience and will strike others as blows against political correctness. His premise about how women have the skill to seem O.K. when they aren't won't play the same way as it did two years ago. He clearly knows this. Toward the end of each show on Saturday, he returned to the subject of his mother as he wondered about her sex life, concluding, "You never really know your mom." You got the distinct sense he was jealous of her on that count.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston, was established in 1831 as a cemetery and garden and claims to be the oldest public garden. There are more than 16,000 plants there and a diversity of trees, including black and white oaks, Japanese hollies and flowering dogwoods. The garden at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, Va., was created around 1720, which makes it one of the country's oldest formal private gardens. In spring, it's resplendent with tulips. But Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, in Charleston, S.C., claims to be the oldest private and public garden in the United States. The plantation was founded in 1676, and the gardens have one the largest camellia collections in the country. While people are in Washington for the exhibit, what other gardens should they see in the area? Definitely the Smithsonian Gardens; we have 13 gardens spread over nine acres around the Smithsonian museums. They're full of every kind of tree, plant and flower that grows in the area. We're known for the saucer magnolia trees and unusual evergreens, such as the monkey puzzle tree, which was imported from Chile; it's 15 feet tall and has incredibly sharp needles. Otherwise, the D.C. area has more than two dozen gardens, and visitors can go to dcgardens.com to see what they are. Can you visit a garden in the winter? Winter gardens are magical. A bit of open sky, the texture of the trees, an occasional flowering shrub or early blooming bulb help dismiss the gloom of being indoors. How can people find gardens near where they live or at a destination they're visiting? The best sources to find a public garden in any region of the United States are maps on the American Public Gardens Association and the American Horticultural Society websites. If you don't know anything about plants or flowers, is it still possible to appreciate a garden? I am biased, but I would say absolutely yes. When you're in a garden, you're surrounded by nature and immersed in beauty, which is rejuvenating. And even if you're not interested in learning about the specific plants growing in that garden, the experience of being in one can be enjoyable for people of all ages.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Owning a car in New York City is seen as a liability by many, especially when a quick Uber ride or the swipe of a MetroCard can easily get you where you need to go. Car owners know that circling the block for a spot and moving the car for alternate side parking is just a part of life, unless they're willing to pay for a parking space. But for some New Yorkers, an unused space in a parking garage or an extra spot in the driveway is a valuable piece of real estate and an easy way to earn extra income. Jee Choe became the reluctant owner of a parking space about 16 years ago when she bought an alcove studio in Greenwich Village. She has since come to see things differently, as renting out a parking spot can be a lucrative venture. The parking spot and the apartment were a package, with the monthly cost for the garage rolled into the apartment's maintenance fee. Her real estate agent told her that it was a good deal. "It's a rare thing in New York," she said, in regard to owning the spot. She paid 275,000 for the studio and parking spot, which is just a short walk from the Pratt Institute's Manhattan location, where she was earning a master's degree. A neighbor across the street was renting the spot from the previous owner, and Ms. Choe extended the lease. The rent check she received for the parking spot was a boon every month. Ms. Choe has yet to meet her garage tenants, who used to leave a monthly check with the doorman but recently started sending the payment by mail. She now rents the space out for 480 a month, which is lower than the amount the garage would charge at 550, plus tax. "But they're hassle free for me," she said of her tenants. She originally charged 375 a month and has raised the parking rent only twice, in line with increases to her maintenance fee and puts the money from the parking spot toward her 1,300 monthly maintenance. Ride sharing services have actually reduced demand for parking spaces, according to Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers Consultants. "New Yorkers are relying more on mass transit and ride shares to get around rather than use their own cars," he said. At the same time, the development boom in recent years has absorbed a lot of the parking lots that used to be found on city streets. Still, Mr. Miller said, "despite the drop in parking supply, I don't believe we can declare a parking shortage." Plus, he added, new residential developments still often include parking. "In the luxury market, garaged parking spaces are still a sought after amenity," he said. New York's Department of City Planning sees parking as "one piece of a neighborhood's transportation system," said Joe Marvilli, the department's deputy press secretary. "Off street parking is required in some new buildings and optional in others, and parking garages frequently serve a neighborhood rather than one building." The average price for a single parking space in recent years has been about 280,000, Mr. Miller said. "Parking space price trends seem to track with the general trends of the apartment market, so prices have dropped over time," he said. "Their prices are largely dependent on the prices of apartments." When the market was booming, some developers asked as much as 1 million for a parking space. "To my knowledge, they never sold or never sold close to that price," he said. Mr. Miller added that parking spaces were often bundled with apartment purchases, making it difficult to know the exact price of a parking spot. But anecdotally, he said the highest price he had heard of was just over 500,000. For Yadh Yaich buying a deeded parking spot, along with a one bedroom apartment at the Carriage House on West 24th Street, turned out to be a wise investment. Mr. Yaich, who is originally from Tunisia and is a finance executive and entrepreneur, took out a mortgage on the 1.175 million apartment and paid cash for the 125,000 parking spot. "Since I bought the first parking spot, I was able to haggle the price with the builders down from 250,000, as they didn't know at that time if they could sell them," he said. "I got it at half of the original asking price, but they all sold very quickly after me. The last one sold for 260,000." In Astoria Heights, Senad Ahmetovic has two cars and two spots in his driveway but elects to rent one of the spaces out to his first floor tenant for a monthly fee of 150. He knows neighbors who charge more for their parking spots, but he sees it as a way to build his relationship with good tenants. Mr. Ahmetovic, who purchased the three family home when it was new construction in 2006 for 965,000, said he was not motivated by the moneymaking prospect of the driveway. "It's a lovely couple that we rent to on the first floor," he said, explaining that the tenant had initially inquired about nearby garages. "He has a BMW 5 Series, I felt bad for him parking it on the street," he said. "I thought it's only fair to let them park and be able to look out on their own car." When the tenants moved in three and a half years ago, he didn't have a second car. By the time his eldest daughter needed her own car about a year and a half ago, though, he didn't have the heart to rescind the offer to his tenant. His daughter, who is finishing up her last semester of college, alternates parking on the street with him, depending on when she gets home. Trish Martin has rented a spot in a garage around the corner from her home in Park Slope, Brooklyn for nearly 30 years and she doesn't regret a penny of the money she has spent on it. "When my kids were young, I would drive into Manhattan with them for hockey practice and then back to Brooklyn. Parking was miserable I'd be driving in circles for 45 minutes and I'd feel like crying," she recalled. "I thought: There's got to be a better way." After many months of asking around, she found a street level spot in a nearby garage in a row of three one car garages, which meant she didn't have to call for the car in advance. With this setup, she could come and go as she pleased. "It's the kind that requires you to open it via an old fashioned pull chain," she said of the garage that started at 200 a month in 1996 and currently runs her 500 a month in rent. Offers to install an electric door opener at her own expense were met with a hard no from the garage landlords, whose old fashioned sensibilities dictated that their tenants use multiple manual locks to secure the space. This means tenants have to manually raise, lower and lock their garages from the outside. For Ms. Martin, the managing director of sales for Halstead Real Estate Brooklyn, the garage is more than a convenience. "It's a social thing," she said, adding that she chats with her garage space neighbors the way she does with the butcher and the greengrocer. "It's a chance to pause and say hello and see your neighbors." Sadman Nihal bought himself a Mercedes last June as a reward for a successful year in business. Even though street parking is available near his apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, he sought out a private garage to protect his prize. "One day I returned to see my car had a dent on the back," Mr. Nihal said. "Someone had likely hit it while they were trying to park behind it. The very same day I searched every site I could and by evening I found a person two blocks from my house who was renting out their parking space. It was 300 a month, which is a bit high, but I had to take it." Mr. Nihal, 24, a native of Bangladesh, is the director of public relations at Velvet Caviar, a company that sells designer phone cases and accessories. To find a parking garage just blocks away from his apartment, he used the mobile parking app, SpotHero, a peer to peer marketplace that matches car owners with neighbors renting out their private parking spots. Mr. Nihal said that he preferred the setup at the two family house where he rents the garage rather than a big public garage because he can just drive in and out whenever he pleases (he also has dedicated parking at his job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard). "It has truly been a life changer for me. The garage even came with cameras I can monitor via my phone so I couldn't ask for more," he said. "The time I have saved having this parking spot has allowed me to do so much more in my everyday life and if I look back it's one of the best decisions I ever made." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Conservatives "feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views," said Thomas Peters, the chief executive of uCampaign, which develops apps for Republican candidates and right leaning causes. Imagine a society in which everyone more or less agrees with you. You wake up in the morning to online greetings from people who share your views on guns, religion and country. Your news feed contains only posts from like minded politicians or articles from like minded news outlets. You can safely post your own comments without fear of vitriol from trolls or challenges from naysayers. This is the insular world in which tens of thousands of Americans who use conservative political apps are experiencing the midterm election season. Amid a chorus of conservative complaints that Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to right leaning views and as those social media giants take steps to limit what they see as abusive or misleading viral content a few Republican consultants have begun building a parallel digital universe where their political clients set the rules. One start up has built an app for the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Supporters of President Trump can download an app from Great America, a big spending pro Trump political action committee, or America First, Mr. Trump's official 2016 campaign app, which has some features that remain active. Many backers of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas use Cruz Crew, an app built for his re election campaign. The apps deliver curated partisan news feeds on what are effectively private social media platforms, free from the strictures and content guidelines imposed by Silicon Valley giants. Some allow supporters to comment on posts or contribute their own, with less risk that their posts will be flagged as offensive or abusive. Many apps have video game like features where users can earn points for making campaign donations or contacting their legislators. Amass enough points and a supporter can attain increasing status levels like "BigLeague" or "Patriot" or even gain a spot on the app's leader board. Crucially, these mini platforms harness the powerful reach of platforms like Facebook and Twitter even while competing with them. Some apps give users the option of posting on Twitter or Facebook messages that are scripted by the campaigns, combining the seeming authenticity of organic social media posts with the message discipline of paid advertising. Proponents are positioning these apps as durable communities that offer conservatives viable alternatives to mainstream social networks. Sheltered from the broader public, however, the platforms can intensify political polarization and social divisiveness, or circulate disinformation. Anyone in the United States may download uCampaign apps, Mr. Peters said, but they give a campaign the ability to bar interlopers who post messages challenging the campaign's positions. The Great America app juxtaposes a mix of enthusiastic posts about Mr. Trump and photos of puppies with anti immigrant memes like "Today's illegals, tomorrow's Democrats." One recent post, with an image depicting nooses, read: "Noose flash: Treason still punishable by death." The Great America app also hosts a ritual called "Fake News Friday," in which it awards "Trump points" to users who post liberal bashing, mainstream media trashing memes. "Is this the beginning of the political Balkanization of digital engagement technologies?" asked Michael Slaby, a communications strategist who oversaw technology for President Barack Obama's national campaigns. "Given the tribalism of current American politics, it's possible." Dan Backer, general counsel for the Great America PAC, said the app was a place for like minded Trump supporters to socialize and entertain themselves. It has also enabled the campaign to quickly and inexpensively engage supporters. Since 2017, the Great America PAC has paid uCampaign about 108,000 for development and monthly service fees. Democratic candidates have also used consumer facing apps to promote their political campaigns and advocacy. But the main election apps currently used on the left such as MiniVAN, built by NGP VAN, a leading technology provider to Democrats are geared more narrowly for campaign volunteers engaging in door to door canvassing, an activity where they can woo and record details on individual voters. Many are not designed to create lasting social communities. This year, Democratic campaigns are also embracing peer to peer text messaging, a technology that may engage younger voters more than stand alone candidate apps do. Not to be outdone, uCampaign recently started its own peer to peer texting platform, RumbleUp, for conservative campaigns. Mr. Peters, a Catholic blogger and former web developer, said he hadn't set out to become the go to app maker for conservatives. In 2012, he was working as a conservative activist in Washington and grew frustrated with the success of the Obama campaign's digital outreach efforts. The Obama campaign had a smartphone app that supporters could use to follow campaign news, volunteer, canvas voters and promote campaign messages on social media. Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger, had an app whose central feature was a photo filter allowing supporters to take selfies with the slogan "I'm with Mitt." Mr. Peters was not impressed. "It did not do the one thing I wanted it to do," he said, which was to "help win the election for Mitt Romney by asking me to donate money to them, to post things to social media, to invite my friends and family to register to vote to do all of the things, basically, that the Obama app did." In the United States, apps developed by uCampaign have been downloaded more than 500,000 times. A Republican polling company, WPA Intelligence, is behind Senator Cruz's campaign app. The N.R.A. and Great America apps, which enable users to friend and message one another, have developed cultures with their own parlance and rituals. In their posts, users sometimes greet one another as "deplorables" or "fellow patriots" and refer to liberals as enemies, "libtards" or traitors. Conspiracy theories including memes against the financier George Soros abound. The midterm elections are not about Democrats vs. Republicans but, as one N.R.A. app poster put it, "socialism vs. freedom." Outsiders, for their part, can keep out. Soon after a reporter for The New York Times contacted 10 users via the apps, a person with the user name Deplorable Dee posted on the Great America news feed: "Troll Alert!!! New York Times asking for interviews, do not communicate with these libtards." Only one user, Ken Kumerle, a car rental agent in South Carolina who has earned more than 366,000 points on the N.R.A. app, agreed to be interviewed for this article. "They all seem very patriotic to me," Mr. Kumerle said of the members of the N.R.A. app community. "I go in every day and try to do something, post or send a tweet." The apps are being deployed as larger tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, are under scrutiny over how they share and secure their users' data. Facebook, which is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for allowing third party apps to obtain personal information about users' friends, has taken steps to restrict what user data can be pulled off the platform. By tracking their users' activities, political apps can collect a wealth of data about them and their social circles outside Facebook's control. Apps from uCampaign and WPA Intelligence, for instance, ask users for their name, address, phone number and email address. The apps from uCampaign may also collect user names and other details when users post campaign messages from the apps on Twitter or connect their Facebook accounts. In 2016, AggregateIQ paid uCampaign to create the campaign app for Vote Leave, the secessionist side of the British referendum on leaving the European Union. More recently, WPA hired the Canadian company to develop the underlying software used in the Cruz app. The Times tested several of the apps' privacy practices and found that, when a user invited a friend to join uCampaign's N.R.A. app, the app did not send the friend's information to itself or to other companies. But The Times found that a similar feature on WPA's Cruz app sent a friend's contact details to an AggregateIQ domain. Chris Wilson, the chief executive of WPA Intelligence, said his company, not AggregateIQ, received and controlled app users' information. Some political apps, including from uCampaign, also ask users who want to send friends campaign messages to share their contacts. If a user agrees, the app can try to match the contacts to profiles of likely voters, using information provided by a political campaign. As an example, Mr. Peters, the chief executive, described how the Trump app in 2016 was able to match 68 of his 900 contacts to voters in swing states. "It asked me to send a text to my mom in Michigan saying, 'Only Trump has a plan to repeal Obamacare,'" Mr. Peters said. "But it asked me to send an email to a friend in Florida saying that 'only Trump has a plan to build the wall.'" Mr. Peters turned some of those features, like inviting friends, into a way for users to collect points and gain status within the group. He began incorporating gamelike features into his company's apps in 2014 as a way to get supporters to participate in political activities. In July, for instance, the N.R.A. app began offering users 100 points for tweeting a slogan urging their senators to support Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court. The messages have since been have tweeted more than 13,300 times.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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On two magazine covers the singer Zayn Malik has graced in the last few months for Billboard and L'Uomo Vogue (as well as the racy video with his girlfriend, Gigi Hadid) he looks every bit the young brooding pop star. The requisite smoldering stare, perfectly manicured stubble and bad boy tattoos are all in tow. Zayn Malik sported gray locks for the cover of Billboard magazine. And then there's the hair. Mr. Malik, 23, a former member of the musical group One Direction, peers out in both images from beneath a silver mane. This isn't a case of a young man going prematurely gray, but a premeditated decision by the performer, who has a penchant for dyeing his hair and then broadcasting it to his 6.5 million Instagram followers. Gus Kenworthy, the Olympic freestyle skier who came out as gay last year on the cover of ESPN magazine, debuted an ashen dye job in December on his Instagram account, thanking Anderson Cooper, the CNN news anchor, for the inspiration, adding the hashtag 50shadesofgay. Gone are the days when guys would actively avoid graying hair. For a new generation of adventurous men, dyeing one's hair gray is gaining traction, appropriating a naturally occurring phenomenon from older men and giving it a millennial twist. "Men are embracing color more in a general way," said Amie Rau, a stylist at Matthew Morris Salon in Denver, who dyed Mr. Kenworthy's hair. "This is an extension of that." Both Mr. Malik and Mr. Kenworthy declined to be interviewed for this article. Ms. Rau said that since their first session, Mr. Kenworthy had brought in an image of a young woman with dyed gray hair as inspiration. "He kept asking me, 'Is it crazy that I want to do this?'" After the ESPN cover, 24 year old Mr. Kenworthy went to Ms. Rau to go platinum blond. "I said: 'You know, you just came out to an entire nation. You should do what you want to do,"' she recalled saying. Gray and silver hair has definitely been trending, said Aura Friedman, a senior hair colorist at Sally Hershberger Salon in New York. "The demographic of guys who come to me to go gray are doing it more as a fashion statement," she said, as opposed to a more natural look. Ms. Friedman has dyed the hair of Phillip Picardi, the digital editorial director of Teen Vogue, and Drew Elliott, the chief creative officer for Paper magazine, among others. Interest definitely seems to be up. A representative from Amazon said it had seen a threefold increase in the last year in customers searching for gray hair dye. "It's kind of an ironic statement, especially when the wearer is noticeably young and probably years away from natural graying," said Michael Fisher, creative director of men's wear at Fashion Snoops, the trend forecasting agency. "It's just another bold way to stand out from the crowd." Tyler Oakley, 26, the social media personality who parlayed his online cachet into the documentary "Snervous" and book "Binge" last year, has experimented with his hair color, adopting many shades, from purple to green. "Gray is the favorite color I've ever had," he said. "It was unique and fun, but it's not eye catching in the way that like lilac or mint was. When I had those colors, I felt like everyone was looking at me. With gray, I felt like I was trying on a new look but it was also relatively natural." Celebrities aren't the only ones to take the plunge. Admittedly, part of that is because of the positive response he received from friends and on social media, getting 90 "likes" on his Instagram account. "Of course, my mom doesn't like it," Mr. Vasquez said with a laugh. Achieving the silver fox look is an involved process. "In the industry we call it a bleach and tone or a double process," Ms. Friedman said, referring to a two part procedure in which the hair is first stripped of its natural pigment and then colored, an undertaking that can last eight hours and is often costly. While there is a range in prices depending on hair length and color, Ms. Friedman estimated that going gray would start at 350 at most salons. (She estimated a session for her services would be 600.) And that doesn't take into account upkeep. "It does require a lot of maintenance, going back to the salon for touch ups and conditioning it at home with the right products in between appointments," she said. The continued care also requires commitment, Ms. Rau said. "It's like owning a pet," she said. Tyler Oakley, at Out100 in November 2014, wearing it gray. However, because there are so many shades of gray from those with bluish undertones to more natural variations the color must be versatile enough to compliment a variety of skin tones. "When you've got gray hair, every move you make seems 'young' and 'spry,'" Andy Warhol said in his 1975 book "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B Back Again)" to explain his decision to dye his hair gray in his early 20s, a look that became his calling card. "It's like you're getting a new talent." While there aren't many precedents for young men co opting the hoary coifs of their elders, trendsetting women like the fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson, the pop star Grimes and Tilda Swinton have all embraced a faux gray. "It has nothing to do with wanting to look old," said Mr. Fisher of Fashion Snoops. "We are in the midst of a time when guys are breaking their own boundaries and really finding new ways to express themselves. Having gray hair plays right into that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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There Are Wasps in the Yard. You'd Better Get to Know Them. Wasps get a bad rap. And sometimes, they deserve it. Bumblebees don't swarm your barbecue the moment you pour the lemonade. Butterflies won't nest by the hundreds in your rafters, then sting you for the crime of walking by. But they're not all "murder hornets," and there's another side to these so called pests. Wasps have a place in the whirl of summer life. They raise families, stage complex battles royal and make paper with their own spit. Some even help us by hunting caterpillars and other crop munching bugs. They're also your neighbors. As you're mowing, gardening or dining al fresco this summer, you'll probably meet some of them. Here's how to appreciate and not tick off these creatures we share the season with. Uninvited guests have arrived at your picnic. They're striped and kind of stocky, with black dots on their faces. They're German yellowjackets, and they will not leave you alone. There is method in their madness. Are they hovering around your ham sandwich? They're looking for protein to bring to larvae back at the nest. Trying to hijack your soda can? They want to slurp up the sugar, which powers their surprisingly zippy flight. Beer or wine is even more tempting, because it reminds them of their favorite treat, fermenting fruit. "They seem like they're trying to ruin our day," said Jennifer Jandt, a zoologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who has studied the species for years. "In actuality, they're just foraging." Why are there so many of them at this time of year? Like ants and honeybees, German yellowjackets are social insects. Each colony is founded by a single queen, who starts laying eggs in late spring and doesn't stop until her death, in autumn. Most of these eggs become workers, who spend the summer feeding their proliferating population of younger siblings: grabbing live caterpillars, bits of roadkill or your tuna salad, then chewing it into mincemeat for the next generation. German yellowjackets make short work of carcasses and rotting produce, Dr. Jandt said: "They're really important decomposers." The invasive species, which first established itself on the East Coast about 50 years ago, is now found across much of the country and is the dominant yellowjacket in many states. If one is trying to dominate your picnic as well, Dr. Jandt suggests playing along. "Let it land, let it do its thing," she said. When she collected data for her master's thesis at the University of Wisconsin Madison, she shared a P.B. and J. with her research subjects every day, an experience she said helped her learn to appreciate the insects' personalities, and "really forced me to be calm all the time." But if, instead of a few foragers, you find yourself dealing with an endless, vengeful stream of yellowjackets, you might have accidentally disturbed a nest. These are hidden underground, or in attics, ceilings or walls, and can be home to thousands of insects. Vibrating a nest is the insect equivalent of setting off a security alarm: Now you're the uninvited guest, and it's time to leave. "Odds are pretty good that if you stumble across a wasp nest, you're going to get stung at least about 10 times while running away," said Dr. Jandt, whose research now focuses on why some wasp colonies are more aggressive than others. A tan mass in the shape of an amphora is hanging from a tree. It brings to mind Winnie the Pooh, who in cartoons often seeks out such structures, assuming they're filled with honey. "Winnie the Pooh gets it wrong," said Norman Patterson, a wasp removal specialist based in Connecticut. "They don't have honey." If the Hundred Acre Wood were the real world, Pooh Bear would reach into the nest and instead scoop out a pawful of bald faced hornets. Bald faced hornets, which are technically yellowjackets but nest above ground, are found in much of the United States. They're named for the black and white patches on their heads, as if they're wearing Guy Fawkes masks. While you might find their iconic summer homes in a tree in your yard, some tuck them under the eaves of houses or hide them cheekily in ornamental hedges. Construction begins in late spring, when a queen builds a small core nest and lays a batch of eggs. By early summer, these eggs have hatched into workers. The workers scrape up wood pulp, sometimes from nearby decks or fences, and chew it to form long ribbons. They then add these strips to the nest one at a time a collaborative, midair papier mache project. A single bald faced hornet dwelling may grow to the size of a rugby ball. It can house hundreds of workers, including a cadre of guards primed to defend it. Mr. Patterson is regularly called to remove these nests, which he said people often come upon "the hard way, when they're trimming their bushes." (He recommends all summer yard work be preceded by a check for wasp traffic.) Mr. Patterson supplies these and other wasps to medical labs, which harvest their venom and use it to create immunizations for people who are allergic to stings. So he captures the bugs alive, usually with a vacuum. If he finds a nest full of larvae, he will take them home and raise them before shipping them off. He's not alone in seeing the good in bald faced hornets. Farmers often like a nest or two around, because bald faced hornets like most wasps are good at pest control. (Mr. Patterson has seen one pluck a fly straight from a cow's back.) But nests in busy areas should always be removed, Mr. Patterson said. If yours is out of the way, though, and you feel like spicing up your summer, "just leave it and watch it," he said. But don't touch. Longer and skinnier than yellowjackets, paper wasps are distinguished by their back legs, which hang down when they fly like a "pair of pants," said Megan Asche, an entomology Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University. There are a number of paper wasp species native to particular areas of the United States, as well as an invasive one, a European variety that has spread nationwide since its arrival in the 1970s. Paper wasps have complex social lives. While some colonies are founded by one wasp, many start out with a few queens, who brawl to establish dominance. The winner lays most of the eggs, and the others shoulder most of the foraging, maintenance and child care. Elizabeth Tibbetts, a biologist at the University of Michigan who studies paper wasp behavior, is investigating how the insects form these hierarchies. She has found that Northern paper wasps can recognize one another, thanks to distinct markings on their faces. More recently, Dr. Tibbetts found that Northern paper wasps can also "keep track of a social network of interaction," she said: Even if they haven't fought a particular queen, they have an idea of her strength from watching her fight others and will treat her accordingly. "You have to be pretty smart to be able to do that," she said. The males have their own rituals. Each fall, male European paper wasps in the Southern United States gather in huge swarms at the tallest point they can find to wait for potential mates. This could be a high rise building, a granary or an amusement park ride. On military bases or at airports, it's often an air traffic control tower. Male wasps can't sting. But this behavior is understandably distressing to people who witness it, including those working inside the control towers. "They really freak people out," Ms. Asche said. So Ms. Asche, whose research is funded by a grant from the United States Air Force, is also doing behavioral studies, testing whether the wasps can learn to associate a particular scent with a reward. (If they can, the scent could be used to trap them or to lure them away.) In the lab, without a home to defend or larvae to raise, they are "a pleasure to work with," she said, and spend most days lounging in the sun "like little tiny cats." Outside the lab, they aren't so bad, either. They're pretty uninterested in picnic food, and "you have to try hard" to be stung by them, Dr. Tibbetts said. But they are "very, very comfortable around human dwellings," and like to build their small, open nests in places like porch rafters, Ms. Asche said. If you don't want European paper wasps near your house, you don't need a military style intervention, just some forethought. In the springtime, if a small nest with just a few paper wasps appears in your eaves, wait for a cool morning below 60 degrees and "just take a stick and knock it down," she said. The queens, who don't fly in cold weather, will fall down with it. Then they will build a home somewhere else. But if it's summertime, best to call a professional. When they do, many people "become concerned," Dr. Raupp said. Some are put off by their size. Others confuse them with other large wasp species, like the Asian giant hornet, which kill honeybees and have a very painful sting. (In the United States, Asian giant hornets have not been found outside Washington State. Yet.) Cicada killers aren't aggressive and can be quite fun to watch, Dr. Raupp said. But their lifestyle is a bit gnarly. After mating with a male, a female will dig a burrow, called a gallery, in soft dirt, perhaps a flower bed. She will then head up to the treetops. When the wasp finds a cicada, she will sting it, paralyzing her prey without killing it. She will then carry it home. If you wait patiently near her hole, you can see her "fly back with this ginormous cicada," often as big as she is, Dr. Raupp said. "You wonder how in the world they can even lift this thing." The wasp will drag her prey into her gallery and lay an egg. She seems to know the sex of the egg ahead of time and apportions cicadas appropriately: one or two for males, and two or three for the much larger females. When the egg hatches, the larva will eat the still living lunch. (Charles Darwin, lover of most life forms, once wrote that the existence of similar wasp species that prey on caterpillars made it hard for him to believe in "a beneficent and omnipotent God.") After its meal, the larva spins a cocoon and stays put, staying underground for the remainder of the summer, autumn, winter and spring until its re emergence as an adult next year, Dr. Raupp said. As summer wanes, colony life for German yellowjackets, bald faced hornets and paper wasps also starts to slow down. In the fall, you may notice a rush of workers fending for themselves, seeking sugar where they can. By the time winter comes, the queens will be hibernating; the males and workers dead; and the old nests abandoned. But if you missed them, don't be sad. They'll all come back next year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Mark Scott had spent all of his working life in Atlanta. He bought a house, then downsized to a 1,200 square foot two bedroom apartment in a condominium tower downtown. "It was a very urban environment, which is rare in Atlanta," he said. "Most people lived in houses. I lived in this high rise building and I loved it." But Mr. Scott, who is head of communications for eVestment, a financial data company, hankered for even more city life. So he arranged for a transfer to his company's New York office. With a budget topping out in the 300,000s, Mr. Scott, 49, focused on one bedrooms in northern Manhattan. He needed a dog friendly elevator building for his elderly dogs, Fred and Colby. Even so, he wanted a low floor, because an out of service elevator would mean he would have to carry the dogs. His measure of a place that would increase in value? A nearby Starbucks. So he made good use of Google Maps, checking locations. "I think Starbucks is a harbinger of an up and coming neighborhood," he said. "They do a lot more research than I could." Mr. Scott flew up for a weekend of apartment hunting. With the help of an agent, he considered a 750 square foot one bedroom with a sunken living room in a 1939 co op on Park Terrace West in Inwood at Manhattan's northern tip. The asking price was 325,000, with monthly maintenance of almost 800. But it was on the ground floor, right on the street. He thought the dogs might bark if they heard pedestrians outside. And to his way of thinking, Inwood was lacking in shopping and restaurants. (The price later dropped to 288,000.) The apartment was 285,000, with monthly maintenance of 800. His offer of 269,000 was accepted, but the co op board was unresponsive. "I ended up pulling that one," he said. "I couldn't wait forever." The co op buying process "seemed fraught with uncertainty," Mr. Scott said. "I didn't want that stress and hostility to be my first experience buying real estate in New York." So he decided to hunt for condominiums exclusively, knowing he would get a smaller space for a higher price. He raised his top price to the 400,000s. And, with so much information online, he decided there was no reason to fly back and forth. "I didn't need to see it in person," Mr. Scott said. "People are buying apartments in hundred million dollar buildings based on floor plans." Without leaving home, he viewed a place listed for 400,000 in a small, fully renovated building on West 152nd Street in Hamilton Heights, which is a part of Harlem. The square footage was just over 500; monthly charges were just over 400. His offer of 397,000 was accepted. But the process stalled. "There's going to be hiccups in every real estate transaction," he said. "But I felt this could be more of an explosion." He feared losing his down payment of 40,000 if the closing didn't happen on time. So he backed out. That one sold for 408,000. It was time for a clean slate. So Mr. Scott contacted Jon Amundsen, a salesman at the Corcoran Group, to whom he was referred by an acquaintance. The two men emailed constantly with listings and photographs. One place seemed right. A 1921 building, undergoing a full renovation, was in a good location in central Harlem. It was across from Jackie Robinson Park, ideal for the dogs; its website even displayed a Starbucks sign. A one bedroom there, of almost 600 square feet, had both a washer dryer and a dishwasher. "Sometimes you'd find one and not the other, and a lot of times not either, so I was excited to get both," Mr. Scott said. The listing price was 410,000, with monthly fees in the mid 500s. "I was a little worried because he was not going to see this until he picked up the keys," Mr. Amundsen said. He emphasized that the apartment faced the back and was five blocks from the subway. "I would try to come up with obstacles for him to consider, but he seemed to be O.K. with it," Mr. Amundsen said. "I would try to give him an out." Mr. Scott would have none of it. He purchased the apartment in the summer, sight unseen, for the asking price. The drive north was nerve racking. "What if the ceiling is super low or if the building smelled funny? All of these things went through my mind about what could possibly go wrong," he said. "But obviously not enough to make me not do it." His fears were groundless. "I've been delighted with the building and the neighborhood," he said. He knew he would have no street view, but likes being on a low floor. Even so, the dogs always take the elevator, which so far has not failed them. Moving many items would have cost more than replacing them, so he was glad to find the Bronx Terminal Market, with its big box stores, right across the 145th Street Bridge. He thought such stores would be out in the suburbs. "It is nice to know there is an affordable place to go and you don't have to go to an artisan towel boutique," he said. The dogs play in the park, where Mr. Scott has met quite a few neighbors. "And," he said, "I see them at Starbucks later."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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BRUSSELS Google may have abused its dominance in Internet search by promoting its own businesses at the expense of competitors, the European Commission said Monday. It warned the company to propose changes in "a matter of weeks" to its method of answering user queries, or possibly face an antitrust lawsuit. Search is the crucial tool that sends consumers to new restaurants and hotels, cheap airplane flights, and local services as varied as plumbers or baby sitters. In issuing the ultimatum, European regulators sent their strongest signal yet that they believe Google, which has long said its search results are neutral, tips the scales in its favor. "The Europeans are saying to Google: 'Time's up. Cave in or we'll sue,' " said Keith N. Hylton, an antitrust expert at the Boston University School of Law. A Google spokesman said the company disagreed with the commission's conclusions and said "innovation online has never been greater." If Google decides to fight, the case could fuel a fledging Federal Trade Commission investigation. United States regulators have been working closely with the European officials, speaking by phone at least weekly. Google is the dominant search engine in the United States and holds even greater sway in Europe, accounting for four of every five searches on the Continent. Joaquin Almunia, the European antitrust chief, said at a news conference here that regulators had identified "four concerns where Google business practices may be considered as abuses of dominance." He said Google might have unfairly exploited its market position by displaying links to its own services, like Google maps or images, when it answers a query, giving preference to them over those of competitors. He also said Google included material in its own search results that was copied from competitors' Web sites. The other two areas of concern involve how Google conducts its advertising business, including how it delivers search ads on partner sites. Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for FairSearch, a coalition of 17 companies including Microsoft, said the group was "pleased that the commission has identified some serious concerns with Google's anticompetitive behavior." If Google does make concessions in Europe, computer users could notice a greater variety of Web services displayed on their computer screens besides those offered by Google, said Nicolas Petit, a law professor at the University of Liege in Belgium. Mr. Petit drew a comparison with an earlier European requirement for Microsoft to include a raft of competing Web browsers as part of its operating system as a way of trying to curb Microsoft from promoting its own software products. 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. Antitrust fines in Europe can reach up to 10 percent of a company's annual global revenue. Google's revenue was nearly 38 billion last year. Mr. Almunia's office also can demand far reaching changes to the way companies run their businesses. Antitrust experts expressed surprise at the rare public offer by the commission, which reflects the delicate balance regulators are trying to strike as they seek to fix problems in the fast changing technology marketplace before proposed remedies lose their relevance. Mr. Almunia's move, some said, was a new phase in aggressive European antitrust enforcement. There may be a need to act swiftly, said Paul Lugard, the former head of antitrust at Philips, the giant Dutch electronics company, and now an assistant professor at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management in the Netherlands. But he said he was concerned that "this form of highly unusual public encouragement in the full glare of the media puts even more pressure on companies like Google to settle early rather than contest charges that they really do think are groundless." Neither Google nor Mr. Almunia described what kinds of offers or changes in search methods could lead to a settlement in the case. Instead, each side appeared to hold out the prospect that it was prepared to walk away from negotiations. Both sides are likely to want to avoid the decade long case the commission undertook against Microsoft, which ended up paying 2 billion in penalties and fines. Mr. Almunia declined to comment in any detail on potential concerns about Google's Android operating system, which the company has used to move into the leading position among mobile phone operating systems. "It's an ongoing investigation," Mr. Almunia said, referring to Android. Ominously for Google, those comments suggest that the company could face yet more pressure from the European authorities to change its practices in another facet of its business. Sources close to the United States investigation have said regulators may be focusing on whether Google has strong armed phone manufacturers using the Android system to offer only Google search on their phones. The F.T.C. last month hired a litigator to examine the evidence against Google and, if deemed sufficient, file charges against the company. Long before that decision is made, weeks of hard discussions will take place behind closed doors in Brussels involving Mr. Almunia and his investigators, and lawyers, engineers and executives from Google. Al Verney, a Google spokesman, said competition on the Web had increased sharply in the two years since the commission began examining the company's practices. That highlights how "the competitive pressures Google faces are tremendous," he said. While Google has faced new rivals, most notably Microsoft, which has plowed billions of dollars into its Bing search engine, the company's share of the market has been surprisingly durable in recent years. In the United States during March, Google accounted for 66.4 percent of searches, up slightly from 65.7 percent during the same month in 2011, and 65.1 percent for that month in 2010, according to comScore.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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Very much so. The United States government provided 1 billion in support for the design and testing of the Moderna vaccine. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health oversaw much of the research, including the clinical trials. Moderna also received an additional 1.5 billion in exchange for 100 million doses if the vaccine proved to be safe and effective. Although Pfizer has its own advance purchase agreement for its vaccine, it did not take money from Operation Warp Speed to support its design or testing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Beyonce is on tour, Drake is setting streaming records and Taylor Swift has split up with her boyfriend. But next week, the most gripping news for the music industry may come out of a federal courtroom in Los Angeles. There, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin will be defending themselves against a lawsuit claiming that parts of "Stairway to Heaven" the band's signature hit and a pillar of rock radio since the song's release in 1971 were copied from "Taurus," an instrumental tune by the lesser known group Spirit. The trial, set to start on June 14 with Mr. Page and Mr. Plant expected to be in attendance, may prove fascinating legal theater for fans. But it will also be closely watched by a music business that is grappling with a series of recent copyright decisions. Last year, a federal jury found that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had copied Marvin Gaye in Mr. Thicke's 2013 hit song "Blurred Lines," and ordered Mr. Thicke and Mr. Williams to pay 7.4 million (later reduced to 5.3 million). Industry commentators said the decision penalized elements of songs long thought of as being fair game, like the generic "feel" of a recording, and warned of a chilling effect on creativity. That case and others like it, lawyers and music executives say, have raised new questions about songwriting and copyright issues long a part of the background of litigation in the industry. They have also led to increased scrutiny whenever a song's credits are challenged or changed, as they were a year ago when co writers were quietly added to Mark Ronson's retro hit "Uptown Funk." "It used to be that melody and lyrics were the basis of all infringement claims, but now that's fuzzier," said Jay Rosenthal, a music industry lawyer and the former general counsel of the National Music Publishers' Association. "'Blurred Lines' has opened the door and made rhythm and beats and 'feel' perhaps proprietary, where before it was not the case." The Led Zeppelin case was filed two years ago by a trustee representing the songs of Randy Wolfe, also known as Randy California, one of Spirit's main songwriters, who died in 1997. But the dispute has echoes of "Blurred Lines" and is being watched as a test of the limits of copyright. The case focuses on the famous opening of "Stairway to Heaven," in which an acoustic guitar plays arpeggiated chords in a descending pattern. That part, the suit contends, copied Spirit's "Taurus," released in 1968. In the suit's complaint, Francis Malofiy, the lead lawyer representing the plaintiff, said that Led Zeppelin's members heard Spirit's song when the bands crossed paths on the road early in their careers. The suit, filed on behalf of Michael Skidmore, the trustee, accused Led Zeppelin of copyright infringement and the novel claim (duly struck down by the judge) of "falsification of rock 'n' roll history." Mr. Malofiy has said that he is seeking as much as 40 million in damages. Mr. Wolfe never pursued a lawsuit during his lifetime. But Mr. Skidmore, a customs consultant and former music journalist who has controlled Mr. Wolfe's trust since 2009, filed the case in 2014, shortly after a Supreme Court ruling that said that copyright infringement cases could proceed even after long delays. Mr. Page and Mr. Plant deny ever having heard "Taurus" before the case came to light and say that "Stairway to Heaven" was written independently. Yet over the years, the band has settled numerous challenges of plagiarism by adding other songwriters' credits to its albums. In 2012, for example, the band settled a suit by Jake Holmes over "Dazed and Confused," and subsequent releases of the song on Led Zeppelin's albums list it as being written by Mr. Page and "inspired by Jake Holmes." 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. Whatever happens with the Led Zeppelin trial, the industry is still trying to understand the effects of the "Blurred Lines" case, which is under appeal. Matt Pincus, the chief executive of Songs Music Publishing, an independent publisher that works with current pop and hip hop acts like the Weeknd and Desiigner, said his company was seeing far more claims of infringement now most made privately, outside of court than ever before. But the reasons were not clear, he said. "It could be opportunism, because lawyers are smelling blood," Mr. Pincus said. "But it could also be because we have moved to a real collaboration economy now, where pop records have multiple collaborators in a way that they didn't five or six years ago." Those collaborators may dispute credits or royalties after the fact. Richard S. Busch, the lawyer who represented the Gaye family in the "Blurred Lines" case, said that each copyright case succeeded or failed on its own merits, and he disputed the idea that his case has had any negative impact on the music industry. "The fact that maybe some people are being caught now that wouldn't be, or are being pursued now that wouldn't be, is not a bad thing," Mr. Busch said. "But the idea that 'Blurred Lines' has opened up the floodgates is absurd, and I would suspect that those who are claiming this may have an agenda to take that position." Donald S. Passman, a top music lawyer who wrote the book "All You Need to Know About the Music Business," called the "Blurred Lines" case "aberrational" and suggested that its long term impact may be minimal. "To me, it's like you're driving along the highway at 65 miles an hour at night," Mr. Passman said. "You see an accident, slow down, and 15 minutes later, you're back at full speed. It's more like that." The judge in the Led Zeppelin case, R. Gary Klausner of United States District Court, has ruled that the band's past problems with copyright cannot be presented at trial, and Mr. Malofiy, the plaintiff's lawyer, may face other challenges as well. Since the case focuses on songwriting, rather than on the recording of the song, the jury must base its decision on the written version of "Taurus" that was used to register its copyright. As in the "Blurred Lines" trial, the jury may hear versions of the two songs as presented by music experts retained by both sides. In a sideshow to the trial itself, the lawyers have been battling in public and through filings with the court. In the most recent volley, Mr. Malofiy accused Mr. Page and Mr. Plant of "refusing to appear" at the trial. But in a filing, Led Zeppelin's lawyers, Peter J. Anderson and Helene Freeman, called Mr. Malofiy's claims "a P.R. stunt in the hope of tainting the jury pool," and said that Mr. Page and Mr. Plant would be present. Mr. Anderson and Ms. Freeman declined to comment. But in a brief interview, Mr. Malofiy called their most recent filing "100 percent bluster." Led Zeppelin also argues that the commonalities between the songs are generic elements in musical composition that go back decades, and the core of the pieces in question are little more than a basic chord progression.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Brian Williams is getting his own show on MSNBC at least for a couple of months. Mr. Williams, the former anchor of "NBC Nightly News," will anchor a daily 11 p.m. show that will offer news and analysis during the final weeks of the presidential election, according to an MSNBC executive briefed on the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the network was not ready to discuss the show publicly. The live show will begin in September and will last through the election, the person said. It is unclear if the network has plans to give Mr. Williams a show after the election. The news of Mr. Williams getting a dedicated time slot was earlier reported by CNN. Mr. Williams has spent the last year as MSNBC's breaking news anchor and as a co host during primary night coverage and the conventions. Despite the roughly 245 hours he has appeared on air in that time, Mr. Williams has still had a relatively low profile in the year and a half since he was removed as NBC's evening news anchor after it was revealed that he embellished his role in a helicopter incident in Iraq, along with other reporting experiences.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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In designing his 1907 campus for the City College of New York at Amsterdam Avenue and 138th Street, George B. Post must have felt like the ham in a sandwich. He was working between McKim, Mead White's lofty, imperial Roman style Columbia College and their demure Renaissance style campus for New York University's Bronx branch, now Bronx Community College. Post didn't outclassical them, instead designing in a rugged, combative Gothic style in Manhattan schist, set off with brilliant white terra cotta. A show of Post's drawings and photographs for his unusual campus will open in February at City College. Founded in 1847, the tuition free City College was the poor cousin of Columbia College and New York University, where elite young men trained for refined careers. Both Columbia and N.Y.U. started out as purely urban universities, but in the early 1890s, N.Y.U. began to campaign to become a residential college; Columbia followed suit after the resignation of its president, Seth Low, in 1901. The children of immigrants flooding the city schools didn't fit their Oxford/Cambridge models of scholarship, sports and clubs, and to matriculate at the new campuses, you needed money for both tuition and room and board. City College held an architectural competition in 1897 for its uptown location at Convent Avenue and 138th Street. Post submitted two designs, one in the Gothic style, the very model of the European university, and one a more urbane Beaux Arts version. The trustees went with the Gothic, and centered the campus around Shepard Hall, a colossal quarter circle with a massive assembly hall.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A dance on a rooftop is a mysterious thing. How is it that a roof is more like water than land? The breeze that comes with elevation, the way the air dances around you as you watch bodies in motion, unlocks something that can't be replicated on a stage or even, for some strange reason, on grass. On Sunday, the rooftop in question at the Empire Hotel made up for its small size by location: It was only a half a block away from Lincoln Center, where performances have been on hold since the lockdown began in March. At the Empire, Dancers of N.Y.C.B., a new organization developed to support members of New York City Ballet during the pandemic, presented a benefit performance featuring choreography by former and current company members: Preston Chamblee, Lauren Lovette, Benjamin Millepied, Justin Peck, Janie Taylor and Christopher Wheeldon. The City Ballet dancers Daniel Applebaum and Lauren King produced the program along with Melissa Gerstein, a former dancer whose daughter attends the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet. It was a group effort, initiated by Ms. Gerstein who, during a welcoming speech, took off her mask for a brief moment to scream, "Yes!" (She clearly missed watching live dance as much as the dancers missed dancing.) The stage was a small patch of Marley flooring, with mirrors hanging on two sides of its perimeter to open up the possibility of seeing dancers from different perspectives. Meaghan Dutton O'Hara brave, determined and standing tall in her point shoes led the way with an excerpt from Mr. Wheeldon's enduring "Polyphonia," in which she took care to display every angle with illuminating, fluid sweep. All the dancers wore masks, which made their eyes more pronounced, both to good and distracting effect; Ms. Dutton O'Hara knows how to make hers enhance the steps. Along with excerpts from works by Mr. Millepied and Mr. Peck both serviceable, though neither particularly inspiring were new pieces, beginning with Mr. Chamblee's "An Awaited Breath," set to music by Fanny Mendelssohn, for the dancers Jacqueline Bologna and Cainan Weber. It spoke to the turmoil of the moment, with falls to the floor, deep contractions and imploring arms, yet its images of resignation and hope had a tendency to ramble on. The other two ballets, though just as brief, possessed more point of view. How great is it when the moment a ballet starts, you know exactly who choreographed it? It relates to the choreographers' dancing: From Ms. Taylor, a former City Ballet principal, the quality had to do with a way of melding specificity with wild, carefree abandon; from Ms. Lovette, a current principal, it was the entrancing ability to take positions and loosen them into silken shapes full of power and passion. Ms. Taylor's "Schmaltz for Two" a funny title for such a dramatic but unsentimental dance woke up the space. Anthony Huxley and Kristen Segin, clad in fire engine red polo tops, faced each another, in sync yet apart, as they circled the tiny stage with flexed wrists; suddenly, their feet burst into a spray of small kicks. In this miniature triptych to music by Joaquin Turina, Aaron Copland, Gyorgy Kurtag and Erik Satie, Ms. Segin, gutsy and electric, next appeared alone, using her elastic torso to dart from here to there trailed by her whipping ponytail. She was followed by Mr. Huxley, whose solo full of quick stops and starts made much of his impeccable line and ease of musicality until he, just as she had, collapsed to the floor. The stage become a living canvas as they awoke to Satie: Crawling, sliding and rolling, they eventually made their way upright with a catlike stretch and their arms raised to the sky. Facing each other, they lowered into a first position plie before drooping over their bodies limp like thirsty plants and stepped sideways reaching their arms toward each other as they backed off the stage as if illustrating a lost embrace. Actually, that last bit was a moment of schmaltz. My heart sank. It was a little anticlimactic and even more cliche. Ms. Lovette's "Wound Up Wind Down," set to "Thankyoubranch" by the American Dutch duo the Books, featured another impressive pairing: Lauren Collett and Emma Von Enck, each in belted knitted dance overalls in pale pink and blue. Positioned back to back, they stretched their arms out, bending forward as their limbs buckled and contorted to create a portrait of mingling sensibilities: eccentric and electric. Shapes came fast, sometimes in a way that made the choreography look under rehearsed and blurry. But Ms. Lovette's vision, a meld of classical and jazz dance with strains of folk and the occasional backbend, created a particular kind of space for two women to express, in both energetic and despondent ways, something that we've all been dealing with for the past seven months: being trapped in a room. It couldn't have been a coincidence that each new work had dancers, in some form or another, falling to the floor. Sometimes I feel like doing that, too. But the way these City Ballet dancers banded together handling customer service, laying down a Marley floor on the roof of a hotel, curating a program was encouraging. They put on a show, and at least for one afternoon, they got to dance again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Over the last several years, light emitting therapy masks intended to treat acne have streamed into the marketplace and onto Instagram, filling feeds with pictures of people that resemble space age hockey goalies. Neutrogena's version of the product, which the company said would kill acne bacteria and fight "inflammation," cost between 30 and 40, making it one of the more affordable masks on the market. But earlier this month Neutrogena issued a recall of its masks, citing a "theoretical risk of eye injury" to a subset of people who had underlying eye conditions or were taking medicine that made them sensitive to light. Neutrogena said in a statement that its July 5 recall followed "reports of mild, transient visual adverse events, combined with a growing scientific discussion around the safety of blue light." A spokeswoman said that the "adverse events" had been caused by the Neutrogena masks, though did not specify how many such events had taken place. She also said that no particular study or expert had informed the company's decision to recall the masks. News of the recall was for the most part missed by consumers though a Reddit skin care group member said a month ago that they had seen an internal Neutrogena memo about the planned recall until this week, when the Australian Department of Health issued a consumer level recall and provided more information. The department said in a statement that it "has been identified that, for a small subset of potentially susceptible people (including people with certain eye related disorders e.g. retinitis pigmentosa, ocular albinism, other congenital retinal disorders), repeated exposure may cause varying degrees of retinal damage that could be irreversible and could accelerate peripheral vision impairment or loss." The statement continued: "Other potential adverse events that may be associated with use of this device are eye pain, eye discomfort, eye irritation, tearing, blinding, blurring of vision, seeing spots/flashes and other changes in vision (for example vision color)." Australia's notice advised all consumers, not only those with underlying eye conditions, to stop using the mask. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the agency was "aware of the recall" and was looking into it. The mask was released by Neutrogena in October 2016. Lena Dunham endorsed it on Instagram and said her post was not an advertisement. The product was awarded Best of Beauty in 2017 by Allure magazine. (On social media, celebrities including Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Kourtney Kardashian and Emma Stone have all shared pictures of themselves wearing similar masks made by different manufacturers.) Dr. Rachel Nazarian , with Schweiger Dermatology Group in New York, said that only recently had concerns about blue light cropped up, and that they mostly referred to people who had baseline medical conditions that caused their retinas to be more sensitive to light. But she said that Neutrogena's mask did not offer enough eye protection. While she planned to continue to use LED treatments in her own practice, she said she used much stronger eyewear than was provided by the company. "It shouldn't be used in such a cavalier form," Dr. Nazarian said. "If you're using the right eyewear protection, you should be fine." Dale Needham , the managing director at Aesthetic Technology, a British company that makes LED therapy products under the name Dermalux, agreed with Dr. Nazarian that eye protection on the Neutrogena masks was lacking. Mr. Needham said that, more generally, there were insufficient regulatory standards to ensure the safety of LED lights on such masks. ("We pride ourselves on the LEDs on our device in comparison to other devices that we've measured on the market," he said, explaining at length the deficiencies in the regulatory parameters.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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An electrical device glued to the scalp can slow cancer growth and prolong survival in people with the deadliest type of brain tumor, researchers reported on Saturday. The device is not a cure and, on average, adds only a few months of life when used along with the standard regimen of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Some doctors have questioned its usefulness. But scientists conducting a new study said the device was the first therapy in a decade to extend life in people with glioblastomas, brain tumors in which median survival is 15 months even with the best treatment. The disease affects about 10,000 people a year in the United States and is what killed Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 2009. It is so aggressive and hard to treat that even seemingly small gains in survival are considered important. The new findings mean the device should become part of the standard care offered to all patients with newly diagnosed glioblastomas, the researchers conducting the study said. The equipment consists of four pads carrying transducer arrays that patients glue to their scalps and change every few days. Wires lead to a six pound operating system and power supply. Except for some scalp irritation, the device has no side effects, the study found. But patients have to wear it more or less around the clock and must keep their heads shaved. It generates alternating, low intensity electrical fields so called tumor treating fields that can halt tumor growth by stopping cells from dividing, which leads to their death. The researchers said the technology might also help treat other cancers, and would be tested in mesothelioma and cancers of the lung, ovary, breast and pancreas. The equipment is made by Novocure, a company with headquarters on Jersey, an English island off the coast of France. It also has a research center in Israel and operations in the United States. The company is paying for the study, which involves 700 patients in 12 countries. Novocure's device has been approved in the United States since 2011, but only to treat recurrent glioblastomas, not newly diagnosed ones. It costs 21,000 a month, and some insurers cover it. So far, Novocure has been providing it free to patients without insurance coverage, according to William F. Doyle, the company's executive chairman. The study tested the device in newly diagnosed cases. The results were presented on Saturday in Miami, at a meeting of the Society for Neuro Oncology, by Dr. Roger Stupp, the study director and chairman of the department of oncology and cancer at the University Hospital of Zurich. The data came from the first 315 patients, who were followed from 18 to 60 months. They were assigned at random to one of two groups: 105 received standard treatment alone, usually consisting of surgery, radiation and the chemotherapy drug temozolomide; the other 210 received standard treatment and the electrical device. Patients who wore the device fared better than those who did not: Their median survival was 19.6 months, compared with 16.6 months in those on standard treatment alone. Among those with the device, 43 percent survived two years, compared with 29 percent among those receiving only standard therapy. Maureen Piekanski, 59, has used an electrical device since 2011 to keep an aggressive type of brain tumor at bay. "It was a surprise, and better than we would have expected," Dr. Stupp said in an interview. The study design called for a data analysis partway through to monitor the patients' safety. When the monitoring board saw how much better patients were doing with the electrical fields, it recommended that the study be stopped so that the device could be offered to everyone. It was the first time that a monitoring board had recommended stopping a brain cancer study because one treatment was so much better than another. Dr. Patrick Y. Wen, director of neuro oncology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who was not involved with the study, said that until now, there had been some skepticism among doctors about the treatment. But "these results seem real," Dr. Wen said. "With these results, I think more people would definitely use it." Dana Farber does not use the device, he said, but with the new data, "I think some patients will probably want to have it, and we will probably plan to use it going forward." A three month increase in survival may not sound like much, he said, "but for our patients, it's not trivial." Another neuro oncologist not associated with the study, Dr. Nicholas Butowski of the University of California, San Francisco, described the Novocure device as "polarizing" and said, "Some of my colleagues just do not believe in it." But Dr. Butowski added: "Perhaps it does work in some patients. It's got logic behind it." He said he would use it, though he suspected that the benefit was relatively small. He also described the device as being in its infancy, and said he expected that Novocure would find ways to make it more effective. Maureen Piekanski, 59, a glioblastoma patient and study participant from Throop, Pa., learned about the device from her daughter, a nurse, who had combed the Internet for glioblastoma studies. "It appealed to me because it was noninvasive and it wasn't going to make me sick," Ms. Piekanski said. "It was worth a try. I had nothing to lose." Before making her decision, Ms. Piekanski consulted several doctors, and one told her that she might as well put sewage on her head. She joined the study anyway, because she knew that even with the best available treatment, her outlook was bleak. She said her radiologist had told her, "If you get 15 months, you did good." She has been wearing the device since August 2011 more than three years. Her tumor is gone, and the disease has not returned. She has M.R.I. scans every two months. "I get two months at a time, always thinking I might have a recurrence," she said. There is no way to tell whether the device has been keeping her alive, or whether she would have done just as well without it. But when she completed the period she had signed up for in the study, and the researchers told her that she could stop wearing the device if she wanted to, she said, "Oh, yeah, I'm keeping it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Paul Shaffer will host a two night tribute to the Bottom Line, which closed in 2004 after three decades as a landmark Greenwich Village nightclub, as part of the Schimmel Center's 2017 2018 season. The tribute, on Oct. 13 and 14, will feature two nights of nostalgia for a different era in New York's night life. Musicians including David Bromberg, David Johansen, Christine Lavin, Darlene Love, Terre Roche and Jimmy Vivino will swap stories and perform in celebration of the club that shaped many of their careers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Is an Opportunity Zone the Right Investment for You? The hottest pitch in real estate is the opportunity zone, one of 8,700 geographic areas in the United States in need of economic investment. Opportunity zones encompass three enticements that make real estate attractive to professional investors: the promise of change in underserved areas, the chance of an outsize investment return and the opportunity for a huge tax break. But confusion arose over how to invest in the opportunity zones, which were designated in the 2017 tax overhaul. Guidance from the Treasury Department, released last month, helped clarify how investments in these zones would work. It also acted as a green light for managers raising money for funds to invest in these. There's just one big catch. To maximize the tax benefits, investors are restricted to a holding period five, seven or 10 years, depending on the tax break which limits their ability to sell the real estate. Wealth advisers said this restriction should raise more caution, but it hasn't. Investors are not asking essential questions. They need to consider that the property market in an opportunity zone could be depressed when it is time to sell. If the investments sour, there may be a rush to dump them in Year 10. They also need to consider their investment strategy: whether to maximize returns or increase social benefit. Unlike buying shares of Apple or Google, which you can sell whenever you'd like or hold on to forever, investing in an opportunity zone has a set of time hurdles set by the special tax treatment. Because the guidelines are so strict, Frazer Rice, senior wealth strategist at Calamos Wealth Management, recommends working with experienced managers. "They need local relationships because these places don't have a good track record," he said. "You need something beyond real estate experience." What has piqued the interest of fund managers is not necessarily the effect their investments could have in a neighborhood or the return on the real estate. Instead, it is the way the tax incentive has been structured. Investors who roll over money with embedded gains from other investments into an opportunity zone before the end of this year can defer taxes on those gains for years. If the money remains invested for five years, investors get a 10 percent break on the gains; after seven years, the tax break rises to 15 percent. On top of that, the gains in the opportunity zone investment itself are tax free after 10 years. So if a 1 million investment is worth 2.5 million after a decade, the investor has a 1.5 million tax free gain. And none of that takes into account the depreciation and other tax benefits that come with owning real estate. The Treasury Department also clarified what qualified as work done in an opportunity zone. When the legislation came out, investors wondered whether any business activity could occur outside that zone. Requiring all work to be done in a depressed area would have helped the community but would have also made achieving high returns more difficult for investors. The new guidance provided by Treasury officials used more relaxed tests that looked at hours, wages or tangible property. Other reasons would also be considered, said Marla Miller, managing director in the national tax office at BDO. That meant that businesses in an opportunity zone did not necessarily have to be intended for the people who live and work in the neighborhood. "Before, we thought it would be a lot of coffee shops and nail salons because we thought you had to perform everything in the opportunity zone," she said. The legislation had already faced criticism because the areas eligible for the tax incentives are not all the same. Take two neighboring zones in Connecticut, for example. South Norwalk has a booming real estate market, as younger professionals move there and frequent the thriving restaurant and night life scene. But neighborhoods in Bridgeport, just a few exits up Interstate 95, remain economically challenged. "South Norwalk is a great opportunity zone," Mr. Rice said, "but if you're stuck in the middle of Bridgeport, you could have all the tax benefits you want, but it may not turn out to be a great investment situation." Ms. Miller said it was wiser to think about the investment as if it were any other project. "If the project does not stand on its own and the fundamentals aren't there, it's not a good deal," she said. Michael Tillman, chief executive of PTM Partners, an opportunity zone fund, agreed. "The deals should be the same deals you'd be doing if they weren't in an opportunity zone," he said. That's good advice, whether you are deciding on the location of the property or your investment strategy. Through the company's database, an investor can see areas that were economically depressed in 2010 and that now have a median household income of 100,000 or more, which would represent a secure investment. Or it can find areas that are in need of a real economic boost, which would be riskier but provide a greater social impact. Two of the company's measures, for example, aim to rate an area's investment potential. The first examines current conditions, while the second determines how that score will improve or deteriorate over the next 10 years. "You can't just build a city in the desert and hope in 10 years it's going to create momentum and you can exit," Mr. Schimenes said. "We're seeing a lot of developers trying to push terms that are a little too aggressive with the investor," he added. "Yet a lot of investors might be desperate, and they'll just invest." This is where strategy matters. Investors need to consider which approach they are going to adopt. It could be one that provides a secure return on a property near a thriving metropolitan area, or it could be one that looks to improve the quality of life in an economically challenged area, at the risk of a lower return. Picking an investment fund will help establish your strategy. PTM Partners, which was started by three real estate developers who had met at the real estate developer LeFrak, is focused on developing properties on the edge of opportunity zones in major metropolitan areas. The fund's first two projects are a 360 unit development in Miami and a 454 unit apartment building that was a former F.B.I. office building in Washington. A third site, in St. Petersburg, Fla., is under contract. Mr. Tillman, the chief executive, said his firm's strategy was to take opportunity zones and overlay demographic data like wages, home size and other economic measures. The goal is to select markets "where long term growth factors are present or in some areas they have already commenced," he said. SoLa Impact has a different strategy: investing with a social conscience. It is raising its third fund to invest in housing in Compton, Watts and other low income neighborhoods in Los Angeles. "Our investors were very attracted to the social impact of what we were doing," said Martin Muoto, founder and managing partner. "In Fund 3, two thirds of the investors care about social impact and one third are primarily motivated by tax avoidance." And that's fine by him. "These are folks who wouldn't normally invest in Compton or Watts, but they're invested and they're allowing me to do my work," Mr. Muoto said. Both funds hope to sell their investments close to the 10th year. Mr. Tillman believes he has identified areas that will still be strong then, while Mr. Muoto is banking on the continued need for basic housing and the attention the 2028 Summer Olympics will bring to Los Angeles. Real estate is an inherently local market, so they both could be right. But investors should consider the downside, and whether the tax break is worth it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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LONDON Nicole Grobert is German, but she has spent almost all of her career in Britain, developing tiny nanomaterials and figuring out how to use them in everything from artificial bones to super efficient batteries. Young scientists have an unusual degree of autonomy here, she has found, and European Union funds enabled her to build her own research group at the University of Oxford. These days, though, Dr. Grobert says her future at Oxford looks cloudier than it used to. Since Britain voted to quit the union, she has been getting calls from universities on the Continent, and farther abroad, gauging her interest in a new job. For now, she is staying put, but if grants grow scarce or immigration rules create new hassles, she is ready to move. "I came with a suitcase," Dr. Grobert said. "I can grab that suitcase and go." For decades, the European Union has provided a collaborative, cross border framework in which British universities have grown and thrived. European grants fund research like Dr. Grobert's and nurture the international back and forth crucial to scholarly work in disciplines from archaeology to economics. Free movement within the bloc has meant faculty from other European nations can live and work in Britain visa free, and students from elsewhere in the union pay the same tuition as Britons. Now, university administrators are watching anxiously as negotiations between London and Brussels lurch along, with little clarity about how drastically ties may change after the divorce, known as Brexit, which is expected next March. Last month, negotiators announced a 21 month transition period, which may postpone the biggest shifts, but like everything about Brexit, it remains subject to change. "This is the single biggest challenge to our universities, in the same way it is the single biggest challenge to our nation, since the Second World War," said Alastair Buchan, Oxford's head of Brexit strategy. "Being in Europe has absolutely transformed the serious U.K. universities," he said. "The threat Brexit brings, in this existential way, is that we won't be able to access the talent, the scholars" from neighboring countries. Dr. Buchan worries, too, that with financial support coming from one government, rather than a large bloc with well established grant making structures, future funding decisions may be driven by political imperatives rather than academic excellence. At University College London, where 50 million pounds, or about 70 million, in annual European grants make up 12 percent of the research budget, a Brexit mitigation group has met dozens of times since Britain voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union, said Michael Arthur, the president and provost. Anxiety among European faculty members has eased a bit since Prime Minister Theresa May's government said in December that citizens from other European Union countries already in Britain would be able to register to stay. But the caveat that no one provision is final until the entire Brexit deal is done means nothing is for sure. University College London has sought to reassure its employees, but the uncertainty "hangs over people," Dr. Arthur said. More than 90 percent of Europeans on staff have been contacted by overseas universities asking if they'd consider a move, he said. Recruiting new researchers is proving even harder than holding on to existing ones. In one fellowship program for young researchers, about 30 of the 100 applications the university usually gets come from continental Europe. This year, there were none. That's before Brexit is finalized, "so imagine what it might be like after," he said. Downstairs from Dr. Arthur's office, a group of European undergraduates in the corner of a noisy cafe said they'd felt less welcome in Britain since the referendum. European Union students already enrolled here, and those arriving this autumn, will be able to finish their degrees without immigration constraints or tuition changes, and the transition arrangements may extend that further, but the rules for those coming later are unclear. Konrad Gradalski, who studies politics and East European affairs, said when he was finishing secondary school in Poland, Britain was a popular destination among his peers. "People had dreams like U.C.L., Oxford, Cambridge," Mr. Gradalski said, referring to Britain's elite universities. "Most of my friends no longer want to come here. They're scared of the racism," because of reports of anti immigrant feeling among Britons. And, "more pragmatically, it's about finance," with worries fees will double or more to the level non European Union citizens now pay, and Europeans will lose eligibility for loans. There are plenty of other options. Institutions in Canada and Australia, as well as continental European universities offering studies in English, are competing with big British and American names in the lucrative international higher education market. Now, "we realize there are other things than Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard," said Alix Dumoulin, a Parisian studying philosophy, politics and economics at University College London. At universities in the United States, international students' enrollment has dipped, which administrators attribute in part to President Trump's anti immigrant rhetoric and restrictive policies. Brexit could have a similar effect, putting off not just Europeans, but applicants from places like India, China and Malaysia, for whom "the general sense that Britain has become a less welcoming and hospitable place for foreigners is quite palpable," said James Wilsdon, a professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield. So far, numbers are holding up. After the Brexit vote, undergraduate applications from European Union students dropped for the first time since 2012, but they have since ticked up again. Applications from outside the union also rose, a reminder that the pool of potential students is growing as middle classes expand in many developing nations. Saying it did not want to pre empt negotiations, the Department of Education declined to comment on Brexit's effects on universities, but said European Union students make an important contribution "and we want that to continue." Sam Gyimah, the government's minister for universities and science, has said Britain will continue welcoming international researchers, and hopes to remain part of the European Union's main research program. "But we are not going to participate at any price," he said in February at a parliamentary meeting on Brexit and science. That underlines the reality that universities' concerns are just one piece of a much larger, fiendishly complex Brexit puzzle. So their priorities, even those government shares, "could be derailed by the bigger politics," said Sarah Main, executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, an advocacy group. The stakes are high. With deep ties to research driven industries like tech, aerospace and pharmaceuticals, universities are an important economic engine. Their prestige, said Dr. Main, is also central to Britain's international reputation. "I think it's part of the U.K.'s character." At University College London, Ms. Dumoulin said that while Brexit might make it harder to stay in London after graduation, she will have lots of other choices. As a French citizen, she will still be able to live and work anywhere in Europe, unlike her British classmates, who are likely to lose that right. "I feel like I'm really lucky," she said. "Because it's not France who's exiting the E.U."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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It is perhaps no small irony that in 1965, the year that the Chicago Bears chose running back Gale Sayers fourth over all in the draft, George Halas, the team's longtime owner, picked linebacker Dick Butkus one spot ahead of him. The tandem defined the team and the league for most of a decade. Both players ended up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But where Sayers was graceful, Butkus was brutal. Sayers eluded tacklers, Butkus slammed into ball carriers and threw them to the ground with glee. Sayers spent his years avoiding collisions. Butkus, the most fearsome player of his time, seemed to live for them. Both of them also had their careers cut short by knee injuries, a reminder that for all the grace football players can display, the game at its core is a bone crunching, head knocking, jaw breaking showdown. Sayers, who died early Wednesday at 77 from complications of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, is rightly remembered for his athletic artistry that some compared to dancing ballet. Footage of his games from the 1960s show him effortlessly slicing left and right, leaping like a hurdler and crisscrossing the field in search of slivers of space between defenders on his way to the end zone. But N.F.L. highlight reels are deceiving. They are long on acrobatics, often shown in slow motion and set to dramatic music. The game at that speed looks practically elegant. Odell Beckham Jr., reaching behind his head to make a one handed grab. John Elway throwing a tight spiral 50 yards downfield into the outstretched hands of a receiver running full stride. Barry Sanders almost tiptoeing past charging linebackers. Those same highlight reels are short on the tackles that leave ball carriers on the ground in a crumpled heap, or the jarring hits that were often addressed with smelling salts. Those videos omit the career ending plays when injured players are taken off the field on stretchers. Sayers's brilliant but brief career hit the skids on Nov. 10, 1968, when on a run to the left side of the field, he tore ligaments in his right knee after a 49ers defender slammed into it. Four Bears teammates carried him off the field. For a player who made his living by using his knees not just to run, but to cut in every direction, the injury was devastating, especially given the state of orthopedic surgery at the time. Sayers, though, was determined to show that he could overcome the odds. "I wanted to prove that one could come back from a serious knee injury in a year," Sayers told N.F.L. Films. "People play with broken ribs, fingers, whatever it may be. But they never shed a tear. They went out there and played." Remarkably, the next season, Sayers finished with more than 1,000 yards rushing for the second time in his seven year career. But unable to glide through defenses the same way, he was never the same and played in just four more games the next two seasons before retiring in 1972. Though Sayers's failing knees ended his career, the invisible injuries to his brain may have been what led to his ultimate demise. In Sayers's day, teams had full contact practices nearly every day during the week and two, and sometimes three, times a day during training camp. During his football career, he likely absorbed thousands of hits. In March 2017, Sayers's family revealed that he had dementia after he had publicly displayed symptoms of it for years. He joins a growing list of hundreds of football players who are known to have developed dementia and other neurological disorders linked to brain trauma. "Like the doctor at the Mayo Clinic said, 'Yes, a part of this has to be on football,'" Ardythe Sayers, Gale's wife, told The Associated Press. "It wasn't so much getting hit in the head. It's just the shaking of the brain when they took him down with the force they play the game in." Even before his diagnosis, Sayers was well known for avoiding the spotlight. N.F.L. players are trained to be stoic, to never show weakness and to sacrifice their bodies for the good of the team. They want to be remembered for their athletic prowess. Many, as a result, suffer in silence for years after they leave the game and the cheering stops.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Demonstrators waved the Mississippi state flag in front of the governor's mansion in April. The N.C.A.A. warned Friday that the state could lose its chance to host major competitions unless it changes its flag. ATLANTA The National Collegiate Athletic Association effectively warned Mississippi on Friday that it would not hold major competitions there unless the Confederate battle emblem was stripped from the state flag. Under an expanded policy that the association announced Friday, states will not be allowed to host championship events if the battle flag is a prominent, sanctioned symbol. Mississippi is the only state that currently stands to be penalized under the rule, which the association changed during a national outcry over racial injustice. The move by the association, one day after the Southeastern Conference issued its own ultimatum, is certain to place new pressure on state lawmakers and fuel public debate around the 126 year old flag, the last in the United States with the battle emblem. "There is no place in college athletics or the world for symbols or acts of discrimination and oppression," Michael V. Drake, the chairman of the N.C.A.A.'s Board of Governors and the president of Ohio State, said in a statement. "We must continually evaluate ways to protect and enhance the championship experience for college athletes. Expanding the Confederate flag policy to all championships is an important step by the N.C.A.A. to further provide a quality experience for all participants and fans." The association's shift is a potential landmark in the emotional debate that Mississippi has had for decades, including a referendum in 2001 that showed nearly two thirds of voters supported keeping the flag that the state adopted in 1894. Although the referendum more or less settled the matter for many elected officials over the years, the revived national scrutiny and with it, the threat of economic consequences is prompting the state's leaders to reassess their views. That the college sports industry is wielding the hammer is proving particularly influential in a state that cherishes baseball and football. "A flag's sole purpose is to unite a people around a common cause. Reality has proven clear that the Mississippi flag no longer unites, but divides us unnecessarily," Representative Trey Lamar, who played football at Mississippi and became one of the most influential Republican lawmakers in the state, said in a series of tweets on Thursday night. The most influential universities in the state Mississippi, Mississippi State and Southern Mississippi have distanced themselves from the flag for years, lowering it on their campuses and pressing officials in public and in private to change it. Mississippi and Mississippi State, which are members of the SEC, said they supported Commissioner Greg Sankey when he said it was "past time for change to be made to the flag." Without a new flag, he said, the conference might avoid holding championship events in Mississippi. Sankey's announcement on Thursday represented an important public relations victory for the flag's critics, who welcomed the statement from one of the South's most prominent institutions. But Friday's change from the N.C.A.A. threatened greater economic peril, in part because Mississippi has benefited from hosting postseason events whose locations are not chosen years in advance. (Some championship event locations are linked to seedings or rankings, not bids by potential host cities.) Just last year, Oxford and Starkville hosted games in the Division I baseball tournament. Starkville was also the site of some games in the Division I women's basketball tournament. "It's been said kind of tongue in cheek, but maybe not so much in years past that if they ever said Mississippi State or Ole Miss couldn't hold a regional baseball tournament, you might get some action," Greg Snowden, a former legislator who was the second ranking Republican in the Mississippi House, said in an interview this week. "There would be teeth if the N.C.A.A. did something." The N.C.A.A. has penalized states for their use of the battle flag for close to two decades, keeping major events with preselected locations away from places, like Mississippi, where the emblem was officially recognized. Only on Friday did a crucial carve out vanish that states could host championship competitions if their teams' performances earned them a sufficiently high seeding or ranking. "We must do all we can to ensure that N.C.A.A. actions reflect our commitment to inclusion and support all our student athletes," Mark Emmert, the association's president, said in a statement. "There can be no place within college sports where any student athlete is demeaned or unwelcome." The association has periodically entered other debates in statehouses around the country. In 2016, it forcefully opposed a North Carolina law that curbed the rights of transgender people and relocated some events from the state. This month, the association said that an Idaho law was detrimental to transgender people and in conflict with the N.C.A.A.'s "core values of inclusivity, respect and the equitable treatment of all individuals." The Mississippi Legislature is poised to adjourn next week, but state officials could try to move a bill through the Capitol in short order. The Mississippi Constitution also gives Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who has signaled an openness to changing the flag, the power to convene a special session if he believes "the public interest requires it." State officials could also choose to wait until next year to consider the flag's fate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Coach Nick Saban tested positive for the coronavirus, and top ranked Alabama said Wednesday that though he had received an inaccurate diagnosis last month, it was real this time. Saban, who has won five national championships at Alabama, will miss this weekend's Iron Bowl, the in state rivalry showdown with No. 22 Auburn. "We hate it that this situation occurred, but as I said many times before, you've got to be able to deal with disruptions this year, and our players have been pretty mature about doing that," Saban, 69, said on a conference call with reporters less than an hour after Alabama announced his positive test, the lone one in the football program. "We just want to carry on the best we can," said Saban, who is in his 14th season at Alabama. He said that he had a runny nose but none of what he described as "the cardinal signs of the virus," like a fever or a loss of taste or smell.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Today's sightings: red paisley mask, pleated pink flowered mask, black VOTE mask, yellow smiley face mask, Etsy bedazzled mask, Spiderman mask. Lots of surgical blue paper masks. A few hard shell N95s. One or two navy bandit gaiters. (Me, I'm under the grinning wolf mask.) Most masks hide who we are and let us try on different identities, but these disguises give me clues to the wearer underneath. As an artist, I appreciate the variety and wit of these choices. But all the color and texture in the world can't obscure the fact that masks are both saving my life and ruining it. This is not a plea to take yours off. For all that's holy, don't. I even double mask: There's a surgical version taped to my face under the cloth mask du jour. The thing is, I'm the last person to want faces to disappear. I'm a portrait artist. Faces are my whole life. I think of the human face as a theater that performs the actor inside, in flickers and puckers and pulls of 42 tiny muscles, in the rise and fall of blood that swirls with our emotions. I paint the glint of bone under the skin, the subtle glow of fat along the cheeks and chin, the grooves that descend from nose to mouth that tell me whether you laugh more often than you growl. Now we pass on the sidewalk like spies from distant countries. I try to reconstruct the mysteries under the mask, but there's no satisfying my face hunger. This hunger is deeper than aesthetic fascination; it goes all the way back to my earliest years. I grew up in the hospital. Because I was born with spina bifida and underwent dozens of surgeries by the time I was 5, I was constantly surrounded by white coated doctors and white uniformed nurses, each of whom were in charge of my body. Each made me fear for what would happen next: Was I going back to surgery? Being sent for painful tests? Was I ever going home? I had no authority to say no, so I learned to read the truth in grown up faces no matter what their words might say. I studied their subtle signals with the passionate dedication of a Talmudic scholar. For me, each mask is a small but painful theft. The virus has stolen your face from me; it's even stolen my face from myself. I use my face to mitigate people's reactions to my body my curved spine, my orthopedic boots, my silver red hair, my limp. I beam out my expressions and my words to defend myself against harassment. Against ignorance. Against being ignored. Now my mask muffles my voice, kidnaps my face and reduces my body to a diagnosis. All that is difficult enough, but how can I convey the misery of being a portrait artist during a pandemic? For 30 years, I've depicted people who experience stigma. My subjects have been mocked, threatened, demeaned because of the way they look or move or enact their identities. I paint to make them visible as they truly are, as bearers of iconoclastic beauty. Portraiture is the purpose of my life. Visibility is crucial. Many of my collaborators they are not mere subjects, but partners in creation are disabled, or queer, or trans, or people of color; those, in fact, who are most at risk from Covid 19. Faces that aren't just masked, but are also entirely missing from public life. People who, like me, are at such medical risk that we have little choice but to shelter in place. We've been rendered invisible as well as vulnerable, our lives controlled by those who don't mask, who are, to be frank, barefaced threats. How do we remind them that we exist from behind a million closed doors? And so, my career has been upended. I can't make portraits if I can't let anyone into my studio. I'd need a space the size of an airplane hangar to create sufficient social distance, and even then, I'd have to view my subjects through a telescope. Not quite the intimate experience one wants when doing a portrait. It took me a while to realize how much trouble I was in. When the virus hit, I had two partially completed drawings in progress one of my college boyfriend, William Fugo; the other of the Cuban novelist Achy Obejas. Will is in Cleveland, Achy in San Francisco. We thought that we'd see one another again soon surely this couldn't last more than a month or two? By April, the answer was obvious. I reconciled myself to working from photographs and from "posing" sessions over Zoom, in which my laptop screen offered an aggravating fraction of reality. Truth is, all portraits, no matter the medium, are only fragments. None can capture the complexity of a human life. The portraitist chooses the symbols and stories that represent the subject, in constrained gestures toward the immensity of biography. I suppose that a Zoom protocol is appropriate for our time. We're all coping with enforced separation, trying to reassemble one another from fragments, from pictures on our screens and glimpses under the mask. A video session is communion and isolation rolled into one. A faux intimacy that is our daily lot. I decided to ask Alice Wong, a disability activist, to sit for me. She lives in San Francisco, 2,000 miles away. For weeks, we met over an unstable internet connection. Zoom vastly increases the accessibility of my practice I can work with anyone, anywhere, no matter their disability or my own. Yet, imagine that you're used to the cloistered privacy of the studio, just you and your collaborator. You've carefully composed the lighting, designed the costuming and props. Imagine the hours of languorous conversation, the breaks for cookies and cocktails. And then imagine that in the midst of posing, your subject shifts or gestures and it's so unexpectedly beautiful that everything changes. That's the thing about real life; it can take your breath away. Now, shrink all that down to a 13 inch by 9 inch digital portal. I can see Alice's hallway behind her; a few framed pictures show me that she loves cats. My eyes aren't great, so it doesn't help that the lighting is dreadful and that the screen flattens any dimensional information and that all colors are distorted. Alice sends me pictures of herself in sunlight, so I can see the true shades of skin, hair and eyes, but those photos are so radically different that I fall back on what the laptop tells me, so that the feeling of Zoom won't be lost. After we finished, Alice interviewed me for her Disability Visibility Project. She described what it was like to pose; she was surprised by how much we talked, having assumed I would demand that she stay statue still. I've learned to work around that, because the conversations I have with disabled people, queer and gender variant people, with BIPOC collaborators, are the real point of my portraiture. The relationship between artist and subject always disappears in the museum, the gallery, but I truly want to know what transpires between the artist and the subject. My collaborators saved my life. I could not endure my own stigmatized body until I learned how they navigated the intricacies of embodiment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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MANCHESTER, England Manchester City needed only a few minutes to come out swinging. It has been that way right from the start, right from the moment Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, started publishing the series of exposes that became known as Football Leaks. City responded to the allegations contained in those leaks not just of breaching the financial rules that govern all teams playing in Europe wide competitions, but crucially of deliberately providing investigators with misleading information with fire and fury. The leaks, the club said, again and again, were part of a "clear and organized attempt" to smear its good name. That fury has only mounted with time, a fire that burns ever brighter, ever hotter. City has vented in public at every step of the subsequent investigation into the accusations, raging that "irrefutable" evidence was being ignored, that UEFA, the governing body for soccer in Europe, was not running a fair or impartial process, that the outcome was predetermined. It has been no more conciliatory in the more private, more refined surroundings in which it pleaded its case: court documents released by the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Wednesday showed the club's considerable legal team had leveled all of the same charges at UEFA there, too, in the hope of having the investigation annulled. The court found that it could not overturn any punishment, on the grounds that City had not, at that stage, been punished. Late on Friday, when UEFA's Adjudicatory Chamber the body that will determine exactly how City should be sanctioned revealed that it had decided to ban the club from the Champions League for two seasons, and fine it 32.5 million, the cold fury reached its pitch. The process was "prejudicial," the club said. It was "disappointed, but not surprised" by the ruling. It always knew it would "need to seek out an independent body and process to impartially consider the comprehensive body of irrefutable evidence in support of its position," it said in a statement. And so now, the fight begins. First, an appeal "at the earliest available opportunity" to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. If that fails though there is no guarantee it will that may not be the end of it. As one email produced as part of the Football Leaks trove made clear, City's hierarchy has the money and the appetite to spend millions on legal fees rather than wear any punishment. The Swiss Supreme Court would be the next step. Beyond that, who knows? The United Nations? The World Trade Organization? City would not take this stance frivolously. The club, like UEFA, knows that what is ultimately at stake matters: more than whether City misses a couple of years of European competition; more than whether it has some bearing on the career plans of Pep Guardiola; more than whether some of the club's glittering array of stars may seek to leave. It is not just the future of UEFA's financial fair play legislation that is on the line, but the very locus of power in European soccer. For UEFA, it is only a slight exaggeration to say the battle is existential. Defeat would mean effectively admitting that Europe's biggest, richest teams are now too big to tame, and that the body theoretically in charge of corralling them is, in reality, nothing more than the organizer of the occasional glitzy draw event in Monte Carlo. For Manchester City, it is, primarily, a chance to prove that it is the clubs who make the rules now, that it is not UEFA's job to dictate who can invest money in the sport, to demonstrate that financial fair play is nothing more than a device to lock in soccer's status quo, to keep out the young and the daring and the ambitious. The club can take that stance, of course, because soccer is like all sports inherently tribal. Few, if any, of its fans blame their team for any of this. On social media, as on match days at the Etihad Stadium, it is hard to find any sense of disappointment that City may have bent the rules. Instead, wagons have been circled, lines drawn. City's fans have long booed the pompous anthem that blares out at the start of Champions League games something that predates the current investigation but, when it next plays at the Etihad before the visit of Real Madrid next month, expect a torrent of hostility. City's fans are arrayed behind their club: UEFA is against them; it is a witch hunt; it is time to drain the swamp. But the reason the club has no choice but to fight, and to fight for as long as possible, is different. City may want the charges to be overturned because it believes in its own "irrefutable" innocence, but the anger with which it has reacted at every stage speaks to another motivation: not the need to vindicate its loyalists, but to maintain the validity of the project for those who it was designed to win over. Manchester City gives Abu Dhabi a platform: not just to attract tourists and investment as the United Arab Emirates seeks to diversify its economy; not just to become a significant landowner and real estate developer in the city of Manchester; but to embed it in the global public consciousness. It is precisely the same logic that inspired Qatar Sports Investments to buy Paris St. Germain. The whole concept rests, though, on positive associations: beautiful, successful soccer; clean, admirable values; an air not only of glamour, but class, too. It is why, in part and on a much smaller scale, the club could not tolerate players as gifted, but as challenging, as Mario Balotelli and Carlos Tevez. That was not the image Abu Dhabi wanted to cultivate for itself. Nor, of course, is the stain of cheating the intimation that City has not done things in the right way something that can be tolerated. City must not just prove its innocence on some technicality; it must demonstrate that the allegation itself was in some way corrupt and that the body making it is illegitimate. That brings with it a risk, of course: appealing to C.A.S. may well result in details of the breaches and misdirection City is said to have committed becoming public. The club, though it is confident of ultimately proving its innocence, will presumably be aware that even then it may not come out of the whole thing smelling of roses in the eyes of the wider world. City has clearly decided the principle is worth the risk of some sort of reputational damage. There will be those who see in that no little honor, a self sacrifice to bring down the flawed framework of financial fair play. But that is not why City has to fight, and to fight with fire and fury, until the bitter end. It does not, ultimately, have a choice.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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MEDIEVAL BODIES Life and Death in the Middle Ages By Jack Hartnell Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1948 novel "The Corner That Held Them" is unusual for its lack of a protagonist. No mortal protagonist, that is. The novel, newly reissued by New York Review Books Classics, follows the fortunes of an English convent named Oby from its founding in the late 12th century through 1382. Characters ebb and flow from the foreground in a curiously swift historical rhythm, often killed off as soon as their stories have begun. In 1332, for example, the local bishop nominates a certain Dame Emily to be the new prioress. Her fellow nuns loathe her, however, and instead elect Dame Isabella Sutthery, "the youngest and silliest nun among them," in a protest vote. "The young and silly can become great tyrants," our omniscient narrator observes, and so Isabella does. "It was not till 1345, when Prioress Isabella choked on a plum stone, that peace and quiet returned, followed by four ambling years of having no history, save for a plague of caterpillars. In 1349 the Black Death came to Oby." She flits among a large assembly of characters to show that a cataclysm like "the Black Death" was experienced differently by those who came into contact with it. After several locals meet their end to the disease, Dame Agnes observes to Prioress Alicia (successor to mad Isabella) that soon "there will be none left but us old hags." Alicia bristles, for "though she was in her 40s she did not feel herself a hag." Agnes apologizes, but Alicia waves her off: "No, no! You did not disturb me. A flea bit me in the breast. As it happens, I was just about to remark that God calls those whom he loves best." Warner's style is delicate and arch, consisting of a gentle skewering of religious ladies that recalls Barbara Pym. Though she teeters on the edge of satire, she lands instead (like Pym or Evelyn Waugh) on poignancy. The nuns strive to be good, and to live up to the ecclesiastical demand that they absent themselves from history altogether. But whether by dint of plague, unsympathetic bishop, flood or vanity's insistent whisper the world just keeps happening to them. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Beneath the surface of Warner's humor is a quiet but powerful meditation on what it means to be mortal. Death tumbles the nuns one by one, scattering them out of Oby's story like leaves from a tree in winter. They face their deaths with resignation, even pluck. Dame Isabel (not to be confused with Isabella of the plum stone) was a sickly nun who "had accepted the idea of an early death; but now she thought that, after all, she would be sorry to exchange the ambiguity of this world for the certitude of the next." This life, so full of misunderstanding and half knowledge, has its joys, Isabel thinks in her last days. "There is pleasure in watching the sophistries of mankind, his decisions made and unmade like the swirl of a millrace, causation sweeping him forward from act to act while his reason dances on the surface of action like a pattern of foam." Though she doesn't call this river of causation history, it's a more apt description of the flow of time through "The Corner That Held Them" than what the chronicles convey. Because there is no protagonist in "The Corner That Held Them," the starring role ends up going to the convent itself, which is less a set of buildings than a symbol of the medieval attitude toward the meaning of life and death making the novel's reissue a timely curative for our own, disruption obsessed culture. A new book about medieval views on medicine helps explain the Oby nuns' contentment with the cheapness of their lives. In "Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages," the British art historian Jack Hartnell tackles a difficult phenomenon: the medieval embrace of medical "theories that have since been totally disproven to the point of absurdity but which nevertheless could not have seemed more vivid or logical in the Middle Ages." The doctors of Europe and the Mediterranean were not practical specialists but rather scholars of Greek and Roman natural philosophy, which taught a theory of nature composed of four basic elements (fire, water, earth, air). Each was associated with differing levels of moisture and heat. The human body contained four viscous liquids or "humors": phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. A doctor's job was to correct an uneven humoral balance, drying up perceived wetness with spices or relieving an excess of heat with cooling herbs. While experts promulgated theory, daily care was mostly administered by midwives, apothecaries, dentists and the odd entrepreneurial carpenter. A local barber might puncture your neck to drain three pints of blood if you complained of a headache. In "The Corner That Held Them," a mad priest has a black cockerel strapped to his head as a remedy. The novel thrums with oozing tear ducts treated by pilgrimage and broken legs resulting in death. Though the suffering of medieval sick people was real and vast, there is a beauty to their doctors' rigorous misunderstanding of human biology. They and their patients were unconstrained by science; accordingly, the medieval body had a much closer and more variable relationship with the imagination. A sweet smell exuding from a burn wound indicated holiness, and for medieval folk it was perfectly plausible that the Italian abbess Chiara Vengente's heart grew tiny, fleshy crucifixes inside its chambers, discovered when her sister Francesca sliced it out of her chest after death in 1308. It's a foreign way of thinking for those of us who prize technological innovation above all else. But we may not be as far from such poetic conceits of the body as we like to believe. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway, for example, has pointed out the insufficiency of scientific language for depicting the world. When a biologist describes a cell process, Haraway argues, she is as much creating the phenomena under discussion as describing a fact. Because language mediates our communication, the ways we think and express ourselves shape the knowledge we put into words. We are all raised to identify the word "progress" with the Renaissance and its revolutions in scientific method and perspectival drawing. But for Jack Hartnell it's a mistake to cast the Middle Ages as a muddy and backward time when truth was hidden, onionlike, under layers of superstition and dogma. Medieval culture simply valued different standards. Hartnell cites "continuity, consistency, reflection, an ability to keep an ideal alive come good times and bad." Thinkers of the era were in thrall to ossified traditions, but their scholarship kept its flame burning through the devastations of plague, destruction and simple mortality. In other words, they did not suffer the delusions of the 20th century that linger today: that technological advances will necessarily improve everybody's lives; that individual prosperity matters more than the community's welfare; that refusing to contemplate death will somehow fend it off. There are richer ways to imagine one's mortal, fleshly being, the nuns of Oby teach, and other strategies than denial for contemplating its inevitable end.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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SEATTLE The choreographer Donald Byrd stood before a video of his younger self, observing a dance he created 33 years ago. In a button down T shirt, loose khaki pants and bare feet, the man onscreen floated through swift turns and bobbing leaps with the continuity of rushing water, letting the phrase resolve in a simple first position. "Now this solo I like," Mr. Byrd said, adding with a laugh: "You can see I studied ballet somewhere." The elegant 1986 work he's dancing, "Divertimento," is one of the first images visitors see in "The America That Is to Be," an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum here that runs through Jan. 26. Organized by the dance artist and scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz, the show traces the evolution, over 40 years, of Mr. Byrd's commitment to dance as a catalyst for social justice. "My thinking was that I'm trying to create room not just for me but for other black people," he said, "young black people at the time, to be who they are, that the container needs to be big enough to contain all of these voices and ways of seeing things." Still concerned with expanding ways of seeing, and unafraid to jolt an audience into paying attention, Mr. Byrd has lately been in high demand and earning what some would say is long overdue recognition. Beyond his role at Spectrum Dance Theater, the Seattle company he has directed since 2002, he has created new works this season for Pacific Northwest Ballet (the haunting "Love and Loss") and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. "Greenwood," his exploration of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, will have its premiere during Ailey's City Center season on Dec. 6. In July, shortly before turning 70, Mr. Byrd received a 275,000 Doris Duke Artist Award, one of the most coveted honors in the performing arts. The opportunity at the Frye was granted as part of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, given to artists in Washington State and won by Mr. Byrd in 2016. "Donald has been celebrated but way undervalued," said Mr. DeFrantz, who has been his friend and worked with him intermittently as a dramaturge since the 1990s. "So it's great to see this attention paid, and maybe it's the start of a kind of acknowledgment of the people who are in the trenches." Despite the proliferation of dance in museums over the past decade, exhibitions focused on the work of a single living choreographer remain rare. "The America That Is to Be" presents an in depth portrait of a bold, enigmatic artist influenced by the neoclassical ballets of George Balanchine and the danced spirituals of Alvin Ailey, Baroque music and Prince, the 1970s postmodernism of Twyla Tharp and the 19th century romanticism of "Giselle." Mr. DeFrantz stresses that the show is not a retrospective but rather follows "a strand of creativity" in Mr. Byrd's oeuvre, oriented toward "possibilities of social justice and social transformation." Rich in rarely seen video, it encompasses landmark works like "The Minstrel Show" (1991), Mr. Byrd's unflinching look at the legacy of racist caricature in American entertainment; irreverent early gems like "Brass Orchid" (1978), with its pas de deux for a cigarette smoking interracial couple (a nod to Balanchine's "Agon"); and pieces spanning his time at Spectrum on subjects including domestic violence, lynching and the experience of political prisoners. On a stage in the central gallery, four days a week, Spectrum dancers perform duets and trios derived from Mr. Byrd's improvisations. Packed with the tense, intimate relationships that characterize much of his work, these offer a close up view of the assertive virtuosity that one company member, he said, once aptly described as dancing "in caps with exclamation points." Mr. Byrd has been known for his volatility, and the exhibition does not overlook difficult parts of his past. One passage of wall text acknowledges his struggles with drugs and alcohol in the 1970s and '80s, as well as his reputation as an "emotionally violent taskmaster." "He had real challenges with substance abuse," Mr. DeFrantz said, "not quite homeless, but being so bohemian that he wasn't caring for himself. He was really irresponsible as a younger artist, and then all that confusion and fear became manifest in how he treated younger dancers or other artists he was working with." In an interview at the Frye, on a quiet block of the First Hill neighborhood here, Mr. Byrd spoke about his taskmaster reputation, which, he says, has followed him even as he has changed. "I would push and was demanding," he said. "I think I'm still demanding, but in a different way." The dancer Fausto Rivera, in his sixth season with Spectrum, agrees. "I've seen a very conscious effort to be not easier necessarily, but to be more patient," he said. Mr. Byrd attributes the change, in part, to working through the insecurity that plagued him as a younger artist. A latecomer to ballet training, he grew up taking tap lessons and, more seriously, studying classical flute. As a student at Yale and then Tufts University, he discovered an interest in theater, earning a degree in drama. (He left Yale after a year, alienated by its elitism, he said.) Balanchine's ballets had piqued his interest as a teenager, when he saw a presentation by the New York City Ballet dancers Edward Villella and Patricia McBride. But it was an infatuation with a dancer at Tufts, he said, that landed him in class at the Cambridge School of Ballet, where a teacher instantly recognized his aptitude. "Around 'Revelations' I couldn't be cynical," he said. "There's something so authentic about the impulse behind the creation of it." Still, his career path remained unclear. After moving to New York, where he trained for two years at the Ailey School, Mr. Byrd auditioned for Ms. Tharp's company and joined for a trial period in 1972; he was let go after a couple of months. "I was even more insecure after this and kind of devastated," he said. "I wallowed in it for a bit and then I said, 'O.K., I do have something to offer.'" In 1976 he joined the company of Gus Solomons Jr., who was impressed by the wiry speed of Mr. Byrd's dancing. "He moved like a sprinter," Mr. Solomons said. "I remember thinking, he's like a mosquito!"While in residence with Mr. Solomons at California Institute of the Arts, Mr. Byrd began to choreograph, starting with "Street Dance," a piece about missing New York for three dancers and three jazz musicians. In 1983 he returned to New York, where he directed Donald Byrd/The Group until its closure in 2002. Over the decades Mr. Byrd has more clearly underscored the potential of dance to enact social change, as a tool that can help us imagine new worlds and ways of thinking. His fifth and latest commission for Ailey reflects on the racist brutality that ravaged Greenwood, the prosperous black business district of Tulsa, Okla., after an encounter between a young black man and a young white elevator operator. Through dramatic gesture and vigorous partnering, he depicts multiple versions of what might have occurred between the man and woman a story still not fully understood before the ensuing destruction. "I think there are parallels that he would like people to see with what is happening today, in terms of race relations, in terms of the nature of violence," Robert Battle, Ailey's artistic director, said. "From my perspective he wants to just leave that with the audience for them to untie that knot, or be left in a knot." At home in Seattle, at Spectrum's studio on the edge of Lake Washington, Mr. Byrd has worked to cultivate a company of dancers with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. (Current projects include a restaging of his 1996 "Harlem Nutcracker" and a new piece on race and climate change.) "There's this very true diversity," said the dancer Nia Amina Minor, noting that this range of experience informs Mr. Byrd's often collaborative process. "And he's been doing that for quite a long time, before it became hip to have diversity in your dance company." Mr. Byrd said that while the word "diversity" gets tossed around, he sees its meaning as this: "There's a kind of convergence that happens that creates a kind of dynamic tension and that dynamic tension is where growth is, and I think where aspiration lives, because then we can imagine things as bigger than only our way of thinking." "That's what I want to have," he added. "That's what I want America to be. That's what I want the world to be. But I have to start here."