text
stringlengths 1
39.7k
| label
int64 0
0
| original_task
stringclasses 8
values | original_label
stringclasses 35
values |
|---|---|---|---|
"This is a remarkable achievement," said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University. The image provides visual evidence that black holes exist. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is. This is a remarkable achievement. What you're seeing here is the last photon orbit. What you are seeing is evidence of an event horizon. By laying a ruler across this black hole, we now have visual evidence for a black hole. We now know that a black hole that weighs 6.5 billion times what our sun does exists in the center of M87. And this is the strongest evidence that we have to date for the existence of black holes. Welcome, earthlings, to the place of no return: a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape it. This is a black hole. It's O.K. to feel lost here. Even Albert Einstein, whose theory of general relativity made it possible to conceive of such a place, thought the concept was too bizarre to exist. But Einstein was wrong, and here you are. You shouldn't be here. Surely you will be pulled in . But fear not, dear earthling: Your brain has taken millions of years to get here, and it's ready for this gaze into the darkness. So let's get started. The notes stayed in the galaxy and never reached us, but we couldn't have heard them anyway. The lowest note the human ear can detect has an oscillation period of one twentieth of a second. This B flat's period was 10 million years. The "songs" of black holes may be responsible for a declining birthrate of stars in the universe. In clusters of galaxies such as Perseus, the home of NGC 1275, the energy these notes carry is thought to keep the gases too hot to condense and form stars. Astronomers have evidence for black holes in nearly every galaxy in the universe Although no black hole is close enough to Earth to pull the planet to its doom, there are so many black holes in the universe that counting them is impossible. Nearly every galaxy our own Milky Way, as well as the 100 billion or so other galaxies visible from Earth shows signs of a supermassive black hole in its center. Moreover the bigger a galaxy is, the more massive is its central black hole. Nobody knows why. The dramatic transformation starts when a massive star runs out of fuel. As the star begins to collapse, it explodes. The star's outer layers spew out into space, but the inside implodes, becoming denser and denser, until there is too much matter in too little space. The core succumbs to its own gravitational pull and collapses into itself, in extreme cases forming a black hole. Theoretically, if you shrank any mass down into a certain amount of space, it could become a black hole. Our planet would be one if you tried to cram Earth into a pea. On March 28, 2011, astronomers detected a long gamma ray burst coming from the center of a galaxy 4 billion light years away. This was the first time humans observed what might have been a dormant black hole eating a star. No matter what a black hole eats a star, a donkey, an iPhone, your grammar teacher it's all the same to the black hole. "A black hole has no hair," the physicist John Archibald Wheeler once said, meaning that a black hole remembers only the mass, spin and charge of its dinner. The more a black hole eats, the more it grows. In 2011, scientists discovered one of the biggest black holes ever, more than 300 million light years away. It weighs enough to have gobbled up 21 billion suns. Scientists want to know if the biggest black holes are the result of two holes merging or one hole eating a lot. But scientists don't know how they grew so large. To find the darkness, follow the light Light can't escape a black hole, so seeing what's inside one is impossible. Getting a picture of a black hole's edge is difficult, and getting a clear picture is something else entirely. And until now, it has never been done. So far, scientists have detected black holes only indirectly, by their signatures, such as a gamma ray burst, supernova or, perhaps, an object on the brink of a black hole's event horizon. Typically, if tremendous energy is emanating from a massive core at the center of a galaxy, the core is probably a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope, the one Sheperd Doeleman and his colleagues used to photograph the black hole in the galaxy M87, features a cast of more than 100 scientists on four continents and one very important crystal used to calibrate atomic clocks. In April 2017 scientists staked out eight telescopes atop mountains on four continents, synchronized them, pointed them at the sky and waited. And so they brought Einstein's monster, the black hole, into view for the first time. A giant magnet in Europe will not destroy the planet Before the European Organization for Nuclear Research fired up the Large Hadron Collider in 2008, critics worried that smashing together protons in a 17 mile ring underground would create a black hole that would swallow the earth. Scientists had smaller ones in mind. In theory, the search for the smallest particles in the universe might kick up mini black holes in the collider's underground tubes, enabling researchers to observe general relativity and quantum mechanics in action, and perhaps open the door to solving the firewall paradox. A decade earlier, similarly apocalyptic worries arose over Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The center's scientists squelched these concerns by pointing out that, according to their calculations, ultrahigh energy cosmic rays were already penetrating the atmosphere and would have created about 100 tiny black holes on Earth every year. If tiny black holes were a genuine problem, Earth would have collapsed into infinity long ago. Still, in June 2008, a safety review proclaimed the L.H.C. safe. Experiments commenced, the Higgs boson was found and Earth survived after all.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Yola Yolanda Claire Quartey sang her first recording session 20 years ago, as a teenager in her English hometown, Bristol. This Sunday at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, she has been nominated for best new artist and three other awards: best Americana album for her debut, "Walk Through Fire," best American roots performance and best American roots song. For Yola, 36, the two decades in between encompassed homelessness, international arena tours, stealthy appearances on dance pop hits and, eventually, the hard won self reinvention that brought her to Nashville to make "Walk Through Fire" with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach as producer. The one constant was her formidable voice a range that stretches toward four octaves, backed by the power to infuse whatever she sings with deep soul. Yola can moan and rasp and steamroller her way through a chorus, bringing crowds to their feet; she can also tease out the pain, longing and humor of subtler moments. Onstage and off, she's a vivid presence: a voluble storyteller with an imposing Afro and a boisterous laugh. She didn't. Streaming wasn't yet an option, so she soaked up music from the LP collections of her mother and her friends' parents. At her most recent New York City show, a sold out Music Hall of Williamsburg, Yola interspersed her own songs with showstoppers from Franklin and Elton John, but also delivered an introspective deep cut from the Beach Boys, "Till I Die." Yola proudly describes her music as "genre fluid" and "out of time." Her Grammy nominated song, "Faraway Look," is a reverb laden ballad that harks back to the early 1960s pop melodramas of the Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison. Much of her album reaches back to vintage Southern soul: hand played rather than programmed, sung with fervent grit and grain, and reclaiming the relationship between soul and country music that Yola sums up as "an interstate between Nashville and Memphis." (Her competitors for best new artist include commercial blockbusters like Billie Eilish, Lizzo and Lil Nas X.) "I was just made to be afraid of my own personality in every single situation I was in before I was solo," she said. Yola describes "Walk Through Fire" as "a breakup record" with her diffident former self. In the video for "Ride Out in the Country," she drives a pickup truck into the backwoods and buries a corpse that also turns out to be Yola. "Doormat Yola goes in the ground where she belongs!" she explained, with a cheerful cackle. "For so much of the album, I'm talking about who I was, not who I am," she added. "You have to go back to a previous incarnation of yourself, you have to reconnect with that old part of yourself and the vulnerability in that state to be able to tell the story." Yola dropped out of college to work as a singer, and despite some lean times at 21 she was evicted and homeless in London she got gigs as a "frontwoman for hire" with her undeniable voice. In the mid 2000s she sang for Bugz in the Attic, a dance pop group that drew large audiences in Europe, Asia and Australia, and in 2008 she toured with the Bristol trip hop pioneers Massive Attack. She also sang and co wrote melancholy, rootsy songs for her own group Phantom Limb. Yola's first teenage recording session was with the Bristol based production team Distorted Minds, and behind the scenes, she continued to work as a studio singer and topliner for electronic producers, belting hooks others had written or coming up with lyrics and melodies for their tracks. "All of my old network that were players and music makers, there were a handful of token women and they were the singers. And then there's a crowd of men and they're like the expertise, all the players and the technicians," she said. "My whole life was one of codependency." Yola's voice topped British dance club hits including "Turn Back Time" by Sub Focus, for which she wrote the top line, and "Don't Look Back" by Duke Dumont. And because British copyright law provides "neighboring rights" royalties to performers as well as songwriters, her work was profitable. But with rare exceptions like the country blues rooted "The Devil and Midnight," which she wrote with the producer Nitin Sawhney she refused to be credited for her studio vocals. In 2012, Yola started to redefine herself, a process that accelerated after the death of her mother the following year. She broke away from old associates, learned to play guitar and started writing songs on her own. "It dawned on me that I needed to be my own rich daddy," she said. "Because what's the music industry full of, other than rich kids who had daddies who could prop them up?" With her dance pop royalties, she financed and produced her largely acoustic debut EP, "Orphan Offering," billing herself as Yola Carter. Its opening song, "Home," turns into a multitracked vocal crescendo, vowing, "Let's get going!" For her showcase at the 2016 Americanafest in Nashville, Yola got a crucial endorsement from NPR Music. She went on tour with a full band, using those royalties from her dance hits "the bank of Yola," she said to pay them. By 2017, after touring festivals in the United States, Europe and Scandinavia, she had built considerable word of mouth. She returned to Americanafest for a more prominent spot. A video of her performing reached Auerbach, who was building his Easy Eye Sound studio and label in Nashville. "As soon as I heard her I wanted to meet her," he said by phone. "I was instantly struck by her voice, by the range of her voice, just the command that she has it spoke to me."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
There was more to Peter's crise than his worry about Patsy or growing distaste for his surreptitious assignment. He was 25, almost 26. Impatiently, he reflected that his life didn't make sense to him, a feeling that had gnawed at him for a long while. What was he doing here? He began a second novel, called "Partisans." The protagonist is a journalist working under cover in Paris on an investigative story about an elusive Communist. The journalist's name is Barney Sand initials B.S. Listening to the sound of his own voice, Sand broods that it "belonged to a man in mirrors whose face seemed more foolish every day." Waiting to undertake the next move in his mission, Sand thinks: "To wait, to wait, as it now seemed to him he had waited all his life: for graduation from school, for enlistment in the Army, for combat that never came, for the war to end, for college to end, for promotion in two jobs he did not want, for a love that did not exist waiting for a raison d'etre which never arrived because he could not recognize it." My grandparents were wealthy. Like the etiolated hero of "Partisans," my uncle believed that his privileged background and private schooling had stunted his personal growth. To use today's psycho parlance, Peter didn't like himself very much. Before he married and went off to Paris, he was often in one sort of trouble or another without really knowing why. He dodged a court martial while in the Navy. He blew up his own engagement party insulting Patsy's mother and making out with a bridesmaid. To paraphrase St. Augustine on his own bad boy phase, Peter became to himself a place of unhappiness in which he could not bear to be, but he could not escape himself. Time and again he would bring himself to the lip of a crisis and, meaning to leap over, leap in. But at this juncture he acted wisely. Quitting the C.I.A., Peter took his wife and newborn son, my cousin Lucas, back home. He settled in Sagaponack, on Long Island, still and always a footloose man but more focused. In midlife he produced two fine novels, "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and "Far Tortuga," and a glorious spate of nonfiction about the natural world. His best nonfiction works are "Under the Mountain Wall," "The Tree Where Man Was Born" and especially "The Snow Leopard," which appeared in 1978. Matthiessen is the only writer to win National Book Awards in both nonfiction, for "The Snow Leopard," and fiction, for his 2008 novel, "Shadow Country." If he were alive, he might voice one regret about his sterling career. His time in Paris kept bobbing to the surface, both the good part about The Paris Review, as the magazine's stature among intellectuals increased, and the negative part about his role in the C.I.A. Well before the C.I.A. story became public, Peter had acknowledged the connection to Plimpton and Humes, and after the revelation he tried to placate other friends for having been less than candid. He protested that he was young and had no politics to speak of, other than a vague, Ivy League sense of patriotism. "People tend to forget," he wrote in his memoir notes, "that 60 years ago, at the start of the Cold War, the C.I.A. had not yet earned the evil repute it has today, and I look back on my own brief participation with more chagrin than shame." He also wrote, "I was no good at this low work and hated the deception that went with it, which I found nerve racking and disagreeable and made worse by the fact that it all seemed petty and pointless as well as an idiotic waste of public money." Putting on a pained smile, Peter would observe that by introducing him to socialists the C.I.A. had educated him in the wrong direction. My uncle, don't forget, became a champion of left wing causes. He wrote books in support of the farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez and the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, and he regularly chastised big corporations and the government for harming the environment. The occasionally shrill vein in his writing cost him both money and credibility.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
The horrifying rash of massacres during this violent summer suggests that public, widely covered rampage killings have led to a kind of contagion, prompting a small number of people with strong personal grievances and scant political ideology to mine previous attacks for both methods and potential targets to express their lethal anger and despair. The Iranian German who killed nine people at a Munich mall was reportedly obsessed with mass killings, particularly the attack by a Norwegian that killed 77 people in 2011. The Tunisian who killed 84 people at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, France, also researched previous attacks, including the mass killing in Orlando, Fla. The Orlando gunman had reportedly researched the San Bernardino, Calif., attack. Some of the attacks are ideological, some are not and some fall into a gray area. But the highly publicized attacks in a nightclub and restaurants in Paris, at airports in Brussels and Istanbul, and in public spaces in Mumbai may be providing troubled people already contemplating violence a spur to act, experts said, in the same way that many school shootings and other violent rampages follow close on the heels of similar incidents in the news. "Those of us in this field, it's the first thing we think about when we read accounts of these recent mass murders: The detailed coverage of terrorist attacks may be giving people who are vulnerable or thinking along these line ideas about what to do and how to do it," said Madelyn Gould, a professor of epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia. The historical evidence that terrorist attacks become blueprints for random massacres is slim, Dr. Gould and others said. No one knows precisely what factors prompt people to commit such extreme acts, when the primary motivation is radical ideology. In rare cases where perpetrators survive, even they often do not have a clear sense of what moved them from despair and anger to large scale murder. "In interviews, they come across as what we call pseudo terrorists," said J. Kevin Cameron, the director of the Canadian Center for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response, who has consulted on school shootings and other mass killing for almost 20 years. "They're people with some ax to grind who are fluid that is, they're truly at their core struggling with suicide and homicide, and they swing between the two. Today the person is more suicidal; a week later he's more homicidal." But there is reason to suspect that contagion is a factor, from previous research on violence. Researchers have long known that highly publicized suicides can precede "clusters" of suicides in the weeks or months afterward, in people already thinking about suicide. The likelihood of such contagion depends on the prominence of the coverage, the detail in the reports about methods, the richness of the portrayals of people affected. In similar fashion, terrorist attacks and mass killings have been exhaustively covered, Dr. Gould said. The vast majority of people who take their lives kill only themselves, leaving no evidence that they wanted to kill others. But experts suspect that murder suicides are subject to contagion effects from high profile cases, though the numbers are too small to establish that statistically. Only about 1 to 2 percent of murder suicides target random people outside immediate family or friends, said Matthew Nock, a psychologist at Harvard. "These events seem more homicide related, with suicide as part of the process, including suicide by police," Dr. Nock said. "But you can see, with a confluence of factors, including readily available high capacity firearms, continuous media reporting of mass killings and terror attacks, that there's certainly fuel for contagion." One study in Germany of rampage killers those who murder as many people as they can, without apparent motive found that these events do not occur randomly over time. Most such attacks, between 1993 and 2000, followed a similar event by weeks. A 2015 study of school shootings in the United States had a similar finding: Attacks tended to follow similar ones within about two weeks. Many school killers have researched the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, including the young man who slaughtered children and teachers at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Conn. an attack that, in turn, informed still another school gunman, at an Oregon community college. In the weeks following a mass shooting in Canada this year, "we got three to four threats a day to duplicate that crime for more than two weeks afterward," Dr. Cameron said. "If you're a suicidal individual who never seriously thought of killing someone else, these mass attacks, whether terrorism or school shootings, or something like Nice, they give you ideas on site selection, on human target selection and how to go out with a bang." Terrorist attacks, besides providing how to ideas, may also provide political cover to angry, mentally unstable people drawn to violence an ideological cause to justify acts of vengeance or grievance, some experts said. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation, referred to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, in an email about the perpetrators of recent attacks in Orlando, Nice and Germany: "ISIS' ideology may resonate with their own anger and promises them applause and recognition. The ideology becomes a vehicle for individual discontents."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
As the crisis caused by the coronavirus continues to spiral out of control, the vast ramifications of the global economy's screeching to a halt are already on display at one of most important companies in the United States: Boeing. Boeing is the nation's largest manufacturer. It employs more than 100,000 people domestically and supports millions more through a supply chain that includes thousands of businesses big and small around the country. But Boeing's stock price has dropped more than 40 percent in the last five days, and with the broader airline industry reeling, President Trump signaled Tuesday that he would strongly consider a bailout for Boeing. "I think we have to protect Boeing," Mr. Trump said. "We have to absolutely help Boeing. Obviously, when the airlines aren't doing well, then Boeing is not going to be doing well. So we'll be helping Boeing." On Tuesday evening, the company said it was in favor of an enormous government support package for airplane manufacturers like itself. "Boeing supports a minimum of 60 billion in access to public and private liquidity, including loan guarantees, for the aerospace manufacturing industry," Boeing said in a statement. "This will be one of the most important ways for airlines, airports, suppliers and manufacturers to bridge to recovery." Boeing was already coming off the worst year in its history because of the grounding of its 737 Max plane after two crashes left 346 people dead. Now the coronavirus is posing daunting new challenges. Airlines, faced with a precipitous drop in travelers, will not be ordering new planes for a long time and are refusing to take delivery of the ones they have already bought. Boeing cannot deliver jets to Europe or China. Supply chain disruptions and social distancing measures may force it to shut down factories. Boeing executives are trying to determine what to do if shelter in place orders, school closings or the virus itself makes it impossible to manufacture planes, said a person briefed on the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. In recent days, senior Boeing executives have made it clear to the White House and Congress that if the aerospace giant does not receive government assistance, it could decline rapidly, causing significant damage to the American economy. The tumbling of its stock price has pulled down the markets in recent weeks. Even before the virus crisis took hold, Mr. Trump blamed the 737 Max for contributing to a drop in the gross domestic product. The fallout from the virus poses Boeing's greatest challenge since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when it cut production in half and laid off tens of thousands of people. Company insiders say the pandemic is far worse, since it has touched every continent other than Antarctica and plunged nearly every airline worldwide into crisis. "It's not just Boeing," said Susan Houseman, director of research at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "Its supply chain may be irreparably damaged. There will be bankruptcies, companies will lose their workers, and they just can't restart in six months." Boeing executives are furiously drafting contingency plans and trying to find a way to keep factories open and avoid mass layoffs or furloughs, three people familiar with the deliberations said. Executives from the medical, financial and human resources teams are monitoring developments constantly, and have identified several potential situations that could cause production to grind to a halt, one of the people said. Boeing executives believe the most likely possibility is that the government effectively mandates a work stoppage, either by shutting down all nonessential businesses or instituting strict travel restrictions, such as border closures or shelter in place orders. 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. Factories could also shut down if too many employees at one facility become sick, raising the risk of community spread on the factory floor. And supply chain disruptions could become so severe that Boeing does not have the parts it needs to make planes. Boeing is bracing for a rise in absent workers, either because school closings force parents to stay home or because people are too scared to leave the house. Already, some workers have begun to stay home, one of the people briefed on the plans said. Should plants have to shut down, Boeing could move them into a state of "suspended operations." Under such conditions, some Boeing employees might still be paid. And if workers at the company's factories in Washington State are sick, they may be eligible for the state's paid family and medical leave. Yet there is also the possibility that the sudden drop in demand for Boeing products leads to layoffs. In that event, executives would consult an internal ranking system known as the "retention totem," a reference to the totem poles of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, where Boeing was founded and still has its largest presence. In the system, employees are put in one of three categories, from R1 to R3, based on how essential they are to the business, three people familiar with the system said. The lower the number, the less likely one is to get fired. Mass layoffs would put Boeing in a very difficult position. Restarting production won't be easy if the company has lost a significant chunk of its skilled mechanics and engineers. But the company will need to cut costs and is running out of other options. Borders are closing, and Mr. Trump has raised the prospect of cordoning off Washington, a move that would paralyze Boeing's production. And with airlines around the world facing imminent bankruptcy, Boeing may soon face an abrupt drop in revenue. Fifteen Boeing employees around the country have tested positive for Covid 19, the disease caused by the new virus. Suppliers are already having problems delivering necessary parts to Boeing; one, a major manufacturer of parts for the company's 787 and 767 planes, is based in northern Italy, an epicenter of the outbreak. General Electric, which supplies 90 percent of all Boeing engines, also gets parts in Italy. Mr. Trump is seeking a 850 billion stimulus package, which is expected to include relief for the aviation industry. For Boeing, the most likely result is that the government guarantees billions of dollars in loans that big banks would make to the company. If Boeing's revenues run dry for months, such loans could allow it to keep paying some employees and suppliers. Even before the prospect of government relief was on the table, Boeing was taking steps to fortify its finances. Last week, it drew down a credit line of 13.8 billion. The impact of the pandemic on the aviation industry has already been profound. Demand for commercial airplanes has fallen sharply, and no one is sure when it will return. Airlines around the world have also sharply reduced service, including American, United, Delta and major international carriers like Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa. Analysts believe that within months, many airlines may go bankrupt. More immediately, Boeing is assessing its ability to continue day to day production. The company is working with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington to figure out whether the prohibition on gatherings of more than 50 people applies to, say, a cafeteria that can seat 200 in the company's plant in Everett. On Tuesday, Airbus, Boeing's chief rival, shut down factories in France and Spain in an effort to stop the spread of the virus. Most analysts, bankers and executives believe Boeing will come through this crisis, partly because it's viewed as too big to fail. Boeing is not just one of two companies in the world making commercial airplanes. It is also one of the largest defense contractors in the country and a producer of critical aircraft and equipment for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "For Boeing to collapse and go out of business, it would be devastating to the economy," said Scott Hamilton, an aviation consultant. "It will survive, in one form or another."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Economy
|
Opening in 1950s Taiwan, during the rule of the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), "Tigertail" introduces us to a young boy named Pin Jui. He lives with his grandparents in the countryside while his mother looks for a job. The film, streaming on Netflix, soon jumps to the present day: Pin Jui, now an old man (Tzi Ma), lives in the United States and clearly has a fraught relationship with his grown up daughter (Christine Ko); it's not hard to discern that from the awkward silences. Spanning more than half a century, "Tigertail" goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results. The writer and director Alan Yang (co creator of "Master of None") was inspired by the story of his own father, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Hong Chi Lee portrays Pin Jui as a young man, who finds work in a factory alongside his mother, just like Yang's father had; they make just enough to scrape by.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Clockwise: Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. George Etheredge for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times Clockwise: Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. George Etheredge for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times Credit... Clockwise: Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. George Etheredge for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times. Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times One Weight Loss Approach Fits All? No, Not Even Close Dr. Frank Sacks, a professor of nutrition at Harvard, likes to challenge his audience when he gives lectures on obesity. "If you want to make a great discovery," he tells them, figure out this: Why do some people lose 50 pounds on a diet while others on the same diet gain a few pounds? Then he shows them data from a study he did that found exactly that effect. Dr. Sacks's challenge is a question at the center of obesity research today. Two people can have the same amount of excess weight, they can be the same age, the same socioeconomic class, the same race, the same gender. And yet a treatment that works for one will do nothing for the other. The problem, researchers say, is that obesity and its precursor being overweight are not one disease but instead, like cancer, they are many. "You can look at two people with the same amount of excess body weight and they put on the weight for very different reasons," said Dr. Arya Sharma, medical director of the obesity program at the University of Alberta. If obesity is many diseases, said Dr. Lee Kaplan, director of the obesity, metabolism and nutrition institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, there can be many paths to the same outcome. It makes as much sense to insist there is one way to prevent all types of obesity get rid of sugary sodas, clear the stores of junk foods, shun carbohydrates, eat breakfast, get more sleep as it does to say you can avoid lung cancer by staying out of the sun, a strategy specific to skin cancer. One focus of research is to figure out how many types of obesity there are Dr. Kaplan counts 59 so far and how many genes can contribute. So far, investigators have found more than 25 genes with such powerful effects that if one is mutated, a person is pretty much guaranteed to become obese, said Dr. Stephen O'Rahilly, head of the department of clinical biochemistry and medicine at Cambridge University. But those genetic disorders are rare. It is more likely that people inherit a collection of genes, each of which predispose them to a small weight gain in the right environment, said Ruth Loos, director of the genetics of obesity and related metabolic traits program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Scientists have found more than 300 such altered genes each may contribute just a few pounds but the effects add up in those who inherit a collection of them, Dr. Loos said. There are also drugs that, in some people, can cause weight gain. They include medications for psychiatric disorders, some drugs for diabetes, some for seizure disorders, beta blockers to lower blood pressure and slow the heart rate, and steroids to suppress the immune system, for example. People taking them, however, may not realize the drugs are part of their problem. Instead, they blame themselves for a lack of self control as their weight climbs. Certain diseases also cause weight gain, Dr. O'Rahilly noted. They include hypothyroidism, Cushing's syndrome and tumors of the hypothalamus. Andrea Gardner, a registered nurse who lives in Weymouth, Mass., is in the midst of that process. She has tried one diet after another, losing weight and gaining it back. She is 5 feet 5 inches tall, and her body, she says, seems to want to settle at a weight of about 185 pounds, which is not acceptable to her. She continues to work with Dr. Apovian, ever hopeful that this time a diet and, she said, willpower, will do the trick. But about 15 to 20 percent of patients respond to measures short of surgery, with response defined as a change in their body weight that is maintained without constant hunger or cravings. While people seldom end up thin, their permanent weight loss is a proof of principle, showing that treatments can lower the weight the brain forces a person to maintain. The last resort, for those whose obesity is extreme, is bariatric surgery, which elicits a permanent and substantial weight loss in almost everyone. In the meantime, there is Dr. Sacks's challenge. His study involved 811 overweight and obese adults, randomly assigned to follow one of four diets and undergo behavioral counseling to help them stick to their diets. The diets ranged over the span of what has become popular. Two diets were low in fat but one low fat diet was high in protein and the other had average amounts of protein. Two others were high in fat and one of those high fat diets had an average amount of protein while the other was high in protein. The research was designed to answer the question of whether one diet was any better than another and it provided an answer: None of the diets elicited much weight loss on average, and no diet stood out from the others. But buried in those averages were the outliers: In every one of the four diet groups were a few superresponders who dropped huge amounts of weight and a few nonresponders who did not lose any. And as soon as his paper on the diets was published, with the conclusion that no diet stood out and none elicited much of a weight loss, he started hearing from people who challenged him. When he arrived for his first appointment with an obesity medicine specialist in April 2014, Scott Goldshine was certain his only hope was bariatric surgery. He had been skinny when he was younger his nickname was Bones but around age 30 he began putting on weight and simply could not halt the relentless accumulation of pounds. Soon he weighed 265 pounds. He is 5 feet 7 inches. So he scoffed when Dr. Aronne said, "I think I can help you." He was and still is the general manager at Zabar's, a famous New York deli, spending his days around food he loves. And his cravings were relentless. "I couldn't go behind the bread counter without taking a couple of slices of bread and a couple of rugelach," he said. But that was only the start. There was the "big fat piece of crumb cake" almost every day. There were the cookies he'd grab from the catering platters. There were the "gigantic sandwiches." Customers noticed his weight gain. "They would come up to me and rub my stomach and say, 'You're getting fat,'" Mr. Goldshine said. Dr. Aronne saw something interesting in Mr. Goldshine's records. He was taking pioglitazone for diabetes, a drug that makes some people gain weight. Dr. Aronne replaced it with Invokana, a diabetes drug that can contribute to weight loss and Mr. Goldshine lost a small amount. Then Dr. Aronne added a drug that combines bupropion, an antidepressant, and naltrexone, a drug used to combat cravings for drugs like opioids. He chose it, he said, because patients often say it helps turn off constant thoughts of eating. Most of Dr. Jennifer Kerns's family was fat. And so was she. Dr. Kerns, 42 now an obesity medicine specialist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington reached a peak weight of 300 pounds. She knows all too well how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. Diets would work, but then the weight would come back. So, in 2006, she tried what she hoped would be the solution to her weight problem; she became a contestant on "The Biggest Loser" reality television show. Her expectation was that with an extreme regimen and the competition, she would get control of her weight. And once she lost the weight, she thought she would keep it off. "The Biggest Loser" contest certainly helped her lose weight she dropped 108 pounds but she was unprepared for how hard it would be to keep those pounds off. At first she thought regular vigorous exercise would do it, but her weight began climbing. Eventually, she discovered a lifestyle program that lets her keep her weight between 155 and 180 pounds her weight fluctuates because each time she relaxes her guard the pounds return. The program is centered on what she calls an iron grip on her diet. Dr. Kerns keeps tempting foods such as desserts and especially anything containing chocolate out of her house. She brings her own breakfast, lunch and snacks to work. She uses an app on her phone to count calories. New drugs came along, allowing him to stop taking steroids, but the damage was done. His weight kept climbing until it reached 252 pounds. He is 5 feet 9 inches. He tried dieting, but to no avail. He blamed himself for lacking willpower. Finally, in 2007, he went to see Dr Kaplan. "It was miraculous," Mr. Elias said. Suddenly, the drive to eat excessively was no longer there. Pounds began to fall off. In six months his weight dropped to around 190 pounds and stayed there for seven years. Then, in early 2014, he wondered if he should stop taking the drug. It did not seem to be working any more. His weight had begun climbing. Dr. Kaplan told him the drug still was effective but usually became less so over time. So, to test that theory, Mr. Elias stopped taking it. His weight climbed even higher and settled around 240 pounds. He thinks he can still lose the weight he gained but, he said, "I lost the motivation." As he sees it, his personal problems have sapped his zest to control what he eats. "My success ended up for me being a double edged sword," Mr. Elias said. "Now that I know it is doable, I am procrastinating in terms of restarting the focus." But Dr. Kaplan said Mr. Elias really needs a different drug. When phentermine was exerting its maximum effect, Mr. Elias ate less no matter what else was going on in his life. In fact, Dr. Kaplan said, it is not really in his power to diet his way back to that low weight and stay there.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW By Alice Hoffman Arguably, every single historical novel should evoke those two much quoted lines of William Faulkner's: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." But coming away from Alice Hoffman's gravely beautiful new novel, "The World That We Knew," historical fiction that transports you to Germany and France in the 1940s and, thus, the Holocaust, those words ring particularly true. Her subjects are preteen and teenage refugees on the run from Berlin and Paris, but with them, she conjures up contemporary children fending for themselves after being separated from their parents by today's horrors. Her hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance and enduring love in dark times employs a character of ancient magical realism, the golem. Although it brings together several narratives, it's primarily the story of a 12 year old Jewish girl, Lea Kohn, who manages to flee Berlin on a train bound for France in the spring of 1941. Lea's father, a doctor, has been murdered, and Lea has narrowly escaped being raped. Her mother, Hanni, and grandmother, Bobeshi, know they will soon be taken by the Nazis, and their only hope is that Lea will survive. Everyone is desperate. In Berlin, the newspapers print photographs of Jewish businessmen, lawyers and professors with captions calling them animals. "That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This is what one must turn to when there was no other option."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
Robert Hemenway's biography is a subtle blend of fact and close reading that recreates the internal mood of a black writer between the Jazz Age and the McCarthy era. Scrupulously avoiding sentiment and simplification, Hemenway has told Miss Hurston's story with as much integrity and attention to language as Miss Hurston evinced as an anthropologist. His biography, so much more readily than the standard sociological rendering, traces with compassion the manner in which economic limits determine our choices even more than does violence or love. Miss Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not. Never does Hemenway oversimplify the relation between Miss Hurston's art and her life; never does he reduce the complexity of her postwar politics. Her importance rests with the legacy of fiction and lore she preserved so tellingly. As Miss Hurston herself noted, "Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off." Read the rest of the review.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
HONG KONG Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said Thursday that China would consider working with the International Monetary Fund to help shore up Europe's finances. But he left unclear whether China was willing to drop conditions that so far have made its proposed help unappealing to European nations. Mr. Wen's comments came at a Beijing news conference after he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on the first day of her three day visit to China. Mrs. Merkel is the first of several European leaders scheduled to visit China this month, as China's huge holdings of foreign exchange reserves have begun to give it financial influence that could potentially rival Washington's. Mr. Wen said that Chinese officials were studying whether the country should be "involving itself more" in helping Europe solve its debt troubles by investing in the region's two big rescue packages: the existing European Financial Stability Facility and the planned European Stability Mechanism. China's contributions could be channeled through the I.M.F., he said. Lending money to the I.M.F. to, in turn, relend to Europe would effectively transfer more of the risk of any European debt default to the I.M.F. China has previously made clear that it would need to buffer the risk of lending more money to Europe. In December, Russia embraced the lending approach now being weighed by China, but Moscow was willing to lend the I.M.F. only 20 billion. Europe is trying to expand its bailout funds by hundreds of billions of dollars. Britain has also said it would consider sending more money to the I.M.F. to help with Europe's troubles but only after the Europeans demonstrated they were finally taking bold steps to stem the contagion. China had 3.18 trillion in foreign exchange reserves at the end of December, dwarfing the reserves of every other country and potentially giving it the financial firepower to make a significant contribution. Having Chinese money on the table could help restore the international investing community's confidence in Europe. It would also signal that the Chinese believe Mrs. Merkel and other European leaders have taken the necessary steps to begin solving Europe's sovereign debt crisis. One big question, though, is what kind of political or trade concessions China might want in exchange for assistance. When Mr. Wen suggested last September that the European Union could dismantle its legal protections against low price Chinese exports, the idea was immediately condemned by European trade officials. An opinion article Thursday in the official China Daily newspaper raised Mr. Wen's trade condition again and suggested that the European Union should also make political concessions like lifting a longstanding ban on arms exports to China. "As a Chinese saying goes, one does not visit the temple for nothing," the column warned. Christine Lagarde, the I.M.F.'s managing director, has been playing a prominent role in trying to broker an agreement that will satisfy creditor nations like Germany and debtor nations like Greece at the same time. That includes a possible plan to convert the temporary, 440 billion euro ( 577 billion) European Financial Stability Facility into a permanent, 500 billion euro ( 655 billion) European Stability Mechanism. European officials have been approaching China intermittently for two years. The aim is to persuade the Chinese government to increase the approximately one quarter of its foreign exchange reserves that are thought to be held now in euros, mostly in government bonds issued by the financially strongest countries in Europe and to get Beijing to diversify that lending by buying the bonds of other, more troubled nations in the euro currency union. Economists and officials with a detailed knowledge of China's position have said repeatedly that China would be willing to help, but only if its loans could be made essentially risk free. One way to do this would be for the European nations jointly to agree to repay the loans even if some nations defaulted. But Germany has been wary of any arrangement that could make it the guarantor of other European nations' liabilities, and there has been little sign that German thinking on this has changed. Another way to address China's concerns about risk would be for the I.M.F. to assume the liability. Chinese officials indicated in November and early December that they were leery of helping Europe, noting publicly that the country's foreign exchange reserves had been financed with money borrowed from the Chinese people. Beijing suggested that it might be safer to invest it in infrastructure projects overseas instead of government bonds. But since then, the sense of crisis in Europe has diminished somewhat. That is largely because the European Central Bank in mid December began extending large three year loans to European commercial banks at extremely low interest rates, damping concerns of a Lehman Brothers style liquidity crisis breaking out. Europe's troubles are far from over, however. The euro region's economy is expected to languish in recession for most of this year. Greece has also been struggling to raise the money for bond payments due next month in order to avoid a default. So the financial negotiations to stabilize Europe remain urgent. A clear priority for Beijing has been to prevent a slump in the value of the euro against China's currency, the renminbi. Such a slump, by increasing the renminbi's relative value, would make Chinese goods less competitive in Europe, China's largest export market. "China supports Europe in safeguarding the stability of the euro," Mr. Wen said at the news conference, alongside Mrs. Merkel. Germany has joined the United States in the past in supporting a stronger renminbi. But Mrs. Merkel was circumspect on the subject Thursday, saying only that she supported the Chinese goal of working together to make the renminbi more convertible on global currency markets.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
Some Tips for Small Foundations Seeking to 'Punch Above Their Weight' For years, the John and Wauna Harman Foundation was doing what most small family philanthropies do. It was writing dozens of little checks, deciding at the kitchen table what to give. But then the next generation got involved, and it began to ask what at first glance seems a contradictory question: Could the foundation have more impact if it wrote fewer checks? Julie Berrey, who married into the family and is now the foundation's executive director, said the answer yes, it wanted to change how it made grants led to the next question: How best to do that? "We were trying to build the airplane as we flew it," Ms. Berrey said. With 10 million in assets, the Harman Foundation is minuscule in a world of philanthropy dominated by names like Bloomberg, Gates and Ford. There are about 86,000 foundations in the United States, and close to 98 percent have assets under 50 million, according to Henry Berman, chief executive of Exponent Philanthropy. Confronted with the headline grabbing largess of billionaire donors, Mr. Berman said, many small family foundations are trying to "punch above their weight" and make sure their money is having a real impact. It's not always easy, but the foundations that succeed share common traits and have similar stories about feeling more gratified in their giving. "We often talk about taking thoughtful risk," Mr. Berman said. "There are lots of people fighting homelessness and lots of people trying to fight opioid addictions. Some are better than others, and you want to put your money to work with them." In the case of the Harman Foundation, the family agreed to focus on end of life care but did not have any medical expertise on the subject and was limited to about 350,000 a year in grants. It decided several years ago to use its money to raise awareness through education. How the family decided on this was somewhat random: Many members had seen and been moved by a PBS documentary on the subject "Having something on PBS was fantastic because you get a bunch of eyeballs on it, but what do you do after that?" Ms. Berrey said. "We said we'd collaborate with the California Health Care Foundation and if it worked we'd take it national. The response was phenomenal." So the family made another grant, to the Hospice Foundation of America, with the hope of about 200 groups seeing the film. It has been shown about 1,500 times, with discussions afterward. Jeff Bradach, the managing partner and a co founder of the Bridgespan Group, a philanthropic consultant, points to three strategies that foundations without enormous assets should consider. Having a concentrated focus is one option. Pooling money with other foundations is another, although ceding control can be complicated. "There's a question for all philanthropists: When are you comfortable being part of a puzzle, and when do you want to be the puzzle?" Mr. Bradach said. "One can have a tremendous impact being part of a puzzle, but you can't always have a tremendous impact being the puzzle." Janice Elliott, executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust in New Haven, said partnerships were essential for the trust to achieve its mission of reducing homelessness in Connecticut. The foundation, which was created by the family that started Thom McAn Shoes, has 145 million in assets, which translates to about 7 million a year in grants. The foundation has moved away from funding homeless shelters and acting as a landlord of transitional housing to being more of a policy advocate in the state's capital, Hartford, and elsewhere, Ms. Elliott said. "Early on, people were advocating at the capital, but their work was not coordinated," she said. "The trust helped to fund the creation of a new organization, called the Partnership for Strong Communities, to bring together advocates and people who cared about homelessness. The goal was to help them understand what happened on the practice and policy level and to have one policy initiative." It was one group of many that Melville has created, backed or joined. This past week, Melville was part of a coalition of dozens of foundations that met in Atlanta for A Way Home America, a national group working to end homelessness among the young. Pooling resources has meant that Melville executives are sometimes the smallest group at the table. "Collaboration is never easy," Ms. Elliott said. "But if we don't do it, we're only at our 7 million and that's all we can do." She said her foundation had worked with the Gates, Ford, Annie E. Casey and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. Because of its size, if the big foundations asked Melville to join a partnership, "we'd be left out," Ms. Elliott said. Instead, she said, Melville made the first move. "So we go ahead and start it ourselves," she said, "and then ask the others to join." Colleen O'Keefe, executive director of the Sauer Family Foundation in St. Paul, has looked to use its 700,000 in annual grants to help groups turn a little money into much more. Several years ago, the foundation, whose patriarch made his fortune in the asphalt business, gave 20,000 to Minnesota's Department of Human Services to pull together some information and hire a grant writer, Ms. O'Keefe said. The department ended up being awarded a 3 million grant over four years. "When I got that call, I thought that was a good investment," she said. Mr. Berman said he advised all small foundations to look for strong nonprofit leaders to invest in. This requires donors to talk to the beneficiaries of those nonprofit groups. Even when small foundations decide to stick to what they've been doing say, giving a local scholarship or funding symphonies and museums Mr. Berman challenges them. "I say that's fine," he said, "but I'll push them to make sure they're doing that in the most thoughtful way, to have the impact they want." Still, the outcome is not guaranteed. While the Harman Foundation is thrilled by how many people have seen the film, data showed gaps in who went to the screenings, Ms. Berrey said. "Despite everyone's best efforts to bring in minorities, it wasn't culturally successful," she said. "Since then, we've honed our strategy and are doing work in the African American community." And a small foundation's learning from the data is a lesson right out of big philanthropy's playbook.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
LONDON Why are we listening to this conversation again? It's the same one that many of us have been having for more than two years and for what feels like forever. And it's not as if any of the observations being made here are at all new. Why go to the theater to hear our own unoriginal and distressing thoughts echoed back at us, and none too pleasantly at that? So ran my feelings during the first half hour of "Shipwreck, a History Play About 2017," Anne Washburn's truly thrilling, truly original fantasia of a drama, which had its world premiere on Tuesday night at the Almeida Theater here. (Another question: why does this New Yorker have to cross an ocean to see what promises to be this season's most exciting American play?) The subject of this long and winding work is the great American myth known as Donald J. Trump. Yeah, him again. And he is indeed the unvarying topic for a group of friends gathered for a relaxing upstate weekend away from New York City in what at least a couple of them had hoped would be a no Trump zone. No such luck. Ideas silly, solemn, trivial, terrified about the meaning of Mr. Trump are the appetizer, main course, dessert and even the equivalent of recreational drugs in the lonely farmhouse recently purchased by the New York couple Jools (Raquel Cassidy) and Richard (Risteard Cooper). Other and by no means unrelated subjects include racial privilege, tabloid gossip (Ivanka vs. Melania!) and the impotence of an art form called theater to instigate political action. Jools and Richard's guests include two other couples: the affluent lawyers Yusuf (Khalid Abdalla) and Andrew (Adam James); and the bohemians Teresa (Tara Fitzgerald) and Jim (Elliot Cowan). Then there's the internet addicted, Ivanka obsessed Allie (Justine Mitchell), a cheerleader for political activism that she never seems to follow through on. The recriminations and regrets they exchange about the 2016 presidential election and its consequences bear an embarrassing resemblance to what I've heard from many friends, relations and like minded strangers on that unavoidable topic. And these have usually been recycled, as if brand new, from opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker. Nonetheless, even in my early minutes of agnosticism, I found my attention hooked and held, wriggling despite myself. This partly has to do with the director Rupert Goold's tantalizing evocation of a tribe on the edge of a devouring cosmos, and also with the irresistible fluency of the seven performers playing friends gathered in the dead of a wintry night. Is it because they're fish in a purpose built satirical shooting barrel? If that were true or exclusively true there's no way we'd be hanging on every word of these querulous, increasingly scattershot theorizers, kibitzers and confessors. But instead Ms. Washburn has created a host of dramatis personae who are just a tad too high strung, burned out, paranoid and guilty to be what they initially seem. And here is where I must warn you, dear readers, that while I always try to honor the Code of the Spoilers, there are certain aspects of this production that are revealed only by degrees. But to appreciate the greatness of Ms. Washburn's accomplishment and, yes, I just used the "g" word you need to know about what's waiting for you here in the blackest midnight of these characters' souls. Granted, there are visible clues as soon as you step into the Almeida. At the dead center of the theater is an immense, battered round table, with many, many chairs pulled up to it. It may be that you, as an audience member, will be seated in one of them. And if you are among such an elect, there may come a time when you may no longer recognize yourself, or those seated beside you. (This might be the point to mention that the gobsmacking surprises of decor and attire are by the set designer, Miriam Buether, and Fly Davis, who did the costumes.) But there, I've said too much. What's on entirely open view from the beginning is a totem pole and a huge animal hide (presumably a bear's) nailed to the wall. Clearly, something primeval is on the prowl. And as the night wears on, and people get drunker and wearier and more wired, their imaginations will take them into a land that is sacred and profane, apocalyptic and eternal, where a gold skinned god with a New Yawk accent tempts a man who believes in the sacredness of the constitution, and the institutions it protects. The name of the man being tempted is ... Well, if you've paid attention from the beginning, you'll know it's that same public servant who appeared to us fleetingly, parenthetically in the very first scene. From the beginning you will also become acquainted with several other, seemingly irrelevant characters, the last previous tenants of this farmhouse: a father, a mother and their adopted Nigerian son. Pay close attention to that young man, whose name is Mark (the quietly charismatic Fisayo Akinade), for he holds the key to the play's ultimate secret. Hint: it is not a political secret, or not exactly. For as in her fabulous "Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play" which traced the evolution of an episode from "The Simpsons" into a heroic, Homeric narrative for a Dark Ages of the future Ms. Washburn is pondering our atavistic hunger to tell stories to make sense out of life. And she knows that when characters like those of "Shipwreck" are faced with what seems inexplicable to them, their so called enlightened minds may find themselves wandering into primal, mythic realms where there be dragons and demons and amoral Dionysiac gods.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
SAN FRANCISCO Women will not reach parity with men in writing published computer science research in this century if current trends hold, according to a study released on Friday. The enduring gender gap is most likely a reflection of the low number of women now in computer science, said researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research lab in Seattle that produced the study. It could also reflect, in part, a male bias in the community of editors who manage scientific journals and conferences. Big technology companies are facing increasing pressure to address workplace issues like sexual harassment and a lack of representation by women as well as minorities among technical employees. The increasing reliance on computer algorithms in areas as varied as hiring and artificial intelligence has also led to concerns that the tech industry's dominantly white and male work forces are building biases into the technology underlying those systems. The Allen Institute study analyzed more than 2.87 million computer science papers published between 1970 and 2018, using first names as a proxy for the gender of each author. The method is not perfect and it does not consider transgender authors but it gives a statistical indication of where the field is headed. In 2018, the number of male authors in the collection of computer science papers was about 475,000 compared with 175,000 women. The researchers tracked the change in the percentage of female authors each year and used that information to statistically predict future changes. There is a wide range of possibilities. The most realistic possibility is gender parity in 2137. But there is a chance parity will never be reached, the researchers said. Other science fields fared better. In biomedicine, for example, gender parity is forecast to arrive around 2048, according to the study. About 27 percent of researchers in computer science are women, versus 38 percent in biomedicine, according to the study. While the study focused on research published in academic journals, the trends may apply to the technology industry as well as academia. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft that are working on A.I. are publishing much of their most important research in the same journals as academics. Academia is also where the next generation of tech workers is taught. "This definitely affects the field as a whole," said Lucy Lu Wang, a researcher with the Allen Institute. "When there is a lack of leadership in computer science departments, it affects the number of women students who are trained and the number that enter the computer science industry." The study also indicated that men are growing less likely to collaborate with female researchers a particularly worrying trend in a field where women have long felt unwelcome and because studies have shown that diverse teams can produce better research. Compiled by Ms. Lu and several other researchers at the Allen Institute, the study is in line with similar research published by academics in Australia and Canada. While gender parity is relatively near in many of the life sciences, these studies showed, it remains at least a century away in physics and mathematics. "We were hoping for a positive result, because we all had the sense that the number of women authors was growing," said Oren Etzioni, the former University of Washington professor who oversees the Allen Institute. "But the results were, frankly, shocking." Other research has shown that women are less likely to enter computer science and stick with it if they don't have female role models, mentors and collaborators. "There is a problem with retention," said Jamie Lundine, a researcher at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. "Even when women are choosing computer science, they can end up in school and work environments that are inhospitable." Many artificial intelligence technologies, like face recognition services and conversational systems, are designed to learn from large amounts of data, such as thousands of photos of faces. The biases of researchers can easily be introduced into the technology, reinforcing the importance of diversity among the people working on it.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
This year's Kips Bay Decorator Show House, open May 2 through June 1 at 125 East 65th Street, is a brick Georgian designed by Charles Platt, a self taught classical architect, landscape architect and artist, at the turn of the 19th century. From the mid 1940s until a few years ago, the house was the headquarters of the China Institute in America, and is now on the market for 26.8 million (at 35 feet wide, it's known as a superwide in broker parlance). Inside, 18 designers have expressed themselves on five floors, including a garden level. Here are 16 of them. In the front hall, Powell Bonnell made a rakish nook with black walls by Farrow Ball, custom wool chairs and a lozenge shape table they designed for the space. The neon framed painting is by Thrush Holmes. As in most of the rooms in this house, a tangle of sprinkler pipes hangs from the ceiling. You can't see it in this photo, but the designers commissioned Zac Ridgely, a Canadian artist, to make a nestlike installation from lacquered steel to hide it. In Richard Mishaan's first floor sitting room, the print on the custom wallpaper, by Iksel Decorative Arts, was taken from a 15th century house in the Middle East. But much of the room was inspired by Turkish and Venetian palaces, and the layering that went on there. The pillow fabrics are from Luigi Bevilacqua. The rug is a 19th century Serapi from F.J. Hakimian. And the feral looking panther on the wall, a contemporary Audubon painting, is by Walton Ford. These ravishing flowers are by Ken Fulk's Flower Factory, part of the design team overseen by Ken Fulk, the home stager turned event planner turned Silicon Valley decorator, who works out of a 15,000 square foot former S and M leather factory in San Francisco, as well as a loft in TriBeCa. Here, Mr. Fulk, the mastermind of Sean Parker's lavish wedding, among other spectacles, imagined a dining room for a grande dame who had outlived three husbands and was enjoying her solitude until she was visited by several escapees from a local zoo, including a monkey, a zebra and a polar bear (see the hand painted de Gournay wallpaper for details). On the menu, steak tartare and Gershwin. Billy Cotton's female avatar had a sadder story: This shadowy bedroom, he said, was the final home of a woman who had seen all sorts of tragedy, some self inflicted. "She loved too much, and all the wrong men; there was definitely addiction and financial ruin," he said. In her last stage of life, he said, she is holed up in the top floor of an S.R.O. hotel, once a grand townhouse, surrounded by donated finery and decoration a spangly pillow on a chair with a tropical print, a leopard print carpet, the novels of Graham Greene the largess of her decorator friends. "This has long been a profession of gay men," he said, and this room celebrates the relationship "between the decorator and his female patron." "I had to find a muse," said Susan Ferrier of McAlpine, whose first moves in this bedroom involved a collection of archaeological prints, left. "A little romance." Who are we romancing? "A league of extraordinary male archaeologists," she said. And so, a bed sitter for a meeting of the Explorers Club, swagged with smoky green velvet curtains behind which, Ms. Ferrier said, "is some very confused architecture, a window and a few false doors; we just had to calm it down." The room was so soothing that on Sunday night, as the designers were putting the finishing touches on their rooms, many of them ended up here, christening the house with a few bottles of wine. The firm of Lichten Craig drew the show house short straw: a weird basement space with no windows, random soffits and bumps, and, like most of the rooms, a tangle of sprinkler pipes hanging from the ceiling. It was the ultimate design school challenge, as Joan Craig put it, "definitely a departure from the glorious salon we'd already designed in our heads." The salon was reimagined as a louche and swanky bar space. Dark walls and ceilings masked the rough spots. A mural by Anne Harris, a New York artist, was inspired by 17th century Dutch paintings. A pair of midcentury chairs by Charles Ramos is upholstered in champagne silk velvet. For decades, the house was the headquarters of the China Institute in America. In the backyard, there was a traditional Chinese garden, with pebble mosaic paving and a herd of scholar's rocks. Janice Parker, a landscape architect, planted a thicket of bamboo among them and fashioned a moon gate from green pussy willow branches, among other interventions that recall, she said, the influences of Tony Duquette, Bermuda, China and Hollywood. "The place was so derelict, we've been power washing it for weeks," she said. "But it was so beautifully done." The Kips Bay Decorator Show House is open May 2 through June 1 at 125 East 65th Street; 40, 212 755 5733. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
