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Commodities markets have taken a beating this summer. Oil, coal, coffee, soybeans, copper, iron and nearly every other commodity has fallen sharply in price, upending currency markets and inflicting pain in large parts of the world economy. But few Americans are complaining. Unless you are trading soybeans or have been focused on the battered shares of companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, or on sinking currencies like the Brazilian real or South African rand, you may not have noticed the commodities debacle. The collapse in oil prices is all too evident in oil shale states like North Dakota and Oklahoma, as well as in nations like Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Norway and Saudi Arabia but it has not intruded into the daily experience of many Americans. For many of us, in fact, the commodities rout hasn't been perceived as a crisis at all: It has seemed to be welcome news. That is understandable, though that view may be shortsighted. Consider gasoline, probably the most closely monitored commodity in America, one whose price is posted prominently at filling stations all over the country. Compared with the recent past, gas is still very cheap. Gas prices typically rise when the summer driving season gets underway, and that pattern held true this year. But over the last three weeks, prices have been dropping again. On Friday the average price of a gallon of regular was only 2.62 nearly 25 percent below the 3.48 level on the same date last year, the AAA says. But people aren't rejoicing, AAA surveys suggest. Since 2013, as gas prices have dropped, the common view of a "fair price" has shifted downward, too, said Michael Green, an AAA spokesman. Certainly there is no national movement to raise prices to help gas and oil producers. Nor are consumers demanding an end to low inflation. The "headline" Consumer Price Index, including energy and food, was virtually flat in the 12 months through June; the "core" number, which excludes those items, rose 1.8 percent over 12 months, the Labor Department said. Declines in the commodities markets have already had a damping effect on inflation in the United States and are likely to restrain it in future data releases, said Azhar Iqbal, an econometrician with Wells Fargo Securities. How much of an effect has the decline in the commodities market had on inflation? As a rough guideline, note that the widely followed CRB Commodities index has declined more than 18 percent since May 2014. Every 10 percentage point drop in that index shaves 0.4 percentage point from the annual headline C.P.I. number in America, and a lesser amount, less than 0.1 percentage point, from the core inflation index, Mr. Iqbal's economic model shows. "The fall in commodity prices has had a measurable effect in the United States," he said. The price declines have complicated matters for the Federal Reserve, which has said that after nearly seven years it will begin to raise short term interest rates from their near zero level, if data on inflation and unemployment justify the move. The unemployment rate held steady at 5.3 percent in July, its lowest level in years, the Labor Department said on Friday. "The low inflation rate, which is connected to commodities, may have induced the Fed to have waited this long to raise interest rates," said Jay Bryson, a global economist with Wells Fargo Securities. Low interest rates are generally thought to be bullish for the stock market, and while the shares of commodities producers have been hammered, the overall American stock market has undoubtedly been helped by that commodities market effect, he said. But even if Americans outside the oil patch haven't been hurt directly, there are important reasons for them to be concerned about the damage in the commodities markets. "Historically, commodities have been very sensitive indicators of global economic activity," said Edward Yardeni, an independent economist and strategist. Big declines in the CRB index have typically presaged recessions and bear markets in stocks, he said. He is not expecting that to happen now partly because the imbalances in commodities markets seem largely to have resulted from miscalculations that led to excess supply. "It's not that demand is that weak," he said, which would be more serious. "The problem is mainly with global supplies." A significant factor behind the current imbalances is a slowdown in the rate of growth of the Chinese economy and perceptions of even greater problems in China, set off by the sharp drop in that country's stock market since late June and by the Chinese government's intervention in that market, said Michael Pearce, a global economist with Capital Economics in London. "I think some of this is overblown," he said. "I'm not expecting a hard landing for the Chinese economy. But these perceptions have had powerful effects." China is the world's biggest commodity consumer, HSBC figures show. It accounts for 12.8 percent of all global commodity imports. (The comparable figure for the United States, the second biggest global consumer, is 10.3 percent.) And these days, when China sneezes, the commodity markets run for cover. Each country and each commodity has its own story, and many countries are enduring significant pain. For example, in South Africa, a major producer of commodities ranging from platinum and gold to iron and coal, the entire mining industry "is in trouble" because of falling commodity prices, the minister of economic development, Ebrahim Patel, said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Currency markets have responded to the changes in the terms of trade, weakening the currencies of commodity producers and strengthening the American dollar. (The Chinese renminbi, which the government keeps in a narrow band linked to the dollar, has strengthened against other currencies, too.) That will make imports to the United States cheaper, and it will make exports more expensive, helping rebalance global supply and demand, Mr. Yardeni said. It can be expected to slow American economic growth and speed up growth in commodity producing countries that are in dire need of stimulus, he said. "We need to keep our fingers crossed and hope that all works out." He added that there was a good chance that it would work out for the United States. Enjoy the quiet and the low prices, by all means, he said. But be aware that unstable and declining global markets can be quite dangerous.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Alex Olmedo, the Peruvian who dominated the world of international tennis in 1959 when he won the Australian and Wimbledon men's single championships and reached the final of the United States Nationals at Forest Hills, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 84. The International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., said the cause was brain cancer. Olmedo was inducted into the hall in 1987. Olmedo took his first steps toward tennis acclaim at the club in Arequipa, Peru, where his father, Salvador, who oversaw the courts, gave him pointers. He was also guided by Stanley Singer, an American tennis coach working in Peru. He made his major championship debut in 1951 when he was 15, losing in a preliminary round at Forest Hills. After settling in the Los Angeles area, he was coached at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Playing for the University of Southern California, he won the N.C.A.A. singles and doubles championships in 1956 and 1958. Olmedo won his two singles matches and a doubles match, teaming with Ham Richardson, to lead the United States to victory over a strong Australian team in the 1958 Davis Cup final, at Brisbane. His selection for the American squad proved controversial, since he was not a United States citizen. But regulations permitted a player to compete for a country after at least three years of continued residence. And Peru did not have its own entry in Davis Cup play. Allison Danzig, the longtime tennis writer for The New York Times, wrote that Olmedo's selection showed that U.S. tennis authorities gave "equal opportunity to every player, to the foreign born as well as the homebred." But Arthur Daley wrote in his column, Sports of The Times, that Olmedo's participation "has to make American tennis the laughingstock of the rest of the world." Don Budge, the 1938 Grand Slam champion, responding to a Sports Illustrated survey of sentiment among leading tennis figures, wrote: "Selecting Olmedo isn't saying there is something wrong with our tennis. However, we should stimulate more interest here to match Australia's." Olmedo, who held a student visa while playing for U.S.C., said that if he decided to remain in the country permanently he would become a citizen. He did, many years later. Late in the 1958 season, Olmedo teamed with Richardson to win the men's doubles title at Forest Hills. Olmedo was at his best on fast surfaces, where he could display his quickness and forge an aggressive game. His extraordinary 1959 season began when he defeated Neale Fraser of Australia in four sets for the Australian championship. He downed another Australian, Rod Laver, who at the time was only 20 years old and unseeded, in straight sets in the Wimbledon final, adding lobs to his customary serve and volley game along with strong groundstrokes. Olmedo lost to Fraser in the Forest Hills singles final. After only two seasons as an amateur (and long before the Open era, when professionals were allowed to compete alongside amateurs), Olmedo joined Jack Kramer's touring pro circuit. He defeated Tony Trabert for the 1960 U.S. Pro Tennis title. Olmedo retired from competitive play in the mid 1960s. He was a longtime teaching pro at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a magnet for Hollywood stars, where his pupils included Katharine Hepburn and Robert Duvall. Alejandro Olmedo was born on March 24, 1936, in Arequipa. His survivors include his son, Alejandro Jr.; two daughters, Amy and Angela; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Ann Olmedo ended in divorce. Olmedo was the second International Tennis Hall of Fame inductee to die in recent days. Dennis Ralston, also a star at U.S.C. and a five time doubles champion in majors, died on Dec. 6 in Austin, Texas.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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BRUSSELS It was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States. The pianist Igor Levit strode onto the stage at the Palais des Beaux Arts, an Art Deco gem here known as Bozar, to play Beethoven. But first, he had something to say. Declaring that "the time of staying in my comfort zone is over," Mr. Levit, 30, did something that would not be in the least unusual at many kinds of concerts, but is still quite rare in classical music: He spoke directly to his audience, brought up the world outside the concert hall, and unhesitatingly took sides in a political controversy. "Yesterday, the greatest economic power in the world has freely elected a bigot, an opportunist, an angry and dangerous man as their new president, as their commander in chief," Mr. Levit said, going on to denounce Brexit and the rise of the far right in France and Germany. Mr. Levit has certainly, and swiftly, made a mark. It is not easy to achieve stardom as a concert pianist these days, with competitions and the recording industry fading as launchpads. Some conservatories, including the Juilliard School, have cut back on piano students, fearing that the market is saturated. Against those odds Mr. Levit has managed to break through, thanks to a combination of his playing and his daring as in a 2015 collaboration with the artist Marina Abramovic on a stark staging of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations in New York. And he has stood out by emerging as the de facto pianist of the resistance, with politics that do not merely flavor his outspoken Twitter feed but inform his musical identity. Mr. Levit and one of his closest friends, Georg Diez, who writes about politics and culture for Der Spiegel, traveled together to the Idomeni refugee camp along the Greece Macedonia border a couple of years ago to better understand the refugee crisis. "What fascinates me about Igor is that art, life and politics are all one," Mr. Diez said. "You have to understand suffering, the state of the world, in order to understand music." Mr. Levit was born in 1987 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (the same city, he noted, as another, slightly younger piano star, Daniil Trifonov), where his mother was a serious pianist and his father an engineer. His family moved to Germany when he was 8 in search, he said, of better opportunities and settled in Hanover, where his mother still teaches at the conservatory. He wasn't shy, even as a teenage student. It was in the conservatory library that he first discovered the music of Mr. Rzewski, now 79, a passionately political American pianist and composer who is eminent in new music circles. Mr. Levit Googled him and found his email address. "Would you write something for me?" Mr. Levit recalled asking. He got a response a few days later. "So I said, 'Well, if you can find somebody to pay for it, sure, why not?'" Mr. Rzewski recalled. "And he did." In 2005, Mr. Levit won the silver prize at the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv, but more important, he caught the attention of the pianist Matti Raekallio, who served on the jury. Soon Mr. Levit, who had been having difficulty with one of his teachers in Hanover, was studying with him. Along the way he was aided by moments of serendipity: In 2014 he served as a concert stand in for two more established pianists, Helene Grimaud and Maurizio Pollini. Mr. Levit said that while he has always been serious about his playing, it was only in the last few years that he had found "a certain kind of inner freedom" as a musician. At the same time, his politics shaped in part by the experience of being a Jewish immigrant in a Germany with a newly ascendant right flank were beginning to evolve. The euro crisis, Occupy Wall Street and the international conflict over migration all played a role. "The refugee crisis," he said, "was a point of no return for me." When Mr. Levit gave his North American debut recital at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014, Alex Poots, who was then its artistic director, was taken by his musicianship and thoughtfulness. He came up with the idea of pairing him with Ms. Abramovic but first he had to get them together to see if they had chemistry. They all went out to the Chiltern Firehouse, a chic London hotel, where the deal was sealed at a noisy, crowded bar after midnight, when Ms. Abramovic turned to Mr. Levit and asked him to play something on the piano. "I said, 'Marina, I can't play the piano here, everyone's dancing,'" Mr. Levit recalled. But the owner silenced the D.J., and Mr. Levit played the final movement of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata. Mr. Poots said that the room fell silent: "From a noisy bar, full of party and life, you could not hear a pin drop." The staging of the "Goldberg" Variations that followed involved the audience wearing noise blocking headphones while sitting in silence for half an hour while Mr. Levit, at a grand piano, slowly moved down a long runway. When he reached the stage, the headphones came off, and Mr. Levit played. "To focus backstage? Whatever," he recalled recently. "To focus together with the audience, in the space the concert will take place? To get into the mood together? Unforgettable." Earlier this fall Mr. Levit returned to Bozar, for more Beethoven. There were no speeches this time. But Mr. Rzewski came to hear him play, and joined him and some friends for dinner afterward, where they got into a heated discussion about why the far right was making gains in Germany. Then the lovably crusty Mr. Rzewski had a musical complaint. At a recent concert of one of his works, he said, Mr. Levit had faked a tricky passage. The fakery itself did not bother Mr. Rzewski. "I'm the master faker," he said with a mischievous grin. The problem, he explained, was that Mr. Levit's solution made a hard section sound easy. "If a composer writes a difficult piece," he said, "everybody should understand it is difficult." Mr. Levit said later that this was something he often thought about while playing, and that it had informed his take on "The People United," especially on the recording. "The only advice he gave me is that a crucial part of any piece is to hear the pianist's physical endurance," he said. Now, with the Gilmore Award, Mr. Levit will be given a chance to explore new horizons. The award named for a businessman from Kalamazoo, Mich., who was devoted to the piano is sometimes likened to the MacArthur "genius" grant, which also comes as a surprise to its awardees, nominated in secret. Piano competitions have of late largely failed to mint intriguing winners, but the Gilmore has favored complete artists young but mature like Rafal Blechacz, Kirill Gerstein, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski and Leif Ove Andsnes, more than flashy virtuosos. Now he has a new instrument to adjust to, new concerts to plan, a new recording coming. The 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth, in 2020, will bring plenty of work, too, for a Beethoven specialist. He said that he was still making plans for what to do with the Gilmore prize money. But Mr. Levit also fantasizes about the kind of academic fellowship that would give him time to study, reflect and interact. (He has little in common with the stereotypical nose to grindstone soloist, living alone in hotel and practice rooms.) One thing that won't change is his determination not to compartmentalize his political from his artistic self. "The idea that art is an excuse for not engaging," he said, "is utterly ridiculous."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Travis Wall, left, and Robbie Fairchild led a class for dancers boys and girls, men and women near the studios of "Good Morning America" in Times Square. At about 7 a.m., around 300 dancers boys and girls, men and women took turns glissading across the concrete at 44th Street and Seventh Avenue, which was transformed into a scene from "Fame." Piles of dance bags formed mountains. Supporters held signs with messages like " metutu," "Boys Dance Too" and " I Wish I'd Started at 6!!! " It wasn't confrontational, but it did make a statement. The class was a response to Thursday's "Good Morning America," on which Lara Spencer, a host, laughed at the news that Prince George was planning to study ballet. "We'll see how long that lasts," she said. On Monday, she apologized for her remarks. "I screwed up, I did," she said. "The comment I made about dance was insensitive. It was stupid and I am deeply sorry." "She knows Debbie and Debbie was like, 'You need to talk to Travis,'" Mr. Wall said after the class on Monday. "'He'll be able to talk to you without anger in his voice.'" Mr. Wall said that after watching the segment, "I was horrified thinking about little boys hearing the laughter." But he was open to talking with Ms. Spencer. "We all just wanted to have a conversation about the problem in this country that we've never really talked about until now, which is how brave it is for a male dancer at a young age to make the decision," Mr. Wall said. "And the scrutiny and the bullying that comes with it." The Times Square class, near ABC's studios, where "Good Morning America" is broadcast, was organized by two Broadway dancers, Charlie Williams and Sam Quinn. It was a way to show younger dancers not just the power of the dance community, but the power of dance. Helping to guide the participants through plies, pirouettes and, yes, even jumps on concrete, were Mr. Wall and Robbie Fairchild, a former principal dancer at New York City Ballet who went on to star in "An American in Paris" on Broadway. Mr. Fairchild said that looking out to see all the young dancers open their arms at the same time was incredible. "We are such a loving, accepting community and if one of us feels attacked in any way it's amazing that we flock together and hold tight," he said. "We have all had similar experiences, and we all have the same PTSD." Harrison Coll, a City Ballet soloist on leave to work on the film of "West Side Story," showed up for the outdoor class, because it was "a beautiful demonstration," he said, "that has nothing to do with hate." He added, with a laugh: "It was a good class, too. They really challenged everyone, and I liked it when Robbie said, 'Ballet's hard. We're still going to make it hard.'" Gilbert Bolden III, another City Ballet dancer, who said he was bullied throughout middle school, was an impressive sight on Monday he took class in point shoes, which are usually the province of female dancers. For the past two years they have been part of his training. "It's such an open art form," he said. "Why not? If you want to do something, just go ahead and do it." Axel Stahl, 11, who has studied at the City Ballet affiliated School of American Ballet since he was 5, said his advice to other students was "keep dancing. " The Monday segment of "Good Morning America" also featured an interview with Mr. Wall, Mr. Fairchild and Fabrice Calmels of the Joffrey Ballet. "More empathy would be lovely," Mr. Calmels said on the program. As a teacher, he said he sees young boys drop out of ballet "because of the social stigma around the form. Children should be entitled to experience things without being bullied." Mr. Wall said some people in the dance world have asked him if Ms. Spencer was getting off too easily. "People make mistakes," he said. "And you have to think about the bigger picture: We brought attention to something that possibly was never going to get the light of day, and now everyone's aware of how incredible it is for a boy to be a dancer." Mr. Fairchild agreed. "I think so much good can come out of this as long as we remain people who are able to forgive," he said. "It's also such a divisive society. Who are going to be the people to try and bridge gaps? Artists."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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On a Saturday in November hundreds of people of all ages savored the mild afternoon in a downtown Memphis hangout named Loflin Yard. Set on nearly two acres, there was something for everybody. Families clustered around bonfires in a sprawling yard. Adults lounged in rocking chairs sipping hot apple cider spiked with bourbon. In a repurposed barn, young professionals faced off in competitive Ping Pong. Others drank craft beer and watched football on two oversized screens. Loflin Yard, which opened in April 2016, is so popular that it's hard to imagine that it is on a street , West Carolina Avenue, that some families would avoid just a few years ago when the area was a magnet for criminals and vagrants. "You had a criminal element looking for things to steal," said Terry Landrum, a deputy chief of the Memphis police department. "No one was there; your parents wouldn't want you down there." In a city long known for its crime problem, Loflin Yard is a striking example of increased local efforts to transform blighted areas into buzzy social hot spots. In the process, these projects are making Memphis a more tempting place for tourists to explore, local officials say. From 2012 to 2017, tourism in Memphis increased by 13 percent, or 1.3 million visitors, and between 2016 and 2017, it rose by 4.1 percent, or 465,000 visitors, according to the Memphis Convention Visitors Bureau. Memphis has seen 13 billion in over 250 revitalization projects in the past four years, according to Cushman Wakefield/Commercial Advisors, the commercial real estate services company. Most of these projects are spearheaded by local entrepreneurs who see the potential in turning downtrodden sites into spaces that add social value. The entrepreneurs behind Loflin Yards, John Planchon and his business partner, Taylor Berger, have made a living transforming forsaken buildings into popular bars and restaurants. One year after opening Loflin Yard the duo launched Railgarten, an even bigger venture farther east in midtown Memphis. The two acre property housed a defunct ice factory. As I stood with Mr. Berger on an upper level overlooking Railgarten's outdoor bar, he noted, "the balcony we are standing on was built to have a compressor " part of the machine used to make ice. About 1,000 people now visit the venue on weekends. Millennials dance to live music or climb the stairs to try absinthe in one of the venue's seven bars. Families head to the playground, the sand box, or the ice cream parlor, which offers flavors like PB Strawberry and ginger peach. The partners' third bar, named Rec Room, is a seven minute drive from Railgarten, on Broad Avenue. The street boomed in the late 19th century when a large wooden boxcar factory was based there. Since the 1970s, however, the avenue's boarded up buildings have drawn criminals. "It was deserted," said Pat Brown, who has lived in Memphis for 36 years and co owns T Clifton Art Gallery, one of the first businesses to move to the revitalized Broad Avenue nine years ago. Rec Room opened in an empty warehouse in April 2015. "We didn't even put air conditioning in because we weren't sure if people were going to show up," Mr. Planchon said. Now, it's full every Friday and Saturday night with young patrons crowded onto couches and playing vintage video games on 20 foot screens. Wiseacre Brewing Co., a craft brewery; Bounty on Broad, a farm to table restaurant; a couture shop and local artisan boutiques have also opened on Broad Avenue. Ms. Brown marvels at the fresh life that these new businesses have infused into the neighborhood. "No one came before," Ms. Brown said. "Now we have people from Canada, Australia, at least five to 10 a week, if not more." And those spots are not the only ones getting notice. In May 2017 Chris and Alex Canale, who are cousins, launched Old Dominick Distillery, Memphis's only whiskey distillery. They set up shop in a 50,000 square foot warehouse in a part of downtown with abandoned buildings and empty streets. The distillery is just blocks from Beale Street, a pedestrian only thoroughfare with storied blues clubs where legends like Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters and B.B. King performed. For 12, visitors can tour the distillery with a spirit maker. They can try a whiskey drink, made from the owners' 150 year old family recipe, on the rooftop bar with stunning views of the Mississippi River. The distillery even reshaped the Memphis skyline when it perched a 13 foot rooster (the brand's mascot) atop the building. The city's most ambitious revitalization project is the Crosstown Concourse which opened last August in the midtown neighborhood. McLean Wilson, a local hotel and commercial real estate developer, raised over 200 million to convert the 1.1 million square foot Art Deco tower, a former Sears regional distribution center, into a mixed use building. It includes apartments, an art gallery, a gym, a church and synagogue, eateries and a produce store. In February, the airy craft brewer, Crosstown Brewing Co., opened in the space.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Left, Jason Henry for The New York Times; right, Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times Left, Jason Henry for The New York Times; right, Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times Credit... Left, Jason Henry for The New York Times; right, Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times It was not a given that Steve Hilton, the conservative Fox News host, and Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor who worked in the Obama White House, would get along. But when they met by chance at a cocktail party in Washington last year, they quickly landed on one surprisingly strong point of agreement: It was time to break up Big Tech. "We thought the same way," Mr. Hilton said. Mr. Wu, who is also a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, agreed. "There's unusual constituencies arising," he said. He later went on Mr. Hilton's show, "The Next Revolution," for a congenial interview. The antitrust movement has been revived by a bipartisan loathing of Big Tech that extends beyond lawmakers to the furthest firmaments of the right and the left. On one side is the progressive left, whose members have been appalled by Facebook's handling of pro Trump Russian disinformation campaigns and Silicon Valley's consolidated power. On the other side is the Trumpist right, whose members see the power of social media companies to ban content as censorship and worry that the arteries of communication are controlled by young liberals. The common cause has made for some strange new bedfellows. The left and the right now often have similar anti tech talking points on cable news and at congressional hearings. Conservatives are showing up at largely liberal conferences, while liberals are going on conservative TV shows. On Tuesday, that alignment will be evident at an antitrust hearing on Capitol Hill featuring executives from Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, as well as policy experts like Mr. Wu. The hearing, held by the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, will examine "the impact of market power of online platforms on innovation and entrepreneurship." "To the bewilderment of many observers, the ascendant pressures for antitrust reforms are flowing from both wings of the political spectrum," Daniel A. Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote last year in a paper called "Antitrust's Unconventional Politics." Now those who have found mutual understanding need to figure out if they can actually get along. It is not easy. Often, it is awkward. "I think we should be skeptical," said Sabeel Rahman, the president of the progressive think tank Demos and an associate law professor at Brooklyn Law School. "What are the coalitions that we ought to embrace? Who's the we?" Mr. Rahman said that he was wary of these new conservative allies and that progressives in the movement needed to be cautious. Yes, they both want to take power out of the hands of large tech companies but then the two sides have to agree on whose hands that power falls into. "How do we operationalize this? Who's doing the moderating? Are these new allies coming in good faith?" Mr. Rahman asked. "The devil's in the details." The detail here is who exactly should be in charge of a company like Facebook, if it is not Mark Zuckerberg. The two sides may both want third party ombudsmen of some sort, but agreement seems to fall apart beyond that. "Most people getting involved haven't really gamed out what this means," said Katy Glenn Bass, the research director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, an advocacy group for free speech. Regulation of online speech is not exclusively an antitrust concern, but today these threads are becoming interwoven. Critics argue that big tech companies need to be broken up or regulated because they are suppressing speech. Ms. Bass, who is organizing a Knight Institute symposium in October on tech giants, monopoly power and public discourse, said she worried that popular enthusiasm for aggressive regulation of speech on the platforms could get out of hand. She worries that now arguments for moderating speech are coming from groups that once stood against government intervention. Update, July 15, 2019: After this article was published, Ms. Bass said her Knight Institute symposium was being moved from October to November. "The idea that these platforms should be pretty tightly regulated on what speech they can host is not a traditional conservative argument," Ms. Bass said. "This has all been a real whiplash." A case in point: On Thursday , The Washington Post published an essay by Charlie Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, proposing that digital platforms be regulated the way publishers are. "Fighting back against private companies with governmental action is a politically and ideologically fraught idea for those of us on the right," he wrote. But he went on to add, "There is now ample reason to believe the market's normal corrective powers are being blocked by anti competitive forces." Traditional conservatives said they were feeling the whiplash. James Pethokoukis, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro market think tank, was at a party this spring that included Republican donors in Washington when the conversation took a turn toward big tech companies. "They were talking about breaking them up, turning them into utilities," Mr. Pethokoukis said. "It's a breathtaking change from even a year ago." He was shocked. To him these companies were American jewels and some of the best bulwarks against rising power abroad. He has since been writing against the movement with pieces like "The Astonishingly Weak Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google, and Amazon." Tech bias has been a longtime concern for the right, and Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, frequently mentioned it. Little came of it. Now the movement is finding more mainstream allies. Mr. Kirk and others who have complained of an anti conservative bias by Facebook, Google and Twitter attended a social media summit at the White House on Thursday . At the event, Mr. Trump accused the companies of exhibiting "terrible bias" and said he was calling representatives from all of them to the White House over the next month. On Friday, Mr. Trump took the tech companies to task again, calling them "crooked" and "dishonest" and adding that "something is going to be done." "In my circles right now," Mr. Pethokoukis said, "if you say, 'I don't think we're seeing systemic bias against conservatives,' it's like they wonder about your sanity." Matt Stoller, a former Democratic congressional staff member who is now at the antimonopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, which leans liberal, said he noticed the same thing. "The white supremacists liked to appropriate this language around antimonopoly and free speech," said Mr. Stoller, who has written a book on the antimonopoly movement, "Goliath." "But now there are real networks on the right that are not white supremacist networks, and the people in them are genuinely concerned about the power of Big Tech." He said he was having to reassess his relationships with conservatives. "I always knew we were aiming at different things," he said. "Now, we have some of the same goals."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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See Now, Buy Now In this new world of faster fashion, you can shop many of the collections that just walked down the runways in New York (and Los Angeles) right now. Ralph Lauren has transformed his flagship with an immersive botanical installation inspired by the see now, buy now spring collection. It covers every wall of the store's first and second floors, where, through Monday, you'll find a lame Lurex gown ( 2,450) and beaded trousers ( 5,990). At 888 Madison Avenue. Michael Kors will continue his Ready to Wear, Ready to Go concept with an edited selection of pieces from the show, including a grommet pleated shirt ( 2,150) and sarong skirt ( 2,150) available immediately. At 790 Madison Avenue. Tommy Hilfiger has a silk print maxi dress ( 375) and patchwork knit top and skirt ( 249.50) from the Tommy x Gigi collection that was revealed on Venice Beach. Or make like a supermodel and rent the aforementioned looks from Armarium for your next selfie opt for 75 apiece. At 681 Fifth Avenue; armarium.com. Following her own Los Angeles presentation, Rachel Zoe has a sequin minidress ( 295) and other glitzy frocks available on her website. At shoprachelzoe.com.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The actress Sophia Loren is a symbol of Italy to generations of moviegoers. Born in Rome on Sept. 20, 1934, as Sofia Villani Scicolone, she was raised outside Naples and suffered intense deprivation during World War II. As Italy entered the postwar "Dolce Vita" era, she became a star of Cinecitta, Rome's film industry center. She won an Oscar in 1962 for her performance in "La Ciociara," or "Two Women," about wartime Italy. Her memoir, "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life," was published late last year by Atria Books. She is the mother of Carlo Jr. and Edoardo, with her husband, the producer Carlo Ponti, who died in 2007. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Loren. Q. You have just come out with your memoir, "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow." Why did you want to write this now? A. Years go by, you're 40, 50, and when you reach the beautiful age of 80, you are taken by a great wanting to start all over again, to be reborn with your souvenirs, and in a way, you fall in love with your future. I had so much to say because many things stuck in my mind and the kind of life I led. So, I started to write little things and put it in a box. It grew and when the book was finished, finally, I was very proud of it and I said, "Sophia, you did it again." It's a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful story, full of many things, many memories, good, bad, because life sometimes is very hard. Very violent, especially when I was born and during the war. But, of course, the end is a very happy ending. Where have you been traveling? I go to see my children in Los Angeles. I've been to many festivals to show some films that I made. I've been in Russia, I've been in Asia. I've been everywhere. But, if you ask me, "What did you see?" I haven't seen anything because I've seen hotels. I've seen a lot of people. I've seen my films, but I am eager very much to choose, let's say two weeks, three weeks with my children to go a little bit around and to see like a tourist.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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An American organization of professors on Monday announced a boycott of Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel's treatment of Palestinians, signaling that a movement to isolate and pressure Israel that is gaining ground in Europe has begun to make strides in the United States. Members of the American Studies Association voted by a ratio of more than two to one to endorse the boycott in online balloting that concluded Sunday night, the group said. With fewer than 5,000 members, the group is not one of the larger scholarly associations. But its vote is a milestone for a Palestinian movement known as B.D.S., for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions, which for the past decade had found little traction in the United States. The American Studies Association is the second American academic group to back the boycott, movement organizers say, following the Association for Asian American Studies, which did so in April. "It's almost like a family betrayal," said Manuel Trajtenberg, a leading Israeli scholar. "It's very grave and very saddening that this happens, particularly so in the U.S.," he said. Dr. Trajtenberg, an economics professor at Tel Aviv University, earned his doctorate at Harvard and like many Israeli academics has had frequent sabbaticals at American universities. Israel has strong trade ties with Western Europe, where the B.D.S. campaign has won some backing for economic measures, a particular concern for Israelis. Last week a Dutch company, Vitens, announced that it would not do business with Israel's national water company, Mekorot, because of Israel's policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel recently faced a potential crisis when it seemed its universities and companies would lose out on some 700 million for research from a European Union program after new guidelines prohibited investment in any institutions operating in territory Israel seized in the 1967 war. Israeli academics were reeling at the possibility that they would be punished over government policy toward the Palestinians, until Israeli and European officials struck a deal late last month to allow Israel to participate. In April, the Teachers' Union of Ireland endorsed an academic boycott of Israel, and several times in recent years there have been strong efforts within Britain's largest professors' group, the University and College Union, to do the same. Israelis have long seen Europe as more hostile even anti Semitic in some pockets but a slap from the United States has a particular sting. "Rather than standing up for academic freedom and human rights by boycotting countries where professors are imprisoned for their views, the A.S.A. chooses as its first ever boycott to boycott Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, in which academics are free to say what they want, write what they want and research what they want," Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the United States, said Monday. America is viewed not only as Israel's staunchest ally, but its best friend, and many analysts have fretted publicly in recent weeks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's outspoken opposition to the interim Iran nuclear deal had damaged relations with Washington. Next month, the Modern Language Association's annual meeting will debate a resolution calling on the State Department to criticize Israel for barring American professors from going to Gaza and the West Bank when invited by Palestinian universities. People on both sides of the issue acknowledged that despite the heat it generates, the requested boycott will have little practical effect, at least for now. The American Studies Association resolution bars official collaboration with Israeli institutions but not with Israeli scholars themselves; it has no binding power over members, and no American colleges have signed on. In fact, the American Association of University Professors, the nation's largest professors' group, said it opposed the boycott. A number of American scholars, while angry at Israeli policies in the West Bank, say they oppose singling Israel out over other countries with far worse human rights records. Others say it makes little sense to focus on Israeli universities where government policy often comes under strong criticism. "O.K., so a couple of Israeli researchers will not be invited by a couple of American researchers," said Avraham Burg, a leftist former Labor Party lawmaker who was one of the founders of Molad, a research group that recently published a report on Israeli isolation. "That for me is awful, because the academic community is the last one with the freedom of thought and freedom of expression." But Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian activist and a founder of the B.D.S. movement, said the boycott vote shed light on the close collaboration between Israel's universities and its government and military, and it put those universities on notice that they will become unwelcome in international academic circles. "It is perhaps the strongest indicator yet that the B.D.S. movement is reaching a tipping point, even in the U.S., the last bastion of support for Israel's unjust system," he said. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has publicly rejected a boycott of Israel. While pro boycott forces draw parallels to the sanctions movement against South Africa during the apartheid era, Mr. Abbas, who was in South Africa last week for the funeral of Nelson Mandela, restated the Palestinian Authority's longstanding position of supporting a boycott only against products made in West Bank settlements, but not institutions that operate within Israel's 1948 lines. "We are neighbors with Israel, we have agreements with Israel, we recognize Israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel," Majdi Khaldi, an adviser to Mr. Abbas, said in an interview on Monday. "The problem is two things: occupation, and the government of Israel continuing settlement activities." On Dec. 4, the 20 member national council of the American Studies Association voted unanimously for a boycott resolution, but decided to put the matter to a full membership vote. The group said that of 1,252 members who cast ballots, 66.05 percent voted in favor and 30.5 percent against, with the rest abstaining. The American Association of University Professors, with 48,000 members repeated its position that while economic action against a nation might be warranted, academic boycotts stifle academic freedom and are likely to hurt people who are not the intended targets. But the American Studies Association's online forum filled with comments rejecting that logic, like this one from David Palumbo Liu, a professor at Stanford: "People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which is coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far outweighs concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Last November, the internet fell in love with Tanqueray, a straight shooting New Yorker who shared memories of her life as a burlesque dancer in the 1960s and '70s with the many millions of people who follow Humans of New York on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Her tales were full of underground glamour and gritty city characters "mob guys," "strippers and porn stars in Times Square" and a madame who "controlled all the high dollar prostitutes back then" as well as resilience and humor. She told of the time her mother kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant at 17; how her mother had her arrested but "the warden did some tests on me and found out I was smart, so I got a scholarship to go anywhere in New York." "I chose the Fashion Institute of Technology, which I hated," she told Humans of New York. The post was shared widely and received tens of thousands of comments on Instagram, including one from the actress Jennifer Garner, who asked: "Why is this not a netflix series?" For almost a year, there were no updates from Tanqueray, whose real name is Stephanie Johnson. Then last week, Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans of New York, announced he would post 32 more quotes by Ms. Johnson, 76, on Instagram in an effort to raise money for her medical expenses and ongoing care. "Stephanie's health has taken a bad turn, and she's in a really tough spot," Mr. Stanton wrote in the post that introduced the series. "I'm going to tell her story right here, right now." The internet immediately rallied to her aid. A GoFundMe campaign started by Mr. Stanton for Ms. Johnson raised over 2.5 million dollars in a week. In the new series, Ms. Johnson revealed bits and pieces of a life that took many unexpected turns, including newfound fame (which, she said, a psychic once predicted). "When this photo was taken, ten thousand men in New York City knew that name," Ms. Johnson is quoted in the caption of a Instagram post, where she is holding up a photo that depicts her younger self in a magenta burlesque costume, complete with a feathered headpiece. "They'd line up around the block whenever I was dancing in Times Square, just so I could sign the cover of their nudie magazine." In another post she speaks about finding herself in the city's burlesque clubs. "The clubs weren't like they are today," the caption reads. "There was no VIP section. No velvet ropes and champagne service. Everyone mingled: the pimps, the hustlers, the entertainers, the tourists." Mr. Stanton, who started Humans of New York in 2010, said he met Ms. Johnson last year when he was leaving the gym one day. He noticed her outfit, a leopard faux fur coat and a headband she had made, and he complimented her. It was the beginning of a budding friendship. "She's lived such a life and she has such a voice," Mr. Stanton said in an interview. "She describes things in ways and puts together strings of words that I have never heard someone say before." The two had been approached by television and movie executives in the past year, Mr. Stanton said, but Ms. Johnson wanted Mr. Stanton to tell her story. The original plan was a podcast. But when Ms. Johnson's health began to deteriorate, the two decided to roll out her story in 32 parts over Instagram. "It wasn't until I got my camera and embarked on this yearlong relationship that I got to know Stephanie," Mr. Stanton said, adding that he realized that Ms. Johnson experiences a great deal of sadness and loneliness. Ms. Johnson told Mr. Stanton that she changed her name often to protect herself from her landlord, and that she has had periods of being very behind on rent and indebted to bill collectors. She also did so to keep from being found by people she met while working in the sex industry. "Tanqueray is a character I created when I went through a divorce," Ms. Johnson said in an interview. "I had to make a living, I just had to reinvent myself to succeed." Over the course of a year, in two hourlong sittings at a diner, Ms. Johnson told Mr. Stanton about her life. Raised outside of Albany in a mostly white community, she was forced to leave her home as a teenager after a tumultuous relationship with her mother. Once in New York City, she did what she had to do to survive. The Instagram posts include recollections of her time renting a room at the Salvation Army; ditching one of the Temptations who wanted to go to bed with her; and calling on the mob to intimidate her ex husband. "Tanqueray is not who I am and never has been," Ms. Johnson said. "I'm a private person. I have no close girlfriends. Most of my friends, like the gay kids who did the balls in Harlem, they were real friends. All those kids are dead now." Of the name itself, Ms. Johnson said: "Don't ask me where it came from. Maybe it was survival and making myself happy instead of making others happy." "I'm going to be Tanqueray because Stephanie ain't gonna get it," she added. According to Instagram, the Humans of New York account has gained over 15,000 new followers on Facebook and over 66,000 followers on Instagram since the Tanqueray series started last week. The account has also received over 7 million likes and 140,000 comments on Facebook since then. The newfound fame and fortune does not faze Ms. Johnson, who, despite the flashy persona, is a quiet, introverted woman who has never smoked a cigarette, doesn't drink and prefers reading and being at home to going to parties. She said she plans to live her life the way she has been and upon her death the remaining money from the GoFundMe will be donated to the Association to Benefit Children, a nonprofit association that serves underprivileged children in New York City.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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MALCOLM X (1992) 7 p.m. on SundanceTV; also on iTunes and Amazon. Drawing from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965), a screenplay by Arnold Perl and James Baldwin, and copious research, Spike Lee traces the life of Malcolm Little (Denzel Washington), the street hustler turned black nationalist leader who became a tenacious force in the civil rights movement. When Warner Bros. capped the film's budget at 28 million, celebrities donated funds to help Mr. Lee carry out his vision. "Exquisitely acted, with a gorgeous, expressionistic Terence Blanchard score, this is one of Spike Lee's most enduring films," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times. "Rosewood," the historical drama about a 1923 massacre in Rosewood, Fla., follows at 11:30 p.m. ATOMIC HOMEFRONT (2017) 8 p.m. on HBO; also on HBO streaming platforms. This documentary follows activists mothers in St. Louis as they pressure the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies to remove radioactive waste that was dumped in a nearby landfill decades earlier. Residents claim the waste has led to high rates of cancer, other diseases and birth defects. On Feb. 1, the E.P.A. announced a plan to partly remove the hazardous material. TWO SIDES 10 p.m. on TV One. Narrated by Viola Davis, this documentary series looks at four recent cases that catalyzed national uproar over police brutality against black people. This final episode questions the death of Sandra Bland, who was found hanging in a Texas jail cell in 2015, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop. A medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, yet Ms. Bland's friends and relatives dispute that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The Museum of Modern Art's decision to tear down the quirky little American Folk Art Museum, barely a decade old, has generated outrage; only the loss of Penn Station in 1963 and the fight that saved Grand Central in the 1970s have been more bitter. But of the structures that have come down since Penn Station fell, there are many candidates for greatest loss, from Beaux Arts skyscraper to cast iron loft building. It was on the smashed remains of Penn Station that Nathan Silver, an architect, put together the 1964 exhibit, "Lost New York," which he later developed into the book of the same name. His book is the Old Testament for the New York preservation movement, with vanished architectural beauty on every page and indignation on every other. Half a century later, Mr. Silver is most aggrieved by the demolition in 1967 of the 1883 Metropolitan Opera House, on 39th and Broadway, in part because he went to the opera there when he was a teenager. It was, charitably, a brewery big warehouse of a thing, without a fragment of elegance, but the historical associations were rich. The Metropolitan, intent on moving to Lincoln Center and concerned about competition, wanted the old house demolished, and so it went with the acquiescence of the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission. Mr. Silver is still angry: "Hisses to Anthony Bliss, the company president," he wrote in a recent email. In the Singer Building's main corridor, a wealth of marble and bronze columns. The architect Peter Samton, who was on the picket line at Penn Station, would nominate the Brokaw Mansions, where he also demonstrated. It was taken in a sudden weekend demolition in 1965 Georgia fatwood on the glowing embers of the Penn Station debacle. The resulting blaze is generally credited with getting Mayor Robert Wagner to sign a law establishing the Landmarks Commission in the same year. "Thank God for historic districts," Mr. Samton says now, recalling the "horribly designed" white brick apartment houses that swept over New York. He cites in particular the one just north of the Guggenheim Museum, which "clashes terribly with Frank Lloyd Wright's wonder." Mr. Silver's book included a chapter, "Landmarks in Danger," with 18 structures seemingly in peril, including Sailors Snug Harbor on Staten Island and the Customs House at Bowling Green. Of the 18, these are among the 14 surviving; four are gone. Still, for a city that was a Wild West of demolition, the record seems pretty good. The four lost would certainly be declared landmarks now, including the ebullient Beaux Arts style Astor Hotel of 1904 in Times Square. Mr. Silver calls the full block Astor an "obvious real estate bull's eye." The arrow hit the mark in 1967. Another of the four was the moody, slightly malevolent Ziegfeld Theater, a limestone structure built in 1927 at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street and designed by Joseph Urban. Described by Mr. Silver as "wacky, expressionist," it fell in 1966. James Bogardus's 1849 cast iron front Laing Stores, at Washington and Murray Streets, was also on Mr. Silver's list. It was demolished in 1971, without Landmarks Commission interference, to make way for the Borough of Manhattan Community College. The good news was that the commission carted off and stored the 150 tons of facade. The bad news was that security was not very tight, if even present: Most of the parts were stolen in 1974, the balance in 1977, and sold for scrap. The fourth doomed building, and the tallest to fall, was the ebullient 1908 Singer Building, at Broadway and Liberty Street, designed by Ernest Flagg as a sort of high rise version of the Astor Hotel. It was 612 feet high at the top of its bulbous tower, with Flagg's trademark use of red brick, light masonry trim and lots of glass. In 1963 the preservationist Alan Burnham put the Singer in the same class as the Woolworth and Metropolitan Life towers. But as the building was readied for demolition in 1967, Mr. Burnham, by then the executive director of the Landmarks Commission, told The New York Times that the agency could not act because "if the building were made a landmark, we would have to find a buyer for it." The architect Richard Dattner was another young modernist to walk the picket lines in 1963, and he considers the greatest loss to be the disappearance of a humane scale in Midtown, "perhaps even more significant than the destruction of a single building, no matter how distinguished." Mr. Dattner cites West 53rd Street, where the Museum of Modern Art gradually demolished the magnificent townhouses and forgettable brownstones, replacing them with a building that could be a corporate headquarters in the suburbs.