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If Sean Spicer's tenure as White House press secretary made him a figure of national renown and mockery, priming him for his current incarnation as a special correspondent on the syndicated TV show "Extra," the legacy of his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is more straightforward. And, perhaps, more lasting. She made the White House briefing boring again gaffes and ratings dropped off before effectively killing it off entirely, or at least leaving it in a politically induced coma. She falsely called a CNN reporter a groper and stripped him of his press credential. (A judge later restored it.) From a lectern with the presidential seal, she urged Americans to watch a propaganda video from the right wing activist James O'Keefe "whether it's accurate or not" and fabricated an anecdote about F.B.I. agents calling her to complain about their former director James B. Comey. Mr. Spicer tossed off his share of falsehoods (a dubious claim about crowd size comes to mind), but he could never quite conceal the strain of life as President Trump's press secretary. The fear of a mercurial boss, the constant pressure to misdirect it played out on live TV across his face, a grimace that gave the game away. Ms. Sanders, who announced her departure on Thursday, never seemed especially flustered. "It's one of the greatest jobs I could ever have; I've loved every minute, even the hard minutes," she said at the White House, after Mr. Trump praised her and gave her a kiss on the head. In contrast to Mr. Spicer's flop sweat demeanor, Ms. Sanders displayed the devotion of a true believer. "God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times, and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president," Ms. Sanders, an evangelical who prayed before her briefings, told the Christian Broadcasting Network. In an interview with The New York Times shortly after taking her job, she confessed that she "certainly didn't approve" of some of Mr. Trump's remarks on the campaign trail. "But at the same time, we were looking for a commander in chief," she added. "Not a pastor." The first mother to serve as press secretary, Ms. Sanders was feted upon her promotion by female reporters and White House aides at a "women of the White House" happy hour. She could be sociable with reporters, sipping wine after hours and offering guidance behind closed West Wing doors. In public, though, she said reporters reminded her of her rambunctious children a cute but cunning put down. At the lectern, she read aloud children's letters to the president, calling attention to Mr. Trump's unsung fans but also running down the clock before journalists had a chance to ask questions. 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. At a pre Thanksgiving briefing, she requested that reporters preface their queries by saying what they were thankful for. Her supporters called it humanizing; many reporters called it patronizing. Despite her boss's boycott, she agreed to appear at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where the comedian Michelle Wolf proceeded to rebuke her as an "Uncle Tom" for "white women," among other insults. Reporters swarmed Ms. Sanders at a party afterward to express sympathies. But the diminution of the briefing eroded some of that support. More than three months 95 days have passed since the last time Ms. Sanders took to the lectern in the James S. Brady Briefing Room. The new normal became ad hoc gaggles on the White House walkway: disorganized scrums where reporters who happen to be on the grounds can shout questions at Ms. Sanders as she walks back to her office. Some contrarian media critics said good riddance, calling the briefing a Sisyphean exercise of obligatory questions and maddening nonanswers. Press advocates disagreed, saying the daily ritual of an administration being held accountable to the public sends an important signal to the world about transparency and accountability. The pressure cooker of White House briefings has been rewarded with lucrative careers. Dana Perino, a press secretary under George W. Bush, is now a popular Fox News host; George Stephanopoulos, who briefed in the early days of Bill Clinton's first term, is the chief anchor of ABC News. Mr. Spicer's post White House run has challenged that path; among his stumbles was a failed talk show pilot called "Sean Spicer's Common Ground."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The fast rising conductor Eun Sun Kim was named the next music director of the San Francisco Opera on Thursday, which will make her the first woman to hold the post at an American opera company of major size and stature. When asked in an interview about the pathbreaking nature of her appointment, Ms. Kim, 39, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, said that it made her think of how her grandmother, a pioneering doctor who was born in 1912, was described for years as a "female doctor" but lived to see the day when women who practiced medicine were called, simply, "doctors." "So I'm grateful to be the first 'female music director,'" Ms. Kim said. "But I also look forward to a future where the next generation will be called just 'conductor.'" Ms. Kim, whose conducting career has boomed in recent years, regularly conducts in Europe, including at the Staatsoper in Berlin, where Daniel Barenboim invited her to make her debut in 2015. She made her American debut in 2017 under the most trying circumstances: conducting "La Traviata" at the Houston Grand Opera in an improvised theater in a convention center, shortly after Hurricane Harvey flooded the company's regular home. Her appointment in San Francisco comes fast on the heels of her successful debut there in June, when she led a highly praised new production of Dvorak's "Rusalka." Joshua Kosman wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle that Ms. Kim "drew glorious playing from the Opera Orchestra and paced every scene freely but precisely" and described the production overall as "the kind of collaborative offering that shows the company at its finest." Matthew Shilvock, the company's general director, was so interested in Ms. Kim that he watched one of her performances from inside the orchestra pit. "From the very first encounter that she had with the orchestra, it was clear that there was something really special emerging there, a special kind of energy I have not seen before with this company," Mr. Shilvock said in an interview. "She's a conductor who really opens her arms and invites the people around her in to make the very best music she can." Ms. Kim will officially begin as music director in San Francisco in 2021, but, as music director designate, she will conduct a new production of Beethoven's "Fidelio" there next season. San Francisco tapped her just as her American career is taking off: She made her Washington National Opera debut last month with "The Magic Flute," and has debuts coming up with Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Metropolitan Opera, where she is scheduled to conduct "La Boheme" in the 2021 22 season. She is succeeding in a field where women still rarely get opportunities. Karen Kamensek, who is currently conducting "Akhnaten" at the Met, is only the fifth woman to conduct there. Marin Alsop remains the only female music director of a major American orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony. There have been pioneers in leadership positions at opera companies, including Sarah Caldwell, who founded the Opera Company of Boston and made it a force through innovative programming and big stars; Eve Queler, the music director of the Opera Orchestra of New York; Simone Young, who was artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera; and Lidiya Yankovskaya, who is the music director of Chicago Opera Theater. But no woman has been music director of an American company as large and important as San Francisco. Marc A. Scorca, the president and chief executive officer of Opera America, a service organization, said that a recent survey of the biggest American companies found that only 10 percent of their conductors were women, and none had women as music directors. "We haven't even reached anything close to parity among conductors," he said, "let alone music directors." Ms. Kim's path to the podium began in Seoul, where, while studying composition, one of her teachers encouraged her to conduct. After going on to complete her studies in Stuttgart, Germany, she began working her way up through the opera world, first as an assistant. In 2011 she assisted the conductor Kirill Petrenko, now the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, on Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" at the Opera National de Lyon. The next year, she made her professional debut, with "La Boheme" in Frankfurt. Ms. Kim said a turning point came when she went to Madrid in 2008 for a competition, after which she landed her first job as an assistant conductor at the Teatro Real there. "I walked in the room for a first round with the orchestra and didn't even know how to say 'hello' in Spanish," she recalled. "And I just walked in and conducted, and it worked. It really sounded as I wanted to hear it. I really felt, then, that music could be my language."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Nothing, outside of the Super Bowl, gathers titanic television audiences together anymore, but let's conduct a thought experiment: How many people would tune in to see Joey Tribbiani say "Howyoudoin'?" one more time? We live in the golden age of the TV reboot. All the nostalgic fervor boomeranging shows like "Roseanne," "Gilmore Girls," "Will Grace" and "Veronica Mars" back into production, though, pales in comparison to the undying popularity of "Friends." The NBC sitcom has attracted new generations of fans via Netflix, many of whom were not yet alive when Rachel first set foot in Central Perk in her wedding dress. A "Friends" reboot would likely be a seismic event in American culture, releasing an infinite gusher of money for its creators and stars. So why is it highly unlikely? I've spent the last two years interviewing veterans of the show for my new book "Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era." With the 25th anniversary of the show's premiere this month, I thought now would be a good time to speak to some of them again to get their thoughts about the possibility of a "Friends" reunion. One thing: The show won't be coming back anytime soon. Here are some of the reasons why. Get Out Before They Go Down "Friends'" appeal was in its highly idealized depiction of the stages of encroaching maturity, from first jobs to first serious relationships likely one of the reasons for its sustained popularity among adolescents curious to glimpse what their futures might be. But a returned "Friends" would no longer be about the drama of youth. "We set out to make a show about people in their 20s," said Kevin Bright, a "Friends" executive producer. "And I hate to break the news to you, they're not 20 anymore. They're 50." While other revived shows, like "Gilmore Girls," have skillfully made use of the passage of time to tweak their characters, David Crane, one of the creators of "Friends," told me he remains loyal to the motto they pitched to NBC in 1994: "It's that time in your life when your friends are your family." When we left "Friends," the sextet were starting families of their own, and so returning to the status quo ante of bottomless coffees and bottomless chitchat would necessarily feel artificial. And while watching the three happy couples (and Joey) navigate middle age might be amusing and emotionally rewarding, it would not be "Friends" as we know it. "You're just going to get slammed, criticized and hated," the longtime "Friends" writer Greg Malins said. "The headline for every review would be 'This Is No "Friends."'" The internet still loves "Friends," but would it love new installations of a series about six well heeled, heterosexual, white New Yorkers and their romantic lives? Or would it love the changes and additions necessary to make "Friends" work in 2019? "What happened to the twins? Is one of them a drug addict?" Bright said of the possible new story lines. "Is one of the six of them divorced? Because they have to be. No 100 percent of friends' marriages last." And even were Bright, Crane, and the creator Marta Kauffman anxious to bring back the show, there is that small matter of convincing the six stars of "Friends" to pick up the mantle. Fifteen years after the show's finale, its lead actors are in notably different places in their careers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm for their alma mater. Both David Schwimmer and Lisa Kudrow had to be cajoled into returning for the last seasons of "Friends." Nothing in their more adventurous work since the show ended Kudrow on the dizzyingly self referential chronicle of stardom lost and desperately sought, "The Comeback," and Schwimmer in theater and in smaller roles like that of Robert Kardashian in "The People v. O.J. Simpson" suggests they would want to revisit their most famous roles. Matt LeBlanc has already seen how a surefire hit can go sour with the short lived "Friends" spinoff "Joey," and had far more success mocking his own fame on the Showtime series "Episodes," cocreated by Crane. Matthew Perry has worked steadily in television since "Friends," and was noticeably absent from a 2016 tribute to the "Friends" director James Burrows attended by the rest of the cast. And Jennifer Aniston is already committed to a splashy new series on Apple TV Plus, "The Morning Show." "People have to accept that creative people do want to do other things," Bright said. "At a certain point, going backward, they didn't want to do the show anymore." When Were You Under Me? Couldn't the "Friends" creators just find a new batch of six charming 20 somethings to have New York adventures in improbably large apartments? Technically, sure. But "the only thing that I think would motivate anyone to do that is greed, and that's not a good enough reason," Crane said. Besides, "Friends" is still minting money as a streaming hit. Netflix doesn't generally release streaming figures, but the show is so popular the service paid 100 million to keep it through 2019. (Next year "Friends" moves to WarnerMedia's HBO Max platform.) So where another show's producers might be tempted to return as a way to cash in, the ongoing streaming success of the original "Friends" makes the creators far less likely to come back solely for a payday. "It's like winning the lottery and then buying more tickets," Crane said. "Why? You won!" We Were Never on a Break Ultimately, many "Friends" veterans are leery of doing anything that might damage the show's legacy. "I think everyone on 'Friends' respects that it was just this perfect thing," said Todd Stevens, one of the show's producers. "It was lightning in a bottle I don't think you can revisit that 25 years later and expect that those ions will still be so charged." The only pathway Stevens sees to "Friends" ever returning is to wait another quarter century, and then make it a show about an elderly Manhattan trio: "It's the three guys on a park bench and it's like 'The Sunshine Boys.'" "Friends" will likely not come back for one simple reason: It has never truly gone away. As you read this, longtime fans are soothing their jangled nerves with an episode or six after a tough day at work, and a teenager is discovering that a show from their parents' youth might make them feel a bit less alone. "Look, I feel so blessed in terms of the success the show has had and continues to have," Crane said. "If it all ended today, I couldn't be happier."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"Cells in the retina of the eye" (1904), one of Santiago Ramon y Cajal's most striking drawings at the Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan.Credit...Cajal Institute, Madrid "Cells in the retina of the eye" (1904), one of Santiago Ramon y Cajal's most striking drawings at the Grey Art Gallery in Manhattan. It presents 80 small notebook renderings in shifting combinations of ink and pencil by the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852 1934) that are considered among the world's greatest scientific illustrations. Together they describe a fantastic netherworld of floating forms, linear networks, bristling nodes and torrential energies. They posit the thing between your ears as an immense cosmic universe, or at least one of the most intricate of all of nature's creations. That the images are also undeniable as art only adds to the complexity of the experience. Cajal is considered the father of modern neuroscience, as important in his field as Charles Darwin or Louis Pasteur are in theirs (though relatively unknown outside of it). His discoveries, made during the last dozen years of the 19th century, concern the way neurons, the building blocks of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system, communicate with one another. His theory immediately accepted by most, but not strictly proven until the 1950s was that neurons are in touch without touching. They communicate across infinitesimal gaps known as synaptic clefts. Through a chemical and electrical transmission, the single stemmed axon of one neuron talks to the branched root like dendrite of another. This process of synaptic messaging between unconnected cells came to be called the Neuron Doctrine, and in 1906, it earned Cajal the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared it with the Italian histologist Camillo Golgi, who had devised a new method of staining tissue that singled out individual cells under the microscope instead of presenting tangled illegible masses. An irony of the joint prize (for revealing the structure of the nervous system) is that Golgi remained unconvinced by the Neuron Doctrine and true to reticular theory, which saw neurons as physically connected. In his research, Cajal's two tools were the most powerful microscope he could find and one of the oldest art techniques known to mankind: drawing, for which he had great talent. Looking through the lens he saw with such acuity and drew so precisely (freehand) that some of his renderings still appear in text books. And yet he also drew with such delicacy and vivacity that his drawings stand on their own as wonders of graphic expression, both mysterious and familiar. The drawings are at once fairly hard nosed fact if you know your science. If you don't they are deep pools of suggestive motifs into which the imagination can dive. Their lines, forms and various textures of stippling, dashes and faint pencil circles would be the envy of any modern artist. That they connect with Surrealist drawing, biomorphic abstraction and exquisite doodling is only the half of it. These small works evoke enough things you already know landscape, weather systems, trees, marine life that they bring you back around to reality, implying the multiple purposes if not universality of certain natural structures. Root systems, functioning in different ways, are found in trees, turnips and the pyramidal neuron, which Cajal called "the noble and enigmatic cell of thought." Born in Navarra, the son of a doctor, Cajal was a rebellious artistic child, with an innate distrust of authority and an obsessive compulsive proclivity. At 8, according to the catalog, he drew everything around him and then set out to collect everything pertaining to birds. He taught himself photography, making carefully posed self portraits throughout his life. And he trained as an artist, but his father cajoled him toward medicine by enlisting him to make anatomical drawings as teaching aids. The son then went to medical school and eventually found his calling in researching the extremely refined, nearly invisible workings of the brain. It was an exciting area of study at that time and it perfectly fused his various interests and talents. This show, the first exhibition of Cajal's drawings in this country, originated at the University of Minnesota and continues in May to the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass. It was selected from the 2,900 or so drawings that Ramon y Cajal made in his lifetime; all come from the Cajal Institute in Madrid, which organized the show with the university's Weisman Art Museum and three neuroscientists on its faculty Eric A. Newman, Janet M. Dubinsky and Alfonso Araque. The catalog is an absolute treasure, jargon free, with excellent reproductions and an illuminating biographical essay by Larry W. Swanson, a neurobiologist and author of "Brain Architecture" (2002). The outliers of the group are Lyndel King, director and chief curator of the Weisman and Eric Himmel, editor in chief at Abrams Books (the catalog's publisher), who contribute a riveting essay detailing Cajal's artistic sensibility and working processes. The drawings will elicit stupefied awe from art enthusiasts, who use their brains without knowing how they work, and excited chatter from visiting neuroscience types. I asked one loquacious, evidently knowledgeable viewer if "gray matter" was a colloquialism or a term of science. I learned that it's a term of science that became a colloquialism: the brain has gray matter, which contains cells, and also white matter, which is fibrous. The 80 drawings here were made between 1890 and 1933, and are divided into four sections. "Cells of the Brain" presents some of the basics, beginning with pyramidal neurons, and including the pericellular nests that surround them like pointy hats, or Eva Hesse sculpture, and proceeding to the coral like Purkinje neurons (from the human and pigeon cerebellum). "Development and Pathology" is rife with strange aberrant forms and a sense of agitated circuitry; also several outstanding drawings in a purely visual sense. Cajal samples the brain cells of a drowned man and one suffering from paralysis and in "Tumor cells of the covering membranes of the brain," he achieves tangled skeins that conjure William Blake and Louise Bourgeois. Things quiet down in "Neuronal Pathways," which I recommend for the strange little landscape that is "Connections within the hippocampus." "Seeing the Beautiful Brain Today," a section on contemporary renderings usually in jolting bright colors, presents animations as well as detailed microscopic photographs that are juxtaposed with reproductions of Cajal drawings of the same subject. Nothing here compares to Cajal artistically, but the animations have their own kind of wonder and should not be missed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Enjoying this newsletter every week? Send it to a friend, or six, and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory. In the space of four days, Liverpool saw its dreams crumble into dust. At Watford last Saturday, defeat ensured Jurgen Klopp's team lost an unbeaten record it had spent months carefully curating, fiercely defending. It can now no longer match the achievement of Arsenal's 2003 4 team, and end the season invincible. Then, on Tuesday, Klopp's players drifted out of the F.A. Cup at Chelsea, undone by a combination of poor goalkeeping, softhearted defending and an 18 year old Scottish midfielder named Billy Gilmour. With that, Liverpool's hopes of a league, cup and Champions League treble evaporated. The way the team is playing devoid of creativity in attack, suddenly infused with vulnerability in defense it is hard not to think that various other targets will go the same way in the near future. Atletico Madrid will be reasonably confident of ending Liverpool's defense of the Champions League at Anfield on Wednesday; the Spanish team has a 1 0 lead from the first leg to cling to, and nobody clings better than Diego Simeone's side. Defeats to Everton next week and Manchester City in early April, meanwhile, would make the chances of Liverpool's finishing the season with more than 100 points surpassing City's points tally of two years ago, and therefore making this statistically the best league performance ever mustered by an English team negligible. Klopp's players, all of a sudden, would have no margin for error. Still, at least Liverpool would have one source of solace: barring a quite spectacular, unprecedented collapse, a choke to end all chokes, it should still win the Premier League the trophy the club wants more than any other, the title the fans have waited 30 years to reclaim, the crown Klopp was brought to Anfield to win at some point between now and May. "Only the Premier League," Virgil Van Dijk said, with withering sarcasm, this week. There is no need to downplay how bad Liverpool's last few days have been. The display at Watford was abysmal. Chelsea was better and Klopp has always made it clear he does not, particularly, value the F.A. Cup but it was hardly encouraging, the furious "response" Liverpool's players had promised after the unbeaten run vaporized. In light of what went before, the last week has been a jarring, screeching stall. It is not even entirely ridiculous to feel that there remains a glimmer of hope for anyone disappointed by the lack of drama thus far in the Premier League title race; fail to win this weekend and what is currently a hiccup starts to look like a genuine downturn. Manchester City, for one, might detect the faintest scent of blood; the 22 point gap could be cut in half by the end of Liverpool's game at the Etihad Stadium in April. But at the same time, it is strange that Liverpool has spent much of the last week being criticized for not meeting targets it had never set and most fans had never envisaged. It is curious, too, that there is a possibility that winning the league at long, long last now seems destined to be characterized as some sort of disappointment. In part, of course, that is because of the standards Liverpool has set: it won 26 of its first 27 games of the season. Argentina's coach, Luis Scaloni, suggested only a few weeks ago it was invincible. It has become a point of reference across European soccer: over the course of the season, I have spoken to a dozen or more coaches in almost as many countries who are dazzled by the work Klopp has done. Players are almost as breathless in their praise. After all that, it is hard not to feel that there might be some sort of bathos in ending the season as "only" sorry, Virgil champion of England. (Winning the Club World Cup is not quite as significant, to most fans, as it sounds). Liverpool fans will be sated, of course, by ending their wait, as is only right. To others, though, this is a team that has seemed, for months, to be on course to etch a place in history, to achieve something that might last forever. It was not supposed to be just another champion. But the reaction serves as testament, too, to how susceptible we are in the news media, among fans, in the broader soccer culture to hyperbole; to how quickly we upgrade our expectations; to how readily we lift the bar for success, ensuring that failure comes more easily; how we judge teams and players by standards that are ill defined and essentially unfair. There is a reason only one team since the Victorian era has gone undefeated through the season; there is a reason only one English team has ever completed the treble; there is a reason only one team has staged a clean sweep of England's domestic trophies: it is really, really hard to do. When Klopp insisted he was taking the season game by game, he was not downplaying his ambitions. It just was not one of his ambitions. If it happened, great, but it was too distant a prospect to be considered in his plans. Perhaps, too, he realized what was coming: the more that people talked about Liverpool going through the season undefeated, the more the team would be criticized if it did not. The closer Liverpool got to achieving a treble, the more it would feel like failure if one or two (or three) trophies slipped from its grasp. If that is the case, Klopp has been proved right this week. Liverpool failed at Watford and at Chelsea not to meet its own expectations, or even the expectations of its fans, but the expectations laden upon it, expectations it could not, realistically, have hoped to live up to. It feels, I think, as if there is a truth for all fans, of all teams, in here somewhere, a lesson that maybe everyone might learn. No matter what you achieve, no matter how well you do, there is always someone telling you there is something more you could have done. Liverpool should still make its fans' dream come true this year. It will just have to get used to being told that its dream was not big enough. What Is Normal? It Depends on Your Perspective Stop me if I have told this story what I like to think of as the Parable of the Old Trafford Singing Section before. Last summer, Manchester United consulted various fan groups as to how to improve the atmosphere at Old Trafford. The answer that came back was that a dedicated singing section should be established, and that the club should endeavor not to pipe in music in the minutes leading to kick off. Let the fans make the noise. So the club did as requested. It cut the music, and waited for the fans to sing. They didn't. It turned out that the fans who felt there should be no artifice in creating an atmosphere tended to spend as much time as possible in the pub before a game, and only entered at the last minute. That was their matchday routine; they were just assuming it was everyone else's, too. In their absence, all that was left was a weird, awkward silence. That was the germ of this story. Fans in the Bundesliga have been protesting against Monday night games for almost three years. But the fate of the Old Trafford singing section made me wonder: Who has decided that soccer should not be played on Monday nights? Is the idea that games should kick off on Saturdays not simply the tradition of one generation being foisted upon another? But reporting on a country where fans have done so much to shape soccer in their own image making their voices heard on issues like ownership, policing and even the designs of stadiums sparked another thought. In England, fans have a tendency to accept decisions made very clearly not in their interests ticket prices, scheduling of games, unwelcome entities buying their clubs as inevitable. That is the nature of soccer, we are told. This is a price worth paying so that your team can compete in the transfer market or the league. This is the way it has to be. This is normal. But normal is relative. In Germany, much of the experience of being a fan of an English club must seem completely alien. And it is hard not to think that having a soccer culture that reflects the values of its fans and customers is infinitely preferable, even if it means they occasionally go too far. Belatedly, eventually, Italian soccer's authorities seem to have found an intelligent response to the outbreak of Covid 19, the coronavirus raging in the country's north: though this week's Coppa Italia semifinals were postponed, Serie A will continue behind closed doors until (at least) April 3. While public health, obviously, has to be the primary concern, this seems to be the only way of attempting to ensure the league not only finishes its season, but does so with something approaching parity: anything less than a wholesale measure would have given, or at least would have seemed to have given, some teams those playing in front of crowds an unfair advantage. The impact the ruling has on the Champions League where Juventus now will have to play its last 16 second leg against Lyon in an empty stadium, and where Atalanta may yet have to play a quarterfinal without fans is likely to be different. But again: soccer is not especially important in the context. It is only a sport, as I wrote last week, no matter how often it feels like it is more. That will become clear now, of course, and it is partly why it took Italy so long to reach this inevitable conclusion: without fans, games no longer seem to be quite the spectacle they appear. It is what happens in the stands that gives a soccer match any sporting event, really its emotional resonance. As anyone who has ever watched a game in an empty stadium will know, it is when the shouts of the coaches echo clearly around a ground, when goals are scored and only a handful of people halfheartedly celebrate them, that it becomes clear that it is fans who give soccer not just its background, but its meaning. A dose of brutal realism from Joe Klonowski, who writes in to confess that the league which is host to his team Major League Soccer is definitively not the best in the world, despite my attempts at coddling last week. "I have to fly 10 hours one way to see the best football," he wrote. "I can take a 10 minute train ride to see M.L.S., but it just isn't the same. I honestly think if they did away with the salary cap and added promotion and relegation they'd be on the level of the big European leagues in 20 or 30 years, but they'll never do that." As it happens, we discussed M.L.S. the standards and perceptions thereof in this week's Set Piece Menu podcast, and it occurred to me that one change that could be made, given the league's expansion, would be to introduce a second tier. That still enables the owners to guarantee incomes, but might help to drive interest for teams not in contention for the playoffs. That's all for this week. Thanks for all the correspondence to askrory nytimes.com; please keep it coming. I will be making sarcastic comments about all of this week's big games on Twitter. Please direct all of the people you hold in the highest esteem here, so that they, too, can benefit from my ill conceived suggestions for how to change M.L.S.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In "Dead to Me," Linda Cardellini, left, and Christina Applegate play women who bond in a grief support group. "It's what life feels like dark and twisty and funny," Applegate said. 'Dead to Me' Deals With Love and Loss. The Stars Speak From Experience. On "Dead to Me," Jen and Judy are best friends forever. Or until the next cliffhanger. This new "traumedy," which began streaming last week on Netflix, follows two 40 something women who meet at a grief support group in Southern California and bond almost immediately. (Misery loves company and late night "Facts of Life" marathons.) Jen (Christina Applegate), a tough as manicured nails realtor, has lost her husband, Ted, to a hit and run. Judy (Linda Cardellini), a moony painter, is mourning her fiancee. Probably. Over 10 half hours, which careen from comedy to drama to thriller, the women's lives and stories take dangerous swerves. So yeah, some spoilers follow. If you haven't started the series, avert your eyes. Because finding out, at the end of the first episode, that Judy drove the car that hit Ted? It's a pretty good surprise. Read our review of "Dead to Me." There are other, less lethal surprises, like the show's frank discussion of women's health miscarriage, perimenopause, mastectomy and its nuanced vision of female friendship. On a recent afternoon at New York's Netflix offices, just west of Union Square, the two women posed in tottery heels (Applegate immediately traded hers for a pair of Converses), then subsided into an overstuffed couch to talk grief, camaraderie and career longevity. Toward the interview's end, series creator Liz Feldman briefly joined in. These are excerpts from the conversation. Tell me about Jen and Judy. CHRISTINA APPLEGATE Jen is unlike anyone, but she's an Everywoman. The world is trying to get her to stop being who she is and stop feeling what she's feeling and as a result she is incredibly rageful and reactive. She doesn't know how to smile or laugh or let anyone comfort her. When she meets Judy, it's life changing. LINDA CARDELLINI Judy is a glass half full person, but life keeps dumping that glass of water over her head. Why do you think these characters become such close friends? APPLEGATE Because they allow each other to suffer. I've gone through grief in my life. Some people didn't understand. There's nothing that holds you down in your grief more than people trying to get you to stop feeling what you're feeling. Jen and Judy both allow each other to feel what they need to feel. That understanding and that sisterhood is a bond that cannot be broken. CARDELLINI They're two people who can totally be themselves with each other. Even though Judy can never truly be herself. Is this a good friendship? Does it have a darker side? CARDELLINI Sometimes in a codependent relationship, you enable people to do things that they shouldn't be doing. CARDELLINI Or when Jen keys a car and Judy says, "I love you." That's warped. What's the worst thing a friend has ever done to you? APPLEGATE I honestly have chosen awesome people. I'm kind of like a "no new friends" person except for my kid's friends' parents. And her. Points to Cardellini. She's allowed to come in. But when I was younger, I had a tendency to let people I wouldn't even call them friends come into my life and manipulate me. CARDELLINI I'm careful with choosing my friends. The only thing I can think of is friends who are gone too soon. It's not their fault, but I miss them. CARDELLINI Will you repeat the question? I was listening to the answer. APPLEGATE She asked me what I was wearing, what designers. And then I just decided to talk about loss. CARDELLINI When you lose somebody, you do the best you can. There are two things in life that you should be able to handle because they're sort of inevitable: Loss of life and loss of love. And those two things are impossible to know how to deal with, no matter how many times they happen to you. Did you personalize these characters? Christina, did you suggest Jen's bilateral mastectomy? APPLEGATE I wanted Jen to have something that made her vulnerable. Making the choice to have a prophylactic mastectomy caused problems in her marriage. So she lives with an insane amount of guilt and shame. Exploring what it's like to be someone who's had an amputation, that was the most personal thing that I brought to it. Linda, what did you bring to Judy? CARDELLINI There's a scene at the end of the show where I lose somebody and I say, "I didn't get to say goodbye." That was not in the script. But it came out of my mouth. Because I've lost people that I didn't get to say goodbye to. Starts to cry. I'm sorry. And now we're all going to cry. CARDELLINI This show, we call it a traumedy, because there's so much traumatic stuff that happens, and then there's humor to sort of alleviate that tension and stress. Did you know every twist when filming began? APPLEGATE I knew what was going to happen. It was in Liz's first pitch to me. And I thought, "That's just so far fetched. How do we earn that?" But we earned it! CARDELLINI On a different show, what you learn at the very end of the first episode could have been an entire season's arc. With the second season, we know what's been set up and where it could go. Have you been picked up for a second season? CARDELLINI Gestures toward the Netflix office. Ask them. APPLEGATE Shouting. Are we getting picked up? Had you really never met before you were hired? CARDELLINI Not a lot of people watched my show while it was on the air. We were in the Macy's Day Parade we were standing on top of a teapot for no reason and I remember people flipping us off and yelling, "Who are you?" It's never happened all at once for me, which afforded me the ability to be a working actress and to earn, which is what I always wanted. I didn't necessarily want to be famous. APPLEGATE This is tongue in cheek, but someone asked me one time, "What's the secret to your longevity?" I said, "Mediocre success." Hollywood hasn't always known what to do with actresses once they age out of ingenues. Is this improving? APPLEGATE Liz Feldman enters. Liz Feldman, hi! Oh yeah. I think more and more we're seeing that. "The Favourite." Hello! "Big Little Lies." LIZ FELDMAN There's also more acceptance for writing roles for women over 40; there's actually more of a thirst for it. When I wrote this, nobody said, "Could you make them younger?" CARDELLINI The over 40 thing? I feel very fortunate that I've found this show. It feels better and more well earned at this age than ever. But I go back and forth. Sometimes I'm strong with it, and sometimes I'm not. It depends.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
In the latest indication of Apple's growing ambitions in the digital health market, the tech giant on Wednesday unveiled a new feature that would allow users to automatically download and see parts of their medical records on their iPhones. The feature is to become part of Apple's popular Health app. It will enable users to transfer clinical data like cholesterol levels and lists of medications prescribed by their doctors directly from their medical providers to their iPhones, potentially streamlining how Americans gain access to some health information. A dozen medical institutions across the United States including Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles have agreed to participate in the beta version of the new feature. Apple plans to open the beta test to consumers on Thursday. "It's really strange to me that you can easily pull up all of your spending record on your credit card going back a long way in every detail, yet your health is way more important and you don't have easy access to your health information," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. "We want to make sure that consumers are empowered with information about their health." Tech giants including Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google's parent company, are going head to head to obtain a larger slice of American health care spending, which amounts to more than 3 trillion annually. Apple, more than the others, has been reticent to publicize its long term vision for health technology. But recent product introductions, like the new health records feature, highlight how focused Apple is on using its iPhone, Apple Watch and apps to give people more control over their health care. In addition to the iPhone Health app, Apple has developed ResearchKit, software to help researchers develop iPhone apps to conduct health studies, and HealthKit, a platform that allows consumers to share health data on their iPhone or Apple Watch with health and fitness apps. Apple is also sponsoring clinical research, called the Apple Heart Study, at Stanford University to determine whether an app for the Apple Watch can detect irregular heart rhythms. A review of Apple's current job openings also gives clues about the company's wider ambitions in the health care sector. According to the company's site, Apple is seeking a hardware engineer to develop "next generation" health sensors for products like the iPhone and iPad; software engineers for the company's "health special projects team" to join "an exciting new project at an early stage"; an engineering manager for the company's motion technologies team "to help shape the next set of groundbreaking features" in fitness and health; and a biomedical scientist to help design studies for health, wellness and physiological measurement apps. "We will empower you to engage with a variety of internal teams and external partners to continually question the limitations of technology implemented in health products," says an Apple job description for a health tech hardware development engineer. Apple's personal medical record feature is hardly a new idea. With much fanfare about a decade ago, both Google and Microsoft introduced free services called Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault that helped consumers centralize their personal health data. But the concept of the personal medical record did not generate widespread adoption in that era, which predated the popularization of the iPhone and mobile apps. Google shut down Google Health in 2011. Microsoft still offers its HealthVault service.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Kara Lacey, 33, does it after a long day of work, sometimes accompanied by a glass of wine. "It's super relaxing, fun and nostalgic," said Ms. Lacey, a publicist who lives in Hoboken, N.J. Alex Bender, 29, a real estate executive in SoHo, did it during a recent jaunt to Montauk, N.Y. "It's nice to concentrate on something that's lighthearted, fun and simple, which I don't often get to do," he said. Nikki Marsh, 35, a stay at home mother in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., does it with fellow moms when they need to relax. "It's a special time when we're not allowed to talk about school or kids," Ms. Marsh said. The newest device to promote mindfulness and inspire 20 and 30 somethings to put down their phones for hours? It isn't a new swipe left app and doesn't involve overpriced stretchy pants. "As adults, we need a chance to escape from our everyday life and do something that's totally meditative," said Kelsey Montague, an artist in Denver who recently released an adult coloring book titled, "What Lifts You?" "Once you start coloring, all you have to worry about is staying in the lines and which color to use. It's an amazing escape." Celebrities have also gotten into the craze. Victoria Beckham recently posted a photograph of herself on Instagram with a copy of the "Vogue Colouring Book" peeking out of her handbag. The book, released in November, features designs inspired by the fashion pages of the British edition of the magazine during the 1950s, including ready to wear by Christian Dior, Givenchy and Chanel. Kate Hudson posted a Snapchat video of her coloring aboard a plane en route to a "Kung Fu Panda 3" premiere. The trend is having an impact in stores as much as on social media. At Words, a popular bookstore in Maplewood, N.J., coloring took off after a group of monks visited the town last summer and taught residents how to create Mandala drawings with rice. "After the monks left, people came in looking for books on coloring," said Lisa Matalon, a saleswoman at the store. "I guess it all stems from the same process of mindfulness and relaxation." Words is now stocked with an array of adult coloring books and accouterments like colored pencils and markers. The most popular books, Ms. Matalon said, are "Enchanted Forest" and "Secret Garden," both by Johanna Basford, who is considered the godmother of the movement with her best selling coloring books. Customers are also requesting coloring books based on popular books like the "Harry Potter" series and "Game of Thrones." Ms. Lacey said she discovered adult coloring last October when one of her clients, the Australian apparel label Cotton On, hosted a party for its new lifestyle brand, Typo, and featured a crafts table with coloring books. The books came in handy for Ms. Lacey, who underwent foot surgery in January and had to stay off her feet for two weeks. "I was told that I shouldn't be doing normal activities like going out or working out, so to counteract the Netflix hole I was falling into, I took some coloring books home," she said. "I was able to put the phone aside for a few hours and really unwind." Now back on her feet, Ms. Lacey continues to color at home after work. Melissa Rappaport, the founder of the public relations firm RappAround in Los Angeles, received a coloring book in December as a gift from an employee. Over the holidays, she and her husband drank wine and sat around coloring. While Ms. Rappaport found the activity soothing, it didn't quite replace her unlimited data usage. "I'd love to say it made me put down my phone," she said. "But I had to Snapchat my progress so my followers could see the whole thing happen."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Brian Tyree Henry looked to the heavens and let out a primal roar. He was playing the arcade game X Men: Children of the Atom and his avatar, Storm, the silver haired weather controlling mutant, had just been laser blasted by Cyclops. "Aw, man! Come on," he said, along with some unprintable phrases. Mr. Henry was spending a Tuesday afternoon playing vintage video games at Barcade in the East Village of Manhattan. "When I was in junior high school, I would always go to the dollar movie," he said. "There was an arcade next door." Between double or triple feature days, he would pass the time sharpening his skills. "This is where we'd come to take out our aggression." Mr. Henry no longer merely watches movies, he acts in them. This month, he has supporting roles in two highly anticipated films: the crime thriller "Widows," directed by Steve McQueen, and "If Beale Street Could Talk," which is Barry Jenkins's follow up to his Academy Award winning "Moonlight." But the 36 year old actor is perhaps best known for his television work, playing Paper Boi, the up and coming trap rapper on "Atlanta." Earlier this year, he received a Tony nomination for best supporting actor in the play "Lobby Hero." Mr. Henry's love of arcade games was palpable on an overcast and muggy day in early October. With his round face and Cheshire cat grin, he sat in front of a video game based on "The Simpsons" for the better part of an hour. Wearing maroon jeans, hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap, Mr. Henry was almost in a meditative state, staring at the screen while answering questions about his upbringing and career. Every so often, he would shout directly into the screen "Go, go, go, go, go!" before snapping back to reality. "This game is like commentary on everyday American life," he said at one point, while navigating Bart Simpson through a bar filled with woozy drunkards. Mr. Henry comes across as breezy and carefree, but he knows his success is meaningful and arrives at an important moment for black actors. "I think of my 14 year old arcade playing self, and I never thought there would be an opportunity to be in a show that was so popular with three black men as the leads," he said, referring to "Atlanta" and his co stars Donald Glover and Lakeith Stanfield. Mr. Henry's character has evolved over the show's two seasons (a third season has been ordered but not yet filmed), challenging the stereotype of a swaggering black male rapper. Paper Boi (given name: Alfred Miles) can be cocky, but also introspective and anxious about his rising profile. The episode "Woods," from Season 2, filled in gaps from his back story and provided nuance. "I didn't want to just show his masculine side," he said. "I wanted to get to the femininity of him. The vulnerability lies in the ability to access both. For me, I was like: Has he cried? Can he cry?" His portrayal of Alfred makes him a sympathetic antihero. "My whole thing is, we all have an Alfred in our lives," he said. "Like, he's my cousin. He's literally my next door neighbor on the block playing dominoes, you know what I'm saying? He's my father. When I first read the script, I thought, 'I know exactly who this guy is.'" He grew up in Fayetteville, N.C., and went to Morehouse College before attending the Yale School of Drama. He landed notable roles before graduating, including in Shakespeare in the Park's "Romeo and Juliet" and, later, as part of the original cast in "The Book of Mormon." With a docket of movies this fall being floated as Oscar contenders, it appears that he is hitting a career stride. "Everyone keeps saying, 'You're having a moment.' And I'm like, this is not a moment for me. I want this to be a movement," Mr. Henry said. "I want this to continue as long as possible because there's just so many stories to tell, man, and so many different ways to do it." Later that night, Mr. Henry would be attending the premiere of "Beale Street" at the New York Film Festival, in which he has a supporting role. It was held at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, not far from where he lives, though he hasn't been spending much time there these days. Other projects include a comedy starring Melissa McCarthy, an action film pitting King Kong against Godzilla, and a reboot of "Child's Play," the horror movie about a possessed doll. "I've gone from sitting in front of Viola Davis to running away from Chuckie!" he said, laughing. When he does have a rare bit of downtime and there are no arcade games readily available, he has another guilty pleasure to help him relax. "I know this is going to sound crazy, there's this channel called Investigation Discovery," Mr. Henry said. "It's basically 24 hour crime drama, like crazy Midwest people killing each other for insurance money. The re enactments are so good." He even spotted his "Atlanta" stand in on an episode, playing a serial killer. "I was like, Man, you killed it, literally," he said. "Some people might think it's cheesy, but if you're on Investigation Discovery, to me you've made it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
