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I've heard of Muslim women in America being taunted for wearing hijabs, I've heard of Jewish men being mocked for wearing yarmulkes and now I've heard it all: A friend of mine was cursed by a passing stranger the other day for wearing a protective mask. There is, of course, a rather nasty virus going around, and one way to lessen the chance of its spread, especially from you to someone else, is to cover your nose and mouth. Call it civic responsibility. Call it science. But science is no match for tribalism in this dysfunctional country. Truth is whatever validates your prejudices, feeds your sense of grievance and fuels your antipathy toward the people you've decided are on some other side. And protective masks, God help us, are tribal totems. With soul crushing inevitably, these common sense precautions morphed into controversial declarations of identity. What's next? Band Aids? "Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans." That was the headline on a recent article in Politico by Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman that noted that "in a deeply polarized America, almost anything can be politicized." I quibble only with "almost." And I submit that the entire story of our scattered, schizoid response to the coronavirus pandemic can be distilled into the glares, tussles, tweets, deference and defiance surrounding this simple accessory. On Monday the White House belatedly introduced a policy of mask wearing in the West Wing but it exempted President Trump. See what I mean about mask as metaphor? Trump demands protection from everybody around him, but nobody is protected from Trump. Story of America. My friend was standing on a street corner in the center of a small town in New York. The state has decreed that people wear face coverings if they're in public settings where they can't be sure to stay six feet or more away from others. So my friend was following the rules, as were her two companions. All three of them were masked. And a man driving by shouted a profanity at them. Just two words. Just two syllables. You can probably guess which. How did she know their masks were the trigger? She said that nothing else about the three of them could possibly have drawn any particular notice and judgment and that she'd encountered other evidence of objection to lockdowns, social distancing and masks in this relatively rural and relatively conservative area. One man, she said, has been standing outside the local post office, yelling about government oppression and handing out fliers. She showed me one. It had an image of a face mask crossed out and said: "ATTN GOVERNMENT AGENTS. Please provide lawful and necessary consideration to aid the bearer in the unimpeded exercise of constitutionally protected rights." It's not just her town. "Mask haters causing problems at retail establishments," read a recent headline in the Illinois political newsletter Capitol Fax, which presented a compendium of reports from merchants around the state, including one in Dekalb who said that a customer wearing what looked like a hunting knife refused to follow Illinois directives and wear a mask. Priorities. Outside the State Capitol in Sacramento two days later, a woman held a sign that said: "Do you know who Dr. Judy Mikovits is? Then don't tell me I need a silly mask." Mikovits is a discredited scientist whose wild assertions and scaremongering regarding vaccines have made her a hero to conspiracy theorists and a social media and YouTube star. Naturally, masks factor into her repertoire. She has claimed that "wearing the mask literally activates your own virus." So masks are props in our polluted ecosystem of information. They're also symbols of American complacency. When the pandemic hit, there weren't nearly enough of them, not even for medical workers, a shortage that more prepared countries didn't experience. And masks are emblems, maybe the best ones, of the Trump administration's disregard for, and degradation of, experts and expertise. Last month, when Trump announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was recommending the use of masks, he went out of his way to make clear that he wouldn't be wearing one and that no one else was obliged. Is it any wonder that weeks later, Mike Pence went maskless to the Mayo Clinic? No. He had a boss to please. He had a statement to make. And the statement was that masks were for wimpy worrywarts keen to do whatever the eggheads and elites told them. Those of us with masks on our faces or masks in our pockets, at the ready, are definitely doing what's right, but we're also making our own statements. I know this because I've hurriedly slipped my own mask on in uncrowded outdoor situations where it almost certainly wasn't necessary but where others were masked. I wanted to signal them. I wanted them to know: I take my own tiny role in vanquishing this pandemic seriously. Rugged individualism ends where dying on this breathtaking scale begins. There's liberty and then there's death.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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OVER the holiday, the Securities and Exchange Commission revised one of the wealth requirements for people seeking to invest in private offerings that hold the allure of big returns. It was a small change, mandated by the Dodd Frank regulatory overhaul law. But it has broader implications. Should the United States government be deciding what people can do with their money? And how do you define who is wealthy enough and smart enough to invest in these offerings? We're talking about private placements a term the financial industry uses for anything from real estate deals to hedge funds to last year's much talked about offering in Facebook shares. What all these investments have in common is that they can be sold with fewer disclosures than public offerings. They also often carry cachet, and those who get into them can end up with large returns. That may seem unfair to anyone excluded because of a lack of wealth. But these private investments can go to zero just as easily as they can climb into the stratosphere, which is why investors who cannot afford to lose a lot of money are barred. Since 1982, specific dollar amounts have been used to define who is an "accredited investor," the S.E.C.'s term for someone deemed sophisticated enough to invest in these nonpublic deals. The two most commonly used measures are annual income over 200,000 for an individual or 300,000 for a couple and net worth, which was 1 million. In late December, the S.E.C. redefined how people should calculate their net worth. Per the requirements of Dodd Frank, the commission removed the equity in a person's primary residence from consideration. (But if the value of that house is less than the mortgage, that liability needs to be included.) "It's an interesting question as to why this qualifies someone as sophisticated," said Robert E. Buckholz Jr., a partner at Sullivan Cromwell. "The income and the net worth requirements are a proxy for the ability to fend for yourself." But also in compliance with Dodd Frank, the S.E.C. will spend the next three years determining whether to make further changes in the accredited investor requirements. While it is hard to say what the review will produce, it is worthwhile to look at how wealth and financial expertise have been confused. WHAT THE RULE DOES In a 2009 article in The Washington University Law Review, Wallis K. Finger, now an associate at Schulte Roth Zabel, used humor to lay out the problem of using money as a proxy for sophistication. "Paris Hilton almost certainly can purchase unregulated securities issued by hedge funds or other private investment vehicles," Ms. Finger wrote. "Although her training and sophistication in the field of high stakes financial transactions may be limited, the Securities and Exchange Commission would leave her to her own devices if she chose to invest in private offerings." For comparison, she created a woman named Sheryl who has a master's degree in business from Harvard and a doctorate in financial systems analysis. "After all of this schooling, Sheryl is long on debt and short on assets," Ms. Finger wrote. "She has several offers to work at the nation's most prestigious investment brokerages. But if Sheryl wants to invest in a private offering, the S.E.C. regulations will not allow it." In other words, using money as a stand in for financial sophistication is a fairly unsophisticated solution. When news leaked out last year that Goldman Sachs was planning to offer private shares in Facebook to its wealthiest clients, there was outrage from people who were excluded. After much media attention, the firm limited the private offering to overseas clients to be sure it complied with S.E.C. regulations. (Anyone will be able to buy shares in the initial public offering of Facebook.) In reality, most private offerings are far less glamorous and carry significant risks. Barbara Black, a professor and director of the corporate law center at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, said she was more concerned about small offerings, like a local real estate partnership, where an entrepreneur tries to raise money by promising outsize returns to investors in the community. "It may be perfectly fine, but the nature of things is that these are risky," Ms. Black said. "You see litigation involving people who are wealthy, but you don't think of them as super rich doctors, dentists, lawyers, some accountants. Are these really sophisticated investors?" DOES IT WORK? The accredited investor regulation is by design paternalistic, but its arbitrariness is what bothers people. Originally, the Securities Act of 1933 aimed to provide more information on securities to prevent investors from being manipulated. Those who were exempted from these requirements were believed to possess enough knowledge to make informed choices. Using the example of doctors and lawyers investing in a local real estate deal, Yasho Lahiri, a partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York, said investors would be better protected with more disclosures, not by their degree of wealth. "What these rules do is limit that amount of information," he said. "If all these real estate documents were out there, you could assess the deals and compare them to others." He added that really sophisticated investments were not marketed to accredited investors anyway. They go to qualified purchasers who have at least 5 million in assets that can be invested and qualified institutional buyers with over 100 million. If the goal, though, is to protect people from losing all of their money in an illiquid investment, the current standard fails on that count, too. Andrew Abramowitz, a lawyer in Manhattan who has worked with both buyers and sellers of private placements, said a better standard might be to limit how much of their net worth people can invest. "There could also be a prohibition on participation in a new private placement if the investor's previous investments in illiquid securities constitute a specified share of investor's liquid assets," he said. At the very least, the dollar amounts have not been changed since they were put in place in 1982, and people who qualify today would not have qualified then. After all, 1 million from 1982 would be worth 2.34 million today. Indexing for inflation had been proposed for Dodd Frank but was removed in Congressional negotiations. OTHER OPTIONS There are all sorts of alternatives to the accredited investor standard. The tough part is turning recommendations into regulations, especially since the S.E.C. faces opposition from groups that depend on a big pool of investors for private placements. Walter J. Woerheide, the vice president of academic affairs at the American College, which focuses on training financial service professionals, suggested a simple test to determine a person's level of financial knowledge, akin to the test for a driver's license. John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia University School of Law, said the rule should be changed to require a minimum net worth of 5 million and to set a standard for diversification so that no more than 15 to 20 percent of someone's net worth could be in unregulated investments. He said he was particularly concerned about legislation being considered by the Senate that would eliminate the current requirement that brokers need to have an existing relationship with clients before they can try to sell them private placements. "Upper middle class Americans who qualify as accredited investors will soon begin receiving streams of unsolicited offers from brokers they do not know for unregistered offerings," Mr. Coffee said. "From a consumer protection standpoint, this combination of little sophistication and even less disclosure seems troubling." And if that happens, investors may have to become more honest in assessing what they know.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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The action thriller "Proud Mary" begins by trying to establish some retro cred, with a vintage Motown tune on the soundtrack (the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," not thematically apt but rhythmically bubbling nevertheless) and a title typeface that recalls the one used in the 1974 blaxploitation picture "Foxy Brown." Under the credits, Taraji P. Henson, as the title character, showers, dresses, puts on makeup and selects a bright blond wig from her wardrobe. Oh, and she also selects a formidable looking handgun from the formidable arsenal behind her wardrobe. After which she goes on her mission, quickly dispatching a guy who barely gets a chance to gape at her wig. In a room elsewhere in the man's apartment, she sees a young boy, headphones blocking his hearing, obliviously playing a video game. This gives her pause. But she doesn't intervene in the kid's life, not just yet. Instead, a year goes by, and Mary discovers the kid, Danny (Jahi Di'Allo Winston), is a runner for a Boston drug dealer referred to only as Uncle. After discovering the boy wounded and starving in an alley, she takes an unorthodox approach to adoption, rubbing out Uncle in a flash of anger. "Proud Mary," directed by Babak Najafi from a script by Steven Antin, John Stuart Newman and Christian Swegal, is a rather more somber affair than other movies in the same tradition. Although the plot mechanics are no more or less implausible than any such genre film. Mary is a hit woman for one drug cartel, Uncle was an operative for a rival one, and the scenario eventually spirals into a minor morass of misidentified killers and lethal paybacks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The finalists in the 2014 North American Car and Truck of the Year awards were announced on Tuesday, and General Motors made a strong showing. Out of the six vehicles selected, three were G.M. models. Chosen by a panel of 48 automotive journalists in the United States and Canada, the finalists are the Cadillac CTS, Corvette Stingray and Mazda 3 in the car category, and the Chevrolet Silverado, Jeep Cherokee and Acura MDX in the truck/utility vehicle category. The finalists were selected from a ballot that also included the BMW 4 Series; Chevrolet Impala; Infiniti Q50; Jaguar F Type; Kia Cadenza; Lexus IS; Mazda 6; Mercedes Benz CLA; and Toyota Corolla. Other truck/utility vehicle candidates were the BMW X5; Buick Encore; GMC Sierra; Hyundai Santa Fe LWB; Kia Sorento; Range Rover Sport; Nissan Rogue; Subaru Forester; and Toyota Tundra. Those candidates emerged after an initial round of voting on 28 cars and 18 trucks or utility vehicles the jury deemed "all new" or "substantially changed" from previous years' models. Jurors evaluated the entries based upon design, innovation, handling, safety, driver satisfaction and value. The two winners of 2014 North American Car and Truck of the Year will be announced at a news conference on Jan. 13, 2014, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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PHILADELPHIA This city has two main ballet companies, the larger and older Pennsylvania Ballet and the smaller BalletX. They perform on either side of Broad Street (BalletX at the Wilma Theater, Pennsylvania Ballet at the Academy of Music) and place ads in each other's programs. Matthew Neenan, a founder of BalletX and a continuing choreographic contributor to it, has for several years been the resident choreographer for Pennsylvania Ballet. Both companies tour extensively, often appearing in New York at the Joyce Theater. (BalletX is due back at the end of June.) These common factors notwithstanding, the companies have begun to look like polar opposites. This week brought new productions at both: two premieres to popular American music for BalletX, and "Swan Lake" at Pennsylvania Ballet. But the main difference between the troupes goes deeper than current repertory it's style. Even in trite creations, the dancers of BalletX are full bodied they seize the moment, prove wonderfully engaged and textured while even in classic choreography, the Pennsylvania Ballet dancers appear trite: lively but glossy. On Wednesday night, hours after a blizzard had swept over the city, BalletX opened its Spring Series, a triple bill of two world premieres and a Neenan revival. "Vivir," a premiere set to a selection of Latin and Afro Caribbean music by Darrell Grand Moultrie, is the kind of emphatically anti musical dance fest that would seriously irk me with lesser dancers where the music has a legato flow, the choreography is punchily staccato, and vice versa. There's little sophistication of structure. But its nine dancers feast on its every opportunity: They show the beauty of both balance and falling, jumps and floorwork, turns and stillness. Each performer becomes an individual you know. Trey McIntyre, the choreographer of the other premiere and a recurrent creator for BalletX (and, less frequently, Pennsylvania Ballet), has long been one of America's most touching dance dramatists: He loves to oppose the social and antisocial, loneliness and conviviality. His new piece, "The Boogeyman," is set to a selection of 1970s numbers (Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Gilbert O'Sullivan). It shows one young man (Roderick Phifer) having a solitary party in his bedroom with the music played on his headset, with six other young people coming and going as if in a club elsewhere. The ballet also shows a similarly isolated young woman (Andrea Yorita), unanswered calls from a pay phone and failures of communication, until finally the two lead characters find each other. By Mr. McIntyre's standards, this narrative is bordering on the twee. And yet the vulnerability and ardor he releases in these characters makes it endearing. Mr. Neenan's "Increasing," set to the first movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C major (played live onstage), has only grown since its 2014 world premiere. Usually Mr. Neenan is more successful using various kinds of American popular music, but this is his finest response to classical music of the several I've seen, even if there are moments when he makes questionable movement choices. It's wonderfully multilayered dance in terms of changing geometries, arithmetics and groups. I wish I could be more grateful for Pennsylvania Ballet's new production of the complete "Swan Lake," staged by the company's artistic director Angel Corella "after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov," which had its premiere on Thursday. When he was a dancer, Mr. Corella was a noted hero in American Ballet Theater's production of this ballet classic. This new production has the merit of replacing Christopher Wheeldon's (2004), probably the worst and most unmusical of the more than 20 versions of "Swan Lake" I have seen. Other virtues here include an avoidance of the usual slow tempos that bog down most "Swan Lakes" (with one intermission, this production runs at two hours and a quarter) and a moderately pretty evocation of the medieval Age of Chivalry that the ballet's makers had in mind (scenery and costumes by Benjamin Tyrrell). But so what? This is "Swan Lake" as rote work. The famous Act 2 lakeside dances for the swan maidens can either express their relief at returning to human form for the night or something very different their stress at their slave like lack of freedom. On Thursday, they did neither: they were merely efficient and bland. The lead couple, Dayesi Torriente and Arian Molina Soca, presented Odette Odile and Siegfried as the least enamored, least musical, least interesting and most self absorbed characters in the ballet. Although the conductor, Beatrice Jona Affron, maintained generally bright tempos, some sudden decelerations during Odette's solo variation seemed bizarre, and there was some poor playing by the brass and lower strings. Tchaikovsky composed his original "Swan Lake" in 1877. After Tchaikovsky's death (in 1893), Petipa and Ivanov and their musical arranger, Riccardo Drigo, extensively revised score and story, possibly following plans the composer had begun to make: Their version has been the framework for most subsequent productions. America now has no good "Swan Lake." Pennsylvania Ballet's initial press release proposed a return to Petipa's version; this gave cause for hope. But, especially in Acts 3 and 4, Mr. Corella's staging is an uneasy hodgepodge of 1877 and 1895 texts. Act 3 is prolonged by gratuitous solos for Siegfried's pal Benno and Odette's nemesis, the sorcerer, Rothbart; Act 4 is rushed, with no opportunity for Odette and Siegfried to release emotion before they decide to defy the sorcerer Rothbart and take their lives. The production would look twice as good with better lighting than Michael Korsch's. (Siegfried's first greeting to his courtiers was obscured by shadow until a follow spot made its way to him.) And some of the Act 1 scenery already looked creased. The company has been well drilled; the dancers do not lack technique. Four other casts of the lead two characters follow this week and next. It is to be hoped they at least raise its tepid dramatic temperature.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Jane Austen and zombies? Ho hum. A new series gives us Emily Dickinson, millennial angst and sexual fluidity and some scholars are here for it. Hear the name Emily Dickinson, and you'll probably think of the virginal woman in white, the reclusive Belle of Amherst who died with her "letter to the world" as she wrote in one of her enigmatic poems unsent. But "Dickinson," a half hour series that premieres Friday on Apple's new streaming service, aims to banish any idea of the poet as the emotionally crippled cat lady of American literature. Forget baking bread and making friends with flowers. This is a Dickinson, played by Hailee Steinfeld, who takes midnight carriage rides with Death (the rapper Wiz Khalifa), and denounces the patriarchy as to use a genteel paraphrase bunk. It's also one who throws raging parties (complete with a hip hop playlist and twerking), experiments with opium, makes out with her bestie (and future sister in law) and gets her period. Alena Smith, the show's creator, describes it as "a coming of age story about a radical young female artist who was ahead of her time." It's also one whose anachronisms and other liberties are intended to underline a serious point. "She wrote nearly 2,000 poems which are one of the greatest bodies of work ever written in English, almost none of it published and recognized in the way we think of as being recognized in the time she lived," said Smith, a Yale School of Drama graduate who has written for "The Affair" and "The Newsroom." "I use that as my excuse," she said. "If she wasn't that well understood in her time, can we understand her better in ours?" "Dickinson" arrives on the heels of two recent feature films about the poet. But if Apple's loosened up, and sexed up, young Emily takes things way over the top, scholars say they are here for it. "I really love seeing pop culture waking up to a spunky, strong, bold, funny Emily Dickinson," Martha Nell Smith, a Dickinson scholar at the University of Maryland, said. "That character is not made up." "I don't think there's a hotter American poet right now," Benfey said. "In a way, having a billboard of her in Times Square makes perfect sense." While the life of a woman who spent her last two decades confined to the family home may seem to lack obvious outward incident, Dickinson's was hardly without worldly drama or luridly gothic if not downright soap opera ish elements. For example: The first collection of Dickinson's poetry, published in 1890, four years after her death, was coedited by her brother's mistress, who took over the task from Dickinson's sister in law, Susan, who was also, scholars argue, the object of her nearly lifelong erotic passion. And yes, she did a lot of baking. But according to family lore, she was also known to have drowned "superfluous" kittens in a vat of pickle brine, a slice of 19th century verite it's hard to imagine the Apple show touching. The effort to create a more presentable, understandable Dickinson began almost immediately after her death in 1886, when her sister, Lavinia, found almost 1,100 of her poems in a trunk, carefully copied out on folded sheets, and mostly bound into hand sewn books known as fascicles. (Today, scholars count about 700 more, some written on envelopes and scraps of paper, or embedded in the thousands of letters she wrote.) Her physical image was also manipulated. In the late 1890s, her sister hired an artist to alter the now famous daguerreotype of a teenage Dickinson (still the only authenticated photograph of her), softening her severely pulled back hair and simple black dress by adding curls and a lacy collar. Over the course of the 20th century scholars have scraped away the Victorian overlay and restored the radically original poet underneath. But on the biographical front, the popular image of Dickinson as a fragile, fey, romantically disappointed recluse has been harder to shake. The idea was given sturdy legs by "The Belle of Amherst," William Luce's 1976 play (later made into a TV movie starring Julie Harris, who originated the role on Broadway). But that same year, in her influential essay "Vesuvius at Home," the poet Adrienne Rich argued against the (mostly male) critics who had reduced her to "quaintness and spinsterish oddity," burying her "unorthodox, subversive, sometimes volcanic propensities." Instead of the Dickinson of "little girl" poems like "I'm Nobody! Who are You?," Rich put forward the ruthless, dangerous, philosophical Dickinson of "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun." The Apple series tips its hat to the Vesuvian Dickinson in its second episode, "I've Never Seen 'Volcanoes,'" which ends with an exuberant carnal eruption. (All 10 episodes of the first season, each named for the first line of a Dickinson poem, will be available at once.) But popular versions of Dickinson have continued to vacillate between the sedate and the riotous, while also offering different takes on the long debated question of her sexuality. Terence Davies's sober biopic "A Quiet Passion" (2017), starring Cynthia Nixon, got strong reviews from critics. But Dickinson scholars gave the film mixed marks, with some saying it missed her humor and wildness, and all but erased her passionate attachments to women while emphasizing her unrequited love for a married minister. Today, the idea that Dickinson had an erotic passion for her sister in law is broadly, if not universally, accepted among scholars, even as some caution about applying contemporary labels for sexual orientation to the 19th century. Dickinson, they note, also wrote passionate letters to men, and in her 40s, may have had a romance with a judge 40 years her senior. "Dickinson" takes a less definitive line, offering a Dickinson who's queer in the broadest sense. She declares in the first episode that she will never marry, and dedicates herself to winning the undying love of Susan, whom she kisses passionately (and unself consciously), but also kisses a male suitor. Alena Smith said she expected some would criticize the depiction as "not gay enough," but wanted to lean into her idea of a "millennial Dickinson," comfortable with sexual fluidity. It's an idea very much of our moment. And so, in our age of oversharing, is the central Dickinson mystery: Why didn't she publish more than a handful of poems in her lifetime? The show's first season gives one answer: the patriarchy. Smith said the show could go on to explore alternate hypotheses, but she said it was not her intention to offer definitive answers, about that or anything else. "People feel very possessive about Emily Dickinson, for a good reason," she said. "Because nobody understands her, everybody feels like their little keyhole into her is the right one."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Douglass cultivated the fiction that he was "self made" and had sprung fully formed from his own forehead. Blight dismantles this pretense in a tour de force of storytelling and analysis, showing that the young orator to be had benefited from a great deal of mentorship and good fortune. Viewed through this lens, the fabled escape from slavery takes on different contours. The slave master's decision not to sell the rebellious young Fred into a living death in the Deep South and instead to consign him to the custody of a brother in Baltimore can be credibly seen as an act of familial grace by a slave owner toward a half white member of his extended family. Among those in the free black community of Baltimore who embraced Fred and propelled him toward freedom was his wife to be, the housekeeper Anna Murray. Blight draws on new archival material and insights gleaned from a lifetime in the company of his subject to shed light on the orator's complex relationship with his wife, Anna, and the two white women who came between the couple within the walls of the Douglass family home in Rochester. The great man's vocation as a wandering oracle was possible because Anna, who bore five children (only four lived to adulthood), ran the household with a sure hand, hosting fugitive slaves, far flung relatives and others who turned up at the front door in need. Anna, whom Blight describes as "largely illiterate," could be of little help with her husband's journalism. For that, the charismatic orator called up the British abolitionist Julia Griffiths, who put aside her life and moved in 1849 to be with him in Rochester and to get The North Star off the ground. She enabled Douglass to survive personally and professionally, managing and raising money for the newspaper and for the food that came across the Douglass family table. She helped "to polish a raw genius into a gem and, for a time, managed his emotional health as well as his bank accounts." Together with her sister, Eliza, Griffiths relieved the Douglasses of an enormous financial burden by purchasing the mortgage of the family home. White Rochester was scandalized when Griffiths moved into the Douglass home, an arrangement that spawned rumors of a romantic link between patron and orator. It is alleged that she moved out when Anna "ordered it." That Griffiths loved Douglass is clear on the face of things, but any claim that the two carried on a sexual relationship right under Anna's nose seems far fetched. The eccentric German intellectual Ottilie Assing was another matter. She wandered into the Douglasses' lives in 1856, seeking permission to translate his second autobiography, "My Bondage and My Freedom," into German. She remained in the family orbit for nearly three decades, serving as confidante and interlocutor and lover. Douglass frequented her rooms in Hoboken, N.J., where the participants of her salon lionized him, validating his rise from slavery into the thinking classes. Assing shielded him when he was on the run from conspiracy charges in connection with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, when he came within a hairbreadth of being captured and marched to the gallows with his revolutionary friend. That Assing was obsessed with the famous orator would have been readily apparent to Anna during the interloper's frequent intrusion on the family home, where she lived for months at a time. We know nothing of Anna's feelings on the matter but the triangle of Frederick, Anna and the love struck Ottilie comes through like the plot of an Edith Wharton novel. At different points, Assing referred to Anna as a "veritable beast" who kept her from her beloved Frederick, and as the "border state" that prevented her from advancing toward her heart's true goal. As Blight writes, "Although Assing sipped tea occasionally with Mrs. Douglass, she held Anna in utter contempt, disrespecting her lack of education and even at times privately denigrating her role as homemaker." The amorous German lingered in Douglass's circle year after year, waiting in vain for the divorce that would allow her to "walk tall as the rightful 'Mrs. Douglass.'" By the time Anna died in 1882, Assing was bitterly aware that the aging orator intended to marry Helen Pitts, a well educated white woman in her 40s, who worked for Douglass in the recorder of deeds office in Washington. The nearly 66 year old Douglass held the plan secret even from his children, with whom he also worked daily, and who seem to have learned of the marriage from press inquiries. He failed to notify his faithful British friend Julia, who received the news secondhand from friends in Rochester. Gracious as usual, she wished the newlyweds well and hoped that the union would give him "true happiness" in the evening of his days. Later that year, Assing killed herself in a Paris park drinking potassium cyanide leaving her beloved a tidy sum in her will.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Now Lives A duplex apartment in Brooklyn Heights perched above the promenade, which she shares with her boyfriend, the photographer Balarama Heller. Claim to Fame Ms. Alondra is an art book dealer and gallerist whose resume includes stints cataloging illustrations for the painter Alex Katz and working closely with the print aficionado John McWhinnie. "I love that you can combine art and books, and over time I couldn't separate them," she said. Big Break After Mr. McWhinnie died suddenly in 2012, Richard Prince plucked Ms. Alondra to head up Fulton Ryder, his mysterious publishing hub and invitation only bookshop. "It was exciting because Richard has one of the best book collections in the world," she said. Last March, she became the director of 303 in Print, a publishing imprint from 303 Gallery that commissions and produces limited edition printed matter from the likes of Karen Kilimnik and Mary Heilmann. "I think that all artists should make publications, whether they are very cheap zines or more elaborate books," she said. Latest Project After years of honing her book smarts under art world heavyweights, Ms. Alondra is now writing her own chapter. In April, she opened Fortnight Institute, "a space for contemporary and historical art, ephemera and books" on 60 East Fourth Street in the East Village with Jane Harmon. The gallery's current exhibition features phallic works by eight artists, including Aurel Schmidt and Jesse Chapman. "We decided to focus on the male member, which still feels like a taboo," she said. "Is it stripping it from its power or putting it on a pedestal? We wanted to leave it open to interpretation."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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MIDDLEBURG, Va. Volkswagen occupied a corner of Northern Virginia's lush horse country with a collection of its newest vehicles recently, affording a group of journalists a closer look at its 2015 model line. With a chance to sample VW's wares came an opportunity to reflect on the automaker's struggle to meet its ambitious sales goals in North America. Does VW have its corporate finger on the pulse of American car buyers? A 13 percent drop in sales last month, compared with August 2013, suggests that it has some work to do. Perhaps a look at a few of the models shown here, along with Lawrence Ulrich's reviews of the 2015 Golf and GTI, offers some insight. A carefully curated vision of bucolic perfection, Middleburg is also not far from Volkswagen of America's corporate headquarters, in an anonymous looking tan office building in Herndon, Va. Because the event was held in the Commonwealth of Virginia, there was a notable presence of uniformed officers along roads in the area; we had been warned before setting out on drives that that the police were sharp eyed and knew we were coming. I observed no fewer than six officers in police cruisers on my drive loops. Naturally, there are only so many hours a day, so it was impossible to try them all. Here's a breakdown of the various models tested: For the average daily commute, Volkswagen's new EA288 4 cylinder clean diesel engine is all of what you need and, for the most part, none of what you don't. I tried a car with the 6 speed manual transmission, and in third gear, it could lug along all day at 20 miles per hour. Many gasoline power engines in smaller cars require the driver to rev the engine to a higher r.p.m. to make peak power, but who wants to do that? The torquey VW diesel works as well in a long line of cars waiting to get into a parking lot as it does merging onto a freeway. The Jetta's interior, like those in other VWs, was straightforward and uncluttered. The infotainment system wasn't really all that intuitive, but the driving experience was pleasant. The question is, Why doesn't Volkswagen sell more of these? The automaker announced recently that its diesel Jetta starts at 22,460, including the destination charge. According to a report from Goodcarbadcar.com, Jetta sales dropped to 163,793 last year from a high of 177,360 in 2011. And the 2014 sales reports show that Jettas are moving slower still this year. There's something Volkswagen hasn't figured out when it comes to plugging the Jetta, which gives every indication of being a capable car for a variety of people, into American hearts. The average and below average ratings the Jetta has received in the J.D. Powers Initial Quality Survey over the last few years could have something to do with the disconnect. The E.P.A. says the Jetta diesel, as tested, is good for 31 m.p.g. in the city and 46 on the highway. The automatic version is rated at 45 m.p.g. on the highway. The turbocharged 2 liter diesel engine makes 140 horsepower, but torque is where it earns its keep. At less than 1,800 r.p.m., the 4 cylinder produces 236 pound feet. Volkswagen advertises 15.5 cubic feet of cargo space. This all electric car should be renamed the Golf Cart, if only because it seems like an automotive version of a cart you'd drive on the links. Like a golf cart, the e Golf is fun in that silent, torquey electric car way, and like the regular Golf, its seating and cargo capacity are handy. But it has a range of less than 100 miles, according to Volkswagen. There are three driving modes that can be selected to either go faster or help save juice: Normal, Eco and Eco Plus. Normal mode makes the car feel fresh and sprightly, but it drains the battery much more quickly than Eco Plus. Unfortunately, the high economy setting simply makes the car perform like an underpowered mid 1980s Subaru (although you could probably scoop up one of those from Craigslist for 34,000 less than the e Golf's 36,000 price). Clearly, ecological and economical driving come at a cost in terms of power, cost and range when compared with gasoline powerd Golfs. The e Golf is equipped with an 85 kilowatt electric motor that Volkswagen says can spin at speeds of up to 12,000 r.p.m., providing an instant 199 pound feet of torque capable of moving the car from zero to 60 miles per hour in 10.4 seconds. It is electronically limited to a top speed of 89 m.p.h., but I didn't bother to find out along Virginia's well patrolled country lanes. According to a report from Edmunds, pricing for the e Golf starts at 36,265. The Tiguan is another of the growing armada of small crossovers including the Honda CR V, Subaru Forester, Hyundai Tucson, Kia Sportage that have become so popular. I've driven the CR V, which was about as engaging as loading a clothes drier, and although the Tiguan R Line was lighter and a bit more engaging, it didn't generate a lot more excitement than the Honda. It's difficult to imagine why anyone would buy a Tiguan over a diesel power Jetta Sportwagen, which has 32.8 cubic feet of cargo space and 91.7 cubic feet of passenger volume compared with the Tiguan's 23.8 cubic foot cargo hold and very tall 95.4 cubic feet of passenger space. But American car buyers like people who rent very tiny, very high ceiling apartments are funny that way. While the elevated driver position seems an obvious selling point, the altered geometry over Volkswagen's cars, which are nicely laid out affected the way the steering column sat in relation to the driver. It's not anything like the nearly horizontal steering wheel of an old Volkswagen bus, but it took a longer reach to keep hands fully engaged with the wheel at all times. The shiny "R" perched near the edge of the flat bottom leather wrapped steering wheel served as a reminder of the R Line's sportiness. The Tiguan R Line I tested came with the same 200 horsepower turbocharged 2 liter 4 cylinder engine as the base Tiguan, but with a 37,700 starting price, including destination charge, that was more than 13,000 higher than the base Tiguan and more than 10,000 higher than the Jetta diesel. The E.P.A. fuel economy rating for the Tiguan is 21 m.p.g. city and 26 highway, which the E.P.A. website says is lower than average. Click on this link for Tom Voelk's video review of the Tiguan. Stepping into this car is likely to make you feel as carefree as a 19 year old college woman about to embark on a spring break trip armed with her parents' credit card. The Beetle convertible would be a perfect accessory for such a trip, as it has seats, a radio, a beautiful 360 degree of the world and a trunk for stashing bathing suits and other small items. It's fast enough, but the 2 liter turbo isn't as easy to drive gently as the low revving diesel models, the powerful GTI or the e Golf in its gutless '80s econobox mode. As a result, the transmission tended not to respond to the "go only slightly faster" foot command on uphill grades, but waited until the accelerator pedal was buried deep enough to drop the transmission down a gear and give the car a pulse of acceleration. That could be something an owner gets used to, but this engine may just play nicer with a manual transmission. (Luckily, the Beetle convertible is available with Volkswagen's brilliant diesel engine, too.) What would probably be more difficult to get used to is the Beetle convertible's rather complicated roof closing mechanism. Across the model line, buttons for sunroof and convertible operation are difficult to see from the driver's seat. On the convertible, if you don't remove the all one color (black) tonneau cover latches, the roof won't close. What the blinking orange light that makes this announcement doesn't tell you is that you also have to remove the entire cover and stash it someplace or else it will fall on you as the roof closes. I threw the cover in the back seat as it dangled from a nearly closed roof. It looked out of place, and its stuffed animal puffiness made me reluctant to fold it and jam it into the trunk. And if you think it may rain, leave the tonneau cover off so that you can close the roof quickly when the skies open. Things don't improve after the roof is closed. The wind buffeting and sunshine pelting the driver with the top down evaporates as the interior dims into a dark cavern with the roof latched shut. But the Beetle convertible is, after all, a convertible. A wrong turn down the bucolic Snickersville Turnpike showed off the car's charms when roofless. The sunny detour also took me behind the expensive scenery along the planned route, into less polished but very real towns where there didn't appear to be many Volkswagens in the driveways. Equipped with a turbocharged 210 horsepower 4 cylinder engine and a 6 speed automatic transmission, the R Line version of the Beetle convertible has an E.P.A. fuel economy rating of 23 m.p.g. in town, 29 on the highway. R Line Beetle convertibles start at 30,415 including VW's 820 destination charge, but the price can rise into the 34,000 range with options.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Access to nature may become more of a priority: A rendering of Front York, a new apartment complex by Morris Adjmi Architects, shows units wrapping around a 25,000 square foot courtyard garden designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. How the Virus May Change Your Next Home The coronavirus pandemic has placed any number of demands on our homes, which now serve as makeshift offices, art studios, gyms, workshops, classrooms and storage lockers. And urban apartments where all of those functions are often squeezed into a space constrained envelope face the biggest challenges of all. Those of us quarantined in a city have devised ad hoc solutions to cope in the short term. But if history is any guide, the experience should have lasting implications for the future of apartment design long after the lockdowns end. More than a century ago, diseases like tuberculosis and the 1918 influenza "had an enormous impact on architecture, with the creation of sanitariums that were very open and were all about the balcony, light and air," said Paul Whalen, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. "Whether it was subconscious or not, that kind of architecture had a big influence on residential architecture throughout the whole 20th century." Working from home with the help of digital tools was a trend long before the pandemic hit. Now that it's widely accepted as a productive way to work, it is likely here to stay in a significant way, even after offices reopen. As a result, some architects believe residential design will take cues from recent developments in office and college campus design. "The home is still one of those places where you find single purpose spaces, and that, surely, is going to change," said Maitland Jones, a partner at Deborah Berke Partners. "One thing we see on college campuses is that no one builds single purpose spaces anymore. Boundaries between where one studies, where one socializes, where one eats, where one sleeps are diminishing." When thoughtfully designed, rooms in an apartment can also serve multiple functions. "If the dining room is not going to be a casualty of the pandemic, but rather a beneficiary," Mr. Jones said, "it has to do quick shifts from dining mode to work mode to probably a third mode," serving as a bedroom, say, or a media room. Room sizes could also change to create more flexibility. "The open office has become a rule in so many different industries, and yet we need lots of little tiny spaces where one can either make a private call or have a very small videoconference," Mr. Jones said. "Homes could easily be like that." When the firm CetraRuddy was designing Rose Hill, a new condominium at 30 East 29th Street in Manhattan, the architects were thinking along similar lines and included a "flex space" in numerous apartments: a windowless alcove smaller than a bedroom that can be closed off with sliding glass doors. "It's a space where you can set up a home office, a library," or a learning space for children, said John Cetra, one of the firm's founding principals. "It wasn't like we were planning for a pandemic, but it is something that people living in the city, I think, will really come to appreciate." After spending so much time indoors, having access to fresh air and nature at home is likely to become a priority. "The one thing I find most people really complaining about is this feeling of being confined in a space," said Morris Adjmi, a New York based architect. One way to provide a closer connection to nature, he said, may be with larger courtyard gardens, like the 25,000 square foot green space he planned with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates at Front York, a new apartment complex in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Or it could be accomplished with more balconies and terraces, like the ones CetraRuddy designed at 200 East 59th Street, a 35 story tower wrapped by terraces on every level to provide each apartment with outdoor space. Mr. Whalen offered another idea: "In a tight city, where every square foot is expensive to build, it can also be done with, say, French doors in a living room" and a Juliet balcony, he said. "In a way, the whole living room, or whole dining room, could sort of feel like an outside loggia." The simplest solution, however, could be a return to large, operable windows and designs for cross ventilation to encourage breezes, which apartments in newer buildings sometimes lack. Facades on glass buildings could open wider to the outdoors, said Angelica Trevino Baccon, a partner at SHoP Architects, like those her firm designed for Uber's new headquarters in San Francisco, where large glass panels open like bifold doors. "Fresh air is just so important for wellness," she said, and natural ventilation also helps reduce energy consumption. In cities like New York, where apartments can seem laughably small, it's not unusual to shop for a single roll of toilet paper or groceries for just one meal to keep from overloading precious storage space. But with trust in supply chains now shaken, having sufficient storage space is likely to become essential, resulting in bigger, more efficiently planned closets and pantries. "It's about being creative with how the square footage is used, and specific cabinets or closets that are more flexible or have more storage space," Mr. Adjmi said. A heightened awareness of how people pick up viruses from the surfaces they touch will lead to more widespread adoption of smart home technology, Mr. Cetra predicted. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. "Maybe it's going to become a new standard where your lights will go on automatically," and your door will unlock when you come home, he said, noting that such technology is readily available but usually considered a specialty add on. "Or you'll be able to talk to the elevator," instead of pressing buttons. Indoor ventilation systems could also be upgraded. "There will be a great improvement in mechanical systems, air conditioning and heating that will perhaps provide more fresh air so you get more air turnover in an apartment," Mr. Whalen said. "Filters will be improved, and even ways of perhaps killing bacteria and viruses will be improved, so that people feel really safe in their apartments," he added. "All those systems are going to be brought up to a new level of sophistication." On a larger scale, many architects expect a greater appreciation for public spaces that will drive improvements outside the home. "That kind of civic responsibility that comes around, on the one hand, with our masks, should also come around in the way that we design buildings," Mr. Whalen said, noting that apartment buildings that positively contribute to a city's streetscape are beneficial even to people who don't live there. "I anticipate a new focus on civic life, on public spaces that benefit everyone parks, sidewalks, streets," he said. "Let's share in this kind of fantasy that some good stuff will come out of the pandemic." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"The Invisibles," which tells the astonishing stories of four of the thousands of German Jews in Berlin who tried to escape deportation to the camps in World War II, is two movies spliced into one. The first records interviews with the four Cioma Schonhaus, Hanni Levy, Eugen Friede and Ruth Gumpel (nee Arndt) conducted in 2009. The second uses these testimonies as the basis for a scripted drama that the director, Claus Rafle, weaves around interview segments like extended re enactments. What results is neither fish nor fowl, but a disappointingly stilted hybrid that gathers momentum only to hit one roadblock after another. No sooner are we gripped by a character's imminent capture than the action is paused for commentary. We would rather stick beside Hanni (Alice Dwyer), a 17 year old orphan, as she dyes her hair and haunts the city's movie theaters, often sleeping on the streets. Or have uninterrupted time to wonder at the breathtaking inventiveness of Cioma (the excellent Max Mauff), who forges passports in exchange for food stamps and even buys himself a sailboat.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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It's the European Year of Cultural Heritage, an ongoing celebration across multiple countries that includes museum exhibitions; tours of gardens and monuments ; theater, dance and musical performances; and the reappearance of many long running annual festivals. Each event is meant to speak to the theme of European cultural heritage in some form or other, according to the European Commission. To that end, many of the activities aim to be both fun and enriching, and appear to be marketed to Europeans rather than to tourists all the better for travelers seeking novel experiences with a more intimate, local feeling than the usual must see attractions. Below, a sampling of more than half a dozen events to enjoy (some even for free), from now through the end of the year. This ongoing countrywide celebration, part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, includes a variety of activities. Among them is the Handel Festival in Halle, May 25 through June 10, a Baroque homage to the German born composer in and around the city where he was born. More than 100 events are scheduled, including a new production of the opera " Berenice , Regina d'Egitto, HWV 38," at Halle Opera. There will also be events in meaningful places throughout the city, like the church where Handel was baptized, and a cathedral where he was an organist. About a three hour drive north, at the Museum Europaischer Kulturen in Berlin, is "I Never Said Goodbye/Women in Exile," an exhibition (now through July 15) of photographs by Heike Steinweg of women be it an author, artist, or political activist living in exile in Berlin. A list of Sharing Heritage events and initiatives is at Sharingheritage.de/en/projects/. During t his three day celebration of history and the arts from May 18 to 20 , there will be more than 150 events at museums across Scotland that will highlight their collections and grounds . For instance, on May 18 in Bo'ness, near Edinburgh, Kinneil House a former noble's home beside the Antonine Wall (part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage list) that dates to the Roman Empire will be open (for free) in the evening, as will the neighboring museum. The house and museum are part of what's known as the Kinneil Estate, where, on May 18, there will also be a nature walk and bat spotting on the grounds, an activity few museums and estates can boast they offer. Also during the festival, on May 20, Historic Environment Scotland will lead tours around the estate, which includes a cottage once used by James Watt, the inventor and engineer. (Note for long distance walkers: The Kinneil Estate and Nature Reserve is part of the John Muir Way walking route across the heart of Scotland.) A list of other museums and events is at Festivalofmuseums.com/events. Attention garden lovers: More than 2,000 gardens (including historic, contemporary and vegetable gardens, according to the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau) will be open to the public during this three day festival from June 1 to 3. There will also be exhibitions, lectures and concerts, along with opportunities to mingle with the country's gardeners, landscapers and botanists. As part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, 2018 marks the first time that the Rendez vous will take place in other countries as well, including Germany, Croatia, Spain, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Monaco, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and in regions like Wallonia (Belgium) and the Canton of Vaud (Switzerland). Details: Rendezvousauxjardins.culturecommunication.gouv.fr.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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A paper based rapid test for the Zika virus was introduced on Friday by a consortium of research groups. The core of the test kit is a piece of paper covered with yellow dots that turn purple in the presence of Zika virus RNA. Although the test is relatively fast and simple, it requires preliminary heating to amplify a sample's RNA, which can be done in most laboratories. The test, which gives results in two to three hours, "is much faster and cheaper than the P.C.R. tests used now," said James J. Collins, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is one of the test designers. It should cost less than 1 per test, said Keith Pardee, a University of Toronto biochemist and another test designer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... an hour, and I like spoofs 'Sherman's Showcase' When to watch: Friday at 10 p.m. on AMC, or at 11 p.m. on IFC. This special installment of "Sherman's Showcase," the fast and very funny mockumentary series, is the show's "Black History Month Spectacular," so it's an extra good episode. Bashir Salahuddin, one of the show's creators, stars as Sherman McDaniels, host of a (fictional) music and variety show, and every episode includes sketches, songs, spoofs and some of the best one liners you will hear on television. The "Peanuts" parody on this special is particularly great, and it makes me even more excited for the series to return in earnest for its recently announced second season. ... a few hours, and I'm hungry (for knowledge) Padma Lakshmi in an episode of "Taste the Nation." 'Taste the Nation With Padma Lakshmi' When to watch: Now, on Hulu. The "Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi takes things in a more serious and thoughtful direction on this new cooking and identity series, which includes episodes about Native American food sovereignty and about border town cooking as a lens for examining attitudes about immigration. For Juneteenth, Hulu is making the fourth episode free for nonsubscribers. It's about the Gullah Geechee community in South Carolina, people whose ancestors were enslaved West Africans and whose food, language and customs are under attack. "The culture happens between the healing and the hurt," the food writer and historian Michael W. Twitty says to Lakshmi. "That's where our culture has been made." 'Watchmen' When to watch: Now, free on the HBO website or On Demand. Also free to watch this weekend: Damon Lindelof's sensational reimagining of the "Watchmen" mythology, which aired last fall. Regina King stars as a Tulsa police officer and the superhero Sister Night, and the show uses its alternate American history Robert Redford has been president since 1993, for example to re examine the actual American history of anti Black racism. There's a lot happening on every episode of "Watchmen," and a lot of discourse to go alongside it, but the episodes are free only through Sunday night. Binge hard.