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. His last dispatch was from Japan's Setouchi Islands, where he took in a once every three years art extravaganza. On Halloween night, defying a ban on masks put in place last month by the police, hundreds of protesters assembled in Hong Kong's Victoria Park just after sunset, wearing masks of Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's chief executive, defaced to look like the Joker and mash ups of Chinese president Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh, an often cited resemblance that had Chinese censors ban the jovial bear. I followed a group of young protesters as they made their way across town shouting slogans and exchanging handfuls of candy, but we never made it to the Lan Kwai Fong night life district. Somewhere in Central, with no warning, the riot police fired canisters of tear gas into the crowd. I momentarily lost my companions and when I found them again they washed out my burning eyes with contact lens solution they carried just in case. When Hong Kong, the former British colony that was returned to Chinese control in 1997, was included in the 52 Places to Go list back in January, we didn't foresee the months of increasingly tense and violent confrontations between protesters and police. In fact, one of the main reasons Hong Kong made it onto the list was a new rail link and 34 mile bridge connecting it to mainland China, which was supposed to bring them closer. The situation in Hong Kong has escalated since the 52 Places Traveler's visit. Read the latest news from that city. I visited Chongli, China, where a new ski resort also made the 52 Places list, and Hong Kong within a week of each other, and they instead felt farther apart than they have in decades. If there is one emotion that can be communicated without the need for language, it is confusion and in Chongli, about 150 miles northwest of Beijing, I encountered plenty of it. Chongli is set to host some of the skiing and snowboarding events for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics (a high speed rail link, currently in development, would make the travel time short enough for it to qualify as part of the host city). But I was early a month before ski season began, and three years before the events that are supposed to bring this place to the global stage. Still, I was comforted by the flashy advertisements I found online, touting Chongli as a "four seasons" destination, with plenty of hiking, mountain biking and even archery to entertain me. I sat down for a beer at a microbrewery at the bottom of Thaiwoo's main ski slope. The bartender, seemingly annoyed at me for interrupting his video game, poured out a watery IPA and went back to his computer. There wasn't even music playing. I was suddenly very thankful that I had only booked a night here. One hour down, 23 to go. Chongli as a host for the world's biggest skiing competition makes little environmental sense. For starters, the area gets only around 15 inches of precipitation a year, the majority of it in the summer. It's cold enough for snow to stick around in the winter, but that snow has to be blasted out of machines over a land parched by droughts. Still, Chinese state owned media has written extensively about the economic benefit of including areas like Chongli, once one of the poorer regions of China, in the Olympics. Not surprisingly, I spent most of my time in Beijing instead of Chongli. There too, development is occurring at a breakneck pace, not just for the Olympics but as part of a greater plan for "Jing Jin Ji," an integrated megalopolis that would include Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei and about 130 million people. I confined my wanderings to Beijing's core within the second ring road. In between walking, cycling and eating for a concise introduction to the city's incredible food scene check out UnTour I talked to locals and expats about what was happening in Chongli. At I: project space, a tiny art gallery tucked behind a mah jongg parlor, I spoke to Antonie Angerer and Anna Eschbach, two German expatriates who are part of the team that started Beijing22. They were careful to not take a position one way or another on all the highways, train lines and ski resorts being built in the run up to the Winter Olympics. Instead, the focus of their work, they told me, was more about providing a platform for others, including local artists. And that it's more about creating a public record in a place where that is not the norm. "If we don't document it now all the construction, the speed that it's happening at, the people who are being affected in two years, all we will have to look at are the shiny buildings," Ms. Angerer said. "It's important to capture what's happening along the way." For me, Hong Kong is a place of nostalgia. My first memories are from Hong Kong, where my parents moved in 1991 with my two older brothers and me. On my first day in the city, the memories came flooding back, sparked by the old apartment buildings painted in the blues and pinks of storybook nurseries; the Star Ferry, with its wooden benches, still chugging across Victoria Harbour on a 10 minute ride; the ubiquitous handcarts transporting boxes of goods from trucks to stores; the dense greenery that improbably hangs between office buildings and over the stairways that wind their way up the vertical cityscape. It was hard to reconcile my memories heavily clouded by a child's innocence and wide eyed wonder with the reality today. Though a huge number of tourists are canceling their plans tourist numbers were down 40 percent in August compared to last year a visitor can come to Hong Kong and never come across a protest, especially on weekdays. But the evidence of upheaval is everywhere. On the Kowloon side of the harbor, graffiti covers the roads and the concrete dividers that line them: "Free HK," "LeBron James: Shut up and dribble," "Hong Kong is a Police State." Lennon walls named after the one covered in Beatles inspired graffiti and notes in Prague pop up in metro stations and on concrete pillars, where they are filled with leaflets and scribblings until authorities tear them down and another pops up somewhere else. Every conversation I had at least touched on the protests, now approaching their sixth month. On my first night in Hong Kong, I had dinner with an old friend. At Happy Paradise, a funky, neon lit spot in SoHo (that is, south of Hollywood Road) run by innovative local chef May Chow, we dug into twists on regional specialties, like an egg waffle made with sourdough and fried chicken zapped with Sichuan peppercorns. Harold Li works for a technology company, but has spent nights and weekends at protests. He has found renewed purpose alongside the black clad protesters, most of whom are at least a decade younger than he is. "I've never been more proud of being a Hongkonger," Mr. Li said. "Sometimes when I go to the protests, I'm going just in solidarity with the other protesters." Protesters were given at least one victory when the extradition bill that sparked the demonstrations was withdrawn. But four other demands have emerged, including an independent inquiry into police brutality. Some protesters I spoke to, like Mr. Li, thought things could calm down if that inquiry was put together; others were unequivocal, and one of the popular slogans shouted out at protests is: "Five demands. Not one less." I felt uneasy being a tourist in Hong Kong, not because I felt unsafe I didn't but because I felt callous enjoying myself. But Hong Kong, with its constant sensory overload, is easy to enjoy. I walked through the Sham Shui Po and Yau Ma Tei neighborhoods of Kowloon, where I ate approximately eight meals in two hours: slices of duck over slippery noodles sitting at a communal table with office workers on break, a bowl of rice rolls smothered in multiple sauces in an alleyway outside Heyitai, a street food stop recommended by the Michelin Guide; a mysterious (but delicious) fried meat I ate just because there was a long line to eat it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Facebook said it intended to offer Libra to almost all of the 2.7 billion customers who are now on its Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp services. It also hopes to allow Libra to be used for payments for things like ads on its social network. Facebook has set up a subsidiary, Calibra, which will be responsible for making Libra available to its users. Calibra intends to build other services on top of Libra, including, eventually, financial services like lending and investing. Facebook hopes its partners, such as Uber and Spotify, will also take Libra as payment for car rides and online subscriptions, as they do with PayPal and Venmo today. How will Libra work behind the scenes? Every time someone buys Libra, that money will be deposited into a bank account where it will sit untouched, so that every dollar's or euro's worth of Libra will be backed by a dollar or euro in the bank, according to the Libra design documents. This is important because the bank holdings of Libra will generate interest that can be used to pay back the cryptocurrency's initial investors. This structure will mean that an infinite number of Libra can be generated, in contrast to Bitcoin, which is meant to be capped at 21 million. Creating new Libra will not require anything like Bitcoin's mining process, which has consumed enormous amounts of electricity and made Bitcoin the target of environmental critics. Facebook and other companies that have created Libra wallets can encourage new customers by giving them a small number of Libra to get started. You will also be able to buy Libra by transferring money from a bank account or debit card. The cost of an individual Libra will be determined by the value of the basket of global currencies that backs up Libra, which will fluctuate slightly over time based on the value of the underlying currencies. If Libra works as intended, once customers own Libra, they will be able to send them to any other business or person with a Libra wallet, anywhere in the world. If you want to turn Libra back into dollars or other traditional currencies, Facebook's wallet, Calibra, will make the conversion at the going rate based on the current value of the underlying currencies and transfer the money to another bank or online financial account like PayPal.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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American democracy is now in such a precarious situation that this week the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to issue an unusual reminder to the armed forces that they all took an oath to the Constitution and "not to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator." Charles M. Blow's comparison of President Trump to a 3 year old reminds me of the question my mother would ask before removing a Band Aid on a hurt knee: "How do you want it? Fast and painful, or slow and painful?" It wasn't much of a choice, because it would hurt me either way. At least I had a choice. Mr. Trump isn't giving us a choice; he is taking the slow and painful course, and he's impervious to the pain he is inflicting on the entire U.S. population. Thank you for your service, President Trump. You may leave now. I was greatly relieved when the election results rolled in, thinking that this was the end of our national nightmare. Apparently I must worry endlessly that he might run again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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A supervised exercise program that gets young children running and playing for an hour before school could make them happier and healthier, while also jibing with the needs and schedules of parents and school officials, according to a new study involving two dozen elementary and middle schools. The results also caution, however, that the benefits may depend on how often children actually participate. Physical activity among children in most of the developed world has been on a steep decline for decades. National exercise guidelines in the United States recommend that children and adolescents engage in at least an hour of exercise every day. But by most estimates, barely 20 percent of young people are that active, and many scarcely exercise at all. Meanwhile, rates of obesity among children as young as 2 hover at around 17 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Understandably, many concerned experts have suggested a variety of physical activity interventions, from more sports programs to the use of "active" video games that allow children to move without relinquishing their screens and joysticks. But many of these initiatives are expensive, logistically complex, time consuming or otherwise impractical. So in 2009, a group of mothers in Massachusetts organized a simple, before school activity program in their local grade school. They opted for the before school start because they hoped to add to the total amount of time their kids spent moving and not displace existing physical education classes or after school sports. It also struck many of the working parents as convenient and, apparently, did not lead to bitter complaints from their children about early rising times. The original one hour sessions consisted of a warm up, running, calisthenics and rousing group games like tag, led by parent volunteers. The workouts proved to be so popular that other parents began asking if they could start a similar program at their children's schools Today, the program has gained a formal curriculum, a name and acronym, Build Our Kids' Success (BOKS), along with corporate underwriting from the shoe manufacturer Reebok. (The similarity of the nomenclature is intentional.) It also has become one of the world's most widely disseminated, free, school based exercise programs. According to a BOKS spokeswoman, it is used at more than 3,000 schools worldwide. But popularity is no guarantee of efficacy. So researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, some of whom have children enrolled in a BOKS program, began to wonder about the measurable impacts of the exercise. They also were aware that a number of school districts in Massachusetts had plans to allow BOKS at their elementary and middle schools during the 2015 or 2016 school years and, for the new study, which was published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, asked if they could piggyback their research onto the start of those programs. Principals at 24 schools agreed. The schools included students from a broad spectrum of incomes. The researchers then asked those families planning to participate in BOKS, which is always voluntary, if they and their children would join a study. Several hundred students in kindergarten through eighth grade and their parents consented. Other children, who would not be joining the exercise program, agreed to serve as a control group. The researchers measured everyone's heights, weights, body mass indexes and, through brief psychological surveys, general happiness, vigor and other signs of well being. For 12 weeks, the students then played and ran during before school exercise. At some schools, the program was offered three times a week, at others twice. Afterward, the researchers returned and repeated the testing. At this point, those students who had exercised before school three times per week had almost all improved their B.M.I.s and fewer qualified as obese. (Many had gained weight as children should while they are growing.) They also reported feeling deeper social connections to their friends and school and a greater happiness and satisfaction with life. Those students who had exercised twice a week also said they felt happier and more energetic. But the researchers found no reductions in their body mass. The students in the control group had the same B.M.I.s or higher and had no changes to their feelings of well being. The upshot is that a one hour, before school exercise program does seem likely to improve young people's health and happiness, says Dr. Elsie Taveras, a professor at Harvard and head of general pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who oversaw the study and whose children have participated in BOKS. (The experiment was partially funded by the Reebok Foundation, as well as the National Institutes of Health and other sources. None of the funders had control of the design or results, Dr. Taveras says.) But the benefits are most noticeable if children exercise "at least three times a week," she says. This study was short term, though, and looked only at a few, narrow physical and emotional impacts. Dr. Taveras and her colleagues hope soon to track the program's impacts, if any, on academics and on aerobic fitness. Perhaps most important, the study was not randomized. It involved self selected students and families who chose to join. The results, in theory, would apply only to the kinds of children who will get up early and run and hop and skip and squeal for an hour before school. But, Dr. Taveras says, those should be all children. "In my experience as a pediatrician and parent, kids naturally love to move," she says. "They revel in it. We have socialized that love out of them." She believes that programs such as the one in this study might help to re instill some of our children's instinctual pleasure in motion, she says. "I've watched" sessions, she says. "You can see the kids light up with joy."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Donald Trump is who he is as a politician because of his unapologetically racial vision of the American nation. Trump's America is white, and he sees his job as protecting that whiteness from black and brown people who might come to the country or claim greater status within it. That's what it meant to "make America great again." And he's delivered, using the power of the office and the force of the state to attack and stigmatize black and brown people, from outspoken celebrities to ordinary immigrants. If that's our lens for understanding Trump if the heart of his movement and ideology is racial control then it appears we finally have a Democratic equivalent, a figure who works on the same signal albeit at a different frequency. It's Michael Bloomberg, the other New York billionaire in American politics, who is currently campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. There are clear objections to thinking of Bloomberg this way. He may have been a Republican, but he's also a liberal. He has given hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal causes and Democratic politicians. He spent more than 100 million helping Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in 2018. He's also given tens of millions of dollars to environmental groups and spent millions more lobbying for new gun control laws. He's given to Democratic super PACs and voting rights groups, individual politicians and the Democratic National Committee itself. And while he is an imperious personality with a disdain for limits he got the rules changed so he could serve a third term as mayor of New York he also doesn't share the president's criminality, corruption and complete contempt for constitutional government. But he does share one important quality. Although he never articulated it in these terms, Bloomberg's actions as mayor reveal that he was someone who also saw black and brown people as threats to the security and prosperity of his territory, New York. And under his administration, the city became a quasi authoritarian state for many of its black, brown and Muslim residents. Bloomberg, as many before me have explored in detail, expanded the New York Police Department's use of "stop and frisk," a tactic that empowered police officers to stop, search and interrogate residents on the sole basis of "reasonable suspicion." Overall, between 2004 and 2012, the NYPD which Bloomberg once called his "own army" while also weirdly claiming that it was the "seventh biggest army in the world" stopped 4.4 million New York residents. The vast majority, more than 80 percent, were black and brown people, especially young men and boys. In 2011, according to a contemporaneous report by the New York Civil Liberties Union, police stopped more young black men than the total number living in the city. "By the time I was 15 to 18, I'd say I was stopped, questioned and frisked at least 60 to 70 times," Tyquan Brehon, a young Brooklyn resident, said in a 2012 interview with The New York Times. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Bloomberg had no time for this criticism. "If we stopped people based on census numbers, we would stop many fewer criminals, recover many fewer weapons and allow many more violent crimes to take place," he said in 2012. He said as much again in 2015 at an Aspen Institute event. "Ninety five percent of your murders murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That's true in New York, that's true in virtually every city." He continued: "People say, 'Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana who are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that's true. Why'd we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. And the way you should get the guns out of the kids' hands is throw them against the wall and frisk them." Bloomberg was wrong about the efficacy of stop and frisk. According to a 2013 report from the public advocate's office (then run by the current mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio), stopping a black New Yorker was half as likely to yield a weapon as stopping a white New Yorker, and one third as likely to yield drugs and other contraband. The reason was simple. A disproportionate number of those convicted of violent crime may have been young men of color, but the vast majority of young men of color weren't involved in violent crime or any crime at all. Stopping someone on the basis of race was a recipe for false positives; stopping on the basis of actual suspicious behavior, on the other hand, would yield results, which is what happened when police stopped white residents. But Bloomberg didn't care to get it right. He believed that to stop crime he had to control the city's black and brown people. And that's what he did, without apology or remorse, until it was politically necessary to express regret. Muslims received similar treatment. Under Bloomberg, the NYPD spied on and surveilled New York Muslims, using both informants and undercover agents to gather information from inside mosques and restaurants, neighborhoods and social groups. Police tracked students, photographed worshipers and used census data to map the geography of Muslim life in the city. It was, like stop and frisk, a flagrant violation of civil liberties even if it was technically legal. And Bloomberg was equally unapologetic. "We have to keep this country safe," he said, addressing questions about the program after it was uncovered by The Associated Press. Bloomberg has apologized for stop and frisk (although not for spying on New York's Muslim communities). However, there's no indication that he has really changed; no evidence that he's dropped the commitment to racial control. But even if he has, liberals outraged at Trump's racism should feel similar anger toward Bloomberg's record in New York. They should be appalled by a man who, when he was entrusted with the power of the state, used it to terrorize innocent people on the basis of race and religion. And in the same way that liberals fear for the future of democracy under four more years of Trump, they should fear for the implications of giving four years, period, to Bloomberg. Given his record, he's someone who might try to consolidate Trumpism moderating its hostilities into less disruptive form rather than reject it wholesale. Yes, Bloomberg might be the one to beat Trump at the ballot box. But he's also the one who might put a Trumpist stamp on American liberalism.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Making and hearing music in public is inherently social, and the mysterious alchemy of a live show of sharing the same vibrating air can't be replicated at home. Empty rooms. Empty stages. Empty seats. Empty dance floors. And not far away, empty lobbies, empty dressing rooms, empty back rooms, empty bar areas, empty kitchens, empty lounges, empty sound booths, empty loading zones. These were places animated by live music, with entire backstage workdays dedicated to presenting just a few hours of intangible sound gigs, shows, concerts for the audiences that gathered there, often with great anticipation and at significant cost. I already miss them dearly. Concerts have been shut down by the Covid 19 pandemic; schedules and calendars, at least in the short run and possibly for much longer, are empty too. As a longtime music critic, that makes my nights empty, as well. I've been going to concerts constantly since the 1970s, two or three a week and often more. The chance to do so was one of my first and most blatant incentives for finding my job. From cramped basement clubs to wide open festival fields, concerts have always meant unknown possibilities. The coronavirus shutdown doesn't make me feel sorry for myself in any way. All compassion belongs with the musicians who were geared up for spring tours, with the roadies, drivers, and sound and light crews who were to work for them, and the box office staff, tech teams, security, bartenders, cleaners and everyone else who makes venues run smoothly, night after night. The shutdown has an immediate and brutal effect on all of their livelihoods, making this a good time, at the very least, to visit favorite musicians' Bandcamp sites (or their other direct revenue sources) and buy something. It's far more supportive than the hundredths of a cent they'd receive for an individual stream of a song. Meanwhile, with those empty nights, the shutdown has redoubled my appreciation for the mysterious alchemy that happens at so many concerts. It's really, when you step back, a very peculiar human activity. Strangers with perhaps a few familiar faces dotted among them gather at an appointed time to watch and hear musicians doing their job. But it's more than a job; it's a ritual, a confluence of visible and invisible forces, acoustic and social and psychological. Heads may bob, toes may tap, singalongs may be joined, dancing may break out. A roomful of individual reactions somehow adds up to a collective one, which might crest into a spontaneous ovation or a mesmerized gasp. Even with a seated, decorous audience, music can summon a certain quality of heightened collective awareness that I've only experienced at a live performance. A concert also presents an increasingly rare opportunity to focus attention on a unique event as it unfolds in real time. There's a chance to let an extended, unpredictable arc of sound, light and information envelop me, with no capability to pause or rewind, no temptation to multitask. Emerging from a spectacular concert which might be as subtle as a jazz set or as walloping as a D.J. set there's a shared buzz in the audience, an ecstatic memory. It's not a sensation I've ever gotten from a live stream of a show, or a group playback of a recording through a state of the art sound system or, as I and so many people will be doing in the coming weeks or months, from listening at home with headphones. Those modes of listening do have their advantages. With a live streamed concert, no one's going to step on my toes or spill a beer on my head. And compared to the sound in most clubs and theaters, not to mention arenas, there are far more details to be heard from a high fidelity studio recording. But the musicians aren't in the room, making an immediate physical effort and sharing the same vibrating air with listeners. When it's reproduced instead of produced on the spot, the music feels more distant, more detached. Somehow it makes a difference that my presence, even as the most minuscule fraction of any live event, doesn't register. The physicality of concerts isn't always pleasant, especially when things get packed. I'm not exactly delighted by chatterboxes, elbowers, drunks and selfie takers (who at times can all be the same person). I've never understood why so many people would rather take a shaky, distorted cellphone video they'll never watch rather than letting a performance transport them. Give me a crowd of polite, sensitive shushers any time. But it does seem a certain percentage of jerks are part of the alchemy. Making and hearing music in public is inherently social. Every ensemble has to work out its own group dynamic: brainstorming and consensus? Cooperative with diverse duties? Boss and employees? Rotating leadership? The countless variations in between? And even a solo act has to imagine an observer, to consider what will best reach a listener who may well be hearing the music for the first and possibly last time. For nearly the entire audience, a concert will be the only live experience of the performer for some time; it can sour someone on an act forever or spawn eager word of mouth. Meanwhile, musicians like all other live performers learn constantly and almost subliminally from their audiences. At a concert there is a wordless but intense feedback loop between players and listeners. Even after the most thorough rehearsals, timings and emphases can change in a charged moment onstage. A crowd's reactions can instruct musicians on how to improve the next performance, and the next. More than a scripted theater work or a choreographed dance performance, live music can make quick changes from night to night: shuffle the set list, stretch out that guitar solo, get rid of that busy lighting, never use that bit of banter again. Each concert is the intersection of a career arc with a single night out for the audience members, and the immediate pleasure (or impatience) of each night's crowd adds up to lasting lessons for musicians. (That's why it's so difficult for many musicians who have made their hits entirely in a studio to work up a stage presence when they suddenly find themselves selling out big rooms; they haven't done the apprenticeship.) Unlike Broadway troupers or dancers, who are also suffering from the shutdown of live performances, musicians isolated by social distancing do have other artistic outlets besides concerts (although touring is what supports the vast majority of musicians who are not racking up tens of millions of streams). They can write and record music at home, and they can collaborate via file transfers or high speed hookups; some, no doubt, will find that a break from the road and a chance to look inward will enrich their music. More and more musicians are already performing (with or without a paycheck) via live streams, where they may not hear any applause but can at least enjoy a congratulatory text, or a stream of appreciative hearts in the corner of a screen. But it's not the same. There's no promise of serendipity, of the full body massage of a room size subwoofer, of the I was there sensation of a great concert. For that, those empty rooms will have to open up again. When they do, I may not even care about a spilled beer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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LONDON Asil Nadir, the disgraced Turkish Cypriot businessman whose Levantine panache and deal making zeal rattled Britain's stodgy corporate establishment in the 1980s, returned here Thursday to face charges that he embezzled PS30 million while running the London based conglomerate Polly Peck International. A stock market darling for much of the 1980s, Polly Peck, with its phenomenal growth, symbolized the boom time swagger of Margaret Thatcher's Britain with Mr. Nadir, who rose from being a newspaper delivery boy in northern Cyprus to become one of Britain's richest men in 1990 as well as a large donor to the Conservative Party, as Polly Peck's tabloid ready personification. But, just as Thatcherism began to fade in the late 1980s, so did Polly Peck's debt fueled ascent. In 1990, the Serious Fraud Office accused Mr. Nadir of 66 counts of fraud and accounting irregularities, throwing Polly Peck once among the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange into bankruptcy and sending a defiant Mr. Nadir, following a brief stop in prison, off into a lush exile in northern Cyprus in 1993. Since then, Mr. Nadir regularly declared his innocence but had not, until now, returned to Britain. In a court case last month, however, the 69 year old Mr. Nadir was granted bail by a British judge. He will stand trial to answer to the original claims in an effort, he says, to finally clear his name. Mr. Nadir flew Thursday in a privately chartered plane from northern Cyprus accompanied by his lawyers, a television crew and his 26 year old wife, Nur via Turkey to Luton Airport north of London. The plane had to travel through Turkey because it is the sole country to recognize the northern government. He was met at the airport by the British immigration authorities and surrendered his passport. In accordance with his bail agreement, he will be fitted with an electronic security device. As he pushed his way through a scrum of shouting reporters in front of his house in Mayfair that he is said to be renting for PS20,000, or 31,000 a month, Mr. Nadir was quick to declare his willingness to take up his case in court. "I am delighted to be here," he said. "I am innocent. Why do you think that I am here voluntarily?" All of this has caught the fraud office off guard. The voluminous files of the case have been archived, most of those who worked on the case have left or retired, and it is unclear how many witnesses are in a position to testify against Mr. Nadir. To a certain degree, Mr. Nadir's emergence in Britain in the 1980s social, political and financial prefigured today's rise to prominence of the oligarch, albeit on a much smaller scale. Like today's billionaires from the former Soviet Union, Mr. Nadir loved his finery posh houses, private planes, his antique laden office in fashionable Berkeley Square and took pleasure in plopping his uninvited self in the midst of Britain's upper classes by sending his sons to Eton College and sponsoring polo matches with members of the royal family in attendance. Even so, despite embracing his adopted homeland, Mr. Nadir always made it clear that his heart remained with Turkey where he had many investments as well as a friendship with Turgut Ozal, the country's powerful prime minister at the time. So when the tabloids sang out that he had reached his "nadir," he would say, "I know that in English the nadir is the lowest point, but in Turkish it means rare and Asil means noble. So I am delighted to have the name. My Turkish name is what counts." Mr. Nadir and his family came in the 1970s from northern Cyprus to Britain, where he set up a small clothing company in East London. He caught a big break several years later when, following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and the island's subsequent division, he set up a flourishing fruit packaging business that became his main corporate vehicle for a decade of deals and mergers. With his appetite for deals and his outsize presence, Mr. Nadir came across as part Sanford I. Weill, the man who cobbled together Citigroup, and part Donald Trump, the real estate mogul. Not surprisingly, the tabloids loved to follow him. Even now, interest in Mr. Nadir has not dimmed, and television channels in Britain interrupted their programming Thursday to breathlessly record each incremental development. For a time, Polly Peck was good news for investors, too, with its shares rising more than 10 times during the decade before it ultimately collapsed. Its failure shocked many in the City of London and also rocked the governing Conservative Party, where Mr. Nadir, who donated more than PS400,000 to the party, found considerable support. The Tory minister Michael Mates was forced to resign after it was disclosed that he had given Mr. Nadir a wristwatch with the inscription, "Don't let the buggers get you down." Since his escape to northern Cyprus in 1993, Mr. Nadir has lived a quiet and private existence, very much removed from his time as a business celebrity in London. He owns the largest newspaper in northern Cyprus but, perhaps surprisingly, given his past appetites and ambition, has kept out of the limelight. But with four children in England as well as a new wife, whom he married when she was 21, the lure of traveling the world again outside of the occasional trip to Turkey apparently became too much to pass up. "He is a chancer and I think he has convinced himself that he was hard done by," said Andrew Finkel, a journalist based in Turkey who covered Mr. Nadir during his prime. "And these cases are difficult to prove especially 20 years on."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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Metropolitan. Maritime. Mystical. Those are the three faces of France's rugged northwest corner, where Arthurian legends, stone circles and Celtic traditions suffuse the forests and fishing villages. Now they are closer than ever, thanks to the two year old LGV train line, which links Paris to the regional capital of Rennes in just 90 minutes. On arrival, you step into an attractive university city of riverside promenades, grand stone squares and historical townhouses with one of France's largest produce markets (which feeds a copious restaurant scene), along with a dense concentration of bars. A bit north, the walled town of St. Malo enchants with its storybook streets and ramparts (destroyed in World War II and rebuilt), sea swept rocky shoreline and proximity to France's most mystical spot of all: the island of Mont St. Michel. A Lancelot beer (5 euros or about 5.60) at a tree shaded outdoor table at the Ty Anna Tavern, a portrait of log beamed quaintness, is a fine introduction to two Brittany institutions: beer and half timbered houses. Continue your architectural tour at Place du Champ Jacquet, where a row of Renaissance houses narrow and crooked sag and lean against each other like Shakespearean drunks, and then to rue Saint Guillaume's Ti Koz, a 1505 masterwork of blazing red beams and carved human figures. End in rue du Chapitre, a stone paved street with multiple stunning old edifices (especially numbers 18 to 22) that now house art galleries, architecture offices and chic boutiques. For cool Gallic goods, Made in Frogs sells everything from scented candles to bow ties. The number of Michelin stars in Rennes has tripled from one to three since 2017, and the credit resides with two upstart restaurants along the otherwise nondescript strip known as rue de l'Arsenal. A dark, angular bachelor pad space with Asian tinged cuisine, IMA landed its culinary prize in 2018. Nearby Racines, which gained its star this year is run by the chef Virginie Giboire and is bright, white, plant filled and cozy. A summer visit found a menu that included thick slices of red tuna with sea salt, accompanied by crunchy diced asparagus and mild green estragon sorbet a study in freshness and textures followed by a disc of shredded lamb with a chickpea froth as light as shaving cream (and certainly more tasty). Dessert was a trip to the tropics, courtesy of sweet sour passion fruit and coconut cream on a financier, a small, moist rectangular almond cake. A three course dinner was 55 euros. Many of the nearly 70,000 college kids in Rennes pack the student dives and shot bars along rue Saint Michel. In other words, avoid this strip. Luckily, you can plunge into Rennes night life (and drinks) in classier venues. You half expect to glimpse Sir Terence Conran sipping a barrel aged Negroni (12 euros) at a white marble table or along a plush turquoise banquette at Le Montfort, a chic liquor bar that takes a page from the British designer's playbook. The drinks menu is a veritable library of spirits and includes Eddu Silver (8 euros), a light and lively Breton whiskey. For hop heads, the canal side outdoor tables of Le Coin Mousse are a pleasant spot to sip some of the bar's hundreds of French beers, including a local Drao amber (3.70 euros). Some of the most powerful works in the Musee des Beaux Arts de Rennes are some of the most macabre. Witness "La Dame d'Antinoe," the mummy of a Roman era woman excavated in Egypt. Still visible on the textile wrap, her painted placid expression and "fear not" gesture carry emotion after nearly 2,000 years. So do the plaintive face and outstretched arm of the eponymous saint being burned alive in the Florentine Renaissance masterwork "Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence," by Mariotto di Nardo. Beasts also meet graphic ends, as in Rubens's massive, kinetic 1616 canvas "The Tiger Hunt" and in Veronese's 1580 huge rendering of Perseus slaying the sea monster. The 20th century works are a bit more cheerful, notably the playfully demented abstraction of Picasso's "Buste d'Homme au Chapeau" (1970). Admission: 6 euros. Even if your dietary restrictions include skinned rabbits and slimy cuttlefish, you will still find much to devour among the more than 300 vendors at the sprawling Marche des Lices, which has been operating since 1622. The street stalls sell mostly fruits, vegetables and flowers, while the two covered market halls lean more to prepared foods and meats. Indeed, potential picnic or train ride snacks abound in the north hall, including fresh breads and pastries (at Fagots et Froment), award winning dry sausages (Saucissons Leandre; 33 6 95 19 06 82) and all manner of cheeses, jams, ciders and wines. Between the two buildings, food trucks serve up dishes from around the globe chicken tikka, falafel, paella, couscous and Rennes's answer to the hot dog: a grilled sausage with caramelized onions and cheese, wrapped in a buckwheat pancake. Multiple daily trains make the 45 to 60 minute journey to St. Malo, a fairy tale town whose crenelated stone ramparts double as an elevated scenic walkway. Mount the stairs at the St. Vincent gate (next to Lion d'Or restaurant) and stroll clockwise. One side offers a shifting perspective from the elevated walkway of the town's Gothic style buildings and narrow cobbled streets, below, while the other side serves up a succession of expansive landscapes and seascapes: the marina, the long jetty, rocky outcroppings, tidal pools, golden beaches and the battlements of the Fort National, built under Louis XIV in 1689. Famous for its maritime explorers and privateers, St. Malo is even more stunning from the sea, and a sightseeing cruise by Compagnie Corsaire provides a 90 minute tour (21.50 euros) of the dramatic bay and coastline. Canadians will recognize the statuary form of the 16th century navigator Jacques Cartier (the first European to reach Quebec) atop a mound of sea ringed rock, while Brits (and others) can marvel at the gabled mansions and grand seaside hotels of nearby Dinard, once a popular resort for English royalty and celebrities. (The town even hosts the Festival of British Cinema in fall.) The winds surge and turn chilly as the boat heads into open water, where a scattering of tiny dark stone islands poke through the waves like crumbs spit up by the sea. If you're lucky, you might catch a glimpse of their occasional companions: the dolphins of the bay. The ocean's edible bounty receives expert and elegant treatment at Restaurant Gilles , a modern and minimalist room with muted colors. Plunge into the thick and buttery shrimp bisque, which gets nuance and texture from chopped vermicelli and roasted croutons. (Oysters from nearby Cancale sometimes turn up as appetizers as well.) Better still, the thick hake with tomato coulis on Riesling sauerkraut shows off the French talent for light sauces and wine infusions that throw meat and fish flavors into relief. For dessert, consider local apples, which are sliced, baked, ringed with apple cider caramel and used as the base for a mound of ice cream. A three course dinner is 33 euros per person. Sometimes you have to poke a hole in a guy's head to get him to act. That's what archangel Michael reputedly did to Bishop Aubert around 708 A.D., and the nudge paid off handsomely: The bishop laid the first stones of what would become, over the course of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a stunning homage to the angel and France's most spectacular religious structure, Mont St. Michel. Rising like a fantasy novel vision from the Atlantic, the circular granite island forms the base for the walled village, ramparts, gardens and at the summit Gothic abbey (admission, 10 euros), whose soaring stone halls and cloister offer stunning panoramas of the coastal flats and ocean below. From St. Malo, Keolis Armor offers daily round trip bus service (23 euros) in summer and reduced service in fall. The bus typically departs at 9:15 a.m. for the one hour journey and returns in late afternoon. Get there early to avoid the crowds, especially in the warmer months. Trips from Rennes are also available. For those about to rock, bring your guitars and set list to Le Magic Hall, a 19th century army barracks turned into a bewitching boutique hotel with its own soundproof rehearsal room for bands. The 19 rooms are dedicated to music, dance, theater and cinema, while the Bohemian chic lobby is outfitted with vintage furniture, books and albums. Doubles in August from 75 euros. Opened last year, Le Grand Be is a big, splashy, four star addition to St Malo's historical walled center. Its 56 rooms are minimalist with touches of color, while the restaurant and bar feature an eclectic design showroom hodgepodge. Doubles from 139 euros. The area around Place St. Anne is a picturesque and central base with a nearby metro station. Airbnb.com lists studio apartments from 50 to 75 per night in late August. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Microsoft landed a major blow in its decades long battle with its video game industry rival Sony on Monday, announcing the 7.5 billion acquisition of a video game company that narrowed the gap between the two tech giants' offerings. By buying the game maker ZeniMax Media, the parent company of gaming studios like Bethesda, Microsoft gained control of major gaming titles like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. The deal allows Microsoft to counter criticism that it lags behind Sony in the quality of its games while deepening its game catalog seven weeks before both Microsoft and Sony release a new generation of gaming consoles. Gamers have long complained that Microsoft's Xbox consoles lacked the type of exclusive, high quality games that Sony promotes as a major selling point for its PlayStation consoles. For years, Sony owned more games studios than Microsoft. But last year, Microsoft passed Sony, owning 15 studios to Sony's 14. The deal announced on Monday increased Microsoft's lead to 23 game studios, and gives it control over some of the world's most popular franchises. Sony declined to comment on Microsoft's purchase. Microsoft did not say how many of its newly acquired games would be exclusive to the Xbox, but pointed to the remarks of Phil Spencer, the company's executive vice president of gaming, who said in an interview with Bloomberg that games would be available to other consoles on a "case by case basis."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Covering Ikea cabinets with custom doors can give an inexpensive kitchen a surprisingly high end look. This kitchen in Copenhagen was customized with Surface doors by Norm Architects for Reform. People often assume that getting a gorgeous kitchen like the ones they see in design magazines would require draining their bank account. And often, they're right: Building a custom kitchen with upscale materials and finishes can easily run into six figures. What they might not realize is that there are cost saving alternatives that can deliver a high end look for a fraction of the price. One of the most popular, employed by a number of architects and designers, is building a kitchen with Ikea cabinets and then covering those cabinets with custom doors, drawer fronts and panels from companies like Reform, Semihandmade and Kokeena. "Ikea makes a great box," said John McDonald, the founder and chief executive of Semihandmade, a company based in Monrovia, Calif. And inside its Sektion cabinets, he added, Ikea "uses the best hardware you can get." Nathan Cuttle, an interior designer who founded the New York based Studio Nato, has built numerous kitchens with Ikea cabinets and custom doors from Reform and Semihandmade. "We've done some tight budget projects," he said, "but still wanted them to be unique." For the kitchen of an average one bedroom apartment, "we're not going to spend 40,000 on the kitchen cabinets, because we don't have the budget," he continued. "We're going to spend maybe 1,500 to 2,000 on cabinets from Ikea and then have, say, 5,000 of custom fronts and panels." We asked designers and manufacturers to walk us through the process. The first step in creating a kitchen you love is figuring out exactly what you want by searching for inspiration in design books, magazines and online sources like Pinterest, Instagram and Houzz. Do you prefer upper cabinets or open shelves? Do you want an island? Do you like doors or drawers for the lower cabinets? Do you want custom panels to cover the dishwasher and refrigerator, to give them a built in look? Measure your kitchen floor and walls. Then begin designing the layout of your kitchen with Ikea's online kitchen planner. "You can put the dimensions of your kitchen into it and play with all the different configurations," said Whitney Menefee, a founder of Townsend Interiors, in Portland, Ore. "Even if you have no design experience at all, you can use that software to design your kitchen," she said, by selecting and placing cabinet boxes on a floor plan. It automatically generates a shopping list of parts. Ikea offers free design consultations online and in its stores. And firms like Inspired Kitchen Design will plan Ikea kitchens for a flat fee, using custom doors and details, if desired. "Forty three percent of the designs we do use custom doors," said Michael Toth, the owner of Inspired Kitchen Design, estimating that his firm designs more than 250 kitchens a month, for 295 each. Mr. Toth's team of designers plan a kitchen from start to finish, using custom "hacks," he said, like cutting an Ikea cabinet down to a smaller size or adding panels around an island, which can sometimes be difficult for homeowners to achieve on their own. Once you have a preliminary design and a style of door selected, share your plans with the custom door manufacturer. "We recommend the client gives us an Ikea drawing with the Ikea fronts and side panels on, because then we know exactly what is needed," said Jeppe Christensen, a founder and the chief executive of Reform. "We also tell them to include handles, so we can see where they want the doors hinged." Then the company produces a quote for custom doors, drawer fronts, panels and other elements as replacements, while confirming the details of the design. "There are always some small adjustments," Mr. Christensen said, so don't buy the Ikea components before making arrangements for the doors. "It's really important for us to make sure that there are no other requirements beyond what the drawing shows and there often are." That includes awkward corners and soffits that may need to be addressed. The company also produces filler strips and toe kicks that match the doors, to give the kitchen a perfectly finished look. Russell Edwards, the chief executive of Kokeena, noted that door manufacturers can make many other components, too. "We can make a custom box, like an open cabinet," he said, that matches the doors. "And floating shelves." When your kitchen design is finalized with the door manufacturer, it's time to order the parts. To ensure you have everything you need from Ikea, Mr. Christensen and Mr. Edwards recommended providing a complete kitchen design, with Ikea doors, drawer fronts and panels, to the retailer, and asking a sales associate to remove those finishing components from the order. And don't worry about insulting Ikea the company doesn't flinch at this sort of order. According to a statement emailed by Janice Simonsen, Ikea's senior public relations specialist in the United States: "While we encourage customers to create their own style with Ikea cabinets, we do believe they should be able to design a kitchen that expresses their own original style this is why we sell modular systems." Ikea usually has its cabinet components in stock, so they can be bought and brought home on the same day, or arrangements can be made for quick delivery. The custom door manufacturers, however, have a longer turnaround time, because the pieces are made to order. Semihandmade and Kokeena, for instance, typically ship doors in two to six weeks. Reform makes its doors in Europe, so the lead time is typically 10 to 14 weeks, delivered. (Depending on your renovation schedule, you may want to order the custom doors long before you intend to tear out your old kitchen and buy the Ikea components.) Ikea kitchens are based on a modular system that can be assembled and installed by a homeowner who is handy with tools, and putting on doors and drawer fronts is one of the most straightforward parts of the process. Whether the doors are from Ikea or a custom manufacturer, they come predrilled for hinges and screws. "You can build it yourself," Ms. Menefee said. "I installed all the doors in my kitchen. Building the Ikea kitchen is the difficult part, but not impossible. It just requires patience." For those who don't have the skill or inclination to build their own kitchens, there are plenty of options for finding a contractor who can do the work. Ikea works with Traemand, a company in which it has an ownership stake, to offer an installation service to buyers. Choosing something different can add to a kitchen's custom look, and there is no shortage of choice, from natural stone like marble and granite to stainless steel. For one Brooklyn kitchen, Studio Nato splurged on counters and a backsplash made from basalt. "We just used a local countertop fabricator to come in and template the kitchen and then do the install," Mr. Cuttle said, after the cabinets were in place. The resulting look? "Super upscale," he said. No one would ever know that inexpensive cabinets were hidden underneath. 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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WASHINGTON It's funny that Donald Trump doesn't like a movie about con artists who invade an elegant house and wreak chaos. He should empathize with parasites. No doubt the president is a movie buff. He has been known to call advisers in the wee hours to plan movie nights at the White House for films he wants to see, like "Joker." And, in an early sign of his affinity for tyrants, he told Playboy in 1990 that his role model was Louis B. Mayer running MGM in the '30s. Trump interrupted his usual rally rant Thursday night to bash the Oscars, saying: "And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year?" He added: "Can we get 'Gone With the Wind' back, please? 'Sunset Boulevard.' So many great movies. The winner is from South Korea. I thought it was best foreign film, right? Best foreign movie. No. Did this ever happen before? And then you have Brad Pitt. I was never a big fan of his. He got upset. A little wise guy statement. A little wise guy. He's a little wise guy." (When he accepted his Oscar, Pitt complained that the Senate did not let John Bolton testify.) Our president is nostalgic for a movie romanticizing slavery and a movie about an aging diva swanning maniacally around a mansion, living in a vanished past. (I am big. It's the party that got small.) Trump's xenophobic movie criticism, combined with his mocking pronunciation of the name "Buttigieg," harked back to the days when George H.W. Bush ran in 1988 wrapped in the flag, saying he was on "the American side," while his celebrity endorser Loretta Lynn complained that she couldn't even pronounce the name Dukakis. Too foreign sounding. It also echoed a segment on Laura Ingraham's show, in which it was suggested that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an American war hero who immigrated from Ukraine, might be guilty of espionage. And in his Vegas rally on Friday, Trump was again calling his predecessor "Barack Hussein Obama." This was another bad, crazy week trapped in Trump's psychopathology. No sooner was the president acquitted than he put scare quotes around the words justice and Justice Department and sought to rewrite the narrative of the Mueller report, whose author warned that Russia was going to try to meddle in the U.S. election again. Philip Rucker wrote in The Washington Post: "As his re election campaign intensifies, Trump is using the powers of his office to manipulate the facts and settle the score. Advisers say the president is determined to protect his associates ensnared in the expansive Russia investigation, punish the prosecutors and investigators he believes betrayed him, and convince the public that the probe was exactly as he sees it: an illegal witch hunt." Trump, who moved from a Fifth Avenue penthouse to the White House, is sinking deeper into his poor little me complex, convinced that he is being persecuted. His darker sense of grievance converges with a neon grandiosity. Trump is totally uncontrolled now. Most presidents worry about the seaminess of pardons and wait until the end. Trump is going full throttle on pardoning his pals and pals of his pals in an election year. The Republicans have shown they are too scared to stop him and won't. The Democrats want to stop him but can't. (Although if they win the Senate back, Democrats will probably end up impeaching him again and this time have plenty of witnesses.) Now, in a frightening new twist, the president is angry at his own intelligence team for trying to protect the national interest. He would rather hide actual intelligence from Congress than have Adam Schiff know something that Trump thinks would make him look bad politically. As The Times reported, the president's intelligence officials warned House lawmakers in a briefing that Russia was once more intent on trespassing on our election to help Trump, intent on interfering in both the Democratic primaries and the general. (They also told Bernie Sanders that the Russians were trying to help his campaign.) News of the House briefing caused another Vesuvian eruption from the mercurial president, who is hypersensitive to any suggestion that he isn't winning all on his own.