14, 16 and 18 Gay Street (between Christopher Street and Waverly Place) and 16, 18 and 20 Christopher Street (between Gay Street and Waverly Place) A combined 31 apartments are for sale, along with two commercial spaces plus a basement store, across three lots on Gay Street and three more on Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. Each building was built in the 1820s, and the six properties share a garden and utilities. The buildings are all two and a half or three floors high, totaling 11,000 square feet of space, and must be sold as a complete parcel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Ten voices from around the world reflect on performing in and ushering and seeing some of the first live shows since March. 'I Even Missed the Smell': What It's Like to Be Back at the Theater Eye contact is gone. Stilettos are swapped for slippers or sneakers. Songs are passionately delivered to laptop screens. Since most of the theater world, including Broadway and the West End, shut down in March, the stage has become largely virtual, a space filled with bookcase backdrops and many a monologue. But cautiously, with six inch cotton swabs and four gallon drums of hand sanitizer, theater is creeping back on the side of a cliff in Cornwall, England; on stoops in Montreal; even, in a few cases, in New York. (And, as widely reported, in the Berkshires, where the first union approved musical in the country just finished its run.) The return, the Tony winning lighting designer Ken Billington said, feels like a rebirth. "It was like coming home," said Billington, who worked on "Sleepless: A Musical Romance," London's first fully staged indoor musical since the shutdown. "Everyone was smiling all the time, which sounds sort of Pollyannaish, but it's true." We asked artists and audiences even an usher and a critic to reflect on what it was like to return to shows across the world. These are edited excerpts. The 40th anniversary tour was halted in March, but then we got the chance to do the show outdoors at the Minack Theater, which is on the cliffs on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. It's just as breathtaking as you can imagine. We'd start early, at 7 p.m., so people could get away in the daylight. Every show was a 90 minute battle against the elements it was very wild and noisy at times. We went through two named storms, Ellen and Francis. But every performer was desperate to get out there, as were the hundreds of audience members. We got standing ovations. One night, a bunch of people took out their phone cameras, and I was like, "Wow, I didn't realize I was acting so well!" But then I turned around, and there was the most perfect rainbow sitting in the middle of the ocean. Being an African American Dolly amid both the Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic is something I'll always remember. I was thinking about the view from the stage all week before we opened I was worried that I would look out into a sea of socially distanced people wearing masks, and I didn't know what it would do to my performance. Singing with a mask on for an hour and a half is not an easy task after opening night, I felt like I'd run a marathon. I forgot how much I craved the camaraderie. Theater people sparkle they're your tribe. You can talk about silly things like headshots and character shoes that people out in the real world don't always understand. I even missed the smell that mix of electricity and dust settled into the walls. Right away, I got shivers. The first one of these 10 minute plays, which are performed each week on stairs and balconies in the Pointe Saint Charles neighborhood, made the hair on my arms stand up. The last one I saw was performed in a park, and the subject was that they're closing some YMCAs in Montreal it's very political; small communities are up in arms because those places are community centers and people were actually screaming, "No!" People who weren't audience members and who were just walking down the street stopped to watch. It was really beautiful. It felt like old times, even with the sparseness of the audience. They were so excited to be hearing live music. At the last minute, I threw in a version of Ray Charles's "America the Beautiful." I spent most of the evening talking about politics and social justice issues, and that song speaks to the aspirations of America America can become great, but only when humans come together. I appreciated the ability to come together and create, but I was acutely aware of the fact that the challenge of making a living in the arts right now is formidable. So many artists are out of work, and the economic relief is lacking. Watching a flesh and blood performance by Ralph Fiennes was something else. The warm gush and gratitude of it all threw my critical faculties off for a while I wasn't assessing David Hare's play as dispassionately as I would have been six months ago, at first. Of course, it wasn't the same experience as "before." The room felt comparatively empty due to the reduced capacity and, since we were all wearing face coverings, there wasn't the same talkative hum. But the experience was thrilling nonetheless, from having a preshow coffee at the bar to listening in on the conversations on the way out. We could only have about 20 people in the audience, so the applause sounded like one hand clapping. But it still moved me to tears. Some of our best choices aren't things we come up with on our own at home, but they're reacting to how someone else says their line. That collaboration is what I've missed. There were a few times when I was able to just look into Nathan Darrow's eyes and forget the livestreaming camera was there. I'm sure I didn't look up enough because I was so happy to be looking at another actor. My first time back in the theater was like being born again. I started doing the lighting, and it was like everything disappeared. Of course, I missed the social element we had no place to go out after rehearsals. I'd go back to my hotel room and have a cookie. But I slept soundly, wonderfully I bounded out of bed in the morning and went to the theater. When the house lights went down on opening night, I thought the audience would cheer, but they didn't. They'd been away for five months and had forgotten how to behave. But halfway through Act I, they got more lively, and by Act II, they were fine. During the standing ovation at the end, they were applauding themselves as much as the performers. It just seemed logical that we couldn't have a 50th anniversary season next year unless we had a 49th. We're a small summer stock community theater housed in a pre Civil War apple barn in the state's northern panhandle. We had to cancel four of our five shows, but cases are low here, so we were able to open our doors for one production in August. It's mostly senior citizens who attend, and they were delighted. People came up to me and said, "Thank God you're doing something this summer. Are you doing another one after this?" And then, at our cast party, my actors did something no cast had ever done for me before: They made a donation in my honor to save the barn. We were nervous, so we capped our first show in our pocket park in July at 65 people. But the demand was incredible we sold out. It was like a mental health day for people. One couple has come back for every show we've done since. Of course, it's not easy being outdoors in a city. One night two fire engines pulled into the parking lot of the building next door. There's traffic noise, or sometimes a motorbike decides to rev its engine down Mass Ave. The occasional drunk will wander by and ask, "What's going on?" Sometimes it shimmers; sometimes it's annoying. But that's the magic of live theater. The absence of physical contact was tangible kisses on the cheek were replaced with taps on the elbow. But there was an overwhelming excitement that we were in a theater again, that we were going to see someone live, onstage, performing right in front of us! I'd missed talking to everyone after the performance, slowly dissecting everything we'd just experienced and realizing that everyone had taken away something different. "Did you see how the lighting made this happen?" "Did this line make you laugh?" "I was trying so hard not to cry when this happened!" It solidified something we'd always predicted that the experience of attending a live performance is irreplaceable.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Kathie Lee Gifford, the co anchor of the popular fourth hour of NBC's "Today," tearfully announced to viewers on Tuesday that she would be leaving the morning show in April. "I've been in this business for 120 years and never worked with a more beautiful a more beautiful group of people who just give, give, give, give," Ms. Gifford said as her co host, Hoda Kotb, welled up next to her. Ms. Gifford and Ms. Kotb, and their ever present glasses of wine, have been a fixture of NBC's morning lineup for the last decade. Noah Oppenheim, the president of NBC News, said that Ms. Gifford was staying on until April to mark her 11th anniversary of hosting the show with Ms. Kotb. He also said that the network would announce succession plans before Ms. Gifford's departure and that they "will, of course, continue to include Hoda."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham announced on Friday that she was taking a week off following the decision of several companies to pull advertising from her show after she ridiculed a student survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. "I'll be off next week for Easter break with my kids. But fear not, we've got a great lineup of guest hosts to fill in for me," Ms. Ingraham said on her show, "The Ingraham Angle." In response to an email, Fox News said that Ms. Ingraham's break was a "preplanned vacation with her kids." The dispute began on Wednesday, when Ms. Ingraham shared an article about how the student, David Hogg, 17, had been rejected from several colleges, and she accused him of whining about it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"To Dust" runs an hour and a half, and that feels right for a buddy movie whose comedy is as stubborn as this one's. But the movie is also trying daring to seriously consider grief, and that movie could have gone on for much longer. You can feel the script, by Jason Begue and Shawn Snyder, straining to tickle an audience. So it has a bereft widowed Hasidic cantor named Shmuel (Geza Rohrig) team up with Albert, a dumpy, mildly grizzled community college biology professor and complete stranger played by Matthew Broderick. Shmuel wants to know what's to become of the body of his recently deceased wife. His sorrow mutates into a paralyzing obsession that mystifies, annoys and embarrasses his mother, two young sons and orthodox community. The boys actually think he's possessed, by a dybbuk in the guise of their mother's ghost. This isn't so much a spiritual or even existential concern for Schmuel as much as a scientific one: What, practically speaking, happens to a corpse? Like, how long does it take to decompose? When his faith and religious leaders have no easy answer, he corners Albert, who reads him one from a forensics textbook.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MONTEREY, Calif. Classic car values started to decline slightly about a year and a half ago. The big question before the six major auctions last week that preceded the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance was whether the slow retreat would pick up speed. Not this year, apparently. The year over year figures for the auctions decreased, to 327 million from 338 million. But the decline was much gentler than expected, an indication that the market may be stabilizing. "Really, it was the best result possible," said Cam Ingram, a collector and restorer in Durham, N.C. "The Monterey auctions were a healthy barometer of a stable market, with educated buyers making the right buys for right reasons." If there was any doubt, it was erased in a suspenseful 27 minutes on Friday, during the sale of a 1956 Aston Martin DBR1 racecar and a 1970 Porsche 917K racecar. The RM Sotheby's auctioneer at the event hammered to signal that the Aston Martin had been sold for 22.5 million, about 10 percent above the pre sale estimate. On the same day, a rival auction house, Gooding Company, sold the Porsche for 14.08 million in about seven minutes. Both sales were met with more than polite applause. "The expensive high profile cars that had to sell, almost all sold, and less expensive, well presented cars that carried a realistic reserve sold for market correct numbers to enthusiast, end user owners," Mr. Ingram said. "The speculators all seem to have gone elsewhere for the moment." There were a few reasons for the anxiety before the auctions: Surging stock and real estate markets now compete with passion investments. Perhaps more worrisome, car collectors are getting older, with some baby boomers deciding to leave the market. As a result, the collector car market is well off its 2014 peak despite an improving economy. Prices have fallen before, including during a recession induced contraction in 2008 09. But that fall did not last long. Things were already starting to look up by 2011, with buyers at the top of the market those bidding for cars costing more than 1 million spending conspicuously again. Mid and entry level buyers returned to the auctions in 2012 13. Brian Rabold, vice president for valuation services at Hagerty, an insurance and data analytics firm in Traverse City, Mich., that focuses on classic cars, said that "2014 may have been the peak year in dollars at the Monterey auctions, but it probably simply reflected the fact that the smartest of the smart money timed their exits well. The momentum probably reached its height in late 2013." It was not all sunny drives and humming engines in Monterey, Calif. Sellers expecting to get as much as they would have 18 months ago went home with their cars. This was particularly evident in the part of the market where prices were at or below 250,000. The experience of the consignor of a pretty 1973 Ferrari 246 Dino illustrated this. Prices for the model peaked in 2015 and have been sliding gently since. The high bid of 220,000 at Gooding Company may have been market correct for 2017, but the seller opted to hold out for something closer to the pre sale estimate of 250,000. In contrast, a different seller at the same auction decided to take just 137,000 for a 1955 Mercedes Benz 190SL roadster, despite an estimate of 200,000. Still, there were many eye popping sales. In addition to the Aston Martin DBR1 and the Porsche 917, a 1995 McLaren F1 went for 15 million at the Bonhams auction. Interesting transactions were made for less expensive cars, too. A 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 sold for a record 127,000 at Mecum Auctions. The Avanti was a European style touring car designed under the supervision of Raymond Loewy. Pegged as a potential blue chip collectible almost since it went out of production more than 50 years ago, the Avanti previously had not taken off as a collectible, rarely exceeding 30,000. "It's taken a younger generation's appreciation for great midcentury modern design to fully embrace the Avanti," said John Kraman, a television commentator and an analyst for Mecum Auctions. The mood created by the Monterey area auctions, which typically set the tone of the market for the rest of the year and perhaps beyond, was far more upbeat than had generally been expected.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The hike to Hanging Lake, just east of Glenwood Springs, Colo., is short and steep, rising more than 1,000 feet in just over one mile. The payoff vista an idyllic turquoise pool fed by waterfalls, ringed in evergreens and seemingly hanging off the edge of a cliff has been known to attract up to 1,500 hikers on a busy day. It's too many for the fragile ecosystem. To regulate traffic, the United States Forest Service, with the city of Glenwood Springs, this year implemented a permit requirement ( 12), limiting visitors to 600 a day between May 1 and Oct. 31. Ticketed entry and visitor quotas have long been leading solutions to tame the tourist crowds threatening to overwhelm attractions from Machu Picchu to, more recently, Dubrovnik. Now, many other popular tourist destinations are trying a new tactic to maintain their tourism numbers without disturbing the attractions that draw them in the first place: positive redirection. Across the globe, travel providers and government agencies are responding to overtourism with suggestions for less crowded places and quieter seasons in hopes of producing a broader but lighter footprint. In Colorado's case, the tourism office's online Colorado Field Guide outlines 150 multiday itineraries with the goal of dispersing its 82 million travelers across the seasons and across the state. "We are far from experiencing the kinds of conditions you're hearing about in Europe, but we're starting to see early warning signs of too many people in the same places at the same time," Cathy Ritter, the director of the Colorado Tourism Office, said. Expanding when and where to go mirrors the rise of tourism, linked to the growth of the middle class in emerging markets. From 25 million travelers in the 1950s, tourist arrivals around the world grew to 1.4 billion in 2018, and the World Tourism Organization forecasts that number to rise to 1.8 billion by 2030. In the United States, 60 percent of travelers believe overcrowding will have a significant impact on destinations they choose within the next five to 10 years, according to the 2019 Portrait of American Travelers survey, conducted by the hospitality marketing firm MMGY Global. A wave of travel companies new and established are lining up to help them make that choice in the interest of destination sustainability as well as peace of mind. "As a tour operator, I think it's our responsibility to help expand people's places of interest," said Jason Wertz, a former art dealer who founded Uncovr Travel in 2018. The tour company specializes in less visited areas and trips often go in shoulder seasons when, Mr. Wertz added, "there are less people and you get a more authentic experience." Tanner Knorr, who founded Off Season Adventures two years ago, frames the case for travel in less popular times of year as not only more relaxed but as easing pressure on natural resources, such as water, and promoting social sustainability. "Our company has been able to keep a lodge in Tanzania open for an additional month, November, when they are usually closed," he said. "Travelers get more personalized treatment because there are fewer people and we're able to spread the economic resources to more people where normally they wouldn't have a job." Traveling in soft and off seasons is usually cheaper, of course, but risks poorer weather. On the other hand, Jared Sternberg, the founder of Gondwana Ecotours, says he has a hard time convincing people to join his Northern Lights tours in Alaska in fall, when the weather is warmer than winter trips, though he says the viewing is similar (weeklong trips cost 2,795). Many destinations, like Colorado, are focusing on dispersing visitors. Sedona, Ariz., has created Sedona's Secret 7, a website that identifies seven untrammeled places in seven categories, including hiking and picnics. Amsterdam aims to entice visitors to explore not just the Van Gogh Museum but South Holland where he grew up, or to experience the canal culture in secondary cities like Leiden. "We don't discourage people from visiting Amsterdam," said Jasper Broekhuis, a social media marketing specialist with the Netherlands Board of Tourism Conventions. "But we are familiarizing people with other places." Pioneering new trips to obscure destinations has long been the virtual arms race of the travel industry waged by adventure and luxury travel companies. TCS World Travel, which tours by private jet, now calls its next destination trips "first chance" tourism, exemplified by its trip to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan next April (21 days for 99,950). "It's our niche area and it's just becoming more and more relevant as travel has become more popular over the past 10 years and people are more well traveled," Shelley Cline, the president of TCS, said. Given the proliferation of tourists, going in the off season or off the beaten track may not ease the summer queues at the Doge's Palace in Venice, but it may ease your frustration. "There are still a lot of people out there who are beginning to travel for the first time and want to see bucket list destinations," said Samantha Bray, the managing director of the Center for Responsible Travel, a nonprofit research organization. The Center encourages travelers to spread out their interest in a place by, she added, "exploring less traveled neighborhoods, eating at restaurants with locally sourced food, buying local handicrafts and essentially voting with your dollars for what you want see thrive in the destination."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Some might say that's a playwright's job description one that Miller himself followed in autobiographical works like "After the Fall," about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. But at least "After the Fall" was presented, however thinly, as fiction. Mr. Weinraub labors to give "Fall" a nonfiction aura, pinning its scenes to real events and including interstitial documentary material like newspaper headlines and verbatim extracts from Miller's antiwar speeches. Sign up for Theater Update, a weekly email of news and features. It doesn't take long to realize that though Miller (Josh Stamberg) and Morath (Joanne Kelly) must have agonized about their decision, and that it must have caused strains in their relationship, the dialogue in which those conflicts are dramatized is necessarily invented and mostly sounds like it. Whenever the writing strays from the bare facts, it feels as if written from bullet points on 3 by 5 cards. This is bad enough in scenes that guess at the exact temperature (and wording) of the couple's wrangling. But Mr. Weinraub has also provided Miller and Morath with foils, if foils can be made of wood. Miller's loyal producer, Robert Whitehead (John Hickok), is more like a backhoe, constantly providing information to the audience by telling Miller things he would already know. And Morath's obstetrician, Paula Wise (Joanna Glushak), is a font of Wikipedia flavored information: "Times have changed," she helpfully points out when encouraging the Millers to deinstitutionalize Daniel, having at first encouraged the opposite. "In the last couple of years there's been more talk, more money for research." Perhaps Paula Wise talks like that because she never existed. These small signs of authorial bad faith wouldn't matter so much if they did not bring into question the larger argument of the play, which is built on a series of coincidences that are supposed to be ironically damning. They cause you to wonder how Morath was pregnant with Daniel, as "Fall" depicts, during the first rehearsals for "After the Fall," in 1963. (She would have to have been pregnant for three years.) And did she really read the first report of conditions at Southbury while sipping Champagne on the same night Miller received a Kennedy Center honor in 1984?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LAST summer, Jared Dangerfield was simply 19, skateboarding the streets of suburban Salt Lake City, plugged into the Jewish reggae singer Matisyahu. He had just wrapped up his year at Utah State University, where there was a girl he liked to make laugh. Memories of college and family are kept in a photo album his sister gave him when they said goodbye, but it is rarely looked at. "Little time to remember home," he says. "We kind of have to stay away from the world." Gone are his friends. Gone is his given name. The next time he will see his mother's face is 2013. Until then, he is Elder Dangerfield, as it says on his name tag. Each day he rises with the African sun to say his prayers before venturing into the urban wilderness of Kampala, Uganda, a churning kaleidoscope of motorcycles, street urchins, vegetable carts and pterodactyl like storks that circle office towers and lampposts. They orbit above him as he makes his way up and down the muddy hills of the capital city, careful to keep his black pants and white shirt clean, scanning faces in search of those who will listen to him speak of his faith. His Mormon faith. As one of the fastest growing religions in the United States, with 14 million followers; with a hit Broadway musical about two 19 year old Utahns in Uganda; and with a member, Mitt Romney, poised to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency, Mormonism is basking in the mainstream spotlight. The church gained nearly 400,000 members in 2010, about 70 percent of them converted by college age missionaries like Elder Dangerfield. Missionary work is not just a fundamental tenet of the faith; it is also a well oiled operation. An army of 52,000 young Mormons proselytize around the world, from Boise, Idaho, to Mozambique, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. In modern day Mormon culture, men are expected to take up evangelism on their 19th birthday and serve for two years; less commonly, women enlist when they turn 21. Missionary work is not mandatory, but it is popular. Eric Hawkins, a church spokesman, describes it as "something we hope all Mormon young men will want to do a time of meaningful personal sacrifice, service, testing and growth." It is certainly a time of sacrifice. Missionaries are slingshot into an intensive, airtight and sometimes lonely schedule of prayer, Scripture study and door to door proselytizing six days a week, 52 weeks a year. They are to abstain from virtually every earthly pleasure not just the usual temptations prohibited under Mormonism, like premarital sex, alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea, but also magazines, television and music not sanctioned by the church. They can call home two days a year, on Christmas and Mother's Day. (When suicide bombings ripped through Kampala during the 2010 World Cup, killing more than 70 people, including an American citizen, the missionaries still were not allowed a call.) E mailing, through a secure Internet server, is for Mondays. "Two of my best friends back home are not members," says Christian Rennie, a former offensive tackle for the Southern Utah University football team who is nearing the end of his tenure in Uganda. "They e mailed me they were spending the weekend in Vegas. I just don't ask for details." Instead, they burrow deep into Scripture and prayer, feeding off the energy the concentration foments. "I've had very familiar feelings in a lesson as I have had in a game the excitement, the energy, feeling like helping your team score a touchdown," Elder Rennie says. He is walking down a narrow dirt path on the outskirts of the city, on the way to a lesson with a new recruit. The storks munch on rubbish scattered across a field nearby. Of going back home, he says, "It's going to be weird." Not too long ago they were all in college. Micheal Zackery Lee squeezed in a semester at Westminster College, a liberal arts college in Salt Lake City. James Davis, with the strong handshake, was three semesters into a veterinarian track at Utah State University. At Utah State, 500 students formally pause their studies each year. Ninety percent return, and the university works to help prepare them to re integrate, including offering an intensive math refresher. Missionaries have been able to pass proficiency tests and get college credit for foreign language. At Brigham Young University, the Missionary Training Center welcomes hundreds of new missionaries every week from around the world. For up to 12 weeks, they study doctrine, learn how to teach the gospel and hone their communication skills. Some 50 languages are taught at the center, in Provo, Utah, which can accommodate 4,000 learners and has a gymnasium, medical clinic and bookstore. Training centers in other countries also prepare students to serve in one of the church's roughly 350 missions. They can be sent anywhere. Mitt Romney, for example, served in France. "I thought I was going to Nebraska," Elder Dangerfield says, his rosy cheeks betraying a sunburn. "The first week I was here I thought, 'Where am I?' " First he was in barren northern Uganda for six months, a smudge above the Equator, where malaria and oppressive heat reign. He picked up bits and pieces of the language, Acholi. Now, he traverses the streets of the capital with Michael Chiromo, from Zimbabwe. Missionaries are paired, six weeks at a time, with a companion in missionary lingo, the first companion is called "father," and the second is called "mother." They stay "within sight and hearing of" each other, according to the handbook they all keep near. "Never be alone," it warns. Companions will study, pray and proselytize together. Together, they will be caught in populist street demonstrations and taste strange foods grasshoppers, dog. Rather than with the residents of their host country, where contact consists of managed conversation about their faith, perhaps the most cultural exchange happens among the missionaries themselves. The threesome turn a corner, and chants of "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" break out from the porch of the man's home. A swarm of youngsters are soon upon them. Ugandan culture emphasizes hospitality, and the man introduces the adults of his family Hope, Maria and the portly Tuba. "Hey! Very nice!" Elder Dangerfield exclaims, breaking the ice with laughter. "For me, I am Elder Dangerfield." "Field marshal of the gospel!" the man teases. The house is too small for guests, the man says, but the missionaries are free to speak to his family in the yard. The missionaries ask for a convenient time for a more serious discussion. An appointment is set for Thursday evening. Mormons are only one of a number of religious groups vying for local hearts and minds in this predominantly Christian nation. Missionaries brought the faith to colonial Uganda in the 19th century, and it became a popular alternative to indigenous practices, including witchcraft. Today, ministries pepper the country, and religious conversion is common. There is even a community of Jews in the country's east who preferred the Old Testament to the New Testament when missionaries introduced them to both. Currently, there are only about 5,000 Mormons in Uganda, less than 1 percent of the population. What is noteworthy, however, is that a third of those were converted last year. The number of missionaries stationed in Uganda has also grown, to 120 from 70 two years ago. The missionaries say they can net a dozen new contacts from the street in a couple of hours, and visit five homes in a day. They estimate each is responsible for around 40 baptisms by the time service is up. Elder Davis says that at the Mormon mission in Latvia, where a friend was recently based, there were zero baptisms. "It's a lot harder to teach the people in Europe than the people in Africa," adds Elder Lee, Elder Davis's companion. "It's Africa's time." The Mormon brand of Christianity is as much a peculiarity in Uganda as in some parts of the United States. In 2010, from its headquarters in Salt Lake City, the church began a nationwide public awareness campaign declaring "I'm a Mormon," hoping to dispel misconceptions about the religion. "Her family says she married a devil worshiper," a recent convert complains about his in laws. (In fact, Mormons worship Jesus Christ, who, according to the sacred Book of Mormon, visited ancient America.) "Why don't you have the cross?" asks a Ugandan who is considering joining. (Mormons object to the crucifixion and death as a symbol of their Christianity.) "The Mormons were founded by some guy who found stones or something," a middle age man calls out from the driver's seat as he delicately maneuvers his car over a pothole. Elder Dangerfield and Elder Chiromo approach, their clothes betraying their identity. "Yes," the man says, "and that they allow polygamy? Do they still do so?" (They do not the church banned the practice in the 1890s and the stones were seer stones, which Smith used to gain his revelations.) The young men take it all in stride the prickly questions, the cultural misunderstandings, the rain and the cancellations. Through it all, their own lives are changing. Their personal values sharpen, and they begin to understand whom they want to be when they return to college. As a freshman, Elder Lee wanted to pursue international business, but now he is thinking of something that will keep him close to his family, possibly accounting, which he picked up as an assistant for the mission president in Uganda. "I have learned more about myself in the last 20 months than I could if I was back home," he says. "You begin to understand what really matters in your life." He had converted to Mormonism at 16 for a girl he was dating. "I was a pretty messed up kid," he says. "I wasn't doing drugs or anything, but I was a huge punk." Selfish, he says. Going to church sparked a change. When he left for his mission, his mother could not understand what he was doing. But she has come to accept her son's choice, Elder Lee says, and wants to start going to church with him when he gets back. It isn't always easy leaving home. The missionaries say some aren't able to complete their missions. They call it "trunking," being antsy to go home. Just ask Elder Lee. "Between six months and 18 months everyone forgets you," he says. "All your friends back home, they stop writing you. That's when the umbilical cord is cut, that's when you start realizing a lot of different things." For Elder Davis, the cord was cut on a Christmas. He phoned his girlfriend of more than five years. She told him she had met someone else and was going to be married. "It happens a lot on missions," he says. Life is further tested by the straitjacket of rules. "Listen only to music that is consistent with the sacred spirit of your calling," the handbook reads. "Do not telephone, write, e mail or accept calls or letters from anyone of the opposite sex living within or near mission boundaries." Failing to follow the rules, the handbook says, could threaten "salvation." Kampala is full of temptations. Near an Ethiopian restaurant popular with the missionaries, pop music blares outside, marijuana is sold down the road, and prostitutes solicit. Several young missionaries were caught fraternizing with women and sent home, the missionaries say. But rules are rarely broken for one, companions are together virtually all the time. "Dating," Elder Lee says, "it's definitely something we look forward to doing again." But he says he misses music the most. "You could get away with it so easy," he says, climbing along a gully, up a hillside of homes, on his way to meet a convert. "Nobody would ever know." A group of children call out "mzungu" "foreigner" in the Luganda language from the shade of a mango tree as Elder Lee leaps over a crevice. "But, like, if you listen to a Nickelback song, you won't be ready to go teach a lesson." The lessons are much the same, convert to convert. The young Mormons simply begin a conversation about what they believe, and if it goes well they leave a pamphlet or Book of Mormon and ask the recruit to give it a read, and pray. They are authoritative but deliver the message in a submissive manner. "We don't expect anyone just to take our word for it; we ask them to pray for it, to ask God if it's true or not," Elder Lee says. "Everyone knows that God is not a God of lies. We're not trying to convert you to us; we're trying to convert you." Unlike other Christian missionaries in Kampala, Ugandans say, Mormons never ask for money. They are polite, not pushy. They volunteer to help local members or anyone curious about joining, even digging ditches or hauling bricks. In the leafy Kampala neighborhood of Kabowa, Charles Owori prepares to take the leap of faith. Mr. Owori has been meeting with the missionaries for several weeks. He holds his copy of the Book of Mormon as the discussion turns to the ultimate matter at hand: Is he ready to convert? "Brother Charles," says Hillary Chigwedere, a young missionary from Zimbabwe, "are you ready to follow the example of Jesus Christ by being baptized by someone with the priesthood authority in the Church of Jesus Christ?" Brother Charles answers: "We read Scripture that Jesus Christ was immersed in the water, but I only had some water poured on my head. So I need that." The missionaries smile. They are satisfied and set a date. Next stop is Joseph Kagodo, a 29 year old D.J. baptized just three months earlier. For new converts like Mr. Kagodo, the values of the young proselytes are as compelling as any set of religious beliefs. Indeed, Mr. Kagodo says the details of Mormon doctrine were confusing for him at first do they believe only in the Book of Mormon, or in the Bible as well? (They are meant to complement each other.) But in a land where many aggressively preach the word of God and worship tends toward the enthusiastic, he appreciated that the Mormons lived as they taught quietly, humbly. "I found what I wanted," Mr. Kagodo says. "It is the way of life. I've met many other Christians who would be very comfortable just saying they are born again or what, but their character does not depict it." "For me," he adds, "the fact that nobody pushes you, but asks you, and read the Scriptures, and just keep the gospel, that matters a lot."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Q. After many years, I started using the Firefox browser again, and the start page for this new version is covered with links and icons. Can I change it? A. Mozilla, which released Firefox 1.0 in 2004, significantly overhauled the browser last year and named it Firefox Quantum. In addition to retooling the software to make it faster and use less of the computer's memory than previous versions, the program got a bit of a visual redesign, including a new look for the New Tab page. The first row of the New Tab page displays icons for the "Top Sites" you visit frequently or have used recently. If you have specific sites you would like to pin to the page or remove from view, you can customize the Top Sites collection. Just move the cursor over the top right corner of an icon and click to get a menu of options.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Throughout its 50 year history, Dance Theater of Harlem has stood for more than just dancing. "We knew we were pioneers," said Virginia Johnson, a former principal dancer with the company, who is now its artistic director. "We were crossing the prairie in a Conestoga wagon, and the Indians were attacking, and we had to band together and make this happen. There was a lot of purpose." It was born out of a tragedy. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Arthur Mitchell, the first African American principal dancer at New York City Ballet, decided that a change needed to be made in his life and in the world. With the ballet teacher Karel Shook, he formed Dance Theater of Harlem in 1969. "Mr. Mitchell was peanut butter," said Iris Cloud, a former dancer, "and Mr. Shook was jelly." Together, they wanted to prove to the world something that still needed proving back then: that blacks could indeed dance ballet and marvelously. The beginnings were humble; dancers took class in a converted garage. But as the years went on, Dance Theater, performing an array of ballets by George Balanchine and later adding works like John Taras's "The Firebird" and "Creole Giselle" to the mix, grew and toured the world. But in 2004, the company, burdened by debt, was forced to go on hiatus. To the dismay of many, that pause lasted eight years. When the company started up again in 2012, with Ms. Johnson at the artistic helm, it had been reduced to 18 dancers, from 44. That Dance Theater has persisted and continues to improve is critical. In the ballet world, dancers of color remain underrepresented. "To see a stage full of dancers of color dancing ballet how beautiful is that?" said Andrea Long Naidu, who danced at City Ballet before joining Dance Theater. "Now, to me when I do go to companies that are not that diverse, I see something wrong with it. Like, Oh my God, what is going on here?" On Wednesday, the company returns to New York City Center with a program that pays tribute to Mitchell, who died in September. (Mr. Shook died in 1985.) The season also includes a reconstruction of Mitchell's 1971 "Tones." "Like everything the company did in the early '70s, 'Tones' was Arthur Mitchell teaching us to dance the way he wanted us to dance," Ms. Johnson said. "It's starkly neoclassical. It's angular, it's dynamic, it's fast footwork, and there's a lot of counterpoint so we could be accurate." Last summer, Mitchell restaged it with two former dancers, a smaller cast and a new name "Tones II." The dancer Christopher McDaniel said that Mitchell seemed frail at those rehearsals. "But he still spoke in that Arthur Mitchell way," he said. Mitchell had a reputation for being tough, but that was hardly news to Mr. McDaniel, who studied at Dance Theater's school as a child. "Just as much as he would tear into someone if they did something wrong, he would celebrate something good," Mr. McDaniel said. In honor of the anniversary, current and former members talked about their time with the company and, of course, Mitchell and his legacy. Here are edited excerpts from those interviews. I had a sister who was taking violin lessons at the Harlem School of the Arts, and she said there was a black man there who was going to be teaching ballet. Arthur was sort of a maniac. He was very much about: "Take off your shoes and socks, let me see your feet, point them really hard. Have you ever been on point before?" I was in awe of him. Arthur told me I didn't know anything, I didn't know how to dance. He was going to have to start at the beginning that everything was wrong with what I was doing. "You're fat, you're ugly." He laid it on really thick. And in later years, I came to understand that it was a test, but when it happened it was devastating. That was first time I ever got drunk in my life. But you know what? I went back. What he was doing was: "Can you change? Changing is going to be hard. It's going to be this hard. Are you willing to do it?" Laughs I started working with them when the name Dance Theater of Harlem didn't exist. My first file cabinet was a shoe box. We walked down the street in Harlem and the street urchins and drug dealers respected these dancers coming to this rough neighborhood they see us going to the beacon of Dance Theater of Harlem that is building great human beings, not just for dance but for humanity. It was a place of hope in the middle of a troubled area. I'm a fair skinned black woman. Very fair. So I walked up to him and asked, "What do you do about someone who wants to join your company who is very fair skinned?" He sort of looked at me and I was like, "Yeah, I'm black." Laughs A couple of weeks later, he invited me to dance with his company. Dancer, 1971 78; director of the Dance Theater of Harlem Workshop Ensemble and School, 1981 85 He used to show us how to dress. Dance Theater of Harlem was like Motown. We couldn't go out of that place without looking our best. I was always a smooth dresser, but I got less jeans and more business suit and nice shirts and pants. He said, "You have to walk in like you are somebody." I never liked performing, but you had to perform to get paid. He used to look at me and go: "Searching, searching, searching always searching. Aren't you ever going to find it?" We would go down South, and people would want you to go through the back of the hotel. Mr. Mitchell was very upset about that. "No, no, no. If they can't go through the front, we're not performing." I think Mr. Mitchell took a lot of blows for us. Sometimes we didn't even know that he was taking blows. He sheltered us from the storm. When I first came to D.T.H. for the summer, I actually lived with Arthur Mitchell's mother because I was underage. Talk about intimidating. It was like, I don't care that you're young and away from home for the first time. You've got to learn how to take care of yourself. You have to learn how to manage and navigate this world that you've decided to be a part of. I wouldn't call him a tyrant. He knew what he wanted. He literally instilled his blood into us, so that no matter what you did when you danced you felt Mr. Mitchell coming out of you. He'd say, "You need a stronger backbone, Andrea!" I'd be like, Oh Jesus Christ, would he leave me alone? And now I feel him. I'm on the faculty at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet now, and when I think can I do this? Am I capable? I hear him in my head. "Andrea. Do it. Go. Make it happen." We were getting to do works that many only dream about. And I don't mean people of color. Dancers. We did Balanchine like it was coming out of our ears. Mr. Mitchell would often say: "Come front and center. You have the right to stand anyplace you want to." Until I got there I didn't realize that many times I did not stand in the front or in the center. There was a liberation and it happened at Dance Theater of Harlem. I left in 1997, and I left because I was old. I was 47. That's old. He was, like, flummoxed. He said: "I've got this ballet coming for you! We've already signed the papers." I was like, oh that's too bad. He had to understand. Arthur Mitchell was a brilliant, very deeply caring person. He had to wear that mantle of ogre, but that wasn't the real Arthur Mitchell. I think he started to soften a bit when he was getting older a little bit. Not a huge amount. Maybe 30 percent? If he didn't care, he wouldn't be so tough. That's what a lot of kids now don't understand. They think of the toughness as meanness. The coddling thing was not something that happened then and it wasn't just Arthur Mitchell back in those days, it was the way of dance. Laughs It was shut up and dance. I remember him at a diversity meeting at the School of American Ballet, and he took over this meeting. He said, "We need to get more African American girls that look like Andrea. Because half the time you don't even know." Mitchell was referring to dancers with darker complexions. He would say those things. It shocked me. He said this a lot: "You either hit the high C or you don't." As a dancer, you either make the magic or you don't. He taught us how to make the magic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