Americans would be wise to brace for war with Iran. Full scale conflict is not a certainty, but the probability is higher than at any point in decades. Despite President Trump's oft professed desire to avoid war with Iran and withdraw from military entanglements in the Middle East, his decision to order the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran's second most important official, as well as Iraqi leaders of an Iranian backed militia, now locks our two countries in a dangerous escalatory cycle that will likely lead to wider warfare. How did we get here? What are the consequences of these targeted killings? Can we avoid a worse case scenario? The escalatory cycle began in May 2018, when President Trump recklessly ignored the advice of his national security team and the opposition of our allies in unilaterally withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal despite Iran's full adherence to its terms and its efficacy in rolling back Iran's nuclear program. Since then, the Trump administration has had no coherent strategy to constrain Iran's program or to counter other aspects of its nefarious behavior. Mr. Trump's "maximum pressure campaign" to impose ever more debilitating economic sanctions did not force Iran to capitulate; instead, predictably, it induced Tehran to lash out with a series of increasingly bold military provocations against Sunni Arab and Western targets while restarting important aspects of its nuclear program. Iran's destabilizing activities in the region, notably in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, have only intensified. At the same time, it has conducted a brutal crackdown on its civilian population. None of the Trump administration's stated objectives have been met; if anything, the United States' security and strategic positions in the region have weakened. In deciding to eliminate General Suleimani, Mr. Trump and his team argue they were acting in self defense to thwart imminent attacks on Americans in Iraq and the region. This may be true, as General Suleimani was a ruthless murderer and terrorist with much American blood on his hands. Unfortunately, it's hard to place confidence in the representations of an administration that lies almost daily about matters large and small and, even in this critical instance, failed to brief, much less consult, bipartisan leaders in Congress. Second, even if the killing of General Suleimani is justified by self defense, it doesn't make it strategically wise. Given the demonstrably haphazard and shortsighted nature of the Trump administration's national security decision making process (including calling off strikes against Iran 10 minutes before impact, inviting the Taliban to Camp David and abandoning the Kurds), it's doubtful the administration spent much time gaming out the second and third order consequences of their action or preparing to protect American military and diplomatic personnel in the region. To assess the fallout of killing General Suleimani, we must understand that the Iranian regime cannot survive internal dissent or sustain its powerful position in the region if it backs down from this provocation. For Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a strong response is essential. For the United States, the question is: What form will it take and how quickly will it come? One thing is clear: Americans are not safer, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo argued on Fox News the morning after. Rather, American citizens are at greater risk of attack across a far wider battlefield than before. Start with Iraq. The State Department has warned American citizens not to travel there. Iranian backed militias have attacked United States and allied installations, and can continue to do so around the country. The government in Baghdad has declared the killing a violation of the terms of the American military presence in Iraq. We will face mounting pressure to withdraw our military and diplomatic personnel from the country. If we leave, the United States will suffer a major strategic defeat: Iran will justifiably claim victory, and the gains of the fight against ISIS will be lost as the terrorist group rebuilds. There is no hope now to revive, much less strengthen, the Iran nuclear deal, and we must expect Iran will accelerate its efforts to revive its nuclear program without constraint. The global economy is imperiled, as the Gulf States' energy infrastructure faces the risk of an Iranian attack, and commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the larger Gulf region is threatened. United States military, diplomatic and commercial operations as well as civilian targets throughout the Middle East are in range of both Iranian missiles and terrorist cells. From Afghanistan and Europe to Africa and Latin America, Iranian proxies once latent can stage asymmetric attacks against American and allied targets without warning. Even in the United States, we have reason to fear that terrorist sleeper cells could be activated. Worse, we face these threats now substantially alone, as the Trump administration apparently neglected to consult or even warn our key allies and partners about the impending risks to their interests that result from killing General Suleimani. In the face of Iranian reprisals, it will be difficult for the United States to de escalate tensions and avoid a larger conflict. Iran gets the next move. The United States has failed to deter Tehran thus far, even with the deployment of 14,000 additional American troops to the Gulf region since May. The announcement this week that the Pentagon was sending 3,500 more soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division seems unlikely to change things. When Iran does respond, its response will likely be multifaceted and occur at unpredictable times and in multiple places. President Trump will then face what may yet be the most consequential national security decision of his presidency. If he reacts with additional force, the risk is great that the confrontation will spiral into a wider military conflict. If he fails to react in kind, he will likely invite escalating Iranian aggression. It's hard to envision how this ends short of war.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
SAN FRANCISCO Social media has overflowed with sexual misconduct allegations during the last few weeks. The 450 word post that Melanie Kohler put on Facebook probably had the shortest life a few hours. It may also have been the first to get its author sued. As the torrent of accusations continues, it is unlikely to be the last. "The lid is off," said Mark G. Clark, a Michigan lawyer specializing in online defamation cases. "Power to the people. Anyone can have their grievance heard. But at the same time, anyone can be irresponsible and malicious." He noted that Facebook and Twitter see themselves as neutral platforms that cannot take a side in disputes. So the aggrieved call lawyers. "We get inquiries daily: 'I've been defamed online. What can you do to help?'" Mr. Clark said. Ms. Kohler, who runs a scuba diving company in Hawaii with her husband, had both narrow and far reaching goals when she wrote her Facebook post on Oct. 18. She wanted to unburden herself of something horrible that she said had happened to her, something that she had never told a single soul before that morning. Describing a drunken night about a decade ago, she wrote about Brett Ratner, a Hollywood producer and director. "Brett Ratner raped me," Ms. Kohler wrote on Facebook. "I'm saying his name, I'm saying it publicly." She was inspired by the national uproar over sexual harassment, but did not really think about joining that larger conversation. The post was intended for her family and friends, and they responded immediately. "I was feeling really loved and supported," Ms. Kohler said in an interview. But such is the nature of Facebook that others quickly read it as well, including an associate of Mr. Ratner's. His attorney, Martin Singer, called before lunch. "I was totally caught off guard," Ms. Kohler said. Accounts of what happened next differ. Mr. Singer said that he had spoken to Ms. Kohler "in a cordial, nonthreatening tone" and that she had agreed that the post was fabricated. Ms. Kohler denied saying that, but said she had been so intimidated by the lawyer that she removed the post. "I'm in a world I never thought I'd be in," Ms. Kohler, 39, said. "If he wins, I don't know what he thinks he's going to get from me." She has high powered help. Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, is best known for representing Edith Windsor in the landmark 2013 Supreme Court case that forced the government to recognize same sex marriages. Ms. Kohler wrote in the Facebook post that the incident happened in 2004 or 2005, but now says it happened a few years later. At the time, she was doing marketing for a now defunct start up energy drink in Los Angeles. She said she had met Mr. Ratner at a club and had gone with him to his friend's house. "He forced himself on me after I said no and no and no again," she wrote in the Facebook post, which was reviewed by The New York Times. "There were only two people there, Brett Ratner and Melanie," Ms. Kaplan said. "No other witnesses. One is telling the truth, and one is not. So the question is, why is Melanie going to come out with it now, other than with the goal she has to help other women, and to make sure Brett Ratner or anyone else is unable to do this again?" Mr. Ratner's suit may not only be the first; it might also be something of a test case for the whole concept of pushing back in court. To the extent the suit draws attention to accusations that might have gotten little publicity without corroboration, it may backfire on the director and set a precedent that others are reluctant to emulate. Mr. Singer explained in an interview last week, before the suit was filed, how he policed the internet on behalf of Hollywood stars. "I have hundreds of high profile clients," he said. He did not name any, but they include Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta, Charlie Sheen and, for a time, Bill Cosby. "People write bad things about them all the time on social media," Mr. Singer said. "You have to figure out when to deal with it and when not to deal with it." Two thirds or three quarters of the time, he said, he asks someone to take something down and they don't. "I reach out, they give me the finger" he said, and "say, 'I'm not doing anything.'" "They make it a bigger story," he continued. "We write websites a letter, and then they post that letter," as a sort of thumbing of the nose. Yashar Ali, a contributor to HuffPost who was pursuing a sexual misconduct story, got a warning from a lawyer. The lawyer said that his client was innocent of any allegations and that the letter "may not be printed or published without my prior written consent." Mr. Ali gleefully posted the letter on Twitter, although he blacked out the names first. When Mr. Singer was interviewed, little had been published about Mr. Ratner, who is probably best known for the "Rush Hour" buddy cop movies. But Twitter was bubbling with anonymous secondhand allegations of unsavory behavior. Mr. Singer dismissed such posts as beneath his attention. "Anonymous postings, that's a problem forever. People hide themselves all the time," he said. "There's a lot of nut cases out there." That's the fear among actors who said they had done nothing wrong but had gotten on the wrong side of a few of their fans. One actor, who was criticized on Twitter by an anonymous account for being overfriendly with female fans, responded with a tweet about bringing in lawyers. He now regrets drawing any attention. "'I didn't do it' is the exact same answer an innocent person would give as well as a guilty person," he wrote in an email. "Nobody has time for a judge or a jury, just an accuser and an executioner." He asked to remain anonymous because, he said, it would end his career if he publicly spoke up. Mr. Singer said he wasn't sure the downfall of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had made a difference in the volume of assertions by victims. "We were dealing with this back in the MySpace days" more than a decade ago, he said. But he added: "Do I think people may be more emboldened? Yes, they may." Other lawyers said that, at least for the moment, the landscape had changed significantly. "There is less fear in making these assertions in various arenas, whether it's through traditional media, social media or privately," said Miles Feldman of the Los Angeles law firm Raines Feldman, which handles dozens of online defamation cases a year. "As a result, we're seeing a serious uptick in inquiries and requests for action." But that is true of the victims as well, suggesting that all sorts of lawyers will be busy in the years to come. Debra Katz, a Washington based specialist in harassment and employment discrimination, acknowledged the appeal of taking complaints online. "It's a sweeter form of justice to out someone as a sexual harasser in a Facebook post than go through a lengthy, painful and expensive trial," she said. Nevertheless, "there's not a lawyer who specializes in sexual harassment cases whose phone is not ringing off the hook."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Francisco J. Ayala, one of the world's most eminent evolutionary biologists and a major benefactor of the University of California, Irvine, has resigned his position there after a monthslong investigation into allegations of sexual harassment. In a sharp rebuke, the university said it would remove his name from its School of Biological Sciences and its science library, as well as from graduate fellowships, endowed chairs and other programs, many of them started or nurtured with his funds. In a letter sent Thursday to university employees, Howard Gillman, the chancellor, said Dr. Ayala, leaves the university as of this Sunday without "emeritus" status and that he "will abstain from future campus activities." In effect, the university has cut off one of its most generous donors and a star professor, an action one faculty member said left her "floored." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In response to an email to Dr. Ayala's office, his longtime assistant, Denise Chilcote, said he was out of the country. She forwarded a statement in which he said he regretted that what he thought of as "the good manners of a European gentleman" compliments and kisses on the cheek had made colleagues uncomfortable. "It was never my intent to do so," wrote Dr. Ayala, who was born in Spain and is now 84 years old. "Nor do I wish to put them, my family, or this institution through the lengthy process of further investigation, hearings, appeals and lawsuits." But Micha Liberty, a lawyer representing three of the four women whose complaints sparked the investigation, which began in November, said there is "a marked difference between gentlemanly behavior and sexual harassment in the workplace. We would not be here if we were talking about manners and gallantry." At issue, she said, were "inappropriate comments and other kinds of behavior," including unwanted touching. "This was a widely known problem," Ms. Liberty added. "There were conversations people had, like stay away from him, don't be alone with him, don't be in an elevator with him." She said that despite earlier complaints, "the university had failed to curtail this behavior," and that she and her clients are exploring "every potential legal option and avenue." The university identified the four women as Kathleen Treseder, who holds the Ayala Chair in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Jessica Pratt, an assistant professor in that department; Benedicte Shipley, an assistant dean in the biological sciences school; and Michelle Herrera, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. Sexist hostility and crude behavior have long been acknowledged in science, but the problems have been met by decades of inaction, according to a report issued earlier this month by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The report found that women often respond to this harassment by declining leadership opportunities, leaving their institutions or even abandoning research altogether. Some of Dr. Ayala's colleagues expressed shock at the allegations made against him. Apart from his many scientific honors, including the National Medal of Science, which he received in 2001, "he is a good human being," said Virginia Trimble, an astrophysicist at the university. "I don't know how else to say it." She said she was "floored" by the chancellor's letter to the university community, and her first action on reading it was to send Dr. Ayala an email whose subject line read "I don't believe a word of it." A number of other faculty members spoke in Dr. Ayala's defense, saying they were troubled by the fact that the wider university community had not yet been able to read the report that led to his ouster. "I have no facts, no information," Donald Saari, a professor of mathematics, said in an email. "I do not even know what are the charges. But all of this is upsetting because it runs counter to everything I know about Dr. Ayala." People on both sides of the matter accused the university of acting in bad faith. Ms. Liberty said that administrators had not taken earlier action on complaints against Dr. Ayala, because he had donated millions of dollars to the university. Protecting Dr. Ayala "was more profitable to them and more important to their reputation than was the security and safety of their female graduate students and professors," she said. At the least, it is clear that many universities are not faring well in the MeToo movement, said Kristen Monroe, a professor of political science at the university who is finishing a book on gender equality in the workplace, and who Dr. Ayala called as a character witness during the recent investigation. "I am concerned that universities do not know how to deal with the due process issues that come up," she said. "Transparent, open procedures we don't have this."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Sleazy bars. Sex shops. Streetwalkers. That was long the dodgy mix in Zurich's fourth district, known locally as Kreis 4, a sprawling red light area next to the city's main railway station. Switzerland's largest city, however, is gambling on an ambitious development known as Europaallee to burnish the neighborhood's style and reputation. In addition to housing and office space, this new district, scheduled for completion in 2021, is already brimming with clothing boutiques, concept stores, cafes and restaurants, many devoted to native Swiss designers and delicacies. As Europaallee rises, Kreis 4 is increasingly on the right side of the tracks. Wine is the specialty at this buzzing bar and restaurant decorated in a funky mix of industrial, vintage, Baroque and bachelor pad style. By night, sit among the bar's Oriental rugs, wing chairs and exposed metal ducts while thoughtfully swirling Swiss syrah (not bad) or pinot noir (much better). Morning provides hangover brunch. The Swiss brunch, one of multiple brunch menus, will restore you with scrambled eggs, three cheeses, muesli with fresh fruit and a coffee jump start.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Imagine a country, a major Western economic power, where the coronavirus arrived late but the government, instead of denying and delaying, acted early. It was ready with tests and contact tracing to "flatten the curve" swiftly and limited its death rate to orders of magnitude lower than that of any other major Western industrial nation. Containing the virus allowed for a brief and targeted lockdown, which helped limit unemployment to only 6 percent. Amid a shower of international praise, the country's boringly predictable leader experienced a huge spike in popular approval, to 70 percent from 40 percent. This mirror image of America under President Trump is Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her surging popularity has politically marginalized the extreme right and extreme left. German unions have worked closely with bosses to keep factories open and working conditions generally safe (the country's meatpacking industry was a notable exception). Ms. Merkel's government has coordinated with all the German states to contain the pandemic and with fellow European Union members to establish a recovery fund for nations hardest hit by the virus. The strengths Germany is showing make it the large economy most likely to thrive in the post pandemic world. The coronavirus is accelerating an inward turn among national economies that began with the global financial crisis of 2008. Governments are assuming more and more control over all aspects of economic life, running up public debts to keep growth alive and imposing new barriers to foreign trade and immigration. Only the virtual side of the world economy is booming, as people work, play and shop on the internet. Which nations will flourish in this reshaped economic landscape? Despite their tech dominance, the United States and China are running up too much debt and their governments have been widely criticized for mishandling the pandemic. Vietnam looks promising, an emerging export powerhouse with a government that has stopped the virus dead in its tracks. Russia also has an intriguing economy, because President Vladimir Putin has been working for years to seal off his country from foreign financial pressure, a defensive move that will prove increasingly valuable in a rapidly de globalizing world. But the big winner is likely to be Germany. Its response to the pandemic has highlighted pre existing strengths: efficient government, low debt, a reputation for industrial excellence that protects its exports even as global trade falls, and a growing capacity to create domestic tech companies in a world dominated by the American and Chinese internet giants. While other countries worry that recent layoffs may become permanent, most German workers stayed on the payroll thanks to rapid expansion of the Kurzarbeit, a century old government system that pays companies to retain employees on shortened hours through temporary crises. Germany was able to expand the Kurzarbeit and much else in the way of social services thanks to its famous frugality. During the long years when Ms. Merkel was pressing austerity on fellow European Union members, they lampooned her as a "Swabian housewife," an archetype of the thrifty German who saves stale bread for dumplings. They aren't laughing now. Because Germany went into the pandemic with a government surplus, it could support its locked down economy with direct payments to families, tax cuts, business loans and other aid amounting to 55 percent of gross domestic product, or roughly four times more than the United States's rescue package as a share of G.D.P. It was also able and willing, for the first time, to provide emergency stimulus funds to neighboring countries that have long complained that German stinginess hurt the entire continent. That move was shrewd as well as generous: Those countries are now better able to afford German exports than they would have been. Yet Germany is not dropping its commitment to balanced budgets. Since much of this spending will be drawn from savings, Germany's public debt is expected to rise, but only to 82 percent of G.D.P. a much lighter debt burden than that of the United States and other highly developed countries, which are spending far less on economic rescue packages. Doubters say that Germany is now dangerously reliant on industrial exports, particularly to China, in a time of slowing global trade. Well aware of these vulnerabilities, Germany is pushing to modernize its leading exporters, the big car companies. Through regulation and public shaming, it is pressuring the carmakers to turn from the still highly profitable combustion engine to the electric cars of the future. Stuttgart, home to Porsche and Mercedes Benz, has banned older diesel motors within city limits. Germany is also making a big if somewhat belated push to become a more competitive tech power. It devotes as much to research and development as the United States does (around 3 percent of G.D.P.) and has a long term plan to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem akin to Silicon Valley, in which venture capitalists fuel promising start ups. Germany's technology industry is not without its setbacks, such as the recent and sudden collapse of the financial technology company Wirecard, which has raised questions about the vigilance of Germany's financial regulator. But many of the industry's first successes, copies of American online shopping and food delivery companies, are scaling up rapidly. The German economic rescue plan includes 56 billion for start ups that can digitize traditional industries, using artificial intelligence and other new technologies. Alongside France, Germany recently announced what its economics minister called a digital "moonshot," which aims to create a European internet cloud to rival those of America and China. Germany is an aging, conservative society, but critics who assume it is too slow to change have been proved wrong before. In the early 2000s, when Germany was dismissed as the proverbial "sick man of Europe," it adopted labor market reforms that restored its status as the continent's most stable economy. As the pandemic accelerates the pace of digitalization and de globalization and drives up the world's debts, Germany stands out for its relative lack of weakness to those challenges, and for a government prepared to handle them. Ruchir Sharma is the chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, the author, most recently, of "The Ten Rules of Successful Nations" and a contributing Opinion writer. This essay reflects his opinions alone. 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.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Here is a list of stories about Tom Hanks I've heard over the last few miserable months, as it appeared that politeness and civility and manners were facing an extinction event in this country. Once, in 2008, when he was shooting "Angels Demons" in Rome by the Pantheon, a bride and her father couldn't approach the chapel because of the hullabaloo, so Hanks stopped filming to escort them to the altar. Once, in 2015, he stopped by a table of Girl Scout cookies and bought some boxes, donated an additional 20, then offered selfies to passers by as an enticement to buy. That same year, he found a young woman's student ID in a park and used his charming Twitter feed, which is filled with found items, to get it back to her. Once, in 1997, before shooting "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg sent Hanks and other cast members out to do military training in the woods with a former Marine. After spending time in the rain, they all voted to quit the training, except for Hanks, who chose to obediently perform the job he was hired for and spurred the other men to stick with it as well. The day after Hanks's new movie, "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," in which he stars as Mister Rogers, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, he was sitting on a bench in a hallway outside a conference room, making jokes to a group of publicists, waiting for me ahead of the appointed time. That does not really ever happen, an actor waiting for me ahead of the appointed time, versus clearly dreading me two hours past it. "I think a long time ago, I learned how important it was to show up a little bit early," Hanks told me. "Be ready to go, you know? And to respect the whole process, and I think that you could respect the whole process even when the other people don't." So Tom Hanks is as nice as you think he is and exactly what you hope him to be, which is great unless you are someone trying to tell a good story about him, with elements like an arc and narrative tension. "Saintly Actor Playing Saintly Public Television Children's Host Mister Rogers Is Saintly" is not a great story. But what am I supposed to do? He sat facing me, cheerful and focused and willing. Maybe this could just be a story that makes you feel better. An hour later, he sat on a panel with the filmmakers and other actors, all of whom seemed giddy to put a Mister Rogers movie out into the world, relaying all the stories they'd heard about him. Tom Junod, who wrote the 1998 article in Esquire that the movie is based on, would talk about the way his interactions with Fred Rogers changed his life. You sit there and you listen and it's hard to believe that those stories are real. In our first interview there in Toronto, Hanks sat back in a chair with his left ankle pressed against the top of his right patella. He was wearing clear plastic framed glasses and a beard for shooting "News of the World," which is set in the aftermath of the Civil War. In our interviews, he says "oh dear" and "geez" and "for cryin' out loud." He is a history enthusiast. He is an information enthusiast. He is an enthusiasm enthusiast. At one point, I can't remember why, he recited the Preamble to the Constitution. In the panels after the premiere, some of the questions seemed to be based on the notion that Tom Hanks is so wonderful and Mister Rogersy that he just had to show up and read some lines since hey, they're both essentially the same: easygoing nice men with graying hair. "I think it's an essence thing," Heller told me of Hanks' portrayal, which, she insisted on that panel and to me, was a performance. "It's something in the energy and the essence and behind the eyes that you feel the same way looking at him as you feel looking at Mister Rogers, and that was what was so important to me. I never wanted him to be doing an imitation." A week after our first interview, a member of Hanks' team would call to plan our second interview, and she would casually bring up that he was actually acting as Mister Rogers, and that yes, he was nice, but he was very much more than that and please maybe I should not tell another story in which Tom Hanks is simply depicted as nice. And then she told me a story about a time she was with him en route to the airport and was feeling a little nauseous in the car. She was trying to make sure he didn't notice, but he did and he changed seats with her so that she could sit the way she needed to in order to feel better. (I then told her the story of the time I interviewed an actor in a hotel lobby, where I was so sick that a member of the hotel staff came over and asked if I needed painkillers or a doctor, and the actor not only hadn't noticed, but continued to not notice even after this happened.) What she was saying was that playing any role successfully takes talent and work; what she was also saying is that being nice is a choice. In "Can You Say ... Hero?," the magazine article that "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is based on, the writer Tom Junod follows Fred Rogers as he interacts with children and commits acts of kindness and empathy that are simple yet totally astounding. But the protagonist of "Beautiful Day" is not named Tom Junod; he's named Lloyd Vogel. In the movie, Lloyd (Matthew Rhys) is an Esquire writer with a bad reputation whose broken relationships with his father and his new son have led to anger and despair. His editor assigns him a short piece on Mister Rogers that changes his life. (The movie veers into science fiction when it features a female editor in chief and a 90s era Esquire staff filled with people of color.) In the last part of the article, Junod prays with Fred Rogers at Rogers' behest, and he writes that his "heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella" that just being around him was enough to make him see the world differently, and then, to be loved by him, was enough to make him a completely different kind of journalist and a completely different kind of person. He and his siblings had the run of the house while their father worked long hours. They didn't eat the frozen vegetables he brought home, and they mostly knew what time it was because of what was on television. "No one told me how to brush my teeth," he said. "I never flossed until I was out of high school, because dental hygiene was handled by a filmstrip that we saw in second grade that said, really, try to eat an apple, and that cleans your teeth. So, hey, I had an apple last week, so my teeth are kind of clean." He was never angry at his parents; he's still not. He saw how hard it was for them to function. They never explained things to him. Now he knows, "it's because they didn't have the verbiage. They didn't have the vocabulary. And they were so racked with self loathing and guilt and et cetera, all that stuff that went along, and there were four of us, for God's sake, and they just, you know, couldn't do it. Now, I've got four kids myself, and as soon as you start having your own kids, you go, like, oh, I get it." He remembers Oprah once asked him on her show about his dysfunctional family growing up, and he thought, "What's that? Oh, that's us." He'd never thought of himself that way. But somewhere underneath he must have known that something was off because he had started accumulating a lot of typewriters. Hundreds of them. It was something about how he never got to keep the things he loved through all of his family's moves. Now that he's 63 and he's thought a lot about it, he realizes that when he was young, he'd often have to move on a moment's notice and was not in charge of packing, so he often lost things that were important to him. "I had nothing, actually, that stayed with me all through my life. I don't have anything from when I was 5 years old. I don't have anything from when I was 3." Like I said, he was 19 when he got his first typewriter. A friend gave it to him "it was a hunk of junk a toy," he said. He went to get it serviced, and the repairman said to him, "This is a toy. Why are you using a toy?" The man sold him a Hermes 2000, which is now lost. So he invested in another. "I said, oh yeah, this is going to stay with me for a while, and I am soothed by it. I'm soothed by having it. I'm soothed by knowing that I can take it anywhere with me." Everyone I spoke with about him told a story about notes they received from one of his typewriters. Sally Field recently received a note from Hanks that conveyed how moved he was by her 2018 memoir, "In Pieces." She was kicking herself because she has yet to convey to him how much she enjoyed his book of short stories, "Uncommon Type," which she had read a year earlier. (She also told me about the weekly newsletter he wrote, on a laptop, on the set of "Forrest Gump," about happenings among the cast and crew. A weekly newsletter.) When he started collecting them he was married, but he was just as transient as he'd been as a child. He was getting gigs on "The Love Boat" and at the Great Lakes Theater outside Cleveland. He began to collect typewriters maybe because he finally had control over his belongings, even though he still moved a lot. When he thinks about that time, he said, "I start thinking about mistakes I made with my own kids and not explaining things or not being there for them. Or being so preoccupied with other things that are going on in our adult world. My son Colin was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter, but that means we have this gestalt understanding because they remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent. My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different." I told him then that I'd watched his Kennedy Center Honors ceremony probably more times than is appropriate. His older children have weathered divorce and uncertainty. His younger sons have weathered a life of wealth and privilege and I wanted to know how you could be a transient person trying to make a name for yourself in the world and also end up with children that sing along to your songs with great affection when you're done raising them. My children were getting older, the oldest about to turn 12, I told him, and I felt like lately, everything I said was misunderstood everything was seen as criticism or nagging and suddenly I could clearly see how a child who used to want to lie in bed with you and watch movies on his birthday could drift toward someone who could barely look at you. Someone who didn't understand that all your insistence was just about being a good person in the world, and the myriad ways to do that, and the even more myriad ways you could stumble upon the opposite. This coupled with an awareness that being good wasn't so simple anymore, and that I ran the risk of my children seeing behind the nagging and criticism, down to my basic daily deeds, and finding that I wasn't so good in the world that at best, I was neutral. It isn't easy being a parent, not for any of us, he said. "Somewhere along the line, I figured out, the only thing really, I think, eventually a parent can do is say I love you, there's nothing you can do wrong, you cannot hurt my feelings, I hope you will forgive me on occasion, and what do you need me to do? You offer up that to them. I will do anything I can possibly do in order to keep you safe. That's it. Offer that up and then just love them." He looked at me for my next question and when he saw my face he said, "O.K. Go ahead. I'm right here for you, Taffy. It's good to cry. It's good to talk." Which I could do on my own. I could make a convincing argument that performance art as a nice person from your public actions to your choice of roles as altruistic, heroic types is a way to hide from expanding your range. I could ask questions about that weird one sided feud with Henry Winkler, who was fired from directing "Turner Hooch" after 13 days and who recently told Andy Cohen that he "got along great great with that dog." I could call old assistants to try to find out what he was really like back then, since the most recent ones I spoke with were warmly talking about how wonderful he is. But if I had that kind of instinct I was worn down over the next few weeks as I spent hours on the phone with people who knew him well. The things they said about him were both remarkable and unremarkable: Heller called him "a human" who "treats everyone like people." Meg Ryan, who starred with him in "Sleepless in Seattle" and other movies said he has an "astronomical" curiosity. Peter Scolari, who co starred with him on the sitcom "Bosom Buddies" and then "Lucky Guy" on Broadway, called him "this very special man who is touched by God." Sally Field told me that Tom Hanks is so good that it actually makes her feel bad. She calls him "Once in a lifetime Tom." Hearing that made me think of something Tom Junod said to me in Toronto, how he went into the Mister Rogers story looking for who Fred was but came out knowing only what he did. He stared at all his reporting for a long time before he realized that the doing is actually the thing we should be paying attention to. "I don't know if Fred was the mask or the mask was Fred," he said. "But in the end does it even matter?" I'm not sure where we got the concept of an Everyman, but Tom Hanks isn't really it. I don't know people with hundreds of typewriters. He is the Platonic ideal of a man, a projection of what we wish we were, or, more worrisome, a theory of what we actually are, and, well: Have you read the other pages of this newspaper? I am too old for Mister Rogers. My children are too old for Mister Rogers, too. So instead I showed them "Splash," then "Forrest Gump," then "Big," then "A League of Their Own." I showed them "That Thing You Do!" and parts of "Cast Away." I told them about the man who heard I wasn't feeling well and adjusted his schedule for me. I told them that it doesn't matter why you do nice things; all that matters is that you do them. And one day, something changed. I had just finished "Toy Story 4," and suddenly all my algorithms were recommending openhearted movies with heroes and good values, and I realized that I had begun to feel a little better. My heart was never a spike; it was always an umbrella but sometimes it would invert against a storm. That day I recalibrated, and suddenly my umbrella was upright, once again able to shield me from the weather. It was enough. It was more than enough. This is an accurate reflection of the time Tom Hanks spent with a journalist.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
It was not clear before Super Tuesday, but it does seem clear now, that Sanders had allowed himself to be tugged a bit too far left on culture war issues to win the white working class in 2020 the way he did in 2016, while remaining too radical on economics to reassure and win suburbanites. And the moments when Sanders could have anticipated a possible Biden comeback the days after his victory in Nevada weren't spent reassuring either set of Democrats that they could support his campaign without supporting a far left revolution; they were spent in an either admirably principled or insanely truculent argument about how, no matter what the Cuban Communists did to political prisoners, you gotta hand it to their literacy efforts. So Sanders lost because of his own choices, in the pundit story because he expected a divided field and surging youth turnout and got a consolidated field and no youth surge, didn't have a plan to win over waverers or moderates, and lost as he intended to win, a factional candidate to the end. This story is entirely plausible, it fits with my analysis throughout the primary ... but still I suspect that in historical memory a different story will prevail, one that centers around neither candidate but instead makes the coronavirus the crucial player in the Democratic drama. In this story, the Biden consolidation will be a subplot in the drama of contagion, the story of an America slowly awakening to the scale and scope of the coronavirus threat, and his swift victory will be placed in the same category as universities canceling classes and sending students home, or airports and tourist attractions emptying all of them examples of a flight to safety, the surrender of grand plans and big ambitions in favor of a desire to just survive. Michigan voted for Biden overwhelmingly for the same reason that both Biden and Sanders canceled rallies just before the vote because this is now the coronavirus election, against whose stark existential stakes all normal political battles must give way. In this telling Sanders has less agency: There might have been more he could have done to reassure Democratic voters ideologically, but there was no way even with Biden's age and verbal stumbles for a consummate outsider like the Vermont senator to portray himself as the most plausible choice to deal with such a mortal threat. Biden's link to Barack Obama, in particular, gave him an insuperable advantage as the candidate of putting People Democrats Trust back in charge, and no clever socialist argument that Medicare for All would make it easier to take care of coronavirus patients was going to overcome the former vice president's safe choice status.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
LONDON Facing the challenges of a cooling market in Europe, Christie's, the international auction house, said Wednesday that it intends to close its secondary South Kensington salesroom here at the end of the year and scale back its operation in Amsterdam. The proposed changes, part of a companywide review, could bring the layoffs of 250 employees, or 12 percent of the total work force, based mainly in Britain and Europe. CSK, as the west London venue is known, has been holding Christie's auctions of lesser value art and collectibles since 1975. Last year, the salesroom mounted 56 live auctions, fewer than half the 125 it held four years previously. Christie's Amsterdam held six sales in 2016. "The art market is fast evolving," said Guillaume Cerutti, Christie's chief executive. "We have been looking at the globalization of the market in the last decade and need to be present and strong where the clients are." The layoffs also reflect the recent shift in economic power from Europe to Asia. Last year, 19 percent of Christie's new buyers came from Asia; a further 39 percent were based in America. The auction house, which is based here, opened flagship offices and exhibition spaces in Shanghai and Beijing in 2013 and 2016. It will open another gallery in Los Angeles in April.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 7). This weekend, the company wraps up its performances of "Giselle," the first full length ballet of the season. On Monday night, the spring gala unveils a piece d'occasion by the tap dancer and choreographer Michelle Dorrance. Set to recorded music by the Brooklyn acoustic ensemble Dawn of Midi, it features 15 dancers. The evening also includes excerpts from Alexei Ratmansky's "Harlequinade," with Isabella Boylston as Columbine and James Whiteside as Harlequin. The week continues with a new program pairing Wayne McGregor's "AfteRite" his premiere set to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and Mr. Ratmansky's "Firebird." 212 362 6000, abt.org AALOKAM DANCE COMPANY at Dixon Place (May 20, 4 p.m.). This company, led by the Bharatnatyam dancers Bharathi Penneswaran and Jyotsna Kalyansundar, presents "Pratyaksha," which can be translated from Sanskrit to mean "perspective." This performance utilizes classical Indian dance to explore movements in Western art, such as Cubism and Impressionism. Featuring a live music ensemble, the evening will showcase five dances that bring paintings by Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh to life. 212 219 0736, dixonplace.org BILL CHATS: WYNTON MARSALIS at New York Live Arts (May 21, 7 p.m.). The choreographer Bill T. Jones and the jazz composer Mr. Marsalis talk about their work, both as artists and as leaders of arts organizations. Mr. Jones is the artistic director of New York Live Arts, while Mr. Marsalis oversees Jazz at Lincoln Center. For this presentation, they discuss their challenges, experiences and careers as they ponder topics like tradition versus experimentation, what it's like to mature with an art form and the role of the artist today. 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
Keeping dry is just one part of staying warm wearing a lightweight, form fitting base layer under your regular clothes will help, too. ( 20 to 28 at Macy's) Wirecutter is a New York Times Company that reviews and recommends products. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Discover where you should go in 2020, and find 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.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
We've known from the beginning how the end will arrive. Eventually, the coronavirus will be unable to find enough susceptible hosts to survive, fading out wherever it briefly emerges. To achieve so called herd immunity the point at which the virus can no longer spread widely because there are not enough vulnerable humans scientists have suggested that perhaps 70 percent of a given population must be immune, through vaccination or because they survived the infection. Now some researchers are wrestling with a hopeful possibility. In interviews with The New York Times, more than a dozen scientists said that the threshold is likely to be much lower: just 50 percent, perhaps even less. If that's true, then it may be possible to turn back the coronavirus more quickly than once thought. The new estimates result from complicated statistical modeling of the pandemic, and the models have all taken divergent approaches, yielding inconsistent estimates. It is not certain that any community in the world has enough residents now immune to the virus to resist a second wave. But in parts of New York, London and Mumbai, for example, it is not inconceivable that there is already substantial immunity to the coronavirus, scientists said. "I'm quite prepared to believe that there are pockets in New York City and London which have substantial immunity," said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "What happens this winter will reflect that." "The question of what it means for the population as a whole, however, is much more fraught," he added. Herd immunity is calculated from the epidemic's so called reproductive number, R0, an indicator of how many people each infected person spreads the virus to. The initial calculations for the herd immunity threshold assumed that each community member had the same susceptibility to the virus and mixed randomly with everyone else in the community. "That doesn't happen in real life," said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health. "Herd immunity could vary from group to group, and subpopulation to subpopulation," and even by postal codes, he said. For example, a neighborhood of older people may have little contact with others but succumb to the virus quickly when they encounter it, whereas teenagers may bequeath the virus to dozens of contacts and yet stay healthy themselves. The virus moves slowly in suburban and rural areas, where people live far apart, but zips through cities and households thick with people. Once such real world variations in density and demographics are accounted for, the estimates for herd immunity fall. Some researchers even suggested the figure may be in the range of 10 to 20 percent, but they were in the minority. Assuming the virus ferrets out the most outgoing and most susceptible in the first wave, immunity following a wave of infection is distributed more efficiently than with a vaccination campaign that seeks to protect everyone, said Tom Britton, a mathematician at Stockholm University. His model puts the threshold for herd immunity at 43 percent that is, the virus cannot hang on in a community after that percentage of residents has been infected and recovered. Still, that means many residents of the community will have been sickened or have died, a high price to pay for herd immunity. And experts like Dr. Hanage cautioned that even a community that may have reached herd immunity cannot afford to be complacent. The coronavirus crashed this year's Purim celebrations in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of New York City, tearing through the parades and masquerades in Brooklyn on March 9 and 10. Schools and synagogues soon shut down to quell the spread, but it was too late. By April, thousands in the Brooklyn communities were infected, and hundreds had died. "It's like a black hole in my memory because of how traumatic it was," said Blimi Marcus, a nurse practitioner who lives in Borough Park, which was hit hard by the virus. But all that has changed now, Ms. Marcus added: "The general feeling is one of complacency, that somehow we've all had it and we're safe." More Asian countries slowly reopen their borders and welcome vaccinated travelers. Is it possible that some of these communities have herd immunity? In some clinics, up to 80 percent of people tested had antibodies to the virus. The highest prevalence was found among teenage boys. But people at clinics are more likely to be showing symptoms and therefore more likely to be infected, said Wan Yang, an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York. Random household surveys would probably find lower rates but still well above the 21 percent average reported for New York City, she said. Researchers in Mumbai conducted just such a random household survey, knocking on every fourth door or, if it was locked, the fifth and took blood for antibody testing. They found a startling disparity between the city's poorest neighborhoods and its more affluent enclaves. Between 51 and 58 percent of residents in poor areas had antibodies, versus 11 to 17 percent elsewhere in the city. The lowest income residents are packed tightly together, share toilets, and have little access to masks. "These factors contributed to a silent infection spread," said Dr. Jayanthi Shastri, a microbiologist at Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai who led the work. Most researchers are wary of concluding that the hardest hit neighborhoods of Brooklyn, or even those in blighted areas of Mumbai, have reached herd immunity or will be spared future outbreaks. But models like Dr. Britton's hint that it's not impossible. Other researchers have suggested, controversially, that herd immunity can be achieved at rates of immunity as low as 10 or 20 percent and that entire countries may already have achieved that goal. Criticism trailed Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, after a widely circulated interview in which she said that London and New York may already have reached herd immunity because of variability among people, combined with a theoretical immunity to common cold coronaviruses that may protect against the new one. "That could be the explanation for why you don't see a resurgence in places like New York," she said. Most experts reject that notion. Several studies have shown that certain immune cells produced following infection with seasonal coronaviruses may also recognize the new coronavirus. But "where is the evidence that it's protective?" asked Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida. These cities have not returned to pre pandemic levels of activity, other experts noted. "We are still nowhere near back to normal in our daily behavior," said Virginia Pitzer, a mathematical epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. "To think that we can just stop doing all that and go back to normal and not see a rise in cases I think is wrong, is incorrect." A second wave might also hit groups or neighborhoods that were spared by the first, and still wreak havoc, she said. Immunity is a patchwork quilt in New York, for instance: Antibodies were present in 68 percent of people visiting a clinic in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, for instance, but in just 13 percent of those tested at a clinic in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. But another group, led by the mathematician Gabriela Gomes of the University of Strathclyde in Britain, accounted for variations within a society in its model and found that Belgium, England, Portugal and Spain have herd immunity thresholds in the range of 10 to 20 percent. "At least in countries we applied it to, we could never get any signal that herd immunity thresholds are higher," Dr. Gomes said. "I think it's good to have this horizon that it may be just a few more months of pandemic." Other experts urged caution, saying these models are flawed, as all models are, and that they oversimplify conditions on the ground. Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, said it wasn't clear to him that Dr. Gomes's model offered only one possible solution. And he was suspicious of the big ranges among the four countries. "Getting those people vaccinated first can lead to the greatest benefit," said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. "That alone could lead to herd immunity." Vaccination schemes for other pathogens have successfully exploited this approach. For example, when children were given the pneumococcal vaccine in the early 2000s, rates of bacterial pneumonia in the elderly rapidly dropped because of a "herd effect." Vaccines that offer just 50 percent protection are considered to be moderately effective, but at that efficiency, even a low herd immunity target would require that a large proportion of the population be immunized, Dr. Bergstrom noted. If there are early reports of side effects that may scare away some people, he said, "we'd do well to start thinking about all that now." Back in Brooklyn, fewer than 1 percent of people tested at neighborhood clinics over the past eight weeks were infected with the virus. But there are still handfuls of cases, Ms. Marcus said, adding that her 10 year old niece was in quarantine because a counselor at her day camp had tested positive. "Sometimes that's all you need, right?" she said. "I'm still hoping we don't see what we had in March and April, but I'm not so sure that we've seen the end of it."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Credit...Alex Cretey Systermans for The New York Times At CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in Illinois, there is always a sense of discovery about the past, present and future. Towering clouds threatened rain as I biked near the French Swiss border. My sturdy velo de ville rolled over every type of surface, and complained only when I steered it into runnels of mud. The trail meandered past dormant vineyards, through forests and fields of cabbage, and under the watchful eye of a hawk. At one point I stopped to walk through an old cemetery and found Roman ruins. The whole morning was so moody and atmospheric that often I forgot the world's largest machine lay several hundred feet below. But then the trail curved in a way that evoked the Large Hadron Collider, the reason for my visit to the outskirts of Geneva. I had just begun a weeklong trip focused on science, and my first stop was the particle collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It houses the 17 mile long ring that is arguably the world's most famous science facility. In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle even smaller than a proton whose existence had long been theorized but never found. Actually proving that it existed gave physicists confidence that the standard model, the theory underpinning their discipline, was sound. It also helped CERN become a tourist attraction, although that process had already begun when it was featured in Dan Brown's best selling novel "Angels Demons," as well as the popular sitcom "The Big Bang Theory." Most of all, though, CERN drew the media spotlight in 2008 as the Large Hadron Collider was about to become operational. Several people not affiliated with CERN claimed there was a slight chance the collider could cause a world destroying "micro black hole." Although the claim was debunked, it helped CERN become a household name. The small welcome area was mobbed with visitors. Our guide was Klaus Batzner, a retired CERN particle physicist whose giddy excitement at the institution's accomplishments more than made up for my limited comprehension of what he was saying. It wasn't because of his accent. Particle physics is so complicated that it was like trying to understand a foreign language, particularly since high school physics was 25 years in the rearview mirror. Our tour began with a presentation about CERN, and perhaps in a nod to lingering public awareness of the debunked micro black hole claim, we were told that during the visit we would receive less radiation than from dental X rays. Thus reassured, we walked across the Geneva bound tramline to the control room of the Atlas detector, one of the two detectors that discovered the Higgs boson. Next to the live video feeds of the detector was a plaque that summarized its lofty mission: "to advance human knowledge, to continue an endless quest to learn where we come from and why the Universe is as we see it today." At CERN, I met Ana Godinho, the Portuguese director of the institution's education, communication and outreach programs, as well as her Belgian colleague Francois Briard. We discussed CERN becoming a worldwide household name, as well as the institution's plans to build more facilities for visitors. "The mystery around CERN works in our favor," Ms. Godinho said. "It's such a huge endeavor. Everything is big here, although we study tiny particles you can't even see." She marveled at the worldwide interest that engulfed CERN when the Higgs boson was discovered. Even non physicists were drawn to the adventure of trying to find it, she said. Maybe it's my background as a diplomat, but I was also drawn to the collaborative nature of this research. During a time when strident nationalism has regained strength, the facilities that I visited during my week of travel seemed blissfully immune. Physicists, governments and universities from around the world contributed to constructing and building the collider. It's a culture of working together that predates the Large Hadron Collider, as I was to learn later. Because CERN was in the midst of its annual winter shutdown, which usually occurs between the end of December and mid March, Mr. Briard was able to take me down to see the actual Atlas detector deep below ground. I stood on a small observation deck and gaped at this several stories tall machine, its interior pulled open for maintenance. The detector was a vast network of mirrors and wires that looked like the blown up photograph of an insect's eye I had seen that morning at the museum. I took dozens of pictures, but none of them truly captured its scope and grandeur. At the end of 2018, the Large Hadron Collider will begin a two and a half year shutdown for major upgrades. Tours to CERN will not be affected, and there even may be a bonus for those visiting in 2019 and 2020 because of potential opportunities to visit underground detectors, according to Mr. Briard. As I finished my visit and walked out of CERN, my ears perked up at the familiar sound of American accented English. I peeked into CERN's main hall and briefly listened to a presentation on DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. This international collaboration will beam neutrinos back and forth like tennis balls through 800 miles of bedrock. I vowed to learn more, but instead that evening I shared a raclette and wine dinner with a gregarious Swiss couple, and promptly forgot about it. Two stories down, we walked through the DZero detector. It was a warren of narrow corridors, accessible via a series of ladders that were probably bought from a nearby hardware store. Dozens of handwritten warning notes decorated levers and handles. The air was cold down there, and musty from a combination of old electronics and disuse. Still, as I climbed up a rickety ladder to enter the two story detector, I felt a giddy sense of adventure. I stood there, mouth agape, staring at tens of thousands of red and green wires, mirrors, rectangular detector panels and blinking control lights. A decade ago, this was all cutting edge stuff. After the tour finished, I took an elevator to the visitor's gallery and observation deck onthe top floor of Wilson Hall. In the fast disappearing light of a winter afternoon, I could see the circular berm that traces the route of the buried Tevatron. A nearby exhibit proclaims, "A beam of particles is a very useful tool" and goes on to list all the applications derived from this research. For example, we can "shrink a tumor, make a better radial tire, detect an art forgery, prospect for oil, and package a Thanksgiving turkey." Similarly, CERN publicizes the fact that one of their researchers invented the World Wide Web in 1989. But to me these applications aren't nearly as impressive as the basic research itself and the excitement of trying to answer the most fundamental question out there: Why is there something rather than nothing? It was dusk when I left Fermilab, and the last rays of sun turned the prairie red orange. As I drove toward the exit, an enormous coyote stared at me from a copse of broken stalks and cattails, its eyes immediately searching mine to determine whether it should run or stand its ground. Before visiting CERN and Fermilab, I probably would have just enjoyed that wildlife sighting and moved on to something else. This time, though, I went home and immersed myself in facts about coyotes. During my week in Geneva and suburban Illinois, I visited an exuberant foreign country called science. It reminded me of so many reasons to travel for sheer pleasure, to gain new perspectives and knowledge, or to feel more connected to someone you love. (I threw that last one in because my sister is a scientist.) However, I didn't expect to be so inspired. Particle colliders and 300 year old lab equipment revealed the better angels of our humanity. An object from Geneva's Museum of the History of Science lingered in my mind for weeks afterward. It was a slender tower made of copper, zinc, felt, glass and wood and it gleamed with the promise of a new era. This was the world's first battery, built by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in the year 1800. Like everything else in the museum, its invention was a necessary building block to arrive at the wonders contained in Fermilab, CERN and our everyday devices. The battery "domesticized electricity," said the note accompanying Volta's invention. I liked the image of this: a fierce lightning bolt tamed, patted on the head, and placed into a container for future use. Since then, I have imagined contemporaries of Volta, and the physicist himself, gazing at that first battery and reveling in the joy that comes from discovering new things, simply because it's in our innermost nature to do so. It's why I loved being a science tourist, visiting these places at the forefront of human knowledge. It was a rejuvenating tonic, one that left me excited about the future. I felt Volta's joy too. This is the first of a two part series on science tourism.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Dionne Searcey, The Times's West Africa bureau chief based in Dakar, Senegal, discussed the tech she's using. What does the technology landscape looks like in West Africa? How is internet connectivity? Do people use Facebook and Google? Internet connectivity has really soared in the last few years. I can get 3G in most major cities and 4G exists in a handful of places, or at least is advertised as existing. Even just a few years ago, reporters needed to carry a BGAN, a portable satellite modem the size of a hardcover novel. I rarely take one. When I arrive in a new city, I always buy a SIM card with a data plan. But pretty much any cafe or restaurant will hand you a Wi Fi password if you ask for it, and even small hotels in out of the way places seem to manage to rig some kind of Wi Fi system. One hotel in Maradi, Niger, about 400 miles outside the capital, had routers taped to the ceiling all over the hallways. And, yes, people are huge users of social media like Facebook and to some extent Instagram. Nigerians in particular are very active on Twitter. Besides business people, many others do not have a laptop. In urban areas, a lot of people have smartphones, especially young people, and if they don't have one, they desperately want one. What kind of role does tech play in many of these developing African countries? A lot of people in more rural areas cannot afford TVs, and even if they can, in many areas electricity is highly unreliable, so mobile phones are a major source of news. Phone credit is expensive and calls across providers cost extra. Some people have created an ingenious system called "flashing" they call you and hang up so you dial them back and pick up the tab. I thought I was getting prank calls before I caught on. WhatsApp groups are the new water cooler conversations where gossip and public announcements are shared via groups. West Africans move around a lot, so WhatsApp allows them a free way to stay in touch with family members living in other countries. Mobile money using a mobile phone to transfer payments is also mainstream in many places and is a lifesaver for people who don't have the option of bank transfers. What tech is most important for you to do your job there? Internet connectivity, by whatever means possible. Phone networks are often so bad that I make most of my calls using WhatsApp. People are really into it, so sources are more inclined to respond to messages on that platform than emails or regular phone calls. Business people and aid workers like Skype. My iPhone saves me every day because I'm constantly moving around so I need an all in one device to access social networks, email, text, take photos, and use WhatsApp and my recording app. I recently dropped my phone in a toilet in Nigeria but managed to grab it quickly enough to salvage the hours of recordings I'd done with war victims before the device finally died. The nearest Apple store is thousands of miles away, and it was a company phone, so replacing it was stressful and involved stops in three continents. How do you overcome connectivity issues? Both cell and internet networks can be elusive, but they work well enough that when they don't, I'm emotionally crushed or, more often, maddeningly annoyed. I usually can't stream video or download big files anywhere but in major cities, and even that is a challenge sometimes. The networks get really crowded, especially at night. WhatsApp and Skype calls are wonderful and clear but cut out a lot. Just dialing phone numbers sometimes takes five or six tries to get a clear line. It's frustrating explaining to colleagues in New York that if they can't reach me on the first try, just keep dialing and eventually they'll get through. What role does tech play in combating issues like police abuse or corruption? Technology has really been pivotal in exposing abuse by authorities in West Africa in much the same way that it has in America. Videos of police abuse posted to YouTube and other social media in a number of nations have caused public outrage and, in some cases, led to firings of officers. In some countries, protesters and voters have used social media to organize during elections or social uprisings. Governments have responded by cutting off internet access and shutting down mobile networks. In Cameroon earlier this year, people got around an internet blackout by typing up messages on phones and paying someone to haul them out of the blackout area and hit send. Beyond your job, what tech product do you love using in your daily life? I really like Instagram. I was late to the app but was encouraged to join by an editor who reminded me that most Americans don't know what West Africa looks like. I like to post photos from reporting trips that offer a view of some of the interesting people I meet and places I get to go and from family life in Dakar, to give a glimpse of regular life here, albeit from an American point of view. My kids a middle schooler and two elementary aged kids like to post regular kid stuff to their private accounts, like photos of their friends and the occasional oversize snail or colorful lizard. It's fun to see how these Brooklyn kids are viewing their life here through their own eyes. We also created an account for the Senegalese street cat we adopted that when awake is vicious, but likes to sleep in absurd poses on his back. We named it relaxation cat. It's a ridiculous Instagram account, but we think we're hilarious.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
The field of wheat seen early in "Mr. Jones" sways prettily under the sun. The director Agnieszka Holland lingers on the image, then shifts to a man busily typing in a house nearby. He's unkempt and unidentified but you will likely guess his name when he mentions "talking farm animals" and begins narrating his once upon a time nightmare: "Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen houses for the night." The man is George Orwell (Joseph Mawle), who then disappears. In short order, so do most of the animals that Holland scatters here and there a pretty cat, a few pigeons, squealing pigs, the rabbit adorning a man's walking stick. Taking their place is the lonely figure of Gareth Jones (James Norton). Based on a real Welsh journalist, he is the unassuming hero of this grim, quietly furious movie, which revisits Jones's 1933 trip to Ukraine, then in the grip of a catastrophic famine. There, the world is barren and the grain "Stalin's gold," as someone casually calls it is gone. A political thriller with an insistent, steady pulse (the script is by Andrea Chalupa), "Mr. Jones" dramatizes a harrowing chapter in the life of a man long overlooked by history. It opens in the early 1930s with Gareth reporting on his recent trip to Germany. He's in one of those ominous centers of power burnished wood, cigarette smoke, crepuscular lighting sharing his worries about Hitler and Goebbels to a gathering of officious harumphers, including his employer, David Lloyd George, the former prime minister. It's a nice bit of scene setting. Minutes later Jones is chatting on a phone in Russian, and not long after he's in Moscow, en route to an unspeakable tragedy. The early Moscow scenes move briskly, creating a churn of faces and names that don't yet mean much to Gareth and may not mean anything to the unschooled. It's a purposeful whirl that conveys the chaos that he experiences as he gets his bearings and meets other foreign journalists, whom the authorities have restricted to the city. The most important and mysterious of these is Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief and a Stalin apologist, played with cool, silky menace by Peter Sarsgaard. (Duranty is said to have coined the term Stalinism and reaped its rewards with a luxurious lifestyle; among his acquaintances was the occultist Aleister Crowley.)