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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On Monday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released the fourth of its annual Goalkeeper reports, which track the slow but steady progress the world has made toward more than a dozen health related goals set forth by the United Nations in 2015. This year's was unrelentingly grim. The coronavirus pandemic has scorched away years of work: More families are in dire poverty, malnutrition is increasing, far fewer children are getting immunized. The assessment comes as the United States, stung harder by the virus than any other country, is retreating from the global health stage and seems focused primarily on saving itself. Could it ever return to its role as the world's leader in both competence and generosity? In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gates devoted a half hour to explaining why he was optimistic that it would. "It's my disposition," he said. "Plus, I've got to call these people up and make the pitch to them that this really makes sense and I totally, totally believe it makes sense." By "these people," he was referring to leading figures in the White House and Congress, whom he has personally lobbied to do "this": namely, add an extra 4 billion to the fiscal stimulus package now under debate in Congress so that poor countries can get Covid 19 vaccines. Ultimately his goal is far more ambitious: to double American foreign aid from less than 0.25 percent of gross domestic product to 0.5 percent or more. He sees the pandemic as an opportunity to do that. "As they say," he added cheerily, "the U.S. government after it's tried every other thing does the right thing." As he did in Silicon Valley while battling competitors and antitrust regulators, Mr. Gates can calculate his chances of success with a ruthless logic. That has rarely been as true as it is now, as a once in a century pandemic devastates the impoverished countries where he focuses his giving. The damage has been wrought less by the virus so far it has killed much smaller percentages of the populations of Asia and Africa than of the Americas and Western Europe than by the economic impact, which has been far greater in countries where people and governments "have no spare reserves to draw on," Mr. Gates said. The collapse of tourism, declines in remittances from relatives working abroad, the shutdown of ports, mines and oil wells, school closings and new stresses on fragile health care systems have all created enormous suffering. Not since 1870 have so many countries been in recession at once, according to the Goalkeeper report. Between 1990 and 2020, the percentage of the world's population living in extreme poverty, which is now defined as living on less than 2 a day, shrank to less than 7 percent from 37 percent. In just the past few months, 37 million people have fallen back below the line, the report estimated. "The longer the pandemic lasts, the worse its economic scars will be," it added. The percentage of the world's children who received all the vaccines recommended by the World Health Organization rose last year to a record high of 84 percent. That figure has now dropped to 70 percent back where it was 25 years ago. Deaths from malaria, malnutrition, childbirth complications and diseases like measles and diphtheria have begun to increase. Nonetheless, Mr. Gates was optimistic that the lost ground would be recovered "in two to three years." The pipelines of money from tourism, remittances, World Bank loans and other sources would begin flowing again as soon as the whole world was vaccinated, ending the pandemic; he expected that to be accomplished by sometime in 2022. Until then, however, there will be a period of intense pain and even greater inequity between rich countries and poor ones. One of the starkest conclusions in the foundation's report is that nearly twice as many deaths could be prevented if Covid 19 vaccines were distributed to all countries based on their populations rather than to the 50 richest countries first. That will not happen soon, Mr. Gates conceded. The Trump administration has publicly refused to join the international collaborative agreement known as Covax, under which the World Health Organization; GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations have joined forces to make sure both rich and poor countries receive new coronavirus vaccines simultaneously. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Instead, Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's unilateral effort to fast track vaccine development, has paid out 11 billion to six vaccine companies in return for ensuring that at least 100 million doses from each company, and options for millions more, are exclusively earmarked for the United States. Although that position "looks selfish," Mr. Gates said, he did not feel it was unjustified. Realistically, he said, "You're not going to succeed in getting the U.S. to treat itself as just a random 5 percent of the world's population." American taxpayers, he noted, have paid two thirds of the costs of the clinical trials and of manufacturing doses even before the trials end. Absent that money, the only available vaccines would be those from Russia or China, which Mr. Gates considered untested and potentially weak. "You can't call up Johnson Johnson or AstraZeneca and say, 'Hey, here's a chance to lose 500 million." If just three of the several vaccines that the United States is backing succeed, he said, the country would have more doses than it could use, and the rest could be shared with the world. Also, Mr. Gates said he expected that by early next year, regardless of who wins the presidential election, the United States would come around to paying much of the estimated 4 billion needed to get vaccines to all the world's poor. He noted that Congress had repeatedly kept funds for AIDS, malaria and childhood vaccines in the foreign aid budget, despite numerous attempts by the White House over the past decade to slash those items; the programs are popular both with liberals and Christian conservatives. And doing so is in America's interest, Mr. Gates said. In a world dependent on tourism and business travel, no country is safe until every country is: "There's a better global argument for generosity on this one than there is for H.I.V. or malaria." Mr. Gates has lobbied both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, to put the 4 billion for vaccines in the deadlocked stimulus bill and said he was "60 to 70 percent confident" that the item would survive the negotiations. Congressional leaders "have a sense that the U.S. has a moral presence in the world," he said. And the payoff on that investment "will be in the trillions." But his ultimate ambitions are far greater. Once the coronavirus threat is gone, he said, "we should go after the modest U.S. foreign aid budget and try to get it to double." Surveys consistently show that Americans are aware that the United States is the world's largest donor of foreign aid. But when asked to estimate what percentage of the nation's gross domestic product goes toward to foreign aid, the typical guess is 5 percent. In fact, the real figure is less than 0.25 percent. By that measure, Britain and Germany spend almost three times as much, and Sweden and Norway are four times as generous, spending a full 1 percent of G.D.P. This pandemic offers a chance for the United States to step up, Mr. Gates said. The last such opportunity came in the 1980s and '90s, with AIDS; the disease hit the United States so hard that many Americans developed some sympathy for its victims. In 2003 George W. Bush capitalized on that feeling and poured 15 billion into the President's Plan for AIDS Relief and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which sought to combat those diseases in Africa and elsewhere. Now that Americans better understand the threats posed by emerging viruses Mr. Gates warned about them in a TED Talk in 2015 they might be willing to pay more to head them off, he said. Doing so would be cost effective. "In the health field, we really do know how to spend money and have impact," he said. "We've learned a lot in the last 20 years." Two decades of distributing AIDS drugs, polio vaccines, diagnostic kits and other goods has put in place a medical infrastructure corps of doctors, nurses, community health workers, laboratories, pharmacies, emergency operations centers that with minimal new spending and training can be shifted to fighting other diseases. Mr. Gates said that he sometimes felt "kind of lonely" visiting congressional leaders to espouse foreign aid. But he has succeeded in persuading even some rigid fiscal conservatives by employing two tactics often used by advocacy groups that receive grants from the Gates Foundation. One is having retired generals from the Global Leadership Coalition explain to members of Congress how pennies spent on humanitarian aid can save billions of dollars that might be needed later to defeat militant movements that thrive when countries are starving. The other is sending members of Congress and their spouses to Africa. Nothing shows how effective foreign aid can be, he said "than having a senator sit and listen to a woman say that, as soon as her crops are more productive, she'll be able to pay the school fees for her kid." Also, he added, those senators may calculate that it is smarter to encourage small countries "to have strategic relationships with us versus, say, China." Journalists, in turn, help "put a human face on the story." (The foundation does not underwrite reporting by The Times, but it does pay for global health coverage by many other outlets.) Ultimately, he said, if this pandemic produces "an administration and a Congress that are more open minded, you could really do a grass roots thing." "You can get everybody who's a doctor, everybody who was ever in the Peace Corps, everybody who was touched by H.I.V., everybody who's been touched by this pandemic, and pull them together to say, 'Hey, maybe the U.S. aid budget should be 1 percent or even 2 percent of the government budget, versus what it is right now,'" he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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DANCE NOW FESTIVAL at Joe's Pub (Sept. 4 7, 7 p.m.). For decades, this post Labor Day sampler platter has ushered in the busy fall season with sweet and savory snippets of dance. Over four consecutive nights, 40 local artists will face the festival's challenge to present a "clear and complete artistic statement" in five minutes or less on the postage stamp size stage at Joe's Pub. Participants range from veterans like Gus Solomons Jr. to young innovators like Caleb Teicher to under the radar artists like Satoshi Haga and Rie Fukuzawa, performing as binbinFactory. After this week's competition, producers will select the 10 they feel did the best, and those dancers will then return for an encore on Sept. 26, when an overall winner will be chosen. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'ELLINGTON PERFORMANCE SERIES' at Birdland (Sept. 1, 5:30 p.m.). Hosted by the American Tap Dance Foundation and the Duke Ellington Center for the Arts, this series of performances puts the music of the jazz great Duke Ellington in a dialogue with dance. This chapter, called "Sacred Sunday, the Gospel According to Ellington," features music from "My People," Ellington's 1963 revue about African American history, and "A Concert of Sacred Music," an album culled from performances in 1965 at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The Sacred Sunday Band and Gospel Choir, led by the musical director Anthony Evans, provides the music, accompanied by the vocalist Jeannine Otis and the tap dancer DeWitt Fleming Jr. 212 581 3080, birdlandjazz.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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In recent months, Roger E. Ailes's influence seemed to be everywhere in the news. Fox News, the cable network he founded, has served as the preferred outlet for the president of the United States. At the same time, the sexual harassment scandal that led to Mr. Ailes's ouster in July continued to besiege the network, most notably with the dismissal of Bill O'Reilly, and ignited conversations about workplace culture across the country. And yet the man himself had largely faded from the public eye. Late last year, he moved to a 36 million waterfront mansion in Palm Beach just five miles from President Trump's Mar a Lago estate and all but disappeared from the political, media and social circles where he once reigned. "Recently, he has really done very, very little," said Robert L. Dilenschneider, a public relations executive who was close with Mr. Ailes. "He spent time with his wife and son." Mr. Dilenschneider said he last talked with Mr. Ailes by phone about a month ago. During the conversation, Mr. Dilenschneider said, Mr. Ailes was "very positive and upbeat," discussing current events and his collection of presidential memorabilia. "At the end of the day, he was a patriot," Mr. Dilenschneider said. Mr. Ailes, who died Thursday at 77, built Fox News into the most profitable and most politically influential cable news network. But the sexual harassment allegations made against him which Mr. Ailes vehemently denied resulted in his spending his final months absent from the political and public arenas. Everything changed for Mr. Ailes on July 6, when Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment. Mr. Ailes fought back, calling her allegations "wholly without merit." A group of Fox News's biggest stars came to his defense, including Mr. O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume and Kimberly Guilfoyle. "This is a man who champions women," Ms. Guilfoyle said. But the parent company of Fox News, 21st Century Fox, did not rally behind Mr. Ailes. The company, which is controlled by the Murdoch family, initiated an internal review of Ms. Carlson's charges, and at least 10 women came forward with stories of inappropriate conduct by Mr. Ailes. On July 21, Rupert Murdoch stood in front of Fox News employees and announced that Mr. Ailes was out as chairman and chief executive. Mr. Ailes left the network with about 40 million, essentially the remainder of an employment contract that ran through 2018. As part of the agreement, Mr. Ailes was barred from starting a competitor to Fox News. In the days that followed, Mr. Ailes was spotted dining with his wife at Michael's, a Midtown Manhattan spot frequented by top media executives. One person who saw Mr. Ailes at the restaurant said that he had held his head high and that his walk to the door was as deliberate as his choice of venue. The next week, Mr. Ailes was seen at a New Jersey diner, eating bacon and eggs and drinking what appeared to be a vanilla milkshake. Mr. Ailes was ultimately frustrated by Mr. Trump's distracted style and refusal to listen to certain mechanical basics. He ended up regaling attendees at debate prep sessions in Bedminster, N.J., with war stories from past campaigns and venting his frustrations about the New York magazine reporter Gabriel Sherman, his critical biographer, people with direct knowledge of the discussions 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. Mr. Ailes did not attend most of the later sessions, which were held at Trump Tower. And when Mr. Trump became president, the two men rarely spoke Mr. Ailes told friends that he believed that Mr. Murdoch had waved Mr. Trump away from communicating with him. At Fox News, Mr. Ailes's ouster exposed a culture where current and former employees have said they faced harassment and feared making complaints. After his dismissal, Mr. Ailes was named in multiple suits by current and former Fox News employees. "The sudden passing of Roger Ailes will make it difficult for Fox News to refute the allegations against him as his testimony was not secured by sworn testimony to date," said Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer who represents 21 current and former Fox News employees. As the scandal at Fox News grew, Mr. Ailes retreated. He bought the waterfront mansion in Palm Beach in September and tried to divest from several other properties in the following months. In December, his wife, Elizabeth Ailes, said she had sold a pair of newspapers in Putnam County, N.Y. In March, Mr. Ailes listed his Cresskill, N.J., home for 2.25 million, a price since reduced to 1.65 million. He was also selling property in upstate New York. The media columnist Michael Wolff wrote on Thursday that he had spoken with Mr. Ailes about a week ago. "The subject was Fox's quickly eroding fortunes and the possibilities for a new conservative network," Mr. Wolff wrote. "Roger, yet proscribed by the non compete provisions of his separation agreement, nevertheless had a plan in his head, and was taking calls. 'I can't call. But I can't stop people from calling me,' he said."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Olympian? Becoming the most decorated Winter Olympics athlete in history requires snow, fortitude, technique, squats, more squats, a team of dedicated physiologists, a stable body weight, running shoes, high intensity intervals, about 940 annual hours of exercise much of it conducted at a surprisingly light intensity and a willingness to substantially shake up training when it is no longer working well. Those are the findings of a new study published in Frontiers of Physiology that analyzed 17 years' worth of records about the workout routines of the Norwegian cross country ski racer Marit Bjorgen, who will turn 38 in March. Ms. Bjorgen won five medals at the Pyeongchang Games, making her the most winning athlete there, for a career total of 15 medals, eight of them gold. She also appears to have led a thoroughly examined life, keeping scrupulous, detailed diary entries about each of her workouts from the time she became a senior level athlete at age 20. Recently, she shared the entirety of these entries with scientists at Nord University in Bodo, Norway, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who already had been working with her on regular fitness testing and monitoring. In the past, these scientists had analyzed similar records from some of the top male cross country athletes in Norway. But much less was known about the routines and responses of accomplished female endurance athletes. So for the new study, which was published before the start of the Olympics, the scientists dove into the entries from Ms. Bjorgen. They also gathered and compared data about her competitive results over the course of 17 years. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. They were looking for patterns and lessons that might be of use for other cross country ski racers and also, potentially, anyone interested in high level endurance competition. What they found confirmed much of the currently accepted wisdom about how best to structure seasons long workout routines for endurance athletes. But in some respects, Ms. Bjorgen's training also confounded expectations about how young athletes progress and what human beings, including women, are capable of. The data for the study began in 2000, when Ms. Bjorgen was 20 and a newcomer to senior level racing. She already had accumulated medals and championships at the junior level, mostly in short, sprint distance events. Now, Ms. Bjorgen wished to start winning longer distance races as well. But her training at the time tended to skew short, at least by the standards of cross country skiing. According to her training diary, she was exercising for about 520 hours a year, with much of this time spent in strenuous but brief sessions, most of them shorter than an hour. Her competitive performance, meanwhile, began to plateau, with her best times stubbornly refusing to drop. So in her mid 20s and with the encouragement of and advice from the university scientists, she upended her routine. Most significantly, she added volume, lots of it. Her workouts gradually became much longer, eventually lasting for two or three hours, says Guro Strom Solli, a doctoral student at Nord University, who once trained and raced with Ms. Bjorgen and led the new study. By the time Ms. Bjorgen reached her early 30s and embarked on her five most successful years as a racer, from 2010 through 2015, she was training for around 940 hours per year, about 80 percent more than a few years earlier. Most of these added workouts were performed at what, in cross country racing terms, counts as "light" intensity, Ms. Solli says, with Ms. Bjorgen's heart rate hovering at about 80 percent of her maximum. By contrast, her heart rate had tended to exceed 90 percent of her maximum during most of her shorter workouts when she was younger. Ms. Bjorgen continued to complete several brief, strenuous interval sessions each week. But a far greater percentage of her workouts now were prolonged and, by her standards, gentle. Most of these workouts were on skis, but during the snowless summers, she ran. She also began focused, frequent weight training, concentrating in particular on her core and upper body. Her biceps eventually became so honed that blogs today celebrate them. And she began to win everything, scooping up world championships and Olympic medals at sprint and long distance events. The lessons for more average athletes from her training arc are perhaps subtle, Ms. Solli says, since Ms. Bjorgen most likely has physical, genetic and psychological gifts that have thoughtlessly bypassed the rest of us. But one takeaway is that athletes should consider shaking up their training to some extent if they begin to feel stagnant, says Oyvind Sandbakk, a professor and manager of the Centre for Elite Sports Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who oversaw the study. Ms. Bjorgen improved when "she changed her regime a bit," he says, shifting the bulk of her workouts from short, hard sessions to longer ones.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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Where Masters and Mistresses of the Universe Can Have It All Not long ago, a shiny, glass and metal shopping mall appeared in Lower Manhattan, the kind of thing Manhattan natives (your stopgap Critical Shopper included) longed for in their foolish youths when suburban friends would floss and brag. It is called Brookfield Place, and behind its streak free panes wait Diane von Furstenberg and J. Crew, Burberry and Bottega Veneta, a Lululemon and a designer gym to wear it in. The point of this Saks is bounty, with racks and designer sections leading seamlessly into the next. Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times These are difficult days for the brick and mortar retail business, which is fighting against the forces of ease, convenience and Amazon.com, so the arrival of a megamall seems like a strange eruption. But Brookfield, a stone's throw from the 9/11 Memorial, is closer still to the gleaming office towers that house American Express, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, some of which are accessible from its well appointed elevator banks. What the good old mall meant to gum popping high schoolers, this one aims to mean to blue chip M.B.A.s with budgets to burn. Want to meet at the food court for curly fries at the nerve center of American capitalism? Touching down here is Saks Fifth Avenue, a New York landmark now untethered from its iconic address and off to explore a new New York. It arrived like an 86,000 square foot emissary from one of the city's stateliest dowagers. Of course, "downtown" is as much a state of mind as an address. Even stocked with designer labels picked for maximum cool (edgy entrants like Vetements, whose fully unstructured Carhartt work apron dress will run you 1,210), Saks, with its manicured gleam and full floor of private salons, feels less downtown than Uptown South. That's not to say it is without the zing of surprise. "Where would you wear these?" wondered Hannah, the girlfriend I enlisted to vet the Saks women's assortment with me. She had in her hands a pair of Miu Miu slides, upholstered in a faux fuzz the color of Cookie Monster and topped with imitation pearls ( 950). They were never meant for the touch of the subway platform. But they would be perfect for a spin around Saks, which resembles a clean, well lighted spacecraft, with rack after rack of clothes in the round. The shoe salon radiates concentrically outward from an enormous bubbled chandelier, and the designer fashion section orbits around a central bank of escalators and a kicky display that changes monthly. (It is currently given over to the exuberant designs of Rosie Assoulin, a riot of deck chairs on a packing peanut "beach." Summer share!) The point of this Saks is bounty: the way the racks groan with clothes, one leading seamlessly, and slightly disorientingly, to the next. The masters of the universe who work upstairs (and whose families are penthoused nearby) are used to having it all, and Saks seems determined to offer it all to them. It is organized by designer, and the gang's all here: the rowdy Americans (Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang, Proenza Schouler), the elegant Europeans (Chloe, Akris), the flouncy, convention flouting avant garde (Comme des Garcons, Sacai, Simone Rocha). There are spaces for more moderately priced "contemporary" clothes, denim, handbags and beauty products, but because of the mostly open layout, everything runs together, even in defiance of logic. A Baja East tie dyed T shirt featuring the "Minions" characters ("very Venice boardwalk," Hannah said) hangs a few feet from dressy office garb by Akris's Punto line. (The same issue prevails on a smaller scale at the Saks men's store across the mall, where racks of outgoing pieces by Thom Browne, Lanvin and Off White segue into Saks's more conservative private label, for maximum sartorial whiplash.) A focused trip through Saks the kind you might make on a lunch break search mission can yield treasures. Hannah found clunky heeled shoes by Dries Van Noten that stopped her short, bright separates from A.L.C. and Alice Olivia, and an asymmetrical tie front dress in a lipstick red by Proenza Schouler ( 1,850) that she loved. "This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I was invited to luncheons," she said, giving it a spin in front of a dressing room mirror as a hopeful clerk looked on. But in the absence of a tighter edit, overabundance can lead to exhaustion. Trendy pieces the patch studded jean jacket, the men's wear style shirt appear with slight variations (and at different prices) across brands. Variety can be a virtue, but this recurrence makes much of the offering feel like a mountain of merchandise in search of a stern curator, special items adrift in mere swag. "Some of it feels like stuff for the Kardashians to put into their closets and never look at again," Hannah said. A full throttle Saks expedition could legitimately require a vacation afterward. Here, too, of course, the store is ready to help. An exclusive selection of sweatshirts ( 95) and hoodies ( 115) by the New York label Knowlita teases a certain tribe's favorite escapes: "St. Barth or Nowhere"; "The Cape or Nowhere"; and, perhaps hopefully, "Saks or Nowhere."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The Trump administration is vetting Judy Shelton, a conservative economist and former Trump campaign adviser, for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, according to people familiar with the matter, putting the longtime Fed critic one step closer to a leadership role at an institution she would like to drastically change. Ms. Shelton, 64, was recently interviewed by Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, but has yet to meet with President Trump. If nominated and confirmed, Ms. Shelton would take one of two open positions on the seven member board of governors in Washington. Two of Mr. Trump's would be nominees, Herman Cain and Stephen Moore, were withdrawn from consideration after Republican lawmakers made clear they would not support their nominations given concerns about their past treatment of, or statements about, women. Ms. Shelton, now the United States executive director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, previously advised Mr. Trump during his presidential campaign and served on his transition team. She has regularly praised Mr. Trump's economic policies, and now favors near zero interest rates, a position likely to curry favor with a president who has called the central bank the "biggest risk" to the economy. In an interview, Ms. Shelton criticized the Fed's current practice of paying interest on excess money that banks keep at the Fed as a way to set the Fed's policy rate. The approach, she said, encourages banks to hold money that they would otherwise lend out, since they are being paid to keep their money idle. To help "phase out" the practice, Ms. Shelton said, she would support gradually cutting interest rates back to rock bottom. If that spurred inflation, Ms. Shelton said, she would want to sell off the Fed's holdings of Treasury securities and other government backed bonds to keep prices from spiraling out of control. "It's like paying the banks to do nothing," Ms. Shelton said of the current practice. Her plan would be "effectively cutting interest rates, but not as a primary goal." Ms. Shelton, who is friends with both Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore, has been a proponent of the White House's 1.5 trillion tax cut, deregulatory approach, and continuing trade war with China, which she calls "uncomfortable" but something "we have to pursue." "The policy changes, I think, are unleashing the potential for a high growth, productive economy,'' she said. Ms. Shelton could have an easier road to nomination than some of Mr. Trump's more recent picks. She was confirmed in March 2018 as the United States director for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, so she has already passed a government background check and made it through Senate Foreign Relations Committee vetting. If she is nominated, the Senate Banking Committee will hold her Fed confirmation hearing. Still, while four of Mr. Trump's Fed nominees were confirmed, his two most recent formal nominations Nellie Liang and Marvin Goodfriend were never cleared by lawmakers. And neither Mr. Moore, a political commentator, nor Mr. Cain, a former presidential candidate, was ever formally nominated after concerns about past issues surfaced. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Ms. Shelton would be an unconventional pick for the Federal Reserve's board of governors. Her preference for a linked currency one tied to gold or some other reference point, rather than simply backed by faith in the government would make her unique among her colleagues. She wrote in 2018 that "we make America great again by making America's money great again." That stance may appeal to Mr. Trump, who has fondly recalled the gold standard. She has also been an outspoken opponent of the Fed, criticizing the central bank's policies as a driver of the 2008 financial crisis and its attempt to clean up the mess. "No other government institution had more influence over the creation of money and credit in the lead up to the devastating 2008 global meltdown," she wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April. "And the Fed's response to the meltdown may have exacerbated the damage by lowering the incentive for banks to fund private sector growth." "She would bring a different voice, a different perspective,'' said James A. Dorn, vice president for monetary studies at the libertarian leaning Cato Institute. "Judy has been much more critical of the Fed than most of the people who are currently on the board." Ms. Shelton holds a doctorate in business administration from the University of Utah and cut her teeth at the Hoover Institution from 1985 to 1995. She sat just down the hall from Milton Friedman, a conservative economist who developed important groundwork for modern monetary policy. Condoleezza Rice, who went on to be secretary of state under President George W. Bush, was another colleague. She then made her way to Washington. She worked with Bob Dole's presidential campaign back in 1996. She spent much of the 2000s writing opinion pieces, serving on corporate boards and working with the National Endowment for Democracy, most recently as chairwoman. She began the 2016 election cycle advising Ben Carson, but began advising Mr. Trump's campaign in August 2016, after she penned a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled "Trump's Contribution to Sound Money." Steven Mnuchin, now the Treasury secretary, called and asked her to join the cause, she said. She went on to work on the Trump transition team in a Treasury role.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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When racial justice protests were sweeping the country in June, Shayla Avery, 16, chose her school in Berkeley, Calif., as the site of her first demonstration. She planned it all out: The demonstrators would march about a mile from San Pablo Park to Berkeley High School, joined by drummers; she would accompany them, standing in the back of a flatbed truck, blasting music and directing the chants through her bullhorn. On the day of the protest, her plans came to life. Hundreds of young people from the East Bay showed up, including classmates and staff members from her high school, as well as dancers from her youth performance group at the Destiny Arts Center in Oakland. There were hip hop and Afro Haitian styles, as well as freestyle dancing with homegrown East Bay moves, like the smeeze, originated by an Oakland dancer called Chonkie. Soon, the young dancers were at the front of the crowd providing the march's energetic momentum. When they got to Berkeley High the marchers formed a circle; one by one or two by two, dancers moved to the center, where they had a moment to show off their moves as the crowd cheered them on. "You have to have levels to the protest," Ms. Avery, who is going into her senior year of high school, said over the phone. "Some people need music and others want to march and chant. Some people want to dance." The dancers in the Destiny Arts teen company, of which Ms. Avery is a part, have long been taught that dance and social justice are interconnected. This year, for their end of year performance, they were preparing a feature length piece called "The Black (W)hole." It combined dance, poetry and film, as a celebration of the lives of six young people who had died in the Oakland area. But nothing went as planned in the world of live performance this spring, and the piece, which was being funded by a grant from the Hewlett Foundation and written by the choreographer and poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph was forced to evolve twice. First, the pandemic made a classic proscenium stage production impossible. Instead of canceling the production entirely, one of the founders of Destiny Arts, Sarah Crowell, suggested that the team pivot to a film version that would allow the dancers to perform the choreography outside. Then, after the police killing of George Floyd sparked widespread and sustained demonstrations, the project was transformed again. The filmmaker hired for the project, Yoram Savion, started to follow Ms. Avery's organizing work, and the film became, in part, about the way the young activists were responding to the killings of Black people in real time. In June, Ms. Avery organized another protest, a march against gentrification in Berkeley; this time, she decided to make dance a more intentional part of it. She invited her fellow dancers from Destiny to perform some of the choreography they had been preparing for "The Black (W)hole." They danced outside at a BART station in South Berkeley, where the march began. It was the first time that the tight knit group of teenagers had performed this choreography together in person since the onset of the pandemic in March; for months they had been rehearsing in their own confined boxes on Zoom, warming up and learning choreography at the same time but in separate spaces. "I feel like I dance a lot harder knowing what I'm dancing for," said Dinah Cobb, 15, who performed that day. Ny'Aja Roberson, 16, performed a praise dance that was mostly freestyle. She said she wanted the movement to come to her in the moment rather than be planned out. "When I was dancing I felt like I was bringing in all the spirits from those people George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin," Ms. Roberson said. "I felt like I was dancing for all of the young lives that couldn't be with us right then and there." Then, the march moved northward to Berkeley Hills with the dancers at the front of the crowd. Central to a march about issues of local racial justice were local dance moves, said Isha Clarke, 17, a Destiny student who was at the demonstration. She is also an activist who last year was a star of a viral moment in which young people tried to persuade Senator Dianne Feinstein to support the Green New Deal. At the demonstration in Berkeley, the young dancers freestyled the smeeze and the Thizzle Dance by Mac Dre, a Bay Area rapper who was fatally shot in 2004. It felt to the marchers both like a sober call to action and a joyful celebration. "I think that joy is a revolutionary emotion," Ms. Clarke said, "especially during these really hard apocalyptic times that we are living through." At another demonstration, in mid July, Ms. Avery placed dancers outside the Berkeley Police Department headquarters, where protesters camped out from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. There were hip hop, modern and freestyle dancers, spoken word poets and visual artists drawing with chalk in the street. Ms. Avery and other organizers projected images of police brutality on the wall of the building. Staff members at the dance studio attended their students' demonstrations and also assisted in some of the logistics, like providing the projector and masks for the dancers that said "Breathe." "I was glowing with pride and hope and excitement," Ms. Crowell said of the students' use of dance in their organizing. "They had made a connection between movement and social movements." As the young dancers were organizing, "The Black (W)hole" was filming outside, by the white pillars of Oakland Technical High School, and inside a disintegrating abandoned train station with high ceilings and good air circulation. Mr. Joseph, who is also vice president and artistic director of social impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, said he wanted the film to show what it's like to have a performance suddenly disrupted by world events. "The way that I thought about it at first was like 'Lemonade' meets 'Homecoming' in Oakland," he said. Destiny Arts' young dancers aren't the only ones who will be featured in the film. So will the dancers in the studio's Elders Project, which is made up of women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. In particular, the video highlights Arisika Razak, 71, who has performed for the film in her backyard and at a rose garden in Oakland. Ms. Razak said she had long seen dance as a force in racial justice movements, pointing to the anti apartheid movement in South Africa, where the toyi toyi dance was both a tool for protest and a celebratory expression. "It's the way we rev the body up to stand in front of police and tear gas," she said. "These technologies of music and dance are almost always how oppressed people have managed to survive."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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It was, by most standards, a short stay. The pop up metal monolith that became the focus of international attention after it was spotted in a remote section of the Utah desert on Nov. 18 was dismantled just 10 days later. On Tuesday a local outdoorsman with a penchant for stunts claimed credit on social media for the sculpture's removal. The office of the San Juan County Sheriff at first announced that it was declining to investigate the case in the absence of complaints about missing property. To underscore that point, it uploaded a "Most Wanted" poster on its website, or rather a jokey version of one in which the faces of suspects were replaced by nine big eyed aliens. But by the end of Monday, the sheriff's office had reversed its position and announced that it was planning a joint investigation with the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency. It was left to an adventure photographer, Ross Bernards, to disclose evidence on Instagram. Mr. Bernards, 34, of Edwards, Colo., was visiting the monolith on Friday night when, he said, four men arrived as if out of nowhere to dismantle the sculpture. Mr. Bernards had driven six hours for the chance to ogle the sculpture and to take dramatic photographs of it. Using upscale Lume Cube lights attached to a drone, he produced a series of glowy, moonlit pictures in which the monolith glistens against the red cliffs and the deep blue of the night sky. Suddenly, around 8:40 p.m., he said, the men arrived, their voices echoing in the canyon. Working in twosomes, with an unmistakable sense of purpose, they gave the monolith hard shoves, and it started to tilt toward the ground. Then they pushed it in the opposite direction, trying to uproot it. "This is why you don't leave trash in the desert," one of them said, suggesting that he viewed the monolith as an eyesore, a pollutant to the landscape, according to Mr. Bernards. The sculpture popped out and landed on the ground with a bang. Then the men broke it apart and ferried it off in a wheelbarrow. "As they walked off with the pieces, one of them said, 'Leave no trace,'" Mr. Bernards recalled in a telephone interview. But a friend who accompanied him on the trip, Michael James Newlands, 38, of Denver, took a few quick photographs with his cellphone. "It must have been 10 or 15 minutes at most for them to knock over the monolith and pull it out," he told The New York Times. "We didn't know who they were, and we were not going to do anything to stop them." He added, "They just came in there to execute and they were like, 'This is our mission.'" The photos are blurry, but they fascinate, nonetheless. Here are images of several men working beneath the cover of darkness, wearing gloves but not face masks, standing above the fallen monolith. We can see its exposed insides. It turns out to be a hollow structure with an armature made from plywood. The photographs are the only known images of the culprits who removed the sculpture; they may not have been the same people who installed it in the first place. On Tuesday, Andy L. Lewis, a professional sportsman in nearby Moab, Utah, took credit for the sculpture's removal with his group, posting a video on his Facebook page. Mr. Lewis is a 34 year old slackline performer who specializes in high altitude stunts and brought his sport to Madonna's 2012 Super Bowl halftime show. His video consists of a short, shadowy clip, barely half a minute long, that shows the monolith lying in a wheelbarrow, as someone quickly rolls it out of the park. "The safe word is run," one man says, as his headlamp illuminates the fallen sculpture. His friend, Sylvan Christensen, who said he had taken part in the dismantling of the sculpture, sent a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday evening explaining that the group took it upon themselves to destroy the sculpture to protect the area not only from the incursion of a silvery sculpture but also from the gawkers who had begun descending to see it. "This land wasn't physically prepared for the population shift," they wrote, adding that the public needs to be educated about proper land use and management. But Mr. Lewis has not always been so supportive of the challenges faced by the Bureau of Land Management. He pleaded guilty in federal court in Utah in 2014 to lying to rangers at Arches National Park. He was accused of hindering their investigation into BASE jumping, a sport that Mr. Lewis practices. At the time, the Bureau of Land Management was trying to prohibit such aerial sports, which can damage the home of owls, bighorn sheep and other animals that inhabit the desert. Mr. Lewis was fined 965 and was put on 18 months probation, during which time he was prohibited from entering a national park. Asked if they were focusing on any suspects, Alan Freestone, chief deputy with the San Juan County Sheriff's Office, said on Tuesday, "I know they have some leads, and that's all we are saying right now." Artists had been casually speculating that whoever put the sculpture up probably had taken it down once it was discovered, as if aspiring to be anonymous artist activists, the Banksy of the desert. But art world speculation had not yielded too many facts. Initially, the monolith was linked to John McCracken, a California born artist who died in 2011 and harbored a taste for science fiction. David Zwirner, the New York art dealer who represents the artist's estate and first identified the monolith as an authentic McCracken, stepped forward on Monday to tell The Times that he had studied photographs of it and no longer had any idea who had made it. Almine Rech, who represents the artist at her galleries in Paris and Brussels, also contacted a reporter to deny that the desert monolith was a McCracken.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Sourdough is the oldest form of leavened bread. Last year Seamus Blackley, father of the Xbox, baked a loaf using what was purportedly 4,500 year old yeast scraped off ancient Egyptian pottery. All modern recipes begin with a starter, basically a flour and water slurry colonized by bacteria and wild, airborne yeasts that eat, breed and exhale carbon dioxide, which helps the bread rise. The tangy taste and brightly acidic smell derive from lactobacilli, cousins of the bacteria that curdle milk into cheese and yogurt. Starters are bespoke to the environments in which they were created; no two sourdoughs taste exactly alike. Mr. De Smedt travels the world for new specimens. He prioritizes renown, unusual origins, the type of flour used, and the starter's approximate age. "Most importantly, the sourdough must come from a spontaneous fermentation, and not inoculated with a commercial starter culture," he said. He adds up to two dozen new sourdoughs to the library every year, from cooking schools, home bakers, pizzerias, and artisan and industrial bakeries. "Sourdough is the soul of many bakeries," he said. "When bakers entrust you with their souls, you'd better take care to it." He has harvested starters from 25 countries, including Slovenia, Peru and Singapore. Starter No. 1 is from Altamura, Italy. The bread is traditionally made of semolina flour, the ground form of durum wheat, and dates at least to 37 B.C., when the Roman poet Horace praised it as the best he had ever eaten. "Number 100 is special because it's Japanese and made with cooked sake rice," Mr. De Smedt said. "Number 72 is from Mexico and has to be refreshed with eggs, lime and beer." Number 43 is a sentimental favorite. "It's a San Francisco starter, and was my first one I ever saw," he recalled. "When I became a test baker for Puratos in 1994, one of my tasks was to refresh 43." Indeed, he baked his first loaf of sourdough with it. He has no way of knowing which of the 125 starters is the oldest. "We can't carbon date them," he said. "The microbial colonies of a starter can change entirely, depending on how it is fed and maintained. If someone insisted she had a 500 year old sourdough, I'd have to believe her." Two years ago Mr. De Smedt and a film crew tracked the path of the Klondike Gold Rush's starter packing prospectors, starting in Seattle, then Alaska, and ending the expedition in Dawson City, Yukon, in northern Canada. "At the turn of the 20th century, stampeders had to show mounted police at the Canadian border that they had enough provisions to survive a year in the Yukon," he said. "In addition to potatoes and canned goods, the stampeders would bring starters, often in linen bags tied around their necks, so that they always had dough ready to make flapjacks." Mr. De Smedt hit the mother lode in Whitehorse, the Yukon capital, where he met up with Ione Christensen, the 86 year old former mayor. Her starter was passed down from her great grandfather, Wesley David Ballentine. "It's a family pet, if you will," she said. Back in 1897, Ballentine stowed the starter in a flour sack and trekked over the Chilkoot Pass on his way to the Klondike gold fields. On cold nights, he and his fellow stampeders would cuddle with the sacks to keep their contents warm and alive.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The stories of the eight families featured here mean we don't have to rely on the hypothetical: Undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Laos, Israel and Mauritania including small children, teenagers and a pregnant woman share their journeys as they fight deportation orders, endure separation from their families, suffer death threats and seek asylum. Many of these desperate people face torture and even enslavement if repatriated to their home countries, and this series is a difficult and eye opening watch. "The man we're about to meet," the gangster Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) tells his family in the new season of "Peaky Blinders," "is the devil." Well, close enough. Tommy is talking about the British fascist Oswald Mosley, who in 1929 was railing against Jews, foreigners and the press. When this season opens, Mosley is a Labour MP, but he wants to start a new, hate fueled political party and he wants to team up with Tommy, whose strain of populism is on the rise. Echoes of "The Godfather" abound this season, so keep your eye out for oranges. Still wanted: Jesse Pinkman. Six years after the finale of "Breaking Bad," the series creator Vince Gilligan returns to the scene of the crimes to reveal what happens to Jesse (Aaron Paul) after he races away from the white supremacist compound in a 1978 Chevrolet. Now a fugitive on the run, Jesse is forced to rely on the few friends he can still trust (Badger and Skinny Pete?) and one longtime associate (the junkyard owner Old Joe). A half dozen other familiar faces from the original series also reappear, including one key cast member who had to be flown in and out of the Albuquerque film set on a private jet to escape notice during production. It's a long story, but in this new comedy a listless man named Miles (Paul Rudd), ground down by life, decides to check into a special spa for rejuvenation and winds up getting cloned. On one hand, Miles can now send his clone (also Rudd) to his boring job, while the original Miles stays home and pursues his dream of writing screenplays. Unfortunately, not only is the clone better at Miles's job than Miles is, his co workers like the clone more, too. Even worse, Miles's wife (Aisling Bea), who's unaware of what's going on, prefers the clone's company. Realizing that he's being elbowed out of his own life, Miles determines to get it back. The show asks us to root for Miles, but you may find yourself pulling for the clone instead. Kate McKinnon hates ketchup, but it turns out she's fine with the stinky durian fruit. In each episode of David Chang's new travel series, the chef visits a different city with a guest star, and for McKinnon's installment, the pair eat their way through Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The show is less structured than Chang's previous Netflix show, "Ugly Delicious," and mostly focuses on chatting, chewing and exploring. There are temple visits and political reflections, as well as a mani pedi with Lena Waithe in Los Angeles and some camel riding with Chrissy Teigen in Marrakesh. As with most gustatory experiences, "Breakfast, Lunch Dinner" is not just about the food, it's about the company, too, and Chang's reflective tone suggests he's been taking a cue from Anthony Bourdain's work.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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DERAILED by a crushing earthquake and tsunami in March, Japanese carmakers will no doubt be glad to put 2011 behind them. Yet most other auto companies managed to shrug off the year's economic aftershocks, though the effects of supplier outages and the summer's floods in Thailand were felt worldwide. Still, as December waned, carmakers were on pace for the second year in a row to add more than one million sales in the United States. Analysts from LMC Automotive are projecting sales for 2011 to total 12.7 million, a 9.5 percent bump from last year's 11.6 million. As a market recovery takes hold, the industry should be feeling like a million for years to come: LMC, which acquired the auto forecasting division of J. D. Power Associates in November, estimates a steady rise to 13.8 million sales in 2012, 15.4 million in 2013 and 16.2 million in 2014. That would finally restore American sales to prerecession normalcy, if not to the 17.4 million peak of 2000. Significantly, the Detroit automakers leaner and less reliant on boom or bust truck sales are now reaping healthy profits, even with the industry's volume roughly four million cars lower than it was in more prosperous times. At its riverfront headquarters in Detroit, General Motors may be measuring itself for the heavyweight belt. With an estimated 8.4 million in global vehicle sales, including its Chinese partner, S.A.I.C. G.M. Wuling, the company is poised to retake the title of world's largest volume automaker from Toyota. That battered Japanese company, LMC Automotive projects, may slip as low as fourth place, behind Volkswagen and Renault Nissan. Despite G.M.'s billions in profits and a 14 percent sales jump in the United States, there were sore spots. With about 7,000 sales in its inaugural year, the Chevrolet Volt plug in hybrid fell short of G.M.'s confident projection of 10,000. Though the Volt represents the tiniest green drop of G.M.'s global sales about 1 of every 1,200 cars the press doggedly pursued a clumsy, all or nothing linkage, casting the innovative hybrid as a referendum on G.M.'s revival. It didn't help that in June a Volt caught fire in Wisconsin, weeks after undergoing federal crash tests. G.M. moved quickly to limit the fallout, offering to buy back Volts from customers concerned about the safety of its lithium ion battery pack. Because lithium ion chemistry pulses through all modern plug in hybrids and electric cars, automakers will be carefully monitoring the federal investigation of the Volt's travails. On that electric frontier, private companies, in partnership with automakers and public agencies, began a historic effort to build a national network of E.V. charging stations. The program, supported by more than 130 million in federal stimulus money and Energy Department grants, provides free home chargers for thousands of E.V. buyers, along with public and workplace charging sites. With cars like the Volt and the Nissan Leaf actually in showrooms, the public's interest in electric power stepped up. One result was that giants of the industry notably Alan Mulally of Ford and Sergio Marchionne of Fiat and Chrysler enjoyed relatively quiet years, while a Danish born former Aston Martin designer found the spotlight. Henrik Fisker's namesake company, after lengthy delays and a 529 million government loan has begun delivering a handful of its 100,000 Karma plug in hybrid sedan to customers. The alluring Karma has received strong early reviews, tempered somewhat by an Environmental Protection Agency fuel economy rating of just 20 m.p.g. when the gasoline engine is generating the electricity. And just last week, Fisker pre emptively recalled 239 cars, citing a potential fire hazard from improperly positioned coolant hose clamps. Aptera, another California E.V. start up, did not even make it to the starting line. Having failed to secure a 150 million federal lifeline, it closed up in December. Aptera's long shot fantasy was the 2e, a three wheel capsule that looked like an earthbound helicopter. Among the big boys, Ford, after basking in bailout free glory in 2010, was on track to close 2011 with a mere 10 percent sales gain, trailing the reconstituted G.M and Chrysler. Ford's MyTouch, a glitch prone, hard to decipher infotainment system, earned scorn from buyers and Consumer Reports. Customers also gave low marks to Ford's obtrusive automated transmission, which marred a solid redesign of the Focus compact. Chrysler's honeymoon with its new owner, Fiat, included a 25 percent sales jump from the gutter levels of 2010. And the company's defiantly pro Detroit Super Bowl commercial, starring Eminem, put a lump in the throat of anyone with a connection to Eight Mile Road, the defining boundary between the tough city and the softer suburbs. Fiat's celebrity commercials fared less well. To promote its newly immigrated 500 minicar, the Italian brand hired Jennifer Lopez, who set off a minor controversy when it turned out her sentimental Bronx "homecoming" had placed a J. Lo body double behind the 500's wheel. Tepid sales of the car also played a role in the removal of Laura Soave from her position as head of the brand in North America. Volkswagen offered its own coming to America tale, opening a 1 billion plant in Tennessee with the help of 570 million in tax breaks, which easily beat out competing come ons from Alabama and Michigan. The Passat plant helped VW to post a 27 percent sales gain. While the VW Group aims for an ambitious one million combined sales for VW and Audi by 2018, more than double current levels, a pair of relative upstarts is already there. Hyundai and its sister company, Kia, smashed the million mark for the first time, on pace for about 1.2 million combined sales. John Krafcik, Hyundai's American chief, again wrote his name atop a historically short list: the executive who could do no wrong. German luxury brands continued their inexorable rise, with Mercedes Benz likely to edge BMW for the luxury sales crown at roughly 254,000 units. Lexus decisively lost its luxury title, tumbling to barely 190,000 sales. A further clue that the well to do were spending in 2011 came in August, when a record price for a car sold at auction was set: 16.4 million for a 1957 Ferrari Testa Rossa prototype. As in 2010, when a sour economy culled G.M.'s Pontiac and Ford's Mercury from the herd, weak brands foundered. Just before Christmas 2011, Saab filed for liquidation, eliminating more than 3,000 jobs in Sweden and ending a quixotic rescue attempt by Victor Muller. As the leader and designer of Spyker, the tiny Dutch sports car maker that swallowed Saab whole, Mr. Muller's refreshing spirit had even cynical industry watchers rooting for a comeback. But it was not to be. Saab could no longer compete in a global industry that requires massive scale. Brand loyalists will miss its signature style and oddities like an ignition switch placed between the seats. On the technical front, downsized, fuel sipping engines, often with a helpful boost from turbochargers or superchargers, continued to sweep the world. BMW and Mercedes began to offer their first 4 cylinder engines here in several years. Even Ford seemed surprised by buyer enthusiasm for its F 150 pickup equipped with a mere 6 cylinder. Yet in an apparent contradiction, the horsepower wars continued to rage. No sooner had Chevrolet rolled out its 580 horsepower 2012 Camaro ZL1 then Ford promised a 650 horsepower, 200 m.p.h. slap with the 2013 Shelby GT500 Mustang.