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Guiding a state like Montana through a pandemic is difficult because Montana is a complicated state in a precarious position. Its significant Indigenous population is spread across seven reservations whose resources are spread thin even in non pandemic times. When bidding on critical resources, the state can't compete with the bigger needs of coastal states like New York or California. As a tourism hub and second home escape for the wealthy, Montana is vulnerable to increased outbreaks brought in from those looking to flee crowded cities. Many of the state's rural counties have health care infrastructure that would easily be overwhelmed if hit by a full fledged Covid 19 outbreak. Testing capacity is stretched thin and should supply chains fall down even for a day the state could find itself unable to catch up with the virus. Given the absence of leadership from the federal government, the job of keeping pace with the coronavirus is largely up to Montana's governor, Steve Bullock, a Democrat. So far, Mr. Bullock's actions have been decisive. Behind closed doors, he's tangled with President Trump, pushing for resources. On March 13, Montana announced its first four Covid 19 cases. Two days later, the state issued an executive order to close all public schools, along with suspending nursing home visits and enacting a stay at home order. Compared to other states, Mr. Bullock's decision came quite early in the state's outbreak New York City, for example, announced it would close its public schools on March 15, after 329 confirmed Covid 19 cases and five deaths. People frequently typecast Montana as a red state. In reality, it's a state that votes based on the candidate over the party. Democrats win by very slim margins here. And Mr. Bullock looking to a Senate run later this year has to walk a fine line between criticizing the president and getting what he needs for his state. And yet the governor has taken the relatively progressive steps of issuing travel directories with 14 day quarantines and airport screenings, expanding unemployment services and, unlike states like Wisconsin, instituting an all mail election for Montana's June primaries. That means Montana has remained ahead of many states with larger outbreaks, including those with Republican governors who waited to act and now face climbing case rates. As of this writing Montana has 354 Covid 19 cases and six deaths. Hospital systems aren't yet overwhelmed and some projection models suggest cautious optimism, alongside intense pressure on Mr. Bullock to keep the outbreak in check. As a relatively new Montana resident, I've been impressed by the governor's decisive action. Late last week I called up Mr. Bullock to get a sense what it's like to preside over a state in a once in a century crisis. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. I want to ask about the leaked audio of a governors' call with the president last month. You were vocal about the testing shortage and it was pretty shocking to hear the president suggest he wasn't aware that testing was a problem. Are you seeing that this is still the attitude of the administration on this? Is there still a disconnect between state governors and the administration? Whether you are in Montana or Louisiana, the governors are damn concerned about whether we can get the testing supplies or P.P.E. personal protective equipment The idea pushed down from the administration is that this must be locally executed, state managed and federally supported. But governors need that federal support if we're going to manage this. And I've had calls with incredible people in the federal government working damn hard to get me what I need. But if this really is supposed to be state managed and federally supported, then we need not just on the ground supplies and materials, but also to make sure statements coming from the administration don't undercut what we do. I'm pleased the administration is now saying distancing ought to run through at least the end of April. But the same time I was putting out Montana's stay at home directive, the very same week the administration was saying that the cure was worse than problem and that things should be opened up by Easter. Right now, what's the one thing the administration could be doing directly for you that they aren't? Make it so that I'm not spending as much time trying to make sure I have the supplies to address this pandemic. We're doing Project Airbridge an initiative to get medical supplies from China to the U.S. now. But 80 percent of that is just going into the private market. We haven't fixed supply chains so that governors aren't competing against governors to try to get things. And it's unclear whether breakdowns are the suppliers' excuse or, in reality, I'm being pre empted by federal government. I'm rooting for the federal government to succeed here but if we as a state aren't seeing actions taken that need to be done we're not going slow this thing. We need federal support. Every state is going to have its own challenges. You're working with tribal leaders and trying to make sure remote counties have resources ready. What other challenges are you experiencing right now that are unique to Montana? In rural counties it's making sure when they say, "Oh, we don't have any cases" that we try to control the actual contagion and we also manage the social contagion. That means making sure everyone takes it equally seriously because a smaller community could easily be overwhelmed. We did something with bridge financing recently for rural, critical access hospitals because if we lose one of those it makes things so much harder along the way. Author's note: The financing would provide low cost funding to allow facilities to purchase supplies, pay staff, and remain open, though there are concerns "it might not arrive quickly enough to keep some hospitals afloat." Now, there are upsides, I think, to our state. Even before this all happened I probably knew the names of 70 percent of our hospital administrators. It helps that in non crisis times we're all so close. Montanans expect to know the governor and I expect to know them. We're all helping each other out locally I've gotten as many N95 masks from North Dakota as I have from than from strategic national stockpile so far Governor Bullock's office clarified on Monday that, over the weekend, Montana received only 10,000 of the 80,000 N95 masks from the national stockpile and currently the state has received more masks from North Dakota than it has from the national stockpile. One challenge I'm noticing is how to manage the influx of out of state visitors and residents coming into the state. It seems especially tricky for those who have second homes and pay taxes in the state. Listen, I love to show off our public lands. I think the tension does exist, though. Let's take it back a couple of weeks where the National Park Service says, "Come to parks, we're not going to charge entrance fees to Yellowstone or Glacier." Now we have the new challenge of people coming to get away from it all and so they come to Montana and local supplies are strained at the same time we're trying to curb or limit the spread. Worse yet, those gateway communities are the smaller towns where the health care system could face serious challenges. Author's note: Several parks have closed recently, including Yellowstone and Glacier. We welcome those second home owners but I'm asking them to make sure if they do come here that they quarantine for two weeks because we don't want other states' problems to become ours. If you flew into Bozeman this afternoon from New York we're going to temperature check you immediately when you get off the plane and say, "You're now in Montana so now we expect you to quarantine for two weeks and then to follow the directives we put out." None of that is to say we're afraid of visitors or that we're walling off the state. It's saying, "If you are visiting Montana you have to take it as seriously as we do. And that's very seriously." Some states Idaho, Georgia and Florida, to name a few have been slow to act. Are you and others putting pressure on them to be more decisive when it comes to the virus? Each governor has to figure out how to best manage this to the best of their judgment. When I decided on our stay at home order, I reached out to a number of governors who put it in a few days before me for advice on how to implement. But I don't second guess what others are doing; that's not how I do it. 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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Megyn Kelly's new office at NBC News sits a block north of Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. But it might as well be a world away. In switching networks at a pivotal point in her career, Ms. Kelly, the No. 2 rated personality in cable television news, is taking a calculated risk that she can swap her dedicated Fox audience for the broader, but more fickle, viewership of network television. There are challenges from the get go. Her splashy arrival has the potential to fray nerves among the big personalities at the network who already compete against one another for interviews and scoops. Ms. Kelly, 46, will also be taking on a daytime talk show format that has been a virtual graveyard for television news personalities in the last 10 years. And the new Sunday newsmagazine show that NBC plans to build around Ms. Kelly will go up against a giant that has not been meaningfully challenged for decades: "60 Minutes" on CBS. Still, Ms. Kelly is a bona fide star with a best selling book and a breakout role in this year's presidential campaign, when she clashed with Donald J. Trump. NBC News comes out the winner in one of the most closely watched talent sweepstakes in years, acquiring one of television's biggest names who could play a role in any number of major network events, like coverage of elections or the Olympics. Interviews on Tuesday with network executives and producers from Fox, NBC and other rival channels suggest that Ms. Kelly's performance at NBC will be as closely watched in the industry as her past few months of contract negotiations. Ms. Kelly will have to design her daytime talk show from scratch. Even though she made her name as a news anchor, she has argued that she is not obsessed with politics. When she hosted a prime time special on Fox in May her first major foray outside cable news she expressed a desire to combine the qualities of Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters and Charlie Rose. That special which featured interviews with Mr. Trump, the celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro and the actress Laverne Cox received middling reviews. It was far from a ratings hit: Among adults younger than 50, the demographic most important to broadcasters, Ms. Kelly's special performed about as well as ABC's "Beyond the Tank," a reality show spinoff. A daily daytime talk show also poses risks. Big name talent like Jane Pauley, Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper have taken a stab at the genre in the past, and each one failed. In Ms. Pauley's case, NBC invested millions of dollars, but the show was yanked in 2005 after just one year. NBC said on Tuesday that Ms. Kelly's show was expected to be closer to a news program than the typical daytime talk show, although it is unclear what exactly that will mean or how much appetite there is for news amid a landscape including shows like "Days of Our Lives," "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Steve Harvey." The audience for daytime television is also significantly more diverse than Fox's prime time viewership. Starting a Sunday rival to "60 Minutes," the standard bearer among newsmagazines, is likewise no easy task. "Rock Center," which Brian Williams hosted, lasted two seasons. NBC's most recent newsmagazine, "On Assignment," ran head to head against "60 Minutes" over five weeks; the show averaged about four million viewers, compared with more than nine million for "60 Minutes," which broadcast two repeats during that time. (This season, "60 Minutes" is averaging more than 14 million viewers.) It is also unclear how NBC will accommodate Ms. Kelly's show during the National Football League season, when NBC's popular "Sunday Night Football" package includes a highly rated pregame show that begins at 7 p.m. Eastern. 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 Andrew Lack, NBC News's chairman, has long had newsmagazines in his blood. In addition to overseeing a "60 Minutes" competitor on CBS in the 1980s, Mr. Lack presided over NBC in the 1990s when newsmagazines, including the network's popular "Dateline," dominated prime time lineups. Fox, meanwhile, must now set a course without one of its biggest names, as the network continues to recalibrate itself after the ouster of its chairman, Roger Ailes. Ms. Kelly's exit from Fox News was so abrupt that it was announced on the day that the network had run a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal trumpeting the ratings of its prime time lineup, with Ms. Kelly prominently pictured. Her departure stunned the Fox newsroom, where journalists and executives spent Tuesday afternoon speculating over which anchor might replace Ms. Kelly in the coveted 9 p.m. slot and wondering if Ms. Kelly would even appear that night. When Greta Van Susteren, another veteran anchor, announced her departure in September, network representatives visited her home to tell her not to bother coming in. In the end, Ms. Kelly was granted a chance to bid farewell to Fox News viewers her last show is Friday. It is not clear who will replace her. Fox News has never had an all male prime time lineup. Potential replacements being floated inside the network on Tuesday include four women who have regularly filled in for Ms. Kelly: Sandra Smith, a host of Fox's noon show, "Outnumbered"; Trish Regan, a rising star at Fox Business Network; Shannon Bream, who covers the Supreme Court; and Martha MacCallum, a morning anchor. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a host of "The Five" who is friendly with Mr. Trump's circle, and Tucker Carlson, who has put up high ratings since taking over Fox News's 7 p.m. slot, have also been suggested. Sean Hannity, whose viewership at 10 p.m. increased enormously in 2016 and has spiked since Election Day, could be moved up an hour, but his momentum in his time slot may make Fox executives reluctant to make a switch. One winner in the sweepstakes for Ms. Kelly could be CNN, even though it did not succeed in recruiting her. CNN, while still behind Fox News in total viewers by a wide margin, has occasionally beaten Fox among viewers 25 to 54, the demographic that determines advertising rates. In 2016, CNN finished within 58,000 viewers of Fox in prime time in the demographic cutting Fox's lead in half. Since the election, Fox has regained a sizable lead, but now, without spending a penny, CNN will now have an opportunity to take another run at Fox's prime time advantage.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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HOLLYWOOD Cartoons, comics, characters, repeat. Every nook of the Titmouse animation studio in Hollywood is filled with relics of pop culture history and creations too obscure to name. There are articulated action figures exploding off desks; plush loaves of bread stuffed into bookshelves; a smiling, shark shaped guitar; and some equally friendly fungus themed ornaments mounted like family portraits. With offices filled with artists in headphones, silently bobbing their heads; white boards crammed with inside jokes, sketches and work notes; and a 10 foot tall sculpture of a guitar toting Bigfoot in sunglasses guarding the parking lot, this is no average workplace, even by Hollywood standards. The artifacts collected here may strike a chord if you watch late night cartoons. The imprint of Chris Prynoski, president and owner of the company, is everywhere here. He and his wife, Shannon Prynoski, vice president and co owner, moved here from New York and in 2000 founded Titmouse, a small start up. The firm grew to a full service production company well known in the cartoon world, with three offices and more than 500 employees. Titmouse has 12 series in production, including pilots, films, commercials and web promos, and work that has appeared on Netflix, Adult Swim, Nickelodeon, Disney and others. It's probably best known for the cult hits "Metalocalypse" and "The Venture Bros." and for its out there founder, Mr. Prynoski, 46, with his trademark lumberjack beard, glasses and low slung cap. You'll find his lair past a pair of arcade era consoles Asteroids and Pacman and around a sweeping hallway covered by a black and white Travis Millard mural of a doglike creature eerily reminiscent of Yoshitomo Nara's "Your Dog" sculpture.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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"Everywhere I would go, I would see teenagers and young, cool looking guys doing it," Mr. Munce said. "It's something new. It's a little bit normcore, it's a little bit skater." The designer Alexander Wang deployed the look in his latest offering. "There's something quite youthful about socks with shorts, especially when pulled up, and I like that," he said. Photographers have captured the trend outside fashion shows, and paparazzi have recently turned their cameras on two celebrity practitioners, Jonah Hill and Joe Jonas. Eugene Tong, a freelance stylist and a frequent subject of street style photographers, favors the look in his everyday life and has helped make it work for brands like John Elliott, Second/Layer and Public School.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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A man carrying a crowbar, a baseball bat and more than 30 lock picks was arrested on Friday outside Taylor Swift's home in Rhode Island, according to the local newspaper, The Westerly Sun. His bail was set at 10,000 on Monday. A call about a suspicious man in the area led the police in Westerly, R.I., to David Liddle, 32, who was charged with possession of burglary tools and a weapon other than a firearm. Upon searching his backpack, police also found a rake designed to break into windows, screwdrivers, a flashlight and several pairs of rubber gloves. The Westerly police chief, Shawn Lacey, confirmed the details reported by The Sun in an email on Tuesday. Mr. Liddle, who is from Des Moines, told the police that he knew Ms. Swift and wanted to "catch up" with her, The Sun reported. Chief Lacey told The Sun that Mr. Liddle said the singer had agreed to help him start a singing career.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The forensic artist Betty Pat Gatliff with Dr. Robert J. Stein, the Cook County medical examiner in Illinois, during a news conference in 1980 about unidentified victims of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Betty Pat Gatliff, a forensic sculptor who helped law enforcement identify scores of people who had gone missing or been murdered by deftly reconstructing their faces, died on Jan. 5 in a hospital in Oklahoma City. She was 89. Her nephew James Gatliff said the cause was complications of a stroke. Ms. Gatliff's artistic skills and intimate understanding of facial architecture led many police departments, coroners and medical examiners to send her the skulls of people whose faces had decomposed or been rendered unrecognizable by acts of violence. Ms. Gatliff advanced the niche field of facial reconstruction well before the advent of modern forensics and television shows like "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." Over more than 40 years, first as a government employee and then as a freelancer, she sculpted about 300 faces and produced an estimated 70 percent rate of identification, according to her records. "Betty Pat's influence was broad and far reaching," Steve Johnson, a past president of the International Association for Identification, a forensic sciences organization, said by email. "I'm not sure I could say she was the best, but she was at the top of the discipline as far as knowledge and experience are concerned." Most of her facial reconstruction took place at her home studio in Norman, Okla., which she called the SKULLpture Laboratory. "I'm more amazed by the human skull every time I work with one," she told People magazine in 1980, dismissing the notion that her work was grisly. "What the Creator has given us just can't be improved on." She brought that fascination to each victim's skull, starting with her first reconstruction, of a Native American man who had been killed in 1967 while hitchhiking. Her work led to a positive identification, and to confidence in her technique. She also sculpted facial recreations of nine of the 33 known victims of the 1970s serial killer John Wayne Gacy, although none have led to identifications. Two of the victims were identified in recent years through DNA. "She often said they were her most frustrating challenge," Karen T. Taylor, a forensic artist and protege of Ms. Gatliff's, said by phone. Each facial reconstruction began with information about the gender, race, age, body type and other characteristics of the remains all gleaned by forensic anthropologists or provided by detectives. Ms. Gatliff created a type of infrastructure by gluing small plastic markers of varying sizes to the skull to match the depths of tissue at critical points around the face. Using the road map created by the markers, she covered the face in clay, smoothing it at first and then sandpapering it to mimic skin texture. Demonstrating her technique to police officers and artists at a workshop in 1987, she told the group, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal, "I guarantee after these four days you won't look at a person's face the same way again." If hair was found with skeletal remains, she could choose a wig with more certainty. She sometimes made informed anatomical guesses about a nose's shape. She used prosthetic eyeballs and tried to produce a realistic gaze. But, she admitted, she knew she could not be perfect. "They never look exactly like the person," she told The Oklahoman in 2002. "A skull will just tell you so much." Her sculptures were only temporary. After photographing a reconstruction from various angles, she removed the clay, cleaned the skull and returned it to the police. The pictures she took, which were given to the news media to solicit the public's help in identifying someone, would serve as the only evidence of her work. "She'd say that artistic ego shouldn't enter this work," Ms. Taylor said. Betty Patricia Gatliff was born on Aug. 31, 1930, in El Reno, Okla., and grew up there and in Norman, where she would live for most of her life. Her father, Richard, was a builder and architect; her mother, Ella (Henry) Gatliff, was a homemaker who had a quilting business. Betty Pat, as she was known, painted and sculpted from a young age. In 1951, she graduated from the Oklahoma College for Women (now the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma) in Chickasha, where she studied art and science. For nearly 30 years she was a medical illustrator for the Navy and the Federal Aviation Administration, where she worked with the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow. As Dr. Snow's forensic reputation grew beyond aviation, he and Ms. Gatliff were approached by police investigators to help identify crime victims around the United States. Their collaboration led to her facial reconstruction of the Native American man. Read the obituary for Mr. Snow, who died in 2014. Ms. Gatliff opened her facial reconstruction business after retiring from the F.A.A. in 1979. She started teaching her technique at workshops at the F.B.I. Academy, the Scottsdale Artists' School in Arizona, the Cleveland Institute of Art and the University of Oklahoma. She also applied her skills to high profile facial reconstructions that did not use a skull. She created a model of President John F. Kennedy's head, which the House Select Committee on Assassinations used in 1978 to test the trajectory of the bullets that struck him. And in 1983 she reconstructed the face of Tutankhamen on a plaster casting of a skull made from radiographs of his mummy, doing so at the request of an orthopedic surgeon curious about the pharaoh. Her boy king had high cheekbones, a delicate nose and thick lidded eyes. "If he winks," she told The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, "I'm getting out of here." A few years later, she reconstructed the face of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro based on a cast of his skull; that earned her a first place award in three dimensional media from the Association of Medical Illustrators. She also won the John R. Hunt Award from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1991 for her work's continued excellence. Ms. Gatliff was the technical consultant for a 1978 episode of the television series "Quincy, M.E." in which Dr. Quincy, a medical examiner played by Jack Klugman, hires a forensic artist, played by Zohra Lampert, to determine if a skull belongs to a missing labor leader. In addition to her nephew James, she is survived by another nephew, John Gatliff. In 2001, Ms. Gatliff was drawn into a campaign by the mystery writer Sue Grafton to identify a woman who was murdered and dumped in a quarry in 1969 in Lompoc, Calif. Ms. Gatliff reconstructed the woman's face from her skull. The case inspired Ms. Grafton's novel "Q Is for Quarry" (2002), which included photos of Ms. Gatliff's work. The woman has still not been identified. Ms. Gatliff said such mysteries can take time to solve. She recalled how one victim was identified 15 years after pictures of her reconstruction were published. "We only put a face on them as a last ditch effort, when nothing else has panned out," she told The Oklahoman. "In solving a homicide, you first have to know who the victim is before you can know who the perpetrator is. So it can be a key to solving the crime. "That's the reason I do it, is to help solve a crime."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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PARIS Daimler, the German maker of Mercedes Benz cars, may resume sales in France after the country's highest administrative court temporarily lifted a ban on Tuesday. Sales had been suspended since July because the cars do not use an air conditioner refrigerant intended to be more environmentally friendly, but which Daimler says is unsafe. While nominally an environmental issue, the matter has taken on the overtones of a trade dispute, risking tensions between German regulators and European Union officials. Daimler sought the court's intervention after the French environment ministry announced that it would not allow the registration of certain Mercedes Benz models that did not use a refrigerant that conformed with European Union law. The ministry argued that by refusing to follow the law, Daimler was harming efforts to reduce global warming and was distorting competition in the auto market. But the court, the Council of State, rejected the ministry's arguments, at least temporarily, and gave the government two days to begin providing the registration numbers Daimler needs to resume sales. Considering the small number of cars in question several thousand by Daimler's estimate the court said there was no serious danger to the environment. Christoph Horn, a Daimler spokesman, said the sale of 4,600 to 5,000 cars had been blocked by the ministry's move. The court also said that it had "serious doubts" about the legal reasoning the ministry had used to justify its decision. A previous attempt by the ministry to stop sales of the cars was overturned by a lower court in July. Daimler, in a statement from its headquarters in Stuttgart, said that it was "delighted" with the opinion and that it expected "the French authorities to start registering our vehicles within the next 48 hours." The case is being closely watched by global automakers. Regulators in the United States and other countries are also seeking ways to reduce emissions of the refrigerants in air conditioners and other such gases thought to contribute to global warming. Carmakers have economic incentives to standardize the refrigerants they use, rather than have to conform to multiple local standards. The new refrigerant, R1234yf, a Honeywell DuPont product, is also being evaluated by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States for possible use. Under a European Union law that became fully applicable at the start of this year, the older refrigerant, R134a, is banned in all new model vehicles. The law does not specify a replacement refrigerant. But the law does require any replacements to meet certain criteria, among them that new refrigerants have an impact on global warming no more than 150 times that of carbon dioxide. Air conditioning gases are considered major contributors to global warming. R134a, which is still being used by Daimler, is 1,400 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, according to the E.P.A. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. By comparison, R1234yf, favored by most global automakers, is only four times worse than carbon dioxide. Using it across Europe would be equivalent to removing four million cars from the roads, the manufacturers say. Honeywell said in a statement Tuesday that it was "unfortunate that Daimler's decision to not comply" with the European rule "has taken up the court's time, roiled the industry, and led to bureaucratic gamesmanship that is bad for the environment." Daimler defends its actions and notes that German regulators approved its continued use of the older refrigerant after its tests showed that R1234yf was unsafe. Both Daimler and Volkswagen, which has also said it will not use the new refrigerant, say they intend to concentrate their efforts on developing carbon dioxide based air conditioning systems. The European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, began examining the legality of the German actions in June and the French response a few weeks later. Michael Jennings, a spokesman for the commission, said Tuesday that the inquiry was continuing and could still take several weeks to conclude. "We have taken note of the preliminary ruling today," Mr. Jennings said. "While we will look at it closely, it does not have a direct bearing on our ongoing deliberations in relation to this issue." The commission is examining why the German authorities are allowing Daimler to ignore European Union law, throwing a wrench into the union's plan to phase out the environmentally damaging refrigerant. If Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for industry, eventually finds the German authorities at fault, he could recommend suing them at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to change their stance or modify their procedures. The French court will now deliberate over a final ruling in the case, while officials at the European Commission in Brussels conduct their own independent review of all the testing done so far on the product. Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority, or KBA, said this month that its discussions of the question with carmakers "resulted in a very uneven picture regarding their risk assessment" and concluded that "a neutral risk assessment by the KBA was impossible." The regulatory uncertainty is already taking its toll. Responding to fears generated by the Daimler test, Toyota Motor said last week that it would return to the old refrigerant, though it said it remained "very confident" about the new product. Unlike Daimler, Toyota is free to make the change, since the models that it had switched were not required to use the new refrigerant this year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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A new musical about the Temptations will open on Broadway next spring, the latest in a series of shows using familiar pop songs to tell stories and lure audiences. "Ain't Too Proud The Life and Times of the Temptations" will run at Broadway's Imperial Theater, the show's producers said Thursday; they did not announce a cast or an opening date. The musical will have had four developmental productions before coming to Broadway, starting last year at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California and earlier this year at the Kennedy Center in Washington; it is now playing at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, and is scheduled to run in Toronto this fall. "Ain't Too Proud" is directed by Des McAnuff and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, who previously collaborated on the long running Tony winning hit "Jersey Boys," which closed last year, and "Summer: The Donna Summer Musical," which opened this year. There are two other jukebox musicals now running on Broadway "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" and "Head Over Heels," featuring songs by the Go Go's. Bruce Springsteen is performing a concert show, "Springsteen on Broadway"; "The Cher Show" opens in December; and there are several more jukebox musicals circling Broadway, including "Jagged Little Pill," featuring songs by Alanis Morissette, and "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical," as well as multiple others in development. "Ain't Too Proud" features a book by the playwright Dominique Morisseau ("Skeleton Crew," "Pipeline"). Ms. Morisseau, like the Temptations, is from Detroit; the show is about the R B group's formation, successes and challenges. The lead producers are Ira Pittelman and Tom Hulce, who previously produced the Tony winning "Spring Awakening"; the pair have told the Securities and Exchange Commission that they will seek to raise 16.75 million to capitalize the new musical.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Two years ago, Matt Kelly couldn't have known that a failed merger involving his real estate firm would propel him toward a central role in Amazon's expansion plans. In May 2016, Mr. Kelly and his firm, then known as the JBG Companies, had an agreement to merge with a large real estate investment trust based in New York. But shareholders of the New York fund balked, and the deal collapsed. A few months later, JBG, based in Chevy Chase, Md., had a new partner. In a deal valued at 8.4 billion, JBG merged with a Washington unit spun off from the real estate behemoth Vornado Realty Trust. The new company, JBG Smith, with Mr. Kelly as chief executive, became the dominant landowner in a Northern Virginia region now being called National Landing, a dilapidated area that includes parts of Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard. Amazon announced on Tuesday that it was choosing this area, along with New York City, for two new headquarters, with 50,000 employees between them. Since Amazon started its search for a so called HQ2 over a year ago, the Washington region had been considered a front runner. The region gives the company access to a large, tech savvy work force and the transportation and infrastructure it wanted. Additionally, Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has a home in the area. For Mr. Kelly, Amazon's decision validated a plan that he had been selling for the better part of a year: revitalizing Crystal City and its neighbors. Mr. Kelly's pitch was to turn a ghost town, as it has been described, into a thriving hot spot, including public green space and hip new retailers and entertainment venues. The plan relied on redeveloping 1970s era office towers into sleek residential buildings. Skeptical investors have become believers, sending shares of JBG Smith up 7 percent in the past month. Analysts warn that Amazon most likely flexed its muscles to negotiate a deal with highly favorable terms, possibly pushing for below market leases in an area that already trends well below national and Washington averages. For JBG Smith, the HQ2 deal may pay off in an uptick in occupancy and rents for residential, retail and other properties it owns adjacent to Amazon's new offices. But it could take five to seven years for this bonanza to arrive, said Danny Ismail, an analyst and lead of office coverage for the real estate research firm Green Street Advisors. "This isn't going to be an overnight thing," Mr. Ismail said. Amazon said it intended to lease 500,000 square feet of office space in three buildings owned by JBG Smith. Amazon has also agreed to buy numerous plots of land held by JBG Smith that could be developed for an extra 4.1 million square feet. The purchase price of the land and other terms were not disclosed. JBG Smith officials did not respond to requests for comment. But in the announcement on Tuesday, the firm said it planned to accelerate construction on other projects in the area, including developments that would create more office and retail space as well as hundreds of residential units. Amazon's move is a chance for JBG Smith to turn lemons into lemonade. For the past year, JBG Smith's publicly traded real estate investment trust has trailed its peers, largely because of Crystal City and adjoining areas, which make up about a third of JBG Smith's portfolio. Charles E. Smith Commercial Realty first developed Crystal City in the 1960s and 1970s, and Vornado acquired that company in 2002. The Crystal City holdings eventually became an albatross for Vornado. Crystal City was once a thriving hub of government agencies and military contractors, but its fortunes sank after a 2005 mandate, in part for antiterrorism concerns, to relocate thousands of jobs from suburban office buildings to nearby military bases. In the following years, Crystal City lost 17,000 jobs, and 4.2 million square feet of office space became vacant. Since then, occupancy rates in the Crystal City region have hovered around 85 percent, among the lowest in the country, analysts say. But champions for the area argued that it still had plenty to offer a big employer, starting with its proximity to Ronald Reagan National Airport. "It's the only place I've ever worked where you could walk to an airport. It's unique in its location and infrastructure," said Mitch Bonanno, a former senior vice president and director of development who oversaw the Washington team for Vornado/Charles E. Smith. JBG traces its roots to the late 1950s when three lawyers Benjamin Jacobs, Donald Brown, and Joseph Gildenhorn started a law and real estate firm in Rockville, Md. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the firm acquired and developed a number of high profile properties in the Washington area, including the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown and projects for the World Bank and the insurer Geico. In the 2000s, JBG began raising money from institutional investors for a series of funds that it used to invest in commercial real estate around Washington. JBG redeveloped part of Shaw, an inner city neighborhood that was devastated by the 1968 riots after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It called the area North End Shaw, a neighborhood geared toward millennials that featured stylish apartment buildings, trendy retailers like the eyewear company Warby Parker and a movie theater with a bar. In the spring of 2016, JBG was looking to expand. It announced a merger with New York REIT, a deal that would have made JBG a public entity, making it easier to raise money to buy properties. The deal also would have diversified JBG's portfolio into the New York City area. But New York REIT investors balked and by the end of the summer, the arrangement had been terminated.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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What if the surgeon started slicing into my knee before it was completely numb? That was my biggest fear, while weighing whether to remain alert and watch the operation on the cartilage in my right knee, or to be put to sleep, preserving my peaceful ignorance. Rational or otherwise, my reasons for staying awake an option increasingly taken by patients, the subject of the accompanying article prevailed. 2) For a long year, my knee pain had resisted straightforward diagnosis and treatment. I wanted an ah ha! glimpse of the problem. 3) Ever since I was a child, I have watched when the doctor gives me an injection. Not because I am brave, masochistic or even curious. On the contrary. Looking away, I imagine something far scarier. So watching a medical procedure has always been a form of self soothing. There I lay on the operating room table at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, jabbering nervously to the anesthesiologist, waiting for the spinal block, an injection that was supposed to render the lower part of my body numb, to kick in. Was I permitted to talk? Or would that distract everyone? How would they know when the block was working? Was I already talking too much? Was that beleaguered exasperation in the anesthesiologist's eyes? I thought they had given me a sedative. Is this me on sedatives? A blue surgical cloth had been draped over my hips. A nurse hoisted a bare limb and began washing it with sterilizer. How odd, I thought: Why have they brought a mannequin leg into the O.R.? Maybe a Halloween joke? I peered closely and recognized the chipped summer toenail polish. Wait. That leg belonged to me. My surgeon, Dr. Robert G. Marx, strode in, greeting everyone, just another day at the office. We were ready to begin. He called for music. It so happens that about seven lifetimes ago, I was a disc jockey. The experience left me a little judgmental, perhaps, about others' musical tastes. What would I put on the playlist "Music for Watching One's Own Surgery"? (Rod Stewart, "The First Cut Is the Deepest"; Louis Armstrong, "Mack the Knife"?) It would certainly not include Dr. Marx's go to choice: Rush, the Canadian hard rock band. But Dr. Marx was raised in Canada. (So many other maple leaf musicians to choose from: Neil Young! Oscar Peterson! Drake! No, not Justin Bieber. Please.) Now he was bopping around, looking pumped. And there was my favorite right knee, naked, powerless in his hands. So I said nothing. To a civilian like me, arthroscopic surgery is astonishing. Although I couldn't see what Dr. Marx was doing, he narrated as he made two incisions: one for a tiny camera, the other for a tiny instrument. Then, on an overhead monitor, video appeared. Now we could all have a good look around my knee innards. Cartilage is relatively bloodless, shiny and white. "There's your honker!" Dr. Marx explained, using his highfalutin medical term for the floating fragment of my medial meniscus. Whenever I attacked stairs, that piece tugged on the highly sensitive knee capsule, dense with nerves. I felt relief and affirmation. This pain had not been in my head. The fragments looked like rubbery slivers of squid sashimi, fluttering in dark video tunnels. Dr. Marx quietly pointed out that because I'd had this surgery once before (under general anesthesia), after today I would not have much medial meniscus remaining. Anxiously hanging on his every word, I did not find the news reassuring. The wistful, shimmering mirage of my 5K morning runs dimmed. But I felt better prepared for whatever the surgical outcome might be. For I could see exactly what he was talking about.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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What did happen to Elsie Scheel, the "perfect" woman mentioned in an article in Wednesday's New York Times that described how people considered overweight had a slightly lower risk of dying than those of normal weight? A century ago, at age 24, Miss Scheel was the subject of a spate of news media coverage after the "medical examiner of the 400 'co eds' " at her college, Cornell University, described her as the epitome of "perfect health," according to a 1912 New York Times article. That article and others also gave her dimensions: 5 foot 7 and 171 pounds, which would have corresponded to a body mass index of 27, putting Miss Scheel in the overweight category. Miss Scheel, it turns out, lived a long life, dying in 1979 in St. Cloud, Fla., three days shy of her 91st birthday. But though it may be tempting to conclude that Miss Scheel's longevity exemplifies the benefits of a not too low B.M.I, her case is only one anecdote, of course. And, according to family members and to hints provided in early articles, she was a person who valued being active and athletic, had a strong and confident attitude, and, as a daughter of a doctor and a mother of a doctor, may have been steeped in healthy habits that were much more relevant to her survival than her weight. "She never took an aspirin or a Tylenol," a granddaughter, Karen Hirsh Meredith, of Broken Arrow, Okla., said in an interview Wednesday. She kept up hobbies like stamp collecting and wrote pieces for the St. Cloud newspaper. And, Ms. Meredith said, "she was still driving late in life." Ms. Meredith said she did not recall her grandmother having any illnesses or being hospitalized except for shortly before she died, when she went into the hospital with stomach pain. She ended up having surgery for a perforated bowel and died the next day, Ms. Meredith said. A death notice said Miss Scheel, who was Mrs. Hirsh when she died, had been a "practical nurse," although Ms. Meredith said the family believed she did not work after she had children. In 1918 she married Frederick Rudolph Hirsh, an architect who supervised the building of the New York Public Library and who was a widower with two children, Frederick Jr. and Mary. He died in 1933 at 68, leaving his wife to raise a son, John, and a daughter, Elise. She moved to Florida from Mount Vernon, N.Y., in the 1940s and never remarried. Miss Scheel's mother, Sophie Bade Scheel, a physician educated at New York Medical College, maintained an active medical practice at a time when relatively few women did. And Miss Scheel may have benefited from good genes: her three siblings were 79, 88 and 93 when they died. Published reports from 1912 and 1913 provide glimpses of the type of person Miss Scheel was and of her immediate post "perfect" experience. She participated in many sports, playing basketball at Cornell. "I play a guard, where my weight helps," she told a newspaper. She was a suffragette and, the Times article said, "doesn't know what fear is." She ate only three meals every two days, loved beefsteak and shunned candy and caffeine. An article in The Oregonian asked her about her advice for healthy living, reporting that "Miss Scheel feels that the average girl does too much of the wrong sort of thing too many dances and not enough good bracing tramps. I just got back from a 25 mile tramp to Enfield Falls." Some of the news media coverage was catty, even brutal. And it was extremely detailed. Her particulars the size of her chest, waist and hips were compared to the Venus de Milo. A day after the Times article, The New York Herald ran a story about Miss Scheel above the fold on its front page: "Brooklyn Venus Much Too Large is Verdict of Physical Culturists." These "physical culturists" claimed that Miss Scheel's weight and height "cannot be reconciled with the accepted ideal of female beauty." One expert, a gymnasium owner, pronounced that "her chest measurement is small for the weight she is credited with; she is too tall to be considered an ideal type and her weight itself is all out of proportion." An article published in The Duluth News Tribune said: "Miss Scheel looked as if she weighed 195 pounds. 'Only 171,' corrected she." Another article, published in The Oregonian and elsewhere, even included two sketches of nude figures and their anatomical 411. The Venus de Milo was 33 26 38, it said. "The Cornell Venus" was 34.6 30.3 40. "Milo's lady, as we know, is minus both arms and a foot, while Miss Scheel is decidedly 'all there,' " the article pointed out. But Miss Scheel seemed to handle the attention with modesty and confidence. "Well if all they say about me is true, I can't help it, for, like Topsy, 'I just grew,' " she said in one 1912 article, speaking from Passaic, N.J., where her parents had recently moved. She was blunt: "Jersey can have no credit for any of my health, for I lived in New York and then in Brooklyn before we moved here a little while ago." And, to add insult to Jersey injury: "I'm going to experiment in horticulture here next summer. The place needs it, as you can see." Her story received worldwide attention and other women, including a Marjorie Watson in London, made claims to being closer to Venus than Miss Scheel. And less than six months after her burst of publicity, The Springfield Daily News ran an article headlined "Perfect Woman Not Happy." Miss Scheel, then working on her father's farm in Sayville on Long Island, was finding perfection "not all it's cracked up to be," the article said. "All the neighbors have been asking about those famous physical measurements. The kids want to know the size of her feet when she walks downtown, the village mashers make bucolic and ponderous jests as she passes by, and the other girls, well, they just sniff and demand of each other 'where on earth anybody can see anything beautiful about a figure like that?' " Miss Scheel told the paper she was moving back to the Garden State, to "some unknown section of New Jersey." Over all, though, Miss Scheel seemed to have the self esteem to cope with the dubiously desirable label of perfection.