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Physicists have discovered a particle that is doubly charming. Researchers reported on Thursday that in debris flying out from the collisions of protons at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, they had spotted a particle that has long been predicted but not detected until now. The new particle, awkwardly known as Xi cc (pronounced ka sigh see see plus plus), could provide new insight into how tiny, whimsically named particles known as quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, interact with each other. Protons and neutrons, which account for the bulk of ordinary matter, are made of two types of quarks: up and down. A proton consists of two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron contains one up quark and two down quarks. These triplets of quarks are known as baryons. There are also heavier quarks with even quirkier names strange, charm, top, bottom and baryons containing permutations of heavier quarks also exist. An experiment at CERN, within the behemoth Large Hadron Collider, counted more 300 Xi cc baryons, each consisting of two heavy charm quarks and one up quark. The discovery fits with the Standard Model, the prevailing understanding of how the smallest bits of the universe behave, and does not seem to point to new physics. "The existence of these particles has been predicted by the Standard Model," said Patrick Spradlin, a physicist at the University of Glasgow who led the research. "Their properties have also been predicted." Dr. Spradlin presented the findings on Thursday at a European Physical Society conference in Venice, and a paper describing them has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. Up and down quarks have almost the same mass, so in protons and neutrons, the three quarks swirl around each other in an almost uniform pattern. In the new particle, the up quark circulates around the two heavy charm quarks at the center. "You get something far more like an atom," Dr. Spradlin said. Quark interactions are complex and difficult to calculate, and the structure of the new particles will enable physicists to check the assumptions and approximations they use in their calculations. "It's a new regime in quark quark dynamics," said Jonathan L. Rosner, a retired theoretical physicist at the University of Chicago. The mass of the Xi cc is about 3.8 times that of a proton. The particle is not stable. Dr. Spradlin said the scientists had not yet figured out its lifetime precisely, but it falls apart after somewhere between 50 millionths of a billionth of a second and 1,000 millionths of a billionth of a second. For Dr. Rosner, the CERN results appear to match predictions that he and Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University made. What is less clear is how the new particle fits in with findings from 2002, when physicists working at Fermilab outside Chicago made the first claim of a doubly charmed baryon, one consisting of two charm quarks plus a down quark (instead of the up quark seen in the CERN experiment). The two baryons should be very close in mass, but the Fermilab one was markedly lighter than what the CERN researchers found for Xi cc , and it appeared to decay instantaneously, in less than 30 millionths of a billionth of a second. Theorists like Dr. Rosner had difficulty explaining the behavior of the Fermilab particle within the Standard Model. "I didn't have an honest alternative to allow me to believe that result," he said. Peter S. Cooper, a deputy spokesman for the Fermilab experiment, congratulated the CERN researchers on their discovery. "That paper smells sweet," he said. "From an experimental point of view, there's nothing wrong. They definitely have something." But he said the Fermilab findings still stood, too. He acknowledged that the two results do not readily make sense together. "I consider this a problem for my theoretical brethren to work out," Dr. Cooper said. He added that it was a textbook example of the scientific method: "Our theoretical colleagues make a prediction. We go out and make a measurement and see if it's right. If it isn't, they go back and think harder." It is possible one of the experiments is wrong. Researchers at other laboratories, including at CERN, have sought to detect the Fermilab baryon without success. Dr. Spradlin said he and his colleagues are searching the same data that revealed the Xi cc for the baryon with two charm quarks and one down quark. That could confirm the Fermilab findings or reveal a mass closer to theorists' expectations. "We should be able to see it with the data we have," Dr. Spradlin said. "I think we are very close to resolving this controversy."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Rick Hartman had just navigated a pair of husband and wife anglers to a pretty little stretch of sapphire colored water along the scruffy sand grass shoreline of the Lower Laguna Madre, off the South Texas Gulf Coast. Normally when a redfish guide pulls a skiff into an area he wants to explore, fish bolt from it, at least until the guide cuts the motor and begins poling. But when Mr. Hartman steered his craft into this spot, he told me when I called him to ask about a trip to the little known but beloved angling destination, reds were everywhere, "circling, tailing, in the middle of the water, just offshore." Right away, his charges began catching fish. Before long, things got just plain silly. When one of his clients would make a cast and hook a fish, a second would chase the fly in the first one's mouth, and his other client would cast to that fish and hook it. "We must have had eight or 10 doubles," Mr. Hartman said, referring to two fish hooked at once. "I think our grand total was 41." A championship fly fisherman who has plied these waters for more than 25 years, Mr. Hartman knows that saltwater fly fishing can just as easily be a brutal, ego bruising pursuit. He was dumbfounded by the virtually unheard of haul. "All I remember thinking was, How is this possible?" After five or six hours of more or less nonstop success, his clients asked to head back to shore early. "They were too tired to catch any more fish." Tucked between the Texas Gulf Coast to the west and South Padre Island, the popular spring break destination, to the east, all just a long cast north of the Mexican border, the Lower Laguna Madre is, as its name suggests, a mother of a fishery. Measuring 59 miles from north to south and seven miles from east to west, the shallow, hyper saline estuary is one of just a handful of bodies of water like it in the world, a wild and sprawling aquatic Elysium. And the adjacent Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge 97,000 acres of broad tidal flats and coastal prairie inhabited by a menagerie of flora and fauna from sea lavender and prickly pear cactus to egrets and ocelots is a natural wonder in its own right. If South Padre Island is MTV, the Lower Laguna Madre is the National Geographic Channel. The area's lack of literary glamour this is not Hemingway's Key West or Norman Maclean's Montana tends to keep the hordes away. That people typically associate the Louisiana coast with fishing more than the Texas side of the gulf only helps. And yet the Laguna Madre is every bit as deserving of a globe trotting angler's attention as more celebrated locales. Mullet, black drum and spotted sea trout all inhabit these waters some of them, in keeping with the state's "everything is bigger" reputation, of world class proportions. But the area's most sought after prize is Gulf Coast redfish. Reds thrive on hard, shallow, white sand flats, and the Lower Laguna Madre, with its average water depth of 3.3 feet, is an ideal environment for the species. Duly seduced by Mr. Hartman's fish stories, I traveled to the area last October for a weekend of chasing reds with him. Warm and friendly, Mr. Hartman, 50, has a habit of talking adoringly about his nurse practitioner wife and track star daughters in a winning Texas twang. He's also remarkably good at steering clients to fish. I am an experienced fly fisherman, both freshwater and saltwater, but had never fished for reds. Typically weighing from six to eight pounds (the largest on record, taken off Cape Hatteras, N.C., tipped the scales at 94 pounds), Sciaenops ocellatus offer solid heft and a worthy fight, and sit nicely on the spectrum of catchability. The color for which the species is named is a beautiful coppery brick shade, and their tails are marked by a signature black "eye spot," an adaptation biologists believe evolved to fool predators into attacking a relatively nonessential part of their anatomy. Redfish feed largely on small crabs and shrimp on the sandy bottom of the flats, sometimes rooting with their mouths to unearth their prey. In that position, their tails poke out of the water; casting to so called tailing fish is considered the most exciting way to land a red. It's a sight anglers dream about, magical and adrenaline inducing. Catching reds isn't about blind casting; it's about targeting specific fish. The idea is to pole a flats skiff, gondola style, or wade on foot in a promising area, spot a fish or a group of them, then cast, retrieve or "strip," your fly, and, if you get a strike, set the hook. On a typical day, an angler might have shots at 20 fish, and land five or six of them. The biggest redfish caught in Texas 15 pounds, 37 inches was taken in the Laguna Madre, and anglers routinely catch reds measuring 25 inches and weighing up to 10 pounds here. On the other hand, saltwater fly fishing is a game of myriad variables, many of them beyond an angler's control, so shutouts happen, too. Redfish make excellent eating (remember the blackened redfish craze of the '80s?), but ecologically minded flyfishers generally adhere to a catch and release ethic. While the species has at times been overfished, conservation efforts have rendered the Lower Laguna Madre population healthy. On our first morning, Mr. Hartman and I met at 5:30, drove to the boat ramp in Arroyo City (one gas station, lots of fishing boats) and launched his skiff under cover of darkness. As the sun rose, pelicans and egrets wheeled, and mullet and ladyfish leapt in front of the boat. The scene was so golden hour idyllic, it was like something out of a Reagan era "Morning in America" ad. Mr. Hartman led us to one of his favorite spots, cut the motor and began poling us across the flat. To catch a redfish, however, one first has to see a redfish, and that was the issue. A layer of clouds had settled over the area, and the water level was unusually high. The visibility was awful. Time and again, we would spot cruising redfish, but not until they were too close to the boat to make a proper cast. When I shot my fly toward them, they spooked, and took off. Just after lunch, the sun broke through the clouds, and Mr. Hartman saw something: "Redfish at 10 o'clock, 20 feet." I made a cast, stripped the fly in front of my target, and hooked him. It turns out it wasn't a red, but a spotted sea trout, a popular and handsome game fish in its own right. This particular specimen weighed a healthy eight pounds or so. We were on the books. Toward the end of Day 1, Mr. Hartman was poling a relatively shallow flat when a school of reds perhaps 30 strong appeared around us. A situation like this is often a day maker, but instead of moving predictably into the current, as reds tend to do, these fish were moving in every direction at once. Just as we would draw a bead on one, it would change course. Instead of catching four or five fish in quick succession, as we might have, we got skunked. As I reeled up, Mr. Hartman summed up our first day with a bit of Lone Star State philosophizing: "Daggum." Day 2 promised new opportunities, and just before noon, Mr. Hartman stopped poling. "Shh, tails," he said. He had found what we had come here for: a group of four tailing redfish. In fact, there were several sets of reds tailing around us. It's not uncommon in saltwater fly fishing to go for hours without seeing a fish, only to suddenly come upon a trove of them. That drama sometimes long stretches of inactivity punctuated by sudden, urgent action is a big part of the sport's appeal. I managed to place my first cast smack in the middle of the group Mr. Hartman had pointed out. Strip, strip, strip. Nothing. Mr. Hartman repositioned the boat so I could get a shot at a second pod. Again, cast, strip, nada. We moved once more, and I fired a shot at a third pod. "Leave it. Strip. He's coming for it," Mr. Hartman said. There was a tug at the end of my line, the scene began to unfold in slow motion, and something like pure joy started to fill my heart. Only my excitement got the better of me, and I set the hook too fast and pulled the fly out of the fish's mouth. He was gone.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Coming to a showroom near you for 2014: the first sport utility vehicle in its class equipped with a 9 speed automatic transmission. It's also the first to offer a parallel parking feature. And, in 4 wheel drive models, the rear axle disconnects automatically, for fuel efficiency. Oh, yes: its name is the Jeep Cherokee. Hold on wasn't that model name retired more than a decade ago? Wasn't it replaced by the Jeep Liberty for 2002? Yet now, in a time of heightened sensitivity over stereotypes, years after ethnic, racial and gender labeling has been largely erased from sports teams, products and services, Jeep is reviving an American Indian model name. Why? "In the automobile business, you constantly have to reinvent yourself, and sometimes it's best to go back to the future," said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand and corporate identity consultancy. Jeep, a division of the Chrysler Group, explained that its market research revealed a marked fondness for the name. The 2014 version, said Jim Morrison, director of Jeep marketing, "is a new, very capable vehicle that has the Cherokee name and Cherokee heritage. Our challenge was, as a brand, to link the past image to the present." The company says it respects changed attitudes toward stereotyping. "We want to be politically correct, and we don't want to offend anybody," Mr. Morrison said. Regarding the Cherokee name, he added: "We just haven't gotten any feedback that was disparaging." Well, here's some: "We are really opposed to stereotypes," said Amanda Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. "It would have been nice for them to have consulted us in the very least." But, she added, the Cherokee name is not copyrighted, and the tribe has been offered no royalties for the use of the name. "We have encouraged and applauded schools and universities for dropping offensive mascots," she said, but stopped short of condemning the revived Jeep Cherokee because, "institutionally, the tribe does not have a stance on this." So far, marketing materials for the 2014 Cherokee model have eschewed references to, or portrayals of, American Indians and their symbols. That's a far cry from the excesses of past years, when marketers went beyond embracing stereotyping to reveling in it. Indeed, Chrysler's restraint seems an indication of just how much things have changed. For decades, American Indian tribal names have helped to propel automobiles out of showrooms. Return with us now to the era when Pontiac's sales brochures carried illustrations comparing its 6 cylinder engines to six red painted, feathered cartoon Indian braves rowing a canoe. Or review Pontiac's marketing copy, which proclaimed that "among the names of able Indian warriors known to the white race in America, that of Pontiac, chief of the Ottawas and accepted leader of the Algonquin family of tribes, stands pre eminent." Of course, the visage of the chief was appropriated as a hood ornament. Many other tribes were adopted as marketing tools. Long gone is the Jeep Comanche pickup truck, sold in the late 1980s, along with the Jeep Comanche Eliminator. Certainly, American Indian names are still in the market: consider Indian motorcycles, about to resurface under yet another new owner, Polaris Industries. And Chrysler's full sized S.U.V., the Grand Cherokee, introduced in 1992 as a larger version of the Cherokee and still a market leader. In fact, its success was a reason for the revival of the Cherokee name for a midsize S.U.V. American Indians have hardly been alone in the cavalcade of automobile cultural stereotyping. In the 1950s, advertising for the Studebaker Scotsman didn't actually use the word cheapskate, but prospective buyers were informed that "when you and your family sit in your thrifty Scotsman...this great Studebaker body cradles you, your family and friends in safety." It should be noted, though, that the Scotsman featured cardboard door panels and its hubcaps and trim weren't chrome plated: they were painted silver. Moreover, in the Roaring Twenties there was no apparent feminist backlash against the Little Jordan Tomboy. The cover of its 1927 advertising brochure depicted a smart, stylish woman in jodphurs and knee length boots, clutching a riding crop. The purple marketing prose stated that "I am the Little Jordan Tomboy," with "a thousand miles of open road before my saucy nose." Also hard to fathom today is the Studebaker Dictator, "Champion of its Class," discontinued after 1937, when the rise of Hitler and Mussolini gave the model name an unpleasant odor. In the late 1920s, the quest for association with high profile leaders led the Windsor Autoworks in St. Louis to shamelessly place a color portrait of the Prince of Wales on its 1929 brochure for a new vehicle, The White Prince. Buckingham Palace was not amused, and expressed its displeasure. American Indians have long opposed derogatory sports team labels and likened fans' use of war paint to the derogation of African Americans with blackface. The N.C.A.A. has forbidden the use of nicknames, as well as mascots, logos, signs and band uniforms that are "deemed hostile or abusive in terms of race, ethnicity or national origin." In 1994, St. John's University in New York changed the name of its sports teams from the Redmen to the Red Storm. Also gone are the Miami Redskins and the Marquette University Warriors; the Southeastern Oklahoma State University Savages are now the Savage Storm. The Washington Redskins have resisted; so have the Atlanta Braves, opposing a name change or the discontinuation of its tomahawk chop. But the Braves' team mascots, Chief Noc A Homa and Princess Win A Lotta, have been remaindered. Even aside from the use of an American Indian tribal name in the Jeep Cherokee, the risks are high in the introduction of any vehicle. Automobile experts estimate the cost of renewing a nameplate like Jeep Cherokee at more than 50 million. Why, given these risks, return to a discontinued brand? "Coming up with new names is very expensive these days," said Mr. Adamson, the brand consultant, explaining that trademark research, focus groups and legal due diligence can be costly. The growing quest for viable names and the third rail of stereotypical labeling are possible explanations for the advent of such hard to spell monikers as the Volkswagen Tiguan, and the growing adoption of concocted names like Acura, Elantra, Infiniti and Lexus as well as the proliferation of alphanumeric designations. "New models have all of these three letter code designations that mean nothing to me," said Stephen W. Hayes, a Manhattan automotive historian and a collector of printed auto memorabilia, of nameplates like MKX, RX 350, F 150, 328i, QX56 and GL450 that populate the auto world. "Companies don't name their cars as colorfully anymore." Nevertheless, "just the name of a brand itself is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have," Mr. Adamson said. "Automobile brands define who you are, and Cherokee summons up rich associations." The Jeep Cherokee was a winner from the start, introduced in 1974 as a sport utility vehicle with the latest gadgets. Recent market research revealed that "there was so much passion behind the Cherokee," Mr. Morrison, the Jeep marketing director, said. "What was really interesting was that people's fondness for the Cherokee was greater than that for Liberty." Giving the new Jeep its old tribal name may have seemed just another acceptable risk. "Names can be polarizing, and can cause controversy, so you have to be careful," Mr. Adamson said, but opposition to brand names has become something of a national pastime. "Anytime you introduce a name, someone will be upset." A name that has zero associations is even more likely to sabotage a new model's introduction. "If you have a name that offends nobody, then you end up with a forgettable brand" that won't cling to the memory, Mr. Adamson said. "So," he said, "it just won't be sticky."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
"There's crop diversity here," said Greg McPhee from the open kitchen at his restaurant, The Anchorage, in Greenville, S.C. "It's not quite the rice and peas culture of the coast." I was asking the chef about the cuisine of South Carolina's Upcountry in the northwestern corner of the state, a region that is defined less by the traditions of the coast and more by its access to a variety of surrounding landscapes. On the menu there are vegetables and foraged herbs from the Appalachian Mountains, rice and grains from lowland farms, and seafood from the coast. Mr. McPhee, a Johnson and Wales graduate who has spent more than a decade working his way around the Southeast, told me that fungi is so plentiful here that he'll find large lion's mane mushroom s on city streets. That bounty has led to mostly vegetable driven dishes as well as just five services a week and a wine list that leans natural not exactly what one might expect in Greenville. But The Anchorage, which opened in 2017 and was nominated for a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant a year later, is part of a wave of highly anticipated restaurants to come to the former mill town. Over the past two years Greenville has seen the opening of a branch of Sean Brock's southern restaurant Husk, imports from Charleston (Caviar Bananas) and Asheville (Biscuit Head), and lauded chef Michael Kramer's modern osteria Jianna, among others.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Federal regulators are investigating whether Chrysler is acting quickly enough to recall almost one million pickup trucks over a steering system defect. It is the second time this year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has questioned the automaker over its promptness in repairing safety defects. The action involves two recalls issued late last year because a steering part had the potential to fail. The safety agency says it has received "hundreds of complaints from owners reporting frustrations with obtaining service appointments and having their vehicles remedied," according to a report posted on the agency's website. Some owners said they lost control of their trucks when the defective part failed. "Had been waiting over six months for parts from dealership to repair the left tie rod recall," one owner wrote to the agency on Oct. 6. "Upon leaving a gas station and accelerating to proceed down the highway, the left tie rod broke, causing the vehicle's left wheel to lock, resulting in total loss of control. The vehicle crossed over to the right shoulder, landing partially in a ditch. Luckily there was no traffic next to me and no one was injured." At the time the recall was issued, Chrysler said it would recall more vehicles than likely had the defect to make sure they found all the ones with the bad steering part. The vehicles covered by the recall were about 842,000 Ram 2500 and 3500 heavy duty pickups from the 2003 8 model years, of which Chrysler estimated that 116,000 would require repairs, a294,000 Ram 2500 and 3500 pickups and chassis cabs from the 2008 12 model years and 2008 Ram 1500 4x4 Mega Cabs, all of which require repairs. Also, about 43,500 Ram 4500 and 5500 4 wheel drive chassis cab trucks from the 2008 12 model years are being recalled, all of which require repairs.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
On a beautiful Thursday evening in Prospect Park, Ariel Elias, a sly young comic from Kentucky, walked down a hill, looked at a few dozen socially distanced audience members sitting near a family flying a kite, and said: "Thank you for being here and shame on you." This joke perfectly captured the odd mix of excitement, anxiety and guilt I felt sitting in a socially distanced crowd, some unmasked, cackling through illegally produced stand up comedy under a vast blue sky. "It's all backward," Elias concluded, adding that even handling bar fights has changed. "Now they say: 'Hey buddy, take it inside.'" Performing live comedy in New York right now is like selling beer during Prohibition: It's outlawed and everyone's doing it. A state official told me this week that comedy shows remain impermissible, and yet that hasn't stopped outdoor performances in gardens, parks and on rooftops, often produced with little to no advertising. No club has been more ambitious during the pandemic than Stand Up NY, an Upper West Side institution that has given stage time to more comics per week than any comedy club in the city (and probably the country). Stand Up NY has done it by commandeering space in parks (including the two I saw last week in Prospect Park) every night in three boroughs, mounting 40 shows last week. The club is already plotting expansion into new parks, including one in New Jersey, with a goal of 60 showcases a week, featuring a host and five comics, until it gets too cold in the fall. These shows drew around a 1,000 audience members last week, the club said, and have even inspired comics who left the city in March because of the shutdown to return. After spending five months with his family in Michigan, the comic Jeffrey Arcuri said that the park shows brought him back to the city he has performed every night for the past week and that he had found grateful audiences. "People who come to these shows really want to be there," he said by phone. "You can see it on their faces." Until the pandemic, Stand Up NY had not exactly distinguished itself in the city's competitive comedy scene, drawing tourist heavy crowds to its cramped room through the use of street teams handing out discounted tickets. "I've owned the club for 12 years and I wasn't so proud of it," Dani Zoldan, who runs the day to day operations on behalf of his partners, told me. But in the vanishing of live entertainment, he saw an opening. "This was an opportunity to not only bring back laughter to New York, but for us to make our reputation, so I wanted to go big," he said in a Skype interview. "I don't want to do one show a night in front of my club. That's boring to me. I wanted to make a splash." In late June, he set up a show in Central Park's Sheep Meadow without a permit and around 50 people showed up. Then he expanded quickly, to other parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The shows are advertised on the club's site, where you can buy tickets or just show up and see it for free. (Venmo donations are encouraged.) Most feature no amplification, but at Prospect Park, the comics did use microphones. The parks department shut down two shows in Battery City but nowhere else. Zoldan said police officers had even stopped and watched performances. When asked why he thought they don't shut him down, he said that the audiences were socially distanced responsibly, but speculated in an email: "I also think they dislike our mayor so much they don't want to listen to his direction." Zoldan, who is not selling alcohol at these sets, said that revenue was about 30 percent of pre pandemic level. The real payoff cannot be measured in dollars, but in the younger crowd he's reaching, the club's growing social media numbers, the appreciative emails from audiences and the relationships with comics. He points to stand ups like Mark Normand and Marina Franklin who weren't performing at the club before the shutdown but have become regulars in his park shows. And yet, his rehabilitation efforts ran into a roadblock when his partner James Altucher published an essay titled "New York City Is Dead Forever," sparking controversy online, including pushback by none other than Jerry Seinfeld, who criticized the argument and poked fun at Stand Up NY in an essay in The Times. Someone even wrote on the sidewalk in front of the club: "Owner thinks NY is dead. I think he killed his club." Zoldan said he disagreed with his partner, calling the essay "a cop out," but he also appeared to relish the fact that for once, Stand Up NY was the club everyone was talking about. And he's well aware that articles like this column could lead to more shows closed. "Even if they keep shutting us down, I'll figure out a way to keep it going," he said. "I never had that feeling where I felt comics and the audience like us. I feel like we're doing something right. Finally." Doing comedy al fresco is not ideal. Some of the jokes get drowned out by airplanes and the laughter doesn't build under the sky as it does with a low ceiling. But the crowds in the shows I saw were young and enthusiastic, and the performers appeared tickled to be in a community of comedy fans again. Laura Sogar, a tall comic in shorts, paused after a pedophile bit to recognize that it was "a pretty intense joke for a park." And when a small poodle interrupted her closer, racing up to lick her feet, Sogar stopped the show: "I'll take that heckle any day. Adorable." Many of the comics did material on the new etiquette of the pandemic. In a successful set, Josh Johnson looked on the bright side of masks: "If you've been ugly, this is your time to shine." Matthew Broussard took off his mask to reveal another and then another, creating a Russian nesting doll like situation. As the Thursday show came to a close, the crowd thickened and the sky darkened. The stand up Robert Dean explained that in a traditional club, a light in the back would indicate that a comic should wrap up. Nodding to the mustard sunset, he told the audience: "The light is the sunset." The funniest sets exploited the unusual nature of the setting, nodding to the women doing yoga a few feet away or shouting at the building in the distance where an ex girlfriend lived. These shows had slow spots, but at their best, they had an experimental, playful spirit. And after half a year of conservative quarantining, I definitely tensed up when a comic took a step forward, and I also wished the shows required the audience to wear masks. But the park is full of people with masks hanging around their chins. It also must be said that the danger of these shows, their possible recklessness, adds a tension that comedy feeds on. At times, the sound of laughter around me turned my thoughts to invisible droplets speeding through the air. Is socially distanced comedy worth the risk? Is it irresponsible to watch park performances? Your answers will vary (and to be honest, my mind changed more than once even midshow) but after the last half year in New York, the city has never felt more alive than when I saw this show.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
Garments by Rei Kawakubo from her Body Meets Dress Dress Meets Body Collection from 1997 in her show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit...Agaton Strom for The New York Times Garments by Rei Kawakubo from her Body Meets Dress Dress Meets Body Collection from 1997 in her show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1980s in the New York art world and other cultural spheres, black was the new black, and the designer most responsible for this state of affairs was Rei Kawakubo. Born in Japan in 1942, Ms. Kawakubo studied fine arts and aesthetics in college and segued into clothing design with no more formal training than having worked briefly as a freelance stylist. She later said she "wanted to do more," and she did. In 1969, Ms. Kawakubo introduced her first women's wear designs under the Comme des Garcons label which translates as Like Some Boys in Tokyo, with ready to wear collections presented there from 1975 to 1999. She made her Paris runway debut in 1981, and her clothes soon were available in New York, first in a small boutique at Henri Bendel, then in 1983 at her own big, minimalist concrete on concrete store, on Wooster Street near Prince, when the SoHo gallery scene was at its height. The black garb became a running art world joke, but for many of us the clothes were a revelation, exhilarating and empowering in their intelligence, unstructured ease and worldliness. Combining aspects of men's wear, traditional Japanese garments and the early modern designs of Madeleine Vionnet and Paul Poiret with punkish holes (and the occasional third sleeve), they were in sync with a time of expanding feminism, appropriation aesthetics and increasingly visible art by women. But the 1980s were only the beginning. Since then, few designers have pushed clothes to such social, sculptural and even architectural extremes, and now her spirit of defiance is on bold display in "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In Between," a magnificent, challenging show that is the latest offering from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's justifiably famed Costume Institute. Like me, you may miss the '80s era in this show, but there is too much else going on to feel deprived. The stripped down presentation of some 120 often strange, extravagant (and sometimes black) garments rifles through the history of clothes and art, combines fabrics in unimagined ways and confounds expectation. Consider it one of several surveys needed to fully account for Ms. Kawakubo's multifaceted achievement. Every year, the Costume Institute makes a different case for art in fashion and for fashion as art, usually in an immersive context and with impressive results. The Kawakubo show takes this argument into radical terrain. It doesn't focus on art within fashion as did the recent show featuring Charles James's sinuously sculptural ball gowns, which were functioning garments. Rather, its center is a staggering panoply of mostly quasi wearable three dimensional forms that are a kind of hybrid, an art of "the in between," driven by Ms. Kawakubo's insatiable quest for originality, or as she prefers to call it, "newness." The result is an inspirational show that places Ms. Kawakubo at the forefront of several modernisms in art and design, Europe and Asia upending notions of style and gender, conflating past and present and constantly pressing forward with fresh ideas about form, process and meaning. But actually the first sign of this turn came much earlier, as proved by the notorious Body Meets Dress Dress Meets Body Collection of 1997. Colloquially known as "lumps and bumps," it includes dresses, skirts and jackets in bright, stretch gingham checks that came with enormous goose down filled protuberances suggestive of tumors, shoulder pads, pregnant bellies or outside fanny packs and in all the wrong places. Though they affected movement, their balance of body, wearability and abstraction is extraordinary, especially if you watch a video of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company using them as costumes in a performance of the 1997 dance "Scenario." The installation corroborates the importance of this collection by prominently displaying 10 examples. This is the Costume Institute's first exhibition devoted to a living artist since its 1983 Yves Saint Laurent show. It was organized by Andrew Bolton, the institute's curator in charge, working with the designer and her team. This was not easy, as revealed in the candid interview between Mr. Bolton and his quarry in the outstanding catalog. Whether you call Ms. Kawakubo an artist or a designer, she is an impresario of the first rank with a clear vision, the will to back it up and a sharp business sense balanced by an instinct for collaboration. Comme de Garcons now encompasses many design and product lines, some by others whose names share the label. "I realize clothes have to be worn and sold to a certain number of people," she said in 1984. "That's the difference between being a painter or sculptor and a clothing designer." Ms. Kawakubo says she does not trust words, but the catalog nearly overflows with quotes from many past interviews, providing an invaluable window onto the doubts, self criticism, assurance and incessant thinking of the creative and by definition not always consistent mind. She claims not to pay much attention to sartorial conventions or history. Maybe, but somehow she has assimilated them so thoroughly they are second nature, and her work is dense with references that fuel its intense conceptual and emotional thrust. Take, for example, the satin top and skirt from the Blood and Roses Collection of 2015: Its ruffles and pleats don't adorn hems or sleeves or necklines; they wind into dense concentric circles resembling eccentric fire hoses. She returns repeatedly to 18th and 19th century European designs and fabrics, as evidenced by her wonderful use of tartans and repeated evocations of bustles, corsets and widow's weeds, sometimes carried to startling extremes. One small mountain of black satin, velvet and lace from the 2015 16 Ceremony of Separation Collection is festooned with black child size dresses and bonnets. It seems at first mawkish, then possibly part of an unfamiliar 19th century grieving ritual or, for that matter, a sculpture by Kiki Smith. Other styles or artists or artifacts Ms. Kawakubo's work can summon include Jean Arp, Mariano Fortuny, Russian Constructivism, the great performance artist Leigh Bowery, Dada and a fluted Greek column. The swings in sensibility can almost be disorienting. In the first half of the show, Ms. Kawakubo goes from minimalist variations on raw seamed canvas skirts in the Abstract Excellence Collection (2004), to the tutus and leather jackets of the 2005 Ballerina Motorbike Collection, to a flowered dress with a stuffed flowered teddy bear on its front, from the Not Making Clothing Collection of 2014. Blessedly, the show's Kawakubo style immersion maintains clarity. The garments nestle in and around an intriguing, blazingly white "village" of boxy or cylindrical structures free of added extras, excepting the Merce Cunningham video. (A handout brochure provides the only information about the clothes.) The main counterpoint is provided by the wigs, headgear and, upon occasion, odd sculptures atop the mannequins. All have been made by the inimitable Julien d'Ys from things like snarls of plastic thread, vintage musical scores or steel wool, as well as fake hair in bright red or yellow or peroxide blond. The setting has a playful instability appropriate to the clothing's unceasing change and piled on references. Some of the architectural forms evoke proscenium stages; others have small cylindrical rooms with funnel tops. There's a modernist glass house and a vaulted roof reminiscent of Louis Kahn's great Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Built at actual size by the Comme des Garcons team in Tokyo and adjusted to Mr. Bolton's needs, this setting demands focus: Look, look, look at these clothes, their fabrics, colors, shapes, shocks, quotations, details, exaggerations and parodies. This show is propelled by Ms. Kawakubo's protean drive, her willingness to experiment and to ignore norms that constant search for "newness." Among the increasingly spectacular fare in the final chambers and corridors are dresses made from tied hobo satchels in white muslin or black lace; combinations of blue fake astrakhan and peacock feathers; and several mergings of samurai armor and 18th century floral textiles, like the ensemble Rihanna wore to the Costume Institute's spring gala on Monday.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
GENEVA Swiss citizens voted Sunday to impose some of the world's most severe restrictions on executive compensation, ignoring a warning from the business lobby that such curbs would undermine the country's investor friendly image. The vote gives shareholders of companies listed in Switzerland a binding say on the overall pay packages for executives and directors. Pension funds holding shares in a company would be obligated to take part in votes on compensation packages. In addition, companies would no longer be allowed to give bonuses to executives joining or leaving the business, or to executives when their company was taken over. Violations could result in fines equal to up to six years of salary and a prison sentence of up to three years. The outcome of the referendum was a triumph for Thomas Minder, an entrepreneur and member of the Swiss Parliament (no relation to the reporter), who turned a personal fight against the management of Swissair, the flagship airline that collapsed in 2001, into a nationwide referendum against "rip off merchants." "I am very proud of the Swiss people who have sent a very strong signal to the establishment," Mr. Minder told Swiss television. Despite the fact that his referendum had been opposed by Switzerland's main political parties, Mr. Minder, who is an independent member of the Swiss Parliament, called on all lawmakers to cooperate in swiftly enacting the law. Nonbinding shareholder votes on executive pay have also been introduced in countries like the United States and Germany in response to Occupy Wall Street and other movements that have attacked the corporate excesses and abuses that fueled the world financial crisis. On Thursday, the European Parliament agreed to limit bonuses of bankers to two times their salaries. In the case of Switzerland, however, Mr. Minder called for a much broader and tougher clampdown, striking a chord among citizens after the world financial crisis exposed major management failures at the financial giant UBS and other Swiss institutions. Mr. Minder's case was unexpectedly bolstered last month when Novartis, the pharmaceutical company, agreed to a 78 million severance payout for its departing chairman, Daniel Vasella. That set off a political storm and intense criticism from some investors, forcing Novartis to scrap the payout and prompting Mr. Vasella to tell shareholders that it had been a mistake. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Cristina Gaggini, an official from EconomieSuisse, the Swiss business federation, said Sunday that the business lobby had made some "major errors" in its efforts to stop Mr. Minder's decade long crusade, adding that the Novartis payout plan had amounted to a turning point in the referendum campaign. After that, Ms. Gaggini said on Swiss national television, "It became impossible to return to a reasonable debate." Ahead of the vote, EconomieSuisse and Mr. Minder's other opponents warned of dire consequences if the referendum passed, notably in terms of keeping Switzerland attractive to foreign companies and investors. But Mr. Minder argued that Switzerland would benefit if it gave shareholders control over the companies in which they invested. Well over half the shares in many of the country's largest companies are already held outside the country. "Investors put their money where they have the most to say, and that will clearly then be Switzerland," Mr. Minder said ahead of the referendum. Robin Ferracone, chief executive of Farient Advisors, an American advisory firm that specializes in executive compensation issues, said that even though the referendum would add "more burden to corporate processes, I do not predict an exodus from Switzerland," because the tax and other benefits of being based in the country would still outweigh "the inconvenience" of having to adjust to stricter executive compensation rules. Mr. Minder started his campaign after his family owned business came close to bankruptcy because it had been a supplier of toothpaste and other body care products to Swissair, the airline that was grounded in October 2001. While Swissair had run out of money, it still managed to pay an advance earlier that year of 12 million Swiss francs (about 9.6 million at the time) to a chief executive, Mario Corti, who then left shortly after the airline's collapse. Mr. Minder then broadened his campaign, accusing several bankers and other prominent executives of receiving "rip off" pay packages. His campaign gained such momentum in recent months that relatively few such executives confronted him publicly, in this neutral and compromise seeking country.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
For decades, the artist Jenny Holzer has projected phrases often borrowed sayings on surfaces such as building facades, ocean waves and mountains. But her new project, called "You Be My Ally" after a line by Sappho, includes her first smartphone app designed to let users at home superimpose some loaded quotes on their own surroundings. Commissioned by the University of Chicago, the project uses 29 quotes from authors in its Core Curriculum or "great books" program, selected in collaboration with students. Most of the quotes come from female authors. Many touch on weighty, also timely, issues like justice, truth and violence including "The Cause of War Is Preparation for War" (W.E.B. Du Bois) and "You Sit Among the Ruins and Lament the Fall" (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). "You can have the content anytime and anywhere you want," Ms. Holzer said. "If you're awake in the wee hours of the morning fretting, you can have Plato or Toni Morrison in your room." The project also has strong ties to the University of Chicago campus. When the app, which is free, is released on Monday, trucks with LED lights will drive through the city displaying many of the sayings. Quotes within the app are initially set to scroll over campus buildings, with only the project title (from Sappho as translated by Anne Carson) also accessible for users to place anywhere within their phone's camera view. On Oct. 30, all quotes will become available for users to virtually project wherever they want using augmented reality technology.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
The discovery of a 9,000 year old female skeleton buried with what archaeologists call a "big game hunting kit" in the Andes highlands of Peru has challenged one of the most widely held tenets about ancient hunter gatherers that males hunted and females gathered. Randy Haas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, and a group of colleagues, concluded in a paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday that this young woman was a big game hunter, who participated with her people in the pursuit of the vicuna and deer that made up a significant portion of their diet. The find of a female hunter is unusual. But Dr. Haas and his colleagues make a larger claim about the division of labor at this time period in the Americas. They argue that additional research shows something close to equal participation in hunting for both sexes. In general, they conclude, "early females in the Americas were big game hunters." Other scientists found the claim that the remains were those of a female hunter convincing, but some said the data didn't support the broader claim. Robert L. Kelly, an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming who has written extensively on hunter gatherers, said that while one female skeleton may well have been a hunter, he was not persuaded by the analysis of other burials that "the prevalence of male female hunters was near parity." The researchers' sample of graves was small, he said, noting that none of the other burials were clearly female hunters. Bonnie L. Pitblado, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma whose specialty is the peopling of the Americas, said the findings were "well reasoned and an important idea for future testing." The authors could question gender roles further and what determined them, she said, calling the study "a really refreshing contribution" to studies of early settlers of the Americas. In most contemporary and recent societies of hunter gatherers, Dr. Haas said, it is well established that hunting is predominantly done by males. Archaeological evidence has tended to support the conclusion that past gender roles were similar. On occasion, female remains have been associated with materials that suggested that they were hunters but the examples have been treated as outliers. What if they weren't, Dr. Haas suggested, and the overall view of hunting should be adjusted? He and others found the grave of the young female with the hunting materials at a site called Wilamaya Patjxa in the Puno district of southern Peru at an altitude of almost 13,000 feet. A. Pilco Quispe, a local collaborator, first found artifacts in that area in 2013 near the community of Mulla Fasiri. In 2018, working with community members, Dr. Haas and others excavated an area of about 400 square feet, recovering about 20,000 artifacts. They found five burial sites with remains of six people, one of whom was the hunter. That find was particularly exciting. One of his collaborators kept finding projectile points, Dr. Haas said, and then a collection of points and other stone tools, with the remains of a skeleton. The group of excavators was thrilled, he said, and the substance of the conversation was, "Oh, he must have been a great chief. He was a great hunter." As it turned out, the buried person, who now goes by the scientific identifier WMP6, was female, about 17 19 years old. Her bones were lighter than might have been expected for a male, and a study of proteins in dental enamel, a relatively new technique for sex identification, showed she was definitely female. Dr. Haas then looked at 429 burials in the Americas from about 14,000 to 8,000 years ago and identified 27 individuals whose sex had been determined who were found with big game hunting implements. Eleven were female and 16 were male. He and his authors acknowledged that the data was not conclusive for these burials, and that the only individual that was undeniably female and a hunter was the person from Wilamaya Patjxa. But, Dr. Haas said, the preponderance of the evidence still led to the conclusion that females were about 30 to 50 percent of the big game hunters. That conclusion is what Dr. Kelly found unsubstantiated. Two of the burials were of infants, which Dr. Haas and his collaborators described as buried with artifacts that suggested they would be hunters. And he cautioned about reading too much into burials. "The interpretation of grave goods, as a cultural, symbolic act, is not simple or straightforward." He had criticisms of the interpretation of the other skeletons as well, and said, "If we accept WMP6 as the only female hunter in the sample, then it suggests the most likely prevalence of female hunters is 10 percent. I would not be surprised at that."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Julien J. Studley, who arrived in New York as a young refugee from Europe and began to build a commercial real estate empire by sending penny postcards to prospective tenants from the bedroom of his fourth floor walk up, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was brain cancer, Reid Richter, a friend of the family, said. Mr. Studley originally apprenticed as a diamond cutter and polisher before turning to real estate, inspired at 19 by a Life magazine article that compared the impact of William Zeckendorf, the New York City real estate mogul, with the imprint that Napoleon III left on Paris. Armed only with a high school equivalency diploma (he was later granted an honorary degree by the City University of New York and named chairman of the New School, where he had taken courses in the humanities), he founded Julien J. Studley Inc. in 1954. Through it he established a niche among brokers as an exclusive advocate for commercial tenants in their often fractious lease negotiations with landlords and developers.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Big Jay McNeely at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 1988. He had a pivotal role in establishing the saxophone before the electric guitar supplanted it as the featured instrument among soloists at the dawn of rock 'n' roll. Big Jay McNeely, whose wailing tenor saxophone and outrageous stage antics helped define the sound and sensibility of early rock 'n' roll, died on Sunday in Moreno Valley, Calif. He was 91. His death, at Riverside University Health System Medical Center, was confirmed by his granddaughter Brittney Calhoun, who said the cause was advanced prostate cancer. Hailed as the King of the Honkers, Mr. McNeely was at the forefront of a group of post bop saxophonists who, in the late 1940s, abandoned the heady reveries of jazz for the more gutbucket pleasures of rhythm and blues. In the process he played a pivotal role in establishing the saxophone before the electric guitar supplanted it as the featured instrument among soloists at the dawn of rock 'n' roll. Best known for his acrobatics and daring in performance, Mr. McNeely whipped up crowds by reeling off rapid sequences of screaming notes while lying on his back and kicking his legs in the air. Other times he would jump down off the stage and blow his horn while strutting his way through the audience. Among his many admirers were Clarence Clemons, the longtime saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and the young Jimi Hendrix, who after seeing him perform in the late 1950s incorporated some of Mr. McNeely's showstopping moves into his guitar slinging persona. Incidentally, given his typically raucous approach, Mr. McNeely's signature hit was a smoldering ballad, "There Is Something on Your Mind," a Top 10 R B hit in 1959 featuring vocals by the doo wop singer Little Sonny Warner. The song was widely recorded by others, most notably the New Orleans crooner Bobby Marchan, who had a No. 1 R B single and Top 40 pop hit with it in 1960. Mr. McNeely's breakthrough record, however, had come a decade earlier: "Deacon's Hop," a growling, percussive instrumental released on the Savoy label. Based on Lester Young's tenor saxophone solo on the Count Basie Orchestra's 1940 recording "Broadway," "Deacon's Hop" spent two weeks at the top of Billboard's Race Records chart, as it was then called, in 1949. At times his theatrics prompted white nightclub owners to summon the police to avert what they feared would be rioting by hysterical teenagers. Some of Mr. McNeely's fellow African Americans also disapproved of his over the top displays, shunning them as uncouth. "I played with Nat King Cole up in Oakland one time, and I came on powerhouse, the crowd was screaming," Mr. McNeely told LA Weekly in 2016. "I ran into him later that night at Bop City, an after hours spot, and he said, 'You'll never work with me again.' "I thought he was joking. He wasn't." The poet Amiri Baraka detected something more disruptive and culturally more pressing than mere unruliness in Mr. McNeely's performances. In his book "Blues People: Negro Music in White America" (1963), he wrote that he heard Mr. McNeely's blaring riffs as a "black scream," an expression of individuality and protest in the face of racial oppression. Cecil James McNeely was born on April 29, 1927, the youngest of three boys, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His father, Dillard, was a porter on a floating casino moored off the Santa Monica coast. His mother, Armonia, a Native American, made Indian blankets and quilts that his father sold to supplement the family's income. Both parents played the piano; Mr. McNeely's brothers, Dillard Jr. and Robert, also played musical instruments. Mr. McNeely started playing in bands in high school, including a trio with the alto saxophonist Sonny Criss and the pianist Hampton Hawes, both of whom would distinguish themselves as jazz musicians. In the clubs of Los Angeles, Mr. McNeely heard and met bebop luminaries like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who in the late 1940s appeared often on the West Coast. But his biggest early influence was the tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, particularly his honking 64 bar solo on the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton's popular 1942 recording of "Flying Home." "Every time we picked up our horns we were just elaborating on that, trying to make it bigger, wilder, give it more swing, more kick," Mr. McNeely explained, referring to Jacquet's solo, in the biography "Nervous Man Nervous: Big Jay McNeely and the Rise of the Honking Tenor Sax!" (1994), by Jim Dawson. "If you want to know where rhythm and blues began, that's it, brother." After Mr. McNeely's unhinged appearance in an amateur night at a club in Watts, Johnny Otis, the renowned bandleader and talent scout, persuaded him to join his ensemble. Mr. Otis was then under contract to Savoy Records, whose owner, Herman Lubinsky, christened Mr. McNeely "Big Jay," not because of his size he was 5 foot 10 and of average build but because of his outsize talent. Mr. Lubinsky also began recording Mr. McNeely under his own name, billing him as Big Jay and His Blue Jays and releasing, along with seven other singles, the career defining "Deacon's Hop." (The saxophone he played on "Deacon's Hop" is now enshrined at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.) Mr. McNeely recorded for a number of labels and toured widely, including performances at Birdland and the Apollo Theater in New York, before retiring from the music business in the early 1960s. He took a job as a postal carrier. At the time, rhythm and blues was being eclipsed by smoother sounds from Motown and elsewhere, and the '60s rock culture would soon prize the electric guitar over the saxophone.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