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Credit...NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don't forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean "fear" and "dread', but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspire anything but. They don't look anywhere near as interesting as the volcanic or icy ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn, nor is their desolation as extreme or diverse as Earth's moon. But that hasn't stopped generations of planetary scientists from being eager to get a closer look at the ramshackle duo. The Soviet Union and, later, Russia have tried three times to reach Phobos, but software errors and launch disasters have doomed every attempt. Scientists in the U.S. have tried and, so far, failed to convince the powers that be at NASA that a mission to the two moons will be worthwhile. The next great hope is Japan, which is aiming to launch a heist mission to Phobos in 2024 that will try to steal some of its rocks. What's all the fuss about? For many, the desire to visit Phobos and Deimos was galvanized by their deeply mysterious nature. "They're super weird, confusing and interesting," said Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist studying Mars, Phobos and Deimos at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We don't know where the moons came from because they look like asteroids foreign to the red planet but behave like byproducts of Mars' early, impact laden history. And if that Japanese mission manages to grab some samples and decode the chemistry of the mangled moons, we might be able to discover their origins. In doing so, we won't just gain a better understanding of Mars' ancient past. We will also be able to peer back in time to the chaos that shaped the early solar system. Much of what we know about Phobos and Deimos comes from serendipitous observations. Rovers on the surface as well as mechanical eyes orbiting Mars are sometimes in the right place to angle their cameras and snap shots of the two moons. Phobos, being larger and closer to Mars, can be seen in greater detail: a misshapen mess scarred by a large crater and multiple grooves that look like they were made by a cosmic cat's claws. Remote observations of their surfaces haven't revealed any standout mineral features or textures that could definitively detail the moons' overall compositions and, ultimately, their origins, said Laura Kerber, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "They check all of the boxes that are consistent with them being these captured asteroids," said Dr. Fraeman rubbly patchworks that drifted too close to Mars long ago and became trapped in the planet's orbit. But both moons orbit the equator in a neat and tidy circular fashion, which suggests they coalesced from a disk of debris that danced around a young Mars. It's difficult to capture an asteroid and have it "wind up in this beautiful, symmetric, circular orbit," said Jeffrey Plaut, the project scientist for the Mars Odyssey mission. Mars, having a tenth of Earth's mass, has a relatively weak gravitational pull, so it seems improbable that it would be able to capture asteroids zipping by, said Tomohiro Usui, a robotic planetary exploration expert at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. But if they formed from a debris disk launched up from Mars after a colossal impact, Deimos should be orbiting closer to Mars than it is today. Reconciling their appearances with their orbits is difficult. "They just shouldn't exist," said Dr. Fraeman. "They don't make any sense." Cast as siblings, both moons may not even have the same origin story. In fewer than 100 million years, said Matija Cuk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., Phobos will get so close to Mars that its gravity will tear the moon apart, transforming into a beautiful system of rings. It won't be the first time, some scientists say. Recent calculations suggest that Phobos was once 20 times more massive. But, as one hypothesis goes, it drifted toward Mars and shattered into ring material, much of it raining onto Mars. The remaining ring material clumped together into a new, smaller Phobos. This cycle has repeated several times over billions of years, with Phobos shrinking with every completed cycle. Although made of ancient matter, the Phobos we see today may have been assembled just 200 million years ago. If it were confirmed that Phobos is a haphazardly clumped together mass, it would be a revelation, suggesting planets with rings are the norm for our solar system. Tiny Deimos, on the other hand, may have remained intact for 3.5 billion years. It is on track to eventually escape Mars entirely, Dr. Usui says, to wander elsewhere in the void. NASA's Perseverance rover, launching July 30 , is the first stage of a protracted series of missions to bring pristine samples of Mars back to Earth for study. Mars's atmosphere, ancient volcanism and flowing water has eroded away many of the planet's earliest rocks. But if Phobos is made of Martian flotsam from a massive impact shortly after the planet's birth, then the moon has retained the earliest memories of Mars.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Sulaiman Addonia's second novel, "Silence Is My Mother Tongue," begins with a trial in a makeshift cinema in a refugee camp in Sudan. The supposed crime: an act of incestuous domestic abuse perpetrated by the protagonist, Saba, against her mute brother, Hagos. It soon becomes clear that Saba's accusers don't actually know much about her. Is she Eritrean or Ethiopian? Muslim or Christian? Saba is presented to us as an enigma, far too fluid to be easily categorized. Throughout the trial, the book's narrator, a fellow refugee named Jamal, relates back to us the remarkably tender stories of Saba's so called "crimes," involving a blanket shared between the siblings and a botched circumcision. Jamal has a poet's tongue and a painter's eye, and he describes his experience of Saba and his other neighbors (some of whom have committed abominable crimes against him) with heartbreaking tenderness. It is a harried and lifelike and momentous opening to a novel. But as the perspective shifts in the second chapter from Jamal's to Saba's, explaining the circumstances of how her family ended up in the camp, the story loses some of its earlier momentum and verve. The prose is just as elegant and descriptive Addonia, who himself fled Eritrea for a Sudanese refugee camp as a child, lavishes us with such details as oil lamps floating toward dark rivers, and mosques built of sand. But what begins as a riveting, mysterious, almost magical and delightfully chaotic depiction of the inner workings of an East African refugee camp shifts into a slower, more careful tale of a young girl and her brother, creating new worlds out of dust. We follow Saba in her day to day life as she explores the camp, becomes acquainted with her neighbors, seeks food and resources, and attempts to restart her education. There is much wandering and observing in these early chapters, the pace conveying the arrested nature of life in a refugee camp an in between space of not home and not journey, a personal and political purgatory for Saba and those around her.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"What you wear doesn't make you a better dancer, but it can make you a more confident dancer," said Sarah Chun, a first soloist with Northern Ballet in Leeds, England. Here she is shown practicing in a leotard from Eleve Dancewear. KANSAS CITY, Mo. "We're very self conscious about our bodies, and we're fighting that every day." So said Misa Kuranaga, a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, one day in December by phone. She was in the midst of rehearsing the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy for the annual "Nutcracker" production and ruminating on the importance of leotards. As she spoke, Ms. Kuranaga was wearing a leotard with a mesh top and mock turtleneck, and a patterned body that began just at the breastbone. "What you wear doesn't make you a better dancer, but it can make you a more confident dancer," said Sarah Chun, a first soloist with Northern Ballet in Leeds, England, via Skype a few days later. "If you're not having the best morning, but you're wearing something that you like, and you look at yourself in the mirror you think, 'Oh yeah, I've got this.'" When it comes to workout wear, leggings and tank tops tend to get all the attention, but leotards, once a favorite of the aerobics crew and the essential everyday wardrobe of the professional dancer, could be making a comeback thanks to the popularity of ballet classes as exercise regimens. And when it comes to leotards, many dancers have begun to favor a small brand from Kansas City, Mo., Eleve Dancewear. It sells premade styles, but its specialty is custom work that can address (and ameliorate) insecurities around one's body. Eleve offers about 60 styles, and once you factor in all the permutations of fabrics, fit and more, there are millions of possibilities. Eleve's founder, Lisa Choules, 48, understands her market intuitively, as she is a former dancer. "I was self conscious, especially coming back after two kids," she said. "I was tall at 5 8, with a long, thin body, but I was busty. So I'd have to buy a medium leotard for the length, but it was so wide, I'd get this weird bubble out the back and it was not flattering at all." She began cutting up secondhand leotards to use as patterns, and started making her own, relying on sewing skills she had picked up from her mother, and during high school, when she studied at Utah Regional Ballet. Ms. Choules chose bright colors and prints for her own practice wear. Then, "when I came to Kansas City Ballet after having my kids, people asked, 'Can you make me a leotard, too?'" she said. "I sent a few to friends in other companies. I'd make a handful and sell them to the summer students that came into town if I needed money." She retired from KCB at 37, wrote a business plan, and applied for a grant from Career Transitions for Dancers, receiving enough money to spend a summer at the Fashion Institute of Technology studying drawing, draping and pattern drafting. Back in Kansas City, she rearranged her basement for more efficient production, and built a website that allowed dancers to custom configure leotards, choosing from a library of about 40 fabrics far more than most rival brands, which typically offered leotards in black, white and a handful of solid, and restrained, colors. When one of her former KCB corps members, Stephanie Greenwald, moved to Germany to dance with Staatsballett Berlin, Ms. Choules sent her boxes of leotards. Ms. Greenwald picked out a few for herself, sold the rest and sent the money back to Kansas City. Suddenly, Eleve was international. The Staatsballett toured Japan, and "we did all kinds of fun prints and mesh, and we were very colorful," Ms. Choules said. "The Japanese girls loved them. We had a huge Japanese following from the beginning." A couple of years ago, Ms. Choules and her husband bought a 10,000 square foot building in midtown Kansas City, and expanded to about 35 employees. All custom orders are made there, as is part of a recently added ready to wear line that is sold more than 100 stores around the world. Notwithstanding her purchase of a Gerber DCS2500 computer controlled cutting table, most of the manufacturing is still done by hand on industrial straight stitch, serger, and cover stitch machines for better stretch and durability. Custom leotards start at 67 and can run to more than 100. "We wear multiple leotards a day, depending on what we're doing and if we're sweating a lot," said Abigail Sheppard, a first soloist with the Finnish National Ballet, who has worn Eleve since 2014. "It's important that they last, because dancers don't make much money." Kansas City had a thriving garment district from the early 1920s until after World War II, but now there are few skilled sewers in the local labor market, so virtually all Eleve's sewers are immigrants; many are refugees from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. One of the few men in the atelier is a human Rosetta stone, translating instructions into Farsi and Dari; Pashto, Urdu and Hindi. Other sewers come from Central America, Syria, China and Bhutan.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Buying a fixer upper was not part of the plan when S. Jefferson Thomas and Patricia Balaci decided to move to Westchester County from Brooklyn last year. After all, their combined renovation experience consisted mostly of watching reality TV. But in a search for more space and proximity to nature, the couple found themselves captivated by a dated one bedroom apartment in Hastings on Hudson, N.Y. Never mind the wall to wall carpeting, linoleum lined balcony and pink bathroom toilet. Facing the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades beyond, the place had a view and at 900 square feet, including the balcony, was much larger than their maisonette in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. So with the proceeds from the sale of the Brooklyn place, they paid about 227,000 for the apartment last July and embarked on an ambitious plan to bring urban design to their slice of suburbia. But with no previous renovation experience, the couple didn't know where to start. A tour of local home improvement stores in search of ideas proved that the streamlined, contemporary look they wanted was not to be found on the shelves of Home Depot or Lowe's. Local design stores in Westchester came closer, but asked 30,000 to 40,000 to outfit the kitchen alone, not including labor. It wasn't until they got into a car accident in TriBeCa that inspiration hit. Wandering the cobblestone streets while waiting for the police to arrive, they paused to look at real estate listings in the window of an agency. There, in an ad for 210 Pacific Street, a new development in Brooklyn where apartments were priced from 2.475 million, they spotted their dream kitchen, with waterfall style marble kitchen counter slabs, fumed rift white oak and Corian cabinets, according to the development's website. The couple were referred to a contractor, Luciano Jacomini of Silver Brook Enterprises, in Bridgeport, Conn., by a structural engineer who was recommended by the co op board. Then, over the next few months, Mr. Thomas made it his mission to track down vendors that could replicate the custom look they wanted, at a price they could afford. "A lot of it was trying to put the right words into Google," he said, noting there were hours of typing various combinations of "Ikea replacement doors" into the search engine. Eventually, he came across Semihandmade, a company that specializes in making doors that fit Ikea cabinets at a reasonable price. Using textured melamine cabinet fronts instead of complete custom built ins saved the couple as much as 20,000, he estimated, freeing up money to spend on more prominent details like a 5,200 Krion waterfall kitchen countertop from Porcelanosa, the manufacturer and designer of tile, kitchen and bath products. "We spent money on the things that are the most obvious," he said. "No one sees your kitchen cabinets behind the doors." The bathroom, they decided, needn't be fancy, but the floor tiles there had to be laid in a herringbone pattern. But as soon as demolition began, hurdles arose. The walls that had closed off the kitchen didn't line up properly with the apartment below. They were "off by two inches, resting on nothing," Mr. Thomas said. "It's scary to think what was actually holding up our kitchen." The walls were so misaligned, he said, "we had to get permission to go downstairs to the apartment below to put in a support column." Wood and metal columns were added in the garage below the neighbor's apartment to ensure stability, and a ceiling beam was installed in the kitchen to help bolster the floor above, with the couple picking up the cost for all the work. Permission was granted by the president of the co op board, who happened to own the downstairs apartment and was renting it out. It didn't hurt that the tenant happened to be a contractor. "He knew what these things entail, and he was reasonably O.K. with it," said Mr. Thomas, noting that the new columns not only improved the stability of both apartments but also allow the downstairs neighbor to open up his kitchen should he ever want to. "It was a learning curve for both of us," said Ms. Balaci, an Italian teacher. "I have to hand it to Jeff," she added. "I picked a smart one, and he could see the big picture." While Mr. Thomas took the lead on managing the renovation, Ms. Balaci kept the budget in check, reining in her husband on expenses she deemed unnecessary, like buying a new hallway light fixture when the existing one looked perfectly fine. "He wanted everything new," she said. "I'm the thrifty daughter of immigrants type where you don't throw anything out and try to salvage it until it's on its last leg." To save money in the kitchen, the couple kept the existing stainless steel stove and dishwasher. And they lucked into a high end refrigerator at a cut rate. An elderly client of Mr. Thomas who found the door of the 2,000 Fisher Paykel in her new apartment hard to open offered to trade it to him for an 800 model from Lowe's. Taking advantage of a sale at Porcelanosa cut their bill for the bathroom vanity, faucet, rainfall shower head and floor tiles by 40 to 55 percent. They splurged on the wall tiles there but found a less expensive Maax bathtub at a plumbing supply store. The pink toilet was replaced by an American Standard model. On the balcony, adding patio decking from Ikea at 3.44 a square foot and a 180 patch of fake grass from SYNLawn gave it a fresh look. At the couple's meticulously renovated apartment, it was clear Ms. Balaci appreciated her husband's attention to detail, but she didn't miss an opportunity to tease him about his thoroughness. "He has a Ph.D. in these lights," she said, gesturing to the recessed lighting in the kitchen and prompting an impassioned speech by her husband about the differences between "remodel" and "new construction" housings. He is now well versed in the nomenclature for the various lights' casings, he said, after he ordered a case of the wrong ones online before consulting his contractor.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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They don't call them problem plays for nothing. You know the kind I mean. Often set in tasteful living rooms, they tend to feature an upper middle class family dealing portentously with a topical issue as it affects their narrow interests. (Intermarriage, homosexuality, political scandal, adultery and alcoholism have all been apt subjects in their day.) Often, there's an accusation of wrongdoing, and a courtroom or confession to resolve it. "After," a play by Michael McKeever that opened on Sunday at 59E59 Theaters, checks all the boxes. Tasteful living room? You betcha. The gray and pale blue decor of the Campbell family's suburban home (designed by Brian Prather) would not look out of place in a catalog perhaps one called Crate Gun Barrel. Tate Campbell (Michael Frederic) is a proud hunter, you see. A noble if ominous deer head looms above the hearth, and a brace of rifles stands at attention nearby in a handsome display case. But Tate's perfectionist wife, Julia (Mia Matthews), finds the deer head "horrible," and not just because it throws off her color scheme. "A beautiful young animal like that," she sighs, "displayed as some sort of trophy." When she adds that the deer is "about the same age as Kyle" the Campbells' 17 year old son you may feel that the play itself has been stuffed and mounted. Yes, we are dealing with teenagers and gun violence but only in the most artificial way. Kyle has sent a text message to a classmate, Matthew, using an anti gay epithet as part of what could be a threat. His parents consider this just a stupid adolescent prank, but Matthew's parents, the Beckmans, do not. They want the school to live up to its "zero tolerance" policy on bullying instead of slapping Kyle's wrist with a three day suspension. They want him expelled. In the first third of the play, titled "Before," the Beckmans show up chez Campbell, Julia having invited them over to discuss the matter reasonably. You know that's not happening. Connie Beckman (Denise Cormier) is already vibrating with resentment the second she arrives; her ugly green outfit lets us know that she's not as upper middle class as Julia, who wears mostly ecru and taupe. (The overstated costumes are by Gregory Gale.) Connie's husband, Alan (Bill Phillips), seems calmer at first but is the one who winds up doing something crazy. It would spoil the story, such as it is, to give away what happens in Part 2 ("During") and Part 3 ("After"). Let's just say that if it weren't for the play's ludicrous reversals and recurrent eddies of argument, it would last about 10 minutes instead of 85. There's even a fifth character Julia's sister, Val whose only function is to deliver a crucial plot point by answering her cellphone. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter. So why are some "plays like this" quite engaging when this one is not? You can't blame the cast members, who ride the hairpin turns of their characters with nearly convincing finesse. Nor is the subject of gun violence and its aftermath unworthy at least when addressed, as in many recent dramas, sincerely. If only that were the case here. But the violence in "After" feels opportunistic. Because it happens entirely offstage, and because its resolution is delivered secondhand, it makes us suspect that the play we are watching is really about something else. Exactly what is hard to say, though I think it may mean to ask what responsibility parents bear for the moral and psychological health of their children. Tate is a hothead; Julia, neurotic; Connie and Alan give helicopters a bad name. Only Val (Jolie Curtsinger) seems to be a sensible adult, so naturally her son gets into Dartmouth. Even if those traits were persuasively related to the plot, there would be the problem of the plot itself, which is about as subtle as that deer head. It's a drawback shared, if less detrimentally, by Mr. McKeever's play "Daniel's Husband," which had Off Broadway runs in 2017 and 2018. "Daniel's Husband," about the problem of gay couples who lack adequate legal protection in the event of a catastrophe, was moving but manipulative; the characters were little more than chessmen arranged to produce a devastating checkmate. Likewise here, except that "After" is moving only to the extent we may feel obliged to honor the enormous exertions of the actors trying to gin up tears. The story is too baldly engineered too bullying, in fact to engage the audience in the manner necessary to produce empathy. The enervating production exacerbates the problem. Joe Brancato, who directed "After" as well as "Daniel's Husband" after developing both at his Penguin Rep Theater in Rockland County, N.Y., seems more interested in simplifying than in complicating the play's schematic conflicts. You could follow the action almost perfectly with the sound turned off. Actually, that might be a good idea. The saving grace of problem play authors like Yasmina Reza ("God of Carnage," "Art") and Terence Rattigan ("Man and Boy," "The Winslow Boy") is their artful, witty dialogue, scoring points and defining characters while tickling the ear. Mr. McKeever's dialogue sounds as if it were lifted from a concordance of morose cliches: "You think I don't know that?" "Don't for one second!" "And the last thing I need is. ..." "Now if you'll excuse me. ..." "Never step foot in this house again."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Elizabeth Hunt Burrett, a mother from Australia, experienced a moment with an orangutan while breast feeding her son at Melbourne Zoo last year. As she tells it, the orangutan came over to watch, locked eyes with her and gave an affirming nod. "It was the most beautiful thing," she wrote in a widely circulated Facebook post. While it may be impossible to know exactly what this orangutan was thinking, it's true that the critically endangered apes are exceptionally dedicated mothers. They give birth to one baby at a time, raising each for six to nine years, until it's time to rear another. Mother and young sleep and spend most of their time with only each other. And young orangutans nurse longer than any other mammal sometimes into their ninth year of life, according to a study published in Science Advances on Wednesday. Because observing wild orangutans can be difficult, the authors recreated the nursing history of four orangutans by analyzing barium, an element absorbed from maternal milk, in teeth taken from museum collections. In doing so, the scientists also discovered a possible clue why the apes nurse for so long: The teeth showed cycles in barium, which might correspond to environmental fluctuations in food. The Southeast Asian rain forests orangutans call home are challenging environments, with unpredictable booms and busts in fruit, the animals' most important food, said Tanya Smith, an associate professor in the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University and an author of the paper. "When times are tough, adult orangutans will fall back on things like bark or hard seeds," she said. "But offspring may not have the ability to eat some of these foods, or the knowledge to find them on their own, so they're maybe falling back on mothers' milk during periods of scarcity." These are the first findings tying nursing to food scarcity in a primate, Dr. Smith added. Previously, researchers estimated that orangutans wean off maternal milk between 6 to 8 years old, but they could never be sure because field surveys of the animals are tricky: Offspring often suckle inconspicuously, high up in trees or at night, and even when suckling is observed, it's hard to know whether the animals are consuming milk or just comfort nursing, with no milk transfer. To get around this, Christine Austin and Manish Arora, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found a proxy for milk intake in orangutan teeth. Teeth are great for studying change over time because you can date them by growth rings, much like trees, Dr. Arora said. When producing milk, mothers incorporate ingredients from their own skeleton, including calcium and trace amounts of the chemically similar barium. These elements get written into the skeletons and teeth of their offspring. Barium makes a good marker for nursing, because it's readily absorbed from maternal milk but not so much from other foods, Dr. Austin said. The researchers studied nine teeth, belonging to two Sumatran and two Bornean orangutans, taking microscopic samples at hundreds of points in time per tooth, then quantifying the amount of barium in each sample. In all four orangutans, barium increased through the first year of life. It dipped between 12 and 18 months old, indicating that the apes started supplementing milk with solid food. Thereafter, barium fluctuated on a roughly annual basis, presumably in response to solid food availability. Scientists typically think of weaning as a "linear progression" from dependence on maternal milk to independence, said Laurie Reitsema, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia who was not involved in the research. This study suggests that "it's actually a series of pulses throughout in the orangutan's case," she said. One reason food varies drastically for orangutans is because many live in forests that experience so called mast fruiting, in which a large number of trees fruit at once, independent of the seasonal cycle. "These events occur every two to six years, and are kind of unpredictable," said Cheryl Knott, an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University who was not involved in this study.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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It was our second night in Jamaica, and I was sitting at a picnic table on a small, rocky beach in Runaway Bay. We were eating a buffet dinner and watching a talent show that combined sideshow stunts by performers walking on nails and blowing flames into the sky with gymnastics and G rated jokes by guests, who included children and a few brave parents. When the crowd applauded, my 18 month old daughter, Roxie, clapped excitedly with them. In the show's final act, an otherwise dignified Canadian father with Justin Trudeau like good looks thrust his pelvis across the makeshift stage as if possessed by the spirit of Elvis Presley. I had somehow stepped into a scene from "Dirty Dancing," transported to a Catskills resort, circa 1963. It wouldn't be the last time, during our five day stay, that I'd feel this sense of generational disorientation of being not so much in another country as in another era. Though my husband, Tim, Roxie and I had already been on the island for two days, we had not yet left the walled confines of our resort. Not only that: We had no plans to leave. Not even once. It wasn't that we weren't interested in seeing the island, birthplace of Rastafarianism, home of reggae and land of rum cake and jerk chicken. But as the parents of an increasingly energetic (and exhausting) toddler, our primary motivation for this trip I'm embarrassed to admit was not culture or music or even the lush expanse of the Blue Mountains. It was babysitting. Affordable, reliable child care and the possibility, at least, of a vacation that actually felt like a vacation. To that end, we had maxed out our modest travel budget on airfare ( 430 per flight) and four all inclusive nights ( 340 per night) before we even arrived. If the trip went as planned, we wouldn't spend another dollar beyond tips, of course after takeoff from New York's Kennedy International Airport. The obvious question, and the one that invariably nagged at me when I considered an all inclusive: Why bother traveling to another country if you're going to spend the entire time at your hotel? It was a question I didn't have an answer to. And yet since I became pregnant, I had been hearing about Franklyn D. Resort Spa, a modest, charmingly dated property an hour's drive from Montego Bay, a cruise ship port and the country's fourth largest city. I had noticed that it was mentioned in Facebook moms' groups and family travel forums, where I did a fair amount of anxious late night lurking. F.D.R., as it's known among its many fans, had devotees families who returned year after year. And I wanted to know why. Then we met Lisa Dixon, our "vacation nanny." And I had my answer. I had known, of course, that child care was part of the F.D.R. package. But I didn't understand how it would work. Would I just leave my child with a stranger and somehow relax? I couldn't imagine it. A year and a half into parenthood, Tim and I had hired a babysitter only once. A nanny a word I associate with British period dramas seemed impossibly luxurious, as out of reach for two working writers as a personal chef or a private plane. But at F.D.R., Ms. Dixon's time and expertise was included in the price of our stay. Having descended from a matrilineal line of women who were paid to care for other people's children, I felt deeply conflicted about the "vacation nanny" concept before we arrived. I worried that it undervalued the work of women like my mother and grandmother. It seemed potentially exploitative. But the balance between cost and convenience is something with which every parent on a budget must grapple. Most of us make choices, at least occasionally, that we aren't entirely comfortable with that raise questions we don't have easy answers to. I expected to feel uncomfortable in the hermetically sealed bubble of the resort, but the disorientation came as soon as we were on the airport shuttle bus. I felt uneasy at taking a vacation in another country with no intention of engaging with the people or culture, history or environment or even just day to day life of that place. There I was, watching Jamaica from a shuttle window. The driver, doing his best to engage his passengers' interest in the country they were visiting, performed a perfunctory call and response, quizzing us on the colors of the national flag: "gold for the sunshine"; "green for vegetation, including the ganja"; and "black." "What is black for? Black is for the people," he said proudly. His audience of sun seeking Canadian and American tourists seemed disinterested. After delivering passengers to three other resorts, we arrived at F.D.R., named for its owner, Franklyn, not the president. The place was compact and cheerfully bright. Unlike the towering white behemoths we'd passed, it was just three stories tall, with 78 rooms, cobalt blue shutters and turquoise and lemon yellow piers jutting into the ocean. Narrow walkways wound through gardens planted in Christmas palms, lantana and hibiscus. The beach was piled with kayaks and paddleboards. The staff seemed to outnumber the guests. Our very first night, tempted by the prospect of a dinner date, I broke my own rule and spent 18 to hire Ms. Dixon to return for a two hour babysitting stint outside her normal 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. shift. Ms. Dixon had short cropped hair, an unaffected smile and a 14 year old daughter of her own. She had worked at F.D.R. for 16 years. She was about my age, and it was clear she took her job seriously. The 9 an hour splurge was worth it, not to be stuck in the room a pleasant, but spare two room suite with floral bed spreads and tropical prints on the walls after Roxie's usual 7 p.m. bedtime. Tim and I sat at a patio table above the beach, ate escovitch fish and eavesdropped on the neighboring table's political conversation about the recent United States presidential election before joining in ourselves. The two families, from Montreal and the Washington, D.C., area, had both been coming to the resort for years and had become friends. The Canadian family had three children, while the other had four adopted special needs children (F.D.R. gives a 50 percent discount for such families). Both families loved the place and knew it inside and out. I could see immediately how, for families with multiple children, the resort would have particular appeal. The older kids were free to take turns whooshing down Big Blue the resort's looping 100 foot water slide snorkel at the small, sheltered beach or play video games in the teen club house, while the younger children were looked after by their nannies, who hover over them in lavender uniforms. (Though the resort declined to specify the hourly rate it pays nannies, an additional daytime nanny costs just 25 per day, which comes to a troubling 3 an hour in a country where a 10 pack of diapers costs 12.) Having worked with hundreds of children over the years, Ms. Dixon was almost certainly a more competent caregiver than I, a first time parent, not yet two years in. Still, I had to force myself to step back, let Ms. Dixon do her job and not feel guilty about sitting at the open air bar, sipping a rum and pineapple, watching Roxie on a beach cluttered with primary colored play structures, content among the other children and their respective nannies. During our first two days on the island, the weather was moody. But having narrowly escaped a New York nor'easter, we were unbothered by the choppy surf and darkened skies that kept us from the ocean. Tim and I, slowly getting used to being freed from child care, did childish things. He joined a ragtag collection of guests and played beach volleyball for the first time in his life, bloodying his knees diving for the ball. I rediscovered my love of water slides, racing up the wooden stairs to Big Blue again and again. When the sun finally came out and the wind relented, we outfitted Roxie in the smallest life vest we could find and climbed aboard F.D.R.'s glass bottomed boat a shabby vessel with a picture frame bottom. After days of stormy weather, the water was cloudy, but Roxie was nonetheless enamored by her undersea view of the sandy bottom, occasional head of coral and hungry schools of shimmering fish, which jumped and churned for dinner rolls tossed overboard. Our tall, sinewy captain called himself Jack Sparrow and, in a running narration that veered into magical realism, referred to the fish as his "babies" and melded characters from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Finding Nemo" with local legends about sunken ships and crashed airplanes. This was a man who enjoyed his job. Before returning to F.D.R., Captain Jack did a Hollywood tour bus style drive by of Unity House, an 18th century stone structure that resembles a Georgian mansion, but is actually a former banana warehouse where the cast of Monty Python stayed in 1982, while developing "The Life of Brian."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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It was a hot mess so much so that when the pilot of an international flight spilled a cup of coffee on the cockpit controls midway over the Atlantic Ocean, it melted one of the buttons and the plane was diverted to Ireland, an investigation concluded on Thursday. The Condor airlines flight had been carrying 337 people, including 11 crew members, from Frankfurt to Cancun, Mexico, when the episode occurred aboard the Airbus A330, according to the United Kingdom's aviation authority. The coffee was on a tray table in the cockpit when the pilot accidentally knocked it over, spilling most of it onto his lap and some of it onto the communications equipment, investigators said. No one was injured in the Feb. 6 episode, during which the pilot's and co pilot's audio control panels were both disabled by the spill and there was a small amount of smoke in the cockpit, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch said. The failure of the two audio control panels caused "significant communication difficulty" for the flight crew, investigators said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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With Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley gone, that undersized, underwhelming demographic known as Generation X was already short on idols. And after the death this past Tuesday of Elizabeth Wurtzel, the "Prozac Nation" author and 1990s angst poster child, our confused, self contradictory cohort may have lost the most Gen X member of us all. Ms. Wurtzel, who died of metastatic breast cancer at 52, was well cast to serve as a face for a generation that the news media perpetually cast as nihilistic and irony suffused latchkey kids whose prospects were dimmed by recession and an America in decline. She certainly had the look: A cover worthy grunge pixie image consisting of bare midriff tops, streaked hair, Goth black eyeliner and a perpetual rock star pout. Not for nothing was she called "the Courtney Love of letters." For proof, look no further than the original cover of her 1998 book, "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women," where she posed topless and smirking, proudly displaying a middle finger to the world. She was not only a child of a divorce, like so many in her generation, but, in some sense, the confused product of the loose social mores of the '60s. As she recounted in the Cut in 2018, the man she grew up thinking was her father "was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by." Her real father, as she found out late in life, was the celebrated '60s civil rights photographer Bob Adelman, with whom her mother had had an affair. It somehow seems very Gen X that she was born in July 1967, the hippie pinnacle in the Summer of Love. As for those famously gloomy career prospects which supposedly doomed her generation at least until the dot com frenzy took off in the late '90s it was hard to call hers dire. Ms. Wurtzel grew up in Manhattan (albeit the gritty Manhattan of the '70s, where Zsa Zsa Gabor, she once wrote, was mugged in the Waldorf Astoria ), attended the elite Ramaz School, and later received a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Harvard. Nevertheless, she entered adulthood haunted by a very Generation X sense of meaninglessness and despair, largely due to the crippling depression that she recounted in excruciating detail over the course of 317 pages in "Prozac Nation," the 1994 memoir that made her a star at 27. "I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat out," she wrote, using an obscenity, "and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out." The book not only helped kickstart a memoir boom in literary circles, but foreshadowed the squirm inducing oversharing of the coming social media age. Ms. Wurtzel's psychic suffering, which, like Mr. Cobain, she turned into a form of performance art, dovetailed neatly with the disaffection and lack of direction that bedeviled her generation, at least in a pop culture sense, according to seminal '90s movies like "Slacker" and "Reality Bites." During her '90s youth, she was a self defined "20 nothing," having survived messy sex episodes and a suicide attempt to embark on a career that seemed to crest and collapse simultaneously. After losing a gig interning at the Dallas Morning News after accusations of plagiarism, she briefly became a rock critic how Gen X! for an eye blink at New York Magazine and later, The New Yorker, where she was let go as soon as Tina Brown took over. And, like any worthy X er, she tended to fall back on irony to weather the storm, as exemplified by the Prozac locket she flashed in her '90s heyday. No wonder that Ms. Wurtzel, at her depths, got to the point where she could not even sign off on the basic tenets of reality. "Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity," she wrote in "Bitch," channeling either enlightenment or Charles Manson. Her role as a generational spokeswoman did not end with the era of flannel shirts and Zima. In a 2012 New York Times article about the first member of the generation Representative Paul D. Ryan to appear on a presidential ticket, I interviewed Ms. Wurtzel, along with Johnny Knoxville of "Jackass" and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana, about that theoretically historic moment. Ms. Wurtzel served up a typically '90s shrug of a response: "Vice president: it's the perfect Gen X job, isn't it? To have no responsibility, to have only the perks of what was left behind by the responsible people." As a generational symbol, however, Ms. Wurtzel did fail in one regard: She did not die young at least not exceptionally so. Indeed, her life in her final years might be seen as a violation of everything she once symbolized. The woman who described herself in "Prozac Nation" as "the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone," lived to earn a law degree from Yale and work for a time at the prestigious law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner. The woman who wrote in that same book that "no one will ever love me; I will live and die alone" did eventually get married, to a writer named James Freed Jr., in 2015. That same year, she underwent a double mastectomy. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, caused by the BRCA genetic mutation, she became an advocate for BRCA testing something she had not had and encouraged Ashkenazi Jewish women, in particular, to push for the test in an op ed for The New York Times. "It seems I am the designated driver at my Seder table," she wrote. Some die hard fans from the '90s might consider her newfound advocacy and domestic turn a surrender. But to the rest of us, it suggests that "Generation X," a term that has largely vanished from the cultural landscape, was less a demographic group than a phase, a youthful illusion that, like Kurt and Biggie, was never destined to make it to 30. Ms. Wurtzel surely felt no shame in settling down. "Shame," she wrote in an afterword to a 2017 reissue of her seminal memoir, "is a terrible thing. You are only as sick as your secrets."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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In the early decades of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf and her friends, the artists, intellectuals and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, left London and went to work, to spend summers, to wait out the German bombing raids and to conduct their tangled romances into the bucolic countryside of Sussex and Kent, now two hours by car southeast of the city. Quite a few of these brilliant bohemians were avid gardeners, and in the spring, when this gorgeous region bursts into flower, one can visit the houses they decorated, the gardens they planted and the homes of the artists and celebrated horticulturists who lived nearby, with whom they exchanged ideas about art and landscape design. Perhaps the most famous of these gardens is the one at Sissinghurst Castle, home of the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson and his wife, the dramatic Vita Sackville West, an excellent writer and the inspiration for the gender shifting protagonist of Woolf's novel "Orlando." I had wanted to go to Sissinghurst Castle for decades, ever since my first editor, Harry Ford, proudly gave me a copy of a memoir he was publishing, by the son of Sackville West and Nicolson. In the 1973 book, "Portrait of a Marriage," Nigel Nicolson described his parents' union (long, loving and harmonious though both partners had same sex affairs). The decision was made when I was invited to speak at a literary festival held annually at Charleston, the former home in East Sussex of Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, who lived there with her husband, Clive Bell, and her lover, Duncan Grant. They were all pivotal members of the Bloomsbury Group, whose attitudes toward love and marriage were as unconventional and as ahead of their time as their ideas about modern painting, literature and design. The offer from the Charleston Festival which hosts readings and talks by dozens of respected writers from Britain, the United States and elsewhere (May 19 to 29 this year) was irresistible. Not only is Charleston less than an hour from Sissinghurst, but it is also near Woolf's home, Monk's House, and a number of famous Kent and Sussex gardens. The ghosts of Bloomsbury, the British countryside at the height of spring: What could be more idyllic? My husband, Howie, and I flew to Heathrow Airport near London, rented a car, survived the perils of driving on the left side of the road (a British friend warned us, half jokingly, about how many Americans get into accidents while leaving the rental car lot) and spent our first night in Royal Tunbridge Wells, a charming town in the southern county of Kent, that, in its heyday, was a spa where people came for the waters at a local spring. We ate a terrific meal at Thackeray's, a restaurant in the house where William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of "Vanity Fair," stayed in 1860 and where the French inspired, market driven menu is a bargain at lunch. We passed the afternoon browsing the shops that line a gleaming white Georgian colonnade known as the Pantiles, in the town's historic center. I had assumed that Sissinghurst would be the most exciting part of our trip, which would have meant that the next four days were, if not a letdown, then at least a second act. But one of the joys of travel is surprise: finding out how easy it is to be wrong, in the best possible way. The two gardens we visited after Sissinghurst Nymans and Great Dixter were not only very different but also as fully beautiful as Sackville West's. I was reminded that each garden, like each person, has a personality determined by the landscape designers, the gardeners, the location and the climate or microclimate. Happily for Nicolson and Sackville West, Sissinghurst Castle, which was in ruins when they bought it, and then restored, was in proximity to the Bloomsbury crowd (of which they were slightly peripheral members) and to accomplished landscape designers who had been in the area for a while. Nymans was founded in the late 19th century, when Ludwig Messel, a German emigre, purchased the 650 acre estate to help secure his position in British society. Much of the house, part Regency manor, part faux medieval castle, burned down in 1947. Part of the house is intact, and the ruins are a romantic backdrop for the landscape. Generations of the Messel family stocked the garden with exotic plants from around the world. During our visit, the pergola was draped with fragrant wisteria blossoms. Lawns were divided by hedges of yew and rhododendron and paths bordered by brilliant flowers, specimen magnolias, cypresses and conifers. Though Nymans is surrounded by acres of forest, its gardens are highly manicured. A different spirit prevails at Great Dixter, the home of the distinguished gardener and garden writer Christopher Lloyd, who lived there until he died in 2006. Since then, the garden has been maintained and developed by Mr. Lloyd's friend and colleague, Fergus Garrett. One enters the garden (much of it the work of the celebrated architect and landscape designer Edwin Lutyens) along a path bisecting a meadow in which bright flowers stand out amid the tall grasses. Each area, some unruly and some orderly, seems to be designed with a slightly different and perpetually surprising notion of what constitutes natural beauty. For a gardener, Great Dixter is pure inspiration: I kept noticing plants (I still don't know their names) that I had been weeding out of my garden for years, but that looked marvelous near flowers and foliage that made these "weeds" look spectacular. As Mr. Lloyd wrote: "I see no point in segregating plants of differing habit or habits. They can all help one another. So you'll see shrubs, climbers, hardy and tender perennials, annuals and biennials, all growing together and contributing to the overall tapestry." He also wrote, "Many plants in this garden are self sown and they often provide me with excellent ideas." The walled garden at the Bell Grant residence in Charleston is lovely but modest compared with others in the region. The house, which the garden enhances, is the great attraction here. Beginning in 1916, it was the home of Vanessa and Clive Bell, their two sons, and a colorful, revolving cast of artists, writers and political thinkers. Among them were the economist John Maynard Keynes, the art critic Roger Fry, the biographer Lytton Strachey and, most importantly, Grant, the painter with whom Vanessa Bell fell in love, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica, and with whom she lived at Charleston until her death in 1961. After Grant died in 1978, the house was neglected; the Charleston Trust was formed to support the house's restoration, and the historic site began hosting visitors in 1986. Energetic and creative, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant painted murals, decorated the walls and window frames, the fireplaces, doors and tabletops. They filled the house with their paintings and with the art of friends, and designed the ceramics, the fabrics, and the rugs that brightened their home. The knowledgeable Darren Clarke, head of curatorial services, took us around the house, explaining the provenance of the canvases and portraits hung everywhere and patiently answering our questions. The house seems oddly quiet, even tranquil despite the riot of color and the vibrant patterns on nearly every surface, and that sense of calm persisted despite the fact that on the weekend we were there, hundreds of visitors arrived to attend the lively readings staged by the Charleston Festival. I could never have visited the area without making a literary pilgrimage to Monk's House, Woolf's last home, where she spent summers beginning in 1919, where she lived full time after her house in London was bombed in 1940, and where she drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse in March 1941. Located in the tiny village of Rodmell, it's a short drive from Charleston. Michael Cunningham, who came here in connection with his novel "The Hours," in which Virginia Woolf is a principal character, said that Woolf's house looks like a graduate student's apartment compared with her sister's home. Monk's House is lovely, but smaller, more restrained, almost spartan in comparison to the exuberance of Charleston. At the bottom of the garden at Monk's House is the writing studio where Woolf worked, and which is set up to recreate the objects she liked to have around her and the atmosphere in which she wrote. There was one more trip that I wanted to make, to Farley Farm House, also a short drive from Charleston. This was the home where the great American photographer Lee Miller lived with her husband, Sir Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist painter, and their son. It was a vacation place and party house for Max Ernst, Miro, Picasso, Man Ray, Saul Steinberg, Dorothea Tanning and Dylan Thomas. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the strikingly beautiful Miller was a fashion model before departing for Paris where she lived with, and learned from, Man Ray. She became an intrepid war correspondent and was among the first photojournalists to document the Allies' entry into Nazi concentration camps. Her photographs were initially published in Vogue magazine. It was sheer good luck that our last free afternoon in that part of Sussex happened to fall on the day (the last Sunday of each month) that Farley Farm House is open to visitors. Miller and Mr. Penrose's son, Antony Penrose, graciously took us around a place that is a working farm, a living memorial, a handsome dwelling and an astonishing small museum. Like Charleston, its walls are covered with art and decorated with murals, and scattered throughout the rooms are stunning examples of art from Asia and Africa. He pointed out the iconic photograph of Miller taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub, taken by her wartime colleague David Scherman, after the liberation of Munich. Documents, mementos, sketches, paintings and photographs illustrate the art historic guest list. In the last decades of her life, Lee Miller became a hugely ambitious cook; Antony Penrose's book "The Home of the Surrealists" includes photographs of dishes that his mother made, among them, two cauliflowers tinted and made to look like a pair of pink breasts surrounded by deviled eggs resembling eyes, a creation that demonstrated her fondness for making Surrealist sculptures of food. Miller's handsome, functional kitchen at Farley Farm House has been left exactly as it was. In the corridor is a glass case containing, among other objects, a dried lizard that Antony Penrose bought in a Mexico City market while he was staying with the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. She had been horrified by its potential for dark magic and called in a local shaman to avert the destructive spell that she believed the lizard had the power to cast. That final note of magic seemed perfect for the last day of our visit to this enchanted region so full of spirits and ghosts, of the illustrious dead and of the living who continue to restore, cultivate and tend the legacies of the plantings, the houses, the art and literature that these writers, artists and gardeners left to us, their grateful posthumous house guests. If You Go We traveled to Kent and Sussex by car from London. The drive takes about two hours. A pleasant country hotel, with an excellent restaurant, nearby to all the Sussex gardens. Double rooms from 200; Ockenden Lane, Cuckfield, West Sussex; 44 1444 416111; hshotels.co.uk/ockenden manor. A pleasant spot for lunch or dinner; 85 London Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent; 44 1892 511921; reservations thackerays restaurant.co.uk. Lunch from PS18, or about 23, per person, dinner from PS55, or about 71, per person. The websites for the gardens mentioned are listed below. Hours vary according to the season and day of the week, so check before going.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The bass baritone Davone Tines and the dancer Nora Kimball Mentzos in Kaija Saariaho's "Only the Sound Remains," an opera based on Japanese Noh plays. Over the years, Jane Moss, the artistic director of Lincoln Center, has tweaked her description of the annual White Light Festival, a project that has had special meaning for her and has proved popular with audiences. When it was inaugurated nine years ago, the festival was touted as a monthlong exploration of spiritual dimensions in music. But isn't all music spiritual in some sense? Even a little Schubert march for piano four hands that might seem jaunty on the surface can have a questioning undertow. More recently White Light has been described as an exploration of the "power of art to illuminate our interior and communal lives," to quote Ms. Moss's program note for this year's festival. But that's still a pretty all encompassing concept. Three White Light programs during the final week of the festival, which ended this weekend with the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho's opera "Only the Sound Remains," manifested quite different dimensions of spirituality, an overused term for a profound concept. On Thursday, despite snowy, sleety weather, Alice Tully Hall was nearly full for the sold out performance of Haydn's oratorio "The Creation," presented by the conductor William Christie and his Les Arts Florissants chorus and period instrument orchestra. A work that relates the biblical creation story is by definition spiritual. But Haydn's oratorio tells the tale with wonder and joy and hardly a trace of spiritual angst or questioning. Much of it depicts God contentedly going about the business of fashioning the firmament and the waters, of creating birds and beasts and, finally, man and woman. Mr. Christie led an ebullient yet purposeful account of this Haydn masterpiece and had an exceptionally fine trio of soloists: the soprano Sandrine Piau, the tenor Hugo Hymas, and the bass Alex Rosen. On Saturday at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the festival presented the highly anticipated American premiere of Ms. Saariaho's "Only the Sound Remains," a production directed by Peter Sellars, who conceived the work with Ms. Saariaho. Structured in two parts, this 2017 opera is based on two Japanese Noh plays as translated by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa. One of the two characters in each tale is an actual spirit a ghostly presence. As interpreted by the composer and director, the plays explore spirituality as a kind of longing, almost a love affair, between mortal and spirit beings. In the first, "Always Strong" ("Tsunemasa"), a monk serving at a temple of the royal court prays to Tsunemasa, who has died in a battle. As a young man, Tsunemasa was a favorite of the emperor, who gave him a splendid lute. The monk offers the lute as a gift of peace to the deceased's soul. A voice replies. He is the young man's ghost who yearns for the old days on earth with his lute, his music, his life. In a program note, Ms. Saariaho, whose "L'Amour de loin" was performed to acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, explains that in "Only the Sound Remains" she wanted to create an intimate opera that would play effectively in a large space. She achieved that goal compellingly. The orchestra comprises a string quartet (Meta4), flute, percussion and kantele (a traditional Finnish plucked string instrument which here evokes the lute). A quartet of singers called Theater of Voices, performing from the orchestra pit, contribute choral refrains and echo vocal lines hauntingly. The score involves electronic processing of the music in subtle ways that lend aural ambience to the sound. The charismatic young bass baritone Davone Tines was endearing as the devout monk who is rattled, yet transformed, by the ghost. The superb countertenor Philippe Jaroussky was a mystical but frightening presence as Tsunemasa, who so misses his earthly life. That yearning came through profoundly in Mr. Sellars's production, which was powerful in its simplicity (with sets by Julie Mehretu and lighting by James F. Ingalls). Just a painted sheet separated the realms of the temple and the beyond. Lighting often turned the monk and the ghost into looming shadowy figures. In one episode, the two singers have what at first seemed a romantic moment: they touch and then kiss. But this came across less as a homoerotic stirring than as a scene of poignant longing between the living and the dead. "Feather Mantle" ("Hagoromo"), the second Noh play, has some tumultuous moments but is finally a celebratory work. One morning a fisherman (Mr. Tines, drawing upon the most robust elements of his voice) finds a beautiful robe, a feather mantle, hanging on a branch. He intends to take it home and show it off. But a moon spirit, Tennin, appears and asks the fisherman to return it. Without it, she explains, she cannot return to heaven. The fisherman relents, on condition that the spirit perform a celestial dance first. This score, using the same instrumental and choral elements, also has atmospheric colorings and haziness, but much rhythmic spark and episodes of dancing. The four part choir often sings lines in sonorous block chords. In an inspired stroke, Tennin is portrayed by a singer (Mr. Jaroussky, again wonderful) and a dancer (the mesmerizing Nora Kimball Mentzos, who also elegantly choreographed the work). The conductor Ernest Martinez Izquierdo led luminous, nuanced and colorful accounts of both scores, which really form one opera in two parts. Alas, there were just two performances. The offerings of this White Light Festival are considerably reduced from earlier years. "Only the Sound Remains" must come back to New York for a longer run.