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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One of the most difficult intellectual and emotional challenges I faced earlier this year at Yale was finding an answer to a Native American student's poignant question: Why should she put any faith in institutions in our society including our judicial system and universities when those institutions had clearly betrayed her people in generations past? "The same Constitution with its protection of the rights to free expression and assembly that you revere," she said, "was previously of no use to people like me." She was right, of course. So why should she and other young people place trust in systems that can perennially fail us? I wish I had told her that the way out of this conundrum is to make these institutions her own. I wish I had told her that these institutions are worth respecting and preserving for their (albeit imperfect) embodiment of Enlightenment values; that she surely should want to embrace those values; and that her generation could make those values more true, not less. These institutions could be hers, and I believe she should want them to be hers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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SpeakingInDance: a new weekly visual exploration of dance. Follow us on Instagram: nytimes. "I thought we were just wiggling and lifting our arms," said the great postmodern dancer Vicky Shick, above, who brings Trisha Brown's minimalist 1973 classic "Spanish Dance" to life. Set to Bob Dylan's version of "Early Morning Rain," the complete dance features five women from the Trisha Brown Dance Company, who slowly raise their arms like extravagant Spanish dancers and travel forward with rocking hips. One bumps into the next, until they're latched together like a train of snaking bodies. In the end, they crash into a wall. People always use words like silky and voluptuous to describe Ms. Brown's loose limbed movement, but even more critical, Ms. Shick said, is its "stupendous and breathtaking specificity and clarity. And the complexity of the action. People go, 'Oh it's so easy.' It's not."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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NASA and Tom Cruise have had discussions about shooting a film at the International Space Station, NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday. The message highlighted NASA's growing interest in finding additional commercial ventures for the space program during the Trump administration. But it follows a variety of earlier attempts to produce entertainment in space that have failed to get off the film lot or the launchpad. Deadline, a Hollywood trade publication, first reported on Monday the possibility of an out of this world Tom Cruise movie. Deadline said it would be an action adventure, but not part of the "Mission: Impossible" film series that Mr. Cruise has starred in since 1996. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. NASA declined to provide additional details. "Not at this time," Matthew Rydin, the press secretary for Mr. Bridenstine, wrote in an email. "We will say more about the project at the appropriate time." NASA has been looking to open the International Space Station to wider commercial use, beyond scientific research for new drugs and novel materials that can only be grown in zero gravity conditions. That includes space tourism. Axiom Space, a start up run by a former NASA space station manager, has been selected to build a commercial module with Philippe Starck designed interiors that would be attached to the International Station. Even before its completion, the company is selling 55 million tickets on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to tourists wanting to visit the more austere accommodations currently available. That flight is more than a year away. An Axiom spokesman declined to comment if the company was involved with Mr. Cruise's movie plans. In 2018 remarks, Mr. Bridenstine raised the possibility of NASA selling naming rights to its spacecraft to companies or allowing astronauts to sign endorsement deals, but the agency has since not made any moves in those directions. Space has long had an allure for the entertainment business. Although footage for documentaries and even television commercials has been shot in orbit, Mr. Cruise's project, if it goes into production, would be the first space film shoot for a narrative feature film. In 2000, Mark Burnett, the producer of "Survivor" and "The Apprentice," had sold NBC on the idea of a reality television series that would culminate with sending a contestant to Mir, the decaying Russian space station. But those plans fell through when Mir was abandoned and deorbited, splashing in the Pacific in 2001. More recently, a Dutch venture, Mars One, claimed it would finance a Mars colony through a television series, but it never even raised enough money for the final selection of potential astronauts. The company entered into bankruptcy in 2019. In January, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion billionaire who is paying SpaceX to fly him around the moon, posted an online advertisement asking for a date to accompany him on the flight. He said a video streaming website would make a documentary of his quest called "Full Moon Lovers." SpaceX is aiming to launch Mr. Maezawa in 2023, but the giant Starship spacecraft that would be required is still in early development. A couple of weeks later, he apologized and asked for the show's cancellation "due to personal reasons." The plot of Mr. Cruise's film is unknown, but some of his previous movies have involved close cooperation with the federal government. The United States Navy helped with the making of both "Top Gun" in 1986 as well as its forthcoming sequel, "Top Gun: Maverick," which Mr. Cruise co produced.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The night life slum known as Hell Square, a three by three grid of Lower East Side blocks below East Houston Street, has teemed with mobbed bars and hooting drunks for over a decade. But on a recent Saturday night, the scene was less frenzied at Jia, a lounge on Rivington Street that opened in May. At the bar, Marvin Avilez, a software developer who lives nearby, said he was opposed to the neighborhood's bar oversaturation and yet there he was with two women, ordering 18 flutes of bubbly. "You're not going to get this ambience anywhere else in the Lower East Side," said Mr. Avilez, 40. Was his patronage betraying his ideals? "When it's in, it's in," he said with a shrug. Jia is a windowless, 75 person capacity rectangle on the first floor of the crystalline, 20 story Hotel on Rivington. Ostensibly inspired by 1930s Shanghai, the decor includes floral wallpaper, floral upholstery and floral lampshades; there is a dance floor, a pair of disco balls and a D.J. booth. "This used to be an opium den," a host claimed. Nefarious mythology aside, Jia mostly seems eager to conjure the spirit of Paul's Cocktail Lounge or Electric Room, both intimate lounges embedded in hotels.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Credit...Pierre Antoine The tunnel to the subterranean bunker that played a pivotal role in the liberation of Paris is long and narrow, each step down deceptively steep. It takes 100 of those steps to reach the former military command post where, for six days, members of the French Resistance helped orchestrate the city's release from the Nazi occupation in 1944. For decades after the liberation, the bunker, in the southern end of the city, languished in neglect, abandoned and visited only by urban sewer explorers or tagged and occupied by squatters. But on Aug. 25, when the French capital marks the 75th anniversary of its liberation during World War II, the newly restored underground shelter will be inaugurated as part of the redesigned and relocated Musee de la Liberation de Paris Musee du General Leclerc Musee Jean Moulin an unusually long name aimed at honoring key heroes of the French Resistance. Above and below ground, the museum walks visitors through one of the darkest and most joyous periods of modern Parisian history, from the calamitous moment France fell and German forces captured Paris in 1940, to the moment the city was liberated four years later by the Resistance and Allied forces. The Musee de la Liberation had previously operated in near obscurity above the Montparnasse train station and was little known among Parisians, much less tourists. Visitor numbers were dismal. Now a few steps from the catacombs, the hope is that the bunker will help the museum become a new tourist attraction in the 14th arrondissement one that preserves the memory of an important moment in Paris history. During their tour, visitors learn that the bunker was originally opened in 1938 as an air raid shelter, and that its existence was known to the German army. What the Germans didn't know , however, was that the Resistance, led in Paris by Col. Henri Rol Tanguy, would take it over in the week leading up to the liberation, and use it as a command post and communications hub. Equipped with its own telephone exchange, the shelter gave Colonel Rol Tanguy and his staff access to 250 telephones around Paris, including at police headquarters and in air raid shelters, allowing them to bypass official communication lines that were likely to be tapped. It also served as an effective hide out, as messengers gained access via the nearby railway line, either to deliver intelligence or receive new orders from Colonel Rol Tanguy. A continuous soundtrack overhead brings the command post to life, playing recordings of sounds often heard during the war: a haunting wail of the air raid siren; shrill, strident rings of old fashioned telephones; calls from members of the Resistance; the click clack sound of running footsteps that conveys a hair raising sense of urgency. The restored "disinfection room" near the entrance where victims would have been treated in the event of a gas attack; vintage gas masks; and the stationary bike used to generate electricity in the event of a power shortage all serve as stark reminders of the realities of war. The bunker also recreates the room that housed the telephone switchboard and the office where Colonel Rol Tanguy would read reports and dictate messages to his wife and secretary, Cecile Rol Tanguy, also a member of the Resistance. Above ground, more than 300 artifacts are on display, including new additions, such as pistols used by soldiers in the 2nd French Armored Division led by Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque (better known as General Leclerc), and a red, white and blue dress bearing images of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. The Parisian wife and mother Marguerite Sabaut wore the dress for the victory parade down the Champs Elysees on Aug. 26, 1944. Marguerite Sabaut made this red, white and blue dress and wore it during the celebratory parade down the Champs Elysees on Aug. 26, 1944. The redesigned museum also pays tribute to General Leclerc and Jean Moulin, who were key architects of the French Resistance. Under Gen. Charles de Gaulle, Moulin would unify the Resistance across France, coordinating efforts with local factions across the country. Leclerc would lead the liberation of Paris with his 2nd French Armored Division and the help of Allied forces, dealing the final blow to the Germans. The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, commissioned the relocation of the museum above the underground bunker in 2015, after meeting Mrs. Rol Tanguy, now 100 years old. At the end of the war, then a young 25 year old mother of two, Mrs. Rol Tanguy worked around the clock for six straight days and nights alongside half a dozen young women in the bunker, while Colonel Rol Tanguy and his staff came and went, meeting with fellow Resistance fighters scattered throughout Paris. For her son Jean Rol Tanguy, 76, the restoration of the command post will bring to life his favorite war story heard growing up: how every day at 10 a.m. between 1940 and 1944, a German soldier would call the bunker and ask if there was anything to report; and how during the week of the liberation, the female workers at the switchboard would pretend that all was status quo. "My parents never really talked openly about the war," he said. "It was only when they met with old comrades from the Resistance that they would talk about it in front of us. This anecdote always made them laugh." Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free, but visits to the bunker must be booked in advance. Reservations can be made online at 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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Mr. Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Ms. Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. Clockwise from bottom left, Al Goldis, Ted S. Warren and Steve Ruark/Associated Press, Al Drago for The New York Times, Peter Foley/EPA, via Shutterstock, Pool photo by Rich Pedroncelli, and Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press Clockwise from bottom left, Al Goldis, Ted S. Warren and Steve Ruark/Associated Press, Al Drago for The New York Times, Peter Foley/EPA, via Shutterstock, Pool photo by Rich Pedroncelli, and Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press Credit... Clockwise from bottom left, Al Goldis, Ted S. Warren and Steve Ruark/Associated Press, Al Drago for The New York Times, Peter Foley/EPA, via Shutterstock, Pool photo by Rich Pedroncelli, and Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press As the Trump administration has floundered in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation's governors have tried to step into the breach. Gavin Newsom of California was the first to issue a statewide order to stay home. In Washington State, Jay Inslee's aggressive measures have gotten credit as the rate of increase of the infection appears to be starting to slow. And Andrew Cuomo's daily news conferences in New York have become a steady and popular source of sound information and empathy. These governors and other local officials have offered a welcome alternative to the president's erratic directives and briefings. And their forceful actions may seem to vindicate the wisdom of the founders, who reserved important functions to the states so that the national government would not grow too powerful. As Vice President Mike Pence put it on March 22, "One of the things that makes America different is that we have a system of federalism." But in the context of the pandemic, federalism has allowed President Trump to indulge his worst tendencies. States depend on the federal government to confront disease outbreaks like the coronavirus pandemic. In the early days of Covid 19, state and local officials weren't in a position to foresee the scope of the threat or control the levers that could have suppressed it. Later, because nearly all states must balance their budgets, they couldn't use deficit spending for bailouts. They can't print money as the Federal Reserve can. And they still don't have the resources to protect their residents which makes it risky for them to anger Mr. Trump as they seek to fulfill their institutional role as a check against federal abuses. Federalism's limits have been apparent since the first reports of the virus emerged from Wuhan, China. In January, U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the Chinese government was minimizing the outbreak, but state and local officials didn't have that information and so could not counter the president when he waved off the threat. In February, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pledged but failed to put in place a system of widespread testing, states and counties didn't have the capacity to act on their own. They had neither the centralized apparatus to conduct blanket testing nor the authority to waive regulations over such testing enforced by the Food and Drug Administration, another source of federal power. The next task was undertaking the vast production and allocation of masks, other protective gear and ventilators. Instead of centralizing this task, President Trump said from the White House lectern, "Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work." He added, "You know, we're not a shipping clerk." But governors can't invoke the Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to order businesses to manufacture necessary medical equipment. Nor can they enlist the Federal Emergency Management Agency to manage the giant project of distributing the equipment. The vacuum left by the federal government forced states to compete for scarce equipment like ventilators, driving up their price and benefiting shady middlemen while causing fatal delays. Mr. Trump has, characteristically, revealed and exploited defects in the federal system. Unwilling to take the blame for shutting down the economy when he thought there was little public support for the move, he sparred with governors like Mr. Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan while also hiding behind them. "The governors, locally, are going to be in command," he said on the same day Mr. Pence spoke of federalism's virtues. "We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job." When the president finally began taking the pandemic more seriously, he shifted to using the governors for partisan gain. Last Friday, Mr. Trump said they "should be appreciative, because you know what? When they're not appreciative to me, they're not appreciative to the Army Corps. They're not appreciative to FEMA." He then said he told Mr. Pence not to call those who were unappreciative. Whether or not Mr. Trump meant it, he made his point: Governors who criticized the president would put their states at risk of getting short shrift from the federal government. The following day, The Washington Post detailed the uneven distribution of protective gear from FEMA. Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts, led by two Democrats and a Republican critic of the president's pandemic policies, received only small fractions of what they asked for while Florida got the delivery it requested twice over. Mr. Trump and Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, had traded praise even as both rejected the advice of public health authorities, with Mr. Trump speaking of jettisoning restrictions by Easter and Governor DeSantis allowing Florida beaches to stay open while the state's infection rate soared. (Mr. DeSantis finally issued a statewide state at home order on Wednesday.) Federal officials say that in allocating equipment, they have made their best assessment of the relative needs of states. But several governors remain frustrated. Mr. Trump has politicized this process at a moment when states are under maximum strain. While the governors who have acted with foresight and care have received deserved praise, others have sowed division. Mr. DeSantis blamed travelers from New York for the problems his own policies caused. Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island sent the National Guard to stop cars with out of state license plates at her state's border and said law enforcement officers would knock on doors in coastal communities in search of visitors from other states. Those are measures that public health experts have not called for and that may be unconstitutional. Other governors, in Texas as well as Florida, have refused to impose adequate statewide social distancing. Inconsistent state policies hamper the national effort to throttle the contagion. They have also thrown into disarray efforts by business to maintain supply chains across state lines. Last week, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers wrote to the National Governors Association asking for uniform directives with a single definition of "essential" businesses that can operate. Instead of pandering to Mr. Trump or to their voters, governors should recognize their common interest in a consistent national response to the crisis, and put coordinated pressure on the White House to make evidence based policy. Mayors can assist, as the U.S. Conference of Mayors did last week by surveying its members and telling the public that almost 90 percent of cities did not have enough test kits or masks and other protective equipment for health care workers. It's a lesson of the schoolyard that applies to politics: Only a united group can defeat a bully. When politicians take on Mr. Trump one by one, they can't match the power of the American presidency. Congress has failed to challenge Mr. Trump effectively because the Republican led Senate refuses to put the interests of the institution above partisanship. But the governors, with their direct responsibility for the welfare of their citizens, have urgent reason to band together and do better. This week, some of them did that in challenging Mr. Trump's assertion that the supply of testing kits was sufficient. "That's just not true," Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, told NPR. Other governors agreed with that assessment in interviews elsewhere. The governors can't take over the federal government. But they can raise hell. Eric Posner is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and is the author of the forthcoming "The Demagogues' Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump." Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School. 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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The British choreographer Russell Maliphant has long been fascinated by sculpture and light, and his concerns for shape, mass and visual intensity have influenced "Still Current," the new program of solos, duets and trios by the Russell Maliphant Company. Mr. Maliphant's choreography reflects his training at the Royal Ballet School, as well as disciplines like yoga, tai chi and martial arts. Working in close collaboration with Michael Hulls, his lighting designer, he traps dancers behind bars of light, isolates them in squares of light and liberates them from such confinements to cross floors adorned with changing lighting patterns. Mr. Maliphant also honors a revered dancer in "Afterlight (Part One)," a segment of "Still Current" inspired by photographs of and geometric artworks painted by Vaslav Nijinsky, the great but emotionally troubled Ballets Russes star. (7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and next Saturday, 2 p.m. next Sunday, Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea; 212 242 0800, joyce.org.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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John Holmstrom, a founder of Punk magazine, has lived in his railroad tenement flat since right before the blackout of 1977. Photographs for this article were provided by the subjects. Paris has its garrets; London, its bedsits. In New York, it's the studio apartment and its grittier cousin, the tenement railroad flat that has sheltered generations of strivers and makers. Now that New Yorkers are sheltering in place, studio dwellers would seem to be particularly challenged. But many say the years in their smaller nests have made them more resilient, primed for self isolation. (Quentin Crisp, the author and dandy who proudly lived in pinched squalor in an East Village S.R.O., liked to point out that one can only be in one room at a time.) If the bedsit seemed fashioned for a Barbara Pym character to nurse her hot plate supper, and the garret to succor a starving painter or poet, the New York studio apartment, from its beginnings, promised grander things. Once a feature of the apartment hotels built in the late 19th century, some were designed as housing for middle class, even affluent, single men. These bachelor flats anticipated a gentleman tenant lunching at his club, dining in restaurants or ordering from the residential hotel's kitchen, and so these early versions lacked a kitchen. By the 1920s, studio apartments had been rebranded as efficiency units, said Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the author of "Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street." Studios became a common urban type, kitted out with neat galley kitchens and even "disappearing beds" that folded down from a wall, a.k.a the Murphy, named after a man who patented them. Such apartments were fine launching pads for young professionals or childless couples, because so much of urban life happened outside the home. But what happens when urban life effectively stops? There are 3,000 apartments that measure under 400 square feet in Manhattan, according to Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a longtime appraiser of the city's real estate, and an untold number in the other boroughs. Here, half a dozen people who live in them tell their stories of quarantine. Mr. Busby, 84, is a composer who has written scores for Robert Altman and Paul Taylor. Over 40 years ago, his mentor, Virgil Thompson, wrangled him a place at the Chelsea Hotel, the formerly bohemian boardinghouse. He moved to his current room in the late 1990s, in the aftermath of the death of his partner, Sam Byers, from AIDS. Mr. Busby was struggling with addiction and the rent, and Stanley Bard, the hotel's longtime manager and eccentric gatekeeper, gave him an ultimatum. "'If you pay your rent and behave yourself, I'll move you to a place where you can spend the rest of your life,'" Mr. Busby recalled Mr. Bard saying, before offering him a studio on the same floor as his old apartment. The room's former occupant had been a heroin addicted heiress, one of a category of Chelsea tenants Mr. Busby described as "rich, black sheep children. I never knew her name." The rent was originally 720, he said, "but it's been lowered to 600 something" since the Chelsea's owners have been rehabbing the place and scrubbing it of its artsy patina, an arduous and complicated process, during which it was discovered that Mr. Busby was paying too much rent. (His apartment falls under the city's rent guidelines.) Post renovation, a few original tenants remain, as Mr. Busby said, "old gargoyles like me hanging around in the corners." Nearly a year ago, he fell and fractured a hip. Other medical horrors ensued. As his injuries have curtailed his movements and sheltering from the spread of the novel coronavirus has shut out nearly everything else, he finds himself recalling a lesson learned from Robert Altman, the director, who cast him as a preacher in the 1978 film, "A Wedding." "I was so scared, I could hardly breathe," Mr. Busby remembered. "Altman said, 'Be grateful for anyone or any thing that makes you this nervous. Don't focus on the fear, focus on the energy, and use that as your raw material.'" At 8:45 a.m., she turns on her laptop; at 6 p.m. sharp, she shuts it down, puts it in its case, puts the case in her hallway, and then takes a walk through Central Park, enacting a reverse "commute." Once home, she takes a bath to separate the evening from the day, puts on a podcast, lights a candle. Even closing the bathroom door, she said, makes her feel refreshed when she re enters the living space. Then she calls her parents, another cue that distances "home" life from work life. The strict routine sustains and buoys her. "Our lives in the offices have clear edges," she said. "When you work from home, everything begins to blend together and that takes a toll. Clear boundaries are key."' It was just before the blackout of 1977 that John Holmstrom, the indie cartoonist, co founder of Punk Magazine and former High Times editor and publisher, moved into his railroad flat on East 10th Street three "rooms," 350 square feet, no doors. He had been couch surfing, and living in Punk's early offices on Tenth Avenue, among other berths, before inheriting the lease on this apartment from two friends: Robin Rothman, who was a girlfriend of Joey Ramone's, and a singer who worked the door at CBGBs who went by the name deerfrance. The rent at the time was 120, and Mr. Holmstrom could barely scratch it together. (It is currently 622.30.) Someone had painted the walls with what Mr. Holmstrom described as "hippie graffiti, those dopey fluorescent swirls," and it took him years to get it off. Otherwise the place was just right for a 24 year old cartoonist, just a mattress on the floor and not much else. The place is standard tenement issue: 12 feet wide, bathtub in the kitchen, a water closet and no room for a proper stove or fridge. Mr. Holmstrom, now 66, cooks with a hot plate and toaster oven, and he has graduated to a bunk bed, sleeping on the bottom and using the top for storage. His collections (comic books, DVDs and CDs) spill out of the shelves along the walls. Five years ago, Mr. Holmstrom donated his own work to the Beinecke Library at Yale, and gained a bit of floor space, he said. The place's lack of doors have inhibited cohabitation, Mr. Holmstrom said. No matter. Cartoonists, he pointed out, are solitary creatures. "Even before this thing," he said. "I would go weeks seeing only grocery clerks because I was drawing. I've always worked out of my apartment. Though I loved walking around. Now I'm being good, I'm old. My sister sent me a mask, but I'm not going out much. A few trips to the Food Emporium on 14th Street." The delis that line First and Second Avenue are closed up, he said, with chains on their doors, an eerie sight. "Now," he added, "I'm cleaning my apartment, thinning the herd." "There's a saying: You learn the most from either traveling the world and living in different places, or staying put and watching the river go by," he said. "I've been watching the river go by." Social distancing has always been a part of the couple's dynamic, if not their lexicon. Together 25 years, Ms. Avery, 51, manager of the editorial department of an advertising agency, and Mr. Sispoidis, 54, an executive coach and artist, have spent the last six years in this nest like apartment on Gay Street. "You have to be supernaturally quiet," said Ms. Avery, to give each other space or if someone is sleeping. They share a twin bed that doubles as a sofa (she is 5 foot 2 and he is 5 foot 8). They can hear each other chewing from across the room, a particular irritant for Ms. Avery. She will shoot her husband a baleful glance, and he'll say, "I know, I know. I'll try to stop breathing now." Mr. Sispoidis has always worked from home. Ms. Avery has only recently been doing so. The place is so small that Mr. Sispoidis has been taking phone calls in the bathroom. Mr. Sispoidis has always worked from home; Ms. Avery has only recently been doing so. More compromises, more social distancing. Mr. Sispoidis uses the tiny bathroom as his office when he has calls, many of which can last for hours. Ms. Avery retreats there at night, for Zoom parties with friends from college. And they have developed a signaling system to create a zone of silence for the long stretches when Ms. Avery is at the kitchen counter with her laptop, and Mr. Sispoidis is not cloistered in the bathroom but sitting three feet away from her on the sofa. While the apartment is largely tchotchke free, Ms. Avery and Mr. Sispoidis have a few Peanuts figurines on display a three inch Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown, Christmas ornaments they keep out year round as good luck charms. Lately, they have taken on new roles. "Having the energy to get upset is a luxury," Lauren Pine was saying the other day. "It's what I think of now as a two legged problem." In November 2017, Ms. Pine, a clinical nurse at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was riding her bike on the Lower East Side when a garbage truck knocked her down and dragged her 20 feet. She lost her leg, her hip and her job, which she adored. Now 52, Ms. Pine has found within herself reserves of patience, and these have been serving her well since the virus closed the city. "Sitting in an Access A Ride for two hours was not unheard of and as much as I hated it, it has tempered me to tolerate a lot, and not be a narcissistic freak," she said of life pre coronavirus. Now, it may take her two hours to provision from C Town, the grocery store a block away from the rent stabilized railroad flat near Tompkins Square Park where she has lived for the last 23 years, for which she pays 1,270. Armed with a backpack and crutches, it's a ballet that begins inside the 400 square foot apartment: on goes the prosthetic leg, then the gloves and a mask. Back home with her groceries, the dance is reversed and amplified: The gloves come off and are discarded; on go new gloves, and out come the wipes to unpack the groceries. "I think of the virus as glitter in a nightclub," Ms. Pine said. "You might not have worn it going in, but it's everywhere when you come out." Until her accident, her apartment was a "storage unit," Ms. Pine said. "I slept here. I hardly ever cooked. I was scared to entertain because it was too messy. I'm not a great homemaker." Her gas bill was so low that Con Edison once called to make sure everything was working. "People who say they're bored, in my world that's an immediate shunning offense," Ms Pine said. "Do something. Volunteer. Take an online course," as she is doing. Ms. Pine was particularly amused by the toilet paper panic. Another two legged problem. "You don't have to go to Whole Foods. You can find toilet paper at every bodega. People don't seem to know how New York works."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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The elite, majestic museums of Manhattan never had to worry about competing for city money with the small fry arts groups of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. Those organizations, hardly world famous or well connected, had to accept scraps while the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center and other giants enjoyed a relative feast of resources under the city's century old formula for financing cultural institutions. But this two tiered system of haves and have nots is poised for its biggest transformation in decades. Mayor Bill de Blasio and his lieutenants are deep into a re examination of New York City's 178 million arts budget and other cultural resources to try to give a higher profile and perhaps more taxpayer money to smaller institutions in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The prospect of a new approach, with an emphasis on greater equity, has some major arts organizations fearful they will end up with less of the municipal funding pie, while more marginalized groups are hopeful about finally receiving more. The de Blasio administration's intentions and vision will become clearer with the release of the city's first "cultural plan," which represents the mayor's big chance to put his stamp on the artistic landscape of the city and counteract his reputation for caring little about culture. City Hall declined to comment. The mayor's team is to submit the cultural plan to the City Council by July 1. Next week, in a prelude of sorts, city officials will release a summary of the views of some 20,000 residents who have commented about culture during public meetings on the plan during the past year throughout city's the five boroughs. Jimmy Van Bramer, majority leader of the City Council and chairman of its Cultural Affairs Committee, said he helped spearhead legislation to create the plan and identify inequities in order to establish "more funding opportunities for small, emerging, community based nonprofit cultural organizations." But in a recent interview, he acknowledged a potential unintended consequence. "There is great concern out there that somehow folks would have funding pulled as a result of this process," he said, adding, "I don't think you need to take from one to give to another, to rob Peter to pay Paul." Tom Finkelpearl, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs, said the plan would not necessarily hurt larger groups. "There will be something that says there are parts of New York City that are under resourced, and that's going to be something we want to address," Mr. Finkelpearl said. "It's also going to say that there is great recognition on the part of this administration of the value of major cultural institutions. These are very important, not just for tourism which we do care about but also to the spirit of the city." The city's re evaluation is taking place as arts organizations nationwide struggle to cut costs and raise revenue amid President Trump's threatened elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, dwindling philanthropic dollars and increasing competition for donors and audiences. In the face of potential cutbacks, major cultural institutions like New York City Center are trying to make clear how much the city's funding matters to them. "The support we receive from the city is essential for us," Arlene Shuler, City Center's president and chief executive, said, "to carry out our responsibilities as caretakers of this exquisite landmark building that houses one of New York City's pre eminent cultural institutions." City Center is one of the 33 arts groups in city owned buildings, on city owned land, or both, that make up the Cultural Institutions Group. These institutions collectively receive about 63 percent of the 178.3 million municipal arts budget. The Metropolitan Museum receives the largest annual allocation, 26 million, while the Bronx County Historical Society receives the least, 184,072. The remaining 37 percent of the budget is distributed through a competitive application process among nearly 1,000 organizations that are not in or on city property. Less prominent arts organizations, some of them also part of the Cultural Institutions Group, say this might be an opportunity for them to catch up a little. "We are serving an underserved community in southeast Queens; we are what the cultural plan is all about," said Cathy Hung, executive director of the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, which will depend on the city to cover about half of its 1.3 million costs next year. "In this neighborhood, we don't have the private resources I don't have the corporations and foundations and individuals," Ms. Hung added. "However you flip the coin, we are always on the wrong side." But that doesn't mean larger organizations are financially healthy, arts managers say. The Met's allocation, for example, represents just a small fraction of its 332 million annual operating budget. Struggling with a deficit, the Met formally asked permission from the city last week to raise revenue by charging admission to visitors from outside the state, an idea Mayor de Blasio supports. Such revenue could conceivably compensate for a loss in city funds. Anne Pasternak, the new director of the Brooklyn Museum, recently said that she would consider a similar admission policy. Because the Met and the Brooklyn Museum are part of the Cultural Institutions Group, such changes must be approved by the city. Some say the city should focus on trying to increase its arts budget over all, so that every organization is fortified. "What is needed is more money there is simply not enough," said Karen Brooks Hopkins, president emeritus of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who is on the Citizens' Advisory Committee appointed by the mayor to consult on the cultural plan. "You see other cities like London making a big investment in culture," she added. "It's not about fighting over crumbs; it's about expanding the pot." In an indication of the mayor's sympathies, the city used a 10 million increase in the culture budget last year to give smaller arts organizations a 12 percent increase and larger ones a 6 percent increase. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which financed the cultural plan's research, said this kind of redistribution makes sense. While organizations like New York City Ballet, a Cultural Institutions Group member on whose board Mr. Walker serves, are important for tourism and other parts of the city's economy, smaller arts groups outside Manhattan are also crucial, he said, and have a harder time. "Larger organizations have more capacity to raise private funds" compared with arts groups "in low income communities of color and in places like Staten Island," he said. "If culture in New York only means large, rich organizations, then we lose the lifeblood, which are the small, innovative, entrepreneurial, off the beaten track kind of organizations with small budgets that the city should also be funding," Mr. Walker said. "If it's not possible for those organizations to thrive anymore, New York will have all of the features of an unequal city." The results of this re examination period won't be felt right away; Mr. Finkelpearl noted that the cultural plan will come out after the city has finalized next year's budget. But because the city's cultural funds are finite, the process is expected to affect how much public support arts organizations will be able to count on in years to come. "I understand that resources are limited," Mr. Van Bramer said. "But budgets are statements of values, budgets are about priorities."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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I remember the first time I ever heard about net neutrality. It was around 2004 or 2005, and when the full idea was explained to me hey, let's prevent phone and cable companies from influencing the content we see online I was surprised there was even a fight about the idea. It seemed obvious that the internet's great promise was that it operated outside the purview of existing communications monopolies. Because phone and cable companies couldn't easily dictate what happened online, the internet was exploding in dozens of genuinely new ideas. Among those back then were blogs, Skype, file sharing, YouTube, Friendster, Netflix ideas that scrambled our sense of what was possible in media and communication, and, in the process, posed existential threats to the established giants. Other than the phone and cable companies themselves, I couldn't see why anyone might oppose the simple premise of protecting the environment that had made all these things possible. Did they hate clean water, too? Yet a decade and a half later as Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, buries net neutrality alive with his repeal of its rules, an act that took effect Monday I'm no longer surprised that there was a fight over this. Instead, I'm surprised that net neutrality lasted this long. Activists are still fighting to resurrect it, and while they are winning some battles after all, net neutrality remains extremely popular I'm increasingly resigned to their long run defeat. Net neutrality was too good for us. And even if rules are restored, the notion that the internet should afford at least a minimally competitive landscape for new entrants now seems as antiquated as Friendster. What's driving this view is what has happened over the last decade, which hasn't been too kind to disruptive competition online. By the time Tom Wheeler, an F.C.C. chief under President Barack Obama, handed down rules to protect neutrality in 2015, we had already strayed quite far from the internet of the early 2000s, where upstarts ruled our lives. The very idea that large companies can't dictate what happens online is laughable now. Large companies, today, pretty much are the internet. In this world, net neutrality didn't have a chance. There's a misunderstanding that the repeal of net neutrality will result in immediate and drastic change online. That won't happen. With lawsuits and legislation pending, with the media still paying attention and with activists poised to pounce on obvious infractions, broadband companies are going to be extremely careful, in the short run, to be on their best behavior. The internet won't be slower tomorrow. You won't be blocked from certain sites. You aren't going to be charged more. But as I argued last fall, a vibrant network doesn't die all at once. Instead it grows weaker over time, with innovative start ups finding it ever more difficult to fight entrenched incumbents. As I've noted often in the last few years, big companies have been crushing small ones over and over again for much of the last decade. One lesson from everything that has happened online recently Facebook, the Russians and Cambridge Analytica; bots and misinformation everywhere is that, in the absence stringent rules and enforcement, everything on the internet turns sour. Removing the last barriers to unfair competition will only hasten that process. It's not going to be pretty. "History shows us that companies that have the technical capacity to do things, the business incentive to do them and the legal right they will take advantage of what is made available to them," said Jessica Rosenworcel, an F.C.C. commissioner and a Democrat, who voted against the repeal of net neutrality last year. By repealing neutrality rules, the government has just given our online overlords that legal right, she cautioned. "Now they can block websites and censor online content," Ms. Rosenworcel said. "That doesn't make me feel good and if you rely on the internet to consume or create, it shouldn't make you feel good, either."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The pianist Igor Levit near his home in Berlin. He has released the sprawling album "Life," and comes to New York for a recital next week. After a streak of ambitious recordings, the pianist Igor Levit didn't have plans for his next album. "I felt like I said what I needed to say, and now I needed time off," Mr. Levit, 31, said in an interview this week. "Then my best friend died." That friend, the artist Hannes Malte Mahler, was killed in an accident while biking in 2016. The tragedy drove Mr. Levit back to the recording studio for his new album, "Life," which he called "the most forthcoming thing I've ever done." "It's not therapy; it didn't make anything better," Mr. Levit said of the album. "But this felt necessary to me." The heart of "Life" is "A Mensch," a piece Mr. Rzweski wrote for a friend who was in the hospital and something Mr. Levit and Hannes Malte Mahler had heard together in concert. The rest of the album, however, changed 30 to 40 times before Mr. Levit landed on a final selection. What he came up with is perhaps the most profound achievement yet in a young but already important career; "Life" befits an artist who earlier this year won the prestigious 300,000 Gilmore Artist Award. Particularly stunning are the transcriptions, including Busoni's of Liszt's mammoth Fantasia and Fugue on the chorale "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" (which was in turn adapted from Meyerbeer's opera "Le Prophete"). Liszt's solo piano version of the Solemn March to the Holy Grail from Wagner's "Parsifal" is both a quiet prayer and a showstopper. It's a triumph of transcription, with the power to conjure a cathedral with only two hands and dynamics that rarely exceed mezzo piano. The notes are not difficult to hit, but it takes extreme control to achieve the magisterial quality of Mr. Levit's recording. He said that when he recorded the "Parsifal" transcription, early one morning at a church in Berlin, where he lives, he paired it with Mr. Evans's "Peace Piece," which serves as the album's life affirming conclusion a message, Mr. Levit said, that "as long as you're alive, the sun will rise and you have to keep going." That dogged optimism, he added, is a reflection of "who I am right now." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. What should we read into the fact that so much of this album is transcriptions? Life goes on; pieces survive beyond any one person. It's very much the idea of free music: something the composer gives to the musician and says, "This is the musical text, but it's yours to liberate." Then the text can be used in new ways, so that the notes on paper become music again. And Busoni is one of my heroes. Actually, after hearing all the Busoni on this record, I have to ask: When will you play his concerto? I did once, as a student. And we are in conversations about it. I promise you, I will play it again. But you didn't choose Busoni's transcription of the Bach Chaconne; you picked Brahms's, for the left hand. I wanted to play the Busoni, but it didn't feel right. It's more of a concert piece, but the Brahms is very naked and pure. And I wanted the piece to be as pure as possible. I'm using my own words, but Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann that it was impossible to understand how this man put so much everything into one piece for this little instrument the violin . I very much agree with that. The Brahms is I think almost skeleton like; I wanted it to be that way. I'm also thinking of a friend who called me and said that if one human being can do this with one left hand, what can we all do with one small effort? What goes into your performance of the "Parsifal" transcription? I can't play this piece twice in a row. It hurts like hell, like a needle in your back. You have to be incredibly physically tense and relaxed at the same time. If you move around too much, it ruins your flow. After six or seven minutes, some muscles start burning. I can't relax in this piece; it's just so controlled and measured. That's surprising, given how meditative it sounds. You don't realize how hard it is, but it is artistically, emotionally one of the most demanding things to play. Achieving a prayer like atmosphere and having absolute control of the sound, line, tempo, everything it is really, really hard. I can never really let go in the "Parsifal," not even when it gets really loud, bell like and cathedral like. It's not like the "Liebestod," where you can let go. There are no waves; it's just like a steady line. And it is, of course, overwhelming. How do you wind down after playing something like that? Laughing Can you please not ask me that? The arc is wide, from sleep to alcohol: whatever feels right. It's not easy, for sure.