The Atlantic, the 163 year old publication that has grown under the stewardship of Laurene Powell Jobs, announced on Thursday that it had selected a new chief executive after a yearlong search: Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired, the tech focused magazine published by Conde Nast. It is unusual for a journalist to take charge of a media outlet's business operations, but Ms. Powell Jobs, whose Emerson Collective owns a majority stake in The Atlantic, and David G. Bradley, a minority owner, said in a joint email to the staff that Mr. Thompson was suited to the challenge. "Nick is singular; we've seen no one like him," Ms. Powell Jobs and Mr. Bradley wrote. " As to leading and supporting Atlantic strategy, Nick brings a surround sound coverage of relevant experience. Having been an editor, he is committed to the undergirding tenets of our work superior editorial standards and complete editorial independence." Mr. Thompson, 45, has spent 15 years working as a writer and editor for Conde Nast publications, including The New Yorker, where he was the top digital editor from 2012 to 2017. In an interview, he said he had spoken with Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor in chief, about the publication's future, including a talk that took place during a socially distanced meeting in Mr. Thompson's Brooklyn backyard one evening this week. "Nick is one of the great innovators in journalism," Mr. Goldberg said in a statement, "and I have enormous confidence that he will guide this company to a new era of subscription and reader growth, technological creativity and business success." The Atlantic's search for a chief executive started last fall, after its former president, Bob Cohn, left the publication. It involved two search firms and included hundreds of candidates. Mr. Thompson, who is scheduled to start as its chief executive in February, and Mr. Goldberg, who has been the top editor since 2016, will both report to the publication's board of directors. The incoming chief executive said he had read The Atlantic while growing up near Boston, where the magazine, founded by New England thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, had its headquarters before it moved to Washington in the years when Mr. Bradley was its sole owner. Mr. Thompson, who became the Wired editor in chief in 2017, noted that he had instituted digital pay walls at The New Yorker and Wired during his tenures at those publications. "If you were to ask me what am I most proud about from my time at The New Yorker," he said, "it's helping to set up a pay wall that made The New Yorker's future more solid." In a 2019 article for Wired, Mr. Thompson argued that persuading readers to pay for articles was good for journalism, as well as a publication's chances at making money. "When your business depends on subscriptions, your economic success depends on publishing stuff your readers love not just stuff they click," he wrote. "It's good to align one's economic and editorial imperatives!" 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. Before going into journalism, Mr. Thompson worked as a street musician in New York and released three albums of acoustic guitar instrumentals. He is also the author of the 2009 book "The Hawk and the Dove," a dual biography of the prominent Cold War figures George Kennan and Paul Nitze (who was Mr. Thompson's maternal grandfather). During his time as the digital editor of The New Yorker, Mr. Thompson moonlighted as a media entrepreneur, helping to found The Atavist, a digital magazine and publishing company that was later sold to the web publisher Automattic. As the top editor of Wired which got its start in 1993 as a publication known for its embrace of all things tech he led coverage that was often critical of the industry, including a 2018 cover piece, co written by Mr. Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, on the turmoil inside Facebook. The cover image was a photo illustration of a bruised and battered Mark Zuckerberg. "I wanted to be covering tech in the smartest, fairest way possible," Mr. Thompson said. "You don't want to be anti tech for the sake of anti tech." In his new role, Mr. Thompson said, "there will be a line drawn" between The Atlantic's business operations and the journalists led by Mr. Goldberg. He added that he did not anticipate that he would report or write for a while. The Atlantic started charging readers for online content last fall, about two years after Ms. Powell Jobs's philanthropic organization, Emerson Collective, took a majority stake in the publication. With that change in strategy, the venerable magazine joined a wave of legacy media companies that have sought to bring in more revenue from digital subscribers than from advertisers. In addition to naming a new business head on Thursday, The Atlantic announced changes to its board of directors. Ms. Powell Jobs will become the chair in January. Mr. Bradley, the current chairman, will become chairman emeritus while retaining his minority stake and stepping away from daily management responsibilities. The Atlantic will also add its first outside director, Michelle Ebanks, the former chief executive of Essence Communications. Since starting its pay wall, The Atlantic has sold 400,000 new subscriptions. It now has more than 700,000 print and digital subscribers, putting it on a pace to achieve its goal of having one million by the end of 2022. The Atlantic has met the coronavirus pandemic with noteworthy coverage, including articles by the staff writer Ed Yong that have won awards from the National Press Club Journalism Institute and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. But the publication's business has suffered in the pandemic's economic fallout. The Atlantic laid off 68 employees in the spring, citing "a bracing decline in advertising" and a hit to its live events business.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Sal Giangrande is the New York Couch Doctor. The ailments he cures afflict pieces of furniture, mainly sofas, that have outwitted delivery crews or movers and gotten stuck. After Sal Giangrande and his team finish performing surgery after their drills, screw guns, rubber mallets, pliers and reciprocating saws are tucked away and the customized safety blankets are stowed for future use he has a surefire methodology for determining whether the operation was a success: he sits on the patient. First Mr. Giangrande gets comfortable. Next he checks for lumps, rips or flaws. The patient is the best type he could wish for: mute, uncomplaining, inanimate. Mr. Giangrande is the New York Couch Doctor. He makes no pretense of holding a medical degree. "I think of myself as a blue collar guy who's authorized to perform surgery," he said, "when in this world it usually takes a white collar." In his line of work, what it usually takes are six strategically placed incisions. The ailments he cures via a dismemberment and reconstruction procedure involving copious amounts of elbow grease afflict pieces of furniture, mainly sofas, that through no fault of their own have outwitted delivery crews or movers and become stuck in the treacherous hallways, doorways and elevators of New York City's brownstones, co ops, condos, town houses and office buildings. This can change a sofa's status from a passive, and often expensive, piece of furniture to an official fire hazard and public nuisance, hence an emergency. Extractions can be painful. "A couch can't scream in pain," Mr. Giangrande said. "But the owners of the couches can get hysterical crying when they see me cutting the arms and backs off their furniture. A lot of people are very attached to their couches." That includes Alec Baldwin, who hired the Couch Doctor to dissect and reassemble a 6,000 couch from ABC Carpet and Home a few years back rather than settle for something smaller. For the record, he did not cry; an underling handled the negotiations. Mr. Giangrande, 42, advises customers who are on the squeamish side not to watch his handiwork, but instead to concentrate on his guarantee of 100 percent satisfaction: he will not take anything apart unless he knows he can put it back together. He perfected his system by practicing on throwaway sofas and, bravely, the beige Mitchell Gold Bob Williams sectional that he and his wife, Holly, bought for their TV room despite knowing it would get trapped in an archway. "It's all about having the nerve to lift up the upholstery and get down to the frame," said Mr. Giangrande, who worked for the delivery department of Castro Convertibles before starting his own business. "But if you know basic carpentry, it's very doable if you're careful." Only in two circumstances has he met sofas that defied deconstruction. First, there are the occasional inherited antiques, brimming with sentimental appeal, but held together with shaky seams and weary wood. These he turns down lest they expire midoperation. Causing heirs to suffer meltdowns is not his thing. "It's too much risk for too little reward," he said. And then there was the herpetological oddity, an Italian made 37,000 couch shaped like a swarm of snakes, high end snakes. It survived importation, but refused to fit into the owner's sixth floor apartment in SoHo. After an on site consultation, Mr. Giangrande admitted to being stumped. "I think the name of the thing was 'The Boa,' " he recalled, "and it literally was made from fabric wrapped around pieces of foam that looked like a bunch of snakes. It really is intricate work that we do, kind of an art, but this was one time where I had to go outside my realm and contact a rigging company. They hoisted it up through a window." On the rest of his jobs, once the furniture has been moved, in pieces, to its desired spot, he reassembles the parts with an imperceptible combination of wood screws and staples. Mr. Giangrande figures he rescues, in a normal week, 20 to 25 sofas. Athletes are good for business Walt Frazier required surgery for an extra deep model that he bought for his Midtown office, and the former Nets coach, Avery Johnson, hired Mr. Giangrande to move a supersize bed and sofa into his Jersey City town house last year. Mr. Giangrande has also operated on a china closet the singer Phil Collins had one that needed to be dismantled before it fit into his apartment and the occasional pool table. Sometimes, he says, it's a 495 sleeper sofa from Jennifer Convertibles snagged by a hairpin turn in a tight hallway in a Brooklyn brownstone. Other times, it's a 20,000 customized seating system pinioned by the crown molding in the elaborate freight elevator at 15 Central Park West. The hallways at Barbizon 63 are notorious, he notes, for ambushing furniture, and beneath the stoop entrances to classic garden apartments strangle even standard issue sofas the way Venus' flytraps inhale insects. He makes house calls to all five boroughs, plus Connecticut and New Jersey. Mr. Giangrande does not lack for desperate customers, and his decade old business is, by design, transacted on a spontaneous case by case basis. Like a surgeon, he is always on call, unless he is on vacation AWOL at Disney World with his wife and three kids in which case his assistants step in. Or the competition does. Besides a firm called Doctor Sofa, the metropolitan area has specialists like Z Brothers, and MJS Furniture Service, and Mr. Giangrande says there are enough stranded sofas to keep them all busy. "Everybody everywhere has a couch," he said, sitting on the shabby chic Peter Andrews number in his living room in New Hyde Park, on Long Island, just across the Queens border. "And sooner or later, everybody moves to a different apartment. Or buys a new couch. Everyone who calls me in a panic and says, 'Hello, Couch Doctor, I've got an emergency!' tends to think they're the only person this has ever happened to. I reassure them that it happens all the time." It happened to Megan Polk, the business manager for Walleye Software, in January. Her firm was changing offices, and she was charged with finding a new sofa for the new space. It had to be large, impressive, and preferably made of black leather, and when she found the perfect thing, on sale no less, at Restoration Hardware, she thought she'd scored a 4,500 coup. Everything was fine until she received a call from the delivery crew informing her that the couch would not fit on the freight elevator. "I called the distributor," she said, "and was told I'd be charged half of what the couch had cost if I returned it and bought a smaller couch at full price, which I really didn't want to do. I was getting pretty upset, and then the delivery guy suggested I call the Couch Doctor. I'd never heard of a service like that, so I was skeptical: all I could picture was someone taking a chain saw to this beautiful couch." She made the call and described the 118 inch long couch to Mr. Giangrande, who was in the midst of his third job of the day. "He knew exactly which model I was talking about," she recalled. "He said, 'Oh, no! You've got a Kensington, that's a complicated one.' " A Chesterfield style sofa, the all leather Kensington has a pocket coil suspension and kiln dried hardwood frame decorated by 1,500 hand hammered brass studs and 85 buttons. It presents, in Mr. Giangrande's estimation, one of the biggest headaches in the business. Misplace a stud or button and you're sunk. Misjudge your cuts and the leather will not rewrap properly. "He told me the job would cost 950 to 1,250 and they would be there in two hours, and I said, 'Sold!' " she recounted. "Later on I found out that not only did they take the couch apart, but they carried the pieces up nine flight of stairs to get it into the lounge of our new office. And when I went over there to take a look at it the next day, it looked totally normal, like it had just come from the distributor. The Couch Doctor saved my couch. I'd definitely use him again." Like Ethan Hawke, who had him wrangle a couch and, later, a table. "If you do a good job, people come back to you," Mr. Giangrande said. "After all, there's only one way in and one way out, and most people aren't going to leave their couch or bed behind if they move."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
As Lulu Wang's "The Farewell" (2019) did with a Chinese American character, "Coming Home Again" looks at the impending loss of a loved one through the prism of the immigrant experience. Chang rae's petulant exasperation at a church group that comes to the apartment for a prayer meeting, and his defensiveness when explaining to his father why he's quitting a full time job to pursue writing, are scenes we've perhaps seen some version of before. But Wang using a direct, unadorned shooting style along with his cast (Justin Chon, who's been around for some time, makes a strong impression as Chang rae) put them across with unusual integrity. Coming Home Again Not rated. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
WASHINGTON, D.C. For much of her childhood, RyAnn Watson has been hospitalized for excruciating flare ups of sickle cell disease. Now 16, she takes refuge from her pain in an art studio at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. On a recent Friday, she was sketching the sandstone towers of the Smithsonian castle with a burnt red coloring pen, under the watch of her therapist, Tracy Councill. "It's more about putting my emotions into the artwork than telling someone about it and making myself upset," RyAnn said. Without any "pressure to spill the beans," she said, "I end up talking to Tracy about everything, once I'm drawing." Although art therapy is offered by a number of established medical centers, many Americans don't know much about it. Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy where mental health professionals use art materials to help patients explore feelings that may not be easy to express in words. Almost overnight, the field has attracted new attention because of a connection with the Trump administration. On Inauguration Day, Karen Pence announced on the newly revamped White House website that she wants to shine a "spotlight on the mental health profession of art therapy." Mrs. Pence, a watercolorist herself, has been a board member of the art therapy program Tracy's Kids since 2011, and helped raise funds to hire two full time art therapists for patients at Riley Hospital for Children in her native Indiana. "I want to get more people aware of art therapy, not only for children who are going through an illness, but adults as well who have gone through trauma," Mrs. Pence said in a phone interview. Such attention from the wife of the vice president of the United States normally would be a boon to any profession, but these are not normal times. Some art therapists were thrilled that Mrs. Pence chose their underappreciated occupation as her signature cause. The American Art Therapy Association announced in its newsletter that it was "enthusiastic about Mrs. Pence's commitment" and eager to support her efforts. "It's a breath of fresh air that someone in such a position can highlight our profession and can bring attention that's needed and well deserved," said Irene David, a pioneer of the field and the longtime director of therapeutic arts at NYC Health and Hospitals/Bellevue in Manhattan. But many art therapists held a different view. On social media, some art therapists argued that the policies supported by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are largely at odds with the group's principles and hurt the very people the profession treats, such as immigrants and trauma survivors. Kate Broitman, an art therapist in Chicago, started a Facebook page called Art Therapists for Human Rights to organize with other art therapists who "felt that great harm might come to our field, our clients and our work, if the association were to enter into a dialogue with Karen Pence." The group had about 615 members as of Monday. "There is a real divisiveness right now between art therapists," said Savneet Talwar, an associate professor of art therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who also works with Bosnian refugees. One side is "for utilizing this opportunity to bring more visibility to art therapy," she said. On the other side, Dr. Talwar said, people say "aligning yourself with her means you're not being true to our ethical principles." Ms. Broitman said her clients in Chicago are worried they may lose their health insurance or be deported as a result of the policies supported by the vice president. "You can't shine a spotlight on art therapy without being accountable to the real danger our clients currently face," she said. Asked to comment on the schism, Kara Brooks, the communications director for Mrs. Pence, said in an email that Mrs. Pence "has been a champion for art therapy for many years." "She has a true appreciation for all those who work in this mental health profession," Ms. Brooks said. "Mrs. Pence's efforts to bring awareness to art therapy over the years show that she really wants to make a positive difference." Most states don't offer licenses to art therapists, meaning they can't bill insurance. Often, private donors fund art therapists in states without licensure so they can work in schools, mental health clinics or hospitals. The profession also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, an organization that may face additional cuts under the Trump administration. Funds from the N.E.A. and the Department of Defense pay for a prominent program called Creative Forces, which offers art therapy to soldiers and veterans coping with post traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries. "We know how valuable it is. Now it's a matter of carrying out the studies to further the evidence of value," said Dr. Sara Kass, a retired Navy captain who is trained as a family physician, who had planned to have the program at a dozen military sites by year's end. That said, Dr. Kass is concerned their funding will dry up. "I think we stand to lose a valuable tool," she said. Despite threats that members will quit, the leaders of the art therapy association still are open to working with Mrs. Pence. "If Mrs. Pence asks for and wants our support which she hasn't yet of course, we are going to offer support and resources," said Cynthia Woodruff, the executive director. One of the biggest boons from Mrs. Pence's support could be additional public and private funding for research. In a 2015 systematic review, the research arm of Britain's National Health Service gave art therapy mixed results. It found that 10 out of 15 randomized trials show benefit to patients, but that overall, the quality of the research was low. The studies reviewed included adults and children with depression, cancer, sickle cell disease and post traumatic stress disorder. "The big problem with all of this is there's no real, well designed studies to show art therapy helps with people's cognition or general well being," he said. After Sonali Agrawal, of Washington, D.C., was given a diagnosis of leukemia at age 4 in 2012, she regularly went to Ms. Councill's studio for years. As she had some of her chemotherapy infusions, she made a clay colander and a bird's nest. "Sonali made a lot of pieces of art in which she was caring for an animal and keeping an animal safe," said Ms. Councill, founder of Tracy's Kids, which has outposts in Washington, San Antonio, Baltimore and New York. "That had a lot to do with her wanting to feel safe." Sonali's father, Dr. Manish Agrawal, an oncologist himself, thought it was "crazy to think she looked forward to coming to the hospital to get chemo." But she did. After watching his daughter's treatment with art therapy, Dr. Agrawal said he felt the need to change how he practiced medicine. "We are so cut and dry," he said of doctors, but "there's a huge emotional toll. There's real suffering." Dr. Agrawal conceded that he is not a Trump supporter, but Mrs. Pence's support for art therapy, he said, "may be the silver lining."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? J. D. Biersdorfer, The Times's Tech Tips columnist and a Book Review production editor, discussed the tech she is using. As the Tech Tips columnist, you sift through lots of reader email about their technological woes. What devices and apps do you use to answer reader questions on tech? I personally test my answers to questions, so my desk often looks like an electronics store that's having a used equipment sale. I have laptops running the past two versions of the Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as an ancient ThinkPad with Ubuntu Linux. I have an Android Nexus 7 tablet, an iPhone 6, an iPad Air and some old iPods. I have a couple of TV streamers (an Apple TV and a loaner Roku Express), the Amazon Kindle and iBooks apps, two e readers and multiple cameras the Sony RX 100 is the one I usually have with me, since it's tiny and takes great photos in low light. I use a ton of software and services, but mostly Microsoft Word and Google Docs for writing. If I really need to focus on a long form thing like a book, I go to Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom app with the 1980s era "WarGames" terminal green on black color scheme. For image processing, I use Adobe Creative software (Photoshop, Illustrator, et cetera) for the images that illustrate Tech Tip articles. Among those products, which is your favorite and why? Smartphones have wiped out my need for most other gadgets, so I have a symbiotic relationship with my iPhone. I knew that I was on the hook when Steve Jobs announced the product back in January 2007, because there was so much obvious potential. I got my first iPhone the day the product was released (June 29, 2007). I also took a pretty deep dive into the App Store back in 2010 when I was writing a book on iPhone apps, and that really opened my eyes to the device's versatility. I still have more than 240 useful apps on my phone because of that book a document scanner, a banjo tuner, the complete works of Shakespeare, a guide to interstate exits, BBC News with live radio, and the list goes on. I especially like some of the photography utilities, namely Tap Tap Tap's Camera and Pro HDR X from eyeApps. I use those two a lot in a hobbyist Instagram feed where I take generically composed tourist photos in popular destinations, superimposed with plastic farm animals. What could be better about the iPhone? As I've had my current iPhone 6 for a couple of years now and the battery is starting to wear out. I wish it had a removable power cell. I'm curious about the potential bells and whistles that may be part of the new iPhone that may be announced this year, since it'll be the iPhone's 10th anniversary. Since I have such a considerable iOS app investment, I don't think I'd jump to an Android phone anytime soon, but never say "never." What tech product are you currently obsessed with using at home? I love my outdated 7 inch Google Nexus tablet, as it's the perfect screen size to read comfortably, scrolling through the morning news with my thumb while having that first cup of caffeine in my other hand (Bewley's Dublin Morning Tea, for the record). What do you and your family do with it? Although it falls in the Helpful but Creepy category because of all the personal information harvesting, I find that the Google app regularly fetches online stories that I actually want to read. The weather, travel and package reminders are very useful, and I find On Tap handy for instant data. What could be better about it? I wish Google would hurry up and release a new tablet in the 7 inch form factor so I can upgrade to the latest operating system. What was the last electronic gift you bought? I got my partner a print/digital subscription to The Economist and because we were planning some space saving renovations earlier this year HGTV's Home Design software. If there aren't any new must have gadgets at the time, I tend to give books or home furnishings as gifts instead.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly ornery, I think that Oracle is like the Kid Rock of tech: Among the least compelling of digital celebrities in Silicon Valley, this 43 year old business software giant always seems willing to show up at the White House and enthusiastically do whatever the Trump administration wants. Join transition committees and business round tables, even as other tech executives hold their noses or flee in horror over President Trump's immigration bans? Sure! Fund raising for the president's re election at the swanky California digs of its puckish founder Larry Ellison? But of course! Set up a database for tracking Covid 19 treatments, even if the controversial and potentially dangerous hydroxychloroquine information pushed by Mr. Trump is to be loaded up on it? Sign us up! You can chalk up Oracle's bear hug of the Trump administration and vice versa as business as usual, and maybe it is. Or you might be inclined to pillory Oracle for cravenly sucking up to an administration with more than its fair share of grifters. That's still a big if. The deal was supposed to be an outright acquisition by an American company, as ordered by Mr. Trump this summer, as he fretted about the security risks of a Chinese company owning a digital platform and all the personal data that comes with it that is wildly popular with young Americans. Microsoft showed interest in buying the company. That fell through, and last weekend Oracle emerged as TikTok's U.S. partner. The deal will have to be approved by Mr. Trump who had some nice words to say about Mr. Ellison on Tuesday. And it must be reviewed by national security experts and the powerful interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which weighs national security risks of making deals with foreign entities. From what we know so far, and things may change, ByteDance would apparently remain the actual owner of the magical recommendation algorithm used by TikTok, whose misfortune amid all of its popularity is to be owned by a company based in China at a political moment when being a Chinese company with 100 million American users is not ideal. Why You Should Care About TikTok Forcing a sale of the app is a show of power, but it doesn't really protect your privacy. "Good morning, y'all. It's Charli." "Playing a little catch with myself." There are roughly a hundred million Americans who regularly use TikTok, the social media app where you can create and share short videos on everything, from dancing to coding. But our government claims it's dangerous since it's owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. "President Trump said he will ban TikTok here in the United States, unless it is able to agree to a sale." And this just in, the Trump administration is blocking all U.S. downloads of Chinese owned apps TikTok and WeChat starting this Sunday. You may be thinking, who cares? But for us, TikTok is so much more than just another app. "Hey guys, a lot of you have been asking for a hair tutorial. So first, we're going to arrest Breonna Taylor's murderers." I use TikTok to talk about Black Lives Matter and so many other social issues to spread a message and get the word across. Through TikTok alone, I've registered thousands of people to vote in the past few months. "Things people don't understand about the dark web." I started posting videos for fun under quarantine, about technology and cybersecurity. I post videos of slapstick comedy. TikTok opened so many doors for me. It's my career. "Gimme some!" MUSIC "Ow! Ow! You're not supposed to really hit me!" "Oh!" TikTok is huge. It's the most downloaded app. Ordering TikTok to be sold to an American company actually worries me. A sale doesn't guarantee that it will be kept intact or that the algorithm will be included. Without the algorithm the entire use experience will be changed. Trump claims a sale is meant to protect our data. But it's really the government dictating how we are allowed to use the internet while they pretend like they're protecting us. If the government really cares about privacy, regulate TikTok don't destroy it. Let's back up a bit. "Back it up, back, back it up. Back it up " What is TikTok, anyways? "TikTok is very successful. It's an amazing thing, whatever it may be." O.K. Everybody thinks TikTok is just dancing preteens or kids doing weird stuff, like "TikTok famous! Ah!" "Mi Pan, (SCATTING)." But it's so much more than that. Those hit songs you listened to in the past year? These ones? "I'm going to ride horse down to the old town road" "I'm a savage." a lot of them blew up because of TikTok. TikTok creators are influential comedians and activists and dancers and singers and doctors. And even people who support the guy trying to ban it. "Because I am pro America, I support someone who is pro America." If TikTok is banned or altered, I lose my entire network. I lose my livelihood. I'm 17 and I can't vote. So if TikTok is taken away I don't have a platform to talk about things that matter to me and so many other young people in this country. In the midst of a global pandemic, amongst other serious domestic issues, why does the government care about an app? Maybe it's because some TikTokers claim to have pranked the president, and it hurt his feelings. "the fallout this morning from President Trump's more than half empty rally in Tulsa. Did TikTok teens help spoil the president's return to the campaign trail?" Or because he wants to appear tough on China. Or maybe it's because the government is worried the TikTok will allow China to collect American data. Do I have concerns about app security, and about TikTok specifically? I think about this all the time. Absolutely yes. I've even made videos on TikTok calling out and denouncing China's horrific human rights record. I understand why we should be concerned. Despite the fact that American intelligence found no evidence that TikTok was sharing data with the Chinese government, and TikTok claims it stores the data outside of China We should keep a close eye on the company. But we should also be keeping an eye on all tech companies, including American ones. Forcing a sale of this one app doesn't solve our overall privacy problems. Even if you don't care about us, you should care how this is an attack on self expression, an abuse of power, and an attempt to limit what we can access on the internet. Right now, it's TikTok. What's next? Forcing a sale of the app is a show of power, but it doesn't really protect your privacy. That's what set the battle over TikTok in motion, which culminated in an executive order by Mr. Trump that it must be sold or be banned in the United States this week, before China presumably downloaded all the data from our dance crazy teenagers (Mr. Trump, of course, has offered no proof that Beijing is sucking up user data). It's a much more complex story than that, of course, part of a worldwide battle with China for hegemony over the next tech age. And there are indeed legitimate concerns about giving a Chinese company access to data, as well as about potential back doors and also the more subtle power that Beijing could acquire to deliver propaganda to Americans through an entertainment app. There is no question that the issues of Chinese influence and surveillance should be top of mind for any democratic government and a cogent and broad ranging policy of how to deal with Beijing is necessary. But this is not that. What we have been left with after all the gnashing of teeth and tearing out of orange hair is a lot of sound and fury that appears to signify very little. The terms of an Oracle deal remain unclear. There is some talk of a kind of separately carved out TikTok for the United States, with an American board and majority American investors, but what is still troublingly opaque is who exactly would own and control the critical code for TikTok. Several tech leaders told me that this half baked solution came about because, as usual, our hair trigger president was over his skis in making his TikTok declarations this summer. It eventually began to sink in with the Trump administration that forcing an American acquisition and the unspooling of a complex global company are not as easy as yelling about the "China menace." For one, many of the investors in ByteDance are very powerful venture capitalists based in the United States, none of whom wanted to be forced to sell their stake through a discounted fire sale orchestrated by Mr. Trump (and several are major Republican supporters). The early front runner in the deal, Microsoft, found itself outmatched by Oracle, which was a big surprise for many analysts. Along with Amazon and Google, Microsoft is a top player in the cloud services business, with Oracle well behind in both business size and talent. While Oracle recently scored a win as the cloud service provider for the pandemically popular Zoom, Microsoft was seen as the obvious choice to take over TikTok by those who understand the technological challenge it will be to strip it of Chinese influence. Microsoft seemed to take Mr. Trump at his word that he wanted a sale, and numerous sources said its offer was a full takeover of TikTok's U.S. business. "Microsoft wanted complete control," said one insider. That had become problematic after China decided to potentially block the transfer of TikTok's recommendation algorithm outside the country. It was a boss move, roughly akin to letting someone sell a car, but without its engine. With that face off, there had to be a quick shift to a new plan that could satisfy everyone. So, under the new deal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that Oracle would be a "trusted technology partner." I am not sure what that means and neither does anyone else. (The Genius Bar at Apple is my trusted technology partner.) Is this just a matter of Oracle overseeing American operations and getting some stock? Or would it be a worldwide deployment for Oracle with huge control of the service? Or would Oracle be just a dressed up provider of cloud services, an overpaid babysitter of data, a rent a cop serving the mall of memes? Mr. Mnuchin also sounded some loud politically motivated bells and whistles like promises of American jobs and a new U.S. headquarters. But those things were already happening before this hubbub started. There had been talk of a possible spinoff and U.S. public offering by TikTok, which might have resulted in the same outcome had Mr. Trump not intervened (there might still be an I.P.O. in the future).
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
MILAN How so many designers end up on the same inspirational page at the same time is one of those oddities of fashion, like the perennial re emergence of drop crotch trousers and hobble skirts, that can seem utterly incomprehensible from the outside. Yet every season one dominant trend emerges, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the accessory world. Witness the rain forest of tropical shoes and bags that sprang up in Milan last week, where escapism proved the engine of the eye.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
The forthcoming film "Coin Heist" the tale of four prep school students who try to rob the United States Mint will present the first big test of a new studio with an unusual business model. Its approach? Buying other studios' abandoned scripts, and recycling the scraps into new franchises. "We're basically rummaging through studio trash for stuff that's been discarded," said Perrin Chiles, a founding partner and chief executive of Adaptive Studios. Hollywood movie studios are renowned for buying up scripts that never see the light of day. They are warehoused for years, even decades. Four years ago, Mr. Chiles founded Adaptive to go Dumpster diving through these neglected screenplays, searching for the best of the worst. Adaptive turns the scripts into novels which it then adapts into films or TV shows. "We want the stuff where you have lost all hope," Mr. Chiles said. "We will take the crumbs off anyone's table." One executive's crumbs can be another's all you can eat buffet, apparently. Adaptive has acquired 50 scripts, 25 from Miramax, and the rest from other studios, agencies and production companies. (Mr. Chiles declined to say what Adaptive pays for bundles of scripts.) Through its publishing arm, Adaptive Books, the company has released a dozen books and plans to publish 18 more over the next year and a half. The novels include "Pasta Wars," a romantic comedy for foodies; "The Silence of Six," a teenage technology thriller; and "DC Trip," Sara Benincasa's raunchy adult comedy about a high school trip to Washington that goes horribly wrong. Eight of the books are in development for film and television. Adaptive is producing some projects on its own, like "Bleeding Earth," a postapocalyptic young adult novel that is being turned into a low budget indie horror movie, and "Coin Heist," made for less than 5 million. Others have been picked up by outside producers, including an adaptation of "Air," a young adult novel by Ryan Gattis, which the musician turned producer John Legend has signed on to produce. Budgets range from indie (a few million dollars) to midrange ( 40 million or more). Adaptive executives say their scavenging approach gives them an advantage over bigger studios that are competing for fresh scripts from writers who are in demand, or wrestling over the same picked over comic book franchises. Adaptive controls the intellectual property across all media, and uses the books to promote the films, which it hopes in turn will help book sales. The novels also offer a relatively inexpensive way to market test high concept stories those with a simple, basic hook and build an audience for a new franchise, Adaptive's executives say. Booksellers have warmed to the concept. The company recently announced an unusual partnership with Barnes Noble, which is giving prominent placement to Adaptive's titles in its 640 stores and has exclusive rights to sell the books for the first six months. With the release of "Coin Heist," which is now in postproduction, Adaptive faces its first big trial with audiences and critics. The project has a long and tortured history going back to 1998, when a screenwriter, William Osborne, wrote a script titled "The Hole With the Mint," an action comedy about a British schoolteacher who recruits his former students to rob the Royal Mint. He sold the idea at the first pitch meeting and wrote three drafts, only to have it languish in the studio vault for 15 years. Then, in 2013, Adaptive bought it as part of a bulk deal for 25 moribund Miramax scripts. Adaptive executives took the script apart. They changed the setting and condensed it into a five page narrative blueprint. They auditioned five writers before hiring Elisa Ludwig to reimagine the story as a young adult novel set in a Philadelphia prep school. "It was never going to go anywhere, and I thought, how great that it gets another life," said Mr. Osborne, who said he had 12 unproduced screenplays scattered at various studios. "So many of one's scripts just sit at the bottom shelf. It's a colossal waste." A similar insight gave Mr. Chiles the idea for Adaptive four years ago, when he was working as a documentary film producer. Many of his friends in Hollywood were busy writing and selling screenplays, but very few ever got made. The screenplays, which were obviously promising enough for studio heads to buy them, seemed like a vast, untapped resource in an industry where intellectual property is the chief currency. Mr. Chiles teamed up with two partners with producing backgrounds, T. J. Barrack and Marc Joubert, to start Adaptive. Both had worked as consultants at Miramax, where Mr. Joubert was tasked with combing through hundreds of unproduced screenplays to see what, if anything, could be salvaged. They raised money from several investors, including the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee; Todd Wagner, the co owner of Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theaters; and Mr. Barrack's father, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a real estate investor and executive chairman of Colony Capital. Adaptive still has a lot to prove in Hollywood. The movie business is littered with companies that arrived with what sounded like a promising idea and never managed to gain traction. Making its job harder, Adaptive lacks a distribution partnership with a major studio. Much of its executives' time is spent trying to wrangle the legal rights for unloved projects that remain in limbo. And the company faces enormous pressure not to let projects fall by the wayside. "The last thing we want to do is pick up these projects we're calling orphaned or abandoned I.P., and have them stay that way," Mr. Joubert said, referring to intellectual property. At first, Adaptive's creative process seems like every screenwriter's nightmare: Executives sit in meetings at the company's shabby chic headquarters in Culver City, Calif. an open office with concrete floors and mismatched midcentury modern furniture and decide how to rip apart and reassemble failed scripts. These sessions result in a narrative blueprint, or "spark page." The spark page then goes out to prospective authors, who audition for the job by submitting a sample chapter or two. At a recent Adaptive meeting, six people debated the merits of the fourth draft of a blueprint for "Mary Rose," an eerie story about a girl who vanishes and reappears with no memory of what happened to her. It was written roughly a century ago by the Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie, the author of "Peter Pan." Although multiple filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, tried adaptations over the decades, it has never been made into a feature film. Marshall Lewy, an Adaptive partner, still had some reservations: "It does get dark. Maybe too dark? Do we want her committing suicide?" After a moment, Mr. Christensen responded. "Maybe the whole thing gets flipped, like in the movie 'The Others,' where you think it's real the whole time but it turns out they are already dead?" Finally, Mr. Barrack offered a solution. "I think that we simply share this concern with potential authors we're starting to select an author, right? and tell them that we're not dictating the ending, that it's up in the air," Mr. Barrack said. "They might very well come up with a better idea." "Good, I'm excited," Mr. Barrack said. "Let's get this thing going. Let's get it out there to authors." There are drawbacks for writers who work with Adaptive. The studio holds the intellectual property rights, so novelists give up any claim to characters they create. There are creative trade offs too. E. C. Myers, the novelist brought in for "The Silence of Six" project, said he struggled to keep the studio's vision for the film from interfering with his ideas for the book. "The Silence of Six" started as a dark political thriller by Stephen Hauser that Miramax bought in 2003. Adaptive transformed it into a young adult novel about a teenage hacker who is investigating a friend's suicide. It's now in development as a film.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Beyonce on the cover of Vogue and Paul McCartney on the cover of GQ. While she told her own story, he was interviewed in depth. All glossy magazine superstar covers may look the same from a distance, but inside, you're never quite sure what you'll find. Take the October issue of GQ, which features Paul McCartney. For decades he has leaned on familiar Beatles anecdotes, presuming that decades old chestnuts may still pass for warm. But in GQ, over the course of several long conversations, he revealed himself to be unstudied, slightly wishy washy and much less preoccupied with the sanctity of his own image than you might think he even offered a recollection about the Beatles' teenage sexual adventures that led to a characteristically sweaty New York Post headline: "Beat the Meatles." The story worked in two ways: For the reader and fan, it was appealingly revealing; for Mr. McCartney, who's been famous so long he is more sculpture than human, it was a welcome softening. This took a willingness to answer questions, to submit to the give and take that comes with a profile of that scale. But not all big stories demand such transparency of their subjects: say, the September issue of Vogue with Beyonce on the cover. The accompanying article is titled "Beyonce in Her Own Words" not a profile, but a collection of brief, only occasionally revealing commentaries on a range of topics: motherhood and family, body acceptance, touring. Anna Wintour refers to the story in her editor's letter as a "powerful essay" that "Beyonce herself writes," as if that were an asset, not a liability. There was a journalist in the room at some point in the process the piece has an "as told to" credit at the end but outside perspectives have effectively been erased. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. For devotees of Beyonce, this might not matter (though it should). But for devotees of celebrity journalism the kind of work that aims to add context and depth to the fame economy, and which is predicated on the productive frisson between an interviewer and interviewee this portends catastrophe. And it's not an isolated event. In pop music especially, plenty of the most famous performers essentially eschew the press: Taylor Swift hasn't given a substantive interview and access to a print publication for at least two years. For Drake, it's been about a year (and a tumultuous one at that). Frank Ocean has all but disappeared (again). What's replaced it isn't satisfying: either outright silence, or more often, unidirectional narratives offered through social media. Monologue, not dialogue. It threatens to upend the role of the celebrity press. Since the 1960s, in depth interviews have been a crucial part of the star making process, but also a regular feature of high level celebrity maintenance artists didn't abandon their obligations to the media just because they had reached the pinnacle of fame. Answering questions was part of the job. It was the way that the people making the most interesting culture explained themselves, whether it was John Lennon on the breakup of the Beatles, Tupac Shakur speaking out from jail, or Courtney Love in the wake of Kurt Cobain's death. It was illuminating to fans, but also something of a badge of honor for the famous, especially when the conversations were adversarial. Stars like Ice Cube and Madonna used to thrive in those circumstances the interviews revealed them to be thoughtful, unafraid of being challenged and alive to the creation of their image. But that was in a climate in which print publications had a disproportionate amount of leverage, and the internet and TMZ hadn't wrested away narrative control. When stars' comings and goings began to be documented on a minute by minute basis, those changes triggered celebrity reticence. On its own, that wouldn't signal the death knell of celebrity journalism as it's been practiced for decades. But the pressure being applied to celebrity journalism from the top might pale in comparison to the threat surging from below, where a new generation of celebrities YouTube stars, SoundCloud rappers, and various other earnest young people share extensively on social media on their own terms, moving quickly and decisively (and messily) with no need for the patience and pushback they might encounter in an interview setting. This generation is one of all access hyperdocumentation, making the promise of celebrity journalism emphasizing intimate perspective and behind the scenes access largely irrelevant. An emblematic example is the rapper Lil Xan, who in recent months has played out several microdramas online: discussing his health struggles and how they put him at odds with his management (his phone was forcibly grabbed from his hand while he was live on Instagram discussing family drama); falling for and then breaking up with Noah Cyrus, Miley's younger sister. Traditional media might catch up to his story someday, but he's not waiting to be asked for a comment before providing one. (He recently announced on Instagram that he was filming a series for Netflix, again bypassing old platforms.) Sometimes, social media posts take the place of what was once the preserve of the tell all interview: Ariana Grande mourned her ex boyfriend, Mac Miller, in an Instagram post; the rapper XXXTentacion replied to allegations of sexual assault on his Instagram Story; the YouTube star Logan Paul used his usual platform to apologize for a video in which he filmed a dead body. These are one sided stories, with no scrutiny beyond the comments section. And so they've be come highly visible safe spaces for young celebrities, especially in an era when one's direct social media audience via Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and more can far exceed the reach of even the most prestigious or popular publication, and in a way that's laser targeted to supporters. All of which leaves celebrity journalism in a likely unsolvable conundrum. The most famous have effectively dispensed with it, and the newly famous have grown up in an age where it was largely irrelevant. Over time, the middle space may well be squeezed into nothingness. And as old media extinction looms, the new ecosystem is often used as a corrective or loud distraction. Selena Gomez is on the cover of Elle this month, and the accompanying story is relatively innocuous. But when it appeared online, she replied with a long Instagram post expressing frustration. "Speaking from my heart for over an hour to someone who puts those thoughts into paid words can be hard for me," she wrote. "The older I get the more I want my voice to be mine." She then listed the specific things she sought to promote in the interview, and lamented that other things namely, her personal life, and her church were given too much attention. And so as the power dynamic tilts in favor of the famous over the press, publications weakened, desperate, financially fragile have been forced to find ever more contorted ways to trade, at minimum, the feeling of control in exchange for precious access. Celebrities guest edit "edit" special issues of magazines. And while Ms. Swift did appear on the cover of Harper's Bazaar this year, in the accompanying article, she is the interviewer, asking questions of the rock muse Pattie Boyd. In 2015, Rihanna photographed herself for the cover of The Fader. (The shoot was executed in concert with a professional photographer.) It was, yes, a metacommentary on panoptic fame, and also the cover star taking her own photograph. If those options aren't available, magazines can simply assign a friend of the celebrity to conduct the interview. In Elle, Jennifer Lawrence interviewed Emma Stone. Blake Lively conducted Gigi Hadid's Harper's Bazaar May cover interview. Katy Perry's March Glamour cover interview was by the Instagram affirmation specialist Cleo Wade. Interview, a magazine predicated on these sorts of intra celebrity conversations, was recently resurrected; in the comeback issue, Raf Simons talks with George Condo (a journalist chimes in occasionally) and Jennifer Jason Leigh talks to Phoebe Cates. The friend doesn't even have to be famous. In Rolling Stone's current feature with the press shy pop star Sia, the author announces himself as a longtime friend of hers. And New York magazine's recent exclusive interview with Soon Yi Previn, Woody Allen's wife, was conducted by a longtime friend of Mr. Allen, to howls of dismay on Twitter.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
LONDON Europe, which led the world in creating a system of emission permits to combat greenhouse gas emissions, dealt a potential death blow to that system on Tuesday. Focusing on immediate economic concerns over future environmental ones, the European Parliament narrowly rejected a proposal to cut the number of pollution permits. Fewer permits would have raised companies' costs to emit greenhouse gases, which scientists have linked to global warming. In voting down the changes, lawmakers seemed less worried about the global environmental implications than on holding down energy costs as Europe continues to emerge from a deep economic slump. "This is a sign of a new era," said Fabien Roques, an energy analyst at the market research firm IHS CERA in Paris. "It is a signal that policy makers will have to take into account competitiveness and costs." The measure was meant to put teeth into efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the smokestacks of utility companies and manufacturers by curtailing the availability of permits that allow companies to emit greenhouse gases. Critics say that when the trading system was put into place in 2005, too many emission permits were created. The weak economy, which has reduced economic activity, has added to the glut, driving the price of permits, some of which are now auctioned, to nearly zero. The proposed measure, which in effect would have made it much more costly to pollute, was rejected by a vote of 334 to 315. While carbon emissions continue to rise globally, Europe's own emissions have dropped 10 percent from 2007 to 2012, with the sluggish economy responsible for much of the decline. That has weakened the political will among European lawmakers to adopt tougher measures to cut carbon production. At issue is the European Union's Emissions Trading System, which, when introduced, was considered a potential global model for gradually raising the costs of emitting greenhouse gases and encouraging industrial users of coal and other carbon heavy fuels to pursue cleaner types of energy. Carbon emission permits are essentially licenses to release greenhouse gases, priced in units that allow the holders to emit a ton of greenhouse gases. Because a big user of coal burning power plants might release millions of tons of greenhouse gases a year, the higher the price for the permits, the higher the cost for polluting. The idea behind the Emissions Trading System, a concept called cap and trade, was to create a market in allowable emission credits by putting a cap on the amount of those credits and letting companies and investors trade those rights. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. But a glut of permits has meant prices have been so low that big carbon polluters have had little incentive to curtail their smokestack emissions. After the vote Tuesday, the market price of a carbon allowance, which lets a factory emit one ton of carbon, fell about 40 percent, to 2.63 euros, or 3.47, a ton. Later in the day it recovered to 3.15 euros. "Prices will sink very low potentially below 1 euro a ton and liquidity will dry up," wrote Kash Burchett, another IHS analyst. Analysts say a price of 30 euros a ton or higher would be needed to persuade companies to switch to cleaner fuels like natural gas, the main alternative to coal for producing electrical power. Natural gas is priced about three times as high in Europe as in the United States, which is benefiting from a shale gas boom. Some European industry groups and conservative politicians on Tuesday applauded the defeat of the measure, which would most likely have put upward pressure on electricity prices and have added to the costs of manufactured goods. "Arbitrary interventions in the carbon market would just make it more difficult for businesses to produce cost effectively in the E.U.," Eurochambres, which represents millions of European businesses, said in a statement after the vote. Conservative British members of the European Parliament, who opposed the measure, seemed to be concerned about both tampering with a market and the possible economic consequences. Doing so, they said in a statement, "will only serve to discourage green investments" and "undermine much needed market predictability as the E.U. economy strives to find a way out of the economic crisis." Advocates of carbon trading systems conceded that the vote was a severe blow to the European effort to use carbon permits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "This is a crisis in European leadership on the climate issue," said Anthony Hobley, head of the climate change practice at Norton Rose, a London law firm. The emissions trading system "has ceased to be an effective environmental tool." The vote rejected a proposal from the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, to effectively raise the price of carbon allowances by limiting their availability. The plan had called for postponing about one quarter of the allowances that would be auctioned through 2015, deferring them until 2019 20. The price of allowances have plunged to less than 3 euros earlier this year, to 7 euros a ton last year, down from 25 euros a ton in 2008. The idea behind the rejected proposal was to "stop the bleeding" and halt the price decline, Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, said in a telephone interview. Ms. Hedegaard noted that the commission was also preparing more fundamental changes for the emissions trading system. But she noted that those, which could include the permanent retiring of some allowances, might be even more difficult to push through the European Parliament than the proposal rejected Tuesday. "This is difficult stuff and challenging when you have a crisis and the focus is on all sorts of costs, " she said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
THE 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS 8 p.m. on NBC. The Golden Globes are usually a breezy, joyous affair, but the tone this year is likely to be much more solemn, as sexual harassment scandals hover. Many stars will wear black on the red carpet in solidarity, and the host, Seth Meyers, said he will attempt to find a balance between humor and gravity in his monologue. "It's safe to say Hollywood has been tipped on its side," Mr. Meyers said in an interview with The New York Times. "The Shape of Water" and "The Post" lead the movie nominations, while "Big Little Lies" (see below) leads the television pack. NFL PLAYOFFS: WILD CARD ROUND The often hapless Buffalo Bills return to the playoffs for the first time in 18 years to take on the Jacksonville Jaguars at 1:05 p.m. Then, at the Superdome, Cam Newton and the Carolina Panthers face the New Orleans Saints, who have beaten them twice this year, at 4:40 p.m.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
Barbara Strauch, a reporter and editor who wrote two books about the brain and directed health and science coverage for The New York Times for a decade, died on Wednesday at her home in Rye, N.Y. She was 63. The cause was breast cancer, her husband, Richard Breeden, said. Before joining The Times, Ms. Strauch (pronounced STROWK) ran the Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news for its coverage of a midnight subway derailment in Manhattan that left five passengers dead and more than 200 injured. Hired by The Times after New York Newsday ceased publication in 1995, Ms. Strauch worked on the national desk, edited business coverage of the New York metropolitan area and was media editor. She joined the paper's science department as an assistant editor in 2000. Appointed health editor in 2004, Ms. Strauch supervised coverage of a rapidly changing health care industry, tracking advances in pharmaceutical research, the rising costs of health care, debates over health insurance coverage and the politics of medical care, as well as the changing roles of doctors and hospitals. She was named science editor in 2011, overseeing all health and science coverage in the daily news report, as well as in the weekly Science Times section. She held that post until this month. As science editor, Ms. Strauch oversaw the introduction of the popular Well blog and a number of projects, including "Chasing the Higgs," about the race between two teams of researchers to discover the Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle." It was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014. Other projects examined patient care, treating children with mental illness and the struggles in cancer research. "Barbara's stewardship of the science section was the capstone to an extraordinary career in journalism," Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said in a memo to the newsroom staff. "Her zest for a great story and her determination to infuse science journalism with sophistication, heart and rigor made our coverage the envy of our peers." Ms. Strauch was the author of "The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries About the Teenage Brain Tell Us About Our Kids," published in 2003, and "The Secret Life of the Grown up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle Aged Mind" (2010), which concluded that certain cognitive functions peak fairly late, when people are in their 60s. In 2010, Ms. Strauch published "The Secret Life of the Grown up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle Aged Mind," which concluded that certain cognitive functions peak fairly late, when people are in their 60s. Responding to online questions from readers in 2009, she explained that teenagers are naturally attracted to risk, because from an evolutionary standpoint they need a biological incentive to leave familiar surroundings to mate and avoid inbreeding. Adults, she said, are better at assessing consequences. "We have teenagers staying out all night or skipping school and their parents tearing out their middle aged hair," she wrote. "The good news is that, if we can get past the power struggle part of all this, admit what we were like at that age, take the long view and call on the calmer middle aged brain we have, we should also realize that a few bad and even risky moves by teenagers are natural and necessary, as long as they do not kill themselves. Easier said than done." Barbara Ellen Strauch was born in Evanston, Ill., on May 10, 1951. Her father, Frederic Jr., was an electrical engineer. Her mother, the former Claire Christiansen, was a reporter for the newspaper The Daily Pilot in Orange County, Calif. In addition to her husband, she is survived by two daughters, Hayley and Meryl Breeden, and a brother, Ron Strauch. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor's degree in English, Ms. Strauch worked for newspapers in New England, Venezuela and Houston. She was a senior editor at New York Newsday. Molly Gordy, a former Newsday reporter, recalled: "She sent me to interview a Salvadoran refugee family for an immigration series, and when I came back saying they were boring, she told me to pack a suitcase and move in with them and not leave until I was in love." She stayed five days, she said. In the course of her career, Ms. Strauch dealt with subjects as diverse as space shuttle missions and police shootings, but she said in the 2009 online piece that "sorting out health news is one of the hardest I have run across, in part because of the hype and more alarming the financial ties and conflicts of interest of many researchers." She lamented the decline in science coverage in other general interest publications. "Something quite serious has been lost," she wrote in 2013 on the website Edge.org., an online discussion group. "And, of course, this has ramifications not only for the general level of scientific understanding, but for funding decisions in Washington and even access to medical care. And it's not good for those of us at The Times, either. Competition makes us all better." "So what we have is a high interest and a lot of misinformation floating around," she warned. "And we have fewer and fewer places that provide real information to a general audience that is understandable, at least by those of us who do not yet have our doctorates in astrophysics. The disconnect is what we should all be worried about."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Three graduates of New World School of the Arts in Miami share advice for students interested in pursuing a dream. Alex Lacamoire has won two Grammys and three Tonys for his orchestration on "Hamilton," "In the Heights" and "Dear Evan Hansen." He attended Berklee College of Music after New World. Cote de Pablo is best known for her role as Ziva David on the hit television series "NCIS." She attended Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. Tarell Alvin McCraney, who went on to DePaul University and Yale School of Drama, shared an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for "Moonlight." He began a new job in July as chairman of Yale's department of playwriting. The arts is one of the few fields where college is not altogether necessary. Is a Bachelor of Fine Arts the right move? Lacamoire The pros of college are that you need experience being away from home, growing up and becoming an adult. But if you have what it takes and there is an amazing opportunity let's say you get offered the national tour of "Wicked" take it. De Pablo There are many roads to achieve success. I have worked with tremendous actors who work with no training and with some who have gotten the most incredible training. But I don't think I would have gotten into a place like Carnegie Mellon if my talents had not been guided by these teachers at New World and certainly by the students I was surrounded by. McCraney If going to college is important to the artist, then it's important. But if not, then not. Getting into a good college theater or music program is painfully competitive. Some take only 12 to 16 students, based largely on auditions. What advice do you offer? De Pablo It's a muscle. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get. In the professional world, hopefully you are auditioning every day. The big advice is when you audition, especially if you have time, try to get the material memorized. Get your eyes off the page. Try to connect. One teacher said to me, "When you leave yourself alone, you can be absolutely compelling." Get out of your own way. McCraney I auditioned for New World three times. I didn't get in until the last, and even then it was through a waiting list. The first audition, I was nervous and unprepared. The piece I had had no relevance to my life at all. It was Christopher Durang's "Baby With the Bathwater." I found it in a monologue book. I started to write my own pieces then. Even then, I knew work was not made for gay, poor, dark skin teenagers. Were your parents supportive of your desire to pursue the arts, a profession where jobs are scarce? McCraney Most of the time not about dancing but acting and writing, yes. De Pablo My parents came from a comfortable reality in South America and they thought every reality was going to be a comfortable one. You want to go to this school fantastic. They were incredibly kind, but a little ignorance is bliss, too. Lacamoire They were extremely supportive. My mom especially would listen to the teachers, who would say your son is special, your son is doing things that other people can't. She never said to me, study dentistry instead. Somewhere in there she was concerned and wanted to make sure I had a backup. She never really pushed it on me. In high school my mom would drive me to all my gigs because I couldn't drive. As students enter the professional world, what are the challenges and how do you overcome them? Lacamoire You are in the business because you have to be in the business, because there is a need to perform, communicate, express yourself. It's such a hard road. There is so much rejection. The means are meager. You have to share a plate of spaghetti with someone because you can't afford it yourself. You continue on because there is nothing else you want to be doing. You have to have that drive. You are allowed to get to a point where you get exhausted and you can't anymore. If you get to that point and there is rejection, if there is still nothing else you would want to be doing, you keep going. But you have to figure out what are you not doing to get gigs. Are you not strong enough at jazz? Get a jazz teacher. Are you not good at reading music? Once you stop learning, you are dead. McCraney "The only thing new you bring to the art is you" Alvin Ailey. Know yourself, your true desires, your limitations, and your capacity for change.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Education