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Music
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Is This the Suitcase of the Summer? Save for Louis Vuitton steamer trunks, luggage has never had a particularly sexy connotation. (Recall Holden Caulfield complaining about his Gladstones banging the hell out of his legs.) The 1 percent of yore hired people to carry their belongings, and some celebrities still glide through airports with nary a suitcase in sight. But about a year ago, amid the sea of black polyester nylon that dominates most airports, I started noticing something new: sleek, colorful, grooved hard shell rolling suitcases with built in chargers. They're made by Away, a two year old luggage start up with 81 million of investment. Fans include Rashida Jones, Karlie Kloss and Dwyane Wade, all of whom have designed limited editions with the company. In December, at an airport in India, I saw a woman fight back tears when a gate agent told her that she might have to check her Away carry on, owing to overhead compartments that were more compact than averag e. In April, at Away's light filled store in West Hollywood, I watched a woman storm in, demanding to know all the colors the carry on came in because she wanted to add something "fresh" to the navy and black pieces she owned. Cults have formed around merchandise like face cream and butt lifting leggings. But rolling suitcases? "Sometimes, when I really miss my luggage but I have no place to go, I'll just open up my luggage on the floor and fill it," said Shelley Bazemore, 60, a counterintelligence analyst in Maryland who served 21 years in the army. After reading about Away online and researching "like I was researching for a doctorate," she bought six Away suitcases and half a dozen personal items In 2015, Jen Rubio was working in brand marketing for the British fashion label AllSaints. She found herself traveling a lot for work, and while wheeling her black nylon "no name" bag through the Zurich Airport, a zipper burst, spilling her clothes all over the floor. Thanks to some duct tape, the bag made it back to London, where Ms. Rubio lived at the time. She relayed her travel woes to her friend Steph Korey, who she met while working at Warby Parker. As young people are wont to do these days, they figured they could make something better. "The whole paralysis of choice was one of the things we wanted to solve when we started this," Ms. Rubio, 31, said at their NoHo office the other day. "You go into a department store, you see a 600 bag and you see a 60 bag, and you don't really know the difference." Away fills the space in the middle. Its most popular suitcase is the 245 "bigger" carry on, which comes with an ejectable lithium ion battery for charging smartphones, tablets and other USB cord addled devices. The first iteration of the suitcase required a screwdriver to remove the battery, and last year, when airlines changed their rules regarding lithium ion batteries because some of them had burst into flames mid flight, Away scrambled to reach its early adopters and retrofit their luggage. They weren't able to contact everyone. Earlier this month, the actress Emmy Rossum tweeted, in all capital letters, about how United Airlines confiscated her Away suitcase and made her stuff her belongings in plastic bags because her carry on wasn't compliant with its rules. "Can anyone explain this to me?!?!" she asked the ether. The company contacted Ms. Rossum and United to explain that the charger could have been removed. (Away also sent Ms. Rossum a new suitcase. ) Other luggage brands are also trying to entice a new generation of wired travelers. Tumi, which was founded in New Jersey in 1975 and named after a Peruvian ceremonial knife used for sacrifices, corralled a group of Instagram personalities to post about its bags to promote 19 Degree, its first aluminum luggage collection. It's hard not to see the line's rose gold suitcase as millennial catnip.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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OXNARD, CALIF. Aficionados have argued for ages over which individual has had the greatest influence on the automobile. Enzo Ferrari is a favorite. Traditionalists may side with Ettore Bugatti. Henry Ford gets the American vote, while Soichiro Honda rates high for innovation. Modernists might include the current chairman of the Volkswagen Group's supervisory board, Ferdinand Piech. Each of those geniuses deserves a major show of his creations, but the Mullin Automotive Museum here, about 60 miles west of Los Angeles, takes a broader view in its exhibition, "The Art of Bugatti." The show, which opened last month, honors not just Ettore Bugatti, whose grand machines remain landmarks of design and engineering, but three generations of the Bugatti family, who produced a fascinating variety of creative works. There are other genius families, concedes Peter W. Mullin, 73, founder of the museum and chairman of M Financial, but they tend to follow a single discipline (with exceptions like Johann Sebastian Bach the Younger). Mr. Piech may be the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, but both stuck with the car business. Mr. Mullin, a Best of Show winner at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance and a lover of French cars, and his guest curator, Brittanie Kinch, researched the family members' artistic pursuits and gathered representative works by each. Carlo Bugatti (1856 1940), born in Milan but living much of his adult life in France, was the patriarch. His discipline was mainly Art Nouveau furniture, though he was also known as a painter and designer of jewelry and silver tableware. Rembrandt Bugatti (1884 1916), a son of Carlo, experienced both success and tragedy. Given his name by an uncle the noted Italian painter Giovanni Segantini the story goes, this Rembrandt was a sculptor, specializing in animals cast in bronze. Living in Belgium in the early 1900s, he would arrive early in the day at menageries like the Antwerp Zoo and fashion animal likenesses while the creatures were most active, all the better to capture them in motion. The tragic part: Rembrandt's suicide at 31, thought to have been a result of depression brought on by his serving at a Red Cross military hospital in World War I and by the wartime killing of many of the zoo animals that had been his subjects. Ettore Bugatti (1881 1947), Rembrandt's brother, was also an artist, but his medium was the automobile. Ettore's creations ranged from the Type 10, a car so small he was able to build it in his basement, to the huge, and aptly named, Royale. His Type 35 is one of the most successful Grand Prix cars in history; the Type 55s were arguably the epitome of pre World War II sports cars; and the various Type 57 models were a sublime mix of speed and elegance. Yet that wasn't enough. In his factory at Molsheim in Alsace under German rule when the factory was established, but later part of France Ettore designed huge railcars, small boats, even a radical airplane. Jean Bugatti (1909 1939) was Ettore's son and a mix of his forebears. While able to keep pace with this father's technical prowess, Jean showed his creative side by designing bodies for Bugatti chassis. Many of the elegant Type 57 bodies came from Jean's drawing board, the most spectacular being the Atlantics. Only two Atlantics remain, one in the Mullin museum and the other in the collection of Ralph Lauren. Tragedy struck the Bugatti family again when Jean died in a freak accident in 1939 while testing a racecar known as the Tank, a Type 57G that had recently won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Those are the main characters in the Bugatti drama, though the show also displays paintings, drawings and sculptures by Lidia Bugatti, a daughter of Ettore. In the museum, decorated like a prewar French auto salon, Carlo's work stands out for its decidedly eclectic design, including thronelike chairs with nonmatching posts on either side, one with a carving at its top, the other post appearing to be topped by a lampshade. One cannot be certain how comfortable the chairs might be, but they are a visual treat. Mr. Mullin relates the story that the classic shape of Bugatti grilles was taken not from a horseshoe, as widely believed, but the curves of Carlo's chair legs. In the exhibition, one can readily see the passion in Rembrandt's work: a bellowing elephant (one version of which graces the hood of Type 41 Royale models) and a bison, its surface a shaggy coat you would love to touch. Still, Rembrandt's specialty seems to have been big cats, an example of which is a stretching panther, its musculature and the curve of its back leading to the arc of its tail, thoughtfully placed next to the Type 57SC Atlantic. For all the flamboyance of Carlo's creations and the sublime beauty of Rembrandt's bronzes, it is the cars that dominate this show, thanks to their fame and their size. The star is quite likely the Atlantic, considered by some to be the Mona Lisa of motorcars. Today's Bugatti Automobiles, part of the Volkswagen Group, produced the modern 1,200 horsepower Veyron 16.4 Super Sport in the show, and also sent for display a 19 foot 6 inch long Royale assembled in 1932. In contrast is the tiny Type 10 Le Petit Pur Sang, whose name translates to little thoroughbred. There is a Type 55 Roadster, designed by Jean Bugatti, rotating slowly on a platform. Five unrestored vehicles, including a wood sided truck, serve as a reminder of the textile magnate Fritz Schlumpf, an infamous Bugatti hoarder. For all the beauty in the exhibition, perhaps the most fascinating display is of a well rusted hulk with just two wheels. "Most people walk in to see the Atlantic but walk out talking about the beauty from the deep," says Mr. Mullin, who is also the chairman of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. It's a story involving a 1925 Bugatti Type 22 lost in a poker game, its new owner unable to pay import duties and the car ending up 170 feet down in Lake Maggiore in Switzerland for more than 70 years. The car was recovered in 2009, and Mr. Mullin bought it at auction the next year for about 370,000. In another display, an unfinished shell appears to levitate above a Type 64 chassis in Mr. Mullin's collection that had never been bodied. Mr. Mullin had Jean Bugatti's preliminary drawings for the car, which included papillon French for butterfly doors, hinged in the roof, predating Mercedes Benz's gullwing design.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Here is his full opening monologue: For the male nominees in the room tonight, this is the first time in three months it won't be terrifying to hear your name read out loud. "Did you hear about Willem Dafoe?" "Oh, God, no!" "He was nominated." "Don't do that! Don't do that." This was the year of big little lies and get out and also the television series 'Big Little Lies' and the movie 'Get Out.' There's a new era underway, and I can tell because it's been years since a white man was this nervous in Hollywood. By the way, a special hello to hosts of other upcoming awards shows who are watching me tonight like the first dog they shot into outer space. Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen. I'm Seth Meyers, and I'll be your host tonight. Welcome to the 75th annual Golden Globes. And Happy New Year, Hollywood! It's 2018, marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isn't. It's gonna be a good year! Considering what has been going on this year with powerful men and their terrible behavior in Hollywood, a lot of people thought it would be more appropriate for a woman to host these awards, and they may be right. But if it's any consolation, I'm a man with absolutely no power in Hollywood. I'm not even the most powerful Seth in the room tonight. points to Seth Rogen Hey, remember when he was the guy making trouble with North Korea? Simpler times. They tried to get a woman to host this show, they really did. They said, "Hey, how would you like to come and be judged by some of the most powerful people in Hollywood?" And women were like, "Hmm, well, where is it?" And they said, "It's at a hotel," and long story short, I'm your host tonight. And we're all here tonight courtesy of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Yeah, give it up for the Hollywood Foreign Press. A string of three words that could not have been better designed to infuriate our president. "Hollywood foreign press." The only name that could make him angrier would be the Hillary Mexico Salad Association. Well, I think it's time to address the elephant not in the room. Harvey Weinstein isn't here tonight. Because, well, I've heard rumors that he's crazy and difficult to work with. But don't worry, he'll be back in 20 years when he becomes the first person ever booed during the "In Memoriam." oohs It'll sound like that. Well, despite everything that happened this year, the show goes on. For example, I was happy to hear they're going to do another season of "House of Cards." Is Christopher Plummer available for that, too? I hope he can do a Southern accent, 'cause Kevin Spacey sure couldn't. Oh, is that too mean? To Kevin Spacey? Daniel Kaluuya is nominated for best actor for his work in "Get Out." Daniel plays a young man lured to an event full of aging white people desperate to reclaim their youth, looking around and oh, my God, Daniel, it's a trap! Get out! "Get Out" was a great film to see in a theater, and also a great way to tell if your date was a racist. If you walked out after that movie and your date said, "It was so sad when they hit that deer," they're a racist. You went to a movie with a racist. "The Shape of Water" received the most nominations of any film this year. Just an incredibly beautiful film, but I have to admit, when I first heard about a film where a naive young woman falls in love with a disgusting sea monster, I thought, "Oh man, not another Woody Allen movie." It's like "Manhattan" in water. "The Post" is nominated for best picture tonight. "The Post" is a film about journalistic integrity, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep staff member comes onstage carrying a heap of awards no, not yet, we have to wait. We have to wait and see what happens. There was some great television nominated this year, too. We had another fantastic season of "Stranger Things." "Stranger Things" reminded me so much of my childhood. Not the sci fi stuff, and I didn't really have any friends. I don't know how to ride a bike. Basically just the part where a guy from RadioShack dated my mom. "Sesame Street" recently released a parody of "Stranger Things" titled "Sharing Things." Meanwhile, Bert and Ernie have been doing a parody of "Call Me by Your Name" for years. I live in New York, so one of my favorite shows of the year was "The Deuce." If you haven't seen it, "The Deuce" is a show about Times Square in the early '70s, when New York was so seedy there were two James Francos. Oprah Winfrey is receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award tonight. What a tremendous honor, for Cecil B. DeMille. And Oprah, while I have you, in 2011 I told some jokes about our current president at the White House Correspondents' Dinner jokes about how he was unqualified to be president and some have said that night convinced him to run. So if that's true, I just want to say: Oprah, you will never be president! You do not have what it takes! And Hanks! Where is Hanks? You will never be vice president! You are too mean and unrelatable. Now we just wait and see.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Betty Friedan was there. Susan Sontag was there. Jacqueline Susann was there. So was Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick, who asked a mischievous question about Norman Mailer's testicles. What was this wild night? A 1971 panel at Town Hall in Manhattan, marketed as a debate on women's liberation and moderated by Mailer, whose incendiary essay "The Prisoner of Sex" had just filled an entire issue of Harper's Magazine. The evening was chronicled in "Town Bloody Hall," a 1979 documentary by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. And it is now the inspiration for "The Town Hall Affair," a new piece by the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage, starring Maura Tierney ("The Affair"). Rousing and infuriating, cerebral and vulgar, the original event marked a flash point in second wave feminism. In this Women's March moment, it seems newly resonant. In 1970, the feminist writer Kate Millett had published an unflattering analysis of Mailer in her book "Sexual Politics," calling him "a prisoner of the virility cult." Mailer responded with "The Prisoner of Sex," in which he savaged Ms. Millett, called his penis "the Retaliator" and ultimately concluded, "The prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on Earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself and conceive children who will improve the species." Ms. Millett refused to debate Mailer. So did Ti Grace Atkinson and Gloria Steinem. Robin Morgan agreed, but only if she could shoot him. Finally, a panel was assembled and the event, which ran three and a half hours, began. After a brief introduction by Mailer, Jacqueline Ceballos, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, gave a cogent speech discussing inequalities. The poet Gregory Corso heckled her and had to be ejected. After a cynical question from Mailer, Germaine Greer, author of "The Female Eunuch" and a woman Life would soon call a "saucy feminist that even men like," took the stage. Resplendent in a slinky black dress and ratty fox boa, she read a passionate speech that disparaged "the man of genius" (an implicit dig at Mailer), calling for a return of "the artist who had no ego and no name." Ms. Ceballos recently recalled Ms. Greer, who declined an interview request, as "her usual bored, superior, disdainful self," and added, "But she was glamorous!" Jill Johnston, an essayist and dance critic for The Village Voice, spoke next. Her talk, somewhere between manifesto and tone poem, began, "All women are lesbians except those who don't know it naturally." When she exceeded her time, Mailer tried to cut her off. Instead, two women ran up from the audience to embrace her and the three of them fell to the floor in what Mailer described as a mess of "dirty overalls." Finally, the literary critic Diana Trilling gave a deceptively fastidious speech that slighted both Mailer and feminist activists while staunchly defending the vaginal orgasm. The Q. and A. session followed, with questions from Friedan, Sontag and the literary critic Anatole Broyard, who asked Ms. Greer to describe women's sexual requirements after liberation. Ms. Greer declined. "Whatever it is they're asking for, honey, it's not for you," she said. Mailer gave Mr. Pennebaker ("Don't Look Back"), who had filmed scenes for Mailer's 1970 mockumentary, "Maidstone," 3,000 to record the evening. But the Town Hall management did not agree, and as Mr. Pennebaker recalled, speaking by telephone from his home, he spent much of the evening dodging security, finally finding refuge onstage. Afterward, he didn't know how to sculpt more than three hours of often jerky footage into a coherent film. It sat on a shelf until Ms. Hegedus, now his wife, took an interest. "For me it was fascinating," she said, speaking on another line. "These women were some of my heroes in the women's movement." She tried to capture the comedy of the event, the seriousness of the arguments, and what she read as the heavy flirtation between Mailer and Ms. Greer. "It seemed like it was some kind of love affair," she said. (She took the movie's title from a sardonic remark by Ms. Greer.) Not many people saw the 1979 film in its first release, though Mailer came to a screening and told Mr. Pennebaker, "This is the night that Jill Johnston turned my hair gray." Mailer also admitted that at that time, he hadn't properly understood the women's movement, Mr. Pennebaker said. For a long time, Ms. Hegedus said, she used to think of "Town Bloody Hall" as little more than a time capsule, a snapshot of a particular cultural moment. But she finds the spectacle of women arguing over their rights and their bodies newly relevant. She and Mr. Pennebaker hosted a screening in Los Angeles after the election this past November "and I was just shocked how much it resonated with people," she said. A few years ago, the actress Maura Tierney saw a listing for a screening of "Town Bloody Hall" at the IFC Center. She tore out the page and later wrote to Mr. Pennebaker and Ms. Hegedus, who mailed her a DVD. Finding it unexpectedly moving, Ms. Tierney gave a copy to Elizabeth LeCompte, the artistic director of the Wooster Group, with whom she has worked over the years. Ms. LeCompte liked it, but she didn't see a play there until she read Johnston's account of the panel in her collection, "Lesbian Nation." Then Ms. LeCompte was sold. In directing "The Town Hall Affair," a playful and occasionally abstract re creation of the panel, interspersed with clips from "Maidstone," she has enjoyed seeing how the panelists' arguments "crack up against each other and explode into different realms, different places and then return again into a kind of stasis." The Wooster Group started working on the piece more than a year ago and it has changed as America has changed, both before and after the election. "It feels like we're in jeopardy right now," said Ms. Tierney, on a break from a recent afternoon rehearsal. "Quite realistically." The piece has engendered lively discussions in the rehearsal room, though Ms. LeCompte and Kate Valk, a longtime Wooster Group actor who plays Johnston in the piece, wanted to keep those conversations private. "They're the subterranean root structure that we build everything on," Ms. Valk said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Pakistan has become the latest country to ban TikTok, the Chinese owned social media platform, in a move that government critics said stemmed as much from politics as from allegations of immoral content. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said in a statement on Friday that it was banning TikTok "in view of number of complaints from different segments of the society against immoral/indecent content." It said it had already informed the company about complaints about its content, but TikTok's administrators did not address their concerns. The regulator said it was open to talks with the company "subject to a satisfactory mechanism by TikTok to moderate unlawful content." ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, said that it was committed to following the law and that it was in regular contact with Pakistani regulators. "We are hopeful to reach a conclusion that helps us serve the country's vibrant and creative community online," it said in a statement. TikTok, with its lip syncing teenagers and meme heavy videos, has drawn criticism from governments around the world, for varying reasons. The Trump administration has attempted to block the app, so far unsuccessfully, citing privacy concerns and the app's Chinese ownership, allegations that ByteDance has disputed. India has banned the service along with other Chinese owned apps amid rising tensions between New Delhi and Beijing. TikTok has also faced occasional bans in places like Indonesia and Bangladesh over issues of public decency, as well as pressure in the United States and elsewhere over privacy and content given its base of young users. But conservative Muslims in Pakistan have increasingly accused TikTok of testing acceptable social norms. They deemed memes and song adaptations as too suggestive and too risque. Many people saw the content as lowbrow and vulgar. There were also growing complaints of underage delinquent behavior and display of illegal weapons. Prime Minister Imran Khan a former cricket star once famous for his flamboyant lifestyle who has become increasingly conservative since entering politics criticized TikTok as promoting "obscenity and vulgarity." Ms. Mirza herself has called for regulating TikTok content and initially expressed support for a ban, though a local media report said she believed the ban should be lifted. She did not respond to a request for comment. "Vulgar content exists on all platforms, but I would argue that the ratio might be slightly higher on TikTok," said Saif Ali, digital account director at Empact Middle East, a marketing firm. "The whole platform is song and dance, so it was always going to ruffle feathers with conservatives." At the same time, critics see politics at work. Political content has mushroomed on TikTok in recent months as the coronavirus has spread and the national and global economy have taken a hit. Political observers said that must rankle Mr. Khan and his party, Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf, or P.T.I. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority "has blocked TikTok not because of immoral content but because TikTokers are poking fun of the Great Leader," Najam Sethi, one of the country's most prominent journalists, said in a Twitter post, making an indirect reference to Mr. Khan. "After the Covid 19 lockdown, Pakistanis going on TikTok doubled to over 20 million active users while economic hardship related to livelihood loss and inflation hit the lower middle and working class hard," said Habibullah Khan, the founder of Penumbra, a digital marketing agency based in Karachi. "These trends seem to have combined to cause a tipping point in public opinion that got picked up by TikTok algorithms." Since May, videos critical of the government started showing up on TikTok's main feed, Habibullah Khan said. The prime minister has blamed past leaders for Pakistan's economic troubles and has implored the public to endure the tough times and wait for a better future. "You don't have to panic," Mr. Khan said during one speech. In one TikTok video that was shared widely a few months ago, two users mocked Mr. Khan by saying that the time to panic had finally arrived. Supporters of the opposition political party Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz also started using the app to criticize the government. One such user, Saud Butt, a supporter of the ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif, 1.2 million followers in a short time. Government officials said the real issue was videos that they said sexualized underage girls. "Had there been any political relevance of TikTok in Pakistan, there would have been a number of serious political commentators on the platform, influencing political discussions," said Arslan Khalid, the prime minister's point person on digital media.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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When trade tensions with China flared last year, many companies sought refuge in a country with a long, stable relationship with the United States: Mexico. Now, that alternative for production and materials may also be in jeopardy with President Trump's threat to impose escalating tariffs on imports from Mexico, aimed at forcing action on illegal immigration. In the short term, the tariffs would mean lower profits for American importers and higher prices for American consumers on everything from avocados to Volkswagens. In the long run, they could force companies to reconsider the continent spanning supply chains that have made North America one of the world's most interconnected economies. That disruption, experts warn, could be far more damaging to the United States economy than the cost of tariffs themselves. The United States imported more than 345 billion in goods from Mexico last year, and shipped 265 billion the other way. But if anything, those numbers understate the interdependence. American refiners process crude oil from Mexico, then sell it back as gasoline. Automakers ship parts back and forth repeatedly during manufacturing. About 30 percent of the content of Mexican exports originated in the United States, according to a recent study. "Our ties to Mexico are in many ways much more immediate than China and in some ways much more powerful," said Pete Guarraia, who leads supply chain consulting for Bain. "I don't think there's much you could do to mitigate the effects because the changes required would be so substantial." Mr. Trump has frequently criticized Mexico and the American companies that relocate production there. But his trade policies have largely focused on China, a target of successive rounds of tariffs on billions of dollars in imports. American companies have responded by moving production and supply chains out of China, in some cases to Mexico, which so far this year has displaced China as the United States' top trading partner. The attraction of doing so only increased when the United States, Mexico and Canada reached a deal last fall to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. BD, a medical technology company, said last month that it was moving some of its manufacturing to Mexico from China in part because of the Trump administration's tariffs. Troy Kirkpatrick, a BD spokesman, said Friday that the company was still in the process of making the shift, involving diagnostic devices and other products, and was assessing the latest tariff announcement. Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post on Thursday evening that he would impose a 5 percent tariff on Mexican imports on June 10, and ratchet it up to 25 percent by October if the immigration issues were not resolved. If the tariffs materialize, consumers could feel them almost immediately, most likely starting with the price of fresh fruits and vegetables a competitive market with slim margins where distributors would have little choice but to pass on costs. "As a consumer, that was my first thought," said Emily Blanchard, an economist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. "Those are my avocados and strawberries. What are you doing?" For other products, the reverberations could be more gradual. Companies may initially absorb some of the costs to avoid losing business, particularly on higher margin items, or ones where they face competition from domestic producers. But economic research shows that consumers eventually bear the brunt of tariffs. The impact could be greater in the case of trade with Mexico because so many imports from there contain parts or materials from American factories. "We're taxing ourselves on our own goods," said Katheryn Russ, an economist at the University of California, Davis. Economists said the direct effects of a tariff of 5 percent or even 10 percent would probably be small, especially with a strong economy and low inflation. The larger threat, they said, was the disruption they could cause for automakers and others who have come to rely on supply chains that seamlessly cross international boundaries. Those supply chains will not fray overnight, said Brian Dunch, a trade expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers. But over time, they could break down, particularly if companies decide they cannot trust trade rules to be consistent from one year to the next. "It's the cumulative effect of all this uncertainty," Mr. Dunch said. "You'll see supply chains Balkanize." No industry better symbolizes the integrated North American economy than the automakers. And no industry stands to lose more if that integration breaks down. General Motors has three Mexican plants that make some of its most important models, including the highly profitable Silverado and Sierra pickup trucks and the new Chevrolet Blazer sport utility vehicle. G.M. and Fiat Chrysler rely on Mexico for about a quarter of their North American production, and Ford for 10 percent. Some foreign automakers are even more reliant on Mexico. Volkswagen, for example, makes Golfs and Jettas there for the United States market, and almost half of the cars Nissan makes in North America are built in Mexico. Tariffs could also disrupt production in some auto plants north of the border because manufacturers operate complex cross border supply chains. Many parts and components used in Mexican plants come from the United States, and vice versa. "It's safe to say that in terms of auto manufacturing, the U.S. and Mexico are not trading with each other so much as they are building the same products together," said Kristin Dziczek, vice president for industry, labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Tariffs, "would significantly raise the cost of building cars in the U.S. and burden supply chains that have been built up over decades," she said. "The industry doesn't have piles of cash laying around to build up new production capacity in the United States." NEAL E. BOUDETTE Tariffs could also mean higher prices at the pump. Imports of Mexican oil have been in decline in recent years, but the United States still purchases more than 700,000 barrels of crude a day from Mexico, 8 percent of total imports. A 5 percent tariff would add 3 a barrel a cost that experts said was likely to be passed on to consumers in prices for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. "It's the American driver who is going to suffer the consequences," said Bruce S. Appelbaum, chairman of Mosaic Resources, a Houston consulting firm serving oil and gas investors. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Tariffs would pose a particular challenge for American refineries on the Gulf Coast that have been tooled to process heavy crude from Mexico, Venezuela and Canada. Adding to the challenge: Venezuelan oil imports have been shut off by Trump administration sanctions. Mexico buys more than a million barrels of American petroleum products a day, providing as much as 20 billion in revenue to American based energy companies annually. Those sales could be threatened if Mexico retaliates with its own tariffs, although doing so would be costly: Mexico benefits from the low cost of American energy products. The natural gas trade will also be affected. About 20 pipelines send up to five billion cubic feet of American gas a day to Mexico, with more flowing in liquefied form by tanker. A shortfall in gas sales to Mexico would depress gas prices, but it could also mean a slowdown in pipeline construction and the loss of construction jobs. "This is a symbiotic relationship he is throwing a monkey wrench at," Steven Pruett, chief executive of Elevation Resources, a West Texas oil company, said of Mr. Trump. "It's very disruptive to business and planning." CLIFFORD KRAUSS The United States imported nearly 28 billion in food and drink from Mexico last year, including more than two fifths of its total imports of fruits and vegetables. Tariffs on those goods are likely to show up in higher prices in produce sections and grocery shelves within weeks. American farmers face the risk of retaliatory tariffs from Mexico again. It was just two weeks ago that Mexico and Canada agreed to lift tariffs on American agricultural products that they had imposed in response to the administration's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Now American farmers are facing the prospect of a renewed trade war. "It's very disappointing because we just got the tariffs removed," said Michael Nepveux, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, "so it's very concerning to see things heading in the direction that they're heading." President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico has so far demurred on pushing the confrontation further. But the possibility of retaliation remains, and any Mexican tariffs could be damaging. Agricultural and food exports to Mexico totaled 19 billion in 2018, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Of the top five exports which include corn, soybeans, beef and dairy products pork and pork products were most affected by the previous round of Mexico's retaliatory efforts. During the first quarter of this year, for example, pork exports across the southern border dropped by 109 million, compared with the same three month period in 2018. "This is hitting agriculture once again at a very vulnerable time," said Todd Hultman, a lead analyst at DTN, an agriculture news and data service. China, for example, the largest buyer of American soybeans, has virtually halted purchases amid heightening tensions. PATRICIA COHEN Mr. Trump's tariff announcement sent a jolt through medical device makers, which in recent years have built facilities in places like Tijuana that produce items like pacemakers, artificial respirators and intravenous bags. Last year, the United States imported medical equipment from Mexico worth nearly 8 billion, according to government trade statistics. Blair Childs, a senior vice president for public affairs at Premier, a company that buys supplies for hospitals and other health care providers, said many medical items were kept off the list of products that were subject to the first set of tariffs on imports from China. But now the list of Chinese products is expanding, meaning medical products from both China and Mexico could be hit with new levies. "We've been scrambling to try and figure out what might this mean," Mr. Childs said. "We're completely focused on trying to avoid price increases." PETER EAVIS
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Twenty of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies on Thursday announced the creation of a 1 billion fund to buoy financially strapped biotech start ups that are developing new antibiotics to treat the mounting number of drug resistant infections responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The fund, created in partnership with the World Health Organization and financed by drug behemoths that include Roche, Merck, and Johnson Johnson, will offer a short term but desperately needed lifeline for some of the three dozen small antibiotic companies, many of them based in the United States, that have been struggling to draw investment amid a collapsing antibiotics industry. Over the past year, three American antibiotic start ups with promising drugs have gone bankrupt, and many of the remaining companies are quickly running out of cash. The new AMR Action Fund will make investments in roughly two dozen companies that have already identified a promising drug with the goal of bringing two to four novel antibiotics to the market within a decade, according to the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, an industry trade group that is administering the fund. Recipients will be chosen by an advisory panel made up of drug company executives, scientists and other experts in the field. The companies will also provide free expertise to biotech companies with promising drugs as they navigate the clinical and regulatory hurdles needed to bring an antimicrobial compound from laboratory to market. "Antibiotics are the mortar that holds the entire health care system together," said David A. Ricks, the chief executive of Eli Lilly, who helped spearhead the effort. "We make drugs for diabetes, cancer and immunological conditions, but you couldn't treat any of them without effective antibiotics." In an interview, Mr. Ricks said he was well aware of the irony that Eli Lilly and many of the other companies contributing to the fund were once the giants of antibiotic development but have long since abandoned the field because of their inability to earn money on the drugs. "We know firsthand how broken the system is," he said. The crisis stems from the peculiar economics and biochemical quirks of drugs that kill bacteria and fungi. The more often antimicrobial drugs are used, the more likely they are to lose their efficacy as pathogens survive and mutate. Efforts to promote antibiotic stewardship mean that new drugs are used as a last resort, limiting the ability of companies to earn back the billions of dollars it can take to create a new product. "It's been a really tough time for companies doing antibiotic discovery despite the tremendous unmet need," said Zachary Zimmerman, the chief executive of Forge Therapeutics, a San Diego company that has several new drugs in the pipeline. He said the fund would provide critical help for companies that have already spent millions identifying an innovative compound but lack the money to carry out the costly clinical trials needed to gain regulatory approval. "A fund like this can really help us get through that valley of death," Mr. Zimmerman said. The collapse of the antibiotic market has dramatically reduced the number of promising drugs. Between 1980 and 2009, the Food and Drug Administration approved 61 new antibiotics for systemic use; over the past decade that number has shrunk to 15, and a third of the companies behind those medicines have since gone belly up. Those backing the fund acknowledge that the effort is largely a stopgap measure. Industry executives and public health experts say that fixing the broken marketplace for antibiotics would require sweeping government intervention to create financial incentives for drug companies, including policy changes that would increase reimbursements for lifesaving drugs kept under lock and key and used only when existing therapies fail. Legislation that would address the problem has not gained traction in recent years. Drug resistant infections kill 700,000 people a year across the globe, according to the United Nations, which has warned that the death toll could rise to 10 million by 2050 without concerted action. Dr. Peter Beyer, a senior adviser at the W.H.O. who led the effort to create the new fund, said the threat of antimicrobial resistance rivaled that of the coronavirus pandemic, but it was a slow rolling crisis that could feel abstract to political leaders focused on the next election cycle. "Hopefully this fund can bridge the gap until politicians realize the urgency of antimicrobial resistance," he said. Everly Macario, a public health expert at the University of Chicago Medicine who focuses on antimicrobial resistance, understands how abstract the threat can feel. In 2004, her 18 month old son, Simon, died from a drug resistant staph infection within 24 hours of arriving at a hospital emergency room with breathing difficulties. "People think drug resistant infections are something that affects other people," she said. "But one day, all of us, both young and old, will need an antibiotic. A world in which antibiotics no longer work is something that should terrify everyone." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Given the scheduling, the long hours spent in cramped spaces and the energy needed to shepherd the herd from place to place, there's a lot that could go wrong on a family trip. So even though spring break is just around the corner for many, you can forgive yourself for not planning your trip yet. Our Getaway column recently tackled last minute trips for those who want to avoid the crowds. Here are a few suggestions for traveling with your own personal crowd. First, there's the question of what to do. If you're torn between visiting a cosmopolitan city and a theme park, no need to compromise. A city like Paris is manageable. Sure, the lines are long at tourist traps, but with the right agenda, you can see the city in a way that subversively makes spring break educational. We've put together a guide to help you choose from all France's capital has to offer for children. Not that you have to go abroad. You can try visiting Chicago or New York. Monica Davey, The Times's Chicago bureau chief, wrote a guide in which she said that the city is "surprisingly easy to visit with children, maybe even too easy." As for New York, we also have you covered there. The city is overwhelming by nature, but don't let that discourage you. There's plenty to keep children entertained even while learning and most sites are conveniently located near one another. If you already have your itinerary planned, there is the matter of how to travel. We interviewed Lucas Grindley, the editorial director of Here Media who, along with his husband, is the parent of young twin daughters. He had some advice for parents traveling with their children, particularly on planes. The gist: Make sure you have more than enough to entertain them.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Gail Schwartz wants to keep her 85 year old husband out of a nursing home as long as she can, but it isn't easy. Because David Schwartz, a retired lawyer, has vascular dementia and can no longer stay alone in their home in Chevy Chase, Md., she tends to his needs from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. every Monday through Saturday and all of Sunday. When she dashes out for errands, exercise and volunteer work in the morning, she checks in by phone with the aides she has hired. "I'm always on alert," she said. "At the grocery store, I'm thinking, 'Is David O.K.?' " An aide now stays overnight, too, because Mr. Schwartz awakened so frequently, disoriented and upset, that his wife began to suffer the ill effects of constantly disrupted sleep. She has moved into the bedroom across the hall. "I need my rest," she said. "I'm no spring chicken myself." Indeed, Gail Schwartz is 78. While she thinks her husband does better at home "he's getting 24 hour attention, and you don't get that in a nursing home," she said friends point out that the arrangement is much harder on her. She worries, too, about costs climbing as Mr. Schwartz's health declines and his needs increase. For now, though, she manages, part of an apparently growing phenomenon: the old taking care of the old. Every few years, the National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Public Policy Institute survey the state of American caregiving; their latest report, published last month, focused in part on caregivers over 75. They constitute 7 percent of those who provide unpaid care to a relative or friend, the survey found more than three million seniors helping with the so called activities of daily living (bathing, dressing, using a toilet), instrumental activities of daily living (shopping, transportation, dealing with the health care system) and a rising tide of medical and nursing tasks. Almost half of them report caring for a spouse; the others assist siblings and other relatives, friends or neighbors, most also 75 or older. About 8 percent of these oldest caregivers still care for parents. The aging of the population has thrust more seniors into this role, said Gail Hunt, president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Caregiving. "There didn't use to be so many 95 year olds," she said, "and someone's caring for those 95 year olds." That's challenging for anyone, though the extent of what's called "caregiver burden" remains a subject of debate. For years, researchers have presented caregiving stress as a potential source of depression, compromised health, even premature death. Some of those findings are being reassessed; a recent study in The Gerontologist, for instance, argues that the picture is "overly dire" and that several studies find benefits for caregivers the "healthy caregiver" hypothesis. People over 75, however, can find caregiving particularly taxing. They spend an average of 34 hours a week on caregiving tasks, the National Alliance for Caregiving report found, 10 hours more than caregivers over all, and they are less apt to have other unpaid help. Because 46 percent take care of spouses, they are also more likely to be live in caregivers, a known source of strain. "You're responsible for their safety," Ms. Hunt said. "You have to interact with the person all day long and maybe all night long, so your sleep is disturbed. It's more stress than if you're coming over periodically to help." The typical older caregiver in the study had been providing care for over five years. "Just the physical part of it, the lifting and bathing and all of that, can hurt you," said Donna Wagner, dean of the College of Health and Social Services at New Mexico State University and a longtime researcher on family caregiving. Older caregivers, typically women, have their own health issues. "My mother is a perfect example," Dr. Wagner said, describing her as a 4 foot 10 woman who cared for her husband, an obese man with heart disease and diabetes, for seven or eight years. "I don't even know how she managed," Dr. Wagner said. After he died at 85, "it didn't take her long to slide right into dementia. It's as if she put it off while she had responsibility for him. There are a lot of mysteries." There is no great mystery about the kinds of policies and programs that could better sustain caregivers. Ms. Hunt rattled off several, including regular respite care, home aides covered by Medicare, tax credits for family caregivers and more subsidized adult day programs. When asked if she foresaw more government support for such efforts, she laughed. Other Western countries do a better job, she said. Yet people like Alvin Vissers, 75, still shoulder the role. He retired from his job as a construction project manager near Brevard, N.C., two years ago to help his wife, Ronda, who is also 75 and in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. Mrs. Vissers, a nurse, can no longer speak much and needs help with nearly everything bathing, dressing, eating. Without constant monitoring, she may wander outside. She sometimes calls her husband of 54 years "honey," but "I don't think she realizes our relationship anymore," Mr. Vissers says. Spouses can be reluctant to seek help, even if they can afford it. Who else could possibly be as sensitive and steadfast as the partner who's lived with this person for decades? But Mr. Vissers, in generally good health despite elevated blood pressure, began having chest pains at night (from reflux disease, it turned out). Another caregiving husband he knew from church had been hospitalized with heart failure, sending his dependent wife to a nursing facility. "I won't be any good to Ronda if I give her all this care and she outlives me," Mr. Vissers said he realized. "The stress of caring for her 100 percent was too much." Last year, therefore, Mr. Vissers began driving his wife to an adult day program three days a week. "It worked out so well we went to five days," he said. The couple's youngest daughter, who had moved into an apartment in their home with her own daughter, makes dinner most nights. Mr. Vissers can find time to exercise, volunteer and attend caregiver support group meetings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Russell Westbrook is a Most Valuable Player Award winner. He is regularly an All Star (nine times in 12 seasons) and will almost assuredly be a first ballot Hall of Famer when his career ends. He has led the league in scoring twice and once scored 43 points in an N.B.A. finals game. He just turned 32 last month and if all goes well, he should have several All Star seasons left in him. It is a basketball resume that many players dream of but only a tiny handful attain. So why is Westbrook, who was traded this week from Houston to the Washington Wizards for John Wall and a draft pick, about to be on his third team in three years? This is virtually unheard of for a former M.V.P. It happened to Derrick Rose (the 2011 M.V.P.) too, but his on court productivity was seriously hampered by injuries. Shaquille O'Neal (2000) and Moses Malone (the M.V.P. in 1979, 1982 and 1983) also played on three different teams in three years, but it was in the waning years of their careers, not at their heights. Westbrook, still in his prime and remarkably durable, is one of the most divisive N.B.A. stars in recent decades, even more so after last season's up and down year with the Rockets. He is the latest in a long line of stars where analysts and fans have questioned whether his style of play is conducive to winning a championship, much like Allen Iverson (who won the M.V.P. in 2001). Westbrook's traditional statistics and accolades are eye popping. But as statistics have evolved in recent years, some of the advanced numbers have not been friendly to him. Perhaps no star player has been more of a lightning rod than Westbrook. Is he a bona fide superstar? Or does he accumulate stats at the expense of wins and his teammates? Sure, his counting stats (typically referring to points, rebounds and assists) are elite. But why isn't that reflected in advanced analytics? Here is a look at some of those numbers and the debates surrounding them. No statistic is more commonly associated with Westbrook than triple doubles (games in which a player reaches double digits in three categories; typically points, rebounds and assists). When a player has one of these, it is considered a noteworthy accomplishment. That Westbrook averaged a triple double for the entire 2016 17 season was remarkable, given that the only other player to accomplish the feat in N.B.A. history was Oscar Robertson of the Cincinnati Royals, who did it in 1961 62. After matching Robertson's feat, Westbrook put an exclamation point on the accomplishment by doing it in each of the next two seasons as well. That three season stretch with the Thunder is on paper one of the greatest runs by a player in N.B.A. history. People assumed Robertson's accomplishment would be impossible to match in the modern game, but Westbrook made it look easy. Critics contended that the scheme that Coach Billy Donovan employed, which called for Westbrook's teammates to give up rebounds for Westbrook, inflated Westbrook's numbers. Westbrook was accused of being a "stat padder" who chased triple doubles over wins. The critics pointed to the Thunder being eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in all three seasons in which Westbrook averaged a triple double as evidence. They have also noted that the triple double is an arbitrary statistic: Someone could score 35 points, grab 9 rebounds and have 19 assists and it would not be considered a triple double. Do the Critics Have a Point? It is actually more complicated than that, at least from a numbers perspective. During the regular season, the Thunder had a significantly higher winning percentage when Westbrook attained a triple double than when he did not. In the 2016 17 and 2017 18 seasons, the Thunder went 53 14 (a .791 winning percentage) when Westbrook attained a triple double; roughly a 65 win pace in an 82 game regular season. In both of those years, the Thunder had a losing record when Westbrook played but did not get one. In the 2016 17 season, Westbrook's M.V.P. year, the Thunder were 13 26 in those games. For the 2018 19 season, Westbrook's final season in Oklahoma City, the Thunder went 23 11 (a .676 win percentage) when Westbrook had a triple double, and 21 18 when Westbrook played but did not get one (.538 win percentage). They were 5 4 when Westbrook did not play. But Westbrook's approach didn't exactly make for great offense in Oklahoma City. In two of the three seasons in which he averaged a triple double, the Thunder had a below average offense, and they were tied for eighth in the other one. The Numbers Beyond the Numbers Where Westbrook is hounded most by his critics is for his inefficiency as a scorer. He's a terrible outside shooter for a guard, with a career mark from 3 point range of just 30.5 percent. In his lone season with Houston, he shot 25.8 percent. In today's pace and space N.B.A., not being a passable shooter can be a hindrance to offenses. Beyond that, Westbrook needs a lot of shots to score the points that he does. His true shooting percentage a measure of efficiency that takes into account 3 pointers and free throws has been below average for most of his career. It is at 53 percent, while last year's league average, for example, was 56.5 percent. For example, last year, Westbrook averaged 27.2 points, 7.9 rebounds and 7 assists per game and shot 47.2 percent from the field. It was enough to make him an All Star and All N.B.A. third team. However, Westbrook's win shares per 48 minutes a statistic that attempts to show how much value players bring to their team per minute, extrapolated to a regulation N.B.A. game paints a different picture. At .098, Westbrook was ranked 101st in the league. For his career, Westbrook has been in the top 10 in this measure just four times, and not since his M.V.P. season. Westbrook has played with multiple A list N.B.A. stars: Paul George, James Harden and Kevin Durant. He will now join Bradley Beal, who finished second in the N.B.A. in points per game last season. Westbrook, though, can seemingly only be successful if he controls the offense with the ball in his hands. His career usage rate a measure of what percentage of a team's plays a player is involved in is 32.7 percent, the second highest in N.B.A. history. The optimal modern superstar can provide production as efficiently as possible. Westbrook has never been accused of efficiency. But it should be noted: George, Harden and Durant have all thrived playing next to Westbrook. Last year, Harden led the N.B.A. in scoring and put together one of the best N.B.A. regular seasons in history. In 2018 19, George, as Westbrook's partner in Oklahoma City, had by far his best year (28 points per game) and finished third in M.V.P. voting. Durant won four scoring titles as Westbrook's teammate and the pair led the Thunder to an N.B.A. finals. Durant also won the 2013 14 M.V.P. with Westbrook as his teammate, with the caveat that Westbrook missed 36 games that season and had a higher usage rate than Durant in the games he played. So What's Going to Happen in Washington? Westbrook really came alive in the second half of last season, before faltering in the playoffs. After the All Star break, Westbrook averaged 27.5 points, 7.0 rebounds and 6.7 assists in 27 games on 55.7 true shooting. He even shot 37.5 percent on 3 point attempts. He can clearly still play at an elite level, and pairing him with Bradley Beal will make for an intriguing combination. The Wizards went 25 47 last season in a weaker conference. Adding Westbrook should, at least, put the Wizards in playoff contention. But can they make actual noise in the playoffs? Westbrook's recent history suggests no.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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"I have a deep feeling of love for all of you," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, told employees in May.Credit...Jessica Chou for The New York Times "I have a deep feeling of love for all of you," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, told employees in May. SAN FRANCISCO On May 5, after almost two months of working alone in his San Francisco apartment, Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, cried into his video camera. It was a Tuesday, not that it mattered because the days had blurred together, and Mr. Chesky was addressing thousands of his employees. Looking into his webcam, he read from a script that he had written to tell them that the coronavirus had crushed the travel industry, including their home rental start up. Divisions would have to be cut and workers laid off. "I have a deep feeling of love for all of you," Mr. Chesky said, his voice cracking. "What we are about is belonging, and at the center of belonging is love." Within a few hours, 1,900 employees a quarter of Airbnb's work force were told they were out. The moves thrust Airbnb into the center of a growing debate in Silicon Valley: What happens when a company that has positioned itself as family to its employees reveals that it is just a regular business with the same capitalist concerns namely, survival as any other? Start ups that sell everything from mattresses to data warehousing software have long used "making the world a better place" style mission statements to energize and motivate their workers. But as the economic fallout from the coronavirus persists, many of those gauzy mantras have given way to harsh realities like budget cuts, layoffs and bottom lines. That now puts companies with a "commitment" culture at the highest risk of losing what made them successful, said Ethan Mollick, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "Part of the compensation is being part of this family," Mr. Mollick said. "Now the family goes away, and the deal is sort of changed. It just becomes a job." In many ways, Airbnb was the ideal example of a commitment culture company. Founded by Mr. Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia in 2008, the start up grew quickly as an online platform that helped homeowners rent out rooms to travelers. Along the way to a 31 billion valuation, it built a reputation as the polar opposite of its sharing economy peers such as Uber, which prized ruthless competition, and WeWork, which collapsed under a partying culture and its founder's self dealing. Inside the San Francisco company's airy, plant filled offices, the posivibes were also plentiful. Employees surprised one another by raising their arms to form celebratory human tunnels, held dog "pawties" in conference rooms designed to look like actual Airbnb listings and were serenaded on their birthdays by the company's a cappella group, Airbnbeats. New employees, who were screened for empathy in job interviews, were welcomed "home" and told: "You belong here." So in March, when the coronavirus hurtled in, the rupturing of the "Airfam" was painful. Airbnb, which had been on track to go public this year, suddenly faced an avalanche of travel cancellations. Revenue evaporated. Weeks later, Mr. Chesky announced the layoffs and scaled back the company's ambitions. "Everything that kind of could go wrong did go wrong," he said in an interview. "It felt like everything stopped working at the same time." From the outside, Airbnb's commitment culture appeared intact. Mr. Chesky's layoffs script, which was published on the company blog, got more than one million views and was praised as compassionate, empathetic and a "lesson in leadership." At a question and answer session about the job cuts later, Mr. Chesky and his co founders offered a standing ovation to the employees they had let go. Clapping and heart emojis from audience members filled the screen. But more than a dozen current and former Airbnb employees, most of whom declined to be identified because they had signed nondisparagement agreements with the company, said in interviews that they had experienced a sudden disillusionment when the carefully crafted corporate idealism cracked. Kaspian Clark, 38, who worked in customer support in Portland, Ore., for around two years, said he had fully bought into Airbnb's mission and felt denial and grief when he was let go. As the company grew, Mr. Chesky began talking of a world where digital nomads healed divisions with in person connections. "I think in the future, people won't travel they'll just be mobile," he predicted in 2013. "People are going to be living a month here, a few weeks there, four months somewhere else." Airbnb was not just renting vacation homes, the idea went, it was building a "United Nations around the kitchen table." His philosophy crystallized in 2018 when he presented a plan for something called "stakeholder" capitalism. In contrast to Wall Street's focus on quarterly financial reports and daily stock moves, Mr. Chesky aspired to a capitalism that had an "infinite time horizon" and was good for society. That philosophy imbued many areas of work for Airbnb employees. Part of their performance reviews, for instance, were based on how well they embodied the start up's core values, three former employees said. "Embrace the adventure" was sometimes used to justify difficult situations, they said, and "champion the mission" was code for putting a positive spin on things. (A company spokesman disputed the characterization.) Airbnb's rental listings grew from 2,500 in 2009 to seven million this year. The company landed funding from top venture firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital. Its valuation, which topped 2 billion in 2012, skyrocketed to 31 billion by 2017. An initial public offering this year was set to make its executives, investors and employees rich. Enter the virus. As travel ground to a halt in March, Airbnb cut its 2020 revenue projection to less than half of the 4.8 billion it hauled in last year. Its I.P.O. filing, which Mr. Chesky had been tweaking with ideas for stakeholder capitalism and planned to submit by late March, went into a drawer. Instead, Mr. Chesky said, he drew up a list of principles for operating in the virus. They included being decisive and emerging "on the right side of history." He compared the situation to a fire. "You're in a house, it's burning, you have to put out the fire while getting the furniture out of the house and also rebuilding the house," he said. Mr. Chesky asked Airbnb's board of directors to call in to virtual meetings every Sunday and set up a daily "war room" meeting with his executive team. He said he had remained glued to his computer most days till around midnight, occasionally baking chocolate chip cookies or going on walks during calls. There were stumbles. When guests wanted out of nonrefundable bookings because the pandemic had forced them to change their plans, Airbnb changed its policy to allow refunds. But the move outraged the company's rental operators, who relied on the income. Mr. Chesky eventually apologized for how Airbnb had communicated the decision. "Was everything done perfectly? No," said Alfred Lin, an Airbnb board member and investor at Sequoia Capital. "It was about speed and being directionally right." Airbnb soon cut 800 million in marketing costs, dropped bonuses and halved executive pay for six months. It also ended contracts with roughly 490 full time freelancers. With cancellations pouring in and call centers closed because of the virus, Airbnb directed employees across the company, including its recruiters, who had frozen hiring, to assist customers. The backlog took weeks to get through. In April, the company raised 1 billion in emergency funding, followed by another 1 billion in debt. Then came the May 5 layoffs. To blunt the shock, Airbnb's severance packages included three months of salary and a year of health benefits, which was more generous than many other start ups doing layoffs. Mr. Chesky has since described a "second founding," in which Airbnb will be more focused on its core home rental business. It will look different, he said, with fewer customers booking international travel, less flocking to crowded cities, more local trips and more long term stays. Two days after the layoffs, the questions came thick and fast in the employee Q. and A. inside Awedience, Airbnb's virtual meeting software, according to five people who attended. Some workers asked why there weren't furloughs or broader pay cuts instead of layoffs. Others asked why certain groups had been chosen for cuts and why the company couldn't trim more perks, like its budget for renting office plants. Mr. Chesky said the situation was too uncertain for furloughs and pay cuts, calling those temporary measures. Layoffs were mapped to the future business strategy, he added. A spokesman said the company spent only a small amount on landscaping and related services. One area hit by layoffs was Airbnb's safety team, which handles situations like shootings and assaults at its rentals. When a fatal shooting at a party in Orinda, Calif., made national headlines last fall, the company banned unauthorized parties at rentals and announced plans to confirm that all of its listings were what they advertised. In the employee Q. and A., Mr. Chesky reiterated past statements that safety was a priority for the company. Workers piped up with written heckles the equivalent of shouting in a crowded theater with messages like "Safety was never a priority!" It was an unusual public show of dissent. Within a week of the layoffs, new safety cases had piled up, two people with knowledge of the situation said. Airbnb asked some laid off employees to return temporarily to work through the cases, they said. Workers on the regulatory response and payments teams were asked to come back temporarily as well, they said. An Airbnb spokesman said that the groups focused on user safety were the same size as before the layoffs and that the company assessed its support staffing levels daily. "Brian has always made clear that safety is our priority," he said. During that time, Leonardo Baca, an information technology professional who was laid off, joined colleagues to attend a virtual magic performance presented by Airbnb Experience part of the company's activities booking service, which had moved online because of the virus. It was meant to be a team building exercise but instead became a goodbye party. Some laid off colleagues were devastated, Mr. Baca said, while those who remained expressed dismay over why they had been spared. "We don't know why people were cut," he said. "You lose a piece of the team." Later, on a Slack channel for former employees, some lamented that Airbnb was gutting its culture, according to messages viewed by The New York Times. In June, an Airbnb contractor who had recently been let go wrote an editorial for Wired that quoted peers calling the company "hypocritical" for its "remarkably callous" treatment of contract labor during the pandemic. An Airbnb spokesman said its contractors "were more than contractors, they were our teammates and friends." He said the company had provided them two weeks of pay and other benefits. Other issues bubbled up. In a chat room for female Airbnb employees after the layoffs, one laid off worker described three instances of sexual harassment while at the company, saying that human resources was unhelpful and that co workers brushed it off, according to an image of the conversation viewed by The Times. The latter, the person wrote, "hurt the most." The company said it does not tolerate harassment and discrimination and investigates all claims. Last month, some employees in Airbnb's China division sent a letter to management outlining what they said was inappropriate behavior by Yanxin Shi, engineering director for its China business, according to one of the employees responsible for the letter, which The Times viewed. They alleged that Mr. Shi had ranked female colleagues by attractiveness and had said he didn't believe in the company's "core values" but could perform them well enough to pass the job interview and teach others to do the same. Airbnb said it had concluded that the letter's "most serious allegations" were not supported and had taken "appropriate action," but it did not specify what that was. Mr. Shi did not respond to a request for comment. Skift earlier reported on the letter. Mr. Chesky said he remained optimistic. The company has been promoting signs of recovery, like a growing number of bookings within driving distance and adoption of its "virtual experiences." In a virtual meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Chesky told Airbnb workers that the company would resume work on its plans to go public. He also reflected on the last four months, which he said had been "traumatizing in some ways." The crisis showed him that Airbnb had strayed from its roots as a place for people to connect, and he planned to rectify that. "Something we can never lose," Mr. Chesky said, "is being true to ourselves, being different, being special."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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IF one considers the F12 Berlinetta to be nothing more than Ferrari's latest coupe, the point of the car has been missed. The supercar's body is merely the fancy wrapping for the gift that is a supremely powerful 12 cylinder Ferrari engine. "Every time Ferrari has unveiled a new 12 cylinder sports car since 1947, something magical has happened," Amedeo Felisa, Ferrari's chief executive, said in an interview. "Our challenge in developing this car, beyond the continued evolution of that magic, was how to beat the best 12 cylinder car the 599 we've ever done. The F12 tops it, I am proud to say." Mr. Felisa is not the only one here who feels that way. The F12 Berlinetta's birth is a point of great pride for every employee of the Ferrari works, it seems. On a visit last fall, regard for the car appeared nearly reverential. The front engine F12 succeeds the 599 GTB, assuming the role of Ferrari's top two seat grand touring machine, the pinnacle of the company's model hierarchy. Its personality is more refined than the company's pure sports models the 458 Italia and Spider, powered by V 8 engines placed behind the driver but that does not mean the F12 is a machine suited exclusively for high velocity autostrada runs. "The F12 is engineered to be driven," Mr. Felisa said. "So take it out of the garage. Drive it." As directed, I took an arrestingly red F12 into the rolling emerald hills of the Emilia Romagna region, the lush breadbasket of Italy. Those ancient roads, with decrepit asphalt, indifferent repairs and earthquake induced undulations, had made for a rather punishing, harrowing drive in most previous Ferraris. In fact, a few miles in a 1957 250 GT Berlinetta on these same roads in the Mille Miglia tribute rally last May proved downright bone rattling. The newest Berlinetta a name Ferrari uses for a sporty coupe body style tamed that same tarmac and seduced it with subtle precision. Mr. Felisa said that among the company's road cars, the F12 was nothing less than "the most high performance Ferrari ever built." The mission of Ferrari's 12 cylinder engines has long been raw performance, of course, but the F12's power plant was asked to deliver more nuanced measures of technological prowess: everyday drivability and 30 percent reductions in fuel consumption and carbon emissions. In the European combined driving cycle (the E.P.A. does not yet list mileage for the F12) the fuel economy works out to 15.7 miles per gallon. But are those relevant motivators for the motoring purists who rationalize the extravagance of a Ferrari? "The auto industry is evolving," Mr. Felisa said. "Ferrari must evolve with it. We will be able to continue to evolve with innovation, new content and new thinking." When Ferrari was a small scale operation building several hundred cars a year, collectors speculators might be a more precise description could gobble up part of the company's annual output and park their new toys in climate controlled garages. Wait a few decades and the passage of time might turn the more memorable models into multimillion dollar classics. At some point, Ferrari management concluded that this was not a sustainable business model. "Collectors are our worst kind of customer," Mr. Felisa said. "A Ferrari is not meant to fill your garage." His message was clear: if owners don't drive their Ferraris if they are bought for decorative purposes only, the automotive equivalent of Faberge eggs sales will eventually dwindle. No special training is needed to drive the F12 in stop and go traffic, of which there is no shortage on the region's crowded two lane roads. But when an opportunity to pass presents itself, nailing the throttle will instantly awaken one's inner Michael Schumacher. The V 12 bursts into an aria, the chassis seems to leap from a sprinter's stance, and voila! the open road appears ahead. The vehicle passed quickly diminishes in size in the rearview mirror. The V 12's exhaust broadcasts an aurally optimized Sirens' song into the cabin. It is indeed magical. "What just happened?" I found myself wondering after the first time I experienced this sensation the exhaust's scream becomes louder the closer one accelerates to the 8,250 r.p.m. peak, where all 730 horses are pulling. The 599 GTB Fiorano could produce magic too, albeit in huge, gluttonous helpings; from a standing start, it could hit 62 m.p.h. (100 k.p.h.) in 3.7 seconds, according to Ferrari. But it was not a friendly everyday companion on roads like these. Response of the 599's 612 horsepower 6 liter V 12 to throttle input was instantaneous, brutal and unmitigated. Paired with a 6 speed manual transmission, that V 12 produced eyeball rolling, sociopathic, felonious fun. The F12 offers all that and more and less. "It is a car with blistering performance," Mr. Felisa said of the F12's new 6.3 liter V 12; it delivers 730 horsepower and 509 pound feet of torque, and it does this without the aid of turbocharging or supercharging. The F12's 0 62 m.p.h. sprint is done in 3.1 seconds, according to Ferrari, using the Launch Control feature. Top speed is "more than 211." Time and again, the F12 obediently followed slow trucks in a docile manner until prompted. And then it would vanish down the road. Roll on torque, from about 2,500 to 6,000 r.p.m., is the V 12's performance sweet spot. To package this V 12, Ferrari went in an almost counterintuitive direction. The F12 is smaller than the 599, halting a trend toward ever larger Ferraris that seems, mercifully, to have peaked. Almost every feature of the car's elegant body, including what Ferrari calls aero bridges the sheet metal between the front wheel and the cockpit helps to channel air to reduce drag. Compared with the 599, the F12 is lighter by more than 100 pounds with the "lightweight" options that hold the weight to about 3,600 pounds and more nimble. The F12 also has a lower center of gravity, increased torsional rigidity, better weight balance, a lower coefficient of drag and more precise steering response. There's more, but a complete listing of all the gadgets on this car would bewilder even James Bond. Thanks to a long menu of electronic features, including traction and stability control, yaw control, electronic differential and braking aids, an operator with basic training at a performance driving school can throw the F12 around a racetrack with reasonable confidence. "The F12 is a fundamental step forward in every way," Mr. Felisa said. It is, in short, a sportier sports car than its predecessor. The direct fuel injected engine is based on the V 12 also found in the FF, but with notable improvements, including a higher compression ratio. It's a masterpiece of space saving packaging, almost cube shaped. The design of the 7 speed dual clutch transmission no manual gearbox is offered has been revised. The gear ratios are more closely spaced to better match engine power, and they are also optimized for the multiple mode settings: Wet, Sport, Race, Traction Control Off and Stability Control Off. Shifting occurs instantaneously; gone are the lag and balkiness of some past Ferrari auto shifters. Ferrari sought improvements in even the tiniest increments by millimeters, degrees and grams. The F12 is assembled with tighter tolerances and almost aerospace precision on a highly automated assembly line here that would have seemed sacrilege not long ago, given Ferrari's heritage of hand built craftsmanship. But a greater level of durability, quality and reliability are expected even of Ferrari these days. The F12 comes with a seven year bumper to bumper warranty. Human comfort is addressed too, with vastly improved ergonomics and luxury features. The driver's and passenger's seats can be ordered in almost any size and configuration, in an almost overwhelming array of colors, textures and materials. Matching luggage and golf bags are also available. Cabin space and luggage capacity have been expanded compared with the 599, despite the F12's slightly smaller dimensions. Gone are the annoying steering column stalks; most functions are now found on, or around, the steering wheel. Most gauges still have analog faces, a nod to Ferrari cockpits of yesteryear. "We do not want to change, or destroy, the characteristics of Ferrari," Mr. Felisa said. "But these kinds of improvements are the only way to ensure the future of the company."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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IN the world of motor sports, the British firm McLaren has a distinguished record of innovation, from the use of carbon fiber to create ultralight, ultrastrong chassis to pioneering a single device to control a car's electrical systems, engine and gearbox. An even bigger game changer may lie ahead. McLaren, which invented a sophisticated simulator system for designing and testing its Formula One cars and sports cars, has begun marketing the technology to mainstream automakers. It says the system could radically improve the speed and efficiency of developing ordinary cars. The simulator can incorporate intricately detailed digital models of cars down to every mechanical component and body panel, and it allows McLaren's drivers and engineers to test different configurations back to back under precisely controlled simulated track conditions. Without the simulator, comparing the performance of different components in real world testing requires a racing team to stop the car, take out the component and replace it with another even as track conditions change, becoming hotter, cooler, wetter or drier. But with the simulator, "it takes a second," said Caroline Hargrove, technical director at McLaren Applied Technologies, which supplies Formula One technology and expertise to companies in a range of industries. In fact, components can be swapped in and out of the simulator even as the driver is powering the digital car around a digital track. McLaren, which entered its first Formula One race in 1966, began developing its simulator in 1998 at the direction of its team principal, Martin Whitmarsh. He had worked at British Aerospace, which used simulators to train pilots on military aircraft like its Tornado fighter bomber, and saw that the technology could be equally useful for racecar development. Dr. Hargrove, an engineer with expertise in modeling, simulation and data analysis, led the effort from the company's headquarters in Woking, Surrey, an hour southwest of the center of London. "What we wanted to do was build a simulator that was useful for designing cars, not just training the drivers," Dr. Hargrove said. "The big difference here is if you want to design the car with it, it has to be very accurate. At the time, there were none to go around and learn from. What we learned from was jet fighter simulators." With their simulators, McLaren's engineers can choose the precise conditions in which to test specific components or combinations thereof, factoring in variable degrees of rainfall, or gradual changes in temperature. Over time, the virtual testing has grown increasingly accurate. As prototypes are tested on a track, sensors pick up data that is fed back into a digital model, which is retested in the simulator. "It's a process of getting closer to reality," Dr. McGrath said. "You never actually get there. But you get close enough." The simulator's impact on McLaren's racecar development has been stark. "Before we used the simulator, at least 80 percent of the designs which we machined and tested we threw those designs away," Dr. McGrath said. "Only 20 percent would get through and actually make it to the racecar itself. Now that we use the sim, it's the other way around." Even cutting edge technology is not a short cut to the top, of course. McLaren has not had the dominant position in recent years that it held in the 1980s in the Formula One rankings, known as the Constructors' Championships. Still, it scored 11 top three finishes from 2000 to 2012. Over the years, McLaren's technology has become a product in its own right, with other racing teams as customers. "We set up a managed service for a whole range of race teams to test their cars," Dr. McGrath said. (He declined to name the teams, citing confidentiality agreements.) "We were able to help them accelerate the pace of development and performance way faster than they would have done if they had to work from scratch and build their own sim." That experience gave McLaren the idea of marketing the system to the auto industry at large. While many automakers use simulators for tasks like assessing driver behavior or virtual crash testing, McLaren says its own tools would extend the possibilities to end to end development. "We hired people from most of those companies for our simulation team, so we know what their simulators are not capable of," Dr. McGrath said. Perhaps the greatest advantage of McLaren's simulator system, now in its third generation, is its flexibility. It can accommodate models of vehicles ranging from Formula One cars and sports cars like McLaren's 650S, which sells for 273,000 to family sedans and sport utility vehicles. To market the system, McLaren formed a partnership with MTS, a company specializing in large scale car testing equipment. While some automakers may want only the simulator's motion platform or other individual components, Dr. McGrath said, "the big prize is to sell the whole simulation system." Francisco Veloso, dean of the Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, who has studied the use of virtualization tools in the auto industry, was cautious about the potential to replicate McLaren's efficiency an industrial scale. "Doing it at a broader level with global supply chains, it does take very sophisticated suppliers as well, and that is a different challenge," he said. "They would have to rethink the development process to really incorporate these in a productive way." But with a simulator costing less than 10 million, Dr. McGrath said automakers could see a return on their investment in the first year, with additional savings as they become more adept at using the technology. He said he was confident it could cut development time in half. In the meantime, McLaren is exploring applications for simulators far beyond the realm of motor sports and transportation like surgery. With surgeons as with fighter pilots, "we can't train you to have quick reactions," Dr. McGrath said. "It's something intrinsic in you. We use simulators to find these people out."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Evidence has suggested for some time that sleep deprivation can lead to obesity, among a host of other ills. Now researchers are digging into the mechanisms that cause our sleep deprived brains to crave food they do not need. A study published on Tuesday in the journal SLEEP suggested that the brain receptors that can lead the sleep deprived to crave unnecessary food were the same as those activated by marijuana. Essentially, not sleeping can give you a ferocious case of the munchies. The study took a close look at receptors affected by endocannabinoids so named for cannabis, the marijuana plant which it found were closely involved in the food cravings that come from sleep deprivation. Sleep restriction in the study's subjects led to amplified endocannabinoid levels in the blood, leading to hunger pangs, which generally intensify in the early afternoon, to increase further. Fourteen healthy, non obese subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 participated in the study. All of the subjects participated in both aspects of the study, undergoing four nights of either healthy sleep or sleep deprivation, after which they were given two regular meals as well as unlimited access to "palatable snacks," including candy, chips with guacamole and salsa, Doritos, Cheetos and ice cream, as well as healthier options such as fruit and yogurt.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The Hollywood studio Blumhouse knows how to make hit movies. Now, it is taking on television. "We're charged with populating the airwaves," said Marci Wiseman, who runs the TV division with Jeremy Gold. LOS ANGELES The Hollywood studio Blumhouse knows how to make hit movies: Produce a film on the cheap, market it to audiences who love horror, and then sit back and watch the huge box office results roll in. It worked for "Paranormal Activity," "The Purge" and "Get Out." The latest example, its "Halloween" sequel, took in 77.5 million over the weekend for one of the best openings in horror film history. Now Blumhouse, founded by the producer Jason Blum, is taking on television in a serious way. And it will have to see if its winning formula for film can translate to the crowded TV marketplace, where American viewers can choose from an estimated 500 scripted series this year alone. The same month that Blumhouse rolled out "Halloween" in movie theaters, it released the first installment of a monthly anthology series for Hulu called "Into the Dark." If you weren't aware that it has been streaming for over two weeks, you're not alone. It has generated little buzz, certainly less than Netflix's new horror series, "The Haunting of Hill House." Blumhouse also knows that it will have to move beyond monsters and the paranormal if it wants to reach a large TV audience. "Our movie company makes seven to 10 movies a year," Marci Wiseman, who runs Blumhouse's TV division with Jeremy Gold, said in an interview. "We're charged with populating the airwaves." She noted that there were only so many slots for scary television shows. "If we could, we would own every one of those slots and gladly do so," she said. "But we also want to be omnipresent and be a studio that is making as many shows as we think deserve to have their stories told." Blumhouse has experienced success on TV before. It was a producer on HBO's acclaimed thriller "Sharp Objects" this summer and the Emmy winning documentary series "The Jinx" in 2015. But it has also been behind a series of forgettable one season flops like "The River" (ABC), "Stranded" (Syfy), "Eye Candy" (MTV) and "South of Hell" (WE TV). Seeking to inject the TV division with experience, Mr. Blum hired Ms. Wiseman, 55, a former executive at AMC, and Mr. Gold, 51, formerly an executive at Endemol Shine Studios and Fox, in 2016. Last year, Mr. Blum sold a 45 percent stake of the television unit to the British based ITV Studios to raise cash to spend on content. The anthology series on Hulu will consist of a new television movie under the "Into the Dark" banner every month for the next year. In addition, there is a television adaptation of the Blumhouse franchise "The Purge" on USA, and "Sacred Lies," a young adult drama on Facebook Watch. Going into production next month for Showtime is an adaptation of a Roger Ailes biography starring Russell Crowe. Several other projects are in production, including unscripted series. In other words, not too many ghosts. Blumhouse executives explained that only 20 percent of the studio's television projects will be traditional horror fare. (The movie division is somewhere closer to 80 percent, Mr. Blum said.) Or, as Mr. Gold put it, "it's simple sales: To only be peddling horror, that's not a great way to scale a whole studio." Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Gold were speaking from the no frills, cramped headquarters of Blumhouse in Historic Filipinotown. The pair work out of a small box of a room where a glass wall separates the roughly five feet of space between their seats. They often communicate by taping Post it notes to the glass. "That's the thing with Blumhouse: You have all this production, but we don't have a lot of space!" Ms. Wiseman said. 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. When Mr. Blum hired Ms. Wiseman and Mr. Gold, he also decided to rip up his game plan for television. He wanted to build a studio where Blumhouse would be calling the shots. "In the movies, we're running everything. We make all the decisions," Mr. Blum said in an interview. "On the production, we're in charge 100 percent. And so I'd go from that to television, where I was asking permission to brush my teeth. For everything! It was extremely frustrating." Still, Mr. Blum described building a successful independent studio as a big financial risk. "It is harder than ever to cut through the clutter," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. "The flip side to that there is more opportunity for independent players to develop content. It's harder to have massive audiences but it's also easier to find someone take a chance on quality content." One of the first orders of business for the television unit was to discard the company's policy of shoestring budgets. The reason? Streaming services like Netflix, HBO and Amazon are more than happy to spend more on one episode of a TV series 5 million plus than Blumhouse does on some of its feature films. "I'm not saying people are saying, 'Please spend as much money as possible,'" Ms. Wiseman said. "But there are just a bunch of buyers that are not price sensitive." If it works, they'll have continuing series on basic cable and streaming services. And they'll have glossy shows, like "Sharp Objects" or the Ailes limited series, where, Ms. Wiseman explained, "the economics may not be as fantastic but the kind of heightened storytelling is really the goal." Essentially, to burnish the reputation of the Blumhouse brand. "Into the Dark" is one of the projects reminiscent of its Blumhouse film brethren. The show is cheap to make right around 2 million per television movie and it will be horror oriented. And if "Into the Dark" is not generating as much attention as "The Hill of Haunting House" neither Hulu nor Netflix discloses viewership statistics everyone is urging patience. "I don't know if 'Into the Dark' is going to work or not," Mr. Blum said. "Is it good that people aren't talking about it? Of course not. I want more people to talk about it. But I don't know what metric to use." Meanwhile, the TV adaptation of "The Purge" has shown solid results in the six weeks it has been on USA, averaging roughly two million viewers, according to Nielsen's delayed viewing data.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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It's morning at Mercedes House, the apartment complex on West 54th Street in Manhattan, and the little ones are frolicking in the loft area, near a big caterpillar shaped play structure. Later, they might be taken out for a walk. And when they're all tuckered out, they can curl up on cots. But this brightly lit space, part of an 1,800 square foot facility that opened last summer, is not for human youngsters, it's for dogs one of many pet amenities that have sprung up in residential buildings in New York in recent years in a bid to entice renters and buyers devoted to the four legged members of their families. "Hello, Bagel!" said Zachary Morello, the manager of this outpost of the Spot Experience, a dog care company, as a goldendoodle approached. When "pet spas" were introduced in high end residential buildings a decade or so ago, they might have seemed like another flash in the pan perk. But they've not only hung on like a dog with a bone, they've also evolved. Slop sinks for pet washdowns have been replaced by gleaming professional grade tubs. Closet size spaces have expanded into sprawling facilities where pooches enjoy "cage free" day care and work off paunches on treadmills, not to mention getting dolled up in the latest hairdos. (Pomeranian lion cut, anyone?) And while these facilities are still most often associated with upscale developments and, yes, widely mocked as an expression of the misplaced priorities of the privileged they are beginning to show up in affordable housing, too. Nationwide, dog ownership is climbing, fueled in part by millennials who are postponing marriage and child rearing and getting a pet instead. The American Pet Products Association found in its most recent pet owner study that 44 percent of American households, or more than 54 million, own at least one dog, up from 38 percent, or 35 million, in 1990. Elaine Tross, an associate broker at Halstead Property who runs a website called Pet Friendly Manhattan Real Estate, estimated that about 50 percent of residential buildings in New York today allow dogs, with condominiums and co ops generally more pet friendly than rentals. Buildings often apply restrictions on breed and weight and charge pet fees, which Ms. MacCleery, of the Urban Land Institute, calls a new revenue source for buildings. Some real estate companies are not only allowing pets, they're catering to them. The Related Companies, after experimenting with small, unstaffed grooming stations in a couple of its buildings in New York about a decade ago, has been rolling out its own proprietary program, called Dog City, in its properties, offering day care, training and weekly visits from groomers and veterinarians. "It's a way of showing residents we understand their lifestyle," said Daria P. Salusbury, the senior vice president in charge of the company's luxury residential leasing operations. Dog City's first branch, a 1,000 square foot facility that opened five years ago in MiMA, a rental/condo complex on West 42nd Street, proved so popular that its outdoor terrace, where in warm weather Dog City members gather while their dogs splash in a bone shaped pool, was quickly expanded. This month, the facility is embarking on a remodeling that will involve enlarging the terrace again. Of MiMA's 200 or so dogs, 80 are members of Dog City, according to Young Jee, the president of Dog City. Members pay a 250 annual membership fee plus monthly add ons ranging from 40 (for self service use of the facilities in the off hours) to 750 (daily day care with walks and report cards written by handlers, plus an ear wash and "pawdicure"). At Related's Abington House rental, in Chelsea, where dachshund shaped benches adorn the lobby, Dog City is decorated with poster size portraits of resident canines. Dogs can get checkups in a private room with an examining table and a professional veterinary scale that can accommodate a full grown St. Bernard. Dog City's flagship location a 2,500 square foot facility in the nearby Caledonia condo/rental complex, which will offer boarding for up to 20 dogs a night is scheduled to be completed this spring. The Dog City branch at Hunter's Point South, an affordable housing complex in Long Island City, Queens, just opened for business, with no annual membership fee and monthly charges maxing out at 300. "The fee structure is scaled to the population of the building," Mr. Jee said. Other real estate companies have chosen not to develop in house expertise but rather to outsource the job. Under an arrangement between the Gotham Organization and the Spot Experience, pet owners in Gotham's buildings get a discount on Spot services, with their dogs picked up by van and transported to the dog company's retail outfits, such as the 9,000 square foot one on West 42nd Street, at the base of Silver Towers. That is where Oscar the Frenchie, a French bulldog with legions of followers on social media, celebrated a recent birthday, a slumber party themed affair with guests arriving in pajamas. It was quieter on a recent tour, with big dogs milling around the big dog room and small dogs frisking in their own more modestly scaled quarters all of the action captured on webcam for the benefit of owners who were traveling or toiling away at work. Meanwhile, in the grooming station on the floor below, a cockapoo got a haircut and a Pomeranian sat under the hair dryer. Even when building owners opt to create more modest self service grooming facilities, the equipment has been upgraded. At 51 Jay Street, a former factory in Dumbo, Brooklyn, being converted to residential condos slated for occupancy in the fall, dogs returning from a romp in Brooklyn Bridge Park will be able to get cleaned up in a handsome stainless steel tub in keeping with the industrial aesthetic of the building before padding onto the herringbone patterned oak floors in the residences upstairs. Here and at many other new developments, the pet wash is on the floor below the lobby, a level where developers have been putting pools, gyms, children's playrooms and bike storage. Just don't call it a basement. "It's the amenities floor," said Deborah Brener Zolan, the building's sales manager and an agent at Halstead Property Development Marketing. Indeed, uptown at 252 East 57th Street, the Skidmore, Owings Merrill designed condominium under construction near Second Avenue, the 950 square foot pet space on the floor below the lobby promises to be positively airy, with nine foot ceilings, a sophisticated ventilation system, grooming equipment and plenty of room for pups to meet for playdates, according to Pamela D'Arc, the sales director, who is an associate broker at Stribling Associates.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: The North Carolina Legislature had been discussing a bill that would have barred Tesla Motors from selling cars online there, but the electric car manufacturer had one more trick up its sleeve. It took a Tesla Model S sedan to the state Capitol and won over legislators by offering opportunities to drive the car. The bill never made it to a vote. (The Charlotte Observer) As Fisker Automotive speeds toward judicial resolution of its bankruptcy proceedings, the automaker's senior lender, Hybrid Technology, is positioning itself for a takeover. Hybrid Technology is trying to use a 75 million credit based on payments it was owed by Fisker. (The Christian Science Monitor) A Chinese company is in the process of obtaining a patent for a flying car design that is more like a hovercraft than a fixed wing airplane. Consisting of a pair of lifting fans positioned at the front and back of the vehicle and two flight control fans in the middle, the vehicle's design is still in its preliminary stages. (The Telegraph) Scientists from the University of Hannover in Germany are working on a technology that would change rainfall data gathering from the current static technique a measurable container in a set location to something more dynamic. By using cars equipped with GPS and windshield wiper speed sensors, rainfall would be calculated based upon a car's location and wiper speed. (Gizmag)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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SpeakingInDance is a new weekly visual exploration of dance. Follow us on Instagram: nytimes. The choreographer Reggie Wilson is always thinking about the writer Zora Neale Hurston. "Nonstop," as he put it. African American artists and writers like James Baldwin moved to France to escape racism, but Hurston stayed in America. Inspired by Hurston and others, "Citizen," Mr. Wilson's latest, uses gestural solos that explore the idea of belonging. He worked one on one with his dancers, including Yeman Brown, above, to create a work that Mr. Wilson said, "is just lathered with repetition" and speed. In "Citizen," Mr. Brown flies through Mr. Wilson's labyrinth of lightning fast arm and foot movements, all the while "trying not to get too far ahead of myself, because if I do I'll trip all over." He likens his performance, which takes place on intersecting diagonals, to being in a video game: "The floor might slip, or the light might blind you," he said, but you have "to roll with that punch and be ready to achieve the action in order to win the game or to get to the end."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Dana White Says U.F.C. 249 Is Being Cautious. Is That Good Enough? Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship president, has insisted that his plans for a 12 fight mixed martial arts showcase this month will be safer for participants than staying at home or going to the grocery store during the coronavirus pandemic. But with the showcase, U.F.C. 249, just 10 days away, it was unclear how White and the U.F.C. could ensure the safety of an entertainment venture that, unlike a grocery store, is not essential. The closest major hospital, which could be needed if fighters get hurt, is a 40 minute drive away, and a hospital spokeswoman said her employers had not heard a word from the U.F.C. as of Wednesday. The Native American tribe that is providing the site a casino that was shuttered because of the virus has previously sought help with fights from California state referees, judges and other officials, but the U.F.C. is on its own now as it evades regulators who have told it not to proceed. And while the U.F.C. has insisted on pressing forward despite additional objections from combat sports doctors and public health officials some legal experts believe that county and state officials could step in, even though the April 18 event is being staged on sovereign tribal land. Fans will not be allowed to attend, and the U.F.C. will most likely take precautions like limiting the number of camera operators and people allowed in each fighter's corner, while moving the announcers away from just outside the cage. But putting on a full fight card with 24 fighters still requires dozens of personnel, including production staff, referees, judges, medical staff, coaches and U.F.C. officials, which would contravene the president's guidance that gatherings should be limited to 10 people or fewer. And White has said the U.F.C. 249 event will be just the beginning that he plans to stage bouts for at least two months at the same site, as well as others perhaps as early as May on a private island, for fighters from other countries who might have trouble entering the United States. White and U.F.C. officials have asserted that the fighters will have access to emergency care. The Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, Calif., is the only Level 1 trauma center within a three hour drive of the Tachi Palace Casino Resort near Lemoore, Calif., where U.F.C. 249 will take place. The U.F.C. has not been in touch with the hospital, said Mary Lisa Russell, a spokeswoman for the hospital. At least seven people tested positive for the novel coronavirus after an Olympic boxing qualifier in London last month, and the Association of Ringside Physicians has warned that combat sports are risky for participants and place undue demands on hospitals. "We do not wish to see any additional strain on an already overwhelmed medical system," the association said in a statement. In holding the fight on tribal land, the U.F.C. is attempting to bypass stay at home orders that have been issued in nearly every state, including New York, where the fight was originally scheduled; Nevada, home to the U.F.C.'s headquarters and where it hoped to hold U.F.C. 249 after New York rejected the event; and California. But while the Tachi Yokut Tribe, which owns the casino and is part of the federally recognized Santa Rosa Indian Community, retains sovereignty over its land, that doesn't necessarily mean state and county officials are powerless to enforce stay at home orders there. The Tachi Yokut Tribe and the Tachi Palace Casino Resort did not respond to phone calls seeking comment. "Since the 1950s, the state of California has full criminal authority over activities in Indian country," said Gabe Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of California and the managing lawyer at Galanda Broadman, a firm that focuses on tribal legal issues. Galanda said that while there are gray areas, state and county officials have a stake in criminal matters, as well as some civil ones, on tribal land because of a federal law passed in 1953 Public Law 280. Various local law enforcement agencies interact with tribes differently, and the stay at home executive order from California's governor, Gavin Newsom, is unprecedented. State and county governments regularly enter tribal land to enforce state and county laws even laws that are contradicted by tribal laws and California officials have begun criminally charging people and businesses who violate the stay at home order. Galanda referred to a concept known as "rent a tribe" whereby businesses set up on tribal land to avoid state regulation and said California might intervene to stop U.F.C. 249. "U.F.C. is quite literally renting a tribe for purposes of a single event in contravention of a state declaration of emergency, and that is a bad optic for the tribe and the U.F.C.," he said. "I don't think that's one that the state of California will be allowed to tolerate." David Robinson, the sheriff in Kings County, which surrounds the Santa Rosa Indian Community, said in an email that the county follows Public Law 280 in its response to tribal land. He emphasized, however, that this is sovereign land and that "the county's shelter in place order cannot be enforced on tribal land." Newsom's office did not respond to a request for comment. If the event does go forward, participants could be punished by state or tribal athletic commissions, which regulate combat sports in the absence of any federal regulation. Tachi Palace Casino Resort regularly hosted regional mixed martial arts events under the moniker Tachi Palace Fights from 2009 through 2018, when it stopped because of a reduced entertainment budget, according to Richard Goodman, the matchmaker for the fights. For several years those fights were unsanctioned, with Goodman hiring referees, judges and medical personnel as independent contractors, but beginning in 2016 he hired the California State Athletic Commission to administer the fights. Many tribes have their own athletic commissions, but the Tachi Yokut does not. "The California commission started really coming down on us as far as not counting these fights on the professional record," Goodman said, explaining why he began sanctioning the fights, even though it was an added cost. The California athletic commission has said it will not approve any fight through at least May 31. But the U.F.C. which commonly authorizes its own events in countries with limited combat sports infrastructure has its own referees, judges and medical personnel to hold fights. For years, the U.F.C. sought the legitimacy of state commissions; now, in many ways, that is immaterial as the company keeps its own records. "It won't matter to them as long as it is in their U.F.C. database," said Goodman, who is now an executive at Valor Bare Knuckle boxing. "They are the top dog. Even if you say this fight doesn't count for us, it is on TV, everyone knows it happened." Participants in unsanctioned fights have been punished in the past, and the Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports has specifically warned that could happen again. "All officials that decide to participate in the event, they may be sanctioned on a tribal/state level," the association's board of directors said in a statement to The MMA Report. Brian Dunn, the A.B.C.'s executive director and the deputy athletic commissioner of the Nebraska Athletic Commission, later said that he had discussed the event with the U.F.C. and that the A.B.C.'s official position on the event was neutral.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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In a New Jersey high school, Abigail, a quiet, worried looking student who's the protagonist of "Blame," returns to classes after some time away. Fellow students jeer and call her "psycho" and "Sybil." (The name refers to the 1970s best seller and its television adaptations, about a woman with multiple personalities.) But soon she's taken under the wing of a new teacher, Jeremy, a former actor, who assigns Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" for a project. And he casts Abigail in the role of you'll never guess Abigail. This arouses the ire of many, particularly Melissa, a punky "popular" girl who's used to getting her way. Quinn Shephard, who wrote and directed the film, portrays Abigail. The use of the Miller play seems intended to draw a dramatic parallel with the high school hysteria. But instead, "Blame" often resembles "Carrie," minus the pig's blood and telekinesis, and with drama class added. Now in her early 20s, Ms. Shephard is not far removed from high school herself. But her movie, for all its frankness (not terribly distinctive from that of many, many other indie movies about troubled teenagers) does not resonate like direct experience. "Blame" is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it's overdetermined and often overplayed. As Melissa, for instance, Nadia Alexander telegraphs her hostility toward pretty much everything with a relentlessness that suggests that she studied acting under Godzilla. Ms. Shephard seems to proceed from the fallacy that a steady stream of humorless unpleasantness automatically equals powerful drama, and lays on the portent accordingly. So, of course, when Abigail is stood up by a popular boy who had suggested a rehearsal date, it's on the afternoon of a torrential downpour. By the time the movie gets around to depicting its evil cheerleaders in slow motion, its emotional credibility is down the drain.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Several months ago, Jann Wenner, a founder of Rolling Stone magazine, received a call from the actor Sean Penn. Mr. Penn, Mr. Wenner said in an interview on Sunday, wanted to discuss something important. But he did not want to speak openly over the phone, so the two began to speak elliptically about a potential project. That vague conversation was the beginning of what eventually became an article, written by Mr. Penn, that rocked both Mexico and the United States when it was published Saturday night. It was an exclusive interview with Joaquin Guzman Loera, the notorious drug kingpin known as El Chapo, that was conducted while Mr. Guzman was on the run from the authorities after an audacious escape from a Mexican prison last year. The 10,000 word article includes accusations of cooperation between the military and Mr. Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, as well as Mr. Guzman's acknowledgment of his status as a drug dealer and his thoughts about the ethical implications of his business. Mr. Guzman, whose escape from prison his second made him one of the most wanted fugitives in the world, was caught on Friday, before the article was published. But after its publication, questions have been raised about the ethics for the magazine in dealing with Mr. Guzman, a criminal being sought on charges of drug trafficking and murder, and in allowing him to approve what would ultimately be published about him. The Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, speaking Sunday on "This Week," on ABC News, acknowledged Mr. Penn's "constitutional right" to meet with Mr. Guzman, but called the interview "grotesque." Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said he was concerned by the editorial approval offered to Mr. Guzman. But ultimately, he said, "scoring an exclusive interview with a wanted criminal is legitimate journalism no matter who the reporter is." Mr. Wenner said that he did not think it was plausible that the magazine would become embroiled in the legal case against Mr. Guzman. "They got their man, so what do they need us for?" he said. "There is nothing we can add anymore." After Mr. Penn and Mr. Wenner agreed to pursue the article, Mr. Wenner said Rolling Stone strove for secrecy. In early October, he said, he was unable to reach Mr. Penn for a number of days. When Mr. Penn next contacted Mr. Wenner, he said that he had met with Mr. Guzman, as they had discussed previously. That meeting also included Kate del Castillo, a Mexican actress who once played a drug kingpin on a soap opera. "It was just between me and Sean, for a couple of weeks as he wrote his draft," Mr. Wenner said. A lawyer for the magazine, and its managing editor, Jason Fine, were eventually brought in to help with the editing process. Work on the article was completed about two weeks ago, Mr. Wenner said, but because of Rolling Stone's production cycle, those involved were subjected to an excruciating wait for the next issue, during which time Mr. Guzman was captured. The reporting and editing of the article were closely held, in part, to avoid the authorities. "I was worried that I did not want to provide the details that would be responsible for his capture," Mr. Wenner said. "We were very conscientious on our end and on Sean's end, keeping it quiet, using a separate protected part of our server for emails." Around Thanksgiving, as Mr. Penn negotiated with Mr. Guzman and his intermediaries to include a video component of the interview, which was eventually sent to him by courier, the magazine was convinced that it would have to resist pressure from the authorities in the United States and Mexico who would want to learn as much as they could about Mr. Guzman's whereabouts. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "We made sure we didn't have any information to give them, other than what we published," he said. "But we would have done everything that a traditional journalism operation would have done in terms of protecting sources." Mr. Wenner said that Mr. Guzman seemed to have become careless with those he contacted while on the run, and would most likely have been tracked whether or not Mr. Penn wrote an article. In fact, the meeting between Mr. Guzman and Mr. Penn had been monitored by the authorities, according to a Mexican official with knowledge of the operation. That led to an October raid on Mr. Guzman's compound in the state of Durango in which he managed to evade capture but which gave the authorities more intelligence about his movements. The article was edited by Mr. Wenner and Mr. Fine, with Mr. Fine responsible for the final line editing before publication. Responding to criticisms of the piece's distinctive writing style, which was mocked on social media, and its discursions into topics including flatulence and technology, Mr. Fine said: "It's a piece by Sean Penn. Sean Penn has a particular style and point of view, and I'm happy with it." Mr. Penn has not commented publicly since the article was published. Mr. Fine said that he, too, had considered the ethics involved with the article's publication and the magazine's arrangement with its subject. If Mr. Guzman wanted changes, he said, the magazine had the option of not publishing the piece. There is a long history of journalists interviewing subjects who were either on the run from the authorities or who were considered unsavory for other reasons. Osama bin Laden was interviewed through the late 1990s, after he had declared jihad on the United States (though before the Sept. 11 attacks). In 2013, the former basketball star Dennis Rodman went to North Korea to meet with that country's repressive dictator, Kim Jong un, for Vice. As for giving Mr. Guzman final approval over the article, Mr. Wenner said: "I don't think it was a meaningful thing in the first place. We have let people in the past approve their quotes in interviews." Mr. Guzman, he said, did not speak English and seemed to have little interest in editing Mr. Penn's work. "In this case, it was a small thing to do in exchange for what we got," Mr. Wenner said. Still, critics of Rolling Stone remain unconvinced. Andrew Seaman, the chair of the ethics committee for the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote in a blog post that "allowing any source control over a story's content is inexcusable." The practice of pre approval, he said, "discredits the entire story whether the subject requests changes or not. The writer, who in this case is an actor and activist, may write the story in a more favorable light and omit unflattering facts in an attempt to not to be rejected." Mr. Coll agreed that the offer of preapproval was wrong. But, he said, "It's hard to judge what Rolling Stone was thinking since apparently the veto wasn't exercised, freeing the magazine of any dilemma." For the magazine, Mr. Wenner said, the interview with El Chapo represented a welcome turn. It was believed to be the first interview Mr. Guzman had granted in decades. Last year, Rolling Stone was heavily criticized for a discredited article that alleged a brutal gang rape had taken place at the University of Virginia. After publication, the police, and people close to that situation, questioned the article's veracity.