I was in Dubai late last year to report a few stories for The New York Times but, as I teed off on the Faldo Course at the Emirates Golf Club shortly before 8 one night, it did not escape me that I was beginning my round at roughly the same time as my children would be going to sleep back home. It was a liberating feeling and, also, wholly unfamiliar; after all, so many rounds played by so many golfers around the world involve a mental countdown clock, a harried feeling of needing to hustle so as to be done in time for a soccer practice/baseball game/dance recital/trip to Home Depot. This was different. At night, the pace of play is quick but the emotions are gloriously slower and dreamier. Like everything else in Dubai, there is construction all around the course at Emirates, but the whirring of the cranes and the backfiring of the ubiquitous trucks quiet to a hum after dark and the skyline that rises above the course, topped, of course, by the spindly Burj Khalifa, makes golfers feel as if they are tiptoeing (or, really, gliding in electric carts) among a cadre of neon giants. In many ways, a fully floodlit golf course is typical Dubai. There are other places around the world where one can, technically, play golf at night, but these are often tiny tracks, a course of short holes where one might need only a few clubs and an hour's time to get around. Paying to install bright lights all over a course that can stretch more than 7,000 yards and already requires a pricey maintenance that includes one million gallons of water per day in the heat of the desert summer is both lavish and ostentatious. But then, those are two adjectives that are not used infrequently in these parts. From a design standpoint, the Faldo Course itself is not breathtaking; its sister layout at Emirates, the Majlis, is generally regarded as superior and hosts professional events throughout the year. But while one can certainly choose to play either course during the day, the true allure here is obvious: Why wouldn't the casual golfer find something else to do in the morning consider this an enthusiastic plug for visiting the local camel racing track, where the action begins at sunrise while saving the joy (and pain) of golf for evening? All the perks of playing a luxury club remain the same. On my visit, I enjoyed a tasty dinner in the clubhouse restaurant after arriving at the course and changed my shoes in the plush locker room (complete with sauna and steam room) before warming up at the capacious driving range with a set of rental clubs that were top of the line. There were even birds chirping and flying about, their internal body clocks apparently so altered by the bright lights that dusk and dawn have become malleable concepts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Elizabeth Bricker of Rumson, N.J., was still half asleep when her mother came into her room two weeks ago carrying an envelope from the University of Southern California. Even through the haze of spring break, she could see that the envelope was big big enough to mean she had gotten in. "I was so excited," she recalled. "Then I opened it and I read the letter and I was like, oh no! I started to cry." She had been admitted, but not for the fall of 2013. She was being offered a spot one semester down the road, in January 2014. "I never heard of anyone being accepted in the spring," she said. Elizabeth was worried that accepting the offer would leave her out of sync with her peers, all of whom were gearing up to start college life in September. But as it turned out, her two best friends got the same offer from their first choice colleges, too. So did a lot of other students across the country. Exact numbers are not available, but according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, over the last few years more and more colleges have been sending out a new kind of acceptance letter, inviting some applicants to wait until the new year before showing up. Back in 2001, when U.S.C. started doing it, Timothy Brunold, the director of admissions, said he assumed the university was a pioneer. Now the list includes, among others, Skidmore College, Hamilton College, Brandeis University, the University of Miami, Northeastern University, Elon University in North Carolina and Middlebury College (which actually beat U.S.C. to the punch by a few decades). They all have their own variation on the theme. Some, like Middlebury, in Vermont, allow students to request second semester admissions; some make the decision for the students. Hamilton, in Clinton, N.Y., does not enroll students until they arrive on campus in the spring; Skidmore, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Northeastern, in Boston, enroll them right away but direct them to spend their fall semester at a designated program abroad. But all are motivated by the same basic arithmetic: between freshman year attrition and junior year abroad programs, campus populations drop off after the first few months of college each year. "With the economy the way it is, they need to be doing what they can to get tuition income," said Scott G. Chrysler Jr., a college counselor in Louisiana who is active in the national group's admissions practices committee. "An empty seat is not generating any income." The arrangement may not be profitable for everyone, warns Tom Weede, chairman of the committee. "Often the letter says, 'We encourage you to enroll in another school and take core related classes,' " he said. "Well, at the other school, if you want financial aid you have to be a full time student. The school that takes you doesn't know you're just going to be there for a semester. So it creates a built in retention problem at a moment we're calling for more accountability and more numbers about outcomes like retention." As fast as the practice may be growing, it is still unknown to most college applicants, and even to many guidance counselors. At Brandeis University, which now enrolls 100 or so students for midyear arrival, the dean of admissions, Mark Spencer, said some applicants were so rattled by the offer that they begged to be placed on the fall waiting list instead. "I say, 'Wait, you want me to un admit you?' " Mr. Spencer said. To address students' concerns, many of these colleges set up special midyear open houses, or enlist former midyear arrivals to call their potential successors and talk about how it all works. And when that spring semester rolls around, these colleges generally offer midyear orientations, modeled on the welcome to campus events that greet most first year students. High school seniors looking to arrive at U.S.C. next spring are already chatting with one another on a Facebook page that the university set up for them. And at Hamilton, which last year enrolled about 10 percent of its incoming class for spring semester, everyone gets a Hamilton e mail account and password, even those who won't arrive on campus for a few more months. At Middlebury College, where one sixth of the class arrives for the first time in February, Greg Buckles, dean of admissions, said, "We kind of cast about for these 'Febby' qualities," like risk taking, entrepreneurial spirit and a drive to lead. Jessye Kass, a senior at Brandeis, said she was "very upset" when she was first offered admission for the spring semester. "I called and demanded to be put in the fall class," she recalled. When that did not work she raised some money and went to volunteer in Ghana. On the strength of that experience she has since started an organization to promote arts education in Ghanaian schools. In a few weeks she will graduate with dual majors anthropology as well as African and African American Studies and dual minors in social justice and social policy as well as peace conflict and coexistence studies, as well as a Fulbright scholarship. She said none of it would have happened if it were not for that deferred semester. Ms. Kass took extra courses along the way in order to graduate with a majority of her class. Other midyear arrivals use advanced placement credits from high school, or transfer credits from their fall semester at another college. But some who arrive midyear and then end up graduating midyear say that schedule has a hidden advantage: it gives them a few months' running start before the much larger mass of spring graduates hits the job market. At Middlebury, midyear graduation brings another difference. Unlike their classmates who must sweat through their late May ceremonies, sticky in an academic gown, the Febbies get to graduate in the middle of winter, at the top of a big hill. And then they zoom down it together, on skis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
In Some Countries, Women Get Days Off for Period Pain Recently Akanksha Seda got in her car at 10:30 a.m., as usual, and rode 45 minutes to her company's office in Mumbai, India. A few hours later, she got her period and, she recalled, "the eighteen wheeler truckload of cramps." Rather than popping painkillers and working through it, as she used to, Ms. Seda went to her supervisor and informed him she was taking the day off. For many Indian women, that would be considered a bold move. Periods are a taboo subject, and discussing cramps with a man can be embarrassing for some, Ms. Seda said. But at Culture Machine, the digital media company where she works, she was entitled to the day off. This month, the company put in place a "menstrual leave policy," allowing women to take a paid day off during their period without dipping into sick days or vacation time. It is one of a handful of private Indian companies to have started such policies in recent months. Menstrual leaves are recognized in few other countries, among them Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea and Zambia. The move has set off fierce debate, not just in India but around the world. Experts say the spread of such policies despite their best intentions could actually deter women's progress in the workplace. The additional days off could be used to justify lower pay or increase hiring bias against women, critics say. Absences could push women out of decision making roles and eliminate them from consideration for promotions. And these policies may play into a decades old prejudice that menstruation makes women unfit for work. "It suggests women are uniquely handicapped in the workplace by the fact that they have periods," said Emily Martin, vice president for workplace justice at the National Women's Law Center. A 2012 study found that 20 percent of women experience periods painful enough to interfere with daily activities. While it is important to acknowledge their experiences, Ms. Martin said, a menstrual leave policy does more than that: It brands every woman who menstruates as ill. It would be better, she said, to develop an overall leave policy for men and women to take time off for a host of reasons, including chronic medical conditions. Periods have long served as an excuse to keep girls out of school and women out of the work force, said Sharra L. Vostral, associate professor of history at Purdue and author of "Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology." Female air service pilots during World War II were often barred from flying if they had cramps, she said. Carla Pascoe, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said some women were told not to use sewing machines or read novels during their periods because they might overexert themselves. "It's because of this history that I'm wary of returning to an argument that all females are crippled by menstruation which is what menstrual leave implies to me," she said. Women with severe period pain should be given time off, she added, but it does not need to be a blanket policy. Devleena Majumder, president of human resources at Culture Machine, said such arguments overlook the unique challenges women face. "We are biologically different, and we need to acknowledge that," she said. That is why maternity leave is offered more commonly than paternity leave, she added. But there's an important difference, said Pauline Maki, research director for the Center for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Having a child affects all women's ability to work, while periods are debilitating only for some. "Family leave policies are based on experiences that are much more universal," she said. Japan has offered menstrual leave policies since 1947, when a law was passed allowing any woman with painful periods, or whose job might exacerbate period pain, to take time off. A 1986 study of the policy found that the number of women using it declined from 20 percent in 1960 to 13 percent in 1981, largely because of societal pressures that frown upon its use. South Korea granted women menstrual leave in 2001, though the policy has since come under fire from men who see it as a form of reverse discrimination. And in Indonesia, women are entitled to two days off a month for period pain, but the policy is poorly enforced. The Italian Parliament will soon vote on a bill introduced in March that would require companies to offer three paid days off to women with severe menstrual cramps. Here, too, some worry it will hurt women more than help. To Ms. Seda at Culture Machine, the debate seems ridiculous. "If the world had no men, if there were only women working, nobody would have been up in arms about a 'first day of period' leave," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Hillsong Unites Believers and Those Old Agnostics John, Paul, George and Ringo The Beatles did not have a great relationship with Jesus Christ. In 1964, the band's publicist told the Saturday Evening Post that the boys were "completely anti Christ." In 1966, John Lennon said the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" a remark that would haunt him until the end of his life. But Christianity is a storied colonizer, and on Sunday, when a group of performers at a Hillsong megachurch in Manhattan made a rapid switch from singing "All You Need Is Love" to their own hymn, "O Come Let Us Adore Him," the transition was seamless. Hillsong, a Pentecostal megachurch that was founded more than 30 years ago in Sydney and spread on the back of a hugely successful Christian recording label, has between 9,000 and 10,000 members in New York most of them young, racially diverse and screamingly fashionable. On Sunday, more than 2,300 of them packed the 2,200 seat Hammerstein Ballroom for the first of two evening services, after which was to come a musical production. "I just Googled churches in New York, and this was the first option that came up," she said. It stands to reason that someone at Hillsong has mastered SEO. The church has made inroads with digitally savvy young professionals in more than 20 cities worldwide, including four in the United States. Its New York members are WeWork employees, N.Y.U. musical theater majors, social media mavens, life coaches and Netflix actors. The service, led by six singers of various races and genders with uniformly excellent hair, came to a close and it was show time. Nathan Finochio, a teaching pastor at Hillsong and the mastermind behind the production, emerged on a stage in the crowd's midst, clad in an electric blue uniform like the one Paul McCartney wore on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." (Mr. McCartney is Mr. Finochio's favorite Beatle.) He and 102 other performers, dressed as if they had gotten lost on the way to SantaCon, belted that record's title track. The show went quickly. The three kings reached Joseph and Mary, both played by black actors, within the initial minutes. Mr. Finochio and the other performers interspersed dialogue and sermon, performing versions of "Blackbird" and "Can't Buy Me Love," during which Mary handed Baby Jesus to a responsible reindeer so she could cut a rug with Joseph. As George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" played to celebrate Jesus's return from Egypt, the crowd on the second floor balcony turned on their cellphone flashlights to mimic candles and waved their arms in devotion. The band's lyrics and arrangements were largely left alone; the Beatles may have talked a big old atheist game, but it's not difficult to see the religiosity in their songs. (At least, apparently, the ones Ringo didn't have a hand in.) He was thoughtful when asked why he thought that millennials, who are stereotypically averse to institutions, religious or otherwise, were attracted to Hillsong. He quoted something often attributed to St. Augustine "the church is a whore, but she is my mother" and said that skepticism for the church was healthy. He seemed less able to explain the attraction. But he said that the joy displayed in the show was a fitting example of Hillsong's appeal. "Sometimes Christians suck at partying," he said, pointing out that a group of people who feel assured that they are going to heaven should have less trouble lightening up. "Christians should be known as the biggest partyers in the world."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
were married Aug. 25 at Old St. Joseph's Church in Philadelphia. The Rev. John Stack, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony. The couple met at Boston College, from which they graduated. Mrs. Bielen, 27, is a senior associate and certified public accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Philadelphia. She is a daughter of Denise Corkery Marbach and Martin J. Marbach of Lower Gwynedd, Pa. The bride's father, a former assistant basketball coach under the late Rollie Massimino at Villanova (including for the 1985 national championship team), is a sales executive at Ampro Sports, a sports apparel company in Upper Darby, Pa. Her mother, a retired partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers, is the president of Gwynedd Mercy Academy High School. Mr. Bielen, also 27, is an M.B.A. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a son of Tracey Hering Bielen and Richard Bielen of Birmingham, Ala. The groom's father is the chief executive and president of Protective Life Insurance Company in Birmingham.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Kristolyn Lloyd, above, looks after the jazzman played by J. Alphonse Nicholson, as well as the Detroit club he runs, in "Paradise Blue." In a Detroit neighborhood called Black Bottom, at the heart of a club district called Paradise Valley, a trumpeter called Blue runs a joint called Paradise, where he fronts a quartet whose sidemen include a drummer called P Sam and a pianist called Corn. The bassist has quit, perhaps because his name was just Joe. Everything is overripe like that in "Paradise Blue," the jazz noir play by Dominique Morisseau that opened on Sunday at the Signature Theater. The names are the least of it though the two women involved in the men's lives go by Pumpkin and Silver, as if they were paint chips. Pumpkin (Kristolyn Lloyd, late of "Dear Evan Hansen") is Blue's girlfriend and the club's chatelaine: cleaning, cooking and starching the sheets for the musicians and boarders living upstairs. She's a "go along gal," happy to serve her troubled man and his difficult art while repressing her own ambitions and talents. But Silver (Simone Missick) represses nothing; she is a black widow (in both senses of the phrase) who shows up at the club one day in 1949 oozing erotic charisma like Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat." Born in Louisiana, Silver arrives with every noir mystery woman's attendant cliches: a lubricious walk, a wad of cash in the bosom of her complicated lingerie, a languorous way of lighting cigarettes and a gun. The gun is the first thing that goes off in "Paradise Blue," but it's something of a red herring; although the play is structured as a flashback whodunit, no one has much of a motive to kill. True, Blue (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is angry and ornery, making the more likably hotheaded P Sam (Francois Battiste) steam. Corn (Keith Randolph Smith) is the conciliator, excusing Blue's difficult personality as the price a black artist pays in a racist society. "Brilliant and second class," he says. "Make you insane." But that explanation, however true, isn't effectively dramatized, as the play takes place entirely among the five black characters. (On Neil Patel's awkward set, the action never leaves the confines of the club.) What the production, directed by Ruben Santiago Hudson, emphasizes is a private illness: Blue is being driven mad by memories of his tragic mother and psychotic father, also a jazzman. As their ghosts crowd in, he starts to lose faith in himself and his music. Ms. Morisseau parallels his spiritual decay with that of the city. She sets the play just as incoming Detroit Mayor Albert Cobo, having run on a platform of reversing urban blight, starts making offers to buy black owned property downtown. ("We the blight he talkin' about," P Sam says.) In the city's pre emptive offer for his prime location, Blue sees a way out, even if it leaves the others in limbo. For Pumpkin, the club, like Black Bottom generally, is a hard earned home. For Silver, it is something even more: a community in which black people run their own businesses rather than (in Ms. Morisseau's typically pungent phrase) "sharecroppin' and reapin' white folks' harvest." And for P Sam, it is the one place where black musicians are not subjected to the indignities of white clubs, allowing them to be the "kings" they are meant to be. With these visions at stake, Blue's willingness to consider the city's offer is seen as a race betrayal, or at least as his sacrificing community on the altar of private art. To counteract that, the others make offers of their own. Oddly in a play that features so much talk of jazz and poetry, the real estate story is the most compelling aspect of "Paradise Blue." Detroit under the real Mayor Cobo, who promised to stem what he called the "Negro invasion" of its white neighborhoods, was not the only city to use slum clearing as an excuse to undermine its black population. August Wilson's Pittsburgh comes immediately to mind, and not just because his play "Jitney," though set in 1977, turns on a similar plot point. Also like "Jitney," "Paradise Blue" is part of a series set in one city across different decades in this case a trilogy that includes Ms. Morisseau's "Skeleton Crew" (presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016) and "Detroit '67" (seen at the Public Theater in 2013). I liked both of those better than I do "Paradise Blue," which so overplays its genre tropes that the characters feel like incoherent afterthoughts. Especially in the second act, as the plot tries to wind itself into a climax, they stop making sense. Instead of resisting that problem, Mr. Santiago Hudson, who directed the belated Broadway premiere of "Jitney" last year, doubles down on it. Every choice seems as extreme as possible, from the cut of the costumes (by Clint Ramos) to the chiaroscuro lighting (by Rui Rita). The performances, too, are hot and compelling in the way a five alarm fire is, making you want to keep watching but also keep your distance. Mr. Nicholson's intensity is especially alarming and Ms. Missick makes a stunning New York theater debut just walking across the stage. But everyone in the cast has lovely moments. Ms. Lloyd's come mostly at the beginning, before her character undergoes inexplicable changes. Mr. Battiste and Mr. Smith who was terrific in "Jitney" as well are solid throughout. "Jitney" may serve as a useful template here. Though Wilson wrote it first among his 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays, he withdrew it for 14 years while he turned out such masterworks as "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences," "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" and "The Piano Lesson." The revised version of "Jitney" that was finally produced was a much better play than the one he had put in a drawer. Likewise, "Paradise Blue," despite several years of development its world premiere was at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2015 feels like a work that merits deeper and longer reconsideration. Though it engages powerful ideas in a format too weak to handle them, that's a much more promising problem than the other way around.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In the delirious sci fi thriller by the Korean director Bong Joon ho, an attempt to engineer the climate and stop global warming goes horribly wrong. The planet freezes. Only the passengers on a train endlessly circumnavigating the globe survive. Those in first class eat sushi and quaff wine. People in steerage eat cockroach protein bars. Scientists must start looking into this. Seriously. News about the climate has become alarming over the last few months. In December, startled scientists revealed that temperatures in some parts of the Arctic had spiked more than 35 degrees Fahrenheit above their historical averages. In March, others reported that sea ice in the Arctic had dropped to its lowest level on record. A warming ocean has already killed large chunks of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Let's get real. The odds that these processes could be slowed, let alone stopped, by deploying more solar panels and wind turbines seemed unrealistic even before President Trump's election. It is even less likely now that Mr. Trump has gone to work undermining President Barack Obama's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That is where engineering the climate comes in. Last month, scholars from the physical and social sciences who are interested in climate change gathered in Washington to discuss approaches like cooling the planet by shooting aerosols into the stratosphere or whitening clouds to reflect sunlight back into space, which may prove indispensable to prevent the disastrous consequences of warming. Aerosols could be loaded into military jets, to be sprayed into the atmosphere at high altitude. Clouds at sea could be made more reflective by spraying them with a fine saline mist, drawn from the ocean. The world's immediate priority may be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet and hopefully exceed the promises made at the climate summit meeting in Paris in December 2015. But as Janos Pasztor, who heads the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, told me, "The reality is that we may need more tools even if we achieve these goals." The carbon dioxide that humanity has pumped into the atmosphere is already producing faster, deeper changes to the world's climate and ecosystems than were expected not long ago. Barring some technology that could pull it out at a reasonable cost a long shot for the foreseeable future, according to many scientists it will stay there for a long time, warming the atmosphere further for decades to come. The world is not cutting emissions fast enough to prevent global temperatures from spiking into dangerous territory, slashing crop yields and decimating food production in many parts of the world, as well as flooding coastal cities while parching large swaths of the globe, killing perhaps millions of mostly poor people from heat stress alone. Solving the climate imperative will require cutting greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, ideally in this century, and probably sucking some out. But solar geoengineering could prove a critical complement to mitigation, giving humanity time to develop the political will and the technologies to achieve the needed decarbonization. With Mr. Trump pushing the United States, the world's second largest emitter after China, away from its mitigation commitments, geoengineering looks even more compelling. "If the United States starts going backwards or not going forward fast enough in terms of emissions reductions, then more and more people will start talking about these options," said Mr. Pasztor, a former United Nations assistant secretary general on climate change. While many of the scholars gathered in Washington expressed misgivings about deploying geoengineering technologies, there was a near universal consensus on the need to invest more in research not only into the power to cool the atmosphere but also into the potential side effects on the atmosphere's chemistry and on weather patterns in different world regions. While it is known that solar radiation management can cool the atmosphere, fears that field research would look too much like deployment have so far limited research pretty much to computer modeling of its effects and small scale experiments in the lab. Critically, the academics noted, the research agenda must include an open, international debate about the governance structures necessary to deploy a technology that, at a stroke, would affect every society and natural system in the world. In other words, geoengineering needs to be addressed not as science fiction, but as a potential part of the future just a few decades down the road. "Today it is still a taboo, but it is a taboo that is crumbling," said David Keith, a noted Harvard physicist who was an organizer of the conclave. 1. Time for action is running out. The major agreement struck by diplomats established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 2. How much each nation needs to cut remains unresolved. Rich countries are disproportionately responsible for global warming, but some leaders have insisted that it's the poorer nations who need to accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels. 3. The call for disaster aid increased. One of the biggest fights at the summit revolved around whether and how the world's wealthiest nations should compensate poorer nations for the damage caused by rising temperatures. 4. A surprising emissions cutting agreement. Among the other notable deals to come out of the summit was a U.S. China agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane. 5. There was a clear gender and generation gap. Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms were mostly old and male. Those who were most fiercely protesting the pace of action were mostly young and female. Arguments against geoengineering are in some ways akin to those made against genetically modified organisms and so called Frankenfood. It amounts to messing with nature. But there are more practical causes for concern about the deployment of such a radical technology. How would it affect the ozone in the stratosphere? How would it change patterns of precipitation? Moreover, how could the world agree on the deployment of a technology that will have different impacts on different countries? How could the world balance the global benefit of a cooling atmosphere against a huge disruption of the monsoon on the Indian subcontinent? Who would make the call? Would the United States agree to this kind of thing if it brought drought to the Midwest? Would Russia let it happen if it froze over its northern ports? Geoengineering would be cheap enough that even a middle income country could deploy it unilaterally. Some scientists have estimated that solar radiation management could cool the earth quickly for as little as 5 billion per year or so. What if the Trump administration decided to focus American efforts to combat climate change on geoengineering alone? That wouldn't work, in the end. If greenhouse gases were not removed from the atmosphere, the world would heat up in a snap as soon as the aerosol injections were turned off. Still, the temptation to combat climate change on the cheap while continuing to exploit fossil fuels could be hard to resist for a president who promised to revive coal and has shown little interest in global diplomacy. As Scott Barrett, an environmental economist from Columbia University who was at the meeting in Washington, noted, "The biggest challenge posed by geoengineering is unlikely to be technical, but rather involve the way we govern the use of this unprecedented technology." These ethical considerations should be taken into account in any research program into managing the rays of the sun. Perhaps researchers should refrain from taking money from an American administration that denies climate science, to avoid delegitimizing the technology in the eyes of the rest of the world. People should keep in mind the warning by Alan Robock, a Rutgers University climatologist, who argued that the worst case from the deployment of geoengineering technologies might be nuclear war. But it would be a mistake to halt research into this new technological tool. Geoengineering might ultimately prove to be a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But only further research can tell us that. The best way to think of the options ahead is as offering a balance of risks. On one plate sit whatever pitfalls geoengineering might bring. They might be preferable to the prospect of radical climate change. Thinking in terms of delirious sci fi fantasies, the trade off won't necessarily be between cockroach protein bars and some happy future of cheap, renewable energy. It is more likely to pit cockroach treats against some dystopian, broiling world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Leonard Pongo's ongoing series, "Primordial Earth," at the Lubumbashi Biennial in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Pongo traveled to remote parts of the country to make his photographs. On the Frontier, the Lubumbashi Biennial Makes Art From Obstacles LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo This hot, dry metropolis may seem an unlikely art center. It is a thousand miles from the capital, Kinshasa, on the southern edge of an enormous, unwieldy country typically associated with wars and other crises. Yet the Lubumbashi Biennial, founded in 2008, recently held its sixth edition in this city in the mineral rich Katanga Province. It gathered work by 42 artists from Congo and beyond, including contemporary African stars like Ibrahim Mahama, Emeka Ogboh, and Kemang wa Lehulere, and a collaboration with Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that is curating Documenta 2022. During the opening weekend, the poinciana trees were in bright orange flower around the National Museum, the biennial's main site, which sits next to the provincial Parliament house. Built in the 1950s under Belgian colonial rule, both structures are gems of African Modernist architecture. A funeral had taken over the Parliament building's plaza, with mourners assembled under white canopies. "They held public trials in the back. Some people were eventually executed," Mr. Baloji recalled of the post Mobutu transition. "It's a political space now," he added. "And that's a metaphor for the city, where art is hemmed in by political forces." As Mr. Baloji posed for a few photographs, two policemen under a tree announced that photography required permission from their commander. Discussion resulted, inevitably, in a small payment. "Even today, public space isn't public," Mr. Baloji observed. "It's a space of constant confrontation." The global mushrooming of biennials and triennials has reached Africa, with new or forthcoming events in Casablanca, Lagos, Kampala, Rabat, and Stellenbosch among others, joining the well established Dakar contemporary art and Bamako photography biennials. Still, Lubumbashi stands out as a frontier event, remarkable for its resilience. Its first edition was an act of daring, imagined after Mr. Baloji's conceptual, collagist photographs documenting Lubumbashi's decayed mining and railways facilities earned him the chance to exhibit at the Bamako biennial in 2007. "It was too beautiful an opportunity to let pass," Ms. Colard said. Among the biennial exhibitions, she installed a series of colonial era photographs of Lubumbashi families, recaptioned by present day residents to comment on nuances and tensions in the way people showed themselves to the camera. "Too often research is done here but presented and consumed elsewhere, and not to people who should be its first audience." The biennial's hardscrabble approach in contrast to Dakar or Bamako, which enjoy support from their culture ministries and significant foreign funding was part of the appeal for Ms. Colard. In Lubumbashi, the Congolese and provincial government were invisible, offering neither support nor censure. "This one has been created by local artists," Ms. Colard said. "It's very grass roots." If Lubumbashi is a remote outpost from an art world perspective, it is a major location in economic history. Katanga is vastly wealthy in metals cobalt, copper, gold, manganese, uranium, zinc used in everything from electric wires to cellphones and nuclear bombs. Founded in 1909 as Elisabethville (for the queen of Belgium), Lubumbashi was built on extraction, the hub where minerals were loaded on the railroad, with leafy neighborhoods reserved for whites in the colonial period, and crowded ones for African workers. "This region always had anything the world needed at the time it needed it," Ms. Colard said. "At the same time, very few people know about Lubumbashi in the world." Mining and its impact social, political, ecological were apparent in the biennial. Hadassa Ngamba, an emerging Lubumbashi artist, exhibited a fabric piece with sections alluding to the region's minerals, including shards of bright green malachite. A wall painting by Ghislain Ditshekedi, in black, red and gray mounted by wood blocks, suggested the circuit board of a modern computer made possible by minerals and includes markings inspired by those on a Paleolithic bone tool found in Congo that some scholars argue is an ancient tally stick. Jean Katambayi used a Tesla coil to zap into life a car shaped carapace of copper wire, a comment on how sleek electric vehicles rely on Congolese lithium and labor. "Will we ever achieve truly renewable energy?" Mr. Katambayi asked after the performance. War and other crises also found attention from Congolese artists' perspectives. In works made in Goma, the headquarters city in eastern Congo for agencies responding to an Ebola outbreak and long running armed conflicts, the filmmaker Petna Ndaliko and the photographer Pamela Tulizo questioned daily life in a place overrun by foreign media and nonprofits. The Congolese Belgian photographer Leonard Pongo examined Congo's natural history in landscapes made in remote parts of the country, using close shots or diffuse light to imbue them with mystical energy. The large format installation was set up, pointedly, on an artificial beach in an upscale shopping and residential complex. "Congo still represents the total possibility of life on Earth," Mr. Pongo said, adding that human depredation was less likely to kill the environment than to backfire on our species. "Nature doesn't care about us. It can eat us up at any moment." In the heart of Lubumbashi is a grim monument to extraction a massive slag heap that aggregates seven decades of copper, cobalt, and other residues in a dark pyramid. It once appeared on Congolese bank notes, a symbol of industrial vitality. Today it sits in the derelict complex of Gecamines, the Congolese state mining company, which has undergone a spectacular collapse since the late 1980s and is now stuck in endless restructuring. Together with the railways, Gecamines used to run this town. Now it is a minority partner in ventures with foreign companies, and most minerals are transported by road. In Lubumbashi, where it lifted thousands of families to middle class status, its unraveling was a seismic shock. The biennial took over the abandoned Gecamines mess hall as a site for works including Mega Mingiedi's ballpoint pen fantastical map of Congo and Lubumbashi, marked with dates and mineral symbols and references to domestic and foreign exploiters. Mr. Mingiedi, who is from Kinshasa, also directed a performance featuring young artists. They built a huge ball of cardboard and PVC and rolled it through the former Gecamines workers' quarters. The ball symbolized the company, fraying and flattening. Eventually, Mr. Mingiedi set it on fire. One evening, the choreographer Dorine Mokha led a performance depicting an effort to recover Congolese history in 2050, when he imagined a virus has robbed Africans of their memory and craven politicians are helping recolonize the continent. He saw artists sheltering in the ruins of the mining company, rebuilding history from snippets of poetry and song. The critique was indirect enough to be safe, Mr. Mokha remarked, noting that the Congolese security services are omnipresent. Mr. Mokha warned against too much nostalgia for the city's industrial heyday. Living as an openly gay man in Congo's homophobic culture, he said, keeps him alert to present day problems. "I'm in a situation where I have to move forward," he said. "There are other stories connected to my life that have to do with this city too, and in 2050 we'll be looking back to those things." Like every biennial, this one too faces the challenge of proving its relevance to city residents and their more material needs. While children and students engaged warmly with artists at their installations, a photo project in working class Kamalondo brought skepticism from local people, who pulled down the poster images within two days. Used to obstacles, the Lubumbashi artists aren't giving up. "To see beautiful things is important for consciousness," Mr. Katambayi said. "It's the beginning of a solution." When he rides in a shared taxi, he said, he pays an extra fare so there are only three passengers, rather than cram in a fourth. He tells the driver that with all the hardships in life power cuts, unreliable water, corruption making space is an aesthetic action. "They tell me, 'You're living in some planet of the future!'" he said. "But they say it in a good way, to encourage me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Now Lives At his aunt's three bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, while subletting his own two bedroom apartment in NoLIta. "It's only because I'm going back and forth to Los Angeles so much," Mr. Iacono said. Claim to Fame The former star of MTV's "Hard Times of R J Berger," which ran for two seasons starting in 2010, Mr. Iacono continues to pursue acting while also moonlighting as a club promoter, hosting a Wednesday night party at the Rumpus Room on the Lower East Side, which draws a fashionable gay crowd. Big Break Raised as a child actor, he booked his first major role in the 2009 remake of "Fame," which took him to Los Angeles. After the movie wrapped, he read for MTV's first scripted show. He got the lead part, but almost turned it down: "I thought, 'I'm going to be in "Fame," I'm going to be a movie star.'" But he took the part, thinking it would be insurance. As it turned out, the MTV show was a hit and the film a flop. Latest Project For nearly a year, Mr. Iacono has been a co host of Hump, a party every other Wednesday at the Rumpus Room on Eldridge Street that was named one of the top gay dance parties by New York Magazine. Among those spotted there include Andy Cohen of Bravo, the designer Alexander Wang and Mickey Boardman of Paper magazine. Mr. Iacono credits his night life foray to Erich Conrad, who ran Beige, the long running Tuesday night party at the Bowery Bar. "Beige was my introduction to night life," Mr. Iacono said. This led to working with Mr. Conrad at PrettyUgly, a now defunct party at the Diamond Horseshoe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
FRANKFURT There may be no better cure for a banker suffering the sovereign debt blues than a new Porsche, and few cities with more bankers in need of solace than Frankfurt. So it is all too fitting that the biennial Frankfurt Motor Show, which opens its doors this week, is defying the euro crisis with dozens of new models, including the latest incarnation of the Porsche 911. But even as BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen and others boast new sales records and roll out important new models, car executives are looking warily in the rearview mirror. They are wondering whether they, too, will be overtaken by the same forces that are pushing down growth on the Continent and raising fears about the future of the euro. Makers of luxury cars, a category that also includes VW's highly profitable Audi unit, may be particularly vulnerable to the side effects of global financial turmoil. "What we learned in the last crisis in 2008 is that the customers of premium carmakers react much faster than other customers," said Ferdinand Dudenhoffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Duisburg Essen. "They lose money in stock markets and they will be cautious about buying new products." There is likely to be little overt sign of such worries at the Frankfurt show, which opens to the public Thursday and runs through Sept. 25. Set on vast exhibition grounds just a short drive from the sovereign debt crisis response center also known as the European Central Bank the show will offer a visual antidote to the gloom that permeates nearby bank office buildings. Because of its size, and because it is held only every other year, the Frankfurt show is an especially big event for the German companies, and they can be expected to stage lavish displays. Despite the slack U.S. economy and a marked slowdown in the pace of European growth in recent months, carmakers continue to report sales records. Porsche said Monday that it recorded its best August ever, delivering more than 9,000 vehicles, a 43 percent increase compared with August 2010. Ford, which has its European headquarters and a major factory in Cologne, said Monday that it had its best August in Europe since 1998, with sales up 19 percent from a year earlier, to 72,200 vehicles. Ford sales from January through August, however, are down 2 percent in Europe, and the company hinted at the risk of a slowdown. "The economy remains very challenging and consumers are jittery particularly in the euro zone," Stephen Odell, chief executive of Ford of Europe, said in a statement. He added, "We remain optimistic." As Mr. Odell suggested, one of the ways the debt crisis can spread to the auto industry is via consumer confidence. If people are afraid of losing their jobs, they are unlikely to make major purchases. "There is huge anxiety about job security and people have less money in their pockets," said Tim Urquhart, an analyst at IHS Automotive. Another way that the debt crisis can infect the car market is through banks. They are under pressure from investors and regulators to preserve cash so that they can absorb losses on their holdings of government bonds. The retrenchment could make it more difficult for some potential buyers to get car loans. During the recession of 2009, carmakers recovered quickly because of extraordinary demand from newly affluent Chinese. Some manufacturers saw sales in China nearly double, and China became Volkswagen's largest market. But growth there is slowing, and will probably not shield the companies from declines in the United States and Europe again. "You're not going to get the massive 20 to 30 percent increases we were getting last year, that can't happen indefinitely," Mr. Urquhart said. Nor will debt challenged governments be able to repeat the cash for clunkers programs and other stimulus measures they provided to keep car factories open. Those programs preserved jobs but also meant that Europe avoided a reduction in carmaking capacity that some analysts say is overdue. This time, the reckoning will be harder to avoid. Particularly vulnerable will be mass market carmakers like Renault, PSA Peugeot Citroen and Fiat, which are dependent on their domestic European markets. Fiat faces the added problem that in its home market, Italy, the government is drastically cutting spending to restore confidence in its ability to repay its debt. Car executives, not wanting to spoil the mood in Frankfurt, would rather talk about their stylish new models than about economic peril. But there is even a hint of austerity in the new products. Lightweight construction and fuel economy are big themes this year, partly for environmental and regulatory reasons but also because of high fuel prices. Fuel efficiency, combined with style and a little bit of fun, is a main selling point for some of the most closely watched new models, including the VW Up; the Fiat Panda (a popular four door hatchback); and a coupe version of the BMW Mini. Even the 911 guzzles markedly less fuel than its predecessors. The new 911 is 45 kilograms, or 100 pounds, lighter than the previous version, because of increased use of aluminum in place of steel in the body. It uses a third as much fuel than the original 911 from 1963, yet has more than double the horsepower, according to Mr. Dudenhoffer of the University of Duisburg Essen. Having just gone through one financial crisis, the carmakers may avoid some of the mistakes they made last time. For example, Mr. Dudenhoffer said, companies have followed more prudent leasing policies. If drivers return their leased vehicles en masse like they did several years ago, companies like BMW and Mercedes should not be stuck with lots full of cars that can only be sold at a loss. But the downturn is coming on more quickly than expected, and there has not been much time to get ready. Said Mr. Urquhart of IHS Automotive, "I don't see anyone who is invulnerable."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Roberto Alagna and Elina Garanca star as the title characters in the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Saint Saens's "Samson et Dalila," which opened the season on Monday. In coming seasons, the Metropolitan Opera will be introducing a range of initiatives to make itself seem less elitist, more approachable and more connected to contemporary culture. There will be collaborations with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Public Theater; productions of overlooked operas; and a raft of new works, including, for the first time in company history, commissions from female composers. Sounds great, right? But it all felt distantly in the future on Monday, when the Met opened its season with an inert, old fashioned new production of Saint Saens's "Samson et Dalila." This timidly conceived staging, by the director Darko Tresnjak ("A Gentleman's Guide to Love Murder") in his Met debut, somehow managed to be both gaudy and dull. It was an all too clear demonstration of the grand opera trappings that still shackle the art form, the constraints that the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, has long pledged to break from. "Samson et Dalila" is, admittedly, not an easy opera to crack. Saint Saens thought this biblical story of a fateful love affair, set against the backdrop of enslaved Israelites and their Philistine oppressors, would best be presented as a stirring concert oratorio. He was persuaded by his librettist to make it an opera. But the work still has elements of oratorio style. The score is filled with formal structures, including chorus episodes (one written as a fugue) that nod to Bach. In a great performance, and an insightful production, these qualities distinguish the opera from other late Romantic melodramas. But this "Samson" didn't feel distinguished. The opera opens with a prelude depicting the hopeless despair of the oppressed Hebrews. The somber orchestral music is thick with heaving strings and earthy thuds. The conductor Mark Elder striving, it seemed, for depth and gravity drew dark, restrained playing from the orchestra. But the result sounded more ponderous than tragic. The prelude leads into a pleading chorus of the Hebrews, who are convinced that God has turned from them. The great Met choristers made the most of the scene, and lifted the performance for a while. But the production weighed it down. Given Mr. Gelb's determination to make opera relevant, one might think that this, of all works it's set, after all, in Gaza would scream for an updated concept. The most contemporary aspect of the staging involves Alexander Dodge's sets, which use striking Islamic trellis designs for the walls of the temple and partitions. Linda Cho's costumes have the captive Hebrews dressed in poignantly tattered, grayish clothes; the Philistines look like absurd characters from an old Hollywood costume drama, all garish colors and gold trim. It's high kitsch. In this opening act, Mr. Tresnjak maintains the stiff quality of an oratorio. The Hebrews, grouped on both sides of a long staircase, face forward and sing directly to the audience. When the valiant Samson appears, he too faces forward to deliver his exhortation to his people to bless the name of God and not lose faith. Mr. Alagna's singing has always had a rough hewed, impulsive quality, especially in recent years. But at his best his voice has youthful colors and athletic vigor, as well. He earned strong reviews last season for his performance at the Met in the leading roles of the double bill "Cavalleria Rusticana" and "Pagliacci." On Monday, there were times when he pulled you in with his reedy sound and charisma. But whole phrases were leathery and insecure. His pitch often wavered. I eventually lost patience with his tendency to scoop up to high notes. Ms. Garanca has been widely acclaimed for the fullness and radiance of her voice. She can be curiously cool, but not always: At the Met last year, she was a revelation as Octavian in Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier," which brought out persuasive passion in her. I wish her Dalila had more of that quality. It's true that a singer has to be careful not to overplay Dalila as stock seductress. And Saint Saens leaves elements of the character ill defined. Is her determination to entrap Samson into betraying the Hebrews a political plot to deliver him to her own people? Has she truly become vulnerable to his love? A mezzo must come up with answers. Ms. Garanca was oddly passive in Act I. An old Hebrew man (Dmitry Belosselskiy) warns Samson to beware of the burning flame in Dalila's eyes, but you sensed little of that fire from Ms. Garanca. During the agitated love scene in Act II, the high point of the opera, Ms. Garanca was more sultry and determined. She directed phrases full of blazing sound and temperament at the tormented Samson. She brought elegant and pining emotion to Dalila's great aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix," though I wanted a touch more wiliness in her singing. And these involving moments were fleeting. In Act III, during Samson's scene of captivity shorn of his hair, blinded and turning a mill wheel the character's spirit is utterly broken. Sad to say, there were times when Mr. Alagna's singing sounded near broken, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Actelion's headquarters in Allschwil, Switzerland. Last year, the company was acquired by Johnson Johnson, which was not implicated in the settlement. The drug maker Actelion Pharmaceuticals has agreed to a 360 million settlement stemming from an investigation into whether the company illegally funneled kickbacks through a patient assistance charity, federal prosecutors said Thursday. Actelion, which was acquired by Johnson Johnson in 2017 and makes expensive drugs to treat a rare lung condition, is the latest pharmaceutical company to settle federal inquiries into their ties to patient assistance groups, including whether companies have used the patient programs to increase the price of their drugs. In 2017, United Therapeutics paid 210 million to settle similar allegations, and Pfizer paid nearly 24 million to do so in May. Several other drug makers have disclosed that they are also under investigation for their use of patient assistance charities, including Biogen, Celgene and others. "Pharmaceutical companies cannot have it both ways they cannot continue to increase drug prices while engaging in conduct designed to defeat the mechanisms that Congress designed to check such prices and then expect Medicare to pay for the ballooning costs," Joseph H. Hunt, an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department, said in a news release. In 2014 and 2015, prosecutors said, Actelion raised the price of its main drug, Tracleer, by nearly 30 times the rate of inflation. Tracleer, which is prescribed to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension, sells in pharmacies for an average cash price of about 14,500 for 60 tablets, according to the website GoodRx. Caroline Pavis, a spokeswoman for Actelion, said in a statement that the company was committed to complying with the law. It admitted no wrongdoing in its settlement. Johnson Johnson was not implicated in the allegations since the activity under scrutiny took place before Actelion was acquired. Drug companies often help patients pay their out of pocket costs through coupons or other financial assistance. These payments are not just about benevolence they also help blunt the outrage over rising drug prices by limiting how much patients have to pay. Insurers then cover most of the cost. But federal anti kickback laws prohibit companies from giving such financial assistance to Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries because doing so is considered an inducement to buy their drugs. For years, drug makers have skirted those laws by instead donating to nonprofit charities, which then give the money to Medicare patients. Such arrangements are legal as long as there is no direct coordination between the pharmaceutical company and the nonprofit organization. Federal prosecutors said Actelion violated the law by collecting detailed data in 2014 and 2015 about the patients receiving help from a nonprofit, the Caring Voice Coalition, and using the data to budget for future donations. As a result, Actelion ensured that the money it donated would be used only to assist patients who used its drugs, and not competing companies' treatments for the pulmonary condition. Prosecutors said Actelion kept up the practice even after the charity itself warned the company against it. Actelion also steered Medicare patients to the Caring Voice Coalition who would have otherwise qualified financially for the company's free drug program. By directing them to the nonprofit, the company avoided having to provide the drug to eligible patients and left Medicare to cover the cost instead, prosecutors said. Caring Voice Coalition no longer offers such programs. Last year, the federal government revoked its right to do so, citing concerns that it was coordinating too closely with drug companies. The charity was also involved in the settlement with United Therapeutics, which, like Actelion, sells drugs that treat the same lung condition. "We continue to help as many patients as we can navigate challenges within the health care system," Greg Smiley, the charity's chief executive, said in a statement. He said he could not comment on legal issues.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