|
The United States Open that is set to begin in New York on Monday will be far from full strength, extraordinarily far, but will it really be the Asterisk Open? As of Sunday evening, 24 of the top 100 women were missing, including six of the top eight and three of the four reigning Grand Slam singles champions: Ashleigh Barty, Simona Halep and Bianca Andreescu. Though Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka will be in the field, it will have the fewest top 10 players four of any U.S. Open since the WTA rankings began in 1975. On the men's side, only 12 of the top 100 were out as of Sunday, but this will be the first Grand Slam tournament of the 21st century without both Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Stan Wawrinka, a three time major singles champion, will be missing, too. The absences are primarily due to concerns about traveling and scheduling during the coronavirus pandemic. Some stars are still recovering from injuries. Federer, the Swiss superstar, has had two knee operations this year. Andreescu has struggled to stay healthy since winning the Open in New York last year. The bottom line is that this U.S. Open is diminished, but if you want to start affixing asterisks to Grand Slam tennis tournaments with weakened fields, you had best have a big box of asterisks. "It is messy, and it is tricky," said Steve Flink, an American tennis historian. "There are so many things you can look at through the years." First, there is the amateur era, which lasted until 1968 and prohibited professionals from taking part in the four major tournaments: the Australian Championships, French Championships, Wimbledon and U.S. Championships. These tournaments became Opens only when they became open to the pros. The hypocrisy helped lead to change, but it also skewed the record book. Laver, who won all four major tournaments in 1962 and 1969, was ineligible for Grand Slam play for five full seasons in between. Rosewall was ineligible for 11 full seasons. Pancho Gonzales, the charismatic American who won back to back U.S. Championships in 1948 and 1949, missed 18 seasons of Grand Slam tennis before returning in 1968 at age 40 to reach the semifinals of the French Open. "There were still a lot of great amateurs, but the public knew who was missing during those years," Flink said. "They were thinking what would have happened if Gonzales was here? Or Laver or Rosewall? They were missing giants of the game." That was not an issue in the women's game, which had no professional circuit. "In women's tennis, there really should be no distinction between amateur and Open era because everybody played," said Martina Navratilova, who became one of the greatest champions of any era by winning 167 WTA Tour singles titles, including 18 Grand Slams, and 177 doubles titles. Other players struggled to reach Paris. There were 30 walkovers in the first round of the men's tournament, and five of the 16 seeded singles players withdrew. In the 1970s, the French Open often had weak fields because of players' commitments to World Team Tennis, the league co founded by Billie Jean King, which was booming in the United States. Navratilova lost in the French Open final in 1975 to Chris Evert and then did not play the tournament again until 1981. "I didn't play because of World Team Tennis, and it just didn't seem to be worth it," Navratilova said. "The money was crap, and we were treated like second class citizens, so you know, why bother?" In 1974, Jimmy Connors won three of the four Grand Slam titles but did not play in Paris. Evert, a seven time French Open singles champion whose best surface was clay, did not play the tournament in 1976, 1977 or 1978. Sue Barker of Britain won in 1976, Mima Jausovec of Yugoslavia in 1977 and Virginia Ruzici of Romania in 1978. None of them won another Grand Slam singles title. Are asterisks in order? Perhaps, but then they would be even more appropriate for the Australian Open during the 1970s, when its shortage of prize money, remote location and inconvenient dates close to the Christmas holidays made for particularly weak fields and unlikely champions. Bjorn Borg, the great Swedish player who won six French Opens and five consecutive Wimbledons, made the trip to the Australian Open once: in 1974, when he was 17 and lost in the third round. John McEnroe, Borg's archrival, did not play in the tournament until 1983. Evert played the Australian Open just once between 1971 and 1980, reaching the final in 1974. Navratilova played there once in the 1970s before becoming a regular in the 1980s. "You also have to remember that the majors, and how many majors you won, were not that important during that time," Navratilova said in an interview on Thursday. "I didn't even know how many I had. We were supporting our tour, which was the most important thing to us. Wimbledon was the crowning jewel of course, and so was the U.S. Open, but the third biggest tournament of the year was our season ending championship, the Virginia Slims championship. That was our third major." Even Wimbledon had a weak link year. In 1973 Niki Pilic, a Yugoslavian player, declined to play the Davis Cup team event for his country because of a scheduling conflict and was suspended from Grand Slam play for nine months. The newly formed men's player group, the ATP, backed Pilic in the dispute, and 81 of the world's leading men boycotted Wimbledon, including the two most recent Wimbledon champions: John Newcombe and Stan Smith. There is no doubt the men's tournament, won by Jan Kodes of Czechoslovakia, deserves at least an explanation if not an asterisk. Williams has looked vulnerable in her two tournaments since the end of the tour's five month hiatus. All five of her singles matches this month have gone to three sets. She was beaten by 116th ranked Shelby Rogers in the quarterfinals of the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., and by 21st ranked Maria Sakkari in the third round of the Western Southern Open last week. Though Williams is still a favorite based on her resume and ranking, it is hard to see her as the favorite, but if she does win No. 24, do not bother trying to put an asterisk on her share of the record. Court won 11 of her 24 Grand Slam singles titles in Australia between 1960 and 1973 against fields that often had few non Australian competitors and had draw sizes that ranged from 27 to 52. Williams has won all of her Grand Slam titles against fully international fields with draw sizes of 128. "Margaret's 24 is still the benchmark," Flink said. "But I think it was padded by all those Australian titles, no doubt about it. In my view, if Serena ties her, it's almost like a victory." One could argue that the U.S. Open happening at all in 2020 is a victory. There will be no spectators and fewer stars, but barring an unforeseen twist, champions will still be crowned, the latest in a very long line of players to win Grand Slam titles in flawed circumstances.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
"This is what crime is," said Tom Rob Smith, the writer behind "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story," the FX true crime series. "Crime is people being ripped from the world." He was talking just hours ahead of the mournful finale of a challenging season (the second in an anthology series that began with "The People v. O.J. Simpson"), which told the story of Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer who in 1997 murdered the fashion designer Gianni Versace in Miami Beach. By the end of his nightmare journey, Mr. Cunanan had ripped away six men's lives, including his own. Across nine episodes, that journey took viewers along a counterintuitive path, beginning with Versace's death and working mostly backward in time, through the murders of four other men and deep into the killer's troubled childhood in San Diego. It was exceedingly painful to watch at times, but to Mr. Smith, the pain was the point. "I know there are gaps in the story where we've had to imagine what happened," he said in a phone conversation on Wednesday. "But I think we're actually very close to the fundamental truth: Andrew destroyed a great many lives." Following are edited and spoiler filled excerpts from that conversation, in which Mr. Smith talked about his work on the difficult and disturbing series, as well as the opportunity it gave him to explore what made those lives worth living and their loss so tragic. I've seen critics talk about how hard it is to tune into a story this painful, week in and week out. Since this was your first true crime project, was that obstacle to audience identification and enjoyment something you wrestled with? One of the reasons we take the story backward is because we want to make the victims the heart of the piece, and they're amazing people. Andrew was targeting people who had things that he did not, whether that be love, financial success, or moral success. I feel very privileged to have read about Versace. I think he's underwritten about, underexplored, a remarkable figure. The same with Donatella Donatella Versace, Gianni's sister and business partner . They were an incredible couple. Lee Miglin is an extraordinary figure. The greatness that he achieves is from tenacity: As the youngest kid of seven or eight, he arrived in Chicago knowing no one, and he worked his way up. He was the American dream. David David Madson, a Minneapolis based architect was this incredible young man, full of love and looking for love. And Jeff Jeff Trail, a gay former naval officer struggling with Don't Ask, Don't Tell ... I felt very lucky to tell their stories. I found them very moving and very celebratory. Andrew, on the other hand, who is the central character ... It's true that when you get to their deaths, Andrew is this despicable figure. But if you go further back, it's hard not to find things about young Andrew that are impressive. He was out to people when he was how old was he, 17? He was this Oscar Wilde like wit who would, when confronted by homophobic bullies in school, look at them and bounce it straight back at them. I mean, I could never have done that in school. I just didn't have it. There was bravery in that. And he was a good friend to many people. He would pay for things. He would be there when they needed him. There's that loss of potential. You feel that on the victims' side these people were ripped from the world and they were achieving so much and you feel it also with Andrew. Why couldn't he have converted his intellect and his consideration for other people into something great? What happened there? You don't want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people's way by homophobia. Even at Versace's funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner's hand in comfort. Yeah. All of that is real. We've got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That's not an inference we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn't control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew's personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he's born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? that's the conundrum of Andrew. I think it's tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It's like he's soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He's like, "I'm going to shame you. You've achieved success and I'm going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you." Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That's a stark contrast. You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he's Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can't deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn't have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom. There's this moment we never managed to get into the show which I've always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him. To get to the core of a person as protean as Andrew, I suppose you have to identify the desire that makes him shape shift in the first place. On his own, he was very sad and very alone. There were often moments when he said that. If you caught him when he wasn't high and he wasn't pretending, he said: "I'm alone and I'm depressed. I haven't achieved anything and I'm miserable." He wasn't stupid. He could see himself in those moments. But he could, for example, pretend to be a millionaire while going to a restaurant and pay 500 for a meal. Even if he only had 500 left, for those three hours, everyone at that table would think he was wealthy and successful. Those restaurants became a kind of theater where he could pretend to be a person that he wasn't. He lived for those moments. When he stopped having those moments, that's when he killed people.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
Last month, Billy Bush sold his Chelsea townhouse for 15 percent less than he paid for it in 2015. The Manhattan real estate market got off to a strong start in 2017, with the closed sale of the second most expensive penthouse at the supertall 432 Park Avenue and a spurt of activity at other new developments. There were several high profile transactions, too. The former "Today" host Billy Bush sold his Chelsea townhouse (at a loss), and a few buildings away on the same street, a full floor loft owned by the Oscar winning director Steven Soderbergh finally sold. Also, the Grammy winning producer Mikkel S. Eriksen sold a condo on the Upper West Side, while the estate of Judith S. Kaye, the first woman to serve as New York's chief judge, sold her co op on Central Park West. The buyer, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company Parklight, had been in contract to purchase the place since April 2013. The unit encompasses 8,055 square feet and has five bedrooms and six full baths. A spokesman for one of the building's developers, Macklowe Properties, said a confidentiality agreement prevented him from disclosing any information about the unit. This penthouse is the second priciest transaction since closings began in late 2015 at the 96 story tower, between 56th and 57th Streets in the heart of Billionaires' Row. The most expensive and the biggest sale for all of last year was the full floor penthouse at the pinnacle, which closed in September at nearly 87.7 million. The buyer was the Saudi retail magnate Fawaz Alhokair. The Chelsea townhouse Mr. Bush sold after being forced to leave "Today." MR. BUSH'S TOWNHOUSE at 224 West 22nd Street sold for 7.43 million, which was about 15 percent below what he had paid for it in 2015. The TV personality, who was relocating from Los Angeles, bought the four story brick house in December 2015 for 8.8 million just months before joining NBC's "Today." He put the home back on the market last October, with an 8.99 million price tag, after his suspension and subsequent departure from the morning show. His forced exit stemmed from a 2005 video that had surfaced in which he and Donald J. Trump were heard engaging in a lewd and misogynistic conversation about women. Mr. Bush twice dropped the price of the five bedroom, 3,540 square foot townhouse most recently to 8.25 million. He conducted all of his property transactions using the JLM Trust. The buyer was Thomas Anthony Holdings LLC. MR. SODERBERGH, the prolific director who won an Academy Award for the 2000 film "Traffic," also left the neighborhood. His prewar loft on the second floor of the co op building at 147 West 22nd Street sold for 4.85 million. Property records, though, show that Mr. Soderbergh actually entered into a sales contract with the buyer, the Brygo Trust, in July 2015. The 4,000 square foot apartment configured with three bedrooms, two baths and a media room was first listed in June 2014 for 5 million. IN OTHER BOLDFACE transactions, Mr. Eriksen, and his wife, Hege Christin Fossum, sold unit No. 32CD at 80 Riverside Boulevard for 8.4 million. Mr. Eriksen is a founder of Stargate, a Norwegian music producer and songwriting team that won a Grammy in 2011 for best dance recording for Rihanna's "Only Girl (In the World)"; they also produced and co wrote Beyonce's hit single "Irreplaceable." The estate of Judge Kaye, who died last year at age 77, sold unit 5A at 101 Central Park West for 4.25 million.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
The 2021 N.C.A.A. women's basketball tournament will be held in one region in hopes that reduced travel will limit the spread of the coronavirus across the 64 teams expected to play, the Division I Women's Basketball Committee announced Monday, mirroring the format set last month for the men's competition. In its announcement, the committee said it was still finalizing dates and venues, but that it was in preliminary talks with officials in the area surrounding San Antonio to host the 63 game tournament in late March and early April. "Conducting the championship in one geographic region allows for more planning and execution of safeguards that provide potential benefits for promoting the health and safety of student athletes, the N.C.A.A. membership and all individuals involved in the championship," Nina King, chair of the committee and a senior deputy athletic director at Duke, said in the announcement. Typically first and second round games are hosted by 16 teams across the United States based on seeding. From there, the tournament feeds into regional sites and culminates in the Final Four at one location. Before Monday's announcement, regional host sites had been declared for Albany, N.Y.; Austin, Texas; Cincinnati; and Spokane, Wash. San Antonio was already designated to host the Final Four in the Alamodome. The change would place all rounds in Texas, if those plans are finalized.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Credit...Caine Delacy for The New York Times Biking the Open Road in Colorado, With a Few Bumps Along the Way The cost for two nights was 199. (The "beer option" costs an additional 30 per person.) Ahead of this trip, I had spoken with Kelly Ryan, a former ski patrol and the daughter of Joe Ryan, who founded the San Juan Huts System in 1987. According to Ms. Ryan, the Grand Junction Moab route, though challenging, is "beginner friendly." While this tour involves long days, the terrain itself is nothing a newbie even someone who's never been on an overnight cycling trip can't handle, she said. Plus, the relative absence of cars on this route makes things more manageable. Typically, busy highways represent a hazard for road biking. "You're more likely to get hurt mountain biking, but you're more likely to die road biking," Ms. Ryan said. This didn't exactly inspire confidence, but then again, this wasn't a road biking trip, per se. The route is split between old paved highways and sections of dirt, and because of that, the route is technically classified as a gravel grinder tour. On a route like this, which involves long distances and rolling landscape on some unpaved roads, a gravel grinder can really shine. I opted to rent a Moots Routt 45 from a nearby Grand Junction vendor. First, one raindrop. Then, another. Uh oh. On our first morning, we left our motel in Grand Junction a little after 8, stopping briefly at a Wal Mart to buy the helmets neither of us had remembered to bring. Dressed in biking shorts and long sleeve tops, we climbed on our bikes and prepared to hit the trail, planning on covering roughly 55 miles over the next seven hours. Well, that was the plan. On our initial foray into the backcountry, which was a steep haul, Joe started to feel the effects of the high altitude almost immediately: the effects of the blazing sun and arduous uphill climb had spooked him. So, we decided on a new plan: he would go back to the Toyota 4Runner rental we'd left in Grand Junction, and shadow me as we made our way to our first overnight stop, as much of the route is accessible to both bikers and drivers. (Though not an expert biker myself, I ride every day in Los Angeles, where I defy odds by getting around without a car.) Nearing Unaweep Divide, the topmost point of the valley (elevation: 7,048 feet), I passed a rambling farmhouse with a burned out tractor in the yard. Dogs barked at me periodically through the cottonwood trees. The road was smooth, and relatively flat. At one point, I stopped near a pond where a family of horses stood statuesque in the knee high grass. As I munched an apple admiring the scene, a raindrop fell on my knee; then I felt another on the back of my neck. The sky was getting ready to open, and I still had another 30 miles to go. The valley lay completely exposed, with no chance of shelter, or an escape route. Joe caught up with me near the horse pond, but I coolly waved him on, either out of bravado or stupidity. And anyway what choice did I have but to keep going? At the same time, it was exhilarating to be alone under that marbled sky. The charged air sparked my endurance, and even though my hands hurt, my rear end hurt, my thighs hurt (everything hurt), I could feel my resistance melt away. Then the road pitched down, and rain started to pour from the sky in sheets. At the same moment, a thick border of maple and cottonwood trees sprung up along the edge of the road, offering a protective tunnel of leaves as I began hurtling toward the bottom half of the canyon. At one point, a bearded gentleman in his 50s whizzed by me in a bright red rain jacket: "Just two crazy guys riding in the rain!" he yelled back at me and continued on. In the freezing air (the temperature had dropped significantly since the rain started), my knuckles were bluish white around the handlebars. And, yet, I had to admit, this was fun. I'd wanted everything to be perfect on day one the scenery, the trail, my travel companion, the weather. Instead, the wild unpredictability of the backcountry of life was asserting itself in the best possible way. As the rain touched the earth, it unleashed a strange panoply of smells: sweet sage, cinnamon, tree sap, wet rock and an herbal, hay like scent, all rose up from the underbrush. Picking up speed, I yelled freely at the trees. Every part of me was soaked. In the tumult of the half storm, I found myself totally opened up and alive. On the menu: Fusilli with tuna Pulling off Highway 141 that first afternoon, we rode down a long driveway of red dirt that led to the other side of a lush green meadow. There, in the flickering shade of some cottonwood trees, sat the hut. It was small, about the size of two garden sheds, and painted pink. There was no shower, but the outhouse (also pink) had an interesting setup. Built at the top of a staircase, and enclosed by large screened windows, the open air toilet almost had the feel of a treehouse. The meadow surrounding the hut ran up to the base of a thousand foot tall red rock pyramid Colorado's version of a skyscraper which dominated the whole landscape. There was a rushing creek, too. Before dinner (fusilli pasta with red sauce and some black olives and tuna), Joe and I wandered over and stared for a while at the swirling green brown eddy, as if mesmerized. I left my shoes and bike shorts there, thoroughly soaked from the day, to dry off in the setting sun. In the Bikers Bible, a 28 page document emailed to travelers after the booking is made (in it, there are instructions on everything from what clothes to pack to how to use the propane tank), smartphones are discouraged, out of respect for other "hut mates" who might be seeking an escape. We didn't encounter another soul during our stay, but in such an awe inspiring place, the thought of checking my email or texts never even crossed my mind. When I woke up in the middle of the night, responding to the call of nature, I strapped on my headlamp, stumbled outside, and then promptly switched it off. Above me, the stars were as crisp and detailed as the lights on a pinball machine. I stood there in a trance for what felt like half an hour, before recalling the real reason I'd come out, and then crawling back inside to bed. Suddenly, the end of the road What's impossible to control, especially in a high altitude place like Colorado, is the weather. On Day 3, After successfully climbing 1,000 feet out of Paradox Valley, I hurtled down Highway 90, euphoric to finally arrive at the Colorado Utah state line. We posed by the "Welcome to Colorado" sign and snacked on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we'd made at the hut that morning. Then, I got back on my bike, headed up Highway 46, and had a sense of foreboding as soon as I hit the saddle. The temperature was quickly dropping, the sky was leaden, and ahead of me was a nine mile ascent, in the cold, with the likelihood of a storm breaking right over me. Joe pulled up 50 yards ahead, and when I rode up, he lowered the window and stuck his head out. "Well?" he asked halfheartedly, nodding toward the back seat. Begrudgingly, I packed up my bike and got in the car. It's a bittersweet feeling to give up when you know your goal is unattainable. With a little more training, or some sunshine, I felt I could have tackled this final haul into Utah. On the plus side, I knew I'd made the right decision. As we began to drive, now in the warm safety of Joe's car, the road took a ruthless pitch up the back of La Sal Mountain, easily the steepest road I'd encountered so far. The curves were sharp, the shoulder was narrow, and most noticeably the rain was coming down hard. Toward the crest, as we neared the 8,000 foot mark, still 20 miles from Moab, the view suddenly widened, and across some meadows we could follow the contour of Mount La Sal, almost within reach, to where its peak was wreathed in white wispy cloud.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
It was midnight in the French forest off the Gulf of Gascony, and I pedaled along the deserted bike trail, fueled by the fumes of a fabulous bottle of Bordeaux and the memory of a seaside feast: oysters and turbot, overseen by a grandmotherly patronne in a flowered housedress. Far ahead my husband's bike light glimmered through the dense pines. Suddenly he stopped and waited for me. "Cherie, can't you go a bit faster?" Guy said rather anxiously. Later, I learned that a boar had just crashed through the woods in front of him. Wild pigs aside, biking along the forested, level trails of France's southwestern Atlantic Coast feeds a fluid frame of mind conducive to indulging in simple pleasures like the aroma of pine resin; the crush of sunshine in a clearing; the impulsive detour to a waterfront chapel; or a lengthy, wine enhanced meal without worrying about Breathalyzer wielding gendarmes. Even so, I used care in planning our bike journey last summer around Arcachon Bay, a kind of Gallic Cape Cod meets the Hamptons, an hour's drive southwest of Bordeaux. Fifty miles in five days seemed ideal, leaving plenty of time for visits to fishing hamlets and wetlands, and for exploring the belle epoque in Arcachon, the bay's nexus, where Europe's fin de siecle high society built fanciful Victorian mansions in the shadow of the mile and a half long Great Dune of Pilat, Europe's highest sand dune, which stretches along the bay like a huge white Band Aid. Finally, as my husband's local cousins noted, by biking we'd avoid summer traffic on the road leading into the Cape side of the bay, often jammed by "outsiders" (Parisians and other wealthy vacationers) who, over the last decade, have joined the bling averse folks from Bordeaux and environs who have traditionally summered on the windswept 15 mile long spit of land between bay and ocean. Even so, I had to dangle a bribe to my speed loving husband who, like others who hail from the land of the Tour de France, seems genetically programmed to get from one point to another posthaste. "When we return," I promised him, as he gazed longingly at the gleaming rental scooters parked outside Locabeach, the bike shop opposite Arcachon's gingerbread trimmed train station. For now, my plan was to rent the cushiest seated bicycles possible, load our gear in saddlebags and head for the pier, where we'd hop the small ferry (named L'Embellie, or the "Lovely One") for the half hour chug to the Cape. Then we'd begin riding back to our starting point. On this limpid, sunny day my eyes could almost take in the entire triangular shaped bay, from the muddy tidal flats at its back to the sifting sand banks at its mouth. It was les vacances, and even the small dogs in carrying cases were relaxed. I convinced my deeply tanned bench mate, Jo Brousse, who had been "coming here for years," to divulge her favorite spots, which included Chez Hortense, a family owned restaurant at the Cape's point. "It's an institution," she said. "People from Arcachon boat across for dinner. Order the turbot." The prospect of turbot was irresistible, even though it would mean a 10 mile round trip from the B B I'd reserved in Le Petit Piquey. But it was late July and we had no schedule. Along the smooth, well marked bike path, the air was spicy and hot, full of buzzing cicadas. Our only concern was avoiding pinecones and giving way to the handful of spandex clad cyclists on the trail. Emerging from the forest path on our way to Chez Hortense, we pedaled for a mile or so along the two lane road and headed around the Cap Ferret lighthouse, named after the main village (which is not to be confused with the better known Cap Ferrat on the Riviera), and along the hollyhock lined lanes toward the bay front oyster shacks. At the end of a dirt path we leaned our bikes against a fig tree. Barefoot girls in sundresses and boys in shorts played tag in a sandy lot while their parents sat on the waterfront decks of oyster shacks sipping wine and hovering over platters of bivalves on rustic wooden tables. The Great Dune, iridescent in the sun's glow, anchored the far side of the water. Soon, we were sampling our own oysters, which were so fresh they contracted from their silvery shells under a spritz of lemon juice. Corks were still popping when we tore ourselves away at 9. Signs for Hortense, posted at crossroads in the ramshackle neighborhood of coveted vacation cottages around the point, led us to the restaurant. The fact that the owners of the BMWs, Mercedeses and vintage convertibles out front were among the patrons gathered on the beachfront veranda didn't detract from the friendly service or the attention of Bernadette, the founder's aging granddaughter. I suspect running a 100 year old legacy that's persevered despite violent tides, tempests and even requisition by the Nazis as their local cafeteria imparts humility. Even the perfectly baked turbot comes from a long tradition, according to our waitress, who said the purveyor, in Brittany, has supplied the restaurant since 1936. The next morning we hit the Cap Ferret market. On previous visits, I'd noticed the high quality merchandise at the outdoor stands: Basque table linens, espadrilles and Turkish cotton foutas (used here as beach towels). This time, I headed inside past butchers, fishmongers and fruit stalls straight to Chez Pascal, generally regarded as the best bakery on the Cape. I stood patiently in the long line and ordered a half dozen "White Dunes" addictive, bite size cream puffs sprinkled with powdered sugar and named after the bay's landmark. All this biking was definitely "opening up my appetite" as Guy so delicately put it. The next leg of our journey had a historic twist. A friend from Bordeaux had put me in touch with Sabine Lesca, whose great uncle, Leon Lesca, was a philanthropic real estate mogul of the area in the mid 1800s, when he used some of his fortune to develop the Cape and build a legendary Moorish style mansion and chapel inspired by his love of North Africa. "When I was a child in the 1950s, we'd spend the whole summer here at Grandmother's house, barefoot all day, helping the oyster farmers and swimming," Ms. Lesca reminisced as we strolled through the sandy alleys of Le Petit Piquey and l'Herbe, two preserved fishing hamlets, mostly consisting of clubhouse size pine plank cabins, and once her family's stamping grounds. "There was no running water then, and they'd call us back for dinner with a hunting horn," she said. "My great uncle's Villa Algerienne was our landmark, with its green cupola and colored windows." Sadly, the villa was demolished in the mid 1960s, but the bay front Chapelle Algerienne, now a national monument restored to its polychrome glory, remains. "The bay inspired Laurent de Brunhoff to write "Babar's Visit to Bird Island," Ms. Lesca said, as we stood in the chapel's front archway, looking out toward the island. Colorful wooden flat bottomed fishing boats called pinasses were beached on the glossy mud. "Jean Cocteau wrote here, too. Now, Marion Cotillard lives behind the chapel," she continued, "and Philippe Starck has a house nearby." Looking at her watch, she brightened. It was 11:30 a.m. "Would you like to join me for some oysters?" she asked. Once we were sufficiently fortified, we pedaled around to the back of the bay, stopping at the Cabane du Resinier, a one room eco museum in a former resin tapper's hut, where we learned that the pine forest's "black gold" provided livelihoods for many through the 1960s. As we proceeded through salt marshes and past the working class town of Ares toward Andernos les Bains the back of the bay's commercial center the sea, sand and sun vibe gave way to the lively community fabric of year round residents, many of whom work in Bordeaux. We didn't stop at the pier (one of the longest in France, at 761 feet) with its bistros and bars, but headed straight for the recently restored 11th century St. Eloi Church, one of the area's oldest buildings, on the foundations of a fourth century Gallo Roman villa. Outside, artists had set up easels under the shade of parasol pines. Inside, the stone floor was splashed with shards of color from light streaming through contemporary stained glass windows. We wanted to linger in Andernos, exploring the neighborhoods of vacation cottages and gabled houses trimmed in red, blue or green, with names like Mon Repos, Primavera and Fantasia. We would have enjoyed a glass of wine at the newest tapas bar, Loft 33, which we passed on the trail. But we had an evening date with the birds at our next stop, 15 miles away. The 9 p.m. sunset bird safari turned out to be a highlight of our trip. "Arcachon Bay, and the marshy delta here, is like a huge, self service hotel restaurant for over 300 species of migratory and nesting birds throughout the year," Anne Parisot, a naturalist and guide for the Teich Bird Reserve, told our group at the park entrance. "Here you're on one of the world's main bird migration routes," she continued, speaking above an occasional heron screech. After we ogled the huge storks nesting in the tree branches, the rest of the tour was like herding cats. Birders are an independent bunch. So if they hear, say, the bluethroat's song or spot a kingfisher or a spoonbill, you'd best raise your binoculars and get comfortable because they're not moving from the path or bird blind (there are 20, along three miles of trails) until they get their fill. The next morning we headed for the coastal bike route skirting the sleepy ports leading to Arcachon. Before lunch, I visited the excellent oyster heritage museum in Gujan Mestras. Guy hung around Dubourdieu, the Hermes of boat builders, founded in 1800, where two young guys fussed over a stunning custom built yacht constructed of mahogany and white oak. Later, in Arcachon, after an easy ride past the town's port bristling with boat masts, and along the crowded beachfront sidewalk, I made good on my scooter promise. In fact, I was glad to be on a scooter instead of a bicycle as we sped up the winding roads to Arcachon's Winter Town (as opposed to its beachy Summer Town along the bay), with its hundreds of Victorian era villas in a pastiche of belvederes, balconies, palm trees and mimosa high above the water. The back lanes and overgrown plots of this residential neighborhood, founded in 1862 as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, opened a portal to another era when doctors believed consumption could be cured by the bay's maritime air, and wealthy European invalids believed in the restorative power of Champagne and a night at the quarter's Moorish style casino. Across a footbridge we found the St. Cecilia Observatory, a fragile looking 80 foot high steel tower built, with the help of Gustave Eiffel, in 1863. We climbed the stairs and watched the sun fall, spectacularly, across the bay and behind the Cap Ferret lighthouse where we began our ride. Lights along the coastline began to twinkle, leading to the ocean's wild expanse. Watching the seawater rush through the bay's narrow neck, I thought of Baudelaire's words, inscribed on a building I had noticed in the old town port earlier in the day: "Free man, you will always cherish the sea." Despite the magnificent view, we didn't linger. It was time for the aperitif. If You Go Bike rental outfits, trail maps, itineraries and cycle friendly lodging are available at bassin arcachon velo.com. Lovely small hotels, like La Maison du Bassin, lamaisondubassin.com (doubles from 140 euros, about 152 at 1.08 to the euro), on the less developed Cape side of the Bay fill up quickly, especially in the popular summer season. Bed and breakfasts like the Cap'acabana, capacabana.com (from 90 euros), a hilltop aerie with swimming pool are a good option, as is La Cabane de Pomme de Pin, chambres hotes cap ferret.com (from 200 euros). In Arcachon, upscale Hotel Ville d'Hiver (hotelvilledhiver.com) is in the restored 19th century waterworks of the city's atmospheric hilltop Winter Town (from 140 euros). A more basic nearby option is the Hotel Marinette, hotel marinette.com (from 45 euros). Chez Hortense (Avenue du Semaphore, Lege Cap Ferret; chez hortense.fr; dinner around 50 euros) is a local seafood institution. Our favorite bivalve feast, though, was at Cap au Large (Port de la Hume, Gujan Mestras, 33 5 56 66 18 12; seafood platters, 22 euros), a seafood purveyor and casual restaurant on the picturesque Port de la Hume owned by Sophie and David Dupuy, whose families have been oyster farmers and fishermen for six generations and who will also take you out to their oyster beds in the bay. Information: loeildubassin.com/596/degustation d huitres cap au large. What to Do The Cabane du Resinier is especially fun for children because the retirees who volunteer for the nonprofit that runs the ramshackle resin tappers cabin love to show off the various ephemera (a bee hive, local taxidermy, different kinds of resin) they've collected over the years; free admission. (Watch for signs off the D106 in Lege Cap Ferret, 33 6 28 41 03 98.) Teich Bird Reserve, reserve ornithologique du teich.com. A guided bird tour costs 12.50 euros; 9.30 euros for children (8 to 14). General admission, 7.90 euros; 5.70 euros for children 5 to 14. Great Dune of Pilat, La Teste de Buche; ladunedupilat.com. Climb to the top, especially at sunset, for a magnificent view over the bay.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
MILWAUKEE Pat Connaughton has crammed enough high flying acrobatics into his drives down the lane as a reserve guard for the Bucks that he was invited to compete in Saturday's slam dunk contest at N.B.A. All Star weekend. He loves playing for the Bucks. He loves playing for them so much, in fact, that he is planting roots. But unlike several teammates who have purchased homes in the Milwaukee area, Connaughton has gone a step further: He is tearing down a dilapidated duplex so he can replace it with a four story apartment building. "I'll try to own this forever," Connaughton, 27, said on a recent morning as he stepped inside the husk of the old duplex at the corner of North Milwaukee and East Knapp streets, just a few blocks from Fiserv Forum, where the Bucks play their home games. The structure was in an early phase of demolition. Workers were ripping down walls. The floor was covered with crushed plaster. But Connaughton could see the future: a three unit building full of modern amenities topped by a 3,132 square foot penthouse, which he plans to make his home. Want to be his neighbor? Connaughton is going to rent out the other two units. (Bucks employees can expect a discount.) He hopes to complete the project by midsummer. If the Bucks win a championship, the parade can launch from his new pad. "I'll have a housewarming party to kick it off," Connaughton said. Some athletes moonlight as musicians. Others dabble in fashion or film or technology. Connaughton has been building a second career in real estate through his development company, Beach House LLC, which is a family affair. His father, Len, is the vice president, and Joe Stanton, a childhood friend, is the director of project management. The company owns four properties and sold two others in Portland, Ore., where Connaughton spent three seasons playing for the Trail Blazers. Beach House also owns three properties and sold another in South Bend, Ind., where Connaughton was a two sport star at Notre Dame. And in Milwaukee, he has two projects in the works, including the apartment building near the arena. Connaughton purchased the property, which had been vacant for months, for 325,000, and he expects the rebuild to cost an additional 800,000. "I'll drop by three or four times a week," said Connaughton, who is currently renting a high rise apartment near the Lake Michigan waterfront. "But Joe is my roommate. So I hear about it every single day." Connaughton is talking, too. He is spreading the gospel of real estate across the N.B.A. by preaching the virtues of "brick and mortar, of tangible assets that won't disappear into thin air." More than a half dozen players have come aboard as Beach House investors, he said, dating to when he began his career with the Blazers. "I would have business meetings after practice, and guys in the locker room would be like, 'Where are you going?'" Connaughton said. "A few of my close buddies on the team were wanting to know more about it: 'Why is this second year guy trying to do stuff with his money when I've been in the league for five years and haven't done anything?'" Connaughton learned bits of the business from his father, who spent 30 years as a general contractor and developer in the Boston area. As a teenager, Connaughton would haul lumber and drywall on job sites. He did not exactly love the work. But while majoring in business management at Notre Dame, he began to see a future in the field. He now considers it his long term livelihood. Connaughton joined the Bucks last season on a two year deal worth 3.4 million, which is a terrific living by any human measure but modest by N.B.A. standards. Put it this way: For a self described "second round draft pick who's never had anything more than a minimum deal," real estate is more than a hobby. "This is what I do, and this is what I'll always do," he said. "But I think the coolest thing has been the interest from other guys in the N.B.A." When Connaughton was playing for the Blazers, he was a member of the "steam room mafia," as guard C.J. McCollum described it. And it's exactly what you think it is: dudes who would frequent the steam room. They had a lot of wide ranging "steam room talks," McCollum said in a telephone interview. One day, McCollum was telling Connaughton about his budding interest in real estate. It was like catnip for Connaughton, who started cluttering McCollum's email inbox with information about everything from purchasing land to acquiring permits. "As things heated up and we continued to learn more about it together, I essentially told him, 'I would love to partner up on something,'" McCollum said. "And he was like, 'When I have something that I'm interested in, I'll send it your way.'" McCollum is now one of several investors in a multiuse building that Beach House purchased not far from Notre Dame's campus. McCollum did his homework. "I must have talked to C.J.'s financial team four or five times," Connaughton said. "It's one of our biggest projects to date." Construction is scheduled to begin in a month. McCollum hopes to check on its progress when he joins Connaughton for a football game at Notre Dame this fall. As McCollum has continued to expand his own real estate portfolio, he has gotten a sense of Connaughton's growing reach. McCollum recalled a recent meeting he had with the developer Don Peebles, whose company, The Peebles Corporation, cites projects worth about 8 billion. At one point during their conversation, McCollum mentioned that he was involved in a project with Connaughton. Connaughton is still learning. Before construction could begin on his apartment building in Milwaukee, he had to make a pair of appearances before members of the city's historic preservation commission. A past president of the city's preservation alliance had sought to prevent the demolition of the existing building, a duplex from the late 1800s. Connaughton's second trip to City Hall to speak before the commission was in December. He wanted to attach his face to the project to pre empt the perception that he was just some high profile out of towner looking to make a quick buck "The one thing that's kind of been a little bit frustrating on my end," he told the commission, "is that it seems to be assumed that the goal is to put as many units and as many moneymaking operations on the property as possible when, in fact, the goal is to put a very tasteful building that can help continue to grow the city of Milwaukee." Peter Feigin, the president of the Bucks, was among those who accompanied Connaughton to the hearing. He kept glancing at his watch. The Bucks had a game against the Orlando Magic that night. The commission eventually allowed the project to move forward by unanimous vote. "I was more worried than he was," Feigin said. "I was sitting next to Pat, like, 'You've got to get out of here.' But I also knew how important it was for him to be there."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times BLOCK ISLAND, R.I. The towering machines stand a few miles from shore, in a precise line across the seafloor, as rigid in the ocean breeze as sailors reporting for duty. The blades are locked in place for now, but sometime in October, they will be turned loose to capture the power of the wind. And then, after weeks of testing and fine tuning, America's first offshore wind farm will begin pumping power into the New England electric grid. By global standards, the Block Island Wind Farm is a tiny project, just five turbines capable of powering about 17,000 homes. Yet many people are hoping its completion, with the final blade bolted into place at the end of last week, will mark the start of a new American industry, one that could eventually make a huge contribution to reducing the nation's climate changing pollution. The idea of building turbines offshore, where strong, steady wind could, in theory, generate large amounts of power, has long been seen as a vital step toward a future based on renewable energy. Yet even as European nations installed thousands of the machines, American proposals ran into roadblocks, including high costs, murky rules about the use of the seafloor, and stiff opposition from people who did not want their ocean views marred by machinery. "People have been talking about offshore wind for decades in the United States, and I've seen the reaction eyes roll," Jeffrey Grybowski said last week in an interview on Block Island. "The attitude was, 'It's not going to happen; you guys can't do it.'" Mr. Grybowski and the company he runs, Deepwater Wind of Providence, R.I., have now done it. They had a lot of help from the political leadership of Rhode Island, which has seized the lead in this nascent industry, ahead of bigger states like New York and Massachusetts. Now, offshore wind may be on the verge of rapid growth in the United States. Using a law passed by a Republican led Congress in 2005 and signed by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has been clarifying the ground rules and leasing out large patches of the ocean floor for wind power development. Nearly two dozen projects are on the drawing board, with some potentially including scores of turbines. Equally important, state governments in recent months have been making big, new commitments to renewable power, driven by a rising sense of urgency about climate change. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York set a goal of getting 50 percent of the state's power from renewable sources by 2030, and the state will probably need large offshore wind farms to help achieve that. In Massachusetts, a Republican governor, Charlie Baker, just signed a bipartisan bill ordering the state's utilities to develop contracts with offshore wind farms for an immense amount of power, 50 times the expected output of the Block Island Wind Farm. Other states are looking at wind power, too, and studies by the Department of Energy suggest that many thousands of these turbines may eventually ring the United States coastline. If that sounds ambitious, consider that the country has installed some 50,000 wind turbines on land over the past two decades. They now supply roughly 5 percent of the nation's electric power, a figure that reaches double digits in particularly windy states like Kansas and Iowa. The turbines are easier and cheaper to build on land. But the wind is also weaker on land, and the power the machines produce there is intermittent. The stronger breezes in the ocean can produce steadier power, potentially helping to balance out intermittent renewable sources like solar panels and onshore turbines. The technology has been proved in Europe, where offshore wind farms as large as 300 turbines are being developed, with each turbine costing up to 30 million to build, install and connect to the power grid. But the first major proposal in the United States, an immense project off Cape Cod that was to be called Cape Wind, was too big 130 turbines and too close to shore, many experts now believe. It drew ferocious opposition from oceanfront homeowners, gradually lost political support in Massachusetts and appears unlikely to go forward. The focus is still on the Northeast. That region has dense cities with strong electrical demand, high power prices, opposition to new power plants on land and some of the world's stiffest ocean breezes off the coast. And the water remains relatively shallow many miles from shore, so wind farms could be installed far enough away that most of them would not be visible from the beaches. With Northeastern states committing to the idea, the big question is: How much would it cost to get thousands of offshore turbines up and running? When the first offshore projects were built two decades ago, European nations had to promise the developers extremely high prices for the electricity generated by their turbines, sometimes three or four times the wholesale power price, to get a new industry going. Since then, offshore wind turbines have become a big business in Europe, worth billions, and the companies installing them have been able to create economies of scale. Recently, European nations have scrapped their old subsidy methods and have used competitive bidding to drive down the cost of the projects. In some ways, the United States benefited by waiting for the industry to mature, as it can now take advantage of those falling costs. Installation is still pricier here than in Europe, and may be for a while, because few American companies have invested in the boats and other gear necessary to do the work. The Block Island turbines were built overseas by a division of General Electric and were installed by a ship from Norway, brought over at a cost of millions of dollars, with help from an American vessel. But Block Island is a rustic vacation spot where residents turned out to be largely supportive of the project. Not only does it help the environment, but it will connect their power grid to the mainland for the first time, giving them a more reliable supply. Competitors are moving to challenge Deepwater Wind for the coming wave of offshore contracts, but the company hopes to hold its lead and win the next project, a proposed wind farm 36 miles off Montauk, N.Y., meant to supply the power hungry South Fork of Long Island. "I do believe that starting small has made sense," said Mr. Martin, who is also Deepwater Wind's chairman. "I would say that the next projects are going to be substantially bigger."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Andy Murray is set to play Stan Wawrinka in the first round of the 2020 French Open: a major matchup that could never have taken place so early at a Grand Slam tournament when both were at their peaks for much of the last decade. It remains remarkably unclear how many fans will get to see them in person. "Life works in funny ways sometimes," said Daniel Vallverdu, who coached Murray and is now coaching Wawrinka. 2020 has been particularly strange, and this pandemic edition of the French Open is no exception. It was postponed from its traditional May and June dates to September and October because of the tennis tour hiatus. Though the draw went ahead as scheduled in Paris on Thursday, French Open organizers are still facing big questions about this year's event less than 72 hours before it is scheduled to begin on Sunday. The initial plan (after the postponement) was to host as many as 20,000 spectators per day at Roland Garros Stadium. But a resurgence in coronavirus cases in France in recent weeks has forced the tournament leadership to significantly reduce the number of people on site. On Wednesday, Olivier Veran, France's health minister, announced that large planned events in many parts of France, including the Paris region, would be limited to no more than 1,000 people beginning Saturday. Though the French Open was still planning on hosting 5,000 spectators per day, that now seems unlikely if it does indeed go ahead. . On Thursday after the draw, Jean Castex, the French prime minister, said in a French television appearance that the 1,000 person daily limit applied not only to fans but to all accredited personnel on site. That would include players and their team members, officials, security workers, reporters, broadcast technicians and others. According to the French Tennis Federation, the number of those accredited far exceeds the 1,000 person limit. "There is no reason we would not apply the same rules to everyone," Castex said, when pressed on the issue. "It's up to them to determine." he said of the French Open organizers when asked if the tournament could go ahead with the new restrictions. "Based on the information they gave me, the answer is yes." Earlier on Thursday, Bernard Giudicelli, president of the French Tennis Federation, told French reporters that the tournament would go ahead and late Thursday night, L'Equipe, the French sports site, reported that Castex had misspoken and that the 1,000 limit only applied to spectators, not to those accredited, all of whom have been required to record a negative coronavirus test before accessing the site. Forget is arguing that the tournament has both the space and the requisite health and safety protocols to still host crowds of up to 5,000 daily. "We are playing this tournament outdoors on the equivalent of 15 soccer fields," Forget said. "Everybody is wearing a mask, even the ball persons and the chair umpires." The French Open, like the United States Open, is the primary source of funding for its domestic tennis federation, with French tennis relying on the profits at the local and professional levels. According to Agence France Presse, approximately 80 percent of the French Tennis Federation's annual budget of 325 million euros ( 379 million) in 2019 came from the tournament. There were 520,000 spectators in 2019, accounting for about 18 percent of the French Open's total revenue. There will also be major losses in sponsor hospitality and merchandising, but as with the U.S. Open, which finished on Sept. 13 and was played without spectators, broadcast rights revenue would remain largely untouched. Those rights are worth about 80 million euros ( 93.3 million) annually, according to A.F.P. Fans or no fans, if the tournament goes ahead it will have first round matchups to savor. Murray and Wawrinka are both three time major champions, and they last played at the French Open in 2017 with Wawrinka defeating Murray, then ranked No. 1, in five grinding sets. Murray's hip condition was becoming a major issue at that stage, and he would eventually require two surgeries. Wawrinka was developing knee problems that forced him to undergo surgery later in 2017. Both have yet to return to the fore. Murray is ranked 111 and required a wild card to play in the French Open. Wawrinka, the 2015 French Open champion, is still seeded 16th. He and Murray practiced together earlier this week on Philippe Chatrier Court, which has been rebuilt since they last played and now has a retractable roof. "Been a long journey to get back on Court Philippe Chatrier," Murray wrote on Instagram. "Three and a half years since I played Stan Wawrinka in a brutal five set semifinal which turned out to be the end of my hip." That was shortly before the draw threw them back together again. "You can't make it up," Vallverdu said. "It's like John Isner and Nicolas Mahut playing back to back years at Wimbledon after the longest match in history." Murray vs. Wawrinka will not be the only men's first round match between Grand Slam singles champions. Dominic Thiem, who joined that club earlier this month by winning the United States Open, will face Marin Cilic, another former U.S. Open champion. Thiem, seeded No. 3, was also placed in the same half of the draw as Rafael Nadal, who has won a record 12 French Open singles titles and will play the 83rd ranked Egor Gerasimov in the first round. Alexander Zverev, the powerful German who lost to Thiem in the U.S. Open final and has had considerable success on clay, is also in that half. Nadal defeated Thiem in the last two French Open finals, and they and No. 1 Novak Djokovic are considered the main threats for the men's title this year. While Nadal and Thiem could be on course for a semifinal match, Djokovic has what appears to be an easier path. He will face Mikael Ymer of Sweden in the first round and has No. 5 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas in his quarter of the draw and No. 4 Daniil Medvedev in his half. But Medvedev, the flat hitting and tactic shifting Russian, has a losing tour record on clay. In the women's tournament, Serena Williams got a rematch with Kristie Ahn, a fellow American, in the first round. Williams defeated Ahn in the first round of this year's U.S. Open on her way to the semifinals, where she was beaten by Victoria Azarenka. Williams won the French Open in 2002, 2013 and 2015, but clay remains her weakest surface and she withdrew in the fourth round in 2018 and lost in the third round in 2019 to Sofia Kenin of the United States.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Last season, when Yannick Nezet Seguin's tenure as the Metropolitan Opera's music director began, audiences had to wait more than two months for him to actually conduct something. It was worth the wait. He led a fresh, elegant and gripping account of Verdi's "La Traviata." This season the waiting period has been much shorter. On Thursday, just 10 days after the Met's season opened with a splendid and timely new production of Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," Mr. Nezet Seguin led an exciting and insightful account of Puccini's "Turandot," a revival of Franco Zeffirelli's glittering, over the top and popular 1987 production. The strong cast was headed by the blazing soprano Christine Goerke as Puccini's icy Princess Turandot, the ardent tenor Yusif Eyvazov as Calaf, and the plush voiced soprano Eleonora Buratto as Liu. The chorus, during the crowd scenes, sounded superb. What stood out, though, was the textured, tart and lushly beautiful playing Mr. Nezet Seguin drew from the orchestra. He seemed intent on making a case for Puccini's final opera, first performed in 1926, nearly two years after the composer's death, as a musically daring score as contemporary, in its way, as any other opera of the 1920s. Though this was a great night for Mr. Nezet Seguin and the Met, it was also somewhat frustrating. As with last season, he will conduct just three works this season: a new production of Berg's "Wozzeck" comes in late December, and Massenet's "Werther" next spring. On balance, audiences should be grateful he's on the scene at all, since he came to the rescue during a crisis in 2018 when James Levine was fired over allegations of sexual harassment (allegations he has denied). Mr. Nezet Seguin, who had been tapped to become music director starting with the 2020 21 season, agreed to start two years early. But his busy schedule as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra was already fixed. Indeed, even as he leads "Turandot" at the Met, he will be conducting performances with the Philadelphia players at home, and, on Oct. 15, at Carnegie Hall. On Oct. 19 he leads the matinee of "Turandot" at the Met, then dashes to Philadelphia for a concert with the orchestra that night, including Mahler's demanding Fifth Symphony. Conducting fine performances and maintaining the excellence of musicians and company members are the most essential parts of being a music director. But it's just as important to shape long term artistic priorities. Mr. Nezet Seguin has talked up some enticing commissions and creative initiatives; we will have to wait and see. On Thursday, from the scene setting orchestra burst that begins Act I of "Turandot," set in Peking in legendary times, Mr. Nezet Seguin seemed determined to plumb below the brassy, slashing vehemence of the music and reveal its inner secrets. The steady slicing chords that back up the stern proclamation of a mandarin to the people of Peking regarding Turandot's bloody edict (that all her potential suitors must answer three riddles or pay with their lives) were dispatched with eerie steadiness at a compellingly reined in tempo. As the music shifted into passages of velvety richness and tremulous sonorities, Mr. Nezet Seguin drew out Impressionist colorings and harmonic pungencies . Crucial details in the music, including clashing dissonances that juice the chords, came through with startling clarity. Mr. Nezet Seguin tried, it seemed, to reveal not just musical but psychological complexities in the music. His approach allowed the cast to dig deeper as well and search for subtleties. Mr. Eyvazov has slimmed down noticeably on Instagram you can see videos of him working out. He looked the part of a dashing, foolishly impulsive young prince who knows how twisted Turandot is but still finds himself hooked by her menacing allure. His voice on this night seemed a little leaner in sound than in previous appearances. But his singing had rich, reedy coloring and youthful ardor, and his soaring phrases with big high notes carried well. Ms. Buratto was an endearing, vocally lovely Liu, the slave who has chosen to accompany and protect Timur, the vanquished king of Tartary, and Calaf's father, simply because one day, long ago, Calaf smiled at her. Liu has to convince you of her rationale for living in the Act I aria, when she pleads with Calaf to put aside his obsession with Turandot and join her and Timur (here, the veteran bass baritone James Morris) on their lonely journey. Ms. Buratto shaped the phrases with melting sound and lyrical grace. Ms. Goerke took a little time to warm up during Turandot's daunting aria "In questa reggia," when she explains the origins of her hatred of men. But after a couple of under pitch high notes, she found her groove and sang the role with steely sound and chilling intensity. And during the tense scene when she poses her riddles to Calaf, who answers them correctly, Ms. Goerke already showed a crack in her ice, a moment of vulnerability, to this stranger, even as she registered horror at the thought of him claiming her.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