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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It's an idea that has long been used as an argument against abortion that terminating a pregnancy causes women to experience emotional and psychological trauma. Some states require women seeking abortions to be counseled that they might develop mental health problems. Now a new study, considered to be the most rigorous to look at the question in the United States, undermines that claim. Researchers followed nearly 1,000 women who sought abortions nationwide for five years and found that those who had the procedure did not experience more depression, anxiety, low self esteem or dissatisfaction with life than those who were denied it. The findings come as the abortion debate intensifies in the United States, with President elect Donald J. Trump promising to nominate an abortion opponent to the Supreme Court after taking office next month. The question of the effect of the procedure on women's health, both physical and mental, has been an effective argument in recent years, used by states to enact a number of regulations and restrictions, and is likely to be a continuing part of the debate. The study, published on Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, found psychological symptoms increased only in women who sought abortions but were not allowed to have the procedure because their pregnancies were further along than the cutoff time at the clinic they visited. But their distress was short lived, whether they went elsewhere for an abortion or delivered the baby. About six months after being turned away from the first abortion clinic, their mental health resembled that of women who were not turned away and had abortions. "What I think is incredibly interesting is how everyone kind of evens out together at six months to a year," said Katie Watson, a bioethicist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. "What this study tells us about is resilience and people making the best of their circumstances and moving on," she said. "What's sort of a revelation is the ordinariness of it." Called the Turnaway Study and run by the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program at the University of California, San Francisco, the research strove to avoid methodological pitfalls of previous studies. Other studies compared women who had abortions with women who chose to give birth, two groups considered so different that many experts said little could be learned from comparing them. Other studies also failed to account for whether women had previous psychological issues, which turns out to put them at greatest risk for mental health problems after abortion. The Turnaway Study accounted for mental health history and focused on women who were close to or beyond the limit of when a clinic would perform abortions, so researchers could compare women who wanted abortions at the outset. Clinic cutoff limits vary somewhat by state, but also by individual clinic decisions. Limits at the 30 clinics in 21 states in the study ranged from 10 weeks of pregnancy to the end of the second trimester, about 25 weeks. Dr. Roger Rochat, a former director of reproductive health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a professor of global health and epidemiology at Emory University, said the study "provides the best scientific evidence" on the subject and was likely to be influential in court challenges to state laws. "This is an incredibly powerful study," he said. "States will continue to pass laws that restrict access to abortion services and they will do it in part based on mental health effects of abortion. But the evidence of this study says that just isn't true." Randall K. O'Bannon, director of education and research for National Right to Life, said that "it's not surprising that there'll be this immediate sense of anxiety and frustration" for women denied abortions because "they've been told that their plans are being squashed." But he emphasized that the study showed those feelings dissipated quickly, suggesting that effects of denying women abortion "were not entirely negative." Dr. O'Bannon had several criticisms of the study. "While it sounds to most people, I suppose, that five years is a sufficiently long time," some women experience problems long after abortion, he said. "This study would not capture those women who had those experiences at 10 years. There are women who go through some serious trauma later on, multiple sorts of effects that they deal with, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts." Women seeking abortions are required to be counseled about possible emotional or psychological effects in 22 states, nine of which focus almost entirely on potential negative effects, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. Although abortions in the United States are overwhelmingly obtained in the first trimester, the study included hundreds of women who sought them later in pregnancy. There were 452 whose pregnancies were within two weeks of the clinic's limit and who received abortions and 231 women who were denied abortions because their pregnancies were up to three weeks past the clinic's limit. The study also included 273 women who received first trimester abortions. Of the 231 turned away, 161 ended up giving birth and 70 miscarried or received abortions elsewhere, often requiring longer travel and more expense. Starting one week after women sought abortions, researchers asked questions to assess psychological well being and re interviewed each woman every six months for five years. M. Antonia Biggs, a social psychologist researcher and an author of the study, said that some people "would expect the women who have an abortion to have increasing depression and anxiety over time, but instead we don't see that." Instead, she said, the research showed that "women denied an abortion have more anxiety, lower self esteem, less life satisfaction than women who are able to get an abortion. But by six months to a year, they're similar to women who had an abortion." Another intriguing finding was that women receiving first trimester abortions were no more or less affected than those ending pregnancies later. "People guessed that it would be more difficult to their mental health to have a later abortion procedure than to have an earlier abortion procedure, and we didn't find that," Dr. Biggs said. Dr. Biggs said the study suggested that "expanding access to abortion care is more likely to protect women's mental health than restricting women's access to abortion care," but she also noted some results that "might not be very pro choicy." Those included that none of the groups differed in experiencing depression, and that women denied abortions did not have "more long term negative mental health consequences."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., north of Detroit, has been named a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. The automaker's research campus opened in 1956 and houses the G.M. design center, once called the styling department. The low, linear glass and glazed brick buildings an example of what is now called midcentury modern architecture are home to some 19,000 engineers, researchers, executives and other employees along the banks of a rectangular lake. The commendation for the award reads: "The General Motors Technical Center (commonly known as the "GM Tech Center") is one of the most significant works of architect Eero Saarinen, who was among the most important modernist designers of the post World War II period in the United States. The G.M. Tech Center marked Saarinen's emergence onto the national stage, and was the first of his four influential suburban corporate campuses that represented a sea change in American business facilities. The G.M. campus represents Saarinen's work not just as a creator of buildings, but also as the planner/designer of total environments." Saarinen later became famous for designing the T.W.A. terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport, the Dulles airport main terminal near Washington, and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. He designed corporate operations for I.B.M., Bell Labs, John Deere and other companies, establishing the idea of a suburban complex modeled after a small college campus. The same tradition eventually made its way to the headquarters of Microsoft, Apple and other high tech firms.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The Kentucky Derby, held annually at Churchill Downs in Louisville, outdraws other American horse races, from the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, N.Y., to the Santa Anita Derby, in Arcadia, Calif. But thoroughbred lovers champion Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, 70 miles east, as the intimate alternative with the hospitable practice of welcoming fans behind the scenes, from morning training sessions to the backside barns. And Keeneland is home to two annual meets, a monthlong series of contests in April that precede the Kentucky Derby and another in October that leads up to the Breeders' Cup, which will be held this year at Churchill Downs, Nov. 2 to 3. Beyond the track, much is changing in Lexington, the capital of American horse country and the 15 county Bluegrass Region. New locavore restaurants and whiskey distillery revivals add post race appeal, as do thoroughbred farms themselves. Eager to expand audiences for racing, these stately farms, noted for their architecturally distinct barns and pastures encircled by double railed fences, are throwing open the barn doors to tours. The three year old nonprofit booking service Horse Country organizes farm tours designed to engage race fans by introducing them to the horse rearing system. There are equine veterinary clinics on Horse Country, stallion specialists, including Godolphin at Jonabell, owned by Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum of Dubai, and farms like Claiborne, the former home of Secretariat and birthplace of 10 other Kentucky Derby winners. "Horses used to be the signature industry, then bourbon came along and they started making distilling interesting," said Headley Bell, a fifth generation horseman and the managing partner of his family's Mill Ridge Farm, a popular nursery among Horse Country members, and a photogenic place to pet foals and feed buckets of oats to feisty yearlings. "It was the drive between the distilleries, that beautiful countryside, that everybody loved so much," he added. "It was our thought that if they could make distilling interesting, why can't we let people come on the farm and get to know the horse?" Drawing the biggest Horse Country tours, Coolmore at Ashford Stud is home to the only two living Triple Crown winners, American Pharoah and, as of September, Justify. To visit Coolmore is not just to appreciate the beauty of the chestnut Justify or American Pharoah, a powerful bay who is generally unfazed by tour goers snapping selfies with him from behind a picket fence. It's also a fascinating and visceral tutorial in horse racing economics. Champions like these retire to stand at stud, commanding thousands to "cover" or breed with a mare (a thoroughbred must be bred live, rather than through artificial insemination, according to the Jockey Club, which sets race industry standards). In the breeding arena, with padded walls and floor mats, Coolmore stallions like Uncle Mo, sire of the 2016 Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist, get 125,000 per breeding, which may occur several times each day. The fee for Justify in 2019 will be 150,000. Like barn and bourbon tourism, Lexington itself is growing and the City Council is debating expanding its borders. The population grew 10 percent in the last decade and, as one measure of its trendiness, a branch of the contemporary art filled 21c Museum Hotel opened in 2016. "When I was growing up, Lexington was known as the perfect market to test new fast food concepts," said the chef Ouita Michel, who owns a string of farm to table restaurants in central Kentucky. She points to Long John Silver's and Fazoli's, which both have roots in Lexington. But the state's settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998 brought 1.9 billion to Kentucky, much of it invested in diversifying agriculture, which has helped seed new vegetable farms, aquaponic ventures and farmers' markets. "Eighteen years ago, when I started our first restaurant, Holly Hill Inn, outside of Lexington in Midway, it felt like pushing a big boulder uphill to get people interested in local, organic food," said Ms. Michel, whose latest Lexington restaurant, Honeywood, features a Kentucky forward menu with dishes like shaved ham and meatless beet loaf. Lexington's culinary start ups concentrate in the Lexington Distillery District, named for the recently revived James E. Pepper Distillery, just over a mile from downtown. Here, Middle Fork Kitchen Bar, a bustling restaurant redolent of smoke from the wood fired oven, epitomizes the area's dining revolution with housemade sausages, daily special cuts of lamb and mash ups like low country okonomiyaki (Japanese savory pancakes). The James E. Pepper distillery, which makes whiskeys sold under the 1776 brand, was closed for more than 50 years before it reopened this summer with a tasting center. The locals like to talk about the area's limestone filtered water as building strong horses and better bourbon. Amir Peay spent more than 10 years restoring the James E. Pepper distillery, which again makes whiskeys sold under the 1776 brand, named for the year it was founded. The 1930s vintage distillery languished, abandoned, for more than 50 years before Mr. Peay found it. Reopened in July with a tasting center, the distillery is next to the Town Branch of Elkhorn Creek, once a water source for whiskey. "Town Branch gave us bourbon and branch," a common term for whiskey and water, said Mr. Peay. About 25 miles west of town in Frankfort, Castle Key Distillery also recently opened, reviving an 1887 bourbon plant originally founded by the whiskey maverick Col. Edmund Haynes Taylor Jr. who is considered the father of bourbon tourism for building a railroad track that brought visitors to the estate. The restored, 113 acre grounds hosts Colonel Taylor's castle home, European style gardens and a walking path. Nearby, Woodford Reserve Distillery draws droves of bourbon fans not just for tours and tastings, but for cocktail classes and guided walks among the stone and brick barrelhouses of the National Historic Landmark that dates back to 1812.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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BRUSSELS China, the United States and two dozen other countries are looking at coordinated retaliation including putting pressure on European airlines and other industries if Europe tries to enforce a law requiring airlines to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. The system, the European Union's boldest initiative on climate protection to date, has provoked a worldwide outcry and raised the unwelcome prospect of a full scale trade war. European officials have stood firm while challenging opponents to suggest an equally effective alternative. The European system requires an airline landing or taking off in Europe to acquire permits corresponding to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during the entire flight regardless of where it originated or ended or the nationality of the airline. The system went into effect this year, although the first payments will not be due until 2013. Other governments have objected to Europe's attempt to regulate emissions outside its airspace, while carriers like American Airlines and China Southern are furious because they could face big bills as the number of permits that they need to purchase rises. In the latest of a series of meetings on the issue, officials from 26 governments will gather in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss a "basket of countermeasures" to block the European system, according to the draft agenda. Those countermeasures include following China's lead in banning its airlines from paying the charges unless and until the Chinese government grants permission; imposing punitive levies on European airlines when they fly over other countries' airspace; reviewing bilateral and "open skies" agreements on landing rights, market access and other matters and freezing consideration of any new routes or capacity, according to a draft discussion paper. In addition, the paper calls on governments to consider reopening trade agreements in sectors other than aviation and to freeze trade negotiations as a way of "putting pressure on E.U. industries." The meeting would "send a very strong signal to our E.U. friends that other countries are really angry and really preparing something strong," said a Chinese diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. However, Connie Hedegaard, the European climate commissioner, said Europe would hold firm. In a phone interview on Friday, she noted that the European Union had tried for a decade to achieve a global solution to reducing emissions before passing its own law, and she criticized the governments meeting in Moscow for not coming up with a better plan. "Our legislation is not going to be changed," Ms. Hedegaard said. Some European officials have suggested recently that parts of the new law could be suspended if there were clear progress this year toward establishing a global system. Those officials said such progress at the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, would have to be achieved by the end of the summer for the law to be suspended before the first payments are due on April 30, 2013. On Friday, Ms. Hedegaard did not discuss the timeline for any possible modification of the European legislation. But any withdrawal of the law "must be the day where we actually have an agreement and it enters into force," she said. The move by Beijing earlier this month to bar its airlines from participating for now in the European system represents the most direct act of defiance yet. The United States Congress is considering similar measures. The two day conference in Moscow aims to adopt a resolution on the countermeasures and invite other countries to sign on. Experts said the measures under discussion, if enforced, could disrupt the air industry. The imposition of countermeasures would most likely be felt by consumers in the form of higher airfares and fewer options in terms of routes and frequency of flights to Europe, said John R. Byerly, a former United States deputy assistant secretary of state for transportation affairs who negotiated the 2007 Open Skies agreement with the European Union. Airlines would lose many of the commercial incentives that were created by the easing of cross border regulations achieved through bilateral air service agreements over the last few years, Mr. Byerly said. "These rights are all very tenuous," Mr. Byerly said of air service agreements, because governments typically had the power to terminate them with just a few months' notice. "I think it is unique to aviation to have this potential downward spiral, where you eventually don't have any rights anymore," he said. "And then you have to put the whole thing back together." Mr. Byerly cited the decade of stagnation that occurred after France terminated its bilateral air transport agreement with the United States in 1992 in a dispute over market access. It wasn't until 2001 that the two countries reached another full open skies agreement, he said. The European Union contends that its system is less costly than portrayed by opponents, and would speed up the adoption of greener technologies at a time when air traffic, which represents 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, is growing much faster than gains in efficiency. The European Commission has been highly critical of the civil aviation organization, the United Nations agency, for failing to move quickly enough to establish standards and goals for greenhouse gases from aviation, as required under the Kyoto climate treaty 15 years ago. Analysts said the threat of a trade war was real, if not imminent. "I expect that there will be a moderation" of the European scheme, said Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Mr. Hufbauer predicted that the Europeans would find a way to either increase the share of free emissions permits for this year from 85 percent to as high as 100 percent, or even to push back the deadline for airlines to pay. "With all of the other much larger problems that Europe is facing right now, I would think they would not want to continue to irritate other countries on this issue," Mr. Hufbauer said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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The PGA Tour on Thursday announced it would resume its season in mid June with a tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, which would most likely make men's golf among the first major American professional sports to restart competition since the coronavirus pandemic halted most events in March. The tour said the event, the Charles Schwab Challenge at the Colonial Country Club, would be held June 11 14 and played without spectators, as would the next three tournaments scheduled for June and early July. Tour leaders, however, conceded that myriad details had yet to be resolved, including testing of players for the coronavirus before they leave for tournaments, assessing the effects of global travel bans on participation and determining whether local health officials would approve the tournaments set for their areas. "I'm confident that we'll be able to resume play; that's different than being certain," Andy Pazder, the PGA Tour's chief tournament and competitions officer, said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. Fort Worth's mayor, Betsy Price, was enthusiastic about the rescheduling of the event, a fixture on the tour that was originally set for May 21 24. "I feel like we can make this work," Price said. "It is a very fluid situation so you can't say 100 percent, but I'm optimistic." On Tuesday, Jay Monahan, the tour's commissioner, was one of 14 sports executives including the commissioners of the N.F.L., the N.B.A., Major League Baseball and the L.P.G.A. named by President Trump to a new council that will advise him on reopening the country's economy. Pazder acknowledged that there was a growing thirst for live sporting events to be televised in the United States, if not worldwide, but said the tour was not "rushing back to satiate that desire." He added, "We're only going to do that when we are sure that it will be safe and responsible to do that." The tour, which suspended play March 13, expects to follow an ambitious, almost weekly schedule of events through the rest of the year. Early this month, the L.P.G.A. Tour said it hoped to resume its tournament schedule on June 19. In the reconfigured PGA Tour schedule announced Thursday, the Fort Worth tournament would be followed by the RBC Heritage, beginning June 18 at Harbour Town Golf Links on Hilton Head Island, S.C. A tournament outside Hartford, Conn., the Travelers Championship, would be up next, June 25 28. Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut endorsed having the PGA Tour event in his state. "I don't think that's too soon," Lamont said of the Travelers Championship. He added that the tournament promised to be something that "showcases the best of Connecticut in a safe way." John J. McCann, the mayor of Hilton Head Island, called the PGA Tour's return "incredible news." "It's a huge win for golf and our community," McCann wrote in an email. From July to December, PGA Tour events would take place in 15 states and seven countries. Tour officials made no predictions about when spectator tickets would again be sold for tournaments. But the first four scheduled events, if held as planned, would be attended by hundreds of players, caddies, rules officials, event workers, a large broadcast crew and other members of the news media. Brooks Koepka, the world's third ranked golfer, was skeptical about the timing for professional golf's return. "I hope we start in June, I just think it's a little unrealistic," Koepka said Wednesday in a question and answer session conducted on Instagram by his swing coach, Claude Harmon III. "You think about all these guys that are going to be in airports flying everywhere. There are so many guys. Everything has to be cleaned. Is it really possible?" "It gives us confidence that we will be able to develop a strong testing protocol that will mitigate risk as much as we possibly can," he said. As for continued restrictions on travel, Pazder said that at least 25 players and 35 caddies live outside the United States and that the tour was monitoring if and when those prohibitions might be lifted. Price said that if existing 14 day quarantines of visitors arriving in Texas from some countries remained in effect in two months, some players might have to arrive well before the tournament's start. She also wondered how many hotels would be needed to lodge players, so that the city could prepare to "get those reopened and get appropriate guidelines in place." Golf's first major championship, the P.G.A. Championship, is scheduled to begin on Aug. 6 in San Francisco, although the P.G.A. of America, a separate golf entity which oversees the P.G.A. Championship, has acknowledged that it may have to move its event out of California, or host the tournament without spectators. The United States Open, once scheduled for mid June in Westchester County, N.Y., was postponed last week until Sept. 17 20. At the same time, the British Open was postponed until 2021 and the Masters tournament was rescheduled for Nov. 12 15 in Augusta, Ga. On the subject of sporting events without spectators, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading public health expert on the president's coronavirus task force, said in an interview that there was a way that athletic contests in pro baseball and football, and college sports could return this summer or fall.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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BARCELONA, Spain When Rosalia, a Spanish singer and songwriter, released her debut album, "Los Angeles," in 2017, she was largely unknown outside of Spain. In the years since, she has won two MTV Video Music Awards and five Latin Grammys, garnered nine million Instagram followers and made a cameo in Pedro Almodovar's film, "Pain and Glory." Her 2018 genre bending sophomore release, "El Mal Querer," also earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist: The 26 year old musician from Sant Esteve Sesrovires, a small town north of Barcelona, is the first Spanish language recording artist to break into the category. (The award ceremony takes place tonight.) But the album has ignited a heated debate about cultural appropriation. Rosalia, whose full name is Rosalia Vila Tobella, was 13 when she first became spellbound by the music of Camaron de la Isla a legendary Spanish Romani flamenco singer. She went on to spend a decade training with the flamenco virtuoso, Jose Miguel "El Chiqui" Vizcaya, before releasing "Los Angeles," which she described as "it's flamenco and it's not." The vocal driven concept album, which melds traditional styles with modern influences, propelled the genre forward. While the origins of flamenco are unknown, the style is linked to the Spanish Romani, who have long been marginalized and discriminated against. The Catalan singer, who weaves the Spanish Romani language and Roma imagery together in some of her work, has been accused of profiting from Roma culture. Her Latin Grammy awards for Album of the Year and Best Urban Song, for the single "Con Altura" or "With Style" (an hommage to classic reggaeton), also invited cries of appropriation, given her white European heritage. The controversies illustrate why it's problematic to lump all Spanish speaking musicians together. And while the critical opprobrium directed at Rosalia has been unfair, there's still a debate worth having.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. Sungjae Im, a precocious 21 year old from South Korea, has been playing professional golf in the United States since 2018. Im, however, does not own a home, rent an apartment or even spend a few weeks at an Airbnb in America, despite a 10 month playing schedule that includes prolonged breaks between tournaments. On the meandering traveling circus better known as the PGA Tour, Im has spent years now living in hotels. Transportation to competitions means airline flights and an endless fleet of Ubers. Last week, upon his arrival here at the Honda Classic, Im allowed that his seemingly endless road trip could conclude if he claimed his first PGA Tour victory in his 50th start. On Sunday, with a steely resolve unmatched by the veteran golfers chasing him, a daring Im held on to a late, one stroke lead to win the Honda Classic. With birdies on two of his last four holes the most daunting stretch of the Champion Course at the PGA National Resort Im's round of 66 left him at six under par for the tournament, just ahead of Mackenzie Hughes, who finished second. Tommy Fleetwood, the popular Englishman who is the only player ranked in the top 20 worldwide without a PGA Tour victory, seemed poised to tie Im in the tournament's closing moments and force a playoff. But from the middle of the 18th fairway, Fleetwood, who began the day with a one stroke lead, shockingly sliced his second shot into a pond to the right of the green to finish third, two strokes back. Afterward, a smiling Im said he was not yet changing his usual accommodation routine. The next PGA Tour event, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, begins on Thursday in Orlando, Fla., roughly 160 miles from away. Im, who travels with his parents, wasn't certain how far toward Orlando he would get on Sunday night, but he knew the category of lodging where he would end up would not matter. "Wherever I'm in a hotel," Im said through an interpreter, "I feel like it's going to be one of the happiest nights of my life." Im, who was the tour's rookie of the year last season, faced some vexing moments just before his late charge on Sunday when he bogeyed the 12th and 13th holes to fall two strokes behind the leaders. But on the intimidating 15th and 17th holes, both par 3s over long expanses of water, Im struck bold, sterling iron shots to within seven feet of the hole. Then he made both birdie putts. "Those are all hard holes but I felt the key was to stay aggressive and to keep shooting for the flags," Im said. "Getting conservative there would have been the real mistake." Fleetwood was duly impressed. "Sungjae is a very solid, composed young player," he said on Sunday evening. "We saw that last season." Many of Im's tour brethren took note in 2019 of Im's durability he played 35 events, which was more than any golfer. He also led the tour in cuts made (26) and had 16 top 25 finishes. He finished 19th in the season long FedEx Cup standings and then compiled a 3 1 1 record for the international team in the President's Cup against the United States team, including a Sunday singles match victory over the reigning United States Open champion Gary Woodland. In 2018, Im was named player of the year on the Korn Ferry Tour, the professional circuit that acts as a feeder to the PGA Tour. For Fleetwood, his 18th hole misstep was the latest setback in his quest to win on the PGA Tour. Last year, Fleetwood, the world's 12th ranked golfer, was second at the Zurich Classic in New Orleans and tied for third at the Palmer Invitational. At the 2018 United States Open, he was second, one stroke behind Brooks Koepka. He nearly holed a short putt on the 72nd hole of that event that would have given him a round of 62. "I feel like if I keep staying in there and getting my chances, I'll get it done," Fleetwood said. "But I'm fine. You know, winning is hard." On the par 5 18th hole on Sunday, Fleetwood needed a birdie to tie Im and an eagle would have meant victory. He had 239 yards to the hole on his second shot and choose a 5 wood that he planned to hit with a left to right fade, matching the shape of the hole.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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"I know everything," the composer Ned Rorem said on a recent afternoon, "but I remember nothing." Mr. Rorem elder statesman of American art song, prolific prose writer, pioneer of gay liberation was exaggerating. Now 95 years old (as of Tuesday), he is more forgetful than he used to be. But he actually remembers quite a lot. Give him the right prompt, and he can dish at length on nearly every cultural luminary of the past century he's known almost all personally and reminisce about Picasso's Paris or the New York City of 25 rents. He's a walking archive and anachronism. But his world is shrinking. Most of his friends have long since died, as has his partner, James Holmes. ("I wish everyone would stop dying," he said.) And the music world will observe his birthday modestly: concerts in Queens and Manhattan in early November, presented by Random Access Music, and a celebration on Dec. 20 at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, organized by the pianist Carolyn Enger. Mr. Rorem's twilight is passing quietly at his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. With daily help from his niece Mary Marshall , he takes walks in Central Park, plays his music on the piano and does crossword puzzles. (With first and last names that lend themselves to crosswords, Mr. Rorem has appeared countless times as a clue in The New York Times's puzzle . "It's the only one I can get," he joked.) His home is tidy but densely packed, with hundreds of books in every room. The walls are covered in art, including portraits of him by prominent artists like Jean Cocteau and Dora Maar. He has a Degas, and a drawing by Klimt. His Steinway piano is covered in stacks of his own scores; below are boxes of archival materials being prepared for the Library of Congress. There are visitors, mostly musicians relishing the opportunity to play a piece from the 1940s or '50s and receive feedback from its composer. (Mr. Rorem had a long career as a teacher, with students including the Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon.) The regulars know to arrive prepared: Ms. Enger, the pianist, had a package of Tate's sugar cookies, and the clarinetist Thomas Piercy, a performer in the Random Access Music concerts, brought homemade chocolate chip cookies. "I don't have any bad habits," Mr. Rorem said. "I don't smoke; I don't swear. But I like cookies." Mr. Rorem, who is warm in casual conversation, has no reservations about giving terse feedback. When Ms. Enger came by on a recent afternoon to play some of his piano works many of them gifts for friends and family, with sentimental dedications she stopped and asked, "Did I interpret it too much?" And Mr. Piercy's first run in with the composer, in the late 1980s, was during a rehearsal with a pianist who had the instrument's lid down; Mr. Rorem stormed in shouting, "No lid! " Mr. Rorem has always had strong opinions about music; rarely have they been fashionable. But his insistence on tonality and his idiosyncratic style a little French and a lot American have outlasted the preferences of the 20th century musical academy. Like vinyl records and sleek Danish furniture, Mr. Rorem has been both popular and passe, and just might now be ripe for resurgence. You would be hard pressed to find greatness in Mr. Rorem's vast oeuvre. But he has never aimed to be a Beethoven. (Indeed, he doesn't even like that master's music.) Still, there are rediscoveries to be made: "Air Music" (1974) feels as fresh as when it won the Pulitzer. And the pyrotechnic Toccata from his First Piano Sonata belongs in the rotation of encores. Beyond music, Mr. Rorem is an icon of gay history. His published diaries, which total thousands of pages, are like sketches for his own "In Search of Lost Time": panoramic and personal, with a cast of recognizable characters. There are jottings about anxiety, artistry and the loud air conditioner of Itzhak Perlman, his neighbor and bete noire but the books are also cris de coeur for sexual freedom. At a time when gay characters in pop culture were often tragic, Mr. Rorem depicted himself as triumphant: handsome, talented and entirely sure of himself. With a candor that prefigured Edmund White, he wrote openly and proudly about his gay friends who shaped American culture, like Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee and Aaron Copland. In the diary collection "Lies," he documented, in painfully raw and incremental detail, the decline of his partner from AIDS complications. "I just wrote about all that because so what?" Mr. Rorem said. "I didn't understand why anybody, including my parents, was particularly impressed. But I guess nobody else was doing it." His diaries are also a log of health anxieties and suicidal thoughts; he seemed, when he was younger, to think constantly about death. Not so much anymore: Mr. Rorem said that "most people are worse off than I am," which is an understatement for a spry man in his mid 90s who has always looked far younger than his years and thinks that it would be "kind of cute" to reach 100. "I'm not planning to die, ever, because I can't quite figure out what it means to die," he said. "What's the point in living if you're going to die?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Last spring, while a senior in college, Nick Caine landed a job in New York as a financial adviser. In San Antonio, where he attended Trinity University, Mr. Caine paid 600 a month for his share of a four bedroom house with two roommates. Judging from the monthly rent his city acquaintances paid in the low 1,000s, although they had roommates he assumed an outlay of 2,000 would allow him to rent a decent place on his own. Maybe he could even get by with about 1,500 a month. Brooklyn was out after Mr. Caine heard stories about the subway shutting down in the snow and stranding people. He preferred to stay "below the top of Central Park," which would place him within 15 minutes by subway of his office in Midtown West. Friends advised him to enlist the help of an agent. So his mother, through a chain of friends, contacted Mark Ritchken, the vice president of the New York Private Realty Group. Mr. Caine, 22, was shocked at the inaccuracy of his calculations. "I was glad to have a broker," he said. "I didn't know what I was doing." He flew out in the spring for a day of apartment hunting. Mr. Ritchken took him to half a dozen places, primarily studios. Mr. Caine found he preferred a small walk up building without a doorman to a large building with a busy lobby. Walk ups "seemed more personable," he said. "You either had a nice street view or a nice backyard garden." He noticed that "if you have a doorman, you get an elevator in the building. I am young, so it didn't matter to me having to walk up four or five flights of stairs." Mr. Caine, who is from Northern California, is an accomplished open water swimmer, having successfully tackled the English Channel at age 16. Near day's end, they visited a one bedroom for 2,500 a month in the East 60s on the fifth and top floor of a walk up building. Mr. Caine liked the place. It was larger than the studio he had imagined himself living in, and he liked the idea of no upstairs neighbors. But surely, plenty of apartments were available in the big city. Should he wait to see more? Absolutely not, Mr. Ritchken told him. The application process was lengthy. And Mr. Caine's employment status was a red flag to landlords. He needed to take and pass several licensing exams before he could even start work. Even then, in his commission only job, he wouldn't be paid for a few months. His grandfather in California planned to lend him money to get settled and to act as guarantor. "It was part of my graduation present," Mr. Caine said. Mr. Caine offered to pay six months' rent in advance, but his application was nevertheless declined. Back in Texas to prepare for graduation, Mr. Caine kept in close touch with Mr. Ritchken, who soon found a suitable one bedroom for 2,350 a month in the East 70s. The listing agent showed it to several people at once. A mother and daughter acted immediately, heading straight to the bank for a deposit to hold it while they applied. So that one vanished. "I started sending Mark more and more listings from the Internet," he said. "Mark said, 'You have to stop. Those are all fake.' " Mr. Caine delayed his move by a month, awaiting a new round of vacancies. In the East 80s, Mr. Ritchken toured a one bedroom for 2,400 a month and recommended it to Mr. Caine. The grueling application process included a request for a 500 certified check to hold the place, which Mr. Caine sent immediately. Mr. Ritchken also offered a year's rent in advance. The next day, he received an email announcing that the landlord was "going in a different direction with the apartment." Then, a vacancy arose in a small walk up building in the East 50s where Mr. Ritchken's company is the exclusive rental agent. The one bedroom apartment, with a back courtyard view and several large closets, even had a washer dryer and a wood burning fireplace. The rent was 2,600 a month, slightly over budget. The photographs illustrating the listing "were probably 10 years old," Mr. Caine said. "The TV was one of the huge ones with a big back behind it." Nevertheless, he rented the apartment sight unseen. "I didn't feel I had a choice," he said. This time, though, the process was easy. The landlord required no guarantor and no prepaid rent. Mr. Caine paid the broker fee of 15 percent of a year's rent, or 4,680. He tried to identify his building from Google Street View, but had to guess at exactly which building it was. When he arrived in midsummer, his first thought was "the staircase seems very narrow." At 480 square feet, the place was a lot smaller than he had envisioned.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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HERE'S another reason F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he wrote about the rich being different from you and me. For most people, real estate deals are made under pressure you have to sell fast because you've made an offer on another place, or you're moving to a new city and you don't have time to really indulge your perfectionist streak. Not so for the superrich. At the highest end of the global residential real estate market, trophy properties, like expensive art, are rarely bought under duress. Billionaires from all over the world can afford not only the price of Manhattan's top penthouses and full floor residences, but also to wait, since they are never scrambling for a place to call home. "These billionaire buyers are really united by one characteristic: their choice of residence is completely discretionary," said Kelly Mack, the president of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. "More often than not these buyers are willing to sit on the sidelines, often for years, to wait for that stratospheric trophy property that is truly unique and stands perfect in every way." Not that there's a lot to choose from now, anyway. The inventory of apartments that might be of interest to the world's wealthiest people has been thin of late, with demand from a growing pool of foreign billionaires eager to park their money in Manhattan outpacing new developments, especially downtown. As of Tuesday, according to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, 28 condos and 5 co ops were listed for 30 million or more in Manhattan. Fifteen of the condos were in one building: One57, the tower under development at 157 West 57th Street, Miller Samuel said. Before we get to the specifics, a few broad guidelines about trophy property shopping emerged from this exercise. "When you go above 25 million you better have a great view, a great building and a great location," said Leonard Steinberg, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman. To that point, the lack of a great view is probably why the condop penthouse at the Mark on the Upper East Side, with a 60 million asking price, wasn't mentioned by many brokers. Sure, it has a chapel like 26 foot high ceiling in the living room and 2,400 square feet of roof space, and it's one of only 10 condo units in the famed hotel. But the penthouse just doesn't reach high enough to capture the sort of breathtaking views that would seem to justify the price tag. Something else that turns out to be true about these trophy properties: They are often made, not born. Rare is the trophy penthouse or full floor residence that isn't the result of creative combinations of several apartments to create a suitable mansion in the sky. Only in the past decade have developers designed massive units with the picky billionaire buyer in mind, said Shaun Osher, the chief executive of CORE. Privacy matters, especially separate entrances in buildings with hotels. Foreign billionaires demand concierge services night and day, and a long slate of amenities like gyms, spas and children's playrooms. But these buyers are not overly concerned about security, said Angela Rapoport, a broker with the Corcoran Group. "Russian buyers I work with see New York as a political and economic haven and a secure place to live," she said. Brokers say they have learned to be patient, even though they are eager for a big commission check. Two years ago, Mr. Osher said, he was working with an Asian billionaire to find a trophy apartment and came up short. He approached the owner of a duplex on the 76th and 77th floors of the north tower at the Time Warner Center that wasn't on the market. The owner said he would sell for 100 million. The man bid 60 million. The owner said no. "He is still looking," Mr. Osher said. In the end, I confined my list to condos because co ops are inaccessible to most foreign buyers, who either cannot get past the co op boards or are unwilling to try. The following list is a snapshot from the last week or so. Several brokers said they were waiting for new downtown developments that will provide fresh trophy penthouses to challenge uptown's dominance. Projects like Walker Tower in Chelsea (at 212 West 18th Street), where a two floor, 12,470 square foot penthouse is expected to list for 94 million later this summer; and 56 Leonard (due, finally, to start selling later this year, Ms. Mack said), in particular a full floor penthouse, may shake up the status quo, and are likely to draw at least some patient billionaires off the sidelines. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. THE OTHER PENTHOUSE AT 15 CENTRAL PARK WEST Sanford I. Weil may have seized the headlines this year with the 88 million sale of his 6,744 square foot penthouse in the complex's "house" to a trust benefiting Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the college student daughter of a Russian fertilizer billionaire, but there is another fabulous penthouse available. Daniel S. Loeb, who runs the hedge fund Third Point LLC, owns the largest penthouse in the taller "tower," which brokers in my sample unanimously ranked among the Top 5 trophies. Brokers and developers around town say Mr. Loeb and his wife are quietly shopping the 10,674 square foot space, which he bought in 2008 for 45 million, and are in search of something larger. "I heard he wants 100 million," Mr. De Niro said. Wishful thinking? The real estate community seems primed to keep shattering records, so a little hype never hurt. A spokeswoman for Mr. Loeb's hedge fund declined to comment on whether he is looking to sell. As for who is on top, Michael Gross, who is writing a book on 15 Central Park West, has no doubt. "Rybolovleva's penthouse, grand though it is" he said, "is so far beneath Daniel Loeb's 19 floors to be exact it is barely worth mentioning in the same breath, and he would have to crane his neck quite a bit downward to see it." THE PENTHOUSE AND WINTER GARDEN AT ONE57 The developer Gary Barnett sent shock waves through the market last month when he revealed that he had sold the two floor penthouse atop the still under construction One57 for 90 million to 100 million. The buyer remains a mystery, and the closing is at least a year off, Ms. Mack said. Until then, the 10,923 square foot residence, with its "grand salon" lording over Central Park facing north from the 89th and 90th floors, deserves a place among the Top 5 condos. But supposedly still on the market is the "Winter Garden" apartment, which occupies the 75th and 76th floors. It rates a close second. At 13,554 square feet, it's even larger than the penthouse, with a private solarium and a formal dining room that looks as if it could seat all of King Arthur's Court. Price tag: 115 million. TIME WARNER CENTER: NORTH TOWER, 76TH AND 77TH FLOORS The Asian billionaire may have lost out, but the duplex apartment still makes the list. With a rare wraparound terrace at Time Warner featuring northward views of Central Park, and of the East River and the Hudson the residence has some ceilings that are 24 feet high, a private reflecting pool and an interior elevator. And it is on the only floor in the north tower with private terraces, Mr. Osher said. The owner is an American businessman in the finance field. THE PENTHOUSE AT SUPERIOR INK Brokers rate the penthouse at Superior Ink, at 400 West 12th Street, as one of the two best available downtown today, though it is not for sale. The original owner, the Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, sold it in 2010 for 33.5 million to Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur who became the first South African in space in 2002 when he flew as a cosmonaut to the International Space Station. The 6,300 square foot apartment has yet to be finished, Mr. Steinberg said. For those dying to capture the Hudson River views from the building, which was designed by Robert A. M. Stern and developed by Related Companies, the full 14th floor of 7,687 square feet is listed for 35.75 million. THE PENTHOUSE AT 145 HUDSON While some brokers say 145 Hudson Street, a conversion of a 1929 Art Deco industrial building in TriBeCa, is too commercial for some discriminating billionaires, few disagree that the penthouse is stunning. The 7,500 square foot four bedroom four bathroom duplex looks like a glass box in the sky. Designed by James Carpenter, it has "museum quality, high performance, insulated glass," specially designed walls that allow artwork to be hung without fear of damage from sunlight, and 4,500 square feet of outdoor space on a wraparound terrace. It was the most expensive apartment ever sold south of Columbus Circle when it went for 30.5 million in 2009. After going back on the market for 45 million last May it was taken off less than a month later, according to Streeteasy.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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PORTLAND, Ore. "This is a Crown zipper from the late '40s," said Bennie Goodson, the general manager of Langlitz Leathers, an Oregon store that is a magnet for the motorcycle world. "Try it. You've never felt a zipper action that smooth." Zippers that date from the Truman presidency may not seem the most desirable hardware to most, but Tommy Lee Jones, Don Simpson and the Dylans (Bob and his son Jakob) would disagree. For bikers or those who want to look the part Langlitz is the equivalent of a couture house: a symbol of a value system that exists outside today's world of fast fashion, social media seeded drops and product placement. Langlitz jackets are still made by hand and sold exactly the same way they were when the company was founded by Ross Langlitz in 1947. It doesn't advertise, and the garments carry no external branding; while each jacket is unique, the only people who will know that it's special are other Langlitz owners, and there aren't many. Chris Page, a Nike executive who is also the president of a local racing club, recently picked up his first Langlitz. "Of course it fits, and it has the features I wanted," Mr. Page said. "But there's more to it than that. The person who cut it, the person who sewed it they're right there. The moment I put it on, I knew I'd have it for the rest of my life, and I could feel that entire trajectory." An avid motorcyclist whose passion cost him a leg and kept him out of World War II, Ross Langlitz won dozens of races in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1940s, a hobby that introduced him to numerous returning servicemen who often wore surplus leather flight jackets while on their bikes. Mr. Langlitz found that such garments didn't fit well when he was hunched over his bike, so he took one apart and modified it, using the skills he had picked up while working in a glove factory during the war. Then he made a jacket from scratch. Portland racers pestered him to make jackets for them, too. His first style, the Columbia, is still the best seller. As demand took off, Langlitz moved to larger and larger facilities. (The company was originally named Speedway Togs; in 1950 it became Langlitz Leathers, with every jacket made to order.) By then there were a half dozen styles, along with three basic pairs of leather trousers. Those are still the main products, although a wide range of options Cossack or dress collars, belts, extra padding on the elbows and shoulders ensure that no two Langlitz jackets are the same. Even the pocket lining is up to the customer; most are canvas sailcloth, but leather is also an option. (The catalog still refers to leather lining as a "gun pocket.") Langlitz Leathers moved to its current location on Southeast Division Street in Portland in 1972. Ross retired in 1982 and died a few years later, leaving the business to his daughter Jackie. Ross's granddaughter Judy is the last family member actively involved in the business, and although she is rarely in the shop these days, the old ways are preserved with near religious fervor. The current catalog still uses photos of Ross modeling his own jackets, taken around 1950, and the shop remains a shrine to the golden era of American motorcycle racing in the '40s, '50s and '60s. It is full of Ross's racing trophies, and motorcycles that, if you look closely, were modified so he could ride them with one leg. Local customers come into the shop to be measured, and some fly in from around the world. Most long distance customers, however, mail in an order form. "We could have people order online, but we find that we get more from seeing the form," said Mr. Goodson, who has been at Langlitz for six years . "If a number is scratched out and changed, we know the customer might be having trouble with that measurement." Customers are also welcome to sketch their own special requests. The order form also includes a box that customers can check if the jacket won't be worn on a motorcycle, so the fit can be adjusted accordingly. A cutter takes that order back to an alcove where hundreds of Ross's original cardboard patterns are archived, traces it onto kraft paper and adapts it to suit the customer's measurements. (Kota Kakutani, who has been a cutter for 14 years, called the process "putting in the pluses and minuses.") The cutter then picks out hides. Nowadays, most are goatskin or cowhide, which is available in three thicknesses. There's a choice of lining material, too; nylon (which is durable) or a cotton rayon blend (a little softer.) Both materials are milled in the United States. Once the leather and lining have been cut, they are bundled with the order form and put on a cart. A seamstress picks a bundle and does all the sewing on a vintage Pfaff sewing machine. She (they're all women) works on an entire garment from start to finish, down to the zippers, rivets and snaps. There's nothing resembling an assembly line, and no piecework. Each seamstress manufactures one or two jackets a day, depending on the complexity of the pattern and the customer's options. Job security is not an issue, because there is always a backlog of several hundred orders. For the last 20 years, Langlitz has also supplied a Japanese distributor that operates boutiques in Tokyo and Nagoya, where staff members help take measurements and translate the order form. About a third of total production is now sold to Japanese customers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Credit...Josh Ritchie for The New York Times KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. The search for cosmic real estate is about to begin anew. No earlier than 6:32 p.m. on April 16, in NASA's fractured parlance, a little spacecraft known as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, bristling with cameras and ambition, will ascend on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a blaze of smoke and fire and take up a lengthy residence between the moon and the Earth. There it will spend the next two years, at least, scanning the sky for alien worlds. Watch NASA attempt to launch the TESS spacecraft on Wednesday at 6:51 p.m. Eastern time. TESS is the latest effort to try to answer questions that have intrigued humans for millenniums and dominated astronomy for the last three decades: Are we alone? Are there other Earths? Evidence of even a single microbe anywhere else in the galaxy would rock science. NASA's Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, discovered some 4,000 possible planets in one small patch of the Milky Way near the constellation Cygnus. Kepler went on to survey other star fields only briefly after its pointing system broke. After nine years in space, it's running out of fuel. Thanks to efforts like Kepler's, astronomers now think there are billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy, which means the nearest one could be as close as 10 to 15 light years from here. And so the torch is passed. It's now TESS's job to find those nearby planets, the ones close enough to scrutinize with telescopes, or even for an interstellar robot to visit. "Most of the stars with planets are far away," said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the TESS team, referring to Kepler's bounty. "TESS will fill in planets around nearby stars." George Ricker, an M.I.T. researcher and the leader of the TESS team, expects to find some 500 Earth sized planets within 300 light years of here, close enough for a coming generation of telescopes on the ground and in space to examine for habitability or perhaps even inhabitants. But there will be more than planets in the universe, according to TESS. "TESS is going to be a lot of fun," Dr. Ricker said. "There are 20 million stars we can look at." The spacecraft will be able to do precise brightness measurements of every glint in the heavens, he said. "Galaxies, stars, active galactic nuclei," his voice trailing off. Most of the exoplanets will be orbiting stars called red dwarfs, much smaller and cooler than the sun. They make up the vast majority of stars in our neighborhood (and in the universe) and presumably lay claim to most of the planets. Like Kepler, TESS will hunt those planets by monitoring the light from stars and detecting slight dips, momentary fading indicating that a planet has passed in front of its star. The mission's planners say they eventually expect to catalog 20,000 new exoplanet candidates of all shapes and sizes. In particular, they have promised to come up with the masses and orbits of 50 new planets that are less than four times the size of the Earth. Most of the planets in the universe are in this range between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. But since there are no examples of them in our own solar system, as Dr. Seager notes, "we don't know anything about them." Are they so called "superearths," mostly rock with a veil of atmosphere, or "mini Neptunes" with small cores buried deep inside extensive balls of gas? Data from Kepler and astronomers suggests that the difference is mass: fertile rocks often are less than one and a half times the size of the Earth, while barren ice clouds often are bigger. Where the line really is, and how many planets fall on one side or the other, could determine how many worlds out there are balls of freezing vapor or potential gardens. "We need to make precise mass measurements," said David Latham of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is in charge of organizing astronomers to follow up the TESS observations. TESS is one of NASA's smaller missions, with a budget of 200 million; by comparison, Kepler had a budget of about 650 million. Recently TESS, partly clad in shiny aluminum foil, stubby solar panels folded modestly against its side, was sitting on a round pedestal inside a plastic tent. The tent occupied one corner of a cavernous "clean room" in a remote building on the scrubby outskirts of the space center here, amid palms and canals and flocks of cormorants. The spacecraft is about the size of a bulky, oddly shaped refrigerator, festooned not with magnets but with mysterious nozzles and connectors. Four pairs of blue clad legs were sticking out from underneath the pedestal, as if high tech mechanics were working under a car. The engineers were taping plaques to the bottom of the spacecraft, including a memory chip containing drawings by schoolchildren who had been asked to imagine exoplanets might look like. Standing to the side, in a "bunny suit" of protective material that left only his bespectacled eyes visible, Dr. Ricker was staring into the tent at his new spacecraft, as if he were watching his car get fixed, and exchanging rocket talk with the engineers who had designed and built it. Dr. Ricker has been a rocket scientist, building astronomical satellites to be shot into space, for pretty much his entire career as a researcher at M.I.T.'s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Most of his previous projects involved measuring X rays or gamma rays from various snaps, crackles and pops in the cosmos, most recently the High Energy Transient Explorer, used to study the cataclysms known as gamma ray bursts. Asked if planets represented a departure for him, Dr. Ricker shrugged, "Not so much." All his work has involved delicate measurements of things changing, what he called "time domain astronomy." The key to this work is to maintain very stable and sensitive detectors the imaging chips that are elite relatives of the sensors in your smartphone so that they can reliably record the changes in brightness, just a few parts per million, that signal a planet passing by its star. Dr. Ricker said he and his colleagues had started "noodling" about a planet finding mission back in 2006. After they lost out in a competition for NASA's Small Explorers program, which are less expensive missions, the scientists re entered a competition for a larger mission in 2010 and won. They had gone to great lengths to design a compact spacecraft that would fit the rockets NASA used for Small Explorers, and so were nonplused when NASA selected SpaceX's Falcon 9, which can carry a much larger payload, to launch the TESS mission. A report released this month by NASA showed that the space agency and SpaceX still disagree on what exactly went wrong two and a half years ago when a mission to resupply the International Space Station disintegrated in flight. In a second mishap in 2016, a Falcon 9 blew up during a launchpad test, destroying a communications satellite whose customers included Facebook. Unbowed, SpaceX and its founder Mr. Musk have plowed on, with 22 consecutive launches of its Falcon and a maiden flight in February for the Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket, which shot one of Mr. Musk's Tesla convertibles past Mars into orbit around the sun. "TESS looks like a little toy inside the Falcon 9," Dr. Ricker said. But a toy with potential. On top of the spacecraft are four small cameras, each with a 24 degree field of view, a stretch of sky about the size of the Orion constellation. The cameras will stare at adjacent sections of sky for 27 days at a time, and then step to the next spot. In the course of the first year, the researchers will survey the entire southern hemisphere of the sky; in the second year, they will stitch together the northern sky. If the mission is extended beyond two years, they will repeat. Dr. Ricker and his colleagues have prepared a list of 200,000 nearby stars whose brightness will be measured and reported every two minutes in what they call the spacecraft's "postage stamp" mode. Meanwhile, images of the entire 24 degree swaths of sky will be recorded every half hour. That cadence is perfect for finding and studying current favorites in the race to locate habitable exoplanets, namely those circling the ubiquitous red dwarf stars, or M dwarfs, in astronomical jargon. "This is the era of the M dwarf," Dr. Seager said. Because they are so much cooler and less luminous than the sun, their "Goldilocks" zones where in principle liquid water is possible lie only a few million miles out from each star, instead of the 90 million miles from which the Earth circles the sun. To start its excellent adventure, TESS will be launched into an unusually eccentric orbit that takes the satellite all the way out to the moon at its farthest point. Gravitational interaction with the moon will then keep TESS in a stable 13.7 day orbit for as long as 1,000 years, Dr. Ricker said. The great apogee, the farthest distance from Earth, will minimize obstruction and interference from our planet. The spacecraft will radio its data back once every orbit, when it is closest to Earth, at about 67,000 miles up. Dr. Latham called it "a slick orbit." But it will take almost two months and many rocket burns to get there and begin to do science. If all goes well, that would be the middle of June. Sometime during that process, Dr. Ricker said, the team will turn the spacecraft's cameras on the Earth for a last look at home. Asked if he was ready to be Mr. Exoplanet, Dr. Ricker winced. "What I'm looking forward to," he said, "is getting some data to look at."