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Re "Is the G.O.P. Getting Serious About Climate Change?," by Ericka Andersen (Op Ed, Aug. 8): The proposals that are cited as evidence of the Republicans' turnaround on climate change focus on carbon capture, which allows polluters to keep burning fossil fuels so long as they capture their emissions. But carbon capture has not been proved to work efficiently, cost effectively or at scale, nor does it offer relief to the communities whose health has been devastated by decades of exposure to fossil fuels. Though natural carbon capture protecting forests, restoring wetlands will likely be part of a solution to climate change, there is no path away from the climate crisis that relies solely on capturing carbon. Given the brief window we have left to avert catastrophic warming, we must deploy proven solutions like clean energy and not wait for carbon capture to become our deus ex machina. When Republicans stop blocking and delaying these solutions, I'll be ready to say the party has truly changed. Michael Brune Oakland, Calif. The writer is executive director of the Sierra Club.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Chadwick Boseman, the regal actor who embodied a long held dream of African American moviegoers as the star of the groundbreaking superhero film "Black Panther," died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 43. His publicist confirmed the death, saying Mr. Boseman's wife, Taylor Simone Ledward, and family were by his side at the time. A statement posted on Mr. Boseman's Instagram account said that he learned he had Stage 3 colon cancer in 2016 and that it had progressed to Stage 4. A private figure by Hollywood standards, Mr. Boseman rarely publicized details about his personal life. He found fame relatively late as an actor he was 35 when he appeared in his first prominent role, as Jackie Robinson in "42" but made up for lost time with a string of star making performances in major biopics. Whether it was James Brown in "Get On Up," Thurgood Marshall in "Marshall" or T'Challa in "Black Panther," Mr. Boseman's unfussy versatility and old fashioned gravitas helped turn him into one of his generation's most sought after leading men. News of his death elicited widespread shock and grief, and many prominent figures in the arts world and civic life paid tribute to Mr. Boseman. Martin Luther King III, a human rights activist and the eldest son of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said the actor had "brought history to life on the silver screen" in his portrayals of pioneering Black leaders. Joseph R. Biden Jr. the former vice president and current Democratic presidential nominee, shared a post on Twitter saying that Mr. Boseman had "inspired generations and showed them they can be anything they want even super heroes." Mr. Boseman had admired T'Challa and Marvel's "Black Panther" comics since attending Howard University, where he worked at an African bookstore as an undergraduate. When the opportunity came to bring the character and his fictional African homeland, Wakanda to the big screen, Mr. Boseman embraced the role's symbolic significance to Black audiences with a statesman's pride and devotion. He lobbied for the characters to speak in authentic South African accents, and led on set cast discussions about ancient African symbolism and spirituality. The film, shot in 2017 after Mr. Boseman received his diagnosis, was a cultural sensation the first major superhero movie with an African protagonist and the first to star a majority Black cast. It was near universally praised by critics for its thematic heft and array of dynamic performances by Lupita Nyong'o, Michael B. Jordan, Angela Bassett and others. Reviewing the movie for Slate, the writer Jamelle Bouie credited Mr. Boseman with imbuing the comic book hero with "both regal confidence and real vulnerability." Audiences were even more enthusiastic. Joyful armies of fans participated in special outings and repeated viewings. Many came to theaters dressed in African inspired clothing and accessories, often using a greeting from the film, "Wakanda forever," as a convivial rallying cry. The fervor helped make "Black Panther" one of the highest grossing movies of all time, with more than 1.3 billion in earnings globally. Its success represented a moment of hope, pride and empowerment for Black moviegoers around the world. And it marked an inflection point in Hollywood, where decades of discrimination against Black led films gave way to a new era of increased visibility and opportunity for Black artists. The statement on Mr. Boseman's Instagram account said it was "the honor of his career to bring King T'Challa to life in 'Black Panther.'" How the Walt Disney Company might continue the blockbuster franchise without Mr. Boseman, if at all, was unclear. Although a sequel had been scheduled for release in 2022, filming had yet to begin. On Twitter, fans quickly mounted a campaign demanding that Disney not recast the role. The studio had no comment. Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born on Nov. 29, 1976, in the small city of Anderson, S.C., the youngest of three boys. His mother, Carolyn, was a nurse, and his father, Leroy, worked for an agricultural conglomerate and had a side business as an upholsterer. It wasn't an upbringing that suggested a future in Hollywood. Mr. Boseman was flanked by the traditional working class values of his parents on one side, and an environment shadowed by racism on the other. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018, he recalled being the target of racial slurs as a child while simply walking down the street. His older brother Kevin, a dancer who has performed with the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey troupes and toured with the stage adaptation of "The Lion King," was a guiding light. Mr. Boseman told The Times that he first gained the confidence to pursue the arts while attending Kevin's dance rehearsals. "He had the resolve to be, like, 'No I have something; I'm going to do it anyway, right or wrong,'" Mr. Boseman said of following his brother's example. "And he was right." Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available. In high school, Mr. Boseman was a serious basketball player, but turned to storytelling after a friend and teammate was shot and killed. He enrolled at Howard University with the dream of becoming a director. While taking an acting class there with the Tony Award winning actress and director Phylicia Rashad, Mr. Boseman and his classmates were accepted to the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. The students couldn't afford the trip, but Ms. Rashad helped finance it with assistance from a friend and future colleague of Mr. Boseman's, Denzel Washington. After starring in "Black Panther," Mr. Boseman reprised the role in two "Avengers" films, "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018) and "Avengers: Endgame" (2019). He was developing multiple projects as a screenwriter (he co wrote an undeveloped script for an international thriller called "Expatriate") and as a producer (he was a producer and star of the 2019 detective movie "21 Bridges") for what he hoped would be a fruitful new chapter in his career. Mr. Boseman continued to take on roles with a sociopolitical edge. He appeared as a Vietnam War hero in the Spike Lee epic "Da 5 Bloods," released in the spring, and will play a 1920s blues musician in a film adaptation of August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," produced by Mr. Washington and Todd Black and due later this year from Netflix. A lifelong admirer of Muhammad Ali, Mr. Boseman sought to wield his celebrity to advance a greater, moral cause. During this summer's wave of protests against systemic racism and police brutality, he expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement and joined other Black entertainers and executives in calling on the industry to cut ties with police departments. Onscreen and off, he was fueled by a commitment to leave nothing on the table. "You want to choose a difficult way sometimes," he said, describing his acting method to The Times last year. "Some days it should be simple, but sometimes you've got to take chances."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford this week revealed its new Troller T4, a Wrangler like sport utility vehicle, for the Brazilian market. The vehicle is equipped with a 3.2 liter diesel engine and a 6 speed manual transmission. The company did not announce pricing, but the current Troller T4 costs about 46,200. (Caradvice) According to a report from Bloomberg, sources familiar with Volkswagen's global strategy said that the automaker might triple its S.U.V. lineup in an effort to overtake Toyota's global sales lead. Roman Mathyssek, an analyst with Strategy Engineers, a consulting firm, told Bloomberg that global demand for S.U.V.s was growing and building them could help VW increase sales in emerging markets and in the United States. (Bloomberg) In other Volkswagen related news, the automaker still has not decided where in North America it will build its new midsize crossover. But according to a report from Reuters, VW has delayed making a decision as authorities in the potential locations Chattanooga, Tenn., and Mexico offer the automaker incentives. Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst with ISI Group, said that VW's crossover would be a strong addition to its portfolio and that the automaker should avoid further delays. (Reuters) Along with Volkswagen, Renault Nissan has high hopes for global sales dominance. Carlos Ghosn, the French Japanese company's chief executive, said in April that he was aiming for top three status. Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors occupy the global sales podium, but Rabih Freiha, a Renault analyst for Exane BNP Paribas, said that Renault Nissan could conceivably break into the top three by the end of the decade. (Automotive News, subscription required)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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We woke recently to heavy smoke in the air. We live in Stanley, a small village in the Victorian High Country, a three hour drive north of Melbourne. The fire authorities were suggesting that the three bush fires could join to form a mega fire. We made the decision to evacuate. We loaded the car and joined the thousands of other Australians across the country who were evacuating their homes in regional areas. Richard Flanagan's article was compelling reading and succinctly reflected the appalling leadership void the Australian community is facing. For many Australians, it seems as if we've entered some sort of "Back to the Future" parallel universe and somehow Biff is in charge. Suicide is an individual action. Richard Flanagan seems to believe that Australia has some significant control over atmospheric carbon dioxide, and that by government action, wildfires and changes to the Great Barrier Reef potentially associated with climate change can somehow be mitigated. Australia is a country with under 25 million people. If all Australians stopped use of fossil fuels entirely, there would be no significant effect on any environmental consequence of carbon emission. Countries buying Australian coal and gas would get it somewhere else.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The National Labor Relations Board announced a new regulation on Tuesday that makes it harder to challenge companies over their labor practices, potentially affecting the rights of millions of workers. The rule, which will take effect on April 27, scales back the responsibility of companies like McDonald's for labor law violations by their franchisees, such as firing workers in retaliation for attempts to unionize. The rule also applies to workers employed through contractors like staffing agencies or cleaning services. That is a reversal of the doctrine that the board adopted late in the Obama administration, which had made it possible to deem a much wider range of parent companies to be so called joint employers. "This final rule gives our joint employer standard the clarity, stability and predictability that is essential to any successful labor management relationship and vital to our national economy," John F. Ring, the board's chairman, said in a statement. The Obama era standard, established in 2015, said a parent company could be considered a joint employer of workers at a franchisee or contractor even if it controlled those employees only indirectly. For example, a company could be a joint employer if it required franchisees to use software that imposed certain scheduling practices. The parent company could also be considered a joint employer if it had a right to control the franchisee's employees even if it hadn't exercised that right. Under the new rule, the parent company will share liability for violations committed by contractors or franchisees only if the parent has substantial, direct and immediate control over the other companies' employees including their pay, benefits, hours, hiring, firing or supervision. In the case of fast food franchises, the parent company would probably have to directly determine scheduling practices, and perhaps other working conditions, to be considered a joint employer. The new rule could also make it more difficult for employees of contractors and franchisees to unionize. A parent company that chooses to shut down a franchise when employees of that franchise are seeking to unionize is likely to face legal risk only if it is deemed a joint employer. Workers and union officials have sometimes accused parent companies of this tactic, though the companies and industry associations have denied that this happens. A parent company that is considered a joint employer typically must also bargain with workers at a franchisee or contractor if they form a union, a requirement that the new rule will help many parent companies avoid. In explaining the rationale for the new rule, the agency said in a statement that it sought to return to the joint employer doctrine that prevailed for decades before 2015, except "with the greater precision, clarity and detail that rule making allows." 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. But the new rule could make it even less likely for companies to be deemed joint employers than before 2015 because it adds the word "substantial" to the words "direct and immediate" in describing the form of control that determines that status. In January, the Labor Department announced a similar rule effectively making it more difficult to hold parent companies liable for minimum wage and overtime violations committed by franchisees. The labor board, which gained a Republican majority in 2017, first sought to reverse the Obama era standard in a ruling late that year. But the board voted to vacate that ruling after its inspector general found that a Republican board member had a potential conflict of interest and should not have taken part. After that reversal, the board took a new tack. Instead of trying to change the Obama era standard by deciding cases involving specific employees and employers, it decided to issue a regulation that would apply to all employees and employers in these kinds of work arrangements. Philip A. Miscimarra, who was the board's chairman during its first effort to reverse the Obama era policy in 2017 and left soon after, said that it was appropriate for the agency to address the issue through a new regulation. "The board clearly has statutory authority to adopt regulations, and rule making can provide more certainty in this important area for employees, unions and employers," Mr. Miscimarra said in an email. Critics of the board, however, argued that the agency was doing whatever it could to achieve a desired policy outcome. "After getting caught violating ethics rules the first time, Republicans on the board are now ignoring these rules and barreling towards reaching the same anti worker outcome another way," Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who is running for president, said in a statement when the board proposed its new rule in September 2018. Wilma B. Liebman, who served as chairwoman under President Barack Obama, said pro worker groups were likely to challenge the new rule in court. She said they could argue that the "blatant effort to evade the same conflict of interest problem" that plagued the initial attempt to reverse the Obama era approach could also undermine the new rule. The board member who the inspector general said had a potential conflict in the adjudication, William J. Emanuel, also had a role in proposing the rule. Mr. Emanuel's former law firm had represented a party in the case that led the Obama labor board to hand down its joint employer ruling in 2015. Ms. Liebman said opponents could also argue that the board had not seriously considered alternatives and objections, something required by law, and noted that the new rule defied a federal appeals court decision largely upholding the Obama era doctrine. The board rejected such allegations in material it included with the new rule, citing court precedent that it said made clear that Mr. Emanuel did not have to recuse himself, and saying it had revised its initial proposal in response to the nearly 29,000 public comments. "Throughout this rule making process, the board has been willing to reconsider the preliminary views expressed," the agency said. Michael J. Lotito, a lawyer who represents employers at the firm Littler Mendelson, said the board had devised the rule with an eye toward accommodating the appeals court decision by allowing indirect control of workers to be a factor in determining joint employment, just not one that could trigger the status on its own. But Ms. Liebman questioned whether courts would accept that argument.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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For an independent designer operating in a world of megabrands like Amazon, Zara, Nike and H M, an old maxim may hold the key to survival: United we are stronger. At least that was the thinking Elizabeth Solomeina applied when she was struggling to find a way to show and sell the jewelry she designs without spending huge amounts of money on rent or outsourcing her work to various boutiques. "I needed a place to sell my stuff, I needed a customer base," Ms. Solomeina said. "When stylists wanted to come over to my studio, I would tell them it's in Brooklyn, and they would be like, 'Never mind.'" "I wasn't alone," she said. "I had friends like this, too." So in the summer of 2016, she gathered 34 of them and together they pitched in funds to open a boutique called Flying Solo on Mulberry Street in NoLIta. Within three months, the group had expanded to 45 designers. In June of this year, it grew again, adding more than 20 to the roster and moving to a two floor shop on West Broadway, on the same block as Missoni, Aesop and DKNY. Last Friday, during New York Fashion Week, the group of 68 held a two hour long presentation and runway show in the store, displaying more than 350 looks. During the presentation, models in neutral colors showed off jewelry and accessories, rotating every few minutes. The runway show included a variety of aesthetic visions. Most of the pieces were the kind you could walk out onto the street wearing, and all were available immediately after the show. As techno beats and songs by Little Dragon, Migos and Sango pounded through the speakers, models strutted by in metallic and brightly colored pants and jackets (from Daniel Silverstain, who has designed for Solange and Lady Gaga); long coats with "Proud Immigrant" written across the back (from Ricardo Seco, a Mexican designer); tweed suits and knit dresses (from Kathrin Henon, who works with Dennis Basso); and much more. Between each section of the show, models in silver pants and Flying Solo T shirts created by the designers walked by with signs denoting the next designer's Instagram handle. Flying Solo operates somewhat like a grocery or building co op, with members paying a membership fee that goes toward rent, production and marketing costs for events like the fashion week show. Each member is required to work eight hours every week, opening and closing the store, cleaning and helping customers on the floor. When the team members opened their first store on Mulberry Street, they put together as much of the interior themselves as they could. "We designed the racks, the shelving," Ms. Solomeina said. "Our designers were sketching, running to Home Depot, assembling racks." They were ready for customers in three days. On West Broadway, it took all of four. "It's our sweat and I hope no tears," Ms. Solomeina said. Flying Solo has had help from outside. Early on, Ms. Solomeina secured funding from Alex Barnett, an investor who has worked with technology companies and charities. Mr. Barnett saw in Ms. Solomeina's proposal a model for the future. "A lot of them are really brilliant designers," he said of Flying Solo's members. "It's a tragedy that the brilliance isn't rewarded. A lot of times it's who has a lot of capital or who gets picked up by a big brand or whatever the trend is at that moment." Speaking of the changes in the retail landscape that have been spurred by the advent of technology and the expansion of giants like Amazon, Zara and H M, Mr. Barnett said: "I don't think change should be feared. It's creating space for innovation. Independent designers need to stop working against each other and realize they're all on the same side."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Shelter in place orders are an effective means to slowing the spread of the coronavirus, yet millions of Americans have no choice but to leave home to go to work every day. Deemed essential for their jobs in manufacturing, grocery stores, pharmacies, warehouses, retailing and restaurants, they face daily risks by working alongside colleagues and customers who may be carriers of the coronavirus. At grocery stores and sprawling warehouses, workers say not enough is being done to protect them from exposure. Walmart employees, for instance, say they lack sufficient sanitizing supplies and protective gear and are forced to congregate in spaces that put them well within a six foot radius of co workers. At meat processing plants, where production lines often require working shoulder to shoulder, the risks are particularly acute. And mass transit workers say they haven't been provided masks or personal cleaning supplies. When their shifts end, they go home to their families, putting more people at risk. Weeks into the pandemic, it's apparent that not nearly enough is being done to protect these front line workers, even as their continued labor ensures that a semblance of normality endures for their fellow Americans. The Department of Labor's primary worker safety enforcement arm, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has taken a largely hands off approach to the pandemic. Only last week did OSHA put a priority on investigating health care facilities for complaints about coronavirus safety procedures, while effectively giving a free pass to some of the nation's largest employers. Without a clear set of rules to follow, employers are making them up as they go. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued sensible guidelines on the federal level that can protect workers, such as standards for social distancing, sanitizing stations and using masks in the workplace. But OSHA hasn't made the guidelines mandatory for workplaces the C.D.C. itself doesn't enforce them nor has OSHA adopted other new rules that could help ensure worker safety during the pandemic. It should do so now. Requiring businesses to follow the C.D.C.'s guidelines would allow OSHA to enforce them with inspections and fines. Instead, a patchwork of rules led primarily by governors in New York, Washington State and California serve as an unsatisfactory substitute by mandating masks in all public settings and the use of other protective measures. But these haven't been aimed specifically at workplaces, many of which need more guidance. OSHA said its prior rules for worker safety apply during the pandemic, though the agency last week did give agents leeway to investigate coronavirus claims so long as they were confined to health care facilities and met certain other criteria. In a statement to The New York Times, OSHA said that "employers are, and will continue to be, responsible for providing a safe and healthy workplace" and that it can respond to formal complaints where a worker is killed or seriously injured on the job, known as the General Duty clause. The agency's Covid 19 guidance for employers, however, acknowledges upfront it "is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations." In the meantime, OSHA offices are fielding thousands of coronavirus complaints but don't have the wherewithal to investigate them. In Oregon alone, by early this month the local OSHA office had received 2,747 complaints about workplace conditions but had issued zero citations, the top local administrator told The Portland Tribune. An OSHA official in Illinois wrote in an email to a local union that, though she had been receiving daily complaints for weeks, "these recommended measures are not enforceable by OSHA since they are guidance and not OSHA law." OSHA also told a lawyer representing an Illinois Walmart worker who died after contracting the coronavirus that "OSHA does not have any jurisdiction on enforcing anything related to Covid 19 at this time," according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As part of an advisory last week, OSHA indicated companies should conduct their own investigations and report back to the agency. "The message from OSHA to employers and their workers is: You're on your own," said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA official and now program director of the National Employment Law Project. That means a formal complaint lodged with the agency's California division, known as Cal/OSHA, by Amazon warehouse workers in Eastvale, Calif., last week isn't likely to result in an inspection, let alone a penalty or reform, she said. Workers there allege that, in Amazon's rush to get customers their essential goods, they have had to work well within six feet of one another and aren't given sufficient time or materials to sanitize their hands or their workstations. Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, said the company was working on expanding testing capacity for its hundreds of thousands of workers and called for regular universal testing to arrest the virus's spread. OSHA also can and should go beyond C.D.C. guidelines to require measures such as staggered shifts and lunch breaks and construction of barriers to protect employees in jobs like manufacturing and meatpacking that require close quarters. And it should carefully evaluate updated C.D.C. guidelines that permit employers to bring some workers back to the job after potential Covid 19 exposure before a two week quarantine. Some say the new policy, meant to keep essential businesses running, risks re exposing workers. Minnesota's Department of Health, by contrast, has maintained a recommendation for a 14 day quarantine for workers after exposure. OSHA has precedent on its side for tougher rules. During the H1N1 flu outbreak, it made C.D.C. rules enforceable, requiring the use of face masks and other measures to slow transmission. It has failed to act so far this time, however. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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An effort to raise money for entertainment workers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic has collapsed because of a dispute between a major charity and a labor union representing musicians. The charity, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, had planned an online fund raiser on Monday at which it would stream a concert, recorded in November, that celebrated the 25th anniversary of Disney on Broadway. The concert, backed by 15 musicians, was also a fund raiser, which brought in 570,426 for Broadway Cares. Two major labor unions, Actors' Equity Association and SAG AFTRA, agreed to allow the streaming of the concert without fees, but the American Federation of Musicians, which has been focused on winning greater compensation for streamed content, did not. "Members of the American Federation of Musicians are suffering from the sudden cancellation of all work as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak," the union's international president, Ray Hair, said by email. "During the height of this crisis, Disney Theatrical has come to us asking to stream media content without payment to the musicians involved in the production. Especially now, with zero employment in the entertainment sector, the content producers should care enough about the welfare of those who originally performed the show to see to it that they are fairly compensated when their work is recorded and streamed throughout the world." Broadway Cares, which has been raising money for a Covid 19 emergency assistance fund, was clearly frustrated. "I understand being told no," Tom Viola, the organization's executive director, said in a statement. "When that happens and it does I can usually see why or understand the extenuating circumstances. It never feels simply meanspirited. This was different and the result, particularly now, is heartbreaking." Disney, which has raised nearly 20 million for Broadway Cares over the last quarter century, was similarly unhappy. "Disney wholeheartedly supported the request from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS to AFM to waive fees for this fund raiser, just as many unions and guilds had happily agreed to do," Disney Theatrical Productions said in a statement. "It's disappointing that in this case, due to AFM's decision, much needed funds will not be raised. We are fiercely proud to be advocates for Broadway Cares and will continue to be, especially at a time like this." Early Sunday, after this story was published, the 15 musicians who performed at the concert, joined by the president of their union local, released a statement saying that Mr. Hair had not consulted them, and that they wanted him to allow the streaming of the concert. "We as an orchestra are happy to forgo any payment for the streaming of this charitable event," they said. "Now more than ever it is essential to join with the other members of the arts community to help those in need." Efforts to slow the spread of the virus have idled millions of people, and those working in the arts have been hard hit, as live performances have ceased, museums have closed, and work on film and television shows has been halted. Many nonprofit and commercial arts institutions, including Disney Theatrical Productions, have furloughed employees in the face of evaporated revenue. At the same time, many entertainers, isolated in their homes, have been participating without payment in online efforts to raise money for charities seeking to help those whose health or finances have been harmed by the pandemic. The failed negotiations between Broadway Cares and the musicians' union unfolded within the last few days, and the tone from the union was harsh. "When you treat musicians as if they were slaves, you reap the consequences," Hair said to a Disney executive in an email. At another point, he wrote: "We are in a zero employment situation. I am waiving nothing. That's final. You should want to pay the musicians, who have no income during this crisis." Disney spent around 200,000 to produce the concert in the fall, and paid the musicians who performed. The company said the upcoming streaming fund raiser was not a Disney event, but a Broadway Cares event, and that it was the charity seeking a waiver. "They are trying to raise money to help your members and the entire community during this crisis," Scott Kardel, the Disney Theatrical labor relations director, wrote to Hair. "Your decision means the fund raising event will be canceled. It's your decision but it seems a harsh and punitive one to your members and the larger community." Broadway Cares argued that it could not afford to pay the musicians for an already recorded concert without also paying the other unions. It noted that it had already given 50,000 this year to musicians' assistance programs, and offered to give another 25,000 to a musicians' emergency fund, which Viola said would be more than the value of the payment Hair was seeking. But Hair refused that offer, writing, "I do not support and will not agree to your demand for gratis services during the current crisis." Broadway Cares then decided it had no choice but to cancel the fund raiser, which would have been hosted by Ryan McCartan, with live interviews woven into the streamed concert. The original concert, performed at the New Amsterdam Theater on Nov. 4, featured songs from Disney shows including "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King" and "Newsies," as well as some lesser known titles. (Anyone remember "King David"?) It was introduced by Whoopi Goldberg and performed by a variety of Broadway stars, including Christian Borle, Norm Lewis, Ashley Park and Sherie Rene Scott.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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During his presidency, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, watched 363 movies at Camp David. Spread out over eight years, it's a pardonably large total, especially for two former film actors, a couple who retained show business as a frame of reference long after they'd gone into its professional cousin, politics. All their viewing of the era's biggest hits probably kept the Reagans more connected to the country than watching four hours a day of cable news. Mark Weinberg, a young press aide detailed to Camp David on the weekends, would join a group of staffers in Aspen Lodge each time the president opened the door just before 8 p.m. Everyone would watch the films, and the staffers would also watch their hosts. More than 30 years later, with the former first lady's blessing, Weinberg began writing this amiable book about the experience. "Movie Nights With the Reagans" is fluffed with a loyalist's nostalgia, but it does offer entertaining glimpses of the first couple, and it may lure even Reagan nonenthusiasts to indulge in some nostalgia of their own. The president was "clearly excited" to see "Top Gun," though the sex scenes seemed to go on far too long for his and Nancy's taste. The "over the top violence" of "Red Dawn" may have similarly dampened their appreciation of its Commie repelling Colorado kids. (Both Reagans expressed disapproval of the pot smoking scene in "9 to 5.") Among films with a political dimension, Weinberg insists that "Ghostbusters" "helped energize the 1984 campaign," featuring as its villain an over regulating E.P.A. bureaucrat. The director, Ivan Reitman, had unusually conservative leanings for Hollywood, but Reagan himself seems to have had a nonideological good time watching the movie. The president liked He saw no connection between the "Star Wars" franchise and his Strategic Defense Initiative, but recognized the films as a lasered update of the westerns he'd once starred in. One of those, "Cattle Queen of Montana," is on the marquee at the Hill Valley movie theater in the portion of "Back to the Future" set in 1955. A nice touch, though Weinberg records that "it felt as if the air had gone out of" Aspen Lodge when Doc, disbelieving news from the future of Reagan's ascent, asks Marty: "I suppose Jane Wyman is the first lady?" One pictures Nancy biting hard on a kernel of unpopped corn, but in the summer of 1985 popcorn had been banished from Aspen Lodge because of the president's recent colon cancer surgery. Along with all the '80s blockbusters, the Reagans showed vintage films, including a few of the president's own. The couple's one co starring venture, "Hellcats of the Navy," allowed the young staffers to see the boss and his wife as a kind of cold showered Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. Reagan had a self respecting view of his movie work and remained sufficiently connected to his old craft to suggest that Steven Spielberg shorten the credits of "E.T." after it was screened at the White House in 1982. Back at Camp David, with not much to be seen watching the backs of the Reagans' heads, Weinberg often struggles to fill the page: His recollections of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" contain a two page aside about Reagan's friendship with Wayne Newton, prompted by Matthew Broderick's lip syncing of "Danke Schoen." A large part of the "Chariots of Fire" chapter is taken up with a sentimental exploration of the Reagan/Thatcher partnership. The author has to sneak away from his seat to consult Reagan letters, diaries and biographies to fortify what is essentially a subjunctive enterprise. He will "have to imagine" whether Reagan was thinking about his vexed relationship with his daughter Patti when watching Henry and Jane Fonda in "On Golden Pond." He "could not help but wonder" if the president "may have seen parts of himself" in "Back to the Future," and can only "suspect" that Reagan "may have reflected" on travails with his alcoholic father when watching Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Conjecture is the big problem for any book about presidential film viewing. Mark Feeney's ambitious, well researched "Nixon at the Movies," published in 2004, reveals that during his years in office Nixon watched just one movie featuring Reagan, a man of whom he had "a thoroughly mixed opinion." The film was "Dark Victory," shown at the president's San Clemente home in August 1973. Feeney plausibly speculates on the contempt Nixon may have felt for the moneyed, time wasting crowd (including Reagan's character) surrounding Bette Davis, the picture's star. But here too, like Weinberg, Feeney "can only wonder" what the book's subject actually experienced while the lights were down. Weinberg's memoir doesn't aspire to the depth of Feeney's study, but its fealty and kindliness have their own appeal. The anecdotes (like the two pages on Reagan's effort to return a pen he accidentally walked off with) are sweet, not piercing; the hue is as rosy as the president's cheeks. The author once fell asleep during a screening of "Show Boat," and afterward was "almost out the door when the president tapped me on the shoulder and said with a wink and a big smile, 'Guess you were pretending it was a cabinet meeting.'" "Movie Nights With the Reagans" probably would have worked better as a half hour oral history, but here it is, not unwelcome, if only to remind us that the role of the president can be played by a charming gentleman instead of a scoundrel.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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E. Katherine Kerr, right, with Meryl Streep in the 1983 movie "Silkwood." Ms. Kerr may have been best known for her film roles, but the bulk of her career was onstage. E. Katherine Kerr, a stage and screen actress and playwright who won strong reviews for her Off Broadway work and an Obie Award in 1982 for her performance in Caryl Churchill's "Cloud 9," died on July 1 in Sarasota, Fla. She was 82. Her friend and neighbor Tess Link, who was by her side when Ms. Kerr died at Tidewell Hospice, said the cause was non Hodgkin's lymphoma. Ms. Kerr had received the diagnosis three months earlier. Ms. Kerr was probably best known for her roles in star studded films like Mike Nichols's "Silkwood" (1983), a drama about a nuclear plant whistle blower, in which she acted alongside Meryl Streep and Cher, and the crime drama "Suspect" (1987), with Cher and Dennis Quaid. The bulk of her career, though, was onstage. In "Cloud 9," a two act satire set in both British colonial Africa and 1979 London, she played three characters two in the first act and one in the second. The performance brought her a Drama Desk nomination as well as the Obie. Ms. Kerr received another Drama Desk nomination for her Off Broadway performance in 1987 in the lead female role of Christopher Durang's comedy "Laughing Wild" at Playwrights Horizons. In his review in The New York Times, Frank Rich called Ms. Kerr "a chic and mesmerizing figure" and noted that Mr. Durang, who also starred in the production, had written the role expressly for her. "One can see why," Mr. Rich wrote. "This actress delivers her most hostile lines ('I wish I'd been killed when I was a fetus') with a savage, taunting bark that might make Elaine Stritch seem like a Pollyanna." Elaine Katherine Kerr was born on April 20, 1937, in Indianapolis to Beatrice and Dr. John Francis Kerr. Her mother was a music teacher; her father, who died in World War II, was a physician. (Her mother later remarried.) She is survived by a great niece, Tess Weber. After graduating from Indiana University, Ms. Kerr took a job as a high school English teacher. In 1963, not long into her teaching career, she was asked to become the faculty adviser of the drama club. With little experience, she decided to go to New York and enroll in summer classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse and then return to Indiana to teach. Ms. Kerr later had small roles in the original Broadway casts of Charles Gordone's Pulitzer Prize winning 1969 play, "No Place to Be Somebody," and Lucille Fletcher's "Night Watch." She performed in Buffalo, Atlanta and New Orleans. But she was struggling to get leading roles in New York. Frustrated, Ms. Kerr took a hiatus in 1978. "I went on a self exploration journey," she told The Times three years later. She sought self improvement through EST (Erhard Seminars Training) and underwent psychotherapy. Afterward she decided to go by the name Katherine instead of Elaine, to reflect her inner transformation. "Elaine sounded like a wimp," she told The Times in 1987. "Katherine sounded strong, positive, in charge." She decided to keep the "E," though, so as not to "kill off Elaine," she said. With a change in her name came a shift in her success. Where Elaine had given solid but minor performances in the early 1970s, E. Katherine gained meatier roles in the '80s and laudatory reviews. She eventually took on playwriting with "Juno's Swans," a comedy about two sisters, Cecil and Cary, who reconnect when Cecil, newly divorced, moves to New York to stay with Cary, a struggling actress. The play's title is derived from a line in Shakespeare's "As You Like It": "And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans/ Still we went coupled and inseparable." "Juno's Swans" had its premiere in 1978 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, a showcase for new talent. It then moved to the PAF Playhouse in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island, where Ms. Kerr had a starring role. It was resurrected in 1985 in an Off Broadway production at Second Stage. It was around that time that Ms. Kerr started teaching acting, holding a two day workshop that took her around the world for three decades. She also taught at Yale, New York University and Sarah Lawrence College and at the Playwrights Horizons Theater School and the 42nd Street Collective. She wrote a book on acting, "The Four Principles: Applying the Keys of Brilliant Acting to Life," published in 2011. As she got older, Ms. Kerr moved to Florida and took to blogging. In her last post, dated Jan. 16 of this year, she discussed her successful treatment for cataracts. "Now, when I type this, words and pictures on my computer look bright, crisp and colorful," she wrote. "And when I look out my window, the palm tree and hibiscus bush look bright, crisp and colorful. My wonderful brain decides which eye to use without any direction from me."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The lander touched down on Mars more than six months and 300 million miles after it launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. InSight has already transmitted back its first image. 50 meters constant velocity. 37 meters ... 30 meters ... 20 meters. 17 meters standing by for touchdown. Touchdown confirmed. Cheering So, it is going to take an image and then send that image to the MarCOs. The MarCOs in turn will relay it back down to earth. That's correct they got it. Let's just wait. Let's see what they saw. There it is. NASA's InSight Mission Has Touched Down on Mars to Study the Red Planet's Deep Secrets The InSight lander, NASA's latest foray to the red planet, has landed. Cheers erupted on Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which operates the spacecraft, when InSight sent back acknowledgment of its safe arrival on Mars. That was the end of a journey of more than six months and 300 million miles. As InSight descended and each milestone of the landing process was called out, "the hairs on the back of my neck would start rising a little bit higher, a little bit higher," Tom Hoffman, the project manager for the mission, said at a news conference after the landing. "And then when we finally got the confirmation of touchdown, it was completely amazing. The whole room went crazy. My inner 4 year old came out." In the months ahead, InSight will begin its study of the Martian underworld, listening for tremors marsquakes and collect data that will be pieced together in a map of the interior of the red planet and help would help scientists understand how Mars and other rocky planets formed. Those lessons could also shed light on Earth's origins. "We can basically use Mars as a time machine to go back and look at what the Earth must have looked like a few tens of millions of years after it formed," said Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator of the mission. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. InSight set down at Elysium Planitia, near the Equator in the northern hemisphere. Mission scientists have described the region as resembling a parking lot or "Kansas without the corn." Within minutes, the first photograph from InSight appeared on the screen, eliciting another round of cheers. The image was partially obscured by dirt kicked up onto a protective but clear lens cover, but it was evident that the landscape was indeed flat. One rock could be seen in the foreground. "I'm very very happy that it looks like we have an incredibly safe and boring looking landing location," Mr. Hoffman said. Because the mission is not interested in rocky terrain or pretty sunsets, planners wanted a flat place with sandy soil. "There's one rock, so I'm going to have to talk to them a little bit," Mr. Hoffman joked. Elizabeth Barrett, a science system engineer, likened the process to a claw game where one tries to pull out a prize without it falling. "But you're doing it with a really, really valuable prize," she said. "And you're doing it blindfolded where you can only take occasional pictures. And then you're doing it via remote control on another planet." That requires some additional care. "You need to make sure you actually have the grapple on the payload before you lift it up and it's actually on the ground before you let it go," Dr. Barrett said. InSight's primary mission on the surface is to last nearly two years. One simple thing Dr. Banerdt hopes to learn: how thick is the crust of Mars? He recalled a project he worked on as an intern in the 1970s where the thickness of Mars's crust needed to be known. "We just had to fake it, because we had no idea," he said. InSight should finally provide the answer. "That's one measurement I would like to go back to the old paper, plug it in to see how close I was," Dr. Banerdt said. Other questions the mission aims to answer: How often does the ground shake with marsquakes? How big is Mars's molten core? How much heat is flowing up from the decay of radioactive elements at the core? To study these questions, InSight will use two main instruments: a dome shape package containing seismometers and a heat probe that is to burrow about 16 feet down. NASA has spent 814 million on InSight. In addition, France and Germany invested 180 million to build these main instruments. The seismometers, which are designed to measure surface movements less than the width of a hydrogen atom, will produce what are essentially sonograms of the planet's insides. In particular, scientists are looking to record at least 10 to 12 marsquakes over two years. Temblors on Mars are not caused by plate tectonics, like on Earth. Instead they are generated when the planet's crust cracks because of its interior's cooling and shrinking. The seismometers could also detect other seismic vibrations from meteors hitting Mars.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Jim Kiick, one of a trio of running backs who formed the guts of the Miami Dolphins' team that made three consecutive Super Bowl appearances in the early 1970s, died on Saturday in Wilton Manors, Fla. He was 73. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Allie Kiick. Kiick had Alzheimer's disease and had been in an assisted living center. Because of the coronavirus, his daughter had been unable to enter his room. "It's pretty hard when you're sitting on the outside of the glass and can't do anything to cheer him up," she wrote on Twitter two days before he died. "He's lost the spark in his eyes, as anyone would in this situation." Running behind a fearsome offensive line, Kiick, fullback Larry Csonka and halfback Mercury Morris propelled the Dolphins to three Super Bowls and back to back titles in the 1972 and 1973 seasons. Kiick scored six touchdowns during those playoff runs, including one in Super Bowl VII, a 14 7 win over the Washington Redskins, that helped the team complete the N.F.L.'s only perfect season. Kiick scored another touchdown and Csonka added two more in Super Bowl VIII, a 24 7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings. The titles cemented Kiick's legacy as a versatile running back and a hard driving star who, with Csonka, was celebrated as much for his performance on the field as his mischief off the field. The tandem, who were both drafted by the Dolphins in 1968, became fast friends. As the roommates and drinking buddies helped turn the hapless Dolphins into winners, the two men grew so prominent in Miami that Kiick was nicknamed Butch Cassidy and Csonka was called the Sundance Kid, a reference to the two bank robbers in the 1969 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. They appeared together on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1972. The following year, they co wrote "Always on the Run" with the help of Dave Anderson, a columnist at The New York Times. The party came to an end in 1974. Unhappy with their salaries, Kiick and Csonka, along with wide receiver Paul Warfield, played out their options. After the Dolphins were bounced from the playoffs that year, the three men jumped to the Memphis Southmen of the newly formed World Football League in a package worth 3.86 million. After the W.F.L. collapsed in 1975, all three players returned to the N.F.L. Kiick finished his career in 1977 after two seasons with the Denver Broncos and the Redskins. Kiick is the latest in a growing list of Dolphins from that era who have died with cognitive and neurological problems at a relatively young age. Earl Morrall, the backup quarterback who led the team for much of the 1972 season, had Parkinson's disease when he died at age 79. Nick Buoniconti, who anchored the Dolphins' vaunted "No Name Defense," died last year after battling memory issues. Defensive lineman Bill Stanfill, 69, and offensive guard Bob Kuechenberg, 71, were found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated hits to the head. James Forrest Kiick was born on Aug. 9, 1946, in Lincoln Park, N.J., to Alice and George Kiick. His father was a fullback for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1940 before fighting in Europe in World War II. He returned to the team in 1945 before becoming a high school coach in New Jersey. His mother was a teacher. After playing baseball, basketball and football at Boonton High School in New Jersey, Jim Kiick became a halfback at the University of Wyoming. He was the team's leading rusher for three consecutive years and won All Western Athletic Conference honors three times. His senior year, the Cowboys were ranked fifth in the nation. In 1968, the Dolphins, then in the A.F.L., chose Csonka in the first round and Kiick in the fifth round. The two men, who had met at a collegiate all star game the summer before they joined the Dolphins, had an immediate impact on the team, which had won just seven games in its first two seasons in the league. In their rookie seasons, they combined to run for more than 1,100 yards and 10 touchdowns. The following year, Kiick led the league with nine rushing touchdowns, helping him earn a second consecutive trip to the Pro Bowl. Everything changed in 1970 when Don Shula took over as head coach. Built around a potent running game and a stifling defense, the team won 10 or more games each of the next five seasons. Presaging their move to the W.F.L., Csonka and Kiick briefly held out at the start of the 1971 season before they signed multiyear contracts. Kiick and Csonka earned a reputation for toughness. In his seven years with the Dolphins, Kiick missed only one game. He played with a shattered big toe, a pulled ankle tendon, a punctured elbow, a dislocated hip and a broken finger. Kiick's role changed in 1972 when Shula rotated him and Morris into the game depending on the situation. Morris and Csonka became the first pair of teammates to rush for 1,000 yards or more in the same season, and Kiick ran for another 521 yards and five touchdowns. "We were the perfect combination," Kiick said to The Associated Press of his role with Morris. "What he could do, I couldn't. What I could do, he couldn't. Together we could do it all." Kiick finished his career with 3,759 yards rushing and 2,302 receiving yards and 33 touchdowns. After he retired from football, Kiick worked as a private investigator in the Broward County Public Defender's Office, according to The Orlando Sentinel. He had been living in an assisted care center for several years. Kiick was married and divorced twice. Besides his daughter, Allie, a professional tennis player, he is survived by two sons, Brandon and Austin, and a brother, William.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Renee Elise Goldsberry says her beauty regimen has been influenced by her stage roles and by TV makeup artists. The Tony Award winning actress Renee Elise Goldsberry, 46, is known for her Broadway performances she played Angelica Schuyler Church in "Hamilton" and had leading roles in "Rent" and "The Lion King" but she has also been making quite an impression on the small screen. She stars opposite Oprah Winfrey in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (it will have its premiere on HBO on April 22), and in Netflix's "Altered Carbon," as a rebel leader. Raised in Houston and Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Ms. Goldsberry now lives in New York. Her beauty know how has been influenced both by her stage roles and by TV makeup artists. I wash my face with Cetaphil. Then I moisturize. I'm always looking for something that doesn't feel greasy but really works and lasts. Right now I'm using the Cetaphil moisturizer for my face, and for my body I use Aveeno. I don't do lip balm. I believe hydration really comes from the inside out, so I try to drink a lot of water. I have children who are always asking for Vaseline on their lips, but I'm saying we need to drink more water. When I was younger, I heard a woman say, "I have to put my face on." That kind of disturbed me. I made a decision that I was wearing my face. I didn't want to create something that wasn't there. That sounds great when you're young, but as you get older, you just tend to do more because ... well, maybe you need it. Still, I try to err on the side of less. If I'm meeting someone for breakfast or something, I put on Smashbox Camera Ready BB cream, which has SPF 15 in it, and Nars blush in Torrid. Once when I was putting on my own makeup for a show at the Apollo, a makeup artist was nearby, and he said, "Please, can I just do this?" He had a Nars blush, and he totally hooked me up. Then he gave it to me as a gift, and I've been using it ever since. Maybe I'll do lip gloss. I like nude colors like MAC Oh Baby. If I feel like I want to bump it up a little more, like for a work meeting, I add mascara. Typically I use a Revlon one. If I'm upgrading from that, like if I'm doing my own makeup for the evening, I use MAC Studio Fix Fluid Foundation. I like it because it's sheer. I might use lighter colors to contour my lids: I'm using a Clinique four color palette right now. I'm trying to look natural and not painted. I'm typically fighting hair and makeup teams because I'm always saying: "Can I wear less? Can I look natural and fresh?" I don't wear fragrance. The most fragrant I smell is probably from a St. Ives Body Wash. It's not that I don't like it. I just don't necessarily feel like I need to add a fragrance to myself. I have several different hair products. I'm always looking for ones that moisturize. I have things from Nexxus, and there's a shampoo and conditioner from L'anza that I found at Ricky's. My hair comes to the center of my back. It can get really light in the summer, but I like it to be a rich dark brown. I don't like it when it just blends into my skin. I go to Terence Mathis I walked into his salon on 45th Street when I moved to New York for "The Lion King" and he uses Bigen, which isn't a permanent color. He does all of my coloring and styling. If I'm doing my own hair, I like a slicked back ponytail. I use Giovanni L.A. Natural Styling Gel. It gives a firm hold, and it keeps my edges down. Also, because I wash my hair once a week, it's important that it's strong enough to work but isn't flaking off the next day. I keep a pedicure but only through the summer. I like to give my nails a rest. With the weather in New York, that works out. I live in Harlem and frequent most of the salons here. I've done acupuncture, and I believe in it. That's the first place I go if I'm having any particular pain anywhere. I absolutely pay attention to diet and fitness. When I'm in a show or a musical, I think my fight or flight instinct kicks in and my metabolism shoots up. I actually have to eat to keep weight on. I personally think women look better with a little weight. The reverse is true when I'm not in a show. The first couple of months I'm happy because I'm seeing a little more weight on; a couple more months later, I'm wondering why my jeans aren't fitting. The first thing I shot after "Hamilton" was "Henrietta Lacks." I was looking really toned, but Henrietta is a bigger woman than me, so I tried to hide that. Now, in "Altered Carbon," I'm supposed to be extremely fit and train warriors to save the world. I have a lot of working out to do. My favorite is to run outside. I love the challenge of making it up a hill. But because I have a short amount of time to get ready, I'm doing circuit training with a husband wife team, Marianna Biribin and Josh Viel. They are amazing. But the clock is running down!