AS in Christmases past, Redge Hanes had a meal with his relatives gathered at the family seat in Winston Salem, N.C. They number about 90 these days and are all descendants from the Hanes who started the hosiery company. The knitting company of T shirt renown was started by a great uncle. "All of the Hanes family was from North Carolina from the early 1700s," Mr. Hanes said. "Some have moved to live and work in other places. But this is their touchstone." Like many well known families that have stayed wealthy over the generations, the Haneses have stories the kind that bind but also ones that illuminate their highs and lows. "In the best families, the family is more important than anything else," said Donna Trammell, director of family wealth stewardship at Bessemer Trust, a firm founded in 1907 by Henry Phipps to manage his wealth from Carnegie Steel. It has grown to manage other people's money but is still controlled by his descendants. "This idea of getting together and sharing really galvanizes the family," Ms. Trammell said. "Understanding the family history is so incredibly important in rooting the family." As the holidays approached, I asked members of a few of the most famous families in America what lessons they had learned from their own gatherings. These are not the stories of the less fortunate that we often hear at this time. These people are the most fortunate. Unlike many families, which lose touch as time and distance separate them, the families have used their histories to stay together or at the very least, guide them as they make their own way. Franklin Delano Roosevelt III prefers to be called Frank. That's how his colleagues and students referred to him in his decades teaching economics at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County. But Mr. Roosevelt, slight and bearded, is a combination of two great American families: the Roosevelts, which produced two presidents, including his namesake and grandfather, the 32nd president of the United States; and the DuPonts, manufacturers of gunpowder in the 19th century and chemicals today, on his mother's side. (His wife is a descendant of Charles Goodyear, who invented the process of vulcanizing rubber in the 19th century.) When he thinks of influences on his life, he points to his grandmother Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he came to know in the last years of her life. He was a student at Yale, and she was a well known international figure, having been a United Nations delegate and proponent of women's rights. "I was halfway through college before I realized that my grandmother was not just your ordinary grandmother," he said. "She would send me a small check for 10 or 15 every summer for my birthday with a personal note saying, 'Frankie, here's something for you; I'd like to see more of you.' In the summer of 1959, I wrote her back saying I'd like to see more of you." They met up regularly the last three years of her life. "She was a global force for good," Mr. Roosevelt said. "I don't want to attribute my whole attitude in the world just to her. But she had a big influence. I did become interested in issues of justice and fairness and poverty because of her." The influence of his own parents was more cautionary. After they divorced, he was sent off to boarding school at age 10. He saw his father, who was married four more times, during the summers. His mother, he said, was distant and unhappy. She committed suicide in her late 40s. "I remember the chef better than I remember my mother," he said. His own family took priority in his life. He has been married more than 50 years and has three children and eight grandchildren. "All three kids, in our view, have pretty good values, although none of them is into politics at all," he said. All families have triumphant stories and more complicated ones. Mr. Hanes's relatives include a head of the Duke University Medical School and an under secretary of the United States Treasury, who was also the founder of the New York Racing Association. But his grandfather James G. Hanes, a mayor of Winston Salem and civic leader, was also a founder of a group that sought to sterilize people deemed "mentally unfit." Mr. Hanes said he took from his relatives a strong work ethic. He said what stuck with him was the example set by his father, James Jr., who presided over the merged Hanes Corporation's substantial growth and also served as North Carolina state senator in the 1960s. "What parents say tends to bounce off of you, but watching the way they lived their life never does," he said. "My father worked extra hard. In his business and the way he treated other people, he had integrity and honesty." One lesson that stood out was when his father, as state senator, sued the county to force a park to integrate. It had been willed to Winston Salem for white residents by a descendant of R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco magnate, with the stipulation that any challenge would prompt the park to revert to the family. "It wasn't a good political move, but he said it was the right move," Mr. Hanes said. His father was subsequently voted out of office. After working in the family business, Mr. Hanes started his own company, the Xpres Corporation, which, among other things, had a system of printing the winning Super Bowl score on T shirts within hours. He expanded the business to 1,500 people and sold it in 2008. "The first and most important lesson was you were honest in everything that you do," he said. "You don't lie to people. There are some people who say all's fair in love and war. My family wasn't one of them." Winthrop H. Smith Jr.'s father died when he was 11, but his legacy guided the son's life. Mr. Smith's father worked behind the scenes with Charlie Merrill to help build Merrill Lynch into a brokerage firm that looked to focus on Main Street. Many of his lessons came from the people he met when he began working at Merrill after college. "I learned how important having integrity was and having a core set of principles," Mr. Smith said. After 28 years rising through the ranks, Mr. Smith said, his principles prompted him to give up a plum job as a vice chairman when E. Stanley O'Neal was appointed chief executive. "He didn't understand our culture or direction," Mr. Smith said. "I impulsively said, 'Stan, I can't work for you, best of luck,' and I walked out. I got home that night and said, 'What did I do?' I had to do it because I wouldn't have felt good looking in the mirror." Mr. Smith says he was vindicated. Mr. O'Neal's actions led the firm to the brink of collapse during the financial crisis, prompting a fire sale to Bank of America. Today Mr. Smith owns the Sugarbush Ski Resort in Vermont, to which he tries to apply similar principles. "If you focus on the customer you have a winning strategy," he said. "If I'm pretending it's snowing when it's raining, that's not in the customer's interest he's going to have a lousy time." The family behind Johnson Johnson, maker of Band Aids and Tylenol, has had numerous and embarrassing public spats over the decades. Jazz Johnson, whose brother Jamie directed the trust fund tell all film "Born Rich," describes the family as being "an organization of thrill seekers who love alcohol and are borderline crazy." In her book "The Social Climber's Bible," written with her non Johnson uncle, Dirk Wittenborn, Ms. Johnson jokes about being 7 and asking why her grandparents were no longer married. "The answer: Grandpa had met and married an incredibly gifted social climber who, besides being a penniless Polish immigrant 41 years Grandpa's junior, also happened to be the upstairs maid," she wrote. The noncomic version includes a lengthy legal battle over her grandfather's 400 million estate when he died in 1983. Ms. Johnson said one of the things she learned from her family was to ignore people's backbiting, which led her to write her tongue in cheek book about social climbing. "What happens whether you're wealthy or not is people are never satisfied," said Ms. Johnson, who runs her family's 2,000 acre farm in New Jersey. "People are compelled to climb the ladder." Today, Ms. Johnson, 36 and married with children, says she finds the formal Johnson family meetings educational and fascinating. Very little time, she said, was spent talking about the family fortune. "Because we're so close, we go through these exercises to get to understand the other's perspective and how other perspectives fit into the mix and can be applied to family interactions," she said. "Everyone is so different, but we get along well." She added, "Forget money. One of the great luxuries of big families is you always have your family members to fall back on."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
Americans who watched the political conventions on television opted for news networks with partisan fan bases to a degree unseen in recent years, another sign of an increasingly divided electorate as the nation hurtles toward the November election. Fox News, whose prime time is a destination for conservatives, accounted for close to half 45 percent of the viewership of the Republican National Convention this week across the six major news networks, Nielsen said on Friday. In 2016, that figure was about 30 percent; in 2012, 36 percent. MSNBC, whose prime time is popular with liberals, accounted for about 30 percent of Democratic National Convention viewership last week across the six networks which also include ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC up from roughly 18 percent in 2016 and 2012. During the Republican convention, MSNBC lost about 70 percent of its average viewership from the Democratic conclave. Fox News's average viewership more than tripled. Television viewers' turn to perceived safe spaces raises questions about the ability of political conventions which reached a broader TV audience in the pre internet era to persuade undecided voters. And it underscores fears about a polarized information environment where Americans can receive little exposure to political ideas that run counter to their own. "It speaks to the larger point that we are siloed in our media choices," David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and CNN political analyst, said in an interview. "We're a polarized country, and that is reflected in the media choices we make. We have the opportunity to create virtual reality worlds that affirm our points of view." A nightly average of 21.6 million people watched the Democratic convention on live TV, compared with 19.4 million for the Republicans. The total television audience for both conventions fell roughly 25 percent from 2016, a sign of Americans' increasing reliance on online outlets and streaming services to follow live events. Neither candidate attracted the number of viewers who tuned in four years ago for Mr. Trump's acceptance speech (32.2 million) or Hillary Clinton's (29.8 million). Because Nielsen excludes streaming views which are difficult to credibly capture its ratings reflect the habits of an older slice of the population that still watches traditional TV. Some political analysts argue that Nielsen ratings are an irrelevant indicator, given the role of social media and other online platforms in the country's media ecosystem. 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. Still, Americans' TV habits over the past two weeks offer a glimpse of a cross section of likely voters. Fox News's dominance during the Republican convention was striking. Its audience on Thursday, for Mr. Trump's climactic speech, was nearly 9.2 million, close to a prime time record for the network. That was more viewers than watched ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC combined. Though the channel's most popular hosts support Mr. Trump, Fox News viewers heard some critical commentary about the president on Thursday. The anchor Chris Wallace called Mr. Trump's speech "surprisingly flat" and "far too long." Brit Hume, an analyst, said the president "seemed to miss the excitement that he generates in himself when he's ad libbing." Even the pro Trump host Laura Ingraham, after calling the president's speech "incredible" and "electric," conceded to viewers, "Some are saying it was a little too long." On MSNBC, three Trump critics Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Nicolle Wallace lambasted the president's address and interrupted the convention for several fact checking segments. The channel's ratings for the Republican convention were among its lowest prime time weeks of the year. For the Democratic convention, the picture was sharply reversed. MSNBC clocked its highest rated prime time week in the network's 24 year history, with a 10 p.m. average of 5.7 million viewers. Fox News's viewership fell far below its usual prime time average. "What we saw in the last presidential election was that Clinton supporters distributed their attention much more evenly among a broader range of outlets, and Trump supporters concentrated much more heavily on Fox News," said Yochai Benkler, a co director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet Society at Harvard Law School. "The fact you have such a high proportion of viewers of the Democratic convention on MSNBC does suggest, to some extent, a gravitation on the Democratic side toward a more partisan, viewpoint reinforcing network," Mr. Benkler said. For Mr. Axelrod, an architect of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns who helped oversee Democratic conventions in 2008 and 2012, the Nielsen trends speak to a wider development in the years since. "We are more polarized than we were in 2012 and 2008," he said. "The elasticity in the electorate is even less. It wasn't great then; it's even less now." Mr. Benkler wondered how many truly undecided voters had tuned into the conventions in the first place. "It's just a very, very small slice of the American public who have not yet made up its mind to go for Trump or not," he said. "They aren't going to be the news junkies that spend their time on 24 hour cable news channels."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Mr. Peck's decor, by the French (Brooklyn based) painter Jules de Balincourt, is in bright Fauve colors: a view of trees, landscape and sky, seen through a fencelike foreground of fauna. The scale and proportions are intriguingly confused: Are these trees or are we low down and looking at flowers? The 10 dancers are individually dressed by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung in horizontal stripes, maybe like those of bees, but in multiple bright colors to match the set. Most have one layer of strands (at chest or pelvis level) that fly out entertainingly. This is comedy, even romantic comedy, but you keep asking, "What's going on here?" Although the dancers sometimes return to a cluster (the swarm or hive?), they often erupt in subgroups (sometimes same sex pairs, as when Daniel Applebaum lifts Anthony Huxley high in the air at speed). At the beginning, Brittany Pollack (a strong, bold soloist, here at her most seriously forceful) and Taylor Stanley (a young principal whose wild freedom often makes him the company's most individual dancer) stand apart, as if wondering how they fit into the group and what to make of each other. Matters are complicated when the prodigious Mr. Huxley (another young principal, in whom stylish classicism often seems exhilaratingly inflamed) takes an interest; but there's also a central, investigative getting to know you Pollack Stanley pas de deux. In the outer sections, formations keep changing so fluently that, when it's over, you hardly know a quarter of what you've seen; but the ending is a nice touch of neatness, with the 10 dancers finally becoming five male female couples, something you never quite imagined happening until it does. Mr. Peck has learned from Balanchine the fun of math as drama: the sheer arithmetic and geometry of the evolving stage events here are central to the entertainment. More important, though, he keeps learning the Balanchine lesson of liberating energy. ("What are you saving it for?" Balanchine would often ask.) It's not unusual to find that a Peck ballet shows City Ballet dancers looking both motivated and unleashed as they are here. These 10 look happily on fire, but it's Ms. Pollack whose audacity acquires a new definition and maturity. Amid the huge ovation, the biggest cheers were for Mr. Peck. The occasion of the "Scherzo Fantastique" premiere was the company's annual gala at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. City Ballet's two week season here is its golden anniversary one. When the company first appeared at Saratoga in 1966, Lincoln Kirstein, who had brought Balanchine to the United States in 1933 and with him created and steered the company, said: "We are in summer residence in what I firmly believe to be the greatest theater in the world for the spectacle of dancing."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
New Phone Friendly Version of Financial Aid Form Is Coming Out The notoriously difficult to fill out federal financial aid form known as Fafsa is going mobile. And, the federal Education Department says, it should be easier to use. The latest version of the document, formally called the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, will be available next month on a new phone app and on a revamped website that works well on mobile devices. The digital options, announced late last year, mean that anyone with a smartphone should be able to complete the form with less hassle. About 95 percent of Americans have some sort of mobile phone, according to the Federal Student Aid office, an arm of the Education Department. The Fafsa has been available online for years. But students and their families generally needed a desktop computer to complete the form because it didn't work smoothly on mobile devices. "It was clunky to use on a phone," said Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Access Network, which promotes college for minority and low income students. The form, which calculates how much students and their families are expected to pay for college, is the gateway for federal student aid, and is used by states and schools as well. Students who file a Fafsa are more likely to attend college, so anything that encourages them to submit the form is welcome, Ms. Cook said. The Education Department this summer introduced the mobile friendly Fafsa.gov website, which automatically adjusts to fit on phones and tablets, as well as a test version of the myStudentAid app, which includes the Fafsa. The new app is getting good marks, including from groups recruited to try it by Ms. Cook's nonprofit group. It's especially helpful, student advocates say, that the form can be started on one device say, a smartphone and completed on another, perhaps a computer. That means students and their parents can work on the form separately, Ms. Cook said. They don't have to be sitting down in front of a computer at the same time. "It got good reviews," Ms. Cook said of the app. The app presents one question per screen, which makes the form less intimidating, said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert. "It was actually fun to complete," Mr. Kantrowitz said. "It makes completing the Fafsa much easier." The testers did flag some problems in the early version of the app. For instance, the college access network recommended that the app be more explicit in instructing both students and parents to sign the form. Crucially, the app doesn't yet allow automatic transfer of financial information from the Internal Revenue Service's online Data Retrieval Tool, which makes it easier to accurately fill in financial details. Currently, users must use Fafsa.gov to take advantage of the I.R.S. tool. (While the website is now mobile friendly, the I.R.S. tool itself isn't "optimized" for mobile use, so that part of the process is still awkward, Ms. Cook said. Users must "scroll and zoom" to see all fields.) The updated app, which will be released next month, will offer the I.R.S. tool with "full functionality," according to an Education Department spokesman. Here are some questions and answers about the Fafsa: When can I use the new mobile Fafsa app? The revised app is scheduled to become available Oct. 1, when the new Fafsa for the 2019 20 school year is released. The myStudentAid app can be downloaded from Apple's App Store or from Google Play for Android devices. The test app is available now for anyone who still wants to submit a Fafsa for the current academic year. But because the app doesn't support the I.R.S. data tool, Diane Cheng, research director at the Institute for College Access and Success, advises students and their parents to avoid using it for 2018 19. Rather, she recommends using the website, which allows automatic transfer of financial information with the I.R.S. tool, reducing the chance of errors that may delay processing of the form.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
When Ronald Braunstein conducts an orchestra, there's no sign of his bipolar disorder. He's confident and happy. Music isn't his only medicine, but its healing power is potent. Scientific research has shown that music helps fight depression, lower blood pressure and reduce pain. The National Institutes of Health has a partnership with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts called Sound Health: Music and the Mind, to expand on the links between music and mental health. It explores how listening to, performing or creating music involves brain circuitry that can be harnessed to improve health and well being. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said: "We're bringing neuroscientists together with musicians to speak each other's language. Mental health conditions are among those areas we'd like to see studied." Mr. Braunstein, 63, has experienced the benefits of music for his own mental health and set out to bring them to others by founding orchestras in which the performers are all people affected by mental illness. Upon graduating from the Juilliard School in his early 20s, he entered a summer program at the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria, and in 1979 became the first American to win the prestigious Karajan International Conducting Competition in Berlin. His career took off. He worked with orchestras in Europe, Israel, Australia and Tokyo. At the time, he didn't have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. But looking back, he can see that his disorder contributed to his success, and his talent masked the condition. "The unbelievable mania I experienced helped me win the Karajan," he said. "I learned repertoire fast. I studied through the night and wouldn't sleep. I didn't eat because if I did, it would take away my edge." "My bipolar disorder was just under the line of being under control," he said. "It wasn't easily detected. Most people thought I was weird." He always sensed something was askew. When he was 15, his father took him to a doctor who diagnosed "bad nerves" and prescribed Valium. As his career progressed, things starte d to unravel, an d his behavior grew increasingly erratic . He was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at age 35. His manager dropped him as a client, and he was fired from a conducting job in Vermont. It was there he met Caroline Whiddon, who had been the chairwoman of the Youth Orchestra Division of the League of American Orchestras. She had been given a diagnosis of depression and anxiety disorder more than 20 years earlier, and had played French horn professionally, which she described as "a notorious instrument that's known for breaking people." Mr. Braunstein reached out to her about creating an orchestra that welcomed musicians with mental illnesses and family members and friends who support them. "I never thought I'd go back to playing French horn again," she said. "Ronald gave me back the gift of music." Mr. Braunstein called his new venture the Me2/Orchestra, because when he told other musicians about his mental health diagnosis, they'd often respond, "Me too." Since the term MeToo is now associated with sexual assault cases, people sometimes ask if the orchestra is connected to that cause. "It gives us an opportunity to explain that we were founded in 2011," in Burlington, Vt., "before the Me Too movement began," Ms. Whiddon said. In 2014 , a second orchestra, Me2/Boston, was created. In between, in 2013, Mr. Braunste in and Ms. Whiddon got married. Each orchestra performs between six and eight times a year. Each has about 50 musicians, both amateur and professional, ranging in age from 13 to over 80, and they rehearse once a week. New affiliate ensembles in Portland, Ore., and Atlanta follow similar schedules. Mr. Braunstein gives free private lessons to those who want to polish their skills. Me2/Orchestra is a nonprofit, and the musicians are all volunteers. Ms. Whiddon raises money through an annual letter writing campaign to cover expenses, with support from more than 100 donors. "When we perform at a hospital, center for the homeless or correctional facility," Ms. Whiddon said, "the cost of that performance is covered by corporate sponsorships, grants or donations from individuals, so the performance is free to those who attend." Participating in Me2/Boston allowed Nancy Lee Mauger, age 55, to pick up the French horn again. The note on the rehearsal door "This is a stigma free zone" made her feel welcome. Ms. Mauger had played French horn until her mental illness made it impossible to perform. She has diagnoses of dissociative identity disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and depression. "In 2009, I was playing a Christmas Eve gig," she said. "It was at the same church, with the same quintet, choir and music that I had played every Christmas Eve for 15 years. This particular night felt different. I had trouble focusing my eyes. At one point, I could not read music or play my horn." It lasted about two minutes, and she thought she was having a stroke. In fact, it was her mental illness. "I learned that little parts of me would come out and try to play my horn during gigs," she said. "The problem was that they didn't know how to play. This became such an obvious problem that I quit." Now, after four years of intensive therapy, she is able to play again. At each performance, a few musicians briefly talk about their mental illnesses and take questions from the audience. "Instead of thinking people with mental illnesses are lazy or dangerous, they see what we're capable of," Mr. Braunstein said. "It has a positive effect on all of us." Jessica Stuart, now 34, stopped playing violin in her mid 20s when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. "Joining the Me2/Orchestra in Boston in 2014 was the first time I had played in years," she said. "I cannot count the ways the orchestra helps me. It has allowed me to overcome the shame I felt about living with mental illness. I no longer feel I have to hide an important part of my life from the rest of the world." Jessie Bodell, a 26 year old flute player who has borderline personality disorder, said he finds rehearsals fun, relaxed and democratic. He noted that unlike most orchestras, Me2 doesn't have first, second or third positions. "There isn't an underlying, tense, competitive feeling here," he said. "We've seen when you sing or play an instrument, it doesn't just activate one part of your brain," said Dr. Collins of the National Institutes of Health. "A whole constellation of brain areas becomes active. Our response to music is separate from other interventions such as asking people to recall memories or listen to another language." Partnering with Dr. Collins on Sound Health is Renee Fleming, the renowned soprano and artistic adviser to the Kennedy Center. "The first goal is to move music therapy forward as a discipline," she said. "The second is to educate the public and enlighten people about the power of music to heal." So far the initiative is investigating how music could help Parkinson's patients walk with a steady gait, help stroke survivors regain the ability to speak, and give cancer patients relief from chronic pain. "The payoff," Dr. Collins said, is to "improve mental health. We know music shares brain areas with movement, memory, motivation and reward. These things are hugely important to mental health, and researchers are trying to use this same concept of an alternate pathway to address new categories of mental disorders."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
Prime time TV viewers first got to know Donald J. Trump delivering his catchphrase, "You're fired," in the boardroom of "The Apprentice." But firing wasn't all that he did on that show. He also gave away prizes: helicopter rides, trips to Mar a Lago and in each season's finale, a job. Later, in the "Celebrity Apprentice" years, he'd grant donations to the winners' chosen charities. That was the other half of the brand that the TV magic of "Apprentice" created for him. On the one hand, the blunt, fearsome boss cutting the deadwood; on the other, the beaming benefactor, handing out boons. The recipients would thank him, praise him, compliment him. He was the center of the story; he got a piece of the deal, too. In a series of taped segments, the Republican National Convention has tried to resurrect that Donald Trump for prime time: the president as gracious, generous host; the benefits of democracy (citizenship, a pardon, a presidential audience, freedom itself) as the prizes; the White House in potential violation of the Hatch Act as his soundstage. Monday night, the program had Mr. Trump meet with a group of Covid 19 frontline workers and a group of American hostages, released from captivity overseas. Tuesday's installments used presidential powers even more brazenly as campaign favors. First, he granted a pardon to Jon Ponder, a felon who founded Hope for Prisoners, a group that helps the once incarcerated re enter society. Later, he spoke at a naturalization ceremony for five immigrants, welcoming them to "our great American family." Both segments were deeply emotional, embodying the chance for reinvention that America offers at its best. They were also deeply cynical, illustrating how willing the president is to leverage the office for his own reinvention, via a TV production. The stunts were reminiscent of this year's State of the Union address, an extravaganza of surprise twists, in which Mr. Trump handed out a scholarship, arranged a viral video style military reunion and graced the right wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the R.N.C. pieces, he sometimes speaks off the cuff, sometimes from a script. But in his familiar TV host role, he seems more comfortable than he ordinarily does reading an address off a teleprompter. The segments are also conceived to dress up the president's image, and his reality. After a week of testimonies to Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s empathy, they show Mr. Trump smiling, congratulating, giving. They also smear Vaseline on the lens of his policy positions. His administration has been boldly putting restrictions on legal, not just illegal, immigration but just look at these five lucky winners! And putting Mr. Trump in close contact with his guests does visually what much of the convention has verbally: pretend like the pandemic is over. Even the meeting with essential workers took place with no masks, and no real social distancing. You can say that staging the segments this way is irresponsible for public health. (It is.) That might have political costs, too. Assuming viewers aren't ensorcelled into forgetting that Covid 19 exists, they're seeing the president indulging in the kind of behavior they've been asked, for months, to forgo for the public good even lately, if only occasionally, by Mr. Trump himself. (This might please voters who believe mask requirements are tyranny, but it looks like the president already has their votes.) Still, the staging gives Trump a rare asset in these times: images of him, in a room, close together with other people. It's an image of before times normalcy. You can see his facial reactions, and theirs. It is our accustomed visual shorthand for people listening and connecting we are wired to look for faces. You can't erase a lifetime of conditioning to this sort of image, even in half a year of a pandemic. Of course, putting Donald Trump in a room with other people carries the same risks it did before Covid. Yes, through the magic of pre taping, his responses can be made more coherent, his attitude easier and more attentive, the same way Mark Burnett imposed structure on his ramblings in the "Apprentice" boardroom. But even in edited form, Mr. Trump can't resist making things about him. The meeting with released foreign hostages becomes a round robin of praise offerings. (Again, much like those "Apprentice" boardrooms did.) Learning that one of the Covid frontline workers is a truck driver who hauled steel for hospital beds, Mr. Trump responds, "I love the truckers. You know, they're on my side. I think all of them, frankly." The reference to political support gives away the game, not that it was that subtly hidden to begin with. All of these displays of generosity and attention came with a condition: Do us a favor, though. Trump didn't have the power to make these kinds of deals in 2016. Now he does, but he also has a record. After four years of belligerence, insults and Twitter rages, can you suddenly remake him as Oprah? Likely not, which doesn't mean you can't create Oprah moments. The pardon segment was absorbing, mostly for how it centered Mr. Ponder and his personal journey. Unusually for a Donald Trump production, it let someone else be the star, as Mr. Ponder told us, "We live in a nation of second chances."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
NASHVILLE In real life, Nya Collins, Jade Fuller, Kennedy Green, Emma Rose Smith, Mikayla Smith and Zee Thomas had never met as a group when they came together on Twitter to organize a youth march against police violence. It was unseasonably hot, even for Middle Tennessee, with rain predicted, and earlier protests here had ended in violence, with the Metro Nashville Courthouse and City Hall in flames. Collectively, these are not the most promising conditions for gathering a big crowd, much less a calm one. But the teenagers were determined to press on, even if hardly anyone showed up. On June 4, five days later, the founding members of Teens for Equality as the young women, ages 14 to 16, call their organization were leading a march of protesters some 10,000 strong, according to police estimates. "I was astonished," Kennedy Green, 14, told me in a phone interview last week. "I did not know there were that many people in Nashville who actually see a problem with the system. I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, there are so many people here who actually care.'" The protesters, most in their teens and 20s, chanted "Black lives matter" and "No justice, no peace" and "Not one more" as they marched for more than five hours. There was not one hint of disarray in their ranks, no angry confrontations with National Guardsmen or police officers clad in riot gear. Nya Collins, Jade Fuller, Kennedy Green, Emma Rose Smith, Mikayla Smith and Zee Thomas are not alone. They belong to a long tradition of youth activists that includes the Children's Crusade of the American civil rights movement; the antiwar activists of the Vietnam era; the Pakistani women's education activist Malala Yousafzai; the gun control activists Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and other survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.; the Indigenous Canadian clean water activist Autumn Peltier and the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, just for starters. These young people are passionate about their causes and unwavering in their commitment to change. The world they have inherited is deeply troubled and desperately flawed, and they see with clear eyes both the errors of earlier generations and the hope of their own. Their power lies in the undeniable moral authority of youth: They did not cause the mess they have inherited, but they are rolling up their sleeves to clean it up. Above all, they are brave, enduring withering attacks by craven adults who hold no scruple against threatening children. You may argue that these activists are simply too young to understand the risks they are taking, but I think they know exactly what they are doing. What they are too young for is cynicism. What they are too young for is defeat. They are young enough to imagine a better future, to have faith in their own power to change the world for good. And that faith should give the rest of us more hope than we have had in years. Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book "Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss." 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.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
Dan Le Batard, the flame throwing host of sports television and radio shows, will leave ESPN in January, the company announced Thursday. "It was mutually agreed that it was best for both sides to move on to new opportunities, and we worked together closely to make that possible," Norby Williamson, an ESPN executive, said in a statement. Le Batard, 51, has written for ESPN or appeared on its shows for two decades, but became a mainstay on the network in 2011. That is when his television show originally titled "Dan Le Batard Is Highly Questionable" debuted on ESPN2. It later moved to the flagship ESPN channel, and the company also syndicated Le Batard's South Florida based radio show across the country on ESPN Radio. But Le Batard, the son of Cuban exiles who insists on speaking freely and takes immense pride in his independence, has repeatedly clashed with his bosses. Since he was named president in early 2018, Pitaro has sought to steer the network away from commentary that can be deemed political. He has said survey data shows fans don't want to hear political discussions on ESPN and has told employees to discuss politics only through the lens of sports. The strategy worked to quell some of the controversy that surrounded ESPN in 2017, when the "SportsCenter" host Jemele Hill called the president a white supremacist. But it began to seem less viable this summer, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis prompted topics of racism and police brutality to dominate the sports landscape. As The New York Times reported in July, some employees said they had been told to tone down their coverage of racial issues in sports. "It was never explicit, it was just sort of us reading the room," Elle Duncan, a "SportsCenter" anchor, said in The Times article. Le Batard's departure from ESPN somewhat parallels the experiences of Bill Simmons, who also carved out his own empire at the network but eventually split with the company after he antagonized his bosses once too often and the two sides couldn't come to an agreement when renegotiating his contract. Still, Le Batard seemed to recognize that he benefited considerably from his ties to the network. "One of the afflictions that comes with ego is the idea that you are responsible for your success and that ESPN isn't," he said on the radio in 2016, after "Any Given Wednesday" Simmons's post ESPN television show on HBO was canceled. "It is another reminder: 'Do not leave ESPN, man. ESPN is a monster platform that is responsible for all of our successes.'" Those comments, however, came before John Skipper, who had a strong relationship with Le Batard, resigned as ESPN's president and before Simmons sold The Ringer, his website and podcast network, to Spotify for a reported 200 million.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Re "Split Senate Clears Trump on Each Count in Finale of a Bitter Impeachment Battle" (front page, Feb. 6): Well, it's finally over, and now come the analyses and the blowback from the White House. And what was accomplished by the impeachment effort? A lot, I think. Some good, some bad. For one thing, the House Democratic leaders reminded us of who we are and what we are. Representative Adam Schiff's "Enough!" should echo through campaign ads all across the nation this fall. The most consequential accomplishment of the impeachment effort, I think, is that it did exactly what President Trump tried to do by pressuring the president of Ukraine. It dragged Joe Biden's name through the mud, and that helps explain Mr. Biden's poor showing in Iowa. So Mr. Trump seems to have a clear shot at being re elected. But there's a silver lining. At least some of the G.O.P. members of Congress who live in fear of Mr. Trump and who turned their backs on the Constitution will not be returning to Washington, and we're likely to see Democratic majorities elected in both the House and the Senate. Thank you, Adam Schiff, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Demings, Zoe Lofgren, Jason Crow, Sylvia Garcia and Jerry Nadler. Thank you for your hard work as House impeachment managers over the many long days and nights of the proceedings. Thank you for heartfelt and inspiring words. And, most of all, thank you for your deep knowledge of and belief in democracy and the Constitution. Thank you for reminding us that there are still people like you in Congress people of character who work every day to do what's right for our country. We now owe it to you to seek out and help elect more people like you in November. Thank goodness this ill conceived debacle of an impeachment has come to its inevitable end. It should be clear now that the program of resistance aimed at toppling President Trump has failed. If anything it has made him stronger. Let me suggest to the Democrats that the time has come to put aside your hatred of President Trump. That does not mean you should stop challenging him. By all means continue to challenge him, but challenge him in the arena of ideas. At the end of the day the party that succeeds will be the party that does the most to improve the lives of Americans. Let's remember that an acquittal does not mean the accused did not commit the offenses alleged, or suggest innocence, only that a jury for whatever reason, including the most shameless and self serving failed to convict. Re "An Act of Defiance by Romney Against a Party He'd Personified" (front page, Feb. 6): It is shocking for a senator of the United States to find it necessary to appear like a penitent schoolboy to explain his vote. It is alarming that currently many Americans seem eager to celebrate blind loyalty, and seek to punish those who exercise their rights to freedom of thought and speech. This is the path to tyranny. I applaud Senator Mitt Romney for his courage, but I grieve that he felt it necessary to explain. It should not have been so. Senator Mitt Romney said, "We're all footnotes at best in the annals of history." He is wrong. He is no footnote. It was easy for every Democrat to vote for President Trump's conviction, and it was easy for every Republican but him to vote to acquit. Both sides yielded to peer pressure and the herd mentality of their party. But Mr. Romney genuinely and unequivocally voted his conscience. He is no footnote. He is a shining light. Re "Republicans Clear Trump Out of Fear," by Senator Sherrod Brown (Op Ed, Feb. 6): Republican senators, you have hitched your wagon to a boat anchor, and he is dragging the G.O.P. to the bottom. President Trump is a self centered bully and liar who has no regard for propriety, morality, truth, scientific facts, history or the conventions that make our democracy work. You surely know this, just as you know that his famous call to Ukraine's president was far from "perfect." You found him innocent of the charges against him, yet I read that a number of you have serious concerns about his actions. Why not assert yourselves and express those concerns? Fifteen or so of you could band together and vote with Democrats to deliver a strong message of censure. Mr. Trump will bluster and tweet, but if you stick together, he will not hurt you, and history will note that the Senate had a spine and a moderate G.O.P. re emerged on this day. How about it? Now that President Trump has been acquitted, he will have three priorities: his re election campaign, his golf game and revenge.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
This summer, as much of the world remained hunkered down at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, news of a series of mysterious explosions trickled out of Iran. The blasts, which took place at military or strategic locations across the Islamic Republic, including Iran's Natanz nuclear complex, were attributed by many foreign policy experts to covert Israeli operatives participating in the continuing shadow war between Israel and Iran. For Moshe Zonder, the creator of the new Israeli drama "Tehran," which aired to immense popularity in Israel this summer just as those centrifuges were detonating, it was the kind of publicity money can't buy. "It was a bombing, and then an episode in our show, and then another bombing, and it kept going like this," Zonder said in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv. "Everyone reacted and said, 'Oh, Tamar Rabinyan is working!'" "Tehran" follows Tamar Rabinyan, an Iranian born, Israeli raised spy sent back into Iran on her first deep cover mission to help coordinate an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program. Apple TV picked up the series in June, partnering with Cineflix Rights and the Israeli network Kan 11, and began streaming it around the world on Sept. 25. New episodes premiere each Friday. Filmed in Athens in Farsi, English and Hebrew, "Tehran" stars the emerging Israeli actor Niv Sultan, as Tamar, along with the "Homeland" alums Shaun Toub and Navid Negahban, both Iranian American. It is the latest spy drama to come out of Israel, which despite being a country of only 8.5 million, is the one of world's most prolific exporters of television to the United States, including adapted shows like "Hatufim" ("Prisoners of War"), the basis for the Showtime hit "Homeland," and original series like Netflix's "Fauda."(Zonder was the head writer for "Fauda.") Apple TV alone has two more Israeli sourced nail biters on deck: "Echo 3," adapted by Mark Boal ("Hurt Locker") from the combat drama "Bishvila Giborim Afim" ("When Heroes Fly") which itself is available on Netflix; and "Suspicion," an adaptation of "Kfulim" ("False Flag"), an award winning thriller that is streaming on Hulu. But "Tehran" is in many ways a departure from these programs, which feature ensemble casts anchored by seasoned, psychically tortured male characters. Tamar, on her first military mission, carries no emotional wounds; her primary affliction is her sheer ambition. She is vulnerable, soft, and her femininity informs every action she takes in Iran. (Sultan, 28, enrolled in months of immersive Farsi classes to learn the language for the role.) "This world of espionage thrillers is usually so manly," Zonder said. Choosing a female protagonist, and a young one at that, forced him and his co writer, Omri Shenhar, as two men writing together, to reconsider the options available to Israeli spies in times of crisis. "When she got into trouble and she had conflicts, she needed to decide and act on what she could do as a woman in order to stay alive," he said. "It was just as much as an adventure for us, sitting together and writing her, making her decisions." For seasoned Israeli security operatives, many of those decisions felt highly improbable another way "Tehran" differs from the popular Israeli series that have come before it. Israeli military dramas are typically constrained by shoestring budgets compared with those of American productions and defined by a gritty realism. Press and social media reactions in Israel to shows like "Fauda," "Prisoners of War" and "Our Boys," HBO's 2019 series about the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens and one Palestinian teen that together triggered the 2014 Gaza conflict, suggest that watching them functions as a kind of group therapy. "Tehran," on the other hand, is slick, wildly entertaining and packed with fantastical plot twists. Tamar becomes embroiled in a love affair with a student activist. She reconnects with her long lost Iranian family. There are double agents, extortion and multiple international kidnappings. All in only eight episodes. Lest any viewers think the script spills real secrets about Israel's covert operations in Iran, Israeli intelligence officials say the show is entertaining, but highly unrealistic. "Obviously the series was made with an audience of ordinary people in mind, and it's a success," said Shabtai Shavit, who served as director general of the Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, from 1989 1996. "But if it was watched by an audience from within the intelligence community, it would be as an exercise to watch a show in order to define what's wrong with a situation." The premise of Tamar's mission slip into Iran in order to hack into its antiaircraft system long enough to enable an Israeli attack is itself problematic, Shavit said, because technology has long existed that would allow Tamar to do her work without ever leaving the security of her desk in Israel. But more critically, Tamar broke several cardinal rules of engagement, including recruiting local Iranians into her spy work a move that would have been strictly forbidden and entangling her Jewish Iranian relatives in her plot, at great risk to their lives and hers. But while some of the big points of "Tehran" are a stretch, the small ones were handled with care. Zonder, who worked as an investigative journalist before making the transition to screenwriting, spent two years working with specialists on Iran from the Israel Academy of Science and Humanities, as well as with senior case managers from the Mossad who dealt with Iran and Iranian Jews who had immigrated to Israel. As he did with "Fauda," Zonder takes the cultural details seriously in "Tehran": the hierarchy within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; the fashion choices of Iranian dissident student subculture; the social strata signified by rhinoplasty; the societal standing of the country's 25,000 remaining Jews. The cast was equally committed to the details. "I had to not only learn the language, but really immerse myself in Iranian culture," Sultan wrote in an email. The goal was to fill out the show's characters and world in a way that kept the Islamic Republic of "Tehran" from coming across as a faceless enemy. "The most interesting aspect of the whole series is that it complicates life in Iran," said Dr. Haggai Ram, a professor of Middle East studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel who specializes in Iranian culture and history. "It shows that Iranians are not just a bunch of fanatics, or just passive victims of an oppressive regime. It shows Iranian society in its complexity." Many Iranian Jews, watching in Israel, found the experience to be steeped in nostalgia. Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian born Middle East commentator who has been living in Israel since he was 14, said the transformation of Athens into Tehran was quite convincing. "The attention to detail was phenomenal," he said. "They even replicated the charity boxes you find on the street for needy families. It was also very good at reproducing the atmosphere of fear in Iran, in terms of the demonstrations." Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that there are least 135,000 Jews of Iranian descent living in Israel today, many of whom came as small children during the Iranian Revolution. Zonder said that many had reached out to him since "Tehran" aired in Israel to tell him that the show had given them a clearer understanding of the dual loyalties their own parents continued to struggle with. It's those bits of humanity that Zonder was most eager to get right. "We picked what we wanted and needed from the research for our story," he said. "It's not a documentary."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
At some point this year, the board decided to eliminate the policy because "it doesn't offer enough flexibility to strategically recruit and retain a talented and experienced work force," according to Amanda Hicks, a spokeswoman for the museum. The board's two principal figures said that keeping Mr. Lowry on was in the museum's best interest. "There is no better leader with whom we can expand upon MoMA's success," Ms. Heyman said Friday. Mr. Black added, "Glenn's gifted and innovative leadership is essential to MoMA's evolution." Mr. Lowry, a scholar of Islamic art and former director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, was 40 when he took over as MoMA's sixth director in 1995. Under his leadership, the museum's endowment has quadrupled, to just under 1 billion. In 1999, MoMA merged with PS1, the experimental art center in Queens, and its principal home on West 53rd Street has expanded twice: first into the present building, which opened in 2004, and next year into an expanded campus designed by the firm Diller Scofidio Renfro. Attendance has shot up, the collection has grown and diversified, and admission fees have climbed, too to 20 in 2004 and to 25 in 2011. He has won praise for his fund raising skills, his management of large scale building projects, and his global outlook, even as he has faced criticism for an expansionist mentality and protests from employees over wages and benefits. (Mr. Lowry, one of the museum world's highest paid executives, was awarded about 2.2 million in salary, bonus and benefits for the 2017 fiscal year.) The museum faced strong opposition in 2014 to initial designs for the expansion that called for the destruction of a neighboring building, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum. MoMA made significant changes to those designs, but the Folk Art Museum did come down. In the last few years, the museum has presented acclaimed exhibitions of Sigmar Polke, Isa Genzken, Bruce Conner, Marcel Broodthaers and Adrian Piper. In 2017, days after President Trump's inauguration, Mr. Lowry also signed off on a decision by curators to rehang MoMA's permanent collection with works by artists from the Muslim majority nations subject to a travel ban.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
USEFUL PHRASES FOR IMMIGRANTS Stories By 146 pp. Blair. Paper, 16.95. In the title story of her new collection, "Useful Phrases for Immigrants," writes, "Why didn't people in movies complain about taxes and insurance and the cost of rent?" The observation reads like the artist's statement of purpose: Her fiction favors the quotidian over the spectacular, the small moments of violence or disappointment common to all. The book covers a broad range of territory. Its geographies include Beijing, New York, San Francisco, Iowa and Canada, its inhabitants academics, elderly immigrants, secretive parents and watchful children. The book is slender, containing only eight stories, but it might also be considered capacious, hard to reduce to a single theme or preoccupation. Chai's style, the sole element that holds these distinct works together, is unaffected. It's as if the author is getting out of her own way, giving herself space to focus on the mechanics of one individual narrative at a time. Yet in each there's a sense of many other narratives just off the page, the lives and back stories we aren't seeing. Short stories are by definition brief, but they needn't be small.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
More than four months after the N.B.A. suspended its season because of the coronavirus pandemic, the league on Thursday night will stage a pair of real games ones that actually count in the standings inside its bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. To mark the occasion, the league made sure to include a bunch of headliners in its grand reopening. What You Need to Know After the Utah Jazz and the New Orleans Pelicans christen the festivities at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, they will clear the stage so that the two heavyweights from Los Angeles the Clippers and the Lakers can reacquaint themselves at 9 p.m. E.T. in what could be a preview of the Western Conference finals. The doubleheader will be broadcast by TNT. What are we watching? Twenty two teams are participating in the league's restart, and each will play eight seeding games before the playoffs are scheduled to begin on Aug. 17. Players have spent recent weeks knocking off the rust at accelerated training camps, and teams played in a series of televised scrimmages. Some looked more prepared than others. See: This Is What Pandemic Basketball Looks Like But Thursday's games are the culmination of an enormous gambit by the league, which desperately hopes to finish the season without any problems. (Looking at you, Major League Baseball.) So far, the N.B.A.'s highly restrictive campus has remained secure. On Tuesday, the league reported that none of the 344 players in the bubble had tested positive for the coronavirus since the results were last announced on July 20. Officials want to keep it that way.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Short on details but long on delight, "Walking on Water" follows the artist Christo as he creates one of his large scale art installations. This cinema verite documentary centers on "The Floating Piers." That project, an orange hued, three kilometer floating walkway on Lake Iseo in Northern Italy, had been planned for decades and was eventually built in 2016. Like the artist's "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin in 1995 or "The Gates" in New York City's Central Park in 2005, the work was dissembled shortly following its completion, this time after 16 days. All of these ephemeral projects are "totally useless," Christo says, declaring that the only reason he makes such things is because he enjoys seeing them. That disarming, pretension free attitude runs throughout the film, save for a few scenes when problems arise and are soon overcome.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Chevrolet aims to rid the Impala of its rental car reputation with distinctive new styling. Tom Voelk drives the 2014 model to see if the changes to this full size sedan are more than skin deep. My wife used to work as a sales representative for Johnson Johnson. Like many sales reps, she was provided a nondescript, inexpensive company car in her case, a Chevrolet Impala. At some point, the "a" fell off the trunk badge and we began calling it the "Impal." The Impal's chief virtue was its huge trunk, which could conceal many cases of sample products typically, Tylenol PM and K Y jelly. Say what you want about the old Impala, but it sure could haul some K Y jelly. General Motors should have made a bigger deal of that. Thanks to rental companies, sales fleets and bargain hunters, the old Impala is a common sight. It has been America's best selling full size sedan since 2004, with nearly 170,000 sold last year. But there's a difference between "popular" and "best." The redesigned 2014 model is aimed at retaining a solid proportion of the old car's customer base while luring buyers whose names are not Avis and Enterprise. It's off to a good start Consumer Reports recently ranked the Impala as the best sedan on the market, the first domestic car to earn that title in more than 20 years. The former model (renamed Impala Limited) is still in production, but available only to fleet buyers. There are now three choices of propulsion: a 2.5 liter 4 cylinder, a 2.4 liter 4 cylinder eAssist hybrid or a V 6. The hybrid's combined city highway rating of 29 miles per gallon is quite impressive for such a large car, but G.M.'s eAssist system is a fairly dreary powertrain, regularly reminding you why it's not called the eFunPower. And that version will not be available until the end of the year. I say if you want a big car, you want the big motor. In the Impala, G.M.'s ubiquitous direct injected 3.6 liter V 6 makes 305 horsepower and 264 pound feet of torque. Interestingly, G.M. dropped this modern, muscular V 6 into the old body style in 2012. Now that's a spicy rental car. The 3.6 is a guttural, vocal motor, which suits the mood in a Camaro or a Cadillac ATS but seems inappropriately aggressive in a family vehicle like a Chevy Traverse. The first thing I noticed about the Impala is that it's preternaturally quiet. I asked G.M. officials if they'd done anything to muzzle the V 6, and they responded that the Impala's interior serenity was accomplished mostly by isolating the passenger compartment through tricks like "triple sealed doors with acoustic perimeter water deflectors" and robot applied sound deadener on the floor pan and trunk. If you jab the accelerator, the engine will clear its throat with a healthy amount of thrust, accompanied by a surprising amount of wheel spin from the front tires. The Impala can light 'em up for quite a while before the traction control kicks in, which should make for some memorable exits from the school drop off lane. The interior is a mash up of visually appealing design rendered with sometimes questionable materials. The wraparound sweep of the dash, the 8 inch screen that powers up like a secret door to reveal a storage cubby behind it, the subtle LED glow of the nighttime lighting all are worthy steps forward for our old friend Impala. The optional front bench seat the last one offered in a car sold in America has been banished in favor of these "bucket seats" that are all the rage. But can we please lose the fake wood pasted hither and thither about the interior? I suspect that other manufacturers are infiltrating focus groups to tell G.M. (and Toyota) that customers really love plastic wood. Remember this: fake wood, it's not good. Feel free to come up with something better, or just stop making fake wood. The Impala's other strange synthetic is the "sueded microfiber" seating surface of my midlevel 2LT test model. The material looks like something you'd find draped on a Chinese recliner at the kind of furniture store that has a going out of business sale every two weeks. It looks acceptable now, but after 20,000 miles you may wish they had just covered the seat in leather. Still, this is a car where the phrase "for the money" comes into play in any discussion of chintzy demerits. After all, this is a cavernous sedan priced at 35,770 as tested. That might sound like a lot for an Impala, but for that money it's pretty well equipped 11 speaker Bose audio system, keyless ignition, navigation system, remote starter and 19 inch wheels. The Cadillac XTS shares its platform with the Impala (same V 6, same basic proportions), and I drove one that cost more than 64,000. Now 35 grand doesn't look so bad, does it? While the 2013 Impala lives on as a fleetmobile, Chevy hopes the slickly restyled 2014 will find 70 percent of its sales with private buyers. So while you'll surely see the occasional sales rep or police chief at the wheel, this is now a vehicle that can be seriously mentioned in the same context as the Toyota Avalon or Dodge Charger. In the '90s, it was fashionable for rappers to name check the Impala. But when Lil' Troy wrote, "Wanna be a baller, shot caller, 20 inch blades on the Impala," I'm sure he was talking about a Chevy from the glory days of the 1960s, not the rebadged police car of the 1990s or the anonymous front drive sedans that were just around the corner. Impala references became so common that rappers just said, "six four," and everyone understood the car in question was a 1964 Impala. In contrast to the Impala's seedy recent past, this new one harks back to those Impalas of the '60s a big, stylish American family car you could be proud to park in your driveway. In that respect, the new Impala's a throwback.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