S.K. The diciest moment was when I got into a brief fistfight at the bus station in Porto Velho, a small, isolated state capital in the Brazilian Amazon. I had arrived at 1 a.m. and was looking for a place to sleep. There was one at a shady hotel near the station, but a taxi driver told me he would take me to a much better one. We agreed on a price, and he proceeded to drive me all over the city in a vain search for an empty room. I finally told him to take me back to the bus station, which he did, and tried to double the price. I refused to pay we started cursing each other in Portuguese, and I guess I took it too far because he basically jumped me. He was diminutive, but in the time before another driver broke it up he managed to rip my shirt. The resulting article doesn't mention it, because I probably didn't want to upset one of my most loyal readers. Hi, Mom. L.P. What are you most proud of about your Frugal tenure? Any favorite columns that come to mind? S.K. Proud may not be the right word, but I'm happy that I never fell into a pattern of whitewashing or glorifying my experiences. So much travel writing makes things seem perfect, which is extraordinarily suspicious, because stuff always goes wrong on the road. My favorite columns are from the times I got sick of the over documented, over reviewed world and escaped to places that did not appear in any guidebook or in TripAdvisor and had no tourism infrastructure. I stayed with a cheesemaker and retired farmer in San Juan Teitipac, Mexico; searched for homemade fruit brandy in Mezobereny, Hungary; and hiked 41 miles of isolated coastline in Piaui, Brazil. I hope these pieces made readers question how much they even need the travel industry. L.P. If 2016 Seth could write a letter (or email) to 2010 Seth, what would it say? S.K. I'd probably send a WhatsApp message, not an email, since that's the primary source of communication in so much of the world today. (Readers should download it before traveling abroad if they expect to keep in touch with new friends in most countries.) But what would I write? First, no matter what your agenda, abandon it as soon as you have a better idea. Find out what's down that dirt road, talk to the quirky stranger, knock on the door of that house. Draw the line at physical danger, not social awkwardness. Second, consistently making up stories to maintain your anonymity, as travel writing sounds like fun in theory, like you're a spy, but in fact it's very stressful. Create a back story that doesn't require much effort: "I'm taking a year off work to travel." What work? "Oh, I'm trying not to think about it while I'm away. Hey, what's down that dirt road?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
LONDON Seven dancers, their backs to the audience, heads turned in profile, move on to the stage in silence, stepping to the left on a bent leg, then ceremoniously curving the right leg forward. Arms interlinked behind backs, the women in soft draped dresses, they look like ancient figures on a Greek vase. The music begins: not ancient at all, but jagged, abrasive strings. A lone man appears. He is performing the same sequence, but facing forward. Pam Tanowitz's "Everyone Keeps Me," a new work for the Royal Ballet that premiered here on Thursday, has begun, and for 20 entrancing minutes, we are in her strange, resonantly poetic world. The dance critic Edwin Denby once wrote that "the strange thing about making pieces that have no logical narrative or logical formal structure is that it needs an exceedingly dramatic gift." He was talking about Merce Cunningham, but that's true too of Ms. Tanowitz, a choreographer who labored quietly at her craft for decades and now is suddenly in demand everywhere. In the last year, she has created pieces for the New York City Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company and the Paul Taylor Company, among others. Ms. Tanowitz's work is in heady company here, with Cunningham's witty, invigorating "Cross Currents" and Frederick Ashton's coolly spare "Monotones II." Both works prepare the eye for what we will see in "Everyone Keeps Me": calm lucidity, drama that emerges from form, the way a large scale work can exist with few dancers. There is an obvious link between Cunningham's style and that of Ms. Tanowitz, who deploys similar limpidity, balletic lines, shifts of weight and direction, complex footwork and non sequitur sequences of steps. But Ms. Tanowitz's work is also intimately her own. "Everyone Keeps Me," set to Ted Hearne's string quartet "Exposure," played live on one side of the auditorium, is immediately engaging as one woman ( Ann a Rose O'Sullivan) detaches herself from the line and begins to dance with the man (James Hay) who entered alone. They fly back and forth in a springing jump, facing each other, never touching, then suddenly wheel offstage in an odd bent legged roll of the body. The dance is thrillingly unpredictable. Couples (both opposite and same sex) form and dissolve, female dancers take turns lying casually on their sides at the back of the stage, watching the others. Solos offer chances to try out extended variations on one idea; hops on a single leg with changing arms, or a balletic arabesque inflected by rotating shoulders. Fragmentary and overlapping, the choreography both echoes and amplifies the music, which itself overlays fragments of sound, occasionally stopping dead then beginning again, sometimes using the bows of the string instruments as percussive tools. The dance is precise, musical, unhurried. And yet Ms. Tanowitz evokes both drama and humor with wit and economy. Dancers rotate their legs as if performing a barre exercise, then flap their feet with intent. After couples pair up, as if to perform a waltz, Beatriz Stix Brunell decides it's not a good idea and exits on her own terms. (The soft pastel hued costumes, by Fay Fullerton, and the subtle color saturated lighting by Clifton Taylor, add notable resonance.) Ms. Tanowitz dispenses with the showier sides of ballet technique. The women are not on point and there is little supported partnering. Instead she clarifies and strips ballet to its essential elements line, changing dynamics, the musicality of the moving body taking away any presentational aspect. The dancers, all superb, seem to be dancing for and with one another, like characters in a play absorbed by their own trajectories. We are lucky to be watching.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Federal health officials on Thursday advised pregnant women to "consider postponing nonessential" travel to 11 countries in Southeast Asia where the Zika virus was circulating. The warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not as urgent as those issued starting in January, which advised pregnant women to avoid Latin American and Caribbean countries overwhelmed by the Zika epidemic. The countries cited in the new advisory by the C.D.C. include Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The C.D.C. has warned pregnant women since Aug. 30 to avoid Singapore because of a fast growing outbreak there. Scientists believe the Zika virus has circulated in Asia since at least the 1960s, but it is unclear how common outbreaks are. Health agencies there have only recently begun testing for it. Zika was not considered a serious disease until late last year, when dozens of babies with tiny heads and malformed brains a condition known as microcephaly were born in hospitals in northeast Brazil to mothers who had been infected with the virus six to nine months beforehand. Many residents of Southeast Asia are probably immune, the C.D.C. said in its new advisory. But infections have been found in people who traveled there from the United States. The risk is "likely lower (but not zero) than in areas where Zika is newly introduced and spreading widely," the agency said. Pregnant women who have traveled to any of the 11 countries or Singapore should have Zika tests, the C.D.C. said. Other recent visitors who have experienced Zika symptoms should also consider being tested. The virus is thought to have circulated in Africa for centuries, probably in monkeys and people. It was first isolated in a monkey in the Zika Forest in Uganda in 1947, and occasional testing since then by virologists has found that many people in tropical parts of Africa carry antibodies to it. Virologists believe it has never caused noticeable waves of birth defects in tropical Africa or Asia, as it has in South America, because most women get the virus as young girls and are immune by the time they reach their childbearing years. The Zika virus was first noticed in the Western Hemisphere in Brazil in early 2015, when large numbers of people in its northeast began suffering its symptoms: low fever, rash, bloodshot eyes and joint pain. It may have circulated at low levels for a year before it was noticed, scientists said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
But as in the human world, those who mix novelty with familiarity occasionally find success, and their new song circulates through a particular community. Usually, it stays there, and Dr. Otter and his colleagues figured this was happening only with their birds in western Canada, that "it was just an isolated, peripheral population" doing their own thing, he said. When they tried to figure out where the song's range ended, though, they realized birds were singing the song in other areas, too. In 2004, half the birds the researchers recorded in Alberta were singing doublets instead of triplets. By 2014, they all were, "and it was starting to show up as far east as Ontario," Dr. Otter said. To get a better sense of the spread, the researchers turned to citizen science birdsong databases. They pulled white throated sparrow songs from across Canada and the northern United States, and plotted them over time and according to song type. In maps, you can see the doublet song gain prominence, its influence expanding and strengthening. By 2019, it had taken over completely from the Yukon to Ottawa, a certified hit that is currently encroaching on the Northeastern United States. By tracking the western Canadian birds with geolocators, they found that some of them spend their winters in the southern United States, where they overlap with birds from other places. They're probably sharing the song there, like a mixtape being passed around. The possibility that the birds are swapping songs on their wintering grounds "really opens up how we think of song learning," said Dana Moseley, an ecologist at James Madison University in Virginia who was not involved in the study. It's also evidence that where birds "winter, where they stop over in migration, and where they breed shapes their behavior," she said. For a song to take off like this is highly unusual, said Dr. Otter. It goes against prevailing birdsong theories, which emphasize the benefits of sticking to your own local song type. What's happening with the sparrows is "kind of like an Australian person coming to New York, and all the New Yorkers start suddenly deciding to adopt an Australian accent," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In New York City apartments, behaviors that were once perfectly normal a Friday night dinner party, taking the dog for a walk, or inviting a sibling to visit for a while are suddenly deviant, and potentially dangerous, leaving property owners and building managers struggling to figure out when and how to keep tenants in line as they attempt to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. As landlords, co op boards and property managers step up cleaning protocols and shut down gyms and roof decks, they're also changing policies about everything from dog walkers to house guests. As some buildings consider taking the temperatures of workers who enter the property, others are wringing their hands about whether or not to send out a memo when a tenant gets sick. Some properties have restricted large package deliveries, even as delivery services have become a lifeline for the homebound, while others haven't changed mail and delivery policies at all. Residents are finding themselves on the receiving end of a patchwork of restrictions that vary from one property to the next and may seem draconian, nonsensical or bafflingly lax. Dan Wurtzel, president of FirstService Residential New York, said some of the restrictions imposed on residents because of coronavirus are "hard things to get used to." "Some restrictions are difficult to just sort of jump into," said Dan Wurtzel, the president of FirstService Residential New York, which manages 550 co ops, condos and rental buildings in the city. "The first time you tell someone that every amenity in their building is closed, or they shouldn't ride the elevator with another person, those are hard things to get used to." In one Lower Manhattan condo that FirstService manages, a resident with Covid 19 unexpectedly came down to the lobby and headed out for a walk while under quarantine orders. "That created a panic, obviously," Mr. Wurtzel said. "The doorman sees the resident walking out to take a walk. They immediately contact us, what do we do?" The doorman alerted the city Health Department, and the city paid the resident a visit that day. "That was the last time he left the apartment." Buildings may be able to set rules, yet their powers may be limited, particularly since housing court is currently only hearing emergency cases. Co op and condo boards have wide latitude to change house rules or bylaws, but landlords of rental properties have less muscle to flex. An overly zealous property manager runs the risk of interpreting the executive order in a way that could violate existing housing laws that are designed to protect tenants. If a tenant pushes back, management has to decide how far it can go to enforce new policies. "The million dollar question is, what is the restriction?" said Eric Sherman, a Manhattan real estate lawyer. "Not allowing guests to come in and out? That's pretty draconian. That's the kind of thing that could be subject to challenge." In early April, Aida Murad figured the only thing she would need from the doorman when her 18 year old brother arrived at her luxury rental building in Harlem to stay with her for a while was a parking permit. He had just driven into the city from Washington D.C., where he was a freshman at George Washington University, which had shut down the campus and shifted to distance learning. But when she walked down to the lobby, the doorman instead told her that he couldn't come in at all. Ms. Murad, 30, a self employed entrepreneur, called the property manager and was told that if she insisted on bringing her brother into the building, she could face legal action because she would be violating a new policy prohibiting any visitors from entering the building at all. But her brother needed a place to stay and going to their parents' home in Jordan was not possible because of travel restrictions. And Ms. Murad, who has a health condition that puts her at high risk for complications from the coronavirus, had hoped her brother could handle the shopping so she could stay indoors. "To not let an 18 year old boy into his sister's home?" said Ms. Murad, describing her previous relationship with the management as a good one. "It was actually kind of shocking, but people act weird in times of fear." Rather than park his car in Harlem, Mr. Murad got back on the highway and drove to Boston to stay with another brother while Ms. Murad called a lawyer. The state's Multiple Dwelling Law allows tenants to have family members live with them, with no exceptions for viruses or emergency mandates. The executive order doesn't specifically prohibit houseguests, but instead addresses social gatherings. "The building insisted there was some law in effect and there was not, there is only an executive order," said John T. Maher, a Manhattan lawyer who represented Ms. Murad in the dispute. But the building's management was grappling with how to balance tenants' rights with tenant and staff safety. The building had installed hand sanitizer on every floor, ordered staff to sanitize all packages before tenants could collect them, and two days before Mr. Murad arrived, deeply cleaned all the common areas. "We felt we were at our best condition," said Gisele Kalonzo Douglas, general counsel and director of business affairs for Pavilion Management, which owns and manages the property. After some tenants complained that neighbors had been having multiple guests visit, management enacted a strict new policy barring all visitors, except essential ones, like home aides. "If there's a stay at home order, your sister or mother shouldn't be going out anyway to see you," Ms. Kalonzo Douglas said. So when Ms. Kalonzo Douglas received a call from Ms. Murad, she balked at the idea of allowing a person who had been traveling to enter the building, potentially putting staff and residents at risk. "I said, 'Aida, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I really need to you to consider the breadth and scope of this.'" After Ms. Murad hired a lawyer, the building backed down, granting her permission to let her brother stay with her. Mr. Murad drove back to his sister's apartment two weeks after his first attempt to get in and finally moved in. While some buildings may be overstepping boundaries, others seem hesitant to enforce the rules when tenants flout them. Signs posted at the midtown rental building where Bill Strzempek, 61, lives remind tenants to keep a social distance, and most residents are hunkered down, sharing quarantine tips on a tenant Facebook group. Mr. Strzempek's next door neighbor, however, is not. The neighbor has been inviting guests over to his studio apartment regularly, with gatherings of up to five people lasting until 2 or 3 in the morning on weekends. The governor's executive order prohibits "nonessential gatherings of individuals of any size for any reason." Violations of social distancing rules are subject to 1,000 fines. Normally, Mr. Strzempek, an executive assistant for a law firm, wouldn't be tracking (or even noticing) his neighbor's social life. But these are not normal times, so he told the superintendent about the gatherings, particularly since his building has a large number of older residents. Instead of getting support, he got a shrug. "He said he wasn't sure what they could do about it," said Mr. Strzempek, who hasn't taken the issue any further, reluctant to punish a neighbor for behavior that until recently was harmless. "I'm disappointed that everybody isn't as socially conscious in this situation," he said. "It's not like you can be ignorant at this point." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Carolyn Curtin moved to Asbury Park in 2002 and fell in love with a late Victorian house with a falling down porch and heaven knows what other problems. She knew nothing about construction, but borrowed a level from a crew rehabbing a building across the street to check it out. "I walked all three stories and threw down the level; everything was spot on," she said. She bought the house at auction for 209,000 and began fixing it up. Then she fell in love with her plumber. "I couldn't bear to see everything clear cut and knocked down and thrown into the heap," she said. Ms. Curtin is one of the risk takers who moved to this historic oceanfront resort when it was a capital of crime, drugs and disappointment. Many came, as she did, for the music and art scene that thrived amid the erosion, with small businesses giving the community its character as a culturally rich outlier on the Jersey Shore. Now that large scale development has finally taken off after a few false starts, the streets are safer (crime dropped by 13 percent last year) and Asbury Park is attracting more affluent weekend and full time residents. Stalwarts like Ms. Curtin are poised both to profit from and mourn the transformation. On the one hand, median home values have risen 42 percent in the last five years. Instead of eyesores, visitors see retrofitted historic buildings like the three year old Asbury Hotel, built in a former Salvation Army boardinghouse, and new construction like Asbury Ocean Club, a luxury condominium and hotel complex slated to open this summer. The once desolate boardwalk and shabby downtown have become vibrant retail corridors. "What you're seeing now is revitalization, but also gentrification," said Amy Quinn, Asbury Park's deputy mayor. Referring to the demographics of the people who arrived a decade ago or more, she said, "We're constantly figuring out how to make sure the black, gay, artist and small business community who came here before this revitalization can remain here." One strategy is to push for upward of 20 percent affordable housing in new developments, including those near the ocean, Ms. Quinn said. (A 2002 plan approved by a former city administration called for 3,200 residential units on the waterfront, but made no stipulations for affordability.) The City Council has also written an ordinance that lets only primary homeowners rent out rooms over short periods. The aim is to prevent outside investors from buying properties to run as seasonal lodgings, when they could be occupied by residents supporting the economy year round. In a city with an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent, Ms. Quinn and her colleagues urge new businesses to train and hire locally. She commended iStar, Asbury Park's leading developer, for doing "work force development on steroids," but questioned whether a property like the developer's Asbury Ocean Club, with units listed for as much as 6 million, is the right fit for the community. Kris Moran, a Brooklyn based film set decorator, lived in Asbury Park for several years in her youth and visits regularly. She and her family stay in a house she bought for a little less than 100,000 in 1997, four doors from her mother. She recalled the days when she had the beach to herself, but had to walk half a mile to find food. Now her 8 year old son rakes in money at his lemonade stand on the boardwalk, and he has lots of competition from other vendors. "In the '80s and '90s, when a restaurant opened, that would be a big deal," she said. Asbury Park is a city of 1.6 square miles, in Monmouth County, on New Jersey's central coast. Built as a resort in the late 1800s, it has frilly, peaked Victorian architecture, three small lakes and a boardwalk nearly a mile long. 705 SUNSET AVENUE A seven bedroom, two bathroom house built in 1908 on 0.17 acres, across from Sunset Park in northeast Asbury Park, listed for 1.15 million. 732 890 0598 The city is split into quadrants divided by north south Memorial Drive (or the railroad tracks alongside it) and east west Asbury Avenue. The northeast quadrant has the waterfront and much of the desirable housing, including vintage, single family houses (many made whole after being subdivided into rentals), condo developments and townhouses like Vive, a six year old iStar project with 28 units that started at 390,000 and now sell for more than 1 million. In this quadrant, you'll find the 1920s Convention Hall and Paramount Theatre with its connecting arcade; the 45 year old Stone Pony music club that stoked the careers of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi; the spiffed up Wonder Bar, emblazoned with the face of Tillie, a grinning fun house figure that is effectively the city's logo; and the vacant Beaux Arts Casino Arena and Carousel House, which attract artists, skateboarders and wedding parties seeking photo ops. Southeast is the main business district, concentrated along Cookman Avenue. Among the pioneers of the latest commercial wave are the Showroom Cinema, an art film house; Words!, an independent bookstore; and Hot Sand, a glassblowing studio. Condos have been developed above many ground level retail spaces. 510 MONROE AVENUE, UNIT 102 A two bedroom, two bathroom condo in a 2007 building in southeast Asbury Park, listed for 499,900, with a 537 monthly association fee. 732 682 0064 The west side is dominated by the black and Latino communities that make up 47 percent and 30 percent of Asbury Park's population, according to 2017 American Community Survey data. In 1970, riots erupted there in response to racial discrimination, hastening the city's tailspin. Now multifamily buildings are attracting investors, and new businesses are emerging on Springwood Avenue, in the southwest. In March, Boston Way Village, an affordable housing complex with 104 units, became the first major residential development to open in the area in half a century. The boundary between east and west will soften with plans to trim the four intimidating traffic lanes on Main Street, which parallels Memorial Drive, to two, with a turning lane in between and space for cyclists. "Demand is really off the charts" for both sale and rental properties, said Mary McAllister, a broker with Diane Turton, Realtors, in Asbury Park. She noted a particular increase in empty nesters drawn to Asbury's walkable streets and many recreations. The median sale price of homes between Jan. 25 and April 24 was 358,500, according to Trulia. This figure, based on 30 transactions, represented a year over year increase of 10 percent. 400 DEAL LAKE DRIVE, UNIT 3G A one bedroom, one bathroom condo in the Santander, a 1920s building in northeast Asbury Park, listed for 200,000, with a monthly 255 association fee. 973 985 5032 The median rent as of April 19 was 5,000, reflecting seasonal demand. Last year, the number dipped to around 2,000 in late fall and winter. As of May 10, there were 71 residential listings on the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New Jersey website, pulled from multiple sources. The most expensive was a penthouse at Asbury Ocean Club, with four bedrooms, four full bathrooms, two half bathrooms and three garage parking spaces; it was listed for 5.98 million, with a monthly association fee of 4,667. The least expensive was a 420 square foot studio at the Santander, a 1920s Mediterranean style condominium two blocks from the beach; it was listed for 200,000, with a monthly association fee of 255. Even in late April, Asbury Park was open for business, its rough edges buffed by all kinds of cool. Tourists shopped the boardwalk, and dogs tore along the beach. Coney Waffle served bodacious, two foot high towers of ice cream, cookies, spun sugar and candy (you can check it out on Instagram). "We're LGBT friendly," Tara Elliott, the owner of Bettie's Bombshells, a boutique with retro Hollywood glamour clothes, announced almost by way of a greeting. Best of all, there were plenty of parking spaces. Asbury Park School District is one of 31 SDA, or state funded, New Jersey school districts. It encompasses three elementary schools (prekindergarten through fifth grade), one middle school (sixth through eighth grade) and one high school (ninth through 12th grade). In the 2017 18 school year, the total enrollment was about 2,000 students. James A. Bradley, a New York City businessman, founded Asbury Park in 1871 on 500 acres of shoreline he bought with a fortune made from manufacturing brushes. He later became the city's mayor. Having converted to Methodism, he named Asbury Park after Francis Asbury, a bishop who was a founder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Recent historical accounts of Bradley's segregationist policies have led some community members to demand that his statue in front of the Asbury Park Convention Hall be taken down. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When Hilary Mason, a data scientist and entrepreneur, discovered that dozens of automated "bot" accounts had sprung up to impersonate her on Twitter, she immediately set out to stop them. She filed dozens of complaints with Twitter, repeatedly submitting copies of her driver's license to prove her identity. She reached out to friends who worked at the company. But days later, many of the fake accounts remained active, even though virtually identical ones had been shut down. Millions of accounts impersonating real people roam social media platforms, promoting commercial products and celebrities, attacking political candidates and sowing discord. They spread fake images and misinformation about the school shooting last week in Parkland, Fla. They were central to Russian attempts to sway the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump, according to a federal grand jury indictment on Friday. And American intelligence officials believe they will figure in Russian efforts to shape the coming midterm elections, too. Yet social media companies often fail to vigorously enforce their own policies against impersonation, an examination by The New York Times found, enabling the spread of fake news and propaganda and allowing a global black market in social identities to thrive on their platforms. Facebook and Twitter require proof of identity to shut down an impostor account but none to set one up. And even as social media accounts evolve into something akin to virtual passports for shopping, political activity and even gaining access to government services technology companies have devised their own rules and standards, with little oversight or regulation from Washington. "These companies have, in a lot of ways, assigned themselves to be validators of your identity," said Jillian York, an official at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates digital privacy protections. "But the vast majority of users have no access to any due process, no access to any kind of customer service and no means of appealing any kind of decision." Some impostor accounts are set up as pranks. Millions of them are controlled by private companies that sell fake followers and other forms of social media engagement to celebrities, professional athletes and authors. Many others are deployed in systematic information warfare campaigns waged by governments. In congressional hearings last week, some lawmakers questioned whether social media businesses were doing enough. "I think the companies themselves were slow to recognize this threat," said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. "I think they've still got more work to do." Leaders of some social media companies have said they are trying hard to grapple with impersonation. In an earnings call this month, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, said the company was expanding what it calls "information quality" efforts, including ways of elevating credible and authentic content on the platform. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a Facebook post in January that the company had nearly doubled the number of workers who review content for fake news and abuse, including impersonation. Facebook's terms of service prohibit impersonation and require that account holders generally use their real names. Twitter, however, allows parody accounts and pseudonyms, and only forbids impersonation when that account portrays another user "in a misleading or deceptive manner." The company does not proactively review accounts for impersonation. That policy can leave real users mystified or enraged. In December, Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian American memoirist who lives in Germany, repeatedly reported to Twitter at least four accounts impersonating hers. "They have my photos, they tweet things from my books," she said. "One of them seems to be selling things." Yet each time Ms. Dumas reported them, emails show, Twitter's support team told her the accounts did not meet its definition of abusive impersonation. A Times investigation last month found that many real accounts are copied and turned into automated "bots" sold by companies like Devumi, a firm now based in Colorado that is under investigation by attorneys general in Florida and New York. (Through a spokesman, Devumi has denied selling fake accounts.) One victim was Erin Barnes, a publicist and writer in Colorado. A bot sold by Devumi used not only her name and portrait, but also a background photograph of her husband and young daughter. "It makes my skin crawl," Ms. Barnes said. The account was suspended only recently, after Ms. Barnes alerted by The Times reported it to Twitter. "If you're using somebody's photos and name together, then that's impersonation," she complained. Twitter appears to be tracking Devumi's network of bots. Since the Times investigation was published, dozens of Devumi's most prominent clients actors, reality TV stars, authors, business executives and others seeking to buy followers and retweets have lost more than three million followers. Close to 55,000 impostor accounts sold by Devumi have been restricted or suspended. Twitter has declined to say whether Devumi's bots violate its impersonation policy, or how many of its employees are focused on rooting out impersonation. The company's first line of defense against impersonation is the countermeasures that flag accounts that run afoul of Twitter policies on spam violations that can be easier for the platform to identify and stop at large scale. But impostor accounts are still relatively easy to find on Twitter. The Times identified hundreds more of them through Twitter's own automated "who to follow" feature: When a user views a known impostor account, Twitter routinely recommends other impostor accounts to follow. One real Twitter account, belonging to Jasmine Artis, a health care worker from North Carolina, was cloned dozens of times. At least 75 of those impostor accounts still exist though some have recently been restricted each using her picture, her name and a brief bio that refers to the school she was attending when her account was copied. Most of the clones have made only a handful of posts, some in Russian or Japanese. Ms. Artis said she had not been aware of the accounts. Even Twitter's "verified" users, many of them well known, are being impersonated. There are active fake accounts impersonating the Democratic senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and the journalist April D. Ryan. None appeared to be obvious parodies. Instead, each posted content that mimicked what the real account might tweet. So she created more than 100 bots of her own, using as many variations of her name as she could think of. Each linked back to her real account, with the message "the real hmason is over there." Eventually, Ms. Mason's homegrown bots, and Twitter's own efforts, seemed to overwhelm the impostors, she said, and the surge in fake accounts stopped. "With Twitter, it was easy" to make bots, Ms. Mason said. "I was shocked by how easy it was."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
As their parents sat anxiously in a waiting room, five children were sharpening their test taking skills in a tutoring center in TriBeCa, underlining words that might hold clues to the answers and crossing off the illogical multiple choice options intended to trip them up. For homework, there were more practice problems. The tutoring business has come a long way from Stanley Kaplan's basement in Brooklyn, and test preparation courses for college or private school admission are practically a rite of American education. But in New York City, where even seats in public schools can be the rewards of a Darwinian contest, the industry has found a whole new lode to mine. The students in the Manhattan center, all high achievers in their elementary schools, were practicing for the state standardized tests that begin this week, exams that for years had typically been overlooked, if not ignored, by the parents of top performers. But competition for top middle schools has intensified as more families choose to remain in the city and others find themselves unable to afford private schools, and performance on fourth and fifth grade standardized tests is crucial to getting into one of those schools. So many parents some wealthy, some not are now shelling out hundreds and even thousands of dollars for tutors and for courses like the eight week Saturday morning boot camp in TriBeCa. And that is on top of test preparation that almost all elementary schools now provide in class. "This is just us wanting to kind of ease the pressure of the test," said the father of a third grader enrolled in the TriBeCa program, run by Bright Kids NYC. The program costs about 550 for eight one hour tutoring sessions. He asked to remain anonymous because he feared his decision to pay for tutoring would reflect poorly on his daughter's school, the Lower Lab School on the Upper East Side, which like most schools makes its own efforts to prepare students for tests. "I think a lot of families are tutoring in some way," he said. "Everybody we know does something." The Education Department has not tried to discourage private tutoring, nor would officials say whether they are concerned about the possibility that it could give wealthier students an unfair advantage in middle school admissions. But the department has already seen an unusual rise in high scores on its tests for gifted programs, administered to 4 and 5 year olds, with figures released on Friday showing 2,656 students qualifying for roughly 400 seats in the most selective schools this fall. The department is switching to a new type of gifted test next year, partly in response to concerns that tutoring and test preparation are influencing the results. "Students at schools with strong teaching and a rich curriculum should be well prepared for the annual exams," said Shael Polakow Suransky, the department's chief academic officer. "At the same time, we do encourage families to reinforce what students learn in the classroom with activities like reading, writing and solving complex problems." Bige Doruk, the founder of Bright Kids NYC, said she began offering the math and language arts boot camp in response to parental demand and had opened more classes in the last month, as the tests drew near. Most of the students in these classes do not need remediation, she said, but their parents want assurance that when the exams begin on Tuesday, their children will be comfortable and not lose their cool. "Parents are feeling the pressure more," said Robin Aronow, a private and public school admissions consultant. "I know parents who have resisted tutoring because they thought it was crazy, but just the fact that I've had parents resist it means there's a lot of it going on." Tutoring companies have popped up across the city, and a quick Internet search turns up dozens of one on one or group programs set up for the state's math and reading exams. Sylvan Learning advertises test prep for "any state test" on its Web site; Manhattan Edge Education offers individual tutoring for the state exams at rates of 80 to 150 an hour, its Web site says; Park Slope Tutorial Services, which charges 75 an hour, reminds parents just how tough it is to get into a good middle school. Although Kumon does not brand itself as tutoring for a particular exam, parents do use the company for the state tests, and 642 third and fourth graders are currently enrolled in the 12 Manhattan locations. This elbows out and wallets open competition for top middle schools is most apparent in Manhattan, where a boom in development has carried in a flood of elementary and middle school age children. Since 2002, four new schools serving the middle grades have opened in District 2, which runs from the Upper East Side to Lower Manhattan, and others have expanded, according to the city. But that has not cooled the contest over selective middle schools like the Salk School of Science, which received 777 applications for 146 seats last year. To have a shot at schools like these, fifth graders need to have scored at least a Level 3 out of 4 on both the reading and math exams in fourth grade. But at some of the most sought after schools, a Level 3, which means that the student met the state's standards, is insufficient. To apply to Delta, a gifted program at Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, the children needed to reach Level 4 on both exams, or a combined scale score of 1,385 out of 1,575, according to the school's Web site. At Anderson, one of the city's most selective middle schools, they needed a 725 on the English test and a 731 on the math test. That means they could get no more than four wrong answers on the English test and five on the math test, making every missed question a costly one. And those scores do not guarantee admission; they simply qualify the student to take another test, given by the school itself. Students who want to take the Hunter College High School test for seventh grade admission must score high on the fifth grade standardized tests. At one highly regarded school, East Side Middle School on the Upper East Side, each applicant is graded on a 30 point scale. Seven of those points are assigned based on students' reading and math exam scores 3.5 points for a score of 4, 2.5 for a score of 3 and the rest are based on an interview, a writing sample, a math quiz and the elementary school report card. The school received about five applications this year for every open seat and those were only the applicants who ranked the school as their first choice. The principal, David Getz, said he had heard people talking about children being tutored for the fourth grade exams, but had not noticed whether his incoming sixth graders had been prepped. "I would hope parents were doing that because their kids were struggling over all, as opposed to just doing well on that specific test," Mr. Getz said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Buckle up, Democrats, because the time between now and Election Day will be a white knuckled, cannonball run of doom scrolling. Joe Biden holds a lead in the polls, giving Democrats hope that President Trump will be soundly defeated in November. That's the good news. Here's the bad news: Beating President Trump is just the beginning. If Mr. Biden wins and if Mr. Trump leaves office peacefully two big ifs Democrats will be confronted with a more intractable problem: The Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump, and it is not likely to change. If Mr. Biden wins, there will be a temptation to embrace a big lie: Mr. Trump was the problem, and with him gone, the Republican Party can return to normal. But today's Republican Party won't moderate itself, because Trumpism is its natural state. Democrats should avoid the temptation to expect Republican cooperation in governing this country. Mr. Trump won the 2016 nomination because the party's voters embraced him enthusiastically. At the time, the strength of that embrace was obscured by the high profile ambivalence of Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, then the speaker of the House. But Republican voters' feelings about Mr. Trump were never particularly complicated. Within a month of entering the primary fight, Mr. Trump took a polling lead and, beside a brief surge by Ben Carson, never lost it. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." In 2016, Mr. Trump didn't change the Republican Party; he met it where it was. The party had been ready for him for years: In 2012, the congressional scholars Thomas Mann of the center left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote, "The G.O.P. has become an insurgent outlier in American politics." More recent studies, including by Pippa Norris of Harvard, have confirmed this assessment. In a brief summary of her research which compared the Republican Party with major parties in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development societies she found the G.O.P. "near far right European parties" that flirt with authoritarianism, like the Polish Law and Justice of Poland or the Turkish Justice and Development parties. This is not a party poised to pivot toward moderation even in the face of an electoral landslide loss. The inevitable calls for reform (like the party's abandoned "autopsy" report after the 2012 election) will yield to the inescapable gravitational pull of the party's own voters and the larger forces dominating our politics. Instead of moderates, Republicans may be more likely to turn to reactionary politicians like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. A first term senator with few substantive legislative accomplishments, Mr. Cotton rocketed to fame through his provocative actions against Democrats. In 2015, for example, he tried to sabotage President Barack Obama's nuclear negotiations with Iran, organizing an open letter (signed by over 40 Republican senators) sent to Iran's leaders declaring the American president's commitments potentially null and void. If Mr. Trump loses, Mr. Cotton is seen as a leading contender for the 2024 Republican nomination. If the forces shaping party politics provide the motive for Republicans to continue down Mr. Trump's path, the Senate will provide the means. Because of how the Senate has evolved in recent decades, it takes a supermajority of 60 votes to pass most bills. A minority of 41 senators can throw a monkey wrench into most aspects of governance, from major bills to mundane business. Republicans can muster those 41 seats using only states Mr. Trump won by an average of 24 percentage points in 2016. Even if Mr. Biden wins and Democrats take the Senate, Republicans will hold enough power to derail nearly everything the new president wants to do. The way forward is to face the reality of what the Republican Party has become and prioritize delivering results for the American people over gauzy, pundit pleasing fantasies. Sure, invite Republicans to participate constructively in the legislative process, but take away their ability to scuttle it. To this end, it is encouraging to see Mr. Biden shifting from his staunch opposition to reforming the filibuster, whose modern iteration is what has allowed Republicans to raise the bar for passing most bills in the Senate from the majority threshold the framers set to the current 60 vote supermajority. Mr. Biden knows the risks of spending valuable time and energy chasing members of a party whose incentive structure precludes cooperation. In the summer of 2009, Democrats spent nearly a year pursuing the votes of Senate Republicans like Chuck Grassley on health care. Meanwhile, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and his allies deployed every tool at their disposal to prevent Republicans like Mr. Grassley from working with Democrats, and succeeded. The Republican Party is now an even more hopeless tangle of pathologies than it was back then. If Republicans choose to take personal responsibility for unwinding themselves and contributing productively to intelligent solutions, they are welcome to do so. But Democrats cannot bet the future of the country on it. Adam Jentleson, a progressive strategist and former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, is the author of the forthcoming book "Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