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Not quite three months after standing supportively, and silently, behind her husband, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, as he resigned his position after losing the Brexit vote, Samantha Cameron is about to do what, to my knowledge, no spouse of a global leader has ever done before. Confirming the news, which was first rumored in October when she registered the company name "Samantha Cameron Studio Limited," Mrs. Cameron told British Vogue, which will reveal first looks in its December issue: "I felt that there were a lot of American and French brands out there that fit that bracket of designer contemporary with the right price point and the right styling. But there aren't that many British brands which fill that space." She is aiming to fill it. The new line, which consists of 40 styles, will be called Cefinn and will be available at Net a Porter, Selfridges and cefinn.com. As to the clothes and their style, "Well obviously you're thinking about yourself, but at the same time it can't be all about yourself because that would be pointless," she said to British Vogue. "I've spent a lot of time trying stuff on my friends." An image released by the magazine shows her in an ecru midcalf trumpet skirt with a white windowpane print and matching belted shell. It looks perfectly proper and accessible (and less obviously "fashion y" than some of the looks she wore during her husband's time in office). On the one hand, this career segue makes a fair amount of sense. Before she landed in 10 Downing Street, Ms. Cameron was the creative director of the British brand Smythson and responsible for turning it into a buzzy heritage handbag house. As W.P.M. (wife of the prime minister), she remained a part time consultant for the brand attending Smythson's New York store opening last March, for example. Her sister, Emily Sheffield, is the deputy editor of British Vogue. As W.P.M., Ms. Cameron's clothing choices were deliberate (and diplomatic), in the model of Michelle Obama, and as a result widely watched: She was applauded for wearing pieces at many different price points and by many different British designers, including Marks Spencer, L. K. Bennett, Peter Pilotto, Christopher Kane, Erdem and Roksanda. She also became the ambassador to the British Fashion Council, making it her official duty to support the industry, and hosted numerous cocktail parties for London Fashion Week on Downing Street. And, given the way pretty much anyone with a public profile and popular image, from rock stars to athletes, has seized on fashion as a career forward, it was probably only a matter of time before politicians or their spouses joined the trend. Especially considering how much time and thought they are now forced to devote to what they wear, and all its possible meanings, they may as well put all that background research to good use. (A crisis strategist once told me he spent hours discussing tie color with a client who was a head of state when they could have been talking about the peace accords.) Mrs. Cameron is in her mid 40s she clearly has more career left in her so why not? And other former Downing Street wives (and other political wives) have continued their pre government careers post government. It's just that the next step has been a little more obviously worthy than fashion. Consider perhaps the most famous former first lady with a career (at least in recent times), Hillary Clinton. Or Cherie Blair, the wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a Queen's Counsel. When her husband left office, she established the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, which focuses on empowering women in developing economies. Or Sarah Brown, the wife of Gordon Brown, another former prime minister, who founded the children's charity Theirworld and became the executive chairwoman of the Global Business Coalition for Education (among other things). There are exceptions: Carla Bruni Sarkozy, a former model and the wife of former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, became the face of Bulgari jewelers the year after her husband left office, and it didn't raise many eyebrows. But in this case, "The response to what she does is going to be in part about how we process political figures," Robert Burke, a luxury consultant and founder of Robert Burke Associates, said of Mrs. Cameron. "She's going to be judged through the lens of her name, and her name is Cameron." And that's even if the name on the label in the clothes is different; even if they are clothes for many, as opposed to the exclusive few. Especially if she continues to be her own best model. Her products will be assessed not just as a nice skirt, say, or a pretty dress, but as a nice skirt and a pretty dress by the woman married to the former Conservative prime minister of Britain, the man who lost the Brexit vote, with all the implications and emotions that are attached to perceptions of him and his party. It is thanks to both, after all, that Mrs. Cameron is as well known as she is. You can't detach the designer and her history. And though the new generation of first ladies has taught us that fashion is an increasingly powerful personal and political tool, and a universal one, it is still widely dismissed as frivolous and unseemly. (I have the social media responses to many column about the politics of dress to prove it.) As a result, for someone in her position, to make clothes her focus is a risk. I honestly hope her brand is a success, because if it is, it may legitimize fashion as the serious choice it clearly is, and help break yet another expectation that wives of leaders behave a certain way and reside in a certain box. But I don't think it will necessarily be a seamless transition. Something to watch for in the new year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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TIJUANA, Mexico Maggie Alejos arrived here in June from St. Anne, Ill., with her husband, her daughter and a cashier's check for 13,500, payable to the Regenerative Medicine Institute. Rail thin, with an oxygen tube anchored above her upper lip, Ms. Alejos, a retired Army nurse, has coped with emphysema for a dozen of her 65 years. Once she came close enough to a lung transplant that doctors prepared her for surgery, only to discover that the donor lung was unfit. At a hospital here, doctors affiliated with the institute extracted about seven ounces of fat from her thighs, hoping to harvest about 130 million stem cells and implant them in her failing lungs. Across the Internet where Ms. Alejos learned about the Tijuana institute adult stem cells are promoted as a cure for everything from sagging skin to severed spinal cords. On the surface, the claim is plausible. Scientists have discovered that fat, bone marrow and other parts of the body contain stem cells, immature cells that can rejuvenate themselves, at least in the tissue they are naturally found. But it has yet to be proved that these cells can regenerate no matter where they are placed, or under what conditions this might occur. Moreover, questions about safety remain unanswered. These sober realities do not appear to have slowed the rise of an international industry catering to customers who may pay tens of thousands of dollars in cash for their shot at a personal miracle. (Some foreign operators offer creative variations on the theme, like cells from sharks and sheep.) Domestic providers, too, can push the limits. In July, for example, a former pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina pleaded guilty to illegally processing and shipping stem cells for treatment without approval from the university or the Food and Drug Administration. The number of clinics and products has reached the point that scientists fear repercussions for their own work. Dr. Hesham Sadek of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who is studying heart muscle regeneration, worries that the marketing deluge now makes it hard for patients to tell science from swindle, and all that lies on the spectrum in between. "It really has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of the whole field," he said. Even though Tijuana has perhaps 20 clinics offering adult stem cell therapy, Dr. Javier Lopez, founder of the Regenerative Medicine Institute, says it is his that has become "the poster company to knock down." Born and educated in Tijuana, he has lived and worked across the border, in San Diego, for more than 30 years, mainly as a health care administrator. He became inspired by stem cells after accompanying a physician friend to a conference in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2008. "It was eye opening," he said. "I immediately thought, 'This is the future of medicine, and I want to be a part of it.' " He says he runs the institute within the accepted framework of clinical trials: Patients sign consent forms acknowledging that the treatment is experimental. Studies are registered with the National Library of Medicine in the United States. Being accepted for treatment requires more than cash. Protocols and procedures are approved by the institutional review board, or I.R.B., at Hospital Angeles Tijuana, and are administered by physicians at the hospital. "The focus of our trial, from Day 1, has been safety," Dr. Lopez said. Still, skeptics in the United States are not convinced. Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, says the Regenerative Medicine Institute blurs the boundary between trial and treatment. The institute's patient consent form "would not pass muster with a competent American I.R.B.," Dr. Turner said, and the testimonials on its Web site place the emphasis squarely on results. Moreover, studying patients who pay undermines the trials' scientific validity, Dr. Turner said. The patient sample is skewed toward those with the means to travel, and their financial investment may amplify an already strong placebo effect. Dr. Lopez says that scientists in Mexico lack the government research support available in the United States, leaving establishments like his no choice but to charge patients. He agrees that many stem cell providers are dubious, and says he works with the Mexican authorities to try to establish uniform standards. As for his own institute, he said, "I'm very proud of what we are doing," and added, "I get upset when people start talking trash about what is done south of the border." In the United States, too, it is easy to conduct business outside government oversight, said Dr. George Q. Daley, who studies stem cells for blood diseases at Harvard Medical School. Close down one shady operation, he went on, and more seem to randomly pop up. Even questionable publicity does not necessarily hurt business. Regnocyte, a company in Florida, posted an unflattering CNN report about it on its Web site under the heading "special coverage." If the stem cell business continues to flourish without proper scrutiny, Dr. Daley and others fear research progress will suffer. Clinical trials depend on patients who are willing to sign on even though they know they might be given a placebo, while competing clinics are offering what seems to be a sure thing. In addition, patients who have already had stem cell therapy could be ineligible for trials. And if too many patients try stem cells unsuccessfully, the public may come to see the entire field as a failure, said Dr. Sadek, the heart cell scientist in Dallas. Many comments on articles about his last paper, published in the journal Nature, "were skeptical and jaded," he continued. "One said, 'I've gotten stem cell therapy and nothing happened.' If the public loses faith in regenerative medicine in general, funding can be affected." Beyond the online testimonials, there is little evidence to indicate whether adult stem cell treatments on offer are working. Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, Davis, says the lack of data is vexing. "There is absolutely no legitimate reason for such clinics to be not publishing their data," he wrote on his stem cell blog this year. "Yet they almost never do it."Stem cell businesses say they have other priorities. "I'm not that interested in doing a lot of research for publication purposes only," said Maynard A. Howe, the chief executive of Stemedica Cell Technologies in San Diego, which is developing a drug made from donated stem cells. Dr. Howe and his brother Roger started the company in 2005 after a sister in law received stem cells in Russia for a spinal cord injury. Dr. Howe says that his company publishes just enough data to meet F.D.A. requirements, but that he would rather his scientists spend their time getting a product to market. He also defends the practice of foreign trials largely on economic grounds. Outside the United States, he said, "I can do a PET scan for 500," a fraction of the typical American rate. "Why wouldn't I do my clinical trial overseas?" For his part, Dr. Lopez says he is trying to publish data from the 125 patients he has treated so far, but he faces a struggle. "Nobody wants to talk to us because we are from Tijuana," he said of medical journals. He has managed to get just a case description accepted for publication. So for now, he does not have much to show in the way of science. He believes in stem cells and in that, he and his critics share common ground. The challenge for scientists is to promote the promise of stem cells with both excitement and restraint. It can be a hard line to walk. "I understand how difficult it is how many years and sometimes decades it takes before you discover a new therapy," said Dr. Daley, of Harvard. "We have a tremendous enthusiasm about the potential of stem cell therapy. "That said, these aren't magical agents that run around your body and fix things. It's frustrating to watch other people who, even well intentioned, aren't acting in their patients' best interest." This week, the International Society for Stem Cell Research is to release a statement declaring the use of stem cells outside scientific settings to be "a threat to patient welfare, patient autonomy and to the scientific process," according to its public policy chairman, Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist at McGill. This is the same group that once tried to offer an online guide to stem cell clinics, but the journal Nature reported that the effort was abruptly abandoned under threat of lawsuits. Ms. Alejos says she accepts the uncertainty of her choice. She came to Tijuana because nothing else had worked. After her anticipated lung transplant fell through, she turned to Google and found stem cell doctors throughout Asia and Latin America who were willing to treat her. Close to home, Mexico felt comfortable. She was well aware of the controversy over stem cell tourism. Even most of her family did not know where she was headed. Back home in St. Anne a few days after the procedure, she had a brief bout of pneumonia over the summer, but generally feels no better or worse than she did before her treatment. She knows she will not be cured. Her dreams are modest, like being untethered from oxygen long enough to go out to a movie. "I was an Army nurse for 30 years," Ms. Alejos said. "I know there is no such thing as a miracle in the world of medicine."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Since its founding in 1959, Nederlands Dans Theater has been remarkably venturesome, assembling an impressive contemporary repertory. In 1978, it established Nederlands Dans Theater 2 (NDT2, for short) for dancers between 17 and 22 years old. More than a training ground, NDT2 has a distinct repertory, several pieces from which will be shown in its first season here in five years, including some unusual examples of collaborative choreography. Paul Lightfoot, NDT2's director, and Sol Leon, its artistic adviser, teamed up for the highly emotional "Subject to Change" and the eccentric "Shutters Shut," which unites choreographic play with wordplay as dancers interpret a poem by Gertrude Stein. Working together, the Israeli choreographers Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar created "Sara," an exploration of memories and dreams.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Conan O'Brien backstage at his newly renovated talk show, which debuts Jan. 22. "What if I tried to, in the most selfish way possible, alter this so that I have a maximum amount of fun?" he said. On Oct. 4, 2018, Conan O'Brien hosted the latest episode of "Conan," his long running TBS late night talk show. Then he didn't come back with a new episode the following week, or the week after that, and he hasn't for more than three months. This was all by design: On Jan. 22, "Conan" will return to TBS with a new look and a different format. Some of the changes to "Conan," which airs Monday through Thursday nights, will be immediately evident: a new set, no more desk and no more house band. Most notably, the show's running time has been cut from an hour to a half hour. Some of O'Brien's extracurricular activities during his broadcasting break projects he unveiled at the end of 2018 like a live tour, a podcast and a new installment of his stand alone "Conan Without Borders" travel specials have helped inspire modifications at the TBS program. They've also become brand extensions, providing more sources of revenue as the TV show shrinks. While some of these changes were designed to keep "Conan" competitive in the crowded late night field, O'Brien hopes they will also help the program capture more of the unpredictable comic energy he's been chasing from the moment he succeeded David Letterman as host of NBC's "Late Night" in 1993. When he looked back on himself in those earliest broadcasts, O'Brien told me on Friday, he said he saw a performer attempting to fulfill competing desires. "We're trying to be anarchists, but I'm trying to be a good boy and do a good job for the network," he said. What he's engaged in now, he said, "is this gradual progression toward me making the job fit me more what do I like?" Over breakfast in Los Angeles, O'Brien talked about the decision to restart "Conan," the changes to the show and what might come next for him in his evolving TV career. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. How does it feel to be so near to resuming the show, after being away for a few months? My analogy is, in surgery, when they have to stop your heart so they can operate on you, there's that weird moment when the doctor must be like, all right, time to start the heart up again! What if it doesn't start? What if I walked out on the first test show and just started openly weeping? But we've done two test shows so far and it feels really good. When did you first have the idea to take a break from the show and reconceive it? Last year, I was coming up on 25 years as a late night host. It made me realize, wait a minute, really? I remember when Johnny Carson retired, it was 30. At the time, that was such a big part of the story, that someone had had a television show for 30 years. It just struck me that the miles do add up. The repetition can get to you after a while. I was the new guy for so long, and then that card flips overnight you go from the inexperienced, nervous punk to the old dean emeritus. I started to think, does it have to be that way? Let's say I've got a couple years left in me. What if I tried to, in the most selfish way possible, alter this so that I have a maximum amount of fun? I decided to scare myself. What led you to these other activities the live tour, the podcast, the travel shows? I had done a tour before, but this was no bells and whistles. I started out thinking, I need like 10 minutes up front. Then that became 15, then that became 20, then that become half an hour. By the end it was 40 minutes. It was really liberating. The podcast was suggested to me as, well, that's a cool space and you might do well in it. It sounded a little strange, and then we tried one where I just interviewed some of my writers, and I loved it. The travel shows opened up my eyes, too, because they're completely outside the realm of anything I do. They can be frightening because they take away a lot of control. I'm out there, I don't often know what I'm going to encounter. What did you take away from these experiences that you could put back into the TV show? The big thing I wanted to do was pull the audience closer and make it like a cool, fun place to do comedy that you might find in Los Feliz or that the Upright Citizens Brigade might have. I wanted it to have a little bit of that compressed feeling, and I like having the audience right there. It feels less presentational in the old school way. Is that why, for example, you got rid of the traditional host's desk and won't be dressing in a suit and tie anymore? I grew up revering the format, and then over time, you think, what's feeling like it's vestigial? I really don't miss the desk. It started to feel like I'm doing someone's taxes. None of my guests are wearing suits. I look fine in a suit, and I will wear a suit sometimes. If one of the Obamas stops by, or when Trump comes, as he inevitably will, I'll wear a suit. The most successful things that we've ever done on YouTube are me wearing my Indiana Jones as archaeology teacher look. And people accept that. What about reducing the show to a half hour? Was that a business decision? There were arguments on both sides. Among the guys in rooms that crunch numbers, it's controversial. You sell a lot of ad time in an hour you sell half as much in half an hour. This is where this joint venture idea evolved: We can scale back the show, but we can make Turner partners. We can develop not just my podcast, but the travel shows and these specials with other comedians. I like to use the Rockefeller oil industry as my model. The octopus, if you will, that strangles America. Does it feel like a blow to be doing a half hour show when there are still so many other hourlong shows out there? It would if I hadn't been around this long. It also would if there weren't shows like "The Daily Show," and Sam Bee and all these other shows. I know when I've been feeling like we're padding out the show because I've got to get to the full hour. When I know that the part of the show that has the real protein and that people really want, happened in the first half hour literally the first 21, 22 minutes. Do you still have flexibility within that half hour? We can go long. We might have stuff that I want to try, and we shoot it and it could go in a different show. I might shoot whole extra acts afterward that I just put online. There might be nights where I do an hour of content. TBS gets the half hour version and some of that other half hour either goes into a different show or is consumed in a different way. So in your first relaunched show, if you feel like having a longer conversation with Tom Hanks, you can? First of all, here's my strategy with Tom Hanks: rudely interrupt. I know the real Tom Hanks. And he needs to be rudely interrupted. He's a very cruel man in real life. Do these changes affect the creative process of the show? I'll give you an example. An alarm bell, to me, is when the post mortem meeting feels like drudgery. We've been doing it after every show since the beginning. We all get together in my dressing room and we go through the show act by act. This is how much we're over, this is how much we've got to edit. This is what worked, this is what didn't. How come that bunny puppet didn't blow up when it was supposed to? We had it down so cold that people were on their iPhones. We all go in there, slumped down, yeah, yeah, yeah. The post mortems on these two test shows? It's like a knife fight in there. It's, "This was way too long, how do we cut this?" "Wait, that felt weird." "Well, I didn't think it felt weird." "I don't like the way this looks." "I like the way it looks." It's turbulent and there's conflict and I like it. It's Lenin's Politburo versus Brezhnev's. One is lots of angry disagreement and the other one is like, uhhh, grain production, and everyone knows this has got another five years anyway and then it's going to fall apart but we'll be dead so who cares. These are terrible analogies, by the way. You've referenced the idea of finality a couple of times now. Even though you've got plenty of life left in you, do you feel like you're somehow setting up for your final act? I'm never going to have a better farewell show than I did on "The Tonight Show." I loved that show and so I feel, in a weird way, I had my farewell show. I did it. I died, and talked to my grandfather and saw the light and was called back. This concept that I must be the king of late night, I don't even know what that means anymore. I don't know who that is anymore. It's an outmoded concept. I've come to realize that there'll come a point where it's just not even thought of as late night: "Oh, you make that stuff that makes me laugh." Is this how you want to go out, with a show that gets smaller and smaller until it's gone? Maybe that's O.K. I think you have more of a problem with that than I do. Laughs. At this point in my career, I could go out with a grand, 21 gun salute, and climb into a rocket and the entire Supreme Court walks out and they jointly press a button, I'm shot up into the air and there's an explosion and it's orange and it spells, "Good night and God love." In this culture? Two years later, it's going to be, who's Conan? This is going to sound grim, but eventually, all our graves go unattended. You're right, that does sound grim. Sorry. Calvin Coolidge was a pretty popular president. I've been to his grave in Vermont. It has the presidential seal on it. Nobody was there. And by the way, I'm the only late night host that has been to Calvin Coolidge's grave. I think that's what separates me from the other hosts. I had a great conversation with Albert Brooks once. When I met him for the first time, I was kind of stammering. I said, you make movies, they live on forever. I just do these late night shows, they get lost, they're never seen again and who cares? And he looked at me and he said, Albert Brooks voice "What are you talking about? None of it matters." None of it matters? "No, that's the secret. In 1940, people said Clark Gable is the face of the 20th Century. Who expletive thinks about Clark Gable? It doesn't matter. You'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten. We'll all be forgotten." It's so funny because you'd think that would depress me. I was walking on air after that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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In the first movement, she is timidly approached by the fawnlike James Hay, who dances for her with quick, allegro finesse before kneeling and kissing her hands. Later, she is back, swirling her skirts under blood red lighting in front of a line of women, then walking alone into the darkness. In the second movement, Ms. Yanowsky, now in a shorter red skirt, sometimes dances with eight men moving sinuously in their long black and red skirts, and sometimes stands watching as they partner one another in graceful, sweeping lifts and supported jumps. The third movement brings Ms. Yanowsky together with the statuesque Reece Clarke (the Royal Ballet's answer to Roberto Bolle) for a disappointingly predictable romantic pas de deux that gives way to a high energy, confrontational ensemble finale. ("The Hunger Games meets Spartacus," I jotted down.) When the group dissipates, the ballerina is left alone, rearing up in a final image under the large, mobile metal structure (by Jon Morrell) that is the work's sole scenic element. Mr. Scarlett deploys his large corps de ballet with skill and musical responsiveness, and the gender politics of the second section (the most coherent and persuasive part of the ballet) are interesting, although he is hardly the first choreographer to put men in skirts, dancing together, on a stage. The opacity of the central woman's identity, though, feels obfuscatory rather than interestingly mysterious, and much of the male female partnering is dominated by upside down swirling lifts that are at first breathtaking, later oddly routine. Still, "Symphonic Dances" is an intriguing piece musically, conceptually, visually and it's a relief to remember Mr. Scarlett's gifts after two recent disappointing narrative works. Together with Mr. Forsythe's hyperkinetic "Vertiginous," a virtuoso "Tarantella" (with Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambe), and Mr. Wheeldon's much improved "Strapless" (with a riveting Natalia Osipova), it's a superior evening at the ballet.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Justin Simien, the creator of the movie and Netflix show "Dear White People," sees the role of the storyteller as giving people something they haven't seen before or showing them how to think in a new way. Justin Simien, the 35 year old creator of "Dear White People," is no stranger to provocation. The satirical comedy, first a movie and now a Netflix show, revolves around five black students Sam, Coco, Troy, Lionel and Reggie at a fictional elite university who revel in the sorts of intemperate and intoxicating polemics that can sour a Thanksgiving dinner. A story line from the first season about an app called "Woke or Not," for example, mercilessly parodied the characters' self conscious commitment to social justice. But even Mr. Simien was not prepared for the controversy that engulfed the TV show's rollout. After Netflix first released a teaser trailer last February, Mr. Simien was inundated with critical messages online, promoting the hashtag BoycottNetflix and excoriating him for "reverse racism." "I read this review on some conservative site because I was so curious where it all was coming from," Mr. Simien recalled in an interview at the Netflix offices in Manhattan late last month. "It was like they'd watched the show just enough to give their readers the impression that they'd watched it and then came up with the most insane interpretations. It wasn't that they didn't get it, it was that they refused to get it." Mr. Simien, who speaks in paragraphs and variously quoted Malcolm X, Eckhart Tolle and RuPaul, discussed why the new season never mentions President Trump by name, what black auteurs owe to their audiences and his upcoming horror film about a (literal) killer weave. "Any chance you get as a storyteller to make people see something that they never saw before, or to think in a new way that's the job," he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. There was some controversy over the title of the show last season, and this season the Sam character, who hosts a radio show within the show, also called "Dear White People," deals with her own similar controversy. How did you digest all of the feedback from Season 1? The backlash stuff was really interesting to me. They were so organized and they didn't just come after us, they came after anything black there were campaigns against "Black Panther," too. I was so curious about it and I did a deep dive and started to try to figure out what were the tactics that they used and how were they so mobilized. The other big thing that informed this season was that Trump won on the day we wrapped Season 1. And I was just so bewildered by how we got here. I started to really research and not just assume that I knew. I read a book called "The History of White People," about all of the cultural decisions that led to the creation of the white race and why white is the ideal form of beauty, and it's so arbitrary. I realized that the reason we can't talk to each other is because people don't know where this all comes from. So this season has a lot of history on its mind, too. When you're investigating those questions on the show, do you worry that white people will just choose not to engage? I think the key to the show is making you care about the characters first, because it's not a thesis. And if we tell the truth about what they're going through, then maybe you'll care and think about it. I think the show has two goals. One is to allow people who don't necessarily look like us to see themselves in characters they don't expect to, so that the next time they see a black guy at Starbucks, they won't feel the need to call the cops on him. And the other thing is to make people who've actually gone through these experiences go: "Oh my God, totally. I'm so glad someone finally put it that way." I think both of those things allow black folks to feel more human in society. What do you make of the idea that obsessive focus on identity is inherently divisive, and that minorities would be better served by a politics that focuses on what we all have in common? I think people who are privileged can say something like that. Because the truth is, I could walk around all day saying: "I don't identify with being black. I don't identify with being gay." But you know what's going to happen to me? Society's going to happen to me. I'm going to go into Starbucks and get arrested, or I'm going to walk through the wrong neighborhood in a hoodie. When you don't have to have the burden of identity, when you don't have to code switch every day or constantly be aware of your surroundings, you get to say that. Part of the reason the show is called "Dear White People" is because there's no way to be black in America without constantly having to explain or protect or defend yourself. Talking about that is not why Donald Trump is president. The new season doesn't mention Trump by name. Why not? I just didn't want to say his name. I didn't want to give it that kind of power. I think the underlying issues that brought about the Trump presidency are American issues, and they've been around before Trump and they'll be around after Trump. He is African. And his accent is based on an actual Kenyan accent, but people thought it was too sing songy. So we brought in the woman who was the dialect coach for "Black Panther" to give it some flavor and some nuance. But I'm sure people will still be mad. Here's the thing about being a black creator: Scrutiny is part of being in the ring. Black folks and the black diaspora are so starved for content that when you're the only person telling the story there's all these people that are like, "Well where's my story?" I remember reading this article about how "Black Panther" had failed the queer community by not expressing LGBT issues. And I was like, but it did so many things! It's literally changed cinema for black people forever, and was an all black cast, and made all the money in the world, and introduced African themes, and is opening in Saudia Arabia ... but we didn't have gay characters. So let's just throw the whole thing away. That kind of thing can be a lot. But it's the cost of telling stories in an oppressive society. You have to be prepared to take some of those jabs and you do the best that you can. Your next movie, "Bad Hair," is about a woman who's possessed by a sentient killer weave. Where'd you get the idea? I always write because I'm really angry about something, and I was so angry that people weren't seeing how black women are getting it from all angles. If you're a black woman, you're at the bottom of the totem pole, even though black women are always among the strongest members of our society and culture. I was also really inspired by Korean horror movies, because hair possession is a subgenre there. I was just thinking, "How would we do this in America?" And of course it couldn't just be fun I always have to have something to say.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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As you go from trekking the Coast to Coast Walkway to a night of theater on the waterfront of this multifaceted New Zealand city, you'll want to be equally prepared for indoor and outdoor adventures. Here are some recommendations from Wirecutter, The New York Times's product review site. Ria Misra, an editor at Wirecutter, suggests that you remember the shifting weather while packing for your time in this stylish, but casual, city: Days spent on and off boats, beaches, and ferries means that you'll also want to be ready for bright, breezy, or even damp conditions. Having a windbreaker, sunglasses, sunscreen, and a base layer top at the ready will help keep you comfortable as you move between activities. Here are some more of Ms. Misra's suggestions for what to take on your trip, including recommendations from Wirecutter's experts. None This multiport USB charger from Anker is small enough to slip into a handbag or carry on tote and is rated for use both in the U.S. and abroad, so you can charge up to four devices at once, whether in the airport, on the plane, or in your hotel. None A type "I" plug adapter. One is included in this Bestek global plug adapter set that Wirecutter likes, but if you're not stopping in any other countries on the way, you can simply get the individual plug. (Although Bestek marks it "Australia," type "I" is also the standard used in New Zealand.) None Battery pack, to keep your phone charged (GPS related apps burn a lot of power) None Camera. A mirrorless camera, like the Olympus OM D E M10 Mark II, will take up less space in your pack or tote than a DSLR, but still give you excellent image quality. None Camera strap, especially if you'll be hiking or playing on the water None Bug spray, for your hike and the beach (remember, the TSA regards aerosols as a liquid, so pack anything larger than 3.4 ounces in a checked bag) None A packable tote/backpack. In the market, you're better off with a zip top tote; on the trail, you might prefer a backpack; on a walk through the museum, the best bag may be one that you can tuck into a pocket and forget about (most museums in Auckland make you check backpacks). This Patagonia travel tote packs into its own pocket when not in use and also converts into either a tote or a backpack. None A light windbreaker, like this hooded one from Outdoor Research, will keep you comfortable while sailing, riding the ferry and hiking. Although it won't stand up to a downpour, it should handily keep seaspray at bay. None A brimmed hat or baseball cap, to keep the sun out of your eyes None Comfortable walking shoes. Be sure to choose a flat soled shoe that will work well on different types of ground, like a pair of trail running shoes, and also that will dry quickly if they get a little damp while practicing your sailing skills. None A base layer top. Although the early autumn temperatures shouldn't be too cold in Auckland, they can drop low enough make the long sleeves of a base layer appealing while you're on the trail. This top from SmartWool (available in men's and women's sizes) breathes well and also doubles as sun protection (for clear days) and layers easily under your windbreaker (for breezy days). None 3 days of clothes, including light layers suitable for roaming outdoors in mild, early autumn temperatures between low 50s and the mid 70s. None A packable towel, for the beach. This Packtowl Personal scrunches down into a small sack for easy transport. None Insulated water bottle. Keep your water cool on your hike and your coffee hot on your way around the city. None Binoculars. Whether you're hoping to get a spot a kingfisher in flight or just look out over the green, volcanic landscape on the Coast to Coast walk, a good set of binoculars, like this pair from Athlon Optics, will keep your view in focus. None Carry on bag. Although individual airlines differ in their exact carry on sizes, international flights generally offer slightly smaller storage spaces. These smaller, lighter carry on bags designed for international travel should work for most flights. None For a short trip, a carry on should be all that you need. But if these 36 hours are just one leg of a longer trip, here's a suggestion for an additional checked bag (that happened to be tested on a trip to New Zealand). None Travel toiletry bag. This one from Sea to Summit is not only smaller and lighter than most but also has a hook for hanging it. None Most flights to Auckland from the continental U.S. will leave you with more than a dozen hours on the plane to fill, so bring a travel pillow, earplugs, and a travel sleep mask to land better rested. None Also, noise canceling earbuds for when you're not sleeping.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Last weekend, Mary Jo Laupp was enjoying a quiet night at a birthday party for her granddaughter until she picked up her phone and her world flipped upside down. A TikTok video she had made urging people to reserve tickets to President Trump's June 20 rally in Tulsa, Okla. and then not show up had gone viral. Rally attendance had turned out to be far lower than billed by the Trump campaign, and TikTok teens and Korean pop music fans were taking a victory lap online. Ms. Laupp's phone was blowing up with calls, messages and notifications. Now Ms. Laupp, 51, who has become known as "TikTok Grandma," has been recruited by the Biden Digital Coalition, a grass roots organization, to put her TikTok skills to work supporting the presidential campaign of Joseph R. Biden Jr. The coalition, made up of about 100 people many of whom are alumni of other Democratic presidential campaigns works to amplify pro Biden messages and build engagement on social media. While it is not part of Mr. Biden's campaign, it is in contact with Biden staff members. Coalition members, who are all volunteers, said they brought on Ms. Laupp for her ability to turn a viral moment into a call to action. "Cleary, something she had done had worked out really well, so we wanted to harness that energy," said Caitlin Gilbert, a coalition co director. Ms. Laupp, who works in the music department at her local high school in Fort Dodge, Iowa, said she was delighted to join the Biden group. "The offer was completely unexpected, but I'm excited to be a part of a team that is embracing social media technology as a campaign tool," she said on Friday. She said her first task was to help build a "political hype house" for Mr. Biden, which is essentially a group of content creators on TikTok who will make pro Biden videos and explore the viability of campaign organizing on the app. "My platform has kind of become this bizarre gathering place for people who want to try to make change," Ms. Laupp said. Young people are "absolutely energized and ready to go." Ms. Laupp, who has four children and six grandchildren, is an unlikely TikTok star. The entertainment app, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, is known for its audience of teens and even younger viewers and for making celebrities of 16 year olds. Ms. Laupp, who is married to a minister, first started using the app in May. Raised in a Christian household in Michigan and a graduate of the conservative Cornerstone University, Ms. Laupp said she had become more liberal over time. In the 2016 presidential election, she voted for the Libertarian Party nominee, Gary Johnson. This year, she volunteered for Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., in the Iowa caucuses. "When asked to name the greatest commandment, Jesus mentioned two love God with everything you have, and love everyone else," Ms. Laupp said. "As it stands right now, one party does a far better job in showing love, compassion and empathy than the other." Denise Aptekar, who also worked on the Buttigieg campaign, said Ms. Laupp was responsible for getting young people at her high school engaged with it. "She called herself a most unusual Pete supporter given the conservative social circles she grew up in," Ms. Aptekar said. The inspiration for the viral TikTok video came from a friend, Ms. Laupp said. For years, the friend had staged solo protests against political candidates she disliked by registering for their rallies under a fake name and not showing up. Ms. Laupp wondered what would happen if masses of people did the same for the Trump rally in Tulsa. So she made a video urging viewers who "want to see this 19,000 seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty go reserve tickets now, and leave him standing there alone on the stage" and was "overwhelmed" by the response.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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From left, Ted Chapin and Torrence Boone with their Paul Bowen sculpture "Days Ring." PROVINCETOWN, Mass. It's tempting to slap an analog versus digital, "opposites attract" label on Ted Chapin and his husband, Torrence Boone. After all, Mr. Chapin, a retired architect, has painstakingly assembled a series of hand held sculptures from vintage typewriter parts, while Mr. Boone, Google's vice president for global agency sales and services, is more focused on analytics and artificial intelligence. Yet Mr. Chapin insisted that though his sculptures may be drastically downsized from his skyscrapers, they're as mathematically precise as any computer algorithm: "It's all about structural engineering. To me it's just pure play. But it's still very structured it's all bolted. There's no welding or glue." For his part, Mr. Boone noted that he'd just finished writing an old fashioned novel, one set far from Silicon Valley, unfolding instead amid the overlapping milieus of art colony, gay resort and nature preserve here at the tip of Cape Cod. It's in their shared love of Provincetown artists where the couple's interests most obviously converge. Work by a local "Who's Who" past and present fills both their Manhattan apartment and their compound like summer home here, which includes an adjoining small barn repurposed into Mr. Chapin's studio and a separate guesthouse often filled with artists from the town's Fine Arts Work Center residency program. (Mr. Chapin is co chairman of the board.) No single style of artwork dominates their collection: Paintings by James Balla, with oceanlike waves of color crashing past one another, share space with work by Tabitha Vevers depicting surreal sexual meetings with sea creatures. A 1947 piece by Jim Forsberg, forged in that era's growing wave of Abstract Expressionism, contrasts with a beautifully straightforward painting of one of the area's signature cottages, done recently by Michael McGuire. A circular wooden sculpture by Paul Bowen makes a starkly minimalist statement in the living room, while the kitchen's walls and ceiling are covered in giddily louche Keith Haring like figures, hand painted by Dex Fernandez after his stint at the art center. These are edited excerpts from our conversation. Why collect work by Provincetown artists as opposed to New York's usual suspects? TORRENCE BOONE The art here is reflective of the place. And we fell in love with the place, with its sense of creativity and its physical beauty. So for us, it reinforces why we've loved coming here for the past 25 years. TED CHAPIN There's also a different attitude toward history; you do a lot of time travel here. You regularly see art from 100 years ago in a way you wouldn't if you were running around Chelsea's galleries. BOONE There's a humility to the art scene here as well. It is more grounded in a sense of character as opposed to a cult of fashion. That's why artists from New York have always come here it's a refuge.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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An H R Block tax associate, Cassandra Veras, working in the Bronx in 2016. The major tax chains generally provide some in house training for their preparers. How Taxpayers Who Want Help Can Find a Reputable Preparer If the thought of preparing your own tax return feels overwhelming even with do it yourself software there's always the option of hiring a professional preparer. Even people who have done their own taxes for years can reach a point where their return becomes more complex and pushes them beyond their comfort level, said Brian L. Thompson, president of the National Society of Accountants. Perhaps they inherited a rental property and have to deal with depreciation, or added a freelance gig on the side. "If you're just putting in numbers and hoping for the best," said Mr. Thompson, a certified public accountant in Little Rock, Ark., "then maybe you need a preparer." Situations that suggest consulting a professional include experiencing a big life change, like a divorce, or starting your own business, said Cindy Hockenberry, director of tax research and government relations with the National Association of Tax Professionals. Also, if you owe back taxes or haven't filed returns for a few years, or if you have received correspondence from the Internal Revenue Service, it pays to hire an expert. "It will be worth it in the long run," Ms. Hockenberry said in an email. Choosing a qualified preparer isn't necessarily straightforward, however. Many paid tax preparers remain largely unregulated and aren't required to undergo continuing training or testing to prove their expertise. So consumers should be prepared to do some research and ask questions. Preparers with certain professional credentials like certified public accountants, tax lawyers and tax specialists called "enrolled agents" generally must meet minimum standards for education and training. States license C.P.A.s and lawyers, while enrolled agents are federally licensed. "It's better if a preparer has some credentials," Mr. Thompson said. The I.R.S. tried several years ago to regulate all paid tax preparers, but a federal appeals court rejected the effort. The I.R.S. does, however, offer an "annual filing season" program, in which preparers voluntarily take continuing education classes and a test to stay current on tax rules. Those completing the program, along with preparers holding professional credentials, are listed in the agency's searchable database of tax preparers. A handful of states California, Maryland, New York and Oregon have laws to regulate paid preparers and make sure they meet minimum standards. Also, Connecticut recently adopted new standards for commercial preparers, which will be phased in over several years. The new law aims to protect taxpayers and ensure that income tax preparers are qualified, in light of "increased evidence of preparer error, unfair practices and even fraud," according to a statement from Kevin Sullivan, commissioner of the state's Department of Revenue Services. At a basic level, all paid preparers must have a preparer tax identification number, or PTIN, issued by the I.R.S., Ms. Hockenberry said. If your preparer doesn't have one, that's a red flag. Taxpayers should always ask for references, inquire how much tax education the preparer gets during the year and ask what the preparer's areas of specialty are, if any, Ms. Hockenberry said. "If the preparer is unwilling to share this information," she said, "walk away." Other signs that the preparer may not be legitimate include charging a fee based on a percentage of your refund, telling you to take a deduction for an expense you didn't incur and refusing to sign the return. The major tax chains generally provide some in house training for their preparers, said Chi Chi Wu, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center. H R Block's website, for instance, describes a 60 hour tax course for potential employees, covering topics like wages, filing requirements and ethics. Susan Waldron, an H R Block spokeswoman, said preparers hired after completing the initial course must take an additional 21 hours of training and complete 10 "practice" returns before working with clients. In addition, she said, returning preparers must take 32 hours of continuing education and skills training each year. Still, the consumer law center suggests that people ask probing questions of their preparer, no matter where the preparer is employed. Michael Best, director of advocacy outreach with the Consumer Federation of America, warned that consumers shouldn't assume that returns produced by paid preparers were always accurate. In a small study of 19 randomly selected preparers in 2014, he noted, the Government Accountability Office found "significant" errors in returns. Just two preparers calculated the correct refund amount; errors varied from giving the taxpayer 52 less to 3,718 more than the correct amount. So be sure to review the return after it is completed, and question items you don't understand, Mr. Thompson said. "Ask yourself, 'Does this make sense?'" Here are some questions and answers about finding a tax preparer: How much should I expect to pay for professional tax preparation? Fees vary by geography (higher on the East Coast than in the Midwest), the education of the preparer (C.P.A.s and lawyers tend to charge more) and the complexity of the return, Ms. Hockenberry said. Expect to pay 100 to 170 for a typical Form 1040 with a Schedule A, assuming you have only wage and investment income. If you're comfortable with a virtual preparer, the online service Henrytax.com matches taxpayers with C.P.A.s online and offers returns starting at 250. Trained preparers who participate in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program provide their services free, though you must meet income or other requirements to be eligible. For a site near you, you can go to the I.R.S. website and search for free tax return preparation. Where can I search for a tax preparer? In addition to the I.R.S. database, various professional groups offer search tools, including the National Society of Accountants and the National Association of Tax Professionals. How can I file a complaint about a tax preparer? The I.R.S. offers instructions on its website.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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WINSTON SALEM, N.C. Within sight of a couple of huge brick smokestacks, looming witnesses to a past built on tobacco and powered by coal, there is something weirdly out of place about Wake Forest University's Institute for Regenerative Medicine . It is run by Dr. Anthony Atala , lured to town 15 years ago from his perch at Boston Children's Hospital to oversee a group of scientists engineering lab grown organs for human transplants. For the city, his institute represents an opportunity to leap from an industrial past into the future. Dr. Atala comes up in conversation all the time: with the head of the Chamber of Commerce, with the mayor, with the executive director of the Venture Cafe, where entrepreneurs come to network. His institute was one of the early residents of the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, a research focused district in the downtown cigarette factories that R.J. Reynolds abandoned long ago. For all the wonders in Dr. Atala's lab, Winston Salem is not keeping up with the nation's larger cities . Even after adjusting for its lower living costs and subdued inflation , income per person declined to 90.9 percent of the average for metropolitan areas in 2017, from 93.7 percent in 2008, government statistics show. "Desperation may be too strong a word," said Nathan Hatch, the president of Wake Forest University, a focal point of Winston Salem for more than half a century. "But this is not a self generating place. We have to be very aggressive and creative." What happened? The cheaper labor that smaller metropolitan areas offered, attracting investment when factories ruled, no longer has much pull. The companies now leading the economy gravitate toward big cities where they can find clusters of highly educated workers and attract more. Amenities bars, yoga studios, restaurants follow. So does venture capital. Housing costs rise, making it tougher for workers in lower paying jobs to stay. The shifting economic geography is also altering domestic migration, which once helped to close the economic gap between rich and poor places. Rich urban enclaves like New York and Silicon Valley are bringing in affluent, highly educated young people but pushing out many residents who are older, less educated and less well to do. On the other end, the populations of many smaller cities, including Winston Salem, are growing even as incomes fall behind. Many other small and midsize areas that were once gaining ground economically are similarly falling behind, including Bangor, Me.; Monroe, Mich.; and Greensboro, N.C. Even the Lexington Fayette region in Kentucky, home to the largest Toyota plant in the world, is losing ground. The critical question is whether midsize cities are doomed to stagnation. Can Winston Salem hitch its future to new engines of economic growth? With its Innovation Quarter and its Institute for Regenerative Medicine, it wants to say yes. But it doesn't really know. 