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Credit...Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times When winter came to Beijing, it arrived as it often does, as a snarling Siberian wind. The cold howled through the hutongs and around the ring roads. It weaseled under the doors and through the seams of your shirt. It was early December. "Da xue" season had arrived, the time for "major snow." But there would be no snow, there almost never is in Beijing. The waning days of 2018 had been crisp and clear, with flecks of starlight pricking the orange dome of the city at night. Snow didn't matter. What mattered was the cold and now that it was here the people could make it. It was Saturday, opening day at Nanshan, one of about 10 ski areas within an hour's drive of Beijing. The resort was packed. For the past four days Nanshan's 32 snow cannons had been firing fool you fluffy crystals that workers then pushed around to cover a few of the slopes. Loudspeakers urged beginners not to take the intermediate runs. Couples lounged on sun decks wearing bright blue rental ski jackets. Steam boiled from kitchens serving bowls of hot and numbing soups. And yet a friend and I have flown 13 hours from the Pacific Northwest to witness something far more exciting than the Olympics: a south facing bump of a mountain where the summit elevation doesn't top 900 feet. On this day, opening day, more than 4,500 skiers and snowboarders will slide down the bottom half of that mountain, a mere 300 vertical feet, on portions of snow covered slopes so short that runs last but seconds. On the busiest holidays, more than 9,000 people will squeeze onto Nanshan, and the rental shops will run out of gear. "What's happening with the Olympics, it's big for China with more resorts and more events, and that's great, but what we're doing here is just so different," Marco said. He gestured out the window where lines were forming to go off his jumps. "We're trying to show people that snow sports are not sports. You don't need to train, you don't need to be serious. This is just shredding with your friends." To get to the ski area the poor man's way today, you must first get to inner Beijing's ancient Deshengmen archery tower, a hulking brown rectangle of a building with upturned eaves that sits atop a 500 year old barbican on the Second Ring Road. Centuries ago, the emperor's armies would return from war through this gate. Today, it's a bustling bus depot. We bungled our way onto the packed 919 express, shoehorning ourselves into the last two seats, thankful that we'd decided not to bring our cumbersome skis. Apartment blocks gave way to scruffy brown hillsides. The bus shot through a tunnel under the Great Wall. We changed buses, got lost, and, three hours and about 3 later, trotted up to the foot of Daqingshan mountain and the entrance to Shijinglong. "I see skiers!" John boomed. There was one run open, a creamy tongue splitting a face of Van Dyke brown. When the Olympics arrive, you'll hear a lot about Yanqing, but probably not Shijinglong. That's because the ski racing events, as well as sports like bobsled and skeleton, will happen elsewhere in Yanqing, at a new national alpine ski and sliding center called Xiaohaituo, about five miles away. Vanke, the company that's positioned to run Xiaohaituo after the Olympics, has been dumping money into Shijinglong, too. The small collection of shops, a ski center and outside areas were all pleasingly refurbished. Snapshots of people goofing off hung on a wall near the ski school. Rows of enormous new condos had been carved out of the mountain. We took a few runs from midway up the mountain, the highest you could go until they made more snow. The skis' edges hissed as I drove them deep into a surface that felt silky and fast. Orange fences lined the run and between them were mostly beginner skiers feeling out the awkward mechanics of the snowplow. On peak days about 1,500 people will come here. "Where are you guys from?" asked a guy at the top of the run. Jin Wentao, or Daniel to his English speaking friends, had studied English in the south of China before moving north to ski. Already a capable skier himself, he was now serving on the front lines of the government push to create those 300 million enthusiasts. School children come up a couple of afternoons every week to take basic lessons from him. The buses were already idling when John and I arrived shortly after 7 a.m., but with time to spare, we ducked into a nearby dumpling shop. I nearly gasped. It was filled with skiers and snowboarders. They were slurping soups with helmets clasped to their backpacks. You could hear the swish of their synthetics as they got up to get the chile sauce. We ordered 20 dumplings and soup and fry bread, and then begged our people to pay for it all using WeChat. The business had gone cashless but it wasn't a problem. "Twenty two kuai," said a young woman, about 4. She pocketed it, scanned a QR code to transfer the money, and raced out to the bus. An hour later, we found Nanshan buzzing with the energy you feel at the start of any ski season anywhere. Ski instructors lined up waiting for their charges. People flowed in and out of changing rooms. You could buy 2.75 beer on a sun deck or sit inside a fancy restaurant for fish soup in a bamboo bucket. People were already starting to hit the Mellow Park jumps, while beginners stuck to the magic carpets. Every now and then an attendant standing mid slope would blow a whistle and a snowmobile would race out to assist an unfortunate enthusiast crumpled on the slope. John and I had our tickets and gear reserved this time 38! which made everything go smoothly, even if the skis were still much too short. We headed up by lift to a midpoint, drifting under the rows of stadium lights that would allow us to do some night skiing later. There, a skier coming off the ramp behind me couldn't stop, plowed into me and then carried on without a word, as if it were all part of the game. Some wore pillow size stuffed animal turtles around their rumps to protect their tailbones in a fall. We pushed off in the silky man made snow where snowboarders arced gorgeous turns, surfer style. A team in red matching suits linked tight figure 8s behind each other. It took 30 seconds to get down and four minutes to ride back up. We chatted with others. On our final night, exhausted after hours of night skiing, John and I rallied for a walk down the broad soulless streets of Miyun. Tomorrow we'd hit the Great Wall for a few hours, but for now we were happy to stumble upon a glorious site: a bar with ski goggles for a logo and "Snowman Ski Club" written by the door. "Bingo," John said. We sat down at a booth and ordered beers. American ski movies flickered on the TV. Snapshots of skiers hung on the walls. Two skiers sat in another booth. They came by our table to cheer us, their bottles dropping lower than ours as a gesture of respect. "Why are you here?" one of them, Mi Le, asked. "To ski!" John said. Out came phones, pictures and rounds of baijiu, a sorghum based spirit. More friends wandered in, like Hai Rui and Little Fatty. None had been skiing for more than a few years, yet all were proud members of the Snowman Ski Club, an informal group that gathers on WeChat to joke and make plans. They'd spent the day roaring around Yunfoshan, another ski area in Miyun. This was their apres hangout, and we should stay. "Welcome to the group, my friends," Mi Le said. "Now when are we going to ski?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Labor Day is an opportune time to take a last minute, fun filled getaway, says Adam Weissenberg, the head of travel, hospitality and leisure at Deloitte, a hospitality services company . "Compared with Memorial Day and Fourth of July, which are incredibly busy travel periods, Labor Day is slower because the school year has already started in many parts of the country," he said. "And, you can definitely get good value for your money." Here are seven possibilities around the country, at a variety of price points. A Beachside Getaway from the Bustle of Los Angeles Loews Coronado Bay Resort, in Coronado, Calif ., has an "Escape from LA" package that's ideal for the long weekend. The package deal includes accommodations, a 50 resort credit and a round trip transfer in a Tesla vehicle between Los Angeles and Coronado Bay. Guests can spend their weekend cruising the bay in a sailboat, kayaking in the resort's private marina or simply relaxing on the beach. Bookings start at 399 a night. Another option in California is a trip to Catalina Island, an hour's boat ride from Southern California. Travelers stay at the Pavilion Hotel, just across the street from the beach, and the package includes transportation between the island and Long Beach, breakfast, an evening wine and cheese reception in the property's ocean view courtyard, the use of beach cruiser bicycles to get around, a zip line eco tour and access to the new Catalina Aerial Adventure, a series of challenging ropes courses and zip lines. Bookings start from 545 a night for two people. If you're looking for a Labor Day getaway that the whole family including children who may not be back in school yet can enjoy, consider a visit to the Mid Atlantic. In Hershey, Pa., Hershey Lodge and The Hotel Hershey have a package over Labor Day that includes free breakfast for a family of four and free admission to Hersheypark amusement park for those ages 17 and under. Packages start at 458 a night for a family of four.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous By Joseph Henrich According to copies of copies of fragments of ancient texts, Pythagoras in about 500 B.C. exhorted his followers: Don't eat beans! Why he issued this prohibition is anybody's guess (Aristotle thought he knew), but it doesn't much matter because the idea never caught on. According to Joseph Henrich, some unknown early church fathers about a thousand years later promulgated the edict: Don't marry your cousin! Why they did this is also unclear, but if Henrich is right and he develops a fascinating case brimming with evidence this prohibition changed the face of the world, by eventually creating societies and people that were WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. In the argument put forward in this engagingly written, excellently organized and meticulously argued book, this simple rule triggered a cascade of changes, creating states to replace tribes, science to replace lore and law to replace custom. If you are reading this you are very probably WEIRD, and so are almost all of your friends and associates, but we are outliers on many psychological measures. These differences, and more, are manifest in surveys of attitudes and many other data sources, and more impressively in hundreds of psychological experiments, but the line between WEIRD and not WEIRD, like all lines in evolution, is not bright. There are all manner of hybrids, intermediates and unclassifiable variations, but there are also forces that have tended to sort today's people into these two kinds, genetically indistinguishable but profoundly different psychologically. 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. WEIRD folk are the more recent development, growing out of the innovation of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the birth of states and organized religions about 3,000 years ago, then becoming "proto WEIRD" over the last 1,500 years (thanks to the prohibition on marrying one's cousin), culminating in the biologically sudden arrival of science, industry and the "modern" world during the last 500 years or so. WEIRD minds evolved by natural selection, but not by genetic selection; they evolved by the natural selection of cultural practices and other culturally transmitted items. Henrich is an anthropologist at Harvard. He and his colleagues first described the WEIRD mind in a critique of all the work in human psychology (and the social sciences more generally) built on experimental subjects almost exclusively composed of undergraduates or the children of academics and others who live near universities. The results obtained drawing on this conveniently available set of "normal" people were assumed by almost all researchers to be universal features of human nature, the human brain, the human emotional system. But when attempts were made to replicate the experiments with people in other countries, not just illiterate hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers but the elites in Asian countries, for instance, it was shown in many cases that the subject pool of the original work had been hugely biased from the outset. One of the first lessons that must be learned from this important book is that the WEIRD mind is real; all future investigation of "human nature" must be complicated by casting a wider net for subjects, and we must stop assuming that our ways are "universal." Offhand, I cannot think of many researchers who haven't tacitly adopted some dubious universalist assumptions. I certainly have. We will all have to change our perspective. Many of the WEIRD ways of thinking, Henrich shows, are the result of cultural differences, not genetic differences. And that is another lesson that the book drives home: Biology is not just genes. Language, for instance, was not invented; it evolved. So did religion, music, art, ways of hunting and farming, norms of behavior and attitudes about kinship that leave measurable differences on our psychology and even on our brains. To point to just one striking example: Normal, meaning non WEIRD, people use left and right hemispheres of their brains about equally for facial recognition, but we WEIRD people have co opted left hemisphere regions for language tasks, and are significantly worse at recognizing faces than the normal population. Until recently few researchers imagined that growing up in a particular culture could have such an effect on functional neuroanatomy. The centerpiece of Henrich's theory is the role played by what he calls the Roman Catholic Church's Marriage and Family Program, featuring prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. "The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in 'figuring out' how to dismantle kin based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread." The genius was accidental, according to Henrich, because the church authorities who laid down the laws had little or no insight into what they were setting in motion, aside from noticing that by weakening the traditional bonds of kinship, the church got rich fast. One of Henrich's goals is to devalue the residual traces of "Great Man" history, so he would be reluctant to rely on any ancient documents that came to light recounting the "real" reasons for the church's embattled stand on these issues. As a good evolutionist, he can say, "The church was just the 'lucky one' that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural beliefs and practices." But as for why the church fathers enforced these prohibitions so tenaciously against resistance over the centuries, this is still a bit of a mystery. Around the world today there is still huge variation in the societies where cousin marriages are permitted and even encouraged, and societies in which it is close to forbidden. There are good reasons for supposing that our early hominin ancestors were organized for tens of thousands of years by tight kinship relations, which still flourish today in most societies. So what happened in Europe starting in the middle of the first millennium was a major development, largely restricted to or at least concentrated in certain cultures where positive feedback turned small tendencies into large differences that then turned further differences into the birth of WEIRD culture and WEIRD minds. This is an extraordinarily ambitious book, along the lines of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel," which gets a brief and respectful mention, but going much farther, and bolstering the argument at every point with evidence gathered by Henrich's "lab," with dozens of collaborators, and wielding data points from world history, anthropology, economics, game theory, psychology and biology, all knit together with "statistical razzle dazzle" when everyday statistics is unable to distinguish signal from noise. The endnotes and bibliography take up over 150 pages and include a fascinating range of discussions. The book bristles with apologies for not having gathered quite enough data on various questions and hence settling for somewhat tentative hypotheses, warnings about not confusing correlation with causation, and occasionally tart admonitions, like "Some critics will ignore these points and pretend I never made them." One can often discover a lot about an organism's predators by seeing what defenses it has put in place. Henrich is expecting a battle, and well he might. There has long been a hostile divide between physical anthropologists, who have labs and study hominid bone fossils, for instance, and cultural anthropologists who spend a few seasons in the jungle learning the language and ways of a hunter gatherer tribe, for instance, or today, spend a few seasons studying the folkways of stock traders or baristas. Henrich is a cultural anthropologist but he wants to do it right, with controls, experiments, statistics and factual claims that can be shown to be right or wrong. In 1960 the field of cliometrics was born, history done with large data sets and statistics, and Henrich wants to show just how far this approach can be pushed. Traditional historians and the more informal cultural anthropologists will see themselves being confronted with a methodology few of them use and challenged to defend their impressionistic hypotheses against his lab based results. The virtues of having a theory to guide investigation are vividly displayed. Who would have thought to ask if the prevalence of rice paddies in different small regions of China played the same causal role that distance from a monastery played in Europe? Or why blood donations are strikingly lower in southern Italy than in northern Italy today. Or how testosterone levels differ dramatically during the life histories of men from WEIRD societies and men from kin intensive societies. Henrich has found dozens of ways of testing aspects of his theory, and it stands up remarkably well, yielding many surprising predictions that find multiple sources of confirmation, but that is not enough. He admits that his research overlooks (so far) large portions of the world's population, and when he counts societies instead of people to get his measure of how abnormal we WEIRD people are, one can wonder what percentage of the world's population is WEIRD today. The normals are turning into WEIRDs in droves, and almost nobody is going in the other direction, so if we WEIRDs aren't the majority yet, we soon will be, since societies with high Kinship Intensity Indexes evolve or go extinct almost as fast as the thousands of languages still in existence. A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously by the experts. That's science. Experts who don't have the technical tools historians and anthropologists especially have an important role to play as well; they should scour the book for any instances of Occam's broom (with which one sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug). This can be an innocent move, since Henrich himself, in spite of the astonishing breadth of his scholarship, is not expert in all of these areas and may simply be ignorant of important but little known exceptions to his generalizations. His highly detailed and confident relaying of historical and anthropological facts impresses me, but what do I know? You can't notice what isn't mentioned unless you're an expert. This book calls out for respectful but ruthless vetting on all counts, and what it doesn't need, and shouldn't provoke, is ideological condemnations or quotations of brilliant passages by revered authorities. Are historians, economists and anthropologists up to the task? It will be fascinating to see.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"We were just thinking of all the restaurants that we've outlived," Judy Collins said on a recent afternoon at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. She was there with her husband, Louis Nelson. "It all started with Orsini's," Mr. Nelson said, referring to the famed pasta house in Midtown Manhattan where the couple had their first date. "There was nothing like Orsini's." And on top of it, Scaletta, their favorite restaurant on the Upper West Side, had just closed. "I was devastated!" Ms. Collins said from the couch in her suite. She had a show later that night in the hotel. "You live through the ups and downs of your personal life, and you have these favorite things in your life and then poof they disappear." This month the couple celebrates the 22nd anniversary of their wedding; in total they have been together for 40 years. "Very good for an old hippie," Ms. Collins said with a smile. The two met at a fund raiser for the Equal Rights Amendment. She was 38 and he was 42, and both were previously married and well along in their careers. "We were both old enough to know what was important," Mr. Nelson said. Marriage never seemed necessary to the couple over their first 18 years together. They toyed with the idea off and on, but neither bit. "We always said, 'If you want to, I'd be happy to,'" Mr. Nelson said. "Judy said to me, 'I'd follow you anywhere.' That's pretty amazing." "I'm a hippie, I don't get it," Ms. Collins recalled. "And then I thought, wait a minute, what am I supposed to do? I went into his hospital room with a big frown on my face and said, 'I think we should get married.' In my fog, I'm thinking if you're married, all of those things are simple." They were married on April 16, 1996, at St. John the Divine in New York in front of 280 guests, 18 years to the day after they met. Guests included Peter Yarrow, Gloria Steinem, Bill Moyers, Susan Cheever and Donna E. Shalala. Pondering their four decades together, Ms. Collins said: "You share the good things, share the tragedies, share the traumas." "We shared the worst thing that could possibly ever happen," Mr. Nelson said. That was the death of Ms. Collins's son, Clark C. Taylor (his father was Ms. Collins's first husband), who committed suicide in 1992. They have survived bouts of jealousy too. Fifty years ago, Ms. Collins and Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash Young became romantically involved while making an album together. Their time together inspired Mr. Stills's hit song "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." The two remained friends and even toured together in 2017; they're hitting the road again on May 1. Ms. Collins has no problem being on tour with a former lover. But in the words of her husband, "it's a rub." "It's annoying," Mr. Nelson said. "But the thing is, I can say that." He came to a second conclusion too: "I guess I won." Leading separate professional lives has also, they believe, helped their longevity. Ms. Collins and Mr. Nelson do not collaborate they even keep their bank accounts separate but they do lean on each other for input. He comes to her shows and provides feedback, and she reads his writing projects. (He is probably best known for designing the Korean War Veterans Memorial mural in Washington.) "It means we help each other but we're very clear about what we're responsible for," Mr. Nelson said. They are also not shy about asking for help. Once, Ms. Collins suggested they split up. Mr. Nelson said, "Absolutely not, let's go see somebody." "If you have an issue, get someone to help you deal with it," Ms. Collins said. "Don't be afraid to talk about it with the person. We both have good relationships with friends that we can run things by. I think that's also important, that you have an integrated life but you're not completely, emotionally dependent on one person to be solving everything you have." So after 18 years together, was being married any different? "After we were married, I never had this feeling before, but all of the sudden I didn't feel alone anymore," Mr. Nelson said. "Things go on in your psyche that have to do with the nature of living on the planet and having certain things that are reliable and certain things that aren't," Ms. Collins said. "I didn't have the same kind of feeling during my first marriage when I was young, at all. It was very sustaining and very palpable. But it does make a difference, and it's a different feeling." Mr. Nelson turned slightly to face Ms. Collins, his face relaxed and wide. "I don't think you ever told me that," Mr. Nelson said. "But I agree with you, it is different."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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LONDON People lining up at a ticket booth under a Ferris wheel. Police officers questioning a skeleton figure as his dog looks on. Two new Banksys have popped up at the Barbican Center here, authenticated on Sunday by the British graffiti artist on his Instagram account. The pieces, which refer to the work of the American artist Jean Michel Basquiat, appear to herald the start of a major exhibition of Basquiat's work, opening on Thursday at the Barbican Center.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Pierre Boulez in the 1950s. His 1944 work "Prelude, Toccata et Scherzo" has been performed publicly for the first time.Credit...Israel Shenker/The New York Times Listen to excerpts from the piano solo "Prelude, Toccata et Scherzo," written in 1944, when the modernist master was just 19. Pierre Boulez in the 1950s. His 1944 work "Prelude, Toccata et Scherzo" has been performed publicly for the first time. The firebrand composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once wrote that it is essential that a creative artist "hides his first attempts and destroys his traces." By withdrawing from circulation several works from his apprentice years, Boulez showed he was willing to follow his own advice. But he didn't destroy everything. Entrusting one youthful score completed in 1944, when Boulez was 19, and never performed publicly in his lifetime to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland, this champion of modernism, who died in 2016, left open the possibility that his early traces might be discovered. Did looking at the score for the first time give you the sense of uncovering a "secret Boulez"? I was of course very surprised when I saw it, the Romantic aspect. But at the same time it might explain or even prove how basically, to me, the First and Second Sonatas from a few years later feel like highly Romantic works. They contain "rational" elements of course, everybody always talks about the rational part of them. But at the same time, the big intervals, I see them as very expressive. Even if he writes "to completely destroy all beauty of sounds." It is highly Romantic to think that. I mean, it's a little aggressive! But it's also Romantic. It's a lot of emotions. I think the "Prelude, Toccata et Scherzo" kind of proves that he had it within his personality. This hyper emotional or, let's say, passionate aspect. You spoke at Carnegie about the first movement as bearing the influence of Bartok. And then you hear some Messiaen in the middle of the movement? Messiaen used irregular kinds of rhythms. He would subtract or add a few beats to make it more interesting. That's what Boulez also does in the middle section. Which is, I think, highly interesting. Because Boulez is generally known as a composer who has a great rational aspect to his compositions. To some people it's a kind of coldness or maybe objectivity is better. But some of the telling indications that Boulez uses in the first movement are "tres expressif" ("very expressive"), "doucement triste" ("mildly sad"), and "comme une plainte qui s'exaspere" ("like a lament that intensifies"). And that's fantastic! It's really almost expressionist. After that intensity is heightened, the beginning comes back with great pomp everything is doubled. It's almost traditional virtuosity, which Liszt also has, and Rachmaninoff. Big use of all the registers of the piano at the same time, as full as you can make it. Very orchestral. Weirder notes, but the feel is definitely Romantic. What do you hear in the second movement? I think the second movement already looks forward to the later Boulez. It's harder to grasp in a way, because it seems rather improvisatory, because of the structure. You have a couple single note passages that you have to play fast, with alternating hands. And all the time these toccata sections are alternated with internal fugal sections. Just kind of traditional fugues, like Bach did, but in a 12 tone system. Toward the end he gets this very complex spider web of motives that are part of both the toccata and the fugue. And all these motives are stacked on top of each other, and it sounds completely random. At that moment, when as a listener you kind of lose it, he restarts some of these important themes in octaves, so you have some pointers. And you feel: "Oh, now I get it. They were just lost in all these complex atonal textures." And then in the third movement? What I find attractive is that it has these aggressive Boulez gestures already. Very pointy and spiky. That element is there, more than in any other movement. But it's actually very groovy, the intervals that he uses: a lot of major and minor seventh chords. And stacked fourths on top of one another. They remind me of much contemporary jazz. Probably Boulez would not agree with that. But I like it very much. Given that you are playing and recording a piece he never published, what is your own sense of a performer's liberty to disagree with Boulez after his death? He didn't want to publish it, it's true. But he did keep it, for some reason. Maybe at least to study at some point. So when I asked the people the Boulez heirs and the people at the Sacher Foundation if I could play it, they said: "Well, yeah, but basically for study reasons. So you can perform it once, just for people to be able to hear it." Then they wanted another performance, and they agreed to a third performance. Because they heard it, and they did agree that it's actually quite a good piece, and very informative. You see in these three movements that he's searching. He's finding his way. Later, it's all crystallized more. But this piece, I like it very much as a listener and as a player. It's already difficult enough to understand Boulez. I love his works. But I do first want to admit that it's hard stuff. And I very much like that in this piece we hear the same kind of principles he would use later, but in a clearer way.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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New York Men's Fashion Week: Bruised, but Still in the Ring Barely three years after New York Fashion Week: Men's made its debut as a stand alone celebration of all things sartorial and male, the bold experiment has fizzled. Inaugurated in 2015 as a move by the Council of Fashion Designers of America to showcase homegrown designers and align their schedules with the nearly monthlong schedule of men's wear shows in Paris, London and Milan, the men's week in New York quickly established itself as a calendar fixture, attracting corporate sponsors drawn to the buzz around a formerly untapped market and luring both the inevitable paparazzi and street style jesters they seemingly exist to document. Designers, too, clamored to get in on a dedicated men's wear week and the access it provided to international buyers and press. And for a time it looked as if New York's men's week could hold its own. Then, on the eve of the fall shows here, the CFDA made it clear that it had merged the men's week into a 10 day fashion calendar that started on Monday, with a scant three days dedicated exclusively to men's wear before coed and women's wear shows begin. What is more, the CFDA will no longer provide funding for the dedicated men's wear week that was one of the key initiatives undertaken by Steven Kolb, the group's chief executive. "We've seen our budget drop by half, at least," Mr. Kolb explained. "We haven't had a hard time finding the talent. We've had a hard time finding the funding." Although the CFDA will continue to organize a men's fashion week, it will now be up to individual designers to find the venues, sponsorship and financing for shows that can cost hundreds of thousands to produce. "My strategy was always to date stamp a time period when American men's wear designers would show," Mr. Kolb added. While those men's wear only shows will stay on the calendar, in different time slots and abbreviated formats, what remains to be seen is who will fill the roster. Big guns like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger no longer show men's wear in New York. And the list of promising talents that marked NYFW: Men's at its start has steadily dwindled over the last eight seasons. Where once close to 90 labels were on the schedule, there are currently just over two dozen. "The two significant changes are that we won't produce anything, though we'll be the organizer, and that everyone will be on their own," Mr. Kolb said. "How that plays out, we'll see." In a sense, the shift may signal a return to the way things were in the days before fashion weeks became a global juggernaut, to a time when, lacking corporately underwriting or lucrative media partnerships, designers often took a guerrilla approach to getting their message across . Without access to show spaces like Skylight Clarkson, Milk Studios or Industria, designers were pushed to exploit the resource that is New York City, staging presentations in borrowed galleries or empty storefronts, in graveyards, deconsecrated houses of worship or seedy gay leather bars. This thought came to mind last week on a visit to a loft above a Chinatown bakery selling 15 layer wedding cakes. Up two flights and behind a battered steel door, the workroom of the designer Emily Bode was a scene of organized tumult. A threesome of Japanese buyers sorted through racks of Ms. Bode's trademark patchwork jackets as a clutch of seamstresses furiously stitched samples behind tables piled high with the vintage textiles the designer favors and a production team huddled over laptops and empty cartons of Chinese takeout. Snow squalls whited out the view over East Broadway, adding to an overall sense of troopers hunkering down for an onslaught. And in a sense, like most independent designers now at work, the 29 year old Ms. Bode confronts a struggle for commercial survival as each new fashion season rolls around. "Every time, before a show, I'm like, 'Why am I doing it?'" she said. Typically, Ms. Bode's presentations rely on personal narratives, and the current one is no exception. Her point of departure this season, she said, was the youth of the artist and gallery owner Todd Alden, a friend whose late '80s style might best be characterized as New Wave renegade slacker preppy. For a show slated to take place on Wednesday morning, Ms. Bode rented an empty art gallery and constructed inside it a version of the New Canaan, Conn., garage where a teenage Mr. Alden once practiced with his band, Feed the Cat. "We're out so much money for fall, it's out of control," Ms. Bode said, noting that day rates for even a modest show space can start at around 5,000. Yet she has to do it, said the onetime CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award winner who, after establishing her label in 2016, became the first woman to show at NYFW: Men's and quickly found her collections being sold by Matches Fashion, Moda Operandi, Dover Street Market and Bergdorf Goodman. "You have to have that one hour during New York men's week because that flood of attention from buyers and social media is what carries us for the whole next season," Ms. Bode said. It was this reality that inspired the British journalist Dylan Jones recently to take aim at a chorus of naysayers seemingly intent on putting an end altogether to dedicated men's wear fashion weeks. None of this diminishes the truth, as Mr. Jones pointed out in an email, that the pool of men's wear talent currently at work is "huge, vast and deep." He was referring not just to his British compatriots but to those in New York, a place that "has helped shape the global men's wear vernacular over the past 70 years." Somehow, the city that produced legacy labels like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis has been lapped in recent years by its European competitors. Yet while the concepts behind all the sneakers and hoodies now dominating European runways have origins in American sportswear, American designers seem to have lost the plot. Few are the creative spheres in which New York plays the underdog; men's fashion at the moment appears to be one. This may not, after all, be such a bad thing as Mr. Kolb noted. In a reformulated landscape, space opens up for the many independents that have proven to be the strength of NYFW: Men's. people like Ms. Bode or, say, Ryohei Kawanishi, a designer whose Brooklyn based Landlord label, while assuredly a flyspeck compared to a colossus like Balenciaga, still draws some of that luxury house's fanatical cultists to designs like the candy colored faux fur coats he designed in 2017 and that were later spotted on Wiz Khalifa and Migos. "To be honest, I never even expected to attract those people," Mr. Kawanishi said of his music world following as he prepared for a presentation based on 1920s athletic wear. "Half the time when celebrities are wearing our things, I don't even know who they are." "Sure, it's bad juju" that the industry has fallen short in its efforts to support emerging talent, said James C. Jurney, the chief executive of the Seize sur Vingt clothing label and a force behind Groupe, a men's wear incubator. Recently, Groupe swooped in to support David Hart, the 37 year old independent once cited by GQ as among the best new American men's wear designers. He is also a perennial red carpet favorite of Trevor Noah, Anthony Ramos, Dylan Sprouse and other male celebrities with the confidence to pull off one of his exquisitely tailored brocade suits. "If you're extremely talented and not quite making it as a business, you should not have to give up," Mr. Jurney said. Ask Joseph Abboud. Along with Tom Ford and Todd Snyder, Mr. Abboud is among of the few big name designers to remain on the calendar of NYFW: Men's. As he readied a collection based on the journey made by his Lebanese forebears through Ellis Island, Mr. Abboud talked about the grit required to survive the vicissitudes of an always fickle industry. "I have confidence in young designers sticking it out, because they're tough," Mr. Abboud said. "Like grass growing through a sidewalk, you find a way."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Two Paths for Charitable Giving: From the Head or From the Heart OUR dog Lucy died this week, and it got me thinking about the role she played in making both my wife and me more charitable. Lucy was a retired guide dog who, during her working life, gave birth to 32 puppies, many of whom also became guide dogs. My wife got involved with guide dogs by accident she saw a striking Labrador walking down Fifth Avenue and asked the person walking it for the breeder's name. Instead she heard about a program where volunteers take puppies for a year and train them in basic obedience before they're ready for formal training as guide dogs. When I came into the picture a few years later, my wife had trained several dogs before becoming a foster parent, as it were, for Lucy, a yellow Labrador who had been selected as breeding stock. As the years went on, we traveled back and forth to the foundation for Lucy to be bred and to whelp her puppies. We got to see how the school turned energetic puppies into well trained guides. We also started to make larger donations. In 2007, we paid to sponsor a puppy, Ocho, from Lucy's last litter and then asked to train it. When that year was up and we had to give him back, my heart would have been broken had I not seen the good these dogs do for people. Ocho is now guiding a young woman who sends us periodic updates. A few years ago, a friend asked if I'd like to become involved with another group that helps blind people achieve their full potential in life. I agreed and have been giving time and money since. Today, probably 90 percent of the money my wife and I give to charity each year goes to groups involved with helping the blind. Before Lucy came into my life, I didn't have a dog, know any blind people or think much about charity beyond writing a check to my alma mater's annual fund. In giving this way, we also unwittingly waded into one of the big debates among donors and their advisers: is it better to give in response to an emotional need or feeling, or are dollars better spent when tied to a metric that measures how effective they are? Mr. Cerruti, who founded a Web site to link donors with nonprofits, said he never tried to presume why Mr. Skaggs gave the way he did, and felt it was something too personal to ask. "He really cared about being a catalyst for opportunity primarily for those who would benefit the most from that opportunity," he said. We have been emotional givers from the start. It always seemed like a pure good to support groups that helped blind people. We've never looked at the ratings from Charity Navigator or GuideStar on either group. But we have followed closely what both organizations have done. We may have gotten lucky. "The giving with the heart people, they may go wrong in trusting an organization that is not trustworthy," said Gene Tempel, founding dean of Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. "One of the pieces of advice we give to people is get to know the organization. It means walking into the organization and asking questions. It means asking for a copy of an annual report." Ani Hurwitz, who retired this week after 24 years of working at the New York Community Trust, said she came from a family of emotional givers. "My father gave a lot to religious stuff because he was religious," she said. "He was also a bleeding heart." She recalled him crying as he watched the nightly news and then making a donation to a charity aimed at easing whatever troubling situation he had seen. Even though she has worked in philanthropy for decades and knows how to evaluate nonprofits, she said she was personally moved by stories more than measurements on the impact of her money. She gives money to Doctors Without Borders because she admires their courage in caring for people in war ravaged places. She recently gave 250 to help buy a telescope for students in the Bronx because she thought it would be great for children who don't travel to gaze at the stars. "I don't look at metrics," she said. "Let's say we make a 75,000 grant to reduce poverty in Bushwick. Do you really think anyone can evaluate if our 75,000 did that? Or was it someone else's 75,000 grant? Can you even evaluate that?" The other side of this debate would say that you not only can evaluate it, but you should. The desire to improve the world and quantify the process is a byproduct of the first Internet boom, Mr. Tempel said. Many big donors, like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, direct some or all of their giving with measurable criteria in mind. Eric Friedman, an actuary in Chicago who gives 10 percent of his income to charity, is not in their league. But he is determined to find the best way to make his dollars matter. He said this started more than a decade ago when he graduated from college and made his first charitable gift to a group of nuns who cared for children. "I'm not Catholic, but I figured they'd be good at taking care of homeless children," he said. "Then I started to get these letters and key chains, and the frequency made me think they're spending all of my money on fund raising." He said he now based his personal giving on the ratings from GiveWell, a charity rating service that I have written about and that aims to find groups that make the next dollar donated to them count. Mr. Friedman said he was giving to a group that buys bed nets to prevent malaria in sub Saharan Africa. Mr. Friedman said donors who give emotionally were like people who spend money on an expensive dinner. "It's too focused on the donor so it will naturally not be focused on the most effective causes," he said. "It's being directed by some other criteria. There is nothing wrong with that. I describe it as consumption." Mr. Tempel said that it was fine to ask organizations to be accountable, but that it could go too far. "People who follow their head looking at return on investment they will be most disappointed if they have unrealistic expectations on what is possible," he said. "Some things are just difficult to deal with, like solving illiteracy in a community." He said this was where nonprofits needed to tell donors what was measurable and what wasn't, to prevent frustration and disappointment on both ends. Of course, many philanthropic advisers stress that giving is not always this black and white: people need to get the emotional reward of giving first, but having a way to measure what those dollars do will sustain their giving. "We feel that people do start with this heartfelt desire to do good and they have all the good intentions in the world," said Debra Treyz, global head of the philanthropy center at J. P. Morgan Private Bank. "But giving dollars does not always translate into results." She said she coached clients to focus on something they care about that's the heart part and then gain expertise in the field to be able to make more intelligent decisions. "There are often ramp up periods," she said. "There's a little bit of trial and error around that. We need to acknowledge what we need to do better, learn from mistakes and move on."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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A panel of health experts stopped short of recommending that all American adolescents and young adults be vaccinated against a dangerous strain of meningitis that has caused outbreaks at Princeton University and the University of California campus in Santa Barbara, opting instead to let doctors decide whether to give the vaccine. A committee of outside medical and public health experts convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted, 14 to 1, to recommend the more limited use of the vaccine in people ages 16 to 23. The vaccine is new and relatively costly and the illness is rare, a combination that seemed to tip the balance toward a more cautious approach. Some on the committee also said they were not comfortable with what was known about the vaccine's safety. "There are some red flags with safety for this vaccine," said Dr. Edward Belongia, the director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Wisconsin.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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He first saw the mother, Monica Vega , when she was in her 35th week of pregnancy, five weeks short of a full term birth. Her obstetrician believed her fetus had a liver cyst. Baby Itzamara, who had abdominal surgery shortly after birth. But, using color Doppler and 3D/4D ultrasound imaging, Dr. Parra Saavedra was able to see that the fluid filled space actually contained a minuscule infant, supported by a separate umbilical cord drawing blood where it connected to the larger twin's intestine. "I told the mother, and she said, 'What? No, doctor, this is impossible,'" Dr. Parra Saavedra said. "But I explained step by step, and she understood." He alerted a local television news network, which followed Mrs. Vega, who is now 33, through the birth of her daughter, Itzamara, and the surgery to remove Itzamara's partially formed twin. On Feb. 22, when Itzamara was at 37 weeks and weighed about seven pounds, doctors decided to deliver her by cesarean section, because they feared the internal twin would crush her abdominal organs. The next day, they removed the fetal twin by laparoscopic surgery. It was about two inches long and had a rudimentary head and limbs, but lacked a brain and heart, Dr. Parra Saavedra said. Fetus in fetu is sometimes misdiagnosed as a teratoma, a tumor that may contain bones, muscle tissue and hair. A DNA comparison is being done, but Dr. Parra Saavedra has no doubt that the fetuses started out as identical twins from the same ovum. Because the smaller fetus took nourishment from its sibling, it is called a heteropagus or parasitic twin. Some heteropagus twins are born conjoined to their healthy siblings, while some grow partially inside and partially outside their twin's body.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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PARIS For those who consider New York's Museum of Modern Art their hometown museum, encountering Constantin Brancusi's bronze "Bird in Space" (1928) at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is akin to spotting an old friend while traveling in a foreign country. "Well, that's kind of what we're going for," said Glenn Lowry, MoMA's director, who brought the Brancusi and more than 200 other artworks from his museum's permanent collection to the Vuitton Foundation here in the 16th arrondissement for a new exhibition, "Being Modern: MoMA in Paris," opening Wednesday (through Mar. 5). "Bird in Space" is being shown in France for the first time, as are works by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Philip Guston, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Carl Andre, Christopher Wool and Romare Bearden. On view for the first time since its acquisition by MoMA is the curtain wall of the facade of the 1952 United Nations Secretariat Building in New York. The exhibition will also be a homecoming for the Parisian Pointillist painter Paul Signac's "Opus 217," which was bequeathed to MoMA upon the death in March of the museum's former chairman David Rockefeller, whom Mr. Lowry recalled accompanying to the current site in Mr. Rockefeller's declining years. Among newer work is an early iteration of 176 digital emoji. The show, which examines the history and the collection of MoMA, combines its renowned works in a new way by mixing disciplines while staying loosely chronological. Extending across four floors of the Frank Gehry designed Vuitton Foundation, it presages how Mr. Lowry and MoMA's curatorial teams are likely to present MoMA's permanent collection anew come 2019, after its ongoing expansion.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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TV ratings are collapsing. Media stocks are falling. Cord cutting is accelerating. There has been no shortage of bad headlines for television networks over the last few months, as investors grow concerned over dropping viewership and as people increasingly find new ways to entertain themselves. Yet while audience attention has drifted toward platforms like Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, there is one group of stubborn holdouts who are not ready to give up on broadcast television: advertisers. This week, as ad buyers cram into New York institutions like Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall to watch the broadcast networks talk up a new TV season, they will again prepare to spend as much as 9 billion to be a part of it. Though the market may be cooling this year, a significant drop is not expected. A reasonable person might ask how, in 2017, is that remotely possible? "It will continue to move forward this way as long as it works," said Lyle Schwartz, the president of investment for North America at GroupM, the ad buying arm of the advertising conglomerate WPP. But isn't buying a 30 second spot on television a little, well, out of date? As a media analyst at Pivotal Research, Brian Wieser, put it, advertising on TV is "as archaic as water flowing through pipes." "You could set up a drone to take water from a reservoir and use fascinating technology and cutting edge approaches to deliver it, but there's a good reason we use these systems," he said. In interviews, ad buyers and television executives pointed to a variety of reasons that advertisers remain attracted to ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS. Ratings aside, television still reaches more people and provides a reliable way for an ad to be seen on a full screen with sound. There is a limited amount of inventory, in contrast to the endless reach of the web, and marketers know rates will spike if they wait to buy airtime. It also does not hurt that Facebook and YouTube have had trouble in recent months with ads showing up next to objectionable content. Still, there are serious questions about how sustainable all of this is. Trend lines certainly suggest things could go in the other direction. Networks are having trouble showing how many people are watching their content across a wide variety of platforms, audiences are growing accustomed to platforms where they can watch shows without commercials, and marketers are eager to find better ways to target potential customers. And at present, broadcast television is holding an edge thanks to an older audience. The median age for scripted TV's No. 1 show, "The Big Bang Theory," and one of its top reality shows, "The Voice," is 55. Among 18 to 49 year olds, ratings in broadcast television fell by 11 percent this season. "If you just look at where the business is going, we're in a transitional phase now where to a large degree, boomers are keeping television as we define it today afloat," said Kevin Reilly, the chief creative officer of Turner Entertainment. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Advertisers are aware that this may not last forever. GroupM predicted that digital platforms would be taking a growing share of new advertising dollars. Still, even though digital players are surging, television remains the established elder statesman for advertisers. GroupM noted that television accounted for 42 percent of advertising investments last year, compared with 31 percent for digital. The sophistication of Google's and Facebook's ability to target ads is no small matter, though, and TV networks have been scrambling to find ways to compete in that arena. Digital companies are capable of targeting audiences so narrow that they can pinpoint, say, Idaho residents in long distance relationships who are contemplating buying a minivan. (Facebook's ads manager says that description matches 3,100 people.) As attractive as that slicing and dicing can be, television appears to have an advantage in terms of the actual commercial time it can offer marketers. "It's great if I can target someone I know is a truck driver who searched for the word 'truck' who visited my site a lot, but where do I get them to watch my ad?" asked Joe Marchese, the newly named head of ad sales for Fox Networks Group. "Who's going to make him or her watch it?" It also fosters a power dynamic that probably sounds foreign to a generation of consumers who tend to see automatically placed ads on YouTube content that could have been made a day earlier by anyone. "What the networks do say is: 'Great, I'm going to invite all my potential clients and clients to a room at the same time on the same day where I'm going to show my shows that I may or may not actually put up this fall and may not keep for two episodes," said Dave Morgan, the founder and chief executive of Simulmedia, which works with advertisers on targeted TV ads. "'And I'm going to make you sit next to your competitors and basically say here's the price of it, and if you don't pay this price now, it's going to cost you 30 percent more in six months.'" Mass marketers aiming to drive people to, say, their stores or car dealerships rely on long held TV plans to align with their product launches, and pulling out could be both expensive and risky. "The reason it's priced high and reason you have to buy in advance is because your competitors might buy it out," Mr. Morgan continued. It's like the Cold War but for brands, he said, adding, "If they have a bunch of missiles, you need a bunch more missiles." And so, for a week in mid May, the networks still have the upper hand.