WASHINGTON The Trump administration announced on Monday that it was restricting Huawei's ability to buy a wider array of chips made or designed with American equipment and software, tightening the limits it has placed on the Chinese telecom giant as it looks to cripple its ability to sell smartphones and telecom gear around the world. The rule expands restrictions the United States enacted in May, which prohibited companies around the world from using American software or machines to make chips designed by Huawei. The new changes apply that rule to more semiconductors, covering any chips made abroad with American equipment. "We continue to monitor the situation as we assess the potential impact," said Rob Manfredo, a Huawei spokesman, in an email. The move comes as tensions flare between Washington and Beijing over the United States' actions to crack down on China's technology sector. In recent weeks, the Trump administration's efforts have expanded from telecom manufacturers like Huawei to consumer mobile applications. This month, it moved to curb Americans' dealings with TikTok, the viral video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging service. The announcement is the latest attempt to limit the reach of Huawei, which Trump administration officials say poses a national security threat because of its ties to Beijing. American officials have warned that the Chinese government could use Huawei's networking technology to gain access to sensitive data around the world, an accusation that the company denies. In a Monday appearance on "Fox and Friends," President Trump accused Huawei of spying on the United States, without presenting evidence of specific espionage, and said the United States would not share intelligence with other countries that used the Chinese company's telecom gear. "We don't want their equipment in the United States because they spy on us," he said. "And any country that uses it, we're not going to do anything in terms of sharing intelligence. Huawei is a disaster." The Commerce Department last year restricted the Chinese firm's ability to buy chips from American suppliers, which led Huawei to try to design more of them in house. But Huawei still needs outside manufacturers to mass produce chips to its specifications, and those companies depend on equipment and software developed in the United States. These were the business relationships targeted by the Commerce Department's latest moves. One such manufacturer for Huawei the global chip juggernaut Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company said last month that it would comply with the new U.S. restrictions and stop shipping to Huawei. But the wording of May's action by the Commerce Department did not appear to stop chip makers from producing chips that would first be sent to third parties or agents who might then sell to Huawei. The rules set in May also specifically barred companies from supplying items to Huawei that were produced to its design specifications, which seemed to allow Huawei to continue buying off the shelf semiconductor products that were not customized to its needs. "There was always this complaint that the language wasn't broad enough," said Douglas B. Fuller, a professor at City University of Hong Kong who studies the technology industry in East Asia. The move on Monday seems to be an attempt by the Commerce Department, he said, "to cover all the bases." A Commerce Department official, who spoke with reporters on Monday anonymously, did not offer specific examples of Huawei's having taken steps to evade the rules issued in May, which are scheduled to go into effect in September. But the official said the changes announced Monday were the result of conversations with third parties about the initial rules. David McCabe reported from Washington, and Raymond Zhong from Taipei, Taiwan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you're lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. The next shower you might be able to see is the Geminids. Active from Dec. 4 to Dec. 17, the show peaks around Friday night into Saturday morning, or Dec. 13 14. The Geminids, along with the Quadrantids that peaked in January, are believed to originate not from comets, but from asteroid like space rocks. The Geminids are thought to have been produced by an object called 3200 Phaethon. If you manage to see them, this meteor shower can brighten the night sky with between 120 and 160 meteors per hour. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. Where meteor showers come from If you spot a meteor shower, what you're usually seeing is an icy comet's leftovers that crash into Earth's atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris which can be as small as grains of sand pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Sarah Saltzberg and Jon Goodell are the founders of Bohemia Realty Group, a real estate agency in Upper Manhattan. Ms. Saltzberg and many of Bohemia's agents have a background in the arts; so do some of their clients, including Jesse Tyler Ferguson of "Modern Family" and Tony Award winning actor Laura Benanti. Sarah Saltzberg knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actor and a writer, too, because she loved concocting improvisations. Then again, as a teenager, she did have a nice little business designing, making and selling macrame bracelets, which made her think about an entrepreneurial career. But never during her childhood did Ms. Saltzberg fantasize about a life in real estate. This is not one of those stories with a surprise ending, so the cards are going on the table right now: Ms. Saltzberg, 42, who made good and continues to make good in the theater, is also a founder, with Jon Goodell, of Bohemia Realty Group, a six year old niche company that specializes in rentals and sales, river to river from 96th Street to the top of Inwood, plus a bit of the Bronx. Ms. Saltzberg's staff shares her creative inclinations. The majority of Bohemia's 120 agents have degrees in the performing arts. The roster includes actors, dancers, burlesque performers, an opera singer and a professional clown. The head of training at the company is a folk/rock singer and songwriter. The uncertainty that is part and parcel of a real estate agent's life (where, oh where, is that next commission coming from?) is familiar to actors who routinely deal with similar anxiety (where, oh where, is the next role coming from?). "Real estate is constantly shifting. You have to hustle to be successful, which is the same as being an artist," said Emily Ackerman, a Bohemia sales agent who is also an actor and playwright. "We're comfortable with instability. In fact, a lot of us thrive on it." Prospective sales agents will undoubtedly be relieved to learn that no audition is required and that the culture of the agency's two offices in West Harlem and Washington Heights is decidedly un corporate. Employees bring dogs and babies to work, and have been known to break into song with perfect pitch, of course. "I've worked at traditional real estate companies, and agents didn't speak to each other," Ms. Ackerman said. "But the vibe here is very different." She added: "So many of us have collaborative experiences working in the arts, and we've translated that directly to our real estate business. We work together on deals." "Working in real estate has allowed me choice," he continued. "I can be more selective about what I want to audition for and the roles I want to take." And, Mr. Letendre insisted, he is relentless on both fronts. "I go after the property a client wants just the way I go after an acting job," he said. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of Bohemia clients are also in the arts. Among them are Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Benj Pasek, who helped write the Tony Award winning score for "Dear Evan Hansen," Laura Benanti, a Tony Award winning actor who has a standing gig as Melania Trump on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," and Celia Keenan Bolger, who plays Scout in the forthcoming Broadway adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird," as well as stage managers and ensemble members of musicals. And who would know better than Ms. Saltzberg and her Bohemia colleagues how tough it is for a theater person to get approved by a bank or a co op board? "I'll say to landlords, 'Hey, I know that on paper this person looks like a risk, but let me explain what this means: This guy just got a job in 'Hamilton.' That show is not closing. He's going to be in that show for a while,'" Ms. Saltzberg said. She is also able to tell potential clients which buildings have flexible management companies and board presidents. "This is a relationship business the same as other businesses," she said. "And when you specialize in a geographic area the way we do, and you really have an understanding of the people in the neighborhood and the people who are running things, you can get things done in a way that maybe you couldn't do otherwise." Ms. Saltzberg got into the business in 2002 while helping to develop and raise money for a fledgling show that would grow up to become the Broadway musical comedy hit "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." She had a featured role in the show as the lisping, pigtailed Logainne Schwartzandgrubenierre, "the daughter of two gay dads," a character that she created (and that continues to provide her a few thousand dollars in royalty payments every year). "A friend was like, 'You should do real estate. Just do it for a little bit. It takes 40 hours to get your license. Make a bunch of money. Put it in your show, and then you can stop doing it,'" Ms. Saltzberg recalled. "And I was like, 'That sounds pretty good.'" Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright for whom Ms. Saltzberg was then working as a weekend nanny, urged her on as well. Three weeks after becoming a sales agent, Ms. Saltzberg, who was living on Central Park West and 108th Street at the time, took note of the vacancies in her building. She phoned the landlord about showing them. He hung up. She dialed again. He hung up again. "I kept calling until he finally listened to me," Ms. Saltzberg said. "I was like, 'I'm what you want: I'm young, I'm energetic, I'm an artist. Artists are O.K. with living in these parts of the city that are not fully developed yet, and I have tons of friends who would want to move into the vacant apartments.'" It was a Thursday. The landlord gave Ms. Saltzberg the weekend to make good. By Monday, she had applications on all the available units. Something clicked. "I found that it was all a lot like being an actor," she said. "It was persistence and using improvisation to solve problems." 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. Since then, she has seen the neighborhood evolve. "When I first started doing this, I walked through drug deals with clients all the time," she recalled. "We'd get to the apartment, and I'd have to think fast, so I'd say things like, 'Well, at least you know you don't have to go very far.'" Within months, she said, the formerly skeptical landlord opened his expansive portfolio of buildings in Upper Manhattan to her. All the while, "Spelling Bee" was moving on a fast track to Broadway. "Once we opened, I was thinking, 'I don't need to do real estate anymore because I'm making a living wage with the show,'" said Ms. Saltzberg, who worked at several other agencies before starting Bohemia. "But I realized I loved it. I loved that what you put into it was what you got out of it. I loved the art of the deal, and I loved the neighborhoods I was working in. It was very exciting to be part of them." Between performances on matinee days, she showed properties, frequently to other actors, frequently in the company of "Spelling Bee" castmate Jose Llana, a future star of the David Byrne operetta "Here Lies Love," who had gotten his real estate license, too. By way of strengthening its community ties, Bohemia contributes money and time to the Harlem Children's Zone and Morningside Park, and does adoption events for Bideawee. "Sarah lives in Harlem and loves Harlem, and it comes across," said Avi Feldman, a partner in Omek Capital, which develops rental buildings, mostly in the 125th Street corridor, and retains Bohemia as its exclusive rental broker. "She involves herself in neighborhood activities and is an integral part of the community." Ms. Saltzberg can be forgiven if she seems a little distracted at the moment. She is working on marketing for the Ammann, a condominium that has just opened in Hudson Heights; Bohemia is the exclusive agent for the development. And come Aug. 13, there will be another opening, this one on Broadway, for the musical "Gettin' the Band Back Together." Ms. Saltzberg is credited with providing "additional material" (and is pleased to report that two former Bohemia sales agents, Ryan Duncan and Tad Wilson, are members of the show's ensemble). "We're offering discounts on tickets to friends and business associates in Harlem," she said. "And to my son's preschool." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times OJAI, Calif. First there's Barbara Hannigan the singer, a fearless soprano who's more likely to give a world premiere than step into a repertory staple. Then there's Barbara Hannigan the conductor. She's even done the two jobs at once. So what's one more? Meet Barbara Hannigan the curator. She programmed this year's Ojai Music Festival a utopia where open minded audiences welcome adventurous works presented against a backdrop of green hills, bird song and Pixie tangerines with the help of Thomas W. Morris, the festival's outgoing artistic director. And she came up with a well balanced meal: four days of concerts, talks and screenings that went down easily, without bloat or arduousness. Among the regulars here a few have been coming since the 1940s, and everyone seems to know everyone some were quick to say Ms. Hannigan's festival is an improvement on last year's, organized by the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Descriptions I heard of that event included "too dark," "a lot" and "not a good vibe." (Zachary Woolfe, who reviewed it for The New York Times, wrote, "While there's joy in the festival's too muchness, the music would be better served by judicious pruning.") I'm happy to report that this year's schedule, while still grueling for anyone who doesn't enjoy live music, consisted of a manageable three concerts a day a short "dawn" program in the morning, and two more, around lunch and dinner, at the outdoor Libbey Bowl and short early evening performances in a gazebo in Libbey Park. And even when the subject matter turned bleak, as it did in pieces by Mark Anthony Turnage, Claude Vivier and Gerard Grisey, they were surrounded by leavening works that maintained, well, a good vibe. This occasionally made for bipolar experiences; I'm still trying to make sense of the Saturday evening program, in which a world music showcase worthy of a cruise ship was sandwiched between John Zorn's masterly "Jumalattaret" and Grisey's apocalyptic "Quatre Chants pour Franchir le Seuil" ("Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold"). But the misfires were few in Ms. Hannigan's festival, which began on Thursday with Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" (sleepy but solid) and ended on Sunday evening with an exhilarating suite of Gershwin songs both conducted and sung by her. Ms. Hannigan had a stacked roster of artists helping her bring the weekend to life not least Mr. Morris, whose 16 year tenure at Ojai has been credited with broadening the festival's scope and ambition. Succeeding him is Chad Smith, who oversees the Los Angeles Philharmonic's bold programming. His first music director under Mr. Morris, the position has gone to a different artist each year, ensuring ongoing freshness will be the composer and conductor Matthias Pintscher, who so far has revealed plans for works by Pierre Boulez (a seven time Ojai music director in the decades before Mr. Morris), Olga Neuwirth and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Read more about Mr. Morris's farewell to Ojai. In addition to assisting Ms. Hannigan in planning, Mr. Morris appeared onstage twice: reciting poetry in "Facade" (William Walton's ridiculous "Pierrot Lunaire" sendup) and joyously jamming with the rest of the musicians in Terry Riley's "In C." After that piece, Ms. Hannigan surprised him with an affecting rendition of Kurt Weill's "Lost in the Stars." Throughout the weekend, young singers from Equilibrium, Ms. Hannigan's artist development initiative oh, yeah, she's a mentor, too provided vocal muscle. Fleur Barron, an earthy Baba the Turk in "The Rake's Progress," sounded like a Carmen in the making. The soprano Aphrodite Patoulidou was an entrancing soloist in Vivier's "Lonely Child," a head trip of a piece in a musical language both direct and mysterious. Doubled voices, like clarinets and violins playing in unison, made sounds thrillingly difficult to pinpoint, their ethereality matching lyrics like "The stars make prodigious leaps in space, / time, dimensions striped with colored zebra markings." With a natural command of the stage, James Way, a tenor with a delicate voice, was a consistent scene stealer. As the auctioneer Sellem in "The Rake's Progress," his mania was skillfully vaudevillian; similarly eccentric were his Noel Coward esque segments of "Facade." When he returned, in the final concert, in Stravinsky's "Pulcinella," his voice was lush and nimble, balancing the sound worlds of 18th century Pergolesi and 20th century neoclassicism. Another group affiliated with Ms. Hannigan, Ludwig , a capable Dutch collective that backed her on her 2017 album "Crazy Girl Crazy," provided as few as one instrumentalist Ingrid Geerlings, fleet in Debussy's flute solo "Syrinx" and as many as a full orchestra. (Ms. Hannigan was a frequent conductor, among others including the percussionist Steven Schick.) Ludwig's shape shifting adaptability kept the programming refreshing and free from reliance on large scale works. Even Rachmaninoff, awkwardly inserted into an otherwise eye opening tribute to the composer Oliver Knussen on Saturday, was reduced; Thomas Beijer's chamber arrangement of "The Isle of the Dead" did the piece no favors by exposing its flimsy architecture. On Friday, JACK the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman; the violist John Pickford Richards; and Jay Campbell, a busy cellist who also appeared solo over the weekend managed not to survive, but to triumph in three concerts, including one, of punishing John Zorn chamber works, that left me exhausted, as if I'd spent all day in a museum. Mr. Smith, could you please give them their own festival as a reward? Two American premieres at JACK's 8 a.m. concerts, by Clara Iannotta and Catherine Lamb, experimented with perception in a way that prompted close listening a mindful start to the day and recalled the visual works of local Light and Space artists like Robert Irwin. Ms. Iannotta's "dead wasps in the jam jar (iii)" (2017 18) felt like a three dimensional space that listeners were made to wander through, as if exploring their childhood homes underwater in a dream. And Ms. Lamb's String Quartet (2009) explored tonal spectrums at a glacial pace. Attempting to track the changes, you risked slipping into a daze, only to be jolted awake by occasional pauses. Near the end, the JACK players arrived at perfect fifths the interval used to tune string instruments and the piece snapped into focus. But the transformations continued, microtonally, warping the harmony like melting wax.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
I've tried various methods of making a garden bed. Years ago, I invested in building a raised bed vegetable garden with rot resistant 2 by 12 lumber. It has served me well, as have the in ground beds that were heroically double dug, adhering to the soil preparation practices of the modern organic farming pioneers Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons. I hope those heroes will forgive me for lately turning to a more passive approach, aided by recyclables (namely, corrugated cardboard and newsprint) and occasionally by thick, reusable clear plastic sheeting. These days, I smother and solarize two powerful weed control tactics for organic growers. Besides the ease and the low budget a sunny patch of lawn can be transformed in time for planting strong growers like tomatoes, pole beans or summer and winter squash there is an additional long term benefit to what might seem a lazy person's approach. Prepping a bed without turning or tilling may actually help reduce the number of weed seeds that are unearthed and then germinate. Less work now; less weeding later. Whatever prep tactic you're using, and whichever material, you should begin by identifying an area where the soil is neither sodden nor impossibly dry. If you're planting vegetables, herbs and most annual flowers, choose a spot in full sun. A basically flat area will be easiest for both prep and aftercare. For first time vegetable gardeners: Start small, with 100 square feet in a 5 by 20 bed (any wider and you won't be able to reach the middle from the sides) or two 5 by 10s. What's growing on the site now will determine any preliminary steps, as well as the method you use that is, whether you should smother the area with paper or solarize it, applying clear plastic to heat the soil and kill the weeds. Or whether you need to do both in succession. Is the site mostly open soil, with a few herbaceous weeds maybe a former garden bed? If there are perennials tougher than turf grass or any woody weeds, use a spading fork or shovel and remove them carefully, which is easiest in moist soil. If what I'm planting is neither delicate nor tiny, and I'm not battling tenacious weeds, my default prep is cardboard. Yes, cardboard and newsprint are safe for mulch (and even to compost). Use the plain brown stuff, not the kind printed with colored ink (although most ink today is soy based). Likewise, collect black and white newsprint, not glossy magazines, and strip off tape or staples from corrugated cardboard. Then simply place a thick layer of newsprint or flattened cardboard over freshly weeded soil or turf mowed or weed whacked to stubble. Overlap the pieces so there are no gaps for weeds to exploit. Remember to moisten the paper, and secure it. If I can get good, crumbly compost, whether bagged or delivered in bulk, I'll cover the cardboard to a depth of several inches and plant right into that medium, in the style of the British horticulturist Charles Dowding, a longtime advocate of no till gardening. Otherwise, I'll cut X's or circles into the moistened, weighed down cardboard, creating little planting pockets into which I add some compost before sowing several winter squash or pole bean seeds in each pocket or positioning a tomato seedling. Then I'll cover the paper areas with the best mulch on hand, even a thick layer of rotted leaves. The pocket method also makes an easy bed for landscape shrubs, or quart size or larger perennials (although the openings will be larger than for a tomato transplant or a few squash seeds). Whether as a preliminary step before mulching, or on its own, solarization is a formidable chemical free weed control strategy. "Soil solarization is the practice of covering moistened soil with clear plastic for a period of weeks, to create a local greenhouse effect," said Sonja K. Birthisel, a postdoctoral research associate at University of Maine, who focuses on ecological weed and pest management in a changing climate. Water molecules in the soil are heated up by solar energy, she explained, and in suitable conditions, heat trapped under the plastic yields temperatures hot enough to kill pests, weeds and some plant pathogens, too. Solarization is most effective during the sunniest weeks close to the summer solstice, but it can also be effective in spring and later summer. Even in Maine in May, maximum soil temperatures beneath the clear plastic in Dr. Birthisel's plots were typically around 100 degrees "or sometimes as hot as 118." After two weeks, she said, that "was effective for pretty substantive weed control." Her research in support of farmers is conducted on open fields, but she has advice for gardeners, too. "If you wanted to take a piece of lawn and turn that into a garden, solarization would be a great first step," Dr. Birthisel told me in an interview last year. "If you lay that down for several weeks, it's going to do quite a number on your grass."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Fourteen minutes and 35 seconds. That's how long it took Ed Santos and Jill Sciuto's futures to radically alter course. Less than 15 minutes. A car ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn. For Micaela O'Toole and Jared Thomas, it was Ms. O'Toole's need to raise extra cash that sealed their fates. For Angelyn Sorenson, Alirio Guerrero, Melissa Schipke and Nick Marzano, their individual decisions to call a shared car service changed their lives forever. Say what you will about communal rides: Sometimes they do more than merely transport passengers from Point A to Point B. And as these personal stories attest, you never know where you're going to meet your beloved. Or how. (Interviews are edited and condensed.) How they met: Ms. O'Toole was Mr. Thomas's Uber driver Sept. 10, 2016. Wedding details: March 16, 2019, on campus at Georgetown, where Ms. O'Toole went to college. Ms. O'Toole: On Saturday, Sept. 10, 2016, I decided that it would be a great weekend to make some extra cash because there was a huge festival, LouFest, in St. Louis where I lived at the time. I gave five or six rides that morning and was about to take a lunch break when one more ride request came in. I drove to the pickup point and two female passengers got into my back seat and told me that one more person would be coming their cousin, Jared. I saw a handsome, redheaded, blue eyed man walked my way and I was very happy when he opened the front seat of my car and hopped in. "Hey Micaela! How's your day going?" he said. We talked the whole way. It felt like we were already friends. At some point in the trip, I said, "Wow, you have a lot of freckles! Who has more?" I then blushed because I couldn't believe I just asked him that question. Jared put his arm next to my freckly arm and we compared he definitely had me beat. As the ride came to an end, I went back and forth in my head thinking, Should I ask this guy for his number? I chickened out. As I watched him walk away, I said to myself, If he's the one, then we'll meet again. About a month after LouFest, I decided to get back on Bumble, the dating app. I'd gone on several Bumble dates before, but took a break because I wasn't finding much out there. I kept swiping through these bachelor's profiles and then boom! It was Jared! I quickly sent him a message without thinking twice. He responded within 24 hours and asked me out. We went on our first date the following day, and then had three more dates. By the end of the first week, we were in love. I called my mom and was like, This is it. After eight months of dating, he got down on one knee and popped the question. Mr. Thomas: I was late getting to the Uber, but when I did, I saw the most beautiful girl sitting in the driver's seat. I'll never forget the great big smile she had on her face. We talked the whole trip 18 minutes long, 16.10 and I remember thinking how cool and easy to talk to she was. When the ride finally came to an end, I got out, and Micaela drove away. I turned to my cousin and said, Micaela: That was the one that got away. Why didn't you ask for her number? she asked. I told her I choked under pressure. Even though I was surrounded by great music, good beer, and enjoying a perfect fall day in St. Louis, I couldn't help thinking about that pretty girl who drove me to Loufest who was so friendly and amicable. I halfheartedly joked with my cousin and said, I wonder what Micaela is up to right now, and I wonder if she's thinking about me, too. But that was it. I never saw or heard from her again until one Monday morning I woke up early to go to work, and noticed a message on my Bumble dating app. It said: After the ride, Ms. O'Toole and Mr. Thomas reconnected on the dating app Bumble. Mr. Guerrero: I work in Murray Hill and was going to the West Village from 23rd Street and Seventh Avenue. Usually every time you get into a ride share everyone's on their phones, tapping away. Most people sit there and don't move. But the woman in the back had moved over to let me in. We had six minutes together. In that time, we hit on everything: politics, where we lived, nationalism, immigration, and how much we don't like Trump. I got to my stop near 10th and Hudson and Angie said, "Do you live in this neighborhood?" I said no, I was seeing my friend's band at Cowgirl. "That's right around the corner from my house," she said. So I invited her to join me. I've never done that before. It was so bold. I had just gotten over a relationship and wasn't really looking. But she seemed really nice. She said yes. We got out of the car and that was the first time we really saw each other. She had nice, tall legs. I was like, Wow, O.K. I figured she'd stay for a drink and leave. I felt good that I had put myself on a limb. We had a nightcap and I got her phone number. We settled on a date two weeks later to see a Johnny Thunder tribute show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. We got along well until a girl threw her drink at her. Angie threw her drink back! I got in the middle of the two women; her boyfriend was about three feet taller than I am. I grabbed our bags, her work bag, coats, sweaters. I got the bouncer to throw them out. We spent the following weekend together, and we've been inseparable since. We have our own hashtag on social media: findloveinavia. Ms. Sorenson: When he asked me to join him after the ride, I said yes. I had gotten out of a relationship a couple of years before and thought, why not? I'm pretty impulsive, and I love live music. On our first real date a few weeks later, we were watching the band when all of a sudden my back was soaking wet. I have no idea what I did! I left and realized I had none of my belongings. A minute later out came Alirio holding everything. I knew right then this guy was a keeper. He totally took care of me. We went somewhere else and talked for hours. He missed his train to New Jersey. We took a Via back to my place. and I let him stay on the couch. In hindsight, I should thank that girl. On Jan. 12, we went to Austin to see Alejandro Escovedo play. During the song "Wedding Day," Alirio asked me to marry him. We flew home on Southwest. The flight attendant asked if we were together. Alirio told her we had just gotten engaged. The flight attendant said, "We're going to marry you!" We walked to the front of the plane. She made a veil out of a napkin. They gave us wings and we said, "With things wings I thee wed." Everyone is laughing and clapping and a group of kids on a church retreat did a chant for us. Another passenger, a photographer, took pictures. Now we have to invite all those people to the real wedding. Nick Marzano and Melissa Schipke shared an UberPool. They were married June 2. Occupations: Ms. Schipke is the founder and chief executive of Tassl; Mr. Marzano works in continuing medical education in Philadelphia. Mr. Marzano: It was about 7:30 p.m., and I'd been working late at my office. I was waiting in the lobby for my Uber, en route to a Bumble first date. It was pouring outside. A woman was standing next to me and then an alert popped up on my app: Melissa will be joining your ride. I put two and two together and asked the woman if she was Melissa. She said yes, but was surprised. She then asked if I'd gone to Penn State. I had, but I was super confused. We jumped in the car and connected the dots. She founded a tech company that does business intelligence for alumni associations. By the time I got out, my mind was completely off my date. We exchanged business cards on the really shoddy pretense that since I work in digital learning and she works in tech, we should get drinks some time. So we did. It turns out that we had connected on Bumble six months earlier. I don't know if we believe our meeting was fated, but we feel incredibly fortunate that we didn't miss each other that night. It does seem that we were supposed to be together. She had emailed with my father in 2014 they had met at a business networking thing. She was a panelist at an entrepreneurship event for my organization a few weeks earlier. A mutual friend, another tech founder, had wanted to set us up. It was unbelievable, really. We were engaged six months after we met. Ms. Schipke: I was in a very talkative mood that night because I'd just come from a networking event. I always have this terrible problem I never know if I'm on a networking thing or a date. Nick is a very attractive looking man, but I'd pushed the idea of dating out of my mind. I don't have time to date. I was on the I don't think I'll ever get married plan. As a business owner my life is the company that I own. It's always been really hard to find someone who appreciates that. But Nick and I are both driven and have a similar goofy sense of humor. It turns out our circles overlapped. We have so many people in common and it was weird. I believe in good timing. If we'd met two months earlier in the same way, it would have been different. Ed Santos and Jill Sciuto were married in March. They were set up by a friend of Ms. Sciuto who had shared an Uber with Mr. Santos. Occupations: Ms. Sciuto is a public relations executive; Mr. Santos is a relationship manager at a corporate bank. How they met: Ms. Sciuto's close friend, Rachel Givens, met Mr. Santos in an Uber on Nov. 27, 2015, driving from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Mr. Santos: I typically don't choose UberPool, but for whatever reason that day I did. It was Thanksgiving weekend 2015. I'd been out with friends in the East Village and at 2 a.m. took an Uber to take me back to Brooklyn. I had a nice conversation with the woman next to me, Rachel. We were talking about relationships, and I told her I was single. She said, I think I have someone for you and I'll put you in touch. I was a little skeptical, but she showed me a photo and I thought her friend was very attractive. I was interested right away. Jill and I met the next weekend, Dec. 6. It went better than either of us had expected. I really liked her in person, and I wanted to see her again, but we were both going away for Christmas. I felt a certain longing. I was excited to get back to the city to see her. A few weeks into our relationship I took a job assignment in Dallas and we were long distance for a little while. But we made it work. This experience helps me believe that fate is at hand. When I saw the photo and met her in person, my heart and my gut told me something. I really trusted my instincts. This whole thing was happenstance and luck but you have to be open enough to see it. Ms. Sciuto: I remember getting a text on a Saturday morning from my friend Rachel: Would you be interested in going out with this guy I met in my UberPool? I said O.K. I think that fate plays a lot in different parts of life. I thought, why not? What have I got to lose? The saying "One door closes and another one opens," has always been in my head throughout various milestones of my life. Ed made me wait a few days before hearing from him and I loved that. Not too eager. Our first date was around 2 in the afternoon at the Happiest Hour, a bar in the West Village. We took a walk through the neighborhood, stopping for a drink and something to eat. I got home at 10 that night and called my cousin, my best friend. I told her about all the places we went and what a great personality Ed had. You don't think you're going to meet someone like this. It's a funny, interesting way to find the love of your life. Excerpt from a speech by Rachel Givens at their wedding: Jill and I met in college at Boston University. Always the life of the party, her smile can light up any room, and she is one of my most driven, loyal and fun friends. What always stuck out to me the most was her positive outlook on the future. While she was single in the city, she celebrated it because she knew the right guy would appear one day, and she was confident that she'd just know it when he did. I got in Uber that night, and we picked up a guy. The very first thing I noticed about him was that he was holding a plate of tacos. All I could do was look down at my pizza and laugh at our stellar choice of late night snacks. Knowing we were both headed to Brooklyn, I introduced myself and asked him how he liked living there. I told him that my husband and I had lived there only six months, but that we loved it. Without hesitation, he asked if we could all be friends, as he didn't know anyone in the neighborhood. It was so endearing. You don't meet a ton of chatty strangers in New York City willing to laugh at themselves, let alone over their late night snacking habits. Jill's face immediately popped into my head. Why? Because Jill would be all about chatting in an Uber at 2 a.m., with pizza on her lap, no less. She would have also already asked about where his tacos where from, what level of spice they were, and if she could try them. She loves diving headfirst into conversations with new people, wherever it may be! That was when I asked him if he was single. He was. Would he be interested in meeting an amazing, beautiful friend of mine? He would.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Aaron Gordon sat slouched in front of his locker, immobile as ice packs worked on his body following yet another loss earlier this season. His Orlando Magic teammates showered and dressed, and left. Gordon's back had been bothering him, and no wonder: He's in his fifth year of carrying the Magic franchise. And he is in for the long haul, too. After doing what he described as "due diligence" this past summer, Gordon signed a four year, 80 million contract, handing over most of his mid 20s to a team that, so far, has failed to put a winning combination around him. But if the 6 foot 9 multidimensional star is still waiting for a winning supporting cast, his 2018 19 season is the latest, best evidence yet that he is approaching a specific kind of broad based play that is fast becoming a requirement for surviving in the N.B.A. Gordon showed it off days ago in a 103 96 win over the Golden State Warriors. He did it all, scoring 22 points, pulling down 15 rebounds and using his defensive athleticism to help limit the Warriors to 9 for 40 shooting from 3 point range. By the end of last week, the surging Magic had found themselves in eighth place in the Eastern Conference and in new territory for Gordon: the playoff race. It has taken every skill Gordon has, but for his part, the 23 year old has embraced the way the competition in the N.B.A. has demanded that he do virtually everything on any given night. "Versatility is going to be a huge part. The league is going in that direction," Gordon said. "So it's going to be 6 9, 6 10, 6 11, 7 foot guys able to do everything handle the ball, pass, shoot, rebound. That's the way the game is going to be." And that's the way the game is for Gordon, and how it has been dating back to his high school days at Archbishop Mitty in San Jose, Calif., where he played point guard before a late growth spurt turned him into a 6 foot 9 forward at Arizona, and then the fourth overall pick in the 2014 N.B.A. draft. "Offensively, his efficiency is up, and his assists are way up," Magic Coach Steve Clifford said of Gordon. "I think one of our issues has been drawing fouls and getting the ball going into the paint. And that's something he's done a good job with." Gordon was back in San Jose this past summer, getting up 300 shots every day, and the result has been a 53.3 true shooting percentage, his most efficient showing in three years, even as he's taken more shots from everywhere on the court and opposing defenses have constructed game plans around stopping him. But he also put in extra time on work like slide steps, all with the long range goal of becoming an elite two way player. Clifford said Gordon laid out his plans for himself when the two first spoke after Clifford was hired over the summer. The results have been extraordinary. Per Synergy, Gordon ranks second (of 140 qualified players) in the N.B.A. in points per possession on isolation plays, minimum 40 possessions, with 0.545 points per possession. And he isn't doing this against just bigs, either: The Magic routinely play him against the opposing team's biggest offensive threat. When the Magic played the Nets in January, Orlando had Gordon take on Joe Harris, a shooting guard, the league leader in three point percentage and winner of the three point contest during All Star weekend. The extent of Gordon's abilities on that end were revealed further against the Nets that night, when a switch landed Gordon on the Nets' D'Angelo Russell, an uber quick point guard in the midst of the finest scoring barrage of his career. Russell feinted left, right, trying to find a pathway with his dribble from the top of the key. Gordon did not let him pass, and Russell, clearly frustrated, finally shunted the ball off to a teammate. The indications that Gordon has become a star are there. What is far less clear is how Orlando puts a championship team around him, though Clifford effusively endorsed him as the model player of that future roster. "He fits with what wins in the N.B.A. right now," Clifford said. "He's 23, and he's made terrific gains, already, this year." Clifford is a capable coach, in his first season with Orlando. But the roster looks less like a plan and more like a series of one off moves. Vucevic is an excellent, traditional center, but his presence has kept Gordon, along with young bigs Mo Bamba and Jonathan Isaac, from getting significant time developing as the kind of stretch 5s most teams around the league deploy. Gordon is picked to run the offense, and does so effectively his assist percentage of 16.4 is a career high but that is in part because Orlando lacks a true starting point guard. Markelle Fultz may be the answer long term, but whether the embattled former Philadelphia 76ers guard even plays this season remains a mystery. Gordon's next step, per Clifford, needs to be the role of go to scorer down the stretch of games, which Gordon agrees with. Will it happen?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Philippe Zdar, a French music producer who worked with Kanye West, the rock band Phoenix and other artists died on Wednesday night after accidentally falling through the window of a building in Paris. He was 52. Mr. Zdar, who was born Philippe Cerboneschi, was one half of Cassius, an electro act he formed in the mid 1990s with Hubert Blanc Francard. They had previously produced tracks together for the French rapper MC Solaar. Cassius was a major player in "French Touch," an electronic music movement that found global success in the 1990s and 2000s. Cassius did not have the kind of hits that other groups in the scene, like Daft Punk, recorded, but its debut album, "1999," released that year, was seen as a touchstone of the genre. The band's first album in three years, Dreems, is to be released on Friday. Mr. Zdar was still in demand as a D.J. and remixer he was to play SummerStage in Central Park in New York on Sunday but in recent years he had become as known for producing other people's music as for making his own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