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. The metropolitan area's population of 670,000 is growing . Some 45,000 jobs have been added since the trough of the Great Recession nine years ago. Zillow rates the housing market as pretty cheap, but "very hot." At 3.8 percent, the unemployment rate is roughly in line with the national average. The overall picture, however, suggests an uphill struggle. Private sector employment is barely higher than it was in 1999. The median wage is 16.87 an hour, almost 2 below the national average. The poverty rate is higher. Winston Salem has been overshadowed within North Carolina by the Raleigh Durham area, an early success in building a research driven economy , and Charlotte, a financial hub. The last time that the Winston Salem area had a higher income per person than Raleigh, 100 miles to the east, was in 1977 . By 2017, Raleigh was ahead by 22 percent. R.J. Reynolds, now a subsidiary of British American Tobacco, still has its headquarters in Winston Salem, but automation has displaced most of the workers. The apparel giant HanesBrands sent most of its manufacturing work abroad long ago. The furniture industry has been hard hit by Chinese imports. All told, the metropolitan area has lost almost half its factory jobs since 1993. Then Caterpillar came, also lured by local incentives, but it has not met its original target of 510 full and part time jobs. Currently, it has around 160, down from a peak of more than 400. Bank headquarters have left: Wachovia in 2001, when it was bought by First Union; BB T in 2019, when it merged with SunTrust. Krispy Kreme, the doughnut company, is moving corporate operations to Charlotte and food production services to Concord. The city made a bid for Amazon's second headquarters. But though Amazon will build a fulfillment center in nearby Kernersville, where FedEx runs a distribution hub, Winston Salem didn't make the short list for HQ2. "If you go down the Amazon checklist, it requires all the things that we don't have," said Koleman Strumpf , a professor of economics at Wake Forest. "We don't have mass transit. No Amtrak. No good airports. It's not a walkable city. It doesn't have great amenities." If any middling city can make a transition to a technology centered future, however, Winston Salem should. It is home to five universities, including Wake Forest, an institution that enrolls four out of its five students from out of state. Transplanted to Winston Salem in the mid 1950s under the Reynolds family's patronage from its original site near Raleigh, the university has a leading medical school, which it hopes will anchor a biotech ecosystem. "The top talent is going to go to the coasts, no doubt about that," said Graydon Pleasants , head of real estate development for the Innovation Quarter. "But there are plenty of smart people who will come here." Winston Salem State University and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts jointly support a Center for Design Innovation, which has an advanced motion detection studio for animation and virtual reality productions. Forsyth Tech, the local community college, also tries to draw companies to the area, promising to provide the skills they need. To entice Caterpillar, for instance, Forsyth bought sophisticated machinery to create the simulated working environment the company wanted. "It was a big investment for the college," said Alan Murdock , Forsyth's vice president for economic and work force development. Another offering is a cybersecurity training program. And Forsyth is setting up a center at a small local airport to train workers in aerospace technologies, potentially seeding a drone industry. While Winston Salem lacks many of the amenities Amazon was seeking, city leaders claim it has plenty of selling points: a low cost of living, a lively downtown and uncongested streets among them. The sources of venture capital are more limited than in California, but the investment goes further. And there is a greater opportunity to stand out. At the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, researchers have created skin and cartilage, urethras and bladders. I saw an artificial heart valve, opening and closing, made from human cells. Dr. Atala hopes one day to build complex, solid organs like kidneys or livers. "One concern I had was whether we would be able to recruit talent as well here as we could in Boston," he said. "Truth is we can recruit better." Twenty people joined Dr. Atala in his move to Winston Salem. Now his institute employs some 450, heavy on Ph.D.s. Other tech entrepreneurs have settled in Winston Salem. David Mounts considered Atlanta and Dallas before deciding to put the headquarters for his tech services company, Inmar, in the Innovation Quarter, where 900 of its 4,500 employees work. "It is easier to create innovation consortia between businesses, academia and government in a small city that understands innovation as a team sport," he told me. In big cities, he said, there are simply too many parties with divergent interests. But Mr. Mounts also recognizes the challenge. Everybody has to pull together. As Mayor Allen Joines said, "We have no choice."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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The artist Kara Walker whose monumental sphinx, "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby," wowed critics and clogged Instagram feeds in 2014 will unveil a new public art project this fall as part of the contemporary art triennial Prospect New Orleans, the exhibition's organizers announced. "Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp," as this iteration of the triennial is called, will be open Nov. 18 through Feb. 25 in New Orleans, and will coincide with the city's 300th birthday celebrations. The triennial's roster features 73 artists from the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Africa, Europe and Asia. More than 30 of them will create works specifically for the exhibition, which is spread around 17 venues including institutions (the New Orleans Museum of Art) and public spaces (Crescent Park on the Mississippi River).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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About a month after advertising on television for the first time, the makers of the free mobile game Heroes Charge decided at the last minute that they wanted to make a much bigger splash: a commercial during television's biggest advertising event, the Super Bowl. UCool, the tiny studio in Silicon Valley that produces the app, announced on Friday that it was paying 2.25 million for a 15 second spot during the fourth quarter of the game on Sunday. Because the start up decided only a few weeks ago to buy the ad, it did not have time to find a Madison Avenue agency to produce it and created the spot featuring its red haired Emberstar character itself. "It is not as easy as opening up the telephone book or Googling 'best ad agency' and getting it started," said Benjamin Gifford, the company vice president for user experience. "Those agencies might not think that we are being serious." UCool is one of 15 first time advertisers that will compete for attention on Sunday against the usual lineup of deep pocketed brands peddling beverages, snacks, cars and technology. Super Bowl XLIX features the most newcomers since the burst of the dot com bubble at the turn of the century. For those companies, the risks and rewards can be especially high. The 4.5 million that it costs for 30 seconds of commercial time can represent more than 15 percent of a small company's entire media budget for the year, according to Kantar Media, a research firm owned by the advertising conglomerate WPP. If the spot succeeds, the marketer stands to gain instant attention and acclaim. If it flops, the marketer has most likely wasted a huge chunk of money. None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. What Will the Giants Do With Daniel Jones? The team must evaluate the quarterback ahead of a contract decision. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. This year's first timers include a mix of little known brands seeking to use the Super Bowl's giant stage the game routinely draws more than 110 million viewers who pay keen attention to the ads to build awareness. Those advertisers include Heroes Charge; Loctite, a maker of superglue; Jublia, a treatment for toenail fungus; Wix.com, a website building service; and Mophie, a maker of smartphone accessories. "We want to make this brand famous," said Pierre Tannoux, the director of marketing at Henkel Adhesives International, whose Loctite brand is spending more money for 30 seconds of commercial time than what it usually spends on ads for the year. The contents of the ad are a secret until game day. Eric Mason, director of communications at Wix, echoed the sentiment. "We're one of the larger companies that people haven't really heard of yet," he said. "We wanted to go to the big stage to let people know who we are." Also advertising in the game for the first time are more prominent brands that decided to try to break through the annual marketing blitz this year. Those include Carnival Cruise Lines, Skittles candy and Always feminine products. "For us, the goal of being in the Super Bowl is about changing the conversation about cruising," said Ken Jones, vice president for corporate marketing at Carnival Corporation, which created four ads and asked consumers to vote for their favorite. "We want to reach people who have never cruised at all." Some marketing experts said that the stampede of new advertisers was possible because several stalwarts decided to sit on the sidelines. Many automakers, for example, including Volkswagen, Jaguar and Lincoln, did not buy time this year. (The game last year featured 11 car brands, according to Kantar Media.) Some analysts cited the lackluster market for television ads. Although spots in this year's game sold out, it took much longer than in years past. NBC, which is broadcasting the game, announced only on Wednesday that it had sold out. By contrast, Fox, which showed the game last year, said all its ad time had sold about two months before kickoff. "It was a challenging ad sales marketplace. I won't diminish that," said Seth Winter, executive vice president for ad sales at NBC Universal News and Sports Group. "This was not the easiest exercise I have been through." Asked whether the quality of the ads would suffer this year because of the low production value that often comes with first time advertisers, Mr. Winter said that the group had reviewed storyboards and did not expect the entertainment factor to decline. The game on Sunday features the most newcomers since 2000. Called the "Dot com Super Bowl," that Super Bowl featured 19 first time advertisers and is considered a symbol of the free spending excess of the period. Several of those marketers no longer exist, like the pet supply site Pets.com, whose ad featured a sock puppet dog crooning the Chicago love song "If You Leave Me Now." (Pets.com closed 10 months after running that spot.) Over the last few years, the number of first time advertisers at the Super Bowl has steadily climbed, with new entrants accounting for about 23 percent of last year's ad roster, according to Kantar. Chobani, the Greek yogurt brand, was new to the Super Bowl last year. Its 60 second spot featured a 1,400 pound bear ransacking a grocery store in search of a wholesome, natural snack. Peter McGuinness, the company's chief marketing officer, said that the ad, along with other related digital and social media promotions, significantly bolstered awareness of the brand. Before the game, about a third of Americans had heard of the company; after the game, awareness increased to 40 percent and sales surged 20 percent, he said. Mr. McGuinness said that Chobani was not returning this year, opting instead to run more promotions throughout the year. But, referring to the Super Bowl spot, he said, "I wouldn't have not done it." Indeed, most brands do not return to the big game the year after they make their debut at the Super Bowl. Two exceptions are Squarespace, the website building service, and WeatherTech, a maker of automotive floor mats, both of which advertised last year. "It is high stakes, high stress, but the returns when you do it right are so vast and almost always worth it," said David Lubars, chief creative officer at Omnicom's BBDO, which is working on several spots for the game.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board's verdict on Donald Trump's presidency in a special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read it here. This month, federal and state authorities arrested 13 Michigan men on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges. Six of the men are alleged to have been plotting to kidnap the state's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, with whom they were furious for imposing shutdowns, as most other governors did, in the early weeks of the pandemic. Ms. Whitmer's actions most likely saved thousands of lives. The arrested men, along with hundreds of other anti shutdown protesters who swarmed the State Capitol in Lansing, considered her a tyrant. As the protests grew in April, President Trump could have supported a governor navigating a tough situation and reminded Americans about the importance of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. Instead, he tweeted, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" a message that has to date received nearly 200,000 likes and almost 39,000 retweets. He tweeted the same of other states with Democratic governors and said the Second Amendment was "under siege." It was as though Mr. Trump saw himself as another anti government insurgent. The message seems to have come through loud and clear. Protesters became bolder, and some marched into the Michigan statehouse brandishing semiautomatic rifles and long guns, forcing a shutdown of the State Legislature. Many political leaders rightly condemned the armed display. Mr. Trump defended the protesters. "These are very good people, but they are angry," he wrote on Twitter. Even after the arrests and charges, Mr. Trump has refused to rebuke violent agitators. Instead, he keeps feeding the fire. Speaking on Fox Business on Thursday, he said of Ms. Whitmer: "She wants to be a dictator in Michigan. And the people can't stand her." A president's words are among his most powerful, and potentially dangerous, tools. They can rally the American public to work together toward a common cause. They can soothe the jangled nerves of a frightened nation, or provide a healing balm at a time of mourning. They can move global financial markets, start wars and embolden violent individuals. From the start of his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. Trump has gleefully upturned every expectation Americans had about how their presidents speak. He revels in crude insults, trivial gripes and constant mockery of those who disagree with him. This is harmful on many levels. "The president isn't just the chief of the executive branch, but the head of state," said Ian Bassin, who worked in the White House Counsel's Office during the Obama administration and now runs the nonprofit group Protect Democracy. "That means part of what the presidency is about is norm setting. When a president establishes that it's OK to make fun of people with disabilities, or to be racist, or to lie, or to assault women, you see that replicated in society. That's not a surprise." Mr. Trump doesn't just mock his enemies. He demonizes and dehumanizes them. His attacks have resulted in his targets whether a lawmaker like Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a television personality like the former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, a government scientist like Dr. Anthony Fauci, or a regular American citizen getting swamped with death threats, and in some cases requiring personal protection. The violent rhetoric, and its consequences, began almost as soon as Mr. Trump's campaign for the White House did. In August 2015, barely two months after Mr. Trump announced his presidential bid by accusing Mexican immigrants of being "rapists," two Boston men beat a homeless man with a metal pipe and then urinated on him. "Donald Trump was right," one of the men said, according to the police. "All these illegals need to be deported." Mr. Trump tweeted out a condemnation of the attack, calling it "terrible" and saying, "I would never condone violence." But repeatedly on the campaign trail, he did just that. At a February 2016 campaign rally, he told his supporters: "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees." A few weeks later he said of one protester, "I'd like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you." At another rally, a protester being escorted out by the police was sucker punched. Mr. Trump called the attack "very, very appropriate" and the kind of action "we need a little bit more of." In August 2016, he warned that if Hillary Clinton was elected, she would appoint Supreme Court justices who would rule in favor of gun control laws. "Nothing you can do, folks," Mr. Trump said, before adding, "Although the Second Amendment people maybe there is, I don't know." This language was dangerous enough coming from a candidate. With Mr. Trump's ascension to the most powerful job in the country, the stakes got only higher, and his reach broader. A few months after his inauguration, he told a gathering of police officers that they should rough up the people they arrest. "Please don't be too nice," Mr. Trump said, to laughter and cheers. When a Republican representative from Montana physically assaulted a reporter who had asked a question, Mr. Trump praised the lawmaker. "Any guy that can do a body slam," Mr. Trump said, "he's my guy." In May, Mr. Trump responded to protests against police brutality by saying, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." When the shooting did start, he defended one person accused of gunfire: a 17 year old boy who drove 20 miles to a Wisconsin protest armed with a semiautomatic rifle, which he allegedly used to shoot three people, killing two of them. It was self defense, Mr. Trump suggested days after the teenager was charged with murder. At the presidential debate last month, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists without equivocation. He would not. Instead, he instructed the violent right wing group the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." Mr. Trump and his defenders regularly claim that he is being misunderstood and say that he has condemned violence and white supremacy more than any president in history. The president is asked to condemn violence so often because violence is so often committed in his name. The Proud Boys, for one, did not take his words as a condemnation. "I think he was saying I appreciate you and appreciate your support," the group's founder said after the debate. Trump supporters are not the only people who commit acts of political violence. But Mr. Trump has been invoked in dozens of acts of violence, threats of violence or allegations of assault, according to a review of five years of criminal cases by ABC News. The victims of some of the worst attacks have been from the minority groups that Mr. Trump so often targets with his words. In addition to the 2015 attack on the homeless man in Boston, there was the terror campaign involving more than a dozen pipe bombs sent to prominent journalists and critics of Mr. Trump by a Trump supporter. There was the massacre in an El Paso Walmart that left 23 dead; minutes before the attack, the 21 year old suspect said he was doing it as a response to "the Hispanic invasion of Texas." And there was the slaughter of 51 people during prayer in two New Zealand mosques by a right wing zealot who said he saw Mr. Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose." In 2017, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that Mr. Trump could be sued by protesters who had been assaulted at a 2016 rally where he had said, "Get 'em out of here!" That statement was "an order, an instruction, a command," the judge said, and the protesters' injuries were "a direct and proximate result" of Mr. Trump's words. The case was dismissed on appeal, but the judge was right: Mr. Trump's supporters know that his first response is the truest expression of his beliefs, and Mr. Trump, for all his dissembling, knows exactly what he is saying. This harm won't end with Mr. Trump's presidency. His toxic rhetoric has filtered down to elementary and secondary schools around the country, where children have been repeating the president's most vile language for the past five years. In hundreds of cases, children have reported being mocked, harassed or attacked for being Hispanic, Black or Muslim, according to a survey by The Washington Post. Many of the incidents have made reference to Mr. Trump's border wall, including one case last year in which a 13 year old New Jersey boy told a Mexican American classmate that "all Mexicans should go back behind the wall." Soon after, the 13 year old assaulted the boy and knocked his mother unconscious. "It's gotten way worse since Trump got elected," said Ashanty Bonilla, a Mexican American high school student who endured so much ridicule from classmates that she changed schools. "They hear it. They think it's OK. The president says it. ... Why can't they?" The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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A team of British scientists released a worrying study on Wednesday of the new coronavirus variant sweeping the United Kingdom. They warned that the variant is so contagious that new control measures, including closing down schools and universities, might be necessary. Even that may not be enough, they noted, saying, "It may be necessary to greatly accelerate vaccine rollout." Nicholas Davies, the lead author of the study, said that the model should also serve as a warning to other countries where the variant may have already spread. "The preliminary findings are pretty convincing that more rapid vaccination is going to be a really important thing for any country that has to deal with this or similar variants," Dr. Davies, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said in an interview. The study found no evidence that the variant was more deadly than others. But the researchers estimated that it was 56 percent more contagious. On Monday, the British government released an initial estimate of 70 percent. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said that it presented a compelling explanation of the past and potential future of the variant. "The overall message of it is solid and consistent with what we've been seeing from other sources of information," he said in an interview. "Does this matter? Yes. Is there evidence for increased transmission? Yes. Is that going to impact the next few months? Yes. Those are all, I think, pretty solid." The variant, which came to the attention of British researchers earlier this month, has been rapidly spreading in London and eastern England. It carries a set of 23 mutations, some of which may make it more contagious. Dr. Davies and his colleagues found more evidence that the variant does indeed spread more rapidly than others. For example, they ruled out the possibility that it was becoming more common in some regions of the U.K. because people in those places move around more and are more likely to come into contact with each other. Data recorded by Google, indicating the movements of individual cellphone users over time, showed no such difference. The researchers built different mathematical models and tested each one as an explanation for the variant's spread. They analyzed which model of the spread best predicted the number of new cases that actually were confirmed, as well as hospitalization and deaths. The researchers concluded that the variant is able to spread to more people on average than other variants are. Dr. Davies cautioned that their estimate of 56 percent more contagious was still rough, because they are still gathering data about the variant's most recent spread. "I think when we get more of that curve, we'll be more certain," he said. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Still, he said, even with the data he and his colleagues have so far, he felt confident that the new variant must be taken very seriously. "I do feel that with the totality of the evidence, it's a strong case," he said. Dr. Davies and his colleagues then projected what the new variant would do over the next six months and built models that factored in different levels of restrictions. Without a more substantial vaccine rollout, they warned, "cases, hospitalizations, I.C.U. admissions and deaths in 2021 may exceed those in 2020." Closing schools until February could buy Britain some time, the researchers found, but lifting those extra restrictions would then cause a major rebound of cases. Dr. Davies and his colleagues also took into account the protection that vaccines will provide. Vaccine experts are confident that coronavirus vaccines will be able to block the new variant, although that has to be confirmed by laboratory experiments that are now underway. To look at the impact of the current rate of vaccinations, the researchers made a model in which 200,000 people were vaccinated each week. That pace was too slow to have much effect on the outbreak. "That kind of pace wouldn't really be able to support much relaxation of any of the control measures," Dr. Davies said. But when they raised the vaccinations to 2 million a week, they saw a reduction in the peak burden on I.C.U.s. Whether the U.K. can ramp up vaccinations by a factor of 10 is unknown. As of Tuesday, the variant had not been identified in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Given the small fraction of U.S. infections that have been sequenced, the variant could already be in the United States without having been detected," they warned. The United States is vaccinating its citizens more slowly than expected. That could potentially become a problem if the variant in the U.K. became widespread in the United States as well. "You need to be able to get whatever barriers to transmission you can out there as soon as possible," Dr. Hanage said. Dr. Davies cautioned that the model he and his colleagues analyzed was based, like any model, on a set of assumptions, some of which may turn out to be wrong. For instance, the rate at which infected people die from Covid 19 may continue to drop as doctors improve at caring for hospitalized patients. Uncertainties remain as to whether the new variant is more contagious in children, and if so, by how much. They also did not take into account other tools for stopping the spread of the variant, such as an aggressive program to test people and isolate those who are infected. "That's a limitation of the paper," Dr. Davies said. The researchers are now starting to analyze new possibilities such as that one. Still, Dr. Davies and his colleagues wrote in the conclusion to their study, "there is an urgent need to consider what new approaches may be required to sufficiently reduce the ongoing transmission of SARS CoV 2." Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, who was not involved in the study, said of the new estimates, "Unfortunately, this is another twist in the plot." "While we were all rejoicing for the vaccine," he added, "here is the possibility of a change of epidemiological context that makes our next few months much more complex and more perilous to navigate. Evidence is accumulating that the variant is more transmissible, and this implies that it will likely require an even greater effort to keep spreading under control." Dr. Hanage cautioned that the model had some shortcomings. The researchers assumed that all people younger than 20 had a 50 percent chance of spreading the disease. Although that might be true for younger children, Dr. Hanage said, it is not for teenagers. "That's the weakest part of their model," he said. Nonetheless, he said, the study provided an important glimpse into the country's possible futures. "It's not a forecast, it's not a prediction, it's not saying this will happen," he said. "It is saying that if you don't take it seriously, this is the kind of thing that could very easily happen." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Soon you won't have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art to see artwork by Carmen Herrera. By the end of May, one of her abstract paintings will be visible from Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Upper Manhattan. Publicolor, an arts and education nonprofit, announced on Tuesday that its students will create a large outdoor mural designed by Ms. Herrera at Manhattan East School for Arts and Academics, a middle school in East Harlem. "The whole idea is to bring the power of visual beauty to neighborhoods where there is very little and where parents are just not taking their kids to museums," said Ruth Lande Shuman, the founder of Publicolor. The mural, which will be titled "Uno Dos Tres," is an adaptation of "Diagonal," a painting by Ms. Herrera from 1987. The design, Ms. Herrera said in a statement, is a "variation on a theme," not a re creation of her earlier work. The new piece takes into account the specific features of the mural's site and its location near the highway. "It needed something strong and bold and different to compete with all the visual noise," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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The N.F.L. draft, the league's biggest spectacle besides the Super Bowl, is a famously unpredictable affair that can humble even the most accurate forecasters. And yet, many football fans find mock drafts irresistible. Especially this year, when it's not as if you could be watching real sports instead. A team's draft selections are usually the culmination of countless hours spent scouting on the road, the strategies of coaches and the calculations of team executives a mix that produces surprises every year and draws millions of viewers. That coordination has been thrown out of whack this year, as coronavirus guidelines have forced team personnel to scout prospects without being able to travel or conduct in person interviews. Mock drafts are always speculative, and their vast popularity suggests fans consume them the way they're intended: as jumping off points for debates, rather than predictions you can take to the bank. According to The Huddle Report, which scores mock drafts after the real one takes place, last year's best forecasts nailed just 11 of the 32 first round picks. It's largely guesswork meant for entertainment. "Assuming the Redskins do not get a can't refuse offer to trade back, they should jump at the chance to get this cornerstone talent for the team's defensive rebuild under defensive minded Ron Rivera," Vinnie Iyer wrote of Young at The Sporting News. Other names often seen in the top 10 of mock drafts include Isaiah Simmons, a linebacker from Clemson; and Derrick Brown, a defensive tackle from Auburn. Wide receivers will fall out of the top 10. Many analysts consider the wide receiver crop to be among the deepest in years, led by Alabama's Jerry Jeudy and Henry Ruggs III, and Oklahoma's CeeDee Lamb. But the teams at the top of the draft are believed to have more pressing needs. The mock drafts largely have a rapid run on receivers beginning as early as the 11th pick by the New York Jets. Some receiver needy teams with picks in the 20s, like the Philadelphia Eagles and the Minnesota Vikings, could move up to pass other teams that may select receivers, including the Las Vegas Raiders, San Francisco 49ers, Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys. But the sense that teams could find first round talent at the receiving position in the second round has some forecasters suspecting teams could look to other positions early on. "Sometimes the draft falls weird, and the incredible excess at receiver in this draft makes so many teams with wideout needs say they'll wait till the second and third rounds," Peter King wrote at NBC Sports. There won't be a running back taken early. There's no Ezekiel Elliott or Saquon Barkley in this draft. NFL.com's four mock drafters don't have a running back going before the Miami Dolphins' 26th pick; Georgia's D'Andre Swift, Wisconsin's Jonathan Taylor and Ohio State's J.K. Dobbins are considered the top candidates.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Where once the campus amenities arms race was waged over luxury dorms and recreation facilities, now colleges and universities are building deluxe structures for the generation of wonderful ideas. They and their partners in industry are pouring millions into new buildings for business, engineering and applied learning that closely resemble the high tech workplace, itself inspired by the minimally partitioned spaces of the garage and the factory. If the Silicon Valley creation myth starts in Steve Jobs's garage (now a designated historic site), the creation myth on campuses starts at M.I.T.'s Building 20. That warren of D.I.Y. offices, allocated to researchers from across the university, produced, through proximity, many breakthrough encounters in its 50 plus years. The building was demolished in 1998, replaced with Frank Gehry's Stata Center, one of the first campus structures that tries to recreate Building 20's creative ferment. What architects take from Building 20 is not its ramshackle aesthetic though some believe less polish provides more freedom but the importance of mixing disciplines, of work performed out in the open, and of transition zones like hallways and staircases as sites for productive run ins. Though studies have shown that proximity and conversation can produce creative ideas, there's little research on the designs needed to facilitate the process. Still, there are commonalities. In many of the new buildings, an industrial look prevails, along with an end to privacy. You are more likely to find a garage door and a 3 D printer than book lined offices and closed off classrooms, more likely to huddle with peers at a round table than go to a lecture hall with seats for 100. Seating is flexible, ranging from bleachers to sofas, office chairs to privacy booths. Furniture is often on wheels, so that groups can rearrange it. (The Institute of Design at Stanford, a model for many, has directions for building a whiteboard z rack on its website.) Staircases and halls are wide and often daylit, encouraging people to dwell between their appointments in hopes of having a creative collision. Exposure to natural light itself contributes to improved workplace performance. There's also much more to do with your hands than take notes in class: The need to move your body, by working on a prototype, taking the stairs or going in search of caffeine at a centralized cafe, is built in, providing breaks to let the mind wander. The rationales for these buildings are varied: Employers are dissatisfied with graduates' preparation, students are unhappy with outdated teaching methods, and colleges want to attract students whose eyes are on postgrad venture capital and whose scalable ideas might come in handy on campus. And so universities of all sizes, both public (Wichita State, University of Utah, University of Iowa) and private (Cornell, Northwestern, Stanford), have opened or are planning such facilities. "Being in bigger interactive spaces encourages expansive thinking, while being in a box of a room encourages box thinking," said Dan Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech. "Sometimes you need to be in a box to concentrate, but to always sit in a little box is a problem." No one has a private office at the Bloomberg Center, the primary academic building, and opaque walls are few. The only spaces faculty members can truly call their own are lockable storage cabinets, with carts for equipment. Traditional classrooms, too, are few the Cornell Tech curriculum privileges projects over lectures. Instead, there will be options so that people can choose how they like to work, from open plan spaces by the windows, to a roof deck with a garden, to huddle rooms for groups of five or less. "As you begin to understand how people work together, there is an ideal size of collaboration," said Ung Joo Scott Lee, principal at Morphosis, the architects. "Beyond five people it is too much of a crowd." If this sounds like Silicon Valley, it should. "We looked at Pixar in Emeryville very carefully, along with Bloomberg L.P. and Google, who have sizable office space in New York and understand the constraints of the urban environment," Mr. Huttenlocher said. (Until it moves onto its own campus, Cornell Tech is headquartered in the Google building in Chelsea every designer working for a university, it seems, has taken a swing through Mountain View.) "Pixar had to bring together very different cultures and get them to work as one, the creative and the business side, but also creative and tech people," Mr. Huttenlocher said. University of Utah: Living Over the Store "Live. Create. Launch." That's the tagline for the University of Utah's 45 million Lassonde Studios, opening this month. The residential component has been absorbed in to this live work building, anticipating the early lifestyle of dot com employees, whose living quarters usually resemble walk in closets. The Utah version is more plush, however: Residents, who can be graduate or undergraduate and in any major, can choose pods (cubbylike rooms with built in bed, desk, storage and TV), lofts in an industrial vernacular (beds in a communal setting with shared kitchen, lounge and bathrooms) or more traditional single or double rooms. Different floors have different themes, based on Utah's existing strengths: one for games and digital media, one for adventure and gear, one for design and the arts, one for global impact and sustainability. The ground floor "garage" has workshops equipped with 3 D printers, laser cutters and other prototyping tools, available to anyone at the university and staffed by work study students. All the programs offered by the Lassonde Entrepreneurship Institute, the division that is building the studios, are extracurricular and interdisciplinary; a few degrees are offered in partnership with the business school. "One thing about the building is it has no formal classrooms, and no faculty or staff offices," said Troy D'Ambrosio, executive director of the institute. "We didn't want to have a classroom because that says, 'In this room you learn, out here you don't learn.'" Innovation buildings tend to be affiliated with schools of business or engineering, but there is a strong arts presence within them. Lassonde Studios, designed by Yazdani Studio of Cannon Design, hopes to attract students from industrial design, the fine arts and communications. "We have made an effort to say, 'Entrepreneurs create new things, and you do that too,'" Mr. D'Ambrosio said. University of Iowa, Stanford: The Art in STEM Art schools have always had open plans, daylit work spaces and power tools. But the new arts building also has many elements of the STEM focused innovation campus in hopes of facilitating the mixing of disciplines and modes of instruction. "If you look at successful businesses now, the people who get hired are people who have ideas; art school offers models for that," said Chris McVoy of Steven Holl Architects, designers of the new Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa. "I believe one of the needs behind this surge in arts buildings is as a reaction to overfocusing on STEM. The world is more and more in need of those qualifications, but it doesn't fulfill a basic human need. Arts programs are where students and faculty can more easily engage in the undefined aspects of life." Iowa's building attempts to embody that idea by placing itself along a primary pedestrian route, so seeing new work is unavoidable. The curriculum, too, draws in majors from across the university, with popular classes that include building your own bicycle. "Our last four hires in the school have been faculty who teach engineering and computer science students alongside art majors," said Steve McGuire, coordinator of Iowa's studio division. "The building, as programmed, will include 16 Steam and engineering courses" that's Steam as in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics. Four hundred engineering majors typically take courses in the art department each year, and the makerspaces are available to students in all disciplines. So in the 25 million Experiential Engineering Building, set to open for classes in January, students will be able to do hands on and applied learning in 25 specialized science and engineering labs; engineering hub rooms will be open 24/7. A separate makerspace with evening hours, run by GoCreate, will offer facilities for metalworking, woodworking, textiles and digital creation to students and local residents. Dassault Systemes, a software company, is planning a 3 D immersive lab, and a few other spaces have been set aside for local businesses. Today's innovation campuses tend to make their pipeline to the real world explicit. Airbus Americas is moving its engineering center, and 400 Wichita employees, to a new structure on the campus, to be built on ground leased from the university. The center will also have room for up to 100 student workers. In another partnership, a law enforcement training center, with construction costs paid by the city and county, will serve the police departments as well as Wichita State's criminal justice students. The 3 D Experience Center will be one of 25 applied learning and research labs in Wichita State's Experiential Engineering Building, which is scheduled to begin hosting classes in January. Kansas public education has experienced state cutbacks at every level in recent months. Wichita State, along with other Kansas universities, has increased tuition 5 percent to make up for the budget cuts. "State funding is dwindling, so we have to be innovative in our financing," Ms. Patterson said. Construction has gone forward on the Innovation Campus because the Experiential Engineering Building, designed by Perkins Will and WDM Architects, is financed via grants to Kansas universities to produce more engineering graduates in a state where aviation and energy are top industries. How successful will Wichita State and other universities be at fueling innovation and, ultimately, a new entrepreneurship economy? The proof may be many years out, and difficult to quantify. But the pressure on administrators to change their campuses may soon come, not just from above and within, but from below. An anecdote from Kevin B. Sullivan of Payette, whose firm has interdisciplinary science and engineering centers under construction at Northeastern and Tufts, underscores the urgency. "I'm on the board of my daughter's high school, and what they are doing there is taking the existing library, gutting it and turning it into a tech enablement space," he said. "The college process may be dumbed down from what they do in high school."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Michele K. Bourquin, an account executive from Atlanta, was 36 and divorced when she first looked into freezing her eggs. "I knew I wasn't getting any younger, and my eggs were aging," Ms. Bourquin said. So she visited a doctor who gave her a blood test that's often used to check a woman's egg supply. It works by looking for anti Mullerian hormone, or AMH, which is secreted by growing follicles, the sacs that house each egg. The results were not good, she was told. Her AMH was too low and her follicle stimulating hormone level was too high, both indicators of diminished egg quantity. In other words, it would most likely take multiple procedures to bank enough eggs. At about 15,000 each, the cost was prohibitive, and her insurance didn't cover egg freezing or fertility treatments. A nurse suggested that she use donor eggs. Two years later, she remarried. Ms. Bourquin and her husband conceived naturally on the first try. Her doctor was "stunned," Ms. Bourquin said. "We even went and bought a lottery ticket," she said. "We were like, are you kidding me?" New research published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association underscores what Ms. Bourquin experienced, and what many fertility experts have already observed: AMH doesn't dictate a woman's reproductive potential. And although AMH testing is one of the most common ways that doctors assess a woman's fertility it's especially important for women struggling with infertility an AMH value isn't always telling. Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork Presbyterian, called the study "elegant." "All it takes is one egg each cycle," he said. "AMH is not a marker of whether you can or cannot become pregnant." Age is more than just a number For women who haven't yet tried to get pregnant and who are wondering whether they are fertile, an AMH value "isn't going to be helpful in that context," said Dr. Esther Eisenberg, the program director of the Reproductive Medicine and Infertility Program at the National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the study. In addition, "AMH wouldn't necessarily be a good marker to tell you when you ought to freeze your eggs." Doctors don't yet have a way to definitively predict egg quality or a woman's long term ability to conceive, but age is one of the most important factors. "I really do feel like that's all we have right now," said Dr. Anne Z. Steiner, the lead researcher of the study and a professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her study followed 750 women between the ages of 30 and 44 who had been trying to conceive for three months or less. During the 12 month observation period, those with low AMH values of less than 0.7 were not less likely to conceive than those who had normal AMH values. The study has various limitations, however, that are worth noting. The researchers only included women who did not have a history of infertility. Women who sought fertility treatments (about 6 percent) were withdrawn. And only 12 percent of the women were in the 38 to 44 age range. In addition, the number of live births was unavailable. Dr. Steiner says she'll next look at whether low AMH is associated with a higher risk of miscarriage among the women who conceived. Ms. Bourquin's daughter is now 2 years old, and she is hoping for a second child. But at 41, things aren't as easy this time around. For months she and her husband tried unsuccessfully to conceive naturally. After three failed attempts at intrauterine insemination, or IUI, and a failed egg retrieval, they are trying IUI yet again. One of Dr. Steiner's earlier studies, published in June of last year, shows that women experience a significant reduction in fertility in their late 30s. "There's no one age where a woman turns into a pumpkin," Dr. Steiner said, but there are slight declines in fertility after the age of 35, followed by steeper drop offs. "The difference between 30 and 33 is negligible," she said. "But the difference between 37 and 40 is going to be pretty drastic." Although AMH testing isn't designed to be an overall gauge of a woman's fertility, it can still provide valuable information, especially for "women who are infertile and seeking treatment," Dr. Rosenwaks said. It can assist in diagnosing polycystic ovarian syndrome, and identify when a woman is getting close to menopause. Previous research also shows that AMH is pretty good at predicting a woman's response to ovarian stimulation for in vitro fertilization, Dr. Steiner said, and it can predict the probability of conceiving via I.V.F. That was the case for Lauren Donato, 37, who has spent about 50,000 trying to conceive, mainly via I.V.F., after learning last year that her AMH was very low. She recently moved back in with her parents to avoid going into debt. She thought about freezing her eggs a decade ago. At the time, she said, she was told not to worry about her fertility.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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On Father's Day in June 2018, Samantha Good was working on an excavation in the Drimolen cave in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind. She uncovered what appeared to be a canine tooth jutting out from the loose brown sediment. Ms. Good kept digging until she found two more teeth and a partial palate, and then alerted her instructors. "I think I said 'There's something interesting happening,'" remembered Ms. Good, an undergraduate student studying anthropology at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia who was participating in a field school at the site. "And it was in fact something very interesting." Angeline Leece, a paleoanthropologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, came to see what Ms. Good had found. "I think my breath stopped for a second," Dr. Leece said. "I looked up at her, and I hadn't said anything. But she saw my face, and she goes, 'Yeah, that's what I thought.'" Ms. Good would eventually learn that she had unearthed a two million year old skull that belonged to Paranthropus robustus, our large toothed, small brained ancient human cousin. It is the earliest and best preserved specimen found so far of the species, which lived alongside and may have competed for resources with our direct ancestor Homo erectus. And the skull provides the best known evidence of an ancestor of humanity evolving to adapt to a changing climate, which a team of researchers detailed on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology Evolution. Around two million years ago, this area in South Africa is believed to have undergone a chaotic climate shift. The regional environment transformed from wetter and more lush conditions to drier and more arid ones. In order for a species like P. robustus to survive in such terrain, it probably would have needed to be able to chew on tough plants. But the specimen found in the cave at Drimolen didn't seem to fit with what some scientists had previously stated about the human cousin. They labeled the skull DNH 155 and determined that it belonged to a male. While other skulls had been found at Drimolen, they were primarily female, and this male was smaller than the P. robustus males found at a cave nearby called Swartkrans, which was 200,000 years younger than Drimolen. Some scientists suggested that since they had found mostly large males in Swartkrans and mostly small females in Drimolen, the size differences could be chalked up to sexual dimorphism, or the physical differences between males and females seen in species, like manes in lions. The argument was that, more or less, only males lived in Swartkrans and only females in Drimolen. "Now, that didn't seem right to me," Dr. Leece said. "What it looked like to me instead is that we have males and females in Drimolen, and males and females at Swartkrans, but the Drimolen ones were just overall smaller." That day in the cave, she slid her finger beneath the dirt and felt a large sagittal crest on the top of the skull. There were so many bones, the excavators used a special conservator's glue to adhere the fossils and sediment together to make sure they didn't lose anything. Dr. Leece and Andy Herries, a geoarchaeologist also at La Trobe, took the specimen out from the ground in one big block of dirt and bone and delivered it to Jesse Martin, a doctoral student at the university, to painstakingly piece back together. After a few weeks of gluing bones and sucking up dirt through a straw, Mr. Martin revealed the spotted skull that was ensnared in the sediment. DNH 155 was so well preserved that one of his team members, David Strait, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, remarked that it had intact nasolacrimal ducts, which is where tears drain. He said to Mr. Martin, "This Paranthropus could have cried." In addition to being smaller than male P. robustus who lived at Swartkrans, DNH 155's cranium indicated its chewing muscles were not as strong as theirs. Mr. Martin said the differences suggest DNH 155 and the other P. robustus found at Drimolen were smaller not because they were all female, but rather because they were earlier forms of the species belonging to a different population that hadn't yet been subjected to the environmental pressures that would favor larger sizes and stronger jaw muscles. "It basically hasn't become this massive chewing and grinding machine that it becomes later," Mr. Martin said. The change would have been the result of microevolution, or an evolutionary change occurring within a species. Such a morphological change, the scientists said, was likely the result of P. robustus adapting to that changing climate, with members of the species who were able to get enough nutrition from a change in their food supply surviving, and passing their traits to offspring. Amelie Beaudet, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge in England who was not involved in the study, said the conclusions of this study will encourage scientists to reconsider some previous hypotheses about how and why P. robustus specimens that belong to the same species may look so different. It's also important that the study's authors didn't announce that the find was a new fossil hominin species, said Marcia Ponce de Leon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Instead, they asked "the interesting question of how a known species changed during its evolution." Because Ms. Good found DNH 155, she was given dedication rights. Fittingly, as it was the "Father's Day Fossil," she dedicated it to her dad, Ian.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The short answer is a lack of preparation and poor execution by the federal government. The initial tests developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a technical problem and federal officials were then too slow to find alternatives. In his Oval Office address last night, President Trump tried to blame Europe for the spread of the virus in the United States. But Europe isn't the problem (and the fact that indexes tied to the future of the stock market began falling during his speech suggests investors were unnerved by what Trump was saying). A much bigger problem is the lack of testing in the United States. As Vox's Brian Resnick and Dylan Scott explain: "Accurate testing is critical to stopping an outbreak: When one person gets a confirmed diagnosis, they can be put in isolation where they won't spread the disease further. Then their contacts can be identified and put into quarantine so that they don't spread the virus if they've become infected, too. That's particularly important for a virus like this one, which seems able to spread before people show symptoms, or when their symptoms are mild." How exactly have American officials botched the tests? After problems arose with the C.D.C.'s test, officials could have switched to using successful tests that other countries were already using. But the officials refused to do so, essentially because it would have required changing bureaucratic procedures. The federal government could also have eased regulations on American hospitals and laboratories, to allow them to create and manufacture their own tests, as Melissa Miller of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine told The Washington Post. But federal officials did not do so for weeks. The Times's Sheri Fink and Mike Baker reported this week about a Seattle lab with a promising test that was blocked by "existing regulations and red tape" while "other countries ramped up much earlier and faster."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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FOOD ON THE MOVE Dining on the Legendary Railway Journeys of the World Edited by Sharon Hudgins Illustrated. 256 pp. Reaktion Books. 35. A friend once stayed at my Beacon Hill apartment because, he said, he had booked serial flights for the sole purpose of writing and they kept laying over in Boston. I understood, sort of. When I most need to concentrate, I find reasons to take serial trips on the Acela, the pleasantest work environment I know. The postcard parade of the Connecticut coast, the soothing water views what could be more delightful, more conducive to creativity? My houseguest's airplane isolation produced several best sellers that keep him flying to highly paid speaking gigs. And he was indifferent to the food! Imagine what those Amtrak views fueled by delightful meals could inspire. I am of course far from the first to find trains uniquely pleasant or productive. "Food on the Move," a new collection of essays by various writers, describes dining by rail in an exalted past and, in the book's tantalizing narratives, sometimes today as an experience as exhilarating and varied as watching the scenery unfold mile by mile. Trains, after all, are not like planes or long haul ships, which must stock their food on departure and face the challenges of onboard storage and cooking facilities all but insurmountable on arid, space challenged planes if relatively minor on cruise ships, which have become floating 18 hour buffets. Trains can replenish their stocks with the very freshest and most local produce every day. Enterprising galley chefs can explore the best local bakers and fishmongers and farmers and take their goods aboard at dawn stops. The visions laid out in this book of the glory days of the Orient Express, the grandest and most local cuisine oriented of the trains surveyed here, or of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, on which bearers would telegraph orders to a railway kitchen down the line for hot delivery at the next stop, make my celebrations over the appearance of a new snack packet in the Amtrak cafe car seem particularly paltry.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Male field crickets perform mating songs and dances for each other. Female Japanese macaque monkeys pair off into temporary but exclusive sexual partnerships. Pairs of male box crabs occasionally indulge in days long marathon sex sessions. Comparable arrangements can be found in damselflies, Humboldt squid, garter snakes, penguins and cattle. In fact over 1,500 species across most major animal families have been observed engaging in sexual activity with individuals of the same sex. But the origins of such same sex sexual behavior have long puzzled evolutionary biologists. How could this behavior evolve and persist in so many lineages, even when it doesn't directly aid reproduction? That very question may be the wrong one to ask, a group of researchers argue in a study published last week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, seeking to flip the underlying assumptions of a whole wing of biology. "The expectation has been that same sex sexual behavior evolved in different species independently, against this default background of heterosexual sex," says Ambika Kamath, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and co author on the study. "And what we're saying is that baseline isn't necessarily the right baseline." Instead, the researchers suggest that same sex behavior is bound up in the very origins of animal sex. It hasn't had to continually re evolve: It's always been there. Evolutionary biologists have long pondered same sex behavior, often describing it as a "Darwinian paradox." Paul Vasey, an expert on non conceptive sexuality at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, who did not participate in the study, says one school of thought held that such behaviors weren't primarily sexual, instead relating to dominance or grooming. Other researchers have suggested it persists in some species because it helps social animals maintain communities, said Max Lambert, a biologist at Berkeley and a co author on the study. Still others suggested that examples of same sex behavior were "practice" for reproductive sex, or even cases of mistaken identity. Most agreed that it had to have some sort of evolutionary benefit to make up for the presumed costs of nonreproductive sexual behavior. None of these explanations satisfied Julia Monk, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale and the study's lead author. Instead of wondering why same sex behavior had independently evolved in so many species, Ms. Monk and her colleagues suggest that it may have been present in the oldest parts of the animal family tree. The earliest sexually reproducing animals may have mated with any other individual they came across, regardless of sex. Such reproductive strategies are still practiced today by hermaphroditic species, like snails, and species that don't appear to differentiate, like sea urchins. Over time, Ms. Monk said, sexual signals evolved different sizes, colors, anatomical features and behaviors allowing different sexes to more accurately target each other for reproduction. But same sex behavior continued in some organisms, leading to diverse sexual behaviors and strategies across the animal kingdom. And while same sex behavior may grant some evolutionary benefits, an ancient origin would mean those benefits weren't required for it to exist. But how has same sex behavior stuck around? The answer may be that such behaviors aren't as evolutionarily costly as assumed. Traditionally, Ms. Monk said, any mating behavior that doesn't produce young is seen as a waste. But animal behavior often doesn't fit neatly into an economic accounting of costs and benefits. Mating attempts between different sexes don't always efficiently lead to offspring either, Dr. Kamath said mating attempts can be rebuffed, conception may not occur and clutches or young may not survive. These are normal hiccups in population level reproduction, and the team predicts that the costs of same sex behavior aren't likely to be any greater. "I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that at some early stage of animal evolution mating was more indiscriminate and that this is part of the evolutionary heritage of higher animals," Dr. Vasey said of the study. "Occasional same sex sexual behavior is not particularly difficult to accommodate within an evolutionary framework when such behavior is performed within the larger context of different sex sexual behavior." An issue with past research in the field, Dr. Lambert said, is that unexamined cultural projections largely by the white heterosexual men who have dominated the field resulted in many researchers failing to accurately document what they were seeing. "We're missing so many observations of sexual behaviors because the people looking at them thought that it must have been an abnormality, based on a preconceived notion of how the world should work," Dr. Lambert said. While cultural ideas can affect our observations of biology, Dr. Kamath said, biology doesn't necessarily tell us anything clear about culture. The team was careful not to draw explicit links to any aspects of human culture, including L.G.B.T.Q. communities. "We do not want our work to be leveraged in harmful ways and we've done our best to avoid that in the way that we've constructed the paper itself," she said. Ms. Monk and her colleagues say that explicitly flipping the cultural assumptions in this case by conducting the study with researchers who self identify as queer, and bringing in outside disciplines like social science can yield better research. "It's important for us as scientists to recognize that while we'd love to think about what we do as objective, it might be really framed by our culture and context," Ms. Monk said. There are still a lot of questions left to be answered, and the team hopes that the study will inspire more research on the prevalence of same sex behavior across the animal kingdom and its potential costs and benefits. When it comes to opening up new avenues of research, Ms. Monk said, sometimes it's as simple as looking at a place where people are asking "why," and instead asking "why not?" "Sometimes there's a really exclusive view of evolutionary fitness and we can have a more inclusive view," she said. "Variation is the baseline, and that baseline persists to this day."