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Gary Clark Jr. was born in the wrong era. In the 1960s or '70s, he could easily have forged a career as a first rank guitar hero: a Texan blues rocker who can step on any stage and bring the place down with a searing guitar solo. Prospects are different in the 21st century. The idea of a guitar hero was thoroughly undermined by punk and then pushed aside by increasingly computerized pop, dance music and hip hop. For decades, vintage style blues and the flesh on strings virtuosity it requires have been shunted toward nostalgia, preservationism and the die hard realms of Americana. In 2019, Clark is an exceedingly rare figure, a bluesman who has a major label recording contract and a worldwide audience, one he has built by tearing up stage after stage, show after show. While his songwriting has lagged behind his performing, he's well aware of his strengths; he has alternated studio albums with live ones. Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder. On "This Land," his third major label studio album, his songwriting has caught up with his playing. It has something to do with experience; now 35, Clark has been performing since his teens. It has something to do with the power of contrariness: that is, Clark's determination to deliver the raw, analog, spontaneous opposite of crisply quantized digital content. And it has a lot to do with America in 2019, where division, frustration and seething anger can use an outlet with the historical resonance and emotional depth of the blues.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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When choreographers talk of putting dancers on pedestals, they're often speaking metaphorically about attempts to idealize bodies. But Milka Djordjevich is putting three dancers onto an actual pedestal in "MASS," her new collaboration with the composer Chris Peck. The constantly changing bodily shapes will be seen as moving sculptures in a surrounding sea of darkness. Far from treating her dancers as idealized figures, Ms. Djordjevich often has them deliberately stumble in space. She says that she is interested in choreography that allows room for error and that she likes to blur distinctions between conventional dance and nondance movements. Her title, "MASS," takes on more than one meaning: It can refer to the physical bulk of the sculptures and to the fact that the dancers sing a complex score inspired by various forms of liturgical music. (8 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea; 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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China is using its status as home to the world's largest population of internet users to help get what it wants outside of its borders. SHANGHAI Within its digital borders, China has long censored what its people read and say online. Now, it is increasingly going beyond its own online realms to police what people and companies are saying about it all over the world. For years, China has exerted digital control with a system of internet filters known as the Great Firewall, which allows authorities to limit what people see online. To broaden its censorship efforts, Beijing is venturing outside the Great Firewall and paying more attention to what its citizens are saying on non Chinese apps and services. As part of that shift, Beijing has at times pressured foreign companies like Google and Facebook, which are both blocked in China, to take down certain content. At other times, it has bypassed foreign companies entirely and instead directly pushed users of global social media to encourage self censorship. This effort is accelerating as President Xi Jinping consolidates his power. The Chinese leadership is expected to officially abolish term limits at a meeting that begins next week, giving Mr. Xi outsize authority over the country's direction. Zhang Guanghong recently discovered the changing landscape for technology firsthand. Mr. Zhang, a Chinese human rights activist, decided last fall to share an article with a group of friends in and outside China that criticized China's president. To do so, he used WhatsApp, an American app owned by Facebook that almost nobody uses in China. In September, Mr. Zhang was detained in China; he is expected to soon be charged with insulting China's government and the Communist Party. The evidence, according to his lawyer, included printouts of what Mr. Zhang shared and said in the WhatsApp group. That information was likely obtained by hacking his phone or through a spy in his group chat, said China tech experts, without involving WhatsApp. Mr. Zhang's case is one of the first known examples of Chinese authorities using conversations from a non Chinese chat app as evidence and it sends a warning to those on the American platform, which is encrypted, that they could also be held accountable for what's said there. As Mr. Xi asserts himself and the primacy of Chinese geopolitical power, China has also become more comfortable projecting Mr. Xi's vision of a tightly controlled internet. Beijing had long been content to block foreign internet companies and police the homegrown alternatives that sprouted up to take their place, but it is now directly pressuring individuals or requesting that companies cooperate with its online censorship efforts. That puts many American tech giants in a tricky position, especially those that want access to China's vast internet market of more than 700 million strong. In the past, these companies have typically gone to great lengths to gain a toehold in China. Facebook created a censorship tool it did not use and released an app in the country without putting its name to it. Apple is moving data storage for its Chinese customers into China and last year took down software that skirts China's internet blocks from its China App Store. Google recently said it would open a new artificial intelligence lab in the country. Often, these companies have little recourse when pressured for help by Beijing. Going to the American government could set off retaliation from China, so many have sought to navigate the situation on their own. "I personally am not sure what the solution is for these companies," said Mr. Rosenzweig. "I don't see a good answer because the Chinese government is really putting them between a rock and a hard place." China leaned heavily on major internet companies when Guo Wengui, a Chinese tycoon in self imposed exile, went on Facebook and YouTube to accuse a number of Chinese officials of corruption. Chinese officials last year complained to Google, which owns YouTube, and Facebook, according to people familiar with the events who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Facebook suspended Mr. Guo's account. In a statement, the company said the account published the personal information of others without their consent, which violated the platform's policies. A spokeswoman declined to comment on whether Beijing's complaints played a role. The Chinese government asked Google's services to take down 2,290 items in the first half of last year, according to the company's statistics. That was more than triple the number it requested in the second half of 2016, which itself had set a record. Content related to terrorism made up a substantial portion of the material China asked Google to take down, according to its data. The majority of China's recent takedown requests focused on videos on YouTube, the data showed. A Google spokesman said the company would not comment further on specific takedown requests. Chinese officials may have even bigger censorship ambitions. At a major Chinese internet conference last year, Mei Jianming, a Chinese antiterrorism expert, said Beijing should put more pressure on companies like Twitter. The goal would be to get them to change their terms of service so they could restrict posts by groups that Beijing considers subversive, like the World Uyghur Congress, which seeks self determination for the people of the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Mr. Mei called for a crackdown on tweets that "defame the party, Chinese leaders, and related national strategies." Sometimes, Chinese people also push foreign companies to censor themselves in the country, nurtured by sentiments on China's propaganda channels. Daimler, the German carmaker, apologized in February after its Mercedes Benz brand posted an inspirational quote on Facebook's Instagram that it attributed to the Dalai Lama. China's government views the Tibetan Buddhist leader as a champion of independence for Tibet, and Mercedes Benz faced withering criticism from Chinese online users who shared those views. Mercedes Benz erased the post even though few people in China could see it because Chinese authorities block Instagram. Still, criticism continued. The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, branded Mercedes Benz an "enemy of the people." China is Mercedes Benz's biggest single car market, accounting for about one quarter of sales. "China is getting stronger," said Lokman Tsui, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a former Google employee. "They're getting more confident in putting pressure on these platforms." Daimler apologized this month after its Mercedes Benz brand posted an inspirational quote on Facebook's Instagram that it attributed to the Dalai Lama. China is also requiring individuals to police what they say on global social media. In a prominent conviction last year of a human rights activist, Lee Ming che, the Chinese police used writing that he had posted on Facebook from Taiwan as evidence against him. "The fact that China is punishing people for critical content published outside China to audiences not based in China is of course a concern," said Mr. Rosenzweig. The case of Mr. Zhang, the Chinese individual under scrutiny for what he posted on WhatsApp, could indicate a further extension of China's reach. The Chinese police have previously focused on activists for what they say on foreign social media, but Mr. Zhang's case seems to be one of the first in which someone has been charged for spreading articles on WhatsApp. Because WhatsApp is encrypted and run by a foreign company, it is generally considered a safer platform than local messaging app WeChat, which has for years been closely monitored by Chinese authorities. Mr. Zhang's lawyer, Sui Muqing, said he was surprised when the police presented him with printouts of articles and comments from Mr. Zhang. "They didn't get the information from him, but they have it," Mr. Sui said. "That was what we found so weird. None of us knew how they were capable of getting that data and whether WhatsApp has become unsafe." Experts said the information was likely gleaned from somebody within Mr. Zhang's WhatsApp group or by accessing Mr. Zhang's phone directly, not by hacking WhatsApp. Chinese officials formally blocked WhatsApp in China about the time of Mr. Zhang's detention. A spokeswoman for WhatsApp said Chinese authorities did not have backdoor access to its encrypted messages. China's Ministry of Public Security did not respond to requests for comment. "When I talk about technology and the internet, people normally pine for them and look forward to a future that will promote liberalization," Mr. Sui said. "But people neglect the fact that modern authoritarianism also rises with the development of technology, which makes wider and deeper control possible."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Theatergoers impatient for the full on hedonism of summer weekends can experience an undiluted foretaste of such ripe pleasure in the early moments of "Cabin," Sean Donovan's darkly lyrical portrait of a sexual triangle, which runs through June 8 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn. We have been watching two seemingly listless young men, dressed in the kind of hot weather wear that slides off quickly, through a bank of shaded windows. Then one of them, Stewart (Tyler Ashley), puts on a pair of high heels and a recording of Liza Minnelli singing "I Gotcha," and energy rips through the languor like a thunderstorm. Mr. Ashley has here to eternity legs that slide, vault and scissor over furniture. Paul (Brandon Washington), the room's other occupant, can't help joining the dance, and part of you surely wants to, as well. (The choreography is by Mr. Donovan, Mr. Ashley and Mr. Washington.) These boys are sky high, possibly on Molly (they keep drinking water) or possibly just on endorphins. But whether you spell it with or without a capital letter, ecstasy is what's being transmitted.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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For once, the conventional wisdom was right: But, as usual, the conventional wisdom skims the surface, focusing on the obvious: his steering of the court toward a center comfortably aligned with public opinion, and protecting it from an institutionally destructive alliance with a president who assumed the court would do his bidding. I'm among those who celebrate these outcomes, and I don't in any way mean to diminish them. Rather, I want to suggest that the 2019 20 Supreme Court term looks even more consequential, for the country and the chief justice, when his triumph is seen in full, in its multiple dimensions. To do that requires looking closely at the three religion cases decided at the end of the term. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court held that a state that offers a subsidy to private schools can't exclude religious schools from the benefit. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey Berru, the court ruled that the federal laws that protect workers from discrimination don't apply to the lay employees of religious schools who have a role in "educating and forming students in the faith." And in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, the court excused employers, including corporations, with a "sincerely held" religious or "moral" objection to birth control from having to take even a modest arm's length step that results in an employee receiving coverage for contraception, to which the Affordable Care Act entitles her. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in only the first of these cases; he assigned the opinion in the second to Justice Samuel Alito and the third to Justice Clarence Thomas. While the first two involve the First Amendment's guarantee of the "free exercise" of religion, the third, concerning a rule put in place by the Trump administration, is not based on the Constitution but rather on administrative law and a federal statute. But the decisions' commonalities are more important than their differences. All three elevate religion to a position of privilege, short circuiting the statutory rights of employees or, in Montana's case, overriding an explicit state constitutional barrier against public financial aid to parochial schools. And all three go to the heart of John Roberts's project. By "project" I don't mean something nefarious. To the contrary, it's not surprising that the ambitious and accomplished people who make it to the Supreme Court have some goal or goals in mind, some way they would like to move the law or, in the case of liberal justices in recent decades, to prevent it from moving in an unwanted direction. For Chief Justice Warren Burger, the project was rolling back the criminal procedure revolution over which his predecessor, Earl Warren, had presided. For Chief Justice William Rehnquist, an Arizonan who came to Washington in midlife, it was, among other things, elevating the role of the states in the federal system. Federalism as such is not much of a motivator for his successor, Chief Justice Roberts, who has spent his entire career comfortably ensconced inside the Beltway. Nor does he, unlike Justice Alito, appear driven to cut back on criminal defendants' rights at every opportunity. After 15 years of watching John Roberts as chief justice, I've identified two main projects. One concerns race: getting the government out of the business of counting by race by rejecting both affirmative action that increases opportunity for racial minorities and federally policed guardrails to prevent the suppression of minority votes. His early years on the job reflected this deep commitment, first with the Parents Involved case in 2006, overturning efforts by two school districts to maintain integration through race conscious school assignment measures, and, six years later, with Shelby County v. Holder, which cut the heart out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The other project is religion: giving religion a place at the public table long reserved for secular society; removing barriers to religious expression in the public square; insisting on organized religion's entitlement to public benefits as a matter of equal treatment while at the same time according religion special treatment in the form of relief from the regulations that everyone else must live by. Benefits without burdens, equal treatment morphing into special treatment. This term's trio of religion decisions carried the project into new territory. The chief justice's opinion in the Montana case, Espinoza, was particularly eyebrow raising, because when the case reached the court, there was no longer a tax credit program in place for any nonpublic school. That the program no longer existed for anyone would seem to make a claim of anti religious discrimination implausible at best. Not so, the chief justice wrote for the 5 to 4 majority. He said the program's cancellation "cannot be defended as a neutral policy decision" because it resulted from a decision of the Montana Supreme Court that the state Constitution's "no aid" provision meant that religious schools could not be included in the program. Because the state court said it couldn't effectively rewrite the statute, it invalidated the entire program. But Chief Justice Roberts found this application of the "no aid" provision to be itself a violation of the federal Free Exercise Clause, amounting to "discrimination against religious schools and the families whose children attend them." Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in dissent that "it appears that the court has declared that once Montana created a tax subsidy, it forfeited the right to eliminate it if doing so would harm religion." She continued, "This is a remarkable result, all the more so because the court strains to reach it." There is a great deal to be said about each of these three cases, much more than this column can accommodate. I'll limit myself to one additional observation, about the Little Sisters of the Poor decision that upheld the complete opt out from the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate that the Trump administration had offered employers with religious or undefined "moral" objections. Anyone who hasn't dug at least part way into the weeds of this complex and long running case (nine years and counting) is likely to have only a dim idea of what was actually at stake, with the confusion compounded by public opinion polls like the one I linked to in the first paragraph of this column. This poll, and others like it, offered a binary choice: "Employers should or should not be forced to cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans." More than 52 percent of respondents said they agreed with the Supreme Court's answer, described in the poll as "should not." But that wasn't the choice. Nobody was forcing employers with religious objections to cover contraception. Following the Supreme Court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case in 2014, the Obama administration offered religious employers an accommodation under which all they had to do was inform their insurance carrier that they objected to covering contraception. The insurer would then eliminate the coverage from the policy and assume the obligation of providing the coverage directly to the female employees, with no involvement by the employer. Ah, but the doctrine of complicity: Along with other religious organizations, the Little Sisters, an order of nuns who hire lay employees for the nursing homes they run, objected that this accommodation was insufficient to protect them from complicity in their employees' sin of using birth control. Litigation resumed, and the whole question was left hanging as President Barack Obama left office. The Trump administration promptly replaced the offered accommodation with a complete exemption, expanding the category of eligible employers and extending the exemption to "moral" objectors. (The court upheld the undefined moral opt out without analysis, as if "religious" and "moral" are synonyms.) It seems to me that the religion cases represent a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts on a different, deeper level than do the cases that left many liberals cheering at the end of the term. Consider three of the most prominent of those cases: the decisions that brought L.G.B.T.Q. individuals into the category of employees protected against workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; that blocked President Trump from ending the DACA program that enables young undocumented immigrants, the Dreamers, to work legally and protects them from deportation; and that struck down a Louisiana law aimed at driving abortion clinics out of business. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the Dreamers case, joined Justice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion in the L.G.B.T.Q. case and wrote a concurring opinion in the abortion case. While hailing each of those decisions, I think it's still possible to take a cleareyed look at them and to put each in a category that I call "yes, but." Yes, employers now can't fire someone for being gay or transgender, but we have yet to see the carve outs that the religious right will demand and to which the court may well accede in subsequent cases. Yes, the president can't end the DACA program in such a clumsy way, but the decision offers a road map for how to do it better. Yes, the Louisiana law replicated a Texas statute that the court had already rejected, but the Chief Justice Roberts was careful to leave the door open to continued attacks on the right to abortion. The religion decisions, by contrast, consist of cases that I would call "yes, and." While the other decisions went no further than necessary to achieve their result, the religion cases went considerably further than they needed to, each one taking and running with one of the court's recent applicable precedents. For example, the Montana schools decision built on a three year old opinion by Chief Justice Roberts in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, holding that Missouri could not exclude a church run preschool from eligibility to apply for a state grant to resurface its playground. The church's exclusion, under a provision of the Missouri Constitution, imposed "a penalty on the free exercise of religion," the chief justice wrote then. In a footnote, he added that the court was addressing only "express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing." It didn't take long for the no discrimination doctrine of Trinity Lutheran to migrate to the heartland of church state controversy in America, public financing of religious education. The Our Lady of Guadalupe School case, which stripped anti discrimination protection from elementary teachers at two Catholic schools, also built on an earlier opinion by Chief Justice Roberts in which the court first endorsed a judicial doctrine called the ministerial exception (as in exception from federal civil rights laws.) In the earlier case, Hosanna Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. E.E.O.C., the teacher who claimed discrimination, while not an ordained minister, had received extensive religious training and served in what the Lutheran church deemed a "called" capacity. By contrast, the two elementary schoolteachers in the new case were ordinary classroom teachers with minimal training who taught the required religion classes out of a workbook. The court extended the ministerial exception to them and, by implication, to all parochial school teachers and perhaps other school employees as well. (One of the teachers was fired after she requested time off to be treated for breast cancer; she died while her Americans With Disabilities Act case was pending.) In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor objected that in contrast to the detailed analysis in the Hosanna Tabor case, the court this time "all but abandons judicial review" and "has just traded legal analysis for a rubber stamp." The Little Sisters decision represents a blatant bait and switch. Six years ago, when the 5 to 4 majority in the Hobby Lobby case held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act required the Obama administration to offer an accommodation for religious employers that did not want to pay for insurance coverage for contraceptives, Justice Alito's opinion for the court was reassuring about the consequences. The effect "would be precisely zero," he said, adding that female employees of the objecting companies "would still be entitled to all F.D.A. approved contraceptives without cost sharing." Of course, that assurance became the basis for the religious employers' resistance to the accommodation on the ground of complicity. In any event, no such reassurance was forthcoming this time. In her dissenting opinion last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that 580,000 women work for employers eligible for the exemption. "Of cardinal significance," she wrote, "the exemption contains no alternative mechanism to ensure affected women's continued access to contraceptive coverage." The government, Justice Ginsburg said, "may not benefit religious adherents at the expense of the rights of third parties." Put that in the past tense. Label it the Roberts project and call it a triumph. In June 2006, as his first term was nearing an end, I ran into Chief Justice Roberts at the court. There aren't many questions a person can appropriately ask a Supreme Court justice, so I went with the obvious: "What are your summer plans?" He had a pile of biographies of chief justices that he planned to read, he said. And then with a wry smile he added, "You know, most of them were failures." 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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The year of "Two Plains a Fancy" is 1893. The place is an unspecified section of Colorado, near mountains. The people are neither pioneers nor lawbreakers, but three seekers of some satisfactory hot springs. There's Alta Mariah Sophronia (Marianna McClellan), who almost immediately admits to the man who rented her a horse that she's a con woman, and that the stone she's given him in payment does not have magical powers. There's Ozanne Le Perrier (Laetitia Dosch), a French geologist who will prove to have a different, more European conception of nude bathing than her companions do. And finally, there's the dandy, Milton Tingling (Benjamin Crotty), who for his journey has packed a truly staggering number of neck scarves. It is from his repository of fashion wisdom that the film's title derives.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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IT'S no surprise that car accidents, speeding tickets and where you live all affect how much you pay for automobile insurance. But consumer groups say that other, apparently unrelated, factors are unfairly being used to set rates. Two organizations, the Consumer Federation of America and the New York Public Interest Research Group, have released separate reports contending that the factors insurance companies are using to determine rates like educational level and occupation are detrimental to consumers, especially to low income customers. And J. Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner and now director of insurance for the consumer federation, said insurers were increasingly using pricing models to raise the cost of auto insurance for some groups of people who are unlikely to change insurers, even if their premiums go up. But insurance companies say any factors they use in determining rates are approved by state officials and that factors like education level and occupation are "highly predictive" of which groups are more likely to make more frequent and more severe claims. The federal government is now entering the debate for the first time. The Federal Insurance Office, created in the Treasury Department in 2010 as part of the Dodd Frank Act's overhaul of the financial system, announced this month that it planned to study and monitor the affordability of auto insurance for low and moderate income consumers. Legally, insurance companies cannot consider income, race or religion in determining premiums, but the New York Public Interest Research Group contends that permissible questions about occupation and education level are being used "as surrogates for income," said Andy Morrison, a consumer advocate at the organization. Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade organization for insurance companies, said, "In general, there's a trend to use more factors," but he said that it benefited consumers. More data available online about all of us, he said, along with increasingly sophisticated software to interpret those details, gives insurance companies better information than ever in targeting insurance rates. That is true, Mr. Morrison said, but in his view, it is not a good development. His group's analysis found that some of New York's largest auto insurers charge higher rates to drivers with less education and nonprofessional, nonmanagerial jobs. The research was simple: Mr. Morrison went to the websites of large auto insurers like Geico, Progressive and Liberty Mutual and typed in identical information for a single 30 year old woman when seeking a rate quote. He changed only education level and occupation. He found that a bank teller with a high school degree would pay on average 18 percent more than a bank executive with a college degree. A high school graduate who worked in retailing could pay 41 percent more annually than that bank executive. "A person with a lower income with a clean driving record might pay more than a person with a higher income with a poor driving record," Mr. Morrison said. Previous studies have shown the problem is not limited to New York. After the report was released, a New York State assemblyman, Kevin Cahill, a Democrat, held a seven hour hearing on the issue, and the state Department of Financial Services, which oversees insurance companies that do business in the state, promised to look into the matter. Most states permit insurance companies to use not only ZIP code, age, driving record, mileage and car make and model, but also marital status and gender which is good news for married people and women, who tend to file fewer claims and so pay lower rates. California, Massachusetts and Hawaii do not allow credit scores to be taken into consideration by insurance companies when determining rates. California also prohibits using educational level or occupation. The fact that California does not allow the use of education level, occupation or credit score shows "it's possible to have a rating system without these discriminatory factors," Mr. Morrison said. The average cost of auto insurance has remained steady over the last decade: In 2004, it was 842 annually per car, and this year it is estimated to be 846, according to the Insurance Information Institute. But that's not the whole picture. According to J. D. Power Associates, the number of people in 2013 hit with premium increases rose by about 2 percent over the previous year, to one in five. While more people may be offered discounts, "the flip side is that someone has to pay for those discounts," said Des Toups, managing editor of CarInsurance.com, a comparison shopping website. "Certain customers are more valuable, and companies are looking at all legally allowable ways to find the customer least likely to file a claim," Mr. Toups said. "The people who benefit are at the low risk end of the scale, and the people who don't benefit are the high end risk and it's just going to get worse." For instance, Mr. Toups said, one insurance company received a patent for a computerized system for analyzing voter registration and voter history as a means of determining risk. While voter information cannot be legally used in setting rates now, the insurance company, in its patent application, did claim that people who vote are less likely to file an auto insurance claim.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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In the four years since his musical "Hamilton" first opened at the Public Theater, Lin Manuel Miranda has become one of America's most successful and ubiquitous entertainers. There he is, serenading President Obama at the White House, triumphantly taking his show to a recovering Puerto Rico, portraying a chimney sweep in "Mary Poppins Returns." And, in a true sign that he has made it to the top of the celebrity mountain, Mr. Miranda has proactively counterpunched potential critiques by playing comedic versions of himself, most notably in "Curb Your Enthusiasm." One way we have not seen him, however, is as a lazy, gullible dumdum which is how he is portrayed in Ishmael Reed's show "The Haunting of Lin Manuel Miranda," currently at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. That's actually a pretty sympathetic take, considering how little Mr. Reed thinks of "Hamilton," which he accuses of, among other things, turning a blind eye to the Schuyler family's ownership of slaves and soft pedaling Alexander Hamilton's elitist politics and his attitude toward slavery. Mr. Reed's views are shared by a range of historians, but he is deploying them by using an art form, theater, that only sets up unflattering comparisons to Mr. Miranda's work at least judged purely in terms of form rather than content. In the play, Lin Manuel (Jesse Bueno), his senses possibly altered by Ambien, is visited by the kind of people left out of "Hamilton": slaves, Native Americans, Harriet Tubman (Roz Fox). As if in a cross between "A Christmas Carol" and a trial at The Hague's International Criminal Court, each of the witnesses lectures Miranda on the reality behind the audience friendly Broadway razzmatazz. Mr. Bueno spends a large part of the show looking befuddled as his character is being schooled.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR (2019) Stream on HBO. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Daniel Bae (Charles Melton) and Natasha Kingsley (Yara Shahidi) become sun crossed lovers who run into each other on a radiant Manhattan morning. This young adult romance follows the endearing protagonists through a lovingly shot New York City as they deal with their respective teenage drama. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott wrote that "'The Sun Is Also a Star,' like its title, doesn't benefit from overthinking. The themes serve the mood, which is charming. You could choose to believe otherwise, of course, but why be that way?" WHAT MEN WANT (2019) Stream on Netflix. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Adam Shankman directs and Taraji P. Henson stars in this gender swapped remake of Nancy Meyers's 2000 movie "What Women Want." Henson plays Ali Davis, a sports agent in Atlanta who gets passed up for a well deserved promotion in her bro centric office. But when Ali drinks a special tea from her psychic (Erykah Badu) she's suddenly able to hear what men are thinking and tries to use her newfound power to sign a basketball superstar. As Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The Times, it doesn't take a mind reader to see that Ali's co workers "are complete boneheads, working in a frat house dressed up as an office."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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A bid by a Swedish company to be the first in the United States to display weaker warnings on its tobacco product suffered a blow on Friday when a panel of experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration concluded that the proposed label did not fully convey the product's health risks. The company, Swedish Match, argues that its product, Snus (pronounced snoose) moist ground tobacco in a sachet to be tucked between the lip and the gum is far less harmful than cigarettes and that any warning label should reflect that. The company argued that the current rules, which treat all tobacco products as equally dangerous, are misleading and a disservice to the more than 40 million Americans who still smoke. But the panel of outside experts did not see it that way. Experts repeatedly said more studies were needed before they could be sure such a change was justified for a tobacco product. They said that the research the company presented did not rule out certain health risks, such as adverse effects in pregnancy, and that the proposed label did not reflect that. One panel member said there also was not enough information on the environmental impact for example, on how the used sachets would be disposed of. The panel's recommendations are not binding, but opponents of smoking said the F.D.A. would be hard pressed to approve the company's application after the tough treatment at the meeting. "F.D.A. will have no choice but to reject Swedish Match's application," said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, an antismoking group. But Dr. Lars Erik Rutqvist, senior vice president of scientific affairs for Swedish Match, sounded an optimistic note, pointing out that such panels are designed to be critical and that the F.D.A. is not obligated to take their advice. The agency has until June to rule on the company's application. "If you ask me, 'Are you depressed?' I say no," he said, sitting at a table in a carpeted conference room at the F.D.A.'s sprawling facility in suburban Maryland. "The role of this committee is to pick apart the type of material they are being presented with, and they did a good job of that." It is the first time since the government began requiring warning labels 50 years ago that federal regulators are considering whether to let a company claim a tobacco product is less harmful than cigarettes. Swedish Match says that Snus is 90 percent less harmful than cigarettes and argues that the product's popularity in Sweden helped drive rates of lung cancer and oral cancer in men to the lowest levels in Europe. The company submitted more than 130,000 pages of documents, hoping to prove the claims, including dozens of studies and 50 years of data from Snus users in Sweden. The panel's meeting stretched over two days and included 10 voting questions, but the tone tilted decidedly against the company. The panel was not asked directly whether the F.D.A. should approve Swedish Match's application, but was tasked with evaluating whether the evidence presented justified a gentler label. Panel members voted unanimously that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Snus did not increase the risk of tooth loss or gum disease, though they were split on whether there was evidence that showed any increased risk of oral cancer. Perhaps the most direct question, whether the research showed that health risks from Snus were "substantially lower" than those from cigarettes, divided the panel in half, with four members voting yes and four no. "I voted no because I have a problem with the word 'substantially' lower as it relates to all health risks," said Pebbles Fagan, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii Cancer Center. "There's no evidence that pregnancy outcomes related to Snus would be any different than with any other tobacco product." But other panel members were persuaded. "You can still care about a wide array of health effects and still endorse the idea that there's a substantial reduction in risk," said Kurt M. Ribisl, a professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. "Cancer and heart disease are top killers of women in this country, and the risk for those are substantially lower in these products."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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From the street, the well lit room with white brick walls and pale oak floorboards can resemble a minimalist stage set. Once inside, though, it feels more like a friend's dinner party where everyone is hanging out in the kitchen. An initial visit just a month after Mrs Robinson's opened revealed an early taste of what Mr. Zviel aspired to: a lively kitchen where he could play and riff with Asian inspired, umami rich dishes directly inspired by New York City chefs like Mr. Dufresne and David Chang: a bowl of crispy charred brussels sprouts served with crunchy toasted rice and loads of fresh chopped cilantro; shrimp noodles in a buttery sake saffron broth, loaded with little salty bombs of fish roe and caviar; a fried soft shell crab served on a fluffy white bao bun with homemade spicy mayo and a thin slice of kohlrabi. (Because Mrs Robinson's encourages both sharing and indulging, there is little difference between appetizers and mains.) During another visit in December, over some obscure and upbeat '70s music, a guest and I perused the menu, which had clearly evolved since my last visit. We started with an off menu special: two spicy deviled eggs with fried oysters, which were messy but delicious. There were hits and misses: A generous and gutsy sandwich of aged beef tartare, fried sweetbreads, shiso bearnaise and hot sauce was a standout; the octopus Bolognese had great potential but the ratio of sauce to pasta overwhelmed. The biggest surprise at Mrs Robinson's is the desserts. Unlike most Berlin restaurants, Mr. Zviel treats it as a grand finale. A thick, creamy popcorn soup is poured around passion fruit ice and a swirl of sweetened black tahini cream, under which are obscured sweet crunchy bits of caramelized popcorn and peanuts. A rum banana cake was served with a nondairy amazake (traditionally a sweet, non or low alcoholic Japanese beverage) ice cream and like the popcorn soup, kept revealing new flavors and textures with every bite hidden at the bottom was a layer of toasted puffed quinoa and amaranth. Like a catchy tune, the dish replayed in our minds days later. Mrs Robinson's, Pappelallee 29; 49 152 0518 8946 ; mrsrobinsons.de. An average meal for two, without drinks or tip, is 100 euros, about 120.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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, who played a pivotal yet little known role in establishing women's studies in the American college curriculum, and financing early research about the inequities women faced in the workplace and other realms of society, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 94. Her death was confirmed by the National Council for Research on Women, a nonprofit organization of university based research centers that she founded in 1981 and served for many years as president. Though she rarely gave speeches, and considered herself more of a researcher than an activist she had a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard Dr. Chamberlain came to be known in the women's movement as "the fairy godmother of women's studies." She earned the sobriquet as a program director for the Ford Foundation from 1971 to 1981, granting about 5 million in seed money to a few dozen groundbreaking academic studies, sociological projects and statistical surveys that laid the groundwork for women's studies departments and public policy research programs across the country. Dr. Chamberlain's contribution to the women's movement was incalculable, said Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a Washington group specializing in public policy issues. "It's hard to imagine how bad things were when she came on the scene," she said. "Women's suffrage was not taught in most American history classes." Female writers were footnotes to the literary canon as taught in most colleges, she added. "She made a huge impact with small but strategic grants," Ms. Hartmann said. In 1975, Dr. Chamberlain approved a grant for a Princeton University study, for example, that analyzed introductory courses in English, history, sociology and psychology at 172 American colleges. The study found that women's history and literature were virtually being ignored. It warned that unless changes were made "most undergraduate men and many undergraduate women would continue to leave college without considering the role of women in history, the implications of sex discrimination in the labor market, or the influence of sex stereotyping on their daily lives." The Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, founded in 1972 with another of her grants, was among the first to study domestic violence, pay inequities, and discrimination against women in loan policies. The Ford Foundation, which Dr. Chamberlain joined in 1956, had a policy of encouraging changes in American college curriculums to keep pace with changes in the culture. In the 1950s, it encouraged expanding international studies programs; in the 1960s, it provided seed money for black studies research. Florence Howe, the founder of the Feminist Press, which received one of the foundation's first women's studies grants, said that Dr. Chamberlain's background as an economist defined her approach to philanthropy. "She always wanted numbers," she said. "She would say, 'give me the numbers' to back up the case for funding feminist studies." Ms. Howe received a 12,000 grant in 1971 to find out whether and where women's studies was already being taught in colleges and universities. The report, "Who's Who and Where in Women's Studies," found a few hundred courses already being taught. By 1976, a follow up survey counted thousands of courses, and 270 degree granting programs in women's studies. In 1977, Dr. Chamberlain arranged a small grant to help establish the National Women's Studies Association, which helped organize international conferences that have since taken women's studies to more than 100 countries. Mariam Kenosian was born on April 24, 1918, in Chelsea, Mass., one of three children of Avak and Zabel Kenosian, immigrants from Armenia. Despite the initial objections of her father, a shoe factory worker who did not believe in women's education, she completed high school and attended Radcliffe College on a full scholarship. Her studies toward a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard were interrupted during World War II, when she worked as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services. She received her Ph.D. in 1950. Her marriage to Neil Chamberlain, a fellow Harvard Ph.D. in economics who taught for many years at Columbia University, ended in divorce in 1970. There are no immediate survivors. Dr. Chamberlain held teaching positions at Connecticut College, the School of General Studies at Columbia University, and at Hunter College, before joining the Ford Foundation. After leaving the foundation, her work as the president of the National Council for Research on Women helped consolidate and coordinate research centers that she had helped seed at Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona and Memphis State, among 100 others. An essay in "The Politics of Women's Studies," published in 2000 by the Feminist Press, was one of the few articles Dr. Chamberlain ever wrote about herself. In it, she used the image of a car climbing a steep mountain in describing her role in the movement. "The car, in this case women's studies, was already on its journey," she wrote. "But outside funding gave it the extra power to get to the top."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Combat boots and nudity, fake blood and a barrage of props. Dancenoise was feminism and showbiz rolled into one. The brash and transgressive post punk performance duo of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton was a staple of the East Village nightclub scene beginning in 1983. After the critic C. Carr saw her first Dancenoise show two years later, she used the word "uncivilized" in a most admiring way and wrote, "I knew I'd have to follow these girls to the ends of the earth if they ever got a gig there." In "Dancenoise: Don't Look Back," Wednesday through Sunday, the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrates these two collaborators with programming that includes a new performance, an installation, film screenings and a reimagining of King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, the East Village bar where Dancenoise organized a weekly performance series. Tom Berry, who originally designed the Wah Wah Hut's ever changing decor, will construct it in the lobby of the Whitney's theater. The exhibition begins Wednesday night with a traditional Wah Wah Hut evening, including performances by Julie Atlas Muz, Stanley Love and Carmelita Tropicana, among others, followed by a Dancenoise premiere on Thursday. James Vance, who created many sets for the duo, has made a sign that will look out over the West Side Highway: "Honk if you love DANCENOISE." Jay Sanders, the Whitney's curator of performance, said Dancenoise became an obsession after he organized the museum's 2013 exhibition "Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama Manhattan, 1970 1980." In that show, he explored how New York performance art emerged from dance, music, theater and visual art. The duo's intense performances were a highly choreographed whirlwind of unison dancing to pop music and brutal slapstick. In "All the Rage" (1989), they leapt onto the stage with nooses around their necks and shouted: "You know what we're going to do after we jump off of that bridge? We're going shopping! Yeah! All right!" (Their shopping list consisted of all things "lite": cereal, skinny milk, toast and margarine.) "It's entertainment, but it's critiquing entertainment at the same time," Mr. Sanders said. While Dancenoise never disbanded, the frequency of its performances changed 16 years ago when Ms. Iobst relocated to San Francisco. Ms. Sexton, born in Brooklyn, stayed in New York. (She is the associate artistic director of the planned Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center.) Each developed a new onstage persona: Ms. Iobst became the Naked Lady, and Ms. Sexton created the Factress, a talk show host that has morphed into a "free ranging performance persona" outfitted in a variety of surreal ensembles, including smoke detector pasties. For "Don't Look Back" slightly misleading, since that's just what they're doing Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton have designed programming that switches from day (a retrospective, featuring an installation of slides, videos, photographs and props) to night (live performances). The Wah Wah Hut evening pays homage to the space that informed their artistic development; as hosts of the Wednesday night series there, they learned how to talk. "We were really dancers," Ms. Iobst said. "We weren't that verbal. We would blurt out things, and then that turned into, let's make this little skit and we'll change costumes and introduce the next act and keep it flowing. From there, little skits expanded out to larger vignettes and longer dances, and that started to become part of a Dancenoise show." Ms. Sexton, sitting in her West Village apartment recently with Ms. Iobst on speakerphone, had just returned from a working session in San Francisco, where they had watched videos looking for rare past material say, a little seen segment from a performance in Germany to incorporate into their new piece. But what exactly is Dancenoise upset about now? "That's the question," Ms. Sexton said. "There are some bits of dialogue that hold up, but so often the shows were made in reaction to what was happening. I can't say what we're taking on, but it's a different storm than it was in the 1980s and 1990s." During a show at La MaMa in 1988. Watching their past performances, they said, has been both inspiring and daunting. "That energy!" Ms. Iobst said. "I just felt I was on a roller coaster. How are we going to get back to that feel of a roller coaster?" Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton, now both in their 50s, met at Ohio University, where they studied dance under Gladys Bailin, a former Alwin Nikolais company member. It's not such a stretch that Nikolais, who blended light, sound, color, objects and bodies to create fantastical worlds, is part of Dancenoise's lineage. "There's some kind of tendency toward props and costumes and visuals that is part of how we start making dance," Ms. Sexton said. "It's putting on a show." The way they created their masterly shows was more casual than it seemed. "People would say, 'You should go away and do a residency,' and I was always like, but the way we rehearse is we shop on 14th Street, go to my house and watch 'The Guiding Light' and make some material," Ms. Sexton said. "I don't know how you do that elsewhere." Tom Murrin, the performance artist and playwright also known as the Alien Comic, was a mentor whose rules were simple: Keep it short, keep the audience wanting more and never say no to a gig. Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton, eager to avoid the usual path for dancers in New York joining a traditional company complied. "We hit it coming right out of the gate," Ms. Iobst said. "It was very much what the scene was at that time. You walked around at night in the East Village, and you would see people performing." At the Whitney, the new Dancenoise performance includes a cast recognizable to longtime fans: Mike Iveson, Ishmael Houston Jones (on Friday and Saturday only), Hapi Phace, Tony Stinkmetal, Richard Move and Ken Bullock. Important to the two collaborators is that "Don't Look Back" be an inclusive experience. "There were so many people involved," Ms. Iobst said. "I don't want to say that they helped us make our work, but there was an energy that propelled it forward." But the connection between the women their strength, their wild intelligence is the heart and guts of Dancenoise. Ms. Iobst said they make a pact before each show. "Lucy and I have to look each other in the eyes and be sort of like, O.K., whatever our fears are or however angry I am that you're making me do this part, the minute that we actually decide to do it in front of people, there's no disclaimer," Ms. Iobst said. "We're going to hang on together for the amount of time this show exists."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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E. L. James, the author of the best selling "Fifty Shades" erotica trilogy, is coming out with a new novel, with a new story and new characters but still plenty of romance. The novel, "The Mister," will be released worldwide April 16, Vintage Books, an imprint of the publisher Penguin Random House, announced on Thursday. "The Mister" tells the story of Maxim Trevelyan, a privileged and aristocratic Englishman, and Alessia Demachi, a mysterious young woman with musical gifts and a dangerous past who has recently arrived in London. "It's a Cinderella story for the 21st century," Ms. James said in a news release. "Maxim and Alessia have led me on a fascinating journey and I hope that my readers will be swept away by their thrilling and sensual tale, just as I was while writing, and that, like me, they fall in love with them."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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So Graydon is gone. Now what? The coming departure of Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair's editor for 25 years, has set off a race to inherit his throne. Rarely does such a coveted editorship come up for grabs, even in an industry undergoing an unusual amount of churn. As executives at Conde Nast consider their options, editors and people in the magazine world say the winning candidate has to check off a few boxes: 1. Be comfortable in Vanity Fair's swirling spheres of celebrity, politics, journalism and finance. Mr. Carter hosted parties and owned trendy restaurants. Mingling, and finessing a seating chart, are key. 2. Be willing to navigate the tumult at Conde Nast, which in the past year has shaken up top leadership and reorganized its production structure as it weathers an industry wide financial downturn. 3. Embracing the digital future is a must. So is the ability to generate new revenue streams to offset continued declines in print advertising and circulation. 4. Impress Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor who now does double duty as Conde Nast's artistic director. Ms. Wintour will likely want an ally at Vanity Fair, one of the company's biggest titles, as she expands her power and influence. 5. Star quality counts. With the departure of Glamour's Cindi Leive, Conde Nast has lost two major editors in the span of a week. An unknown quantity at Vanity Fair could fuel a perception that the company is losing its luster. Here is a look at several top contenders, based on their experience, interviews with people in the industry and chatter in the Manhattan publishing world. She turned US Weekly into a behemoth, then revived The Hollywood Reporter from a dusty trade into a glossy weekly with influence on both coasts and big online traffic. She is a woman of color with an enviable track record in a lily white field of candidates. Vanity Fair has long been seen as a next step for her and she was spotted in the hallways of Conde Nast's headquarters this week. But some at Conde Nast question her journalism chops. Ms. Min would also have to uproot her family from Los Angeles, where she has a real shot at leading a television network, a business with a much brighter future than magazines. Mr. Fielden, the editor of Esquire (part of Hearst, a Conde Nast rival), told The Times in 2016, "I'm a person who likes clothes, but I'm also a guy who worked at The New Yorker for 10 years. I don't think you have to be one guy or the other." That high/low sensibility matches the Vanity Fair vibe. Of arguably more importance are Mr. Fielden's ties to Ms. Wintour, who chose him as the founding editor of Men's Vogue in 2005; when that title folded, he took over Town Country, whose high society coverage has echoes at V.F. Natty and comfortable around celebrities, Mr. Fielden can lean on his Wintour connection as a possible trump card. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. The maverick genius of the 1980s, now the gray eminence of the 2010s, Mr. Moss is perhaps the most successful editor of his generation. After founding the groundbreaking weekly 7 Days, he oversaw The New York Times Styles section and ran the Sunday Magazine before taking his current perch at New York, where he picks up national magazine awards like pennies on the sidewalk. At 60, he is closer to retirement age than Conde Nast executives may prefer. And Mr. Moss is a social caterpillar who avoids the gala circuit, a drawback for Vanity Fair's extroverted culture. But it would be hard to count out his visual creativity and stable of talented (and devoted) journalists. Whether he wants to leave his well compensated role at New York is another question. GQ, a Conde Nast property, has thrived thanks to its longtime editor, Jim Nelson, who has run the magazine since 2003. Known for throwing lavish retreats catered by hip mixologists, Mr. Nelson has the loyalty of his staff. But in an industry stocked with celebrity editors, he remains curiously obscure, keeping a lower profile than peers like Mr. Carter, Ms. Wintour, and David Remnick of The New Yorker. Conde Nast leadership trusts him, but can Mr. Nelson hold court poolside in Cannes and air kiss Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars? It's harder than it looks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The Masters does set your watch to it formality better than any sporting event. From the prominent green jacket ceremony to the mundane paint on sewer covers, every detail of the tournament is coordinated and beholden to a familiar presentation. This is how the youngest of the men's golf major championships achieved such rapid brand strength and popularity. Augusta National is a powerful club full of powerful people but the coronavirus pandemic had little regard for its traditions and certainly not its tournament schedule. The watches and calendars were all reset in March as golf, and the rest of the sports world, went on hold. A plan for a rescheduled Masters in November was put in place, but like so much in 2020, it will be far different from the Masters we've come to expect each April. The most conspicuous difference in the 2020 Masters will be the quiet, spectator less grounds throughout the week. It's been a norm in golf and other sports for months but the Masters has a special relationship to its live audience, whose members are called "patrons," per club tradition. "The crowds are so big there, you try to just get involved in playing your game and not paying that much attention to the crowds," said Tommy Aaron, who won in 1973. "But they're there, and if you're going well, they can give you a boost." "And if you're going badly," he added, "it can seem to be magnified." Earlier this summer, Tiger Woods said players were "making more birdies" during spectator less PGA tournaments on account of "not having to deal with the amount of distractions" created by the crowds. That could provide a stark advantage, and lower scores, over the 2019 Masters, where crowds swarmed around the final group of Woods, Francesco Molinari and Tony Finau. Molinari's tenuous grip on the lead evaporated as the round progressed, and there were even some cheers down in Amen Corner when his tee shot on 12 went into Rae's Creek. Cheering poor shots is verboten at the Masters and described as "most distressing" in a printed note from Bobby Jones, one of the founders, at the front of the Masters Spectator Guide. This year, Augusta National won't have to enforce it. The timing of the tournament in November lends itself to different playing conditions and, for connoisseurs of Augusta National's flora, a different landscape marked more by dogwoods and maples. The ropes and grandstands are absent this year, replaced by dark painted lines to keep the handful of people at the course out of play. And some hints of autumn color surface around the course. Take the 12th hole, the heart of Amen Corner and in the view of many the most celebrated hole at Augusta. A right hander at the tee box this week can glimpse reds and yellows not ordinarily seen during the Masters. The bridges over Rae's Creek are lightly framed with fall's hues. Yet Phil Mickelson, a three time Masters champion, said he had hardly noticed the colors as he played the course. "I really don't see much outside of the holes," Mickelson said. TV viewers, presumably not facing the distraction that will face Mickelson, can set aside azalea gazing this year and keep closer tabs on the trees and how they shape the architecture of the course. Some shots, players suggested, may be more tempting because they are more visible because of the lack of leaves or, in some spots, spectators. "It's weird because you can see almost every hole when you're standing on the No. 1 tee, you can look out and see everything," Brooks Koepka said Tuesday. "I'm not used to that." For all the concerns about a frigid Masters, temperatures should approximate April with forecasts of highs in the upper 70s and lows in the 60s throughout the weekend. Warming up for a round in benign early morning temperatures should come as a relief to the fused back of the 44 year old defending champion. Instead, thunderstorms will likely be a far greater threat than the temperature. Players said the course appeared to be playing longer and that chipping around the greens could be impacted if rain rolls across Augusta. But turfgrass experts said the greens, notoriously speedy, tricky and maintained to the point of obsession, should play similarly to April. "That place is as different as any other course in the world," said Gerald Henry, a turfgrass management professor at the University of Georgia. "The pressures that I'd explain that are happening at your local golf course just don't exist out there and that's intentional, obviously." The small Masters field of between 90 and 100 golfers generally affords the tournament significant flexibility when it comes to scheduling tee times: They do not need to start players right at sunrise and they can send the entire field off the No. 1 tee. With limited daylight in November, the Masters will use a two tee start for the first two rounds. Players will begin on No. 1 and No. 10 tees in early and late morning waves on both Thursday and Friday. The tournament used the rare two tee start for the final round last year, when it raced to beat afternoon thunderstorms that had been forecast.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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That feeling when the content is being created. LOS ANGELES FaZe Clan could be called a media company, or an esports team, or an influencer marketing agency, or all of the above. "Something like who we are has never existed before," said Lee Trink, the organization's chief executive. He comes from the entertainment world (he helped discover Kid Rock) and his best attempt is to describe FaZe Clan is the Dallas Cowboys meets Supreme meets MTV. But it's more than that: a direct to consumer e commerce business, releasing merchandise and apparel; an in house content production studio; a talent management business; a sales team acting as a mini advertising agency negotiating brand deals; and a technology arm that develops software to meet the demands of talent. FaZe Clan consists of 34 content creators and 15 professional esports players, and 11 hybrid creators who are both pro players and entertainers. All of them excel at creating social media clips; together they have brought 214 million viewers into the fold. Members are easy to recognize online. They refer to themselves using their gamer tags, which always start with "FaZe." There's FaZe Banks, 27; FaZe Temperrr, 24; FaZe Rain, 23; and FaZe Apex, 23, four early members considered the backbone of the organization. FaZe Kay, a 23 year old British Twitch star and gamer with 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube, joined in 2014. His younger brother, FaZe Jarvis, is the resident baby brother of the FaZe house and often the butt of pranks. (He once won a Fortnite game with a boa constrictor coiled around his neck.) Jarvis also might be the first great casualty of the organization. He recently received a lifetime ban from Fortnite. That game has been his ticket to top tier employment and his source of fame. He is now deciding what's next. "I've just been taking a lot of time to reflect on everything," he told his subscribers a few days ago. He is 17. FaZe Clan moved to Los Angeles in 2016, first to Newport, then to Calabasas and, in 2018, into dual 12,500 square foot mansions in the Hollywood Hills. One house is full of strictly FaZe members. The other contains a roving cast of FaZe adjacent influencers, like RiceGum (a model and rapper) and Sommer Ray (a fitness model). The houses act as live in dorms for influencers. During the day, they work. One day in October, Vera Salamone, FaZe Clan's director of talent, conducted a 10 a.m. stand up meeting. She asked the boys what they planned to accomplish during the day. "I have meetings, then I'm making a video with Jarvis. Getting ready for the weekend. I just want a day off," said FaZe Kay. Everyone laughed. After the meeting, the gamers slumped off into their rooms to begin the daily grind. Most FaZe Clan members spend the majority of their time in their bedrooms, posted up in front of their gaming stations. "I spent 90 percent of my time here in my room," said FaZe Kay. "There's not much you can really do," he continued. "All I do is play Fortnite anyway. I sit in my set up and play, so I'm not really too bothered. I don't even really go outside too much." FaZe Clan members block out the neighborhood's breathtaking views with thick blinds to prevent glare. The rooms feel like packed caves. Beds are generally unmade and in various states of disarray. FaZe Temperrr has the largest room in the house. Larger than a small New York City apartment, it's crammed with piles of personal items: a box of Travis Scott limited edition Reese's Puffs, a Gucci wallet, a plush Mario doll. His mantle is covered with anime figurines and childhood photos. FaZe Barry, Temperrr's Bengal cat, roams his huge marble bathroom. FaZe Kay keeps a Boring company fire extinguisher on his bedside table, propped up against his gold YouTube play button plaque, awarded when he reached 1 million followers. Empty Arrowhead water bottles are clustered around the plaque like prayer candles. FaZe Jarvis's room is the one notable exception. It's spotless and completely empty aside from a Dyson fan, his own YouTube play button plaque, also on his bedside table. Outside FaZe Jarvis's room is the entrance to the house's private movie theater, compete with a bar and a stripper pole on an elevated platform. Several members said one big misconception of life in the house is how monotonous some days can be. "People think it's a lot crazier than it is because people see nothing but highlights," said FaZe Teeqo. FaZe Clan members have a specific type of fame, an experience similar to teen stars and YouTubers. To anyone under the age of 20, they're almost immediately recognizable. To adults they look like average kids. Most can get around L.A. without much hassle. "If you go to a mall on a Saturday, it's not going to be too good," said FaZe Teeqo. "But if I got to Trader Joe's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, it's fine." FaZe Clan made a name for itself by embracing influencer culture and taking a social media content first approach to gaming. Back in 2010, Call of Duty (COD), a first person shooter game, was wildly popular. While many top COD players focused on winning tournaments and accolades, FaZe Banks, FaZe Temperrr and other early FaZe members became famous for trickshotting. That's when a player invents creative stunts in a game, sometimes to the detriment of their performance. It's jumping off a building while spinning around 360 degrees and shooting someone on your way down. Sure, you died, but it looked cool. FaZe players would put these outrageous highlights on YouTube and promptly go viral. FaZe Banks, a former lacrosse player who began playing COD in 2009, mastered YouTube early. His first video, a tutorial on how to hack your Xbox score, generated 800 in ad revenue. "It was my moment where I was like, wait a second, there's a lot of money to be made on the internet," Banks said, "and my internet hustle was video games." Just a handful of YouTubers had reached a million followers by then. "We were the first gamers really showing our faces on the internet," said FaZe Temperrr. They inserted small reaction shots and narration over gameplay. Members also began vlogging, showcasing their daily nongaming lives. "People loved it," Banks said. "People had something to follow outside the gameplay. They play COD every day, but now they get to see the lifestyle we live and that we're cool kids." In 2012, they began a traditional esports team, pairing panache and trickshotting and social media prowess with top gameplay talent. They quickly began racking up trophies. For most of FaZe Clan's existence it had no corporate structure. "As soon as I met these guys, I was like, this is an incredible business, but there's no infrastructure," said Greg Selkoe, the organization's president. The members of FaZe had fostered a fandom of millions online, but they weren't effectively converting their audience numbers into cash. Last year, Mr. Selkoe and Mr. Trink signed on full time. Now, about 70 people work for FaZe Clan on the business side. It took on a round of outside investment a year ago, and has welcomed celebrity members like Lil Yachty and Offset, who also invested. In September, the company announced a partnership with Manchester City, an elite soccer team. Their job is to create content around the sports franchise and to partner on merchandise. Just as Supreme was birthed from skateboarding culture, FaZe Clan hopes to establish a gaming adjacent apparel business. It recently collaborated with Champion, New Era and 24karats, a high fashion Japanese clothing line. Expansion efforts haven't been without speed bumps. "If there's multiple ways to do something, FaZe will do the craziest way," said Mr. Trink. Last year, a now defunct social media company and former officemate sued the company for an undisclosed amount in excess of 1 million for "intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and misappropriation of trade secrets." The Bigger They Are Traditional esports teams, like OpTic, have taken a page out of FaZe's playbook. They too are attempting to make more content and more personalities, not just win games. 100 Thieves, another company seeking to merge gaming and lifestyle, raised 35 million this summer. FaZe Clan's relative scale, however, is staggering. FaZe Clan has more than 7.5 million followers on Instagram alone; 100 Thieves has 571,000. "As an organization they've got this incredible network effect," said Sundance DiGiovanni, a co founder of Major League Gaming. "When they bring someone in, that person sees an explosion on their social channels." Like any average college aged kid, FaZe Clan members like to have a good time. Some hit the clubs on the weekends or attend parties hosted by young Hollywood talent and fellow YouTube stars. Events at the FaZe Clan house itself have become infamous. Last year, the crew hosted a 900 person party with 700 young women. "Marshmello" he's a big D.J. "said it was the best party he's ever been to," Temperrr said. In October, Banks and some friends caused an estimated 30,000 worth of damage to a hotel room at the Encore at Wynn Las Vegas after a wild night. The less fun side is that burnout is a major concern for online creators. Nearly all top FaZe Clan members have experienced it. "It's really hard to stay consistent with this level of work," said FaZe Adapt. "There was a couple moments when it got hard. If I wasn't posting every day, I was filming all day, editing all night." In late October, FaZe Rain, one of the founding owner members, posted a series of alarming messages on Twitter, and slammed fellow members of FaZe Clan for not being there for him. FaZe Rain had previously discussed struggling with depression, and revealed that he had suffered a "mental breakdown" that landed him in a psychiatric ward. "I've been doing this since I was 11 years old, man," he said at the time, meaning making content for YouTube. Currently his social media output veers between "I feel like I lost myself" and, this week, "All you need is confidence then you can do anything." FaZe Adapt and others have taken months offline to recuperate, but many members still regularly push themselves to the limit. "We work nonstop," said FaZe Temperrr. "We're well aware of what can happen if you don't work hard. We're at such a great point that if we we're going to start slowing down, people would catch up and we wouldn't have this opportunity again." "If you don't have your eyes on this, internet culture in general, esports, video games, if you still don't take it seriously, you should. You need to wake up. Every day we live more and more on the internet. If you can't see where this is going you should pay more attention," said Banks. "Eventually we will all live in the internet, and I want to exist in that world. That's where I see us."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Why the hell am I like this? I'm not in the Academy. Lots of what I love never gets near a nomination. And the winners and losers don't make my life better or worse. But I do think the Oscars are a diagnosis of the health of the movies. They tell everybody what the people who make our movies like or what they want us to think they like; what they want one another to think they like. They can be miserably transparent (how many movies about show business have won best picture?); and risibly self congratulatory (bloated epics, vanity projects, "Crash"). But it's always useful to know where a moviegoer stands with these people. And the five to 10 films nominated for best picture operate as a class that doubles as an X ray of the Academy and the movie business. O.K., but what's to roll my eyes at? Welcome to the Nth Annual Academy Awards! I hear that. This might be a reductive way of looking at the Oscars. Math is just organizing the preferences and passions of about 9,000 people. Why's race such a factor now? Well, for one thing, when it comes to the Oscars, there is some accounting for taste. And this year, the problem isn't with the particular remaining movies "1917," "Ford v Ferrari," "The Irishman," "Jojo Rabbit," "Joker" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" or the white people in them. Not since my wish list and Walkman days, have I despised so few nominees in this category. Most of them I love. As for the one failure, I've never worked harder to get with the program. But after four tries, I gave up. This Joker, quite often literally, has no clothes. Assembled, these distinct movies become a representative entity, and a person like me notices a theme that could poke out an eye. And whiteness is part of that story. It's always been, of course. But this year feels different. A homogeneity has set in. The nominated movies start to look like picture day at certain magnet schools. "Jojo Rabbit" is a Hitler Youth comedy! Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ..." is a dream about the accidentally heroic pre emption of racist Charles Manson's murder plot. And "Little Women" quietly dramatizes the freedom white women experience after the men have left to fight a war; a war to end the enslavement of black people. Sounds a little too ironic, and yet the movie means us to understand the irony. Those white ladies are better off than any black people. They're just not equal to the women's enlisted brothers, fathers and beaus. The border between their time and ours has a gusty permeability. Some of what's so strong about "The Irishman" and "Once Upon a Time ..." comes from how remembered they both feel rue soaked in the first movie; heavy with "what if" in the other. At the movies (in the West), the convenient thing about the past is that you can solve the matter of race by pretending it doesn't exist. Most of these movies, in addition to their thematic rearview, are based in actual history. ("1917" sends two British World War I soldiers on a critical, thrillingly stressful postal mission.) You can't put nonwhite people in places they weren't and when a movie does, you get something mildly anarchic like a biracial Jewish New Zealander having a ball playing Hitler. Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ..." has a great line; as they wait for their car, Brad Pitt tells a weepy Leonardo DiCaprio, "Don't cry in front of the Mexicans." Their white American maleness is too mythic and valuable to go around blubbering all over valets. "Joker" is about a comedian, but it doesn't have Tarantino's sense of humor about its whiteness. Whiteness here is a tragic, symbolic condition. Overlooked, unseen, under medicated, Joker, and eventually his disciples, discover that being a guy with a carnival ready white face helps get him the attention he wants. And even though this is the only movie of the bunch (the only non Korean, Hitler free movie) to feature even remotely meaningful parts for nonwhite actors (a bunch of Latinos beat up Joker in the opening minutes; his social worker and neighbor are black women), guess what: He kills a lot of them! Couldn't these nine movies just be evidence of taste? Good taste? They certainly could. They are. And yet, after the hash tags and threatened boycotts, after "Hidden Figures," "Get Out" and "Black Panther" and "BlacKkKlansman"; after "Moonlight" winning over "La La Land"; after no woman being a two time directing nominee; after the touted diversification campaigns and calls for "inclusion riders" (calls in acceptance speeches!); and in the same year that a popular Latina surprisingly missed the cut and the only black acting nominee is playing a plantation escapee (albeit one of history's most famous escapees, but still) the assembly of these movies feels like a body's allergic reaction to its own efforts at rehabilitation. Only two of the nine movies are set in what we'd called the present moment; and one of those ("Parasite") comes to us from Seoul. Which means, the other seven six of which are set in the United States take place in the past. The last time something like that happened was in 2009, back when there were still only five nominees and the movie most present was set in Mumbai "Slumdog Millionaire." Before that it was the premillennial time warp of 1999: two movies taking place in Elizabethan England and three set during World War II. Out with the new, in with the ancient! So what's happening now isn't exactly novel. Plus, movies set in the present almost never win. The 2017 fiasco that left "La La Land" confused for "Moonlight" is a rare example of front runners set close to now. I, at least, am amazed that the only two of the nine movies pointing a way forward, embracing modernity (shrewdly in "Little Women"), are by a white American woman and a South Korean man. And that the movie expected to win the Oscar takes place 103 years ago. Maybe this is just bad luck. I mean, what could the Academy have done to prevent itself from duplicating schisms beyond the movie theater? National schisms. (Nationalist schisms.) According to all the forecasting, these were the nine most predicted nominees. There's no shafted movie by or about nonwhite people, despite certain passions for "The Farewell" and "Hustlers" or even mine for "Waves." The last thing I'd want is for the Academy to vet and damage control the nominees, the way the muckety mucks who operate the Grammys are rumored to do. Guys, too many whites! We got to get "Queen Slim" in here. Let the Academy Awards do what they've always done: Tell on the film industry. We're in the middle of so many shifts. The aim to diversify the movies looks like it's taking hold just as there are fewer middlebrow studio movies and streaming is becoming king. Some of the shifts involve the remakes, reboots and reimaginings that keep falling from the intellectual property tree the eternal reliance upon action and superhero movies. Women and nonwhite folks? Put 'em in there! Put 'em in parts that white folks used to have and call it reparations! Comedies and blockbusters with Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista and Issa Rae and Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart and Eugenio Derbez and Jason Momoa. Really, some of that reupholstery is just more integration. The vicissitudes of progress all that change, all that changing back can create an optics headache over at the Academy. It could leave you with whiplash, with the impression that the membership is just over it. I can look at these otherwise innocent movies, gathered together, and surmise progress fatigue: We already did that. If Joaquin Phoenix wins the best actor Oscar for "Joker," he's likely to remind his fellow industry professionals, as he did last Sunday at the BAFTAs, that their tiredness is not an option, that it's an embarrassment. That fatigue starts to mirror life everywhere else, as it used to be and sometimes as it remains. Separate, unequal: You've put enough nonwhite people in pop hits that you have to think alternatively. So when the so called awards season heats up, you can't find anything serious, nonwhite and good. So come nomination morn, the Oscars suddenly look like evidence of white flight, this reliable suburb of "quality" and "taste" and eligibility. My favorite complaint from longstanding Academy members about more women and nonwhite people joining the gang is that some of them are in violation of a credits criterion. They're underqualified for membership but only because the industry has thrived on systemic disqualification. I know, I know. It's not as though you can't find nonwhite people at the movies. "Bad Boys for Life" has been at the top of the box office for three weeks. And that might be part of the problem because the closest "Bad Boys" will ever get to the Oscars is three billboards outside the Dolby Theatre.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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As our devices get smaller and more sophisticated, so do the materials we use to make them. That means we have to get up close to engineer new materials. Really close. Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide by nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample. The technique relies on the same basic physics behind the M.R.I. scans that are done in hospitals. When doctors want to detect tumors, measure brain function or visualize the structure of joints, they employ huge M.R.I. machines, which apply a magnetic field across the human body. This temporarily disrupts the protons spinning in the nucleus of every atom in every cell. A subsequent, brief pulse of radio frequency energy causes the protons to spin perpendicular to the pulse. Afterward, the protons return to their normal state, releasing energy that can be measured by sensors and made into an image.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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THIS IS US 9 p.m. on NBC. This fan favorite family drama returns for its fourth season, charting the Pearsons' ups and downs through their past, present and future. This season, the show will continue to uncover more about the parents Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and "the Big Three" the triplets Kate (Chrissy Metz), Randall (Sterling K. Brown) and Kevin (Justin Hartley). But it will also introduce a few new characters. In the premiere, Rebecca introduces Jack to her parents, which may serve as the first time fans will meet Rebecca's father, played this season by the actor Tim Matheson. Jennifer Morrison has also been confirmed as a recurring guest star, though it's not clear yet how her character connects to the Pearson clan. And the director M. Night Shyamalan, who was spotted in the Season 4 trailer, may even somehow make it into the mix. EMERGENCE 10 p.m. on ABC. This new thriller follows Jo Evans (Allison Tolman), a police chief in a quiet Northeastern town who finds herself caught up in an atypical adoption scenario after she finds a young girl, totally unharmed, at the site of a mysterious plane crash. Not long after that act of kindness, Evans gets caught up in a conspiracy that surrounds the girl's identity.
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Television
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Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. IARA LEE RETROSPECTIVE at Maysles Cinema (April 28 May 2). This filmmaker and activist is perhaps best known for her 1996 documentary "Synthetic Pleasures," which examined how then emerging phenomena like virtual reality and cosmetic surgery were changing the way humans related to the world around them. That movie will screen on Sunday, and Lee will appear for Q. and A.s at all four screenings in this series. 212 537 6843, maysles.org TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL at various locations (through May 5). Every spring Robert De Niro offers up this downtown movie smorgasbord. (See our recommendations of potential discoveries here.) The big revival screening is a Sunday showing of what's being called the "final cut" of "Apocalypse Now." It's being shown at the Beacon Theater with the addition of "very low frequency" sound meaning audio that you can't hear but might be able to feel. It sounds like the modern equivalent of Sensurround, which was used on "Earthquake." Brace yourself for those helicopter vibrations. tribecafilm.com
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Movies
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After his hit series "Six Feet Under" ended in 2005, Alan Ball indulged his inner fanboy, creating the vampire melodrama "True Blood" and working on the gothic small town crime story "Banshee." The move suited him his aptitudes for dark comedy and unsettling atmosphere were a natural fit for genre entertainment. But with "Here and Now," his new family drama for HBO (beginning Sunday), he's back to making Big Statements, his mode in his Oscar winning screenplay for "American Beauty" in 1999. "We're living in a new reality" is the tagline on the show's billboards, and Mr. Ball wants to say something definitive about it. Unfortunately and this was also true of "American Beauty," despite its multiple Academy Awards he doesn't have anything new or particularly interesting to say. Straight white people are self loathing and lame. Dads are depressed but redeemable, moms are pretty much a lost cause. We'd all be better off if we put away our cellphones and got outside. Through four episodes of its 10 episode season, "Here and Now" works the well plowed soil of middle age suburban malaise, the ground of Updike, Cheever and their many imitators. The suburbs have been replaced by Portland, Ore., and the ennui ridden father, Greg Boatwright (Tim Robbins), is 60, the new middle age. (Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham in "American Beauty" was 42.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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LOS ANGELES Earlier this year, just as the North Carolina rapper DaBaby was hurtling into the hip hop stratosphere with his hit single "Suge," he was resting for a rare minute at home in Charlotte when he was awakened by a stream of calls and messages. First came the news that his father had died suddenly in Nashville. Stunned and full of questions, DaBaby, born Jonathan Kirk, could hardly grasp the gut punch of the tragedy, in part because someone wouldn't stop calling him on the other line. When the rapper finally answered, it was his road manager. "'You No. 1 you did it!' He's screaming it sounded like he was doing back flips, ecstatic, just going crazy," DaBaby recalled. "Baby on Baby," his major label debut, had hit the very top of the Apple Music albums chart, setting him on a path to becoming perhaps the year's premier breakout rap star. The emotional whiplash of that moment, DaBaby explained coolly, was something he has gotten more used to in the last year, as his exponential ascent has been repeatedly interrupted by flashes of harsh reality, including his involvement in a fatal shooting and numerous alleged assaults. "Kirk," his third project in 12 months and second album this year, was released on Sept. 27 via Interscope, with features from Migos, Chance the Rapper and Gucci Mane, and is expected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard chart. The 13 tracks begin with "Intro," the most personal song of DaBaby's career, which touches on his father's death and the upheaval of his new reality. But the tenderness is short lived as DaBaby gets right back to the things that have quickly become his trademark: bouncy, jabbing beats with a rapid, percussive tumble of cartoonishly menacing punch lines and audacious, uniquely blush inducing sex raps. But while his musical formula is dominating streaming services, making DaBaby the most inescapable, in demand collaborator of the summer (see: Megan Thee Stallion's "Cash ," Post Malone's "Enemies" and many more), he must also quickly level out into a reliable brand and businessman to solidify his arrival into hip hop's fickle top tier. Though DaBaby's rise has felt more organic and for rap, nearly old fashioned, based largely on undeniable verses, beats and outlandish videos compared with the meme driven phenomena of a 6ix9ine or Lil Nas X, it has not been without its extracurricular viral moments, most of them controversial at minimum. In videos that have proliferated across local news stations and the rap internet alike, DaBaby has beaten the literal pants off an aspiring artist who was harassing him in a Louis Vuitton store (and then made a T shirt out of it); punched a handsy fan who reached for his chain at a show; and become a defendant in an ongoing lawsuit after members of his team attacked another aspiring rapper who had been badgering him for a photo in Boston, among other violent incidents. And while the chaos of his climb has done nothing to slow his momentum or entree into the pop mainstream in fact, it may have even helped it definitely feels unsustainable. "As my circumstances have changed, I've had to move in a different way and make some adjustments," said DaBaby, who along with his team declined to address specific occurrences, but has insisted that he has only ever been protecting himself. His manager, Arnold Taylor, added, "He's street, but we ain't thugs that's the difference," and echoed the need for more discretion and security as DaBaby's notoriety has increased. "We just need to move different and evolve," Taylor repeated as a general refrain. Across two days in Los Angeles the week of his album release, DaBaby, who is compact like a cannonball, with an alpha manner and deep dimples, only ever seemed professional and locked in, fully aware that stardom was his for the securing. Repeatedly, he flexed his prodigious work ethic and people pleasing skills, crisscrossing the city for a nonstop slate of performances, interviews, handshakes and other obligations that come with the social media soaked music industry of today. With a crew of about a dozen at all times including a relatively new security guard who resembles an oak tree built out of multiple smaller oak trees the rapper was punctual and accommodating, hitting all of his marks while sneaking FaceTime kisses to his 2 year old daughter. In less than 24 hours, DaBaby managed to accomplish a blur of tasks including: a college show for some 10,000 undergrads interested in moshing; a 6 a.m. wake up to announce "Kirk" via social channels; a dance session in an Airbnb to tease a new song on the video platform Triller; back to back radio station interviews; a promo shoot for a streaming service ("Alexa, play DaBaby"); a multiple hour taping for a web series; another one on one interview; two more radio station sit downs; and a club appearance, all of which, of course, was documented for Instagram. "I've been a machine for a while now," said DaBaby, nearly hoarse from the marathon of self promotion, though it was not even half done and would continue into the next week and beyond. But more work, after all, was what he had been working toward. DaBaby, who was born in Cleveland but raised in Charlotte, started rapping only as an adult about five years ago, and initially under the name Baby Jesus, which he eventually changed out of concern that it had become a distraction. At the same time, distractions designed to go viral were part of his early blueprint, like the time he walked around the South by Southwest festival in Austin wearing only an adult diaper and jewelry. For a time, "My internet presence was definitely bigger than the music," DaBaby said. "I'm so good at marketing, so once I knew I had them looking, I turned up with the music. I knew what I was doing it was premeditated." Taylor, his manager and a former radio and promotions executive at major record companies, recalled seeing DaBaby in North Carolina clubs around the time he was launching his own South Coast Music Group label. "I didn't even know if he was a rapper, I just knew he had a big entourage with him and was moving like a rapper," he said. Once the pair teamed up, they focused on a well worn path: building buzz around the South with mixtapes and club shows, while DaBaby found his sound. Though he initially futzed with Auto Tuned vocals and repetitive melodies, a la Travis Scott and Migos, the rapper started finding more traction with ferociously rapped freestyles over existing hits, a somewhat lost art that he said he learned from Lil Wayne. Now, with years of melody dominating the upper echelons of rap, DaBaby's throwback dedication to mostly just rapping helps to set him apart. "When I started coming on my music the way I was coming on freestyles just relentless, at your neck, as soon as the beat starts, that's when everything really clicked," he said, adding that he has now worked with many of the artists whose songs he was unofficially remixing, including Lil Baby and Offset. In November 2018, just days after the release of "Blank Blank," DaBaby was shopping with his daughter, her mother and another child at a Walmart in Huntersville, N.C., when he has said two men threatened him with a gun. During an altercation, he fired a shot that left a 19 year old man dead. DaBaby was eventually found guilty of a misdemeanor carrying a concealed weapon but was not charged in the death. The Mecklenburg County district attorney's office said in a statement to The New York Times that it had "reviewed the police investigative file and agreed with the Huntersville Police Department's decision not to charge Kirk further as prosecutors could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self defense." DaBaby would only say that he was "blessed," and that his close calls in life were motivation to keep achieving more. Since the shooting and the release of his "Baby on Baby" in March, his profile has even expanded to the Top 40 sphere, where he has added guest verses to hits like Lizzo's No. 1 smash "Truth Hurts" and Lil Nas X's "Panini." Caroline Diaz, an A R executive at Interscope who is assigned to DaBaby's musical development, said it was important to maintain a careful balance between crossover moments and content true to the rapper's base, with his own albums remaining pure. "He could've thrown a Lizzo or a Post Malone on there that's what everyone expects but it's still a hood album," she said of "Kirk." "His project is so street, but then when you look at his features, he's able to do everything." Still, despite the rapid professionalization of DaBaby's career, an air of unpredictability and easily raised hackles mingled with celebratory moments in Los Angeles. At his U.C.L.A. student concert, security was tight and the rules were explicit no smoking, no drinking, no jumping in the crowd but DaBaby tested the limits, getting as close as possible to an audience that seemed to be teetering on the edge of mayhem. "Don't go out there?" he triple checked with his manager onstage during the performance, gesturing to the crowd. He flashed a mischievous grin, but held back. "They would've kept my money," he said after. "It would've been bad business." The next day, on a busy stretch of Fairfax Avenue, DaBaby soaked up the attention that came with sitting, door open, in the back seat of a parked SUV as shoppers and pedestrians passed. He was noticeable, if not exactly approachable, when at one point, a young, sweaty man whose car had broken down only feet away began rather loudly, and rudely, requesting a photo with the rapper. DaBaby stayed silent, shaking his head, as his team encouraged the increasingly agitated man to mind his business and walk away, but the growing tension was incontrovertible. "I'm never listening to him again," the man said, before miraculously getting his beat up car to start and driving away. Moments later, a group of nine children with backpacks and headphones noticed the rising star in their midst, and began murmuring, eyes wide. They lurked and gawked, tentatively pulling their cellphones out before one got up the nerve to ask for a photo. DaBaby, his grin gleaming with diamonds, hesitated for a second before agreeing to a single group shot with the now joyous crew. As they all parted, DaBaby slipped one boy a crisp 100 bill and told the group to split it, slipping back into the relative safety of the SUV as they sprinted down the block squealing.