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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If Yoda were a luxury car analyst, he would advise and soothe Cadillac with a Jedi epigram: Patience you must have. After decades in the desert, followed by a long climb to relevancy, Cadillac came out fighting in 2013 with a veritable light saber of a sport sedan, the ATS. Measured solely on athletic handling and fun to drive factors, the ATS pulled off the unthinkable: It defeated the dark emperor of the class, the BMW 3 Series. That the BMW beats the Cadillac in most other categories engines, transmissions, mileage, seating comfort and trunk space just shows that Cadillac must keep on training if it's to unseat a brand and a model that have had a 40 year head start. Cadillac's 38,000 ATS sales last year might seem disappointing, compared with 97,000 for the 3 Series sedan and 79,000 for the Mercedes Benz C Class sedan. Yet the glass half full view is that, as an opening salvo in this hypercompetitive segment, selling nearly 40,000 compact Cadillac sport sedans isn't half bad. (The ATS did outsell the Audi A4.) The more troubling statistic might be that sales of ATS sedans have fallen 21 percent this year, through July, according to AutoData. General Motors is halting production of the ATS and the larger CTS for three weeks because of swollen inventories. This all suggests that Cadillac needs to do more to get the ATS on buyers' radar. Or that shoppers have seen the positive reviews, but aren't yet convinced that Cadillac's cars or image measure up to the Europeans'. As a slowly reviving Jaguar has learned, the only answer to that is to keep pushing, delivering so many worthy models to market that you can no longer be ignored or belittled. The ATS coupe shows Caddy pushing ahead, filling a market hole with a hot driving foil to the BMW 4 Series, Mercedes C Class coupe, Audi A5 and coming Lexus RC. While its sedan cousin is handsome, the coupe looks more sporting, and seems far more persuasive on the street than in auto show displays. Bob Boniface, Cadillac's design director, says that while the brand doesn't put much stock in focus groups, it went back to the drawing board when consumers overwhelmingly rejected a muscled, high waisted version that resembled a smaller CTS. "There was a lot more visual mass and heft, and people really picked up on it," Mr. Boniface said in a recent interview. "We got religion and changed everything." The showroom version emphasizes width and streamlined elegance, with slimmer roof pillars, lower window sills and larger rear glass. The coupe introduces Cadillac's modernized grille and wreathless crest emblem, which the sedan is adopting for 2015. The coupe shares the sedan's 109.3 inch wheelbase, but it's nearly an inch longer and 1.4 inches wider, with a 1.1 inch lower roof. The wide body coupe looks especially strong and well planted from behind, with subtly canted taillamps. Eighteen inch alloy wheels and tires are staggered, with grippier, one inch wider rubber in back. You pay a price for this style in the back seat, which gives up headroom to BMW and Audi coupes. Legroom is better, with just enough space to quell most complaints. But the front seats could be more supportive for hard driving and more comfortable for the long haul. Those seats remain a weak spot for Cadillac, compared with the thrones of Audi, BMW and Mercedes. The cabin hits its deluxe cues with reasonable aplomb, including available semianiline leather. The Cue infotainment system, while improving, remains a work in progress. A clever touch: Its central control panel powers open to reveal a hidden cubby. Standard features, also found on the 2015 sedan, include keyless entry, Bose audio, remote starter and capless fuel filler. The coupe is also the first among dozens of 2015 G.M. models to adopt a 4G LTE connection for the OnStar communications system said to be 100 times faster than before that can link up to seven wireless devices to the Internet for as little as 5 a month. Wireless phone charging is another optional attraction, as is Siri Eyes Free text to voice functions for iPhones. Internet speed aside, driving velocity is the ATS's forte. Maximum torque of its standard 272 horsepower, 2 liter turbo 4 cylinder has been raised to 295 pound feet, nearly 14 percent more than the 2014 sedan's. With the lightest base curb weight in the class at 3,418 pounds, the ATS can sprint from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5.6 seconds, Cadillac says, and even a touch quicker for models with the 3.6 liter, 321 horsepower V6. I slightly prefer the V6's smoother power delivery and sound, though the 4 cylinder makes the ATS feel more urgent. The torque enriched 4 cylinder does feel slightly more decisive than before, with less turbo lag. Starting at 38,990, this 2 liter version also offers an increasingly rare 6 speed manual shifter. Most ATS coupes will come with a 6 speed automatic with magnesium paddle shifters. All wheel drive is an option with either engine, for roughly 1,700. I drove both a 2.0T Luxury model that starts at 42,915 and reached 47,735 with options, and a well stuffed 3.6L AWD Premium coupe that started at 52,430 and topped out at 54,025. That Premium model comes with a Magnetic Ride Control suspension that adjusts to the road surface every millisecond, along with a limited slip differential and sticky summer tires. Unlike some competing systems, the magnetic suspension changes the Cadillac's comportment in a way you can really feel. The comfortable Touring mode is about 10 percent softer than the standard model's mechanical suspension, and the Sport mode is about 20 percent stiffer. On secluded roads in northern Connecticut, the coupe reminded me of what makes the sedan such a winner: The ZF electric steering is pure and precise and the chassis is absolutely unflappable, thanks in part to excellent weight distribution: 51 percent in front, 49 percent at the rear. Even at road blurring speeds over ruined asphalt, nothing threw the ATS off its thoroughbred stride. For decades, automakers from Audi to Infiniti have tried, and failed, to match the soul stirring handling of BMW's 3 Series (and now, the 4 Series coupe). On the fleet heels of the ATS sedan, this new Cadillac coupe does exactly that. The critics are bowled over, yet the public remains unmoved. For Cadillac, the trick will be to turn all those glowing reviews into a bonfire of sales.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Noe Mercado, a scientist at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research in Boston, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine with Johnson Johnson.Credit...Tony Luong for The New York Times Noe Mercado, a scientist at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research in Boston, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine with Johnson Johnson. Each workday morning in March, Noe Mercado drove through the desolate streets of Boston to a tall glass building on Blackfan Circle, in the heart of the city's biotech hub. Most residents had gone into hiding from the coronavirus, but Mr. Mercado had an essential job: searching for a vaccine against this new, devastating pathogen. Parking in the underground lot, he put on a mask and rode the empty elevator to the tenth floor, joining a skeleton crew at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Day after day, Mr. Mercado sat at his lab bench, searching for signs of the virus in nasal swabs taken from dozens of monkeys. The animals had been injected with experimental vaccines Mr. Mercado had helped create. The monkeys then had been exposed to the coronavirus, and now Mr. Mercado was finding out whether any vaccine had protected them. One morning, after he loaded all the data into a software program, a single telling graph set his heart beating: Some of the vaccines, it appeared, had worked. Mr. Mercado hurried around the lab to share the news. Given the times, there were no hugs, no high fives. And he did not bask in glory for long. Making a vaccine demands patience, attention to detail and a tolerance for bitter failure. "Yeah, I'm excited, but I'm also thinking about the next step," Mr. Mercado later recalled. "What if it doesn't pan out?" The coronavirus has now infected about 13.8 million people worldwide and killed at least 590,000. Millions more may die. The only hope for a long term protection, literally the only shot at a return to normal life, is an effective vaccine. In January, researchers at the vaccine center dropped everything they were doing to find one. The man heading up the effort is Mr. Mercado's boss, Dr. Dan Barouch, the director of the center and one of the world's leading vaccine makers. Now they are about to take a major step forward. Janssen Pharmaceutica, a division of Johnson Johnson, has been collaborating with the Beth Israel team to craft a coronavirus vaccine based on a design pioneered by Dr. Barouch and his colleagues ten years ago. Next week, clinical trials of the vaccine will begin in Belgium. Dr. Barouch's team will soon start up a trial in Boston. Since January, Dr. Barouch's team in Boston has run experiments in cells and monkeys, while Janssen's researchers in the Netherlands have raced to find a recipe for producing the new vaccine in huge quantities. Already they have started producing a batch for the clinical trials. If the vaccine proves safe in initial tests, a trial for efficacy will launch in September. If that experiment is successful, Johnson Johnson will manufacture hundreds of millions of doses for emergency use in January. Over the course of next year, the company plans to produce up to a billion doses. While Johnson Johnson is one of the world's biggest companies, with a market capitalization over 370 billion, it's a fairly small player in the vaccine market. On July 1, its Ebola vaccine received approval from the European Commission. The company's vaccines for other diseases are still in clinical trials. Even so, the United States government has given 456 million to Johnson Johnson, funding from the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed; the company has invested another 500 million in the coronavirus vaccine project. "We thought, maybe we should make a vaccine for that," recalled Jinyan Liu, a staff scientist at the center. But without more information about the new virus, there was nothing they could do. Everything changed that night. At 9:41 p.m., Dr. Kathryn Stephenson, the director of the center's clinical trial unit, sent Dr. Barouch a short email from her iPhone: "This was released today saw someone link to it on Twitter." The link led to an open access virology site where scientists based in China had posted a file containing the entire genetic sequence of the new coronavirus. "Please feel free to download, share, use, and analyze this data," wrote Yong Zhen Zhang, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai and the leader of the consortium. Five minutes later, Dr. Barouch emailed Dr. Liu, Mr. Mercado and Zhenfeng Li, a research assistant at the center: "Can one of you extract the new coronavirus sequence from this file?" Soon the four scientists were poring over the sequence, a series of 30,000 genetic letters that no one had seen arranged in exactly this order before. "We worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday, day and night," Dr. Liu said. By the end of the weekend, they had a good idea of what they were up against, and how to defeat it potentially. On Monday, the scientists returned to the lab, ready to start on the most ambitious endeavor any of them had ever undertaken. But the researchers would not have to create a vaccine from scratch. They would be working from a playbook that Dr. Barouch had been writing for 20 years. In 2016, amid the Zika epidemic, Dr. Barouch and his colleagues quickly retooled their Ad26 vaccine to make Zika viral proteins. They got as far as trials that showed the vaccine was safe in people and generated a long lasting immune response, but shelved the project when the Zika epidemic retreated. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. As the new coronavirus began to spread in January, the lab already knew how to make a vaccine for a sudden outbreak. What they needed now was a way to target the new virus. Previous research on SARS and other coronaviruses made the choice clear. They would prime the immune system to attack the so called spike proteins that cover the surface of the new coronavirus. As January wore on, Dr. Barouch realized that Covid 19 was going to be far graver threat than SARS. "We would not be able to stop this virus by traditional public health measures," he said. "It was absolutely clear that we needed a vaccine." He emailed to Johan Van Hoof, the head of vaccines at Janssen. "I am writing today because the coronavirus outbreak in China is looking bad," Dr. Barouch wrote. "Are you interested in making a rapid Ad based vaccine like we did for Zika in 2016 2017?" Two minutes later, Dr. Van Hoof replied: "Would a call work now?" And four days after the call, they signed an agreement to collaborate. The Center for Virology and Vaccine Research has a staff of dozens of researchers, ranging from medical doctors and senior scientists to postdoctoral researchers, grad students and assistants just out of college. Dr. Barouch's team turned away from projects on H.I.V. and other diseases, and divided up the work to make a coronavirus vaccine. Mr. Mercado and his colleagues fashioned copies of the coronavirus gene that directs production of its spike protein. They came up with ten variations to see which would produce the best immune response. Meanwhile, Katherine McMahan, a research assistant at the center, worked on the team building a test for spike antibodies in the animals that would receive the vaccine. Creating it took up most of her waking life. On some days, she didn't get around to eating lunch till nighttime. In late February, researchers injected the spike genes into mice and then sent Ms. McMahan blood from the animals. Ms. McMahan's test confirmed that they were making coronavirus antibodies. Ms. McMahan was near tears: "It began to feel like a war that we could win." Outside the lab, though, there was no sense that a war was coming. She urged family and friends to stock up on food and other supplies, without much luck. "Many of us were having a Chicken Little experience," she said. "You're saying, 'Look, you've got to take this seriously,' and getting blown off." The nasal swabs that Mr. Mercado examined revealed that some versions of the vaccines only partially protected the monkey, but others worked much better. As the investigators reported in the journal Science, they couldn't detect the virus at all in eight of the 25 monkeys who got experimental vaccines. The results gave Dr. Barouch hope that one of his team's vaccines or one of those developed by another group might work. "It's the real deal," he said. More monkeys were injected with the Ad26 virus, now equipped to produce the spike gene. Dr. Barouch predicts that this vaccine will induce higher levels of antibodies than the prototypes did. The experiment will also provide crucial clues about how the immune system responds to the Ad26 vaccine. Some vaccines confer protection mostly by triggering the body to make antibodies that attack a virus. But others can stir virus hunting immune cells to join the attack. The results of the latest round of experiments will be published within a few weeks. For all the progress made by Dr. Barouch's team, the Ad26 vaccine has its skeptics. John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, said other types of vaccines tested in animals have produced higher levels of antibodies. These vaccines, made of viral proteins, would be his choice for a weapon against the coronavirus. Six companies have already launched human safety trials of their protein vaccines. "That's what I'd be doing," said Dr. Moore. "It's freaking obvious." One drawback of viral protein vaccines is that they take more time to produce in huge quantities. Other vaccines, like Johnson Johnson's Ad26, will come more quickly, and Dr. Moore acknowledged that they may work well enough to provide protection. If so, there may not be a need for a better but slower vaccine. "If Plan A works, then you don't need a Plan B," Dr. Moore said. While Dr. Barouch and his colleagues were testing the vaccines on animals in the United States, a team of Johnson Johnson researchers was gearing up to manufacture them in the Netherlands. Scientists there took advantage of their years of experience with Ad26, which they have used to make vaccines for H.I.V., Ebola and other viruses. Making an Ad26 vaccine requires remodeling an adenovirus and then creating vast quantities of the new version. But Ad26 cannot multiply in ordinary cells. It must infect specially engineered ones. Johnson Johnson's technicians produce batches of these cells in huge vats filled with a nutrient rich broth kept at a constant temperature and stirred to pull in oxygen. "It's to make the cells feel happy and comfortable, to make product," said Paul Ives, the senior director of drug development at Janssen. Once a batch of these nurturing cells has grown sufficiently, Dr. Ives and his colleagues infect them with the modified Ad26 viruses. Each cell churns out thousands of new viruses, which are removed and purified so that they can be used as vaccines. Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wonders if Johnson Johnson can live up to that promise, given that it has never made Ad26 at anywhere close to this scale. "Making a couple of million doses over several years for clinical trials is very different than producing hundreds of millions of doses within months for the market," he said. Johnson Johnson has said it will distribute the vaccine on a not for profit basis. Speaking in March to the Belgian newspaper De Tijd, Dr. Stoffels calculated a cost of ten dollars per vaccine. In a follow up interview, he said that the price would not be set until the company finished making an initial supply. Amid a pandemic, critics say Johnson Johnson should not be allowed to set the terms. "If we get a vaccine, it should be free and available to everybody," said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. and a critic of Johnson Johnson's drug pricing. "How do you get these big, massive awards to produce a vaccine without any rider on the money saying it must be used in a way that it's affordable to everybody?" he asked. For now, no one knows if the vaccine will actually work. Dr. Barouch and his colleagues are getting ready to inject the Ad26 vaccine into hundreds of volunteers in Boston in late July. Researchers will not only observe whether the vaccine is safe but also look at the antibodies it prompts the volunteers to make. If those trials produce promising results, Johnson Johnson will run a much larger one in the fall to see if the vaccine is effective. At the same time, Dr. Barouch and his colleagues are planning a third round of experiments on monkeys. They want to inject the animals with antibodies against the coronavirus and then infect them. By giving different monkeys varying doses, the investigators hope to figure out what level of antibodies in the human body is required to prevent Covid 19.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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CLEVELAND After a long day of negotiations on Friday between major drug industry corporations and thousands of local governments and states suing over the companies' role in the opioid epidemic, talks ended with the parties even among the plaintiffs still far apart. "We worked hard to put together a 48 billion deal that would give immediate relief to our states and we're deeply disappointed that the cities and counties refuse to go along with that deal," said Josh Stein , the attorney general for North Carolina. And Herbert H. Slatery , the attorney general for Tennessee, said that in his state, four people had died that day. "When we delay things it has real consequences in the lives of people," he said. The day began with the chief executives of three major drug distributors among those summoned to the fe deral courthouse in Cleveland by Judge Dan A. Polster, who was attempting to wrest a last minute, comprehensive settlement to resolve thousands of cases filed by cities and counties as well as those filed by state attorneys general in state court. Judge Polster is presiding over the first federal opioid trial, set to begin on Monday, involving two Ohio counties. With the trial looming, the talks had been gathering in intensity in recent days. Adding to the pressure cooker atmosphere was the specter of 12 jurors, sworn in by the judge on Thursday, in anticipation that opening statements would begin as scheduled. Inexorable moves such as these can often prod the sides to the desired result: settlement. It was unclear at day's end how far apart the sides were, and informal discussions would continue over the weekend. Friday's extraordinary sessions included top executives from the distributors, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson; state attorneys general from Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Tennessee; lawyers for more than 2,300 opioid lawsuits filed by cities, counties and tribes nationwide; and delegates from cities large and small that have been devastated by the two decade long epidemic. More than 400,000 people have died in that time. Also in court were executives representing Walgreens, the pharmacy chain; Teva, the Israeli based manufacturer of generic drugs; and Henry Schein Medical, a small drug distributor. The harsh words on Friday night from the attorneys general exposed the sharp divide between two powerful groups of plaintiffs, the states and the local communities. "It's regrettable that they think it's us," said Joe Rice, the lead lawyer for thousands of cities, counties and tribes whose cases are consolidated under the judge's supervision. He instead criticized the distributors for proposing a deal that was short on money and took too long to unfold. The attorneys general said that they had been inclined to accept the deal, which would be paid out over 18 years. It would include 18 billion in cash and 3 billion in delivery services from the distributors, 4 billion from Johnson Johnson, and 23 billion worth of generic medicine from Teva. Companies reached for comment either declined to do so or did not respond to messages. Paul Farrell, another lawyer on the team for local governments, said that discussions with Walgreens, which is being sued for its role as a distributor of opioids to its own pharmacies, "were not fruitful." The case at the center of Monday's trial was brought by two Ohio counties, Cuyahoga and Summit, although the negotiations contemplated a settlement that would resolve thousands of other cases around the country. The Ohio trial is considered a powerful litmus test for all the parties. There are many more other drug industry defendants, including the pharmacy chains Walmart, Rite Aid and CVS, in the far flung w eb of litigation. But now that Purdue Pharma's tentative deal is caught up in a lengthy bankruptcy court review, a global settlement would be the first in the national opioid litigation. Plaintiffs' lawyers say a wide ranging settlement could have a domino effect on the remaining defendants, encouraging them to reach a comprehensive deal too. But people familiar with the state of play on Friday in Cleveland suggested that the existing obstacles could lead to a much narrower outcome, with only the Ohio cases settling, rather than a global resolution. One sticking point, said some members of the local governments' legal team, was that the distributors would not estimate the losses suffered by West Virginia communities, saying that the state itself had already settled with the three distributors for about 73 million. A signature tension in the talks to date is how to allocate any money from the settlement. Local governments are wary of ceding that power to the states, mindful that much of the money from the Big Tobacco settlement ended up in general funds for legislatures, rather than being disbursed to local communities. Mr. Farrell said that "the attorneys general are deciding among themselves how to allocate the money." People familiar with the negotiations also said that a major stumbling block was a dispute over fees for the private lawyers. But Mr. Rice dismissed that assertion with a wave of his hand. "We have agreed that the attorneys' fees will be established by the court," he said, a process that had been established in earlier mass litigations like the Volkswagen cases. He characterized the fees as "in single digits." Typically, plaintiffs' lawyers work on contingency fees for roughly 25 percent to one third of a settlement. Another issue in the talks is public transparency: If the companies reach a settlement, plaintiffs' lawyers want to ensure that records of what transpired during the years of one of the country's greatest public health crises are unsealed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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There is a spare beauty to the Illinois prairie, with winds swooshing between its wide sky and paper flat fields. Central Illinois will often surprise visitors who don't realize there's much between St. Louis and Chicago. But the writer David Foster Wallace knew this gusty stretch of the Midwest well. He felt at peace among the prairie lights of its university towns, which nourished his literary genius before his death in 2008, at age 46. In early spring, before the crops were planted, I drove down from Chicago's Midway Airport along Route 66, that old fashioned strip of duct tape affixing America's great farmland to California and the Mountain West. Wallace had driven that direction many times, I knew, returning from major literary tour stops around the country to his anonymous home in central Illinois. Local farmers were burning off the rain washed stalks and husks of last year's harvest. Stiff winds blew the smoke flat, creating a dreamy white line above black fields. The late afternoon air carried the tang of clippings burning slow and controlled like patchouli incense, a discordant thought for this anything but countercultural area. To the west, orange and peach striations yielded to a deep blue that mellowed the full sky. Distracted by the sunset, I drove below 50 miles an hour, holding up the red Ford pickup behind me on the two lane road. After catching the wild light reflected on a series of ponds, once a limestone quarry, outside the town of Chenoa, I pulled over. This sunset was an IMAX dimension prairie fire. My mother had urged me back to the state's glacier flattened center, where I grew up, at this time of year. There would be no corn or soybeans yet to ripple endlessly like an ocean, but she appreciated March's stark earth and sky. I lived out East now, and it had been months since I could watch a sunset's full reach from horizon to horizon. I remembered what Wallace, a central Illinois native, had told family after he left for Amherst College in Massachusetts. The Berkshires were pretty, he wrote, but not beautiful "the way Illinois is." Finding beauty and nuance in a landscape others might dismiss as nothingness was part of what has made Wallace, who took his own life, a postmodern American classic. Like the actor John Malkovich, who also grew up quirky in downstate Illinois, he represents both high and pop culture. The New Yorker writer D. T. Max published Wallace's biography not long after his death. "The End of the Tour," a film about how he lived anonymously in Illinois even as his national fame grew, was a critical darling in 2015. His 1,100 page masterwork, "Infinite Jest," was released in a 20th anniversary edition this year. His writing is still referenced everywhere from a "Simpsons" episode to a Decemberists video. The meditative spaces and down to earth people of the Midwest were central to Wallace's writing, as he pushed back the ironic for the heartfelt. And he didn't produce brilliant work in spite of the more conventional folks surrounding him in Illinois; as his essays and books like "The Pale King" reveal, he was inspired by the Midwest's sincerity to go beyond America's cultural snark for truth about its contemporary life, which he found rushed, overstimulated and lonely. At home in Illinois, this tormented genius, wild maximalist and yet somehow earnest moralist of a writer said he felt "unalone and unstressed." One morning after the traffic stopping sunset, I set out for Champaign Urbana. The college town of 120,000 is where farm kids like my father would try pizza and tacos for the first time. Dad studied at the U. of I. in the '70s, when Wallace was growing up in Urbana, and for seven years during Wallace's adolescence, drinking beer was legal at age 19. Dad remembers the city as chaotic then marijuana wafting, teenagers vomiting, trash piling up. For Wallace, life was unstructured. I stopped at placid Blair Park, where he and a high school teammate, John Flygare, taught tennis for five summers. They'd collect cash for the lessons, order pizza out of the proceeds, then turn over whatever was left in the cash box to the Urbana Park District every couple of weeks, Mr. Flygare told me. No one monitored. "I see my kids almost assuming their lives are going to stay structured," he said. "When we were among ourselves, we were just free." There were no children in the park that morning, a school day. Soccer nets were up now, signs of an organized sport new to Illinois. An older man walked his dogs alone. Two miles away I walked into the Illini Union, one of the U. of I.'s acres of neo Classical buildings, positively Roman in their scale. Upstairs was all elegant blond wood, but downstairs reeked of a cheap rec room, with pizza, doughnuts and tater tots competing for airspace. Aping college students, Wallace and his friends often played pool on one of the many tables, now orange felted, Mr. Flygare said. The teenagers were always in a pack; not so today. A student whose blue hair was gelled up like a unicorn horn fired up an "In the Groove" dance game solo. Other times the Urbana tennis teammates smoked or drank in hotels or on the road when they drove to tournaments around Illinois, which they entered at will, coach free. The freedom fostered Mr. Flygare's autonomy, he told me. Other teammates, he said, found the downside of the wide openness; one developed a spiraling drug problem. Wallace, too, later fought depression and addiction. He entered treatment in Boston, according to the Max biography, and joined a 12 step program back in Illinois. He drew on those experiences in "Infinite Jest," whose high I.Q. characters struggle with their need for a program and its platitudes. " 'Getting in Touch With Your Feelings' is another quilted sampler type cliche that ends up masking something ghastly deep and real, it turns out," Wallace wrote of an alter ego character, Don Gately, who relives traumas in recovery. "It starts to turn out that the vapider the A.A. cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers." The two lane highway was accompanied by train tracks Bloomington was founded as a wealthy depot town in one of the world's most fertile counties. En route I passed towns like Farmer City, where grain elevators stood above the fields like naval ship superstructures on the ocean. I listened to the reassuring all viewpoints appreciated intoning of Tom Ashbrook, a 4 H kid who grew up outside Normal, on National Public Radio's "On Point." Knowing Wallace and his friends preferred psychedelic rock, I flipped to a '70s station, and Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage" thrummed in. Signs with lightning bolts and thunderclouds in one town along the way, Mahomet, proclaimed it a "StormReady Community." This was the start of tornado season in Illinois. Wallace described that time in "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," an essay about his tennis years and the downstate wind; he claimed he read the gusts like a weather vane to lift his game against the city kids. He trash talked Chicago, saying that as "one giant windbreak," the city "does not know but from a true religious type wind" that could inspire an unholy fear. With nothing tall between central Illinois and the Rockies, he wrote, the winds "move east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gather like avalanches and roar in reverse down pioneer ox trails toward our own personal unsheltered asses." That night a local TV report noting "westerlies," "supercells" and "wind gusts at 60 miles an hour" broke into prime time. "A tornado warning remains in effect for Fulton County, the Fairview and Farmington areas," the weathercaster announced. "It's gonna be interesting to see how this holds together." Eventually the storms died down. Despite the occasional edge of danger, Illinois was where Wallace took shelter. New York hissed with egos inflating and deflating, he told the Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky. After his successful first novel, and an unhappy stint earning an M.F.A. at the University of Arizona, he returned home in 1993 to try what he called "academia at its nicest" at Illinois State. "When I'm here," Wallace said, "it's just more like, 'Huh, what an interesting storm, going on outside my window. I'm sure glad I'm inside.' " Illinois State provided stability. I started at blocky, solid Stevenson Hall, where Wallace's colleague Robert McLaughlin showed me the writer's office, 420C, now a medieval language center. "I still think we should put up a plaque," he said, as a professor walking by chuckled. "See, they laugh at me. Although it's true David would have hated that." From the campus I strolled the few blocks to uptown Normal, where Wallace often hung out with his students and his various girlfriends. Grimy in the '90s, with comic book stores and sandwich shops, uptown now felt fresh scrubbed, with boutiques, murals, wine bars and a new Marriott where the university's David Foster Wallace Conference now draws scholars from around the world each spring. Behind the all brick buildings, a train sounded its lonesomeness, and Union Pacific freight cars chugged west. I looked for the new location of Babbitt's Books, which Wallace once told Conde Nast Traveler was his favorite bookstore. A former Illinois State art major, Brian K. Simpson, long owned the store until he moved it down the street and sold to a millennial owner in 2015. Peeking inside with me, Mr. Simpson said that the place looked better swept than during his day, when it was piled with books, and when writers like Wallace gave readings upstairs in a clammy old apartment where a worn couch sat among the hodgepodge of folding and kitchen chairs. "Infinite Jest" was now in the window, but the place does only modest Wallace business locally, the new owner said. He sold his first copy of "The Pale King" to me. Across Beaufort Street was another Wallace favorite, the Coffeehouse Deli, a lovable establishment whose beige walls dated back decades, and some of whose crumbs might have, too. "This place is from, like, 1985," a clerk said as the credit card machine balked. Charles Harris, the retired English Department chairman who had hired Wallace, and his wife, Victoria Harris, a former colleague and friend of the writer's, met me there. "The way he depicted Gately was the way he was in person," she told me. "He listened so astutely. Nothing was overlooked when you spoke." Mr. Harris took me past Wallace's place, a plain ranch house on a modest lawn along Bloomington's rural Woodrig Road. Wallace lived there alone, then with a girlfriend, Juliana Harms, then alone again. A horse was pastured beyond the windbreak, a line of spindly willows alongside his yard. It had the edge of town positioning locals call "tornado bait." Wallace finished "Infinite Jest" in a room there he later painted black. "Some of the greatest literature of the past 50, 60 years was written in that house," Mr. Harris said, and we gaped. Curtains drawn, the place had a vacant air, its scraggly bushes overgrown to the size of dairy cows. Serially tormented by relationships and writing, Wallace found a different peace out West, but it proved fragile. In 2004 Wallace married Karen Green, an artist he met in California, back in Urbana, among family, and they returned to Claremont to live. Storms were still on his mind. In one letter he called the writing process "a tornado that won't hold still long enough for me to see what's useful and what isn't." He tried switching antidepressants, with shattering results. Within months he was dead. Before Wallace left Illinois, a Bloomington Normal newspaper columnist, Bill Flick, had poked at his local anonymity by writing about his national fame. I had lunch with Mr. Flick at Monical's Pizza, a Midwestern chain with around 60 locations. This one, near State Farm Insurance's headquarters east of downtown Bloomington, had been a Wallace favorite. The pizza was as flat as the land (the secret was tilling the crust with some sort of puncturer, a cook said), and the toppings went to the edge. His interview with Wallace, in the Denny's next door, had been uncomfortable, Mr. Flick remembered. "David was quiet and guarded," he said. "Maybe because I was invading his little space, his own private Idaho in the calming middle of Illinois. That probably scared him." On our way out I asked the waitress, in her 20s, if she knew of David Foster Wallace. She winced apologetically she didn't know the name. I stepped out into a promising March afternoon, the wind strong as ever, the sun high. Even in death, central Illinois leaves Wallace in his anonymity, and a deep peace. If You Go Visitors revel in the kitschy memorabilia of the Route 66 Association of Illinois Hall of Fame and Museum, on a portion of the Mother Road between Chicago and Bloomington Normal (110 West Howard Street, Pontiac; 815 844 4566.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The basement cabaret space at the SoHo Playhouse is not a large room, so it isn't possible to be very far from the action. Still, at "Macbeth Muet," a 50 minute frolic through tragedy from the Montreal based company La Fille du Laitier, you wouldn't want to be at a front row table. Too much risk of getting spattered with flying blood (fake) or the innards of eggs (real). "Muet" is French for "mute," and there is no dialogue in this inventive and oxygenating tiny cast retelling of "Macbeth," one of two bold takes on the play that I saw this week. The other Dzieci Theater's "Makbet," performed inside a metal shipping container in Bushwick, Brooklyn left me a little dazed; more on that in a bit. But "Macbeth Muet," which I saw at the end of a wearying day, sent me back onto the street refreshed, energized and pretty charmed as well. Part of the annual Fringe Encore Series, which presents favorites from fringe festivals around the world, "Macbeth Muet" is like a cross between a low budget puppet show and a silent movie, with all the riffing silliness that suggests. What's unexpected, and impressive, is the social and emotional acuity of this variation on Shakespeare's play. It's recommended for ages 13 and up, which sounds about right. Created by Marie Helene Belanger and Jon Lachlan Stewart, who also directs, this production hasn't forgotten the essential role of sex in marriage, including the Macbeths'. Such physical passion is part of the youthful vitality of the show, performed by Jeremie Francoeur and Clara Prevost. Their whitened faces are in keeping with the production designer Cedric Lord's stark palette: black, white, blood red. Also a tinge of pink, once Macbeth (Mr. Francoeur) and his lady (Ms. Prevost) have embraced murder as their path to the crown. Macduff and Banquo are the main supporting characters, each played by a puppet of sorts: Macduff represented by a hockey glove (Lady Macduff is an oven mitt), Banquo by a foam plate with eyes (his wife is also a plate, but with lashes and a hair bow). The witches are folded paper figures black, of course. The eggs, by the way, represent children, and they may break your heart in a way you don't see coming. The actors manipulate them all, and these simple objects prove versatile vessels for the show's whipsaw mood changes: comic or tender at one instant, brutal or woeful the next. Each switch is supported by Mr. Stewart's winking sound design, rife with pop song samples. Borrowing from the visual language of film, "Macbeth Muet" takes some of the form's storytelling liberties, too, cutting between present and past to explain how these characters got to their current situation. Flashbacks show each couple the Macduffs, the Banquos, the Macbeths meeting, falling in love and either starting a family or trying to. We watch the Macbeths, sweetly hopeful, harden with each loss they suffer. Silent movie style placards, sparingly deployed, impart information at moments when text is vital. One is the famous warning to Macbeth, which he takes as reassurance: that "none of woman born shall harm" him. A flurry of placards also arrives near the end, cheekily explicating the loophole that leads to his vanquishment anyway. Otherwise, though, it is up to the audience to be familiar enough with "Macbeth" to follow as the actors briskly hit its highlights. What rescues the show from mere cleverness is its overarching vision, made vivid in a final tableau that would be a spoiler to describe. In it, we see clearly the needless destruction that the power mad leave in their wake, and it is revolting. The Eastern European flavored "Makbet," in Brooklyn, is an altogether different experience, starting with its setting: a nonprofit recycling center called Sure We Can. The immersive prelude to this production begins outside, with audience and actors surrounded by tall piles of colorful bottles and cans wrapped in clear plastic. The effect is oddly cheerful. The live accordion music helps with that, and so does the sustenance that the friendly performers offer around: perhaps a fat chunk of kielbasa "to fortify against dark magic?" Or, for the same purpose, a small shot of vodka? In old country accents to match the fare, they insist that they distilled the vodka which on Sunday afternoon was vanilla out back. The audience sat in a circle on overturned plastic crates and listened as Mr. Mitler channeled messages from the spirit world for anyone who asked. At the center of the circle was a garbage can, fire blackened inside, and I suddenly thought how cozy it might have been for Shakespeare's Weird Sisters, gathered around their caldron on a sunny late summer day. What I didn't think, then or at any point, was that when we all got up and walked into a corrugated shipping container to watch the play, the door would be shut behind us, which it was. I'm not claustrophobic, but it was about 80 degrees out, and frankly it seemed a little dangerous. More than that, though, it was distracting because if sweat is coursing down your body while the air is steadily thickening, you are not in an optimal environment for theatergoing. We hadn't been in there long when I wondered if this was the dark magic that the vodka and sausage had been meant to fortify against. Mr. Mitler, who adapted, directed and designed the 90 minute show, is one of its three principals, along with Megan Bones and Yvonne Brechbuhler. They play nearly all of the roles, handing parts off to one another, sometimes in mid speech. Whichever actor is wearing the red shawl at any given moment is Lady Macbeth; whoever dons the black hat with the red band is her husband. Other characters get their own costume signifiers, all of them pulled out of a big metal pot and clearly explained at the start. It is a shadowy, dimly lit performance, with a chorus contributing atmospheric music. The ritual of storytelling is built into the staging, with some remarkably lovely movement sequences. But "Makbet" is vastly more interested in magic the dark kind and the theatrical kind than it is in the bloody struggle for the crown. So there is no weight to its tragedy. It becomes merely an experiment in form.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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"Clap When You Land" is "the kind of book that I was looking forward to having conversations about," Elizabeth Acevedo said. Two months after 9/11, an American Airlines flight bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in Queens, N.Y. It was largely overshadowed by the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, but it shook New York City's close knit Dominican community. All 260 people on board were killed, most of them Dominican, and everyone seemed to know someone who was grieving. Stories about those who were lost began to emerge, and the writer Elizabeth Acevedo became intrigued by the secrets brought to light. "We never think about how the indignity of these deaths then bring up a lot of larger questions about family," she said in an interview from Washington, where she lives. Her new novel, "Clap When You Land," was inspired by that tragedy. It follows two 16 year old sisters, Yahaira in New York and Camino in the Dominican Republic, who don't know of each other's existence until after their father dies in a plane crash. Because the book draws from the trauma experienced by her community, Acevedo was crushed that the coronavirus pandemic has prevented her from meeting readers in person. "It's the kind of book that I was looking forward to having conversations about really being able to see the community that I was writing for in the audience," she said. "We know what it meant to hold one another. We know what it means to come from families that have these secrets that we don't talk about." Culture and connection are crucial to Acevedo, a National Book Award winner and the first writer of color to win the Carnegie Medal, and she uses her upbringing and background in rap and poetry in her work. Her best selling 2018 debut, "The Poet X," was a novel in verse that follows 15 year old Xiomara as she explores her sexuality and finds her voice through spoken word poetry. Then came her 2019 novel, "With the Fire on High," about a teenage mother who dreams of becoming a chef. "Clap When You Land" is out on Tuesday. In "Clap When You Land," Acevedo returns to her poetic roots, alternating between the two sisters' voices. Camino lives a humble life with her aunt in Puerto Plata, and she fears that her father's death dashed any hopes she had for becoming a doctor and escaping her circumstances. Meanwhile, Yahaira is left to face old resentments toward her dead father and an altered family dynamic in New York City. A settlement payment from the airline highlights the inequities between the sisters' lives, and their two voices invoke a common feeling among immigrants: that of belonging not to one place, but two. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. They reflect on this in one passage as they try to reconcile their father's fractured life. "It's like he bridged himself/ across the Atlantic," one says. "Never fully here nor there./ One toe in each country," the other responds. "Ni aqui ni alla." Neither here nor there. The book's title nods to a tradition Acevedo, who was born in New York City to Dominican parents and visited the island nearly every summer, observed on her trips back. As soon as the plane touched the ground in Santo Domingo, the passengers would break into applause. "There was something beautiful about this celebratory moment," she said, but she always wondered what it meant. "Is it that we're hopeful? Is it that we're thankful? Is it for the pilot? Is it God?" As she grew up listening to her parents' stories of life back home, her trips helped her see how migration had changed them. "They do have to be different people here. They do have to walk guarded in a different way," she said. "I think that does something to us, that back and forth." In Santo Domingo, she ran around barefoot, played in the rain with her cousins and watched Mexican telenovelas like "Marimar." "It was such a discovery of family and of closeness and of a rootedness," she said, one that opened her eyes to connections between her family's customs in New York and those she witnessed in the Dominican Republic. She realized: "This is why my mom does the things she does. It's not just my mom. It's this whole community I just hadn't realized I'm also a part of and attached to." Growing up in New York City, Acevedo, now 32, would sit on her stoop writing and spitting raps for whoever would stop and listen. She became a teenage participant in New York City's slam poetry scene, finding fewer constraints in poetry than she did in hip hop. "When I got to high school, so much of what I was trying to do was break free," she said. "I wonder if that was why free verse suddenly felt like a wider landscape." She created her own performing arts major at George Washington University, incorporating her love of the stage and of reading and writing. After graduation, in 2010, she decided to stay in Washington, in part so she could continue to develop independently from her family. After two years of teaching through Teach for America, Acevedo decided to pursue an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Maryland. Though she felt unsure she knew of only a few Dominican writers back then, and none had come up through hip hop and spoken word she told herself: "You've always been a writer. You realize now what it means to have literature that matters for young people." She added: "It kind of kept circling, like 'Why not you?'" In 2014, she started competing in poetry slams again. Several of her poems attracted thousands of views online, including "Hair," about the complexities of having textured hair, and "Spear," about rape culture. Shortly after, she wrote and sold her first book, which combined all her seemingly disparate influences. "Her characters go beyond the immigrant narrative," Zoboi said. "It is reaching deep into the souls of girls and their desires and their longings and just how they move through the world and how they navigate all that is placed on them." Acevedo has been relieved to see her work resonate with so many, but it worries her sometimes. "I don't take for granted how well my work has been received," she said, "but it is a difficult pressure to carry. How can you still play and experiment and fail, potentially fail, like write a bad book, and feel like that is OK when so many people are looking to you like you are the writer of this form?" Still, Acevedo has been heartened by the different entry points readers have found to her books and characters. "The scariest thing is feeling like you come from folk who maybe haven't been represented in a certain artistic form and just wanting to do right," she said. "It's been gratifying to know I can write and not try to hold every single kind of Dominican." Xiomara, her protagonist in "The Poet X," expresses this sentiment when she describes the moment she hears spoken word for the first time. "We're different, this poet and I. In looks, in body,/ in background," she says. "But I don't feel so different/ when I listen to her. I feel heard."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The events in Thuringia have shaken German politics. Ms. Merkel called the outcome "unforgivable." Lars Klingbeil, the secretary general of the Social Democrats, spoke of a "low point in Germany's postwar history." Even the conservative tabloid Bild called the result a "disgrace." After a wave of public fury including protests across the country Mr. Kemmerich announced on Thursday that he would resign in order to allow new elections. (It's far from clear that a new election wouldn't produce even stronger results for the AfD, however.) But what led to these shameful machinations goes far deeper: the increasing normalization of the radical right in German politics. Even if Germany's conservatives and liberals have not previously entered into formal agreements with the far right at the federal level, and are unlikely to let the AfD into a future government, they have nonetheless helped it gain power and far too often set the agenda. That dynamic won't disappear soon. This was not the first time that centrists have collaborated with the AfD. There have been at least 18 cases in which Ms. Merkel's party has cooperated with the AfD on a local level, it was reported last fall. In the state parliaments of Berlin and Brandenburg, for example, the two parties have voted together on legislation. Leading Christian Democrats from several states have declared their willingness to work with the far right party. In Saxony Anhalt, the two parties teamed up in 2017 on an "inquiry on left extremism." And in the same state, two Christian Democratic members of Parliament wrote a position paper last year in which they considered a coalition with the AfD. "We must reconcile the social with the national," they stated, echoing neo Nazi rhetoric. The AfD has grown consistently since its founding in 2013 and is now present in the parliaments of every one of Germany's 16 states. The parties of the center, meanwhile, have all shifted rightward. Both the Free Democrats, under their leader Christian Lindner, and the Christian Democrats have moved their policy platforms in an anti immigrant direction. Neither Ms. Merkel nor the party's new leader, Annegret Kramp Karrenbauer, have created clear boundaries between their party and the far right. But many voters, especially in the east of Germany, would rather buy the original product than its copies. How did it come to this? One major factor is the obsession of many German centrists with the so called horseshoe theory of politics, where the far left and the far right are equivalent.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Lilly Singh, who built a career on YouTube as a comedian, is getting her own late night show. Ms. Singh, 30, will host a half hour show in the 1:35 a.m. slot on NBC beginning in September, according to a statement from NBC on Thursday. She will be an executive producer on the show and will be the only woman with a late night show on one of the so called Big Four broadcast networks, the statement said. "An Indian Canadian woman with her own late night show? Now that is a dream come true," Ms. Singh said in the statement. The show will include in studio interviews as well as taped skits and segments. The announcement comes a month after the news that the late night host Carson Daly would step away from his 1:30 a.m. show, "Last Call With Carson Daly." Ms. Singh's new show, "A Little Late With Lilly Singh," which she discussed Thursday on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," would be "kind of like my YouTube channel," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Not long ago, a physicist at Stanford posed a rhetorical question that took me by surprise. "Why is there so much beauty?" he asked. Beauty was not what I was thinking the world was full of when he brought it up. The physicist, Manu Prakash, was captivated by the patterns in seawater made as starfish larvae swam about. But he did put his finger on quite a puzzle: Why is there beauty? Why is there any beauty at all? Richard O. Prum, a Yale ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, offers a partial answer in a new book, "The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us." He writes about one kind of beauty the oh is he/she hot variety and mostly as it concerns birds, not people. And his answer is, in short: That's what female birds like. The idea is that when they are choosing mates and in birds it's mostly the females who choose animals make choices that can only be called aesthetic. They perceive a kind of beauty. Dr. Prum defines it as "co evolved attraction." They desire that beauty, often in the form of fancy feathers, and their desires change the course of evolution. All biologists recognize that birds choose mates, but the mainstream view now is that the mate chosen is the fittest in terms of health and good genes. Any ornaments or patterns simply reflect signs of fitness. Such utility is objective. Dr. Prum's and Darwin's notion of beauty is something more subjective, with no other meaning than its aesthetic appeal. Dr. Prum wants to push evolutionary biologists to re examine their assumptions about utility and beauty, objectivity and subjectivity. But he also wants to reach the public with a message that is clear whether or not you dip into the technical aspects of evolution. The yearning to pick your own mate is not something that began with humans, he says. It can be found in ducks, pheasants and other creatures. "Freedom of choice matters to animals," he said recently on a birding trip to a beach near his office in New Haven. "We've been explaining away desire rather than actually trying to understand or explain it. That's one of the biggest shifts that the book is about." "I don't know anybody who actually agrees with me," he said with a frank smile. "Even my own students aren't there yet." To grasp his view, a little bit of history is in order. Darwin famously proposed the idea of evolution by natural selection, what is often called survival of the fittest. To put it simply, living things vary in their inherited traits, from speed to color to sense of smell. The traits of the individuals who survive longer and have the most offspring become more common. So, over time, the faster antelope have more young, the fastest of them have more offspring, and antelope end up very speedy. But reproduction isn't just about surviving and staying healthy long enough to mate. You have to find a mate. And in many species, your mate must choose you. This process is sexual selection. Female birds are often the ones choosing. And their choices can produce male birds that are incredibly colorful, and some that are elaborate dancers or designers of striking boudoirs like the bower birds. If, for example, females like males with long tails, then long tailed males have more offspring, and the longest tailed of those offspring reproduce more. In the end, that species becomes known for its long tails. Maydianee Andrade, an evolutionary biologist and vice dean at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, who studies sexual selection and teaches evolution, said that "the question is basically this. You can think of females when they are choosing a mate as foraging. So what are they looking for?" "If you're dragging a giant tail behind you, that might tell the female something," she said. "A male that survives carrying a large heavy tail is more impressive than a male that survives with a short tail." But survival might not have anything to do with it. Some female finches use white feathers to line their nest, perhaps to camouflage white eggs. In one experiment, they also liked males with white feathers stuck on their heads better than other males. This seemed to be an aesthetic choice, and also proved that there is no accounting for taste. Darwin contended that selection based mate choice was different from natural selection because the females were often making decisions based on what looked good on beauty, as they perceived it and not on survival or some objective quality like speed or strength. Scientists of that era reacted negatively, partly because of the emphasis on females. "Such is the instability of vicious feminine caprice that no constancy of coloration could be produced by its selective action," wrote St. George Jackson Mivart, an English biologist who was at first a great supporter and later a critic of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, preferred the idea that the colors and patterns meant something either they were signs that this was a male of the right species, or they indicated underlying fitness. Perhaps only a strong, healthy male could support such a big, beautiful tail. At the very birth of evolutionary theory, scientists were arguing about how sexual selection worked. And they kept at it, through the discovery of genes and many other advances. Fast forward to the 1980s, when Dr. Prum was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, sharing an office with Geoffrey Hill, now a professor at Auburn University. At that time, mainstream evolutionary thought took a big swing toward the idea that ornaments and fancy feathers were indications of underlying fitness. "Animals with the best ornamentation were the best males," Dr. Hill said. This was called "honest signaling" of underlying genetic fitness. The idea, he said, "almost completely ran over what was the old idea of beauty." Dr. Hill, for one, was completely convinced. "I was pretty sure I could explain all ornaments in all animals as honest signaling." But, he added, he has since reconsidered. There are some extreme forms of ornamentation that he thinks don't signal anything, but rather are a result of the kind of process Dr. Prum favors. But, he said, he thought Dr. Prum had taken an important idea and gotten "a little bit carried away with it." The book, he said, "was a great read, and I could tell he put his heart and soul into it." But, he said, he found it "scientifically disappointing." Darwin himself, Dr. Hill said, "was completely unsatisfied with his work on sexual selection." And the mainstream of evolutionary biology is not hostile to a partial role for arbitrary female choice. Dr. Hill has recently argued for combining several different processes to explain sexual selection. Dr. Prum is indeed given to enthusiasm, and to intellectual contention. He has been on the winning side of initially unpopular ideas before. That's backward, says Dr. Prum. Take beauty. Since animals have aesthetic preferences and make choices, beauty will inevitably appear. "Beauty happens," as he puts it, and it should be taken as nonadaptive until proven otherwise. In proposing this so called "null hypothesis," he draws on the work of Mark A. Kirkpatrick at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies population genetics, genomics and evolutionary theory and had read parts of "The Evolution of Beauty." "I'm very impressed that Rick is taking on this crusade," Dr. Kirkpatrick said. He is not convinced that all aspects of sexual selection are based on arbitrary choices for perceived beauty, but, he said, if Dr. Prum can convince some other scientists to question their assumptions, "he will do a great service." For Dr. Prum, at least, there is a partial answer to the question posed by Dr. Prakash. Why are birds beautiful? "Birds are beautiful because they're beautiful to themselves."