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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In May 1992, a team of field biologists set out to survey a remote patch of wilderness along the western border of Vietnam. After nine days on the trail, the group was running low on food, so two members were dispatched to a nearby village to stock up on provisions. The two men were merely hoping to buy vegetables, but on the wall of a hunter's shack, they stumbled across something spectacular: a pair of long horns, sleek, sharp and straight. The biologists had never seen anything like them. The horns belonged to a saola, a species of wild ox previously unknown to science. "Suddenly, the scientific world had before it proof of a large, new living creature, previously unimagined," writes William deBuys in his lyrical new book, "The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures." (Read excerpt.) It was an animal unlike any other on Earth not just a new species but a new genus, a mammal with no known close relatives. The saola has strange scent glands on its white flecked muzzle and a preternaturally calm disposition. Viewed from the side, its two horns appear as one. "Like that other one horned beast," Dr. deBuys writes, "it stands close to being the apotheosis of the ineffable, the embodiment of magic in nature. Unlike the unicorn, however, the saola is corporeal. It lives, and it can die." Indeed, the saola is under grave threat; its small sliver of habitat, in the Annamite Mountains along the border between Laos and Vietnam, is being steadily dismantled. Traders smuggle rosewood out of the forest, and poachers hunt an array of rare animals that are highly coveted by chefs and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine. Saola are not the most valuable quarry, but wire snares do not discriminate. "The occasional saola is a bystander, felled in the general mayhem," Dr. deBuys writes. But saving the saola, Dr. deBuys makes clear, will be no easy task. No Westerner has ever seen one in the wild, and scientists don't know how many of the elusive animals still roam the forest, or whether the recently discovered species is already extinct. As Dr. deBuys writes, "the challenges of saola conservation verge on epistemology: How do you save a ghost when you are not sure it exists?" "The Last Unicorn" is an adventure tale and a meditation, an evocative read that makes clear why wild places matter and how difficult it will be to save them. Dr. deBuys, a nature writer and conservationist, first heard about the saola in 2009, when an audience member at a talk he delivered suggested that he write about the creature. Two years later he was in Laos, accompanying the field biologist Bill Robichaud on a three week trek through the Nakai Nam Theun National Protected Area, searching for signs of the animal. Dr. deBuys chronicles the expedition in all its punishing detail. The terrain is unforgiving, and he and his companions are forced to navigate thick forest, slick streambeds and steep mountains. They battle fatigue, dehydration and illness. And they run smack into evidence of just how thoroughly the forest is being plundered, stumbling across poachers' camps, collecting hundreds of snares, and discovering the carcasses of endangered animals that simply put their feet in the wrong place. Dr. Robichaud attempts to wrangle uncooperative guides and win over wary villagers, all while scouring the forest for signs of a rare and mysterious animal that may or may not be extinct. It can seem at times like a fool's errand, but there are, Dr. deBuys points out, all sorts of reasons to protect the Nakai Nam Theun and Earth's other wild places. They may harbor rare species that provide new insights into biology or hold secrets to the next blockbuster drugs. And these areas perform vital ecological services, such as sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or naturally purifying water. What keeps the conservationists going, however, aren't these eminently practical considerations. It's beauty.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Saved by the Max, a "Saved by the Bell" themed pop up restaurant in West Hollywood, is one of the latest venues designed to let fans have an "immersive experience" of their favorite TV shows and movies. WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. When Eric Bushard, a 34 year old senior manager of strategic partnerships at Yahoo, heard that a pop up restaurant inspired by the TV series "Saved by the Bell" was opening here on Santa Monica Boulevard, he texted a friend he has known since the fourth grade, "Hey Screech, it looks like the Max is open again!" To his fiance, who is 17 years his senior and has never watched the show, which aired Saturday mornings on NBC from 1989 1992, these words meant nothing. But to Mr. Bushard and his buddy, both of whom grew up in San Diego, they were an invitation to wallow in Day Glo nostalgia for a series that is their cohort's beloved counterpart to the Gen X favorite "The Brady Bunch." Called Saved by the Max and located in the same shopping center as a Target and a Best Buy, the diner is one of the latest venues designed to let fans have an "immersive experience" of their favorite TV shows and movies. Others have included the popular "Downton Abbey" exhibit, open on 57th Street in New York City through September and expected to travel after that, and the short lived Rue La Rue Cafe, a "Golden Girls" themed destination that opened and closed in Washington Heights last year. The brainchild of three Chicago entrepreneurs Derek Berry, Zack Eastman and Steve Harris, who all have experience as club promoters Saved by the Max meticulously recreates the neon lit cafe where the kids from Bayside High School in the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Palisades liked to hang after class. Keen eyed visitors to the restaurant will notice, in an array of school lockers, replicas of such props as the brick sized cellphone favored by the preppy bad boy Zack Morris (Mark Paul Gosselaar) and bottles of caffeine pills like those abused in the series' most infamous episode by the leggy egghead Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley, years before she abused herself in "Showgirls"). There is even a recreation of Principal Richard "the Big Bopper" Belding's office: paneling, pennants and all. Mr. Haskins had this reaction when he visited a Chicago incarnation of Saved by the Max in 2016 when it opened in the city's Wicker Park neighborhood. That restaurant, which at 2,500 square feet was less than half the size of the California version, was supposed to be open only for a month but proved to be "crazily popular," as one local Zagat reviewer put it. "When we put tickets on sale, they sold out in a matter of minutes," Mr. Berry said. "We found ourselves going a full year, until we decided to put Saved by the Max on tour." The West Hollywood edition is taking reservations through September 2019. Tickets, which include an appetizer and entree, cost 40. Some nights, visitors might get a cast member as a chaser. "I'm going to be popping in sporadically and showing up in full costume and character," said Ed Alonzo, the magician and actor who played Max, the cafe owner on "Saved by the Bell." "Seeing me in the actual diner, dressed as Max, is very surreal for people," he said. The upscale diner menu was created by Brian Fisher, a usually much more serious chef known for his cooking at the Michelin starred Chicago restaurants Schwa and Entente. Dishes include Mac Screech, a cheesy appetizer named for the nerdy goofball played by Dustin Diamond; A.C. Sliders, made with ginger and beer braised pulled pork and saluting Bayside's star athlete A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez); Tori's Fried Chicken, which is Korean spiced, served with a coconut milk waffle and named for Leanna Creel's character; and the Kelly Kapowski, a Monte Cristo sandwich honoring Tiffani Thiessen's breakout role as the prettiest girl in high school. Mr. Fisher was a fan of the show, he said. "Oh yeah, big time. I was the perfect age." (35.) One of the reasons the show resonated with him and others who watched, suggested an executive producer, Bennett Tramer, is because the show's actors were the same age as their characters, then a rarity in television. "On 'Head of the Class,'" said Mr. Tramer, referring to the 1986 1991 ABC sitcom about gifted high school students, "They had to take their midterms and then apply for Social Security." Among the show's most ardent fans are the composer and actor Lin Manuel Miranda he even quoted a line from the caffeine pill episode in his Hunter College High School yearbook Lena Dunham, Questlove and Amy Schumer. The actress Saoirse Ronan has said in interviews that watching "Saved by the Bell," which can be streamed on Hulu and Amazon Prime, helped her prepare for her Oscar nominated performance as an awkward high school student in "Lady Bird." And a 2015 "Saved by the Bell" reunion skit on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," featuring members of the original cast, was called "the greatest '90s moment ever" by HuffPost and since has racked up more than 39 million views on YouTube. Universal, which owns "Saved by the Bell," did not commission the pop up restaurant, but has enthusiastically sanctioned it and become a partner. Reviving classic entertainment properties, said Carol Nygren, senior vice president of Worldwide Live Entertainment, Universal Brand Development, "is always a popular trend, and being able to recreate scenes that play into fans' memories of popular shows is so much fun." In recent years, Hulu and Netflix sponsored recreations of Luke's Diner from "Gilmore Girls" and Jerry's apartment on "Seinfeld" to herald those shows' arrivals on streaming services. In 2014, Warner Brothers partnered with Eight O'Clock Coffee to do a pop up version of Central Perk, the coffeehouse on "Friends," and secured a copyright on the name for use in "coffee shop and cafe services" last January. And who can forget the giddy days of 1997 when Fox built a life size replica of the "Simpsons" house in a suburban Las Vegas subdivision? Enthusiasm for "Saved by the Bell" related experiences, however, may outplay all of those properties. "It's the right time for "Saved by the Bell," Mr. Eastman said. "People's interest in the show hasn't died. Folks who are 32 to 38 years old, we're all looking for something that's different to do, something that's not a nightclub that you have to be somebody to get into." His business partner, Mr. Harris, who is in his early fifties, said the men chose the show in part because that age group is "out and spending and being more active than people who grew up on 'Cheers' and 'Happy Days.'" (Ouch!) In fact, Peter Engel, an executive producer on the series and author of the 2016 memoir "I Was Saved by the Bell" has dubbed that group of early millennials the "Bell Generation." "They're still connected with the show," he said. "What show, after 26 years, has had a restaurant in Chicago and now in L.A.?" He noted that a documentary is being made about the creation of the show and said he has written a musical based on the series that he described as a "celebration of the '90s." He'd like the play to go to Broadway," but he'll settle for Las Vegas, as long as there is a Saved by the Max restaurant attached.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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It was supposed to be a moment of triumph. An august committee had for the first time relied only on the most rigorous scientific evidence to formulate guidelines to prevent heart attacks and strokes, which kill one out of every three Americans. The group had worked for five years, unpaid, to develop them. Then, at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association, it all went horribly awry. Many leading cardiologists now say the credibility of the guidelines, released Nov. 14, is shattered. And the troubled effort to devise them has raised broader questions about what kind of evidence should be used to direct medical practice, how changes should be introduced and even which guidelines to believe. "This was a catastrophic misunderstanding of how you go about this sort of huge change in public policy," said Dr. Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who is a past president of the American College of Cardiology. "There will be a large backlash." What went wrong? Some critics say the drafting committee mistakenly relied only on randomized controlled clinical trials, the gold standard of medical evidence, but ignored other strong data that would have led to different conclusions. The group's efforts were severely underfunded. And it announced fundamental changes in medical practices without allowing a public debate before its guidelines were completed. "A lot of people expect they can come up with guidelines as a pure scientific discourse and present them to the public," said Dr. J. Sanford Schwartz. a committee member and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "That's what we did here, but the world has changed." When the new guidelines were released, many doctors were shocked that they were suddenly being told to stop their decades long practice of monitoring levels of LDL cholesterol, the kind that increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, after patients begin taking statin medicines. Others were stunned when a pair of Harvard medical professors offered evidence within days of the guidelines' release that its new online risk calculator greatly overestimated a person's chance of having a heart attack or stroke. The committee writing the guidelines made a critical, early decision to consider only evidence from clinical trials, a marked departure from how previous guidelines were made. Some independent experts provided with an advance draft of the guidelines, including Dr. Roger S. Blumenthal of Johns Hopkins and Dr. Antonio M. Gotto Jr., a former president of the heart association, objected. They said a wealth of genetic and populations data indicated that lower cholesterol levels are better, especially for high risk patients. The same critique would loom large after the guidelines were released. Committee members also said they struggled with inadequate financial support. They originally formulated 18 important questions they would seek to answer. But it was soon apparent that they had overreached and did not have nearly enough money from the National Institutes of Health for such an ambitious effort. And the money dwindled over time after the National Institutes of Health underwent budget cuts. Every time the agency got hit, so did support for the committee drafting the guidelines, said Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, who was director of the heart institute for much of the time. "This is one of the untold consequences of budget reductions," she said. Eventually, the committee whittled the 18 questions to just three: Should doctors and patients aim for specific numerical target levels of LDL cholesterol? Should doctors use drugs other than statins to drive LDL levels down? And should there be target levels for LDL plus other forms of harmful cholesterol linked to cardiovascular risk? They concluded that there was no evidence for targets or for using drugs in addition to statins to lower cholesterol. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute contracted with two companies to exhaustively review the scientific literature thousands of papers submitted by committee members on those three questions. Meanwhile, the committee met by teleconference most Wednesdays. The committee chairman, Dr. Neil J. Stone of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, who said he spent thousands of hours on the project and cut his family vacations short, sought consensus. Discussions continued until every vote was unanimous. "You can insert the word 'Talmudic,' " said committee member Dr. Ronald Krauss of Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Vocational schools need to redesign their curriculums to increase courses for sustainable jobs. Governments could take the lead and provide incentives and subsidies for those courses, rather than blindly pursuing broad brush economic measures like universal basic income. Corporations could also provide programs, such as Amazon's Career Choice program. This program pays up to 12,000 annually over four years for Amazon's hourly employees to earn degrees in high demand occupations such as aircraft mechanics, computer aided design and nursing. Pandemic or no pandemic, the importance and number of human centric service jobs, such as nursing, will grow as wealth and life spans increase. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2030, we will fall short of the number of health care workers required to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of "good health and well being for all" by approximately 18 million. There is an acute need to reassess such vital, yet undervalued, human centric service roles both in terms of how they are perceived and how much they are paid. These jobs will form a bedrock for the new A.I. economy. As we prepare people for the eventual transition to an A.I. driven economy, we will also need to recalibrate many of today's jobs. Like software did a few decades ago, A.I. can augment humans' creative thinking with a computer's relentless ability to churn through masses of data, hypothesize alternatives or optimize outcomes. There will not be a single, generic A.I. tool, but specific tools customized for each profession and application. We may have an A.I. based molecule generation program for drug researchers, an A.I. advertising planner for marketers or an A.I. fact checker for journalists. Merging A.I. optimization and the human touch will reinvent many jobs and create even more. A.I. will take care of routine tasks in tandem with humans, who will carry out the tasks that require, well, humanity. For example, future doctors will still be a patient's primary point of contact, but they will rely on A.I. diagnostic tools to determine the best treatment. This will redirect the doctor's role into that of a compassionate caregiver, giving them more time with their patients. Just as the mobile internet led to roles like the Uber driver, the coming of A.I. will create jobs we cannot even conceive of yet. Examples today include A.I. engineers, data scientists, data labelers and robot mechanics. We should watch for the emergence of such roles, make people aware of them and provide training for them. Finally, just as the wealthy Italian cities and merchants funded that country's Renaissance, we must hope that A.I. will inspire a renaissance of its own. With machines taking over many duties and tasks in the new economy, A.I. will inject flexibility into traditional working patterns, allowing us to rethink what work life balance should look like and transforming both the weekday routine and retirement thresholds. With more freedom and time in such a new social contract, people will be liberated to follow their passions, creativity and talents, and to let that personal exploration inform their careers as never before. Painters, sculptors and photographers will be able to use A.I. tools to compose, experiment, enumerate and refine their artwork. Novelists, journalists and poets will use new technologies to take their writing in previously unthought of directions. Educators, freed from the drudgery of grading and paperwork, can finally unleash their energy to design lessons that encourage curiosity, critical thinking and creativity. A.I. programs can help teach facts and figures so that teachers can spend more time developing students' emotional intelligence.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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A radio telescope in western Australia that picked up effects of the first starlight in the universe, a mere 180 million years after the Big Bang. It was morning in the universe and much colder than anyone had expected when light from the first stars began to tickle and excite their dark surroundings nearly 14 billion years ago. Astronomers using a small radio telescope in Australia reported on Wednesday that they had discerned effects of that first starlight on the universe when it was only 180 million years old. The observations take astronomers farther back into the mists of time than even the Hubble Space Telescope can see and raised new questions about how well astronomers really know the early days of the cosmos, and about the nature of the mysterious so called dark matter whose gravity sculpts the luminous galaxies. "We have seen indirectly evidence of very early stars in the universe stars that would have formed by the time the universe was only 180 million years old," said Judd Bowman of Arizona State, leader of the experiment known as EDGES, for Experiment to Detect Global EoR Signature, in an email. Dr. Bowman and his colleagues published their results in Nature Wednesday. The presence of stars manifested itself as a telltale dip in the intensity of a bath of radio waves, so called cosmic microwaves, leftover from the fires of creation itself. The dip meant that cosmic energy was being absorbed by primordial clouds of hydrogen gas that hung over the universe like a fog, but whose atoms had been thrown out of balance by the sudden presence of starlight. The presence of the dip, at a characteristic wavelength of hydrogen, confirmed earlier predictions from models of how and when the stars were born. But the depth of the dip and the amount of the absorption was a surprise. It suggested that the gas inhabiting the cosmos was only half as hot as astronomers had calculated only about 3 kelvin above absolute zero, or minus 454 Fahrenheit. "This is difficult to explain based on our current knowledge and assumptions about astrophysical processes in the early universe," Dr. Bowman said. One possibility, suggested by Rennan Barkana of Tel Aviv University in Israel, is that the primordial hydrogen could have gotten chilled by interacting with the dark matter that also permeates the cosmos. "If true, this would be the first clue about the properties of dark matter, beyond its gravitational pull which is how its presence has been inferred," said Dr. Barkana, who published his idea in an accompanying paper in Nature. How this all played out was the result of a subtle dance of atomic physics and thermodynamics the study of heat. In its early days before the stars lit up, the universe was a fog of hydrogen and helium that had been synthesized during the first three minutes of time and that was now basking in the fading heat of the Big Bang. Hydrogen in empty space is prone to radiate radio waves with a wavelength of 21 centimeters. At first the gas and the microwave were in tune with each other, and the hydrogen was emitting just as much as it received from the background radiation bath. But when the stars began to turn on, ultraviolet radiation from them altered the energy levels of the electrons in the hydrogen atoms, knocking them out of sync with the microwaves "decoupling" them in the physics vernacular. Since the gas was already physically much colder than the radiation, it began to absorb the 21 centimeter waves from the cosmic background, creating a deficit, or a dip. The shock was how great a dip that was and thus how much colder the hydrogen was than cosmologists had figured. "The only known cosmic constituent that can be colder than the early cosmic gas is dark matter," Dr. Barkana wrote in his Nature paper. Astronomers know that dark matter makes up about a quarter of the universe by weight way more than atomic matter from its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies. The leading explanation has been that it consists of clouds of subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang. They're called wimps, for weakly interacting massive particles, and are hundreds of times as massive as a hydrogen atom. Because these particles are so massive they are also slow, or "cold" in cosmic jargon. In theory, they should be passing through our bodies and everything else by the millions every second. But over the last three decades increasingly sensitive attempts to detect these particles directly have failed, and theorists are beginning to consider other more complicated models of what they call "the dark sector." Now the EDGES observations might have opened a new window into that dark realm. And any progress in identifying dark matter could revolutionize particle physics. The idea that dark matter could have cooled the primordial hydrogen would imply that dark matter particles are only a few times heavier than hydrogen atoms, "well below the commonly predicted mass of weakly interacting massive particles," Dr. Barkana explained in his Nature paper. It would mean that radio astronomers have a way of getting a grip on dark matter. None of this is for certain. Yet. Both Dr. Bowman and Dr. Barkana emphasized that the observations need to be confirmed by other instruments and experiments. The EDGES result was based on averaging observations over the whole sky. But new projects in the works, like the Square Kilometer Array in Australia and South Africa will be able to measure these temperature discrepancies in different parts of the sky and track the different evolution of dark and luminous matter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The composer and percussionist Michael Colgrass performing the world premiere of his "Rhapsodic Fantasy" for chromatic drums and orchestra with the Danish Radio Orchestra in Copenhagen in 1966. Mr. Colgrass used 12 tone and serial techniques alongside soaring lyricism, and several of his works employ the rhythms, timbres and energy of jazz. Michael Colgrass, a composer of vivid, genre crossing orchestral and chamber works who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for "Deja Vu," a concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra, died on July 2 in Toronto. He was 87. His wife, Ulla Colgrass, said the cause was squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer. Mr. Colgrass refused to align himself exclusively with any of the warring postwar new music styles. He found his own path by drawing on whatever styles and techniques suited the composition on his desk. He used 12 tone and serial techniques alongside soaring lyricism. The rhythms, timbres and energy of jazz his earliest musical passion are heard in several works, including "Deja Vu," in which jazz tinged brass figures seem to arise from the colorful percussion writing and take on lives of their own amid slow moving, atmospheric string scoring. Elsewhere for example in "Folklines: A Counterpoint of Musics for String Quartet" (1988) Mr. Colgrass borrowed from disparate world music styles. And in some works, like "Letter to Mozart," he used quotations from composers of the past, transforming them with modernist techniques. Another such work, "The Schubert Birds" (1989), briefly alluded to Schubert within a texture that included bird calls. This variation was meant to evoke the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (whose nickname was Bird), as well as otherworldly percussion timbres and harmonically spiky string writing. Often, there was an undercurrent of humor in these juxtapositions. Mr. Colgrass usually built his scores on imaginative and often whimsical ideas, rather than standard structural models. His early work "As Quiet As" (1966), an orchestral score that the Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded, was based on a newspaper article in which children were asked to complete the phrase "as quiet as a ... " Mr. Colgrass chose seven responses and characterized them instrumentally in the work's seven movements. When he did use classic models as in "Concertmasters" (1975), which he patterned after a Vivaldi triple violin concerto, complete with harpsichord in his orchestration there was usually a twist; in this case it was 12 tone themes replacing Vivaldian sequences. "I went out on the floor and stood there a moment looking at the students," he wrote. "Then I undressed and stood on my head. There was a wave of murmuring, and the room got very quiet. I somersaulted, fell onto one shoulder, rolled to the other, raised my body on my forearms and shook my feet in the air, twisted, stretched and arched like a cat and collapsed motionless on the floor." When he finished, he told the students: "Your body is the first musical instrument ever invented. Like any instrument, it has to be tuned. That's what I just did, and I'm going to show you how to do it." Michael Charles Colgrass Jr. was born in Brookfield, Ill., a village in the Chicago area, on April 22, 1932. His father was an Italian immigrant who had changed the family name from Colagrossi when he was working as a professional boxer; he later worked as a postmaster. His mother, Ann (Hand) Colgrass, was a homemaker. Mr. Colgrass wrote in his memoir, "Adventures of an American Composer" (2010), that his family had not at all been musical. But when he was 10, he saw the film "Reveille With Beverly," in which the drummer Ray Bauduc and the bassist Bob Haggart perform "Big Noise From Winnetka." It set his mind on becoming a jazz drummer. When he asked for a drum kit, his father insisted that he earn the money for it, which he did by persuading a local golf club to hire him as a caddy. He started his first band, Three Jacks and a Jill, when he was 11. The band, which also included a trumpeter, a pianist and an accordionist, played jazz standards at school dances and assemblies, and eventually at adult venues like the Kiwanis Club. Mr. Colgrass enrolled at the University of Illinois as a percussion student in 1950. But when he complained to his teacher, Paul Price, that he found the school's band repertoire boring, Mr. Price suggested that he take up composition. His first piece, "Three Brothers" (1951), for percussion, won the approving attention of John Cage during one of his visits to Chicago. It is still performed. After service in the Army, during which he played timpani in the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Colgrass moved to New York, where he studied further with the composers Wallingford Riegger and Ben Weber. He continued to compose but supported himself, in the late 1950s and into the '60s, as a freelance percussionist. His steadiest job was in the pit band for the premiere run of "West Side Story." But he also participated in recording sessions most notably for Columbia's "Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky" series and performed with the American Ballet Theater, the New York Philharmonic and several jazz ensembles. By the mid 1960s Mr. Colgrass was getting enough commissions to give up most of his performing work. In 1964 he won a Guggenheim scholarship to work in Copenhagen, where at a record session he met Ulla Damgaard, a Danish journalist. They married in 1966. She survives him, as do their son, Neal, and a sister, Gloria Lokay. Mr. Colgrass and his family moved to Toronto in 1974, and he took dual citizenship. He continued to receive commissions from some of the largest American orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. His Pulitzer winning work, "Deja Vu for Percussion Quartet and Orchestra," was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and had its world premiere with that orchestra in October 1977. Mr. Colgrass also studied neuro linguistic programming, a form of therapy to help people sharpen their communication and creative skills. He wrote about these techniques in his first book, "My Lessons With Kumi: How I Learned to Perform With Confidence in Life and Work" (2000), and used them not only in master classes with young musicians, but also in lectures for sports teams and corporations. And he developed a system of graphic notation, to help children compose before they learned to notate; the system has been adopted by schools in the United States and Canada. Composing, though, was always the center of Mr. Colgrass's creative life. "You need things to live," he told the Chicago broadcaster Bruce Duffy in a 1986 interview. "Camus said, 'I write for the same reason I swim, because my body needs it.' Well, my body needs good music, and if I don't have it I don't feel right. As a composer, if I don't compose for a certain amount of time, I begin to feel odd and funny. I begin to get irritable, and a lot of things begin to go awry. "That's something that has become part of my working life," he added. "It's a challenge that makes me feel my best."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Mr. Maundrell, 38, is the founder and president of aptsandlofts.com, a residential real estate brokerage firm based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that specializes in properties in Brooklyn, and, more recently, Long Island City, Queens. Q. Is there a David J. Maundrell IV yet? A. No, I have a little girl right now. No one ever knew I was the third until about a year and a half ago. My dad retired from being in banking his whole career and came to work with me. So my dad's a junior and it caused a lot of confusion. People would call and they'd say, "I'd like to talk to David Maundrell." And they would be asked: the son or the father? They would automatically think that my father owned the company. Q. What does your dad do at the firm? A. He's a sales agent and he's getting his associate broker's license. Q. Is it difficult telling your dad what to do? A. I have managers. Thank God I don't have to. Q. What is your main role in the company? A. I bring in new business. And a lot of my days are involved in consulting on our new developments, everything from pricing strategies to layouts to finishes. Q. Brokers have become more involved with development planning. A. It even starts earlier than that. I have folks who call me and say, "I'm thinking about buying this piece of property. What can we get?" We help come up with the unit mix and the individual layouts and kind of work with the architects, which is very tricky. Architects look at the real estate broker and say, "What do you know?" It's what the consumer wants, and we're just relaying that to you. I don't know what people want anymore, but I know what they don't want. Q. What don't they want? A. People don't want apartments with very little closet space. They don't want strip kitchens. They don't want these small, cramped rooms. People also don't want one person's vision. We try to help design a product that we can cast a wide net and bring in many people. Sometimes certain designs alienate. It may only be for one type of buyer or renter. A. We tried to do something last summer. I said to myself: "What am I doing? Why am I trying to go into Manhattan where there's so much more in Brooklyn that I can conquer?" Q. Will you be opening another office in Brooklyn? A. I'm in the final stages of confirming a third office. I can't say where. It'll be in a part of Brooklyn that I feel my brand works. Q. And what about an office in Long Island City? A. Long Island City is a very tricky market and I got close to doing that also. The problem with Long Island City is that with the exception of the Lightstone building, which I'm doing, all the Long Island City waterfront is owned by Avalon or TF Cornerstone. Those buildings have their own on site leasing teams and they control all the product, so it's very hard to do deals in those buildings. Q. How much of your business is rentals versus sales? A. More of the product right now is rental. But behind the scenes what we're seeing is developers are getting ready to go with more condos versus the rentals. We're in the planning stages of putting together a marketing strategy for a building in Williamsburg, with 20 units, that will come out at close to 1,200 a square foot. This was a ground up development that was originally planned as being a condo. Then they were going to go rental and sell the building. Now they're going to go condo. Q. How much higher are rents in Manhattan, compared with Brooklyn? A. It could be anywhere from 30 to 50 percent, depending on where in Manhattan you're looking. But even Williamsburg is becoming very pricey these days the market is pushing it up. A. Business is good. We have to bring to market from now through the next two years close to 4,000 apartments rental and condo.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Don't overlook condos. Investors have been snapping up condominiums to rent out amid the development boom, creating opportunities for high end renters. A big concentration of investors can mean a surge in rentals when the building starts to close, said Marc Schaeffer, a real estate agent at Kleier Residential. "You have to catch the timing right," said Mr. Schaeffer, who noticed a rise in rental listings at Carnegie Park, an amenity laden condominium at Third and East 94th Street, and was able to get clients a 150 a month discount on a two year lease for a two bedroom. Instead of paying 5,800 a month, with an expected increase of 2 percent to 5 percent the following year, his clients are paying 5,650 a month. "We accomplished this by pitching our offer to similar listings in the same building and letting the owners' broker know we were submitting the same offer to other apartments," he said. "This worked because we were dealing with three different competing landlords." End your lease in the summer. In general, rental demand picks up from May through August, when school is out, college grads move to the city and the weather is better. So when Elisabeth Polanco, a kindergarten teacher in Washington Heights, wanted to move to the city from Rockland County, N.Y., this spring, Sherry Mazzocchi, an agent at Citi Habitats, knew what to do. By asking for a 15 month lease instead of the typical yearlong term, she reduced the rent on a three bedroom walk up to 2,225 a month from 2,450, with an April 4 move in date, saving her client 3,375 over the course of the lease. Move in the dead of winter. Knowing it is harder for landlords to fill vacancies during the winter, when rental activity tends to wane, Jordan Kramer, an agent at Compass, helped Sasha Sherman and Ben Cohen knock 400 a month off a newly renovated East Village three bedroom walk up that was asking 6,000 in December 2014, for 4,800 in savings. The roommates, who were sharing with a third friend, initially offered 5,800 a month with a Feb. 1 move in date. Aware that there were no other offers on the table, Mr. Kramer recommended his clients ask for another 200 off if they bumped their move up to Jan. 15. The landlord agreed. As a result, said Mr. Sherman, the sales manager for BOLD Organics, a frozen Italian foods brand based in Harlem, "we got an incredible deal on a beautiful apartment." Pay your rent upfront. For those with the means to do so, paying at least six months of rent in advance can net you a discount. Last year, Jesse Klein, a salesman at Platinum Properties, was working with a college graduate and the graduate's mother, with a budget of 2,700 a month. After touring a number of apartments, they visited an open house for a 2,750 a month alcove studio in the East Village, where they found other prospective renters lined up outside to see it. "My client's mother literally took out her checkbook and said to the owner's broker, 'I will write a check now for six months' rent if you can knock it down by 100 a month,' " Mr. Klein said. "I was like, 'All right, this woman means business.' " While not every landlord would entertain such a request, Mr. Klein said, the owner's broker jumped on the phone and got the landlord's consent. Be creative. A landlord who won't budge on the rent may be willing to waive gym memberships, parking or other costs associated with a rental. In January, Kevin Djungu Sungu, an agent at Citi Habitats, helped a client secure a 2,550 a month one bedroom at a new rental building in Harlem that was originally listed for 2,650. In addition to paying the broker fee and offering a free month's rent, the landlord agreed to increase free storage to one year from six months. Be respectful. "I think people get the impression that they have to be some kind of animal going in and negotiating," said Adam Frisch, a principal of Sierra Residential, a brokerage firm that specializes in landlord representation. "What doesn't work is to call up and say, 'Listen, you have to send me a lower increase or I'm going to sue you.' Or 'You're not taking the garbage out enough; I'm going to get the city to give you a violation.' " His advice: Stick to the facts. Remind your landlord with a note that explains that you are a tenant in good standing and always pay your rent on time. If you point this out and ask politely for a reasonable rent reduction, Mr. Frisch said, "often the answer will be yes."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Conservationists have been sounding the alarm over invasive species for years, warning of the damage they can cause to habitats and native animals. But in Florida, an invasive snail might be helping an endangered bird species come back from the brink, researchers say. The population of North American snail kites birds that use curved beaks and long claws to dine on small apple snails in the Florida Everglades had been dwindling for years, from 3,500 in 2000 to just 700 in 2007. Things began to look particularly bleak in 2004, when a portion of the Everglades was invaded by a species of larger snail that the birds had historically struggled to eat. Ornithologists assumed the shift would hasten the snail kite's decline. But the number of snail kites in the Everglades grew over the decade following the invasion of the larger snails. The reason, according to a study published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, is that the snail kites have rapidly evolved larger beaks and bodies to handle the bulkier snails. "We were very surprised," said Robert Fletcher, Jr., an ecologist at the University of Florida and an author of the study. "We often assume these large bodied animals can't keep up with changes to the system, like invasions or climate change, because their generation times are too long. And yet we are seeing this incredibly rapid change in beak size of this bird." Dr. Fletcher and his colleagues analyzed 11 years of morphological data they had collected on the birds. Because snail kites can live to the relatively old age of 8, that time period represented fewer than two generations for the birds. Nonetheless, the researchers found that beak and body sizes had grown substantially (about 8 percent on average, and up to 12 percent) in the years since the invasion. Exactly how the birds are pulling off this evolutionary trick is not clear, but natural selection does appear to play a part. Young snail kites with larger bills were more likely to survive their first year than snail kites with smaller bills, presumably because the large billed birds were better able to eat the invasive snails. Young birds eating the invasive snails, which are two to five times larger than the native ones, were also growing faster than birds weaned on the smaller ones, which may account for the increase in overall body size. But the researchers found suggestions of a genetic component to the changes, as well. By tracking the birds' pedigrees, they found that large beaked parents gave birth to large beaked offspring, setting the stage for large scale evolutionary change. Thirteen years after the larger snails invaded, the population of the birds has nearly tripled, to "well over 2,000," Dr. Fletcher said. "It's been a major development for the recovery of this species." Outside of Florida, related snail kites are found in parts of South America, Central America and the Caribbean, where they are not considered endangered. Overall, the findings are good news for animals squaring off against invasive species or other rapid habitat change, including global warming. "This work illustrates very clearly that these large top predators can respond to invasions at a rate much quicker than most people have ever imagined," Dr. Fletcher said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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There's a bloom to the dancing at American Ballet Theater just now; you can feel this even in the darkest or most taxing works. The company's two week season at the David H. Koch Theater, which ends on Sunday, has been offering nine works by nine men, representing a century of choreography leading up to two works new this month. The range of styles is wide and yet there's a luxuriance to the execution that fills the air, a youthful, ready for more brightness. The company should improve its marketing: This meeting of performers and repertory deserves larger audiences than it's currently attracting at the Koch. The final piece to arrive there, on Thursday, was Alexei Ratmansky's Shostakovich "Piano Concerto No. 1." Made as the concluding work of Mr. Ratmansky's 2013 Shostakovich trilogy, it holds its own independently, too. (The company revives the trilogy, one of the most singularly imaginative creations of our time, for four performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in May.) Like all of Mr. Ratmansky's ballets to this composer some date back to his time as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet (2004 08) "Concerto No. 1" is a complex portrait of the Soviet Russia reflected in the music, and, like the rest of the trilogy, it's double edged. It repeatedly features high, acrobatic lifts and heroically daredevil virtuosity, but also elements of strain and fearfulness. You can't miss how one of the two lead ballerinas (on Thursday, Gillian Murphy) protects the other (Maria Kochetkova), twice, as if guarding a younger sister from horror; and you can't miss the element of peril around much of the ballet's bravura. No Shostakovich works have been choreographed more than his piano concertos their slow movements have also turned up in a couple of narrative ballets but it's the Ratmansky treatments that best reveal their inner worlds. (His "Concerto DSCH," to the second one, was made for City Ballet in 2008; though its surface is more dewily innocent, its young athletes belong to a specifically Soviet climate.) Yet, though Mr. Ratmansky is attuned to this music's nervous system, it's remarkable how often he veers away from its surface; some of the biggest lifts seem to have no musical peg. Seldom do we find the tight marriage of sound and movement of "Concerto DSCH." That's fine; the Balanchine Stravinsky ballets show no single kind of musicality either. (Christopher Wheeldon's "Mercurial Manoeuvres," made to the first piano concerto for City Ballet in 2000, is more neatly pinned to the details of the score, without deepening our appreciation of its spirit.) "Concerto No. 1" has always been physically exciting; renewed acquaintance reveals increasingly satisfying connections to Shostakovich here. More than any other of Mr. Ratmansky's Shostakovich works, "Concerto No. 1" deals in choreographic motifs. These, not meant to illustrate recurring figures in the music, seem to express aspects of the composer's coded thought. And they seem designed to go on resonating in our minds after the dance, as if posing questions. The ballet has barely begun when its first ballerina (Ms. Murphy) holds a formal attitude with the support of four men; each lets go in quick succession, leaving her balancing on point, perilously, for just a moment. But as the ballet ends, gender roles are suddenly reversed: In a rapid quartet, the two lead men (Cory Stearns and Daniil Simkin) are supported in, first, multiple pirouettes by their women, and then as the music ends in those same formal attitudes (on half to), with the women now their cavaliers. It's an emblem of heroic risk. Brilliant images occur throughout. As the final movement starts, the corps makes a momentous entrance: A column of six men each carrying a woman on his shoulder, her line outstretched but static, as if she were a missile advances slowly down the diagonal. As they pace to the beat, they make this both a funeral march and an image of huge historic tension. Other works this season that also grow with renewed acquaintance (in some cases, even after many years and many viewings) have been Frederick Ashton's "Monotones I and II," George Balanchine's "Valse Fantaisie," Paul Taylor's "Company B" and Twyla Tharp's "The Brahms Haydn Variations." Each watching of Mark Morris's "After You" shows further facets but they don't deepen it: It's ingeniously, elaborately bland. (The gentle layerings of its Hummel music, by contrast, become steadily more fascinating.) Dancers at all levels have made big advances. Jeffrey Cirio (his debut season) has proved himself an artist of brilliance and charm. Gabe Stone Shayer, with his large, open face, his much larger jump and his skill in playing with rhythm, has emerged as one of the company's happiest assets. (Both men shine in solos in "Company B.") Because Isabella Boylston, Herman Cornejo, Ms. Murphy and Mr. Stearns are established principals, it's tempting to take them for granted; but all of them are marvels of increasing versatility and each can make something heart tightening of a step or a phrase. Ms. Kochetkova, in her first season as a company member rather than a guest, is not an immediately knowable stage personality; but the eager audacity she and Mr. Simkin showed in "Concerto No. 1" was remarkable. Mr. Simkin is a peculiar set of contradictions: Often the way he spins and turns is so weightless as to be the wrong sort of facile. Still, as the Ratmansky proved, his dancing can have both bite and fun. James Whiteside, though not the company's most elegant male dancer, always takes to the stage with energy and purpose (and with a legible face); there are more stylish dancers who are less visible. Roman Zhurbin has been the company's best actor for some time; to see the fullness of his dancing in a couple of solo roles has been very welcome. I could mention many more. The repertory for the company's 2016 Metropolitan season would be tantalizing even if no dancers were announced; but they have been, and they make it doubly so.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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There is nothing surprising anymore about a sad clown. So many melancholy tales have been told about the tortured lives of comedians that the pertinent question about a new story is not whether the entertainer is miserable but why. In his deeply researched historical novel "He" which recounts the tumultuous life and triumphant career of , the slender half of the double act of Laurel and Hardy the Irish mystery and thriller writer John Connolly proposes some options. There's the long shadow of Charlie Chaplin, whose monumental success and undeniable genius torment Laurel, and the usual exploitation by Hollywood producers like the titan of silent comedy, Hal Roach. Then there's the amoral, demanding "Audience," always capitalized and often ominous. "The Audience will laugh at a cat being burned," one characteristically cynical line begins. "The Audience will laugh because others are laughing." Written in spare, fractured prose from the perspective of a narrator who seems to be reporting from inside Laurel's mind, this odd and ambitious book is so dense with show business detail that it may alienate nonfans. Even Laurel and Hardy lovers may be put off by its somber, experimental mood. Laurel, the British vaudevillian who successfully made the transition from the silent era to talking pictures, is the center of the story but his name is never mentioned. He is referred to only as "he," a self conscious flourish in a narrative preoccupied with the disconnect between public and private lives. The novel begins with, and continually returns to, the end of Laurel's life. His mind is diminishing as he chases "butterfly memories," which announce the subjective perspective of what follows. His partner, the American performer Oliver Hardy, comes off much better, a good friend whose loyalty provides Laurel's one emotional anchor in a life of transitory relationships.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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You've seen black holes in science fiction movies and in illustrator's impressions. But until the morning of April 10, you never saw what a black hole really looks like. And then there it was, the monstrous void at the middle of the galaxy Messier 87, staring back at you like the eye of Sauron. The story of how one astronomer, Katie Bouman, became the face of the quest to visualize the singularity, was a good yarn, too. NASA scientists compared Scott Kelly, the astronaut who spent 340 days on the space station, with his twin brother, Mark, on Earth. In orbit, Scott Kelly's body experienced a vast number of changes, including mutations in DNA and declines in some cognitive tests. Many of the changes reverted once he returned to Earth, although some did not. Some scientists deemed the risks manageable; others saw the findings as a cautionary tale a warning over whether long trips in space will ever be safe for humans. A space crime allegation was made for the first time Summer Worden filed for divorce in 2018 from Anne McClain, a NASA astronaut. This year while Ms. McClain was aboard the International Space Station, Ms. Worden accused her of identity theft and improper access of private financial records. Ms. McClain admitted to accessing Ms. Worden's bank account, but said she had always been responsible for keeping the couple's finances in order. The case is not yet decided. However it turns out, more criminal allegations and other legal disputes are bound to emerge as more humans and their economic activity move to low Earth orbit and beyond. As NASA said goodbye to the Opportunity rover this year, its other rover, Curiosity, detected unusual signals on the red planet's surface. A large spike of methane, a gas usually produced by living things on Earth, was detected in June. But just as scientists on Earth wondered if the signal was evidence of potential microbial life on the red planet, the gas was gone. If that wasn't puzzling enough, scientists said in November that they had detected varying amounts of oxygen, which was "confusing, but it's exciting," one said. While four new spacecraft could arrive at Mars next year, none will have instruments to study these gases. Want to buy a trip to the space station? Soon, you might be able to for at least 35,000 a night. You can also buy a 250,000 seat aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane that comes with a snazzy flightsuit. The target customer is obvious; only the wealthiest travelers will be able to afford the privilege of private spaceflight. Who gets to decide what happens in the commons beyond our planet is still an open question. One private company, SpaceX, launched 120 satellites all by itself this year, the first nodes in one of several proposed orbiting mega constellations that would beam internet service back to Earth. Astronomers fear that the night sky might never be the same. We got our first close ups from beyond Pluto