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Music
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Seeing back to back programs of the same company can reveal a lot about its dancers. Do they become more or less complex, the more you get to know them? Do you want to keep spending time with these people, or have you had enough? In the case of Ailey II, after a total of four hours and seven works over two consecutive evenings, I could have kept on watching. Given the blandness of some of the troupe's repertory, that speaks to who was dancing it. Each of the 12, the six women in particular, has such a distinctive presence and personality that there's more to learn with each viewing about the dancers' individual strengths and how they operate as a group. Having admired their collective talent, you also start to notice the variations within; some members of the team are less technically flawless than others, which only makes them more likable, more human. In a system (the Ailey training ground) that seems to value perfection (whatever that means), a little bit of genuine struggle to lift one's leg toward some unattainable angle and hold it there, to hoist a partner triumphantly overhead is not necessarily a bad thing. The second of two programs in the company's 40th anniversary season, seen on Thursday, included an Alvin Ailey staple, "Streams" (1970), and three works from the past four years by Benoit Swan Pouffer, Amy Hall Garner and Robert Battle, the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. (The majority of dancers in that company are graduates of Ailey II.) "Streams," to Miloslav Kabelac's gong heavy percussion, was the season's most academic offering, a kind of primer in the fundamentals of Horton technique, the basis of an Ailey education. That style, with its taut balances and sudden lower spine contractions, can make an overwrought, effortful impression. In her razor sharp solo, Jacquelin Harris embodied it the most naturally, as if it were her first language. But Ms. Harris is comfortable with many languages, corporeally speaking. Remarkable in every piece this season, she stood out again in Ms. Garner's "Virtues," an ecstatic finale to New Age y Karl Jenkins. Here, in George Hudacko's cream colored dresses, the women relished slow, swaying, majestic walks and the chance to fling themselves into their partners' arms. Who knew that Ailey II had some minimalism (well, almost) up its sleeve? Mr. Battle's "We," performed by Tyler Brown and Gentry Isaiah George, is uncharacteristically understated in its portrayal of a tentative romance. Mr. Pouffer's "Rusty," a work that reflects on the process of dancing, was all over the place, but it cast the ensemble in a refreshingly casual light.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Adam Alter warns that many of us youngsters, teenagers, adults are addicted to modern digital products. Why We Can't Look Away From Our Screens In a new book, "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," the social psychologist Adam Alter warns that many of us youngsters, teenagers, adults are addicted to modern digital products. Not figuratively, but literally addicted. Dr. Alter, 36, is an associate professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University who researches psychology and marketing. We spoke for two hours last week at the offices of The New York Times. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. Q. What makes you think that people have become addicted to digital devices and social media? A. In the past, we thought of addiction as mostly related to chemical substances: heroin, cocaine, nicotine. Today, we have this phenomenon of behavioral addictions where, one tech industry leader told me, people are spending nearly three hours a day tethered to their cellphones. Where teenage boys sometimes spend weeks alone in their rooms playing video games. Where Snapchat will boast that its youthful users open their app more than 18 times a day. Behavioral addictions are really widespread now. A 2011 study suggested that 41 percent of us have at least one. That number is sure to have risen with the adoption of newer more addictive social networking platforms, tablets and smartphones. How do you define "addiction"? The definition I go with is that it has to be something you enjoy doing in the short term, that undermines your well being in the long term but that you do compulsively anyway. We're biologically prone to getting hooked on these sorts of experiences. If you put someone in front of a slot machine, their brain will look qualitatively the same as when they take heroin. If you're someone who compulsively plays video games not everyone, but people who are addicted to a particular game the minute you load up your computer, your brain will look like that of a substance abuser. We are engineered in such a way that as long as an experience hits the right buttons, our brains will release the neurotransmitter dopamine. We'll get a flood of dopamine that makes us feel wonderful in the short term, though in the long term you build a tolerance and want more. Do the designers of the new technologies understand what they're doing? The people who create video games wouldn't say they are looking to create addicts. They just want you to spend as much time as possible with their products. Some of the games on smartphones require you to give money as you play, so they want to keep you playing. The designers will build into a game a certain amount of feedback, in the same way that slot machines offer an occasional win to hold your interest. Not surprisingly, game producers will often pretest different versions of a release to see which one is hardest to resist and which will keep your attention longest. It works. For the book, I spoke with a young man who sat in front of his computer playing a video game for 45 consecutive days! The compulsive playing had destroyed the rest of his life. He ended up at a rehabilitation clinic in Washington State, reSTART, where they specialize in treating young people with gaming dependencies. Do we need legislation to protect ourselves? It's not a bad idea to consider it, at least for online games. In South Korea and China, there are proposals for something they call Cinderella laws. The idea is to protect children from playing certain games after midnight. Gaming and internet addiction is a really serious problem throughout East Asia. In China, there are millions of youngsters with it, and they actually have camps where parents commit their children for months and where therapists treat them with a detox regime. Why do you claim that many of the new electronic gadgets have fueled behavioral addictions? Well, look at what people are doing. In one survey, 60 percent of the adults said they keep their cellphones next to them when they sleep. In another survey, half the respondents claimed they check their emails during the night. Moreover, these new gadgets turn out to be the perfect delivery devices for addictive media. If games and social media were once confined to our home computers, portable devices permit us to engage with them everywhere. Today, we're checking our social media constantly, which disrupts work and everyday life. We've become obsessed with how many "likes" our Instagram photos are getting instead of where we are walking and whom we are talking to. Where's the harm in this? If you're on the phone for three hours daily, that's time you're not spending on face to face interactions with people. Smartphones give everything you need to enjoy the moment you're in, but they don't require much initiative. You never have to remember anything because everything is right in front of you. You don't have to develop the ability to memorize or to come up with new ideas. I find it interesting that the late Steve Jobs said in a 2010 interview that his own children didn't use iPads. In fact, there are a surprising number of Silicon Valley titans who refuse to let their kids near certain devices. There's a private school in the Bay Area and it doesn't allow any tech no iPhones or iPads. The really interesting thing about this school is that 75 percent of the parents are tech executives. Learning about the school pushed me to write, "Irresistible." What was it about these products that made them, in the eyes of experts, so potentially dangerous? You have an 11 month old son. How do you interact with your technologies when you're with him? I try not to use my phone around him. It's actually one of the best mechanisms to force me not to use my phone so much. Are you addicted to this stuff? Yeah, I think so. I've developed addictions from time to time to various games on my phone. Like many of the people in the survey I mentioned earlier, I'm addicted to email. I can't stop checking it. I can't go to bed at night if I haven't cleared my inbox. I'll keep my phone next to my bed, much as I try not to. The technology is designed to hook us that way. Email is bottomless. Social media platforms are endless. Twitter? The feed never really ends. You could sit there 24 hours a day and you'll never get to the end. And so you come back for more and more. If you were advising a friend on quitting their behavioral addictions, what would you suggest? I'd suggest that they be more mindful about how they are allowing tech to invade their life. Next, they should cordon it off. I like the idea, for instance, of not answering email after six at night. In general, I'd say find more time to be in natural environments, to sit face to face with someone in a long conversation without any technology in the room. There should be times of the day where it looks like the 1950s or where you are sitting in a room and you can't tell what era you are in. You shouldn't always be looking at screens.
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Science
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On Oct. 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist and outspoken critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was killed and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. After a cover up, Saudi Arabia issued verdicts in a secret trial that absolved Prince Mohammed of any wrongdoing. Yet the Central Intelligence Agency and other investigators have concluded he probably ordered the killing. Two years on, two new documentaries remind us that Turkish prosecutors and those closest to Khashoggi are still awaiting justice, hoping he won't fade from memory. Covering the high profile case of a subject who opposed the Saudi government outright brought challenges for the filmmakers, both during and after shooting. "Kingdom of Silence," a Showtime documentary by Rick Rowley ("16 Shots"), debuted Friday, the second anniversary of Khashoggi's death. (In a rare move, Showtime is allowing nonsubscribers to watch it free on the platform and on YouTube.) The film follows Khashoggi's career, from his early days as a wide eyed journalist in Afghanistan to his time as a spokesman for a top Saudi politician to his final years as a self exiled Washington Post columnist. His story is told in the context of American Saudi relations, through commentary from intelligence officials, activists and journalists, among them the New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright (who is an executive producer) and Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent and friend of Khashoggi's. "The film's primary virtue," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, "is in presenting many friends and colleagues of Khashoggi who illuminate his ideals, ventures and personal relationships." Khashoggi himself is also present, through archival footage and writing excerpts. At first, Rowley set out to craft a murder mystery. But as he dug deeper, he no longer wanted to investigate who was behind the murder "It's not a question," he said but why it took place. "Who was this man that the kingdom would risk so much to silence?" he recalled thinking. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, "we were all looking at the death," said Vinnie Malhotra, the executive vice president of nonfiction programming at Showtime. "We weren't examining the life." That life was filled with contradictions. For instance, one of Khashoggi's friends didn't know he had a wife in Washington, D.C. whom Rowley interviews while another friend wasn't aware of his fiancee in Istanbul. And it wasn't until Khashoggi's later years, the film argues, that he personified the dissident he is known as today. Rather, the film is a portrait of a longtime insider who had valuable, potentially damning information. It uncovers an unreported detail: Right before his death, Khashoggi had agreed to meet with an investigator working with families of 9/11 victims that are suing the Saudi government. The investigator wanted to discuss the government's ties to Al Qaeda, but Khashoggi was killed before that meeting could take place. Shooting the movie came with challenges. Saudi Arabia denied Rowley's team journalism visas, so he sneaked in on a tourist visa and shot under the radar. The crew also received threats throughout the course of filming, but Rowley hesitated to say more. "You can't be naive when you begin a project like this," Rowley said. "You're constantly communicating with people who are the targets of surveillance themselves, or who are working for intelligence agencies, or who might actually be assets of the Saudi intelligence themselves." The movie chronicles the final years of Khashoggi's life from the perspective of Omar Abdulaziz, a young Saudi activist in Montreal and friend of Khashoggi's who, like the journalist, fled Saudi Arabia, criticized its rulers and has had to pay for it. Their stories progressively intertwine, particularly as the film looks at the kingdom's cyberoperations. Both Khashoggi and Abdulaziz were targeted for their online rhetoric, and Abdulaziz has said that the royal court hacked his smartphone using the same software that has been used to spy on journalists and activists. In the days leading up to Khashoggi's death, he and Abdulaziz were collaborating on a social media campaign to counter Saudi propaganda on Twitter. Last January, the United Nations accused Prince Mohammed of hacking the cellphone of Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive and the owner of The Washington Post, potentially as an attempt to influence the outlet's critical coverage of the kingdom. Fogel said he was aware of the story before it went public and explores it in his movie to emphasize a chilling point. "If they can use this technology to go after the richest man in the world and shame him, who can they not go after?" he asked. "Who is not safe?" Fogel gained access to evidence from Turkish investigators, prosecutors and government officials, and spent considerable time with Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi's fiancee. He intersperses footage from the crime scene with anecdotes from Cengiz, who shared voice mail from Khashoggi and led Fogel into what would have been the couple's home. The goal, Fogel said, was to create an "emotional journey." The movie debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January and received glowing reviews from several critics (and Hillary Clinton). But none of the major streaming platforms went after it. Early reports speculated that Netflix, Apple and Amazon all had reasons not to buy it. Netflix complied with a request from the kingdom to block a 2019 episode of "Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj" from streaming in the country, raising the question of whether it would have taken similar action if it had released "The Dissident." And the hacking of Bezos' iPhone had implications for both Apple and Amazon, which he leads.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 8). The swans haven't left the lake just yet: This weekend is your final chance to catch performances of "Swan Lake." (And Saturday night, Misty Copeland is scheduled to dance.) Beginning Monday, another love story consumes Ballet Theater when John Cranko's "Onegin," based on Pushkin's novel in verse, opens with Diana Vishneva in the first of her final two performances with the company. That remarkably lush dancer will pour her emotions into the part of Tatiana opposite the debonair Marcelo Gomes. On Tuesday and Thursday, Alessandra Ferri, the veteran ballerina, performs as a guest artist with Roberto Bolle. 212 362 6000, abt.org LORI BELILOVE THE ISADORA DUNCAN DANCE COMPANY at the Joyce Theater (June 19, 7:30 p.m.). In "The Art of Isadora," Ms. Belilove and her dancers celebrate what would have been Isadora Duncan's 140th birthday with a selection of early solos and group works created in homage to Apollo and Dionysius, as well as more tragic solos created during Duncan's final years. Any chance to see Ms. Belilove's refined company is worth it, but this time, there's an extra incentive: Appearing as a guest artist is Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet principal, who will perform Duncan's "Narcissus." No, she's not a modern dancer, but Ms. Mearns, fearless and dazzling, is alway up for stretching the boundaries of her art. 212 691 5040, isadoraduncan.org ESME BOYCE at the 92nd Street Y (June 16 17, 8 p.m.; June 18, 3 p.m.). The choreographer Esme Boyce, a Juilliard graduate, presents "Interrobang," a new work inspired by Dada. (The title refers to a nonstandard punctuation mark used to pose questions in a tone of excitement or disbelief.) It's no surprise that in the work she experiments with elements of humor and absurdity. The premiere is paired with Ms. Boyce's "Dark and Pretty Flat" (2014), which is inspired by the horizontal landscape and explores the idea of feeling like a stranger in one's homeland. The program is also a family affair: Kit Boyce, Ms. Boyce's father, is its set designer; Cody Boyce, her brother, composed the music. 212 415 5500, 92y.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Home security has come a long way from the days when hard wired alarm systems were the only option for single family homes or, in the case of apartment complexes, a security guard or two to patrol the grounds. Today, wireless or cellular all in one systems allow you to check on your house from afar, and voice command capabilities let you tell a virtual assistant to shut the garage door while you cook dinner. As for apartment buildings, roving robots and sophisticated camera systems have improved security and also given residents more control by shifting video intercom access to cellphones. In co op and condominium buildings, property management firms have been increasingly installing camera systems with 360 degree vision that can provide data analytics, according to Dino Iuliano, chief revenue officer at Planned Companies, a concierge, security, maintenance and janitorial services firm. These systems send video footage to electronic encoders at security monitoring centers either in apartment buildings or off site locations run by a security firm. The encoders analyze and break down the video into data, and send alerts and responses when something is deemed "out of the norm," Mr. Iuliano said. For example, a motion detector that has been triggered can turn on the lights at night; or, a package that has been left unattended in an area where it shouldn't be will signal the security firm to alert building staff. "We're at the point where security in some high end buildings is starting to resemble systems in casinos and airports," he said. LeFrak City, a sprawling housing complex in Corona, Queens, has Rosie, a security robot that ambles through the grounds and acts as an "extra set of eyes" for the security team, according to Randi Koch Nir, the director of lease enforcement at Mid City Security, the firm in charge of the complex's security. The robot, built by Knightscope, based in Mountain View, Calif., was rented about a year ago as part of a 70 million upgrade to the complex. Rosie has cameras facing in four separate directions, providing a 360 degree view, and patrols the area 24/7. The footage is monitored by LeFrak security personnel. Resembling the sleek, cylindrical top of a spacecraft, Rosie was named by Ms. Nir after her mother Roz, and because the machine reminded her of the fictional robot maid from the cartoon "The Jetsons." She is programmed to patrol the complex in silence, but in an emergency, she can broadcast messages through a loudspeaker. She also comes in handy while monitoring the outdoor common areas at night when no one is around, Ms. Nir said. "But if anything suspicious happened, Rosie would be recording it." According to a Knightscope spokeswoman, Rosie's basic cost structure starts at 7 an hour, or about 61,000 a year. For apartment buildings that need an intercom upgrade, firms like Doorport and ButterflyMX have been marketing smart access systems that are operated by cellphones. These systems require new hardware at the building's front door, but no new hardware or wiring inside individual apartments. Instead, tenants can use their phones as video intercoms to let guests and deliveries into the building. Ben Taylor, chief executive of Doorport, said he is also testing a new product that would allow landlords to upgrade their existing intercom systems without changing the current infrastructure by the front door. After an app is downloaded to a cellphone, Doorport's proprietary software would allow tenants to create and send access codes to guests for temporary access to the building. A small hardware component installed by the firm into the existing intercom would enable recognized cellphones to automatically open the front door, even if the phone is in a back pocket or a bag. The tenant could also use the firm's app as their video intercom system to buzz guests in, or send temporary access codes to guests. "I believe easy access is gaining popularity as an amenity," Mr. Taylor said. The firm is currently testing the prototype in a 30 unit building in the Upper East Side owned by Ponte Equities. Angelo J. Ponte, a project manager, said he was interested in the product as a cost effective way to retrofit the firm's older properties with new technology because there's very little infrastructure cost associated with the upgrade. "To have the ability to automatically open the door when your hands are full with groceries you can't put a price on that," Mr. Ponte said. "It's brilliant." The technology is not that different for single family homes, where homeowners can opt to have a system professionally installed or go the D.I.Y. route. Sensors that detect things like water leaks, or whether a window or door has been opened, can be purchased from hardware stores for as little as 10 to 40. Basic camera systems from companies like Nest Labs start at about 200 and get more expensive as more hardware and capabilities are added to the kit. SimpliSafe offers a D.I.Y. kit that includes monitoring services. Firms like Nortek Security Control, which sells products under the 2GIG and ELAN brands, among others, also offer add on products like stove and gun monitors, which are connected to the same monitoring system as the video cameras and intrusion sensors. If the stove is left on too long, or a gun is moved from a locked location, a notification is sent to your cellphone or a security panel.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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MAGICAL LAND OF OZ 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). You'll find no yellow brick road or wicked witch in this new PBS program. What you will see are colorful parrots, mountain peaks blanketed by snow, kangaroos and a shockingly muddy crocodile. Yes, this is a nature program focused on the animals of Australia (the other Oz). The biological richness of that continent comes through in the diversity of the species filmed here. Another element that comes through: How merciless even nature's smaller beasts can be, an angle in this first episode when the narrator observes a fly perched on the back of a crocodile. "The fly then sucks up the blood with its fleshy mouth parts," he says, "filling to bursting point on its victim's rich, cold blood." ROUGH NIGHT (2017) 7:30 p.m. and 9:25 p.m. on FXM. Scarlett Johansson stars as a soon to be married politician named Jess in this comedy, which is more "The Hangover" than "Frost/Nixon." During a race for State Senate, Jess gathers a group of friends for a bachelorette weekend that goes awry. "It's all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers who include Zoe Kravitz and Ilana Glazer weren't generally so appealing," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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While You Were Gawking at Snapchat Posts, One Artist Was Listening to Them You might not have thought about Snapchat this way. You might not have thought much about it at all. But if you are one of the social media app's 191 million daily users, those brief videos of your sneakers pounding the pavement, your friends clinking glasses or your adorable baby bashing cymbals might have been creating sonic art. While Snapchat is primarily used as a visual application, an unusual collaboration between its engineers and an artist, Christian Marclay, has produced an exhibition based on the sounds in posts created by the app's users. "Sound Stories" is to run June 18 to June 22 at La Malmaison in Cannes, France, as part of this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Snapchat's defining feature is that pictures and videos shared among friends quickly disappear and are not stored on anyone's phones, giving the experience a sense of privacy. The videos used in the exhibition are ones that people have uploaded to Snapchat's "public stories," which are available for any user to see. Mr. Marclay, who has spent decades exploring ways to manipulate sounds, told the team at Snap, the app's parent company, that he wasn't so interested in how posts looked, but rather what they sounded like. The exhibition contains five works, displayed in separate rooms. Last week a team of Snapchat engineers, led by Andrew Lin, eagerly gave a demonstration of the pieces at the company's New York office in Times Square. Mr. Lin joked that this project was "different than my normal work, for sure." The first piece, "All Together," at first glance seemed like a random cacophony of sounds scattered across 10 smartphones. But it was actually a product of diligent curation from Mr. Marclay of hundreds of publicly available Snapchat posts to create a specific sound meant to adjust the visitor's mind for the rest of the works in the exhibition. In "The Organ," visitors to the exhibition can play a full size digital keyboard hooked up to a projection screen that shows posts whose sounds correspond to the note or chords being played. "I wanted things to be more interactive so the audience could be part of the composition," Mr. Marclay said. In "Talk to Me/Sing to Me," visitors can sing or speak into several smartphones suspended from a ceiling. The phones, using an algorithm developed by Snap engineers, then mimic their sounds, while also interacting with each other. The fifth work, "Sound Tracks," featured sounds that could be straight out of a terrifying nightmare. The audience is treated to a dark room of eerie cries. Then, after glancing upward through cylinders hanging from the ceiling, they discover that the source of the sounds are actually tablets showing slowed down versions of heartwarming posts, like adorable children playing with animals. "The thinking process behind the engineers and an artist is quite similar," Mr. Marclay said. "You have to get out of your comfort zone and try to push the limit and see what can be done with what's available." This isn't the first time Snap has delved into the art world. Last fall, it collaborated with Jeff Koons on an augmented reality project to show his work superimposed on landmarks around the world. Around the same time, Betsy Kenny Lack, Snapchat's head of global brand strategy, expressed interest in what might be Mr. Marclay's best known work, "The Clock" (2011), which meticulously edited together thousands of film clips referencing clocks to signify the passage of time. She wanted to produce something similar for Snap and pitched it to Evan Spiegel, the chief executive, and then to Mr. Marclay. "Usually, I don't accept these kind of offers because I'm always afraid of some commercial venture," Mr. Marclay said. It took some lobbying from Snap and Jay Jopling, Mr. Marclay's dealer at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London. Mr. Marclay was swayed, drawn by what Snap engineers said was possible with its technology. The exhibition comes as Snap's brand is in need of a boost. A redesign of the Snapchat app late last year was met with scorn, in particular from the reality television personality Kylie Jenner, who said on Twitter in February: "Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me ... ugh this is so sad." Her post was shared almost 75,000 times, and may have been partly responsible for a tumble in Snap's stock price. The company's financial troubles started soon after it went public last year, and it has continued to lose money. In addition, late last month, the streaming news channel Cheddar reported on an email from a former Snap software engineer named Shannon Lubetich who, on her last day with the company in the fall, sent a mass email to her colleagues detailing a toxic work culture. Snap declined to say how much it spent on "Sound Stories," but engineers said it was a side project they worked on in addition to their day jobs. Mr. Spiegel, the chief executive, said in an interview that it furthered Snapchat's brand as being about "empowering expression."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Since Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater began rolling out its online programming in March, I've been waiting for Ailey's always uplifting "Cry" to make an appearance. It arrived, appropriately, just in time for Mother's Day. Ailey created this bracing 16 minute solo in 1971 as a birthday present to his mother, dedicating it to "all black women everywhere especially our mothers." Through Thursday at 6 p.m. Eastern, the company is presenting a 1972 performance by its original interpreter, the ravishing Judith Jamison, at alvinailey.org. It is still a gift. Screens have a way of diminishing kinesthetic empathy our ability to feel, physically, what a dancer might be feeling, to move without moving but Ms. Jamison's energy pierces through that barrier, as if she were right there with us. In the images of struggle, liberation and joy that fill the solo's three sections, every pliant reach of the arm and contraction of the spine remains electrifying. The performance is just one part of a "Cry" playlist that also includes an in depth interview with Ms. Jamison and a new video compilation of Ailey women current and former company members dancing "Cry" at home. And if you're hooked, there's more on YouTube, where you can find the magnetic Deborah Manning, one of many successors in the role, dancing it in full. Taking dance class in your living room has its hazards and limitations: bumping into furniture, disturbing your downstairs neighbors. But this era of online instruction also brings new freedoms, like the ability to take classes with teachers thousands of miles away.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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SAN FRANCISCO Since Uber started a self driving car program in 2015, it has insisted on developing its own driverless technology and operating its own fleet of autonomous vehicles. Now the ride hailing company is starting to shift away from that own it all strategy. Uber is receiving a new 500 million investment from Toyota, which would value the company at 76 billion, according to a person briefed on the deal, who was not authorized to speak publicly. With that investment, Uber plans to provide its self driving technology to a fleet of Toyota minivans, which may be operated by the Japanese automaker or a third party, the companies said in a joint announcement. The fleet will also be equipped with Toyota's safety software, called Guardian, and will pick up passengers on Uber's ride hailing network. The companies anticipate starting a pilot program by 2021. "This agreement and investment marks an important milestone in our transformation to a mobility company as we help provide a path for safe and secure expansion of mobility services like ride sharing that includes Toyota vehicles and technologies," Shigeki Tomoyama, executive vice president of Toyota Motor, said in a statement. Toyota's investment was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The pharmaceutical company Celgene has agreed to pay 280 million to settle claims that it marketed the cancer drugs Thalomid and Revlimid for unapproved uses, the company said on Tuesday. Under the terms of the settlement, which resulted from a lawsuit filed by a whistle blower a former sales representative at Celgene the company will pay 259.3 million to the United States and 20.7 million to 28 states and the District of Columbia. The Celgene settlement is the latest in a string of multimillion dollar fines that pharmaceutical companies have paid to settle charges that they inappropriately marketed certain drugs in recent years, but this case is one of the largest settlements to involve a cancer drug, said Reuben A. Guttman, who represented the whistle blower, Beverly Brown. Cancer drugs are seen as more difficult to pursue in so called off label marketing cases in part because oncologists often prescribe drugs for unapproved uses in an effort to combat a deadly and still mysterious disease. "The company got the idea that it could be fast and loose with what it was saying about its drug because it was selling to cancer patients who might be in need," Mr. Guttman said. "At the end of the day, what this is about is that even when you're on life's edge," he added, a company "can't break the law by off label marketing a drug." Brian Gill, a spokesman for Celgene, which is based in New Jersey, said in a statement on Tuesday that the company denied any wrongdoing and said it was "settling to avoid the uncertainty, distraction, and expense of protracted litigation." He noted that, before the settlement, a federal judge had dismissed a portion of the case that claimed that Celgene had illegally paid doctors to induce them to prescribe Thalomid and Revlimid, and he said that the company stood by the significance of its drugs, which he described as "breakthrough medicines." By 2016, Revlimid, which was closely related to Thalomid, was Celgene's leading product, bringing in nearly 7 billion in sales. Thalomid's sales in 2016 totaled 152 million, according to the company. The company's shares were down 1 percent at the close of the stock market on Tuesday. The settlement is the most recent chapter in the story of thalidomide, the notorious drug that was developed by a German company and marketed around the world in the 1950s as a sedative and anti nausea treatment. In the 1960s, following discoveries that the drug caused horrific birth defects, thalidomide was pulled from pharmacy shelves worldwide. Although the drug was not approved in the United States, the thalidomide crisis led to the overhaul of the nation's drug approval process, including the requirement that companies prove a drug is not just safe but also effective. In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration approved it for use in patients with a complication of leprosy, albeit with severe restrictions intended to prevent it from getting into the hands of pregnant women. Celgene called it Thalomid. Even though it was approved for a rare condition, many in the medical community expressed hope it could soon be used to treat a broader range of conditions, from cancer to autoimmune diseases and AIDS, according to news reports. Sales of Thalomid quickly took off, in part because as Ms. Brown claimed in her complaint Celgene "flooded the country" with sales representatives who were under heavy pressure to pitch the drug to oncologists for a variety of cancers. The F.D.A. sent Celgene two warning letters, in 1998 and 2000, claiming the company had been marketing the drug to treat cancer. In 2000, one Wall Street analyst estimated that 90 percent of Thalomid's sales were to treat cancer, according to Ms. Brown's complaint. Doctors have leeway in deciding which drugs to prescribe, but pharmaceutical companies are supposed to promote their products only for uses that are approved by the F.D.A. Celgene did not gain approval to market Thalomid as a cancer treatment until 2006, when the F.D.A. cleared it to promote the drug for multiple myeloma. In 2005, even before Thalomid received its approval for use in cancer patients, it was Celgene's leading product, bringing in 387.8 million in net sales, according to the company's financial statements. Also in 2005, the company received approval to sell Revlimid for a rare cancer, and Ms. Brown's complaint claims that the company as it had with Thalomid marketed it to treat a broader range of cancers. It also pressured doctors to switch Thalomid patients to Revlimid, which is more expensive. Ms. Brown's complaint also claimed that Celgene's inappropriate marketing of Thalomid exposed patients to heightened risks that included potentially fatal blood clots and other side effects. Those risks were added to the drug's warning label only after it received the approval for cancer treatment, Mr. Guttman said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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PARIS If fashion had a prom, it might be the annual black tie gala held by the Vogue Paris Foundation to raise funds and to showcase major donations to the Palais Galliera, the city's fashion museum. Now in its third year, the dinner held Tuesday in the museum's courtyard (tented, carpeted and filled with white roses for the event) was hosted by Emmanuelle Alt, editor of French Vogue, and Olivier Saillard, director of the Palais Galliera. It also doubled as a who's who of brands, executives, designers and their muses (model and otherwise), schmoozing and celebrating on the penultimate evening of Couture Week. "This is just so beautiful; what a scene, what a setting," Vanessa Paradis declared to Ms. Alt. The actress, wearing a gold jeweled tank top, then whipped out her tobacco and rolled two cigarettes, her crystal glass still in hand. Other local faces included Clemence Poesy, Josephine de la Baume, Lou Doillon and Caroline de Maigret (just hours after her official debut as a Chanel ambassador), all of whom gathered for Champagne and foie gras on an open air balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Nearby, Bella Hadid leaned on a marble pillar in a dusky pink paillettes encrusted cocktail slip by Givenchy; and the actress Zoe Kravitz, in a razor sharp YSL tuxedo combo (with barely a whisper of a sheer top beneath) chatted with the brand's chief executive, Francesca Bellettini. The summer breeze proved a little problematic for some; "I have to keep my hands clenched tight to my sides. There will be no dancing for me later," said the model Anja Rubik, dressed in a dark tailored suit with a completely open jacket and not much else. Not so for the designer Marc Jacobs, who kept his black leather bomber firmly zipped all night. After a packed week of shows and events, there was little surprise that some guests were seeking a moment of solace and contemplation. Inside the palais, away from the buzz of the crowd, Azzedine Alaia and Mario Testino toured the museum's exhibition while Gabriel Kane Day Lewis, the model and son of the actor Daniel Day Lewis, stood in a corner with a friend while vaping intensively on an e cigarette. Just before 10 p.m., guests sat for dinner, first applauding Ms. Alt's brief welcome speech: "I am very shy, so I am going to let Olivier Saillard speak." Later, there was the grinding live performance of Mahaut Mondino, daughter of the photographer Jean Baptiste Mondino, and the appearance of a giant birthday cake for the American Vogue fashion news director Mark Holgate to the room's cheers. For one night at least, fashion was one happy family.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Three premieres are in store for the coming season of Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, at Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater March 8 through March 26 next year. Mr. Taylor will present two new works his 145th and 146th dances for the Paul Taylor Dance Company. One, "Ports of Call," is set to music by the 20th century French composer Jacques Ibert; the other, "The Open Door," features Elgar's "Enigma" Variations. The third premiere, "Continuum," is choreographed by Lila York, this season's Taylor Company Commissions recipient and a veteran Taylor dancer. The piece will be set to Max Richter's 2012 recomposition of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." Taylor classics like "Esplanade" (1975) round out the season lineup, which also includes performances by a guest company, Lyon Opera Ballet. The Lyon dancers will perform Merce Cunningham's 1958 work "Summerspace," with costumes by Robert Rauschenberg and music by the American experimental composer Morton Feldman.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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"Heures Heureuses!" Happy Hours! trumpeted the chalkboard menu on the terrace of 92, rue de Charonne. And as I sipped my cocktail at an outdoor table, absorbing the euphoria of a perfect spring evening, the words felt more like an apt description than a promotion. In a haze of cigarette smoke and laughter, a full spectrum of my Parisian neighbors filled the crowded tables: a vivacious fashionista in huge red eyeglasses chatting with a Franco African woman in a motorcycle jacket; a male couple in Ray Bans cuddling at the next table. Behind me, two older women clinked wineglasses and leaned forward to hear each other amid the funk music groove. Twilight was falling. A Parisian night was about to flare into fullness. The last time I visited La Belle Equipe cafe, a five minute walk from my apartment, the outdoor space was an ocean of flowers, candles and hand scrawled condolence notes. Hundreds of mourners gathered, whispering prayers for the 19 people gunned down there just two nights earlier, during the terror attacks of Nov. 13. Some longtime friends from the nearby Cafe des Anges, my corner cafe, had been among the casualties. Horror and mourning. Destruction and rebuilding. Shattered lives and a return to the quotidian. Paris, and other parts of Europe rocked by terrorism, tilt dizzily back and forth these days. Thanks to support from friends and family and Parisian solidarity, in general I have managed to keep my balance and move ahead with life in this city that I have chosen as my home. For years people have asked me, why did you move to France? French people ask with pride. Americans ask with a dreamy look in their eyes. I know that look well. I was raised by Francophiles. My father lit out for Paris in the 1950s and spent months in a cheap hotel in the St. Germain des Pres neighborhood. He drank beers at Brasserie Lipp and picked up his mail from the old American Express office near the opera house. My mother arrived in the mid 1960s for her junior college year abroad. She returned with paperbacks by Sartre, Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir and albums by Charles Aznavour and Georges Brassens. I grew up with my mother's soundtrack and my father's stories. Going to France someday seemed as natural as going to college or getting a job. The Paris they evoked, reaffirmed by films like "The Last Metro," "Last Tango in Paris" and "Diva," was a moody, twilight city of long nights and endless intrigue. I set out in 2004 with an aspiring writer's predictable visions: the cozy bookshops of St. Germain des Pres; the avant garde architecture and contemporary art of the Centre Pompidou; the twisting hillside streets of Montmartre; the raspberry sorbet at Berthillon; the hot chocolate of the Cafe de Flore; revival cinema houses in the Latin Quarter; nocturnal picnics overlooking the Seine; the red neon sleaze of Pigalle; wine bars; jazz clubs; sunrise over the mansard rooftops. Paris delivered those rewards and more, though French life has proved far more complicated and lately volatile. Only with time would I learn some of the less savory aspects of Paris society and French politics, notably the fallout from French colonialism in North and West Africa, the Algerian war of the 1960s, and an inchoate attempt to integrate immigrants from those countries into French life. But nothing could prepare anyone for Nov. 13. The aftermath for some of my neighbors was crushing. An easygoing acquaintance named Khaled, a French Tunisian cool cat who had bartended at the Cafe des Anges, was with two of his sisters during the attack on La Belle Equipe. They were killed; he survived. I saw him a few days later, dazed and red eyed. Then he vanished from the neighborhood. A longstanding French friend witnessed some of the shootings while out walking. He hid in a theater and sneaked home in the wee hours. Afterward, he feared being outside. I urged him out once once for a drink. After an hour, he asked me to see him into a taxi. Then he vanished, too. I went back to New York City, my hometown, in late December, as I do every year, to visit friends and family. This time, I found myself wondering: Why return to the tragedy of Paris and the turmoil of Europe? But I felt a connection both geographically and morally to the challenges in Europe and beyond. I was finally feeling at home amid the city's grand boulevards and splintering medieval passages. And I didn't want to be Paris's fair weather fan. So I returned eager, but unsure of what might unfold next. Beyond my neighborhood, beyond France, the view sometimes appears equally cloudy. Sometimes I unroll an imaginary map and trace a trail of favorite cities in Europe that have also suffered terrorist nightmares in recent years. Brussels, our neighbor to the north, in March. Copenhagen, a frequent stop during three decades of visiting my Danish stepmother and stepbrothers, where a gunman opened fire on a cafe and a synagogue in February of 2015. Istanbul, a storybook city that I visit almost every year. Sometimes my travels turn up ghosts. In Parma, Italy, this spring, I spent days dreaming only of my next meal. Hocks of air cured Parma ham and blocks of Parmigiano cheese awaited around every corner. Then, passing the city's venerable university, the face of Guillaume, an old friend, materialized in my mind. A former bartender at my corner hangout, Cafe des Anges, he was part of the group gunned down on Nov. 13 at the nearby Belle Equipe cafe. He had studied and lived in Parma, a fact that I had forgotten until that moment. Funny, sly and fluent in Italian, he had been training recently to become a schoolteacher. I leaned against a wall, face to face with his terrible end once again. In spite of these attacks, I don't travel around Europe any differently than I did before. I don't pack survival gear; I don't buy travel insurance. I'm not constantly looking over my shoulder or at State Department travel warnings, which almost urge you to compose a will before crossing a border. Why? Because the expanse of territory with no terrorist history, no jarring personal memories, is vast. For every spot in Europe touched by terrorism, there are many, many more that continue their routines as they always have. Putting my finger again to my imaginary map, I can connect numerous cities that I have recently visited in total tranquillity. In Zurich, the only time I was scared was when I asked for hotel prices. In Milan, the main stress was how to fill two days with as many art museums, design galleries and osterias as possible. Even Sarajevo, which two decades ago was the site of some of modern Europe's worst atrocities, proved welcoming. Last fall, I passed from the domes, minarets and carpeted tearooms of the old Ottoman quarter into the churches, squares and pastry shops of the 19th century core, with its palpable Austro Hungarian influences. Never once did I feel unsafe. And even amid the rising xenophobic climate in Europe and the racist noise of the far right parties, there are voices of tolerance. Pope Francis in particular has been an example of compassion. Among his Easter rituals, he washed the feet of refugees of multiple faiths. More recently, he visited the Greek island of Lesbos, the landing point for so many Syrians fleeing the devastation in their country, and brought back a dozen to resettle in Rome. Sometimes the bright spots are much closer to home. In November I visited Denmark to celebrate Thanksgiving in my family's town, Knebel. That Thursday, I accompanied my sister in law to the language school where she teaches Danish to foreigners. The teachers had organized an international dinner to showcase food from the students' various countries. Entering, I heard a friendly commotion in Arabic. A group of young Syrians was hustling to prepare dishes for their fellow immigrants Eritreans, Palestinians, Iranians. That evening, surrounded by the forests and farmlands of Scandinavia, we dined on kibbe (ground meat in a casing of cracked wheat) and kenafeh (a warm, sweet white cheese dessert) as the Syrians told of abandoned studies and families in their war ravaged country. Syrian Kurds sang songs. One fellow, a former student of British literature, quoted verses by William Blake. That simple dinner fostered a sense of community and exchange that every global policy maker should feel just once. It is spring now in Paris. The City of Light is not plunged into darkness; the Seine is not a stream of tears. The neighborhood is in bloom. At one end of the adjacent street, Rue de la Roquette, oak and cherry trees blossom in Pere Lachaise cemetery, the final resting place of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Chopin and other expatriates who rhapsodized about this city, as well as Moliere, Edith Piaf and a multitude of French legends. At the other end, a new generation of strivers applies to become Parisian. "Droit d'Asile" asylum seekers reads the sign outside the Office Francais de l'Immigration et de l'Integration, where refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia line the pavement. In between, on my Rue des Taillandiers, life lurches ahead. Journalism assignments and deadlines. Walks to the gym (not often enough). Metro rides to the overpriced chiropractor whose Old World office suggests a baron's apartment. Mornings at the outdoor market. Nights at the cinema (also not enough). Email backlogs. Electric bills. Leaks. Loud neighbors. Lunches with friends. And as the leaves at last reappear, so do vanished neighbors. My first Parisian friend, who had feared leaving his apartment, is out again, hitting the Paris bar circuit and jetting off to Brazil, Mauritius and beyond. Even Khaled, the former Cafe des Anges bartender who lost two sisters, appeared the other night. He was standing at his old counter, a customer this time, having drinks and joking with friends. Out for a spin on my battered Italian scooter, I can see the city's surge in full view. Six new restaurants and wine bars have opened within a one minute walk of my building. So have the restaurants and cafes attacked on Nov. 13. On the terrace of La Belle Equipe, sitting among the twilight throngs, I scan a menu as diverse as this city: French tartare de boeuf, American style barbecued ribs, Middle Eastern shakshouka. I am already eager to return, many times, to the "heures heureuses" here, and to the many hours of happiness that I have known all over this neighborhood, this adopted city, and this continent, my home.