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford announced Wednesday that it would introduce an all new Focus sedan and Focus Electric at the New York auto show next week. The 2015 Focus features new styling similar to Ford's other models and the option to equip the car with Ford's 1 liter EcoBoost 3 cylinder engine and 6 speed manual transmission. (Ford) Harald Krueger, production chief at BMW, said this week that the automaker would decide where to put its new North American factory within the next few months. With demand for its product rising in North America, BMW will build 50 percent more vehicles at its Spartanburg, S.C., plant. BMW said it was considering, among other places, two sites in Mexico for the new factory. (Bloomberg) In other BMW news, it is scheduled to preview its 9 Series flagship sedan at the Beijing auto show this month, says a report from Auto Motor und Sport, a German magazine. The new long wheelbase 9 Series will be positioned to do battle with the Mercedes Benz S600 Maybach and the Rolls Royce Ghost. (Automotive News, subscription required) Gett, a smartphone powered car delivery service that seeks to rival Uber, partnered with WunWun, another delivery service. When Gett customers order a car, they can now also order items like coffee, flowers and food with their rides. The service will be available in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, and will cost 10. (The New York Daily News)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Jimmie Johnson clinched his sixth Nascar Sprint Cup championship with a ninth place finish in the season finale on Sunday at Homestead Miami Speedway. Matt Kenseth finished the season in the runner up position, 19 points behind Johnson, with a second place finish in the race, behind the winner, Denny Hamlin. Dale Earnhardt Jr. took third in the race. Johnson avoided disaster on a restart late in the race when he and Kenseth collided. Johnson's car sustained some damage and dropped well back in the field. But he was slowly able to recover and race his way back into an unassailable position in the season points battle. Johnson, 38, has won the championship in six of the last eight seasons; he now has his sights set on tying the record of seven championships in Nascar's elite series, held by Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt. In other racing news from the weekend: Kurt Caselli, a champion motorcycle racer, was killed Friday while leading the Baja 1000 desert race with less than 100 miles to go, near Ensenada on Mexico's Baja California peninsula. Caselli, 30, was a factory rider for the KTM team, which issued a statement Saturday saying that its investigation indicated that Caselli had struck an animal. He was taken to an Ensenada hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Caselli, of Palmdale, Calif., was a champion many times over in trials competition, motocross and other forms of two wheeled racing. The Honda teammates Colton Udall, Tim Weigand, David Kamo and Mark Samuels were the overall motorcycle winners with a time of 18 hours, 29 minutes and 14 seconds. B.J. Baldwin won the four wheel category. Sebastian Vettel scored an easy victory Sunday in the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas near Austin, Tex. It was a record setting eighth consecutive victory in a single season for the 26 year old German driver his 12th of the season on the Formula One circuit. Vettel, a four time Formula One champion, has a chance to tie the all time series record of 13 victories in a single season held by Michael Schumacher in the season finale in Brazil this month. Romain Grosjean of Lotus came in second in the race, followed by Vettel's Red Bull Infiniti teammate, Mark Webber, who is scheduled to retire from Formula One racing at the end of the season. Dario Franchitti, the three time Indianapolis 500 champion, announced he would end the driving part of his career after being injured in an IndyCar crash in Houston last month. Franchitti, 40, sustained leg, back and head injuries when his car flipped into a fence on the final lap of a race after coming into contact with another car. A four time IndyCar series champion, Franchitti returned to his native Scotland recently to continue his recovery. "One month removed from the crash and based upon the expert advice of the doctors who have treated and assessed my head and spinal injuries post accident, it is their best medical opinion that I must stop racing," Franchitti said in a statement. "They have made it very clear that the risks involved in further racing are too great and could be detrimental to my long term well being. Based on this medical advice, I have no choice but to stop." Friends noted that Franchitti refused to use the word "retire." Sebastien Ogier won the Wales Rally of Great Britain on Sunday, capping off a title winning season in the World Rally Championship. Ogier won nine events in the series this season and finished comfortably ahead of Thierry Neuville in the points tally. Neuville, driving a Ford, came home third in Wales, behind Ogier's Volkswagen teammate, Jari Matti Latvala. Austin Dillon narrowly defeated Sam Hornish Jr. for Nascar's Nationwide series championship title, with a 12th place finish in the season finale Saturday night at Homestead Miami Speedway. Hornish, who came up just three points shy of the title, finished the event in eighth place. The finish was not without controversy. Nascar officials were criticized for taking an unusually long time to clean up after a wreck late in the race a development that seemed to preserve the chances of Dillon, whose ill handling car was fading from contention. The ensuing 12 lap caution period tied a record for laps under a yellow flag, leaving only five green flag laps in the race. It wasn't enough time for Hornish, who had an early race lead, to regain his advantage in points. Roger Penske, who owns Hornish's car, said Nascar's handling of the situation was "very disappointing." Dillon, who along with his brother Ty, were publicly criticized last month by their departing teammate Kevin Harvick as "rich kids" who have "had everything handed to them with a spoon," clinched the title without having won a race on the 33 event schedule.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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SAN FRANCISCO The race to buy TikTok's U.S. operations has entered its final stages, with two groups submitting bids for the video app, said three people involved in the deal talks. One of the bids was from Microsoft and Walmart, which have teamed up, and the other was from Oracle and could include a coalition of investors, they said. The discussions remain fluid, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly. It is unclear which group will secure a deal, and the makeup of the bidders could still change. But TikTok's owner, the Chinese internet company ByteDance, will most likely make a decision on the competing bids in the coming days, they said. And whichever bid is selected is likely to set TikTok's U.S. business down very different paths. A deal with Microsoft and Walmart could draw on Walmart's digital sales background to turn TikTok into a kind of e commerce app for both creators and users, people involved in the talks said. That could make TikTok more like Douyin, ByteDance's TikTok like Chinese language video app, which already has e commerce integrated into it. A deal with Oracle, the enterprise software company, would be more of a data play. Oracle could use TikTok's data about social interactions to benefit its cloud, data and advertising businesses, the people said. Representatives for TikTok, Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment. In a statement, Walmart confirmed it was participating in the discussions and said, "We are confident that a Walmart and Microsoft partnership would meet both the expectations of U.S. TikTok users while satisfying the concerns of U.S. government regulators." Any deal would cap months of turbulence for TikTok, which has been under intense pressure from the Trump administration. White House officials, who have become increasingly tough on China, have said that TikTok poses a national security threat because it could provide data about U.S. users to Beijing. This month, President Trump signed an executive order mandating that TikTok sell its U.S. operations by mid September or cease transactions within the country. That pushed ByteDance and TikTok to seek a buyer, in what could amount to a blockbuster deal. Microsoft had already been talking with TikTok and ByteDance about a potential acquisition, people with knowledge of the talks have said. They initially discussed Microsoft taking just a minority stake in TikTok, before the scope of a deal ballooned. Since then, Oracle and other bidders have also joined the talks. Bankers and others have also called Netflix, Twitter and others to gauge their interest in doing a deal with TikTok, though the degree of interest has varied widely. Under stipulations set by the White House to alleviate national security concerns, ByteDance would need to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to reduce the app's Chinese ownership. It would also have to sell to one or more companies that have a technology services provider, in part to transfer TikTok's American user data over to U.S. servers. Both Microsoft and Oracle satisfy those requirements. Prices for a potential deal have ranged from 20 billion to 50 billion, people with knowledge of the talks have said. It was unclear what bid amounts were submitted. Microsoft, with 137 billion in cash and a market value of more than 1.7 trillion, is far larger than other potential acquirers and has the deepest resources. Oracle, with a market value of 175 billion, has roughly 43 billion in cash and short term investments, and also holds debt. Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note to investors that the participation of Walmart was likely "the final piece of the puzzle that ultimately cements Microsoft successfully acquiring TikTok's U.S. operations for likely 35 billion to 40 billion." The emergence of the two bids follows the resignation late on Wednesday of TikTok's chief executive, Kevin Mayer. Mr. Mayer, a former Disney executive who had announced he was joining TikTok in May, said he was resigning because he had signed on for a global role, not to run a carved up version of the company. In a note to employees, he also indicated that a deal for TikTok might be close. Zhang Yiming, ByteDance's chief executive, said in his own note that ByteDance and TikTok were moving swiftly to resolve its issues in the United States and India, where the app was banned in June. "I cannot get into details at this point, but I can assure you that we are developing solutions that will be in the interest of users, creators, partners and employees," Mr. Zhang said. While Microsoft's and Oracle's interest in a bid for TikTok's U.S. operations has been known, Walmart's participation only emerged on Thursday. The world's largest retailer, known for its brick and mortar stores, has recently been pushing into digital businesses like entertainment, partly as a way to outpace its rival Amazon. In 2018, the retailer reached a deal to have Metro Goldwyn Mayer create short form original series for Walmart's ad supported streaming service, Vudu. At the time, Walmart said it expected to team up with more studios to create content for the service. It also entered a joint venture with Eko, a New York start up that focuses on "interactive storytelling," in which viewers control the plot of commercials and television episodes. Vudu features so called shoppable ads, in which viewers watching on internet connected TVs can click on the words "add to cart" on an ad and have the product being advertised dropped into their Walmart.com shopping queue. In April, Walmart agreed to sell Vudu to Fandango. "The lines are blurring between traditional shopping, digital shopping and social media," said Michael Lasser, a retail analyst for UBS. "Connecting with a younger audience is vital to Walmart's long term outlook, especially as more digitally native generations move into their prime consumption years." The pandemic has shown the importance of e commerce to Walmart and other big box retailers. In an earnings report this month, Walmart said its online sales doubled during the quarter. Microsoft and Walmart have teamed up before. In 2018, the companies announced a multiyear cloud partnership aimed at accelerating Walmart's digital commerce business.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The business model of many of the country's tech start ups spend furiously to acquire new users, worry about profits later wobbles as one company's stock piles up on the streets. BEIJING Brilliantly simple, emission free solution to the problem of urban congestion? Or the maddening height of venture backed technology hubris? Dockless rented bicycles swept into Chinese cities two years ago. Their arrival inspired a wave of similar mobility experiments around the world, even as city dwellers in China bemoaned the sight of candy colored bikes heaped in unholy piles on their sidewalks. Now, one of China's leading bike start ups, Ofo, is facing serious financial problems. Its founder is on a government blacklist for unpaid bills. Millions of riders who placed deposits are demanding their money back. And the business model used by many of China's tech firms spend furiously to acquire new users, worry about profits later is showing its limits. The run of Ofo customers seeking refunds appears to have started last week. Doubts about the company's financial health had swirled for months. People said on social media they were unable to get refunds on deposits of 15 to 30, which they put down to rent Ofo's bumblebee yellow bikes. (The company's Chinese nickname translates as "Little Yellow Bike.") But according to state media, one user posted on the social platform Weibo last week that he had quickly gotten a refund after writing an email to Ofo in English. The post touched off outrage about the apparent differences in the way the company was treating Chinese people and foreigners. It also set off a rush among other Ofo users seeking refunds. "Ofo's user base is large, so there is a possibility that the number of applications for deposit refunds will soar," the company said late Monday in a statement posted on Weibo. "Please be patient. We promise that deposits will be refunded according to the proper procedures. To all users, please don't worry!" The statement appears only to have made people worry more. Many customers used the Ofo app to apply for refunds and joined a queue that had climbed to nearly 12 million people by Thursday. "I thought countless times about cutting operating capital to pay back some of users' deposits and debts to suppliers, and even about dissolving the company and filing for bankruptcy," Mr. Dai wrote . An Ofo spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Hundreds of people have also shown up at Ofo's Beijing headquarters this week. On Thursday, the company's fifth floor office was filled with police officers and shouting customers. Two women were crying. Zhang Wei, a migrant worker, had come to the office on Monday seeking a refund and had left without it, missing a day of work in the process. Mr. Zhang, 27, showed up again Thursday morning and wound up angrily kicking an Ofo employee. After being taken to the local police station and released, he returned to the Ofo office. He finally managed to convince an employee to transfer him the amount he had put down, around 30. By then, he had spent a total of around 15 to travel to and from Ofo's offices by subway and taxi. But he said it was worth it. "It was never about the money," he said. "I just needed to vent." Liu Jingyi, a student from the northern city of Xi'an, had forgotten about her Ofo deposit until she saw people talking about it on Weibo last month. Ms. Liu, 23, said she was not optimistic that she would get her money back. "Look at how many shared bikes there are now," she said. "I always felt that these cash burning business models would have to end sooner or later." When the history of the current go go era in China's tech industry is written, Ofo's rise and fall may serve as a useful parable. In bike rentals, ride hailing, food delivery and more, a good business idea attracts a swarm of copycats. Cutthroat competition ensues. Many companies and investors get burned. Mr. Dai founded Ofo in 2014 while studying at Peking University. Cities like New York, London and Paris had long had programs for renting bicycles for short time periods. But those programs required riders to return the bikes to docks fixed to the ground. Ofo and another Beijing start up, Mobike, realized that by equipping bikes with GPS and digital locks, commuters could use their phones to rent bikes, freeing them from fixed docks. That would keep bikes circulating, and available wherever people needed them. Almost overnight, the streets of China's cities started to resemble a kind of bicycle free for all. Imitators sprouted by the dozen, and other start ups angled to find the next big thing in sharing: umbrellas, basketballs, cellphone power banks, even concrete mixers. Investment poured in. China's tech giants, including Alibaba and Didi Chuxing, put money into Ofo. Eventually, the start up raised 2.2 billion, according to Crunchbase. State media hailed bike sharing as one of China's "new four great inventions," putting it and high speed rail, e commerce and smartphone payments on the same plane as paper, movable type, the compass and gunpowder. But it did not take long for the fever to become madness. Vandals set two wheelers ablaze and heaved them into rivers and canals. Whispers abounded about rental companies hiring people to destroy rivals' bikes or dump them in out of the way places. Beijing and other cities decided they had had enough, and blocked start ups from adding more bikes to their streets. Financial pressure started building as well. As long as new riders kept signing up, cash kept flowing in the form of deposits. But it has been expensive for the companies to replace damaged stock, and to hire workers to haul bikes all day from low to high demand locations. In April, Mobike was acquired by Meituan Dianping, a food delivery giant whose financial resources could help it continue to subsidize cheap bike trips. But Ofo has had trouble lately raising money from investors, Mr. Dai said in his letter this week. The company withdrew from several overseas markets, including the United States, this year just months after entering them. Mr. Dai, who said just last year that Ofo had ballooned to more than 2 billion in value, was recently added to an official blacklist of credit defaulters. According to a government database, he and Ofo's parent company owe a total of 7.8 million related to various contract disputes. Being on the list means Mr. Dai can be blocked from booking fancy hotels or flying first class. Ofo's bikes still have their fans in China. Bi Wenwen, a 38 year old entrepreneur in Shanghai, applied for a deposit refund in November. She does not expect to receive it, but she said she would still use Ofo in the meantime. "It provides a lot of convenience," Ms. Bi said. Wang Jinzhi applied for a refund from Ofo two weeks ago. But he has already lost all confidence in the sharing economy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Five days after George Floyd was killed while in custody of the Minneapolis police on May 25, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell released a 150 word statement about the death and ensuing protests. The N.H.L. and N.B.A. followed suit the next day. But M.L.B.'s first public statement on the matter did not come until 10:29 a.m. on Wednesday nine days after Floyd's death. Until then, its only words came from a leaked internal memo from Commissioner Rob Manfred to employees on Monday. "Our game has zero tolerance for racism and racial injustice," the statement on Wednesday read. "The reality that the Black community lives in fear or anxiety over racial discrimination, prejudice or violence is unacceptable. "Addressing this issue requires action both within our sport and society. MLB is committed to engaging our communities to invoke change. We will take the necessary time, effort and collaboration to address symptoms of systemic racism, prejudice and injustice, but will be equally as focused on the root of the problem." Nathan Kalman Lamb, who teaches about the intersection of sport, labor, race and social inequality at Duke University, said he found sports leagues' statements to be particularly hollow now considering how they responded or didn't to the peaceful protests by the former N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016. "If the N.F.L. or Major League Baseball had come out and endorsed that statement, saying they're going to make meaningful and material changes to support a movement against police violence and policy brutality and murder in society against black people, that would've sounded pretty powerful to me," Kalman Lamb said. Minnesota Twins Manager Rocco Baldelli, who is white, tweeted two days after Floyd's death, "George Floyd should be breathing right now. We have a lot of progress to make." Adam Wainwright, a white pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, wrote on Twitter that he had reached out to his teammate Dexter Fowler, a black outfielder who has received racist attacks on social media in the past, "to tell him that I was sure he didn't need my affirmation but just wanted him to know he was awesome and making a difference." According to Wainwright, Fowler told him that his call was needed. "The silence can be hurtful so I respect the hell out of you for reaching out," Wainwright said Fowler told him. "Would really be meaningful if you used your platform too!" "My white privilege has allowed me to be oblivious to the true magnitude of oppression the black community faces," Yankees pitcher James Paxton, who is white, wrote on his Instagram account. "My silence to this point is also a product of my white privilege. I'm beginning to realize my privilege and ignorance. Time to listen, learn and take action." On Monday, Derek Jeter, the former Yankees star and the son of a black father and white mother, was the first M.L.B. owner to release a statement about Floyd, and said protesters should not be demonized.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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When my son, Noah, entered seventh grade, his voice deepened and his personality changed. Gone was my chatty sidekick. In his place was a sullen recluse. Moms with older sons assured me this was normal. "It will pass," they promised. It took five years. And even though the new Noah laughed freely and didn't flee the dinner table before he finished chewing his last mouthful, there was still a distance between us. My hope that we might close that gap grew more remote two years ago, shortly after he turned 20 and slid into a depression so dark that he spent three months in a psychiatric hospital. The first time he was released, he tried to kill himself within three days, leading to six more weeks as an inpatient. The next time he was released, I was terrified to let him out of my sight. I stopped longing for the chatty boy he had once been and thanked God daily for what I had: a son who was alive. A son who no longer appeared to believe that if he couldn't be perfect, he might as well be dead. He made it through college while living at our family home in Alberta, Canada. Then came Covid. The job Noah was to start in May was postponed and he suddenly had six weeks with no plans. "Why don't you build the cedar strip canoe you've been talking about?" I suggested. "Maybe," he said. "But I'd need tools a router and a table saw. They're expensive." Soon he was visiting lumberyards and hardware stores, which remained open as essential businesses during the coronavirus shutdown. He turned our garage into a workshop and enlisted his fellow unemployed engineering classmates to help, usually about four at a time, working with the garage door open for ventilation. Eventually the work force expanded to include childhood friends, family friends, high school friends, and a friend from his time in the psychiatric hospital. Every day a different group came over to saw, mill, rout, sand, glue and plane, all things I've always wanted to learn, but never had the chance. I took breaks from work to help. I held cedar strips in place. I glued. I picked up pizza and baked cookies for the kids I'd dubbed the Covid Canoe Crew. One drizzly day, I joined Noah under a table on our deck (the only dry, dust free and ventilated space we could find) to varnish the seats he'd crafted from strips of ash. When packages of rattan arrived in the mail, he taught himself to cane the seats, and then taught me. At night, side by side on the living room couch, we wove the strands into an intricate pattern. Sometimes we talked. Other times we sat in companionable silence. For the paddles, Noah and the crew cut strips of ash, cherry and maple and laminated them. They spent hours hand planing them. As the shavings fell away, what had once resembled planks at the end of a broom handle were transformed. Like the canoe, the paddles were works of art. Unlike the canoe, they reminded me of the cutting board that my cousin, a shop teacher, had made my husband and me for a wedding gift 28 years ago. I've always wanted to make something that beautiful, but didn't know how. "Do you think you could help me make a cutting board?" I asked Noah. After a trip to the local lumberyard for maple, cherry, walnut and a wood I'd never heard of purple heart, which Noah rightly suggested I would like we got to work. After calling my cousin for advice, I told Noah how wide to cut the boards. Then we glued and clamped the newly sawed strips together. When the glue dried and I noticed slight gaps between some of the strips, my cousin advised me to pull the board apart and use a planer to clean up the edges. At the rate I worked with Noah's hand planer, that would have taken years. I was lamenting my lack of progress to a friend, unaware that he had a workshop full of power tools. He gave me a key. Noah and I began going at night, coming home well past bedtime, sweaty and coated with sawdust. As we pulled dried glue off our fingers, we'd plan our next visit. Since mid June, we've spent hours together, in the garage, at the workshop, or at the hardware store or lumberyard. We've made more than two dozen cutting boards. Also and this is something I really appreciate he usually sweeps up the sawdust before I get around to it. The mess we generate continues to surprise me, but the bigger surprise has been the effect that woodworking has had on our relationship. When I asked Noah to help me make a cutting board, I figured it would be a one time experience. I never expected that we would discover a shared passion. For me, it's a chance to be creative in a different way than I am in my day job as a writer and editor. For Noah, who likes making things with his hands, it's a chance to use high end power tools he'd have no access to otherwise. Two years ago, when Noah came home from the hospital after multiple suicide attempts, my husband, daughter and I debated what to do with the kitchen knives. Ultimately, we decided not to hide them: We wanted Noah to know we trusted him with his life. Now, he's the one protecting me. When he taught me to use a jointer the first night in the workshop, he scolded me when I put my hands too close to the blade. It seems trite to affix a silver lining to the cloud that is Covid 19, but my relationship with my son is anything but trivial. None of us have any idea how or when Covid Time will end. Nor do I have unrealistic illusions about mental health: as the daughter of a man who died by suicide and the mother of a son who wanted to, I believe that good mental health is something to be grateful for, to tend to and nurture. And Noah is open about his experience; he gave me his blessing to tell this story. The boards that Noah and I make are only as strong as the materials we use and the time and care we put into each project. The gaps in that first board formed because two strips of wood didn't fit together properly. Before they could form a lasting bond, we had to change them.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Clockwise from top left: via Konrad Olsson; via Jordan Fudge; via Timo Weiland; and via Noah Jay. Clockwise from top left: via Konrad Olsson; via Jordan Fudge; via Timo Weiland; and via Noah Jay. Credit... Clockwise from top left: via Konrad Olsson; via Jordan Fudge; via Timo Weiland; and via Noah Jay. If, for Ryan Dichter, Week 1 of his coronavirus isolation was a time for dandling his infant daughter, Teddy, slouching around in sweatpants and waiting for the happy hour start gun, it became clear to him, as the terms of our collective confinement wore on, that the time had come to shower up and tug on some hard pants. "At first every night was Friday night," said Mr. Dichter, 36, a real estate agent who sells luxury residential properties in New York. "I was watching too much TV and having a few too many cocktails because it was unclear where this was going. Fast forward, and it's time to get properly dressed. School night's still school night." Since the first coronavirus cases were reported in this country, the terrain of the average workday shifted with seismic force and suddenness. Workplaces were abruptly shut down, and, for those that still had jobs, the office became that chair in a corner by the closet. Business was transacted largely on Zoom. And, unless the phone slipped, no one knew that you were multitasking while half naked below the waist. Rituals once thought fundamental to organizing a presentable version of oneself for the public were now called into question. Who says a guy has to shave and shower in the morning? How come you need shoes when you can't leave the house? Why not slap on a ball cap if you have a bad case of bed head? Increasingly, the need arises to sharpen one's presentation onscreen, as a means of standing out amid the "Hollywood Squares" grid of a monitor or merely to establish for your colleagues that, when the Google calendar meeting alert popped up on your smartphone, you were not still rubbing sleep from your eyes. "I was joking around with a friend that we've all become cam boys and cam girls now that we're just individual boxes on a screen," said Timo Weiland, 36, the creative director of the men's wear label that bears his name. Locked down at home in Brooklyn for the last three weeks, Mr. Weiland has found an urgent need to reinstitute daily grooming and dressing routines that he let lapse when it appeared that few of his business encounters were going to occur in a physical space. "It's about preserving a sense of professionalism in a formless environment, where the sense of urgency is gone," he said. "I have seven to 10 Zoom meetings a day, and I feel far less prepared if I'm wearing a hoodie and pajamas look." It was Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect, theorist and dandy who once posited, in his short lived journal, Das Andere, that a person is properly dressed not when he stands out but when he is wearing the correct apparel for the moment at hand. By that standard we should all be wearing battle gear. Yet Mr. Weiland gets by with one of his label's relaxed fit cotton twill chambray blazers worn with James Perse T shirts and a pair of forest green velvet Vans slippers that "go with every shade of Levi's I own." When working from home, Mr. Weiland forgoes obligatory fashion black for bright colors. "I like the way they pop," he said. "And it stimulates the way I communicate online and on video, even if I'm just taking one step forward to the countertop." For Jordan Fudge, 27, a venture capitalist in Los Angeles, the world of work has been Zoom centric for long enough that being at home has not significantly altered how he dresses for the job. That is, he continues to wear the comfortable though casual athleisure basics that are all but obligatory in his field. He does, however, "smarten things up a little bit," he said. Conjuring functional new norms of dress for a nation thrust forcibly into modes of work still unfamiliar to many will take time, Mr. Fudge said. "We're getting there as a culture," he said, pointing out that "The Daily Show" host, Trevor Noah, for one, has adapted nimbly to the new normal, shedding the sharply tailored suits he typically favors on air for denim button downs and high end hoodies. "We need to appear to be in control, even if everything is out of our control," Mr. Fudge said. Other factors are key to dressing for work, according to Konrad Olsson, 38, the founder and editor of Scandinavian Man. Speaking by phone from Sweden, Mr. Olsson pointed out a truth perhaps lost on those for whom wearing a three piece suit seems as alien as climbing into a suit of arms. The traditional suit, he said, was a form of protective gear, a means for demarcating boundaries between public and private, work and leisure, the exigencies of the corporate world and the intimate needs of one's family life. "Gay Talese has always been a true inspiration for me," Mr. Olsson said, referring to the New Jersey born journalist who, descended from a long line of tailors, holds fast to a belief that dressing up each day for work is a profound and civilizing, almost devotional act. "He always talks about dressing up for the story," Mr. Olsson said. And it is true that, even at 88, Mr. Talese continues to knot his tie and slip on a jacket each morning before descending the stairs to the home office in the Upper East Side townhouse he has lived in for decades. "I don't have my office, I don't have my desk, I don't have my co workers and the other attributes of a job around me," Mr. Olsson said. "I'm sitting in my 9 year old daughter's room working on all these Zoom calls." Putting on a blazer, he said, not only lifted his mood but also helped him restore the "structure and contour" of days that had begun to puddle around his slippers. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Switching out jeans and "yesterday's T shirt" for a velveteen suit and tie, blazers and khakis, a double breasted suit and sandals, he began posting self portraits to his Instagram account konradolsson with the legend "No Casual Fridays in a Crisis." "It sounds pretentious, but it's important that I dress this way," Mr. Olsson said. "It's showing the world that I put value in our time and what we do together." Brian Tran, 28, a founder of Serif, a co working start up, quit New York for Colorado just before the shutdown. For him, organizing a daily wardrobe is his way to "create structure and a routine that are incredibly important to me." "I represent a lot of fashion clients, and obviously I'm going to dress differently for a big Israeli investor than when I'm representing someone with a new shoe line who wants to do a pop up in Brooklyn," Mr. Jay said. "Either way, I don't want someone seeing me onscreen and saying: 'Oh, wait. What are you doing.'" Even for James Cusati Moyer, 30, an actor, who has never held a desk job and who last observed a dress code as a waiter in college, there is something to be said for dressing up to greet the day as a means of boosting self esteem. The streaming series he began filming in Canada after his Broadway run in "Slave Play" ended is on pause, and his tape auditions have slowed to a trickle. Still, as Mr. Cusati Moyer said, "There are only so many hours a day I can remain in the clothes I slept in the night before." So, even on days when the shape of his life is defined by FaceTime encounters and bounded by the four walls of his apartment, he dresses in a vintage T shirt and Uniqlo trousers, which is the normally peripatetic actor's travel uniform. As a video game producer who also teaches at the Tisch Center for the Arts, Jeff Petriello, 33, makes an ideal poster boy for those whose every day is Casual Friday. Yet since the quarantine began and as successive Zoom meetings stretched out for as many as eight hours Mr. Petriello has found himself focused on his hourlong grooming ritual and morning forays into his closet where he marks each new day on lockdown by "turning a look." "People express themselves in different ways, and fashion is a way I learned to," Mr. Petriello said. "That routine is something I'm trying to stick to," he said. "It makes the day feel more real if I wake up and think, 'That's what I'm wearing!' Even if nobody's seeing me."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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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. A new Quinnipiac poll has Joe Biden leading President Trump by 13 points, with Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg also ahead of the president. Of course, as late night hosts lamented, voters don't always do what the polls say they will. "So the polls look bad for Trump, but I don't know. Can I trust them? I've been hurt before. My psyche is still processing the feelings from Election Night 2016, and my liver's still processing the bourbon. Dare I love again? Oh, who am I kidding? I can't stay mad at you, polls. You had me at 'Trump's losing.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "If you want to know how much these polls matter, just ask President Hillary Clinton." JIMMY FALLON Trump suggested that the polls were fake, and that he was leading in several states where he was said to be behind. "The New York Times reported that after being briefed on a devastating 17 state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Joe Biden in many of the states he needs to win. I wouldn't be surprised if they were making up new states just to cheer him up. 'Good news, Mr. President. You're winning big in Old Jersey, East Dakota, Californication and Blorf." SETH MEYERS "Yes, they are winning in every state they've polled: Delus iana, Chaos sachusetts and Denial vania." STEPHEN COLBERT "So they suppress numbers, but first they made up the numbers, and the numbers don't even exist. Can you imagine Trump giving an alibi? As Trump It couldn't have been me, officer. I was asleep the whole time. Plus I was at work. The crime didn't occur, and I don't exist. Smoke bomb! I'm gone." STEPHEN COLBERT In Iowa on Tuesday, Biden made a bold campaign promise: "We're going to cure cancer." "Which explains why just this morning President Trump came out in support of cancer." CONAN O'BRIEN "That would be great. It's touched his life. It's touched so many lives. But, please, if you can cure cancer, could you maybe just do that now? ... President or no president, people might vote for a candidate who promises to cure cancer, but they would definitely vote for the guy who's already done it." STEPHEN COLBERT Biden also took a few shots at Trump, but as Stephen Colbert noted, "the only president Biden seemed to mention more than Donald Trump was Barack Obama." "Thirteen. That is a lead that is so big, it's ready for a bar mitzvah." STEPHEN COLBERT "To win, all Biden has to do between now and next November is stop talking." CONAN O'BRIEN "Right now, the sitting president of the United States, the leader of the free world, is trailing the mayor of South Bend, Ind. That's like the heavyweight champ being knocked out by your cousin who claims he knows karate." STEPHEN COLBERT "Trump's behind everybody. Actually, I just heard right now he's even losing to the Thailand women's soccer team." JIMMY FALLON "And somehow, Bill de Blasio still loses by 137 percent." STEPHEN COLBERT Mindy Kaling is turning 40 this month, which James Corden and Adam Scott assure her is "glorious" because you have "less expletive to give."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. The Swedish pop singer, songwriter and producer Robyn makes music for fembots and dancehall queens and everyone in between; for kicking losers to the curb and welcoming new love; for flipping the bird to technology and rules and anything holding you back. But she specializes in songs suited for "dance crying," tracks that smother loss in synth supernovas. In 2007 there was "With Every Heartbeat," then came "Dancing on My Own" in 2010. Now the trilogy is complete with "Missing U," her first solo release since 2010, which she wrote and recorded with her longtime collaborator Klas Ahlund and Joseph Mount (who records as Metronomy). The lyrics describe presence and absence finding the physical detritus of a relationship in her pockets and memories in her mind, sensing the weight of what's gone. The track twinkles and throbs, nudging her along. Robyn is here, thankfully, once again. CARYN GANZ Robyn has made no secret of her admiration for Neneh Cherry, and the two Swedish musicians collaborated in 2014 on the sassy "Out of the Black." Now Ms. Cherry is back in a very different mode: "Kong," produced by 3D of Massive Attack and Four Tet, is somber and ominous, blending lyrics about personal challenges with the struggles of refugees seeking peace. A dubby bass line provides a guidepost at times, it feels like everything else is fading in and out of consciousness or awareness; awake, but lost. C.G. A lovely downer duet about the last dregs of a relationship from two casually confident young singers. Clairo is pulling away "I need some time away from you/Can't even be in the same room" while Cuco is pleading his case: "Call me, you've got my number/Don't let me go yet, lover." The song oozes gently, not favoring one or the other. Like most tugs of war, there's no resolution, only that persistent feeling of uncertainty that never quite fades. JON CARAMANICA Throughout his new album "Swimming," Mac Miller sounds genuinely submerged, sonically and emotionally. He's given to a lush, deeply textured production style, and for the most part here, he sounds content to be swaddled by synths and drums. "Self Care" is one of the album's high points, largely because it nails the sentiment of being low. Produced by DJ Dahi with Nice Rec, it's appealingly insular, fill of lyrics about what a joy it is to be the one to save yourself. Touches of Dev Hynes vocals and Erykah Badu's "On and On" add density to the haze. J.C. Tony Bennett and k.d. lang? Hm! Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga? Whoa. Tony Bennett and Diana Krall? Ah, yes. This eminently logical duo will release its first full length collaboration next month. And get ready to be even less surprised: It's a collection of Gershwin covers, titled "Love Is Here to Stay." The first single is a medium fast take on "Fascinating Rhythm," whose snappy spirit befits Mr. Bennett. (He turned 92 on Friday, by the way.) But Ms. Krall sounds even more comfortable, hugging the rhythm's curves and wisely underinvesting. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO An electric bass line that creeps quickly across the carpet. Woven, Stevie Wonder esque harmonies from horns and synth. Svelte vocals by Smithsoneon, occasionally curling into a croon so velvety he sounds like Aaron Neville. Sounds come at you fast and dense but always reassuringly on "Your Love," a single off the debut album by Freelance. This week the Harlem based musical collective unveiled the music video; it covers just over half of the almost seven minute song, fading out right before an Afrobeat tinged instrumental section. G.R. Last year, the unlikely alliance of DJ Khaled, Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper and Quavo delivered one of the essential songs of the summer, the feather light "I'm the One." Lightning does not strike twice. Sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone, though this effort did lead to a video in which DJ Khaled wears what appears to be a custom made leather shirt designed to match his Chanel sneakers, and Mr. Bieber seems to wear a shoelace for a belt. J.C. Caleb Wheeler Curtis's alto saxophone playing has plenty of modern jazz conventions within it that technical, patterny stuff that turns most listeners cold almost immediately but they're not what he's about. On "Brothers," the scholarly vocabulary becomes part of the background in comparison to the relatable content he's putting forth: his occasional, cooing vibrato, or his sincere, dancing runs. "Brothers" is the title track from his debut album. G.R.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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In its fantastic second season, NBC's "The Good Place" found empathy within the devil. Michael (Ted Danson), an immortal bureaucrat charged with torturing four souls in The Bad Place a version of hell where his prisoners are meant to inflict their neuroses on one another develops a conscience and helps them escape. While they argue their eternal cases in front of an omniscient judge (Maya Rudolph), Michael explains himself to his infernal supervisor. "I was just trying to prove that humans could be made to torture each other," he says. "Instead, they helped each other. They were bad people. This wasn't supposed to be possible." People never learn, people don't get better: These are unsurprising beliefs from a minion of hell. But they've also been the guiding principles of the last two decades of TV. From the dawn of "The Sopranos" through the rise of Netflix, acclaimed antihero dramas have focused on bad people getting worse or good people going bad. (In "Breaking Bad," the concept is right in the title.) There are many delights to "The Good Place," which ends its too short 13 episode season Thursday: its ingenious twists, its riffs on the banality of damnation. (Hell is stocked with Hawaiian pizza and plastered with movie posters for "Pirates of the Caribbean 6: The Haunted Crow's Nest or Something, Who Gives a Crap.") But the most refreshing thing about "The Good Place," in an era of artistic bleakness, is its optimism about human nature. It's made humane and sidesplittingly entertaining television out of the notion that people and even the occasional immortal demon are redeemable. For a generation now, the moral journeys of TV's best shows have mostly run in the other direction. Tony Soprano spent six seasons in therapy yet learned nothing except how to be a better criminal. The corrupt police officer Vic Mackey, in "The Shield," rationalized his brutality as what it took to bust gang members. The exceptions ambitious series about people seeking grace and improvement like HBO's "Enlightened" and Sundance's "Rectify" tended to be overshadowed. Sunnier sitcoms like "Parks and Recreation," from "The Good Place" creator Mike Schur, dealt with characters who were already decent, not striving to become that way. Over time, antihero culture spread from premium cable to the mainstream. The bristly protagonists of Fox's "24" and "House, M.D." broke rules to get the job done. Reality TV made stars of people who, in the credo of that genre, weren't there to make friends. Antiheroes are de rigueur in noirish streaming dramas like "Bloodline" and "Ozark." The mind set even bled into in public life. Donald J. Trump, reality TV star, in many ways ran an antihero candidacy, contrasting himself with political nice guys like Jimmy Carter: "We want someone who is going to go out and kick ass and win." (When he suggested threatening the families of ISIS fighters, he was borrowing a tactic from Jack Bauer in Season 2 of "24.") None of this is to say that antihero stories are necessarily amoral. Some, like "Breaking Bad," assumed moral universes of retribution and consequences. But they were a kind of rebellion against the pat moral lessons of earlier TV, in which you could count on the good guys to win simply because they were good. "The Good Place," on the other hand, avoided falling into easy moralizing by committing to the idea that becoming good is hard work. This was built into the structure of "The Good Place." For most of the first season, Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a selfish ne'er do well, believes as part of Michael's ruse that she's in heaven and was placed there by mistake. So she gets her assigned "soul mate," the moral philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to teach her to be a better person. The result is a running crash course in remedial ethics, with the most madcap name dropping of the greats of moral thought since Monty Python's "Bruces' Philosophers Song." ("The Good Place" has something in common with the absurdist, meaning of life obsessed humor of the 1970s, like Python and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.") In a Season 2 episode, for instance, Chidi brings up the "trolley problem," a thought experiment devised by Philippa Foot: You're driving a trolley and must either continue on the track and kill five people or switch tracks and kill one. Is it better to kill five innocents through inaction or one by choice? The characters of "The Good Place" ended up in hell for relative misdemeanors. Eleanor is an oaf, but hardly a murderer. Tahani (Jameela Jamil) is a vain social climber with a jealous streak; Jason (Manny Jacinto) is a sweet dimwit. Chidi's sins are intellectual paralysis and self flagellation. (When he learns he's in hell, he assumes it's for drinking almond milk: "I knew it was bad for the environment, but I loved the way it coated my tongue with a weird film.") This may seem unfair is anyone good enough for The Good Place? but it serves a purpose. It's easy to feel distance from a true monster like Tony Soprano. The characters on "The Good Place," on the other hand, have everyday failings. They have work to do just like we do. In "The Good Place," morality is not something you have; it's something you do. It's a muscle that requires exercise. The show shares with dramas like "Breaking Bad" the belief that being good is hard. But it doesn't believe that being good is futile. The series feels like part of a wider reaction against the dark TV view of human imperfection, something that was once groundbreaking but has become a commodity. CBS All Access' "The Good Fight, " like its predecessor "The Good Wife," is about the conflict between principle and the cynical practice of law. ABC's "The Good Doctor" (anyone notice a pattern in the titles?) is a sort of syrupy reverse "House" in which the diagnoses come not from a misanthrope but a well meaning autistic savant. But the upbeat sophistication of "The Good Place" is still rare, in this world and, apparently, in the next. When Ms. Rudolph's judge agrees to hear the characters' case, she says that she's only doing it out of boredom. "It's either this," she says, "or start 'Bloodline.' "
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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SEATTLE As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa wanes, physicians from Doctors Without Borders are confronting a mystery: More of their patients are surviving. They do not know why. "The reasons are really unclear," said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, who helped run the agency's response in Liberia and gave a presentation describing its experience at an AIDS conference here. Doctors Without Borders better known by its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres has cared for more Ebola patients in West Africa than any other organization. At its peak, it was running 22 centers; it now runs eight. Since last March, the average death rate at those remaining centers has dropped to 52 percent, from about 62 percent. Although patients are getting more intravenous hydration and more nursing care as staff members have more time, the agency does not believe that accounts for the whole difference. Rather, patients are arriving with less virus in their blood. Viral loads have dropped by almost half, Dr. van Cutsem said, which increases a patient's chances of survival enormously. Initially, he said, the assumption was that patients were coming in earlier in the course of their illnesses. Rumors that everyone who entered Ebola centers died were once rife, but now have faded. But that was not the case, either. According to interviews with patients, the time between the first appearance of symptoms and the day they arrive has not changed. "That leaves us with two hypotheses," Dr. van Cutsem said. One is that fear has made West Africans more careful, and that even those who are infected have gotten smaller amounts of virus into their eyes or mouths. Perhaps they are wearing gloves when they bury bodies, he said, or at least partially protecting themselves while caring for sick relatives. In many diseases, the size of a viral dose may make the difference between life and death. Even though viruses multiply, immune systems handle small amounts of virus better than large ones. The other theory is that the virus has mutated to be less lethal. But Dr. van Cutsem said he knew of no genetic evidence to prove that. Doctors fighting some previous Ebola outbreaks have had the impression that the virus weakened because more people infected late in the outbreak survived, he said. Two Ebola experts, Thomas W. Geisbert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and Dr. Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., said that, though the idea is plausible, they knew of no genetic evidence of it happening, largely because so few samples have been sequenced. The conventional wisdom is that viruses slowly mutate toward less lethality because the strains that kill all their victims run out of hosts and fade out. But Dr. Sabeti said she has no gene data showing that that is happening in West Africa, especially since scientists are not yet even sure which mutations make Ebola more or less lethal as they do, for example, with flu. Her team has published the genomes of nearly 200 virus samples collected during the current outbreak, 99 of them in August and another 95 this week. All came from one hospital in Sierra Leone. Other than that, she said, she knew of "only eight or nine" other new sequences posted by others. Struggles over the ownership of blood samples and even nasal swabs taken in foreign countries have become more common in recent years, especially when they may lead to vaccines. During the H5N1 bird flu scare of a decade ago, Indonesia stopped letting samples be sent to the West, complaining that Indonesians could not afford the vaccines made from them. During the early days of the recent MERS outbreak in Saudi Arabia, struggles over credits on academic papers held up sequencing of samples. Dr. Sabeti said in an interview that she had heard that other teams had received samples but were waiting to publish articles about them in academic journals. "With everything that's going on, it's unfortunate that we know so little," she said. "This is a very cool finding about viral loads dropping, and I'd love to investigate it. We need some sort of incentive to share data."