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 ... 40 minutes, and I like spilling secrets 'Vida' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on Starz. "Vida" returns for a third and final season this weekend, with its requisite sex, social strife and gossip. The sisters Lyn and Emma (played by Melissa Barrera and Mishel Prada) are kind of getting along, which they both sense can't last, and they deal with that in different ways, Lyn by squeezing harder and Emma by pulling away. Characters on "Vida" are very up in each other's business, which is one reason this show is so good at rich, complicated interpersonal conflict: Everyone starts from a place of You think you know me so well, but you don't. ... an hour, and I like excess 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' When to watch: Sunday 10:10 p.m., on Showtime. This spinoff of the horror series "Penny Dreadful" moves the festivities to 1938 Los Angeles, where it takes on a little of everything: Nazis, Mexican mysticism, politics, racism, evangelism, demons, cop stuff, old cars that make funny noises, you name it. Natalie Dormer anchors the show as a creepy shape shifter, and she's flanked by strong performances from Adam Rodriguez, Rory Kinnear, Michael Gladis, Kerry Bishe and Nathan Lane among others. It's possible the show has bitten off more than it can chew, but then again, demons can chew an awful lot. ... a few hours, and I need gentle comedy 'Rosehaven' When to watch: Now, on SundanceNow or with a Sundance add on on Amazon. If you've burned through shows like "Schitt's Creek," "Gavin and Stacey" and "New Girl," watch this three season Australian comedy. It's about two BFFs, Emma and Daniel (played by Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor, both of whom also created the show), who live in rural Tasmania and work at Daniel's mother's real estate agency. It's a cozy goof off show, where characters make jokes for one another's benefit, not the audience's. "Before you go, can you do one thing for me?" Emma asks when she has a cold. "Can you watch a whole season of 'Game of Thrones' with me?" Relatable.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Pusha T, 38, who is based in Norfolk, Va., has been involved in nearly every major facet of the hip hop world, beginning with his early days as half of the duo Clipse. He recently signed on as president of Kanye West's record label G.O.O.D. Music, and his latest album, "King Push: Darkest Before Dawn the Prelude," was released on Dec. 18. Here, five favorites from his diverse closet. Jacket: I love the pieces from By Walid. It's this London brand my stylist Marcus put me on to some time ago. This piece is silk with 18th century embroidery. Every jacket is a one off. I actually went to the designer's studio last week in London and got to meet him. It was pretty fresh. He's extremely artsy and a really cool guy. He had some newer patterns and jackets to choose from. For me, the details matter: Fashion and hip hop are always about being first and being different and being able to set yourself apart from the bunch. T Shirt: Right now I'm really into John Elliott. He's an American designer. He has a pretty comfortable sportswear brand. His T shirts, I probably have one of every color. I first met him at the first season of Kanye's fashion show. He sort of let me know what he had going on, and when his newest collection dropped, I got a couple pieces.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The number of new state unemployment claims dipped last week, but job losses continue to batter the economy as rising coronavirus cases pushed some regions of the country to reverse course and reimpose shutdown orders on businesses. More than 1.3 million workers, seasonally adjusted, filed new claims for regular unemployment benefits last week, the government reported on Thursday. Another million first time claims were filed under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. Taken together, the report paints a disappointing picture of recovery: Total new unemployment claims have edged up from their mid June lows. Although hiring nationwide has picked up in recent weeks, most of the payroll gains were temporarily laid off workers who were rehired. The pool of employees whose previous jobs have disappeared and who must search for new ones has grown. "Their circumstances may be more challenging to rectify than those who were laid off because of a temporary closure," said Elizabeth Akers, who was a staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. "Finding new jobs will be more difficult. There's been scarring in the economy." Recent readings from employment sites also point to more lasting damage to the labor market. Overall job openings at ZipRecruiter rose last week, for instance, but the number of new jobs posted declined for the fourth week in a row. "For now, at least, that suggests the increase in vacancies is being driven by a slowdown in hiring, not an increase in labor demand," said Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter's labor economist. "Recent jobs reports are encouraging, but the increase in employment entirely reflects rehires of workers on temporary layoff," she added. "The recovery in new hiring has yet to begin." The longer the pandemic dampens or halts shopping, dining out, travel and business operations, the more likely it is that jobs put on a brief hold simply vanish. Brooks Brothers, the nation's oldest apparel brand in continuous operation, filed for bankruptcy this week and permanently closed 51 stores. And airlines announced that they might lay off or furlough tens of thousands of employees in October despite billions of dollars in government aid because air travel has not rebounded. A wide range of indicators recently have suggested that the economic rebound is losing momentum in states where virus cases are rising quickly. The unemployment data released Thursday didn't paint a clear picture, however. New filings fell in Oklahoma, Florida and other virus hot spots, and rose only slightly in Arizona. Claims rose in New Jersey and New York, states where the virus is comparatively under control. And economists caution against reading too much into week to week changes in state filings, which can be volatile. 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. Congress created the emergency Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program in March to extend benefits to independent contractors, self employed workers and others who don't qualify for regular state unemployment insurance. The effort got off to a slow start: Many states struggled to roll out the program while dealing with a record number of regular unemployment claims. Jobless workers across the country reported encountering jammed websites, lost paperwork and confusing or contradictory instructions. Those issues have spilled into the data itself. Backlogs, data entry errors and other issues have made it hard to know how many people are receiving benefits under the program, or exactly when their claims were first filed. At least some states appear to be counting the same recipients multiple times. But economists say there is little doubt that the program is helping millions of workers who would ordinarily fall through the cracks of the unemployment safety net. More than 10 million people have filed claims under the emergency pandemic program, which is set to expire at the end of the year. A weekly 600 federal supplement for all jobless workers is scheduled to end this month. The Paycheck Protection Program, an effort designed to preserve jobs by offering forgivable loans to small business, was recently extended through October. Liz Etheredge, the chief executive of Mecklenburg Paint in Charlotte, N.C., said the federal loan made it possible for her to keep workers employed. The spring paint season was just starting when the pandemic hit. "Oh, gosh, things just pretty much stopped," said Ms. Etheredge, whose company also handles property management. Initially she helped most of her 30 employees apply for unemployment benefits, which she said was time consuming and confusing. "One day I waited on hold for three hours to reach somebody" with the state to work out glitches with benefit applications, she said, "and then another day I waited two hours." She applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan, hoping to avoid permanently laying off painters. "It came just in time," said Ms. Etheredge, who was able to avoid using up her savings. She has put everyone back on the payroll through the use of her loan money, so she expects that the entire amount will be forgiven. About a quarter of his business, which spans much of the state, dried up when the pandemic started, Mr. Falls said. He was forced to lay off about 25 workers south of Montgomery when the schools they cleaned closed. A new contract at a county government building elsewhere in the state and demand for enhanced sanitizing at other offices, though, made it possible to keep the rest of his 200 employees on the payroll, and even hire a few more. "We were kind of fortunate," said Mr. Falls, who said he planned to rehire the rest of his employees once schools reopened. Lisa D. Cook, a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University, worries what will happen when these assistance programs dry up. "At the heart of this is job loss," said Ms. Cook, who testified before a congressional committee this week. State and local governments are laying off health care and education workers, and eviction bans are expiring even though a significant chunk of household renters and businesses are having trouble making payments. "I just worry about this all piling up in the system," she said. Many jobless workers may have to wait a long time for the labor market to improve. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said this week that high unemployment would probably persist in the United States and other developed countries at least until 2022.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Early in Lydia Peelle's first novel, "The Midnight Cool," she surveys the teeming crowd of men and animals at a horse and mule auction, and writes: "Skinny dogs trotted through it all like they had someplace to be, crescents of hoof trimmings from the blacksmith held like cigarettes between their teeth." The people in Ms. Peelle's fiction are fully imagined, but we'll get to them. It's animals that give her work its heartbeat. The first story in her 2009 debut, "Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing" as assured and rewarding a collection as you'll find was titled "Mule Killers," referring to the tractors that put these beasts of burden out of the agriculture business. The narrator's father, a farmer, especially loves a now unnecessary mule named Orphan Lad, with his "sharp shoulders and soft ears, the mealy tuck of his lower lip." The majority of the action in Ms. Peelle's novel takes place in 1916 and 1917, in the months leading up to America's entry into World War I, and mules are center stage. The book is even dedicated to them. Billy, a middle age horse trader, and his young partner and charge, Charles, turn their attention to the British Army's and eventually the American Army's demand for strong mules overseas. They're not above cutting corners, but they operate in a patriotic atmosphere in which people remind one another: "Don't just do your bit, but do your all." Billy is injured by a bad tempered, dangerous horse sold to the pair under false pretenses by Leland Hatcher, the richest man in a Tennessee town. Charles falls profoundly in love with Leland's spirited daughter, Catherine. The book revolves around three dramas, all of which unfold at a leisurely pace: Charles's potential consummation with Catherine; the men's ability to navigate their mule business to an honest profit; and flashbacks to the late 1800s for Billy's back story, including the explanation of his close relationship with Charles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A hapless man stands on the sidewalk, watching and wincing as an ex girlfriend tosses his possessions out a second floor window in a commercial for DirecTV Now. A husband and wife are overjoyed to learn from a Fidelity investments adviser that, yes, they have saved enough for retirement to realize their fondest dream, one that involves a boat and a grandchild. And a considerably younger couple is delighted with the possibilities presented by the Clearblue ovulation test system. The men and women vary in age, circumstances and happiness levels, but they have one thing in common. They are all part of interracial couples. Recently, companies and brands like JPMorgan Chase, Humira, State Farm, Smile Direct Club, Coors Light, Macy's, Tide and Cadillac have featured multiracial couples or families in their advertising. "There's no doubt that the incidence of these commercials is at least double what it was five years ago," said Larry Chiagouris, a professor of marketing at the Pace University Lubin School of Business. "For the longest time, ads presented the typical American household as Caucasian, heterosexual, two children and two cars in the driveway," he added. "There's still a part of the world that's like that, but there's a large portion that is nothing like the 'Father Knows Best' Americana image. It's taken the advertising community, and particularly their clients, a long time to come to grips with that. They're risk averse." That relatively new awareness, Mr. Chiagouris said, has resulted in not only more ads with interracial couples, but also more gay and lesbian couples. The prevalence of these commercials "is a reflection of modern society," said Sarah Block, the executive vice president and creative director of Leo Burnett USA, who has worked on several ads depicting multiracial families, including commercials for Kraft. "It's portraying the situation that is out in the world." The commercials are a way for a companies to signal that they're open minded and progressive. "I think there's an ever increasing demand from customers to understand not just what products and services you provide but also to understand who you are as a company, what your values are," said Fiona Carter, the chief brand officer of AT T, which owns DirecTV. "I think there's been a seismic shift in people demanding that the media they're consuming truly portray their lives," she added. "I would say there's been a corresponding intentionality in our company to ensure that we're doing right by our customers portraying diversity and letting our customers then see their own stories in the advertising we do." Of course, not all viewers have been enthusiastic or even accepting. When Cheerios released a commercial in 2013 featuring an interracial family, it received enough racist vitriol online that the YouTube comment channel below the ad was closed. But there was also an outpouring of support, and Cheerios ran a sequel to the ad during the Super Bowl in 2014. "Cheerios is about families and about families in America, and we're a very diverse group of people here," said Andrea Diquez, the chief executive of Saatchi Saatchi New York, the agency that produced the commercials. "We didn't think it would be controversial." 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. Old Navy and State Farm have also dealt with racist commentary online after posting Twitter spots that showed interracial relationships. At this point, such advertising isn't considered particularly groundbreaking, said Allen Adamson, a co founder of Metaforce, a marketing strategy firm, "but because we're a polarized nation, they still don't sit at all well with some consumers." "It's a cost benefit thing," he said. "Most marketers have come to realize that no matter what they do, a certain segment is going to be offended. But the upside seeming inclusive outweighs the risk of ruffling feathers." Marty Kohr, a lecturer in persuasive messaging at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, cited data from the Pew Research Center to explain brands' interest in depicting multiracial couples and families in their advertising. In 2017, 39 percent of poll respondents said interracial marriage was good for society, up from 24 percent in 2010. "For the growing number of people who think interracial marriage is a good thing, that positions your brand as forward thinking and inclusive," Mr. Kohr said. Susan Canavari, the chief brand officer for JPMorgan Chase, said the bank wasn't trying to make a statement with its 2016 commercial that followed the relationship of a white boy and a black girl as it progressed from puppy love to marriage. "We really just intend to make all our communications reflect our customers," Ms. Canavari said. "We didn't get more or less response to that ad than to any other. "We're a bank," she added with a laugh. "Everything we do is greeted with some sort of cynicism."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Sexually active women who are not using birth control should refrain from alcohol to avoid the risk of giving birth to babies with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, even if those women are not yet known to be pregnant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended. The C.D.C. report, released on Tuesday, estimated that 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 who drink alcohol risk exposing their infants to the disorders, which can stunt children's growth and cause lifelong disabilities. The report, which appeared to refer exclusively to heterosexual sex, also said that three in four women who intend to get pregnant do not stop drinking alcohol when they stop using birth control. "The risk is real. Why take the chance?" Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the C.D.C., said in a statement. Alcohol consumption during pregnancy has been widely linked to stunted physical, mental and behavioral development of children. In October, a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that "no amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
FRANKFURT In a chic '60s suit, spiky heeled boots and pillbox hat, Dana Caspersen strode to the center of the stage of the Bockenheimer Depot here, followed by a camerawoman. "Ladies and gentlemen," Ms. Caspersen declared. "I'd like you to notice my extraordinary resemblance to ..." (assuming a French accent) " ... Catherine Deneuve!" The audience cheered, and the dancers onstage buzzed excitedly around her. By the end of the performance, the perky self assuredness of that opening was shredded, Ms. Caspersen's naked vulnerability on display as she sat quietly in a chair, speaking the final words of the piece. It was her last appearance in William Forsythe's "Kammer/Kammer," first staged in 2000. It was performed here last weekend for what was probably the last time, as the current incarnation of the Forsythe Company closes up shop. Jacopo Godani, former Forsythe dancer, will take over as director in September, with a new group of dancers, while Mr. Forsythe will become the Paris Opera Ballet's associate choreographer and teach at the University of Southern California. And Ms. Caspersen, 51, who has been a signature performer in Mr. Forsythe's work for almost three decades, is moving into her new phase offstage, working in conflict resolution. "I'm ready for a different role," she said, speaking in the airy apartment she shares here with Mr. Forsythe, her husband since 2000. (They plan to base themselves in the United States after this summer.) Tiny, with short blond hair and a thoughtful gaze, Ms. Caspersen speaks in precise, beautifully formed phrases that she occasionally interrupts to redefine. "As a performer, you create situations from the inside," she said. "Now I'm interested in looking more broadly at bigger structures: How do our actions shape our world, and how does the world shape our actions? How, on a broad scale, can we make an awareness of conflict, and a curiosity about it, part of the way we think and teach young people?" Ms. Caspersen added: "This is where dancing practice is useful. Dancers will come in every day and do plies, and every day you have to reconnect to the idea of a plie rather than thinking you've mastered it. It's the same in conflict; it's not about having a set pattern of response, but about practicing the most basic actions of perception, expression and focus." The leap from performer to mediator is less extreme than you might think, Ms. Caspersen said. "What shaped me in the first years here was that Bill was asking us to consciously seek ways of seeing differently," she said. "Dealing with conflict is not so different: It is also about recognizing what actions we are taking, which actions are possible and about having the capacity to choose the action we actually want to take." The Minneapolis born Ms. Caspersen has been part of Mr. Forsythe's core group of dancers since 1988, first with the Frankfurt Ballet, then the Forsythe Company. She has been central to many of his seminal works, providing inspiration for pure dance works like "Quintett" and "Of Any If And," and often shaping and incarnating dramatic figures (the Woman in Historical Costume in "Artifact," Persephone in "Eidos Telos," the crazy neighbor in "I Don't Believe in Outer Space") in his more theatrical pieces that mix dance, speech and heightened sound. Ms. Caspersen said she discovered conflict mediation when a friend took her to a workshop. "Life was throwing all kinds of conflicts at me, and I thought there had to be a better way of dealing with it than I was managing," she said. She began to read all she could on the topic and discovered she could earn a master's degree. But, like most professional dancers, Ms. Caspersen had been working full time since high school and did not have an undergraduate degree. She was also performing full time and, like all of Mr. Forsythe's dancers, closely involved in the intense collaboration used to create work in Frankfurt and touring all over the world. Ms. Caspersen, who wore a neck to hip brace for severe scoliosis from 14 to 18, is not one to shirk hard work. Through performing, writing and three hip operations, she got a master of fine arts degree through Hollins University in Virginia, which is geared to dancers' schedules and offers credits for professional experience. She then completed a master's in conflict studies and mediation at the Woodbury Institute of Champlain College in Vermont. "She has great common sense," said Mr. Forsythe, who arrived later at the apartment. "I had been saying to her for years, you should become a Supreme Court judge, so this is perfect. It's like her decisions onstage; I can't imagine her not making the right choices." Soon after Ms. Caspersen began the master's in mediation, Mr. Elffers, whom she knew through mutual friends, told her she should write a book. "I said, 'I'm not even trained yet, and I know nothing,' " she recounted. "Five or six years later, I had finished the course, I was injured and couldn't go outside, and thought, O.K., I'm going to write the damned book."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In another example of the blurring boundaries in the health care industry, UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's largest insurers, said on Wednesday that it is buying a large physician group to add to its existing roster of 30,000 doctors. UnitedHealth's Optum unit will acquire the physician group from DaVita, a large for profit chain of dialysis centers, for about 4.9 billion in cash, subject to regulatory approval. DaVita operates nearly 300 clinics across a half dozen states, including California and Florida. With the purchase, UnitedHealth is increasingly moving into the direct delivery of medical care. "Combining DaVita Medical Group and Optum advances our shared goal of supporting physicians in delivering exceptional patient care in innovative and efficient ways," Larry C. Renfro, Optum's chief executive, said in a statement. Analysts praised the move as keeping with UnitedHealth's broader goal of building a large ambulatory care business. "The asset is strongly synergistic" with the company's overall "mission and strategy," Ana Gupte, an analyst for Leerink, told investors after the deal was announced. The proposed acquisition comes after the announcement that another big insurer, Aetna, planned to merge with CVS Health. That transaction, if approved, could transform CVS's 10,000 drugstores into community based health care "hubs," where people could get blood tests or help managing a chronic disease like diabetes. Executives at Aetna and CVS said that this new model would result in better care and lower costs for patients. At a time of growing uncertainty in the health care marketplace, doctors, drugstores, hospitals and insurers are looking outside their traditional businesses to join forces. The tax overhaul proposed congressional Republicans could cut payments to federal programs like Medicare sharply and upend the Affordable Care Act, and employers and consumers are increasingly worried about the high cost of medical care. The potential threat of new competitors like Amazon entering the pharmacy business and technology companies delivering medical care through cellphones has led former adversaries to become partners, driving insurers to team up with hospitals and doctors' groups. They are seeking to deliver care in novel ways, outside the expensive setting of a hospital. While the combination with CVS allows Aetna to experiment with providing medical care in a retail setting, insurers are also looking to partner directly with doctors and health systems. To change how people receive medical care, particularly when managing chronic, and costly, diseases like diabetes and asthma, the parties "are going to have to reorganize," said Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "There's no chance that the existing companies, be they hospital or insurers, have the right configuration of assets to be successful" at turning health care into a business where the parties are able to produce better outcomes at a lower cost, he said. What is striking about the recent combinations, Professor Garthwaite said, is that insurers are the ones seeking to integrate the delivery of care into their operations, as opposed to a large health system like Kaiser Permanente, the health maintenance organization based in California, directing members to its hospitals and doctors. "For a long time, we thought there was a world in which Kaiser was the future," he said. But Kaiser Permanente has proved to be mostly an exception to the rule. Several large systems began offering health plans under the Affordable Care Act, only to end up losing money and getting out of the business. Aetna and UnitedHealth appear to be trying to develop their own in house network of doctors to try to change how care is delivered. UnitedHealth, which already operates a large pharmacy benefit manager and a variety of health care services through its Optum unit, is among the most diversified and most successful insurers. The acquisition of DaVita Medical Group, which includes such high profile organizations as HealthCare Partners and the Everett Clinic, is the latest move by UnitedHealth to expand into the realm of delivering medical care as a way of reducing costs. The company already operates medical practices in Southern California and elsewhere, and it owns nearly 250 MedExpress urgent care clinics. The company says the clinics offer much of the same care available at a hospital emergency room but at a significantly lower cost. Last January, UnitedHealth also acquired a chain of surgery centers, a move the company said could lower the expense of having an outpatient surgery by more than 50 percent. The company expects to perform roughly 1 million surgeries and other procedures this year. Insurers are also increasingly experimenting with different methods of paying for care and attempting to provide better oversight of potentially expensive chronic conditions like diabetes or heart failure. To date, Aetna and Cigna have favored joint ventures with large health groups. While these new partnerships promise to change how people get care, by marshaling better information about patients and steering them to less expensive and more convenient places, whether an urgent care clinic or drugstore, delivering on that promise may prove challenging. DaVita, which bought HealthCare Partners five years ago as a way to become a major player in the care of people with chronic conditions, found itself struggling to make money on its medical group. In describing the group's most recent quarterly financial results, DaVita's chief executive, Kent J. Thiry, said they were "extremely disappointing." The sale, which is expected to close next year, return DaVita to its core kidney dialysis business, although Mr. Thiry said in a statement that the company expected "to pursue other investments in health care services outside of kidney care." DaVita has been under scrutiny for its relationship with a charity, the American Kidney Fund, that helps pay the cost of private insurance for patients receiving dialysis treatment. Consumers could also see their choice of doctor or pharmacy sharply limited under these arrangements as insurers attempt to steer patients into the groups over which they have the most control. Both Aetna and UnitedHealth insist their goal is to develop a new model of care that will be available to people outside their respective health plans, and Optum says it now works with more than 80 health plans. Even if insurers succeed in lowering medical costs as a result of the new ventures, economists and other experts warn that shareholders, not consumers, could benefit unless the lower costs yield lower prices for coverage. There must be sufficient competition among insurers for consumers to benefit, Professor Garthwaite said. "You need three, four or five insurance companies trying to pull that strategy off," he said. "That's really hard to do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The American economy has picked up speed and is now on course to expand this year at the fastest rate in more than a decade. That acceleration gives President Trump a stronger hand as he contemplates more tariffs and takes an increasingly confrontational approach with China, Canada, Mexico and other trading partners. Economists have raised their growth estimates for the second quarter to an annualized rate of nearly 5 percent, more than double the pace of the previous period. Some economists say the figure could hit 3 percent for the full year, a level last reached in 2005. As growth slows in Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere, the United States finds itself at the top of the global economy. The United States is also less exposed to the fallout from an escalating trade war since it does not rely on exports as much as other countries. It all gives Mr. Trump leverage with world leaders, potentially forcing them to make concessions. But his threats could also backfire. Economists warn that the president's clout is limited and that his attacks on the trading system could dampen the outlook not just in other countries but also domestically. "If you have the strongest economy in years, then the trade shock appears manageable," said Gregory Daco, head of United States economics at Oxford Economics. "However, with growth peaking, the trade shock will become more intense. With a global backdrop that is not improving anymore, we have to be careful about the back half of 2018 and 2019." In July, the recovery will reach the nine year mark, making it one of the longest in modern history. But for much of that time, the engines of the economy were rarely synchronized. When consumers were spending at a healthy clip in 2015 and 2016, business investment lagged as energy companies scaled back or abandoned projects in response to a sharp drop in oil prices. All that has changed in recent months. Now, the different parts of the economy appear to be operating as one well oiled machine. Consumer spending rebounded after a soft start to the year, with retail sales in May rising by a robust 0.8 percent, double what analysts had forecast. "We have a very strong economy, and if the trade negotiations are successful, it'll be even stronger," said Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He added that the president was "impatient to fix broken policies," with trade at the top of the list after last year's tax overhaul and deregulation effort. The trade deficit, often cited by the White House as a vulnerability, narrowed in April, further bolstering economic activity in the second quarter. Strong April orders for fabricated metal, computers and other goods used in production also helped, as did a buildup in inventory as businesses restocked shelves. Such additions to inventory barely had an impact on growth in the first three months of the year, but could contribute nearly a full percentage point in the second quarter. Increased government spending is providing added propulsion. The two year budget deal reached in Congress in February added 300 billion in new government spending that is starting to flow into the economy. "It's something of a sugar high, but it feels good," said Diane Swonk, an economist with Grant Thornton in Chicago. Taken together, these factors have compelled economists to re evaluate the economy's tempo. At the beginning of May, Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm based in St. Louis, estimated growth of 3 percent in the second quarter. By mid June, it was putting the figure at 4.5 percent. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's GDPNow model is even more upbeat at 4.7 percent. But the good news may not last. While Ms. Swonk expects a 3 percent expansion for the full year, she added, "This likely will be the peak growth for this cycle." Trade wars won't sharply curtail economic activity, unless they cause businesses to lose confidence, said Spencer Dale, chief economist for BP, the energy giant. The bigger problem, he said, is that trade wars could "eat away at trend growth" by reducing G.D.P. by a fraction of a percent a year. That might not seem meaningful in any given year, but compounded over a decade or two, it could leave the economy noticeably short of what it might otherwise have achieved. The Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, has also noted those risks. "Changes in trade policy could cause us to have to question the outlook," he said on Wednesday at a European Central Bank conference in Portugal. Still, the United States remains more insulated from a trade shock than other countries. Exports account for just 12 percent of American gross domestic product. That's the lowest share among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of industrialized countries. By contrast, the figure is 31 percent in Canada, 37 percent in Mexico and 44 percent in the European Union. In the United States, consumer spending accounts for nearly 70 percent of G.D.P. And recent surveys and other data show that people are bullish about the economy's trajectory, according to Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics. Owners of small businesses are also confident about their own prospects and about the overall economy. When Mr. Shepherdson put out a note to clients on May 14 highlighting the possibility of 5 percent growth in the quarter, he was quick to add that his forecast looked outlandish. "I was being tongue in cheek, looking at what would happen if everything goes right," he said. "But it's become more like the base case." Despite the improving consensus, Mr. Shepherdson said the quarter's pace "is not sustainable," but he does expect consumer spending to be solid in the second half of the year. Sean McCartney, an executive vice president at Radial, a fulfillment and logistics business, agrees, and he's putting his money to work. Radial will hire about 24,000 temporary workers later this year for the company's fulfillment centers, call centers and warehouses to prepare for back to school demand and the holiday shopping season. That's up by roughly 1,000 from last year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Lacey Evans taking down Natalya Neidhart in the first ever WWE women's match in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh, on Halloween. RIYADH, Saudi Arabia On Halloween, as two female WWE wrestlers battled inside a roaring King Fahd International Stadium, Najla Ibrahim stood with a hand on her heart and another in the air, capturing the moment with her smartphone. For years, the nurse from Riyadh followed wrestling from afar and yearned for the day when women would take the ring in her country. "I'm very proud because they are making history," Ms. Ibrahim, 23, dressed in a black abaya and seated next to her older sister, said as the match ended under a shower of fireworks. "I've been waiting for this for so long." A year after the state directed assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian dissident columnist for The Washington Post, the government of Saudi Arabia is accelerating efforts to diversify its economy, cultivate domestic spending and polish its global image by broadening cultural offerings centered on Western sports and entertainment. Staging a women's wrestling match is no small feat in a kingdom where strict interpretation of Islamic law has long dictated that women be segregated, wear full body coverings and have a male guardian. While the moment was notable, it was also carefully manufactured, stirring debate about whether Saudi Arabia is changing or just glossing over its flaws. "It's definitely 'sportswashing,'" said Philippe Nassif, Amnesty International's advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa. "In the case of Saudi Arabia, they are infamous for the oppression of women's rights and ethnic and racial minority rights. What better way to attempt to change that image than an all women's wrestling match?" The relationship between international brands like World Wrestling Entertainment and the Saudi government is symbiotic, as companies seek untapped markets while the kingdom tries to move its economy beyond dependence on oil production. But the push comes with complications. Western businesses and stars have faced backlash and boycotts amid accusations that they are aiding a public relations initiative from an oppressive Saudi government. Big money soon flowed. In July, Saudi Arabia's General Sports Authority announced a 650 million investment to develop local athletes and teams and to attract international events. At an investment conference in Riyadh in October, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal, the chairman of the General Sports Authority, explained how making Saudi Arabia a hub of global sports could lift economic growth and create thousands of jobs. 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. "A big part of the change within the kingdom is the sector of sport and growing the sector of sport," he said. Wrestling is one sliver of Saudi Arabia's new appetite for athletics. This month, Anthony Joshua and Andy Ruiz Jr. will travel to a custom built arena in Diriyah, outside Riyadh, for a heavyweight boxing title fight billed as the "Clash on the Dunes." February brings the debut of the Saudi Cup, a horse race with a 20 million purse the richest in history. A Ladies European Tour golf tournament is being planned for March. "We are in a really huge transformation, softening the image," Majed al Sorour, chief executive of the Saudi Golf Federation, said on the sidelines of the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in October. Boundaries broaden, but only so far. The sports expansion is part of Prince Mohammed's attempt to bring in foreign investment and increase the financial potential of a country whose population skews young. Of the kingdom's 22 million citizens, about two thirds are under 30. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. After Prince Mohammed was elevated to crown prince in 2017, he pursued a campaign aimed at convincing the world that Saudi Arabia was changing culturally, with a series of reforms that were methodically rolled out to burnish its image. In the last 18 months, movie theaters opened for the first time in more than 35 years, women gained the right to drive and segregation of the sexes was relaxed in public places. On a Monday night in late October, Saudi men and women in their 20s swayed to hip hop music at a fashion boutique that opened for Riyadh's Design Week. Like international companies, young people in Saudi Arabia are adjusting to new boundaries and calibrating their ambitions. At the event was Mohammed Alhamdan, who five years ago was an aspiring actor working at a McDonald's in Riyadh before he started creating satirical music videos that went viral on YouTube. Now he has more than seven million followers on social media networks and is paid to create and perform in advertisements for brands like McDonald's and Pepsi, which operate in the kingdom. "Everything is new, for us and the country," said Mr. Alhamdan, 25, who goes by the online persona Warchieff. Saudi Arabia's growing circle of social media influencers still tread cautiously when approaching cultural taboos. Mr. Alhamdan said he was careful to create videos that grabbed attention without veering into cultural criticism that would get him in trouble with a government that aggressively stifles online dissent. Critics of Saudi Arabia contend that its embrace of Western sports and entertainment is a diversion to distract from a grim human rights record. "I see all of this more as a way for the government to generate revenues from things other than oil than a genuine effort by the government to grant freedom," said Hala Aldosari, a Saudi scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Central Intelligence Agency concluded last year that Prince Mohammed personally ordered the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. Since then, the kingdom has worked with international public relations firms to rehabilitate its reputation, and the crown prince has said he takes "full responsibility" for the murder. But international observers say human rights violations continue. Amnesty International condemned the kingdom in October for arresting and detaining civil society activists and criticized the Saudi government for cloaking in secrecy the trial of those involved in the Khashoggi killing and for mass executions in April of Shiite Muslims who participated in antigovernment protests. A Human Rights Watch report last month said that despite advances for Saudi women in the last year, numerous women's rights advocates continued to be detained, charged with criminal offenses and tortured for speaking out. Conditions for journalists who call for reform remain risky. The human rights group ALQST said on Nov. 25 that the Saudi authorities had arrested at least eight bloggers and journalists in five cities across the country in November, raiding their homes and seizing their laptops and cellphones. "They are trying to cover up their abuses by holding high profile sporting events and spectacles supported by businesspeople, politicians and sporting figures around the world," ALQST said in a statement. For Western athletes and entertainers, doing business in Saudi Arabia remains fraught. Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal faced criticism last year for planning to play an exhibition tennis match in Jeddah. They eventually withdrew, citing an injury to Mr. Nadal. In July, the rapper Nicki Minaj withdrew from a music festival after an outcry from critics of Saudi Arabia's treatment of women and its ban on homosexuality. For corporations, boycotting Saudi Arabia is more difficult. Netflix came under fire this year for pulling an episode of Hasan Minhaj's show, "Patriot Act," in Saudi Arabia because of the show's criticism of Prince Mohammed and the Saudi led military campaign in Yemen. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, offered a blunt assessment of the decision at a New York Times DealBook conference in November, saying the company was "not in the truth to power business." Formula E, the electric motor sport racing series, also faced questions about its decision to open its season in Saudi Arabia last year, weeks after Mr. Khashoggi was murdered. Last month, the event was back again, drawing thousands of fans and musical entertainers from Britain and Norway. "I think Saudi is going through a period of change, and I think we need to support the change," Alejandro Agag, the founder of Formula E, said in an interview in Riyadh. "Sport is a neutral thing that brings people together." Ernie Els, the champion golfer from South Africa, who is helping the Saudi government establish itself as a global golf destination, offered a similar rationale. Despite backlash for his involvement with the Saudis, he said he hoped golf could help the country in the same way rugby helped unite South Africa, under the leadership of President Nelson Mandela, in the 1990s after apartheid. "I understand the concern from the international community, but you have to start somewhere," Mr. Els said in an interview. "Our partnership with the General Entertainment Authority further strengthens our fan engagement through large scale events and action packed programming while being at the forefront of change that is taking place in the region," he said. In April, during a WWE Greatest Royal Rumble in Jeddah, a promotional video between matches showed scantily clad female wrestlers, prompting the Saudi General Sports Authority to issue a statement apologizing for the scenes. Male wrestlers perform bare chested in Speedo style shorts. Arranging a women's match was complicated, and WWE officials said they had held extensive talks with the Saudi government about the appropriate time to allow the athletes, Natalya Neidhart and Lacey Evans, to perform. Attire was also a major concern: To pass muster, the women swapped revealing costumes for loosefitting T shirts worn over long black sleeves and leggings. Fahad Saeed Khan, an engineer in the audience dressed in Adidas track pants and a Polo shirt, said wrestling was a welcome alternative to Riyadh's staid entertainment options of going to a mall or socializing in a park. "It's good," Mr. Khan, 27, said, adding that men and women in Saudi Arabia had been kept apart for too long. "Things need to open up."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
ATLANTA It's no secret Atlanta is one of the nation's great culture capitals, home to many power brokers in music, fashion and the arts a city that, since the 1980s, has produced some of the biggest names in rap, R B and hip hop, and over the last decade, seen explosive growth in its entertainment industry (thanks, in part, to Georgia's generous tax credits). This mighty metropolis is also now where some of the internet's most important creators are living and working today. Atlanta is where 15 year old Jalaiah Harmon created the Renegade, a dance that took over TikTok in late 2019 and remains one of the app's best known viral trends. It's where Lil Nas X turned "Old Town Road" into not just a hit single but the biggest thing on the internet. It's where YouTube stars with followings in the multimillions record their videos and where some of TikTok's biggest viral videos and trending challenges began at a casual weekly meet up called TikTok Thursdays. Atlanta's creators are noteworthy for the ways in which they defy prevailing ideas about the influencer economy. Like most people making content online, they're hard working, focused and have a deep understanding of the internet. But they show none of the entitlement or attitude that has come to characterize the better known TikTok stars of Los Angeles. There is drama it's the internet, after all but also an overwhelming sense of community and camaraderie. Another key difference revolves around race. Atlanta's creators are predominantly Black. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, most influencer collectives have no or very few Black creators. And despite creating and driving many of the internet's biggest trends, Black creators receive fewer brand deals and are consistently paid less than their white peers. But Atlanta's new generation of entertainers is hoping to change that. In the last three weeks, two all Black Gen Z creator mansions, the Collab Crib and the Valid Crib, opened in the city about 30 miles apart. Their members want to cement Atlanta as a hub for online talent and are hoping these homes will bring a level of legitimacy to their status within the larger creator ecosystem. "We're trying to work together and build each other up as one," said Devron Harris, 20, a member of the Valid Crib. In November, they secured a lease on a seven bedroom brick home on a quiet cul de sac about 20 minutes from downtown Atlanta. It's charming and suburban, with black eyed Susans lining a small concrete path in the front yard. The house is in the final stages of a renovation; the stairs are still unfinished and the floorboards are being installed. But over the past few weeks, the group's members have been moving their stuff in. (All of the common rooms are unfurnished, though their landlord is planning to provide some furniture soon.) "Right now our house is still loading, I'd say," Mr. Williams Colon said. He's already poured a ton of effort into his own room, installing colorful rope lights around the ceiling and painting a geometric design on one of the walls. "We're trying to put our own vibe and style into it so when people see it they know, 'Oh, that's Valid Crib.'" Collectively, the members of these two houses are responsible for dozens of viral trends. O'Neil Rowe, 19, of the Collab Crib, created dances to songs by DaBaby, Roddy Rich and Lil Yachty that all took off on TikTok. His own single, "Snappin,'" has already appeared in 20,000 TikTok videos. Valid Crib and Collab Crib creators are also already regularly featured on massive meme and Instagram accounts like Worldstar and The Shade Room ("Instagram's TMZ," as The New York Times put it a few years ago). D'Aydrian Harding, 19, a member of the Valid Crib, founded his own "TikTok cult" (an open fandom, not an ideological group). Though the followers and fame that have come with the work have been reaffirming, Mr. Billingsley said he finds the freedom and power of being a creator to be the most appealing part of the job. "It's the entrepreneurship aspect," he said, "working for yourself, being your own boss. A lot of people nowadays in our generation don't want to work for somebody. A lot of people are establishing their own brands and really working for themselves. That's really the American dream now." Creators at the Collab Crib recently kicked off a 90 day blitz where they plan to each post at least three times a day on all platforms. They write down follower count goals and meet regularly to discuss metrics and brand deliverables. "At Valid Crib, it's this or nothing," said Richard Bimpa, 19. "There's no going back, it has to go. All of us are working hard and grinding. It's do or die at this point." Mr. Bimpa said he was currently posting five videos a day to TikTok and four to Instagram, in addition to teaching himself to edit YouTube videos. Though the Valid Crib formed organically, Mr. Dorsey now manages both groups. "I have more executive control over Collab Crib and the structure of the house, logistics, planning and the overall concept of the house," he said. "When it comes to Valid Crib, they got their own house and negotiated their own deal. I let them control their own thing." But in light of the pandemic, he's also had to act as a public health adviser to both groups. He made sure members of the Collab Crib tested negative for Covid 19 before moving in, and has tried to limit the number of visitors at the house for the time being (though he hopes that, in the future, the houses can serve as a home base for the broader Black creator community). Creators of color have seen this sort of discrimination from brands for years. Accounts like InfluencerPayGap call attention to the pay disparities between Black and white influencers. Black creators are featured less frequently in brand campaigns. They've described feeling tokenized and receiving inferior treatment at brand sponsored events. On TikTok, as on other social platforms, white creators profit off Black culture and, as the writer Jason Parham recently wrote in Wired, "steal the viral spotlight." "Racism even plays into the algorithm and why Black creators tend to have smaller followings," said Chrissy Rutherford, a digital creator and a founder of 2BG Consulting, a brand consultancy focused on diversity and inclusion. "A lot of brands have complained that there's no Black creators with larger followings, but it's like, have you ever considered that you are basically only engaging and following and giving likes and opportunities to white creators? It works both ways." Eventually, Mr. Dorsey got Dubsmash, a short form video app with deep ties to the Atlanta creator community, to sign on as the Collab Crib's primary backer along with Cash App, a mobile payment service. Dubsmash is also helping the group negotiate brand deals and is providing media training and career mentorship. Instagram chipped in some money contingent on the creators supporting Reels, its new short form video feature. The sleep products company Casper provided mattresses. (The Valid Crib has received no outside funding, and members of the house split the rent by room.) What the creators in Valid Crib and Collab Crib want is to fundamentally change the system and show that mainstream success can be found outside the L.A. bubble. "We're starting a wave that isn't there for people that look like us," said Mr. Dorsey. "We could have easily moved to L.A., but we wanted to trailblaze something new. Everyone in L.A. is trying to fight to get a seat at the table, while we're in Atlanta building our own table." Some creators also feel that they're treated more fairly outside of Los Angeles. "There are more opportunities as a Black male or Black female in Atlanta than you would get in L.A.," Mr. Harris, of the Valid Crib, said. "People are more willing to work with you even if you don't have as many followers." Both houses have plans to release merch and product lines and are hoping to forge deep partnerships in Atlanta's music and entertainment industry. They have become politically involved, too, encouraging their followers to register to vote in Georgia's Senate runoff elections. After the pandemic, they also plan to host more in person events and meet ups. But these next few months will be pivotal. Hype is transient on the internet, and without the right press or the amplification that comes with big brand partnerships, some houses fizzle. Creators are acutely aware of the fleeting nature of online success, and those in Atlanta plan to churn out more and more content in coming weeks. "Hopefully a year from now we'll be in a bigger house," said Mr. Harris. "More Valid Crib members are graduating high school, so hopefully they'll move in." (Not every member of a creator house lives with their collaborators.) "We want to be the biggest creator house on the East Coast," said Mr. Billingsley. Theo Wisseh, 18, a member of Collab Crib, nodded in agreement. "We want to become one of those brands with one of the most die hard fan bases where everything sells out in two minutes," he said. Already, that base seems to be growing. "It's the new Hollywood. YouTube, Instagram, it's taking over," said Malachi Collier, 19, a Black creator who lives in Georgia and has been following what Mr. Dorsey and the Collab Crib and Valid Crib are building. "It's another outlet for our culture, which is why Atlanta is taking over."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Charlyn Buchanan, a 32 year old software engineer from Jersey City, stood with a flute of champagne in one hand, and in the other, her Bridelux's itinerary that detailed upcoming speakers and showcased vendors. This was Ms. Buchanan's first wedding expo since becoming engaged last August. Her wedding is set to take place at the end of the year, and so she was attending the expo "to gather ideas and create my own intangible vision board and see what's out there," she said. In mid January, Bridelux Atelier, a high end bridal expo that started in London four years ago, came to the United States for the first time to showcase at the InterContinental hotel, on East 48th Street in Manhattan. Promising the cognoscente of the wedding industry while capitalizing on royal wedding fever, Bridelux brought speakers like the florist Philippa Craddock, who was involved in the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Among the other vendors: Claire Ptak of Violet Cakes; the celebrity event planner Bryan Rafanelli; the stationers Ceci New York; and the veil maker Monvieve Milano. Wedding expos can be found in many cities around the country. They're often held in chain hotels like the Marriott Marquis and Grand Hyatt, as well as event and convention spaces like Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Some rotate locales, others remain in the same space month after month. Wedding Salon hosts nine shows a year, setting up in Miami, Washington, Chicago and New York. The Long Island Bridal Expo does 36. Some expos are intimate, highlighting three dozen or so vendors for 150 attendees; others showcase 100 or more businesses to crowds of 600 plus. In an Instagram world, where entire weddings are booked and created completely from sources found online yes Zola and Etsy, we know many people may wonder how and why expos still exist. The answer is simple: They offer brides and grooms in person contacts, not to mention prizes and swag bags stuffed with wedding items and discounts. "You're meeting experts face to face but also are seeing their work, which can be overwhelming on the internet or misleading on someone's website," said Tatiana Byron Marx, who founded Wedding Salon 15 years ago. "Brides want to work with people they like. You're hiring 15 to 40 vendors, each with their own contract. Meeting everyone at their studio is time consuming." Like most expos, Wedding Salon offers photographers, videographers, cake makers, florists, D.J.'s, wedding gown designers, and specialists for hair and makeup, among others. Tony Drago, who has run the Long Island Bridal Expo for 28 years, says he tries to showcase local professionals. "Brides can walk around and have true conversations without being harassed," he said, "and there's not 200 or 300 vendors so they don't become numb and forget who they spoke to." Like others, Mr. Drago makes available transportation options like limousines, buses and trolleys, along with bridal consultants, florists, stationers, table designers and party favor creators. Many expos also try to create experiences through live D.J.'s and band performances, fashion shows, even spray tanners and makeup artists. Couples can envision their first dance or a cocktail hour with sample drinks and canapes. Travel representatives from dreamy destinations are also on hand, some providing giveaways, prizes and discounts. During a four hour slot, Ms. Marx can draw 800 to 1,000 people at a New York show. "These are inspirational, girls' night out bring your girlfriend or matron of honor and have fun," she said. Mickael Georges, a 35 year old social worker from Queens, went to Bridelux with his fiancee, Alexandra Colas, 33, a nurse, for the experience. "I've never been to anything like this, but I wanted to get a visual of what she likes," he said. "How can you know what something costs, and pay that much for something when you're not sure what's out there? This lets you see everything." Industry professionals also attend. Julie Lindenman, 32, an event planner in Manhattan who is getting married in June, was spotted taking a lap at Bridelux. "I came to see what everyone is doing, to support my friends in the industry, but also to explore new things for my own wedding," Ms. Lindenman said. She especially enjoyed meeting the fashion designer Reem Acra. "She inspires me in the wedding world. To meet her and see her collection in person was amazing." Some expo promoters tour their shows like rock concerts. Bill Heaton, who has run the Great Bridal Expo for the last 38 years, kicks off his tour in Boston or New York. He then spends September through April hitting 25 to 30 cities, moving steadily across the country and ending in California's Silicon Valley. "National vendors like Williams Sonoma, Macy's, Pottery Barn and Sandals, who are interested in meeting couples in every market, follow us for the entire trip," he said. "Others, like a local wedding cake company in Dallas will only go to that stop and not Houston because they don't ship cakes there." Mr. Heaton estimates that 400 to 600 brides attend each show, where 50 to 80 exhibitors are presented. His charge is 10 or 12. Over the years, he's seen an increased sophistication among brides and grooms. "The idea of the personal marketplace has always been of interest to the consumer," he said. "The difference is that couples used to be 19 or 20, now they're getting married at 30. They have careers. And because they're paying for the wedding, as opposed to having their parents do it, the groom is more involved." Expos seem great for the would be wedded, but vendors can pay a chunk of change to be seen. Fees typically start at around 500 and can easily exceed 1,000. Ms. Marx said 50 to 60 percent of her vendors get work. "The match happens at the show, but the transaction happens after the connections and intros are made," she said. "Weddings are a fairy tale fantasy people aren't letting that go," Mr. Rafanelli said. "That's why they're here. It boosts their confidence because they crave the 'how can I do that' information and visuals they learn at these events. It becomes obtainable, especially when you see everything all at once in one place. You're drenched in it." And it was true. By 4:30 p.m., the Bridelux ice sculpture had melted. And the model wearing a Reem Acra wedding dress was seated and taking a much needed pause. What was left of the sushi looked a little sad. The crowd had thinned out considerably. One of the performers from the list of rotating bands was singing Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason To Stay Here." Many attendees had found several. "This was exactly what I needed," said Ms. Buchanan, the Jersey City software engineer, who at the end of the expo had switched from champagne to a gin and tonic. "Now I'm looking at wedding planning with a completely different attitude. I come from humble beginnings and I've always been a minimalist. I don't have to bring that approach to my wedding. I'm only going to have one. I deserve this. I worked really hard, we worked hard together, and I got to see all of that today." Read more on how to make the most of your wedding expo experience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