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The novel on which this movie is based, a slim thriller by the great American writer Charles Willeford, is in many ways typical of the author. It examines misogyny and murderous psychosis from so seemingly close a perspective as to make the reader queasy, if not downright upset. But the 1971 book contains something extra: an erudite satire of contemporary art, often expounded upon by an insufferable mansplainer. The mansplainer, in the book and this movie adaptation directed by Giuseppe Capotondi, is James Figueras, played as a looming, imposing figure by Claes Bang. First seen delivering a lecture cum con job to some museum tourists in Milan, he's soon summoned to the Lake Como estate of a rich art collector named Cassidy. He brings along Berenice, a plucky pickup (Elizabeth Debicki) who proves to be an impediment to the task Cassidy has in store for James. Cassidy has put up a reclusive, legendary artist at his estate and wants James to steal one of his paintings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Ronald C. Davidson, who oversaw one of the biggest advances in fusion energy research, attempting to replicate the power of the sun, died on May 19 at his home in Cranbury, N.J. He was 74. The cause was complications from pneumonia, said the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where Dr. Davidson was director from 1991 to 1996. Fusion is the process that powers the sun, generating energy through the merging of atoms, and, for decades, scientists have tried to reproduce that on earth. During Dr. Davidson's tenure, the Princeton lab made major advances toward that goal, studying ways to make the fusion self sustaining. In 1993, the laboratory's immense Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor began a series of runs using a mix of deuterium and tritium, two heavier forms of hydrogen. ("Tokamak" is an acronym of three Russian words that mean "toroidal magnetic chamber," referring to the doughnut shaped reactor that housed the ultrahot gases.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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For the Browns, Trying Everything May Finally Lead to Something None The Cleveland Browns tried just about everything from 2016 to 2019 in an effort to escape decades of failure: embracing analytics, rejecting analytics, emphasizing character, ignoring character, austere scrimping, lavish spending and sometimes attempting all of those tactics simultaneously. Not surprisingly, the rapid succession of 180 degree lurches in organizational philosophy did not make the Browns better. Until this season, that is. The Browns have a 4 1 record, and their balanced offense and fearsome pass rush have them poised to produce their first winning season since 2007 and reach the playoffs for the first time since 2002. The secret to the team's turnaround is that it is no longer seeking some secret method for turning things around. The most recent epoch of Browns futility began when their controlling owner, Jimmy Haslam, hired Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer after a 3 13 finish in 2015. His front office exploits for baseball's Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s were recounted in Michael Lewis's best seller "Moneyball" and fictionalized in the feature film of the same name. DePodesta is revered as one of the founding fathers of sports analytics: Alexander Hamilton as portrayed by Jonah Hill, a data driven maestro of the draft and trade markets renowned for turning short term sacrifices into long term dividends. DePodesta was hailed as the Browns' latest potential savior (there have been many), someone who could easily rebuild the roster by outwitting the fusty, anti intellectual N.F.L. establishment. Unfortunately, baseball and football are very different sports, and the Browns installed what looked like a shoddy version of "Moneyball" based less upon statistical research than book jacket blurbs and existential riddles: Saving is spending. Losing is winning. Failure is the ultimate success. For two years, DePodesta's regime engineered trades to acquire draft picks and traded draft picks for even more draft picks in what seemed like an effort to restock the Browns' nonexistent farm system. Meanwhile, the coach, Hue Jackson, like the middle manager of some forgotten regional sales branch, appeared to grow a little too comfortable in an environment where winning was almost discouraged. The Browns were 1 31 over two seasons, an anti accomplishment even by their standards, but the team's topsy turvy messaging made it hard to tell whether the losses were part of a counterintuitive plan. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Haslam, who had burned through three sets of coaches and general managers since purchasing the team in 2012, replaced a top DePodesta lieutenant, Sashi Brown, with a traditionalist general manager, John Dorsey, late in the 2017 season. Dorsey selected Baker Mayfield with the top pick in the 2018 draft, acquired Odell Beckham Jr. in a trade with the Giants, and made other moves that signaled a shift in the team's priorities from "win in some far flung future" to "win soon." Describing what happened next in a few sentences would be like trying to summarize the French Revolution on a cocktail napkin. After a rolling series of boardroom clashes, Jackson was fired, Dorsey gained greater control of football operations, DePodesta donned a phantom mask and disappeared into the rafters, and the inexperienced Freddie Kitchen rose from obscurity to become the Browns' offensive play caller midway through the 2018 season. Paul DePodesta is revered as one of the founding fathers of sports analytics. Kitchens's brief tenure unfolded like the sequence in a campus comedy where the lads of Alpha Kappa Chugga lock the dean in his closet and declare every week to be Greek Week. Having finished the 2018 season with a 5 2 hot streak and after earning a little too much preseason hype, the Browns played as though they expected to reach the playoffs through sheer talent and rebellious swagger. They went 6 10 instead, as Kitchens committed basic strategic blunders, Beckham and Myles Garrett got into on field altercations with opponents and Mayfield regressed at quarterback while publicly feuding with the local and national media. Few teams have ever allowed so little success to go so completely to their heads. Kitchens and Dorsey were fired at the end of the 2019 season, with DePodesta reappearing from a trap door beneath the stage to introduce yet another cast of characters, led by General Manager Andrew Berry and Coach Kevin Stefanski. Superficially, the latest leadership change looks like the result of another boardroom coup, with DePodesta ousting Dorsey's royalists and inserting inexperienced, analytics friendly functionaries with scanty resumes in their place. But the newcomers appear more committed to winning games than engaging in thought experiments: They acquired veteran talent in their first off season instead of using last year's "Animal House" shenanigans as justification for another "Moneyball" themed roster purge. Analytics now operate under the hood for the Browns instead of flapping like a flag mounted from the car's antenna. It's tempting to interpret the Browns' current success as a triumph for DePodesta's initial vision, though it would also be rather sad to interpret four early season wins after four years of upheaval as any sort of "triumph." More accurately, the Browns have finally built a quality roster despite themselves, with some key pieces arriving during the first "Moneyball" dynasty (Garrett, wide receiver Jarvis Landry), many during the Dorsey rebellion (Mayfield, Beckham, running backs Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt) and a few during the current Grand Reformation (offensive lineman Jack Conklin, tight end Austin Hooper). The 2020 Browns are enjoying success because they are a talented team that executes fundamentally sound game plans each week instead of prematurely boasting of their pending greatness or adhering to a franchise building paradigm that sounds suspiciously like a multilevel marketing scheme. It's a simple formula that won't inspire any intellectual movements or feature films. But it's working, at least for now.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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TWO SISTERS A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad By Translated by Sean Kinsella. 419 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. 28. 's 2003 book, "The Bookseller of Kabul," sold more than a million copies and landed the author in court. In the book, Seierstad portrays the inner workings of an Afghan family with whom she lived for several months: the patriarch's acquisition of a second wife, the perils of flirting in a conservative society, the tyrannical behavior of men and the suffering of women. The patriarch the bookseller of the title claimed that Seierstad misrepresented him as a brute, violated the sanctity of his household and jeopardized his family's lives. "Surely it is the Afghan culture that puts these young women at risk," Seierstad said at the time. One of the bookseller's wives sued Seierstad for invasion of privacy, though she was eventually cleared of the charges. These were the days after Sept. 11, during the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic world was suddenly something that needed to be penetrated and understood. Two civilizations had clashed, and everyone was confused. But for a long time, only one bore the burden of having to explain itself, and of watching itself be explained. Fifteen years later, the wars begun after 9/11 continue in spectacular and gruesome new forms. The books about them have also changed, at least a little. In her new book, "Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad," Seierstad, the author of several other works, including "One of Us," about the 2011 massacre of dozens of Norwegians by a far right terrorist, again takes on conservative Islamic culture, war zones and fathers. But this time the mystery she's exploring is the appeal for Muslims of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. Seierstad wants to know: Why did thousands of Europeans leave their homes in the West to join ISIS in Syria? As in "Bookseller," the main character in "Two Sisters" is the patriarch of a large family: Sadiq Juma, who moved his wife and children (eventually he had five) to Norway from Hargeisa, Somaliland, after fighting in the Somali civil war. In Norway he found work in a Coca Cola warehouse, but when the book opens he is injured and on sick leave, and the family is being supported by NAV, the Norwegian welfare authority. Sadiq has embraced his Norwegian life, whereas his wife, Sara, didn't want to learn the language. She speaks Somali with her children, and as the years pass she has fretted about them becoming "too Norwegian," particularly their son Ismael. He was more rebellious than her daughters, Ayan and Leila, who "asked for permission for everything." Then, in October 2013, the two girls disappear. A farewell email arrives from an unknown location in Sweden: "Muslims are under attack from all quarters, and we need to do something," the sisters write. They apologize for hurting their parents but promise to make it up to them in the afterlife. Hours later, another email follows, this time from Adana, Turkey, where the girls are having their last meal in Europe, waiting for someone to bring them to the war zone: They suggest that their family read "Defense of Muslim Lands: The First Obligation After Iman," by Dr. Abdullah Azzam, who inspired Osama bin Laden to finance the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and is known as the "father of modern jihadism." Sadiq immediately flies to Turkey to intercept his daughters. He's too late. At the Syrian border, parents from Kuwait, Qatar and Britain have come looking: "Hunched figures. Desperation in their eyes." A Turkish taxi driver connects Sadiq to a Syrian smuggler, who arranges his trip across the border to the town of Atmeh. Sadiq's travails in Syria including 12 days in a bloody, excrement filled ISIS prison are among the most well executed scenes in the book. "What sort of hell is this?" a Syrian cellmate asks before he is beheaded. Meanwhile, Sadiq's daughters, who have been taken in by ISIS in a nearby town, send messages to Ismael back in Norway complaining about their father's pestering of ISIS leaders to release them and bragging about "not having to lift a finger" for "a house, water, electricity, the lot!!!" Ayan and Leila did not respond to Seierstad's requests to speak to her for this book. As a substitute for firsthand interviews, she quotes the girls' surreal internet chat speak. "So we're probably never going to see each other again?" Ismael says, deploying a crying emoji. "Don't ever think that, we always have Skype, haha," Leila replies. Ismael descends into depression, and the girls become meaner. "Sad to see my sisters offering their bodies to retards fighting to get killed, otherwise it's all good," Ismael writes. "HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA better to die than to live life like a loser," Ayan writes back. The sisters figure in the family's life as disembodied aggro texters. They speak in the language of the Facebook update, and unsurprisingly it makes everyone else feel awful. "They had chosen a life without him," Sadiq thinks. "They were making pancakes in Raqqa." Without Ayan and Leila's testimony, "Two Sisters" is less a portrait of why two European women joined ISIS than one of those they left behind. Even without the sisters' voices, the passages in which Seierstad attempts to piece together how the girls were radicalized are absorbing. As the oldest and her father's favorite, Ayan dominates the account. When she was 13, she and her friends wore Kiss T shirts and skinny jeans. Her favorite author was Knut Hamsun. Ayan is herself a good writer, with an impressive imagination; in a short story she wrote for school, she conjures the interior life of an American soldier in Vietnam: "We are on night patrol doing a recon. Those sly gooks could be hiding just about anywhere." The soldier recalls taking part in massacres in which women and children were coated with oil and set on fire. "How can the sky be so beautiful when the world is so sickening?" Ayan writes. From an early age, she was a feminist, "tough and self confident," and "indignant at the oppression of women, the focus on body image." She thought Islam sometimes oppressed women, too. Uncovering the truth. Over several months, The New York Times pieced together the details of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State. Here are the key findings from the investigation: The U.S. military carried out the attack. Task Force 9, the secretive special operations unit in charge of ground operations in Syria, called in the attack. The strike began when an F 15E attack jet hit Baghuz with a 500 pound bomb. Five minutes later, the F 15E dropped two 2,000 pound bombs. The death toll was downplayed. The U.S. Central Command recently acknowledged that 80 people, including civilians, were killed in the airstrike. Though the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials, regulations for investigating the potential crime were not followed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. The Defense Department's independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. American led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day described finding piles of dead women and children. In the days following the bombing, coalition forces overran the site, which was quickly bulldozed. Then came three crucial developments: Ayan's mother hired a Quran teacher for her brood, who held radical views; Ayan discovered an organization called Islam Net, which she joined for the religiosity as much as for the cute boys; and she and her friends met a group of charismatic thugs who longed for jihad abroad. Seierstad portrays Islam Net, inspired by Saudi Salafism, as the crucial catalyst for the girls' initial radicalization; its leaders demand that Ayan devote more time to its activities, prying her from the grasp of her advanced Norwegian high school. The group preaches peace to non Muslims they hope to convert, but the first Islam Net gathering in Norway is devoted to a discussion of how the American government and the Jews planned the Sept. 11 attacks. Sept. 11, and the subsequent embrace of "us vs. them" rhetoric by the United States, come up often in "Two Sisters." Muslims in Norway feel threatened by the anti Islamic rhetoric of the war on terror, lumped together into one inherently suspect group. Teenagers "stuffed all their setbacks and growing pains in the same bag: It's because I'm a Muslim," Seierstad writes. Then came the war in Syria, an opportunity for self definition: "Why be a second class Norwegian when you can be a first class Muslim?" Muslims, Ayan and Leila agreed, "needed some form of defense." Seierstad, perhaps still sensitive after the trials of "Bookseller," admits in an extensive reporter's note that she allowed Sadiq and Sara to read "Two Sisters" before publication. Her deference to Sadiq might be one reason we get few details regarding what he and Sara were like as parents. And although much of the book takes place in Norway, I didn't emerge with a vivid sense of why the girls rejected it. Seierstad shows the Norwegian teachers struggling with the girls' lifestyle choices wearing the niqab in school, leaving in the middle of class for prayers but she never pulls back and describes Norway in her own words, as if it, too, might be as foreign a place for the reader as the Islamic world. "If there is one thing I have learned, it is that respect, tolerance, equality, solidarity and unity are important values in Norwegian society," one of Ayan's Muslim friends says. "But is it respectful when people ascribe opinions to me and associate me with something criminal?" These girls had philosophical questions about the state of the world, and about their own souls. Seierstad quotes Chekhov: "Either you must know why you live, or everything is trivial, not worth a straw." As monstrous as it was, the Islamic State gave these girls a reason for living. I'm not sure we understand yet why secular societies often do not.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Jimmy Kimmel marked the exact midpoint of President Trump's term on Monday with a special, satirical edition of his show, "Intermission Accomplished: A Halftime Tribute to Trump." "We are here tonight to celebrate the midway mark of Donald Trump's first term in office," Kimmel said. "Because, let's be honest, this is a man who is far too humble to celebrate himself." He proceeded to rattle off a series of "accomplishments" that he said Trump had achieved in his first 730 days in office. "Quick question for those of you here in our studio audience: Did any of you get attacked by an MS 13 caravan on your way here to the show tonight? No? And guess why because of Donald Jennifer Trump. This man knows how to get things done." JIMMY KIMMEL "The news media says Donald Trump hasn't achieved anything, and that is just plain wrong. And I can prove that it's wrong with three words: the Space Force. That's right, the U.S. Space Force. I have no idea what it is, but I love it. And that's not all he's done. The list of his accomplishments are endless. More than 6,000 tweets in office at least half of those with no misspellings at all! More than 100 days on the golf course. Keeping tabs on the environment. And let's not forget the election itself. Donald Trump got 62 million votes! Second most of any presidential candidate in 2016." JIMMY KIMMEL Vice President Mike Pence quoted from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a TV interview on Sunday as he argued for Mr. Trump's proposed border wall. Pence used a King quote that, he said, advocated driving change through the legislative process: "Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy." Stephen Colbert seemed O.K. with the quote, but he said it might backfire to mention King and Trump in the same breath. "Mike, are you sure you want us to judge Trump on the content of his character? He puts a lot of effort into the color of his skin. Whatever that really is." STEPHEN COLBERT Seth Meyers noted that Trump and Pence made an unannounced visit to the national King memorial in Washington in observation of the holiday on Monday, but that they spent only two minutes there. "According to the White House press pool, President Trump spent approximately two minutes at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial today before returning to the White House. And it's not a good look when you give Martin Luther King the same amount of time you gave Stormy Daniels." SETH MEYERS "You gotta be careful out there. If you start feeling symptoms of confusion or memory loss, you're either suffering from hypothermia or you're Rudy Giuliani." JIMMY FALLON, commenting on the winter storm that hit New York City over the weekend "Today is Day 31 of the government shutdown. Now that the shutdown is over 30, Democrats are hoping Trump will start to lose interest." JIMMY FALLON "Speaker Pelosi rejected the deal before the president even announced it. She said no before Trump even asked a move known in Washington as 'the Melania.'" STEPHEN COLBERT, discussing the proposed border wall Seth Meyers examined the state of the shutdown negotiations.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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A lawyer for Lil Wayne, Howard Srebnick, acknowledged in a statement that the rapper was charged with possessing the gold plated handgun, but raised questions about the Second Amendment rights of felons. "There is no allegation that he ever fired it, brandished it, used it or threatened to use it," Srebnick said of the gun. "There is no allegation that he is a dangerous person. The charge is that because he was convicted of a felony in the past, he is prohibited from possessing a firearm." He added: "Although the Supreme Court has not yet decided the constitutional question, Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently wrote an appellate dissenting opinion in which she stated that 'Absent evidence that he either belongs to a dangerous category or bears individual markers of risk, permanently disqualifying a felon from possessing a gun violates the Second Amendment.'" Lil Wayne, a New Orleans native who has been famous since he was a young teenager, is widely considered to be among the most influential rappers of all time, based on more than a dozen albums and many more mixtapes and guest appearances. His most recent LP, "Funeral," opened at No. 1 on the Billboard chart in February, becoming his fifth title to reach the top spot. He is also the author of a prison memoir, "Gone 'Til November: A Journal of Rikers Island," released in 2016. The rapper recently appeared, ahead of the election, alongside President Trump in Florida, and received some backlash from fans for vouching for the work the administration had done in the Black community. "He listened to what we had to say today and assured he will and can get it done," Lil Wayne tweeted after the meeting.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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You'll sense the retro vibe even before entering this 53 room boutique property that opened in the summer of 2015 in the former Home Savings Bank building, adding a restaurant later that year. A stylish restoration by the Los Angeles based design firm Commune preserved many of the midcentury structure's architectural features, including the zany gold and white striped facade. The lobby's gorgeous interiors look plucked from a set of "Mad Men," with patterned red and cream carpeting and curved cognac leather couches illuminated by golden pendant lamps. Beyond the cool aesthetics, this local focused property stands out for its dedication to all things made in North Carolina, from breakfast offerings to bedding textiles. At the epicenter of downtown Durham, the property is a convenient base in this transitional neighborhood, which has undergone a stunning revitalization in recent years. Short term street parking is plentiful, and there's a nearby municipal lot. More convenient (and often, more economical) is valet parking ( 14 overnight). A long hallway carpeted in colorful geometric patterns led to my deluxe king, the basic category. The fifth floor room was spacious and bright, with plush indigo carpeting and a floor to ceiling window. Along one wall was a long wooden desk with a turquoise ceramic lamp and a chair clad in nubby red fabric. Other eye catching accents ranged from the heavy mustard hued drapes and cherry red bedside tables to an abstract art print above the bed. There was plenty of storage space between wall hooks and a wood paneled closet. But best of all was the bed itself, which had a supremely comfortable pillowtop mattress and crisp white sheets topped with a handmade patchwork denim quilt from Raleigh Denim.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The government is back. Government data, however, will have to wait awhile. The partial government shutdown left forecasters, investors and policymakers without much of the data they rely on just as concerns were mounting that the United States' decade long economic expansion could be nearing its end. Now that the monthlong shutdown is over, it will take government statisticians time to collect and analyze delayed figures for retail sales, manufacturing, housing and other parts of the economy. On Monday, the Commerce Department said it would not be able to release an estimate of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter that had been scheduled for Wednesday. That means that when officials gather Tuesday and Wednesday for a meeting of the Federal Reserve's policymaking group, the Federal Open Market Committee, they will do so without access to much of the information they usually have. The timing is awkward: Fed officials have emphasized in recent months that with the economy's direction uncertain, they will be paying particularly close attention to the latest data when making decisions on interest rates and related matters. "The F.O.M.C. have told us that policy has become increasingly data dependent, but what data?" said Joel Prakken, chief United States economist for Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm. In practice, the central bank had already indicated that it did not plan to raise rates at this week's meeting. But it isn't just the Fed that is struggling with the lack of government reports. Economists, investors and business leaders have all been left without a clear view of the economy. "We're missing a lot of key releases at a time when the economy appears to be slowing," said Nancy Vanden Houten, senior economist for Oxford Economics. "We're missing data on retail sales at a time when it would be great to see if the shutdown is having an impact on consumer spending. We're not getting trade data at a time when we're in a trade conflict with China." READ MORE: What's Happening in the Economy? Here's a Guide to the Data The shutdown, which idled hundreds of thousands of federal workers and disrupted operations across the country, will also have a direct effect on the economy. The Congressional Budget Office on Monday estimated the economic cost at 11 billion, although much of that will eventually be recovered as operations resume. Economists haven't been flying completely blind. The Labor Department was unaffected by the shutdown, which meant that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was able to collect and release inflation, unemployment and hiring estimates as usual. The monthly jobs report, arguably the most closely watched indicator each month, will come out Friday as planned. And economists still had access to privately collected statistics on housing, consumer sentiment and other topics. Still, the pause in funding mostly shuttered the Commerce Department, which houses the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Census Bureau. That resulted in the delay of several closely watched reports. Last week, the Conference Board published its index of leading indicators meant to be a sort of early warning system for downturns in the economy without three of its usual 10 components. It isn't clear how long it will take government releases to get back on schedule. The answer will probably vary: Data on building permits, for example, is collected by local officials and submitted to the Census Bureau; as a result, the government should be able to gather the information and produce estimates relatively quickly. Retail sales figures, however, are based on a monthly survey that wasn't conducted during the shutdown. 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. The trickiest report is also arguably the most important: gross domestic product. The broadest measure of goods and services produced in the economy, G.D.P. is based on more than a dozen indicators, including several of the reports that were delayed. That means the government won't be able to produce its estimate until nearly all the other data has been collected. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Monday it would not release G.D.P. data this week and would also delay three other reports scheduled for this week and next, including statistics on consumer spending and international trade. The agency said it was consulting with the Census Bureau and other agencies and could not "say anything definitive about release dates" at this time. It is possible the Commerce Department could end up skipping the initial estimate of G.D.P. and wait until late February, when it would ordinarily release the first of two revised estimates. That's what happened after the 1995 96 shutdown, the previous record holder for the longest shutdown. The greater risk is that the delays in data collection could hurt the quality of the statistics once they are produced. Government surveys are meant to be conducted the same way, at the same time each month, to ensure that the data are consistent over time. Changes can raise the risk of errors, said Maurine Haver, president of Haver Analytics, a data provider. "Surveys just simply aren't being done, and in some cases will never be replicated," Ms. Haver said. Economists said the shutdown had most likely ended before serious damage was done. Most major releases will be delayed by weeks, not months. Still, disruptions like these could have longer run consequences for the confidence people have in government statistics, said Tara Sinclair, an economics professor at George Washington University. "The U.S. is really considered the gold standard in data for the rest of the world, and we're kind of falling down on our job here," she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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You know you're not in New York anymore when a restaurant website has a page with the line "What is a delicatessen?" up top. Manhattan may be losing one of its top pastrami palaces when the Carnegie Deli closes, but Hong Kong recently welcomed Morty's, which opened in April in the bustling Central district, on the ground floor of Jardine House. The office tower is home to mostly lawyers, financiers and dentists, a clientele that in New York would probably be familiar with lox, bagels, smoked meats and the like. But this is Asia. A Chinese businessman, standing in a long weekday lunch line recently, said he had not visited New York but had become a regular at Morty's. He ordered the Reuben. Why? He had seen one on "Seinfeld" and thought it looked good.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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In HBO's spirited fantasy epic "His Dark Materials," Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen ), a runaway girl with a secret destiny, comes into possession of an alethiometer , a golden clockwork gizmo with the power to answer any question. One mystery, however, still eludes her. "I don't think I understand any grown ups at all," she says. "His Dark Materials," beginning Monday and based on the religiously skeptical trilogy by Philip Pullman , is a story about witches and giant polar bears, magic (or quasi magic) dust and actual spirit animals. But above all, it is a story about parallel worlds, alike and yet wildly different, separated by an imperceptible barrier: the worlds of childhood and adulthood. The story opens at Oxford, but not our Oxford. In the "Materials" world a kind of steampunk melange both more and less technologically advanced than our own the cathedral like university is both hugely powerful and closely overseen by the Magisterium, a repressive theocracy with not a few similarities to the Roman Catholic Church. Lyra, raised as a foundling by the scholars, has the run of the school, blissfully ignorant of the political religious infighting around her, until the man she knows as her uncle Asriel (James McAvoy ), turns up claiming the stunning and heretical discovery of another universe. The ensuing scandal, and a conspiracy involving the abduction of children, sends Lyra on a hero's quest to the frozen north, chased by the blasphemy police.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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This four bedroom, four and a half bath condominium is on the 30th floor of the Concourse Skyline, a multi tower, mixed use development on Singapore's southeastern waterfront. The 2,174 square foot apartment overlooks many of the city nation's signature attractions, including the Singapore Flyer Ferris wheel, the Singapore Sports Hub and the Gardens by the Bay. Completed in 2014 in Singapore's District 7 an area now being revitalized, with prewar buildings being renovated or replaced by new developments the Concourse Skyline is close to museums, restaurants, schools and the island's business district. "It's quite a nice area, a mix of old and new," said Huan Mei Han, the head of research for List Sotheby's International Realty Singapore, which has the listing. The apartment is divided into three spaces, with two bedrooms at one end, common spaces in the center and two bedrooms on the opposite side. The open living and dining rooms have marble tile floors and a wall of glass with sliding doors that open to a spacious balcony overlooking Marina Bay. The kitchen, with off white counters and De Dietrich appliances, is off the dining room, along with an adjacent half bath. The Concourse Skyline development, completed in 2014, has 360 units, including six penthouses. Down a small hallway past the kitchen, two bedrooms have large windows. One has a walk in closet and an en suite bathroom with panoramic views of a different swath of the city. The other bedroom uses a hall bathroom. A small hallway leads to the other living area, with a smaller bedroom, bathroom and study, as well as the master suite with an adjacent study. The development has 360 units, including six penthouses. The development's amenities include a 164 foot pool, a Jacuzzi, wellness facilities, meditation deck and sauna, green open spaces with barbecue grills, and a pond on one of the rooftops. The development also has a covered bridge to the Nicoll Highway Mass Rapid Transportation station. Singapore Changi airport is about 25 minutes by car. The sovereign city nation of Singapore has a highly diverse population of about 5.6 million residents and one of the world's highest rates of homeownership, due largely to a robust public housing program that allows residents to own homes subsidized by the government. Historically, government steering has kept the housing market stable, said Ismail Gafoor, the chief executive of PropNex Realty, Singapore's largest private real estate company. Following the global financial crisis of 2008, for example, prices dropped by about 30 to 40 percent before rebounding within a year, Mr. Gafoor said, after the government boosted demand for housing by incentivizing immigration for skilled workers. Singapore's population grew from roughly 4.2 million in 2005 to 5.5 million in 2015. An increase in the supply of public housing has also resulted in falling prices in that market. In the private sector, prices have been rising. Only about 15 to 20 percent of Singapore's housing stock is private, said Kent Soo, an agent with Real Center International Private Limited, a Singapore agency. Mr. Soo said private sector prices have been rising since 2017, when many buyers who had been waiting to react to government measures implemented in 2013 including a mandated reduction in debt decided to enter the market. In 2018, the market cooled when the government raised the rate of stamp duties that most foreigners, and in some cases locals, pay on residential real estate. (Buyers from the U.S. and several other nations were exempted.) The private housing market in Singapore is now characterized by two trends: reduced volume, due in part to government efforts to maintain sustainable price growth, and a slight rise in prices caused by an uptick in big ticket luxury transactions. Ms. Han said several new superluxury penthouses sold this year, raising the property price index. Geographically, Singapore's property market is divided into three general regions: the Core Central Region, which has the highest caliber and highest priced properties; the Rest Of Central region, which surrounds the core; and the Outside Central Region, where prices are typically lower. Agents also mentioned Sentosa, a neighboring island with luxury properties, where foreigners can buy landed properties without restrictions. However, Mr. Soo said Sentosa has been struggling to attract buyers, and prices have fallen there because people tend to prefer the Core Central Region. In the Core Central Region, a two bedroom, 1,000 square foot apartment might cost 3 million to 3.5 million Singapore dollars ( 2.2 million to 2.5 million), while in the Outside Central Region, prices for a similar two bedroom typically range between 1 million to 1.5 million Singapore dollars ( 725,000 to 1.1 million), Mr. Gafoor said. Ms. Han said that newer luxury condominiums start at 5 million Singapore dollars ( 3.6 million), or around 3,000 Singapore dollars ( 2,200) per square foot. Ms. Han said that based on government statistics, about 20 percent of the buyers of residential properties in the Core Central Region are foreign. About 65 percent of the buyers of that area's luxury offerings are legal permanent residents of Singapore from other countries. As part of its effort to regulate the real estate market, and because of its small surface area, Singapore imposes certain restrictions on foreign buyers. For private residences, "Foreigners are permitted to purchase an apartment or condominium units in and around the city, or apartments and houses at Sentosa Cove. For other properties, for example detached houses, foreigners need to first obtain approval from the Land Dealings Approval Unit before making their purchase," said Peen Fung Lim, a director of Yuen Law LLC, a Singapore law firm, via email. The process typically takes between several weeks and several months, he said. Denny Lin, the legal general manager with Apex Law, a Singapore firm, said being a permanent resident and making an economic contribution to Singapore can help one's chances of approval, which is administered on a "case by case" basis. There are two modes of owning residential property in Singapore: Some homes are purchased in perpetuity, with a freehold title. The other option is leasehold, whereby properties are typically leased for either 99 or 999 years. A longer lease term fetches a higher price, Mr. Lim added.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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PARIS What does Google know about its users and how does it know it? European privacy regulators on Tuesday warned the company to clarify those issues or risk fines or other penalties by early next year. In a letter to Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, 27 European data protection agencies asked the company to modify its global privacy policy that governs dozens of Google online services including the flagship search engine, Android mobile phone apps and YouTube videos so that users have a clearer understanding of what personal data is being collected and can better control how that information is shared with advertisers. Along with other Internet companies like Facebook and Microsoft, Google collects personal data, like the sex and age of users and their Web browsing histories, in order to tailor their services to individual users and also to sell ads. When Google introduced the privacy policy last winter, it described it as a way to streamline its use of personal data across a range of services that were each previously covered by separate privacy guidelines. And in keeping with European privacy law, Google said it was collecting the data only if users "opted in." But opting in essentially became a requirement of using each of the services, by clicking the "I Agree" button before using the service for the first time, after the new policy went into effect. Analysts say the impact on Google's business of accepting the regulators' recommendations depends on whether customers readily accept having to opt into a more detailed privacy policy. If large numbers of users opt out, Google's advertising revenue would suffer. European privacy regulators had expressed concern last winter about the new procedures and had asked Google to delay implementing them. After the company declined, the European Commission asked France's privacy agency to take the lead on a legal analysis, which resulted in the warning letter Tuesday to Mr. Page. The privacy regulators said Google provided users with incomplete disclosure about its processing and storage of the data, as well as insufficient control over how information from different Google services is blended to build detailed personal profiles. Google also makes it too cumbersome for users to block the collection of these data, the regulators said. "The new privacy policy allows an unprecedented combination of data across different Google services," Isabelle Falque Pierrotin, chairwoman of the French data protection authority, said at a news conference in Paris. "We are not opposed to this, in principle, but the data could be employed in ways that the user is not aware of." Ms. Falque Pierrotin, whose agency, called CNIL, conducted an investigation of the policy change on behalf of the other European Union data protection authorities, said she would give Google "three to four months" to make changes. If the company refuses, she and other officials said, the data protection authorities might take legal action or impose fines. Google said it was reviewing the letter and an accompanying report from the data protection authorities, but added that it was confident that the new policy respected European Union law. "Our new privacy policy demonstrates our longstanding commitment to protecting our users' information and creating great products," Peter Fleischer, the Google global privacy counsel, said in a statement. The letter to Mr. Page is only the latest addition to a growing list of regulatory headaches for Google. Antitrust officials at the European Commission are investigating whether Google has used its search engine to favor its own services and through preferential rankings to put competitors at a disadvantage. A similar inquiry is under way at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. David Vladeck, the F.T.C.'s director of consumer protection, met last week in Brussels with Ms. Falque Pierrotin, said Cecelia Prewett, an F.T.C. spokeswoman. She declined to divulge what they discussed. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. On privacy, Google has been under growing scrutiny since it acknowledged in 2010 that it had collected private data on individuals when it took photographs for its Street View mapping feature. Regulators in several countries, including the United States and France, have fined Google in connection with this practice; criminal and civil investigations are still open in Germany. "There's a collective concern being expressed by different regulatory agencies in many parts of the world about the use of information online," said Joel Reidenberg, director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University in New York. "As the trend goes this way, we can expect to see more of these kinds of concerns expressed and a decreasing hesitancy about taking action." While European Union lawmakers are working on an overhaul of the bloc's data protection rules, with an eye toward updating them for the borderless era of the Internet, enforcement remains a matter for national regulators. In France, CNIL has the power to fine companies as much as EUR300,000, or about 390,000, for privacy breaches. In some countries, data protection agencies can bring criminal complaints; in others, it cannot. Given this fragmentation, analysts said it was striking that the national regulators, acting at the request of an advisory panel created by the European Commission, had come together to issue a joint letter to Google. "On the one hand, this is the first time all the European data protection agencies have acted together as a group to tell a company that its actions are unacceptable," Mr. Reidenberg said. "On the other hand, there is a bit of a mixed message, because they are refraining from taking any immediate action." Coordinating such regulations and enforcement across continents is even more difficult, especially when cultural differences intrude, like in the perceived greater attachment to privacy in Europe than in, say, the United States. But regulators and Internet companies say greater alignment is desirable at a time when digital communications zip across borders and companies like Google operate on an ever more global scale. Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the European Commission's data protection panel, said that regulators in Canada and some Asian countries had participated in the investigation, in an effort to give the inquiry an intercontinental scope. He and Ms. Falque Pierrotin said the European regulators had also consulted with the F.T.C., though the U.S. agency did not sign the letter to Mr. Page. In the letter, the European officials said Google's new policy allowed the company to "combine almost any data from any service for any purpose." The regulators asked Google to give consumers more visibility over how their data is collected, used and combined, saying one possibility might be to create "interactive online presentations." The regulators also chided Google for failing to specify how long it kept certain kinds of data, and urged the company to make it easier for users to "opt out" if they did not want their information gathered. The regulators also said Google did not distinguish between data of different levels of sensitivity, saying the company attached the same importance to credit card numbers or the contents of a search query, for example. And they said so called passive users of Google services that is, those who use a Google feature embedded in a third party Web site often are provided with no information on Google's data policies.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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In a recent interview in their offices in Los Angeles, Markus and McFeely discussed the many choices and possibilities of "Endgame," the roads not taken and the decisions behind who lived and who died. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Read our review of "Avengers: Endgame." Check out all the superhero makeovers. Catch up on all the M.C.U. movies in two minutes. How did you decide where the major events of "Infinity War" and "Endgame" would fall? CHRISTOPHER MARKUS The biggest point was probably the Snap. And we realized fairly early on that if we didn't do it at the end of the first movie, the first movie wasn't going to have an end. And if we did it too early in the first movie, it would be a bit of an anticlimax after you've killed half the universe to have them stumbling around for half an hour. STEPHEN McFEELY Another big plot point is when everyone comes back. So the question is, is it early in the second movie? Late in the second movie? You notice the players left on the board are the O.G. Avengers Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye , and let's give them their due. It meant that we were likely going to bring people back late. So that if you were a big fan of Doctor Strange or Black Panther or Bucky the Winter Soldier or Sam the Falcon , you're only going to get a little brief window on them. It can't be all things to all people. "Endgame" sort of tricks you by having the heroes kill Thanos almost immediately, only to discover it doesn't solve anything. Why was that important? McFEELY We always had this problem. The guy has the ultimate weapon. He can see it coming. It's ridiculous. We were just banging our heads for weeks, and at some point, the executive producer Trinh Tran went, "Can't we just kill him?" And we all went, "What happens if you just kill him? Why would you kill him? Why would he let you kill him?" MARKUS It reinforced Thanos's agenda. He was done. Not to make him too Christ like, but it was like, "If I've got to die, I can die now." There's a lot of bleakness and despair for roughly the first hour of the movie. Did that feel like a risk for a big event picture? MARKUS It felt less risky once I saw the reaction to "Infinity War." You never know how you're going to hit people, emotionally. We've been sitting with these events for years. We no longer have an emotional reaction. And then you see people crying in the theater. We've got to honor that or it's going to feel like we're just jerking them around. McFEELY It was the part in test screenings where people were most uncomfortable. Because you are wallowing to a degree. There doesn't seem to be any hope. In the end of Act II for most superhero movies, maybe they lose for five minutes. Here it's for five years. That seemed important. And that theme of loss is continued when Scott Lang visits a memorial to the dead in San Francisco. McFEELY We used to have beats in the script where there are those in every city. Millions of names. MARKUS It's that sense of collective trauma and the fact that if you weren't killed, you wake up the next day the trauma happened and I'm still here. How do we deal with this? That was the Stan Lee trick. Where's the anxiety coming from? Now that they have Power X. How did you start to determine the trajectories for the heroes in "Endgame"? McFEELY Chris and I wrote a master document while we were shooting "Civil War," and one of the things we were interested in exploring is, remember the What If comics? Well, this is our what if. If you lost, Thor becomes fat. Natasha becomes a shut in. Steve becomes depressed. Tony gets on with his life. Hulk is a superhero. MARKUS Clint becomes a murdering maniac. When we were spitballing for "Endgame," we started with, Thor's on a mission of vengeance. And then we were like, he was on a mission of vengeance in the last movie. This is all this guy ever does! And fails, all the time. Let's drive him into a wall and see what happens. McFEELY He just got drunk and fat. Though Ant Man didn't participate in "Infinity War," we saw how the Snap affected him in the tag for "Ant Man and the Wasp." How did you decide to pay this off in "Endgame"? McFEELY In late 2015 they say, you're writing the 19th movie "Infinity War" and the 22nd movie. So we chose to make lemonade. And that was a big moment we figured out we can withhold Ant Man because he's in his own movie. And their movie is not affected until the tag, and that just gives us a place to go in "Endgame" . You can do this when you're planning ahead this much. The tone is all weird, right? Because that's a light, fun movie and then we just kill everybody in the tag. Hawkeye took arguably the darkest turn of any hero in this series. McFEELY He's a good example of people who had much stronger stories after the Snap. What was the story to tell with Hawkeye in the first movie that was different than anybody else's? Leaving his family to go fight again? Yeah, he did that in "Civil War." The hope is that he's killing bad people. MARKUS There was a time where we contemplated having that archery scene in the first movie, after the Snap. You snap, and then you pop up in Clint's farm what are we watching? and that's the first indication it had a wider effect. But he literally had not been in the movie prior to that point. It's cool, but it's going to blunt the brutality of what Thanos did. McFEELY Joe Russo said we'll put that up front in the second one. Where did the idea for the time travel story line come from? McFEELY Kevin Feige at one point said, I would like to use the Time Stone, or use time as an element. It let us spend a few weeks seeing what's the kookiest thing we could do with time and not break the movie. MARKUS We all sat there going, really? We're going to do time travel? It was only when we were looking at who we had available, character wise; we hadn't used Ant Man yet. And there really is, in people's theory of the Quantum Realm, a time thing in the M.C.U., right now, available to us, with a character we haven't used yet. We have a loophole that's not cheating. It's crucial to your film that in your formulation of time travel, changes to the past don't alter our present. How did you decide this? MARKUS We looked at a lot of time travel stories and went, it doesn't work that way. McFEELY It was by necessity. If you have six MacGuffins and every time you go back it changes something, you've got Biff's casino, exponentially. So we just couldn't do that. We had physicists come in more than one who said, basically, "Back to the Future" is wrong . MARKUS Basically said what the Hulk says in that scene, which is, if you go to the past, then the present becomes your past and the past becomes your future. So there's absolutely no reason it would change. Did you try any other approaches to the time travel story? McFEELY In the first draft, we didn't go back to the original "Avengers" movie. We went back to Asgard. But there's a moment in the M.C.U., if you're paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault. In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him. MARKUS Thor had long scenes with Natalie Portman. And Morag the planet where Peter Quill finds the Orb was hugely complicated. McFEELY It was underwater! That was clever but it was just too big a set piece. What that didn't do is allow for Thanos and his daughters to get on the trail at the right moment. So we went back to when Peter Quill was there. And we realized that when you can punch Quill in the face, it's hilarious. I still think it's hilarious. MARKUS There were entirely other trips taken. They went to the Triskelion at one point to get the Tesseract , and then somebody was going to get into a car and drive to Doctor Strange's house. McFEELY Just saying it out loud, it's like, what are we doing? MARKUS It was when we were trying to avoid going to "Avengers" because it seemed pander y. McFEELY We're not always right. MARKUS The obvious ones seemed so obvious that it's too obvious. McFEELY Eventually, Joe Russo went, why are we going to this movie when we can go to "Avengers?" Let's make it work. Were there scenes you wrote for this sequence that didn't make it into the film? McFEELY It didn't play well, but we had a scene in a trench where, for reasons, the battle got paused for about three minutes and now there's 18 people all going, "What are we going to do?" "I'm going to do this." "I'm going to do this." Just bouncing around this completely fake, fraudulent scene. When you have that many people, it invariably is, one line, one line, one line. And that's not a natural conversation. MARKUS It also required them to find enough shelter to have a conversation in the middle of the biggest battle. It wasn't a polite World War I battle where you have a moment. How did you coordinate the moment where all the female Marvel heroes come together? McFEELY There was much conversation. Is that delightful or is it pandering? We went around and around on that. Ultimately we went, we like it too much. MARKUS Part of the fun of the "Avengers" movies has always been team ups. Marvel has been amassing this huge roster of characters. You've got crazy aliens. You've got that many badass women. You've got three or four people in Iron Man suits. Were there other characters you could've had but didn't use? MARKUS There were moments, as they brought everybody back, where we're like, technically, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer have Ant Man suits. Do we bring them back? It became impossible to track the people we did bring back, but also, it's just going to be an orgy. McFEELY Do you put Luke Cage in there? "Endgame" shares some unexpected parallels with "Game of Thrones," which also recently ran episodes about its heroes preparing for a significant battle and then the battle itself. Why do you think these narratives are similar? Did you ever look at "Game of Thrones" for inspiration? MARKUS We're in a high stakes time and a jarring time in history, where you have to contemplate what you're willing to do to improve the situation. Whether or not everyone's speaking to that, or just good old fashioned storytelling, I don't know. McFEELY Marvel has been accused of being the most expensive television show there is, and there's some truth to that. The genres are different, the tones are different, but it's serialized storytelling. MARKUS We occasionally wonder, did we just make the world's most expensive inside baseball fan service? But then we go, the fans are actually the majority of people who come to this. It's inside baseball, but everyone is following the baseball. That's also why the Marvel characters have lasted this long. They're weird. They have strange quirks. McFEELY The bland ones don't last. MARKUS I remember "Game of Thrones" being a reference for the first movie. How far apart can you keep these strands, and for how long, and still feel like you're telling a single narrative? "Game of Thrones" has people who are just meeting now! As much as people think the culture's going down the drain, there seems to be an elevating of people's estimating of the kind of narrative that will succeed in popular culture. McFEELY Whatever you think of this movie, it's complicated. It is not another sequel. MARKUS And a lot of popular TV is complicated. "This Is Us" is complicated. "Simon Simon" was not that complicated. Great as it was. But it does seem like there is an acceptance of more complicated forms of storytelling. Was the three hour running time of "Endgame" ever in question? MARKUS There was an agreement within the whole group that we're going to take our time; we're not going to cut a half hour of it so we can get one more screening in per day. McFEELY We couldn't! Where are you going to cut a half hour? There was not a sequence you could cut. MARKUS Look at some of the most popular movies of all time. They're long as hell. When people want to see something, it doesn't seem to get in their way. There's some short, totally unsuccessful movies, too. Why does Natasha Romanoff have to die? McFEELY Her journey, in our minds, had come to an end if she could get the Avengers back. She comes from such an abusive, terrible, mind control background, so when she gets to Vormir and she has a chance to get the family back, that's a thing she would trade for. The toughest thing for us was we were always worried that people weren't going to have time to be sad enough. The stakes are still out there and they haven't solved the problem. But we lost a big character a female character how do we honor it? We have this male lens and it's a lot of guys being sad that a woman died. MARKUS Tony gets a funeral. Natasha doesn't. That's partly because Tony's this massive public figure and she's been a cipher the whole time. It wasn't necessarily honest to the character to give her a funeral. The biggest question about it is what Thor raises there on the dock. "We have the Infinity Stones. Why don't we just bring her back?" McFEELY But that's the everlasting exchange. You bring her back, you lose the stone. Was there a possible outcome where Clint Barton sacrifices himself instead of her? McFEELY There was, for sure. Jen Underdahl, our visual effects producer, read an outline or draft where Hawkeye goes over. And she goes, "Don't you take this away from her." I actually get emotional thinking about it. MARKUS And it was true, it was him taking the hit for her. It was melodramatic to have him die and not get his family back. And it is only right and proper that she's done. "Endgame" sets up Sam Wilson as the new Captain America. Is that a future Marvel film? Would you write that? MARKUS We really do just know what you know. They're doing "The Eternals," which is a property I know next to nothing about. We've been here, trying to set this contraption running. Were we to take another one on, you can't increase the scope or the stakes from where we are at the moment. We'd have to shrink it back down, do an origin story. There are deep bench characters where I'm like, if you roll that guy out, I couldn't resist. There is a great Moon Knight movie to be made, but I don't know what is. You've been writing these films and characters for more than a decade, and you never got bored of them McFEELY Or fired. For sure. MARKUS We've come close to both. It's a testament to the concept but also the people we're working with. We're not bumping up against this dictatorial level where it's like, "I have some notes. I really want to see him fly a dragon put the dragon in. I'm going to lunch." McFEELY If we have an idea, people take it really seriously. They valued "Winter Soldier" and they saw how "Civil War" was coming together. They'd seen our process and us working with the Russo brothers, and they said, if Joss Whedon is not coming back I don't know that decision it was clear that, unless they hated us, it was going to be this team. MARKUS But there also was a possibility, because "Avengers: Age of Ultron" made a little bit less than "Avengers" 1 that we were taking on "Superman" 3 and 4. Maybe people were done with it. McFEELY The goal was not to advance it to the stratosphere. It was to just not screw it up.