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Companies like Inovio and Pfizer have begun early tests of candidates in people to determine whether their vaccines are safe. Researchers at the University of Oxford in England are testing vaccines in human subjects, too, and say they could have one ready for emergency use as soon as September. Moderna on Monday announced encouraging results of a safety trial of its vaccine in eight volunteers. There were no published data, but the news alone kindled hopes and sent the company's stock soaring. Animal studies have raised expectations, too. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on Wednesday published research showing that a prototype vaccine effectively protected monkeys from infection with the virus. The findings will pave the way to development of a human vaccine, said the investigators. They have already partnered with Janssen, a division of Johnson Johnson. In labs around the world, there is now cautious optimism that a coronavirus vaccine, and perhaps more than one, will be ready sometime next year. Scientists are exploring not just one approach to creating the vaccine, but at least four. So great is the urgency that they are combining trial phases and shortening a process that usually takes years, sometimes more than a decade. The coronavirus itself has turned out to be clumsy prey, a stable pathogen unlikely to mutate significantly and dodge a vaccine. "It's an easier target, which is terrific news," said Michael Farzan, a virologist at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Fla. An effective vaccine will be crucial to ending the pandemic, which has sickened at least 4.7 million worldwide and killed at least 324,000. Widespread immunity would reopen the door to lives without social distancing and face masks. "What people don't realize is that normally vaccine development takes many years, sometimes decades," said Dr. Dan Barouch, a virologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who led the monkey trials. "And so trying to compress the whole vaccine process into 12 to 18 months is really unheard of." "If that happens, it will be the fastest vaccine development program ever in history." But the technology used by both companies has never produced a vaccine approved for clinical use, let alone one that can be made in industrial quantities. Moderna was criticized for making rosy predictions, based on a handful of patients, without providing any scientific data. Other research teams have turned to more traditional strategies. Some scientists are using harmless viruses to deliver coronavirus genes into cells, forcing them to produce proteins that may teach the immune system to watch out for the coronavirus. CanSino Biologics, a company in China, has begun human testing of a coronavirus vaccine that relies on this approach, as has the University of Oxford team. Other traditional approaches rely on fragments of a coronavirus protein to make a vaccine, while some use killed, or inactivated, versions of the whole coronavirus. In China, such vaccines have already entered human trials. Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, predicted that at least 20 additional vaccine candidates will make their way into clinical trials in the weeks to come. "I'm not worried at all about it," he said of the prospects for a new vaccine. Many of these vaccines will stumble as the trials progress. As more people are inoculated, some candidates will fail to protect against the virus, and side effects will become more apparent. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. But from what scientists are learning about the coronavirus, it ought to be a relatively easy target. The coronavirus sports tempting targets on its surface, unique "spike" proteins the pathogen needs to enter human cells. The immune system readily learns to recognize these proteins, it appears, and to attack them, killing the virus. When work on a coronavirus vaccine started, some researchers worried that antibodies actually might worsen Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. But in early studies, no serious risks have emerged. "That doesn't mean that there won't be, but so far there hasn't been any indication, so I'm cautiously optimistic on that point," said Dr. Alyson Kelvin, a researcher at the Canadian Center for Vaccinology and Dalhousie University. Ensuring that vaccines are safe and effective demands large trials that require careful planning and execution. If successful vaccines emerge from those trials, someone's going to have to make an awful lot of them. Almost everyone on the planet is vulnerable to the new coronavirus. Each person may need two doses of a new vaccine to receive protective immunity. That's 16 billion doses. "When companies promise of delivering a vaccine in a year or less, I am not sure what stage they are talking about," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at Yale University. "I doubt they are talking about global distributions in billions of doses." Manufacturing vaccines is profoundly more complex than manufacturing, say, shoes or bicycles. Vaccines typically require large vats in which their ingredients are grown, and these have to be maintained in sterile conditions. Also, no factories have ever churned out millions of doses of approved vaccines made with the cutting edge technology being tested by companies like Inovio and Moderna. Facilities have sprung up in recent years to make viral vector vaccines, including a Johnson Johnson plant in the Netherlands. But meeting pandemic demand would be an enormous challenge. Manufacturers have the most experience mass producing inactivated vaccines, made with killed viruses, so this type may be the easiest to produce in large quantities. But there cannot be just one vaccine. If that were to happen, the company that made it would have no chance of meeting the world's demand. "The hope is that they will all, at some level, be effective, and certainly that's important because we need more than just one," said Emilio Emini, a director of the vaccine program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is providing financial support to many competing vaccine efforts. As part of a public private partnership the White House calls Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration has promised to design a kind of parallel manufacturing track to run alongside the clinical trials, building up capacity well before trials are concluded, in hopes that one or more vaccines could be distributed immediately upon approval. President Trump said on Friday that the goal of the project was to distribute a vaccine "prior to the end of the year." To do that, Mr. Trump is relying on the Defense Department to manage the manufacturing logistics related to vaccine development. But in an interview on Thursday, Gen. Gustave F. Perna, who will manage the manufacturing logistics, said discussions about the equipment and facilities needed for production were just beginning. He described his work as a "math problem": how to get 300 million doses of a vaccine that doesn't yet exist to Americans by January. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Finding the supplies and planning their distribution would occur at the same time, he said. "I need to have syringes," General Perna said. "I need to have wipes, right? I need to have Band Aids. I need to have the vaccine." He added: "Now, how am I going to distribute it? What is it going to be distributed in? What do I need to order now to make sure I have the distribution capability? The small bottles, the trucks." Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said that seemingly minor aspects of production and distribution could complicate progress later on. "This is on a scale we've never seen since the polio vaccine," he said. "It's the little things like the syringes, the needles, the glass vials. All of that has to be thought about. You don't want something that seems so simple to be the bottleneck in your vaccination program." A coronavirus vaccine doesn't yet exist, but already there are questions about who will be able to afford it. At the World Health Assembly meeting this week, a proposal from the European Union was adopted recommending a voluntary patent pool, which would put pressure on companies to give up their monopolies on vaccines they've developed. Oxfam, an international charity, has published an open letter from 140 world leaders and experts calling for a "people's vaccine," which would be "made available for all people, in all countries, free of charge." "These vaccines have to be a public good," said Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand, who signed the letter. "We're not safe till everyone is safe."
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Ask yourself, how many buddies do you have with dive watches? Now ask yourself, how many of them dive with one? One man who has made a living doing so is Jason Heaton, a Minnesota based journalist, who is known to watch geeks as a test pilot for the world's most illustrious undersea timepieces. As a contributor to magazines like Men's Journal and Outside, and sites like Hodinkee and Gear Patrol, Mr. Heaton, 47, has scuba tested many dive watches, ranging in price from a few hundred dollars for a Scurfa to a 145,000 Richard Mille over the course of more than 400 dives around the world. Fresh off a dive off Sri Lanka, where, wearing a Rolex Submariner, he explored the wreck of the H.M.S. Hermes, an aircraft carrier sunk during World War II, Mr. Heaton discussed the continuing allure of dive watches in an era when many scuba enthusiasts consider them obsolete. Q. First off, does any diver really need a dive watch? Short answer, no. The electronic dive computer came into regular use in the late 1980s. You get on a dive boat now, nobody's wearing a watch well, maybe 10 percent are. There's this secret fraternity out there. But it's a dying breed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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One of the most respected and influential groups in the continuing breast cancer screening debate said on Tuesday that women should begin mammograms later and have them less frequently than it had long advocated. The American Cancer Society, which has for years taken the most aggressive approach to screening, issued new guidelines on Tuesday, recommending that women with an average risk of breast cancer start having mammograms at 45 and continue once a year until 54, then every other year for as long as they are healthy and likely to live another 10 years. The organization also said it no longer recommended clinical breast exams, in which doctors or nurses feel for lumps, for women of any age who have had no symptoms of abnormality in the breasts. Previously, the society recommended mammograms and clinical breast exams every year, starting at 40. The changes reflect increasing evidence that mammography is imperfect, that it is less useful in younger women, and that it has serious drawbacks, like false positive results that lead to additional testing, including biopsies. But the organization's shift seems unlikely to settle the issue. Some other influential groups recommend earlier and more frequent screening than the cancer society now does, and some recommend less, leaving women and their doctors to sort through the conflicting messages and to figure out what makes the most sense for their circumstances. In fact, although the new guidelines may seem to differ markedly from the old ones, the American Cancer Society carefully tempered its language to leave plenty of room for women's preferences. Though it no longer recommends mammograms for women ages 40 to 44, it said that those women should still "have the opportunity" to have the test if they choose to, and that women 55 and older should be able to keep having mammograms once a year. This year, 231,840 new cases of invasive breast cancer and 40,290 deaths are expected in the United States. The guidelines apply only to women at average risk for breast cancer those with no personal history of the disease or known risk factors based on genetic mutations, family history or other medical problems. The changed policy resulted from an exhaustive review of research data, which the cancer society conducts regularly to update its screening guidelines, said Dr. Richard C. Wender, the organization's chief cancer control officer. The last review was in 2003, and this one took about two years. Dr. Wender said he hoped the new guidelines would end some of the debate and confusion about mammography. But some doubted that the guidelines would bring clarity. "I think it has the potential to create a lot of confusion amongst women and primary care providers," said Dr. Therese B. Bevers, the medical director of the Cancer Prevention Center at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Dr. Nancy L. Keating, a professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard and a co author of the JAMA editorial about the guidelines, said she thought the new advice had been thoughtfully developed and was headed in the right direction. Dr. Keating, who practices at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said doctors and patients had clung to the practice of early and yearly mammograms out of fear that they would otherwise miss detecting a cancer. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of prominent cancer centers, recommends mammograms every year starting at age 40. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends them every year or two from ages 40 to 49, and every year after that. It also recommends yearly clinical breast exams starting at age 19. The obstetricians' group said it was convening a conference in January, with the participation of the American Cancer Society, the comprehensive cancer network and other organizations, to try to develop a consistent set of guidelines. Among those invited are the United States Preventive Services Task Force, which recommends less testing: generally mammograms every other year for women ages 50 to 74. In 2009, it advised against routine mammograms for women ages 40 to 49, a decision that ignited a firestorm of protests from doctors, patients and advocacy groups. The task force, an independent panel of experts appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, subsequently softened its approach. Now, instead of advising against routine screening for women in their 40s, the group says, "The decision to start screening mammography in women before age 50 years should be an individual one." But the task force gave the evidence for screening women under 50 a rating of "C," reflecting its belief that the benefit is small. Services with a C rating do not have to be covered by the Affordable Care Act, according to the Department of Health and Human Services a serious worry for advocates. In response to the new cancer society guidelines, the task force issued a statement saying it would "examine the evidence" the cancer society had developed and reviewed before finalizing its recommendations. The statement also noted that the task force recognized "that there are health benefits to beginning mammography screening for women in their 40s." In making recommendations about screening, experts try to balance the benefits of a test against its potential harms for women in various age groups. A general explanation of the reasoning behind the new guidelines is that breast cancer is not common enough in women under 45 to make mammograms worthwhile for that age group, but that the risk of the disease increases enough to justify screening once a year after that. Specifically, the risk of developing breast cancer during the next five years is 0.6 percent in women ages 40 to 44, 0.9 percent from 45 to 49 and 1.1 percent from 50 to 54. The risk keeps increasing slowly with age, but by 55, when most women have passed through menopause, tumors are less likely to be fast growing or aggressive, and breast tissue changes in ways that make mammograms easier to read so screening every other year is considered enough. As for the decision to stop recommending clinical breast exams, the society said that there was no evidence that the exams save lives, but that there was evidence that they could cause false positives meaning they could mistakenly suggest problems where none existed and lead to more tests. The exams can take five or six minutes that could be put to better use during office visits, said Dr. Kevin C. Oeffinger, the chairman of the cancer society subgroup that developed the guidelines and director of cancer survivorship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. According to the evidence review accompanying the guidelines, the benefit of regular mammography is that it can reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer by about 20 percent. Because breast cancer is less common in younger women, their baseline risk of dying is lower, and screening them saves fewer lives. While younger women have less to gain from mammograms, the cancer society found, they incur all the potential harms. One harm is false positives, which can lead to more tests, including biopsies. A 2011 study cited in the article explaining the new guidelines found that 61 percent of women who had yearly mammograms starting at age 40 had at least one false positive by the time they were 50. Being tested every other year instead of every year can cut the false positive rate significantly, the JAMA Oncology article explaining the guidelines said, to about 42 percent from 61. Some women consider false positives a small price to pay for the chance of identifying a cancer early. Others find being called back for more tests too nerve racking. Another potential risk of mammography is overdiagnosis, meaning some of the tiny cancers it finds might never progress or threaten the patient's life. But because there is now no way to be sure which will turn dangerous, they are treated anyway. There are no widely accepted figures on how often overdiagnosis occurs. Researchers think that it is mostly likely in women found to have ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S., tiny growths in the milk ducts that may or may not evolve into invasive cancer. About 60,000 cases of D.C.I.S. are diagnosed in the United States each year.
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Health
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Esa Pekka Salonen will conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra of London in performances of Bruckner and his own cello concerto. Manfred Honeck will lead the Pittsburgh Symphony in Mahler and Beethoven. And William Christie and Les Arts Florissants will leave their usual Baroque era behind and try their hands at the Classical style with a performance of Haydn's oratorio "The Creation." Those are some of the highlights of next season's Great Performers series at Lincoln Center, which was announced Tuesday and will run from October through May. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center said that it would focus on Russian music next season, including a special winter festival and a performance by the Borodin Quartet. Its season will also feature the Escher String Quartet playing a new work by Andrew Norman and two programs celebrating the composer George Crumb, who turns 90 in October 2019. The society said that its popular summer evening series would return to Alice Tully Hall for three evenings this July. The twin announcements gave further shape to what the 2018 19 season will look like around Lincoln Center.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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A win by Jaime Harrison would be "the most thorough rebuke of Trumpism that we've seen." It was a bit of news that came and went quickly amid the fury of political developments these days, but last weekend Jaime Harrison, the South Carolina Democrat who is fighting to unseat Lindsey Graham, announced that he had not merely broken the record for fund raising for a Senate candidate in a single quarter. He had shattered it. From July through September, Harrison took in about 57 million. That was nearly 20 million more than Beto O'Rourke, the previous record holder, collected during the same span two years ago, when he waged his ultimately unsuccessful battle against Ted Cruz in Texas. "I pinch myself," Harrison said when I spoke with him on Tuesday night. "Good Lord." He's the recipient of so much money because he's the vessel of so much hope. While he may not have the nationwide celebrity that O'Rourke attained in 2018 and South Carolina is much smaller than Texas, the themes in Harrison's challenge of Graham are as big as can be. No other political contest in 2020 offers quite the same referendum on the ugliness of Donald Trump's presidency. No victory would rebut Trump's vision of America as emphatically and powerfully as Harrison's would. Harrison would be the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate from the Deep South. The only Black Republican in the Senate, Tim Scott, is also from South Carolina. So South Carolina where about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to North America arrived, where the Civil War began and where a 21 year old white supremacist named Dylann Roof killed nine Black churchgoers in their house of worship in 2015 would have two Black senators and would be the only state with an all Black Senate delegation. How's that for an answer to Trump's racism and for a stirringly inspirational turning of the page? Harrison noted that the Senate seat that he is seeking was once held by John C. Calhoun, an infamous defender of slavery. "This was the seat of Benjamin Tillman, who would go to the floor and talk about the joys of lynching," he added. "This was the seat of Strom Thurmond," who took a leading role in opposing civil rights legislation. Harrison, 44, rose from a mobile home to college at Yale, law school at Georgetown and the distinction of being the first Black chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. He also worked for Representative James Clyburn, the South Carolina lawmaker who played a key role in salvaging Joe Biden's beleaguered presidential bid by rallying Black voters to the former vice president. South Carolina turned Biden's campaign around. Is it about to set the national tone again? "If Jaime is to win, then this is the most thorough rebuke of Trumpism that we've seen," Bakari Sellers, a former state legislator in South Carolina, told me. "It also restores a lot of people's faith in the basic humanity of this country." And it's no pipe dream. While I wouldn't bet on a Harrison victory not in a state that Trump won by 14 points in 2016 and that still seems to be safely in his column some political handicappers now consider the Harrison Graham race a tossup. Several recent polls show the men effectively tied. Harrison's financial advantage is overwhelming. And he has been able to blanket the state in ads excellent ones at that while Graham has struggled to keep up. Harrison said that while Graham hasn't done a traditional, in person town hall with voters in South Carolina in years, "You can find him on Sean Hannity every other night begging for money." Graham craved this week's hearings on Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, because, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he's getting oodles of free television exposure just when he needs it. He's surely also betting that his role in elevating another conservative justice will please many South Carolina voters and shift their attention from his breathtaking inconstancy. He once vowed that he'd never consider, let alone promote, a Supreme Court nominee put forward in the last year of a president's term, telling journalists to mark his words and use them against him if the need ever arose. The need indeed did. He once railed that the way to make America great again was to "tell Donald Trump to go to hell." Now he's Trump's adoring golf buddy. Does that mean Graham is a fairway weather friend? It certainly means that his convictions have all the weight of whipped cream. One of the main story lines of the Trump years has been the spectacular moral capitulation of most Republican lawmakers, who junked supposedly cherished principles to placate a president whose hold on his base and capacity for vengeance mattered more to them than honor, than patriotism, than basic decency. Graham is the poster boy of that surrender, Complicitus Maximus, in part because his 180 degree turn to Trump required that he show his back to his close friend and onetime hero John McCain. Graham's defeat by Harrison would be more than a personal comeuppance. It would be a morality play. And so, just as the unprecedented contributions to O'Rourke owed plenty to the nastiness of Cruz, the even bigger contributions to Harrison speak to the noxiousness of Graham. "Lindsey Graham is, next to Mitch McConnell, the most attractive target for the left to take down," Todd Shaw, an associate professor of African American studies and political science at the University of South Carolina, told me. Harrison conceded that a significant measure of his traction in this race is attributable to "the fever about Lindsey Graham," who personifies what voters dislike most about politicians. "So many people thought so highly of him, and to have him betray that trust has added an extra layer of passion," Harrison said. He added: "The country is simply tired of being divided. They're tired of the chaos. They're tired of the racialized rhetoric. One of the things I say, tongue in cheek, is that we need a national holiday after this election so that all of us can sit on a counselor's couch for a few hours. We all just need that reprieve." Jessica Taylor, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told me that Graham's predicament was neatly illustrated by a surprising recent development: "He started running a biography ad this past weekend." That suggests that he's concerned about his likability and needs to reintroduce himself to his constituents. "That's not the kind of ad you run if you've been in Congress for 25 years," Taylor said. Like other prominent political analysts, she favors Democrats, who are currently at a three seat disadvantage, to regain control of the Senate. She gives them the clear edge to defeat Republican incumbents in Colorado and Arizona, and she puts seven other races with Republican incumbents, including Harrison's, in the tossup category. One of those races, in Georgia, also involves a Black Democratic challenger, Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He's trying to unseat Senator Kelly Loeffler, and if both he and Harrison were to win, there would be two popularly elected Black Democratic senators from the Deep South, where there had never been any before.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The Schiaparelli hasn't landed, it appears. At least, not the way it was supposed to. Officials from the European Space Agency said on Thursday that they had stopped receiving signals from the Schiaparelli lander, part of the ExoMars 2016 spacecraft, a sign that it had failed to make its planned "soft landing" on the surface of Mars. Despite the apparent failure, officials said they were not alarmed. The lander was supposed to conduct scientific measurements from the Martian surface, but the primary goal was to help prepare for more ambitious missions in the future. The other part of the spacecraft, the Trace Gas Orbiter, has been transmitting data since it entered orbit around Mars on Wednesday. He added that it was important to "learn what happened, in order to prepare for the future," but said that it would take time for officials to decode the data. The mission is a joint effort by the European and Russian space agencies. David Parker, the European agency's director of human spaceflight and robotic exploration, said that "we have data coming back that allow us to fully understand the steps that did occur, and why the soft landing did not occur," and that a board of inquiry would "dig deeper into the data." Schiaparelli's mother ship will remain in orbit to analyze gases in the planet's atmosphere, an effort that could answer questions like whether the planet has ever supported life. The atmosphere of Mars makes it tricky to land a spacecraft there. It is thick enough to heat an arriving lander to thousands of degrees, yet too thin for parachutes to provide a gentle descent. The loss of Schiaparelli would not directly affect the ExoMars 2020 mission, which will rely on a different landing system developed and built by the Russians. But that too is as yet unproven. NASA so far is the only space agency to explore the surface of Mars, beginning with the Viking landers in 1976 through the arrival of Curiosity in 2012 seven successful landings in all. (The Soviet Union did manage to land its Mars 3 lander in 1971, but the spacecraft died seconds later.) But NASA spends considerably more on its missions, wringing out as many possible problems as its engineers can think of. The Curiosity mission cost 2.5 billion. NASA's next rover, largely a clone of Curiosity with different instruments, will cost at least 2 billion. By contrast, the price tag for the European Space Agency's 2016 and 2020 ExoMars missions for the orbiter and lander in 2016, and the rover in 2020 is about 1.4 billion. (That does not include the Russian contributions.) When NASA attempted Mars landings on the cheap, it too failed. The Mars Polar Lander, which cost 110 million, crashed in 1999. Inadequate testing failed to uncover design flaws, an investigation concluded, including the one that is thought to have doomed the lander. The unfolding of its landing legs high above the surface may have inadvertently set off a sensor that turned off its engine, and the lander plunged to its demise. Two basketball size probes released by Polar Lander also failed. It's not yet clear what happened to Schiaparelli. Early indications from radio signals captured by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Pune, India, and from the orbiter suggest that the landing module "successfully completed most steps of its six minute descent through the Martian atmosphere," including deceleration through the atmosphere and the deployment of its parachute and heat shield, E.S.A. officials said. Yet both sets of signals ceased shortly before the module was to have settled to the surface. Discrepancies between the two data sets are being analyzed at the agency's space operations center in Darmstadt, Germany. Schiaparelli appears to have ejected its back heat shield and unfurled its parachute, officials said early Thursday morning. But the thrusters may have shut down sooner than expected.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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OBIT JIMMY BRESLIN 5373 SCRIPT of cut uploaded to scoop on 9.23.2016 BRESLIN: I always knew from the sports writing, don't go where the others go. Go to the losers' dressing room at all times. music TITLE CARD: THE LAST WORD TITLE CARD: JIMMY BRESLIN REPORTER TITLE CARD: animation of signature VO: As columnist, novelist, biographer and raconteur, Jimmy Breslin witnessed and chronicled the American 20th century with an eye for life lived in the lanes of the overlooked, and the unwritten. He also contributed two classic titles to the literature of cosmic ineptitude: "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," about a crew of dissolute Brooklyn Mafiosa, and "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" about the 1962 New York Mets. Ultimately Breslin's most enduring love was newspapers and he produced pieces that changed journalism. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL In 1963, the funeral of President John F. Kennedy drew reporters from around the world. BRESLIN: They're all herded together and they were talking about how Jacqueline Kennedy walked, what Truman looked like at graveside, or the planes overhead. Well forget about it, that's nothing. VO: Breslin found Clifton Pollard the man who had dug the President's grave. BRESLIN:He was getting three dollars and one cent an hour to dig the grave. And// when he was through with it, he//He tried to get back to watch the funeral and they wouldn't let him back.//. You're looking like a bum, you're a laborer. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL BRESLIN: While they were having the big funeral services he just went over the hill and dug another grave. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL BRESLIN: //I remember, when it was all over, he looked at the grave, they fixed it up late in the evening. And I remember him just saying, " it's an honor to have done this." FOOTAGE: KENNEDY BURIAL TAPS. VO: Among journalists, his account of that day became a genre of its own. For years afterwards, editors would send reporters out to stories with instructions to look beyond the obvious, to tell their tale through the gravedigger. VO: Born in 1930 in Queens, New York, Breslin grew up with dreams of the sportswriter's life... BRESLIN: We used to get the Long Island Press at home on 101st Avenue where I lived. And I'd spread it out //on the living room floor and read it. .Carl Lundquist, that was my favorite writer,// I had a...a candle in my mind to him.// He covered the major league baseball roundup. // He would start with the game of the day and work his way through the schedule. And all I dreamed of was Lundquist in a riding in a Pullman car from St. Louis, then he'd go up to Chicago//well the pullman cars were at Sunnyside Yards, we used to go down there and stand on the hill and look at them and dream we were going away in them. //I didn't know that Lundquist was on 42nd Street, and he used to put a different city on top of the story every day, then he took the Long Island Railroad home to Long Island. He never went anyplace. VO: After getting his start on the obituary desk at the Long Island Press, Breslin became a leading figure in what became known as the New Journalism. He and writers like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Pete Hamill brought literary techniques and personal voices to their work. BRESLIN: //you've got to let the people come in and see something. Set a scene. 02:13:30 // You gotta have people talking. Let them hear the people involved talk. SOUND UP FROM CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH VO: In 1965 as the civil rights struggle was reaching an epic climax, Breslin was in Alabama covering a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. At the front of the march was Dr. Martin Luther King. The very last man was Albert Turner, a bricklayer, who wanted to vote. BRESLIN "What bothered Albert Turner on this night was the figure on his pay stub. It said that twenty seven dollars and fifty two cents had been taken out for income taxes. He looked at the stub and a strange thought ran across his mind. If the government can take 27.52 a week, then it can give back something to Albert Turner, like a vote in an election. //He represented to me everything in the south. People taking a chance to force change that had to be. SOUND UP FROM CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH VO: Breslin traveled widely, always writing to the rhythm of of columnist's deadline. He spent the afternoon of June 4, 1968 in Los Angeles, reporting a column about gun violence. That evening, he went to the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was holding a rally to celebrate winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. Breslin: I walked into the kitchen just as they were breaking from their rally. //And I'm in the kitchen and this guy ah holds a gun out at Kennedy and shoots. Nat sound news coverage of shooting Breslin://There was hysteria there, they were screaming and yelling, but they couldn't get the gun out of the fellow's hand, I remember that. //All of a sudden they threw him onto the steam table, and ah everybody pushed and I winded up sitting on his legs and Roosevelt Grier just put an arm over him at that end and he couldn't move.// Nat sound news coverage of shooting Breslin: They stamped feet on his hand to get the gun out, and that was that. VO: Shaken by the assassination, Breslin took a break from the news. He wrote his first novel a best selling Mafia satire based on his reporting about the Gallo crime family of Brooklyn called "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" Nat Sound: Movie Breslin: They had a gang war. There was a war between kidnappings and shootings. ,Tthey kept hitting telephone poles when they shot. Nat Sound: Movie Breslin: They had a lion in the basement.... pop /t/ook a lion on a leash around Mulberry Street. pop .. I had to be nuts not to hang out with that act. VO: The movie, which flopped with the critics, featured a very young Robert DeNiro. Breslin: He got 750 dollars a week for that movie. He must get 750 dollars uh, to brush his teeth now. VO: Breslin himself became a performer in 1969, when he officially entered the race for New York City council president on a ticket with fellow writer Norman Mailer, who was running for Mayor. Their campaign featured a plan for the city to secede and become the 51st state. A: //that's a bad idea, isn't it. That we could be all alone here with our money, and living a nice life... VO: Much to the relief of themselves and people who knew them well, neither Mailer nor Breslin were elected. VO: During the summer of 1977, when New York City was hit by a vast power blackout and massive looting, Breslin also was writing about the 44 caliber killer, known Son of Sam, who shot one of his earliest victims just a few block from Breslin's house in Queens. BRESLIN: Then some weeks after that, a college student named Virginia Voskerichian is walking from...from the subway on Queens Boulevard down from the station square and //from the bushes jumped a guy with a gun and he held...she got terrified and held a big textbook up to her face and he shot through it and she was dead. VO: After months of terrorizing the city with a spree of shootings that left five people dead, the killer sent JImmy Breslin a letter. BRESLIN: It was printed in big backslash printing, marvelous cadence, hello from the sidewalks of New York and the ants that dwell in the sidewalks and the dried blood in the cracks in the sidewalks of the city// signed Son of Sam. VO: Breslin used his column to plead with the deranged killer, but on July 31st he struck again, this time in Brooklyn, murdering 20 year old Stacy Moskowitz and wounding her boyfriend. The news sent the simmering city into complete panic. SOT Brown haired woman Getty 176746614: You have to be careful you have to watch where you go now, how late you stay out.. Ultimately It was a parking ticket issued near the scene of the Moskowitz killing that lead police to a suspect and finally cracked the case. David Berkowitz was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for the killings. BRESLIN:I never heard from him again except Christmas card from the devil, he sent me. Once or twice. // VO: He might not have been everyone's idea of a man of letters but the range of Breslin's writing was matched by few in his era. He wrote biographies of Damon Runyon, the chronicler of Prohibition New York, and of Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodger executive who integrated baseball by signing Jackie Robinson. In columns for the Daily News and New York Newsday, he was one of the earliest voices demanding dignified care for people with AIDs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986 after exposing the use of torture by rogue police officers in Queens. BRESLIN: It's a great thing, though. A newspaper column you just put yourself into it and make sure that people will want to read it the next day, it gives them something. It's a great obligation to the reader. VO: He filed his last regular column on November 2, 2004, and kept working on new books, plays and film projects. When the Times spoke with Breslin in 2007 he was 77 years old and about to release his latest book, "The Good Rat" about one of his favorite subjects Mafia families. Q: How do you want to be remembered? 12;33 Audio drop out BRESLIN: What does it matter? Please don't talk about me when I'm gone? I mean I don't care what you say or what you do, if I'm not here it don't count. MUSIC OUTRO CREDITS (c) 2016 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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If you weren't planning on traveling to travel to see the total solar eclipse on Monday but are rethinking your decision, you should know it's still possible to witness this rare celestial event. Here is a breakdown of how to get there, how to find a place to stay and which activities to do. (In case the ones we recommended earlier are sold out.) Is flying still an option? Yes. Although seats are more scarce than usual, Expedia.com reports, you can still find room on planes to nearly all eclipse viewing destinations, including Charleston, Nashville and Lincoln, Neb. Though Sarah Gavin, a spokeswoman for the company, suggested that you may have to compromise. "Availability is certainly more limited than it would be otherwise but not impossible if you're willing to be flexible with connections and flight times," she said. So you may have to fly out of the way to get to your final destination. There are some nonstop flights, according to the airfare prediction app Hopper.com, which found plenty of availability between Aug. 18 and Aug. 20 for flights to eclipse viewing destinations from New York City, Los Angeles and about a dozen other major cities around the United States. Hopper's scan of nonstop flights to total eclipse viewing spot also showed sky high prices. According to its data, a round trip ticket for a flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York City, to Charleston a few days before the eclipse can cost as much as 970. Is there any other way? If you can't find a flight directly into an eclipse destination or don't want to spring for the premium airfare required to do so, fly to a city that's three to five hours away by car, get a rental and drive, said Paul Tumpowsky, the chief executive of the New York City based travel agency Skylark, which sold several eclipse viewing trips. "You could fly into that city the morning of the eclipse, when there is plenty of flight inventory, or, to be safe, get there the day before, stay at a hotel and drive to the eclipse destination the morning of August 21," he said. "This way, you don't have to worry about finding accommodations in the location where the eclipse is happening." This strategy is likely to yield far more affordable airfare: according to Hopper's data, a round trip flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Charlotte Douglas International Airport between Aug. 19 and 21 on American Airlines can be as low as 330. Are rental cars available? Yes. Fliers will likely need to rent a car to reach their eclipse destinations, and rentals are still available in both eclipse viewing destinations and in cities within a five hour drive from these destinations. Silvercar, with locations in Denver and Chicago, has cars available for rent in both cities the weekend before the eclipse with prices averaging around 69 a day; the only vehicle in Silvercar's fleet is a silver Audi A4 equipped with Wi Fi, a GPS device and a car seat, upon request. Hertz has limited availability in eclipse viewing destinations, according to Lauren Luster, a spokeswoman for the company, and Avis has some availability in cities near eclipse destinations including Atlanta and Memphis, said Alice Pereira, a company spokeswoman. Where can I find a hotel or home rental? Hotels and home rentals through sites such as Airbnb are hard to come by (several of the local convention and visitors bureau sites list the latest availability). Where else could you stay? Some campgrounds still have spots for tents and are affordable. According to Hipcamp, an online campground booking site, there are more than a 1,000 campsites in the path of totality with availability; most charge a 100 or less a night, and many charge under 50 a night. For a complete list, visit hipcamp.com/discover/eclipse 2017.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The Sounds That Haunted U.S. Diplomats in Cuba? Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say In November 2016, American diplomats in Cuba complained of persistent, high pitched sounds followed by a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and hearing loss. Exams of nearly two dozen of them eventually revealed signs of concussions or other brain injuries, and speculation about the cause turned to weapons that blast sound or microwaves. Amid an international uproar, a recording of the sinister droning was widely circulated in the news media. On Friday, two scientists presented evidence that those sounds were not so mysterious after all. They were made by crickets, the researchers concluded. That's not to say that the diplomats weren't attacked, the scientists added only that the recording is not of a sonic weapon, as had been suggested. Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre Z of the University of Lincoln in England studied a recording of the sounds made by diplomats and published by The Associated Press. "There's plenty of debate in the medical community over what, if any, physical damage there is to these individuals," said Mr. Stubbs in a phone interview. "All I can say fairly definitively is that the A.P. released recording is of a cricket, and we think we know what species it is." Mr. Stubbs presented the results of the analysis at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. He and Dr. Montealegre Z also posted an early version of their study online. They plan to submit the paper to a scientific journal in the next few days. When Mr. Stubbs first heard the recording, he was reminded of insects he came across while doing field work in the Caribbean. When he and Dr. Montealegre Z downloaded the sound file, they found that its acoustic patterns such as the rate of pulses and the strongest frequencies were very similar to the songs of certain kinds of insects. Male singing insects produce regular patterns during courtship. Females are attracted to certain males based on their songs, which has led to the evolution of different songs in different species. If the sounds heard by the diplomats were made by insects, Mr. Stubbs and Dr. Montealegre Z reasoned, it might be possible to pinpoint the particular species. To search for a match, the researchers analyzed field recordings of North American insects stored in an online database at the University of Florida. They found a striking resemblance to one species in particular: the Indies short tailed cricket. Yet the cricket's song differs from the Cuban recording in one important respect. The noises heard by the diplomats were erratic, while the insects make high pitched, rapid fire pulses. Mr. Stubbs suspected that this mismatch might be an artifact of the recording itself. Diplomats made their recordings inside houses, while biologists have recorded the crickets in the wild. So Mr. Stubbs played the cricket recording in a house. As the calls bounced off the walls, they echoed in a pattern similar to the irregular pulses heard on the Cuban recording. The song of the Indies short tailed cricket "matches, in nuanced detail, the A.P. recording in duration, pulse repetition rate, power spectrum, pulse rate stability, and oscillations per pulse," the scientists wrote in their analysis. Experts on cricket songs said the analysis was well done. "It all seems to make sense," said Gerald Pollack of McGill University, who studies acoustic communication among insects. "It's a pretty well supported hypothesis." When the American diplomats first complained of the strange noises in Cuba, they dismissed the possibility that insects were responsible. But short tailed crickets are exceptional: They have long been known to make a tremendous racket. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "The song of the males of this cricket, here, is a continuous ringing z z z z z z of tremendous volume and penetration which practically fills a room with veritable din," an entomologist in the Dominican Republic reported in 1957. Mr. Stubbs recorded short tailed crickets while in Costa Rica, and he found their songs overpowering. "They're incredibly loud," he said. "You can hear them from inside a diesel truck going forty miles an hour on the highway." The Indies short tailed cricket is known to live in the Florida Keys, Jamaica and Grand Cayman. A closely related cricket is known to live in Cuba, and Mr. Stubbs suspects that its Indies cousin lives there, too. Mr. Stubbs said that his conclusion does not rule out an attack on American diplomats. But the sounds linked to the initial complaints may have been a red herring. "It's entirely possible that they got sick with some other completely unrelated thing that was not a sonic attack, or that they were targeted in some other way," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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What are we supposed to do with a movie like "Human Capital"? It opens with a banquet hall waiter, somewhere in Westchester, being run off the road and into a coma, then spends the rest of its 97 minutes with the folks who maybe did it. The movie is not concerned about the waiter, or the family he was on his way home to. The other characters don't care either. I could forgive the indifference, if we'd been plunked down for some hearty character exploration or a juicy moral essay. But maybe I'm asking too much of a movie that couldn't bother to call itself anything more than "Human Capital." The loose sources are an American novel (by Stephen Amidon) and a much better Italian movie by the same name, from 2013. But the Italian movie, which Paolo Virzi directed, had a marrow deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn't done its homework. After the car hits the waiter, played in a blink by a charismatic Dominic Colon, the story jumps somewhere else. A real estate broker named Drew Hagel (Schreiber) drives his teenage daughter, Shannon (Maya Hawke), to hang out with her boyfriend, Jamie (Fred Hechinger), at his family's grand concrete, stone and steel manse. Rather than drive back home, Drew mopes around the property. I knew I was in for a rough hour and a half when Jamie's dad, Quint (Peter Sarsgaard), gets a load of Drew and, rather than say "I love 'Ray Donovan!'" or "Which defensive line were you on?" invites him to help win a tennis match.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Monica Coenraads, left, and her daughter, Chelsea Coenraads, who has Rett Syndrome, at their home in Trumbull, Conn., last year.Credit...Monica Jorge for The New York Times Monica Coenraads, left, and her daughter, Chelsea Coenraads, who has Rett Syndrome, at their home in Trumbull, Conn., last year. Monica Coenraads had a terrible feeling something was wrong with her 14 month old baby, Chelsea. She had not learned to walk. She had one word, duck, and then lost it. During a family vacation to Barbados more than 20 years ago, Chelsea cried the whole time. She bit her parents so hard they bled. She was only happy in the hotel room with the shades drawn. "I got home and said, 'That's it. We have to figure out what is wrong.'" Chelsea, it turned out, had a rare genetic disease, Rett Syndrome. It's one of about 7,000 rare or orphan diseases defined in the U.S. as an illness that affects fewer than 200,000 people nationwide with more such diseases being identified every day. Ninety five percent of them have no known therapies. They are overlooked by most scientists, and some illnesses may be untreatable, even if they are understood. And what research there was has largely been halted as labs closed in response to coronavirus fears. Ms. Coenraads, 57, who lives in Trumbull, Conn., has encouraged research into Rett Syndrome where there had been none, providing hope for her daughter and the small number of people who live with the disease, and showing one way that a determined person can succeed against such odds. When frantic parents of children with other rare disorders ask how she did it and what they can do, Ms. Coenraads recognizes the fear in their voices. "We have no choice," she said. "We are desperate parents. We have children with horrible diseases." She talks to every parent who calls, but, she said, "I always get off the phone thinking, 'You don't know what you're up against. It is daunting, and it will consume your life.'" What follows are the stories of Ms. Coenraads and three people who have succeeded in promoting research on uncommon diseases, but in very different ways. Ms. Coenraads is not extraordinarily wealthy and had no science background when she started searching for help for Chelsea, who is now 23. She ran a small Italian restaurant in Stamford, Conn., but sold it when she was pregnant with Chelsea, intending to be a full time mother for a year or two. The Coenraads had never heard of Rett Syndrome when they received that diagnosis for Chelsea, at age 2. It is a neurological disorder caused by a mutated gene on the X chromosome that destroys a child's abilities to walk, talk, eat and even breathe easily. There was no treatment, no cure. And because it is so rare it affects only 1 in 10,000 girls and almost no boys it seemed destined to languish as a research curiosity, not something companies would pursue. "I just had to believe there was hope, and if we could get the right people involved with sufficient funding, we could move therapeutics forward," she said. Ms. Coenraads knew she needed money to attract scientists, so she started the Rett Syndrome Research Trust in 2007. It has since raised 70 million, nearly all from private donations and galas with silent and live auctions "typical nonprofit fund raising," Ms. Coenraads said. But money was not enough. "I wasn't going to sit back and assume research was happening and things would work out," she said. She wanted to figure out the bottlenecks and what would be needed to move the work forward. She began by looking for scientists who knew about Rett and calling them. "Everyone helped," she said. "Everyone gave me the names of a few others. Within six months, I had a plan." She explained what was involved: "You have to get up to speed on the science, which is no easy feat," she said. "And after that, you must understand what has been done and, more important, what has to be done." If that weren't daunting enough, she said, "you have to learn the basics of drug development and how to recruit scientists and companies to work on your disease." And she cautioned that with academic researchers, "you have to recognize when a project sure is interesting but isn't necessarily going to move the needle closer to a cure." Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. Even after a breakthrough, academics usually are not able to initiate the sort of clinical studies that are needed to show a research discovery can help patients. "Ninety nine percent of the time, the discovery will languish," she said. "Scientists will move on to their next discovery." Once she had gathered enough academic research, she was able to "hit the ground running," she said, contacting companies and telling them what they wanted to hear: Yes, there was a mouse model of the disease. Yes, there were so called natural history studies that illustrate what to expect if the disease was not treated. One scientist, Sir Adrian Bird at the University of Edinburgh, described Ms. Coenraads's work in a ceremony when his university conferred her an honorary degree: "For what started as a tiny charity to inspire world class research on a disorder that initially languished in obscurity and ignorance, and take it all the way to the brink of clinical application in less than 20 years is an amazing achievement." He added: "There is no doubt that it would not have happened without Monica's single minded advocacy." At 23, Chelsea is in a wheelchair, unable to speak, stand, eat or use her hands, and she needs a feeding tube. She has scoliosis and intractable seizures, as well as tight, painful muscles. But Chelsea is aware and loving, Ms. Coenraads said, with, "a beautiful and engaging personality." The coronavirus has presented new challenges for her care. Because she's at such high risk, caregivers cannot enter the Coenraads' home. Ms. Coenraads's husband, Pieter, who owns a store that sells uniforms and medical scrubs, has to go to work every day so Ms. Coenraads is now on her own to care for Chelsea. She helps her daughter stretch every day and exercise on a treadmill, using a device that supports her and holds her upright. "It was very hard in the beginning, but we found our rhythm," Ms. Coenraads said. "Now I can get work done and care for her." She Became Her Own Expert Most seeking a cure for a rare genetic disease hope to recruit scientists and companies to do the work. But one determined couple took another route. They went back to school and became scientists themselves. The journey of Sonia Vallabh, 36, and her husband, Eric Minikel, began in December 2011. She was living in Cambridge, Mass, and had just graduated from Harvard Law School. Her mother died the year before, at age 52, from a genetic prion disease, a degenerative and uniformly fatal brain illness caused by misfolded prion proteins. Some of the mutations that cause genetic prion diseases are very rare. Symptoms begin subtly, progressing from clumsiness to an inability to walk and developing slurred speech that eventually inhibits talking. Late stages often result in dementia. Knowing there was a 50 50 chance, Dr. Vallabh took a genetic test that gave her the bad news that she was going to develop genetic prion disease, and probably around the same age as her mother. Dr. Vallabh had just started work at a small consulting company, and her husband, now 36, had recently gotten a degree in urban planning from M.I.T. The couple decided they had to learn more. They knew there was no treatment or cure for genetic prion diseases. Was there any promising research? They realized they didn't understand enough about the science to ask the right questions. "There was a certain amount of vocabulary needed," Dr. Vallabh said. "I didn't want to call people and have them say, 'Oh yeah, we're working on a cure. We will call you in five years.'" She started night classes in molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology and genetics at the Harvard Extension School and audited courses at M.I.T. Then she decided she needed to see how things were done in a lab. So she got a job as a research technician at Massachusetts General Hospital, quitting her day job as a lawyer. Her husband soon followed, quitting his urban planning job and starting a position there in bioinformatics. Soon they decided they had to study prion diseases, so they enrolled as Ph.D. students at Harvard. After receiving their degrees, they were hired at the Broad Institute in Cambridge with a laser focus on finding a treatment that might work in Dr. Vallabh's lifetime. They decided their best bet was molecules that can block the production of prion proteins called antisense oligonucleotides. Drugs based on the molecules work in other genetic disorders; they enter the brain by being injected into the spinal fluid, and appear to be safe. In October 2014, the couple met with Ionis, a small biotechnology firm, to see if the company would develop a prion antisense oligonucleotide. Dr. Vallabh learned from the meeting that the rules are different for rare diseases. For common diseases, companies do the preliminary work. But with rare diseases, "the burden shifts," she said. It is not enough to have data supporting an idea for an effective treatment. Dr. Vallabh and Dr. Minikel had to develop a test to show the drug was working. They had to do studies showing the treatment changed the disease's course in animals. They had to sign up more than 200 people willing to participate in research or clinical trials. And they had to meet with the Food and Drug Administration. "I knew we had to get the kids treatment," she said. Dr. Harald Jueppner, a pediatric nephrologist at Massachusetts General, was the researcher who first identified the mutation that caused the condition. Dr. Nizar learned that he had been studying the mutated gene, called a PTH/PTHrP receptor, for 20 years out of scientific interest. But he had never seen a patient. She told him he could now see three herself and her two sons. She also learned that Dr. Jueppner and a colleague, Thomas Gardella, had found in lab experiments that certain peptides, or short chains of amino acids, looked promising as possible treatments for Jansen's. At that point Dr. Nizar latched onto the researchers, urging them to study the peptides for Jansen's. They tried one of them in animal experiments. It partially reversed some of the bone abnormalities, Dr. Jeuppner said, but, he added, "remember, this mouse model of Jansen's is far from being ideal." Dr. Nizar stayed in constant contact with Dr. Jueppner and Dr. Gardella prodding them to not lose sight of the work. "Working with Neena has been an incredible experience." Dr. Jueppner said. "She is a force of nature." In 2017, Dr. Nizar set up a foundation to support research. But she was not in a good position to fund raise. "We only had eight patients, and I couldn't go to GoFundMe. My family and friends are tired of giving me money," she said. So Dr. Nizar spoke to experts at conferences hosted by the National Institutes of Health, hoping to find a way to receive research funds. With her enthusiastic prodding, Dr. Jueppner and Dr. Gardella received a grant to study and improve the peptides they'd found as a possible Jansen's treatment In 2018, Dr. Nizar asked the F.D.A. for guidance. "They were surprised we didn't have a drug company, " she said. "I told the lady at the F.D.A. that, at this point, I am the drug company." Matt Wilsey knew a lot about what it takes for a company to succeed. The 42 year old tech entrepreneur and investor had a wide array of friends in California's Silicon Valley. But he never thought he'd have to use his business savvy to try to save his own child. When Grace Wilsey was born in 2009, Mr. Wilsey and his wife, Kristen, now 39, knew right away she had some problems. She was floppy and did not seem to be alert. She did not develop normally she did not sit up, or crawl. She did not learn to walk or talk. When Grace was three, Mr. and Mrs. Wilsey found out why Grace had a genetic disorder so rare only one other child in the world, a little boy in Utah, was known to have it. It was caused by a mutation in a gene, NGLY1, but scientists did not know what that gene did or why a mutation would result in such devastating effects. They didn't know how the disease would progress or if Grace would die young. Mr. Wilsey sprung into action. He asked Stanford physicians for guidance and was told he needed a foundation with a good advisory committee. Having money is great, they said, but you have to know whom and what to spend it on. He started a foundation and began cold calling and emailing scientific luminaries, asking if they would talk to him and agree to work on the project. So far, the foundation has raised 9 million, mostly from friends and family. Carolyn Bertozzi, a chemist at Stanford, was one of his initial recruits. "He is really good at forming personal relationships," Dr. Bertozzi said. "That allowed him to convince total strangers to join his team and work on his cause." She was also touched by Mr. Wilsey's story and intrigued by the scientific challenge. "Imagine you are a parent. No one had ever had this diagnosis before, and you have no idea what to expect." Mr. Wilsey understands that it might appear his success is a result of his money and connections. But, he said, they have little to do with it. "Many of the people we work with don't even receive funding from us," he said. The "magic sauce," he said, is "hard work, time and constant relationship building." In 2017 he also invited patients from around the world to come to Palo Alto for a conference, and 21 families attended. He hopes to repeat the conferences every few years for the growing number of identified NGLY1 patients, now up to 70. The scientific team finally figured out that the mutated gene controls the way other genes function. Now they hope to develop a treatment gene therapy, or anything else that works. To move along whatever treatment looks promising, Mr. Wilsey and Dr. Bertozzi formed a company, Grace Science, LLC. Mr. Wilsey realizes he has advantages others do not. He and his wife have the luxury of being able to work full time on their project. He has wealthy friends and relatives who donated generously to their foundation.
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