IN most places in America, doctors and lawyers are at the top of the career pyramid. They're often the top earners in town. And they usually live in the nicest neighborhoods and drive expensive cars. But their attitudes toward money and investing can create financial challenges later in life. And the years of education that got them to where they are, their financial advisers say, can also stand in the way of their financial decision making. As Greg Erwin, managing principal at Sapient Private Wealth Management who works with doctors, put it, "A lot of these physicians would like to believe that investing and savings is pure science, and that's not true. It's an art form." Over the last two columns, I have looked at the behaviors of some highfliers athletes and people who make their living drilling and transporting oil and gas; and those who have built their wealth in volatile fields like technology and real estate. In each of those cases, I asked financial experts to share their insights into the financial and investing mistakes that are often typical of these clients. In this column, I'm going to look at what the rest of us can learn from doctors and lawyers. DO NO HARM Doctors have a reputation among financial advisers for spending every bit of money they make. They earn a lot, after all, and figure they can work a long time. But doctors who engage in this type of spending can forget how hard it will be to maintain their lifestyle in retirement without millions of dollars saved. "Doctors can have a sense of entitlement," said Lewis Altfest, chief executive of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, who has a specialty in advising doctors. "Doctors are highly respected in their communities. They have historically been among the most gifted intellectually and they're not afraid to exercise it." While doctors are certainly smart, their medical ability does not necessarily translate to financial acumen. Mark Gurland, 59, a hand surgeon in New Jersey who is married to a psychiatrist, said he had a theory about doctors' financial behavior. Since most do not finish their internships and residencies until age 32 if they have gone straight through from college they have been living cloistered existences even as their college friends have been working for at least a decade. "When they're done, my feeling is, there is this repressed self sacrifice and when money appears, they're living in huge houses and driving the fanciest new cars," he said. "They have a lot of money they worked hard for, and they're spending it." On the investment side, he said, doctors often believe that their knowledge of medical issues translates into something seemingly simpler, like investing. Dr. Gurland, who has always been a saver, said he had been guilty of making investments on a tip or a hunch. A cardiologist friend persuaded him to invest in fiber optic cables a decade or so ago: he said he doubled his money and then lost almost all of it. When he invested in a company that was promoting a drug for hand surgeries, he thought he had a winner but lost money on that one as well. Now, he said, he defers to his adviser on investments and thinks of some of his most annoying patients who try to tell him what's wrong with them. "Every day, we see patients in today's world who seemingly know more about medical conditions than the doctor," he said. "Why? Because they went on the Internet and read about this." Mr. Erwin, the adviser, said he tried to offer doctors a financial plan that dealt with their desire for rewards. At the same time, he lets his clients know about the risks inherent in not saving and in trying to fit in time for investing when they have an all consuming job. "They're very methodical thinkers, but they're also extremely busy," Mr. Erwin said. He said he spent time coaching his doctor clients not to get swayed by a friend who thinks they should invest in something they know nothing about or has an opinion about timing the market. But doctors generally get two important things right. Doctors, particularly those with a unique specialty, buy disability insurance because they know that if they can't work as a hand surgeon, for example, their income will plummet, even if they can still work as a doctor in a different capacity. Given their high incomes, they can eventually be persuaded to defer a large portion of their income into retirement plans to lower their current tax bill. Mr. Altfest said he had clients contributing as much as 150,000 a year often in a defined benefit plan, but in many cases it took showing them how dire retirement could be if they didn't save. Yet those who have the bulk of their savings in retirement plans can end up with a different problem, Mr. Erwin said. Since the doctors never paid income tax on that money, it is taxed as ordinary income when they withdraw it. People who save in brokerage accounts, by contrast, pay the lower capital gains rate when they sell those securities. And most other professionals have nontax savings to balance the tax bill from their retirement account distributions. OBJECTIONS OVERRULED Lawyers can certainly be as busy as doctors, but they also chart their days in billable hours: giving up time to talk to financial advisers or to think about their financial situation can literally cost top litigators 1,000 an hour. "They want a strategy that they sign off on but that they're not going to have to micromanage," said Ross Gerber, chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, who said a third of his clients were litigators in the Los Angeles area. "Trust is huge. I don't think they're looking at their statements at all." That is not a practice any adviser would recommend, but it's just another area of their lives where lawyers delegate as much as they can, advisers said. And the difference between lawyers and everyone else, of course, is that they make so much money that advisers are willing to do the work for them. Like doctors, most lawyers spend a lot of money but also put a lot of it away for retirement. Brooks Herman, head of research at BrightScope, a company that rates retirement plans, said that when he looked at 401(k) plans by industry, lawyers had the strongest ones as a group: their plans had low fees and high average balances. But lawyers' income could be at risk when a portion of their compensation is deferred into plans sponsored by the law firm. As happened when Dewey LeBoeuf filed for bankruptcy last year, the money in those plans could be lost or reduced. Even at well run firms, the managing partners are concerned over how underfunded these partner plans are and how reluctant younger partners are to make sacrifices to support the plan. "One of the problems firms are encountering is a generational rift that is developing between folks in the 55 plus level who see the pot of gold and are committed to stay, and the 40 somethings looking at profitability growing more slowly," said Dan DiPietro, chairman of the law firm group at Citi Private Bank, which has 40,000 lawyers and 600 firms as clients. "You can almost view it as a Social Security issue on a microcosm level." Some firms, he said, are invoking clauses in the plans that allow them to limit the payouts based on revenue and profit. Such a shift, though, could cause retirement plan problems for the more spendthrift lawyers. "On the one hand, we're dealing with the top 2 percent of wealth in the country," Mr. DiPietro said. "But their financial I.Q. doesn't come close to their overall smarts level. There is a tendency to ignore things." While putting together a group of particular clients can benefit advisers as they look to build their business, the arrangement also benefits the clients: their adviser has seen all of this before. "None of this is rocket science," Mr. Erwin said. "It's managing behavior, and spending and saving."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Devon Teuscher knows, perhaps more than most, that being a dancer for American Ballet Theater is a waiting game. Now a soloist, she joined the company as an apprentice about 10 years ago. "There were so many times when I was like, should I jump ship and go somewhere else?" Ms. Teuscher, 28, said in a recent interview at the Metropolitan Opera House. "I thought, no, be patient. Stick it out. Keep working." It paid off. Among her leading roles this season is the dual part of Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake," in what will be her New York debut. "I always wanted to do it, but part of me also never believed that I would," she said. "I don't believe in myself as much as I probably should." Ms. Teuscher, nearly 5 foot 7, is a poised, long necked beauty who doesn't seem to be lacking in confidence in person, but the ballet world can send even the most self assured down a dark hole of doubt. After her first performance in Washington earlier this year, Ms. Teuscher burst into tears. "The bows were so surreal," she said. "There were so many shows that I had done as a member of the corps de ballet, standing in the very last line and watching the ballerina take her bows. To be that person in the front and to know what it takes to be in the back was very incredible." After her second performance Ms. Teuscher filled in for an injured Gillian Murphy she had more control over her emotions. But Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater's artistic director, didn't. "He told me, 'The first show you cried,'" she recalled. "'The second show you made me cry.'" Ms. Teuscher is the complete package, a mixture of astonishing technique, grandeur and ease. She doesn't show you how she's dancing a role; rather, she embodies it with a natural vivacity of breathtaking coordination and elegant strength. After he watched Ms. Teuscher perform in "Swan Lake," Mr. McKenzie was elated. "It's a rare bird no pun intended that can take a ballet like that with the technical demands and expectations and all of it and subjugate the technique to the dramatic through line and then deliver the technique like she's reciting poetry," he said. "There's no apparent effort." As Mr. McKenzie sees it, Ms. Teuscher is a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s, an era when dancers may not have had the technical capability that they do today but could "invoke and elicit a response from the observer that resonated as the truth. It feels like the pendulum is swinging back. Devon might be the symbol of that." Ms. Teuscher began dancing around 9 or 10; she wasn't suited for sports, but her parents knew she needed a reason to move. Ballet seemed to be a natural fit. She first trained with Deanna Doty in Champaign Urbana, Ill.; when her family moved to Burlington, Vt., she began to study under Alexander Nagiba, who taught her male variations. A natural jumper and a turner, Ms. Teuscher had no idea that the steps she was learning were intended for men. She breezed through them. For ballet dancers, the rank of soloist can be frustrating: In recent years, Ms. Teuscher's biggest fear was that she would grow stagnant as she had seen others do. "I was questioning, is this going to happen for me or not?" she said. "You can't be sure. You can't tell. I learned that you have to put it all out there now." But the past year has been momentous. She was the 2016 recipient of a Leonore Annenberg fellowship, which afforded her the ability to work with the acting coach Byam Stevens, as well as spend time at the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet. "To go somewhere where they don't know you at all is like having a clean slate," she said. "They'll call you out on things. I raise my eyebrows when I turn. No one told me that here." It also forced Ms. Teuscher to be receptive to any suggestion or criticism. "I was there to learn and to grow and to try anything they said," she explained. "The biggest thing I took from it was that I need to stay open. For the rest of my career." That was November. When she began work on "Swan Lake" in New York, she had a plan: Be as present as possible. "You never get your first one back," Ms. Teuscher said, referring to her debut in that ballet or any. "So just be there." In preparing for "Swan Lake," Ms. Teuscher was faced with a paradox. She discovered that she had more in common with Odette, the Swan Queen placed under a spell by an evil sorcerer, but was more comfortable with the virtuosic choreography of Odile, Odette's doppelganger, who seduces Prince Siegfried at the ball. "I love turning," she said. "I was like, great, this is easy. But I did not feel in any way confident in the persona of Odile. I have a really hard time feeling like a sensual woman." At the same time, the technical aspects of Odette intimidated her: "I can't do arabesque balances that's not my thing," she said, laughing. But Ms. Teuscher, who is Mormon, could relate to Odette's deep vulnerability. "I've always had questions about what is right and what is wrong and how to live your life," she said. "That inner struggle and those emotions are easier for me to tap into. The doubt, the questioning, the fear those are things I was constantly facing and still am." Ms. Teuscher didn't end up relocating to another ballet company, but four years ago, she did make an important change. She left Manhattan. "I was like, O.K.: I'll move to Brooklyn instead of going to Europe," she said. "That was huge." She now lives in Fort Greene, where she feels like she's part of a community. She takes her dog to a nearby park; her neighbors, nondancers, attend her performances. "It's healing to be where there are green trees and neighbors and people I like," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
And suddenly, he was standing on the "Seinfeld" stage, sweetly resisting smacking me in the head. We were several seasons in, and this was his debut as Frank Costanza, George's frustrated, cantankerous father. I remember sitting a few seats from him for the table reading, unabashedly thrilled he was there. From that first reading, it was clear that he and Estelle Harris, who played his wife, were magic. It was equally clear that working with them without constantly dissolving into laughter was going to be challenging. The internet is filled with blooper after blooper of all of us doing scenes with Jerry Stiller, unable to hold it together mostly due to that glorious, hang dog, put upon face that would contort in frustration and madness and the spontaneous, unexpected line readings that would come from him. But he didn't even have to speak all he had to do was look or gesture at us, and we'd come apart. And every time he'd apologize for it. As if he had done something wrong. As if he had somehow interfered with our work. Which only made us love him more. Despite the bluster and volatility that Jerry became famous for as both Frank Costanza and later as Arthur Spooner on "The King of Queens," the actual Jerry Stiller was a gentle, warm, humble and graceful gentleman. But on the day we met, I really wanted him to hit me in the head. We were rehearsing our first big scene together in the Costanza home. George had screwed something up and the beleaguered Frank was raging about it. I remember standing in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. Jerry crossed to me and delivered a great "Frank" zinger before passing into the kitchen. Somehow, I thought that it might be funny if he would try to strike me. I suggested to Jerry that if he used the heel of his palm to smack me on my forehead, I could pretend the blow was hard enough to send my head backward where I would bang it against the wooden panel of the door. I felt like the comedian in him liked the idea, but it might have been kinder to ask Jerry Stiller to chew glass. The very thought of raising his hand to me, of striking me, was anathema to him. I would bet that this kind, sweet man had never raised his hand in anger to anyone. And that the very thought of it was hurting his soul. He gave it a few feeble, halfhearted tries each followed by an apology and inquiry into whether I had survived unscathed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The Season 3 premiere of "Better Things" is about nothing, and it's about everything. Sam Fox (Pamela Adlon), a mid list actress who lives in Los Angeles, tries to squeeze into some old clothes she's outgrown. She takes her oldest daughter, Max (Mikey Madison), off to start college in Chicago. She has a scary flight back. She arrives home at night, discovers that her mother, Phyllis (Celia Imrie), has had a fender bender, and ends up, exhausted, helping her stressed out daughter Frankie (Hannah Alligood), with her homework. There is nothing like a traditional plot arc in the episode, nor is there in most episodes of "Better Things." And yet, as the confident new season unfolds starting Thursday on FX, you see the number of themes the premiere has casually established: aging, growing up, freedom, dependence, mortality, responsibility, the flowering and wilting of life, all at the same time. That's all just human existence, the labor of love. And there is nothing on TV today that represents it better or more gorgeously. Sam's college trip with Max, for instance, nails the tension of parenting between the desire to hover over your kids and to push them away. Sam takes Max to a bar and urges her to seize her new life, but when Max leaves her to go out with some friends, Sam calls her back: "Wait! I want my big, life, 'This Is Us' milestone moment goodbye hug!" But "This Is Us," this is not. Family dramas like that one often juice the proceedings with deaths and stunts and outlandish twists to compensate for the fact that they don't have the built in stakes of, say, a terrorism thriller. "Better Things," a comedy rooted in slice of life naturalism, trusts that the little stuff is enough. Sam is overwhelmed with little stuff. She's the spread too thin filling in a generational sandwich, a single mom raising three demanding daughters and keeping a wary eye on her own mother, who has a house across the way but may not be able to live independently much longer. Sam handles all this with a mix of free range mothering, brash humor and improv tough love. To defuse a fight between Frankie and youngest daughter Duke (Olivia Edward), she orders them to "get it all out" for exactly one minute: "Say the worst things that pop into your head, anything, and then it's over." They do, and Duke a sweet, sensitive bundle of nerves unloads such an amazing torrent of filth that they all collapse in punch drunk laughter. This scene will be studied in parenting texts for generations. Read an interview with Pamela Adlon and her TV daughters. Sam's parenting style bleeds over into other parts of her life. When there's a scare on her flight, she's the one who coaches a terrified stranger through it. On a movie set, she's the one who speaks up to the director about the unsafe working conditions, conscious that she's being that person she's acutely aware how her business treats "difficult" middle aged women but also that, if she doesn't say something, no one else will. I know, I know, nobody ordered one more freaking cable series about the lives of people in show business. But "Better Things" involves a rarely explored tier of acting life. Sam isn't a celebrity or a struggling nobody; she's successful enough to get recognized for her old TV roles, but not enough to get a fabulous lifestyle from it. Adlon herself has been a don't I know you from something actress for years. (One character recognizes Sam from "Ching of the Mill," a reference to Adlon's voicing Bobby Hill on "King of the Hill.") In "Better Things," she's bloomed into an earthy, sardonic lead, a perceptive writer and a director with an intimate eye. In the season premiere, she captures Max locking eyes with a sad faced woman in a store aisle, a tiny, haunting, unexplained moment that captures the wonder and terror in that moment of standing on the threshold of adult life. The 12 episode season (I've seen eight) is the first Adlon's made without her co creator, Louis C.K., who left after revelations of sexual misconduct with female comedians. It's kept its voice while taking on a structure that's ingeniously both impressionistic and more cohesive. The result is a series that's small and big at the same time. The episodes play out like series of vignettes, but serial arcs build: Phyllis's declining faculties, Sam's battles at work, her kids' growing and acting out and the general theme of aging. "This is normal," a doctor cheerfully tells Sam when she reports symptoms of menopause. "You're degenerating." Often, those others are disappointing men: The ghost of her late father (Adam Kulbersh) looms over this season, as does her ex husband (Mather Zickel), whose unreliability is a source of stress for Duke. "Don't worry," Sam tells her, "I'll hate him so you don't have to." In another show, that line might be an episode ending, cue the acoustic soundtrack catharsis. Here, it's just something Sam says while the family's out getting burgers. Life is busy. You get your "This Is Us" moments where you can squeeze them in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Emily Ting, who both wrote and directed the movie, occasionally hits on an interesting image, like the workers at their stations, but the biggest trouble here is in the writing. By the time the film gets around to showing what a character has felt, they have already told the audience twice and most likely another character has explained as well, just in case anyone missed the memo. Of the actors, only Ng resonates. His character is the least understanding and least understood, and, mercifully, Ng does not try to connect the dots between his mood swings. His performance suggests the film that might have been one in which characters are allowed to just be, without having to explain themselves. Not rated. In English and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Last April, the conductor Simone Young, who had not returned to the New York Philharmonic since her debut in 1998, saved the day by jumping in on short notice to conduct the orchestra in Mahler's Sixth Symphony. That's a formidable 90 minute score. But Ms. Young fared well, which was no surprise, given the depth of her experience with major orchestras and leading opera companies throughout Europe and her native Australia. And on Wednesday she was back at the Philharmonic, this time with a long scheduled program that showed her at her best. In a way, it felt like Ms. Young's real return. She began with Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" from "Peter Grimes." In that opera, these orchestral episodes serve as atmospheric transitions between scenes. In the Philharmonic's colorful performance, the sound of the violins, playing the high, wafting opening lines of the "Dawn" interlude, was bright, piercing and eerily beautiful. The fluttering woodwinds that break in came across like rustling, slightly ominous sea birds and mists. The deep, dark chords in the lower strings and brasses that emerge were like heaving sea currents.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
BRIAN BROOKS We're struggling through this and finding our way and finding new life in the studio and in life and on the stage. I'm confused about where the line between our friendship and our work together is drawn. How does it work between you, as dancer and choreographer? WHELAN I trust Brian's instincts. I think Brian is looking at me for who I am. And I feel free to say stuff along the way. BROOKS I come in with a conceptual idea, with music, movement material, research questions and phrases and sequences. But I'm definitely sensitive to who's in the studio. I pay attention to what comes back at me from the dancers. I teach a phrase and then Wendy bends it and pulls it. BROOKS It's call and response. Like, how do you translate this? She draws attention to aspects of my own work that I'm blind to. Her sense of suspension of time through the gaze and gesture is fundamental to the work. I'm more of a manic choreographer by choice the idea of moving as fast as you can until something stops you has been elemental for me. Do you use that opposition in the piece? BROOKS We're trying to find an equilibrium between us as we go through the same set of tasks. To have us walk forward side by side down to center stage, even that simple arrival is a way to get information about these two people. What intrigues you about Brian's work? WHELAN The intricacy of his folding and unfolding and winding and twisting. I love the arm work. I have these really long arms, and I have to say my arms are sometimes my favorite body part, so I like what he gives me to do with them. And I like the mental challenge of what he gives me to do. There are so many tiny details, and it's so three dimensional for a ballet dancer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO Uber's board has voted to move forward on proposals by two investment groups to buy shares in the ride hailing service and is considering a third offer, with any final decision set to affect who gains the upper hand at the company. Over the last week, the privately held company's board voted to take the next step on investment interest from SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. It is still considering an offer from a consortium led by Shervin Pishevar, an early investor in the company, to buy Uber shares from an existing investor. The board also earlier voted to go forward with a proposal from a coalition led by the Dragoneer Investment Group to buy stock from Uber's existing shareholders. The three proposals were described by four people close to the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The offers which are mostly focused on buying Uber stock from current shareholders, rather than issuing new shares are preliminary. At this stage, the investment groups will begin a due diligence process that could eventually lead to formal investment terms. The offers have emerged at a delicate time for Uber, which currently has no chief executive and is dealing with board and investor infighting. Travis Kalanick, Uber's co founder and chief executive, stepped down in June under pressure from investors. Since then, various factions of investors, board members and Mr. Kalanick have all battled to advance their own interests at the company. Yet even as Uber undergoes leadership troubles, the company which is largely funded by venture capital and private equity firms remains an attractive investment because it is the world's biggest ride hailing service and is growing fast. Uber itself does not need new money; the company has raised more than 10 billion in debt and equity and has some 5 billion in the bank. But the board considered the proposals for a variety of reasons. For some of Uber's existing shareholders, selling stock now could help lock in a hefty profit at a time when the company's future is unclear. One of the proposals could also lead to the ouster of one investor whose firm Benchmark has an Uber board seat and that some other board members believe is deliberately damaging the company. One concern has been whether a share sale could end up negatively affecting Uber's valuation, which stands at 68.5 billion and has made the company the most highly valued private start up in the world. Two of the three proposals include buying shares at a discount to Uber's valuation, but also provide a face saving way for the company to maintain its 68.5 billion value. Dragoneer's investment coalition wants to buy out shareholders at a discount to Uber's current valuation, and SoftBank is offering to buy shares at a lower valuation as well. But both groups would also purchase a small amount of new shares at Uber's current valuation to keep the company's value propped up on paper. The group led by Mr. Pishevar said it would purchase the shares at the current valuation. Whichever deal ultimately gets approved, this would be the first time that Uber has sold a large chunk of shares at a price that was the same on paper as a previous round of financing. A spokesman for Uber and a spokeswoman for Uber's board declined to comment, as did SoftBank and a spokeswoman for Mr. Pishevar. Dragoneer did not respond to a request for comment. SoftBank emerged as one of the first to be interested in buying Uber shares. For months, the conglomerate has angled to purchase the shares from existing investors at a discount to the company's current valuation. To let Uber preserve its 68.5 billion valuation on paper, SoftBank agreed to put a small amount of new money into the company at that price. Uber's board has been wary of the SoftBank proposal because of investments by its founder and chief executive, Masayoshi Son, in the ride hailing company's rivals in Asia. But Mr. Son and SoftBank could offer Uber strategic help in Southeast Asia, where the service has been spending heavily. The two sides have quietly worked for weeks to test whether there is enough interest from sellers to make a deal work. More recently, an investor coalition led by Dragoneer, which includes the private equity firm General Atlantic and others, has emerged with a deal that would protect Uber's valuation. The proposal incudes a small purchase of new shares at the current valuation, but the bulk of the investment would come through buying out existing shareholders at a discount via a so called Dutch auction an auction that begins with a high price that declines until a buyer says yes. But as a condition of the sale, Mr. Pishevar wants to buy out 75 percent of the shares held by Benchmark, one of Uber's earliest and largest investors. That would cause Benchmark to step down from its seat on Uber's board. Benchmark's relationship with Uber has deteriorated in recent months after the venture capital firm became one of the key players to push for Mr. Kalanick's resignation as C.E.O. Last week, Benchmark also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Kalanick to force him off Uber's board. In response, Mr. Pishevar on Friday issued a letter to Benchmark demanding that the firm surrender its seat on the Uber board and sell its Uber shares to outside investors. His investment proposal would reduce Benchmark's stake in the company to the point that it would remove itself from Uber's board. "While I publicly asked you to resign from the Uber board in light of the overall circumstances, I do have tremendous appreciation for your role in helping the company's development in the past," Mr. Pishevar said in a new letter to Benchmark on Saturday, which was obtained by The New York Times. A spokeswoman for Benchmark did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But on Twitter last week, Benchmark said that it was "incredibly optimistic about Uber's future," and that it believed the company could someday be worth 100 billion. But Benchmark also said that Uber would have to have the correct chief executive and be accountable to its riders, drivers and employees before it could be "one of the defining companies of our time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The A's won seven of their 10 games against the Astros in the regular season, but the dynamics will be much different in a best of five series with no days off. One by one they disappeared from the playoffs, like naughty children on Willy Wonka's factory tour. The Minnesota Twins plunged into the chocolate river. The Cleveland Indians turned into a blueberry. The Cincinnati Reds fell down a chute. The Chicago White Sox were shrunk on TV. There were so many Central Division teams in baseball's expanded playoffs last week that they outnumbered the fictional transgressions in the chocolate factory. The Milwaukee Brewers, the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals also got golden tickets, but never reached the glass elevator. Maybe they ate too many snozzberries. "We got punched in the teeth two games in a row, and now we're here," said the Cubs' Kris Bryant, suddenly finding himself in the off season after a swift elimination by the Miami Marlins on Friday. "I don't know, it's just the weirdest thing that I've experienced maybe in my whole life, definitely in my baseball career. It's just been strange, very strange." Those best of five series start Monday in neutral site parks, with the American League up first. The Houston Astros and the Oakland Athletics, rivals from the West division, will meet in Los Angeles at 4:07 p.m., Eastern time. Four hours later, two East division teams will play in San Diego when the Yankees face the Tampa Bay Rays. The National League series start on Tuesday: The East teams the Marlins and the Atlanta Braves will play in Houston, and the West teams the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers will clash in Arlington, Texas. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Only the Rays also faced a divisional opponent in the first round, dispatching Toronto in two games after winning six of their 10 regular season matchups. The Rays have had an even easier time with the Yankees so far this year, winning eight of 10. "Look, I don't think it's ever an advantage to play the New York Yankees, especially when they're ready," Tampa Bay Manager Kevin Cash said. "Saying that, we have a very good team as well. You'd rather have the familiarity, I think. If both teams have the familiarity, it's kind of even, so if I had to lean one way, it would be that." In the other three head to head matchups this season, the division champion also had a better record: The A's took seven of 10 from the Astros; the Dodgers six of 10 from the Padres; and the Braves six of 10 from the Marlins. On Sept. 9, the Braves overwhelmed the Marlins, 29 9, the first major league game ever with that score. That also happened to be the Braves' edge in games with the Marlins across the 2018 and 2019 seasons: 29 wins for Atlanta, nine for Miami. Those Marlins lineups were dismal, but this one is different. "It's quite drastically better, to be honest there's really not a break in their lineup," said Braves pitcher Josh Tomlin, adding that the Reds, who failed to score off the Braves in the first round, rely more on power. "Not saying the Marlins don't, but they're more of a scrappy team. They put together good at bats, they go the other way, they don't strike out a lot. They just have that knack, like little grinders." Tomlin is part of a Braves bullpen with a 3.50 earned run average this season, fourth best in the majors behind three other teams in the final eight: the A's (2.72), the Dodgers (2.74) and the Rays (3.37). But Atlanta's relievers worked more innings than every team but the also ran Boston Red Sox, which could give them an advantage now. But Cash who laughed at a suggestion that the Rays' creative bullpen usage gave them an edge pointed out an important difference. "Look at it this way," he said. "We have a four game series against New York, generally there's roster moves made within that series. You're not really able to do that. So the depth is definitely going to be tested. We'll probably take countless conversations and hours on how we're going to do right by our pitchers." A complete game or two would help, of course, but those have all but vanished; major leaguers combined for just 14 nine inning outings this season. Not a single pitcher remaining in the playoffs threw as many as 115 pitches in a game, and no Dodger even reached 100. San Diego's best starters, Mike Clevinger and Dinelson Lamet, have both topped 100 this season but both missed the first round with arm injuries. Even if they are activated for the division series, expect a lot of shuffling from the Padres, who used a total of 26 pitching appearances to cover 27 innings against St. Louis. "They all came in with an attitude that, 'I'm going to attack, I'm going to be in the zone and I'm going to get ahead of hitters,'" Padres catcher Austin Nola said after guiding nine pitchers through a shutout on Friday. "That was impressive to watch."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
David Bowie's music was a staple of the men's fashion shows that recently concluded in Europe, and it was back for the start of the men's fashion week in New York as the first model made his way down the runway for Joseph Abboud. The song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)," was originally released in 1982, five years before Mr. Abboud started his namesake collection. The designer went on to become an icon of American men's wear in the 1980s and 1990s, but he eventually lost the rights to his name. The last time he had a fashion show was 15 years ago. But after taking the job of chief creative director at Men's Wearhouse, now known as Tailored Brands, he was able to reclaim the Joseph Abboud label for himself in 2013. Many young men's wear enthusiasts may not have heard of Mr. Abboud. "But their dads have," the 65 year old designer said backstage, after a rehearsal for the show. Mr. Abboud waves at the crowd at the end of his fall 2016 collection show. He recalled showing his collection 24 years ago at the American Museum of Natural History, where he carried his infant daughter down the runway for his bow. "She's too big to carry now," he said. So when Mr. Abboud speaks about men's wear, he does so with authority. "Men's wear has never been this exciting," he said. "Not since the late '60s and early '70s, when there was this whole peacock revolution that changed the way men dress." Mr. Abboud, wearing a trim waist coat and silk scarf, described his new collection as an American take on London's Savile Row. "But we've pushed it to a theatrical level," he said. The suits on display Tuesday morning came with ruffled pocket squares or lapel pins with feathers tall enough to tickle the models' chins. The patterns were psychedelic mash ups of herringbone, paisley, tweed and velvet. The tradition minded tailors of Savile Row may not be so keen on such flourishes, and the Boston born Mr. Abboud is about as American as it gets. All of his suits are made at his factory in Massachusetts, where he employs 800 artisans, and some of the models walking his runway wore American flag print scarves. But he did have one British fan in attendance: the actor Russell Tovey, a star of the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge." He sat front row, next to the Bravo talk show host Andy Cohen, and he was wearing a Joseph Abboud turtleneck and suit tailored by Mr. Abboud himself at the brand's Madison Avenue store. "It was a massive treat," Mr. Tovey said backstage. "He's a legend. And the store is wonderful." After Mr. Abboud took his bow, many in attendance shuffled out and into the presentation of Stampd, a young Californian brand showing for the first time. The bomber jackets, tailored track pants and elongated sweats and tees looked much more like what was being worn by many of the fashionable guys in the crowd. But that is not something that would phase Mr. Abboud. "To me, there's nothing sexier than a guy in a well tailored suit," he said. "Sportswear is great, but not every designer can do tailored."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Last month, a camera phone video showing a husky gentleman thunderously slapping a young woman on a New York subway went viral, with more than 8.5 million views on YouTube to date. The brawl also reintroduced an infamous article of clothing. "You got a wack eight ball jacket that came out in 1990," said the young woman as she taunted the fellow rider, moments before the smack that was heard across the Internet. Memorialized in rap lyrics as an emblem of the '90s, the flamboyant color blocked jacket has inspired both reverence and revulsion for more than two decades. Most memorably, perhaps, it was mocked as deeply unhip in a "Seinfeld" episode, when worn by Elaine's doofus boyfriend. As the slap down proved, the eight ball jacket refuses to die peacefully. Like a leathery cicada, it makes its periodic return, bolstered by iconic simplicity and nefarious associations. First, there was a brief, but largely under the radar, resurgence in the mid Aughts. More recently, streetwear companies like Stussy and Supreme released jackets with the billiard ball. And last summer, T.I., the Atlanta rapper, wore it the video for "About the Money." On the Lower East Side, new red and black versions sell for 300 at Nick Son, a discount men's clothing store on Orchard Street. Next door, at S A Leathers, a fur collared eight ball jacket costs 250. "The retro kids love it," a salesman there said. At Procell, a vintage boutique on Delancey Street, an early red, yellow and green rendition manufactured by Phase 2 sold for 298 last month. The jacket's contemporary cachet lies between nostalgia and its goony, streetwise connotations. "An eight ball jacket is like colorful skin on a poisonous snake," said Daniel Baker, a comedian from the Bronx who performs as Desus. "It's nature's attempt at warning you that this person should be avoided." The original eight ball jacket was birthed in 1990 by Michael Hoban of North Beach Leathers, a shop in San Francisco. Part of a series emblazoned with dice and playing cards, the colorful 775 jacket flourished, perhaps because of unintended associations with cocaine ("eight ball" is slang for an eighth of an ounce). Worn by star athletes like Darryl Strawberry and Bobby Bonilla, it was imbued with bad boy brashness. Leaping on the trend, manufacturers spawned mutations. "As fast as you could make them, you could sell them," said Daniel Day, better known as Dapper Dan, the Harlem haberdasher who outfitted celebrities like Mike Tyson and Big Daddy Kane. His high end eight ball jackets cost 1,200. "I had a version for workers and a version for bosses," said Mr. Day, who credited Teddy Riley, the New Jack Swing innovator, with popularizing the look in New York. But there was a dark side to the flashy gear. During one month in 1990, two young New Yorkers were murdered for eight ball jackets, including Rashid Smith, a Brooklyn teenager. The fad waned not from violence, but from oversaturation. Following a wave of cheaper knockoffs, the jacket's prestige evaporated. "That whole New York mentality was about being as unique as possible," said Christopher Martin of Kid 'n Play, the rap duo who starred in the "House Party" movies. "Plus, the eight ball joints didn't have that butter soft leather." Within the hip hop set, the jacket sunk from prized to passe. Soon it was a punch line aimed at unstylish stooges. "Bogus brothers making albums when they know they can't hack it/'Cause they lyrics is played like eight ball jackets," rapped Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest on the 1992 track "Show Business." The iconography still carries a stigma. "I view it as dangerous from a fashion standpoint," said Frank Sinatra Jr., a founder of Stussy, a brand whose references to the eight ball have ranged from T shirts in 1989 to baseball jackets and sneakers this year. "We do it tongue in cheek. You cannot take the eight ball seriously." But the maligned garment, if nothing else, is a survivor. "These jackets have no place on this planet," said Spike Feresten, who wrote the "Seinfeld" episode mocking the eight ball jacket. His motivation, he said, was finally killing off the trend. "Obviously, it didn't work," he said. "It's like herpes. It will always be around and some people will have it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. As you drive east along Texas State Highway 4, it looks like a giant, shiny and pointy grain silo is rising out of the scrubby flatland at the tip of southern Texas. But it is the first version of a spaceship design that Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and founder of the rocket company SpaceX, hopes will be humanity's first ride to Mars. Within a month or two, he says optimistically, this prototype of the Starship spacecraft without anyone aboard will blast off to an altitude of 12 miles, then return to the ground in one piece. "It's going to be pretty epic to see that thing take off and come back," Mr. Musk said late on Saturday at a SpaceX facility outside Brownsville, Tex., where Starship is being built. Starship, by comparison, is 164 feet high and 30 feet in diameter. It will be paired with a behemoth booster stage called the Super Heavy, and the full rocket will be 387 feet tall and able to lug more than 220,000 pounds to orbit. That would be about as powerful as the Saturn 5 rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon 50 years ago, but able to fly again and again and again. By making rockets more like other forms of transportation where the vehicle is not thrown away after one trip, the cost of going to space could plummet. Mr. Musk said an orbital test flight of a refined Starship prototype and the Super Heavy booster could come in less than six months. "I think we could potentially see people flying next year," he said. Mr. Musk, who spoke to a couple of reporters after the public portion of the event, said SpaceX could still meet timelines he set out a few years ago landing a Starship on the moon and Mars within the next few years. Mr. Musk, however, has a history of setting aspirational schedules that turn out to be too optimistic. Despite such futuristic ambitions, the Starship, made of stainless steel, reflected an imperfect, handcrafted sheen of an earlier era. "It's like you drove into a Flash Gordon movie or something," said Andrew Goetsch, who lives in the nearby hamlet of about 30 homes and is thrilled to have a front row view of Mr. Musk's space dreams, a sentiment not shared by all of his neighbors. "It's not often they build a rocket where you can get close enough for it to fall on you," Mr. Goetsch said. There are good engineering reasons for the choice of material. Mr. Musk originally had planned to use high tech carbon fiber, but switched to denser stainless steel. It is cheaper, easier to work with, becomes stronger in the ultracold temperatures of space and has a higher melting temperature that can more easily withstand the heat of re entry into Earth's atmosphere. For the last three years, Mr. Musk has repeatedly revised the design trimming the size, changing the heat shield, adjusting the shape of the fins. "It took quite a while to just frame the problem," Mr. Musk said. Once the SpaceX engineers settled on the current stainless steel version, the first two prototypes (the other was built in Florida) have been put together at a breakneck pace. "Ten months ago, there was a lot of barren dirt and nothing," Mr. Goetsch, the Boca Chica neighbor, said of the SpaceX site where Starship now stands. In August, SpaceX tested a simpler prototype, Starhopper, with a single engine, which Mr. Musk earlier compared to a flying water tower. It rose to an altitude of 500 feet, flew sideways and then set down at a different spot. What is more puzzling to them is how SpaceX can make money with Starship. Mr. Musk agreed that it was far larger than necessary to launch current satellites. For now, Mr. Musk conceded, there is not much of a commercial market "not that's especially relevant" for Starship to fill. Starship could be used for deploying SpaceX's Starlink internet service, Mr. Musk said. The company hopes that will provide a major source of revenue, despite fears over the impact of placing thousands of satellites in orbit. A single Starship launch could carry about 400 Starlink satellites. He said SpaceX was continuing to study using Starship as a speedy likely expensive way to travel around the world, New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes. "It's basically an I.C.B.M. that lands," Mr. Musk said. "Nothing gets there faster than a I.C.B.M. It's just minus the nuclear bomb and add landing." He said the company has the financing to follow through on the plans, at least for the initial phases. "I think we have a path to getting the ship to orbit and even doing a loop around the moon," Mr. Musk said. "Maybe we need to raise some more money to land on the moon or land on Mars." The ultimate goal is for Starship to take people to Mars. He argues that people moving to another planet would serve as an insurance policy for humanity's survival. Mr. Musk still thinks Mars colonists could set off in the next decade. He already has one paying customer for a trip nearer to Earth. Neither SpaceX nor Boeing, which also received a contract for transporting NASA astronauts, appears to be on track to launch crews this year. A SpaceX capsule exploded during a ground test in April with no crew aboard. On Saturday, Mr. Musk responded that the "vast majority" of SpaceX's resources are focused on its existing spacecraft, including Crew Dragon, and setting launch dates was up to NASA at this point. "The NASA administrator was like 'What's going on? Are you not working on Crew Dragon or something?' in that tweet," Mr. Musk said during the post event interview. "Actually, there's nothing more we can do from a hardware standpoint. The hardware is basically done. It's really just a whole bunch of NASA reviews, essentially. Speed up the NASA reviews, we can launch sooner." If Starship does start flying soon, and especially if it lands on the moon, that could amplify arguments that NASA could save money by buying rides to deep space from SpaceX rather than continuing development on its own Space Launch System rocket, the key component in plans to return NASA astronauts to the moon by 2024. S.L.S. could cost 1 billion per launch and plans are to fly it less than once a year. NASA has already spent billions on S.L.S., first announced in 2011, and Orion, the crew carrying capsule, although this has not stopped appropriators in Congress from continuing to finance work on it. The first S.L.S. flight has been delayed for years; it is not expected to lift off until 2021. The first moon landing by astronauts is to occur on the third launch of S.L.S. At Boca Chica, the work accelerates. Mr. Musk on Saturday discussed his desire to manufacture rocket propellant on site, instead of trucking it in. Not all of the neighbors, who can easily see the rocket from their yards, are happy. "It used to be that if a car drove down the street, that was noisy," said Cheryl Stevens, who like many of her neighbors came here because it was isolated surrounded by a wildlife refuge, minutes away from the beach. Now, she said, there is round the clock construction. SpaceX has now decided it would be better for residents of Boca Chica Village not to be there. The company this month sent letters to Ms. Stevens and other homeowners offering three times the value of the property. The letter said SpaceX wanted an answer within two weeks and that it was not willing to negotiate the price. "They want everyone gone," said Gale McConnaughey, who has owned his home here for 13 years. He and others said the appraisals lowballed the value of their homes. SpaceX has now extended the deadline by three weeks and some residents are talking with the appraiser to adjust the numbers. But Mr. McConnaughey expected that SpaceX would eventually push them away. "What can you do?" he said. "You can't stop progress."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