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Patrick Herning has a vision for the future of plus size shopping. "Say you're in Nordstrom with your straight size friend," he said, using the term for standard industry sizing. "She sees this Altuzarra blazer, and you can go to 11 Honore for the same one: same brand, style, fabric, just a different size." That is his elevator pitch for 11 Honore, the designer shopping site he founded in 2017 for sizes 12 and up. The company, based in Los Angeles, has helped labels like Diane von Furstenberg, Carolina Herrera and Rachel Comey venture for the first time into extended sizing. Some luxury labels on the site, including Henning, a tailoring line, and Baacal, a sustainably made line designed by Cynthia Vincent, were introduced exclusively as plus size lines. Others, like Dyvna, from Shirley Cook, the founding chief executive of Proenza Schouler, make clothes up to size 18. High fashion has, historically, not been a welcoming place for plus size customers, even if Ashley Graham has made it to the cover of Vogue a few times. Culturally, women with bodies well outside the range of sample sizes were not embraced Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, often made his ungenerous feelings about larger women known and there were almost no places to buy well made or fancy clothes, even if you had the money and the desire for them. Why invest in clothes if your body was considered undesirable, or when you were one successful diet away from the necessity of wearing them in the first place? "Plus size women have never been told they could stay that way and invest in themselves as they are," said Lauren Chan, who started Henning last year. "Before this chapter, I was a plus size model and a fashion news director at Glamour. I had these incredible colleagues wearing Miu Miu every day like they had that armor on, but my weight fluctuated, and I wore from size 12 to 20. I was in meeting in C suites in Conde Nast wearing Forever 21." Henning blazers have a trim on the lining with a pep talk that reads: "Wear it like you mean it." "SINCE I WAS A PRETEEN, I was a size 14 and up," said Aidy Bryant, the "Shrill" star, "Saturday Night Live" player and a founder, with the costume designer Remy Pearce, of the plus size line Pauline. "I feel like so much of my youth was going to the mall or stores with my friends and watching them shop and being like, 'I'll buy a hair clip.'" Ms. Bryant remembered a photo shoot during her "Saturday Night Live" debut season, with Kate McKinnon and Cecily Strong. "They had these unbelievable dresses, and then I got to my rack and there were two things on it and they were both from Macy's," she said. "I thought, something is not the same here. This isn't a system I get to be a part of at all, and that's hurtful. I can't stand beside them and enjoy the same thing. The breadth of choice is just not there." Couture customers can have access to designer clothing for the right price, and celebrities like Beanie Feldstein may get to wear a Miu Miu gown to the Oscars. Still, plenty of famous women whose bodies are above a sample size, including Leslie Jones and Melissa McCarthy, have spoken publicly about the difficulty of finding designers to dress them for the red carpet. There may be more plus options than ever and some designers are nodding toward inclusivity by incorporating one or two plus size models on the runway but there is a very long way to go, as illustrated by the influencer Katie Sturino's "Make My Size" series on Instagram. In the series, Ms. Sturino, who wears a size 18, photographs herself in the dressing room struggling to fit into the largest size she can find from labels like Aritzia or Zimmerman or at Neiman Marcus in Hudson Yards, along with an open letter to the brand and her nearly 500,000 followers expressing her desire to spend money on their clothes. "I get that if you're starting a small collection, you may not be able to afford plus, but Zimmerman, Alice and Olivia, Tory Burch still don't do it," Ms. Sturino said. Her campaign has had its share of success stories, as when she did a "Make My Size" post on the Veronica Beard line. "They look like fashion girls," Ms. Sturino said, referring to the founding sisters in law, Veronica Swanson Beard and Veronica Miele Beard. "I didn't think they would care or want to dress me, but they reached out and said it was something they were working on and thinking about. We went to lunch the next week." "Tanya Taylor is another one," she said. Both lines have extended sizing. The misstep that some designers make, Ms. Sturino said, is to offer only basics to their plus size customers. "I don't want another 19 pair of jeans," she said. "A plus size woman can buy black pants. The misstep that brands take is: 'Oh these women don't want to wear color.'" MR. HERNING IS FOND OF SAYING that more than half of the United States population is the 11 Honore audience as of 2018, it was estimated that 68 percent of American women are size 14 or larger, according to Plunkett Research but it is one that he, as a slim man, had not paid attention to until a few years ago. He worked in fashion and event marketing with clients like Louis Vuitton and the Italian label Marina Rinaldi, which is owned by the Max Mara Fashion Group and has long been one of the few plus size luxury lines. "Great pants, pencil skirts, button up shirts, jeans," Mr. Herning said. "I don't like using the word 'basic.' It's to complement investment pieces. The inspiration is the Row." Right now he has two wishes. One is for brands that offer limited sizing on 11 Honore, including Ganni (up to size 14) and Dolce Gabbana (up to an 18 that runs small), to expand to size 24. The other is for new brands to come into the fold: Gucci, Dries Van Noten, Stella McCartney. Mr. Herning wouldn't name brands he has approached that don't want to venture into plus. "More than 70 percent have changed their minds," he said. "I have yet to put a brand out there because so many have come back to me."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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When Patrick Ayres first saw the condemned 1918 house that would eventually be home to Cloverdale, he didn't dare go in. The 31 year old former executive sous chef of Canlis in Seattle had moved home to Steamboat Springs, Colo., to raise his kids and envisioned opening a restaurant that would cement the state on the culinary map. This place didn't even have a functioning roof. "It was a disaster, falling apart," he said. But other options in Steamboat were bland as stale soda crackers, so Mr. Ayres and his wife, Kaylee, ended up buying it, along with a 10.5 acre homestead that sits five miles away. Cloverdale Restaurant and Farm opened in July 2017, featuring a five and a 10 to 14 course tasting menu. "Tasting menus are a way for us to be constantly creative, even in the middle of service," Mr. Ayres said. They feature an array of produce, 90 percent of which is grown on the farm, with help from a master gardener; each member of the restaurant staff tends the crops at least once a week. Most new farmers face an uphill battle, but Cloverdale's were at an elevation of 6,695 feet. Last summer, consecutive frosts in June, July and August throttled the summer squash and bush beans. The solution installing four 75 foot low tunnels alongside their greenhouse has worked. The restaurant is outstanding. We opted for the five course menu at our recent dinner, though the second I tried the first dish a savory parsnip panna cotta topped with a crumbly layer made from baked molasses and rye wheat berries, then studded with tender radish and carrot pickles cut into perfect moons I wished I had gone for the longer option. A creamy sunchoke and chestnut soup buoyed seared striped bass, sprinkled with crispy shaved sunchoke chips. Lamb cooked sous vide was light, not gamy, served with fried sweetbreads and grilled preserved eggplants that left a faint whiff of wildfire on the plate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Credit...David Kasnic for The New York Times When the Church Brew Works opened in 1999, it amounted to a rare bit of good news for the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Its population had shrunk by half since 1960. A quarter of its residents were over 65, mostly old timers who once worked at the steel mills that hugged the Allegheny River. The community had "its guts ripped out," said Sean Casey, who opened the brewery in a Catholic church that had been deconsecrated six years before. Its immediate neighbor was a building where drug dealers made crack cocaine. It's hard to recognize that Lawrenceville today. Carnegie Robotics has a facility in the neighborhood, as does the National Robotics Engineering Center and Caterpillar's automation center. The population is much younger. The Church Brew Works had a hand in this transformation. "As the technology sector started to be more successful, it attracted young professionals with disposable income wanting to eat better," said Michael Madison, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has blogged about the city. The brewery not only provided food and beer. People "come in and discover the lost art of conversation," Mr. Casey said. The coronavirus pandemic has shut down many of these conversations. Business has declined 75 percent. By next summer, when Mr. Casey hopes things will get back to normal, "we are going to have had 17 months of not turning a profit." And the story is the same across thousands of restaurants. It raises a question that will reverberate in Lawrenceville and beyond: What will happen to America's urban centers when the restaurants are gone? By Aug. 31, over 32,000 restaurants and 6,400 bars and nightspots that had been open on March 1 were marked closed on Yelp. In New York City perhaps the nation's dining out capital a survey by the Hospitality Alliance found that 87 percent of restaurants were not able to pay all of their August rent. In September, the New York state comptroller estimated that one third to one half of the 24,000 restaurants in the city could close permanently over the next six months. Forty three percent of bars were closed on Oct. 5, and spending at those still open was down 80 percent from the same day in 2019, according to Womply, a company that provides technological platforms to small businesses. In 2019, restaurants, bars, food trucks and other dining outlets took at least 47 percent of the food budget of consumers in cities with populations above 2.5 million, according to government data. That compares with 38 percent for people outside urban areas. In the early 1970s, by contrast, urban consumers devoted 28 percent of their food budget to dining out. Restaurants have been a key element of America's urban transformation, helping draw the young and highly educated to city centers. This has often turned industrial and warehouse districts into residential areas. It has also overhauled many low income neighborhoods, sometimes forcing longtime residents out of town. While high tech industries and their well paid jobs have undergirded these changes, social and cultural establishments have also proved pivotal. Already in the last two decades of the 20th century, cities with more restaurants and theaters per person were growing faster than their peers, notes a study by the economists Edward Glaeser, Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz, even as rents grew faster than wages. They were driven by rising disposable income, mostly, as the high tech economy increased the payoff of a college education. Declining rates of marriage and childbearing not only freed up time and money, but also increased the demand for social spaces largely provided by restaurants, bars and cafes. 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. "A distinct and persistent feature in downtowns is their high density of restaurants," Ms. Handbury said. "It's the feature that attracts people to downtowns especially the young and college educated." There are other attractions. Nightclubs, museums the opera, even. Public safety is paramount. Good public transportation also helps. But as Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago puts it, "Restaurants are huge." They are hangout places and dating places. "When you think of other urban amenities, there is nothing that is as democratized." Honey Butter Fried Chicken opened in the formerly industrial enclave of Avondale on the North Side of Chicago in 2013. Parachute, a Korean fusion restaurant, opened up the street a year later. Then came a Montessori school down the block two years after that. A couple of years ago, Matthew Hoffman, the artist of "You Are Beautiful" fame, opened a studio and retail shop across the street. "One thing we noticed is that not a single person came in to our retail shop on Mondays, when Honey Butter was closed," Mr. Hoffman said. "But it's been a great relationship. They've sent chicken over. We've sent art and stickers back." That ecosystem is now in danger. Honey Butter Fried Chicken is hanging in there. "The fried chicken sandwich is kind of built for takeaway," said Josh Kulp, who runs the enterprise with a partner, Christine Cikowski. But Parachute, which has a Michelin star, is straining to make it selling food to go. " 15,000 a week is break even," said Beverly Kim, who owns the restaurant with her co chef and husband, Johnny Clark. "But last week we did 8,000; this week 6,000. We are bleeding money like crazy." Service is also limited to takeout orders at Lula Cafe in Logan Square, about a mile and a half to the south, and business is down about 80 percent. "No one is not losing money," said Jason Hammel, a Brown graduate who moved to Illinois in the 1990s to learn writing from David Foster Wallace but ended up a restaurateur. "I can make it for two or three more months," he said, "but without federal aid I don't know if I can survive the winter." Versions of this story are being repeated in restaurant after restaurant across urban America. In Atlanta, Michael Lennox opened the Golden Eagle, an evening cocktail joint, and the daytime taco shop Muchacho in a former train depot in 2017, expecting an AMC theater in a new development across the road to drive business their way. But the theater opened two weeks before the pandemic arrived, and it has been closed since. As restaurants fail, cities will lose economic output and jobs, of course over two million restaurant jobs and 173,000 bar jobs were lost between February and August. But they also stand to lose their glue. In a recent research paper, Sitian Liu of Queen's University in Canada and Yichen Su of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas conclude that the declining value of urban restaurants is contributing to a residential reorganization in which suburban housing is in great demand while the market in the densest urban areas is dormant. In a nutshell, if you can't go out to eat, why even live in the city? Michael Andrews, an economist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studied the value of this social interaction by looking at what happened when it was shut down. In the 1910s, before Prohibition, several states passed laws banning alcohol consumption. At a stroke, this closed the saloons that had operated in counties where alcohol consumption had been legal. Mr. Andrews detected that in these formerly "wet" counties, patenting activity dropped. The reason, Mr. Andrews determined, had little to do with drinking. Rather, the saloons had provided a critical social space for the exchange of ideas. Mr. Andrews and Chelsea Lensing at Coe College are working on another study, about the importance of coffee shops to innovation. Looking at the expansion of Starbucks from its base in Seattle starting in the 1980s, their preliminary results suggest that patenting activity increased when Starbucks came to town. The same happened when Dunkin' Donuts, Peet's Coffee and other chains arrived. All this could bounce back, of course, once a vaccine or a treatment removes the threat of Covid 19 from the dining experience. Restaurants are already a high churn business. Few survive for more than a year. Even if a large share fail, entrepreneurial cooks with a line of credit could take their place. The question is how quickly. Mr. Glaeser, for instance, is confident that restaurants and amenities will return, but he argues that "it could take as long as a decade to work through this thing," even if a vaccine is developed quickly. The longer the shock, the more likely it is to produce permanent scars. Mr. Couture's baseline assumes that as the pandemic subsides, maybe next spring, bars and restaurants reopen quickly and cities are back to pre pandemic normal. But he admits that there are other possibilities. The hit to restaurants and other local businesses could combine with the rise of remote work to push more people to the suburbs, eroding the urban tax base and reducing city services, and "tip us into some kind of new equilibrium in which some cities are declining," he said. The economic equilibrium sustaining Mr. Hammel's restaurant in Logan Square is already giving way. "If Lula reopened tomorrow, I would struggle," he said. Most of his staff members were people in their 20s musicians, actors, a photographer, somebody doing social work who couldn't afford to stay in Chicago without a job and have left. Winter is coming. At this point, he said, "the city is not a viable place anymore."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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There are few things on the island of Hawaii that are more valuable than fresh water. This is not because the island is dry. There is plenty of rain. The trouble is that there is tremendous demand for this water and much of it that does accumulate on the island's surface disappears before it can be used. New research by marine geophysicists reveals that underground rivers running off the large island's western coast are a key force behind this vanishing act. Fresh water is often pumped on the island from aquifers formed from rain at higher elevations where it is easy to access. The drawback is that if too much water gets pumped to meet demand, little remains to travel through rocks to farms and fragile ecosystems that depend upon it. To make matters worse, recent studies of this water labeled with isotopes and tracked over time have revealed that these aquifers are also heavily leaking somewhere else. "Everyone assumed that this missing fresh water was seeping out at the coastline or traveling laterally along the island," said Eric Attias, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii, who led the new study published Wednesday in Science Advances. "But I had a hunch that the leak might be subsurface and offshore."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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A home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald's cashier in Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Maywood, Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed. Yet these same people also are on public assistance relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short. And they are not alone. Nearly three quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low wage workers, from giants like McDonald's and Walmart to mom and pop businesses. "This is a hidden cost of low wage work," said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Berkeley center and a co author of the report, which is scheduled for release on Monday. Taxpayers pick up the difference, he said, between what employers pay and what is required to cover what most Americans consider essential living costs. The report estimates that state and federal governments spend more than 150 billion a year on four key antipoverty programs used by working families: Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and the earned income tax credit, which is specifically aimed at working families. This disparity has helped propel the movement to raise the minimum wage and prompted efforts in a handful of states to recover public funds from employers of low wage workers. In Connecticut, for example, a legislative proposal calls for large employers to pay a fee to the state for each worker who earns less than 15 an hour. In 2016, California will start publishing the names of employers that have more than 100 employees receiving Medicaid, and how much these companies cost the state in public assistance. "The low wage business model practiced by many of the largest and most profitable employers in the country not only leaves many working families unable to afford the basics, but also imposes significant costs on the public as a whole," Sarah Leberstein, a senior staff lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, testified recently before Connecticut lawmakers. Other states, as well as several cities, including Washington, D.C., have moved to raise the minimum wage above 10, while local activists in fast food, retailing, home care, airport services and other low wage industries have organized protests to demand 15 an hour. Organizers of the Fight for 15 movement are planning a nationwide wave of protests and strikes for this Wednesday April 15. Adriana Alvarez, a cashier at a McDonald's in Chicago, is among the people pushing for higher wages. After five years with the fast food giant, Ms. Alvarez, 22, earns 10.50 an hour, well above the federal minimum wage of 7.25. Still, she depends on food stamps, Medicaid and a child care subsidy to help get through the week. "He eats a lot," Ms. Alvarez said of her 3 year old son, Manny, with a laugh. He also drinks a lot of milk, she said "a half gallon every two days" and because he is lactose intolerant, he requires a more expensive brand, using up most of her 80 allotment of food stamps. Most everyone else she works with including many 10 year plus veterans of the franchise receives food stamps, said Ms. Alvarez, who started working at McDonald's full time when she was in high school. A report issued last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland said that labor's share of overall income had fallen to record lows in recent years while profits have soared. A handful of powerhouse companies have cited a tightening labor market as the reason behind recent wage increases, including McDonald's, which recently announced a 1 bump over the local legal minimum for its corporate employees. (The announcement does not apply to the vast majority of McDonald's employees, who work in franchises.) Several economists, including the Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz, who has written extensively on inequality, credited political rather than competitive pressures for the decision by some larger fast food and retail employers to raise wages. William E. Spriggs, chief economist at the A.F.L. C.I.O., said the McDonald's announcement was "a response to worker campaigns to increase the minimum wage and what is going on in legislatures on the state and local levels." Denise Rush, a home health care worker in Durham, N.C., often works seven days a week, returning home near midnight after her two teenagers have already gone to bed. At 9.50 an hour, her biweekly paycheck totals just over 700, or the cost of her monthly rent. There is little left for other expenses. "It's a crazy dilemma," she said. "Do I pay the whole bill or do I gas up the car to go to work?" Despite receiving coverage for her children's health care from Medicaid as well as about 300 a month in food stamps, Ms. Rush, 41, is still struggling. "We're talking about basic needs," she said, including such staples of modern life as a cellphone to keep in touch with work and her children and a home Internet connection to allow her children to do their homework. Her paycheck also fails to pay for the uniforms and fees for the lacrosse, basketball and soccer teams that Ms. Rush says she believes are essential to keep her son and daughter occupied and out of trouble while she is working. Fortunately, she said, the school has helped pick up that tab. About 48 percent of home health care workers are on public assistance, the Berkeley researchers found. So are 46 percent of child care workers and 52 percent of fast food workers. Even some of the nation's best educated workers have turned to taxpayers for support; a quarter of the families of part time college faculty members are on public assistance, the Berkeley researchers found. "I'm very proud of my doctorate, it was well earned, but in terms of the work force, it's a penalty," said Wanda Brewer, who lives in Maywood, a Chicago suburb, and teaches at DeVry and Concordia colleges. She is paid 2,700 for each 15 week course she teaches. She and her 4 year old daughter are both on Medicaid; they also receive 390 a month in food stamps and a child care subsidy. She has applied for other jobs at chains like Walmart, Home Depot and Menard's, but says she can't even get a call back because such employers consider her overqualified. "When I apply for anything outside education, they laugh at me," Ms. Brewer said. "The term professor immediately commands respect. The assumption is you're making a fair wage, a living wage, but that is not necessarily so."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The squids are all right as are their cephalopod cousins the cuttlefish and octopus. In the same waters where fish have faced serious declines, the tentacled trio is thriving, according to a study published Monday. "Cephalopods have increased in the world's oceans over the last six decades," Zoe Doubleday, a marine ecologist from the University of Adelaide in Australia, and lead author of the study, said in an email. "Our results suggest that something is going on in the marine environment on a large scale, which is advantageous to cephalopods." Dr. Doubleday and her team compiled the first global scale database of cephalopod population numbers, spanning from 1953 to 2013. It included historical catch rates for 35 cephalopod species, including the Japanese flying squid, the giant Pacific octopus and the common cuttlefish. The species inhabit marine ecosystems all over the world, from Australia and the United States to Morocco and Madagascar, among other countries.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The "Winter Garden" duplex penthouse at One57, Extell Development's vitreous skyscraper, which has attracted a bevy of billionaire buyers since sales began in 2011, sold for 91,541,053 to a group led by the hedge fund mogul William A. Ackman. It was the second highest price ever paid for a single residence in New York City and the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The priciest transaction, also at the 90 story condominium at 157 West 57th Street, was a 10,923 square foot duplex penthouse on the top two floors that sold to a mystery buyer late last year for 100,471,452.77 and closed in January. This most recent sale, No. 75, on the building's 75th and 76th floors, is actually larger, by around 2,600 square feet; it includes six bedrooms, seven full baths and two powder rooms, spread over 13,554 square feet. The estimated monthly carrying charges are 25,289, according to Ashley Murphy, a spokeswoman for Extell, which declined to comment further on the sale. Known as the Winter Garden, for its 2,500 square foot curved glass atrium that opens to the sky and is large enough to house a garden or swimming pool, the aerie provides an eagle's eye view of Central Park, along with vistas of the Hudson and East Rivers and almost every landmark on the horizon.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The tenor Lawrence Brownlee has been the only Black winner of the Richard Tucker Award since it was first given in 1978. The Richard Tucker Music Foundation, which grants prestigious awards to young singers, removed David N. Tucker from its board of directors on Monday evening. Mr. Tucker, a son of the distinguished tenor for whom the foundation is named, was removed after an uproar over comments that he made on a Black singer's Facebook page. "The Richard Tucker Music Foundation condemns the hurtful and offensive comments made by one of our board members, David Tucker," Jeffrey Manocherian, the foundation's chairman, and Barry Tucker, its president and another of Richard Tucker's sons, said in a statement. On Saturday, Julia Bullock, a Black soprano, shared a Washington Post story on her Facebook page that quoted protesters in Portland, Ore., who said they had been detained by federal officers in unmarked vans. In response, Mr. Tucker commented, "Good. Get rid of these thugs and I don't care where you send them. They are a Pox on our society." In another comment, he wrote, "About time someone tough will try to crush the mob before they destroy and kill more innocent people. Bravo to Trump to send in Federal troops." When Russell Thomas, a Black tenor, replied in a comment that the Tucker Foundation had given its top prize, the Richard Tucker Award, to only one Black artist since it was first granted in 1978, Mr. Tucker wrote that "pulling the race card is another convenient excuse to modify excellent standards of vocal artistry." A spokeswoman for the foundation said on Monday that while there had been a single Black winner of the Tucker Award Lawrence Brownlee, in 2006 the foundation had awarded a dozen smaller career and study grants to Black artists over the past decade. Mr. Brownlee called Mr. Tucker's comments "racist" and "deeply disappointing" in a Facebook post on Monday. He said that while he was the only Black artist to have received the prize, there were many other Black singers whose talent would have made them worthy recipients. The Black Opera Alliance, an organization founded last month that aims to expose racial inequity in opera, wrote an open letter to the foundation's board on Sunday calling for Mr. Tucker's removal. "We are deeply disturbed," Derrell Acon, the founder of the group and the director of engagement and equity at Long Beach Opera in California, wrote in the letter, to which other members of the group also contributed. "It is impossible for someone who holds these views to contribute productively to any organization that seeks to cultivate a culture of respect, equity and justice." The group called for the foundation to publicly condemn Mr. Tucker's comments, to do more to combat potential racial bias in its leadership and to embrace Black performers. Since the letter was published, several past winners of the foundation's top prize also condemned Mr. Tucker's comments and called for his removal. Last year's winner, the soprano Lisette Oropesa, tweeted on Sunday evening that Mr. Tucker's comments were "disappointing" and "racist." The mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato, who won the 2002 prize and currently serves on the foundation's board, tweeted on Monday that she had told the foundation that she could not continue to serve unless it removed Mr. Tucker. The mezzo Stephanie Blythe, who won the award in 1999, wrote on Facebook on Monday that she was "horrified" by Mr. Tucker's comments, and also called for his removal. "These statements were not some spur of the moment, off the cuff comments," she wrote. "They were full of indoctrinated hate." Mr. Acon said in an interview that his goal in forming the Black Opera Alliance was to empower Black singers and administrators to speak out against injustice in the industry. "We don't want to allow the system to just absorb injustice and for it to become yesterday's news," he said. "We want to put companies and institutions to task and make sure they respond in an equitable way." Mr. Tucker's removal comes amid a broader reckoning in the opera world over the lack of diversity in classical music. A New York Times story published last week revealed that the Metropolitan Opera has only three Black managing directors on its 45 member board, and just two Black members of its 90 person orchestra. The Met has not presented an opera by a Black composer in its 137 year history.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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George Balanchine's pure dance masterpiece "Jewels" explores three facets of ballet: "Emeralds" evokes France; "Rubies" captures an angular, energetic midcentury American modernism; and "Diamonds" conjures the courtly grandeur of imperial Russian classicism. Several performances commemorating the work's 50th anniversary at next summer's Lincoln Center Festival will take that internationalism to a new level: The festival plans to bring together the Paris Opera Ballet, New York City Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet to dance "Jewels." Their collaboration for five performances at the David H. Koch Theater, July 20 to July 23 is to be announced on Wednesday at a 10 a.m. news conference on Facebook Live featuring representatives from all three companies. At the opening night performance on July 20, the Paris Opera Ballet will dance "Emeralds," which is set to music by Faure; New York City Ballet will dance "Rubies," set to Stravinsky; and the Bolshoi Ballet will dance "Diamonds," set to Tchaikovsky. In later performances, City Ballet and the Bolshoi will trade off "Rubies" and "Diamonds."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The opera singer David Daniels, one of the world's leading countertenors, was arrested on Tuesday on a sexual assault charge stemming from a 2010 incident in Houston. Mr. Daniels and his husband, Scott Walters, were arrested Tuesday afternoon in Michigan, where they live, on warrants issued by the Houston Police Department, said Detective Lt. Aimee Metzer of the Ann Arbor Police Department. The two men, who were being held in the Washtenaw County Jail in Michigan on Wednesday while awaiting a hearing on bail and extradition, denied the accusations. Mr. Daniels rose to fame as a countertenor, singing high parts that were once the province of castratos or mezzo sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera and around the world. When he and Mr. Walters were married in 2014, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an avid opera fan, officiated. Now, with his arrest, Mr. Daniels becomes the most prominent classical music star to face criminal charges of sexual misconduct in the wake of the national MeToo reckoning. Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters were each charged with sexual assault in connection to a 2010 incident in which a singer said he was drugged and assaulted by the couple, according to charging documents filed by the Harris County District Attorney's Office in Texas. The singer, Samuel Schultz, said in an interview in August that the two men assaulted him in May 2010, when, as a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, he had gone to hear Mr. Daniels in Handel's "Xerxes" at Houston Grand Opera. After attending the performance and cast party, Mr. Schultz said, he was invited to Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters's apartment. There, he said, he was given a drink that caused him to lose consciousness. He awoke alone, he said, naked and bleeding from his rectum. A lawyer for Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters denied the accusations. "David and Scott are innocent of any wrongdoing," their lawyer, Matt Hennessy, said in a statement. "Sam Schultz is not a victim. He never would have gotten this much attention from his singing, and he knows and resents that fact. He waited eight years to complain about adult, consensual sex to ride the MeToo movement to unearned celebrity. We will fight this." Mr. Schultz said in an email that he had been told about the arrests by the Houston police, but he declined further comment. Mr. Schultz said over the summer that he had initially been afraid that making the accusations would damage his fledgling career. But he went public last summer first anonymously, in an online post, and then naming Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters as his attackers in an interview with The New York Daily News. A Houston police officer, D.H. Escobar, wrote in the charging documents that he had found Mr. Schultz, who was identified in the report only by his initials, to be "credible and reliable." The officer said that he had met with a therapist Mr. Schultz consulted in 2010, and that her notes were consistent with what Mr. Schultz had told the police. The officer said that he had also reviewed medical records which showed that Mr. Schultz had sought medical attention "as a result of the sexual assault" on June 1, 2010. The charging documents state that the Houston police officer had reviewed a report by the University of Michigan Police Department, which had also investigated the incident over the summer. According to that report, Mr. Daniels had told university police that he had invited Mr. Schultz back to his apartment for a nightcap, where "things became sexual." Mr. Walters told the university police that Mr. Schultz had taken an Ambien after seeing Mr. Walters and Mr. Daniels take them, according the report, adding that he then grew "woozy." And Mr. Daniels told the police that, two days after that encounter, Mr. Schultz had "freaked out" and contacted him and Mr. Walters, telling them "you know what you did" before blocking further contact with them, the report said. Mr. Daniels has been a voice professor in recent years at the University of Michigan. A student paper, The Michigan Daily, reported that the school granted Mr. Daniels tenure in May, despite the fact that it had received an anonymous complaint of sexual misconduct two months earlier. Another student, Andrew Lipian, sued the school and Mr. Daniels in October, accusing Mr. Daniels of sexual misconduct; Mr. Daniels filed a countersuit. Kim Broekhuizen, a spokeswoman for the university, said in an email that Mr. Daniels had been on leave since August. "We will continue to closely monitor the situation as we determine the appropriate next steps," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Credit...Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times With his new film, the peerless American filmmaker self isolating and reflective in New York unsettles past and present conflicts. It's a funny thing, Zooming with Spike Lee. He's remote, confined within a box within a box on your computer screen, and yet somehow undiminished. Maybe it's the look the ball cap and the glasses or maybe it's the way he looks at you. Lee has been staring directly into cameras for more than 30 years. Think of his most famous characters Mars Blackmon, from his 1986 feature "She's Gotta Have It," and a series of Nike commercials with Michael Jordan; or Mookie from "Do the Right Thing" and they're confronting you head on. This is Lee's preferred stance: undaunted, in your face, eye to eye. And it works. Even on a stuttering videoconference, the man is unmistakable. He's been isolating at his home on the Upper East Side since March, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down much of New York City. His only regular contact with the outside world comes via his bike a gift, custom painted orange and blue in honor of his beloved New York Knicks which he rides alone for three to five miles each morning, wearing a mask and helmet. At night, he has family dinners with his wife, Tonya, and two children, Satchel and Jackson, just as the neighbors begin cheering and banging pots and pans as part of citywide tributes to beleaguered health care workers. As a 63 year old African American, Lee is in a high risk group for mortality from the virus. Is he afraid? "Hell yeah, I'm afraid!" he said, sitting on a sofa beneath an oversized, vintage poster for the 1950 biopic "The Jackie Robinson Story." "That's why I'm keeping my black ass in the house!" "The morning after I got the Oscar, I got on a plane and headed to Thailand," he said, referring to a shooting location for "Da 5 Bloods," which will premiere June 12 on Netflix. Tonya brought home the award his first competitive Oscar win, in the best adapted screenplay category for "BlacKkKlansman" (2018) where it now sits in their library next to the honorary Oscar he received in 2015. "For me, it was right back to work." But lately, he has tended more than usual to think about the past, ruminating on his early triumphs and bruising failures. In the early days of the pandemic, Lee self published the screenplay for a dream project that never came to fruition his own biopic about Robinson that he had hoped would star Denzel Washington. "When everything stops, you have a lot of time to think," he said. "Not getting that film made was one of my biggest disappointments." It's not hard imagine a younger Lee, the guy who locked horns with everyone from Reggie Miller to the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, feeling anguished and impatient about the interruptions. But the gravity of the pandemic has put everything else into perspective. "I'm not sitting around wishing for this or that," he said. "People are losing their lives to this thing, their loved ones. So I give thanks to God that I'm alive and try to take things day by day." He is acutely aware that many people don't have the luxury of isolating as he has. A healthy majority of his films are set among the working class characters like the ones he grew up around in Brooklyn pizza delivery men, teachers and hairdressers of color who he has argued are as deserving of empathy and valorization as anyone else. And he has been watching as they risk their lives for the benefit of the rest of us. Though Paul's vocal defense of the president may come as a surprise to some, Lee has a long track record portraying complicated black characters without sanitizing them. Exit polls show that while the vast majority of black voters overall supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, 13 percent of black men supported Trump. "My mother taught me at an early age that black folks are not a monolithic group," Lee said. "In order to make the story dramatic, I said, 'What would be the most extreme thing we could do with one of the characters?'" "It was a problem for me at first," admitted Lindo, who said Trump was "anathema to everything that I believe in." He continued, "I tried to talk Spike out of it: 'Can we just make him a conservative?' But I think there are some black people who are so deeply disgruntled, because of very real disenfranchisement, that they're ready to believe someone like Trump might be able to help them." The four veterans of the film played by Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis affectionately refer to one another as "bloods," a term used by their real life counterparts in the war. In a story that pays homage to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948), "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) and "Apocalypse Now" (1979), the bloods are on a mission to recover the body of their former squad leader, Stormin' Norman (Chadwick Boseman), which is not incidentally buried near a secret treasure. The drama that unfolds among the men, and between the group and their present day Vietnamese rivals is a modern parable about the enduring depravations of war and the false promises of American individualism. "All of us, and humanity as a whole, have to learn to think about more than just ourselves," Lee said. "If the pandemic has shown us anything, it's that we've got to support one another. We can't go back to what we were doing in B.C., before corona, with great inequalities between the have and have nots." Lee, born in 1957 in Atlanta, the eldest of six children, grew up watching news reports about the Vietnam War on television. His most indelible memories are of his heroes denouncing the conflict, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali, who was stripped of his world heavyweight boxing title for refusing to be drafted into the armed forces. The film incorporates documentary footage of both men. An opening montage also features clips of several other activists, including Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Kwame Ture, whose ascendant Black Power movement in the late 1960s coincided with the most contentious years of the war. Lee first grappled with film's power to shape history as student at New York University in the 1980s. While attending the graduate film program there (he has since become a tenured professor at the school), Lee was appalled by what he has described as his instructors' sympathetic portrayal of D.W. Griffith's white supremacist epic, "The Birth of a Nation" considered the first major motion picture. His early student film, "The Answer," about a black screenwriter tasked with remaking "Birth of a Nation," was a defiant rebuttal to Griffith. A similar impulse has invigorated his movies ever since. "Novels, movies, TV, they've all pushed a false narrative: the white mythic hero," Lee said. "Look at the films John Ford made with John Wayne, which dehumanize Native Americans as savages, animals, monsters. It's been the same story with black people, women, gay people we've all been dehumanized." With "Da 5 Bloods," Lee saw an opportunity to explore a side of the black experience of Vietnam that hadn't been shown in cinema, despite the many classic films that have been made about the war. The original script, titled "The Last Tour" and written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, was about white soldiers. Lee and Willmott began rewriting it in 2017, after the original director, Oliver Stone, reportedly dropped out. The two were particularly interested in the psychology of black soldiers who fought for freedoms abroad that they'd been denied at home, a subject Lee previously explored in his World War II film "Miracle at St. Anna" (2008). In "Da 5 Bloods," we see how that cognitive dissonance has refracted over time, as the bloods, among a disproportionately high percentage of African Americans who served in the war, look back at their lives and try to assess the damage. "All they had was each other, and there was a real unity and brotherhood that came from that," Willmott said. Lee added flashbacks, including one in which Stormin' Norman gives a speech about Crispus Attucks, a black man who became the first American casualty of the Revolutionary War. Another, inspired by real stories told by black veterans, shows the moment when the bloods learn that Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated. Lee was more pragmatic about the choice. "I was not getting 100 million to de age our guys," he said, alluding to the reported 160 million budget for last year's Netflix drama about old men reconciling with their former selves, Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman." Netflix, which does not disclose its budgets, also produced two seasons of Lee's series based on "She's Gotta Have It," and the director said that he had loved working with the company overall. "I think we were able to turn a negative into a positive," he said. "Da 5 Bloods," which, in addition to footage of antiwar protests, is intercut with some extremely graphic documentary images of the war, including a haunting photo from the My Lai massacre, reaffirms Lee's capacity for outrage at his country. That capacity was tested again recently, when footage showing the killing of Ahmaud Arbery was released earlier this month. "It's 2020, and black and brown people are being shot like animals," Lee said, his voice climbing to a new register. "Tell me in what world can two brothers with a handgun and a shotgun follow a white jogger in a pickup truck, kill him, and it takes two months for them to get arrested?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Hypertension is dangerous. High blood pressure damages the inner lining of the arteries, limits the ability of the heart to pump blood and strains the organ in a way that can lead to heart failure. The condition increases the risk for stroke and vascular dementia, and hypertension is one of the most common causes of kidney failure. It impairs vision by damaging the blood vessels in the eyes. But the disease usually has no symptoms, and of the 29 percent of Americans who have high blood pressure, fewer than half have it under control. The prevalence of hypertension was unchanged from 1999 to 2016, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate of controlled hypertension people taking medicine to lower it increased from 1999 to 2010, but was unchanged through 2016.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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ROCKLAND, Me. Reade Brower cuts an unassuming figure for a media mogul. On a drizzly October day here, he could be found tucking into a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon at the Home Kitchen Cafe, clad in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and a Red Sox cap. He was wearing shoes, which he often forgoes, as he had when he ran a recent marathon. Appearances aside, however, Mr. Brower's footprint on this state's newspaper industry is enormous. He owns 18 weeklies and four of the seven daily newspapers in Maine, and his presses print the other three. In 2016, Mr. Brower, 61, and a partner bought two Vermont dailies. His latest acquisition came this year, when he bought The Lewiston Sun Journal, Maine's second largest daily, along with its presses, and more than a dozen weeklies. Mr. Brower's hold on the newspaper industry of a single state stands out, even in an age of increased consolidation that has led to hand wringing over the influence of giant technology companies and wealthy media owners like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and Sheldon Adelson. Maine's emergence as a national political hot spot whether for Gov. Paul LePage's combative conservatism or Senator Susan Collins's pivotal position as a centrist Republican adds to the influence Mr. Brower could have over the public discourse through his properties. Mr. Brower seems to greet it all with a shrug. "I don't feel at all powerful," Mr. Brower said. "My job is to create a sustainable business model that keeps people who want to be working in this industry working. And to have enough money coming in to pay the bills and make a profit so it's a viable business. I don't feel this surging power. All of the papers continue to operate autonomously." Indeed, Mr. Brower who describes himself as "an independent moderate who leans a little to the left on social issues and a little to the right on fiscal matters" does not generate much angst among the state's media watchers. They instead focus on what they see as an ownership structure that keeps the focus on local news coverage. "He's not Jeff Bezos, he's not John Henry, he's not one of these guys who has made billions in some other industry and is buying a newspaper as another asset in the portfolio," said Anthony Ronzio, a past president of the Maine Press Association, referring to the owners of The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. "He's someone who cares about publishing and is going to run it like a business to make a go of it. And I think that's the best anybody in the newspaper industry today can ask for." Mr. Brower built his fortune with a direct mail company, Target Marketing, that he began in a shed behind his house. It eventually became the state's largest such company its reach stretched to every household in Maine before he sold it. He is now the owner of MaineToday Media, Sun Media Group the Lewiston paper's publisher and Courier Publications, a group of coastal weeklies. His base of operations is a cluttered office on the third floor of an old brick building across the street from the Home Kitchen Cafe. "They just gave me a key last week," Mr. Brower said, fishing it from the pocket of his shorts. "Because when I would get there, nobody would recognize me, and I'd have to wait for them to go find Lisa to let me in." But the state's most notable politicians certainly know who he is. Mr. Brower said both Mr. LePage who has a famously adversarial relationship with the Maine press corps and Ms. Collins reached out to him when he became the owner of The Portland Press Herald. He said he had told them that he was willing to meet but that he would not be influencing any of his newspapers' coverage. He has yet to sit down with Mr. LePage, though he has met with Ms. Collins several times. "We've had great conversations, and that's the only way to learn," he said. The previous owner of The Portland Press Herald, Donald Sussman, was married to Chellie Pingree, a Democratic congresswoman from Maine. That seemed to have exacerbated Mr. LePage's vitriol toward the paper; at one point he joked that he'd like to blow up their offices. The change in ownership to Mr. Brower has not amounted to a warming of the relationship. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. "He doesn't want to get into those dialogues with people he doesn't agree with, and then the free press becomes your enemy," Mr. Brower said. Peter Steele, a spokesman for Governor LePage, said the newspaper was "still as intellectually sloppy, biased and inaccurate as it was under Sussman." "The governor has asked Reade to discuss the paper's editorial content with him, but Reade has refused," Mr. Steele continued. Consolidation in the state's print media, Mr. Steele added, "leaves Maine readers with no opportunities to find independent and objective journalism." Exactly how financially beneficial the consolidation has been for Mr. Brower is unclear; he did not disclose his revenues. He said the operations are sustainable, though each paper is not always profitable. The publications often share content and their websites utilize pay walls. But Mr. Brower said he has an advantage over publicly traded media corporations like Gannett and GateHouse. "Most newspapers are trying to put at least 15 or 20 percent on the bottom line for their investors," he said. "I don't need to do that." When Mr. Brower followed his girlfriend to Maine in 1980, he began printing coupon books for merchants in downtown Rockland, building off skills he had developed as a college student selling ads for the University of Massachusetts newspaper. In 1985, he started The Free Press, a quirky, free weekly serving towns along the west side of Penobscot Bay. After marrying his girlfriend and starting a family, he scrambled to make ends meet, even selling batteries and balloons from the trunk of his Toyota Tercel. "I've really scrapped and hustled for many, many years," he said. Then he began Target Marketing. After it became successful, he sold the company in 2004 and formed a printing co op, bundling print jobs to get discounts from presses. One of the co op members owned what is now Courier Publications, which collapsed on a Friday in 2012. The next day, Mr. Brower was meeting with the publisher's creditors, trying to recoup 75,000 he was owed for printing. He walked out as the owner of the weeklies. "It fell in my lap," Mr. Brower said. Mr. Brower soon bought a press in Brunswick. In 2015, he approached MaineToday Media about doing some of their printing. Mr. Sussman, a hedge fund manager who had rescued the papers in 2012, replied that he should buy the company. "It was this close to sustainability when he turned it over to me," said Mr. Brower. "The only thing we had to do was put in a new printer." Ms. DeSisto said that circulation has been falling at her papers, but circulation revenue was increasing because of a premium pricing strategy. She has reached agreements with the unions that represent most of her 330 employees, and said staffing has been flat since Mr. Brower bought the company. As for himself, Mr. Brower said his core competency is grit. He mentioned a marathon in Fenway Park in September that raised money for the Red Sox Foundation. His bare feet were aching when he finished at midnight, long after the other runners. "It was really epic, those last three laps when they were trying to pull me off the course," he said. "They shut off the lights, they closed the stadium up, they kicked everybody out." In the end, Mr. Brower was the only person left.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration has delayed by a year the deadline for the nation's chain restaurants, pizza parlors and movie theaters to post calorie counts on their menus in what some consumer advocates said was a setback for public health but others contended would simply give companies enough time to comply. Pressure had been growing to delay the rule, which was proposed in November and would have taken effect at the end of this year. Food companies in particular, the pizza industry had campaigned against it, saying it was onerous and in many cases served no purpose, as most Americans order pies over the phone and not in a restaurant, where they would see a menu. A measure in the House sought to delay compliance by a year. On Thursday, the agency announced that it had done just that to give companies more time to comply. Critics said the delay was not a fatal blow, but was worrisome, as it would give the restaurant and grocery industries more time to lobby against the measure. "This is a huge victory for the restaurant lobbyists," said Marion Nestle, a professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "Food companies must be hoping that if they can delay menu labeling long enough, it will just go away." But the delay may be more about bureaucracy than industry influence. Many who supported the rule said that the agency had yet to issue a crucial guidance document that would help the industry understand how to carry it out, and that with less than six months to go before the original deadline, there was a risk that the rule would create chaos. Some of its strongest backers, including Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, had called on the agency to delay it. Michael R. Taylor, the deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine at the F.D.A., said in a statement that the rule's new implementation date would be Dec. 1, 2016. "The F.D.A. agrees additional time is necessary for the agency to provide further clarifying guidance to help facilitate efficient compliance across all covered businesses," he said. Mr. Taylor said that the decision to extend the deadline came after "extensive dialogue" with restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses that would be affected, and that the agency planned to issue detailed draft guidance in August to help establishments comply with the rule. Menu labeling became law in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act, and the F.D.A. issued a proposal for how it should be carried out the next year. But the final rule was delayed for three years, due in part to fierce opposition from some national chains, including pizza restaurants and movie theaters. When the agency finally announced the rule last year, it was stronger and more sweeping than consumer advocates were expecting, covering food in vending machines and amusement parks, as well as certain prepared foods in supermarkets. The rule applied to food establishments with 20 or more outlets, from fast food chains like KFC and Subway to sit down restaurants like Applebee's and The Cheesecake Factory. Lynn Liddle, an executive vice president at Domino's and chairwoman of the American Pizza Community, an industry group, said in a statement that the final rule had "serious deficiencies," and that the trade group, which has lobbied vigorously against the rule, was putting its hopes in a House bill, the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act, which it says would allow restaurants that take most of their orders online or by phone to label menus online rather than in stores. Another provision of the bill would limit coverage of the rule to establishments with more than half their revenue coming from prepared foods. Margo Wootan, the director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said that provision amounted to a loophole that would exempt supermarkets, convenience stores and movie theaters from having to provide calorie information to their customers for their prepared foods. She said a sponsor of the bill had promised to remove it. The requirement applies to prepared foods for example in salad bars or hot food bars in grocery and convenience stores that are intended to feed one person. A sandwich or a salad would fall into this category, but not bulk items like loaves of bread or a rotisserie chicken. The rule also covers alcoholic beverages. Beverages served in food establishments that are on menus and menu boards would be included, but a mixed drink at a bar would not, F.D.A. officials said last year. Dawn Sweeney, the chief executive of the National Restaurant Association, said in a statement, "This standard makes good sense for the industry and our customers," adding that "some of our members are ready to implement menu labeling while others still need more time." Daren Bakst, a research fellow in agricultural policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it was not surprising that the implementation date for the rule had been extended, as grocery stores and convenience stores establishments that he argued were not intended by Congress to be included were probably struggling to comply as their products were less standardized than those at chain restaurants.