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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OF all the tools at his disposal, Jaan Hjorth reserves special affection for a 1942 Monarch model EE lathe. The behemoth device, a mad array of levers, dials and hardened cutters, is so versatile that Mr. Hjorth calls it "the tool that can make itself." More to the point, it can whittle a clamp for the ignition coil of a 1958 Lancia Appia, mill a tiny cam for the door lock of a '65 Lancia Fulvia, or, as needed on a recent afternoon, bore a hole in the tip of a plunger assembly from the thermostatic actuator of an Alfa Romeo fuel injection system. In a far corner of his repair shop here, Mr. Hjorth, lanky and tall, his heavy metal length blond hair tied back for safety, secured the plunger in the lathe's chuck, tightened a bit into a drill like proboscis and set the machine in motion. As the bit entered the plunger's tip, tiny brass filaments twisted out and fell onto a mound of shiny aluminum shavings below, remnants of an earlier endeavor. Employing a ton and a half apparatus to pare a few milligrams of metal from an object no bigger than a spark plug might seem like overkill, but in Mr. Hjorth's world, precision is of the utmost importance. There are no warehouses brimming with thermostatic actuators for vintage Alfas or ignition coil clamps and door lock assemblies for Lancias; when these parts melt or fracture or otherwise cease to function, Mr. Hjorth must painstakingly refurbish and restore them or, frequently, recreate them entirely from scratch. The work is exacting and time consuming, but like many craftsmen, Mr. Hjorth, 54, seems to derive as much satisfaction from the process as he does from the end result. This is evident in his reverence for the utility and workmanship of the antique tools that crowd his shop as well as his admiration for the ingenious and often idiosyncratic engineering built into the midcentury Italian cars, and Lancias in particular, that are his specialty. Born in Hollywood, Mr. Hjorth (pronounced yaawrt) spent much of his childhood in Europe, and in his teenage years moved to Piedmont, a small city east of San Francisco Bay. It was in this period that he developed an affinity for Italian cars, and on discovering that Italian cars spent much of their time in the shop, maneuvered his way into a job at a garage called Fredz Autogofast in nearby El Cerrito. Initially, the work was far from glamorous for the most part, Mr. Hjorth recalled tedious chores like scraping off the remains of water pump gaskets. Eventually he took on a greater variety of tasks, relishing the work so much that in 1978 he bought the business, the sum total of which he described as "a Rolodex, a hydraulic press and an acetylene torch." Shortly thereafter, he started his own business, which he christened Motor Pro Garage. Mr. Hjorth gravitated to Lancias. Founded in 1906 and now a division of Fiat, Lancia built an early (and durable) reputation for graceful, technically innovative cars that performed well on the road and on racetracks. "They were just the most interesting things out there," Mr. Hjorth explained. "They were the best made machines in the world from an aesthetic and engineering standpoint." Arguably, Mr. Hjorth owes the existence of his niche to the fastidiousness of Lancia's engineers, which ensured that 50 and 60 years later their creations could be endlessly disassembled, rebuilt and rejuvenated. "Take something like a Lancia ignition lock," he said. "It's like looking inside a piece of jewelry. Every last piece comes apart." Mr. Hjorth does most of his business from spring through fall, when the roads are dry. During those seasons the cars arrive at Motor Pro Garage in a growling, burbling procession. One Friday this September, a striking specimen appeared: a '62 Lancia Flaminia convertible, a rare model produced in collaboration with a Milanese coachbuilder, Carrozzeria Touring. The Flaminia's owner, Gary Dowling, a film sound technician who lives in Angwin, a small town about 80 miles north of San Francisco, first made contact with Mr. Hjorth three years ago. At the time, Mr. Dowling was about to have his convertible's upholstery restored and learned from an acquaintance that Mr. Hjorth owned a Flaminia coupe with an original, unaltered interior. Mr. Dowling asked to see some photographs, which Mr. Hjorth gladly supplied. "When you find out someone's a Lancia nut, you don't want them to lose the fever," Mr. Hjorth said. "So, sure, I'll send you some pictures." Recently, Mr. Dowling, a competent amateur mechanic, was stumped by a peculiar problem. After an extended session of engine tuning, the Flaminia's idle was rock solid, but at freeway speeds the engine bucked and surged. Once again, said Mr. Dowling, "all signs pointed to Jaan." In the driveway of the shop, Mr. Hjorth raised the car's lightweight aluminum hood. He took a cursory look, blipped the throttle and listened as the engine returned to the steady drone of its idle. He loped into the shop and emerged carrying a suitcase size instrument bristling with knobs and switches. "The Hitachi oscilloscope," said Mr. Hjorth, explaining the presence of a tiny gray television type screen on the box's face. "Boring, but bulletproof." He attached the device to the ignition wires, and while flipping switches and turning various knobs, peered at a series of jagged green lines jumping across the screen. "Hmm," he said. "Your distributor's not too happy." Mr. Hjorth deftly loosened a nut and pulled the distributor from the engine. Back inside the garage, he mounted it to the spindle of a 1956 Sun distributor testing machine, whose bright colors and Pop Art looking logo called to mind a primitive arcade game. A quick spin revealed that one of the distributor's two sets of contacts was incorrectly gapped. Mr. Hjorth adjusted the gap, synchronized the points and returned the distributor to its roost. He then set upon the Flaminia's Solex carburetor, peeling back its lid to reveal the naked float bowl. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, Mr. Hjorth unscrewed a brass jet and examined it under a loupe. "Don't tell me this is your jet," he said, with a note of exasperation. He retreated to his workbench and returned with a miniature tapered reamer, the sort used by watchmakers, and proceeded to widen the jet's orifice by 0.146 millimeter, proposing, as he did so, a curious theory that today's gasoline is more viscous than the petrol of the 60s, and that symptoms like the Flaminia's can often be alleviated by a slight bit of vasodilatation. With the jet reinstalled, it was time for a quick spin, with Mr. Hjorth behind the wheel and Mr. Dowling in the passenger seat. On the test drive, the Flaminia seemed to be behaving, but Mr. Dowling's trip home would be a truer test. In the meantime, Mr. Hjorth had another matter to attend to reviving a rakish Zagato bodied 1959 Lancia Flaminia Sport from a seven year slumber. A week later, Mr. Dowling gave an update on the convertible. The surging was reduced, he said, but not completely alleviated. "I think Jaan needs to ream the jet a little more," he said. His tone suggested patience rather than frustration, as well as an understanding, no doubt shared by Mr. Hjorth, that in dealing with Italian art it is better to cut too little than to cut too much.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Dan Gagne has been a plumber for three decades, but it has been years since he held a wrench. He has built a plumbing business in the Bay Area that generates 20 million a year in revenue and employs 100 people. The money his empire brings in allows him and his family to pursue other interests. "The income is more than I'd ever imagined," Mr. Gagne, 54, said. "I own several homes. We've invested in eight acres in Costa Rica and are going to build a health spa. We live there about six months of the year." He credited his wealth not to his skill as a plumber but to his being part of a national franchise, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing. Franchises are promoted as a way to control your destiny and build wealth by getting a head start, as well as guidance in good times and bad, from the franchiser that created or controls the concept. But when an economic cycle is at its height, there's a risk that people will move too fast into a new franchising concept and not do enough due diligence, which could lead to a dream of wealth turning into a nightmare of loss in a recession. Just since 2012, about 1,740 brands have tried the franchise model, according to FRANdata, a company that tracks and advises the industry. Opportunities include Sir Grout, which specializes in grout, tile and wood restoration, and Shack Shine, a house detailing service. The costs for many of these concepts typically range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars (although a single McDonald's location tops out at 2.2 million). But the comparatively low barrier to entry can cloud the risk assessment for entrepreneurs. Franchises are often promoted as businesses that fare well in a recession, but Darrell Johnson , chief executive of FRANdata, said the research did not support that. (A new report from the National League of Cities found that two thirds of city finance officials expect a recession as soon as next year.) "Franchising is not an industry," Mr. Johnson said. "What you're really asking is, what industries are more or less susceptible to downturns? And within those industries, what's the presence of franchises?" If someone is inclined to buy a franchise, whether for the independence or the wealth, a cleareyed view of what is being pitched is important. Here are some questions to consider. For starters, analysts say, investors should ask whether the underlying industry is growing. But even in growth areas, not every franchise is a winner. Franchising, like the economy, is cyclical. Data shows that the top growth areas for franchising include fitness centers, children's educational programs and the general health sector; food, as a broad category, is ebbing. Potential buyers should look carefully at federal disclosure forms that are required for franchises, paying particular attention to Item 19, which addresses the return on investment and the unit economics, said Jeff Johnson , founder and chief executive of the Franchise Research Institute. The second big factor is whether branding will matter. Darrell Johnson of FRANdata said most people know their primary physician's name but probably not the name of the doctor's medical practice. Yet in an emergency, people are highly unlikely to ask for a doctor by name, relying instead on the reputation of the hospital or ambulatory care center. Branding counts in some franchise areas, too, like home health services. "Senior care is one sector where branding matters," he said. "It's hard to arrange something if I'm six states away. But there could be a consistency and expectation around a certain type of senior care." Do you have a winning idea of your own? A better opportunity to create wealth may be to become the franchiser by setting up a business that creates and manages your concept and collects fees from licensing and revenue. Coming out of the 2008 recession, Mr. Gagne followed the franchising company's direction on marketing and creating efficient systems. And that, he said, helped take his business from 5 million in revenue in the downturn to 11 million in 2011 and double that today. "Could I have done this on my own?" he asked. "Probably not. I would not have gotten all the knowledge that I've gotten." Unless the brand is already widely known, like 7 Eleven or Midas, what the franchisees receive in support from corporate headquarters can determine whether they build wealth. The most successful franchises focus on technology and systems that create a repeatable experience for consumers, said John Carter , chief executive of Vonigo, which specializes in technology for mobile franchises like pet grooming and massage therapy. "There's a difference between a technician someone with expertise in a certain field and someone who has business expertise," Mr. Carter said. "Just because someone is a great mover doesn't mean they should be building a moving franchise." An entrepreneur needs to have some experience before starting a franchise. "It's the business elements that count the most: sales, marketing, finance, technology, systems, human resources and who you have on your team," he said. George Saldana has been an electrician for 42 years. In 2006, he bought a Mr. Sparky franchise. He credits the franchiser's technology for his moving from a business that paid him well to one that has created wealth for him and his family. "We spent the last five years developing our propriety process to run our business in San Antonio," Mr. Saldana said. By being able to modify the franchise system, he said, he kept better track of service calls and provided service records to his technicians showing repairs that had been done and upgrades that were needed. There are downsides, including the risk that the franchiser may not be well run. Jeff Johnson of Franchise Research said he had been an area developer for Schlotzsky's Deli, a chain that grew after an initial public offering in 1995 to more than 750 locations before filing for bankruptcy in 2004. Franchisees lost all the wealth they had accumulated in the company's stock. To avoid this trap, he said, potential investors need to ask: "Do you believe the franchiser is looking ahead and around the corner when it comes to the competition, the economy, changes in customer tastes?" "The best franchise opportunity may not be the one that makes the best hamburger," he said. "It could be the one with the best purchasing, marketing and buying power. No one thinks a McDonald's hamburger is the best, but McDonald's has systems driven by technology: You're getting the same experience at any location." In addition to the financial and franchise due diligence, Darrell Johnson said people should look for franchisees (not ones recommended by the franchiser) and ask them: "Would they do it again? Are they interested in buying another one?" Another risk is oversaturation of a concept in one area, like four frozen yogurt shops in one small town. Jeff Johnson said that even if those shops were all well run and received plenty of corporate support, there were only so many frozen yogurt fans to go around. "You just can't have a fancy frozen yogurt stand on every corner," he said. "When things tighten up, the strong will survive, but the ones that have problems with distribution and pricing will fail." And the franchisees will fail with them. One way to mitigate this risk is to spread it around. Jeff Rahn invested in franchises in the Minneapolis area that focused on different essential services: heating and air conditioning, electrical, and plumbing. Combined, their annual revenue is close to 12 million. "All of them follow the same blueprint: no new construction and very little commercial work," he said. "We do service work, and we do replacements. You don't have the ebb and flow of new construction, where you're so crazy busy and then the economy takes a downturn." That's a sound plan, Mr. Carter of Vonigo said. "You can't expect the franchiser to do everything for you," he said. "Ultimately, you're an independent entrepreneur and have to work your tail off."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Entrepreneurs have a reputation for working long hours to get their businesses up and running, leading some of their employees to a quick burnout. But some business owners have instituted activities that may seem better suited to summer camp outdoor planning sessions, meetings in a salt room, deal talks on a surfboard. They may sound fun and relaxing, but they are meant to be productive. Eric Tetuan has the kind of New York job where he could be in the office 100 hours a week and still think about work the rest of his waking and probably some of his sleeping hours. He loves what he does, running an event and production company called ProductionGlue in Midtown Manhattan. But a few years ago, he felt the effects of his staff's being overscheduled. He saw morale sinking and mistakes rising at his company. So he began forcing his workers to take walks, ride bikes or just sit by the Hudson River. There was just one twist: These were not solitary moments to recharge but activities to be done with colleagues as a way to discuss work outside the office. His goal was to increase creativity at ProductionGlue, a business that thrived on creating spectacles. "I knew it wasn't about more oversight on jobs," said Mr. Tetuan, a co founder of the firm and its chief innovation officer. "It was about a holistic change to how we approached the job." And that meant leaving the office behind. "There are a lot of distractions when you go into a conference room," he said, adding that workers were focused half on the meeting and half on their devices. "On a walk, we spur more ideas." Far from aping the tech industry's often derided perks think Google's rewarding employees with massages or Spotify's lunchtime concerts these entrepreneurs, with a work force ranging from a handful employees to several hundred, are using unconventional approaches to improve their employees' focus. Studies show that employees seek certain benefits when job hunting. Most tend to seek out more traditional perks like health care, flexible hours and vacation time, according to findings from Fractl, an advertising agency in Delray Beach, Fla. But more elaborate perks like game rooms and gym membership were important when it came to retaining workers, according to a study from Technology Advice, a marketing agency in Nashville. "Above some level of financial security, people care about being part of a community and belonging at work," said Jennifer Chatman, a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. "The key insight about these kinds of perks is that they bring people together and make work more fun. In this way, they effectively increase motivation and performance." Marco Schnabl, co founder and co chief executive of automotiveMastermind, a company that sells predictive data around car sales to dealerships, said his employee head count had tripled in a year. Despite the rapid growth, he needs his 230 employees working together, not just working remotely on projects. "We're in the financial center, and you have water all around," Mr. Schnabl said of working in New York, where the company is based. "So we say: This is going to be a walking meeting. For the next hour, we'll go on an extended walk with three or four people anywhere we can exercise our bodies a bit and think about topics that are relevant to the business." David Heath, co founder and chief executive of Bombas, a start up that donates a pair of socks for every pair it sells, said the company had a 96 percent retention rate since it was founded in 2013. He attributed the low turnover to unconventional meeting spots. "If people are building bonds when you go to SoulCycle or to a manicure, it frames the relationship differently," he said. "These are things you traditionally do with friends. It develops respect." Even delivering bad news, he said, "comes from a moment of empathy." Mr. Heath said Bombas had revenue of 70 million, which represents a year over year growth rate of 500 percent, and had donated four million pairs of socks to date. And retention of the company's 37 employees during a time of such tremendous growth has been a key to its success, Mr. Heath said. "Sometimes I'll feel instead of doing it in the conference room, let's go sit outside or have breakfast," he said. "An 8:30 a.m. monthly meeting, that's early for some people in the start up world. What if I can elevate that a bit and say we meet at 7:30 a.m. for yoga?" Just as a meeting outside can help spur creativity, solve a problem or keep an employee happy, it can also serve to end an impasse. Larry Newman, chief operating officer of the Health Media Network, a wellness and health education company, credits surfing with helping him close several deals, including the sale of his first health care company. "We had spent countless hours in meetings and with lawyers," Mr. Newman said. "I said, 'I think we can get this done face to face.' We sat there in the water on our boards. We talked about the final points and pieces." For the record, they were not surfing and talking at the same time: "You'd probably get killed," he said. Mr. Newman said he had a negotiation planned for the surf off in Montauk, N.Y., in the fall. And he is hopeful that it, too, will help to wrap up a deal. "You're negotiating to a human level, not a business level," he said. "It excites people." This approach is paying off for employees and owners alike, but there are clearly times and places it does not work. Mr. Tetuan said all of his company's initial creative meetings with clients take place in conference rooms to accommodate all the people who need to be involved. Lyss Stern, chief executive of Divalysscious Moms, a direct marketing company geared toward parents, said she had moved away from long lunches or drinks after work because they were too time consuming. Her preferred meeting spot now is a Himalayan salt room at Modrn Sanctuary in Manhattan. The salt floor is antifungal and antibacterial, and some people believe it can help with respiratory problems; for others, it can give them an energized feeling. But not everyone likes to leave a meeting with a dusting of salt on their suit. "If it's a chief executive who has no time and just wants to meet in his/her boardroom, then it doesn't work," Ms. Stern said. "Or if it's someone who's straight up, very conservative, this may not be the type of meeting you want to take." Still, she tries to do meetings there whenever she can. "You're sitting there, having this meeting, but you're also getting these mental health benefits," she said. "You're inhaling the dry salt. You're doing beneficial things for yourself and others." Another potential drawback of these unconventional meeting spots is being out of touch with the very clients who are paying for the strolling, surfing and salty talks. So many entrepreneurs today are expected to be reachable. For Mr. Tetuan, taking a few hours away from the office and a client is a worthwhile trade off. "Having that hour to think and not be distracted, I can get more done in a day," he said. "Someone may be looking for us for two hours, but at the end of the week, they know they're getting more out of us than others."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Now Lives A 1930s triplex apartment in Hollywood that he shares with two roommates. Claim to Fame Mr. Belaga is a wildly expressionistic and improvisational cellist who sees no need for a conductor, regardless of whether he is playing at National Sawdust in Brooklyn or the Brutally Early Club, a saloon style gathering organized by the art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. "I made a pact with myself that while I would always participate in someone else's music, all the sounds and noises out of my cello would be composed by me," he said. Mr. Belaga also moonlights as an occasional bartender and model as "a support system for the cello stuff," he said. Big Break Not long after moving to Los Angeles in 2014, he met the transgender performance artists Wu Tsang and Boychild at a house party in Venice. "We quickly fell in friend love," he said. A month later, the trio performed "Moved by the Motion," a vocal and dance performance with a live soundtrack provided by Mr. Belaga, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. "Scoring to a visual gesture is natural for me," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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JIMMY FALLON has brought "The Tonight Show" back to New York City, and in return for leaving California, the show's owner, NBCUniversal, is receiving a tax credit that amounts to about 20 million a year. It's a nice deal for NBC and Mr. Fallon, who had already been taping a late night show at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and doesn't have to relocate to the West Coast. But it is the kind of incentive that makes tax experts wince. In a report on incentives to filmmakers, the Tax Policy Center found no evidence that tax incentives actually had the effect on behavior their sponsors claimed. They just resulted in lost tax revenue. I had Fallon on the brain this week as I thought about two new studies looking at how tax policies influence or should influence our actions. One looked at the level of taxes and other management fees that should cause an investor to reconsider certain types of investments. The other examined the impact of high state taxes in New Jersey, where this week Gov. Chris Christie released a state budget without his hoped for income tax cut. In "The 50 Percent Rule: Keep More Profit in Your Wallet," Stuart E. Lucas, chairman of Wealth Strategist Partners, which manages about 1 billion for a small number of wealthy families, analyzed state and federal taxes along with management fees to argue that if 50 percent of your return went to someone else, then you should reconsider the investment. Index funds and most mutual funds are under the 50 percent line. Hedge funds are always above it for a taxpaying individual. Private equity investments are on the line. "We have always known that the costs of alternative investments were higher, but the process of going through and doing all the detailed work really galvanized what those costs were," said Mr. Lucas, who also teaches in the private wealth program at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. In Illinois, with combined state and federal taxes of 36.8 percent on short term gains and 28.8 percent on long term gains in 2013, Mr. Lucas's study looked at how high returns from various investments would have to be to achieve a 5 percent after tax, after fee return for investors. The index fund he used, with a 1 percent dividend yield and a tax deductible management fee of 0.14 percent, would need a return of 7.2 percent. A mutual fund with a tax deductible management fee of 0.66 percent, a dividend of 1 percent and taxes split evenly between short and long term gains, would need to return 8.4 percent. It gets more challenging with alternative investments. A private equity fund with a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent fee on profits above an 8 percent return and all gains taxed at the long term rate, would have to earn 11.7 percent. To get a 5 percent after tax, after fee return for a typical hedge fund with a management fee of 2 percent, a performance fee of 20 percent and a lot of tax generating trading the fund would have to earn 14.5 percent. Of course, half of a high return is better than 70 percent of a very low one. Mr. Lucas agrees, with a caveat. "The higher the return, the more exceptional the return is and the less likely it is to actually play out the way you hope," he said. "If I'm highly confident that I have an exceptional opportunity to make an exceptional return, and it means paying out a larger part of the profits, I would do that." That was when he advised clients to put money into private equity funds that made less liquid investments. "In public markets," he said, "we believe those kinds of opportunities are rare." Getting below that 50 percent number becomes even trickier in states with higher taxes than Illinois. In New York City, the combined local, state and federal taxes on short term gains can run as high as 52.3 percent, according to research from the Aperio Group. In California, the rate can hit 52.6 percent Mr. Lucas's study is not the first time someone has advocated for considering expenses in investment returns. William F. Sharpe, a Nobel winner in economics, wrote in the 1960s about the negative effect that mutual fund expenses have on returns. In subsequent research he showed the increased investment returns that people who use lower cost funds had over people whose money was in higher cost ones. In the January/February edition of Financial Analysts Journal, John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, examined Mr. Sharpe's various papers on the subject and added his own research. He suggested low cost funds in tax deferred retirement accounts could add as much as 65 percent to a person's savings over a high cost actively managed fund. The broader point for individual investors is that all costs need to be carefully considered. "I suspect that we are going to be operating for at least the next five years in an environment of low investment returns in part because we've had such great returns and relatively high tax rates," Mr. Lucas said. "In that environment, the cost of the leakages is very high relative to the total profits." When it comes to New Jersey's taxes, it is a wonder any high earners live there at all. RegentAtlantic, which manages about 2 billion, analyzed data on tax rates on investments, property and estates in "Exodus on the Parkway," to be released next week. The firm painted a picture of New Jersey as a state whose tax policies were causing it to lose residents at the point when their income and wealth were highest and their taxes could support the most. In one example, the firm demonstrated the savings a hedge fund manager would have by moving to Greenwich, Conn., and not Summit, N.J., both about the same distance from New York City. If he had the choice of a 1 million house in either town, he would save 28,000 a year in property taxes by living in Greenwich. If he invested that savings each year for 30 years at an 8.5 percent return, he would have an additional 3.8 million. There are certainly other reasons to live in a state beyond low taxes, like proximity to work, good schools, friends and family. But the RegentAtlantic study found that New Jersey had reached a tipping point where it was losing more income each year than its neighbors a net loss of 1.6 billion a year compared with net losses of 342 million for Connecticut and 237 million for Pennsylvania. (New York loses more in dollar terms, but its population is more than double New Jersey's.) "The average adjusted gross income of people moving to New Jersey is 50 percent lower than those leaving New Jersey," said David H. Bugen, managing partner of RegentAtlantic and one of the study's authors. If there is an upside to both of these studies, it is that people have a choice. They can consider the tax consequences of the investments they make and where they choose to live. Or they can simply pay more in taxes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Eric Bentley, an influential theater critic as well as a scholar, author and playwright who was an early champion of modern European drama and an unsparing antagonist of Broadway, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 103. Mr. Bentley was among that select breed of scholar who moves easily between academic and public spheres. His criticism found its way into classroom syllabuses and general interest magazines. And more than dissecting others' plays, he also wrote his own and had some success as a director. He adapted work by many of the European playwrights he prized, especially Bertolt Brecht, whom he first met in Los Angeles in 1942. At Columbia he became engaged in leftist campus politics during the volatile 1960s and surprised everyone when he quit in part, he said, to experience life as a gay man, having divorced his second wife. But it was as a critic that he made his first and most enduring impression. The critic Ronald Bryden, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, said that Mr. Bentley's 1946 essay collection, "The Playwright as Thinker," "did for modern drama what Edmund Wilson in 'Axel's Castle' had done for modern poetry; it established the map of a territory previously obscured by opinion and rumor." Mr. Bentley published one admired collection of criticism after another, among them "In Search of Theater" (1953) "What Is Theater?" (1956) and "The Life of the Drama" (1964) "the best general book on theater I have read bar none," the novelist Clancy Sigal wrote in The New Republic. Mr. Bentley's book "Bernard Shaw" (1947) prompted Shaw himself to say that he considered it the best book written about him. Mr. Bentley argued that the great serious drama of the modern era had been written in Europe. He pointed to the operas of Wagner and the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Garcia Lorca, Synge and Pirandello as well as Shaw. And great drama was still being written, he said in the 1940s, referring to Brecht, Jean Paul Sartre and Sean O'Casey. "Experimentalism in the arts always reflects historical conditions, always indicates profound dissatisfaction with established modes, always is a groping toward a new age," he wrote in "The Playwright as Thinker." The critic Ronald Bryden said Mr. Bentley's 1946 essay collection, "The Playwright as Thinker," "established the map of a territory previously obscured by opinion and rumor." Mr. Bentley discerned a new naturalism in the modern voice. "What is it we notice if we pick up a modern play after reading Shakespeare or the Greeks? Nine times out of ten it is the dryness," he wrote, distinguishing that from dullness "the sheer modesty of the language, the sheer lack of winged words, even of eloquence." Mr. Bentley was less enthusiastic about American playwrights even, at first, Eugene O'Neill. "Where Wedekind seems silly and turns out on further inspection to be profound," Mr. Bentley wrote of the German playwright Frank Wedekind in the notes to "The Playwright as Thinker," "O'Neill seems profound and turns out on further inspection to be silly." As for commercialized Broadway, he judged it to be anathema to artistic theater, a view many readers regarded as tantamount to an attack on American culture. "Condescending and misanthropic," Cue magazine said. The drama critic Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, said that "Mr. Bentley does not believe in a popular theater" and feels that "the audience is incapable of valid judgment in aesthetic matters." Broadway's defenders reminded Mr. Bentley that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Shaw had, above all, been popular. To which Mr. Bentley rejoined, "To be popular in an aristocratic culture, like ancient Greece or Elizabethan England, is quite a different matter from being popular in a middle class culture." He eventually became more favorably inclined toward American dramatists, but he never let up in his goading of American theatergoers to pay more attention to Europeans like Brecht. For a time he even wore his hair in bangs like Brecht. While at Columbia Mr. Bentley turned out a twin series of anthologies, "The Classic Theatre" and "From the Modern Repertoire," which became standard reading in drama curriculums. Mr. Bentley in 1960. "Experimentalism in the arts," he wrote, "always is a groping toward a new age." In the turmoil of the 1960s, he was a founder of the DMZ, a cabaret devoted to political and social satire whose subjects included the war in Vietnam, and he criticized Columbia's handling of student political demonstrations on campus. In 1969 he quit his teaching post, shocking his friends and colleagues. Many thought he had done so in protest, but he later said that he had simply realized that he wanted to be a playwright. "I always dreamed myself the author when I translated," he said. There were also personal reasons for resigning. He had decided to leave his second wife and live openly as a gay man, he said, and he thought his Columbia colleagues would not have tolerated that. Around the time he began moving away from academia, the theater reporter Pat O'Haire of The Daily News depicted him in his 12 room Riverside Drive apartment, its walls and shelves dense with theater memorabilia: "Away from campus, or the confines of teaching, Bentley can only be described as a sort of combination establishment guerrilla," she wrote. "He goes barefoot and wears jeans, but his shirt, though colorful, is a traditional Brooks Brothers button down. His hair is long and flecked with gray; he wears a beard that is neatly trimmed in a Captain Ahab style, with the upper lip shaved. It seems as if he is straddling two worlds." Eric Russell Bentley was born Sept. 14, 1916, in Bolton, a northern industrial town in Lancashire, England, to Fred and Laura Bentley. His father was a respected local businessman. His mother had wanted Eric to become a Baptist missionary. Mr. Bentley was a scholarship student at the prestigious Bolton School, where he studied the piano. He then went to Oxford on a history scholarship; C.S. Lewis was one of his teachers. Yet as a merchant class student surrounded by upper class swells, he felt out of place. Shaw became an early hero, Mr. Bentley told The Times in 2006, because he seemed to be a fellow outsider. "'Pygmalion' is a great classic in my book because it's an Irishman's recognition of the basics of class ridden Britain," he said. He emigrated to the United States after receiving his bachelor's degree from Oxford in 1938 (he was naturalized in 1948) and received a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale in 1941. On the strength of his early books, Mr. Bentley was appointed in 1952 to succeed Harold Clurman as drama critic for The New Republic, a position he held until 1956. He also wrote for The Nation, Theatre Arts, The Times Literary Supplement in London and The New York Times. When he wasn't writing in the 1940s, he taught and directed at the University of California, Los Angeles; at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and at the University of Minnesota. From 1948 through 1951 he traveled in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, directing plays. In 1950 he helped Brecht with his production of "Mother Courage and Her Children" in Munich. He also directed the German language premiere of O'Neill's play "The Iceman Cometh." In 1952, after his return to the United States, Mr. Bentley took over Joseph Wood Krutch's course in modern drama at Columbia. The next year he was appointed the Brander Matthews professor of dramatic literature at Columbia, where he stayed until his resignation in 1969, with time off in between as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard in 1960 61 and as a Ford Foundation artist in residence in Berlin in 1964 65. He was later the Cornell professor of theater at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland. Mr. Bentley was known to perform songs from the theater in nightclubs, accompanying himself on the harmonium. As he concentrated more on his playwriting, he found his subjects in those who had rebelled against established society. He took up the causes of the left in "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the Un American Activities Committee, 1947 1958," first produced in 1972; the astronomer Galileo in "The Recantation of Galileo Galilei: Scenes From History Perhaps" (1973); Oscar Wilde in "Lord Alfred's Lover" (1979); the sexually inconstant in "Concord" (1982), one of a series of three plays in "The Kleist Variations"; and homosexuality in "Round Two" (1990), a variation on Schnitzler's play "La Ronde." Mr. Bentley discussed his sexual orientation in 1987, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. "I generally avoid the word bisexual," he said. "People who call themselves bisexual are being evasive. They don't want to be regarded as homosexual or they want to be regarded as supermen, who like to sleep with everything and everybody. "Nevertheless," he went on, "if one can avoid these connotations, the word would be applicable to me, because I have been married twice, and neither of the marriages was fake; neither of them was a cover for something else; they were both a genuine relationship to a woman." Those marriages were to Maja Tschernjakow and to Joanne Davis, a psychotherapist. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second in separation (they never divorced). In addition to Ms. Davis and his son Philip, he is survived by another son, Eric Jr., and four grandchildren. For all his laurels as a critic, Mr. Bentley carried a nagging regret: that his plays were not appreciated as much as his criticism. "Brecht once told me that he left unpublished a lot of his poetry," Mr. Bentley said in the 2006 Times interview, "because, he said: 'If they regard me as a poet, they'll say I'm not a playwright, I'm a poet. So I don't publish the poems, so they'll say I'm a playwright.' "I feel at times that I should not have written my criticism," Mr. Bentley continued, "because when I write a play, they say, 'The critic has written a play.'" Christopher Lehmann Haupt, a former senior book critic for The Times, died in 2018. Julia Carmel contributed reporting.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Think of the great patrons of music, and some resonant names come to mind: Nikolaus, Prince Esterhazy, for instance, who for three decades employed Joseph Haydn; or Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, who funded Italian baroque luminaries. But cast around for their successors the most important commissioners of living composers and you encounter a string of initials: BBC, WDR, SWR. The fertile generosity of these public broadcasters (the latter two are Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Sudwestrundfunk, regional radio entities with headquarters in Cologne and Stuttgart) is the subject of this year's Focus Festival at the Juilliard School. It opened on Friday with a stimulating concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in Manhattan. Under the banner "On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissioning," the festival presents five more programs, through Feb. 1, that reveal how much of a lifeline noncommercial radio has become to composers since the end of World War II. The conductor Joel Sachs, who designed the festival and led Friday's concert, said in a phone interview that a British composer had told him bluntly: "We'd all starve without the BBC." While the festival draws attention to the wealth of opportunities created by international broadcasters, it also points a finger at the glaring absence of similar initiatives in the United States. "The problem with commercial radio is that it doesn't want to do anything as esoteric as classical music," Mr. Sachs said, "let alone commission contemporary music." Mr. Sachs said that in his research he had learned of a handful of new works commissioned by isolated American broadcasters, including stations in Minnesota and Cincinnati. But these numbers paled next to the statistics he gathered of radio commissions from Europe and Canada in the postwar era. The BBC supplied a list, possibly incomplete, of nearly 1,600 compositions. Radio France listed 2,300 titles. German regional broadcasters were each responsible for hundreds of works. Canadian composers have benefited from the robust support of the CBC, which commissioned some 1,200 pieces. These broadcasters are cultural powerhouses, and not just on the airwaves. Most have their own ensembles, including symphony orchestras and choirs, and run festivals like the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, organized by the WDR, or the Donaueschingen Festival, a storied engine of avant garde music that is now under the auspices of the SWR. Each summer the BBC Proms whip up public enthusiasm and draw huge crowds with televised concerts that include new commissions. Some countries make a point of targeting their commissioning largess toward their own composers. One example is Finnish Radio, which sees fostering new Finnish music as part of its mission. That's how a Modernist gem like Jouni Kaipainen's "Trois Morceaux de l'Aube" came into being. It received a superb performance on Friday by the cellist Sasha Scolnik Brower and the pianist Michalis Boliakis. A radio commission gave life to this darkly ruminative work, shot through with flashes of rhythmic exuberance, in 1981, when the composer was 25. In Germany, where the postwar occupying powers designed a decentralized broadcasting landscape free of government control, the mission is broader. In a phone interview, Harry Vogt, who has headed the new music program at the WDR for decades, said he sees it as his responsibility "to produce things, far from commercial considerations, that wouldn't come into being on their own." The balancing act there lies in staying accountable to the public through programs "you don't want to do things that interest nobody," he said while granting composers the creative freedom to develop their art away from the pressures of the market. Mr. Vogt said his commissions also extend beyond the concert hall to sound installations in public and industrial spaces in order to reach new listeners. "There is always an educational component, too," he said, "though you try to avoid it reeking of pedagogy." Friday's concert proved that, in casting the net wide, the patronage of the broadcasters reels in works of varying quality. I was underwhelmed by Colin Matthews's "A Voice to Wake," with its vocal line that felt somehow both sibylline and mechanical. The Korean German composer Younghi Pagh Paan's "U MUL (The Well)," commissioned by WDR, relied a little too heavily on watery sound painting. On the other hand, listeners are indebted to Radio France for Akira Nishimura's beguiling "Corps d'Arc en Ciel," with its brilliant play on density and light. And, in this context, it was instructive to hear Salvatore Sciarrino's "Archeologia del Telefono," an instrumental work infused with his trademark fragility, in which brittle sounds hover on the edge of imperceptibility, carrying subtle charges of humor. In concert, Sciarrino's music fascinates in part because of the odd techniques used to draw sounds from the instrument. I couldn't help but wonder how a radio listener would interpret the dry flutter produced by a violinist bowing what looked like a Post it note tacked to her instrument. The esoteric sound world of such works requires an even more intense concentration on the part of the radio listener who, unlike the audience in the room, is literally all ears.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The Week in Tech: Putting an A.I. Genie Back in Its Bottle Each week, we review the week's news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here's a look at the week's tech news: "The facial recognition genie, so to speak, is just emerging from the bottle," Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, wrote in December, when he called for regulation of the technology. San Francisco just put it back in. On Tuesday, the city's Board of Supervisors banned the use of facial recognition software by the police and other city agencies in an 8 to 1 vote. Supporters said its use by government was an invasion of privacy incompatible with healthy democracy. Departments will now need to first submit proposals and post public notices to use the technology. Private sector and federal use isn't affected. That the ban was introduced by San Francisco, a city pivotal to the development of the technology, was viewed by some as a siren call. "This is like Detroit banning a certain model of vehicle because it's too dangerous," said Alvaro Bedoya, a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. "You may not live in Detroit, but, boy, you'd think twice before getting in that car." Expect more cities to follow: Somerville, Mass., outside Boston, is considering something similar, and Brian Hofer, a paralegal who drafted the San Francisco ordinance, is pushing for other anti surveillance measures across California. Like it or not, it's a rare sign that technologies viewed as threats to citizens' well being can be blocked. "The decision refutes a defeatist and widespread opinion that once a technology is established, you can't stop it in its tracks," said Evan Selinger, a philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. More than an app fight On Monday, the Supreme Court allowed an antitrust class action lawsuit against Apple, giving consumers an opportunity to try to prove that the iPhone maker used monopoly power to raise prices of iPhone apps. As my colleagues Adam Liptak and Jack Nicas reported, the lawsuit focuses on the fact that Apple charges developers a commission of up to 30 percent for selling products through its App Store, bars them from selling the apps elsewhere and plays a role in setting prices. Apple claims that it is a middleman: that customers buy software from the app developers. But the court, in a 5 to 4 ruling, said iPhone owners had a "direct purchaser" relationship with Apple, so they had the right to sue. It's interesting that the decision went against Apple at all. Liberal jurists often favor antitrust action, and conservatives avoid it. So you'd have expected the verdict to be 5 to 4 in the other direction, along the conservative liberal line of the Supreme Court. But the new justice, Brett M. Kavanaugh, tipped the other way. You could read Justice Kavanaugh's decision as an indicator that, as people of all political stripes begin to find Big Tech troublesome, conservatives may accept that antitrust could be a useful tool in curbing its power. If that's accurate, Big Tech should be very concerned. In 2019 there's little more fashionable than calling for Facebook's dismantlement. This past week, Senator Kamala Harris and Joseph R. Biden Jr., two of the Democrats running for president, said it should be considered, joining another, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for wider Big Tech breakups. And don't forget that Chris Hughes, a Facebook co founder, wrote this month that he wanted its split up, too. We could argue (at length) about the validity of the idea. But how plausible is it? The weapon of choice behind most of these calls is antitrust law. Fine. There's plenty of potentially anticompetitive behavior to go after. But in terms of end results, a breakup is possible, but by no means certain, from such legal action, according to antitrust experts I spoke with. Einer Elhauge, a Harvard law professor who was chairman of the antitrust advisory committee to the Obama campaign in 2008, told me that splitting WhatsApp and Instagram from Facebook the most popular proposal was plausible but might depend on how deeply integrated they had become. "It's hard to unscramble eggs," he said. And Facebook's push to intertwine the platforms more closely may make such unscrambling only harder. Harry First, a law professor at New York University who specializes in antitrust, said breaking up what then remained of Facebook would be "problematic and expensive," making it unlikely. More skeptical was Diana L. Moss, the president of the American Antitrust Institute, who said that for any antitrust action, "the remedy has to be applied specifically to the harm; it cannot be a broad remedy." That means that "it may not even include breaking up the company," but would instead involve something less severe, like conduct requirements. Mr. First agreed that injunctions and the formal monitoring of conduct were "much more likely" outcomes than a breakup. So if an antitrust argument is used to break up the social network, it's not guaranteed to have the desired outcome. But, as Mr. First told me, for those who want it, "it's good to have a goal." On Wednesday, more than a dozen countries, including Britain, France and Germany, signed a nine point plan with big tech companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to address extremist and violent content. A notable absence: the United States. The Trump administration cited free speech protections for not signing, saying that "the best tool to defeat terrorist speech is productive speech." The same day, the White House unveiled a bias reporting tool that enables people to report, to the government, censorship that they believe is a result of political bias on social networks. That thrusts into the public domain a widely held view among Republicans that platforms like Facebook and Twitter censor conservative viewpoints. As my colleague Kevin Roose pointed out, that looks like a savvy collection tool for voter data. But it's also an interesting, if not particularly surprising, demonstration of the priorities of the Trump administration.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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DanceBrazil, a longtime staple at the Joyce Theater, is wrapping up a festival of Brazilian dance there through Sunday with its primal fusion of Afro Brazilian movement and contemporary dance. At its core is capoeira, the martial arts form from which much of the group's brash power derives. Performers contrast a weighted, rocking connection to the floor with bursts of upward energy: out of nowhere, a whipping fan kick spins into a cartwheel. Sinewy muscles, not joints, control the body, and even with abrupt shifts of direction capoeira is, after all, a system of fighting the movement retains a seamless flow. That sensibility is apparent at various points in DanceBrazil, but with this company, led by the artistic director Jelon Vieira, the dancing is rarely the problem. It's the choreography that loses momentum. In "Buzios," the first of two New York premieres on Wednesday, Guilherme Duarte, a company member, choreographs a work exploring the role that a game of divination jogo de buzios means cowrie game in Portuguese plays in Brazilian culture. At least this isn't a literal rendering of a shell game. Just as Luciano Santana's white costumes, adorned with ruffles and bumps, are meant to evoke shells, at least loosely, they also create an impenetrable center where the gods of Candomble religion can appear and disappear. "Buzios," set to a moody, nebulous score by Leo Jesus and Mauricio Lourenco, opens with the dancers facing the back of the stage with their feet firmly planted. Pressing their palms together, they take lunging steps while shaking their hands over each shoulder. From time to time, they form circles or semicircles as if resetting the game, yet in this dance a vagueness settles in that is further marred by a false ending. The final, rambling duet is mystifying in all the wrong ways.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Follow our live coverage of the Biden inauguration. President Trump and many of his supporters complained over the weekend that "software glitches" undermined the vote counts in Michigan and Georgia and argued that the problems portended wider issues in other counties and states that used the same software. But issues in the unofficial vote counts in Michigan's Antrim and Oakland counties were caused by human error, not software glitches, according to reviews by the Michigan Department of State, county clerks and election security experts. Officials concluded that they were isolated cases that did not signal wider issues with vote counts elsewhere. And in Georgia, software issues only affected how poll workers checked in voters in two counties and delayed the reporting of results in another. The issues did not affect the counts. "Anyone trying to falsely connect the situations in the two states is spreading misinformation in an effort to undermine the integrity of our elections system," said Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of State. In Antrim County, Mich., a Republican stronghold, unofficial results initially showed President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. beating Mr. Trump by roughly 3,000 votes a sharp reversal from Mr. Trump's performance there in 2016. Local officials caught and fixed the error. In the revised count, Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden by roughly 2,500 votes. The problem, election security experts and state officials concluded, was that an election worker had configured ballot scanners and reporting systems with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant some results did not line up with the right candidate when officials loaded them into the system. In Oakland County, Mich., the result of one local race was changed after election officials spotted an error in the unofficial counts. The first tally said an incumbent Republican county commissioner had lost his seat, but the corrected tallies showed he kept it. County election workers had mistakenly counted votes from the city of Rochester Hills, Mich., twice, according to the Michigan Department of State. The workers later spotted the error. "As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process," Tina Barton, the clerk in Rochester Hills, said in a video she posted online. "This was an isolated mistake that was quickly rectified." Michigan officials added that the errors came in the counties' unofficial tallies and that they were fixed before another layer of checks that is designed to catch such mistakes. In that review, two Republican and two Democratic "canvassers" certify the vote counts in each county, checking poll books, ballot summaries and tabulator tapes. Antrim County relied on widely used election management software made by Dominion Voting Systems. That led conservative publications like Breitbart and The Federalist to falsely suggest that the mistakes were with Dominion and could mean wider issues elsewhere. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Yet three out of the other four counties that experienced issues in Michigan and Georgia did not use Dominion. Oakland County, Mich., used software from Hart interCivic. And in Georgia, only one of three counties that had problems, Gwinnett, tied the issues to Dominion, said Harri Hursti, an election security expert on the ground in Georgia. The issues in Gwinnett County delayed the reporting of vote counts but did not affect the tallies. The other Georgia counties, Spalding and Morgan, had issues with the systems that check in voters at the polls. Those so called Poll Pads were made by a company called KnowInk. "People are comparing apples to oranges in the name of Dominion," Mr. Hursti said. "This was a glitch in the way that KnowInk Poll Pads interacted with ballot marking devices, not with Dominion, period." Yet Twitter and Facebook posts from Mr. Trump and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, suggested the issues in Michigan and Georgia illustrated much wider problems with the election. Since Friday, there were more than 3,700 Facebook posts that mentioned "election," "software" and "glitch," and they were collectively shared more than 250,000 times. Right wing news sites echoed those complaints.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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WESLEY CHAVIS AND CORI OLINGHOUSE at Gibney Dance (Dec. 14 16 at 8 p.m.). For this iteration of Gibney's DoublePlus series, in which a curator selects two artists to share an evening, Dean Moss has paired Wesley Chavis and Cori Olinghouse. They are two very different artists, but Mr. Moss sees in their work attempts at personal and communal healing. In "Ku In Tuo Muah," Mr. Chavis takes breath as a point of departure. In "Grandma," Ms. Olinghouse employs Clown Therapy a personal improvisational practice of, in her words, "queering the clown form" to address familial dynamics and offer a comical critique of consumerism and the media. 646 837 6809, gibneydance.org DIG DANCE: NEW YORK/PACIFIC ISLAND TIME at 92Y (Dec. 8 9 at 8 p.m., Dec. 10 at 3 p.m.). This weekend, the New York cultural organization Halawai (Hawaiian for "meeting") convenes a number of dance artists hailing from Hawaii and the Pacific islands who draw from the cultural traditions of those places while adding a personal, contemporary stamp. Participants, many of whom are introducing new work or work new to New York, include Pele Bauch, Kung Yan Lin, Laura Margulies, Christopher K. Morgan, Kumu Hula Elsie Kaleihulukea Ryder, Kensaku Shinohara, Paz Tanjuaquio and Te Ao Mana. 212 415 5500, 92y.org KOTA YAMAZAKI/FLUID HUG HUG at Baryshnikov Arts Center (Dec. 13 15 at 7:30 p.m.). A centuries old Japanese music tradition, midcentury French philosophy and post World War II performance art meet in "Darkness Odyssey Part 2: I or Hallucination," a new work by the choreographer Kota Yamazaki. The dancers Julian Barnett, Raja Kelly, Joanna Kotze and Mina Nishimura join Mr. Yamazaki in his study on the simultaneous strength and fragility of the body, which he can make as fluid as water or as solid and volatile as the earth. 866 811 4111, bacnyc.