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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MIAMI BEACH The third time's the charm. Following two postponements caused by construction delays, Miami Beach's city owned Bass art museum has announced its October 2017 reopening following a 12 million renovation project. The overhauled museum, housed in a 1930s era Art Deco building, will include four new galleries, adding 4,100 square feet of exhibition space, as well as an additional 4,000 square feet for educational activities. The reopening also continues a programming shift away from the Bass's permanent collection of Baroque and Renaissance era artworks donated in 1964 by the museum's namesakes, John and Johanna Bass, and toward contemporary art. (Some of the Old Masters art later turned out to be either fake or misattributed.) To that end, in October, the Bass is to feature a retrospective of work by the artist Ugo Rondinone, who was born in Switzerland and is now based in New York, filling the museum's entire second floor, and a solo show by the multimedia artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, who was born in Cameroon and is based in Belgium. Which raises a question. With the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (which moves into its own new building in December), and North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art all focusing on the same au courant corner of the art world and, not least, pursuing the same donor base here, is there room for a fourth institution to thrive in that same niche?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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A GHOST STORY (2017) on iTunes and Amazon. Although 2017 was the year of the horror film, there was at least one ghost story that wasn't scary: this one, directed by David Lowery. It stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, a couple who are separated, in some ways but not others, by the death of Mr. Affleck's character, who is portrayed post mortem by Mr. Affleck in a bedsheet with eyeholes. Here, death does not, in fact, do them part. FRANK (2014) on iTunes, Amazon and Hulu. Fancy another film featuring an A list actor in an absurd costume? How about Michael Fassbender in a giant papier mache head? You'll find that, as well as Domhnall Gleeson as a would be rocker and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a tantrum throwing synth player, in this film from the director Lenny Abrahamson. The story follows Mr. Gleeson's character, who quits his boring day job to join an avant garde rock band fronted by Mr. Fassbender's character, who never takes off his big head. The group goes on a long retreat, during which they record an album (or try to). Other members of the band are played by Francois Civil and the real life drummer Carla Azar. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott wrote that "Mr. Abrahamson's main achievement, enabled by the sensitive and resourceful cast, is to find a tone that is funny without flippancy, sincere without turning to mush."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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CLEVELAND In the months since he began pursuing the presidency, Donald J. Trump has exhibited a command over the national news media that is without parallel in modern times. The can't look away quality of his public persona and his media awareness have frequently pushed much of our national journalism into an unsavory corner where the imperatives of equal time, hard scrutiny and adherence to traditional standards have given way to the business lure of the huge television ratings and internet clicks that Mr. Trump uniquely provides. Still, nothing will test the news media like the next few days in Cleveland, where the Republican convention gets underway on Monday. Mr. Trump will have something that even he has never had; something that only presidents and major party nominees get. And that is nearly full control of the national media stage for four straight evenings in prime time, across not only cable news, but, at least for one hour every night, the broadcast networks as well. He has been planning to make full use of his time in his trademark way, with daily themes that will weave in staples of hot button topics from talk radio and the Fox News Channel's opinion programs: Bill Clinton's infidelity, Hillary Clinton's response to the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, and immigration. How far Mr. Trump goes with that convention approach, first reported by Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times last week, remains to be seen; one never knows. But some of it promises to border on spectacle, to put it mildly. (Let me repeat: Among the potential themes is Mr. Clinton's sex life.) It could be one of those events that we look back on as a defining moment in American media, especially for the television networks: Did they once again this year hand themselves over to a Trumpian infomercial the ultimate Trump infomercial and bask in the ratings? Or did they rediscover their vital role of providing context, perspective and truth in a contest that is not a countdown clock worthy sporting event or reality show, but a competition for the presidency of the United States in fraught and dangerous times? Truth will not come to the fore without hard work and, potentially, a fight. The robust fact checking industry that has sprung up over the past several years will have to work overtime during both conventions. But while Mrs. Clinton's dossier of falsehoods has increased with the F.B.I. report contradicting so many of her statements about her private email server, Mr. Trump and his campaign have generated so many untruths that Factcheck.org declared that in the 12 years since its founding, "we've never seen his match." And that was before this year began. His convention could surprise everyone and stick to only verified attacks, while coming off as a more traditional affair. But many of Mr. Trump's expected convention subjects have generated their share of false, unsubstantiated or wildly exaggerated assertions that Mrs. Clinton "slept through" the Benghazi attack (false); that the current administration is financing illegal immigration (false); and that it is not vetting refugees from the Middle East (false). It's telling that in one of its last personnel moves before the convention's start on Monday, the Trump campaign hired a new "director of rapid response," Steven Cheung. His primary responsibility will not be to combat the claims of the opposition the usual job of political rapid response but rather to take on the reportage of the news media. Even more telling was Mr. Cheung's pedigree. He last served as the spokesman for Ultimate Fighting Championship, the mixed martial arts league where opponents seek to beat each other into submission in a fenced in octagon that's practically a cage. Quicken Loans Arena here may serve as the ultimate cage, given that Mr. Trump has maintained a blacklist of reporters, has vowed to loosen libel laws as president and is featuring at the convention the Silicon Valley billionaire who is seeking to put Gawker Media out of business through financing multiple lawsuits, Peter Thiel. The situation puts a whole new twist on the quadrennial question about how news organizations should cover the national political conventions, which were once conclaves for the real work of nominating presidents and vice presidents but went on to become mere media messaging pageants. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. With that turn, a certain cat and mouse game developed between the networks and the convention planners over how much of the action on the main convention stage would be beamed directly into Americans' living rooms unfiltered, especially in earlier, prime time hours, before the top billed speaking slate begins. That segment guaranteed full coverage on the broadcast networks now represents only a single hour on television. The networks will usually cut away to their own anchors and analysts their stars when they deem the convention doings to be ratings downers. The top goal of the campaigns, then, is to "hold the cameras," said Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist who spearheaded convention planning for the Mitt Romney and George W. Bush campaigns. Of course, no candidate has been able to hold the cameras quite like Mr. Trump. And, given his reality show and self marketing background, it has stood to reason that he would have a convention filled with television ratings bait. Yet that came into doubt in recent days as some potential convention stars like the former N.F.L. quarterback Tim Tebow and major party leaders declined to participate. In a hopeful sign, the networks have made it clear to both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton that the same rules apply to the conventions that have applied to their coverage all year: The cameras will go to the ratings draws. "Both campaigns know that keeping the attention of the networks and keeping the attention on their podium is their job, not the networks' job," said Chuck Todd, who is host of "Meet the Press" on NBC and "MTP Daily" on MSNBC, and also serves as NBC News political director. (NBC will team up with PolitiFact for the convention.) I wondered aloud to Mr. Todd what networks like his would do if the Trump campaign goes ahead with prime time programming around the Clinton era sex scandals, which would certainly be a first in televised convention history. There would be an element of "Wow, we haven't seen that before," he told me, "So it fits the definition of 'new' in the word 'news.'" But, he added, "Every network's going to make a different decision." This is where the big test comes in. If the convention airs the most lurid claims made about Mr. Clinton such as the rape accusation made against him by the former Arkansas nursing home administrator Juanita Broaddrick, which Mr. Trump recently raised and Mr. Clinton's lawyer publicly denied long ago will the shock value overwhelm live news judgment? Even as Jay Wallace, Fox News Channel's executive vice president for news and editorial, told me that Mr. Trump's convention slate appeared to be "playing to some portions of our audience" those who tune in to the likes of Sean Hannity, whose show features many of the same themes he said, "I don't feel like we're going to blow out our programming at certain hours for stuff like that." In fact, all of the network executives I spoke with last week repeated what Sam Feist, the CNN Washington bureau chief, told me that they would make decisions on the spot, on a "case by case basis," and that regardless they would do aggressive fact checking, for both conventions. That could prove vital, especially after the big post 10 p.m. speeches that will most likely be shown in full. You could imagine seeing Mr. Trump exhort the convention crowd against the news media if he is displeased with its coverage, which would be its own sort of spectacle. Mr. Schriefer, the Republican strategist, said Mr. Trump as well as Mrs. Clinton would be wise to remember that conventions are the first time many people "turn on the television to decide, Can this man or woman be president of the United States?" Those are the stakes. The news media would be wise to remember it, too.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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How do you tell an alligator from a crocodile? And no, dad joke enthusiasts, the answer isn't that you see one later and the other after a while. The most obvious way to discern the two reptiles is to stare down their sinister snouts. Alligators have U shaped faces that are wide and short, while crocodiles have slender almost V shaped muzzles. And if you're daring enough, take a gander at their chompers. When an alligator closes its mouth, you tend to see only its upper teeth. Crocodiles on the other hand flash a toothy grin with their top and bottom teeth interlacing. Many of the differences between the two center on their heads and mouths. Now, researchers from Japan have identified what they believe to be another feature that sets the reptiles apart: Alligators tend to have shorter humerus bones in their forelimbs and shorter femurs in their hind limbs than crocodiles, the team reported last week. "This information could help explain differences in their ecology and locomotion, including the strange fact that, while small crocodiles have been observed to bound and gallop, alligators have not," Julia Molnar an evolutionary biologist from the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine who was not involved in the study. She said the limb differences can affect things like speed and leverage in the animals.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Private equity funds have performed well in the last few years, returning 10 percent in 2018 alone, beating all other indexes. That rate of return is attracting amateur investors who are setting up high risk, high return deals on their own. These investors do not want to hand over millions to professional managers . In most cases, they are successful professionals who have adopted a do it yourself approach to private equity investing. Dr. Keith Wright , a dermatologist in Atlanta, is part of a group of lawyers and businesspeople in the city who have been pooling their money for about six years in search of the outsize returns of private equity legend. "It came from the boredom everyone felt with mutual funds," Dr. Wright said. "When we started off, all we were looking for was a home run." Some investors seek to cast a wide net across several industries . Donald Prophete , a labor relations lawyer, is president of Omega Investment Partners, a group of eight investors in Kansas City, Mo., with money in several sectors, including autos, health care and real estate. "Five years ago, I realized I was in the wrong job," Mr. Prophete said. "My calling was to be an entrepreneur." "This is a sign of a hot market all around us," said Matt Glaser, head of equity, nontraditional investments and research at Wilmington Trust. And that market is drawing armchair experts out of the woodwork. Mr. Glaser said private equity investing took time and analysis for it to succeed. H is team has been taking longer to make investments, fearful of overpaying for a private equity opportunity that may not perform well. His team is about to present a deal to clients, for example, that it had been researching for more than a year; typically, it would spend several months performing due diligence. These amateur investor groups are another iteration of investment clubs that have popped up around the country for decades. Most of those clubs have sought to channel the collective wisdom of their members to do something that professional investors struggle to do full time. When putting money into public equities, investors have an out if things go wrong : They sell their shares on the stock market . Private equity, by design, provides no such escape hatch. An investment in a start up means investors get their money back only if the company goes public or is bought by someone else. So do these do it yourself private equity investors stand a chance? They might, though a lot of work will go into it. "I think all of these investors get that if it was easy, everyone else would be doing it," said Alfred W. Coleman , a corporate partner at Saul Ewing Arnstein Lehr in Minneapolis, who helped set up the funds created by Dr. Wright and Mr. Prophete. "But a good portion of what was driving this was access and control. They didn't have access to these pools and investments, so they had to create it on their own." It starts with how they hear about deals, known as sourcing. Mr. Glaser said Wilmington Trust saw a lot of deals, given the size of its investment capital 92 billion. But of the hundreds it looks at in any given year, the firm invests in about three. It puts 50 million to 100 million in each one. Palm Drive Capital, a venture capital firm in New York, has invested in six unicorns, or companies with valuations of a billion dollars or more, since its founding in 2014, said Seamon Chan , managing partner at the firm. Palm Drive sometimes looks at hundreds of deals a week, all in the software industry, and passes on most of them, he said. "When we are interested in moving forward with a company, it's gone through a big filtering process," Mr. Chan said. Even then, the group tries to negotiate the best terms for its investment. "We're pretty valuation sensitive," he said. In this sense, individuals focused on private equity are at a disadvantage. Their groups are not going to see the best deals, but even if they did, they would not have the capital to invest at that level. Mr. Prophete, the corporate lawyer, said the eight members in his group each put in 125,000 a year . With 1 million on hand, the group has access to a lot of deals, he said. The group has been active for about seven years. The members relies on their contacts to find opportunities. "We have never not had a pipeline of deals," he said. These deals are small, though, the type that large private equity funds would not consider. Mr. Colston has focused his investments on sports related companies, including sports technology, performance and online gaming. "It was the industry I knew and could have a real understanding of it," he said. "We're trying create opportunities around players transitioning out of sports," Mr. Colston said. Members can invest 5,000 to 100,000 in qualified deals. "It's an investment vehicle with the thesis that we're looking to invest in companies where we can move the needle." This strategy has long been practiced by private investors at the next level up: the family office that manages money for high net worth individuals and typically has tens of millions of dollars to work with. McNally Capital, a private investment firm based in Chicago, has been investing money for wealthy families for more than a decade. Its investments range from 20 million to 75 million in companies with values of 60 million to 200 million. Ward McNally , managing partner at the firm, said he would not make an investment unless someone at the firm understood a company's business firsthand. "The whole thing revolves around improving your odds of success," he said. "People are so focused on finding the next social media website to create value. You should invest your capital in a way you understand and really leverage who you are with what you know to create value." In these smaller funds, group dynamics matter. Personalities clash, and the more individuals who have a say, the harder the investment decisions can be to make. John Rompon , managing partner of Marjo Investments, which makes private equity investments for wealthy families, said it was essential for one person to be in charge. "The people not in charge are just making the decision to invest money in the fund," he said. "It's not a collective decision." Well conceived documents can put guidelines for the fund in place. But what can seem logical and necessary at the start can have unintended consequences. Dr. Wright said three people had left his group since it started, including the fraternity brother who had brought him in, but their money stayed behind. That was written into the fund documents up front. "If you leave anytime before the 10 year horizon, you redeem nothing and you lose everything," he said. "It's painful, but it's there to encourage you to stick this out." If members depart and an investment performs well, they still get nothing. Mr. Coleman, the lawyer who has helped organize several small funds, said people really needed to consider the emotional component of investing in such high risk, illiquid investments. The investments are relatively small, but the stakes are often high. "It's the difference between spending 30,000 on a new boat or car that's tangible or an investment like this that you hope will pay off but could evaporate in a year," he said. "They're not seasoned money managers, and it's money they don't want to lose." When investments turn out well, there is a feeling of satisfaction from having helped a company that would have been overlooked by larger private equity funds. "You move from the fanciful exit number and you start looking at the companies you've invested in and start caring for their mission," Dr. Wright said. "You want them to have a viable company, and you look at the monetary return less."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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For old school Roman cuisine, these places are in top form. At the tourist free end of Trastevere, Ristorante la Tavernaccia da Bruno (Via G. Da Castelbolognese; 63; 39 06 581 2792) serves all your classic dishes but also has great ravioli and vignarola. Call for reservations; the secret has long been long out. In Testaccio, the city's capital of traditional Roman trattorias, the locals only attitude has been replaced with a cool kid chill. But neither were in evidence at Piatto Romano (Via G. B. Bodoni, 62; 39 06 6401 4447), where the service was warm and the food top notch. For more sophisticated, or at least different, fare, head north to Marzapane (Via Velletri, 39; 39 06 6478 1692), where the young Spanish chef has wowed city foodies. Make reservations way in advance. If the restaurant is booked, try your luck at the nearby Pro Loco (Via Bergamo 18; 39 06 841 4136), which is more casual, but also excellent. At Retrobottega (Via della Stelletta, 4; 39 06 6813 6310), watch chefs meticulously craft inventive dishes in an open kitchen. The restaurant is serious about its food and "it place" vibe.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Did the white working class vote its economic interests? The day after the presidential election in a long and brooding interview with Rolling Stone magazine President Obama offered his take on why blue collar whites flocked so decidedly to Donald J. Trump. "This is not simply an economic issue," Mr. Obama concluded. "This is a cultural issue. And a communications issue." From family leave and overtime rules to Obamacare, he noted, his administration offered a steady stream of policies to help working class communities. But "whatever policy prescriptions that we've been proposing don't reach, are not heard, by the folks in these communities." This view fits a common narrative among liberal analysts of American politics, most prominently conveyed in "What's the Matter With Kansas," the 2004 best selling book by Thomas Frank: Republicans use cultural issues like abortion, guns and gay marriage to gain the votes of struggling workers who nonetheless stand to lose the most from the Republicans' small government agenda. But it largely misses the mark. Yes, the economy has added millions of jobs since President Obama took office. Even manufacturing employment has recovered some of its losses. Still, less educated white voters had a solid economic rationale for voting against the status quo nearly all the gains from the economic recovery have passed them by. There are almost nine million more jobs than there were at the previous peak in November 2007, just before the economy tumbled into recession. But the gains have not been evenly distributed. Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years. The racial and ethnic divide is starker among workers in their prime. Whites ages 25 to 54 lost some 6.5 million jobs more than they gained over the period. Hispanics in their prime, by contrast, gained some three million jobs net, Asians 1.5 million and blacks one million. This lopsided racial sorting of jobs is only one of the fault lines brought to the fore by the presidential election. Only 472 counties voted for Hillary Clinton on Election Day. But according to Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, they account for 64 percent of the nation's economic activity. The 2,584 counties where Mr. Trump won, by contrast, generated only 36 percent of America's prosperity. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The political divide between high output and low output parts of the country also meshes with the cleavage between urban America largely won by Mrs. Clinton and the vast, less populous rural stretches where Mr. Trump racked up large numbers of votes. Non Hispanic whites account for 62 percent of the population. But they make up some 78 percent of the population of nonmetropolitan areas and 71 percent of that of small cities, according to the demographer William H. Frey from Brookings. By contrast, they account for only 56 percent of the population of the 100 largest urban areas in the country. Problem is, many of the jobs created since the economy started recovering from recession were in service industries, located primarily in large metropolitan areas not in small towns and rural areas where the factories that once provided steady good jobs were either shuttered or were retooled to replace workers with machines. Even as the typical American household experienced the fastest income growth on record last year, median household income outside of metropolitan areas fell 2 percent, according to the Census Bureau. By last summer employment in nonmetropolitan areas was still 2 percent lower than in the first quarter of 2008. "It has been a good decade for metropolitan America," said Mr. Muro, who heads the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings. By contrast, "you can't underestimate the economic and social pain across the rural tier." Given such clear divisions less educated whites living in depressed rural areas, on one side, and minorities living in more vigorous big city economies on the other the social and racial animosity manifest during the election campaign is hardly a surprise. So there is a clear economic argument for Mr. Trump's angry voters to have bucked the establishment. But all that raises a bigger question. Will President Trump deliver on the promises the new, well paying jobs that his supporters demand? Mr. Achuthan, for one, thinks not. "Trump will get smacked in about a year or so," he told me. "Regardless of his policies." The story extends back to the turn of the century when China was allowed into the World Trade Organization, setting off a wave of investment by multinational corporations hoping to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor. Goods producing jobs in manufacturing and construction, which had been roughly flat since 1979, plummeted by more than three million before a building boom fueled by an inflating housing bubble clawed back many of them. When that bubble burst, the construction jobs evaporated too. And there has been no new job producing boom to take its place.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Caster Semenya, of South Africa, who is an intersex athlete, won the 800 meter race at the 2016 Olympics, while Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi (in the red shorts) finished second. Niyonsaba is also impacted by track and field's testosterone regulations. With the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics approaching in July, Human Rights Watch on Friday demanded that track and field officials halt sex testing of female athletes, describing the practice of measuring and restricting their natural testosterone levels as abusive and harmful. Sex testing has been a deeply contentious issue in sports for decades, but the dispute has been heightened since 2018, when track and field's world governing body instituted its latest rules regarding intersex athletes like Caster Semenya of South Africa, a two time Olympic champion runner at 800 meters. The sport's regulations have inflamed debates about biological sex, gender identity and fair play. Semenya and others who have what are called differences of sexual development, or D.S.D.s, are required to suppress naturally elevated testosterone levels through hormonal therapy or surgery before competing internationally in women's running races at distances from the quarter mile to the mile. World Athletics, track and field's governing body, acknowledges that the restrictions are discriminatory, but says they are necessary to ensure a level playing field. Semenya, who identifies as a woman and has declined to undergo testosterone suppression, has lost appeals before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is based in Switzerland, and the Swiss Supreme Court. Last month, her lawyers said she would take her case to the European Court of Human Rights, though it is unclear if any decision can be reached before the Tokyo Games, scheduled to start on July 23. Otherwise, Semenya, 29, has suggested she will try to run the 200, an event free of the recently introduced testosterone restrictions, at the Olympics. In a 120 page report, the New York based Human Rights Watch amplified with athletes' voices what critics of the current testosterone regulations have long argued: that they are medically unnecessary and humiliating; encourage coerced medical intervention; can result in physical and psychological injury and the loss of careers; violate fundamental rights to privacy, dignity, health, nondiscrimination and employment; and adhere to standards of femininity that are racially biased, disproportionately affecting women of color from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. "Whether it is hormone therapy or surgery, why should a perfectly healthy woman agree to do so to compete in sports?" Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi in East Africa said in an email to The New York Times. She finished second to Semenya in the 800 at the 2016 Olympics and is also affected by the testosterone regulations. Like Semenya, Niyonsaba has refused to undergo hormone suppression and is now training to run the 5,000 meters, a distance at which the biological restrictions do not apply. "They treat us as if we are cheats," Niyonsaba said. "We deserve to be respected as athletes, as champions." The report was based on interviews last year with 13 female athletes from African and Asian countries, as well as input from lawyers, doctors, academics and medical ethicists. Annet Negesa, an intersex middle distance runner from Uganda, told researchers that an operation to remove her internal testes was performed in 2012 without her consent. The operation, she said, left her battling headaches and achy joints and ruined her career. Another athlete, identified by her initials as J.G., said in the report that once she was declared ineligible because of testosterone regulations, she lost her career, could not get a job and struggled to eat. "My life is over," she said. Payoshni Mitra, an Indian scholar and athletes' rights advocate who was a co author of the report, said in a telephone interview from London that "regulating fair play is understandable. Committing human rights violations in the process is not acceptable. And that is what World Athletics is doing." Human Rights Watch called on World Athletics to immediately rescind its testosterone regulations. And it implored the International Olympic Committee to uphold the Olympic Charter, which prohibits discrimination of any kind, and to develop guidelines that meet the standards of international human rights and medical ethics. In a statement, World Athletics rejected the accusation that biological limits set on athletes competing in certain women's events were based on race or gender stereotypes. Rather, the governing body said, the testosterone regulations provide "an objective and scientific measure" to preserve equitable competition. The International Olympic Committee said it was working on inclusivity guidelines to "ensure fairness, safety and non discrimination of athletes on the basis of gender identity and sex characteristics." A 2017 study, commissioned by World Athletics and later challenged by independent researchers, said that women with D.S.D.s tended to have distinct advantages in races from a quarter mile to a mile, distances that require a combination of speed and endurance. In 2018, track's governing body instituted regulations governing female athletes who have a disorder of sexual development and both X and Y chromosomes, the standard male pattern. Intersex athletes with testosterone in the male range, the governing body argued, possess an unfair advantage in lean muscle mass, strength and oxygen carrying capacity in certain events. The lowest level of testosterone in the typical male range is four times the highest level in the typical female range, according to World Athletics. But critics of the regulations have contested the science underpinning the World Athletics rules and noted that there was no scientific consensus on the precise impact of testosterone on athletic performance. In June, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that sports officials should revoke regulations regarding intersex athletes. And the World Medical Association last year urged doctors not to implement the regulations, saying they were based "on weak evidence." It is a mistake to view this issue in scientific terms alone, said Katrina Karkazis, a co author of the Human Rights Watch report and a visiting professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at Emory University. "In doing that, you obfuscate or ignore the very real harms done to women," Karkazis said. "That is the importance of the report."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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1. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large, nonstick skillet and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until tender, about 5 minutes, and add the peppers, chile, and garlic. Stir together until the garlic begins to smell fragrant, about 1 minute, and add salt to taste. Continue to cook, stirring often, for about 10 minutes, until the peppers are quite soft. Add the tomatoes, sugar, and thyme, bring to a simmer, turn the heat to low and cook uncovered for 20 to 30 minutes, stirring often. The mixture should be thick and sweet. Remove from the heat and keep warm. 2. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Cover a baking sheet with foil and lightly oil the foil. Place the fish on top. Season with salt and gently rub the salt into the surface of the fish. Add pepper to taste. Fill a roasting pan with boiling water and place it on the oven floor. Place in the oven and bake until the fish flakes and white bubbles of protein appear on the surface, 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of the fillets (you can scrape them away if you don't like the look of them). Remove from the heat and serve topped with the piperade. Advance preparation: The peppers can be prepared through Step 1 and kept on hand in the refrigerator for three or four days. Nutritional information per serving: 279 calories; 12 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 2 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 71 milligrams cholesterol; 10 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 123 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 33 grams protein Martha Rose Shulman is the author of "The Very Best of Recipes for Health."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Republicans have a long, disreputable history of conflating any attempt to improve American lives with the evils of "socialism." When Medicare was first proposed, Ronald Reagan called it "socialized medicine," and he declared that it would destroy our freedom. These days, if you call for something like universal child care, conservatives accuse you of wanting to turn America into the Soviet Union. It's a smarmy, dishonest political strategy, but it's hard to deny that it has sometimes been effective. And now the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination not an overwhelming front runner, but clearly the person most likely at the moment to come out on top is someone who plays right into that strategy, by declaring that he is indeed a socialist. The thing is, Bernie Sanders isn't actually a socialist in any normal sense of the term. He doesn't want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning; he has expressed admiration, not for Venezuela, but for Denmark. He's basically what Europeans would call a social democrat and social democracies like Denmark are, in fact, quite nice places to live, with societies that are, if anything, freer than our own. So why does Sanders call himself a socialist? I'd say that it's mainly about personal branding, with a dash of glee at shocking the bourgeoisie. And this self indulgence did no harm as long as he was just a senator from a very liberal state. But if Sanders becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, his misleading self description will be a gift to the Trump campaign. So will his policy proposals. Single payer health care is (a) a good idea in principle and (b) very unlikely to happen in practice, but by making Medicare for All the centerpiece of his campaign, Sanders would take the focus off the Trump administration's determination to take away the social safety net we already have. Just to be clear, if Sanders is indeed the nominee, the Democratic Party should give him its wholehearted support. He probably couldn't turn America into Denmark, and even if he could, President Trump is trying to turn us into a white nationalist autocracy like Hungary. Which would you prefer? But I do wish that Sanders weren't so determined to make himself an easy target for right wing smears. Speaking of unhelpful political posturing, the runner up in New Hampshire has also been poisoning his own well. Over the past few days Pete Buttigieg has chosen to pose as a deficit hawk, thereby demonstrating that while he may be a fresh face, he has remarkably stale ideas. Maybe Buttigieg is unaware of the growing consensus among mainstream economists that the deficit hysteria of seven or eight years ago was greatly overblown. Last year the former top economists in the Obama administration published an article titled "Who's Afraid of Budget Deficits?" which concluded, "It's time for Washington to put away its debt obsession and focus on bigger things." And where Sanders is playing right into one disreputable Republican political strategy, Buttigieg is playing into another: the strategy of hobbling the economy with fiscal austerity when a Democrat occupies the White House, then borrowing freely as soon as the G.O.P. regains power. If Democrats win, they should pursue a progressive agenda, not waste political capital cleaning up the G.O.P.'s mess. Again, if Buttigieg somehow becomes the nominee, the party should back him without reservation. Whatever he may say about deficits, he wouldn't do what Republicans do: use debt fears as an excuse to slash social programs. So who will the Democrats nominate? Your guess is as good as mine. What's really important, however, is that the party stays focused on its strengths and Trump's weaknesses. For the fact is that all of the Democrats who would be president, from Bloomberg to Bernie, are at least moderately progressive; they all want to maintain and expand the social safety net, while raising taxes on the wealthy. And all the polling evidence says that America is basically a center left nation which is why Trump promised to raise taxes on the rich and protect major social programs during the 2016 campaign. But he was lying, and at this point everyone with an open mind knows it. So Democrats have a perfect opportunity to portray themselves, truthfully, as the defenders of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the now popular Affordable Care Act against Republicans who are more or less nakedly favoring the interests of plutocrats over those of working families. This opportunity will, however, be squandered if the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she is, turns the election into a referendum on either single payer health care or deficit reduction, neither of which is an especially popular position. Things will be even worse if the Democrats themselves degenerate into squabbles over either ideological purity or fiscal probity. The point is that whoever gets the nomination, Democrats need to build as broad a coalition as possible. Otherwise they'll be handing the election to Trump and that would be a tragedy for the party, the nation and the world. 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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Forget about a dress with an enchantingly long ruffle. How about a flamenco dancer who looks like she stepped out of a J. Crew catalog in a blue striped top and slim navy pants? That, apparently, signals innovation. (Or, as you may be thinking, the exact opposite.) On Thursday at Symphony Space, the World Music Institute opened its Festival Ay! Mas Flamenco with La Otra Orilla, a Montreal group formed in 2006 that distances itself from tradition. Nothing like over miked, so called experimental flamenco to make you pine for some soulful flamenco puro. The production, "Moi les Autres" ("Me and the Others"), seemed to be more attentive to costume changes than to content, but the point was fairly self explanatory: to explore an individual's connection with and distance from others in a group. In this case, it was a quartet. The troupe's founders the dancer and choreographer Myriam Allard and the singer and director Hedi Graja; the percussionist Miguel Medina; and a guitarist, Caroline Plante. At the start, a guitar was held in near darkness by black clad men so that it looked as if it were floating in air; repeatedly, Ms. Plante walked to it, positioned her arms as if to play and appeared to strum a few notes before returning to the wings. It was difficult to judge exactly what live sound she was contributing to the looping score a booming instrumental recording, credited to her.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The first case of Zika infection in Puerto Rico was reported last December, but the virus spread slowly for months before exploding into thousands of cases in early summer, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that as many as 50 women a day could be getting infected. Puerto Rico's policy is that pregnant women there with Zika symptoms should be seen by a doctor at least three times during a pregnancy, with fetal ultrasounds each time. The C.D.C., which is underwriting much of the territory's Zika fighting efforts, said Friday that the child would be monitored until he or she was 3 under the Zika Active Pregnancy Surveillance System, as are all children born to mothers infected with Zika. Sometimes babies infected in the womb with viruses like rubella or cytomegalovirus appear normal at birth, but later turn out to have serious problems with hearing, vision or learning, and officials want to know if Zika carries the same risks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The incidence of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is increasing, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At any given time, there are an estimated 110 million sexually transmitted infections in the United States. While HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease, according to the C.D.C., chlamydia is the most common type that can be easily cured, yet the number of cases rose 4.7 percent from 2015 to 2016. The increases occurred nationwide; rates were highest in the South and lowest in the Northeast. Chlamydia is usually asymptomatic, and the number of reported cases may have grown in part because of newer, more sensitive screening techniques. Adolescents and young adult women have the highest rates of chlamydia: one survey found that 9.2 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 were infected, as were 8.0 percent of women aged 20 to 24.