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Like most Brooklyn renters, Robert Collignon never expected to buy a snow shovel, let alone a Subaru Forester. But a career change and a six month road trip in a Volkswagen Westfalia camper van a few years ago meant subletting his apartment in Williamsburg and eventually led him to a new home in the Catskills. "The idea was that I'd come up here and buckle down for a few months, but I really fell in love," said Mr. Collignon, 35, sipping a beer one late summer afternoon on the deck of the cabin he rents in Hobart, N.Y., about a three and a half hour drive from the city. "I kept on adding one month, then another. Then I stayed through the winter." A year and a half later, he has no intention of returning to the city. Hence, last winter's purchase of a snow shovel and "the requisite Subaru," with four wheel drive and heated seats. The renovated hunting cabin, which he rents for 1,000 a month (a little less than half of his Williamsburg rent), lies down a long dirt driveway, off a quiet country road. It's surrounded by a large lawn he devotes about an hour each week to mowing it which slopes down to a marshy pond. Part of the desire to stay is professional. Quitting his job in advertising and embarking on a road trip led Mr. Collignon to his new venture, an artisanal food business. He ate a lot of freeze dried "astronaut" ice cream while he was on the road, and discovered that the ingredients in his favorite treat were somewhat alarming. He now makes organic, freeze dried ice cream bars out of a commercial space that he rents for 450 a month in nearby Margaretville. "Try finding that in Brooklyn," he said. He hopes to start selling his Cosmik Ice Cream bars this fall. But like his two cats, who were once confined to his Brooklyn one bedroom but now prowl indoors and out catching, by his estimate, two mice a day, in addition to the occasional rabbit and snake Mr. Collignon has come to love the rural life. "The property is growing on me. In the spring, all of a sudden baby animals are everywhere. The birds all came back, and I watched the geese grow up," he said. "I sit here in the mornings, drinking coffee, and I can't complain." The cabin is small, about 600 square feet, with one bedroom downstairs and a low ceilinged loft, reached by a ladderlike staircase, that runs the length of the building. It is unusual for the area, he said, both in its size and aesthetic. The space has modern, airy feel large windows offer expansive views of the surrounding mountains and the walls and wood floors have been painted white. "Most stuff up here is like ski lodges or vacation houses; it's much larger. And I didn't need or a want a three bedroom log cabin. This is better for a single person," said Mr. Collignon, who found his place through a local broker he discovered on Craigslist. "I didn't see anything else like this, either. It was all either grandma chic, with drapes and doilies everywhere, or decorated like a hunting lodge." Even so, it took a little while to get used to some aspects of country life, like hearing strange rustlings in the bushes at night and seeing people with shotguns walking on the side of the road in the morning when he was driving to work. "Hunters," he'd remind himself. The closest movie theater is an hour away, and most of the area restaurants are closed Monday through Wednesday. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block, however, has been the lack of internet service. The cabin gets only satellite service, which means no streaming movies or binge watching television shows. "I have to get Netflix DVDs in the mail. That's basically the evening entertainment. That and cooking. It's lonely at times, for sure," said Mr. Collignon, adding that he does his best to entice friends to visit, an easier task in summer than winter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Whether you think of them as quotidian, or "soaring masonry facades enlivened by decorative details," as does the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the network of 1910s and 1920s buildings erected over Grand Central's sunken railroad yards was a remarkable development, unlike anything ever done in New York. But the linchpin of what was called Terminal City, the huge 1913 Biltmore Hotel, is long gone with the exception of a clock and a tunnel. It was William J. Wilgus, an engineer for the New York Central Railroad, who had the idea of using the air rights above Grand Central's yards to generate revenue, and this idea drove the new terminal, which opened a century ago. One early plan for Park Avenue, which ran over the covered tracks, was for a formal boulevard flanked by grand Washington style institutions. But the voice of economics prevailed: Park Avenue was developed with apartment houses and office buildings. The day after the funeral, Wetmore secretly approached the railroad and got it to void the initial contract, naming Warren Wetmore sole architects for all future related work. That was substantial, involving at least a dozen large office buildings and a great hotel right next to Grand Central, from 43rd to 44th Street, between Madison and Vanderbilt Avenues. This was the 26 story Biltmore, the first of Warren Wetmore's ill gotten commissions. In early 1914 The Real Estate Record and Guide described the thousand room hotel, with a terraced sixth floor setback on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, as having been designed so as "not to dwarf the monumental effect" of Grand Central. This was rather a generous judgment, considering that the hotel was five times as high. Madison Avenue was dominated by its great, uninterrupted bulk. The two tall, gawky wings facing Vanderbilt, separated by a light court, suggest colossal diving boards. The Biltmore's guests could step off their trains, engage a porter for their luggage, and stroll through Grand Central and into an elevator in the hotel basement. Once checked in, they could retreat to the terrace, which had a roof garden, and in some years skating, and must have been refreshing in the days before air conditioning. The hotel also custom built some apartments on request. Dau's New York Blue Book of 1919 gives a Biltmore address for the architect William Rutherford Mead, whose partners Stanford White and Charles McKim had died in 1906 and '09, respectively. Although the usual narrative is that at this time well to do families were shifting from private houses into the new apartment buildings, hotels were obviously a third option. In October 1914 hotels all over the city dropped their flags to half staff when word came that the hotel's operator, Gustav Baumann, had fallen from the 22nd floor to his death on the terrace. The New York Times reported that he had lost his balance. A partner with John Bowman in the Biltmore operation, Baumann was one of the best known hotel men in New York. He left an estate appraised at 190,000, which seems a comfortable sum, but two years before it had been valued at 4 million. The Times said he had been losing money on both the Biltmore and the Ansonia, which he also controlled. Stem had sued Warren and Wetmore when he discovered they had gone to the railroad behind his back. In 1920 the Court of Appeals found in his favor, awarding him about 500,000, including 1 percent of the construction cost of the Biltmore. By the 1980s, Midtown seemed anything but zesty, just a collection of aging structures far out of fashion. In 1981 the Milstein family closed the hotel, which was rumored to be a candidate for landmark designation. Suddenly, demolition began. Preservation groups scrambled to save some of the interiors, including the Palm Court, which held the clock. But they were not successful, and the brutal red granite 335 Madison Avenue, designed by the firm Environetics, went up in its place. It is hard to imagine, but in another hundred years preservation organizations may promote its preservation, too, just as they are now promoting landmark designation for the Yale Club and other structures in the area. The Biltmore clock was placed in the lobby of No. 335, but has the pickled aspect common to architectural elements divorced from context. For real old time Biltmoriana, walk around to the 44th Street side. You'll find a long vehicle ramp, with an arched ceiling of Guastavino tile, that led to the basement of the Biltmore and the connection to Grand Central. You can still drive down, but now it's just a garage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Helen Frankenthaler in her studio "in the woods" in Provincetown, 1968. Working on the floor, she poured thinned paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas, a technique that established the Color Field movement. The Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928 2011) had a way of ignoring boundaries . As a child, she drew a line in chalk on the ground from the Metropolitan Museum to her family's apartment on 74th Street. Later, she did away with the idea of "paint on canvas" by essentially fusing the paint and the canvas: saturating unprimed grounds with liquidy, thinned out oil and acrylic . In "Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown," at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., we see her develop this signature method by immersing herself in the landscape on the Massachusetts coast (sometimes literally, as in a photograph of Frankenthaler swimming right outside her waterfront home and studio). At the same time, we see a young artist responding to the pressures of increasing fame and a new family life by trying to set some limits. Spanning the years 1950 to 1969, "Abstract Climates" (which debuted at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum last summer) deftly interweaves creative and personal breakthroughs with a combination of artworks and ephemera. It culminates in a rapturous, triumphant gallery of the large scale "soak stain" paintings that gave rise to the Color Field movement works like "Flood" (1967), with its translucent pink and orange waves lapping at strips of blue and green. She had hit on the stain technique some years before "Flood," in the airy pink and blue fantasia of "Mountains and Sea" (1952), which was painted in Manhattan and inspired by the landscape of Nova Scotia but is sufficiently influential to have made it into the show. In Provincetown, however, Frankenthaler used this method more freely and on ever larger canvases emboldened, perhaps, by more capacious studios and proximity to water, but also by the more relaxed atmosphere. It was a place where Frank O'Hara or Henry Geldzahler might drop by for lunch, but an artist could work for hours undisturbed by what Frankenthaler called the city's "influx" of dealers, critics and reporters. (It undoubtedly helped that she chose not to install a telephone.) Although the show focuses on the work Frankenthaler made in Provincetown, it looks very much at home in the Hamptons (where she spent several summers in the 1950s, as evinced by a marvelously casual 1952 photograph of two art world power couples: Frankenthaler and Clement Greenberg, the art critic who was her boyfriend at the time, enjoying a day at the beach in East Hampton with their friends Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.) It was Greenberg who prompted Frankenthaler's first trip to Provincetown, in 1950, with a suggestion that she study with the revered teacher of abstract painting Hans Hofmann. A small oil from that time, "Provincetown Bay," appears cautious with its muted gray greens and distinct horizon line. Most of the show's paintings, however, date from the 1960s, when Frankenthaler and her first husband, Robert Motherwell, were regular summer residents in Provincetown. Her progression from small canvases to large ones, drawing to painting, tight brush strokes to pooling stains, is rapid and exhilarating. In a group of expansive works from 1961, as in "Orange Breaking Through," unwieldy splotches of tangerine and crimson disturb simple black outlines of squares and circles. By 1962, the stains with their uncontrollable, feathery edges have taken over; corralled into tight, centralized clusters, they evoke landscapes (with some help from titles like "Breakwater" and "The Cape"). Then they expand and merge into each other, as in "Low Tide" (1963), with its aqueous blue green mass partly engulfed by yellow. Organized by Lise Motherwell, one of Frankenthaler's two stepdaughters, and Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the exhibition's many familial touches (datebooks, letters, snapshots, and a warm but candid catalog essay by Ms. Motherwell) highlight some of the work life challenges Frankenthaler and her peers faced, many of which persist for female artists today. As an artist on the rise, with solo shows at Tibor de Nagy and Andre Emmerich and a mini retrospective at the Jewish Museum under her belt, Frankenthaler was already navigating some of those issues in 1960 when, about a year and a half into her marriage to Motherwell, she unexpectedly became a full time stepmother to Lise and her sister Jeannie because of a change in custody arrangements. (They later went back to live with their mother but continued to spend summers with their father and stepmother in Provincetown.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Re "Fear, Knowledge and the Coronavirus," by David DeSteno (Sunday Review, Feb. 16): Worldwide paranoia over the coronavirus is out of control. The World Health Organization characterizing it as a "very grave threat" globally serves only to trigger even more fear mongering. Here's the deal: The overwhelming majority of people who have died from the virus are Chinese residents of Hubei Province over age 60 who were already seriously ill and susceptible to viruses. I'm in China, about 500 miles from the epidemic's epicenter. I'm taking precautions like washing my hands no less than 20 times a day and wearing a mask when I'm out in public, but I'm not overly concerned. Why? Because if you're even marginally healthy and happen to contract the virus, you won't die. You'll be sick for a couple of weeks but will almost certainly recover. And if you're not in China to begin with and haven't been around anyone from Hubei Province recently, your chances of getting the virus are very small and dying from it infinitesimal. So anyone getting hysterical needs to chill out.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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There was no parade of royals, no throng of fashionable spectators in top hats and fascinators. But the normally glamorous Royal Ascot horse racing meeting still got underway as usual on Tuesday. Also missing was the enthusiastic racing fan Queen Elizabeth, for the first time in her 68 year reign as sovereign. "I am sure," she wrote in a statement, "it will remain one of Britain's finest sporting occasions." The four day event was immortalized in "My Fair Lady" by Eliza Doolittle, who shocks a crowd of toffs by earthily urging on her horse. This year is the first time there are no spectators at the nonfictional Ascot. Before the first race, there were a handful of people in the paddock keeping a respectful distance from one another.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Saturday was a red letter day twice over for New York dance goers: the 30th anniversary of the choreographer Frederick Ashton's death and the return to the American stage of the dancer Marcelo Gomes. Ashton, though British, always felt his work was better appreciated in New York over more than 50 years of his lifetime; Mr. Gomes who made an immediate resignation from American Ballet Theater in December after an allegation of sexual misconduct has been among the city's most missed dancers. The Sarasota Ballet, which returned to the Joyce Theater this week, combined the two occasions. It performed Ashton's "Monotones I and II" (1965 66) as part of a triple bill shared with Christopher Wheeldon's "There Where She Loved" (2000) and Ricardo Graziano's "Symphony of Sorrows" (2012). On Saturday, however, it replaced the Graziano work with four further items of Ashton choreography: Mr. Gomes performed the last of these, the final pas de deux from "The Two Pigeons" (1961), in which the hero returns in repentance but with a pigeon or dove as a symbol of his rediscovered love. The Sarasota company had announced in June that it was bringing on Mr. Gomes as a guest artist after the end of his 20 year career at Ballet Theater, which said at the time that an investigation into the misconduct allegation had concluded. Neither the Ballet Theater nor Mr. Gomes has spoken publicly about it. When Mr. Gomes entered, pigeon on his shoulder, during Saturday's matinee performance, Victoria Hulland (the ballet's heroine) and Andre Messager's music had effectively established a mood of quiet poignancy. It continued unbroken even after Mr. Gomes turned to face the audience. Though this pas de deux requires no dancing from her hero beyond partnering and gestures, he looked in very good shape: slim and suggesting the same heartfelt integrity as ever. There was no ego in his magical performance; he immediately absorbed himself in the world of the ballet. (The evening audience nonetheless applauded his entrance: very New York, but deliberately shattering the spell.) Famous as a superlative partner, Mr. Gomes showed this in the effortless delicacy with which, after one prolonged lift, he returned Ms. Hulland to arrive on the floor on her points. He's danced the complete two act ballet in Sarasota, where in the coming season he performs several other Ashton creations. Ms. Hulland, a little too dainty when dancing alone, responded to his presence and support with all the ardent pliancy that Ashton famously required of his dancers. The Sarasotans are one of those companies that New York likes to associate with one choreographer alone. Like the Royal Danish Ballet (which, according to this theory, should dance only ballets by August Bournonville when visiting this city), Sarasota over the past 11 years, as directed by Iain Webb and Margaret Barbieri (former Ashton dancers both), has established its credentials as the foremost exponents of Ashton works, dancing many that have seldom or never been seen elsewhere this century. They made a marvelous impression with an all Ashton program at the Joyce two years ago. This year, they also tried, commendably if unsuccessfully, to establish their 21st century credentials. Mr. Wheeldon's "There Where She Loved" alternates between Then and Now. Then is danced to Chopin songs, Now to Weill ones; the scenario seems to go as follows: "Back then, we women were happy, and danced blithely with a lot of very pretty and narcissistic men who kept their clothes on and always treated us as if we were queens among the queens. Nowadays, we're perfectly miserable, dancing with men who remove more clothes; who, despite behaving more heterosexually, treat us badly; and whom we love much more." This is compelling if you're attracted to Mr. Wheeldon's cling on for dear life view of love; I'm not. But the music was another matter, with Cameron Grant at the piano, the sopranos Michelle Giglio (Chopin) and Stella Zambalis (Weill) both singing with beauty and eloquence. Mr. Graziano is also among the company's finest dancers. His "Sea of Sorrows" choreography is a skillful imitation of the idiom widely established by Jiri Kylian: There's little human individuality, since everyone onstage is homogenized by the same emotion in this case, inexplicable grief. Though the men (bare chested) repeatedly keep the women from crumbling to the floor, the women's anguish allows them several samey displays of energy in the men's arms. Dancing equals suffering. The music, taped, is the third movement of Henryk Gorecki's third symphony, with ravishing singing by Dawn Upshaw. It was wonderful to see again Ashton's two "Monotones" pas de trois, though really they belong on a far larger stage than the Joyce. (Though each features only three dancers, they should evoke limitless realms the desert in the first, outer space in the second.) Lighting blanched the first pas de trois so that its green costumes seemed pale lemon, but it was fascinating to watch the choreography accompanied by Satie's original piano writing ("Trois Gnossiennes" and "Trois Gymnopedies"), admirably played by Mr. Grant. Especially at Saturday's performances, the dancers illustrated the flow of line that was a central characteristic of Ashton's style: line in both space and time, with still positions that radiate and phrasing that threads staccato steps into a larger legato continuity. Every movement flows out of the last, suspensefully: Even after more than 40 years of watching these seemingly simple dances, I find sequences here with rhythms and shapes that softly electrify. The least familiar and most frivolous item on Saturday's program was "La Chatte metamorphosee en femme" (1985), a solo to music from Offenbach's 1858 opera of that title but evoking an earlier 1837 Parisian ballet of the same name, made as a vehicle for the Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler. (Ashton made the solo for a Viennese gala commemorating Elssler; his friend and colleague William Chappell designed the feline fur lined dress along the lines of the one worn by Elssler.) The joke is that this woman, formerly a cat, cannot shake off her cat behavior, least of all when a mouse appears. But, being by Ashton, it's a real dance, with memorable prances on point, claw like hands, and an explosive circuit of turns and jumps before a final, vocalized "Meow." This was followed by the brilliantly high energy skating pas de trois from "Les Patineurs" (one of the ultimate instep dances, from 1937) and the languorously dreamlike "Meditation from 'Thais'" (1971), in which the former courtesan Thais returns as the erotic fantasy of the man for whom she has renounced the world. Ashton's command of styles was encyclopedic, far more so than any choreographer alive today.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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From tailfinned Cadillacs of the 1950s to three ton S.U.V.'s at the turn of the century, luxury vehicles have always pushed the limits of size and mass. Now it's happening again, but in the opposite direction: automakers are whipping up bite size luxury models, confident that Americans are finally seeing the upside of small, yet artful, portions. These cars also spotlight a new kind of status, a less is more mentality that's taking root in everything from food to fashion. Small, yet relatively precious, with prices of roughly 30,000 to 50,000, these models suggest that their owners could afford to buy a bigger car but choose not to. For S.U.V.'s, especially, the old question of "how big can they go," is undergoing a 180 degree switch. Hummer size entries are barely on the table. Instead, fuel efficient crossovers like the BMW X1, Buick Encore and Mini Countryman are creating a niche that, not long ago, would have seemed too inconsequential for carmakers and consumers to bother with. Tall riding and squat, shaped a bit like petite hiking boots, these entries are one size smaller than compact crossovers think of the Audi Q5, BMW X3 or Volvo XC60 that themselves seemed a novelty only a decade ago. Yet those compact haulers quickly became the fastest growing part of the luxury market. The Encore is the antithesis of the traditional battleship size Buick. Lincoln hopes its coming MKC, a luxury crossover utility based on the Ford Escape, can help to reverse its slump. Audi's Q3 crossover, about two inches shorter than a Honda Civic, is coming to America, perhaps next year. Porsche recently hired 1,000 workers in Leipzig, Germany, to build the Macan, a downsized S.U.V. that goes on sale early next year. And for 2015, Mercedes Benz is prepping a crossover, tentatively called the GLA, that would match up against the X1 and Q3. A stylish example is the Mercedes CLA, due to go on sale this fall at a come hither starting price of 30,825 (including the mandatory 925 delivery charge). That Civic size sedan is powered by a turbocharged 2 liter 4 cylinder engine producing 208 horsepower. In decades past, luxury compacts were often perceived rightly, in many cases as a bait and switch. Most notoriously, for 1982 Cadillac slapped leather trim and alloy wheels on a Chevrolet Cavalier economy car and called it the "Cimarron by Cadillac." Instead of seeing the Cimarron as automotive royalty, critics and consumers called for its head. A few years later, Mercedes loyalists were unimpressed by the 190, a compact sedan that came to be dismissed as a "poor man's Mercedes." A later attempt to sell Americans on a small Mercedes hatchback, the C230, also fell flat. But more recently, European automakers established beachheads with small sport sedans like the 3 Series, C Class and A4, turning them into best sellers and profit centers. Even Cadillac has made amends with its 2013 ATS sedan, its first small car since the Cimarron and an impressive 3 Series fighter. The Mini Cooper deserves some credit for changing perceptions of what a small car can be and how much the public is willing to pay for one. BMW's 2002 redesign of the legendary, fuel sipping, rally winning Mini originally introduced to England in 1959 for about 800 wasn't a luxury car per se. Yet it represented a new way of thinking, at least for Americans who stereotyped tiny cars as being cheap, dull, unreliable or unsafe. The reborn Mini was fashionable and fun to drive, and it was hardly inexpensive; checking off some of the many BMW bred options could kick the price to 30,000 and more. In the Mini's wake, automakers are following its high design formula, said Jeff Schuster, senior vice president for forecasting at LMC Automotive, a research firm. In contrast with the past, he said, "These aren't dumbed down luxury vehicles that try to fool you" with a designer name. The pint size brigade also dovetails nicely with the psychology of post recession consumers. "Buyers are coming back in, but they're feeling a little more frugal than before," Mr. Schuster said. "With these models, they can still aspire to a premium vehicle with the features they want." Early next year, Audi will offer a redesigned A3 now a sedan, like the Mercedes CLA, rather than a hatchback. While Lexus offers a luxury hatch, the CT 200h hybrid, European brands pointedly continue to leave high end hatchbacks at home. Mr. Hall noted that America's introduction to hatchbacks did not go well, with poorly executed small cars like the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Chevette. And the image of hatchbacks as budget bottom feeders has persisted. In Europe, Mr. Hall said, single car households prize hatchbacks for their versatility. In the United States, crossovers ably fill the role of family hauler, often as the second car in the family. "Hatchbacks are great if you need one car to do multiple things, but we're not a nation of one car, small parking space families," Mr. Hall added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Shortly before the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened to the public in 2016, Kobe Bryant took a walk through its sports gallery, which chronicles Black athletes' fight for equality and their cultural contributions. Mr. Bryant, whose 1 million donation to the museum gave him the sneak peek, later decided to donate some of his own memorabilia to the collection, including a Los Angeles Lakers uniform and a pair of shoes that he wore during the 2008 NBA finals. Those items had not yet made it into the museum's gallery, but after Mr. Bryant's sudden death in a helicopter crash in January, which also killed his daughter Gianna Bryant, the museum has decided to put his jersey on display, it said on Monday. Damion L. Thomas, the museum's sports curator, who walked with Mr. Bryant through the gallery in 2016, said that part of the reasoning for displaying Mr. Bryant's jersey was that after Mr. Bryant's death, he had been seeing visitors congregate by a photo of him that was up in the gallery.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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BERLIN When the team from one of Moscow's leading avant garde theaters performs during a brief residency in Berlin this week, much of the attention will be focused on a man who is not there. That man is the group's director, Kirill S. Serebrennikov, who is under house arrest in Russia, accused of embezzling 133 million rubles, or about 2.3 million, in government funds allocated to a festival he ran. For many in Russia and abroad, however, the case against Mr. Serebrennikov seems like a piece of politically motivated theater: punishment for a provocative artist who has been an outspoken critic of President Vladimir V. Putin. If convicted, Mr. Serebrennikov faces up to 10 years in prison. The Gogol Center, the avant garde theater he has led since 2012, had made arrangements long before his arrest to visit the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where it will offer two of his productions, both of which celebrate titans of 20th century German language literature. Mr. Serebrennikov, 48, is one of the few Russian directors to have achieved success on the international theater scene. In Germany and in Berlin particularly he has been especially in demand for opera productions. In October 2017, Oper Stuttgart presented his half finished production of "Hansel und Gretel," transposed to Rwanda. Mr. Serebrennikov is also a welcome guest at Komische Oper Berlin. His most recent work there was a modern day, social media heavy staging of Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" in 2016, which is currently being revived. He was also set to direct Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" in the 2019 20 season. "It's with great sadness that we think about Kirill," Barrie Kosky, the Komische Oper's artistic director, said in an interview. "We're all waiting. That's the most frustrating and saddest thing about it." Mr. Kosky said that he hoped Mr. Serebrennikov would soon be able to work again at the Komische Oper and elsewhere, but that he was anxious about what the Russian director might face first. "I'm fearing that it will be a bit of Russian grotesque with shades of Bulgakov," he said, referring to the Russian author of the satirical novel "The Master and Margarita." The investigation against Mr. Serebrennikov began in May 2017. Prosecutors have so far presented little to support their claims, and they have dismissed striking evidence against them multiple newspaper reviews, for instance, of a show they say was never staged. Mr. Serebrennikov has repeatedly protested innocence, most recently on Feb. 21. At home and abroad, the outpouring of support for the director has been enormous. A Change.org petition initiated by Thomas Ostermeier, artistic director of the Schaubuhne (another Berlin theater where the Gogol Center has performed in the past) has garnered more than 50,000 signatures. Among the most prominent artists lending their support are the actress Cate Blanchett, the filmmaker Lars von Trier and the Nobel Prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. At a news conference at the Deutsches Theater on Monday, Mr. Serebrennikov's assistant, Anna Shalashova, urged the assembled journalists to read a campaigning website tracking the case. "You will see how Kafkaesque this whole trial is," she said. Since Mr. Serebrennikov's arrest, many have suggested that the director is being made an example of to discourage other Russian artists from voicing dissent in their work. Ms. Shalashova seemed to subscribe to this view. "Kirill is the emblematic figure of Russia's theatrical landscape," she said. "By now, he's Russia's most important director. Perhaps that's why he's been singled out." Ulrich Khuon, the Deutsches Theater's artistic director, said the guest performances were "part of a larger movement of international solidarity." "And I think that it has a psychological and emotional effect on the work that the theater does and on Kirill," he added. Beyond mere symbolism, however, Mr. Khuon said he was more hopeful than Ms. Shalashova that artistic exchanges such as this one might influence the trial's outcome. "I think that this wide publicity could be politically relevant for Putin's, or the court's, decision," he said. Mr. Khuon also sees the artistic exchange between his theater and Mr. Serebrennikov's as an opportunity to explore the role of the arts in society. "In Russia today, this is of course both tougher and more necessary" than in Germany, he said, adding that the Deutsches Theater's program regularly examined the company's East German history. Odin Biron, an American actor in the Gogol Center's ensemble, said he was at a loss to explain what exactly had prompted the action against Mr. Serebrennikov. "What I do know," he said, "is that there's a definite line, very important for the current administration to frame the questions: What is Russian? What Is Russia? And one of the main columns that that understanding rests on is Russian literature. It's how you support the language, which, in essence, supports the country."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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LEIPZIG, Germany While it's impossible not to think of Johann Sebastian Bach as you walk through this city, where he spent the final decades of his life, what little remains of his world here has been altered almost beyond recognition. The house where he and his family lived was demolished a century ago. Next door, St. Thomas Church, where Bach was a cantor from 1723 to 1750, was overhauled in Gothic Revival style in the 1880s. St. Nicholas Church, where the "St. John Passion" was first performed in 1724, got its current cupcake pastel interior decades after Bach died. And Bach certainly would never have heard Arabic being widely spoken, as it is now, in the bustling, largely immigrant neighborhood of Neustadt. It was here, on a mild weekend afternoon recently, that Yo Yo Ma bounded into a room in a community center, Stradivarius cello in hand, and moved swiftly around a seated circle of adults and children, grinning and giving one long high five. Mr. Ma, 62, was entirely there. He stayed in the community center only about half an hour, but without seeming rushed, he blended disarming generosity he gave two budding cellists his instrument to try out in front of the group with a kind of subtle social work. "Learning a new piece is like moving from one place to another," he said in answer to someone's question, connecting music making to the lives of the migrants without making too big a deal of it. If Mr. Ma seemed wholly at ease, a veteran politician delightedly working a town hall, it is because his visit, blending Bach and social responsibility, was nothing unusual in the career of the musician of our civic life. The one we call upon to play at the funeral Mass of a senator and the inauguration of a president, the anniversary of a terrorist attack and the commemoration of the victims of a bombing. And what Mr. Ma plays at moments like those, to make us cry and then soothe us, is, more often than not, a selection from the Bach cello suites. These six works are the Everest of his instrument's repertory, offering a guide to nearly everything a cello can do as well as, many believe, charting a remarkably complete anatomy of emotion and aspiration. In each city, he will pair a performance of the full cycle nearly two and a half hours of labyrinthine music, played with barely a pause with what he's calling a "day of action" that brings Bach into the community, as in his trip to Neustadt. It's a small and glancing, but also deeply felt, attempt to suggest that this music, with its objectivity and empathy, its breathless energy and delicate grace, could, if heard closely by enough people, change the world. And the world, Mr. Ma readily acknowledges, could use some changing. The day of his recital in Leipzig, he said, "I'm thinking of what happened in Chemnitz," only 50 miles southeast, where anti immigrant riots had raged a few days earlier. A week later, asked by The Financial Times about President Trump, Mr. Ma said: "Would I play for him on his deathbed? No." Composed around 1720, just before Bach moved to Leipzig, the cello suites, now musical and emotional touchstones, were little known until the early 1900s. It was thought, even by some who knew of them, that they were merely etudes, nothing you'd want to perform in public. They may have remained a curiosity had it not been for the great cellist Pablo Casals, who happened on a used edition of the score in a Barcelona shop when he was 13. Decades later, in the 1930s, he made a classic recording of the set, the success of which put the suites on the path to ubiquity. Their magic lies in a perfect balance of exploration and security. They move through harmonic progressions with scientific curiosity and patience, but also with an intensity of feeling that keeps excruciating and releasing, over and over. Simultaneously expansive and reassuring, they are, for many, the very definition of consolation. "It has helped me through challenging times, with a death in the family," Mary Pat Buerkle, Mr. Ma's longtime manager, said of his Bach. "It completely calmed me of ridiculous jitters the morning of my wedding. I was more than a little jittery, and I asked my husband to please put it on for me." When he recorded the suites for the first time, in 1983, Mr. Ma was still in his 20s, though already decades into a career that began as a child prodigy in the early 1960s, when his family moved from Paris to New York. It's an assertive, dramatic, robust reading of the music, with heightened extremes. That first go, he said with a laugh, "is like youthful 'I know everything.' The second is middle aged confusion." That second recording, "Inspired by Bach," was released in the late 1990s, accompanied by ingenious films that depicted the ever inquisitive Mr. Ma in collaboration with artists from other disciplines: a landscape architect, the choreographer Mark Morris, the etchings of Piranesi, ice dancers. He's right that there's an element of bewilderment or, at least, the modesty of maturity in this more ruminative, less rhythmically moored take. The Fifth Suite, in the 1983 album, has the haunted beauty of an empty Venetian palazzo, with prevailing gloom shot with sudden shafts of blinding sunlight. In 1998, the same suite feels milder and more summery, the overarching condition one of restorative shade rather than stark shadow. Between the two recordings, Mr. Ma gradually moved from instrumentalist to icon. (When Kramer gets hit in the head on a 1992 episode of "Seinfeld," he starts randomly blurting out "Yo Yo Ma.") "It happened over time," Ms. Buerkle said. "It wasn't like there was a magic moment. Over a long period of time, incrementally, you become the go to person. It's such a strange thing in this business. You become, at some point, the household name." Mr. Ma took that status seriously and has used it to richer effect than the rest of the tiny handful of classical musicians at his level of renown. In 1998, he started the Silk Road Project, dedicated to genially exploring cross cultural artistic connections, out of which emerged the constantly touring Silk Road Ensemble. Now a grandfather, he has aged easily into the role of global citizen humanist, lecturing on the role of artists and culture in a fraying society. (The question is whether his "days of action" will have the substance, beyond photo ops, to match his good intentions.) Above all, he simply has more curiosity than any other major star: Mr. Ma could easily make his living playing Elgar's crowd pleasing concerto and only that; instead, he spent a chunk of his time last year introducing a wild new concerto by Esa Pekka Salonen. And no one who wanted an easy time of it would commit to three dozen exposed, exhausting performances of the complete Bach suites. One of the greatest tests yet of his vaunted abilities to communicate with audiences has come with his desire to perform the suites, as intimate as music gets, in spaces many times larger than Bach could have imagined. Mr. Ma did them in 2015 at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London, more often the site of grand symphonic performances. Last September, he took on what seemed to be a folly: playing the suites outdoors, in front of more than 17,000 people in Los Angeles. "In my heart of hearts, I had envisioned him doing this at the Hollywood Bowl," Ms. Buerkle said. "And being able to sit there and witness that was a magical moment, because people said it couldn't be done." The critic Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, called it "the loveliest experience of my listening year." I knew what he meant after hearing Mr. Ma do the whole thing here at St. Nicholas Church, where Bach made music three centuries ago. During the performance, I noticed a new physical calm in him: The effusive body movements for which he's known and, by some, lightly mocked the face scrunched in a grimace, neck craned away from the instrument in exaggerated concentration were gone. "As a younger musician," Mr. Salonen, the composer and conductor, said in an interview, "he had this tremendous skill and charisma, and he was doing it onstage. There was tremendous energy and expression of every note he played. And now he's kind of relaxing from that. He's kind of leaning back every now and again. He's going with the flow, he's letting things speak, he's not making a case for every note." Mr. Ma played with honesty, straightforwardness and lack of exaggeration; the music was milked for neither laughter nor tears, with a tone like wire coated in silk. The first suites were taken lightly, as if sunnily refined sketches; it was in the final three that Mr. Ma entered another sphere. The Prelude of the Fourth Suite soldiered past a sudden feeling of rupture and loss, becoming a study in perseverance and courage. The Courante let out sudden floods of color; the Bourree was rough and spunky, the Gigue raucous. The Fifth Suite's Sarabande was a long, sinuous exhalation of melancholy. After two hours of music and the forlornness of the Fifth Suite, the Sixth was resplendent, a golden ending. It moved past loveliness into something greater. "For Mr. Ma," Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times of a performance of the suites at Carnegie Hall in 1991, "Bach's world is unfailingly beautiful sound and graceful melody. Anyone who has sung or played Bach's music knows, to the contrary, its tendencies toward density and difficulty. Mr. Ma denies that these exist." Nearly three decades later, that's no longer true.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Outdoor Stages: Dance in the Park, Where You Can't Hide Behind a Tree If you passed through Madison Square Park in the past week or so, you might have come upon people in colorful unitards contorting on the lawn or clambering over a fence, again and again, before they huddled and tried something else. The choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, with dancers of their choosing, are creating something out in the open. They're participating in a collaborative public art project, "Prismatic Park," sponsored by the Madison Square Park Conservancy. The sculptor Josiah McElheny has created a red pavilion for poets, a blue wall to back musicians and a green circular floor for dancers. Artists from those disciplines are in the park for a rotation of residencies through Oct. 8, and will be tasked with making works inspired by the space and unplanned interactions with the public. More outdoors: "Pride Prejudice" in the Hudson Valley Jim Jarmusch on Films Alfresco 24 Outdoor Performances to See This Summer Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Riener have chosen to make their whole process public, starting nearly from zero, giving dancers prompts for structured improvisations and building on those, day by day. A week into their turn, which culminates in a marathon session from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, the duo spoke about how it was going. The following are edited excerpts from the interview. How did you approach the project? SILAS RIENER We were both excited by it and interested in subverting it. So, of course, the first thing we did was ignore the circle and use the full area. RASHAUN MITCHELL I tell the dancers, "You're going to be confronted by people, a squirrel is going to run by, you're going to stop to say hello to your boyfriend all of that is what we're doing." MITCHELL We've done a lot of work outside, but this felt more vulnerable, because we weren't coming in with something set. The first day, my nerves were wild. RIENER This part of every process is typically private, and I wasn't prepared for how uncomfortable I would feel. The constant feeling of being on display, even in your rest moments. You can sort of hide behind a tree ... MITCHELL You can't hide, because the tree is also looking at you. There are eyes everywhere. How important is it to you that viewers, even passers by, understand what you're doing? MITCHELL I like the mystery. It doesn't come with a set of conventions. You have to figure out for yourself what you want to do with it. But when people ask what we're doing, I try to talk with them. Because we're in a public space. If we're going to pretend we're in a bubble, we might as well be in a theater. How have people in the park been responding? RIENER In other performances in public spaces, I have felt people reacting like, "You're messing up my 15 minute break by being a weirdo," but there's a permissiveness here. It's like, "I was going to come and stare in this direction anyway and you're in my field of vision and that's O.K. with me." MITCHELL One time, an older man started gesturing for me to come over and I started mirroring the gesture. And he got a kick out of it and started moving his whole body and we were in this dance together. Has the experience changed for you over the first week? MITCHELL I've dropped into what it is, and feel more aligned with myself and connected to other people. I hope that's happening for the other dancers and maybe, maybe, there's some tiny change that happens for one person in the public. It's a hard time in the world right now, and in a weird way, this is therapeutic.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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When the director Sam Mendes was a young boy, he and his father often traveled to the West Indies to visit his grandfather Alfred Mendes, a novelist. Sam, who had been brought up in North London, found his grandfather to be quite exotic: The small and wiry World War I veteran would sing opera in a booming Trinidadian accent, traipse around his creaky Colonial house in shorts and flip flops and vigorously greet each morning with a pre dawn plunge into the sea. Alfred Mendes also had a tendency to obsessively wash his hands, always for several minutes at a time, to the point where Sam and his cousins noticed that above all his other quirks. "We would laugh at him," the director recalled, "until I asked my dad, 'Why does Granddad Alfie wash his hands so much?' And he said, 'Oh, he remembers the mud of the trenches during the war, and the fact that he could never get clean.'" That's when the boys stopped laughing at their grandfather. It's also when they began asking what happened when, at age 19, Alfred Mendes enlisted and fought on behalf of Britain in what would become one of the world's deadliest conflicts. "We expected, I suppose, conventional stories of heroism and bravery," Mendes said. "We certainly didn't expect what he told us, which was unbelievably shocking and quite graphic tales of utter futility and chaos." There was the wounded soldier his grandfather carried back to the trench under enemy fire, only to discover once he arrived that the man was dead, his body having absorbed a bullet meant for Alfred. Another story involved a German soldier whose head was lost in an explosion, though his body somehow carried on running. And then there was the mission that Alfred Mendes volunteered for on Oct. 12, 1917, after nearly a third of the men in his battalion had been killed in the Battle of Poelcappelle. The survivors were stranded across many miles, and Alfred, who had been trained as a signaler, was sent to rescue them and lead them back to his camp. "That tiny man in the midst of that vast expanse of death, that was the thing I could never get out of my mind," said Mendes. It is the image that inspired the new film "1917," directed and co written by Mendes, about two British lance corporals who must make their way across miles of battleground to deliver an urgent message that could save 1,600 of their fellow soldiers from a massacre. Still, though the stories his grandfather told him had never been far from Mendes's mind, that didn't mean making a movie like this came easily. "People say, 'Oh, you must've wanted to tell the story for years,' and actually, I didn't," said Mendes, 54, whose career has encompassed big screen projects like "American Beauty" as well as a long list of stage credits, including "The Ferryman" and the 1990s revival of "Cabaret." Mendes was also aware that while Hollywood has made many a World War II movie about hero soldiers fighting Nazis, the more muddled motivations and trench warfare stalemates of the First World War would require a different kind of storytelling. "That war was just a chaos of mismanagement and human tragedy on a vast scale," he said. "You could kill someone at 1,000 yards with a machine gun, but you couldn't communicate with a soldier 20 yards away." After directing the James Bond movies "Skyfall" and "Spectre," Mendes was having trouble mounting a new film project. His agent Beth Swofford suggested that he explore the World War I stories he had once told her. In 2017, a year after the Brexit vote, Mendes found further inspiration. "I'm afraid that the winds that were blowing before the First World War are blowing again," he said. "There was this generation of men fighting then for a free and unified Europe, which we would do well to remember." Once Mendes began mulling the screenplay with co writer Krysty Wilson Cairns, he quickly laid down three rules. Instead of adapting his grandfather's own story, Mendes would follow two relatively anonymous soldiers whose heroism would be accidental. The story would take place in the spring of 1917, when the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line and left a trail of devastation and traps in their wake. And there was one other artistic inspiration that would turn out to be the film's defining feature. Mendes wrote it on the screenplay's first page: "1917" would be presented as if it were all shot in one take. "It was absolutely a given that was what excited me about it," said Mendes. "There's a great danger that once you've got used to making films, you get lazy with the way you shoot them. 'Oh yeah, I know: close up, over the shoulder, two shot, moving shot, fancy shot every three scenes.' You can kind of read it in other people's movies." But to film "1917" in robust long takes and to stitch those separate pieces together in nearly invisible ways would pose a unique challenge. "For the first few scenes in the draft, I would feel like I was wearing a straitjacket," admitted Wilson Cairns. "It's a real bummer, the loss of moving around in time and space. But in exchange for that, you get to move around the film landscape the way we do in reality, and what that gives you as a writer is the ultimate ability to disappear." Mendes began filming "1917" in April of this year at Bovingdon Airfield in England. He was locked into a Christmas Day release, giving him an unusually short window to complete a film of this scale. And though Mendes had rehearsed the film extensively with his cast and assembled an Oscar winning team of behind the scenes collaborators, including the cinematographer Roger Deakins and the editor Lee Smith, any little thing that went wrong during all of those long takes could scuttle the work of hundreds of people. "There were times when I thought, 'I'm using every fiber of everything I know about theater and film combined," Mendes said. "I was pushed to the limit to try and find solutions." He didn't make it easy on himself. Though the shots were planned with the utmost precision, what happened within the frame was often subject to change depending on the weather, the ability of the actors to hit their marks in the mud, or how the more capricious members of the cast including several animals and a baby would react to the camera. When George MacKay, who plays one of the main characters, was accidentally knocked to the ground by another actor during a perilous sprint, Mendes kept it in the movie. "I wanted to lock the audience in with the characters," said Mendes. "The audience reacts to those scenes in a different way because they know they're not going to get out of it unless the men get out of it. You have a level of association that perhaps would not exist if we shot it conventionally." Mendes finished the film a few days before Thanksgiving, and since then he has been on a whirlwind media tour meant to give "1917" a late award season push. So far, so good: The Golden Globes nominated Mendes for best director and the film for best drama. Still, he has hardly had time to take a breath. "I find talking about the movie is my gradual goodbye to it," he said. It's also a chance to reflect further on the grandfather who helped inspire it. Mendes recalled that when he was 12, Alfred Mendes asked him to sign a contract the older man had written out by hand, in which the young boy promised he would write his first novel by the age of 18. "He told me, 'You're going to tell stories. This is what you have to do.'" Still, Alfred Mendes could hardly have imagined that one day, that grandson would go on to tell a story drawn so vividly from the tales he spun in that great drafty house in the West Indies. Now, with "1917" finally complete, Mendes is reminded of the quote from the philosopher Albert Camus, that "a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." "And I think that is true of those stories," Mendes said. "I think, for whatever reason, my heart first opened in those moments."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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President Trump on Wednesday announced a series of new sanctions against Cuba that prohibit Americans from importing Cuban cigars and rum and staying in hotels funded by the Cuban government. The new restrictions follow a series of measures announced by the Trump administration in 2019 that aimed to curtail travel to Cuba from the United States, including a ban on cruise ships, private yachts, fishing vessels and group educational and cultural trips. The Treasury Department said on Wednesday that United States citizens will also be restricted from attending or organizing conferences in Cuba and participating in public performances, clinics, workshops, competitions and exhibitions on the island. "Today, as part of our continuing fight against communist oppression, I am announcing that the Treasury Department will prohibit U.S. travelers from staying at properties owned by the Cuban government," Mr. Trump said at a White House event honoring Bay of Pigs veterans. "We're also further restricting the importation of Cuban alcohol and Cuban tobacco."