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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DeMarcus Cousins on Friday night with two of his equally stellar teammates Kevin Durant, left, and Draymond Green. LOS ANGELES There was a moment during the Golden State Warriors' morning walk through on Friday that Shaun Livingston, even after his 14 seen it all seasons in the N.B.A., felt a need to pause in admiration of what was happening. So Livingston stared out onto the floor at Staples Center and tried to process that DeMarcus Cousins had indeed joined the starry quartet of Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green to run through some defensive instructions as a unit. "I'm not going to lie," Livingston said. "I saw the five of them together and for a second, I was like: 'Wow. That's a fantasy squad.' " The rest of the Warriors would go on to enjoy their own fantasy becomes reality moment Friday night. Finally making his debut with the two time reigning champions, after nearly a year in injury exile, Cousins frankly looked as joyful as we've ever seen him in an N.B.A. game, logging four effective stints for a total of 15 minutes 3 seconds in a 112 94 road rout of the Los Angeles Clippers. There were a few awkward drives to the rim, more than a few of his familiar grumbles to the referees and six fouls in those 15 minutes, but Cousins also racked up an impressive 14 points, 6 rebounds and 3 assists. Despite Cousins's rust and apparent lack of conditioning, Golden State outscored the Clippers by 21 points in his time on the floor before he fouled out. "This is his night," Curry said afterward. It certainly was. The 6 foot 11 inch Cousins hammered home a vicious dunk for his first basket as a Warrior, ran the floor with aplomb, hounded the various Clippers he guarded one on one into 0 for 7 shooting, found a cutting Curry for a layup with a nifty bounce pass out of the post, took a charge against a driving Tobias Harris and, most notably, drained three 3 pointers. Two of those 3's, early in the fourth quarter, "really broke the whole game open," Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said. Most of all, Cousins smiled. He smiled and laughed a lot. He soaked in a celebratory water dousing on live TV from Curry and Thompson, proudly awarded the game ball to his mother, Monique, and came away from his first real game action in 355 days by proclaiming it "probably one of the best days of my life." And that might be the most ominous aspect of Cousins's long anticipated bow with the juggernaut he joined on a bargain deal via free agency last summer. That one year deal, worth just 5.3 million, came amid leaguewide concern about how Cousins would respond to a torn Achilles' tendon in his left foot, historically one of the sport's most devastating injuries. The resultant skepticism wiped out most of his free agent market. "Things should only get better from here," Curry said. Said Kerr of Cousins's teammates: "They all love him. He's a really good teammate. He's an emotional guy, but he's loved." Even with a playful nickname like Boogie, there have been few happy occasions in the pros for Cousins, who has played more N.B.A. games (536) than any other active player without a taste of the postseason and had been sidelined since he shredded his Achilles' as a member of the New Orleans Pelicans on Jan. 26, 2018. But his desire to find a productive role with the franchise that has won three titles over the past four seasons was very clear on Friday night. Playing in short bursts to start every quarter, Cousins, 28, still found the time to flash every facet of the versatile skill set that, when it neutralizes the emotional side that Kerr referenced, has long made him one of the league's most tantalizing talents. "He's going to help them," Clippers Coach Doc Rivers said forlornly. "He does so many things." In the 46th game of what Curry himself described as a "very dramatic" season for the Warriors, Cousins's return also helped Golden State shed some of the aftertaste from its last visit here to play the Clippers when a nasty argument on the bench between Durant and Green led to Green's one game suspension without pay and considerable tension afterward. Those scenes seemed particularly dated on Friday even as Curry cast a wary eye on all the gushing sure to emerge in coming days about how mighty Golden State now looks with all five of its reigning All Stars in uniform. "We're not going to drink all the Kool Aid," Curry promised, insisting that the integration of Cousins remains "a work in progress.'' Still, no N.B.A. team has been able to trot out a lineup featuring five All Stars from the previous season since the 1975 76 Boston Celtics. Well aware of such history, Kerr tried before tipoff to convince his players to tune out the external noise. "There's going to be instant judgment, analysis and criticism," Kerr said after the morning shootaround. "We're either going to be, at the end of the night, unbeatable or in big trouble." Asked after Friday's emphatic triumph if it was thus safe to proclaim his team unbeatable, Kerr joked: "Yes. Please go ahead. Season's over." While things aren't quite that hopeless for the league's other 29 teams, it sure seems as though a new season just started for the Warriors, who are back atop the Western Conference despite a 32 14 record that isn't as gaudy as usual. The Clippers might have been short handed without the injured Lou Williams and with a hobbled Danilo Gallinari, but the Warriors' ability to slot Cousins in among their marquee foursome or mix him in with trusted reserves such as Livingston and Andre Iguodala quickly made them look as dangerous as they ever have during their championship run. Noting that he wasn't being double teamed no matter what the lineups on the floor were, Cousins called it "a first" in his career. "I can get used to this," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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LONDON The Spanish born architect Santiago Calatrava is known among New Yorkers as the designer of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which cost almost twice its original 2.2 billion estimate, an overshoot that has been attributed partly to him. That hasn't prevented Mr. Calatrava from landing his first London project, right next to the O2 concert arena on the Greenwich Peninsula. The 1 billion British pound (about 1.25 billion), 1.4 million square foot complex named Peninsula Place will consist of three towers with curving sides, a domed Winter Garden public passageway, an arcade and a vast footbridge. The client is Knight Dragon, a development company owned by the billionaire Hong Kong entrepreneur Henry Cheng. "New York and Lisbon and Bilbao: they were rehearsals for the important piece of work he's about to do for us," Mr. Khan said. The Greenwich complex will contain offices, apartments, a hotel, shops and restaurants, while the footbridge will mark the Greenwich meridian, the line on the world map that separates east from west. The complex is part of London's biggest single regeneration plan, an PS8.4 billion urban transformation scheme that will lead to the construction of 15,720 new homes, schools, public spaces, a film studio and a design district. Mr. Calatrava said in an interview that he spent a year and a half on the project, producing 10 different studies and models. He said he believed that the client had chosen him because he had done several other transportation hubs in cities including Lisbon; Lyon, France; and Zurich. Peninsula Place will be partially built over a London Underground subway station, and be "at the heart" of a transportation hub, he said. Asked about the cost overruns in New York, Mr. Calatrava attributed them to "extra work." Subway lines had to be "rebuilt completely all the way through the site," he said, and as much as 500 million in additional expenses became necessary after the 2004 and 2005 terrorist attacks on the transport networks in Madrid and London. Has his reputation suffered? "My reputation brings me to do this magnificent project in London, and I am happy," Mr. Calatrava said. The vice chairman of Knight Dragon, Sammy Lee, said he was "not worried at all about cost overruns." Mr. Calatrava's only other project in England is a footbridge in Manchester.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Thomas Ades: 'Concentric Paths Movements in Music' (Friday through Sunday) At 44, the British composer Thomas Ades is already a lion of contemporary classical music. In this Sadler's Wells London production, his music described as "sonic surrealism" is muse to four choreographers. Wayne McGregor tackles "Concentric Paths," a violin concerto; Karole Armitage sets a duet to "Life Story" with piano and voice; and Alexander Whitley interprets "Piano Quintet" (with Mr. Ades on piano). The showstopper is Crystal Pite's "Polaris," set to the orchestra of the same name, which she has called "epic." With 66 dancers, so too is her dance. Part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, whitelightfestival.org. (Brian Schaefer) Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba (Saturday, Sunday and next Friday through Nov. 29) Dance exports from Cuba tend to portray the island in cheerful, apolitical terms, and Ms. Alfonso's "Cuba Vibra," performed by her company of two dozen musicians and dancers, is no exception. This energetic show at the family oriented New Victory Theater, appropriate for ages 6 and up, packs five decades of Cuban dance history into 95 minutes. The synchronized precision of the Rockettes meets the flair of flamenco and salsa. Saturdays and next Friday at 2 and 7 p.m., Sundays at noon and 5 p.m., 209 West 42nd Street, 10th floor, Manhattan, 646 223 3010, newvictory.org. (Siobhan Burke) Ballet Hispanico (Friday and Saturday) The Brazilian choreographer Fernando Melo makes his New York debut, compliments of Ballet Hispanico performing "If Walls Could Speak" at the storied Apollo Theater. The evening length work is an ode to Mr. Melo's birthplace in all its cultural richness and political complexity, accompanied by live percussion and samba. That work occupies the evenings; a Saturday matinee aimed at families features selections from the company's repertory. Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., 253 West 125th Street, Harlem, 212 531 5305, ballethispanico.org. (Schaefer) Blaktino Dance Concert (Saturday) This is the final offering of the monthlong BlakTinX performance series, featuring artists many hailing from the Bronx who work in a variety of dance styles. The title of the performance is "Souls of Our Feet," suggesting it will be both heartfelt and grounded. Participating choreographers include Oxana Chi, Gierre Godley, Jasmine Hearn, Zave Martohardjono, Angie Pittman, Christopher Rudd, Acharo Smith, Nelida Tirado and Lorenzo Walker. At 8 p.m., Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, 2474 Westchester Avenue, at St. Peters Avenue, 718 918 2110, baadbronx.org. (Schaefer) Ronald K. Brown (through Sunday) For three decades, Mr. Brown and his company, Evidence, have been important contributors to American movement with their seamless blend of traditional African dance and modern dance. The result is usually energetic, and often spiritual. To celebrate the company's 30th anniversary, Mr. Brown presents two programs of work from the past 20 years, including "Why You Follow/Por Que Sigues," originally created for the Malpaso Dance Company in Cuba and now part of Evidence's repertory. At 8 p.m., BRIC House, 647 Fulton Street, at Rockwell Place, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, bricartsmedia.org. (Schaefer) Jean Butler (through Saturday) Steeped in Irish dance from a young age, Ms. Butler has had a fascinating journey from the original starlet of "Riverdance" in the mid 1990s to a choreographer working on a much smaller, more experimental scale. In "This Is an Irish dance," a new duet with the cellist Neil Martin, she continues exploring the form and her relationship to it, with a focus on the interplay between dancer and musician. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Burke) Company XIV (Wednesday through Jan. 17) If the traditional "Nutcracker" evokes the transition from childhood to adolescence, then Company XIV's "Nutcracker Rouge" might be the subsequent crossover into adulthood and the accompanying sexual awakening. The choreographer Austin McCormick combines a strong dose of burlesque, baroque and ballet with glittered pasties and G strings for a charmingly sensual and playful holiday romp. Tchaikovsky never sounded so scandalous. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 5 p.m., Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, 800 745 3000, companyxiv.com. (Schaefer) Complexions Contemporary Ballet (through Nov. 29) Having relocated to Atlanta after 20 years in New York, Complexions returns to its native city for a busy season at the Joyce Theater. Its two week run includes new works set to Metallica, Bach and the jazz singer Jimmy Scott, as well as a tribute to Maya Angelou and a premiere by the company's co director Dwight Rhoden, an extension of his 2009 ensemble work "Mercy." Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) 'Murray Louis A Celebration of the Legendary Choreographer' (Friday) Alwin Nikolais has been called "modern dance's pioneer of multimedia." One of his star dancers and artistic comrades was Murray Louis, who in 1953 created his own eponymous dance company. As part of the 92nd Street Y's Fridays at Noon series, dancers from Marymount College will perform three of Mr. Louis's works: "Bach Suite" (1956), "Geometrics" (1974) and "Four Brubeck Pieces" (1984). Archival footage will also be shown, and original members of Mr. Louis's dance company will discuss his avant garde impact on 20th century dance. At noon, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 212 415 5500, 92y.org. (Schaefer) New Chamber Ballet (Friday and Saturday) The latest program from Miro Magloire's company includes four works by Mr. Magloire: an expanded version of "Gravity," a trio to music by the 90 year old Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha; "The Other Woman," set to Bach; "Friction," which depicts interpersonal tension to music by Richard Carrick; and a new duet to solo piano by Beat Furrer. The company's resident choreographer Constantine Baecher contributes "Mozart Trio," in which the dancers discuss their feelings, in words as well as movement. The often unfamiliar music, played live, is always a highlight. At 8 p.m., City Center Studios, 130 West 56th Street, Manhattan, 212 868 4444, newchamberballet.com. (Schaefer) Miki Orihara (Friday through Sunday) The conundrum of the thought experiment called "Schrodinger's cat" concerns the unknown point of transition from one physical state to another. That question inspired the dancer and choreographer Miki Orihara, celebrated for her captivating work with the Martha Graham Dance Company, to create "In the Box." Directed by the theatrical visual effects specialist Hiroyuki Nishiyama (a.k.a. nissy), "In the Box" uses interactive projections to explore the paradox of "Where Technology Meets the Body," as the show's subtitle explains. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., Sunday at 7:30 p.m., Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune Street, at Washington Street, West Village, 212 229 9200, inthebox nyc.com. (Schaefer) Paul Taylor Commissions: Doug Elkins Larry Keigwin (Saturday and Sunday) Earlier this year, when Mr. Taylor expanded his dance company to become a center for preserving and promoting American modern dance, he took the big step of commissioning new works from younger artists to add to his extensive repertory. Excerpts from creations by Mr. Elkins and Mr. Keigwin are the focus of this program, performed by Mr. Taylor's troupe as part of the Guggenheim Museum's Works Process series. Several of Mr. Taylor's own dances, as well as a discussion with Mr. Elkins, Mr. Keigwin and the Paul Taylor biographer Suzanne Carbonneau, will round out the evening. At 7 p.m., Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212 423 3575, worksandprocess.org. (Schaefer) Pilobolus (Friday through Dec. 6) A girl on the verge of womanhood falls asleep and wakes up in a surreal fantasy world. Nope, not "The Nutcracker" (though stay tuned). This is "Shadowland," a new adventure from Pilobolus receiving its United States premiere. In collaboration with Steven Banks, a writer of "SpongeBob SquarePants," the company delivers a mix of theatrical spectacle and physical inventiveness soaked in wonder. As per its title, "Shadowland" showcases two dimensional silhouettes formed by creative contortions of the body. (No performances on Thanksgiving and Nov. 30.) At various times, Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Place, at Washington Square South, Greenwich Village, 866 811 4111, nyuskirball.org. (Schaefer) Twyla Tharp (through Sunday) Celebrating 50 years of making dances, this weekend Ms. Tharp concludes her 10 week cross country tour at Lincoln Center. An offsite presentation of the Joyce Theater, the bill includes two golden anniversary premieres: "Preludes and Fugues," set to Bach's "The Well Tempered Clavier," and "Yowzie," to selections from the American jazz music compilation "Viper's Drag." Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., David H. Koch Theater, 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com. (Burke)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Earth's climate is changing around us. From the frequent wildfires in California to the increasingly severe cyclones in the Indian Ocean, evidence of human caused global warming is becoming clear. But even as polls indicate a growing acceptance of the reality of global warming, many people are still not motivated enough to act; it feels too abstract, more likely to affect others rather than themselves. Lately, to convey the urgency of climate change at a personal level, scientists have begun translating its dry data points into heart rending melodies. "Music is really visceral," said Stephan Crawford, founder of The ClimateMusic Project, a San Francisco based group that creates music based on climate data. "Listening to a composition is an active experience, not just a passive one. It can make climate change feel more personal and inspire people to take action." On Oct. 29, a composition by The ClimateMusic Project a jazz and spoken word piece called "What If We...?" was performed by the band COPUS in front of an audience of about 250 people at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., for the opening of the World Bank's Art of Resilience exhibition.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The fish in this photo look as if they have frozen to death midjump. But what really happened is more complicated. And while it's easy to feel sorry for the frozen fish and worry that something has gone terribly wrong, you can take comfort in the fact that their deaths were part of an ecological reboot for the lake where they died. "Sometimes nature seems harsh, but it is all a part of the life cycle of a wetland," Kelly Preheim, a kindergarten teacher and birder who shot the photo, wrote in an email. The National Wildlife Refuge System, part of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, first shared the photo on its Facebook page as part of a picture captioning contest in December. But it received renewed attention this week after the Department of Interior shared it on Twitter. Ms. Preheim was amazed to see a four foot wall of frozen fish while birding in Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota and said she had never heard of this phenomenon. But commenters on Facebook reported seeing something like it before. And in 2014, a man and his miniature schnauzer stumbled upon a whole school of frozen pollock along the surface of a bay in Norway. The man thought the fish had gotten trapped in the bay while trying to escape a predator, and then strong winds and freezing temperatures froze the fish in place.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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WASHINGTON Senate Democrats narrowly won a vote on Wednesday to save so called net neutrality rules that ensure unobstructed access to the internet. The Senate passed a resolution in a 52 47 vote to overturn a decision last December by the Federal Communications Commission to dismantle Obama era rules that prevented broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast from blocking or speeding up streams and downloads of web content in exchange for extra fees. The commission's repeal of net neutrality is set to take effect in a few weeks. The rare victory for Democrats is sure to be short lived, with a similar resolution expected to die in the House, where Republicans have a larger majority. Only three Republican senators voted in support of the resolution. But that's beyond the point. The effort to stop the repeal of net neutrality rules is part of a broader political strategy by Democrats to rally young voters in the November elections. "Contact your Republican senator," Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said in a speech before the vote. "See who votes for net neutrality and who votes against. And let them know how you feel about the way they voted." For Democrats, net neutrality is part of a three legged stool internet access, gun control and marijuana legalization they are leaning on to entice young voters to engage in the midterm elections. Such voters broadly side with Democrats, even though they are notoriously complacent in nonpresidential election years. "So the Democratic position is very simple: Let's treat the internet like the public good that it is," Mr. Schumer said. It is unclear if net neutrality still holds the same interest that set off nationwide protests last December when the F.C.C., led by chairman Ajit Pai, a President Trump appointee, dismantled the rules. Tech companies and consumers decried the commission's action as a major reshaping of the internet, because it would allow broadband providers to create fast lanes for websites that pay to make sure their content, like streaming video, gets priority delivery. Few changes to internet service are expected to come right away. But it is not stopping Democrats from trying to use it to their advantage. They have been making a similar push on gun control, an issue that grabbed the attention of young people after a gunman slaughtered 17 students and staff members at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February. And Mr. Schumer has plans to introduce a bill next month that would legalize marijuana. Republicans were unable to prevent the vote, despite being in the majority, because the measure was tied to an action by a federal agency. The measure, brought as part of the Congressional Review Act, needed only to be brought up within a short period once the agency's rules were codified, and needed only a majority of votes to pass. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the chairman of the commerce committee, called the vote on net neutrality "political theater." "We are having a fake argument," Mr. Thune said about the vote. He said the Senate "is going nowhere, my colleagues on the other side know that." Mr. Thune and other Republican lawmakers have proposed their own net neutrality legislation. The law would restore parts of the Obama era rules, but it would not categorize broadband providers as common carrier providers that need to follow utility style rules, which many Democrats consider essential. "The heavy hand of government is plain to see in the plan Democrats passed in 2015 and is now seeking to reimpose," Mr. Thune said. Cable, wireless and telecom companies also support the creation of a law for net neutrality that is not as strict as the 2015 regulations, which were created by Tom Wheeler, the former chairman of the F.C.C. The heads of major trade groups warned Senate leaders of great harm from the net neutrality rules. The regulations "would curb the necessary investment and infrastructure improvements that are critical for connecting more Americans to high speed broadband and enabling wider internet access, especially in poor and rural areas," they wrote in a letter to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, and Mr. Schumer this week. The broadband providers have warned that the net neutrality rules and the designation of broadband as a utility like service could make high speed internet service subject to rate regulations at the F.C.C. The companies have the backing of the vast majority of Republicans. The three Republican senators who voted on Wednesday in favor of restoring rules Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Kennedy of Louisiana have complained about the lack of broadband internet competition in their states. Mr. Kennedy said one fifth of Americans have access to only one provider of broadband internet with sufficient speeds for most modern needs like streaming video. "The vote comes down to one thing and one thing only: the extent to which you trust your cable company," he said. Many Silicon Valley start ups and consumer groups are in support of the stricter rules and have been backing Democrats on the issue. Dozens of tech start ups, including Pinterest, Medium, Redfin and Etsy, wrote to Senate leaders in support of the vote to restore the broadband rules. "The repeal of open internet protections threatens the very foundation of the internet," the companies wrote in their letter. "The F.C.C. has abandoned its long history of net neutrality protections and left consumers and businesses without essential protections for their lives and work online." The congressional battle over net neutrality is just one of many fights taking place over the rules. States have been active in bringing back rules, even with the F.C.C.'s instructions last December that states cannot directly create new rules.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The top of the Billboard album chart over the last couple of weeks has been a tale of two formats: streaming and sales. Last week, the winner was the controversial rapper XXXTentacion, who reached the top of the chart with a huge streaming number 159 million tracks played but had just 20,000 album sales, according to Nielsen. This week, the pattern is exactly the opposite, with Jack White's "Boarding House Reach" taking the No. 1 spot with 121,000 sales and just 4.2 million streams. Mr. White, one of music's most ardent supporters of vinyl, sold 27,000 copies of the album as vinyl LPs more than XXXTentacion's entire album haul, which includes both physical sales and downloads.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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When talk turns to whether the Metropolitan Opera should put on old works like 1709 old habits die hard. The story has been told for decades that intimate Baroque operas will vanish in the vast Met. Modern audiences won't want to sit for hours through parades of static arias and confusing plots. During intermission at the company premiere of Handel's "Agrippina" on Thursday, I ran into an acquaintance in the lobby who said that he was enjoying the show. "But of course," he added, gesturing back toward the 3,800 seat theater, "it's way too big." This "Agrippina" yanked from ancient Rome into a deliciously bleak vision of our time, played with electric vividness, and starring a guns blazing Joyce DiDonato should put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Handel belongs at the Met less than Verdi, Puccini or Wagner. Bold, snicker out loud funny, magnetic and unsettling through its power struggle convolutions, this production musically and dramatically fills the company's looming proscenium. It's begging to be enjoyed with a bag of popcorn or with a martini packing some of the work's frosty heat. Handel was lucky to get, in Vincenzo Grimani's gleefully wicked text, that rarity in opera history: a libretto with dramatic focus, ambivalent characters and worldly humor. (The genre isn't known for dark comedy.) Three centuries on, "Agrippina" remains bracing in its bitterness, with few glimmers of hope or virtue in the cynical darkness. But it's irresistible in its intelligence and in the shamelessness it depicts with such clear yet understanding eyes. The story is ostensibly about the Roman empress Agrippina's ferocious machinations to get her husband, Claudius, to cede the throne to her vastly unqualified son, Nero. Her obstacles sometimes co opted as pawns include the beautiful Poppea; the noble, lovelorn general Otho; and a couple of bumbling courtiers. But the audience at the premiere in Venice, for what turned out to be the first big hit of Handel's career, would have known that the satire was directed at Grimani's political enemies, including the pope, just as much as at the amorality of the ancients. Even in the early 1700s, this was recognized as a work with contemporary reverberations. So in 2000, when David McVicar first directed this "Agrippina" in Brussels, it made sense for him to update those reverberations and to make them explicit, rather than the subtext. His Agrippina stalked the stage in a power suit; Nero was a slouching, sullen teenager; there was carousing at a stylish bar, complete with cocktail harpsichordist. Yet the characters began and ended the performance on plinths inscribed with their names: This was a staging antique and modern at once, with surreal touches of synchronized choreography, bits of slapstick and a central golden staircase rising to a golden throne, the prize everyone is climbing toward. That first run made certain critics think of ruthless politicians of the then recent past, like Margaret Thatcher and the Clintons. Twenty years later with the production's arrival at the Met, the addition of smartphones for onstage selfies and the relaxation of some aggressive late '90s shoulder pads the figures brought to mind by this tale of decadence and self enrichment have inevitably changed. Skittish Met board members fearing a reprise of the Public Theater's incendiary depiction of a President Trump like Julius Caesar being stabbed in a 2017 Shakespeare staging need not fear. There is nothing overt about the president in this "Agrippina" save, perhaps, a scene with a golf playing emperor that actually dates back to Brussels. Yet the relentless grasping after dominance that's on display as well as the mezzo soprano Kate Lindsey's gymnastically raunchy, coke addled portrayal of Nero (Nerone, in the opera) does evoke something of the riveted disorientation endemic to our time of, ahem, norm breaking. Without being too blatant, this "Agrippina" does get at the emotional climate of a disruptive era, the clenched jaw feeling you may well get as you wait for the New York Times app to load on your phone. You don't want to look; you can't look away. Mr. Bicket has already led Handel's "Rodelinda" and "Giulio Cesare" at the Met. He knows how to guide the company's orchestral forces in a style that's not its standard repertory, and the result is an appealing paradox: both beefy and lithe. The textures have the glinting clarity of a Baroque ensemble, but also a richness that fills the huge house. The orchestral work is more consistently brilliant than the singing. Ms. DiDonato plays and sometimes overplays Agrippina as a boozy harpy, almost stumbling as she walks and shimmying to the music in her head. Under pressure, the top of her voice can grow pinched and strident. But a little lower down, her tone is vibrant and articulate, with a steely core. And she offers tantalizing glimpses of Agrippina's doubts. Her posture is ever so slightly stricken after she's misled Claudius into decrying the faithful Otho as a traitor. Her aria "Pensieri, voi mi tormentate" is a commanding combination of lines dripping fire with floated high wires of sound. Her final moment in the staging, wondering where her venality has finally brought her, shows her hilariously and poignantly unwilling to return to the annals of history that is, to die.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Four days after the explosive Donald J. Trump "Access Hollywood" tape was made public, Billy Bush was negotiating his exit from NBC. Mr. Bush and NBC are working out the terms of his departure from "Today," which may come in the next few days, according to two people briefed on the plans. It would be a swift fall for Mr. Bush after a brief tenure as a host in the 9 a.m. hour of the show. He joined "Today" this summer. In the videotape from 2005, which was filmed during the taping of an "Access Hollywood" segment, Mr. Bush laughs and goads Mr. Trump as he speaks about women in vulgar and lewd terms, claiming he tried to have sex with the woman who was then Mr. Bush's co host. Mr. Bush, 44, apologized on Friday evening, and throughout the weekend NBC officials maintained they had no plans to discipline him. As late as Sunday morning, the plan was for Mr. Bush go on "Today" on Monday and address the controversy, saying something along the lines of the statement he released on Friday, in which he said he was "ashamed.'' But the backlash was significant. Mr. Bush's Facebook page was deluged with thousands of angry comments. Two women that Mr. Bush and Mr. Trump discussed in the tape the former "Access Hollywood" host Nancy O'Dell and the "Days of Our Lives" actress Arianne Zucker released statements over the weekend expressing their disappointment. Given the tape's incredible visibility, it was likely that Mr. Bush would remain part of the news cycle for the near future. "Today" is in competition with ABC's "Good Morning America" and the fallout from the videotape could have affected NBC's ratings in the morning hours, particularly among women, who represent a significant portion of the show's viewership. By Sunday night, NBC had suspended Mr. Bush. Noah Oppenheim, the executive in charge of "Today," told his staff in an email, "there is simply no excuse for Billy's language and behavior on that tape." NBC News officials also learned in recent days that at the Olympic Games this summer, Mr. Bush bragged to some staff members about a videotape involving bad behavior by Mr. Trump. The New York Post first reported this on Monday night. "Access Hollywood" personalities like Natalie Morales, Kit Hoover and Nina Parker have offered Mr. Bush support this week ("The Billy that I know and a lot of people would say this has the biggest heart of anybody and he is a good person," Ms. Hoover said), but few other people have defended him. Complicating matters, Mr. Bush did not have a particularly warm relationship with many of the other stars of "Today." That point was underscored in August when Mr. Bush landed what looked to be the scoop of the Olympics: The first in person interview with the swimmer Ryan Lochte as he described being robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro. As Mr. Lochte's story disintegrated in the following days, Mr. Bush was hesitant to condemn him. During a segment of "Today," Mr. Bush contended that Mr. Lochte "lied about some details." Al Roker quickly stepped in to dress down his colleague, saying pointedly, "Billy, not some details," before adding, "He lied."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it had promoted Meredith Kopit Levien, who had been its chief revenue officer since 2015, to executive vice president and chief operating officer, as part of a restructuring of The Times's digital departments. The company also announced that Kinsey Wilson, who joined The Times in 2015 and had been the executive vice president overseeing product and technology, would not stay on in a permanent role. His position is being eliminated. He will continue to advise senior leaders "on a range of strategic matters," according to a news release. In Ms. Levien's new role, she is expected to oversee teams responsible for product, design, audience and brand, consumer revenue, advertising and NYT Beta, which develops new digital products like Cooking and Watching. In a joint interview on Wednesday, Ms. Levien and Mark Thompson, the president and chief executive of The Times, said the reorganization was intended to accelerate the pace of the company's digital businesses. They said a simplified structure would aim to free employees to make decisions more quickly.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon ho turned from the street into a passageway barely wide enough for two people. "Look at these dirty stairs," he said rhapsodically, pausing to peer through a doorway at tiles of perhaps '70s era vintage. The passageway descended farther and took a hairpin turn into a pedestrian alley of uneven brick walls, overhead knots of electrical wire and drying laundry. "Maybe a detective could chase a criminal here," he said, presumably imagining actors careening down the alley. "I have to shoot something here before something destroys it." Mr. Bong, the critically acclaimed director of the dystopian thriller "Snowpiercer" as well as "The Host," which is set in Seoul and stars a man eating river monster, is not your average tour guide. And that was exactly the idea. I had visited the South Korean capital once before, during a rainy autumn, and while dazzled by the neon lights and spectacularly effective subway system, had barely scratched the city's surface. Seoul is the heart of an urban area of more than 25 million people among the largest in the world and like any 21st century megalopolis, it is impossible to grasp as a single entity. From N Seoul Tower, a 777 foot spire atop an 800 foot hill, the densely packed city rolls away into the hazy distance, stopping only where it comes up against the encircling mountains. If you look down from the top, there could be hundreds of Seouls, and I didn't know which to choose. "Snowpiercer" was based on a French graphic novel and shot in the Czech Republic with actors from at least seven nations. In it, people of all classes, humanity's last survivors, are jammed together on a hurtling train. I should not have been surprised, then, that Mr. Bong, 45, chose to share a global Seoul. To get to our rendezvous, I climbed the sloping streets of the Itaewon neighborhood, past a cluster of gay and transgender bars, and, farther on, an increasing quotient of Middle Eastern restaurants. In Itaewon, you can take a date or business associate out for a suitably impressive dinner on Itaewon ro No. 27, or get a cellphone hooked up after hours in Nigerian Alley, side streets that respectively draw full freight expats and the scrappier remittance class. I passed these places on my way to meet Mr. Bong at the Seoul Central Mosque, set on a hilltop where Itaewon meets the neighborhood of Hannam, its dome and twin minarets a beacon to Korea's tiny minority of Muslims. While Friday congregants milled behind us in the late afternoon sun, we sat on a bench that looked out over the city. "This part of Seoul is amazing," he said. "It symbolizes the incoherence of a city that doesn't have strong continuity." He held his hands up and made a rectangle with his fingers, framing an imaginary shot. "Look at the layers," he said. In the foreground were old houses, then a church steeple in the middle distance, a common sight in a country that is nearly a third Christian. Beyond lay the Han River and too many high rises to count. "In five or 10 years these old houses will be gone," he said. "This is a city of destruction and reconstruction." As the call to prayer sounded, Mr. Bong led me away from the mosque and onto a narrow street, Usadan ro No. 10. The businesses we passed fell roughly into three categories. There were specialty shops haberdashery, hardware where it appeared neither staff nor signage had changed in 50 years. There were restaurants of more recent origin serving kosher Korean food or Turkish kebabs. And then there were the newest arrivals: a three month old wine bar, a juice bar, a tattoo studio slash art gallery called Soul Ink, a clothing shop in which every item was either black or white. One cafe sported a name that, as near as I could figure out, roughly translates as "maybe we're open today"; two invitingly fluffy white Samoyeds named Cloud and Storm "work part time," according to the barista. The neighborhood hovered in that sweet spot just before people start complaining about gentrification. "Here it all mixes very naturally," Mr. Bong said. We walked farther down the street to a bar called Aoi Sora with a triangular sign. It specializes in daytime drinking, Mr. Bong said; from Monday to Thursday, it closes at 7 p.m. Inside, by the light of a single large square window at the back, he ordered clams in their shells and a bottle of clear alcohol with a ginseng root winding through it, which was not on the menu but was created by the bartender, who in his off hours teaches a class in traditional booze making. We sipped from small ceramic cups, and Mr. Bong talked more about his changing city. "Every alley has its own story," he said. Over eight days in Seoul, destruction and transformation were regular themes. Ms. Shin, the novelist, explained her city this way: "In Paris or New York, when you have an appointment with a friend, you can meet her in the same place that you did a year ago. In Seoul, you can't, because there will be something new there." New Yorkers may quibble, but her point stands; in Seoul the change is especially fast and comprehensive. But, Ms. Shin said, those same qualities are part of the city's dynamism and energy. They are also ones essential to her work. Ms. Shin, 52, is the author of "Please Look After Mom," which sold more than a million copies in Korea and was published in English in 2011. In it, an old woman from the countryside comes to visit her grown children in Seoul. She makes it as far as the central train station and then disappears, lost in the matrix of the shape shifting city. "Seoul is an important backdrop because I wanted to represent the clash between generations," Ms. Shin said. The city is not all frenetic evolution. There are serene oases in its parks and greenways, on the grounds of its centuries old palaces and in its museums. Ms. Shin asked me to meet her at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. It displays Korean art through the centuries, as well as contemporary works by both Korean artists like the video art pioneer Nam June Paik and international stars like Andreas Gursky and Louise Bourgeois. When we arrived just before opening, an air of tranquillity prevailed. A small group of us Ms. Shin, a poet friend of hers, an interpreter and I followed an English speaking guide through the Mario Botta designed wing that houses mostly traditional art. (Other parts of the museum complex were designed by Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas.) The first piece we saw was an ethereal celadon ewer from the 13th century, decorated in a raised relief lotus pattern. Beneath a soft spotlight in the darkened room, it looked almost translucent. Under the Goryeo dynasty, which lasted from the 10th to the 14th century, Korean artists adopted the Chinese method of making the glazed, pale green pottery, then refined the craft to the point that many art historians consider Korean celadon among the finest ever made. Though a well of knowledge herself, our human guide had also handed us digital ones. Museum audio guides tend to be clunky and overly insistent, but these lightweight, touch screen paddles invited play. My sleek little machine sensed which object I was looking at and silently presented its image with white on black text. Some of the objects could be enlarged and spun around on the screen, allowing me to study curves and texture in minute detail the next best thing to being able to pick up the items. In front of a 15th century blue and white porcelain jar, I became so absorbed in the digital display that I fell behind the group. But one specific item was our true destination. It was a foot and a half tall, white, rotund, 18th century porcelain vessel called a moon jar. Lit from above, it appeared to float like a heavenly body over its pedestal. A jagged, tea colored stain cut across the surface like an abstract painter's flourish, the result of oil once held in the vessel seeping out. Ms. Shin said the jar reminded her variously of a mountain, a pregnant woman or a woman in a hanbok a voluminous traditional dress on a windy day. She visits the jar regularly, she said, and it offers her peace when she is stressed. If Seoul's manic side pulses through her settings, the jar shapes her work in a different way. "I want to write sentences as beautiful as the moon jar," she said. "I haven't done it yet." She is particularly in love with the oil stain. "The line of the stain shows the flow of time. Humans didn't make it; only history and nature could." Ms. Lee, the fashion designer, invited me to visit her at her showroom in Gangnam, the district made internationally famous after being cheerfully ridiculed by the pop singer Psy. Gangnam has had an exceedingly short modern history two locals, only half jokingly, told me that it began in 1988, when the country's first McDonald's opened there and became a popular meeting place. By reputation a land of bling, it is where the luxury brands that line ritzy avenues around the world have established their Korean beachheads. It is also the seat of Korea's own fashion industry, home to labels like Jinteok and Bakangchi, both stars of Seoul Fashion Week. They and other Korean designers share the stretch of Samseong ro between Hakdong ro and Dosan daero with Ms. Lee's brand, Resurrection. Ms. Lee, 44, is a traditional Korean woman in some respects: She went into the same business as her mother, who works in the same building, still a designer, and helps care for Ms. Lee's two sons. But she is also known for her sumptuous neo Gothic creations, which have clothed, among other foreign celebrities, Marilyn Manson. When he played in Seoul about 10 years ago, Ms. Lee seized fate and delivered some of her clothes to the concierge at his hotel. Ten minutes later, she said, Mr. Manson called her and asked for more. "He has a strange beauty, a grotesque beauty," she said, calling him one of her biggest influences. So it was perhaps not a surprise that I found her in the Resurrection showroom, which is open to the public, sitting on a carved black lacquered chair upholstered in velvet. Her hair was streaked magenta. Dozens of red candles set in front of an enormous mirror suggested an altar, and wrought iron chairs contrasted with a red wall that displayed an eclectic set of crosses. I would not have been surprised to find a well appointed dungeon nearby. All this was backdrop to clothes made of sheer fabrics, leathers and synthetic furs, visible heirs to the designs of Alexander McQueen. Ms. Lee is unusual in the world of high end fashion as a woman who designs mainly for men. Or, at least, she sends mostly men down the runway, often looking like futuristic vampires, but women buy her designs, too. Her men's wear, in turn, sometimes incorporates feminine details. She showed me a men's sleeve garter inspired by women's garter belts. Men, women, East, West Ms. Lee mixes it up. Her love of black and leather reflects her Western side, she said (she studied at Parsons School of Design in New York). Lately, though, she has been reaching into the Korean past. She walked to a rack of clothing and brought out a gold, red and black brocade jacket. This kind of silk was once used to make hanbok, she said, and she learned how to work with it from her mother. She showed me another piece, a men's jacket for her 2015 collection, in a traditional embroidered swan pattern. "That's my homework," she said. "To combine Korean traditional fabrics with the modern." Mr. Kim and Mr. Nam, both in their 40s, had similar takes on Samcheong, remembering it as an old, rundown but romantic neighborhood that somehow, around a decade ago, became fashionable. Having escaped the kind of wholesale overhaul that has affected other areas, it has undergone a different, more gracious kind of modernization. It is still home to many hanok, traditional houses with wood frames and curving tiled roofs. Most are no longer the homes they once were, but have been restored in keeping with their original design and repurposed as shops, teahouses and restaurants. The buildings' arched eaves line the stair step passageways that lead up from the main road, Samcheong ro. Mr. Kim's mother would bring him to a noodle soup restaurant in the neighborhood when he was a boy, and when he was dating his now wife, they would come to its cafes or the restaurant where we had lunch. The soup restaurant he and his mother would visit, Sujebi also the name of the soup itself is still there, and when we walked by, more than a dozen people waited outside. Groups of friends strolled the sidewalks, some couples embracing the curious local custom of dressing to match each other, stripe for stripe and toque for toque. Mr. Nam said he first came to the renewed Samcheong in 2004, when Park Chan wook, director of the revenge movie "Oldboy," invited him to meet at a French restaurant. "I was skeptical," Mr. Nam said, "but he told me that the neighborhood was starting to change." Now he doesn't come to Samcheong often, but when he is publicizing a new movie, he rents out a whole cafe in the neighborhood and invites the news media. We finished our neighborhood tour over iced drinks in a cafe; its windows were wide open to the sun and a light breeze ruffled our napkins. Out on the sidewalk, Seoulites passed glass storefronts and curving tiled rooftops, sometimes both part of a single building that stitched together old and new. Mr. Kim looked up and down the street and said, "I wish I could come here more often."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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On the eve of the 50th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's canonical antiwar science fiction novel "Slaughterhouse Five," Christie's has auctioned a scrapbook in which the author, who died in 2007, collected correspondence and photographs from his time in the United States Army in Dresden during World War II. The images and texts in this monumental artifact, all unpublished, survived thanks to the safekeeping of Vonnegut's sister, Alice. From letters to his family, signed "Kay," to photos of a once majestic city now in rubble, these clippings provide a deeply personal behind the scenes look into the experiences from which the novelist drew in writing his sixth and perhaps most influential novel. Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Melissa Aldana joined the Sullivan Fortner Trio on Friday to celebrate the coming release of Mr. Fortner's new album. Welcome to "The Month in Live Jazz," a column highlighting three standout performances from the past month on stages across New York City. Sullivan Fortner, a pianist born in New Orleans, has an extravagant amount of talent and a hyperactive flow on the keyboard. He mixes chords and crossing patterns and two handed unison lines, all at a rapid clip. Sometimes he'll play with both hands right around the center of the instrument, but you'll swear that he's using every key. At other times, he really is. Mr. Fortner is about to release a fine album, "Moments Preserved," and he celebrated the occasion with a four night run at Jazz Standard, performing with a trio that included the drummer Marcus Gilmore, an experimentalist with an ear for micro attunements and stippled phrasing. On Friday, Melissa Aldana, one of the more exciting young tenor saxophonists today, joined as a special guest. She mixes the influence of certain clean toned tenors of the 1990s Mark Turner and Chris Potter, especially with that of classic figures like Joe Henderson and, further back, Don Byas. On "Aria," the first tune of the night featuring Ms. Aldana, Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Sullivan seemed almost isolated in their own worlds, sending flares and building private 3 D designs. There wasn't a clear place for her saxophone to go, and at first, it seemed as if this partnership might be doomed. But then, midway through her solo, something clicked in. Ms. Aldana's playing has a smooth and cascading quality; it's not punctuated and scalpel wrought, like Mr. Fortner's. With the bassist Matt Brewer offering a sturdy ballast, Ms. Aldana cooled the energy coming off the drums and the piano, holding long notes and weaving her own symmetrical lines. Mr. Fortner's sophomore album, "Moments Preserved," comes out on June 8 on Impulse! Ms. Aldana appears this Friday and Saturday at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan, where she will debut a new suite of compositions dedicated to Frida Kahlo. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. By now the nexus of jazz and hip hop is thoroughly strip mined terrain. But there's still room for a few unheard, outsiderish ideas. You just have to go find them. Dana Murray has put together a long and tangled resume over the past quarter century, playing with Wynton Marsalis; the trip hop band Wax Poetic; and Russell Gunn, one of the early innovators of hip hop jazz fusion. A few years ago, Mr. Murray moved back to Omaha, his hometown, and since then he's rarely been heard from in New York. But last month, Ropeadope Records quietly released Mr. Murray's first solo album, "Negro Manifesto." It's a difficult, often rewarding collection that plays out something like an electroacoustic opera, using trenchant words and queasy sounds to diagnose the ills of a contemporary racial dystopia, and to outline its historical precedents. The album's tracks sometimes fall uncomfortably between songs and skits, but that indeterminate quality is part of the package. Mr. Murray made the album over the course of a few years, working with some guest singers and rappers and instrumentalists, but recording most of it on his own. Heralding its release at Nublu 151, he led a six piece band through much of the album's material. A lot of the energy and direction flowed directly from Mr. Murray's drum kit and his laptop. On "Comfort," a song about the promises and dangers of romantic love, a verse of bluesy singing from Heidi Martin gave way to a slow, searing alto saxophone solo from Darius Jones. Ms. Martin came back toward the end, meeting Mr. Jones's cries with a held note, their two sounds growling and cooing and finding a warm, tenuous resonance. Later, Mr. Murray let go of the electronics and began playing a wide barrel funk beat, somewhere between Clyde Stubblefield and Hamid Drake. Mr. Jones interjected here and there, while the rapper Malik Work spat rabid, righteous poetry, railing against the colonization of the mind. With the percussionist David Hawkins adding thick mallet strokes on a second drum kit, Mr. Murray kept up a thunderous and slant fit groove. It was not comfortable music, but it got under your heart, and lifted up. Mr. Murray's debut album, "Negro Manifesto," was released last month on Ropeadope Records. Since the mid 1990s, the pianist Guillermo Klein has been working with his 11 piece big band, Los Guachos. His writing for this group was provocative and ambitious from the very start: The music he makes is melancholy and marbled with darkness, but it's wry, too, not overly self serious. At the core of that identity are its rhythms often Caribbean or tango inflected, yet distinctly related to the dense language of late 20th century jazz. Over the past 20 years, Mr. Klein has lived in the United States, Spain and his native Argentina, but he's kept up writing for, and performing with, this band. It has been a regular act at the Village Vanguard for the past dozen years. On Sunday, the group closed a weeklong run there with a set of 10 originals, some old, many new. On "Nos Miraran Pasar" based on the tango classic "El Dia Que Me Quieras" the horn section became a spinning wheel of carnivalia, displacing its own motion, multiplying Astor Piazzolla by Philip Glass. And on "Burrito (Cristal)," the rhythm section established a plodding, hesitant, seven beat cycle, while the tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry took a declarative solo. Underneath him, Mr. Klein added a sequence of tolling chords sometimes ironic, sometimes plainly lovely. Mr. Klein's most recent album with this band, "Los Guachos V," was released in 2016 on Sunnyside Records.
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, the daughter of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, will release a children's picture book on inspirational American women titled "She Persisted." The book will share the stories of 13 historical women who relentlessly pursued their goals in the face of opposition, including Harriet Tubman, Nellie Bly, Maria Tallchief and Oprah Winfrey. Illustrated by Alexandra Boiger, "She Persisted" will reach bookstores on May 30, and will feature a cameo that is yet to be announced.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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The trial involving Gawker and Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, over the publication of a sex video raised timeless legal questions about privacy and freedom of the press. The result, with the jury awarding Mr. Bollea 115 million in compensatory damages, could threaten Gawker's existence. But in many ways, the Gawker that posted the video an aggressive and unpredictable news and gossip site has already passed into memory. So, too, has an era of the web in which Gawker thrived. In the last few years, digital news sites with ambition even the ones, like Gawker, that had originally hailed themselves as being anti establishment have undergone something of a self correction. Vivid videos of random bedroom romps are out; a little bit of privacy is in. Readers, empowered by social media, have reshaped publications directly, by collective will. And they seem to realize that the photos and videos captured on their smartphones or elsewhere could just as easily be used against them as anyone else, including a celebrity. "Now that 'everyone' has a 'sex tape' and everyone is at risk of having their sex tape published online," the publication of celebrity sex tapes is less justified in the eyes of readers, said Max Read, a former editor of Gawker. The online world in which these sites operate, even compared with 2012 when Gawker posted the video of Mr. Bollea, is no longer the same. Visitors increasingly arrive from social platforms mainly Facebook and those readers have far more control of how a story is received. Pleasing stories can be shared and cheered on those social platforms. Behavior deemed bad can now be shunned with immediate results. The change was evident as the verdict came down on Friday. On Twitter and elsewhere, fans of Mr. Bollea and critics including many journalists enthusiastically cheered the potential death of Gawker. Some others, shocked at the size of the award, declared it a chilling moment for the press. (Legal experts suggest that the real influence of the case, in the event that this decision is upheld, would be narrow.) But in 2012, the vast majority of Twitter posts that linked to Gawker's video were lighthearted jokes about Mr. Bollea's physique, about the humiliation of a childhood idol, about fame seeking. The user tsayvs, who did not provide a real identity, linked to Gawker's video the day after it was posted and called Gawker's description a "masterpiece." After the verdict was announced and facing a cascade of messages from the affronted, he posted again: "Am I the only one on Team Gawker here." If he was not alone, he sure seemed to have little company. A similar sense of outrage built in 2014, when hackers posted hundreds of photos obtained from celebrities' private accounts. Publications that had previously trafficked in leaked nude photos including Gawker Media properties and sites like BuzzFeed shied away from publishing them. Instead, reporters covered the hack as news. Writers published essays examining the hack through the lens of privacy and consent; readers, frequently confronted with privacy worries of their own, were receptive. Today, the decision of whether to publish the most sensitive content often doesn't fall on publications or editors. It falls to online services that openly host videos and images, and to the social platforms on which videos and images spread. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. A video like the one that ran on Gawker might now appear on a site like LiveLeak, where people can post and distribute videos. Or it might be posted to a site like Vidme, a newer video host, or directly to Twitter, where it might be removed, only to surface again. File hosts and social networks are governed by individual terms of service. Imgur, an image site where photos from the celebrity iCloud hack were uploaded for a time, has rules that ban "nonconsensual ('revenge') porn." Twitter's rules prohibit "private and confidential information," including "images or videos that are considered and treated as private under applicable laws" a matter of interpretation left first to the company. Facebook, which began hosting news last year, prohibits most nudity. In addition, its guidelines state, "Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed." Having rules is one thing; enforcing them is another. Large platforms usually rely on a combination of employee oversight and user reporting to identify content that violates policy. Rules are enforced primarily through after the fact removal, not upfront moderation. Imgur, despite a ban, still hosts a large repository of sexual material. For media organizations, that means some of the most difficult decisions are limited to deciding if, and how, to acknowledge information that seems to publish itself. A hack in which content from Sony's internal network, including email, was posted online forced editors to choose whether to access and use information that was available to anyone with a web browser. Celebrity nude photos, posted by hackers, became a news story and jumping off point for discussions about privacy and consent. Videos of violence involving police officers, some posted directly to platforms by citizens, forced the subject into view, reverberating around the country. ISIS circumvented news outlets by uploading videos directly to video hosts. Gatekeepers had become bystanders, controlling little beyond their own participation. Gawker appears to have accepted this new reality. In July, after the site outed a male media executive for messaging a male escort, Gawker's founder, Nick Denton, who is an outspoken critic of more conventional news outlets, had the post taken down. Some of his top editors revolted and left not long after. He then announced that the site should be "10 to 15 percent" nicer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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