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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For my project about the future of movies, the actress and director Elizabeth Banks was bullish about the new opportunities offered by streaming services, but she's noticed that the entire industry has been tightening its purse strings. "Everything is now being scrutinized so deeply that it's getting harder and harder to get these deals done," said Banks, who is next directing "Charlie's Angels" for Sony. Here are excerpts from our conversation. Before we look to the next 10 years, what have you personally noticed has changed in the movie industry over the last decade? There's a lot more work, but it's a lot harder to make money on anything. It's one of the reasons the unions are up in arms right now. For low end workers, the people on the tail of those big productions, it's a lot harder to get by. And that's true for middle class actors and writers, too. In the old days, you could pay off student loans making a commercial and that happened to me in the early 2000s! That's because the union did a great job of protecting us. Now, most commercials are nonunion, and somehow the advertising industry is getting away with that. Even for top tier stars, the simple idea of a huge paycheck based on box office performance will be harder to measure in the streaming era. I arrived in Hollywood at the very end of the heyday of big movie stars, and you hear through the grapevine about things like Keanu Reeves's "Matrix" deal he reportedly made more than 100 million through that deal . The idea of those types of deals happening now? It's much harder. Every negotiation is much harder. The internet has changed a lot of things, too. People have been putting out their content for free on YouTube because they want to get noticed, and suddenly the value of their work goes to zero. We're still kind of coming back from that, in my opinion. When you're updating a property like "Charlie's Angels" that's intended to become a major franchise over the next decade, what are you anticipating about the changing audience? The last "Charlie's Angels" movie was made nearly 20 years ago, and it was very star driven: Cameron Diaz was the biggest female star at the time, Drew Barrymore was huge, and Lucy Liu was coming off a hit show with "Ally McBeal." That felt like it was enough, you know? But now you've got to think about selling the movie all over the world you can't just have girls on the beach in California. The idea of setting the movie on a global scale opens it up to various audiences. Everything these days feels like you want it to be event ized in a way. And you've got to have diversity in casting it. Young people especially want to have ownership over what they're seeing, and when they discover someone, that sense of ownership feels real to them. The idea that films and TV are star driven is falling away a little bit. What will the landscape look like for female directors a decade from now? Oh God, I'm trying to be hopeful. I'm excited, because I made "Charlie's Angels" at Sony and they also made movies this year with Greta Gerwig and Marielle Heller, both of whom I admire so much. My hope is that more and more women get to do every job behind the camera. The good news is that there's more than just Kathryn Bigelow, although I will say that there always has been more than Kathryn Bigelow. I encourage female filmmakers to reach for bigger movies. We work in an industry where we're second class citizens on many levels, and it takes a lot of courage and confidence to go in and say, "Give it to me." But I meet those women all the time. They're here, they're ready to do the job, and they just need the opportunity. When you're putting together a new project, how often are you asking yourself, "Should this be theatrical or streaming?" All the time. We're all storytellers, and we all want to get the most eyeballs on the story. We're constantly asking ourselves what we think the best home is for the content, and it's also been sort of liberating to feel like you can get a piece of material that you think is going to be a huge movie, and then two years into developing it, you realize, "You know what? We should break this up into six episodes and make it a limited series!" That's actually an option now. Do you think there are certain genres that simply aren't going to come out in theaters anymore? I do believe the theatrical experience is going to be more and more event ized for major studios, but for someone like me who grew up on romantic comedies, watching them come back on streamers has been really gratifying. People actually like this stuff that the studios stopped giving them, and the streamers picked up the slack. So that's one example of how streamers can make these sorts of midrange movies that the big corporate studios are not as interested in putting out theatrically. Look, as someone who grew up with art house theaters, who went to Lincoln Center to see "sex, lies, and videotape," I'm really bummed out to not have that same sense of community in the theater anymore. But indie film is still happening, people are just consuming it more and more on their couches. I think it's actually an opportunity for the midrange movie. When you talk to people younger than you about the way they watch movies and consume pop culture, what do you find striking? I find that young people really want to interact with the experience, they don't just want to be presented with the experience. That means social media gets involved, and they're sharing it with other people. But honestly, that feels very similar to what I felt growing up. I didn't go to the movies alone very often you'd go to the big animated movie with your family, or you'd sneak into a film with your friends on Friday night. The biggest difference is that there's just way more choices. It's all about how you cut through.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Colette, the fashion and lifestyle emporium in the First Arrondissement of Paris that proved to be a launchpad for young designers and a shopping destination for industry insiders and tourists alike, will close its doors on the Rue St. Honore in December after 20 years. A statement confirming the decision was posted on the boutique's website on Wednesday. "As all good things must come to an end," the statement said, "after 20 wonderful years, Colette should be closing its doors on December 20th." The company cited retirement plans for the founder, Colette Roussaux, who ran the store with her daughter, Sarah Andelman, and made it one of fashion's favorite new style family businesses. "Colette Roussaux has reached the time when she would like to take her time; and Colette cannot exist without Colette," the statement read, referring to the store requiring its founder. "I know people think it's crazy that we decided to close rather than sell the name, because it has value, but we knew if someone else ran it, it would not be the same," Ms. Andelman, 41, said by phone from Paris, noting it had been a very emotional day for her. "The messages we have received have been so many, and full of so much love," she said. The closing of the store, long considered an apex of Parisian fashion trends and a vital champion of emerging labels, comes amid rising rents for retailers in Paris and increasingly unpredictable consumer habits, including a move toward more fashion spending online. The city of Paris has also been hit by volatility in the tourism sector in the last two years, after a series of terrorist attacks. Colette, which is fully owned by Ms. Roussaux and Ms. Andelman, had sales of 28 million euros ( 32 million) in 2016, with e commerce accounting for 25 percent of that. An eclectic three story trove of elaborate cocktail gowns, tuxedos, sneakers, postcards, pens and gadgets, all across 8,000 square feet, Colette was founded by Ms. Roussaux in 1997. It was one of the first stores to cater to an aesthetic lifestyle, as opposed to a specific product category, becoming a model for a new kind of retail. Ms. Andelman functioned as the store's buyer and public persona. "The first stop the fashion crowd would make was to Colette," Robert Burke, founder of the luxury consultancy that bears his name, said in an email. "The selection of brands, the way the forms displayed, the clothes and the mix of designers was inspiring. If you were carried at Colette, you were cool. If you had a launch of product or a book signing at Colette you were recognized by not only the fashion world but the international fashion consumer." The end of the Colette era is bound to raise question about the continued viability of such "concept stores," which place an emphasis on attitude and discovery over the bottom line. (Colette famously never had a marketing plan.) However, other concept stores, such as 10 Corso Como in Milan, which was founded in 1990 and has been on an expansion spree with stores in Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai and Beijing, and one to open in South Street Seaport in New York next year, have successfully navigated the new retail environment. Dover Street Market, the multi idea emporium owned by Comme des Garcons, is likewise thriving, and the British store matchesfashion.com has transformed itself by focusing its business online. Indeed, however, the decision to close Colette is that rare thing in fashion, which is notoriously bad at succession planning and finds it almost impossible to let sleeping brands lie: an active attempt on the part of a globally recognized name to determine the end of its life span. Instead of being a cautionary tale for the industry, it is yet another example of the store's pioneering nature. "I know it's a quite radical decision," said Ms. Andelman. "But it was like a baby for us, it was so personal, and so we prefer that it stays as a wonderful memory, and the space is used for something new." The industry accolades for Colette began almost immediately. Bryanboy, the fashion influencer, wrote on Instagram, "Colette to me is the ultimate shopping (and research) destination in Paris, with their well edited buys and support for many people whether it's a big brand or a small entrepreneur or artist. When I didn't have a lot of money to buy designer clothes, I used to buy my music compilation CDs from you! For a generation, Colette was the gold standard of cool." According to the company statement, also posted on Instagram, negotiations are in progress with Saint Laurent, the French luxury house owned by Kering, to lease the premises, which is owned by Ms. Andelman and her mother. "We would be proud to have a brand with such a history, with whom we have frequently collaborated, taking over our address," the statement said, adding that such a move could "also represent a very good opportunity for our employees." Ms. Andelman said that ensuring the future of the staff was key. Francesca Bellettini, chief executive of Saint Laurent, acknowledged the history of the space, saying, "For the last 20 years, Colette has been such an iconic and prestigious project and destination in Paris. It feels natural to us to discuss the opportunity to take those amazing premises over in order to give them a second life." As for Ms. Andelman, she is mulling a future as a consultant, though plans are in the very early stages. "I will continue to do what I do: curate ideas and work with brands on different projects," she said. "Life continues on. We are all in good health, which is most important." In the meantime, the Colette team are taking pains to emphasize that until December, it will be business as usual. "Until our last day, nothing will change. Colette will continue to renew itself each week with exclusive collaborations and offerings, also available on our website, colette.fr."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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How an Arctic Hyena Was Found in Canada, Then Lost, Then Found Again None This past February, Jack Tseng sat down in a warehouse room at the Canadian Museum of Nature's research facilities in Gatineau, Quebec, to examine a pair of million year old teeth. Peering through a microscope, he studied their cusps and ridges. "Within 5 minutes, I could tell," he said. These were the teeth of ancient hyenas specifically Chasmaporthetes, or "running hyenas," known for their speed and endurance. Although only four hyena species exist today, the prehistoric world was full of them: nearly 70 species are currently known to have once roamed the planet. Signs of running hyenas specifically have been found across the southern United States and Mexico, as well as in Africa, Asia and Europe. But these teeth, officially identified Tuesday in the journal Open Quaternary, provide the first evidence that hyenas also lived north of the Arctic Circle. They help map the species' route of dispersal, suggesting the hyenas crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia into North America, just as humans most likely did. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In order to make it into the scientific record, the teeth which the researchers think are between 850,000 and 1.4 million years old endured a bit of an odyssey themselves. After spending millenniums buried in Yukon sediment, they weathered additional decades of obscurity in the museum's deep storage a common type of fossil purgatory, currently occupied by countless specimens worldwide. This ice age fossil tooth found in 1977 and tucked away for years in the collections of the Canadian Museum of Nature belonged to the "running hyena," Chasmaporthetes. "Fossils get refossilized in museums," said Dr. Tseng, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo. He is an advocate for these forgotten fossils, and makes a point of revisiting existing collections to see what treasures might hide in them. In 2017, Dr. Tseng helped to describe two new species of prehistoric beardog based on previously discovered skulls. The hyena find came from a decades long game of scientific telephone. In the 1970s, two sets of researchers each found a tooth in the Yukon Territory's Old Crow Basin, an area so paleontologically generous that some have described it as a "supermarket for fossils," Dr. Tseng said. In the past, the basin has coughed up evidence of giant camels, proto wild dogs and Pleistocene peccaries, expanding each species' previously known range. Suspecting the tooth she found had belonged to a hyena, Brenda Beebe, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto, sent photos and details to another expert, Bjorn Kurten of Finland, who filed the correspondence away. After Dr. Kurten died in 1988, his former student, Lars Werdelin, found Dr. Beebe's letter. He, too, forgot about it until a couple of years ago, when it resurfaced "during an office move," said Dr. Werdelin, one of the paper's co authors. He then told Dr. Tseng, who headed to Ottawa to see the teeth for himself. Dr. Tseng's identification is convincing, and the study "fills an important gap in our understanding" of ancient hyena dispersal, said Duane Froese, an environmental scientist at the University of Alberta who was not involved in the research. "It's tremendously cool to think of hyenas in the Arctic," he said. Mysteries remain. After all, "it's just two teeth," said Dr. Tseng. But they serve as points on which to hang informed speculation. In the team's renderings, they imagine the hyenas with white fur, for camouflage in the Arctic ice. And because Chasmaporthetes were likely strong enough to crack bones, they may have played an important nutrient recycling role in the prehistoric ecosystem, breaking down the carcasses of large animals like mammoths, caribou and horses. A question of national pride, though, is finally settled. "Americans had the hyenas," said Dr. Tseng, and now Canada has them too. It just took a little while to find out.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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MUMBAI, India Jeff Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post has complicated business for his much bigger company, Amazon, in Trump era Washington. Now the same thing could be happening in New Delhi under India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has increasingly sought to rein in both the international news media and foreign technology companies. Last week, a senior official of Mr. Modi's governing Bharatiya Janata Party criticized The Post's coverage of the country during a visit by Mr. Bezos to announce new investments in India, one of Amazon's fastest growing markets. The official, Vijay Chauthaiwale, urged Mr. Bezos to return to Washington and "impart some wisdom" to Post employees about the bright prospects for India that Mr. Bezos was touting in New Delhi. On the same day, Mr. Modi's commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, dismissed Mr. Bezos' announcement of a fresh 1 billion investment to help small businesses in the country. "It is not as if they are doing a favor to India," Mr. Goyal told reporters. He then referred to the antitrust investigation of Amazon and its chief rival that Indian regulators opened the day before Mr. Bezos arrived. Although both men later tempered their remarks, the double barreled assault on The Post and Amazon is reminiscent of President Trump, who has repeatedly attacked Mr. Bezos, The Post's coverage of his administration, and Amazon often all in the same tweet. Amazon filed a lawsuit against the United States government late last year, arguing that a multibillion dollar federal contract for cloud services had been awarded to Microsoft because of Mr. Trump's personal animus toward Mr. Bezos. The Trump administration has denied that the president's feelings influenced the decision. An Amazon spokeswoman in India declined to comment. In an interview, Mr. Chauthaiwale said that India was not trying to link its policies toward Amazon with concerns about The Post's news coverage. "I don't think the Indian government will do these things," he said. "We also know that business is different from journalism." But he said that The Post's coverage of India, particularly in its opinion pages, had been unfairly biased against the government. "The Washington Post does not want to give its readers both parts of the narrative," he said. The Post said in a statement that it had "covered India fairly and accurately, even when the government has imposed tight restrictions on the flow of information, as it did with Kashmir." The news organization added that its Opinion department published a variety of viewpoints from India and around the world. Over the past year and a half, the Modi government and its B.J.P. allies have grown increasingly strident in their criticism of foreign news media. That criticism swelled into a cacophony over international news coverage of the government's decision in August to strip away the statehood of the predominantly Muslim region of Jammu and Kashmir, send in troops, shut down the internet and arrest community leaders and opposition politicians. The Post and other news outlets, including The New York Times, published numerous reports contradicting the government's claims that all was peaceful and normal in Kashmir. In response, senior officials like the external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, have complained in Washington and New York about the reporting. Mr. Jaishankar also canceled a meeting with members of the United States Congress after leaders refused to exclude Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, who has sponsored a resolution urging the Modi government to lift restrictions in Kashmir. In India, the government has increased limits on foreign news outlets, including shortening the duration of journalists' visas and preventing them from going to Kashmir and to Assam, the center of a fight over a new citizenship law that is perceived as anti Muslim. In the realm of business, the government has also taken a nationalistic approach, seeking to rein in the power of foreign technology giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Flipkart, an Indian e commerce site purchased by Walmart in 2018. Some business leaders see the effort as counterproductive as India struggles to reverse a deepening economic slump and rising inflation. Others suggested that the rhetoric is tougher in public than in private. "I've been in touch with our member companies," said Mukesh Aghi, the chief executive of the U.S. India Strategic Partnership Forum, a business group whose members include PepsiCo, Cisco, Mastercard, Boeing and Disney. "Over all, we are not experiencing any change in sentiment with regard to investment in India." Mr. Aghi said that the United States and India were working to improve their relationship, with the hope that Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi could sign a long awaited trade deal during a possible visit by the American president to India at the end of February. "There will be positive changes for U.S. companies in India," Mr. Aghi said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA at David Geffen Hall (April 14, 3 p.m.; April 15, 8 p.m.). A doubleheader from this solid British ensemble, led by the conductor Edward Gardner, albeit with distinctly routine programs. On Sunday, they perform Debussy and Ravel, including Ravel's Piano Concerto, with Jean Efflam Bavouzet at the keyboard; on Monday, Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture, Sibelius's Violin Concerto with James Ehnes, and Mahler's Symphony No. 1. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org ORCHESTRA OF ST. LUKE'S at Carnegie Hall (April 18, 8 p.m.). Pablo Heras Casado, the former principal conductor of this ensemble, reflects on Classicism and Neo Classicism in this program, with Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1, Stravinsky's Suite No. 1 for small orchestra, Haydn's Symphony No. 103 and Ravel's Piano Concerto, with Helene Grimaud as the soloist. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org 'SEMELE' at Carnegie Hall (April 14, 2 p.m.). The English Concert's annual performances of Handel oratorios and operas at Carnegie, under Harry Bicket, have been surefire hits for the past several years. Brenda Rae sings the title role, alongside Elizabeth DeShong, Soloman Howard, Benjamin Hulett, Ailish Tynan and the Clarion Choir. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org 'SIEGFRIED' at the Metropolitan Opera (April 13, 11:30 a.m.). The "Ring" moves apace with the third installment of Wagner's cycle. Christine Goerke continues as Brunnhilde, with Stefan Vinke as Siegfried, Michael Volle as the Wanderer, Tomasz Konieczny as Alberich, Gerhard Siegel as Mime, Dmitry Belosselskiy as Fafner, Karen Cargill as Erda and Erin Morley as the Woodbird. Philippe Jordan conducts. The performance repeats during complete runs of the cycle starting in late April and early May; devotees of voice will note the appearance by the leading Wagner tenor of our time, Andreas Schager, in this opera on May 2. 212 362 6000, metopera.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Three years ago it was hard to imagine that this scene would ever be a reality. My husband and I had a sizable mortgage on a house in Montclair, N.J.; college payments loomed for our three boys. Though my three sisters and our parents owned houses within two miles of one another on Mount Desert Island, I was resigned to the fact that I probably never would. I played a game with myself when I went to visit: Which house would I choose, if I were to buy one? It seemed an impossible goal. The children of hippies who left the South during the political turmoil of the late 1960s, my sisters and I were raised in Bangor, Me., a little more than an hour from Southwest Harbor. Perhaps in part because of our accents and our odd ways wearing clothes we made ourselves, driving around in a secondhand VW van with Day Glo butterfly stickers on the side we were an insular tribe. Though my two youngest sisters were born in this state, none of us will ever be considered Mainers. ("Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven don't make them biscuits," as the locals say.) We lived for a while in England, where our father, William J. Baker, went to graduate school. We went to college out of state, settling in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. But like homing pigeons, we all in different ways and at different times found ourselves swooping back to Maine. One by one, my three sisters with spouses and children in tow began buying and renovating their own old houses. Without explicitly discussing it, we made a collective choice to be together for as long as we could in the summers, despite demanding jobs, opinionated husbands, different budgets and logistical complications. Consciously or not, we pursued careers that allowed us flexibility. To this day, we share the same goals for family togetherness: to meet almost daily for hikes and swims and big raucous dinners, while also carving out time for rest, work and our own individual families. My sisters and I have varying incomes and lifestyles. But we inherited from our parents the sense that a lack of money shouldn't keep you from living well, as long as you're willing to look beyond the obvious and roll up your sleeves. In the past 10 years, while raising four children, Clara and her husband doing all of the work themselves added a second floor with four bedrooms and two baths and transformed a scrubby, barren wasteland of a yard into a lush garden. They have a knack for discovering unusual treasures, like an antique slate sink unearthed from the scrap pile at a potato farm, and giving yard sale finds new life with a coat of paint. Their entire home is heated by an energy efficient woodstove in the winter. With our parents and sister living year round on the coast of Maine, the rest of us had more incentive than ever to return, if just for summers. Cynthia Baker, the second oldest a university fund raiser living in Washington was next: She and her husband, a tech company executive, bought a modest 1912 wood frame house for 300,000. Like Clara and my parents before her, she was told by more than one contractor that the place wasn't worth salvaging. But with the help of the innovative A4 Architects of Bar Harbor, and a windfall from a start up, Cynthia had the house stripped to its bones. The contractor removed dry rot and moldy wallpaper and added dormers, porches and balconies. He opened up walls and created a kitchen large enough for hanging out with the entire extended family. There were various challenges along the way, including burst pipes, but when the dust settled, Cynthia and her husband had a bright, open home with picture perfect views. (Recently, they bought the one story 1853 cottage next door as a place for their now adult boys.) When my youngest sister, Catherine Baker Pitts, was ready to buy a house in 2004, she didn't have to look far: The crumbling two bedroom 1901 mansard roofed house next door to Clara's cottage was for sale. Catherine and her husband, both New York psychoanalysts, saw its potential despite the outhouse, rusty trailer and abandoned ATV's in the field behind the house not to mention the pervasive mold and shattered windows. They paid 250,000 and budgeted another 200,000, but the renovation turned into a bigger project than they anticipated. After vanquishing termites, replacing a leaky roof, and stripping entire rooms of lead paint, they decided to add a great room with large windows, and a first floor master bedroom suite. Then they built a spacious playhouse which doubles as a guest cottage for their three boys and Clara's four children in the meadow between the two houses. When they were finished, 10 years later, they had spent a good deal more than they'd planned. But they had created, in essence, a family compound. For my sisters and me, discussing design plans and paint chips became a pleasurable way to reconnect after long stretches of time apart. (I didn't have a place in Maine, but I enjoyed living vicariously.) If you go into our houses, you'll find a similar aesthetic expressed in different ways. True to our counterculture roots, we all prize textiles and pottery. We tend to favor the same island artists, such as Henry Isaacs, Jennifer Judd McGee and Judy Taylor; we prefer light walls with colorful accents. Clara's taste is perhaps most traditional, Catherine's more contemporary. But these are different manifestations of a similar sensibility. One day last summer Cynthia was browsing in a consignment shop in town and selected a couch and a chest of drawers. The owner gave her a broad grin. "Funny you should pick these," he said. "Your sister Catherine brought them in for resale yesterday." In 2014, something wonderful happened. My novel "Orphan Train" set, in part, on Mount Desert Island was an unexpected success. I knew immediately what I'd do with the check. I even had the house picked out, one of those I'd dreamed about when they all seemed out of reach: a 19th century ship captain's home with a wraparound porch across from the town dock. My husband, a media strategist, and I were able to buy it for 520,000. The previous owners had added a large kitchen; we hired a resourceful contractor who worked through the winter to build a master suite over it and renovate the attic. He was unfazed to discover as one often does with an old house, I've learned rotten floorboards, knob and tube wiring and crumbling walls. Two years later, it is just what I'd hoped it would be: a home base in summer for my husband and three boys, a gathering place for family and friends, and a quiet space for me to write in in the off season. It's midmorning now. When I arrive home from Cynthia's, I unclip Lola's leash and we sit on the front porch, gazing out at the water. Though I can't see them from here, Clara's and Catherine's houses are behind the pines just across the harbor. I'm reminded of the Spanish word querencia, meaning a home ground or refuge. Our mother died three years ago, the Big House is on the market while my father searches for a smaller place here. So the happiness I feel is tinged with melancholy. Mom would have been so pleased that her impulsive decision to put down roots on this island had such profound consequences for her children and grandchildren, and who knows? maybe for generations to come.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The world's deepest dwelling centipede found as much as 3,600 feet below the surface is in Croatia, a new study in ZooKeys reports. The centipede was found in three caves in the Velebit mountain range, along the Adriatic Coast. It has powerful jaws with poison glands and long, curved claws that allow it to clutch its prey. And like other cave dwelling arthropods, it has elongated antennas, trunk segments and leg claws. Researchers named the centipede Geophilus hadesi, after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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It feels a little cruel to be reporting how good the JACK Quartet's concert on Sunday afternoon was. After all, it won't be repeated any time soon, at least not in New York. And few people saw it; the Morgan Library Museum's Gilder Lehrman Hall was far from full. But JACK's performance, a head spinning marathon of Elliott Carter's five string quartets, two and a half hours of notoriously thorny music, was one of the most eye opening and exhilarating concerts I've heard all season. The fearless JACK players Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; and Jay Campbell, cello will continue to offer Carter a la carte. And, in an email, they said a recording of the full set is on the way. But rarely are these works presented together, live. (Die hard fans on Sunday reminisced about hearing the Pacifica Quartet do all five; that was over a decade ago.) And what a lifetime: The year he was born, 1908, Mahler's Seventh Symphony had its premiere; the year he died, 2012, brought Caroline Shaw's "Partita." Theodore Roosevelt was his first president; Barack Obama, his last. He finished his final work just months before his death, at 103. The string quartets date from 1950 to '95. On Sunday, JACK didn't present them in chronological order which doesn't really matter. If Carter's output has a through line of progress, it's a fuzzy one. He was more interested in novelty; he once said that every piece he wrote was "a kind of crisis in my life." Each of his quartets is a singular interrogation of the form. The Fifth (1995) is where the Morgan program began. This deeply human piece made all the more so by JACK's interpretation, which teased out the expressiveness that critics have sometimes said Carter's music lacks is like a love letter to the art of chamber music. With hazy harmonics, crunchy rolled chords and metallic plucks, the series of short movements and interludes conjures rehearsal conversations in which someone offers an idea or a demonstration of how a passage should be played, and the rest respond. The final measure, a violinist's harmonious double stop, suggests eventual agreement. Next was the Pulitzer Prize winning Quartet No. 2 (1959), in which each player is given an individual strand of melodies, harmonic intervals and rhythms that develops throughout the 22 minute work. Imagine "Twitter: The Quartet," with each voice brazenly independent, stubbornly struggling to be heard above the fray. It's impressive that the JACK musicians, with conflicting characters to portray, remained so tightly together; it's miraculous that they did so while barely signaling to one another with eye contact or gestures. (Then again, this is an ensemble that specializes in performing Georg Friedrich Haas's music in total darkness.) I'm surprised the Second Quartet wasn't immediately followed by the Fourth (1986), which feels like a sequel but a utopian one, in which the players decide on a compromise between individuality and the common good. At 45 minutes, Carter's rhapsodic Quartet No. 1 (1950 51) is the longest of the bunch, a cri de coeur of a composer breaking free from what he, in his writings, described as "my professional and social responsibility to write interesting, direct, easily understood music." But, for all its intellectual rigor, this work has heart hiding under the surface. And humor, as when vibrato rich sostenuto in the violins is interrupted by a belching low note from the cello. The Third Quartet (1971), which also won the Pulitzer, calls for dividing the ensemble into two duos, facing one another. On one side were Mr. Otto and Mr. Campbell, with a rubato attitude as they navigated the progress of four distinct musical characters; on the other, Mr. Wulliman and Mr. Richards, their rhythm more regular, offering six contrasting characters. It's a lot to take in for an audience. Just imagine what it's like for the players. These Carter works are brutal tests of an ensemble's skill and stamina. On Sunday, the JACK passed. Times five.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Annabelle Neilson, center, with Kate Moss, left, and Naomi Campbell during a fashion show in London in 2010 to raise money for Haiti. LONDON Annabelle Neilson, a former model, children's author, reality television personality and friend and confidante to fashion stars like Alexander McQueen and Kate Moss, died here on July 12. She was 49. Her sister, Camilla Neilson, said in a statement that the cause was a heart attack. The police said they had been called to Ms. Neilson's multimillion dollar home in the Chelsea neighborhood, where her body had been found. Born into an aristocratic British family, Ms. Neilson embarked on a modeling career after recovering from drug addiction and was introduced to Mr. McQueen when she was 22. As his star ascended both in and out of the fashion world, she became one of his muses and a close friend. She achieved minor notoriety during this period for her revealing outfits, including a totally sheer McQueen dress that she wore to a party in 2000. "He liked my wackiness and the fact that when I went out, I made his outfits live," Ms. Neilson told W Magazine in 2012. The London scene in the 1990s was dominated by the antics of the so called Primrose Hill set, named after the ritzy London neighborhood where celebrities like Ms. Moss, Jude Law and Sadie Frost (before their divorce), and the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher lived and gave all night parties. Ms. Neilson made headlines after she eloped to Las Vegas in 1994 with Nathaniel Rothschild, son of the banker Jacob Rothschild. After three tumultuous years the marriage ended in divorce. Ms. Neilson reportedly received a substantial settlement after signing a confidentiality agreement and reverting to her maiden name. The pressures of drug addiction, public scrutiny and internal demons took their toll on many of the era's biggest celebrities, including Mr. McQueen, who took his life in 2010 at age 40, the day before his mother's funeral. Ms. Neilson, the last person to see him alive, was devastated. "He was my brother, my boyfriend, my soul mate," she told The Daily Mail. "Most of the time people called me Mrs. McQueen. Quite often we were sharing a bed." "The truth is, I was happier with Lee than with anyone else," she added, using his given name. "He asked me to marry him towards the end, and I said no. I wish now that I had said yes." In 2014, Ms. Neilson became a star of the Bravo television series "Ladies of London," and for two seasons viewers watched her recovery from a 2013 horseback riding accident that had left her with a broken back and pelvis. She later said that she had decided to appear in the series because she wanted to introduce herself as a children's author. " 'Angry Me' evokes the frustrations and feelings for children when they can't release such a powerful emotion as anger it can be so many different things that a child can struggle with," she told the lifestyle website MyBaba in 2015. " 'Messy Me' is based on my sister. 'Dreamy Me' is based in part on me but also on all children who when they are asleep have the ability to make anything happen and anything possible." She continued: " 'Imaginative Me' I wrote for my friend, Lee Alexander McQueen, and I will dedicate that book to him for very obvious reasons. He was the most imaginative person I ever knew." Ms. Neilson, who had written 40,000 words about her relationship with Mr. McQueen although she never published them contributed to various projects about his life and legacy, including the documentary "McQueen," which was released this year. Annabelle Neilson was born on March 31, 1969, to Maxwell Neilson, a London investment adviser, and Elizabeth, the Marquesa Campus di Santinelli, an interior designer. Annabelle enjoyed a privileged upbringing, dividing her time between the family's country estate, Chiltern House, in the Chilterns, northwest of London, and West London. She was a fourth cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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"My Fair Lady," which won the Tony for best new musical in 1957, will return to Broadway next year for the first time in a quarter century. Lincoln Center Theater said Monday that it would stage a revival of the musical, directed by Bartlett Sher, who has become the nonprofit organization's go to director for revivals of midcentury classics. The show, as any theater lover knows, is about a working class flower saleswoman, Eliza Doolittle, who is taking speech lessons from a professor named Henry Higgins. Set in and around London in 1912, it is based on a play, "Pygmalion," by George Bernard Shaw. The original production of "My Fair Lady," featuring music by Frederick Loewe and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, opened on Broadway in 1956, starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, and by the time it closed, in 1962, it was the longest running musical in Broadway history, with 2,717 performances. There were Broadway revivals in 1976, 1981, and 1993, and the New York Philharmonic staged a production in 2007. But the show is probably best known from the 1964 film adaptation, which starred Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison and won eight Academy Awards in 1965, including best picture.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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MUNICH "We tell the story of Moses because it is actually our story," one teenager, a refugee from Afghanistan by way of Iran, said in the Hazaragi dialect to the German speaking audience at the Bavarian State Opera here on a recent Sunday evening. Others chimed in: "The story of Moses is also my story," they said in French, Kurdish, Greek and Arabic. They were the cast of "Moses," a feel good yet sobering new production by the Bavarian State Opera's youth program, written for refugees, children of immigrants and born and raised Bavarians. The director Jessica Glause, who created the libretto based on interviews with refugees in the cast, has concocted a blend of humor, horror and youthful energy that hardly feels like a didactic documentary about Europe's refugee crisis. Behind the scenes, "Moses" has provided a way to learn German and make friends in short, to make the process of migration a little less painful. And audiences have responded favorably: The work's premiere run, last December, sold out, and because of demand, performances were added to the revival at the Munich Opera Festival in July. Theater about the refugee crisis has proliferated in Germany since migration into the country reached its peak in 2016. But rarely has the hot button issue which continues to threaten Chancellor Angela Merkel's power and fuel the rise of the far right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD entered the realm of opera, much less children's opera. Ms. Gessat said that in the first half of 2016, when the production was still in development, she and her team thought of featuring refugees in the cast no musical experience required and eventually "Noye's Fludde" became simply "Noah," an adaptation that included their stories. That summer, while Ms. Gessat and her colleagues were on vacation, some of the darkest stories from the refugee crisis began to emerge: harrowing boat rides across the Mediterranean Sea that left many dead, and governments struggling to reckon with a massive influx of people in need of homes and livelihood. "When we came back," Ms. Gessat said, "our idea was suddenly very relevant." Among the people she spoke with were Ali Madad Qorbani, a young man from Afghanistan who fled to Iran, then Europe, after his father had disappeared; and Zahra Akhlaqi, also from Afghanistan, whose mother came to Europe first while she and her sister waited in Iran, where, she said, they were forbidden from going to school but would dress up like students at home and play pretend. Now, their lives are slightly more stable, though just as precarious as any refugee's. Mr. Qorbani is an intern at the Bavarian State Opera, and Ms. Akhlaqi is a bright student who said she learned German in part by reading canonical literature like Goethe's "Faust" and Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." (She also speaks fluent English.) The heart of "Moses" is how they and other refugees in the cast have adjusted to life in Munich. If "Noah" was an opera about a journey, then "Moses" is about what comes after, with questions about what it means to find a home and how to fit in somewhere new. There are still monologues of how and why some of the cast members came to Europe, but much of the material is about reconciling their faiths and cultures with those of Germany including one humorous passage about trying German beer for the first time. But they also describe how they don't always feel welcome, such as a scene in which the plagues in Moses's story give way to one person describing signs near Munich that say refugees overrun Germany like locusts. Moments like this are sobering reminders in an otherwise uplifting story. Life offstage unfolds in much the same way, with stretches of happiness punctuated by harsh reality checks. At a recent rehearsal, for example, the cast members behaved more like friends than colleagues: greeting each other with hugs, and cheerfully working together on a challenging, even avant garde production. Away from the opera house, Ms. Akhlaqi is close with Mila Stephan, one of the Germans, who said they like to hang out and cook Italian food together. But there was also the day one of the cast members, a Nigerian refugee named Unity Okojie, went missing. He had performed in the premiere run of "Moses" in January, but could not be found for the revival this summer. Ms. Gessat said he could still be in Munich, or back in Africa; they just don't know. His absence has been written into the show. At the moment where he should be making his entrance onstage, Ms. Stephan and Martin Lucke, another German cast member, address the audience, telling them what Unity would be saying if he were there and explaining the instability of life for sub Saharan refugees. Toward the end of the opera, Ms. Stephan and Mr. Lucke sing "Unity's School," a catchy English language number about assimilation; it later served as a crowd pleasing encore that had even the usher, Stefan Schubert, dancing and mouthing the words. The Bavarian State Opera's youth program will return next season with another refugee minded adaptation: an Adam and Eve story, based on Haydn's "The Creation." While it is in development, the AfD party with its nationalistic criticisms of state funded institutions that engage topics like the refugee crisis continues to gain ground in German politics. But, in interviews, Ms. Gessat and Ms. Glause were quick to say that their job is to reflect the world around them, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore the refugee crisis. Indeed, Ms. Glause said that conservative politicians may change their minds if they met the cast of "Moses." "I would tell them to come see this show," she said. "Come hear these stories."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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'I'm Better Than That,' Serena Said. But Her Competition Is Better, Too. MELBOURNE, Australia This time, it seemed reasonable to think that Serena Williams had put herself in better position to change her Grand Slam fortunes. The greatest player of her era, perhaps of any era, had trained with enthusiasm in the preseason and warmed up for the Australian Open by winning her first tour title in nearly three years. She had looked healthy and convincing in her opening two rounds in Melbourne. Though she had not won a Grand Slam title since 2017, she was the oddsmakers' consensus favorite to win the singles championship and claim her 24th Grand Slam victory, even at age 38. Yet her quest to secure that record tying singles title remains just that: a quest, and her three year, circuitous route back to the highest peaks of tennis difficulties with childbirth; a confrontation with a chair umpire at the United States Open that set off debates about women, power and race; the surging tide of younger contenders has arrived at a crossroads. It was the sort of major momentum shift that Williams typically rides to victory. Instead, Wang held surprisingly firm and Williams uncharacteristically faltered, losing this third round duel, 6 4, 6 7 (2), 7 5. "Honestly, if we were just honest with ourselves, it's all on my shoulders," Williams said, acknowledging that this time there was no one else to blame. "I lost that match." And so now the inevitable questions come about her next chapter, at a time when a number of tennis' titans are aging and quitting. Williams said after the loss that she has no intention of stopping. Still, it is unclear whether the unimaginable day of a Serena less world of sports closer or if this is yet another setback on the path to a momentous comeback befitting her aura, something on the order of Tiger Woods's victory at the Masters last year. "You can never count her out because she's Serena, but it's increasingly getting more difficult," said Chris Evert, the ESPN commentator and 18 time Grand Slam singles champion, in an interview late on Friday night. "The women are getting better and getting more and more confident against her as time goes on," Evert added. "They are almost matching her power, and that is only making it harder." It was easy, perhaps too easy, to view Friday as a changing of the guard, with former No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki heading into retirement after her third round defeat to Ons Jabeur, and with the American 15 year old Coco Gauff recording her most significant victory yet by upsetting No. 3 seed Naomi Osaka, the defending champion. "Serena and players like Caroline have carried the torch for so long now, and in a sense, it's starting to be handed over to the younger generation," Evert said. It remains unclear just how far Gauff is prepared to carry it at this early stage. She has poise far beyond her years, undeniable talent and rare charisma, which has already made her a crowd favorite in London, New York and Melbourne in her brief pro career. She seems to be improving not just week to week but match to match. And yet her 6 3, 6 4 triumph was as much about Osaka's shortcomings, as it was about Gauff's talent. "I don't really have the champion mentality yet, which is like someone that can deal with not playing 100 percent," Osaka conceded in a confessional news conference. "I always have wanted to be like that, but I guess I still have a long way to go." Williams is in a different position, agonizingly close to familiar territory. When Williams left the tour to give birth to her daughter, Olympia, she was still close to the peak of her powers: she won her 23rd major singles title at the 2017 Australian Open without dropping a set while two months pregnant. Since her return to competition in February 2018, she has reached four Grand Slam singles finals at an age when nearly all of tennis's great champions have already retired. But she has lost all of those finals, often playing well short of her best against inspired opposition. She has been beaten soundly by establishment figures: Angelique Kerber at Wimbledon in 2018 and Simona Halep at Wimbledon in 2019. She has lost convincingly to new stars who grew up watching her win on television: Osaka at the U.S. Open in 2018 and 19 year old Bianca Andreescu at the same tournament in 2019. Friday's defeat belonged in a different category, considering that Williams had overwhelmed the 27th seeded Wang by the no nonsense score of 6 1, 6 0 in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open just a few months ago. Wang, a free swinger with power and speed who plays mainly from the baseline, bore no resemblance to the player who looked trapped in the spotlight at Arthur Ashe Stadium in September. The power gap has indeed closed with Williams's opponents, although her first serve does remain a singular weapon, but only when she places it properly. Against Wang, Williams landed just 56 percent of her first serves. Still, the intimidation factor has also diminished and the bonus points that go along with it. Unlike last summer, Williams converted just one of six break points against Wang Friday. "It's not even about the Slams," she said of the pressure of chasing No. 24. "It's just about me playing good tennis, and I didn't do that today. That is more disappointing. So it's not even about the win. It's just more about, I'm better than that." She made similar comments after losing to Andreescu last year. It has happened too frequently to be a coincidence, but Williams has put herself in contention too frequently for that to be a coincidence, either. She insists that falling short stings just as much now as it always has. "I just have to pretend like I don't want to punch the wall," she said. "But in reality, I do."