PALERMO, Sicily Off the coast of Sicily, a rickety boat of migrants is in distress. Tossed by waves and drenched, women and children scream as a voice barks, "Jump and swim!" They do, but as history shows not everyone will make it. This is the tragically familiar journey that has been made across the Mediterranean by countless migrants fleeing war and famine in recent times. But instead of transpiring in the sea between Italy and Libya, this scene was being enacted on the stage of the Teatro Massimo, an opera house in the Sicilian capital, Palermo. Co produced by the theater and by the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, "Winter Journey," which has its world premiere in Palermo on Friday, tells the story of desperate migration from troubled, war torn countries to Europe, in all its indifference and rejection. "It is a journey toward a country where they will find hostility, a cold welcome or perhaps no welcome at all, to a place where there is a winter of the soul," said the Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, who wrote the score of the opera to a libretto by the Irish novelist Colm Toibin. "It is a journey to a hostile world," Mr. Einaudi said, "in which your soul can die." The story is told from the perspective of three characters: a man from an unnamed country moving from hardship to hardship as he seeks a better life in Europe, and the woman and child he has left behind. The choir serves as a Greek chorus, while a politician (a speaking role) intervenes intermittently with refrains that will be familiar to many European ears: "The boat cannot dock at our port," "Why should we deal with this problem?" and, "We do not want strangers on our streets." Mr. Toibin said in a telephone interview that the work was "a simple story, almost a folk tale," in which the main characters "sing their own stories," focusing on the personal to "stir emotions." But "Winter Journey" is not a simple call for open borders , he said. "Even though it is clear where my sympathies lie, I am alert to the complexity of the argument and that has to be registered." Mr. Einaudi is both a prolific composer (this year, he released "Seven Days Walking," a series of seven albums that came out over seven months) and a versatile one, drawing on various influences. African music which Mr. Einaudi studied on the continent informed the composition of "Winter Journey," he said. "I am well acquainted with the instrumental and vocal nuances of that part of the world, and so in composing the orchestral parts, I created a nest in which these voices could nestle in a natural way." "They coexist very well and harmoniously," he added. "Winter Journey" is billed as an opera, but the main performers are not professionally trained opera singers though they are well known African artists. The man is played by Badara Seck of Senegal, the woman by Rokia Traore of Mali, while the role of the child is sung by a boy, Leslie Nsiah Afriyie, who was born in Ghana and now lives in Palermo. Another boy, Mouhamadou Sazll, plays the role onstage. The project was hatched in late 2017, when the theater asked Mr. Einaudi and the Palermo born film and stage director Roberto Ando to come up with an opera about migration. In an interview, Mr. Ando described the work as a eulogy, of sorts, for "the Europe that was and isn't anymore. A world that we hoped had more strength, and instead risks faltering." At one point, the chorus recalls the time, not so many decades ago, when "Europe tore itself apart," with "aerial bombing, fighting in the streets, and people fleeing through the night, hungry, cold, seeking refuge." "People have a habit of settling and forgetting" said Mr. Toibin, who is working on a novel about German exiles during World War II, when untold numbers of people were also displaced. "I wanted people to think about that," he said. The opera also fit into the Teatro Massimo's vision of what an opera theater can be today. "It's a theater that accepts the responsibility of interpreting the urgencies of the community, and in so doing helps the community to grow," Mr. Giambrone said during an interview at the theater last month. Migration, he said, is one of the "most fundamental, global themes of the times, which in Palermo resonates especially profoundly, because the city is a port of hospitality. " A recent outreach program co produced with the Rome Opera has taken performances out of the opera house and onto the streets, sometimes by way of a traveling show performed on the back of a truck, or by staging productions in low income neighborhoods whose residents don't tend to go to the opera much, if ever. For the past two summers, the Massimo has brought productions to the down at heel Danisinni quarter of Palermo, and what could have been a one off experience has instead become a monthslong project including the creation of a choir of local residents to perform in the shows. This year, they sang in Rossini's "La Cenerentola." "The theater should not be elitist," said Mr. Giambrone, who raised eyebrows years ago when he encouraged patrons to come to the opera dressed casually. "We want to express a different model of theater in tune with the community." "Winter Journey" is Mr. Einaudi's first attempt at composing an opera, though he has previously worked on projects that incorporate theater and dance. "I wanted it to be as real as possible," without becoming rhetorical, he said. With Mr. Toibin, he added, he "found a line that is expressive of a sober, interior sentiment."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Rotavirus disease is a highly contagious virus that can cause severe illness and death in infants and young children, but there is a vaccine that is highly effective in preventing it. A large new study confirms previous research suggesting that the vaccine may have an added benefit: lowering the risk for Type 1 diabetes. About 1.3 million Americans have Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease that usually arises in childhood, and there are an estimated 40,000 new cases each year. There are two versions of the vaccine, both administered orally. One, called Rotarix, is effective against a single strain of the virus and is given in two doses. The other, RotaTeq, given in three doses, protects against five different strains. Among the 1.5 million children in this study, 40,317 received all recommended doses, 83 percent of them taking the three dose RotaTeq program.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
AS temperatures heat up, so has the demand for summer homes in what some real estate agents call the "non Hampton Hamptons": Bedford, Pound Ridge and other semirural northern Westchester towns and villages with acres of open space and lots of greenery. April is described as the prime month for selling and renting vacation homes, whatever the location. But brokers less than an hour north of Midtown say their territory is special. It may not offer stretches of sandy beach and oceanfront vistas, but it counters with something pretty appealing: getting there doesn't entail the "traffic nightmares" often experienced on the Long Island Expressway, said James B. Renwick, the broker owner of the Renwick Sotheby's International Realty in Bedford Village. And then there is the privacy, and the scarcity of paparazzi lurking in the shadows. "Northern Westchester is not a place you go to be seen," Mr. Renwick explained, adding that the area attracts people whose idea of leisure is to sit by a pool and read a book, or to go horseback riding or hiking on the many trails that crisscross the area. The celebrities who do retreat to Westchester like Glenn Close and Ralph Lauren may get a glance or two from passers by, but for the most part they tend to blend into the landscape. That different species of weekend retreat was exactly what drew Beth Chartoff Spector, asset manager for a financial firm, and her husband, Jason A. Spector, a surgeon at NewYork Presbyterian /Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. Three years ago, they and their sons, now 6 and 9, began spending weekends in a sprawling four bedroom six bath colonial in Bedford Corners with spectacular views of the countryside. The owners had paid 2.7 million for the four acre property in 2005, but rarely used it and decided to rent it out for 8,500 a month. The Spector family, who spend the week in their three bedroom co op in Greenwich Village, had been "getting antsy to escape the city," Ms. Chartoff Spector explained, and they jumped at the opportunity to rent a fully furnished country house. For Dr. Spector, who occasionally has to race back to the city on weekends for an emergency, the house is "only 35 minutes door to door to the hospital," his wife said. They had considered the Catskills, but decided they were too far from the city. As for the Hamptons, Dr. Spector ruled out the unpredictable Long Island Expressway. The house in Bedford Corners, a natural for entertaining, was perfect for them in many ways, and on weekends Dr. Spector, an accomplished cook, sometimes prepares dinner for 15 or more guests. After several seasons when rentals and sales of summer homes slowed, agents like Ghy Manning, owner and principal broker of Vincent Whittemore Real Estate in Bedford, are finally noticing a pickup in the number of people families and couples of all ages, she said lured by the spring weather into traveling north in search of a summer getaway. "Last year was one of roughest since the downturn," Ms. Manning said, noting that the mild winter had helped change the dynamic. Some of the hunters, she said, are renting for the summer "with an eye to buying and moving up here full time." There is no way to know how many houses are being acquired for vacation use, said Anthony Cutugno, a senior vice president for luxury properties at Houlihan Lawrence in Bedford. But sales in summer house territory have increased: 972 homes were in contract countywide as of March 31, versus 742 on the same date in 2011. The rental market is also percolating, he said, and some owners who cannot sell are waiting out the market by negotiating short term leases. Summer rentals, which traditionally run from Memorial Day to Labor Day, run the gamut from 35,000 to 120,000 for the season. Among those currently available is an 18 room colonial with a saltwater pool on four acres in Bedford, listed by Ms. Manning for 20,000 a month; and a four bedroom colonial on four acres in North Castle, listed by Renwick Sotheby's for 10,000 a month. Typically, Mr. Renwick said, the owners rent out their homes while they spend the summer in Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket or Fishers Island off Long Island. The Hamptons tend to be pricier. In East Hampton for the entire season, prices range from about 30,000, for a three bedroom, two bath house with a pool but no water view, to 200,000 for large waterfront properties, according to listings on the Corcoran Web site.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Enjoying this newsletter every Friday? Send it to a friend, or six, and have them sign up at nytimes.com/rory. There is something unsettling about watching a soccer match played behind closed doors, in a stadium filled with echoes and air, rather than noise and life. The faces of the players, the jerseys they wear and the movements they make are all the same, of course, but the setting is so alien, so different, that a sense of dislocation sets in. It is sports in the uncanny valley. Stadiums are curious places. Few are things of architectural wonder, though a handful take the breath away: the Stadium of Light in Lisbon, where Benfica's eagle flies around the field before each game; Tottenham's new home, still with that new paint feel; San Siro, Milan's brutalist cathedral. The Artemio Franchi in Florence is a soulless bowl when you walk past on a Tuesday morning, the most basic stadium design you could possibly imagine, as if the architects received only one instruction from their Fascist employers: Make it sort of round. But not too round. On a Sunday afternoon, though, with Fiorentina at home, it is a hazy riot of purple. Old Trafford is a spaceship in a dreary parking lot. Goodison Park looks like it is held together by glue. Until, that is, they come to life. The presence of fans transforms these places into something to make the heart soar, and it transforms the games those fans come to watch. They lend the sport in front of them emotional resonance; remove them, and it becomes a strangely sterile experience, verging on pointless, slightly forlorn. Fans make soccer mean something. It is an unappealing prospect, then, that it may be months before stadiums are filled again: some time in 2021, even by some of the most optimistic projections. The public health risks are just too great for the mass gathering of fans in stadiums and, just as significantly, for fans on their way to stadiums. Indeed, for many, there is no point playing soccer again until people are allowed in to watch it. The slogan that has long been held up as a retort to the soccer business' casual disregard of the paying spectator football without fans is nothing applies more literally than ever. And yet, for all the sincerity and poignancy of that sentiment, for all that soccer without fans is not soccer as we know it at all, the fact that most of Europe's major leagues are now steeling themselves to play behind closed doors for some time should not be dismissed as a decision only rooted in grubby convenience and thinly veiled greed, a path chosen purely for the benefit of television. After all, the people watching on television are fans, too. This is, for many, a delicate subject. There is, in general, a strict hierarchy among fans, one that conventional wisdom supports unquestioningly (and I am aware that contravening it may not be popular). In this ranking, the best fans, the most devoted, are the ones who travel home and away with their team, spending hours and days on buses and trains, sacrificing everything for the love of their colors. Some of these are ultras by declaration, some only by inclination. Just behind them are those who go to home games, the ones who make the commitment to build their weekends around their teams, who make soccer the centerpiece of their lives. Occasional match goers get some kudos; those who turn up only for the big occasions a little less. Fans who only watch on television are some distance behind, derided, in some cases, as not true fans at all. This is, though, an outdated model, one that applied when teams were local and tickets affordable, but much less so now. No matter how devoted, some fans may not be able to attend through geography. They may have family commitments that prevent them going. They may work on weekends. They may not have enough money for a match ticket, much less a season ticket, or neither the resources, the time or even the ability to travel. When we say, then, that games are being staged for the benefit of television, what we mean is that games are being staged for the benefit of fans (most of whom) can only watch on television. Television is an abstract term, designed to obscure and stigmatize. For most fans, and for all but a minuscule percentage for the major teams, it is the only way to consume soccer. It is also, of course, what keeps the whole thing rolling: those eye watering television deals are only possible because of the subscriptions the broadcasters can raise, because of the advertising they can sell, because of the money that comes, at root, from fans. Staging games behind closed doors is not ideal. It is not what anyone wants. It is, for want of a better term, worse than when the stands are full of noise and color, when there is unbridled joy at one end and unyielding despair at the other. But we are not in an ideal world these days. All we have are unpalatable choices. There are many obstacles to overcome, yet, before soccer can return. It must be determined that it is safe for the players to train, and then to play. It must be decided that it will not place an unnecessary burden on an overstretched state. No game is worth a single life. But having fans in place, in the stadium, should not be the bar. Football without fans is nothing. For now, though, those fans may have to be further away than they would like. It is, sadly, a sacrifice that has to be made. The alternative to a few months of watching sports in the uncanny valley, after all, is bleaker still. The economic consequences of waiting for a perfect world are such that, by the time fans are allowed back into the stadiums, there may be nobody there on the field to watch. In the Absence of Leadership, the Silence Is Filled Javier Tebas, the man who runs La Liga, has given so many media briefings in recent weeks that we can only presume he carries a microphone in his pocket. Christian Seifert, his counterpart at the Bundesliga, has been clear on both the benefits and the pitfalls of Germany's plan to restart soccer in the coming weeks. Aleksander Ceferin, the head of UEFA, has obliged interview requests from across the continent. From the Premier League, though, the richest domestic soccer competition on the planet, the one that commands more viewers and more fans and creates more noise than any other, there has been only silence. And in many ways, that is sensible. It is impossible to put a date on when soccer might return. It is a fool's errand to try to second guess a pandemic. Why set a target if you know you may not meet it? Better, the Premier League may have decided, to be cautious, to be patient, and not become a hostage to fortune. Which would be fine, if soccer did not abhor a vacuum. And so, in the absence of clear leadership, the conversation over how or if to restart the Premier League season has become the preserve of the anonymous source: various executives, at various levels, pitching their ideas, the fruit of their imaginations, shaping the discussion to their own ends. The Premier League, almost uniquely, seems to be incapable of speaking with one voice, of coming up with a collective solution to a collective problem. It is not a great sign, at the start of the greatest challenge in the organization's 28 year history. There is a risk that, if the economic damage does not end its era of supremacy, its taste for self interested squabbling might. That approach has largely been vindicated, though: The women's game has grown steadily, and occasionally spectacularly, over the last decade or so. But it has always come with an obvious downside. Most women's teams still rely in some way on the money that pours into the men's game for funding; they are too often an afterthought when it comes to infrastructure; and tribal loyalties spill from men's soccer into women's, limiting each team's appeal to fans. Now, though, comes a real test. Many in the women's game are fearful that, as clubs deal with contracting finances, the relatively meager amounts they direct to their women's teams will be the first to go, seen as an easy way of redirecting cash to the favored child. Soccer as a whole is going to suffer the consequences of the virus, and the shutdown. The worry is that suffering, like everything else, may not be shared equally. That is my instinct though it is also only my instinct when you think about the fallout from the shutdown. Clubs have massive financial black holes already (and they will be worse if the season is not finished). There may be further lockdowns to come, affecting next season, at least, too. Corporate spending will drop, which will reduce income from hospitality boxes. Sponsorships may be harder to come by. Most important, though, is the whole broadcast model: Will rights deals be worth as much in the future, if the subscriber base dwindles (as seems inevitable, in a recession)? How long can these companies cope without sports to show? That means, of course, clubs having to be a little more frugal, so we see reduced spending on transfers, but it may also mean players' being forced to accept lower salaries than they might otherwise have expected. They are only worth what someone else deems them to be worth, of course. It is not to say soccer won't survive, but I do wonder if the cash drenched golden era is, for now, over. Plenty of you were in touch, too, with alternative suggestions for the most significant games in history. Shane Thomas was among those to offer more modern examples: Don't worry, Shane, we'll be coming to them. Paul Connelly believes the 1967 European Cup final Celtic's win over Inter to be a better, an earlier, example of attacking soccer proving supreme to the 1972 final. It's a valid argument, but it was Ajax, rather than Celtic, who went on to define what direction the sport would take for the coming decades.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Credit...Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times Isabel Rose, the telegenic heiress to one of New York's best known real estate dynasties, has always had an ability to make her publicity wary family squirm. In 2005 she published a novel, "The J.A.P. Chronicles," in which she took aim at the Hermes clad, charter plane flying set whence she came. (In a mostly positive review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel's characters "shallow, mean, self centered, ruthless and resentful.") Ms. Rose, 48, is a fixture on the New York cabaret scene, performing an Ann Margret inspired act at nightspots like Joe's Pub and 54 Below. A 2014 video for her single "Trouble in Paradise" showed her cavorting around in a rhinestone encrusted romper from Patricia Field, flanked by a trio of drag queen backup singers, as she sang about how she wouldn't wind up as anyone's trophy wife. But recently, Ms. Rose has been in the news for something with considerably larger stakes: the gender transition of her 8 year old child, Sadie (formerly Samuel). On Feb. 24, shortly after President Trump signed an executive order that rolled back federal protections for transgender students, Medium published an open letter by Ms. Rose that was addressed to Ivanka Trump. In it, Ms. Rose asked Ms. Trump to take a stand on behalf of parents like herself. She pointed out their similarities. "We are both from prominent New York real estate families, we both attended private all girls schools and went on to earn degrees from Ivy League colleges, and we both married smart Jewish men and now have young children," Ms. Rose wrote. Then, she issued a directive: "Ivanka, put yourself in my Jimmy Choos for a minute. What would you do if you were me? Because I know exactly what I would do if I were you: I would take my father aside and explain that failing to protect innocent children's rights to use the bathroom of their choice is wrong and unfair and un American." Within hours, the letter went viral, generating hundreds of comments that ranged from profoundly supportive to utterly horrified. It was reposted on the website of Harper's Bazaar. CNN commissioned a follow up piece, in which Ms. Rose gently picked apart some of the more stinging commentary that had come her way, noting that there is a subtle but essential difference between giving a child permission to express who they are and engaging as a parent in "indulgent behavior." At gay and transgender benefits around town, Ms. Rose arrived in her Isabel Marant trousers and the Row blazers, and was greeted almost like a folk hero a Jessica Chastain look alike who had spoken truth to power and put her social position at risk on behalf of a cause that needs powerful allies. Ms. Rose didn't hear directly from Ms. Trump, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called and congratulated Ms. Rose on the letter. Earlier this week, Ms. Rose even met with Mr. Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Ms. Rose said she pleaded for protections. Darting around Lower Manhattan, Ms. Rose was amiable and self deprecating about what she has been through. At a benefit for the Family Equality Council, one of the hosts began talking about how miraculous having children is. "Except when they're unbelievably annoying," Ms. Rose interjected. She noted that what is most remarkable about her family is how unremarkable they are; that change (or what she calls the "reversal of expectations") is simply the most reliable fact of life. "I don't understand the tendency to catastrophize," she said. "I see it and the only conclusion I draw is that it produces adrenaline. It makes people excited." In 2002, Ms. Rose was the star and a writer of an independent film called "Anything but Love," which centered on an aspiring cabaret singer named Billie Golden who lives in Queens, watches Eartha Kitt enviously through the window of the supper club she works and fends off her the opprobrium of a mother who says: "You live your life as if you're in some kind of technorama musical." Of course, in real life, Ms. Rose did not grow up in Queens but on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her father, Elihu, is a real estate scion and retired professor of military history at New York University who serves as the chairman of the Park Avenue Armory. His family manages rental buildings all over Manhattan as well as in Queens, and much of their fortune has gone back to local cultural organizations such as the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center, all of which have areas named after them. Even at Central Synagogue the congregation frequented by prominent families like the Lauders and Tisches they loomed large, from the checks they wrote, to their black tie seders. As parents to Isabel, Mr. Rose and his wife, Susan, were determined to be completely supportive. "That's how it is with all of our children," Susan said in a phone interview this week. "There was never any other way." Still, there was no question, that Isabel despite her diplomas from Yale (summa cum laude) and Bennington (master's degree in writing) was an unusual family member. She is a performer. And performers can be a lot, even ones with Ivy League degrees. In 1998, Ms. Rose married an investment banker at the Plaza, then split with him a year after their daughter, Lily Ezrow, was born. In a case of art imitating life, much of this struggle informed "Anything but Love," in which the showgirl heroine leaves a flush financial type at the altar and runs off with her lowly accompanist. And, in fact, there was a guy whom she both married and divorced soon after that. "Sometimes we have to learn good judgment by experiencing the repercussions of bad judgment," Ms. Rose said. Then came the novel, "The J.A.P. Chronicles," which she subsequently adapted as an Off Broadway show with one actress playing all six roles. In 2008, Ms. Rose connected with Jeffrey Fagen, a tattooed Penn graduate who spent years trying to be Robert Smith and now runs a clothing company called Panda Diplomacy. "What we weren't predicting was door No. 3," Mr. Fagen said. It wasn't just that their son, Samuel, wanted to play mermaids at age 2, which led Ms. Rose online to numerous articles that described this as a typical predictor of "gender dysphoria," the mental state typically used to describe pre transitioners. It was also Samuel's refusal to smile for photographs with Lily and the violent tantrums that transpired while getting suited up for a relative's bar mitzvah. "I'm a girl, Mommy," Ms. Rose recalled being told, over and over. Friends didn't really know at first what the exact nature of the problem was. They simply saw a child, according to Mr. Fagen's close friend Mitch Epner, who was "totally withdrawn." When Ms. Rose began to express the belief that Samuel might be transgender, friends doubted her. (More than a few also wondered privately: Why does the dramatic stuff always happen to her? "Isn't that the question," she said. "I don't know.") Even Mr. Fagen did a certain amount of blaming his wife, which she found surprising given that he was, as she described it, "a rocker with a master's degree in poetry." "All I can tell you is that I went through all the permutations people go through," he said. So Ms. Rose took the good cop role, becoming the confidante her husband wasn't ready to be. On vacation in Palm Beach, Fla., she took Samuel, then around 4, to the Lilly Pulitzer shop and watched with curiosity as pink poplin turned a depressed child turn into a happy nymph. Back in New York, they watched David Bowie videos and went to the set of Ms. Rose's video, where the first introductions to drag queens like Hedda Lettuce were made. Ms. Rose hoped to show her son there were many ways one could be a boy, from wearing metallic face paint to putting on green wigs and high heels. Unfortunately, this didn't really work with Samuel, who was alarmed by Ms. Rose's compatriots and utterly uninterested in Bowie. Nor did it assuage the concerns of friends and relatives who argued at the time that Ms. Rose was "indulging" her child and pushing ever closer to the great trans abyss. Throughout, Ms. Rose waded through confusing studies and heard troubling statistics about trans people attempting suicide. Attending another bar mitzvah, in Huntington, N.Y., in March 2014, the concern became more immediate. Before the reception, the family was in their hotel room and Ms. Rose went to take a nap. When she woke up, Samuel was in front of the mirror crying and Mr. Fagen was on his knee, asking what was wrong. The response: "I want to burn my face off." "Until that moment, I never really understood the profound discomfort," Mr. Fagen said. "How does any child that young learn to hate themselves so much? After that it was, whatever it takes." The first person they were going to have to come out to was Ms. Rose's eldest daughter, Lily, who was then 12 and had been somewhat in the dark about all of this. But thanks to an iPhone and the miracles of family sharing plans, she learned the extent of their dilemma without even being told. "My mom and I have the same photo stream," Lily, now 15, said one day after school a few weeks ago, while seated across from Ms. Rose in the den of the family's 5,000 square foot sun drenched apartment underneath a giant Marilyn Minter portrait of a high heel. "I was going through the pictures and I saw some of my clothes, but it wasn't me. So I was a little confused." "I was in middle school," she said. "You want to be normal and fit in. So I had to take a step back and say, you know what, this is not about me." Together, the family embarked on extensive counseling at the Gender Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, where gender divergent children and their siblings and parents attend sessions together and then split off into peer support groups. Mr. Fagen patiently explains that those issues are years away, and that for now what has changed are "wardrobe and pronouns." Given the confidence Ms. Rose showed at temple and on Facebook, perhaps the letter she published on Medium shouldn't have come as a surprise. But it did to Susan and Elihu Rose. "Well, that was crazy," Susan said, chuckling. "Eli and I were down in D.C. We came home from the Smithsonian museum of African American history, we were totally pooped, and I said: 'My God. Look at this amazing letter.' I didn't know Isabel was writing it. I didn't know anything about it. Then Eli said, 'Oh my God,' and he mentioned that he knew someone who knew Ivanka and maybe they could pass it to her. The next morning I sent it out to friends, especially friends with marginalized children who might be gay or transgender. I think it's just an inspiration." Lily had a more complicated reaction. She asked her mother if she realized she had outed Sadie. While the administration at Sadie's elementary school accepted her last year with the awareness that she is transgender, there hasn't been an explicit conversation with members of her class. Mr. Fagen, asked whether he worries about his wife's openness with the world, and all the publicity about their daughter, said: "Absolutely. Every day." "That's why you sometimes have to tie my string to the chair," Ms. Rose said. Which was keenly self aware, though it doesn't really answer the question of what might happen should Sadie decide as an adult that she wants her medical history to be private. How will she feel about what is for the world a mere Google search away?
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
TEN DRUGS How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine By Thomas Hager Synthetic opioids drugs far more potent than anything that's come before are flooding America's streets. New users start up daily, while old users fall deeper into cycles of despair. And as officials bicker about whether addiction is a medical problem or a criminal one, thousands upon thousands of people are dying. That may sound like a contemporary account, but as Thomas Hager, a historian of medicine and science, explains in his absorbing new book, "Ten Drugs," it also describes America's first, forgotten opioid epidemic a century ago. The culprit back then was morphine, a compound isolated from poppy sap. And as Hager makes clear, we're just as helpless treating addicts today as we were in the early 1900s. The 10 titular drugs aren't necessarily the most important ones ever; neither penicillin nor aspirin makes the cut. Instead, Hager writes, he picked each for its "historical importance plus its entertainment value." (The first public demonstration of a treatment for erectile dysfunction onstage at a medical conference is especially memorable.) But above all, Hager explores the fraught human relationship with drugs: "Are they good for you? Often. Are they dangerous? Always. Can they perform miracles? They can. Can they enslave us? Some do." One chapter covers chlorpromazine, which awakened thousands of catatonic mental patients in the 1950s. Many were able to leave their asylums for the first time in decades only to find an alien world, with their careers obsolete and their spouses remarried. Other drugs were selected less for their medicinal value than for the groundbreaking way they were discovered: through high tech, systematic screening rather than blind groping.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
This article is part of the Opinion Today free newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it every weekday. Grimly surveying a country she described as a tinderbox, our columnist Michelle Goldberg noted over the weekend that the protesters in Minneapolis had faced "a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country's gun toting anti lockdown activists." It's a scenario I've wondered about, and maybe you have, too: What if the protesters in the streets of America's cities had adopted the tactics of the anti lockdown agitators? Would they have gotten results faster? Instead of calling them thugs, would President Trump have called them "very good people," as he did the heavily armed white protesters in Michigan? There's an illuminating precedent, as you may know: On May 2, 1967, about two dozen members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, carrying loaded shotguns and pistols, walked onto the grounds of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Calif. They strolled past a group of eighth graders gathered for a picnic lunch with California's Republican governor, a former actor named Ronald Reagan. "The students stopped and stared in amazement as the Black Panthers marched right by," wrote Adam Winkler in his history "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America." You can see snippets of video of the incident here and here, but I recommend watching Stanley Nelson Jr.'s absorbing documentary, "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," which composes a rich narrative from interviews and archived footage. The Panthers made their way into the Capitol building, up the steps and into the visitors gallery. There they stood with their guns, quietly listening to the proceedings before security escorted them out. No shot was fired; no law was broken. Why were they there? To protest gun control measures that members of the assembly, and Reagan, were eager to see passed. Why the Republican interest in gun control? Because Huey Newton, a founder of the Panthers, had learned in classes at San Francisco Law School that under California law you could carry a gun in public, as long as it was visible. Armed Panthers had begun tailing police through the streets of Oakland. "When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice," Winkler wrote. He quoted Newton as saying that with "weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects but their equals." When he reached the top of the Capitol steps that day in 1967, Bobby Seale, the Panthers' other founder, issued a prepared statement. He said the proposed legislation was "aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people." The time had come, he continued, "for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late." That same day, Reagan declared, "There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." He also said, "I don't think loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that ought to be solved between people of good will, and anyone who would approve of this kind of demonstration must be out of their mind." The legislation passed, with a new provision prohibiting anyone but police from bringing a loaded gun into the Capitol. Carrying a loaded gun on a California street became punishable by up to five years in prison. Today, the party of Reagan advocates a right to carry a concealed gun in public, while black Americans who have flocked to their own gun association since Trump was elected continue to struggle to be treated as equal by the police. 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.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hello again! I'm back from a week spent mostly offline, and am excited to get back to the internet, where I'm sure things have been totally normal and borin checks earpiece hang on, I'm being told that Elon Musk is dating the Canadian musician Grimes after they connected on Twitter over a joke about an obscure artificial superintelligence thought experiment? Whew, O.K., I was worried we'd slipped into normalcy. Onward. The biggest nonromantic tech news of this week came from a new A.I. tool introduced at Google's annual developer conference. The program, known as Duplex, is an automated voice assistant capable of making hair appointments, booking restaurant reservations and conducting other tasks over the phone. It even inserts lifelike pauses and filler words like "um" and "hmm" for extra realism. But the demo which amounted to a series of extremely high tech crank calls raised a lot of hackles. Zeynep Tufekci, a professor and writer, called Duplex "horrifying," and said that Google's willingness to use A.I. to fool humans and to brag about its ability to do so on stage at a public event showed that "Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing." Matt Haughey, the creator of the internet forum MetaFilter, tweeted, "How Google did that Duplex A.I. voice demo without anyone flagging it internally is beyond me." The company, he added, "needs a V.P. of gut checks." In a statement, a Google representative said: "What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product." Even some A.I. experts were taken aback by the Duplex demo, which showed off a kind of technology that scammers could one day use to make mass robocalls, conduct social engineering hacks and impersonate people on the phone. Google has said that the technology won't be used for telemarketing. The company says it will be used to call businesses using publicly available numbers to gather information like a store's hours. But it doesn't take much imagination to see how this kind of technology could be used for all kinds of questionable or dangerous tasks. And there's an obvious ethical question of whether a robot caller should be required to identify itself as a nonhuman. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at M.I.T. who has written extensively about artificial intelligence, told the The Washington Post that while Google's Duplex demo was technologically "amazing," it still raised ethical questions. "I don't think the main goal of A.I. should be to mimic humans," he said. Defenders of Google's Duplex experiment have pointed out that an automated phone call service could be helpful for people with disabilities, or for freeing people from annoying customer service slogs. ("O.K. Google, cancel my cable subscription.") But Google is now in a precarious position. It wants to keep pushing its A.I. development forward, but it needs to do so in ways that won't scare people at a time when distrust of the tech industry is growing by the day. Bloomberg reports that the backlash to Duplex caught Google by surprise. That, to me, is the most disturbing piece of this week's news that people inside the company thought that a demo of advanced A.I. fooling an unwitting human receptionist would be greeted with universal praise. I keep thinking of a Twitter thread posted last November by Kumail Nanjiani, one of the stars of HBO's "Silicon Valley." He noted that while doing research for the show, the show's crew members often visited the offices of tech companies and were struck by how little thought engineers gave to the ethical implications of their products. "Often we'll see tech that is scary," Mr. Nanjiani wrote. "And we'll bring up our concerns to them. We are realizing that ZERO consideration seems to be given to the ethical implications of tech. They don't even have a pat rehearsed answer. They are shocked at being asked. Which means nobody is asking those questions." Maybe Google should have invited a few more actors to their prelaunch product meetings. Some other tech stories I found interesting this week: My colleague Sheera Frenkel has a story about all the mountains of Facebook data scraped by academic researchers, much of which is still trading hands in the open and potentially being misused. Cambridge Analytica is increasingly looking like the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of Facebook, my colleague Cade Metz reports that the social network is opening up new A.I. labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, mostly by raiding nearby research universities for talent. A professor at the University of Washington sums up the problem nicely: "If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers." At The Atlantic, Robin Sloan writes about Fortnite, the video game that is taking the nation by storm. (And that I am still very bad at.) My colleague Michael Corkery has a good story about how Walmart is trying to keep up with Amazon by spraying money all over the e commerce sector. Finally, I found this story about Spotify's decision to remove songs by R. Kelly from playlists because of accusations of sexual abuse against him fascinating. It's proof that internet services can't be neutral in 2018, and that complaints about "de platforming" and censorship are only going to grow louder as more large tech platforms exercise their powers. Kevin Roose writes a column called The Shift and is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter here: kevinroose.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
BRAD ALLEN has no time to stand around and talk. Friday is race night at Ace Speedway, so there's a drivers' meeting to convene and prerace activities to coordinate. A representative from a national racing series is waiting up in the track office, meanwhile, to discuss a coming event. And at some point Mr. Allen, Ace's general manager since 2010, will need to meet with the track's owner, Abraham Woidislawsky, who is making a rare visit from up north. If recent experience is any guide, it should be a friendly discussion. As if that weren't enough, Mr. Allen entered his own car tonight, his first race in more than a year, so he needs to touch base with his pit crew, otherwise known as his father and his uncle. They'll have to shout practice has begun, and cars are already screaming around the 4/10 mile paved oval at up to 120 miles an hour. There are five races on the schedule, with nearly 60 entries in three divisions. It's a blessing to be busy again at Ace, a 56 year old bullring about an hour west of the Research Triangle here in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Only a few years ago the speedway was verging on collapse, weighed down by debt, losing fans and competitors in equal measure. The recession that began in late 2007 hit hard; even major series like IndyCar and Nascar Sprint Cup suffered in attendance and TV ratings, intensifying the challenge of retaining the support of sponsors and automakers. Down at the grass roots level, where the racing hews closest to its rough and tumble origins and where future stars are groomed, the very existence of some tracks has been threatened. According to the National Speedway Directory, by 2011 the number of active racing facilities in the United States and Canada fell by nearly 100 from its peak of about 1,600 in 2004. Most of those tracks are short ovals like Ace, which draw drivers, fans and sponsorship dollars almost entirely from their local communities. Even in the best of times profits can be thin, and for many small racetracks survival has long been a week to week proposition. Known as Southern Speedway when it opened in 1956, Ace started out as a dirt track. In 1990 it was paved and gained Nascar affiliation; an expansion and renovation in 1999 brought it to its current seating capacity of 5,000. Ace remained under local ownership until 2006, when Mr. Woidislawsky, a 72 year old Philadelphia real estate developer, bought the speedway with a partner for 2.1 million. With his Eastern European accent he was born in Russia and raised in Poland and Israel he would never be mistaken for a local resident. Meandering through the pits on race night he seemed at ease, trading greetings and well wishes with drivers, crew members and track officials. Mr. Woidislawsky, who concedes that he knows almost nothing about racing, said his involvement with Ace resulted in part from his love of the spectacle and his admiration for the hardworking families who participate. Meanwhile, the economic downturn was taking its toll, with unemployment in Alamance County, Ace's home, rising above 13 percent in early 2010. Racing is expensive perhaps 30,000 a year for a Late Model competitor and when a local economy suffers, drivers, sponsors and fans all cut back. Trying to reverse a steady decline in attendance and revenue, Mr. Woidislawsky hired and fired several track managers in his first three years as owner. The track's debts mounted, and according to Mr. Allen, then only a competitor at Ace, some checks to vendors and drivers bounced. Disputes over money and whom to blame when there isn't enough of it are something of a tradition in the racing business, and the he saids and she saids of Ace's troubles during those three years could fill a bank vault. No matter where the fault lies, those dark days demonstrate how quickly the financial food chain that supports a small racetrack can spiral toward collapse. Fewer cars mean fewer fans and a loss of incentive for sponsors; a loss of sponsors means lower payouts. By the fall of 2009, the number of weekly competitors had plummeted, Mr. Allen said, down to 10 or 12 cars in the pits on some nights, and the crowds in the stands thinned as well. The low point came on a Friday night late in that season when Mr. Allen counted about 200 people in the stands. "And half of them were Cub Scouts who just happened to be camping on the grounds," he said. Through it all, Mr. Woidislawsky's reputation in the community suffered. That he was trying to run the business remotely from Philadelphia visiting the track only four times a year, by his estimate didn't help. Finding the right person to handle day to day operations was essential. Mr. Allen, 47, was not the most likely candidate to reverse Ace's fortunes. He'd never run a racetrack before, and like the speedway itself, he'd been through a tough spell divorce and unemployment and was paying his bills by working odd jobs. Still, he brought a lifelong love of Ace Speedway he remembers watching his uncles race there as a child, and he won Modified championships at the track in 2006 8 and he was trusted within the local racing community. When Mr. Woidislawsky hired him for the 2010 season, his job, in essence, was to rebuild that community and in the process revive the track's fragile financial ecosystem. He started by cutting ticket prices, and he gave discount rates to local sponsors to encourage their loyalty. He called drivers who had left the speedway, inviting them to return. To Mr. Allen, this was the main issue. "If nobody's going there to race, nobody's going to watch," he said. Higher car counts would lure more fans to the track, which would attract sponsors, which would in turn allow Ace to offer higher purses. Not incidentally, back gate revenue the entry fees paid by drivers and team members, 25 to 30 a head would increase as well. If this race night is any indication, his duties never stop. He dons a rainbow wig and overalls to join in prerace antics for the fans, and leads them in a kind of pep rally chant; he even joins the track's announcer in singing the national anthem. There's an awkward moment, too, when the owner's visit is announced. Mindful of the moment, Mr. Allen reminds the fans of Mr. Woidislawsky's continued support of Ace and coaxes a polite round of applause from them. The disparate cultures represented by the two men, the local boy with the Carolina drawl and the northerner whose strained English can come across as blunt, couldn't be more obvious. Both agree that the relationship has involved some push and pull, culminating last fall in what Mr. Allen described as an angry exchange over the last minute cancellation of a big race. Mr. Allen said he was prepared to leave Ace at the end of the season he had offers from three other tracks, he said but on a November visit to Philadelphia the men found common ground. "I realized this guy's really not too different than I am," Mr. Allen said. "We're just in different worlds." Their continued partnership appears to be working. Two of this season's early races drew about 2,000 fans, according to Mr. Allen, and attendance since then has averaged about 1,800. And for the first time in years, the track is operating within its budget, Mr. Allen said. Talk about money long enough and you see nothing but dollar signs around the track one can only imagine how much it costs to rent one of those track sweeping trucks for a night, or replace those light bulbs. Once the green flag drops, none of it matters. Nobody comes to Ace Speedway to get rich, anyway. They're here to nurture a dream or keep one alive, or because they've been coming for generations, whether they love it or love someone who does. And short track racing almost never disappoints. The corners are tight and the drivers get feisty, as do the fans. Out on the track tonight, the Extreme class clatters around the oval like a junkyard raised from the dead. The Modifieds are a more serious affair after a few too many shenanigans among drivers the flagman jumps onto the track during a caution flag period and halts an oncoming car like a traffic cop. There's an altercation in the pits after three cars are thrown out of the race, prompting fans to rush the fence along the front straight for a look. Meanwhile, Mr. Woidislawsky's good will tour of the grandstands continues, including a summit meeting of sorts with Miss Ace Speedway, a student at nearby Elon University. Even if it seems at times that folks still don't quite know what to make of him, there's a grudging respect for what Mr. Woidislawsky has done for Ace. "I never feel like they don't like me," he said. "Every time I see them, 'Hi Abraham, thank you for staying with us, and bearing with us.' " For Mr. Allen, who finished sixth in his first race back, the larger implication can't go unstated. "In the end, he could have closed the thing down," he said. "He could have turned it into a mobile home park, or just bulldozed it. But he kept it open."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
In the demographic battle for Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Club Europa was a symbolic stronghold for Polish tough guys who still live with their parents against the invasion of real life "Girls" characters who still live off their parents. But with the recent opening of Good Room in Europa's surrendered hull, it's not hard to imagine a shirtless Hannah Horvath hoisting her victory banner over Greenpoint, perhaps once and for all. Not that Cafe Grumpy types necessarily reign here. As Greenpoint's only full fledged nightclub, Good Room is luring not only the neighborhood's G train riders, but partyers from other burgs. "People are coming over from Williamsburg because Wythe is becoming like another meatpacking," said Jily Jimenez, a designer, who was visiting on a recent night. This 5,000 square foot danceteria sits on an uncinematic block between a TD Bank and the 94th Precinct police station. The main room offers the usual nightclub fare: giant disco ball, bordello red uplighting, leather booths snaking along the wall. A cozier, cabinlike second room feels like the party within the party. Those who prefer not to speak like a sky diving instructor will appreciate the muted sound in the bar area. On opening night, Alexander Wang whipped his majestic mane to beats by the house legend Juan Maclean alongside coveys of the fashion birds who roost around Manhattan Avenue. A frigid Friday in December was more sparsely attended, but it didn't stop two slim men with Crest wave coifs from re enacting "A Night at the Roxbury," while Bumblefoot, the guitarist for Guns N' Roses, stroked his Fu Manchu at the bar.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
Bill Withers began his recording career in his 30s, which meant he hadn't been sheltered from the everyday lives he would write about. The music of Bill Withers radiated a quality that's rare in pop songs and, really, anywhere else: selflessness. It's in the subjects that Withers, who died on Monday, chose to sing about: his grandmother's hard won wisdom in "Grandma's Hands," the suicidal regrets of a failed husband in "Better Off Dead," and in one of his most indelible songs, "Lean on Me," a churchy pledge of unconditional help and compassion. Perhaps it was because Withers was already a grown up, in his early 30s, when his recording career started. He was raised in a large family in West Virginia coal country, served in the Navy and worked factory jobs before getting the chance to record. He hadn't been sheltered from the everyday lives that he would write about. Withers's most triumphant years, the early 1970s, were also an idealistic time for soul music. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Earth, Wind Fire and others were writing community minded songs that melded urban realism and utopian aspiration. Withers could be every bit their peer, particularly in the ways he brought big issues down to personal stories, like his portrait of a badly wounded Vietnam veteran, "I Can't Write Left Handed." And when he wasn't observing outside characters, Withers could also depict the deepest jealousy, loneliness and melancholy, in songs like "Who Is He (And What Is He to You)," "You," and his despondent megahit, "Ain't No Sunshine," a model of profound simplicity. His voice was at the center of every song, reedy and gritty, strong enough for preacherly declamations and smooth enough to carry a lover's endearments. Yet he chose to treat that utterly distinctive voice modestly as a vehicle, not a centerpiece. He sang his stories with down home fervor, but he was also more than willing to let the sense of the words dissolve into rhythm and incantation, into impulses and feelings. Withers made it seem with deep rooted knowledge and virtuoso skill that each song was creating its own borderless style and groove on the spot, steeped in but never beholden to blues, gospel, country, jazz, folk, rock or any other defined idiom. Imagine Withers's voice removed from songs like the defiant "Use Me," and the grooves he devised (with his top notch studio bands) nearly capture the mood on their own though Withers's vocals would also engage those grooves with every phrase. Withers was ill used by a recording business that second guessed his songwriting. In his acceptance speech at his long belated 2015 Rock Roll Hall of Fame induction, he defined A R, record label jargon that stands for artists and repertoire, as "antagonistic and redundant." After his 1974 album " 'Justments," filled with brooding songs about love gone wrong, Withers and his new label, Columbia, recast him as a more conventional romantic crooner. He had some suavely commercial moments: "Lovely Day" in 1977, which for its final minute flaunts one almost impossibly sustained note after another, and "Just the Two of Us," which appeared on a 1980 album by the saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. Withers's musical ingenuity lingers on his later albums in some eccentric rhythm tracks and sly chord progressions and he did manage to resist making disco. But the joyful, risky self invention of his early albums had given way to professionalism. He made his last album in 1985, then earned a living from his publishing catalog, refusing offers to record again. The Withers album to savor is the one he recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1972. He brought a band of first call studio musicians and gathered all of his best early material, seasoned by serious touring. Songs that had been limited to three minutes in studio versions get a chance to groove longer and harder: "Use Me" rides a backbeat of audience handclaps to syncopated ecstasy, and tops that with a reprise. Withers's voice had a rawer tone than his studio performances without sacrificing any improvisational subtleties. And the songs were populated not with one singer's ego, but with friends, relatives, lovers, rivals and, in an all out 13 minute, key changing, wah wah throwdown, a week in the life of an entire neighborhood, "Harlem." It's not about Withers; it's about music where everybody lives.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