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Even within the gruesome history of torture and execution devices, it ranks as a thing of unspeakable cruelty a harrow that punctures the skin of the convicted prisoner by writing the crime of which he has been accused on the surface of his naked body, over and over again. The process takes 12 hours altogether. And the condemned man is never told beforehand why this is happening to him. That instrument of annihilation sprang from the toxically fertile mind of Franz Kafka, who made it the centerpiece of his great short story "In the Penal Colony." A subject of interpretive debate throughout the century since the work was first published, this infernal machine has now been reassembled in the form of a computerized control board on a tiny stage in the East Village, at Next Door at the New York Theater Workshop. In this case, it would appear, its torturous operation takes considerably longer than half a day. As reimagined by the writer and director Miranda Haymon in a short, sharp shock of a play also called "In the Penal Colony," which opened on Thursday night Kafka's mechanical death dealer is applied to black American men for the duration of their lifetimes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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An overhead light drawing attention to his face, the actor Danny Glover drops his head into one hand and starts to cry. Then, he abruptly switches to deep belly laughs, before resuming a straight face. "When I act, if I do this, it's totally in my control," he says into the camera. "But for someone with pseudobulbar affect, choosing to cry or laugh may not be your decision." The 60 second TV advertisement, aired widely until late last year, has raised questions about the role of direct to consumer advertising typified by ads that call on you to "ask your doctor" about possible treatment in promoting the use of medicines for uncommon conditions far beyond the narrow population of people who most benefit from them. Pseudobulbar affect, or PBA, is a neurological condition characterized by inappropriate, uncontrolled outbursts of laughing or crying. The ad did not mention any drug by name. But it was sponsored by Avanir Pharmaceuticals, the California firm that manufactures Nuedexta, a medicine that targets the disorder. The ad ends by referring viewers to a "Facts About PBA" website and a toll free number. PBA mostly affects those with neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, a recent stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease. Because the definition of the condition is ambiguous, estimates of its prevalence vary. Doctors may find PBA common or uncommon, depending on their specialty. Avanir sets the number at two million Americans. The market has proved lucrative. Nuedexta's sales rose to 218 million last year from about 37 million in 2012, according to EvaluatePharma, which tracks pharmaceutical pricing and markets. "I suspect this disease is being redefined to include overly emotional people" through advertising, said Adriane Fugh Berman, a doctor who teaches at Georgetown University Medical Center and has investigated pharmaceutical marketing practices. The United States is one of two countries that allows advertising of prescription drugs. Not so, says the company in a written statement. The company's efforts, it said, are "focused on raising awareness about PBA to help people better understand the symptoms of a condition that is often overlooked, misunderstood and misdiagnosed." Nuedexta has also attracted attention because it is expensive, more than 700 a month for a supply of twice a day pills. The drug is a combination of two low cost ingredients an over the counter cough medicine and a generic heart drug that, purchased separately, would run roughly 20 a month, according to online cost estimators. But that comparison is imperfect, because the dosage of the heart drug is so much lower in Nuedexta than it is in the generic prescription drug. And concocting a mixture at home is potentially dangerous, said Dr. Aiesha Ahmed, a neurologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center who has researched the prevalence of PBA and its treatment options. "You'd have to get the exact doses right, and that would be tricky," she said. Nuedexta doesn't cure PBA, but it must be taken for the rest of a patient's life to help reduce episodes of laughing or crying. While it's the only drug approved specifically for PBA by the Food and Drug Administration, doctors have successfully used several less expensive treatments, all antidepressants, to treat the condition. "The cost for mixing two old drugs together is unconscionable," said Dr. Jerome Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The strategic marketing of Nuedexta is part of a trend in which even small pharmaceutical firms turn to the airwaves to encourage use of their products. Pharmaceutical industry spending on television ads has been on the rise up 62 percent since 2012 to an estimated 6.4 billion even as TV advertising for other product types has stayed flat, according to Kantar Media, a firm that tracks multimedia advertising. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. By last year, drug ads were the sixth most common category of television advertisement behind cars and restaurants up from 12th just five years ago. A number of the ads, like Nuedexta's, promote medication for unusual conditions, such as a sleep disorder that affects only people who are blind. Others target more common conditions, such as opioid induced constipation. Drug makers defend such advertisements as a way of educating patients who may not understand that they have a disease or that they have symptoms that can be treated. The uncontrolled laughing or crying of PBA "is quite debilitating," and Nuedexta provides substantial relief for many, said Dr. Richard Malamut, Avanir's chief medical officer, a neurologist who recently joined the company. Avanir declined to say how much it is spending to market Nuedexta. In justifying the drug's price, Dr. Malamut said the company had invested hundreds of millions of dollars over 10 years on research before securing F.D.A. approval in late 2010. More is now being spent to research whether it, or other Avanir products, could help with other neurological conditions. "We understand the cost of medication is burdensome for people without coverage," he said, noting the company offers some financial assistance programs to help such patients. Nuedexta was developed by Richard A. Smith, a neurologist associated with the Center for Neurologic Study, which was looking for a new treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In the early 2000s, Dr. Smith combined dextromethorphan an ingredient in cough syrups such as Robitussin with quinidine, a drug used to treat irregular heart rhythms. The heart drug helps increase and maintain levels of the dextromethorphan in the bloodstream. Preliminary studies showed that patients "almost immediately started reporting an effect on PBA," Dr. Smith said in a telephone interview. The drug was eventually sold to Avanir. After F.D.A. approval of the drug, Avanir began its pitch to consumers with a 2013 ad campaign online and on television that directed viewers to the PBA facts website. The campaign produced "an overwhelming" response, with "350,000 new unique visitors to the website or calls to the hotline," Keith A. Katkin, the chief executive at the time, told investors that year. That potential, along with other drugs in Avanir's research labs, helped prompt Otsuka Holdings of Japan to purchase Avanir in 2014 for 3.5 billion. But after marketing surveys found that only about one third of potential patients and primary care doctors who treat such patients knew about PBA, Avanir enlisted Mr. Glover's celebrity firepower, said Lauren D'Angelo, the senior director of marketing for Avanir. The advertisement featuring Mr. Glover, who doesn't have PBA, appeared on cable and national news programs in 2015 and through the end of last year. Mr. Glover's publicist said he didn't have any comment on the campaign. After the ad ran, a subsequent survey found that awareness among primary care doctors rose to 72 percent, and to 52 percent among patients.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Sarah Barnett, the head of BBC America, will take on an expanded role at AMC Networks that puts her in charge of several cable channels, including AMC, SundanceTV and IFC, the company said on Monday. The move was announced a week and a half after Charlie Collier, a former leader of the company, left to take a new position as the chief executive of Fox's entertainment offerings. Ms. Barnett, 53, helped usher in buzzy shows like "Orphan Black" and "Killing Eve" at BBC America, which is part of AMC Networks. She will be stepping into an expanded role at a crucial time for the company's flagship network, which exploded in popularity a decade ago, thanks to "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," and is home to "The Walking Dead." But the zombie thriller's ratings have nose dived over the last year, raising the pressure on company executives to find the next hit.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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It's no secret that frugal American travelers can stretch their budgets wherever the United States dollar is strong. One such place is, conveniently, our northern neighbor. For the past year, the dollar has fluctuated between 1.30 and 1.36 Canadian dollars, effectively offering a discount of about one third to American travelers visiting Canada, compared to 2010 when the currencies were close to parity. Canada, of course, has a wealth of attractions apart from offering value, including plenty of places to escape the crowds in its vast 3.8 million square miles, which are inhabited by a relatively sparse 37 million (compared to roughly 329 million Americans in similar footage). For those seeking a good buy and fewer crowds, the following destinations offer possible Canadian corollaries to popular sites in the United States including a big city, wine region, rural retreat and mountain town. If you like New York City, try Toronto Like the largest city in the United States, Toronto, Canada's largest, offers a wealth of cultural and culinary attractions, but in a smaller area where Airbnb lists private rooms at 46. "In Toronto, you can have an intimate experience with culture on the highest level through events or exhibits that would be completely packed in other cities," said Mia Nielsen, the director of Art Toronto, the annual international contemporary art show, which runs from Oct. 25 to 27. In addition to cultural institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario (admission, 25 Canadian dollars or about 18.90; free for people ages 25 and under), she recommends the Power Plant (free), a contemporary art gallery, for mounting "thought provoking and rigorous shows," and artist run centers, nonprofit art spaces supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, such as Mercer Union (free). She also recommends the newly expanded Museum of Contemporary Art ( 10) where "Age of You," a group show on the theme of technology's impact on culture, will open on Sept. 5. Between shows, hit a Syrian cafe or Chinese noodle shop. Just over half of Toronto's population, 51 percent, is foreign born and the city counts 230 nationalities, a source of great culinary diversity. "The prices pale in comparison to the New Yorks, San Franciscos and Chicagos of the world, but the value is there," said Franco Stalteri who, since 2009, has been hosting periodic pop up dinners with globally renowned chefs like Fergus Henderson called Charlie's Burgers. "We benefit from a vast multiculturalism I've never seen anywhere else." If you like Napa Valley, try the Okanagan Valley It's hard to compete with Napa Valley home to nearly 500 wineries for excellence and variety. But in south central British Columbia, the Okanagan Valley holds its own with scenic appeal and quality quaffs. Unlike readily available Napa varietals, if you want to drink an Okanagan wine, you'll likely need to visit; about 90 percent of British Columbian wine is consumed in the province. "Rather than exporting the wine, the wineries are great at welcoming visitors in," said Laura Kittmer, the spokeswoman for the British Columbia Wine Institute, a provincial association of wineries. Of British Columbia's more than 280 wineries, 185 are in the Okanagan, a valley centered by the 84 mile long Okanagan Lake and continuing south roughly 40 miles to the town of Osoyoos. The northern areas are known for varietals such as riesling while the southern, desert like area grows heat lovers like syrah. Most of the vines are less than 30 years old, but their quality has markedly improved in the past decade. Nine vintages including three from Mission Hill Family Estate picked up gold medals at this year's International Wine Spirits Competition in London. Travelers flying into lakefront Kelowna, the urban center of the region, will find wineries that run the gamut from sophisticated to rustic. Among the sophisticated, Quails' Gate overlooks the lake from the tasting room and an adjoining restaurant where a five course, wine paired lunch costs 79 Canadian dollars. Nearby, the informal Hatch operates in an old tractor shed (4 dollar tastings are waived with the purchase of a bottle). If you like Hudson, N.Y., try Prince Edward County, Ontario For a rural escape with a trendy Brooklyn vibe, head north of Hudson, N.Y., to Prince Edward County. Located on an island in Lake Ontario, roughly between Toronto and Ottawa, the County, as it is called, attracts urban dropouts who have imported their tastes in beer, food, style and music. Kim Gray, the Calgary based co founder and editor of Toque Canoe, a Canadian travel blog, took her first trip to Prince Edward County this winter and described it as a laid back, nature focused retreat where city dwellers come to leave their "big city worries and stresses behind." Base yourself at the June Motel, a midcentury motor lodge near Picton given a makeover as a stylish 16 room motel with pink doors, bold floral wallpaper, a plant filled lobby bar and occasional meditation sessions (rooms from 145 dollars). In summer, the activity centers on Sandbanks Provincial Park, home to three expansive beaches for walking and swimming, and hiking trails in the dunes and the woods (admission, 12.25 dollars per vehicle).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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LAS VEGAS Ask any hacker who's been around long enough, and there's a good chance you'll hear an archetypal story, tinged with regret, about the first time his or her real identity was publicly disclosed. After enjoying years of online anonymity, the hacker known as Grifter was unmasked by a less than scrupulous spouse. "Hey, Neil!" his wife called out at him, absent mindedly, from across a crowded room, while accompanying him (for the very first time) at a hacking conference. "My beautiful wife, she outed me in front of the entire hacker community," he said with a laugh. Dead Addict's version of the story involves an employer who pushed him to apply for a patent for which he was required to provide his full legal name. "The people who later doxxed me," he said, using a term for publishing private information about someone, usually with malicious intent, "pointed to that patent." I met Grifter, whose real name is Neil Wyler; Dead Addict, who, citing privacy concerns, spoke with me on the condition that I not share his real name; Nico Sell, which, while undeniably the name she uses publicly, may or may not be her legal name; and dozens of other self described hackers in August at Defcon, an annual hacking convention one of the world's largest held in Las Vegas. A lion's share of the media attention devoted to hacking is often directed at deeply anonymous (and nefarious) hackers like Guccifer 2.0, a shadowy online avatar alleged to have been controlled by Russian military intelligence officers that revealed documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016. And, to be sure, a number of Defcon attendees, citing various concerns about privacy, still protect their identities. Many conceal their real names, instead using only pseudonyms or hacker aliases. Some wear fake beards, masks or other colorful disguises. But new pressures, especially for those who attend Defcon, seem to be reshaping the community's attitudes toward privacy and anonymity. Many longtime hackers, like Ms. Sell and Mr. Wyler, have been drawn into the open by corporate demands, or have traded their anonymity for public roles as high level cybersecurity experts. Others alluded to the ways in which a widespread professionalization and gamification of the hacking world as evidenced by so called bug bounty programs offered by companies like Facebook and Google, which pay (often handsomely) for hackers to hunt for and disclose cybersecurity gaps on their many platforms have legitimized certain elements of the culture. Defcon has grown exponentially since its founding in 1993, when Jeff Moss or, as many of his hacker friends know him, The Dark Tangent, or simply D.T. gathered about 100 of his hacker friends for a hastily assembled party. By contrast, this year's convention, the 26th, drew some 27,000 attendees , including students, security researchers, government officials and children as young as 8. It's difficult to characterize the conference without being reductive. One could describe all of its 28 constituent "villages" (including the Voting Machine Hacking Village, where attendees deconstructed and scrutinized the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, and the Lockpick Village, where visitors could tinker with locks and learn about hardware and physical security), offer a complete list of this year's presentations (including one by Rob Joyce, a senior cybersecurity official at the National Security Agency), catalog its many contests and events (like the Tin Foil Hat Contest and Hacker Karaoke) and still not get at its essence. The ethos of Defcon is perhaps best embodied by a gentleman I encountered in a hallway toward the end of the conference. He was wearing an odd contraption on his back, with wires and antennas protruding from its frame and with a blinking black box at its center. An agribusiness giant, he said, had recently heralded the impenetrability of the security systems built into one of its new computing components. He had obtained a version of it how, he wouldn't say and, having now subjected it to the ever probing Defcon crowds, had disproved the company's claims. "Turns out it's not very secure after all," he said with a grin, before vanishing around a corner. Mr. Moss, perhaps the epitome of a hacker who has jettisoned anonymity and entered the public sphere, has had an evolving relationship with aliases. Like many of his early online friends, he was interested in hacking and phone phreaking (the manipulation of telecommunications systems) "stuff that wasn't really legal," he said. Aliases provided cover for such activity. And every once in a while, he explained if a friend let slip your name, or if you outgrew a juvenile, silly alias you'd have to burn your identity and come up with a new name. "In my case, I had a couple previous identities," he said, "but when I changed to The Dark Tangent, I was making a clear break from my past. I'd learned how to manage identities; I'd learned how the scene worked." He also remembers when everything changed. During the dot com boom, many hackers transitioned to "real jobs," he said, "and so they had to have real names, too." "My address book doubled in size," he said with a laugh. And in time, as Defcon's popularity ballooned, his list of formal appointments grew, too: membership at the Council on Foreign Relations, a seat on President Obama's Homeland Security Advisory Council. "The thing I worry about today," he added, taking a more serious tone, "is that people don't get do overs." Young people now have to contend with the real name policy on Facebook, he said, along with the ever hovering threats of facial recognition software and aggregated data. "How are you going to learn to navigate in this world if you never get to make a mistake and if every mistake you do make follows you forever?" Like Mr. Harewood, 11 year old Emmett Brewer, who garnered national media attention at this year's Defcon by hacking a mock up of the Florida state election results website in 10 minutes, also alluded to the marketing appeal of his alias, p0wnyb0y. "I came up with it a couple years ago, when I first got included in a news article," he said. "I think an alias helps you get more recognition sort of like how The Dark Tangent has his." "P0wnyb0y is shorter and catchier than my name," he added. "And it just seems a lot cooler." Emmett said his involvement with Defcon he has attended for several years, accompanied by his father has left him skeptical about the degree to which his peers share things online. "My friends put everything up on the internet," he said, "but I'm more mindful." Still, he said he wasn't invested in keeping his real name separate from his alias. "I don't see it as the end of the world" if people can easily link the two, he said. "But some other people take that stuff more seriously." That's not to say, though, that the younger generations of hackers are all comfortable operating so openly. Ms. Sell's daughter, who spoke with me on the condition that I refer to her by her hacking handle, CyFi, was especially guarded about her identity. "When I was 9, I discovered a class of zero day vulnerabilities," said CyFi, who is now 17, referring to software bugs that developers are unaware of. She ultimately disclosed the bugs, she added, "but I didn't want to risk being sued by all those companies so hiding my identity was the best way to go." As with Emmett, CyFi is wary of her generation's penchant for oversharing online. "My friends have definitely been frustrated with my lack of social media," she said. "But the less data there is about you out in the world, the less people can try to mess with you." Linton Wells II, a former principal deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, began attending Defcon around 2003. He now volunteers as a "goon" the term for the volunteers ( roughly 450 this year ) who help organize and run the conference. Mr. Wells said that governmental officials who attend Defcon fall into one of three categories. "One was the people who openly announced they were feds either speakers who announced their affiliations, or there was a Meet the Fed panel," he said. "There were others who wouldn't deny it if you asked them, but who didn't go out of their way to advertise it. And then there were those who were either officially or unofficially undercover." The relationship hasn't always been contentious, he added, noting that, in 2012, Keith Alexander, who was then director of the N.S.A., "came out here and spoke in a T shirt and bluejeans." Less than a year later, though, after the Edward Snowden leak, things soured. "For the next couple years," Mr. Wells said, "the feds were well, if not uninvited, then at least tacitly not particularly welcome." "But using our handles," he added, "was our natural way of communicating. And having that protection, it felt good. We were putting ourselves out there as hackers communicating with the government which, at the time, was not something you did." As with many longtime hackers, Mr. Grand who became widely known after appearing on a Discovery Channel show called "Prototype This!" has grown more comfortable operating in the open. But he still appreciates the value of anonymity. "Hiding behind a fake name doesn't mean you're doing something malicious, and it doesn't mean you're a bad person," he said. "It means you're trying to protect your privacy." "And, in this day and age, you need to," he added, "because everywhere you look, your privacy is being stripped away."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None This Weekend I Have ... a Half Hour, and I Need Comfort 'Bob's Burgers' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on Fox. "Bob's" kicks off its 10th season with a total sweetheart episode, in which Bob buys Linda a ring for their anniversary which Gene promptly loses at a water park. It's as silly and darling an episode as the show has ever had, with plenty of puns and affection and enthusiasm, and some A frustration from Bob. If you are feeling worn down by the world and need a fresh reminder of how love works, watch this. ... an Hour, and I Like Music 'Great Performances: Now Hear This' When to watch: Friday at 9 p.m., on PBS (check local listings). The violinist and conductor Scott Yoo hosts this mini series about classical music with an almost Alton Brown level of peppy, nerdy energy. On this week's episode, "The Riddle of Bach," he travels through Germany and France to better understand the culture that informed Bach's style and to decode sheet music visible in a portrait of the composer. It's fun and a little silly, and when Yoo and other musicians play together in otherwise casual moments, it's quite beautiful, too. 'Glitch' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. Season 3 of this Australian drama is now streaming, but definitely start at the beginning; seasons are only six episodes each, so it's not a huge investment. But it has a big payoff. The show is set in a small town where suddenly, somehow, people start coming back from the dead (like Belle, played by Jessica Faulkner). It's like the French series "Les Revenants," but less overtly spooky. Like other shows of its ilk, "Glitch" is better when it is focused on the real emotions and ideas of its characters rather than on the "science" of what's happening, and luckily the show is aware of that. It's grounded in authentic ideas and behaviors, finding poignancy and meaning beyond the fantastical elements.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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"The Hunger Games," by Suzanne Collins, came out in 2008. It is the first in a trilogy by the same name that includes "Catching Fire" (2009) and "Mockingjay" (2010). The series has more than 100 million copies in print worldwide, and spent more than 260 consecutive weeks on The Times best seller list. The books have spawned four record breaking films and many Katniss Halloween costumes. In a 10th anniversary edition of the book, which hits stores this month, David Levithan, a vice president and publisher at Scholastic Press, interviewed Collins. An excerpt from that interview, including potential spoilers, is below, condensed and edited for clarity and length. Read "Katness Everdeen Is My Hero," an essay by the writer Sabaa Tahir, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the publication of "The Hunger Games." David Levithan: Let's start at the origin moment for "The Hunger Games." You were flipping channels one night. Suzanne Collins: Yes, I was flipping through the channels one night between reality television programs and actual footage of the Iraq War, when the idea came to me. At the time, I was completing the fifth book in The Underland Chronicles and my brain was shifting to whatever the next project would be. I had been grappling with another story that just couldn't get any air under its wings. I knew I wanted to continue to explore writing about just war theory for young audiences. In The Underland Chronicles, I'd examined the idea of an unjust war developing into a just war because of greed, xenophobia and longstanding hatreds. For the next series, I wanted a completely new world and a different angle into the just war debate. DL: Can you tell me what you mean by the "just war theory" and how that applies to the setup of the trilogy? SC: Just war theory has evolved over thousands of years in an attempt to define what circumstances give you the moral right to wage war and what is acceptable behavior within that war and its aftermath. The why and the how. It helps differentiate between what's considered a necessary and an unnecessary war. In The Hunger Games Trilogy, the districts rebel against their own government because of its corruption. The citizens of the districts have no basic human rights, are treated as slave labor, and are subjected to the Hunger Games annually. I believe the majority of today's audience would define that as grounds for revolution. They have just cause but the nature of the conflict raises a lot of questions. Do the districts have the authority to wage war? What is their chance of success? How does the re emergence of District 13 alter the situation? When we enter the story, Panem is a powder keg and Katniss the spark. DL: A connection you made early on was with mythology, particularly the myth of Theseus. How did that piece come to fit? SC: I was such a huge Greek mythology geek as a kid, it's impossible for it not to come into play in my storytelling. The connection to the myth of Theseus happened immediately. As a young prince of Athens, he participated in a lottery that required seven girls and seven boys to be taken to Crete and thrown into a labyrinth to be destroyed by the Minotaur. In one version of the myth, this excessively cruel punishment resulted from the Athenians opposing Crete in a war. Sometimes the labyrinth's a maze, sometimes it's an arena. In my teens I read Mary Renault's "The King Must Die," in which the tributes end up in the Bull Court. They're trained to perform with a wild bull for an audience composed of the elite of Crete who bet on the entertainment. Theseus and his team dance and handspring over the bull in what's called bull leaping. You can see depictions of this in ancient sculpture and vase paintings. The show ended when they'd either exhausted the bull or one of the team had been killed. After I read that book, I could never go back to thinking of the labyrinth as simply a maze, except perhaps ethically. It will always be an arena to me. DL: Another key piece of The Hunger Games is the voice and perspective that Katniss brings to it. Some novelists start with a character and then find a story through that character, but with The Hunger Games I believe you had the idea for the story first, and then Katniss stepped into it. Where did she come from? SC: Katniss appeared almost immediately after I had the idea, standing by the bed with that bow and arrow. I'd spent a lot of time during The Underland Chronicles weighing the attributes of different weapons. I used archers very sparingly because they required light and the Underland has little natural illumination. But a bow and arrow can be handmade, shot from a distance, and weaponized when the story transitions into warfare. She was a born archer. Her name came later, while I was researching survival training and specifically edible plants. In one of my books, I found the arrowhead plant, and the more I read about it, the more it seemed to reflect her. Its Latin name has the same roots as Sagittarius, the archer. The edible tuber roots she could gather, the arrowhead shaped leaves were her defense, and the little white blossoms kept it in the tradition of flower names, like Rue and Primrose. I looked at the list of alternative names for it. Swamp Potato. Duck Potato. Katniss easily won the day. As to her voice, I hadn't intended to write in first person. I thought the book would be in the third person like The Underland Chronicles. Then I sat down to work and the first page poured out in first person, like she was saying, "Step aside, this is my story to tell." So I let her. SC: Her parents have their own histories in District 12 but I only included what's pertinent to Katniss's tale. Her father's hunting skills, musicality and death in the mines. Her mother's healing talent and vulnerabilities. Her deep love for Prim. Those are the elements that seemed essential to me. I have a world of information about the characters that didn't make it into the book. With some stories, revealing that could be illuminating, but in the case of The Hunger Games, I think it would only be a distraction unless it was part of a new tale within the world of Panem. DL: When did Peeta and Gale come into the equation? Did you know from the beginning how their stories would play out vis a vis Katniss's? SC: Bread crops up a lot in The Hunger Games. It's the main food source in the districts, as it was for many people historically. When Peeta throws a starving Katniss bread in the flashback, he's keeping her alive long enough to work out a strategy for survival. It seemed in keeping with his character to be a baker, a life giver. But there's a dark side to bread, too. When Plutarch Heavensbee references it, he's talking about Panem et Circenses, Bread and Circuses, where food and entertainment lull people into relinquishing their political power. Bread can contribute to life or death in The Hunger Games. DL: When it comes to larger world building, how much did you know about Panem before you started writing? SC: I knew there were thirteen districts that's a nod to the thirteen colonies and that they'd each be known for a specific industry. I knew 12 would be coal and most of the others were set, but I had a few blanks that naturally filled in as the story evolved. When I was little we had that board game, Game of the States, where each state was identified by its exports. And even today we associate different locations in the country with a product, with seafood or wine or tech. Of course, it's a very simplified take on Panem. No district exists entirely by its designated trade. But for purposes of The Hunger Games, it's another way to divide and define the districts. DL: Where do you write? Are you a longhand writer or a laptop writer? Do you listen to music as you write, or go for the monastic, writerly silence? DL: You talked earlier about researching survival training and edible plants for these books. What other research did you have to do? SC: You know, I'm just not very handy. I read a lot about how to build a bow from scratch, but I doubt I could ever make one. Being good with your hands is a gift. So I do a lot of book research. Sometimes I visit museums or historic sites for inspiration. I was trained in stage combat, particularly sword fighting in drama school; I have a nice collection of swords designed for that, but that was more helpful for The Underland Chronicles. The only time I got to do archery was in gym class in high school. DL: You cowrote the screenplay for the first Hunger Games movie. I know it's an enormously tricky thing for an author to adapt their own work. How did you approach it? SC: I wrote the initial treatments and first draft and then Billy Ray came on for several drafts and then our director, Gary Ross, developed it into his shooting script and we ultimately did a couple of passes together. I did the boil down of the book, which is a lot of cutting things while trying to retain the dramatic structure. I think the hardest thing for me, because I'm not a terribly visual person, was finding the way to translate many words into few images. Billy and Gary, both far more experienced screenwriters and gifted directors as well, really excelled at that. Throughout the franchise I had terrific screenwriters, and Francis Lawrence, who directed the last three films, is an incredible visual storyteller. The most rewarding moment on the movie was the first time I saw it put together, still in rough form, and thinking it worked. DL: Do you picture your characters as you're writing them? If so, how close did Jennifer Lawrence come to the Katniss in your head? And now when you think about Katniss, do you see Jennifer or do you still see what you imagined before? SC: I definitely do picture the characters when I'm writing them. The actress who looks exactly like my book Katniss doesn't exist. Jennifer looked close enough and felt very right, which is more important. She gives an amazing performance. When I think of the books, I still think of my initial image of Katniss. When I think of the movies, I think of Jen. Those images aren't at war any more than the books are with the films. Because they're faithful adaptations, the story becomes the primary thing. Some people will never read a book, but they might see the same story in a movie. When it works well, the two entities support and enrich each other.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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In 1993, Jeffrey Edwards was a soloist with New York City Ballet when he did something radical, at least for the company: He accused Peter Martins, the powerful ballet master in chief, of verbal and physical abuse, and reported him. "I brought a complaint to the general manager, company manager and the dancers' union, describing Peter's conduct in detail," Mr. Edwards said in a recent statement to The New York Times. The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, confirmed that it had received the complaint. But to all appearances, nothing much happened. Mr. Martins continued in his role as leader of City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, and Mr. Edwards left the company shortly thereafter. The next year, Victor Ostrovsky, a 12 year old student at the ballet school, had his own run in with Mr. Martins. During a dress rehearsal, Mr. Ostrovsky said he was horsing around onstage with other children when Mr. Martins became enraged and grabbed him by the back of the neck in what Mr. Ostrovsky called "a death lock." "He's yanking me around to the left and to the right, he's digging his left thumb and his middle finger I felt like he was piercing my muscle," Mr. Ostrovsky said in a telephone interview. "I started crying and sobbing profusely." He dropped out of the school. "I was depressed; I was embarrassed," he said. "He assaulted me onstage in front of the whole cast." Mr. Edwards and Mr. Ostrovsky are two of five City Ballet dancers one of whom still works with the company who in recent interviews accused Mr. Martins of threatening or physically abusing them and others in the company. Their descriptions of his behavior from raising his fist to physical altercations could be another problem for Mr. Martins, who has taken a leave as the leader of City Ballet and the School of American Ballet while they investigate a sexual harassment claim against him. Mr. Martins has long been known to have intimate relationships with dancers, as well as a quick, volcanic temper. That he was able to act so freely, his critics say, points to dysfunctional power relationships between Mr. Martins and his employees, and between him and City Ballet's management, which at times seems to have looked the other way. After incidents with Mr. Edwards and another dancer, Kelly Boal who recently described her encounter to The Washington Post some dancers suggested adding an "abuse clause" to their contract. Lindsay Fischer, a former City Ballet dancer who was head of the union committee at the time, said the clause which had originally been proposed in response to a racist incident at the Houston Ballet was ultimately voted down. "In the end, we left the contract the way it was," said Mr. Fischer, now principal balletmaster, at the National Ballet of Canada. "Our opinion was we were already protected by ordinary law, not to mention human decency." Stephen E. Tisman, a lawyer for Mr. Martins, said: "While the investigation is going on, Peter is not going to be commenting publicly on allegations." City Ballet and the school also said they were unable to comment, citing the investigation. Mr. Martins is an outsize figure in the dance world, controlling virtually every aspect of City Ballet from choreography to casting and making it nearly impossible for dancers to speak up without professional consequences. Alina Dronova, a dancer in the corps de ballet for 17 years, said Mr. Martins was routinely allowed to be aggressive. "He would grab me by my neck and kick me out of his office," she said. "He would do that to almost everyone." For dancers to succeed, it sometimes seemed as if physical intimidation had to be endured. "I have the visual of him standing over me with a fist clenched two weeks before he promoted me," said a current member of the company who asking for anonymity out of fear of repercussions. John Clifford, a principal dancer and choreographer under George Balanchine, recalled teaching a City Ballet class in 1987 when Mr. Martins grew angry with him. "He slammed his fists into the wall about an inch from my head," Mr. Clifford said. "It was a violent, intimidating act, and it scared me. "He just blew up," Mr. Clifford continued, adding that Mr. Martins never asked him back. Mr. Clifford is also one of two former dancers who said they witnessed Mr. Martins get violent with Heather Watts, a former principal dancer with the company who had a yearslong stormy romantic relationship with Mr. Martins. "I saw him pick her up and slam her into a cement wall," Mr. Clifford recalled. "I was outside his dressing room." (Ms. Watts declined to comment.) "I want to make sure these girls who are reporting this are taken seriously," added Mr. Clifford, the founding artistic director of Los Angeles Dance Theater. "It's not gossip, it's fact. It's something I saw with my own eyes." In 1992, Mr. Martins was charged with third degree assault against his wife, Darci Kistler, then a principal in the company. Ms. Kistler told the police that her arms and legs had been cut and bruised. The misdemeanor charge was later dropped. Several of the interviewed dancers expressed surprise that City Ballet had kept Mr. Martins on after that incident. Over the weekend, City Ballet appointed an interim team of City Ballet dancers to lead the company during Mr. Martins's absence, the duration of which has not been specified. The team was introduced to the company at a Saturday meeting of City Ballet's dancers, Katherine Brown the executive director, and two trustees: Charles W. Scharf, the chairman, and Robert I. Lipp, the vice chairman. At the meeting, Mr. Lipp expressed hope that Mr. Martins could soon "be back and continuing in his regular role." "I know it's not business as usual," he added. "We're going to do the right thing, whatever that turns out to be."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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SAN FRANCISCO Amazon said in a legal complaint unsealed on Monday that it had lost a 10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon because President Trump used "improper pressure" to divert the contract from the company to harm its chief executive, Jeff Bezos. The Defense Department reviewed outdated submissions from the company and overlooked key technical abilities, Amazon claimed, saying those errors tipped the scale in favor of Microsoft, which won the contract in October. Amazon had been considered the front runner for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, in part because it had built cloud services for the Central Intelligence Agency. Also, its Amazon Web Services business, known as AWS, is the country's biggest cloud computing provider. But Mr. Trump said publicly that other "great companies" should have a chance at the contract. He said he would take "a very strong look" at the JEDI contract, noting that companies including Microsoft, IBM and Oracle had complained about the award process. Mr. Trump has openly criticized Mr. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. The president has accused the paper of spreading "fake news." Amazon's complaint, filed in the United States Court of Federal Claims in Washington, said Mr. Trump had attacked the company behind the scenes to hurt Mr. Bezos, "his perceived political enemy." It would be improper for a president to intervene in the awarding of a contract, according to experts on federal contracting. Amazon wrote that the department had "failed to acknowledge the numerous instances in which AWS's demonstrated capabilities vastly exceeded performance requirements while ignoring instances where Microsoft necessarily failed to demonstrate its solution met the technical requirements." The Defense Department rejected the idea that Mr. Trump had meddled in the contracting process. "This source selection decision was made by an expert team of career public servants and military officers from across the Department of Defense and in accordance with D.O.D.'s normal source selection process," said Elissa Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department. "There were no external influences on the source selection decision." Janelle Poole, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said: "We have confidence in the qualified staff at the Department of Defense, and we believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft." JEDI was formally opened to bids in July 2018. The project was designed to modernize the military, from the Pentagon out to the battlefield, by adding more security, connectivity and artificial intelligence to the nation's arsenal. Because of the complexity of the work and the prestige of the client, it was considered the most important contract the cloud computing industry had seen to date. Amazon did not detail new instances of Mr. Trump's direct involvement in the process. The company relied on his public statements and Twitter posts, as well as those of his son Donald Trump Jr., and private comments reported in the press. Amazon argued that the president's disdain for Amazon and Mr. Bezos was plain for everyone to see, including people directly involved in the procurement. Amazon cited Mr. Trump's removal of Jim Mattis as defense secretary as an example of direct interference in the JEDI decision. Mr. Trump directed Mr. Mattis's replacement, Mark Esper, to review the JEDI bidding process. Mr. Esper had said he would conduct an independent review. A speechwriter for Mr. Mattis said in a book published several weeks ago that Mr. Trump had wanted to give the contract to a company other than Amazon. Amazon's complaint said the Pentagon had begun preparing to award the contract to Microsoft on Oct. 17. But on Oct. 22, Mr. Esper said he was recusing himself from the process because his son worked for IBM, which had bid on the contract and been rejected. The Defense Department announced a few days later that the JEDI contract would go to Microsoft. Under pressure from Mr. Trump, the Pentagon "departed from the rules of procurement and complied consciously or subconsciously with its commander in chief's expressed desire to reject AWS's superior bid," Amazon said in its complaint. The company also said the Defense Department required Amazon to build new classified data centers to handle its material, rather than letting the company use its existing data centers that have been approved for classified use. This change, which Amazon said had come at "the 11th hour," drove up the cost of its bid for the contract. Amazon's legal team includes Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general of the United States, who is now at the law firm Gibson, Dunn Crutcher. Microsoft's victory in the contracting process has the potential to reshape the cloud computing industry, which Amazon dominates. On Saturday, Mr. Bezos spoke at the Reagan National Defense Forum, an event to discuss the nation's defenses, and reaffirmed Amazon's commitment to working with the military. Workers at other large tech companies, such as Google, have protested their technology's use in weaponry. "My view is, if Big Tech is going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That just can't happen," Mr. Bezos said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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In 1949, when America was obsessed with the threat of Communist agents pervading and perverting the nation's core institutions, the University of California introduced a compulsory loyalty oath. At a faculty session to consider the new political test, one professor in his mid 50s from the medieval history department, an exile from Germany known on campus as a gregarious dandy with an acid wit, rose to his feet and began declaiming in a strange, incantatory singsong, high pitched with emotion. Recalling the oaths of allegiance in the early days of Hitler's government, the speaker announced: "This is the way it begins. The first oath is so gentle that one can scarcely notice anything at which to take exception. The next oath is stronger!" Resistance had to start with the first oath, he asserted, for it was "a typical expedient of demagogues to bring the most loyal citizens, and only the loyal ones, into a conflict of conscience by branding nonconformists as un Athenian, un English, un German." The audience was riveted; some were galvanized against the new rule. Presumably few knew that the speaker began his career as a militant German nationalist who is said to have declared after World War I, "Right of me is only the wall," and who, while praising the Teutonic knightly virtues, once wrote that "since the dawn of time" true loyalty had been possible only for Germans. In ": A Life," the distinguished medieval historian Robert E. Lerner presents a richly illuminating study of the German Jewish scholar he calls "perhaps the most influential" medieval historian of all time. He also offers a timely meditation on the vicissitudes of abstract, purist ideals under the pressure of savage real world events. Sometimes the loftiest convictions prove the most politically fungible. Lerner traces the growth of the Kantorowicz family's large fortune in the liqueur trade, details Ernst's privileged childhood in Posen (he was born in 1895), recounts the future historian's enthusiastic war service, reviews the different phases of his early historical researches (most notably into the life of Frederick II) and follows his long, mostly convivial exile in Britain and the United States. Until the loyalty oath controversy, Kantorowicz was happiest in California, where he marveled at the "completely unencumbered, completely pagan" students who turned everything into play and made him appear to himself "very old and terribly young at the same time." But it was only after he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton that in 1957, at the age of 62, Kantorowicz finally published the book that made his reputation: "The King's Two Bodies."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Knee replacement surgery relieves pain and improves function in patients with severe osteoarthritis much more effectively than nonsurgical therapy alone, researchers reported on Wednesday. Despite hundreds of thousands of knee replacements performed in the United States yearly, until now there had been no rigorously controlled trial comparing the operation with more conservative approaches. In the new study, 50 adults with moderate to severe osteoarthritis completed exhaustive nonsurgical treatment, including exercise and supervised weight loss. A similar group of patients received knee replacements, followed by the nonsurgical therapy. After a year, 85 percent of patients who got an artificial knee reported pain relief and functional improvement, the study found, compared with 68 percent of patients initially assigned to nonsurgical treatment. The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "Surgery is much better at improving pain than physical therapy," said Dr. Jeffrey N. Katz, director of the Orthopaedic and Arthritis Center for Outcomes Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new report. "But at the same time, it's a little bit surprising that this physical therapy regimen was associated with substantial pain relief." Most surgeons have assumed that total knee replacement provides superior results. But experts said this new trial suggested that patients with severe osteoarthritis and difficulty walking should not always go under the knife. "You can be 52 and have an awful knee and need surgery, and you can be 52 and get more years with the help of some of the interventions mentioned in this study," said Dr. David Jevsevar, chairman of the committee on evidence based quality and value of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. "It's really still gray." A quarter of the patients assigned to the therapy only group eventually opted for operations anyway. The researchers still counted them as nonsurgical patients. So the difference between groups might have been even more pronounced. The number of knee replacements has risen drastically in the United States, the study's authors noted. In 2012, more than 670,000 knee replacements were performed at a cost of 36.1 billion. And the rate of surgeries almost doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to a report published last month by the Department of Health and Human Services. Soren T. Skou, the study's lead author and a physical therapist at Aalborg University Hospital and at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense, said the rationale for doing the trial was to pinpoint the degree of added benefit for surgical patients, compared with treatment alternatives. All 100 participants in Dr. Skou's study were in their mid 60s, slightly obese and candidates for total knee replacement. They reported moderate pain and difficulty functioning, and X rays confirmed moderate to severe arthritis. People with severe pain were excluded. Dr. Jay R. Lieberman, the chairman of orthopedic surgery at Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, said the "very well done" study confirmed surgery's advantages and might also help guide patients who do not want the operation. "This is the type of data you can provide to patients if they ask, 'What are the success rates of conservative treatment?' " he said. Dr. Lieberman, a paid consultant for DePuy Orthopaedics, said he wished the study had made clear which components of nonsurgical treatment education, exercise, supervised weight loss, use of insoles or pain medication like ibuprofen were most effective for patients. "Do you have to combine all five to get these results, or would some patients benefit from two out of five?" he asked. The study followed patients for a year, and no one knows if nonsurgical therapy will have a sustained effect beyond a year. Knee replacements can last a decade or longer before failing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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"The owner is not a trainer," Dr. Fugazza said. "He reported that Whisky attended a puppy course," she added, "but she didn't go on with training." That's another encouraging part of the story. So what if you didn't get an M.F.A., you might still be able to write that novel. Whisky learned the names of the objects in her cornucopia of fun by playing a game with her owners in which she would go fetch the toy they named. They played a lot. Dr. Fugazza and her colleague at the university, Adam Miklosi, wrote in the journal Scientific Reports that Whisky had 10 balls, seven rings, four ropes and four Frisbees. Since the names of the objects always included a specific adjective and general noun, like "small Frisbee," Dr. Fugazza wanted to test if Whisky had gotten the idea of what a Frisbee was, and what a ball was, in a general, abstract way. The way the experiment worked was that Dr. Fugazza went to Whisky's home. In initial tests Whisky fetched most of her toys successfully. Then, for the category test, Dr. Fugazza would try her on four new toys at a time, first letting her play with the new toys with her owners in one test, or just explore them herself, in another test. Then Dr. Fugazza set the group of new toys in one room while she and the dog's owners waited in the kitchen. One of the owners would ask Whisky to bring "a ball" or "a rope." She was successful about 50 percent of the time when she was given a chance to play with the new toys before the test. Given that she was choosing from four different items, that is much better than chance, Dr. Fugazza said. Her achievement meant not only that she could group objects in categories in her mind, but also that she knew the words for those categories. While Dr. Fugazza suggests that all dogs have the ability to think in categories, only a select few, either because of training, or natural ability, actually know words for categories. And she had learned all that "naturally, in a way that is actually a little bit similar to what happens to human children," Dr. Fugazza said. Monique Udell, who studies dog behavior and cognition at Oregon State University, and who was not involved in the study, said that it's hard to draw general conclusions from one dog. But, she said, "this study is an important reminder that animals are often learning from us even outside of formal training sessions." She said the work suggests that scientists should keep in mind the whole learning history of a dog when they use canines as test subjects. And dog owners might remember that "our animals may be learning more from us than we think."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Early on in the documentary "The Dog Doc," one of the veterinarians working at the Smith Ridge clinic in South Salem, N.Y., mentions that each animal who comes into the clinic is blood tested and offered a nutrition plan based on the results. It's the first time in "The Dog Doc" that the standards of care practiced at Smith Ridge deliver a jolt. In this compelling film, it's not the medical miracles that most impress. Instead, the movie makes its biggest impact with treatments that feel like common sense. The director Cindy Meehl focuses her film on Smith Ridge, and on Dr. Marty Goldstein, the veterinarian who started it. Goldstein has spent his life advocating for a more holistic approach to medicine in animals. He treats dogs with vitamins and supplements, and he focuses on diet and noninvasive surgeries as an alternative to the more aggressive treatments typically recommended within the profession.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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THE BOYS Stream on Amazon. A trailer for this streaming series adaptation of comic books by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson features eye gouging, machine guns, lots of swearing and what appears to be a baby that fires lasers from its face. And that trailer is only about two minutes long. The thrust of the series whose showrunner is the "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke is something like a dirty, topsy turvy take on "The Avengers," set in a world where badly behaving celebrity superheroes abuse their powers. Karl Urban plays Billy Butcher, the leader of a squad assembled to keep the superheroes' misbehavior in check. That turns out to be a bit like employing hyenas to babysit coyotes. PASSING: A FAMILY IN BLACK AND WHITE Stream on Topic. The comedian Robin Cloud hosts this series of documentary shorts. In the beginning, Cloud announces her intent to reconnect with relatives whose parents cut ties with the family, relocating from Harlem to the Midwest and trying, in their new life, to pass for white. When a reunion does happen, it brings with it conversations that touch on complicated questions about identity.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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