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Elevated blood pressure at age 50 is linked to an increased risk for dementia in later years, a new study reports. The research, published in the European Heart Journal, found that systolic blood pressure (the top number) as low as 130 increased the risk, even though 140 is the usual level at which treatment with blood pressure medication is recommended. The scientists measured blood pressure in 8,639 men and women in 1985, when they were age 35 to 55, and then again in 1991, 1997 and 2003 over the course of a long term health study. Through March, 2017, there were 385 cases of dementia. After controlling for many risk factors, including stroke, heart failure and other cardiovascular diseases, they found that a systolic blood pressure at age 50 of 130 or greater was independently associated with a 38 percent increased risk of dementia.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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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. For years, New York State has operated one of the most generous Medicaid programs in the country, a point of pride in a state with a long tradition of investing in the social safety net. The program provides health care and other services to more than six million people, largely low income New Yorkers, and the costs are shared between the state and federal government. But profligate spending has sent costs spiraling in recent years. The Medicaid program has become a driving force behind a 6.1 billion hole in New York's budget next year, and a brewing political battle over what to do about it. Though Medicaid costs are rising across the United States, in New York among the country's largest programs, and long one of its most expensive spending has surged. From 2015 to 2019, annual spending grew by an average of 6 percent, according to a report last year by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative nonprofit research organization. That's roughly double the rate of growth in the previous several years, even as enrollment remained flat. Health care and budget experts have said a variety of factors are behind the trend, including an increase in demand for personal care programs that provide nonmedical services to disabled New Yorkers, a minimum wage increase and financial assistance that the state has provided to struggling hospitals. 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." New York's share of its 75 billion annual Medicaid bill is now about 30 billion and growing, imposing an increasingly untenable burden on state and local budgets. The federal government pays the rest. The good news is that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is in charge of administering the federal program, has moved to rein in costs. The bad news is that he has said localities will have to pay for increases in local Medicaid spending above 3 percent. That's unfair and unrealistic. Local governments in New York already pay more mandated Medicaid costs than local governments in any other state, a dynamic that's been in place since the program began in the 1960s. That's not unusual in New York, where Albany relies on New York City's tax base to fund the bulk of state services from education to commuter rails. In 2018, local governments in New York sent 7.6 billion to Albany for the program, according to a 2018 report from the Citizens Budget Commission. In Fulton County in upstate New York, for instance, the local Medicaid bill for 2016 amounted to more than 15 percent of the county budget. In New York City, the annual Medicaid tab is roughly 5 billion, or nearly 5 percent of the city's budget. If the spending increases continue, and the state forces local governments to pay for them, the de Blasio administration estimates the city would owe an additional 1.1 billion next year. The state says the figure would be much lower. Mr. Cuomo has called on local governments to reduce costs. That's fine: New York City and counties across the state, which oversee enrollment, should work to root out any fraud or abuse and ensure that those who sign up for the program are eligible and truly in need. "They are the on the ground administrator. We respond to them," Mr. Cuomo said in a phone call Wednesday. Really though, local governments have limited say over how the program is run. Most of that responsibility rests with the state. When it comes to reducing Medicaid costs, that's where the focus should remain. The most promising effort so far is Mr. Cuomo's Medicaid Redesign Team, a working group assigned to find 2.5 billion in savings this year, preserving benefits while slashing waste. The governor used a similar task force to successfully carry out cost saving Medicaid reforms nearly a decade ago, aided by the Affordable Care Act. The new group will be led by the same two men: Michael Dowling, the president and C.E.O. of Northwell Health, and by Dennis Rivera, the former head of 1199 S.E.I.U., the powerhouse health care union. They are set to make their recommendations ahead of the April 1 budget deadline. It will be up to Mr. Cuomo to ensure the public good is top of mind. The redesign group should issue a thorough report, presenting its findings to the public and the Legislature. Right now, it's not clear they plan to do so, and that's a problem. While not perfect, the approach is far better than simply forking over more and more taxpayer dollars and sticking local governments with an ever growing tab, as the state has been doing. To get New York's Medicaid program back on track, the group will need to take a hard look at spending on nonmedical services like cooking and bathing for homebound New Yorkers. According to the Empire Center, New York's Medicaid spending on such personal services was the highest in the country. That may be because of a program that has expanded in recent years in which Medicaid pays nonmedical providers like family members to care for clients. In 2016, personal spending in New York accounted for 40 percent of national Medicaid spending for the category overall, up from 23 percent in 2011, the Empire Center said. Complicating matters is a political dynamic friendly to the health care industry. In 2018, for example, the Greater New York Hospital Association gave more than 1 million in political contributions to the state's Democratic Party. Not long afterward, the state increased Medicaid reimbursement rates for the first time since 2008, costing the state an estimated 140 million per year. Mr. Cuomo has denied that donations influence his policy decisions, and Cuomo administration officials said at the time that the increase was necessary, and simply long overdue. Health care experts disagree, and say hospital revenue had already been on the rise. New York's Medicaid bill is out of control. The first order of business is to understand more about why, and to be honest with the public about what needs to be done about it. 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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You Could Be in a Gay Bar Right Now and Not Even Know It None Amy Lombard for The New York Times "This was Andy Warhol's Factory, Studio 54 and the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one," said Brad Vogel. The 70 or so people gathered on Broadway just north of Bleecker Street looked confused and a little skeptical about the empty storefront. "This was 'the place.' Not in this building here, but under your feet," Mr. Vogel said. He was explaining the history of Pfaff's, a German beer cellar that opened in 1859 at 647 Broadway and counted Walt Whitman among its bohemian regulars who sought the company of other men. While Mr. Vogel a lanky, 34 year old attorney and poet with a commanding voice who serves as the executive director of The New York Preservation Archive Project spun tales of this forgotten nightspot, a young man in a pink tank top and navy shorts stenciled the words "Gay Bar Was Here" with blue chalk on the sidewalk. Michael Ryan, who created the gay bar tour, stopped near the Saint in the East Village. Amy Lombard for The New York Times This guerilla landmarked site was one of nine stops on Gay Bars That Are Gone, a free tour offered as part of Jane's Walk, which celebrates urban activist Jane Jacobs each May. Other stops on the two hour tour included a demolished disco (Palladium, 140 East 14th Street), a 1970s hustler bar (the Ninth Circle, 139 West 10th Street), a hedonistic dance club (The Saint, 105 Second Avenue), a steamy bath house (the New St. Marks Baths, 6 St. Marks Place) and a silenced piano bar (Bon Soir, 40 West 8th Street) where Barbra Streisand made her Manhattan debut in 1960. This unusual tour of the city's L.G.B.T. past was conceived by Michael Ryan, 26, an amateur historian, who spends his day managing partnerships for TEDx, a community driven branch of TED Talks. Raised in Augusta, Georgia, Mr. Ryan was always something of an urban history buff. "I always thought going downtown was cool and I liked all the old buildings," he said. In his teens, he helped organize a benefit concert to restore the Miller Theater, an Art Deco movie house built in 1940 in downtown Augusta that reopened this year as a performing arts venue. As a freshman at New York University in 2010, he began to explore the city's gay club scene, though he was often told that Grindr had dampened night life. "I had been at one too many bars or a dinner parties where people were like, um, New York was better in the '80s. You missed it, it's dead," he said. "At first I would just write it off and be like, they're just older, bitter New Yorkers who like complaining. But then I was like, wait a second. They just mentioned all these places in the Village." Lisa Davis, writer of the novel Under the Mink, outside of what was Club 82. Amy Lombard for The New York Times With his curiosity piqued, he pored over books including "Gay New York" by George Chauncey and "The Gay Metropolis" by Charles Kaiser that documented New York's forgotten gay landmarks and illuminated a lost gay subculture. So after college, when he started working as an events manager for the Municipal Art Society of New York, which sponsors Jane's Walk, he decided to turn his hobby into a tour. He organized the first gay bar walk in 2015, starting at the Roxy (515 West 18th Street), a dance club in the 1990s, then heading east to the Limelight (47 West 20th Street), a former church that was the epicenter of the '90s club kid universe, before heading south to the Anvil (500 West 14th Street), an after hours sex club from the 1970s. His first walk attracted a modest crowd of about 20, which doubled by the following spring. (The next tour is not scheduled till next May, but Mr. Ryan hopes to organize one sooner.) Visitors gathered outside the site of the Eve Addams' Tearoom, a lesbian hangout in the 1920s. Amy Lombard for The New York Times To make up for his relative youth, he joined forces with Kyle Supley, 37, a fellow gay history buff and performer, to co host the walk in 2016. Appropriately enough, they met at Mattachine, a monthly party held at Julius' (159 West 10th Street), considered the city's oldest continuously operating gay bar. Mr. Supley even brought some firsthand knowledge to the enterprise, having danced at clubs like Twilo and the Tunnel in their late 90's heyday when he was an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology. They also sought out experts to join the walks. This year, Lisa E. Davis, 76, an author on L.G.B.T. history, recounted stories of celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland attending late night drag shows at Club 82 (82 East 4th Street), a subterranean nightclub which operated from 1952 to 1973. "Straight people came because gay people were so much fun," she said. The space is currently home to the Bijou, an adult movie theater. "One day I was walking by with my partner and I was telling him this used to be Club 82. I pushed on the door and it just opened and the smell was like 1974," Mr. Supley said during the tour in May. "We walked downstairs and it's still a porn theater." Participants ranged in age from their 20s to 70s. Amy Lombard for The New York Times Other guest speakers included Gregory Young, co host of the Bowery Boys podcast on New York history, who shared stories about the Slide (157 Bleecker Street), a so called "fairy den" from the 1890s. Amanda Davis, a historian for the NYC L.G.B.T. Historic Sites Project, offered a history lesson in front of the former Eve Addams' Tearoom (129 MacDougal Street), a lesbian hot spot from the mid 1920s run by a Polish Jewish emigre named Eva Kotchever. A sign on the door, she said, once warned: "Men are admitted, but not welcome." Nora Burns, a downtown performer who is part of the comedy trio Unitard, recalled her hazy nights partying with drag queens at Boy Bar (15 St. Marks Place), a sweatbox of a club featured in the novel "The Lost Language of Cranes" by David Leavitt. The group left their mark in chalk. Amy Lombard for The New York Times "On a Thursday night, the shows wouldn't get started until 1 or 2 in the morning," said Ms. Burns, regaling a crowd gathered around a stoop on St. Marks Place. "The cover was maybe five dollars, but I don't think anyone paid." "It was an amazing night and there's not anything like that now," she added, comically imitating a New Yorker lamenting the good old days while, at the same time, winding up for her own punch line. "You missed it!"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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In the last 18 months, Comedy Central has seen the departure of its most familiar on air faces, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Now comes a high level change behind the scenes. Michele Ganeless, Comedy Central's longtime president, is leaving the network at the end of the month and will be replaced by Kent Alterman, president of original programming. Ms. Ganeless has been in charge of Comedy Central since 2004, and has been at Viacom for more than two decades. She said in an interview that the decision was hers. "It's been the better part of 25 years," she said. "And I'm ready for a new challenge." It is an anxious time in the cable industry, and Comedy Central is confronting a problem shared by a number of its peers: Ratings are declining as network executives point toward less lucrative digital successes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Danes see potential in unlikely places. In Copenhagen, a city that cultivated a worldwide gastronomic movement from the ostensibly meager bounty of the Nordic landscape, the latest local hot spot is a decaying former shipyard. Refshaleoen, in the city's northeastern docklands, is a heavily industrial area that once housed one of Europe's largest shipbuilding operations. When the shipyards closed decades ago, many of the hulking warehouses and factory buildings were left deserted. "So many of my colleagues in the city, when I told them that we were going to open up out here, they said to me, 'You're crazy. It's so far away, it's so far away. No one's going to go,'" said Matt Orlando, the former head chef at Noma who left to open his own outstanding restaurant, Amass, in Refshaleoen in 2013. (In 2018, Noma itself opened its much anticipated new location minutes away.) "It was kind of this forgotten about corner of Copenhagen," he said. "This untapped, raw piece of Copenhagen that still exists in the central part of the city." "It's dramatically different now. There's so many people out here," he continued, mentioning the artisanal bakery Lille, which opened last May, and La Banchina, a waterside cafe and restaurant with a private sauna and an idyllic pier where locals sip natural wine on sunny days. And in January, in a soaring industrial space near Amass, Mr. Orlando opened Broaden Build, a craft brewery and casual restaurant with picnic tables, color splashed walls and seasonal dishes. "It's still really raw and rough," he said, comparing the area to Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, with its faded shipyard grandeur. "The way it's changed mostly is that all of the buildings out here, all these warehouses and small little nooks and crannies are now occupied by people with businesses." One of the most ambitious new residents is Reffen, a roughly 50,000 square foot, outdoor food market (formerly called Copenhagen Street Food) with more than 40 vendors that relocated to Refshaleoen last summer after a successful stint on Papiroen, an inner city island now being redeveloped. The market will reopen for the season on March 29. "It has without a doubt brought a whole new burst of energy to the island, and exposed what is out here to the general public," Mr. Orlando said of Reffen, which was constructed from old shipping containers on a dusty harborside lot surrounded by dilapidated warehouses. Another new tenant (and fellow Papiroen transplant) is Copenhagen Contemporary, an exciting art center that opened last June and exhibits the work of international contemporary artists, including Doug Aitken and the Danish trio Superflex. "It's 15 minutes on a bike from central Copenhagen," said the director, Marie Nipper, who previously worked at the Tate Liverpool. "The distances in Copenhagen are so small, but in a Danish context it's kind of far outside of the city because it hasn't been part of that daily routine before." "The space that we're in is the old welding hall where they used to weld some of the larger parts of the ship," she said, noting that the monumental size of the building is ideal for large scale installations, such as a collapsing forest by the Swiss artist Claudia Comte (through Sept. 1). "It was really the perfect location for us." Another major draw is Mikkeller Baghaven, a barrel aging operation, beer garden and tasting room in a former workshop next to Reffen. "Everything that we make here incorporates wild yeasts and bacteria that we've isolated from this area, Refshaleoen, or Denmark, in general," Ehren Schmidt, the master blender and brewer, said. This means Baghaven uses, for example, strains from wild blackberries and apples off a nearby tree to produce its spontaneously fermented beers, saisons and wild ales, many in limited edition batches, which are often available only on site. 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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5 Shows to See in New York: Not Just Cher but Cher Horowitz If you follow theater, you probably already know about the Broadway bigfoots opening this month: "Network" starring Bryan Cranston, "To Kill a Mockingbird," starring Jeff Daniels, and "The Cher Show," starring three Chers. But it's also a month, Off Broadway, for wider exploration, from Beverly Hills and Brooklyn to France, Iran and Iraq. Wait there aren't just three Chers in town this month. There are four. The one without Bob Mackie outfits is Cher Horowitz, the eternal optimist at the heart of "Clueless, The Musical," adapted from the 1995 movie that was itself a riff on Jane Austen's "Emma." The New Group production, directed by Kristin Hanggi, stars Dove Cameron in the role made famous by Alicia Silverstone. She and her Beverly Hills friends now sing and dance to a score of '80s and '90s hits including "U Can't Touch This" and "She's So High." Some lyrics have been rewritten, but don't expect other major changes. The musical is by Amy Heckerling, who wrote and directed the movie. (Tickets: One of the bright spots in the lives of the thousands of people stuck in a migrant camp in Calais, France in 2015 and 2016 was a makeshift theater called Good Chance. Organized by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, it gave refugees a place to perform and listen, dance and cry. It also gave Mr. Murphy and Mr. Robertson the material for a play. But the result, called "The Jungle" after the name of the camp, is not a tribute to the transcendence of liberal values. Rather, it's a way of asking whether their good intentions made a positive difference or were just a diversion. After a successful run in London, the immersive production, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, lands at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo. Featuring several former residents of the camp, it may leave you harrowed. "By the end," Ben Brantley wrote in a review this summer, "cast and audience seemed to have melted into one teary, sweaty blur." (Tickets: stannswarehouse.org) Lynn Nottage's two Pulitzer Prizes for "Ruined" in 2009 and "Sweat" in 2017 honor big tragedies about big subjects: war, labor, powerlessness. But one of her earlier, breakthrough plays, in 2004, was a picaresque comedy on a much smaller scale. Instead of a community there is one woman, Undine (born Sharona Watkins). And among the awful things that happens to her is that ... she's forced to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. But the story of a successful black woman's "social fall and moral rise" is deliciously told, making "Fabulation, or the Re Education of Undine" (directed by Lileana Blain Cruz) a great opener to Ms. Nottage's residency at the Signature Theater. A revival of "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark," a Hollywood satire from 2011, follows at the Signature in January. (Tickets: signaturetheater.org) The idea behind Nassim Soleimanpour's "White Rabbit Red Rabbit," which played on Monday evenings for nine months in 2016, was that a different "guest star" enacted the text at each performance, without having seen it beforehand. It was a stunt that paid off, at least when the actors were inventive enough. Nathan Lane, for instance, was able to make connections between the nearly sadistic requirements of the form and the situation in which it was written: Mr. Soleimanpour, an Iranian dissident, was then, in essence, a prisoner of a repressive power. Now he lives in Germany and can say what he likes more directly. But in a new play, "Nassim," directed by Omar Elerian, he doubles down on the gimmick. The unprepared guest stars scheduled to perform this month in the Barrow Street Theatrical production include Michael Shannon, Cush Jumbo and Michael Urie. But this time they have a surprise collaborator as well. No spoilers here! (Tickets: barrowstreettheatre.com)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Senators hammered Mr. Dorsey over his decision to add labels to false and misleading election related tweets, which Republicans said displayed bias against conservatives and Democrats said had not gone far enough to check misinformation. Mr. Dorsey, who attended the hearing virtually from what appeared to be a kitchen, resisted being drawn into debate with lawmakers. As he did in a hearing three weeks ago, Mr. Dorsey defended Twitter's labeling tactics, although he admitted that in some cases the company had mistakenly labeled tweets that did not violate its policies. The task of moderation is incredibly challenging, Mr. Dorsey argued. "We are facing something that feels impossible," Mr. Dorsey said. "We are required to help increase the health of the public conversation while at the same time ensuring that as many people as possible can participate."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The charges against Joe Sullivan, Uber's former security chief, are believed to be the first against an executive stemming from a company's response to a security incident. OAKLAND, Calif. Uber's former security chief was charged on Thursday with attempting to conceal from federal investigators a hack that exposed the email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million drivers and passengers. The criminal charges filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco against Joe Sullivan, 52, are believed to be the first against an executive stemming from a company's response to a security incident. But the charges drew an important distinction between failing to protect Uber's computer network and failing to tell the authorities about it. Prosecutors said that Mr. Sullivan committed two felonies when he didn't disclose the 2016 incident to federal investigators who were already investigating a similar data breach that had occurred two years earlier. "When a company like Uber gets hacked, we expect good corporate citizenship, we expect prompt disclosure to the employee and consumer victims in that hack. In this case, what we saw was the exact opposite of good corporate behavior," said David Anderson, the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, in an interview. If convicted on both charges, Mr. Sullivan could face up to eight years in prison. He is the second Uber employee to face federal charges related to his work at Uber, which for years cultivated a reputation for pushing legal boundaries as it established itself as the leading ride hailing company. Anthony Levandowski, a former Uber engineer, was sentenced last month to 18 months in prison for stealing self driving car trade secrets from Google. Mr. Sullivan became Uber's chief security officer in 2015 after leading cybersecurity efforts at Facebook. He led the ride hailing company's security work until he was fired in 2017 when his handling of the data breach, which also exposed the license numbers for about 600,000 drivers, was discovered by Uber's newly appointed chief executive. A spokesman for Mr. Sullivan, who is now the chief information security officer at the internet company Cloudflare, said Mr. Sullivan had acted with the approval of Uber's legal department and there was no merit to the charges against him. "If not for Mr. Sullivan's and his team's efforts, it's likely that the individuals responsible for this incident never would have been identified at all," said Bradford Williams, the spokesman. He added that "Uber's legal department and not Mr. Sullivan or his group was responsible for deciding whether, and to whom, the matter should be disclosed." In a 2018 statement about the breach, Mr. Sullivan said, "I was surprised and disappointed when those who wanted to portray Uber in a negative light quickly suggested this was a cover up." In 2016, hackers discovered a way to access Uber's user data and quickly stole a copy of it. Uber found out when the hackers emailed the company and said they had acquired users' personal information. They demanded money. Mr. Sullivan and other Uber employees negotiated a 100,000 payment and convinced the hackers to sign nondisclosure agreements. Mr. Sullivan was "visibly shaken" when he learned of the hack and told others that he "could not believe they had let another breach happen and that the team had to make sure word of the breach did not get out," according to court documents. At the time, the Federal Trade Commission was investigating Uber in connection with a similar data breach that had occurred two years earlier. But even though he was aware of the F.T.C. inquiry and spoke under oath with investigators, Mr. Sullivan did not inform F.T.C. officials about the 2016 hack, prosecutors said. He also kept information about the incident from Uber employees who were responsible for communicating with the F.T.C. about the earlier incident, according to court documents. Uber attempted to handle the incident quietly through its so called bug bounty program. Technology companies often pay bounties to security researchers who discover and report flaws in their software. But bug bounty experts questioned whether the payment Uber gave to the hackers fell within the ethical boundaries of such programs, which are designed to induce people to report security flaws so they can be fixed. In October, Brandon Glover, a Florida resident, and Vasile Mereacre, a Canadian national, pleaded guilty to the hack. They could each face a maximum of five years in federal prison and are expected to be sentenced next year. Uber did not disclose the breach until 2017, after its former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, was ousted by investors and replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's current chief. Mr. Khosrowshahi fired Mr. Sullivan and Uber's legal director of security and law enforcement, Craig Clark, who had helped oversee the response to the security incident. "We continue to cooperate fully with the Department of Justice's investigation," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman. "Our decision in 2017 to disclose the incident was not only the right thing to do, it embodies the principles by which we are running our business today: transparency, integrity and accountability." The criminal charges against Mr. Sullivan are the latest in a string of legal entanglements stemming from the 2016 breach. In 2018, the F.T.C. broadened a prior settlement it had reached with the company. Uber also paid 148 million to settle an investigation into the hack brought by several state attorneys general. Uber was also fined approximately 1.2 million by British and Dutch regulators in connection with the breach. "Uber's decision to cover up this breach was a blatant violation of the public's trust," Xavier Becerra, California's attorney general, said in a statement after finalizing the 2018 settlement. Companies often face government investigations after their systems are hacked, and civil penalties against companies that do not promptly disclose these incidents are common.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. KYLE MARSHALL at BAM Fisher (Dec. 4 6, 7:30 p.m.; through Dec. 7). Making his BAM debut as part of the Next Wave Festival, Marshall, who danced with Trisha Brown and Doug Elkins, presents two works that each explore an important part of his identity one spiritual and one physical. In "A.D.," he probes his faith, questions Christian iconography (why are angels always portrayed as white?) and asks how Christianity affects the country more broadly. In "Colored," a 2017 work, he and two other dancers portray the way black bodies are both idealized and demonized, and how they are perceived in dance, especially by predominantly white audiences. 718 636 4100, bam.org MOVEMENT RESEARCH FESTIVAL FALL 2019 at Danspace Project (Dec. 5 7, 8 p.m.). This year's festival, called "ComeUnion," explores how a person's physical perceptions and experiences can pave the way for personal and social healing while responding to social justice issues. Workshops, screenings and discussions begin on Wednesday and continue through Dec. 8, but the three curated programs of performances, each featuring a different lineup, begin on Thursday with Camilo Godoy, Jerron Herman and Stevie May, followed on Friday with KK de La Vida, Dustin Maxwell and Grace Osborne. Saturday's program consists of works by Christopher Unpezverde Nunez and Merian Soto. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (Nov. 29, 8 p.m.; Nov. 30, 2 and 8 p.m.; Dec. 1, 1 and 5 p.m.; Dec. 5, 7 p.m.; through Jan. 5). 'Twas the day after Thanksgiving and all through the land, ballet companies began trotting out productions of "The Nutcracker," a holiday dance tradition most grand. And in New York, the grandest among them is City Ballet's, formally known as "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker," which has been performed since 1954. That title rightly emphasizes this version's secret weapon: Act II's glorious choreography, particularly the breathtaking final pas de deux between the Sugarplum Fairy and her cavalier. Act I has its own virtuosic feat in the form of a supersize Christmas tree, which captures all the magic and wonder of this familiar tale. 212 496 0600, nycballet.com
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Lady Gaga's latest album, "Chromatica," has topped this week's Billboard album chart the latest laurel in a long career comeback, and an affirmation of Lady Gaga's superstar status amid the pandemic. "Chromatica" has become Lady Gaga's sixth No. 1 album, with the equivalent of 274,000 sales in the United States, according to data from Nielsen Music. That is the biggest opening week number for a female artist so far this year. (Releases by the Weeknd, Eminem and the K pop group BTS all sold more in their first weeks out.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Twelve years ago, an old boyfriend took me on my first "backpacking" trip in Big Sur ("backpacking" in quotes because, unlike him, I was sporting a regular book bag with a sleepover era sleeping bag clumsily attached, and wearing Converse sneakers with the soles worn down). He had recently come across an old paperback guide that detailed directions to a secluded swimming hole, and had planned our whole hike around it. The trail was hot, dusty and exposed; I endured by picturing the secret pool at the end. But when we got to the place in the trees where we were meant to turn, the so called path was so overgrown that it looked like someone had rolled a ball down the hill. We scrambled down through the bushes, me cursing and my sneakers slipping, only to find ... nothing. The swimming hole didn't exist. We had erred in our timing or this wasn't the place. Probably a fork of a creek had dried up, as many do. Since then, I have successfully made it to swimming holes that did, in fact, exist at the time of my arrival. These include spots along the Russian River, which snakes through the redwoods in the Sonoma Mountains, and areas on the Trinity River, which tumbles over the rocks of the formidable Klamath Mountains. Both are strong, rushing rivers, harnessed to provide water for hundreds of thousands of people and farmland and vineyards, with reservoirs that are increasingly at risk, imperiled by cycles of drought and deluge. The swimming holes are what happen when the water pauses on its own and, entering into some felicitous arrangement with the rocks and soil, renders a space wide and deep enough to hold some stillness. I get the feeling that Northern Californians especially love swimming holes because our beaches are so un beachy. Take Ocean Beach in San Francisco, an expanse of intimidating waves and frigid water. Sometimes swept with fog and a punishing wind, the beach has no lifeguards and, instead, a sign that says: "Danger Rip Currents. People Have Died Swimming and Wading Here." Pescadero State Beach, which I went to as a kid, had similar warning signs (although that didn't prevent my dad from wading alone into the breakers). The beach was a place to have salt, sand and a cold mist whipped through your hair and maybe see a gray whale or an orca if you were lucky but not so much a place for tanning and swimming. For that, people head inland, where they can float along the American River in an inner tube, a beer nestled in its cup holder, or wade in the Tuolumne in Yosemite, spreading their towels on boulders. (I have fond memories of getting myself good and cold in the water there, and then lying on various hot rocks, imagining I was a Western fence lizard.) I live in Oakland now, not too far from what could be called a man made swimming hole. In 1938, the creek was dammed in the part of the Berkeley Hills that had recently been designated as Tilden Park. A joint project of the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, the resulting "recreational reservoir" was named Lake Anza and is still a popular swimming spot today, complete with a small beach, a lifeguard, a bathhouse, and a stand selling sandwiches and milkshakes. Like so many New Deal era projects, it's the kind of optimistic, leisure focused space that clearly hails from another time. Lake Anza may be more permanent than the swimming hole I never found, but a visitor can still find herself there in the wrong time or place. Swimming is only allowed in the summer, and even then, officially, only inside a marked off area near the beach. To actually swim in the deeper part of that area, which is further restricted, you have to pass a swim test. Such barriers always accentuate my feelings of difference from the river otters, sunfish and rainbow trout, to whom both clock time and floating partitions are a mere curiosity. (A friend once told me that a river otter swam alongside him as he did laps there.) And, in fact some swimmers do come in the winter: buffleheads, ring necked ducks, mergansers and other waterfowl visiting from the north. At one point, four uniformed members of the Berkeley Fire Department walked up. They looked contemplatively down at the water from a bridge over the creek. "Uh oh," said one bather , noticing them. "Something we should be worried about, officers?" "Nope," one of them answered. He sighed. "Just wishing we weren't working today."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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"The vision," said Mr. Flannery, who was assisted in achieving it by the designers Michael Bagley and Michael Adams, "was to combine them into one grand house for entertaining." They partially broke through walls on the garden and parlor levels, where floor to ceiling bay windows face north and overlook the garden, to create connective archways between what had been two separate homes. Now the parlor floor has a formal entry gallery with a hidden bar behind mirrored doors (one of Mr. Feinstein's favorite things), a sunken sitting room to the west, and a music room and living room in the back overlooking the garden. There are herringbone wood floors and two spindle staircases. Downstairs on the garden level there is an 11 by 30 foot formal kitchen with a marble center island and countertops, a Viking stove and grill, and a formal dining room with a triple set of French doors to the backyard. There is a full bath with a soaking tub from which a bather can survey the gardens. (The town house does not lack for witty embellishments.) The third floor has an informal "family kitchen," a dining area, three bedrooms, and two baths. A private staircase leads to the fourth floor master suite on the western half of the home; the master bath is at the top of the stairs, the 11 by 16 foot bedroom with an original fireplace to the rear, and in the front overlooking 63rd Street is a man cave reimagined as a 16 by 11 foot dressing room with its own marble fireplace and a built in center unit with a marble top and multiple storage drawers. There are two bedrooms and baths on the eastern side of the fourth floor, and on the top floor, a home gym, another full spa type bath and a large covered terrace in front. Mr. Feinstein said they are reluctantly downsizing in the city because their main residence is now in Carmel, Ind., where he is the artistic director of the Center for the Performing Arts and where he established the Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Initiative in 2008.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Two productions from the 1980s returned to the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater this week, in refurbished form. The new iterations of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar's "Shelter" (1988) and Talley Beatty's "Stack Up" (1982), part of the company's five week City Center season, proved a study in contrasts of how dances can weather the passage of time. While "Shelter," a potent statement on homelessness and displacement, speaks pointedly to the present, the rambunctious "Stack Up" seems bound to another era, which made it no less intriguing to watch. Ms. Zollar, the founder and director of Urban Bush Women, created "Shelter" after moving to New York and being struck by the extent of the city's homeless population. Set to a sonic collage that includes poetry by Hattie Gossett and driving percussive music by Junior Wedderburn, the work both depicts transience and pushes back at it, through the persevering performances of six dancers. While "Shelter" has been danced in the past by women and men, the version unveiled on Tuesday features a stellar all female cast: Ghrai DeVore, Samantha Figgins, Jacqueline Green, Jacquelin Harris, Rachael McLaren and Linda Celeste Sims. They begin piled on the ground, a heap of bodies that later reappears, uprooting itself and migrating from place to place. Countering these weary moments, they also unleash deep reserves of power, in high, slashing kicks paired with downward punching fists and propulsive, intricately shuddering phrases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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The update, which was quickly reversed, appeared to affect iPhone users but not those with Androids or those using the app on desktop. In a series of tweets, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, explained that the new feature was a "test" that was released widely by mistake. "Just a test that went to a few orders of magnitude more people than intended... sorry about that," he wrote in one tweet. "Due to a bug, some users saw a change to the way their feed appears today," Instagram said. "We quickly fixed the issue and feed is back to normal. We apologize for any confusion."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Back in 2008, another era of the music industry when the bad news was about piracy and record stores dying, and there wasn't much good news Lil Wayne stood out as a rare bankable star. His album that year, "Tha Carter III," was a unicorn, selling more than a million copies in its first week out, and it instantly became a rap classic. Now, at 37, Lil Wayne is an elder of the genre but can still command huge mainstream attention for his legal struggles as well as for his music. His latest release, "Funeral," opened at No. 1 on the latest Billboard chart, becoming his fifth title to reach the top. "Funeral," which features 2 Chainz, Lil Baby, Adam Levine and others including a posthumous appearance by the rapper XXXTentacion, who died in 2018 had the equivalent of 139,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen Music. It was helped by deals that bundled copies of the album with concert tickets and merchandise, but also had a healthy 135 million streams. Also this week, the Atlanta rapper Russ opened at No. 4 with his new album, "Shake the Snow Globe," and the pop singer Kesha started at No. 7 with "High Road."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Under pressure from Congress to take action amid a worsening opioid epidemic, the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday announced several measures aimed at dealing with abuse. Dr. Robert Califf, the acting commissioner and nominee to run the agency, announced the measures in a phone conference with reporters. He said the steps were an attempt by the agency to toughen its response to the crisis, in which tens of thousands of Americans were addicted to the prescription painkillers and were dying of overdoses. He said the actions were part of a broader government effort: Earlier this week, the Obama administration said it would ask Congress to spend an additional 1.1 billion next year on the problem, which would help increase badly needed treatment facilities. "It has reached a point where we felt we had to step back and take a careful look at everything and see what we could do," Dr. Califf said. "We thought we could do more." The decrees include convening an expert panel before approving some new opioids, strengthening requirements to study a drug after it has come to market, and increasing access to training on pain management for doctors and other prescribers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Brad Pitt won a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor in a motion picture for his role in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood." For the 77th annual Golden Globes, some things have stayed the same (Ricky Gervais returned for his fifth stint as host) but others have not (the Globes menu is vegan now, because of the climate crisis). This year, once again, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has been criticized for snubbing women in several big categories including best director, best motion picture and best screenplay. Historically, only five women have been nominated, ever, for best director at the show. Greta Gerwig, who was not nominated as a director for "Little Women," showed up anyway. Here's some more things we noticed: Andrew Scott was still being called the "priest" on the carpet and it's getting weird Ryan Seacrest said on the red carpet he's perhaps the only person in the U.S. who hasn't finished the second season of "Fleabag." But he did yell, upon seeing one of the show's stars, Andrew Scott, on the red carpet: "The priest, the priest is here!" Mr. Scott said that he and creator writer star Phoebe Waller Bridge plan to collaborate again. "We're definitely going to do something." Turns out J.Lo does all her own stunts While filming "Hustlers," she was insistent that the director Lorene Scafaria "get a close up of my face," she said, lest someone think a stunt double jumped in for that film's remarkable pole dancing scene. Alex Rodriguez, who was with Ms. Lopez on the red carpet, chimed in to say that a fringe benefit of the project was "having a pole in our master bedroom for six months." Also why was Ricky Gervais hosting again? Even he said he doesn't really know. "As I put down the phone," he recalled on the red carpet tonight, "I said, 'Why am I doing this again? That's Christmas ruined.'" He was prepared to be critiqued for his jabs and said he planned to tell anyone who thinks he went too far: "Listen, they're just jokes."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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