MADRID With Spain struggling to escape the European debt crisis and facing the threat of another recession, cash strapped companies in the country are increasingly looking abroad for new business and financing and losing their Spanish accent in the process. While it is hardly a corporate exodus, the fear that the trickle will become a flood if the Spanish economy worsens is generating concern at a time when the government in Madrid is struggling to find additional revenue to close a gaping budget deficit. Highlighting concerns about Spain on Thursday, Standard Poor's downgraded the country's long term debt rating, to AA from AA, because of its poor growth prospects and troubled banks. Telefonica, the former public telephone monopoly, set off alarms in September when it said that it would create a new digital unit in London for its most promising mobile and online businesses. The news came shortly after it announced major layoffs in Spain, where unemployment is already higher than 20 percent. Other companies are taking smaller steps, like using foreign subsidiaries to circumvent punitive borrowing costs at home. At the same time, some multinationals, like the two biggest Spanish banks, Santander and BBVA, are playing down their nationality to reassure international investors as they seek to expand their business outside the country. The value of Spain as a corporate brand has become "a lot worse," said Pablo Vazquez, an economist at the Fundacion de Estudios de Economia Aplicada, a research institute in Madrid. The effect is felt not only in falling earnings, he said, but also "in terms of the intangible benefits that the Spanish brand transmitted before, those of a dynamic and youthful European society." Avoiding an exodus should be a priority of the next government, following a general election on Nov. 20, he added. Company executives have been reluctant to discuss publicly their concerns about being in Spain, particularly before the election. Telefonica insisted that the decision to shift the digital unit, which includes its popular social network Tuenti, should not be viewed as an abandonment of Spain, even though the reorganization also involved folding its Spanish unit into a broader European business. Guillermo Ansaldo, a Telefonica executive, said at a conference a day after the relocation announcement that the group would continue to invest heavily in Spain, after spending EUR24.5 billion, or nearly 34 billion at the current exchange rate, in the country over the past decade. Still, since the onset of the financial crisis, the proportion of Telefonica's investments in Spain has fallen to 24.5 percent of its global capital investments in the past financial year, from 27.6 percent in the 2007 financial year. In a surprising U turn, the fashion retailing giant Inditex announced last month that it would move the online sales subsidiary of Zara, its flagship brand, back to Spain from Ireland. It made that statement shortly after reports in the Spanish news media highlighting the tax savings that the Zara unit had made in Ireland. Inditex, however, is among the few Spanish companies to have been relatively unscathed in the financial crisis. "Spanish companies are really getting hit very hard in terms of their ability to issue shares and raise financing in general," Mr. Ghemawat said. "It might not boost the market capitalization immediately, but it does make sense to shift assets to safer jurisdictions, should things really get more sour here." But given the public outcry that any full fledged departure could generate, Mauro Guillen, a Spanish professor of international management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said that companies were instead likely to use "lots of intermediary solutions." A company that followed Telefonica's lead would be likely to benefit, since "being based in London would give them more favorable access to financing," said Luis Garicano, a professor at the London School of Economics. Abertis, an infrastructure group, took a different direction. Last March it issued EUR750 million in bonds through its French subsidiary. The deal allowed Abertis to benefit from the stronger credit rating of its French unit, which is rated AAA by Standard Poor's, compared with BB for the parent company. That gap is in line with higher operating margins for the French business. Whatever happens to Spain, almost every Spanish multinational has set ambitious targets to derive more earnings from outside the country. For instance, Francisco Gonzalez, the chairman of BBVA, has said that Spain should ultimately account for only 10 percent of its profit, compared with 31 percent in the second quarter, as growth in emerging markets has continued to outpace that of the Spanish franchise. BBVA also recently moved its bond trading activities to London from Madrid. To reassure international investors, big Spanish companies have also been highlighting their decreasing reliance on their home market. For example, Santander recently ran an advertising campaign in international media outlets with the slogan "A strong global brand," underlining its diversification and the small portion, just 12 percent, of first half profit that came from its Spanish consumer banking business. Crisis stricken Portugal represented only 2 percent. "None of our biggest clients is now asking us to highlight Spain as part of their advertising strategy quite the opposite," said a director at a leading advertising company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of client confidentiality issues. Aside from Latin America, Britain has arguably become the main target of Spanish companies abroad. Most of that investment occurred during the boom years before the financial crisis, notably the 2004 acquisition of the mortgage lender Abbey National by Santander and the 2006 takeover of BAA, the British airport operator, by Ferrovial. But it has started to pick up again, according to Justine Winterburn, senior investment adviser at the British Embassy in Madrid. "As a result of the economic downturn, we are experiencing a rise in the number of companies interested in the U.K. market," she said, with 2012 expected to show a further increase. Britain welcomed 56 new Spanish investment projects in the past financial year, up 47 percent from a year earlier, according to U.K. Trade Investment, a government agency. The latest Spanish investments in Britain generated 3,542 jobs there, an increase of 116 percent over the previous year. That is good news for Britain but infuriating for Spanish labor unions. Still, Fernando Casado, director of the Business Council for Competitiveness, a lobbying association formed in February that represents the largest companies in Spain, said that it was unrealistic to expect multinationals to stay put in the current economic environment. "The goal of the big companies must be to invest outside and then lift others in their wake," Mr. Casado said. "The reality is that the prospects for making a strong investment here today are low. But if you're successful outside, you will also create a very positive chain reaction and lift suppliers here."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times "The Post" tells of the tense days leading up to The Washington Post's decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, the government's secret history of the Vietnam War. The New York Times had broken the story but was prohibited from running the full series after the Nixon administration won a court injunction. That's when The Post took up the story. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film stars Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, The Post's publisher, who came into her own by defying President Richard M. Nixon's order, and Tom Hanks as the legendary editor Ben Bradlee. It is also the first time these three Hollywood icons have all worked together. I spoke with Mr. Hanks and Ms. Streep about the film's uncanny parallels with today, their thoughts on the Weinstein moment, and what it's like following in the footsteps of what is arguably the best newspaper movie ever, "All the President's Men," starring Jason Robards as Bradlee. Our meeting took place before Ms. Streep was nominated for an Oscar for her turn in the movie, which also picked up a best picture nod. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. STREEP I didn't think the definitive Washington Post movie was made. It was a great movie, but it neglected to mention Katharine Graham, and her central position. She was glancingly there. HANKS There was a reference to her. (To Mr. Hanks) Especially you stepping into a role that was iconically done. How do you go about that differently? HANKS I viewed this as the story of the week that Katharine Graham became Katharine Graham. In which case I had the juicy aspect of playing the only ally she had. You know, philosophically, the relationship that they had was based on so much stuff. You might as well just call it love, respect, empathy, understanding, professional moxie. HANKS It's also cantankerous, like when he said, "Katharine, get your finger out of my eye." From the moment we both read it and said, "Oh, I'm not going to let this pass me by," it grew into the specifics of what the Pentagon Papers were. It actually bolstered the story of the week that Katharine Graham became Katharine Graham. STREEP Where do the hardest things come from? They come from deep. Usually they come from your parents. Her father was a formidable figure, and her mother was even more terrifyingly important in her life. Absent, but the absence was important. Katharine Graham was someone who was a product of her time. It was the whole culture that undermined all women, especially women that should've had the most agency of all highly educated wealthy women who had every opportunity to step into important places in life but they sat back. The more I read about her, the more I thought, "Who do you think you are trying to be Katharine Graham?" She was so thoughtful, deep principled and wily in that way that women had to be when they were only the second tier of a society. HANKS There was that moment where the men stayed and talked about policy and current events, and the women went in the other room. I didn't know that still happened in the early '70s. STREEP You have to remember that I was in graduate school when I was first allowed to get a credit card without a male family member signing for me. The film is a model for men and women working together respectfully, which, who would have thunk it, is what we need, that good example. STREEP Yeah, but just think if I had been the managing editor of The Washington Post and you had been my publisher. If I said, "Get your finger out of my eye." There are echoes of Nixon in what we're hearing now from the White House, with the difference being that the person in the White House is saying that real reporting is "fake news." Was it gratifying to do a movie set when people actually believed things? HANKS The assault on the First Amendment under the Nixon administration was old school, a D Day version of "Let's stop this story because it's national security and they're traitors if they print it. Because if they dare print it, they'll find out that we lied. And if they know that we're lying, we can't do our jobs." What's happening now is this guerrilla war that is going on against the First Amendment. This idea now that has actually been verbalized by various people high up in the current administration, that there is such a thing as an "alternative fact." It gives validation to what is patently false, that the purveyors know is a lie, and worse, know that it is completely unconfirmed and is scurrilous. And in that realm comes some degree of the same message: "Don't let them find out the truth, because if so we can't stay in power." All of this stuff that was going on was not lost on any of us. How do we rebuild faith in these institutions? HANKS Well, I think it's a marathon. It's the long haul. Eventually I think the truth does come out. At The New York Times, colleagues feel that this is a New York Times story. They broke the Pentagon Papers. What are your thoughts on that? HANKS I read an article before we even started shooting, which was "How dare they do this movie about The Washington Post when it was us?" We're all reacting off what The New York Times did. They did not have Katharine Graham. They did not have that side of it. The Times gets all the props in the world. Have your colleagues rest assured that they get props. I've got to shift conversation to the news these days, sexual harassment. One thing that struck me after the Harvey Weinstein accusations broke was people were saying, "What is Meryl going to say?" They were waiting for you. STREEP I know. I found out about this on a Friday and went home deep into my own life. And then somebody told me that on "Morning Joe" they were screaming that I haven't responded yet. I don't have a Twitter thing or handle, whatever. And I don't have Facebook. I really had to think. Because it really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work. You make movies. You think you know everything about everybody. So much gossip. You don't know anything. People are so inscrutable on a certain level. And it's a shock. Some of my favorite people have been brought down by this, and he's not one of them. What do you make of the fact, though, that people are waiting for you to speak? STREEP I don't want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that's valuable to say. And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now. What have you experienced over the years and how have you dealt with it? STREEP I have experienced things, mostly when I was young and pretty. Nobody comes on to me now . So I wouldn't have had that more recently. But back in the day, when everybody was doing cocaine, there was a lot of expletive behavior that was inexcusable. But now that people are older, and more sober, there has to be forgiveness, and that's the way I feel about it. Do you want to go into specifics? STREEP No, no, I don't. I mean, I was really beaten up, but I don't want to ruin somebody's mature life. I just don't. I do think if the world is going to go on, we have to find out a way to work together, and know that it's better for men if they respect us deeply as equals. Going back to your early days, people are wondering if you had problems with Dustin Hoffman, and your thoughts on the talk around him, to put it euphemistically. Did he slap you? STREEP That was when we were making "Kramer vs. Kramer." This is tricky because when you're an actor, you're in a scene, you have to feel free. I'm sure that I have inadvertently hurt people in physical scenes. But there's a certain amount of forgiveness in that. But this was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping. But I think those things are being corrected in this moment. And they're not politically corrected; they're fixed. They will be fixed, because people won't accept it anymore. So that's a good thing. (To Hanks) What do you make of this MeToo moment? HANKS I know that I have participated in crude humor worthy of a baseball locker room on a set. And that's bad words, and a degree of stupid sexuality in the confines of the circus. I was asked by Diane Rehm on NPR if I had ever been aware of this type of sexual predatory behavior. And I said: "Well, it's easy to say no. I mean, I'm oblivious to an awful lot of this. But I'd be a fool to say that it's never happened on some job I've had, because I'm not in every office." But four days after the Harvey Weinstein stuff broke someone wrote, "Who says it's too late to learn new behavior?" There's no reason not to view this as a reckoning that is going to make us a better society. STREEP There shouldn't be the idea of a locker room. The payload is unloaded on women, because that's the last group it's kind of O.K. to demean, degrade. Did either of you feel "complicit" is a tough word, but that you might have put on blinders? STREEP Well, honestly for me in terms of Harvey, I really didn't know. I did think he was having girlfriends. But when I heard rumors about actresses, I thought that that was a way of denigrating the actress and her ability to get the job. That really raised my hackles. I didn't know that he was in any way abusing people. He never asked me to a hotel room. I don't know how his life was conducted without people intimately knowing about it. HANKS I would claim that I was never knowingly complicit, but that doesn't mean I wasn't oblivious. You know what's oddly liberating about this is that we would go off and make movies that have absolutely nothing to do with any of these topics, but journalists bring them up, you know? STREEP But that's because we have the pulpit. You don't know that when you go to drama school. You take out those loans, you think, "Well, maybe I can pay those back." You don't think somebody's going to ask you to make a speech in front of the Committee to Protect Journalists. HANKS Or whether Social Security should be privatized. Do you think it's out of place? HANKS No, not on this movie. STREEP It's great to be asked to step up because you know what, everybody should. HANKS And this movie this is what this entire film deals with. We made this movie about 1971, but it really is about 2017. There's no reason not to get involved in what this overpowering discussion is about. You're both beheld as icons. The Washington Post review said, "Icons playing icons."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
China, which has long been criticized for soaring C section rates, actually has rates lower than previously reported, although they are still quite high, according to a large new study done jointly by Chinese and American scientists. Public health alarms were raised in 2010 when the World Health Organization reported that 46 percent of Chinese babies were delivered by cesarean rather than vaginal birth. The new study, published last week in JAMA, found the real rate to be about 35 percent. It is still climbing slowly, despite a national policy discouraging elective C sections. The C section rate varies widely by regions. In urban, wealthy Shanghai, it was recently as high as 68 percent, while in remote Tibet it is now about 4 percent. C sections are medically necessary to save the life of the child or the mother in only 10 to 15 percent of all births, according to the W.H.O., and a large 2015 study found that the ideal number was about 19 percent. China's extraordinarily high rate is a result of its former one child policy, changing medical care conditions and its increasingly capitalist economy. According to the study's authors, many parents and grandparents demand C sections to assure that births take place on a lucky day in the astrological calendar, or because they believe that a surgically removed infant is more likely to be perfectly formed. More than 99 percent of all women in China now give birth in hospitals 30 years ago, only about half did. But they typically have gone through labor in open wards with no husband or family present, too few nurses and no pain relief. C sections are an attractive alternative, said Dr. Susan C. Hellerstein, a Harvard Medical School obstetrician and one of the authors. Doctors made more money from fees and "tips" from families if they operated, the researchers found. And if they performed scheduled surgeries rather than risk vaginal births, doctors felt they were less likely to be accused of malpractice, which is a criminal offense in China, or to face angry families demanding compensation. Vaginal births can quickly go wrong if, for example, the cord wraps around the baby's neck. The study was led by doctors from China's national statistics office, Peking University, Harvard Medical School and New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. The 2010 W.H.O. survey erred by relying on figures from just 21 hospitals, mostly in cities, said Dr. Jan Blustein, a health policy specialist at N.Y.U. and co author. The new study tallied 90 percent of the country's births over seven years. While a few cities like Shanghai had astronomical rates, half of all Chinese still live in rural areas where home births are more common and distances to hospitals are greater, so actual rates are closer to the ideal 10 to 20 percent range. In Tibet, however, C sections are so rare that mothers and children who could be saved from death are undoubtedly not getting the operations, Dr. Hellerstein said. C sections save lives in breech or multiple births, for example, or when a mother has dangerously high blood pressure or a fetal heartbeat fails. But babies born by C section are more likely to hospitalized for breathing problems and more likely to suffer asthma and obesity later in life, possibly as a result of not getting microbes present in the birth canal. Mothers who have had C sections also are more likely to hemorrhage or to have a uterine rupture in the next pregnancy. Since 2009, China has been trying to control medically unnecessary cesareans by educating patients, doctors and midwives, and by warning individual hospitals when their rates are too high, said Dr. Jianmeng Liu, director of the Office for National Maternal and Child Health Statistics of China and a study co author. China's C section rate, the authors noted, is close to that of the United States, where it is slightly over 32 percent.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
On Saturday, Henri Bendel, the department store whose brown and white stripes once defined the concept of the boutique as a carnival of gewgaws and glamour, will shut its doors for the last time. It has been a slow farewell, 24 stores blinking out like fireflies since the start of the year, culminating with the shuttering of the New York flagship this week. (The website will stay open until Jan. 28.) It comes two weeks after Lord Taylor on Fifth Avenue held its last fire sale, leaving its echoing Italian Renaissance halls empty in order to make way for a new tenant. (Other Lord Taylor stores, as well as its website, remain open.) Both events were signaled last fall (though at first Lord Taylor said it was simply downsizing and would keep a presence on the ground floor of its famous building). As a result, locking the actual door was almost an afterthought. Most of us have already done our mourning and bemoaning, our breast beating about the digital future. It is true that retail is a Darwinian world, one in which only the ruthless and omni channel adept survive. B. Altman and Bonwit Teller closed back in the last millennium, and the sky did not fall. Gimbels and Alexander's are no more. The rumors around Barneys New York on Madison won't go away. Saks Fifth Avenue just shut its women's store in Brookfield Place in downtown Manhattan, and almost no one blinked. (Though that may have been because few people realized it was there; in any case, it's worth noting that both Saks and Lord Taylor are owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is in turn controlled by NRDC Equity Partners.) Yet never fear: The Saks crown jewel on Fifth Avenue across from Rockefeller Center is in the midst of a much heralded makeover, complete with the arrival of L'Avenue, the canteen of Avenue Montaigne, to feed the ravening fashion hordes. Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus are coming. Thus the world turns on the engine of capitalism. While the end of the Saks downtown women's experiment, which lasted approximately two years , is mostly the story of a business bet on a consumer group that never materialized, the demise of the other two stores each present for more than a century represents the end of an idea. They represented not only consumption, but also much more: the way New York became a city of aspiration, invention and reinvention. They were about communion and the treasure hunt for identity; rites of passage individual and generational. In their walls, memories lie. Losing them, we lose a piece of our own past too. Few stores embodied it as much as the flagship of Bendel's, currently owned by the beleaguered L Brands (which has other problems thanks to Victoria's Secret). When it was on 57th Street, up until the late 1980s, it was known for its trendsetting past, as the place that introduced Coco Chanel to the United States and employed Andy Warhol as an illustrator. In its Fifth Avenue space, behind its grand Lalique window, shoppers browsed beneath a soaring atrium backed by a sweeping staircase. Or Lord Taylor, with its 11 floors of grand proportions and democratic attitude, more affordable and approachable than the haute Bergdorf Goodman to the north, focused on the virtues of American sportswear. Together, they elevated even the most mundane purchase to the level of so called experience and entertainment, concepts discussed today as a breakthrough in retail thinking. As if. That was always what these stores provided. Lord Taylor once had a concert hall. It had the first lunch bar. Bendel's created the "street of shops" within its shop in its 57th Street incarnation. Not to mention the fact that both stores were run by women long before the industry at large woke up to the need to address its own gender imbalance: Geraldine Stutz, who presided over Bendel's from 1957 to 1986; and Dorothy Shaver at Lord Taylor from 1945 to 1959. Unlike the e tail world, which exists in the unmoored present, these stores all came with a past. I am one of those people who always found the abundance of the department store overwhelming as opposed to comforting. (My reluctance had less to do with the efficiency of the online world than with my own personal option anxiety.) But I know there are many who didn't feel that way, who saw the muchness of color and texture and product as a psychic comfort. They didn't go to stores to buy, necessarily, but to revel in a world that offered sensory delight without judgment. Unlike in the boutiques of today, no one followed you around watching to see if you would buy. You were anonymous until you didn't want to be. I associate these stores with my grandmother, who left school at 12 during the Depression and for whom browsing was a joy. If Walter Benjamin saw the arcades of France as the last refuge of the flaneur, the department stores of New York were the refuge of those who wanted, for a moment, to pretend they were enjoying the life of the flaneur. To escape into fantasy.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
new video loaded: Frugal Traveler: Hop on South Africa's Scenic Night Train in 360
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
MIAMI Miami City Ballet, widely known as one of the world's leading exponents of choreography by George Balanchine, also has a record of new choreography. Its current quadruple bill, labeled "See the Music," opens with Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" (1941) and has Nacho Duato's "Jardi Tancat" (1983), a new company acquisition, as a centerpiece. But it also features two works recently made for the troupe, Justin Peck's "Chutes and Ladders" (2013, to the first movement of Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 1) and Alexei Ratmansky's "Symphonic Dances" (2012, to Rachmaninoff's 1940 work of that name). The Ratmansky was commissioned by the company's previous artistic director, Edward Villella; the Peck was commissioned by Lourdes Lopez, its new one. This speaks, as much else does, of artistic continuity within the Miami company. There has been no pronounced change of style or repertory since Mr. Villella's departure in 2012: The Ratmansky and the Peck works were closely concerned with their music, a part of the Balanchine approach shared by both artistic directors. Injury kept several of the company's finest principals (notably the sisters Jeanette and Patricia Delgado) offstage during the performances I watched on Saturday and Sunday, but their replacements flourished, and the audience had four very different genres of choreography to compare. "Symphonic Dances," an exciting piece lasting some 35 minutes, abounds in felicities of steps and construction. You watch it with both delight in its passing detail and suspense about what will happen next. It's also mystifying. With the dancers passing through three sets of costumes (by Adeline Andre and Istvan Dohar), the work establishes dramas, characters and situations we still haven't fully understood when the curtain falls. This is intentional. A program note by Mr. Ratmansky says: "There is no real story. I want the audience to leave with the images and feelings that the movement gives them." To a large degree, that works beautifully. "Symphonic Dances" takes us through three very different scenes, each a dream world laden with emotion and fatefulness. I loved the long, sleeveless frocks in pastel hues worn by the women in the first movement, and the much brighter colors (azure, lemon, scarlet and others) of the women's diaphanous dresses in the second movement help to establish this scene as a marvelous dream ballroom.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
SCRIPT Rezeda Suleyman People wrote me asking can I come into your shop if I'm not Muslim? Clothes that cover your body are a standard for any woman, not only Muslim. NATALIA NARMIN ICHAEVA, Wandi muslim fashion pr Scene with the selfie stick Anyone who's not busy, come join us! WE MAKE MUSLIMS the TRENDSETTERS Ildar Hazrat Alyautdinov, Imam, Moscow Cathedral mosque YOU're not afraid to SAY I' MUSLIM anymore. There used to be time when people would be ashamed TO SAY IT TITLE Muslim Imagemakers, Made in Moscow Scene at the mosque TITLE CARD: An estimated 16 percent of Moscow's population are Muslim. NATPOP It's a blessed day today, it's Friday. Ildar Hazrat Alyautdinov, Imam, Moscow Cathedral mosque About 2 millions of Muslims live in Moscow. They say that in a few decades Muslims will make UP 25 percent of Russia's population, because Muslims' birthrate is high. Text card: In recent decades, Islam in Russia has often been associated with terrorist attacks and insurgency in the North Caucasus. Ildar Hazrat Alyautdinov, Imam, Moscow Cathedral mosque You can clearly feel Anti Islamic sentiment is taking a back seat; Ukraine may be a possible Rezeda praying People always need to envision an enemy. "IT USED TO BE MUSLIMS. Now, the situation in Ukraine has created a new enemy. I noticed Muslims moved out of the spotlight. WE CAN USE this time TO MAKE OUR LIFE IN MOSCOW BETTER. Scene "I chose this fabric because it's not see through. Dmitri Oparin, anthropologist, professor assistant, Moscow State University It's time for Muslims to redefine their image, to establish new relations with with society. COVER HIS EYES MOVING NATALIA NARMIN ICHAEVA, wandi muslim fashion PR "Let's post the beauty shot" I'm 29 and have been promoting the Muslim lifestyle in Russia for three years. TITLE CARD Mrs. Ichaeva's company promotes 40 Muslim fashion and lifestyle brands in Russia. NATALIA NARMIN ICHAEVA, wandi muslim fashion PR We offer unconventional MARKETING, because Muslim brands need a special approach. TITLE CARD Suleyman hired t he company to broaden her brand's appeal. It suggested removing one model's hijab in her advertisement. Music break TITLE CARD Rezeda Suleyman, It was a difficult decision. Theoretically, it's forbidden to show women without headscarves or with a neck uncovered. NAT photo with women in the first photoshoot without a hijab NATALIA NARMIN ICHAEVA, wandi muslim fashion pr We were saying now that this brand is no t only for covered women. Rezeda Suleyman With this change I wanted to urge non Muslims to take care of their body, keep it away from strangers' eyes and dress modestly. NAT sound NAT vendor to the Slavic customer "It fits your shoulders so well!" Rezeda Suleyman WE INVITE SECULAR socialites AND CELEBRITIES to our events because they are role models for a certain audience. THEY HELP US BREAK STEREOTYPES AND CREATE A POSITIVE IMAGE OF MUSLIM WOMEN Nina Kurpyakova, actress I was offered to wear a very beautiful dress to the red carpet. Of course I' will wear it. AND IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT religion the designer is. It's business. Natalia Narmin Ichaeva Often a GIRL BUYS A FEW DRESSES AT OUR events first, then she ASKS WHAT KORAN translation SHE SHOULD read. IT'S amazing THAT A DRESS WAS THE REASON FOR IT. NAT saying goodbye to the actress I'm leaving. Thank you, have a good evening! Keep in touch. Bye! Bye bye sweetheart! Ichaeva Of course, it's difficult to merge Muslim lifestyle with the one people are used to. Title card Despite efforts to redefine the role of Islam, some admit integrating it into the mainstream still faces many challenges. Muhammad Adli (Andrei Kotikov), Muslim convert, ethnic Russian: No one on the subway fights with me. I can pray. But Moscow lacks MOSQUES. A HAND HAS MORE FINGERS THAN MOSCOW HAS MOSQUES. They say there is no land to build more , BUT THEY FIND LANDS FOR SHOPPING MALLS. Ildar Hazrat Alyautdinov, Imam, Moscow Cathedral mosque One reason why mosques don't get built is public opinion, unfortunately. When we get land, activists stand out and protest any mosque construction. NAT camera shutter clicks photos from 2013 protest in Moscow Russia officially is a secular state, but most people here are Christian Orthodox. As Moscow's mufti I often encourage Muslims to be active and I blame diminished place in the society to their lack of activism. Scene with the church/Sunday Up Market: Hello How can I help? Can I get one too? Medinat Khalukhaeva, Tourism manager in Chechen republic: WE'RE TAKING PART IN HALAL EXPO REPRESENTING THE TOURISM IN CHECHEN REPUBLIC We're becoming more outgoing. TITLE CARD Following wars in Chechnya, the Chechens became one of the most stigmatized Muslims. Some say religious discrimination in Russia is not as strong as ethnic xenophobia. Medinat Khalukhaeva, Tourism manager in Chechen republic: SOME TOURISTS ARE SCARED THAT IT'S DANGEROUS TO BE IN OUR REPUBLIC. Natpop Chechen republic worker giving out brochures This is about religious places to visit. Sure. Thank you. We are a tour company. Medinat Khalukhaeva, Tourism manager in Chechen republic: While Muslims are out of the media spotlight, we need to continue to project a positive image to be treated with dignity, as people who deserve it. Zulfiya Raupova NAT MUSIC AS TATARS WE are definitely IN A BETTER PLACE, COMPARED TO OTHER ETHNICITIES TITLE CARD: Tatars are Russia's biggest Muslim group and the second largest ethnicity. NAT Zulfiya at the kindergarten How are you? What have you been doing in the kindergarten? Is everything good? Zulfiya Raupova NAT say goodbye to your cla ssmates. Zulfiya Raupova Tatars have been living in Russia for centuries, so they fit in the local culture. NAT Dad gets the biggest slice Rustem Kudoyarov Islam that we, Tatars, practice is very moderate NAT Music Raupova is bringing her traditional music to the mainstream. NAT Music Zulfiya Raupova My audience is growing Any music with ethnic influence ignites interest. I used to see mostly Tatars in my concert audience, but now I see different ethnicities. NAT And now you will hear the music by an emerging composer from Tatarstan's capital , Zulfiya Raupova. I feel a huge responsibility to break stereotypes about Muslims with my music and attitude. Our religion is larger than people think it is. You can only understand it by diving in. NATPOP applause REZEDA Rezeda Suleyman, fashion designer Natpop Rezeda and the sewing facility manager: Would you like me to take care of her for some time? Yes, thank you. I started to wear headscarves at 19. Nowadays it's easier to go out covered. Because when terrorist attacks were happening, I walked in the subway and some would rush to a different car in fear. Now it doesn't happen. Everything is pretty calm. Natalia Ichaeva TITLE card Raised as a Christian from Belarus, Ichaeva converted to Islam two years ago. I'm ethnically Slavic and it helps me to build bridges in my work and for myself. NATPOP Natalia talking to the actress in the dress Wow, it fits you s well. This band collar look very good on you. Natalia Ichaeva People are more open to me as Slavic when I offer a different view of Muslims. Imam society has formed A VERY NEGATIVE IMAGE OF ISLAM, AND perhaps more TIME has TO PASS FOR THIS ATTITUDE TO go AWAY" Nat in the car Natalia See you later. Peace be upon you Dmitri Oparin, anthropologist, MSU It's not a religious question; it's a social problem. Russia is a multi ethnic country. We have always lived together, Most problems can be provoked only by administration, the power, and media Fayza Jha, organizing committee, Moscow Halal Expo We're not different if we wear a hijab and if we pray 5 times a day... and whatever propaganda is, people see with their own eyes We live the same life. Natalia Ichaeva It would be strange to deny that The MOST IMPORTANT goal for me as Muslim and for my business partners is to get anyone into understanding and adopting Islam. We don't impose; WE LEAVE A CHOICE TO EVERYone. " Music Instagram stand with abaya
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
This College Football Team Had No Coronavirus Cases at First. Then It Shut Down. When Kansas State opened the doors to its athletic facilities, welcoming its football players back to campus starting the first weekend in June, administrators breathed a sigh of relief once the first batch of coronavirus tests came back. The first wave of athletes spent a week in quarantine before voluntary workouts, as all players were required to do, and the scorecard was pristine: 90 tests, zero positives. Another six players straggled in a day or two later and were swabbed. Again, no positives. Then, by June 12, the final group of 24 arrivals largely freshmen was tested. But just a week later, Kansas State shut down its workouts until at least mid July after two positive cases in that final group morphed into four and then eight before leaping to 14, as nearly half the team needed to be checked again. With its announcement on Saturday, Kansas State became the first school from a Power 5 conference to shut down football activities. Two other Football Bowl Subdivision schools did the same after outbreaks among their athletes, with Houston making the decision on June 12 and Boise State on Monday. The swift escalation at Kansas State, from clean slate to clampdown, shows how perilous it can be for universities even with sanitized facilities, extensive protocols and without blocking and tackling in football practices to bring athletes back to campuses as more than half the country is experiencing spikes in coronavirus cases. Among the states with the most severe outbreaks in the United States is football mad Texas, which has seen such a sharp rise in infections more than 5,000 new cases were reported on Tuesday that Gov. Greg Abbott, who had been bullish on an early reopening last month, urged residents to stay indoors. As university presidents, knowing the many millions of dollars that football generates, planned to open their campuses later this summer, there were other examples in the last week to give them pause. At Clemson, 28 athletes including 23 football players tested positive for the coronavirus. At Texas, 13 players tested positive and another 10 were self isolating. And at Louisiana State, the reigning national champion, at least 30 players were in quarantine, according to Sports Illustrated. "I think everyone realizes the plan is written in pencil," said Heather Lyke, the athletic director at Pittsburgh and a member of the N.C.A.A. Division I Council, which last week approved guidelines for how teams can practice leading into the season. She added: "It's frankly hard to predict where things are going to go. The point where the council approved the calendar, things were in a reasonable state." If the future is murky, so, too, is the breadth of recent cases. There have been confirmed positive tests at 23 of the 130 F.B.S. schools, but some public schools including Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have refused to release testing data of their athletes, claiming that federal laws prohibiting the release of students' personal information allow them to not release aggregated data. And given the cost of testing close to 100 each at Kansas State, which will have about 120 players plus coaches and staff to test schools with tighter budgets will surely consider fewer tests. At U.C.L.A., 30 players including the team's starting quarterback demanded in a letter that a third party health official be present when they participate in football related activities because they did not trust school officials to act in their best interest with the virus. "It shows this blatant disregard for what's going on in the nation and around the world with this pandemic," said Billy Hawkins, a University of Houston professor who has written on the black athletic experience. He lauded the U.C.L.A. players and said workouts around the country should not take place until there is a vaccine or schools can assure players, who are not paid salaries, that they will not get sick. "If they continue in this voluntary phase, if they continue along this path, obviously more cases are going to emerge in this population," Hawkins added. "What scares me the most is when I hear people say, 'Oh, they're young. It's easier to recover.' I don't know if that's a guarantee." The decision by Kansas State to halt workouts was straightforward. Gene Taylor, Kansas State's athletic director, said it was becoming too difficult to regulate close contact among the players, and that there was concern that a recent surge in cases could overwhelm the local health care system in Manhattan, Kan., a college town two hours west of Kansas City with about 55,000 residents and a main hospital with only about 12 intensive care beds available. "We may not have the capacity if this thing takes off and there were hospitalizations," Taylor said. "We want to monitor the ones in quarantine, make sure we don't have more positives. We'll take a pause, then retest again when we get back." Taylor said what contributed to the outbreak was the three day gap between the testing on June 12, a Friday, and getting the results on June 15, a Monday. The initial two players who tested positive had spent the weekend with groups of teammates one at an apartment playing video games with anywhere from eight to 15 players, and one who went with a group to nearby Tuttle Creek Lake, a popular recreation spot. When players reported on June 15, the day workouts began, there were two more players who had fevers, a symptom of Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. As those who were in close contact with infected players were tested again, more positives cropped up which led to more testing. In all, close to 55 players were retested, Taylor said. "It rolled through the week like that and by Friday we got together and said, 'We've got to make a decision,'" Taylor said. The players congregating without masks or social distancing made innocent mistakes, Taylor said. But in a Zoom meeting last week with Coach Chris Klieman, the players and their parents, Taylor told players they could lose their scholarships if they did not follow protocols just the way they would if they regularly broke team rules. In an interview, Taylor said that would not happen and, he added, Klieman reiterated as much to the players and a few anxious parents the next day. But Taylor said he wanted to get the players' attention. "I, at the end of the conversation, was just asking them please, please, please, please be careful," Taylor said. "You have to understand how serious this can be and how it can get through the entire team. I was almost begging them. Sometimes players need to hear a little stronger language than others. There were just a few that needed to have a wake up call. I think that wake up call is very real now." In Riley County, where the school is, half of the diagnosed coronavirus cases (78 of 156 as of Wednesday) were among the college age population, ages 18 to 24. Public health officials rely on a grading metric that tracks movement within the county, comparing it to pre pandemic levels. Earlier during the outbreak, Riley County received an A for social distancing. Now it rates as an F. "At that point, we were staying home more, only going out for essentials, so our movement was low," Julie Gibbs, the Riley County health director, said of the change in an email. "With businesses opening up, we expected to see more movement, but I did not expect to see our grade drop quite that much. We need to get back to where we were before." The bump in infections among college age adults, she added, is because too many are going to clubs and bars, and not wearing masks or keeping the prescribed six feet away from others. The outbreak at L.S.U. came in large part from players going to a popular bar when they arrived back in Baton Rouge, La., according to Sports Illustrated. Some schools have tried to insulate themselves from liability by requiring athletes returning to campuses for workouts to sign waivers acknowledging the risk of being infected or in the case of at least one school, Southern Methodist, releasing it from any liability. (Kansas State did not have a waiver, but provided its protocols to players and their parents and asked for feedback.) The waivers have caught the attention of lawmakers. On Wednesday, Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Cory Booker of New Jersey urged Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., to prohibit such waivers, calling them "legally dubious" and "morally repugnant." Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University, said if players were getting sick after returning to school for the sole purpose of training for football, not going to class it was almost immaterial whether they became infected while lifting weights or at a local watering hole. "They got exposed because you the athletic department brought them back to campus," Binney said. "They were only at the bar because you told them to come back. Getting sick is a perfectly foreseeable consequence of calling students back to campus." Taylor, the Kansas State athletic director, said it was "a fair question" to ask why schools have their athletes back on campus now, preparing for a season whose shape and scope will surely be altered by the pandemic. But he said the summer workouts, which are deemed voluntary, help prevent some injuries once practice begins and allow players to make progress toward their degrees by picking up summer school credits. For now, Kansas State football players have been asked to shelter in place for two weeks before they are retested. The only ones who are required to stay are the 14 who have tested positive, Taylor said. Many of the infected were already living together in houses or apartments, so they can stay put. Several who live with players who did not test positive have moved into dorms by themselves. Taylor said that workers in protective gear are delivering two meals per day, along with groceries, to the infected players. The outbreak prompted Kansas State to also push back the date for opening workouts for its other fall teams, cross country and women's volleyball, which had already returned to campus to quarantine for one week before they were scheduled to be tested on Wednesday. They will instead be tested on July 1 and begin practicing no earlier than July 5. Football players, once they test negative between July 6 and 9, could resume workouts as early as July 13. At the moment, that seems far away. The season opening game, scheduled for Sept. 5 against visiting Buffalo, is a distant speck on the horizon in the Little Apple. There, and on many other campuses, excitement for the looming season has been diminished by uncertainty and so many questions.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Credit...Philippe Calia for The New York Times IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S. BANGALORE, India IBM dominated the early decades of computing with inventions like the mainframe and the floppy disk. Its offices and factories, stretching from upstate New York to Silicon Valley, were hubs of American innovation long before Microsoft or Google came along. But over the last decade, Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India about one third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM's businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT T and Shell to performing cutting edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta. The work in India has been vital to keeping down costs at IBM, which has posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue declines as it has struggled to refashion its main business of supplying tech services to corporations and governments. The tech industry has been shifting jobs overseas for decades, and other big American companies like Oracle and Dell also employ a majority of their workers outside the United States. But IBM is unusual because it employs more people in a single foreign country than it does at home. The company's employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007, even as its work force in the United States has shrunk through waves of layoffs and buyouts. Although IBM refuses to disclose exact numbers, outsiders estimate that it employs well under 100,000 people at its American offices now, down from 130,000 in 2007. Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one half to one fifth those paid to Americans, according to data posted by the research firm Glassdoor. Ronil Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who studies globalization and immigration, said the range of work done by IBM in India shows that offshoring threatens even the best paying American tech jobs. "The elites in both parties have had this Apple iPhone narrative, which is, look, it's O.K. if we offshore the lower level stuff because we're just going to move up," he said. "This is a wake up call. It's not just low level jobs but high level jobs that are leaving." While other technology titans have also established huge satellite campuses in India, IBM caught the attention of President Trump. At a campaign rally in Minneapolis just before the November election, he accused the company of laying off 500 Minnesotans and moving their jobs to India and other countries, a claim that IBM denied. Although he has not singled out the company for criticism since, Mr. Trump has tried to curb what he viewed as too many foreigners taking tech jobs from Americans. In April, he signed an executive order discouraging the granting of H 1B temporary work visas for lower paid tech workers, most of whom come from India. IBM was the sixth largest recipient of such visas in 2016, according to federal data. IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y., is sensitive to the perception that Americans are losing jobs to Indians. After Mr. Trump won the election, IBM's chief executive, Ginni Rometty, pledged to create 25,000 new American jobs. Ms. Rometty, who helped carry out the India expansion strategy when she was head of IBM's global services division, has also discussed with the new administration plans to modernize government technology and expand tech training for people without four year college degrees. She also joined one of Mr. Trump's now defunct business advisory councils. IBM declined to make Ms. Rometty or another top executive available for an interview. But the company noted that it is investing in the United States, including committing 1 billion to training programs and opening new offices. Ms. Narayanan, who spent 12 years working at IBM in the United States and China before moving to India in 2009, said the company decided where to put jobs based on where it could find enough qualified workers and the customer's budget. "It's not as if someone says, 'Oh, jeez, let me just take these jobs from here and put them there,'" she said. William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who has studied the globalization of business, said IBM and other tech companies had benefited greatly from the emergence of a low cost, technically skilled English speaking work force in India. "IBM didn't create this," he said. "But IBM would be a totally different company if it wasn't for India." IBM, which opened its first Indian offices in Mumbai and Delhi in 1951, is now spread across the country, including Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Most of the Indian employees work in IBM's core business: helping companies like AT T and Airbus manage the technical sides of their operations. Indians perform consulting services, write software and monitor cloud based computer systems for many of the world's banks, phone companies and governments. But researchers here also try out new ideas. Looking to build a new system for searching with images instead of words, a team in Bangalore turned to Watson to index 600,000 photos from the world's top fashion shows and Bollywood movies. Last spring, a major Indian fashion house, Falguni Shane Peacock, tried the tool, which helps designers avoid direct copies or even do a riff on an old look, and generated new patterns for three dresses. "It has the capability of doing research in a couple of seconds that would take a long time," Shane Peacock, who runs the Mumbai firm with his wife, said in an interview. IBM even has a Bangalore "garage" full of app designers who build corporate iPhone and iPad apps to simplify tasks like helping airline agents rebook passengers, bankers make loans and doctors update patient files. During a recent visit, Ramya Karyampudi, a user experience designer, was at the whiteboard sketching out an app for a smart refrigerator that would solve the universal problem of what to make for dinner. Starting with a drawing of a husband trying to plan a surprise meal for his wife, Ms. Karyampudi depicted the internet connected refrigerator looking at what food was inside, sending over relevant recipes, telling him what extra ingredients he needed to pick up, and playing a video showing him how to cook it all. IBM's outsize presence in India today is all the more striking given that it left the country entirely in 1978 after a dispute with the government about foreign ownership rules. IBM has also been working with Manipal Hospitals, a chain based in Bangalore, to adapt Watson to help doctors treat certain cancers. Presented with a patient's medical history, the system taps into a database that includes advice from doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to recommend the best treatments including the price, a big consideration since most Indians lack health insurance. Dr. Ajay Bakshi, Manipal's chief executive, said the biggest potential for the technology was in rural hospitals with few doctors. Manipal has just begun offering online "second opinions" from Watson for 2000 rupees, or about 31. "It never sleeps. It never forgets. It doesn't get biased," he said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
Jordan Uhl, a political consultant and activist in Washington, D.C., wanted to make sure as many people saw these videos as possible. Encouraged by a friend, he edited together 14 clips, including one from a reporter at The New York Times of an officer accelerating and opening a car door that hit protesters. The result is a two minute, 13 second supercut that he called "This Is a Police State." As of Monday night, the video had amassed more than 45 million views from Mr. Uhl's tweet alone. After he posted a Dropbox link so that anyone could download and share the video, it garnered tens of millions more views. (For context, the video that the birder Christian Cooper recorded of Amy Cooper in Central Park has been viewed 44 million times on Twitter. The viral disinformation video "Plandemic," which traveled across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram last month, was viewed more than eight million times after just over a week online.) "So many people were posting it to IGTV and Stories and tagging me," Mr. Uhl, 32, said. "I can't even keep track of how many people are sharing it." He said his intention was to signal boost the experiences of the protesters and said he made limited intervention in the footage. "I trimmed some of the videos down for time," Mr. Uhl said, adding that he "didn't even color correct." He did, however, add the Twitter handles of the original posters, for credit. He views the video, focusing solely on what appear to be police misdeeds, as a corrective to what he believes to be an emphasis on covering looting and property damage by media. "I wanted to push back and show how the main story should be that, in response to a mass mobilization against police brutality, the police responded with more brutality," Mr. Uhl said. "People are deeply unwilling to acknowledge the abuse from police," he continued, noting that "the passive language used for police versus the active language used for protesters demonstrate our society's unwillingness to confront systemic injustice imposed by police." Those whose footage appears in the compilation video said they were glad to see their individual clips put into broader context. Alison Sul, a 21 year old protester in Texas, said that her video had already been viewed 2.9 million times, but Mr. Uhl's video provided a new audience. "The more people who see this stuff, the more accountable the police are going to have to be," said Nate Igor Smith, 40, a photographer in Brooklyn. "It doesn't seem to matter which city you're in, you're seeing a lot of the same things happening. I think having one video where you can see things from so many different cities is powerful," said Arlen Parsa, 33, a documentary filmmaker in Chicago. "It tells a larger story than just what's happening in one city." Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet Society at Harvard University, said that Mr. Uhl's video "really reinforces that black protests, white protests and all social justice protests generally are not violent in nature. It moves us away from the 'there are bad people on both sides' or 'there are good people on both sides' argument and really highlights law enforcement's aggressive attitude toward black people displaying their rights." "When there's one clip you can turn away, when there's two you start to get a better picture, when you see so many examples it's impossible to ignore them as anomalies," said Guthrie Graves Fitzsimmons, 30, an author in Kentucky who is credited in the video. In the responses to Mr. Uhl's initial tweet, a stream of people shared even more clips of police using force against protesters, bystanders and even children. He received so much footage that, on Monday, he posted a second supercut. So far it has garnered more than 825,000 views. "Other people have said this before me," Mr. Uhl said, "but none of this is new. It's just finally being recorded."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
The happily ever after delivered by Disney's "Maleficent" has vanished like a puff of bilious smoke, as its unhappy, reactionary sequel makes depressingly clear. Released in 2014, the first movie is a satisfying rethink of "Sleeping Beauty" both Disney's and Charles Perrault's that showed how intelligent intervention could upend centuries of oppressive ideas about women. In its revisionist take, the titular dark, dangerous fairy played by Angelina Jolie isn't naturally evil or merely spiteful in bestowing a curse, but exerting her power with a vengeance. Played by Jolie with slinky verve, voluminous wings and two magnificently crowning horns, Maleficent is the earlier movie's greatest special effect. She's also its most inspired disruptive stroke, having been wronged once upon a time by a suitor, the type who usually bails damsels out of distress. Instead, he secures the throne by seducing and drugging Maleficent, and then clipping her wings, a startling metaphor of violation. The most bracing thing about the original "Maleficent," though, is that it shifts the narrative weight from the love between a sleeping princess and a rescuing prince to that between the princess and her fairy godmother. Maleficent is back and so is Jolie, who, with her augmented cheekbones and perfectly calibrated hauteur, remains the only reason to bother with it. Much else has changed and not for the better, whatever this hash insists. At the end of the last installment, Maleficent enthroned her adored surrogate daughter, Aurora (Elle Fanning) who had grown up to become the cursed and liberated beauty and given her the Moors, a computer generated peaceable and enchanted wonderland. Aurora rules benevolently from her flower throne, smiling over a menagerie of flowery, floofy and leathery creatures great and small, cutesy and stately. The sequel's problems are tipped by its title, "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil," which sounds as if our great horned one had landed a gig as a dominatrix. More worryingly, it suggests that, contrary to what you learned last time, Maleficent is, yes, very bad, a gambit that's presumably meant to keep new viewers guessing about her character. But if she is evil, as this sequel promises, it makes you wonder about all the other dismal, stubbornly enduring cliches that the first movie jettisoned, specifically that reliably sexist duo: the wicked female usurper whose power inherently challenges ye olde patriarchy and the innocent maiden who needs a prince to rescue her. You don't wait long to be disappointed. Generic from start to finish, the sequel was directed by Joachim Roenning, whose credits include the forgettable sea adventure "Kon Tiki" (I had to look it up, and I reviewed it), which is probably what got him the job heading up the most recent "Pirates of the Caribbean" installment. It made a mint and that may explain why he was tapped for "Mistress of Evil," though he does little but move stuff around, leaving the heavy lifting to Jolie and armies of special effects workers. (The writers are Linda Woolverton, who wrote the original movie and whose voice is scarcely heard Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman Blue.) If "Mistress of Evil" had any of its predecessor's flashes of self aware humor, embellished beauty or basic filmmaking intelligence, it might be easier to take or at least ignore. But it's a clotted mess. It's also dispiriting because it has traded a fairy tale about female solidarity for a war movie about what happens when women assume power. It opens with a bent knee and ends with an ever after kiss, but much of the rest is a convoluted brawl filled with noise and computer minions who are tossed like darts. At center is a grasping, malignant queen (Michelle Pfeiffer), the very stereotype that the first movie rejected. She even comes with an awful mini me (Jenn Murray). Female villains have long been useful scapegoats, repositories for social and cultural anxieties about men, women and power. The original "Maleficent" pushes against that stereotype with a protagonist who's at once hero and villain, which means that she's finally neither. Much like "Frozen," it insists that women can be complex and that even a princess doesn't need a prince to justify her life. Women can work together, love one another, find their own way. In 2014, when Maleficent rather than the prince delivered the kiss that roused Aurora, it felt like an awakening. This new flick doesn't just feel like a retreat, it also feels like a poisoned, candied invitation to sleep.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.