At first the news seemed to follow a familiar, exhilarating pattern. Late on Thursday, two new albums with material by Beyonce credited to the name Queen Carter appeared on Spotify and Apple Music. Social media exploded, assuming that Beyonce, the master of the surprise album release, had repeated her magic trick yet again. But the story quickly unraveled. Fans noticed that the albums were made up primarily of old tracks and demo recordings, and the albums were taken down. The Beyonce album releases, it turned out, were a hoax, apparently uploaded to Apple and Spotify through Soundrop, a do it yourself distribution service that caters to young, independent musicians. Unauthorized recordings online are nothing new, of course, but are usually found on YouTube or on file sharing networks. Yet the fact that two albums by one of the biggest stars in the world were available on Spotify and Apple two giant online outlets long seen by the music industry as bulwarks against piracy is largely unheard of. (It did follow the release this month of demo recordings by the R B singer SZA, which, the head of her label said on Twitter, had been "stolen and leaked.") For Spotify in particular, which has made moves to allow independent artists to upload music directly to its platform bypassing the usual controls of a label or distribution company the Beyonce and SZA leaks point to a possible risk for the company in maintaining its always fraught relations with the big music conglomerates.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
PARIS In a season of fashion world uncertainty like the one just passed, with questions percolating Who will end up at Dior? What is happening at Lanvin? What will be the impact of the new direction at Balenciaga? drama reigns. That keeps the system churning along; fashion runs on the stuff. But to focus on only the biggest names, the biggest changes and the biggest questions is, inevitably, to miss many of the worthy, quieter labels. That struck a viewer at Vanessa Seward's unostentatious, pretty show (though unostentatious is not always the word that springs to mind when a metallic gold jumpsuit comes galloping out). Ms. Seward, a veteran of Chanel and a former creative director of Azzaro, is a fashion lifer rather than a touted tyro, and her namesake collection, backed by the casual company A.P.C., took up residence on the runway early last year. Her collections run to the realistic rather than the fantastic, but they are filled with appealing items: elegant long coats, no nonsense midlength skirts, smart denim and gaucho tailoring. Those appealing items fill her stores, too, which are popping up at great speed: The first, in the First Arrondissement of Paris, opened in September, quickly followed by a second in the Third Arrondissement this year. Two more, on the Left Bank in Paris and in Los Angeles, are on the way. Quieter in presentation (secreted in an upstairs studio on Place Andre Malraux, without a formal showing) was Hillier Bartley, the collection by the former Marc by Marc Jacobs creative team of Katie Hillier and Luella Bartley. Their designs are brash where Ms. Seward's are coy Ms. Bartley spoke of the influence of 1970s rockers, "wolves in women's clothing," as she called them, and how to translate their devil may care embrace of women's wear back into women's wear but grand. There is humor and spark to the collection (Ms. Bartley lovingly referred to an oversize, rust colored mohair sweater with leopard elbow patches as "the orangutan"), which is still in limited distribution but rapidly growing. Ms. Bartley, who is a longtime industry veteran and the partner of David Sims, the fashion photographer, is well aware of the line to be straddled between salable clothes and those made for magazine pages. The goal, she said, is "trying to keep that balance of something you want to wear and want to shoot."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Almost a year ago, Jeff Bezos hinted that Saudi Arabia had played a role in The National Enquirer's 11 page expose of his affair with the Los Angeles television personality Lauren Sanchez. In making the case in a post on the website Medium, Mr. Bezos noted that his newspaper, The Washington Post, had published the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and had also covered the kingdom's suspected role in his murder. In the post, Mr. Bezos said he had retained the security expert Gavin de Becker to investigate how the tabloid had obtained his text messages. This week, a forensic analysis commissioned by Mr. Bezos was made public, and it concluded with "medium to high confidence" that his iPhone X had been hacked after he received a video from a WhatsApp message sent to him from an account reportedly belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, with whom the billionaire had swapped contacts at a dinner in Los Angeles. The Bezos report, compiled under Mr. de Becker by the digital security firm FTI Consulting, was so juicy that it overwhelmed traditional journalistic skepticism at some news outlets. The details were hard to resist: an allegedly murderous crown prince, the world's richest man and his intimate texts splashed across the pages of a supermarket tabloid that has ties to Prince Mohammed and a longtime Bezos detractor, President Trump. In fact, the report did not definitively link the hacking to the Enquirer expose. Months of reporting by The New York Times and other publications, including information that has emerged in recent days, appears to refute the notion that The Enquirer, owned by American Media Inc., received the information for the expose from a foreign hack of Mr. Bezos' phone. The hacking of an American by a foreign leader would count as an affront to national sovereignty and security under normal protocols. It also has legal implications: American Media is under the watch of federal law enforcement officials in New York, who have agreed not to prosecute the company for its role in aiding President Trump's 2016 campaign as long as it does not break the law. The widespread coverage of the report also has personal implications for Mr. Bezos, who has achieved something of a coup in this latest bit of news. On Feb. 7, weeks after The Enquirer's expose appeared in supermarket racks, Mr. Bezos published the Medium article suggesting a possible connection between Saudi Arabia and the tabloid scoop. He noted that The Post was energetically covering Mr. Khashoggi's murder by Saudi assassins weeks after he wrote the last in a series of columns sharply critical of the crown prince, who the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded had ordered his death. About two weeks after Mr. Bezos' Medium post, Mr. de Becker hired FTI Consulting to do the forensic analysis of the billionaire's iPhone. In March, Mr. de Becker said he had "high confidence" that Saudi Arabia had hacked Mr. Bezos' phone. The FTI Consulting report that was made public this week did not offer evidence of a link between the hacking and the Enquirer story. American Media has said that it obtained information about the affair from Ms. Sanchez's brother, Michael Sanchez, a Hollywood talent agent whom people at The Enquirer have described as a longtime source of information and tips. Mr. Sanchez and American Media executed a nondisclosure agreement on Oct. 18, 2018, "concerning certain information, photographs and text messages documenting an affair between Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez," according to a contract between the two parties reviewed by The New York Times. Eight days later, Mr. Sanchez granted American Media the right to publish and license the text messages and photographs he had provided in exchange for 200,000, according to the contract and four people with knowledge of the arrangement. 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 single source of our reporting has been well documented," American Media said in a statement. "In September of 2018, Michael Sanchez began providing all materials and information to our reporters. Any suggestion that a third party was involved in or in any way influenced our reporting is false." After federal agents and prosecutors examined allegations of wrongdoing by American Media in connection with the Bezos story last year, the company provided evidence showing them that Ms. Sanchez had provided text messages and compromising photos of Mr. Bezos to her brother, who passed them along to the tabloid, according to four people with knowledge of the situation. That does not preclude the possibility that Saudi Arabia could have sent other useful information to The Enquirer. Nor were Mr. Bezos and his investigators off base in suspecting a possible link between the tabloid and the kingdom. American Media and Saudi Arabia had both tried to build relationships with Mr. Trump, and one way to the president's heart could have been an attack on Mr. Bezos, whom Mr. Trump once referred to as "Jeff Bozo" in a Twitter post. At the same time, the American Media chairman David J. Pecker sought business opportunities and financing in Saudi Arabia. He met with Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia in 2017 after attending a White House dinner with a well connected contact of the crown prince. In March 2018, American Media published a 97 page glossy magazine, "The New Kingdom," essentially a promotional brochure for the crown prince and the nation. Starting in September 2017, The Post had published columns by Mr. Khashoggi in which he excoriated Prince Mohammed for "unbearable repression," "behaving like Putin" and "squeezing" the Saudi news media. Mr. Bezos, who had sought to build data centers in the desert kingdom before Mr. Khashoggi's murder, met Prince Mohammed in person at a dinner in Los Angeles in April 2018. The two chatted and exchanged contacts. Mr. Bezos' forensic team said that Prince Mohammed sent Mr. Bezos the suspect video shortly afterward. The relationship between Mr. Bezos and the Saudis deteriorated after Mr. Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. The Post demanded answers amid a growing consensus in the intelligence community that Prince Mohammed was involved. Mr. Sanchez has said that The Enquirer was already onto the story about the affair before he discussed it with the tabloid, suggesting there was another source. Saudi Arabia has said it had nothing to do with it and has also called suggestions it hacked Mr. Bezos' phone "absurd." Two people with knowledge of The Enquirer's reporting process said that its staff started trailing Mr. Bezos after one of its reporters received a tip on Sept. 10, 2018, from Mr. Sanchez that a well known billionaire was having an affair with an actress. Mr. Sanchez didn't disclose their identities, but the tabloid staff suspected he was referring to Mr. Bezos. On Oct. 18, The Enquirer's photographers snapped pictures of Mr. Bezos with Ms. Sanchez. That same day Mr. Sanchez and American Media executed their agreement to prevent him from shopping the story elsewhere. The following month, according to the FTI Consulting report, which was reviewed by United Nations experts, Mr. Bezos received another message on his phone from the crown prince, this one featuring a photograph of a woman with a resemblance to Ms. Sanchez and a misogynistic joke: "Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree." FTI interpreted the message as a veiled suggestion that the crown prince knew about his relationship with Ms. Sanchez, which had not yet been made public, according to the report. At the time, American Media had just emerged from a cloud of suspicion for its role in buying and burying information from the former Playboy model Karen McDougal about an affair she said she had with Mr. Trump. After American Media executives admitted that they had effectively paid her hush money to help Mr. Trump's campaign in violation of federal election law they cooperated with an investigation into the payment. Federal prosecutors in New York agreed not to prosecute, at least as long as the company did not break the law again. The Enquirer's story about the Bezos affair, including intimate text messages sent by Mr. Bezos and photographs of the couple on the terrace of what the tabloid described as Ms. Sanchez's "love nest," upset the company's majority investors, according to two people with knowledge of American Media. In his Medium post, Mr. Bezos revealed that his team had received threatening emails from American Media's chief content officer, Dylan Howard, that described revealing photos of Mr. Bezos that the tabloid had yet to publish. In the letter from Mr. Howard and a second letter from an American Media lawyer that Mr. Bezos included in his account, the company said that it would not publish the compromising selfies if Mr. Bezos publicly stated that he did not believe that the tabloid publisher was politically motivated in publishing the expose. Mr. Bezos called the offer "extortion and blackmail" in his Medium post. He added that he was motivated "to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out," and Mr. de Becker went to work. The evidence in the resulting report shows evidence of Saudi intrusions into his iPhone X. But a direct link from the kingdom to the tabloid tale remains elusive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Ann Gish Phillips in her Manhattan showroom in 2012. "The philosophy of the store is to do what I feel like," she said when it opened in 2011. Ann Gish Phillips, a bedding and textiles designer whose luxury home goods company sold more than 1,500 products in stores around the globe, died on Aug. 2 at her home i n North Salem, N.Y. She was 70 . Her daughter, Jane Gish, said the cause was lung cancer. Mrs. Gish Phillips started her brand with a set of washable silk place mats and napkins before rapidly expanding into bedding and, later, furniture and home decoration accouterments, all under the brand name Ann Gish. Department stores and online retailers carry her wares, and her designs have been used in Broadway shows, including the most recent production of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," as well as in films and on television shows. Her products were given their most prominent display in 2011, when Mrs. Gish Phillips opened a 4,000 square foot store in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. She immediately declared her unconventionality. "The philosophy of the store is to do what I feel like," she told The New York Times after the opening. She added, "One bed might stay for six months; another might change in a week." Jane Gish, who recently took her mother's place as chief executive of Ann Gish Inc., said Mrs. Gish Phillips had never looked at trend reports or at what her competition was doing, quoting her as saying, "I don't need to. I know what I like." She later launched more moderately priced bedding lines; most of her high end products were washable, distinguishing them from the competition. The Flatiron store closed this summer after its lease expired , but the company hopes to open a new showroom in Manhattan, Jane Gish said. The company, which is private, would not disclose sales or revenue figures. Before starting her business Mrs. Gish Phillips had worked as an interior designer in Los Angeles in the 1980s, running a firm called Ann Gish Associates. When, by her account, she decided that the home furnishings market did not have what she was looking for, she decided to fill the void. She brought her first products place mats and napkins made from Dupioni silk to the Mottura home decor showroom in Los Angeles, which was then owned by Gary McNatton. "I was totally taken by them," said Mr. McNatton, who is now a co owner of Hudson Grace , a home decor shop in San Francisco. "Silk is a much more sturdy material than you'd ever imagine," he recalled her explaining, "and it is much more for the every day than the precious material that we think it is." Mr. McNatton ordered several dozen of each sample and asked that they be delivered the next week. Mrs. Gish Phillips was completely unprepared. "She hadn't ordered the fabric, she hadn't washed the fabric, she hadn't gotten sewers," Jane Gish said. "It was so by the seat of her pants." Mrs. Gish Phillips tried her hand at sewing to fill the order herself before sending out calls for help. Neighbors, friends of friends and even the family's local dry cleaners came to assist with the sewing. The order was filled, and Mrs. Gish Phillips's new career was on its way. Ann Gish Inc. was established in 1991. Her business was a family affair. Jane began working at her mother's company after studying linguistics at New York University, "not counting basically stamping envelopes in her office when I was 12," she said. And Ann's husband, David Phillips, is the chief financial officer. They worked together for more than two decades. Ann Josephine Gangel was born on Oct. 1, 1948, in Manhattan to Melvin and Jane ( Kaufman ) Gangel. Her father managed a department store in the city. Years later, her mother owned a Southern California beauty parlor chain called Miss Haircut. Mrs. Gish Phillips spent most of her young life in New York City . After her parents divorced , Ann, her two sisters and her mother moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., where Ann spent two years at Beverly Hills High School. Her mother would marry a total of five times , the first four marriages ending in divorce. One husband, David Peters, adopted Ann and her two sisters, Ilene and Geraldine, giving them the surname Peters . Ann regularly sneaked out of the house at night as a teenager and used LSD , her daughter said. She was eventually sent back East to live with her grandmother in Purchase, N.Y., and finish high school at the Walden School in Manhattan. She would later attribute her obsession with color to LSD's hallucinogenic effects. After spending a few months at Boston University, she dropped out and returned to New York City, where she worked for a time as a TV and film producer , her family said . She met her first husband, Paul Rubinstein, while working at an advertising agency in the late 1960s. The couple had two sons before divorcing several years later. She married Walter Gish (Jane's father) in 1980. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, in 1993, but Ann kept the surname Gish.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
SAN FRANCISCO Bird, a start up that rents out electric scooters, is being valued at 2.5 billion in a new funding round led by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. The funding puts Bird's valuation slightly above the 2.3 billion that it was pegged at last year. At the time, the 2.3 billion figure represented double the start up's previous valuation, as venture capital investors fought to pour money into scooter start ups. But that eagerness has deflated over the past year as investors have questioned whether the scooter companies can make money. The scooters have been subject to vandalism and theft, and early models were not very durable and lasted only a few months. Furthermore, after the recent tepid initial public offerings for Uber and Lyft, investors have thought twice about pouring money into unprofitable transportation start ups with untested business models. Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. The total capital that Bird will raise in the new fund raising has not been finally decided, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Bird said last year it had raised a total of 418 million in funding.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Top, from left, all gender restrooms at the Whitney; the University of Utah; Founding Farmers restaurant in Washington, D.C. Center, from left, the Folk Art Museum; Civic Hall; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Bottom, from left, the Whitney; Hampshire College; Barnard College. Before the Whitney Museum of American Art moved to its new location in Lower Manhattan, it hosted a discussion about what it means for a museum to be a safe and welcoming space. Providing restrooms for everyone on the gender spectrum was near the top of the list. "We invited artists of all gender identifications in," said Danielle Linzer, the director of access and community programs, "and we heard loud and clear that it was something they really needed access to. Rather than being euphemistic, we decided to be direct." The signs at the new building say "All Gender Restroom," and Ms. Linzer has observed women wondering aloud, "You mean I can go in the men's room?" The Whitney isn't alone in being challenged to rethink one of the most basic uses of public space. With the issues of serving openly in the military and same sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community particularly the "T" part. Schools and universities (including Johns Hopkins and Michigan State), museums (like the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City), restaurants both trendy and modest (such as the Pass Provisions in Houston and the Midtown Cafe in Santa Cruz, Calif.) and even the White House (in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) are recasting the traditional men's/women's room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary. Part of the reason is legal. Seattle, Berkeley, Santa Fe, Austin and Philadelphia are among the cities that have passed laws requiring single user all gender restrooms. Philadelphia has an online Gotta Go Guide showing the location of such facilities, and there's an app, Refuge Restrooms, that does the same nationwide. Philadelphia businesses will have 90 days to become compliant, said Helen L. Fitzpatrick, director of the mayor's office of L.G.B.T. affairs. "But the goal is that nobody should ever receive a fine," she said. "I will be going out and using the law as a teachable moment." Introducing a new lexicon is part of the process. In September, Ms. Fitzpatrick visited a bar with an offensive sign about Caitlyn Jenner in the window. After she spoke to the owners, a new sign went up: "Cis gender white men learned something new today!!" In September, the school board in Elko County, Nev., voted to keep transgender students out of restrooms corresponding to their gender identity. In Wisconsin, two state legislators want to require school boards to designate restrooms as exclusive to one gender, and gender is defined as the "physical condition of being male or female." (In neighboring Minnesota, the Democratic led State Senate defeated a similar bill.) And on Tuesday in Houston, voters rejected a measure known as the bathroom ordinance, which would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. But some change is taking place because organizations believe it simply makes sense. Samuel Bass is the principal of Miraloma Elementary School in San Francisco, where restrooms for the younger grades are now all gender, and the remaining facilities will be converted. "For too long in K through 12, we have asked every single student to conform to one or the other binary," he said. "We had several students on the gender spectrum, and decided it was the right thing to do. It doesn't affect other students. Children don't know gender norms until we as adults teach them. With any change, parents have questions. When they realize that it's just like it is at home, it's not a big deal." Many transgender people report planning their days around where and when they can go, enduring bladder infections if they hold it in, risking harassment or violence if they don't. Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center, an L.G.B.T. resource group at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, recently completed the first national study of college students who identify as something other than male or female. Guess what almost everyone named as the biggest issue? Even when the intention is inclusivity, the reality is complicated. Under the New York City Human Rights Law, people must be allowed to use the single sex restroom consistent with their gender identity. But strict plumbing codes or landmark status mean that businesses can't just change the signage and then be in compliance. Multiple codes regulate the requirements, depending on the type of building, the year it was built and occupancy. In some cases, the code stipulates that a venue is allowed to have all gender facilities rather than being required to do so, reflecting a shift from economic to societal considerations. Broadway theaters are still grappling with the issue, but the Theater at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles had all gender restrooms for the red carpet premiere of the Emmy winning television series "Transparent." (The digital series about a father transitioning to being a woman introduced a guerrilla campaign in the lead up to the awards in which the production company covered up gender specific signs on the doors of single stall restrooms in restaurants, replacing them with signage that said "Be Transparent.") Public restrooms didn't become commonplace in this country until the late 19th century. A cholera epidemic during the Civil War made people realize that it was inappropriate to throw the contents of a chamber pot out the window, and generated a deep commitment to public hygiene. Ever since their introduction, restrooms have been a curious ground zero for civil rights, whether for African Americans or people with disabilities. Discrimination against transgender people has brought the issue into sharp new focus. But the idea of shared restrooms is not new, as fans of "Ally McBeal" will remember (even though the facilities at the Cage and Fish law firm often seemed to be commandeered for frolicking with Jon Bon Jovi or Robert Downey Jr.). That fictional multi stall restroom gets more complicated in real life, especially if it's the only option; some places are taking the less controversial route of single user facilities, and some are covering their bets by continuing to provide traditional male or female restrooms, too. As with gender self identification, even the language is tricky: gender neutral, all gender, gender inclusive, gender open, unisex ... all are in the mix. Barnard College uses the term "Gender Inclusive" on restroom doors that also show icons of toilets and dripping faucets. (Barnard's efforts to educate the campus included a flier that proclaimed, "We want everyone to be able to pee in peace.") The University of Nevada, Las Vegas chose a colorful commode and the words "Gender Neutral" and "Unisex," although these terms meet with less than enthusiasm in the transgender community. "To me, saying gender neutral is like saying colorblind," said Genny Beemyn,of the Stonewall Center. "We see gender. To deny it is to deny people's reality. We're trying to increase recognition of the diversity of gender rather than to erase it." The term "all gender" seems to be in favor. That's what it says on restrooms at the New School in New York City, along with pictographs of the plumbing inside. "I never thought I'd be talking so much about urinals," said Gail Drakes, director of social justice initiatives. In a state not generally regarded as a bastion of progressive thinking, there are all gender restrooms at the University of Utah. Illinois State University also decided on that signage, with a somewhat prolix addendum: "Anyone may use this restroom regardless of gender, gender identity or expression." "We're not changing the purpose of the facility," said M. Shane McCreery, director of equal opportunity, ethics and access at the school, "just acknowledging that we recognize everyone and want them to be included." It's unsurprising that college students are pushing the agenda of all gender access. The tectonic plates of corporate America shift more slowly. The policy at Target is that "family" restrooms suffice for now. Starbucks issued a boilerplate assertion that "a coffeehouse should be a welcoming, inviting and familiar place." (Translation: Some locations have all gender restrooms, and there may be more.) But Nike World Headquarters in Oregon is using a simple black and white image of a toilet, created by a 28 year old self described social justice advocate named Sam Killermann. He was motivated by the prevalence of a "Victor/Victoria" stick figure wearing a divided skirt/pants that is widely loathed by those who identify as gender nonconforming and stress that they don't feel like half of anything. "People were terrified of this idea," Mr. Killermann said, "and the conversation kept coming back to: What do we put on the door? I kind of snapped, not in a bad way, and did a blog post making fun of the half woman/half man sign, hoping it would illustrate how absurd it was and the very real issue of people being safe." A Brooklyn company called SmartSign, which used that hermaphrodite ish graphic, contacted Mr. Killermann, offering to buy the rights to his toilet sign (and, by the way, he's perfectly O.K. with being known as the toilet sign guy). He said the company could have it free. "They took that sentiment," he said, "and one upped me, and started giving it away." So far, the company has donated the toilet sign to churches, hospitals, libraries, public school districts, food co ops, one circus and 128 colleges. In many parts of the world, W.C. (water closet) is already a well established all gender sign, but there are new variations from as far away as Kenya, where the door to each restroom at the Angama Mara Safari Lodge shows boy and girl Maasai warriors. The White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia had an original solution: two restrooms designated for Democrats and Republicans, another two for Pointers and Setters. (A little joke about anatomy get it?) "Customers loved the idea," the former owner Judy Wicks said, "although it was confusing to foreigners. Tourists from Japan, where the culture is so polite, would stand there trying to figure out where to go." There is no mistaking who can go where at the Founding Farmers restaurant in Washington, D.C.; its restroom doors read Men, Women and the Rest of Us. "Men are generally pigs in restrooms, and women are nice and sensible," the owner Dan Simons said. "That's where I started. I have two restrooms right next to each other, so I labeled one 'Women' and the other 'Everyone.' Then I received a letter saying that the restrooms were discriminatory because women had their own. "I realized that for some people this is a stressful topic," he added, "and I thought: 'Why don't I make it clear? We need a label that says no label.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Margaret 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 miss gossip Dawn French in the first episode of "The Trouble With Maggie Cole." 'The Trouble With Maggie Cole' When to watch: Sunday at 8 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings.) Dawn French stars as Maggie in this light six part drama. A local historian, she is delighted to be interviewed on the radio, only to accidentally spill all her small town's secrets and not just the juicy stuff, some hurtful stuff, too. "Residents of tight knit British community deal with emotional fallout from personal catastrophe" is usually reserved for murder shows, so it's nice to see a lot of well earned seething without the horrible violence. If you remember what it was like as a kid to run into your mom's friend at the grocery store and then stand there for 20 minutes while learning lots of dirt, or if you just want to wear tasteful tunics and feel free, watch this. India Oxenberg, as seen in "Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult." 'Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult'; 'The Vow' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on Starz; Sunday, 10 p.m., HBO. HBO's nine part series about Nxivm ends this weekend, and Starz's better four part series begins. While that might be cult overkill for some, the shows' different approaches reflect some of the exact social shortcomings that facilitate abuse, namely a reluctance to point out and, ideally, stamp out misogyny. "Seduced," which centers on the story of India Oxenberg, sees that as the clear through line, whereas "The Vow" buries some of Nxivm's most shocking teachings until its eighth episode. Many times in recent months I have wondered how so many people can believe so many lies from such obvious charlatans, and these shed some light on that. Anjelica Bette Fellini, left, and Maddie Phillips in a scene from "Teenage Bounty Hunters." 'Teenage Bounty Hunters' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. The bad news is that Netflix canceled this wonderful show, but the good news is that it exists at all. It's quirky and naughty and funny, the show so many teen shows think they are but aren't quite, satirical and earnest often in the same scene. The fraternal twins Blair and Sterling (Anjelica Bette Fellini and Maddie Phillips) are students at a froufy Christian high school who stumble into a side gig as bounty hunters, so there are strong "Veronica Mars" vibes. But where that show had a deep sense of cynicism, "Bounty" has an often happy whimsy to it, more adjacent to a "Pushing Daisies." If you like banter or "Buffy," watch this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
THE BUYER Sanna Shah is pleased with her move from a rental in Brooklyn to her own home in SoHo. For a Designer, Less Is More For nearly five years, Sanna Shah rented a studio on a pretty brownstone block in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Late last summer, she received a notice of nonrenewal. Her landlord, she said, wanted to renovate and raise the 1,650 a month rent. "My rent was such a steal that I knew I was going to have a difficult time finding a comparable rental," she said. But she didn't mind leaving Fort Greene, where the streetscape was quickly changing. "The historic buildings that made the neighborhood charming were being overshadowed by the new developments," she said. She set out to buy a co op unit for around 500,000 to 600,000. She preferred a postwar building. "I feel like prewar is a can of worms for ownership," she said. "For a rental, it is fine, but I wanted something a little more reliable in terms of the building systems. I have renovated prewar stuff and have seen things come up that people couldn't have anticipated, so I didn't want to be on the receiving end of that." Ms. Shah, 32, who is from the Washington, D.C., area, sought a no frills building. "I learned quickly that you end up paying for a doorman," she said. "Your monthly rollout goes up very quickly as you scale up. You are paying for those perks." In the fall, she contacted Kobi Lahav, an associate broker at Mdrn. Residential, whom she had met a few years ago when he helped a friend find a one bedroom downtown. In Midtown East, the housing stock included spacious studios in her price range. "Sanna didn't expect too much for her money, which was a good place to start," Mr. Lahav said. Just east of Gramercy Park, a nicely renovated one bedroom listed for 550,000, with monthly maintenance of just over 1,100, was in a 1930 building called Little Gramercy. It had exposed brick walls. "I found that to be a shabby chic aesthetic," Ms. Shah said. "I wanted something more finished looking. Exposed brick is an overpowering interior feature." She also feared it might attract bugs. "I feel like things can live in a wall like that nobody wants to say that out loud." Her building is postwar, which she prefers. "I feel like prewar is a can of worms for ownership," she said. Katherine Marks for The New York Times She moved on, and the place sold for 610,000. "The brick wall made it popular," Mr. Lahav said. A few blocks south, a sunny alcove studio at Gramercy Park Towers, circa 1964, had an asking price of 599,000. Maintenance was around 850 a month. It, too, was in pristine condition. But Ms. Shah was wary of the location on busy Third Avenue, and found the building's swooping marquee too theatrical. "It was not the kind of ambience I imagined coming home to," she said. "I wanted understated." The building also had a full time doorman, as did many in the area. "I didn't want all these people to greet when I came home," Ms. Shah said. "It feels more hotel than home to me. Some people like all the service, but I wasn't looking for that." Mr. Lahav showed her a small studio in another Gramercy building, for a temptingly low 465,000, with monthly maintenance of 800. It was smaller than most, he said, "but she actually liked it. She was not a typical buyer who is looking for square footage." Ms. Shah passed up a studio at Gramercy Park Towers, circa 1964. She was wary of living on busy Third Avenue, and found the building's swooping marquee too theatrical. Katherine Marks for The New York Times She didn't go for the Murphy bed, however, which seemed too labor intensive for day to day living. "I didn't want to do all these acrobatics to make it work," she said. Farther downtown, a modest SoHo building, circa 1962, had a studio available, with 475 square feet. Again, it was smaller than many places they had seen. But it was on the quiet side of the building, facing a courtyard, and the building had a landscaped roof deck. "A girl was sitting on the roof enjoying her coffee," Mr. Lahav said. "It looked like it was staged. Sanna could imagine herself sitting there." Ms. Shah loved everything about it. "I could totally tell that the current owner was an architect, the way the space was organized," she said. "The studio was laid out in a considered way. I was happy to entertain and live and work and do everything in one open space. I know how to make that work for me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Credit... Dina Litovsky for The New York Times Sometimes our pictures tell the whole story. In February, the photographer George Etheredge visited Donald Trump Jr. at his father's 230 acre estate in Bedford, N.Y. The president's son is a known hunter and outdoor enthusiast, but Mr. Etheredge felt drawn to more of a "Happy Gilmore" image, of Mr. Trump surveying the family's Bedminster, N.J., green with a golf club and cart. After spending some time at the Trump family's Westchester property, Mr. Etheredge's vision changed. "I saw this stump, and I thought it would be kind of perfect," he said. His instincts were good: The picture was swiftly embraced by the internet and became a phenomenon in its own right, independent of the deeply reported article it accompanied. Not every great picture we publish becomes a meme, but each one helps shape the way our readers understand the world. Here are some of our favorites from a year full of famous faces, furry friends, fashion and frivolity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
HONG KONG It is not just many Americans who are upset about the Standard Poor's downgrade of United States debt. A lot of people in China are angry, too. But they are aiming their venom at the Chinese government. Chinese Internet sites lit up over the weekend with criticism of Beijing's management of the country's foreign reserves a usually esoteric subject that had attracted little public attention. But the S. P. action hit a nerve. The ambitions of the Chinese people, eager to take their part as consumers in their nation's economic success story, have in many ways been stifled by their government's fiscal and monetary policies. China's stock market plunged Monday, as investors worried that recent events in the United States and Europe would weaken demand for Chinese exports. The Shanghai A share stock market closed down 3.78 percent and was the third worst performer in Asia on Monday, trailing only markets in Taiwan and South Korea. Many of the Internet postings were similarly nationalistic, questioning whether the government had acted in China's best interests by investing about half of the country's 3.2 trillion worth of foreign reserves in United States Treasury securities. No other country's government comes even close to such an outflow. "On the question of U.S. debt, China's strategic decision makers are pigs, they would rather let the people's money be used by others than let the money be used by their own people," said one posting over the weekend. The comment soon disappeared, presumably removed by censors. But much of the outcry seemed to be more about venting wounded pride than proposing monetary alternatives. That may be because, whether the microblogging patriots realize it or not, few other options exist as long as China sees the need to buy tens of billions of dollars each month to keep its currency weak and protect the nation's export machine. Too few substitutes for United States Treasuries are available to absorb China's huge foreign reserves. Still, the Chinese political establishment does not want to be perceived by the public as too accommodating of American financial policies. That may be why the state run news media have been harshly critical of the United States' debt management woes. The attacks that started on Saturday with the state run news agency, Xinhua, blasting America's "addiction to debts," continued Sunday and Monday with critical commentaries in state owned newspapers. Just as notably, though, the central bank and other government agencies remained officially silent about the downgrade. In fact, in a move that could hardly be deemed anti American the central bank, the People's Bank of China, let its currency, the renminbi, climb 0.23 percent against the dollar Monday morning in the daily fixing of its value. The United States has long pressed Beijing to let the renminbi rise in value. The new level, 6.4305 renminbi to the dollar, represents the largest single day jump in the daily fixing since November. Still, the renminbi has risen only 2.5 percent against the dollar this year. Economists in Beijing and the West are skeptical that Chinese leaders are ready to accept a sharp rise in the renminbi's value. Producing enough renminbi to buy so many dollars has put the central bank on a collision course with consumers and businesses intent on developing the domestic economy. One policy has been the rapid expansion of China's money supply. The broad money measure known as M2 has soared in China by 64.3 percent since the start of 2009 far outpacing the 10.4 percent of M2 in the United States in that period. The expanding money supply has produced rapid inflation in housing prices, and is starting to affect consumer goods and services. Prices in July were up 6.5 percent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics announced on Tuesday morning in Beijing. The other People's Bank policy crimping the domestic economy is the requirement that state controlled commercial banks lend ever more of their deposits to the central bank instead of to businesses. Chinese commercial banks must now deposit more than a fifth of their assets at the central bank, earning virtually no interest. That has given the central bank a source of inexpensive financing for its hoard of foreign reserves, but it has left many small and medium size private businesses unable to obtain loans. Commercial banks are allocating their limited supply of credit disproportionately to state owned enterprises. One blogger over the weekend summed up the public frustration: "Chinese people are working so hard, day in and day out, the economic environment is so good, but people's livelihoods are not so great turns out it is because the government is tightening people's waist belts to lend money to the United States."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
MUMBAI, India Bela Bhatia, a human rights lawyer in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, is accustomed to surveillance. She works in a region prone to both guerrilla violence and government reprisals, and the authorities do not like many of her clients. Still, Ms. Bhatia said she was shocked to learn her phone had been infected with invasive spyware delivered through missed video calls on WhatsApp, a messaging service that is used by about 400 million people in India, WhatsApp's biggest market. "You are carrying the spy in the pocket with you everywhere you go," she said. "It is much more than one had imagined that the Indian state could do." Ms. Bhatia is one of more than a hundred Indians who learned in recent months that every keystroke, call and GPS location on their phones had probably been recorded by the surveillance software, which is sold by the NSO Group, an Israeli firm. NSO says its technology is licensed only to governments for combating terrorism and fighting crime. It also promises it won't sell to governments with records of human rights abuses. But the revelations from India over the last two weeks show that even countries with decent scores on global human rights indexes will use NSO technology to track journalists, critics and dissidents, digital rights activists said. "This attack is a window into what happens when you give governments extralegal access to people's communications," said John Scott Railton, a security researcher at the Citizen Lab, which worked closely with WhatsApp to uncover the attacks and notify the targets. "These tools will be used for all kinds of unaccountable espionage. The temptation for abuse is just too great." The case is the latest in an avalanche of claims of abuse to emerge in recent years from the multibillion dollar commercial spyware market, where governments instead of protecting the privacy of consumers are the paying clients. At the center of these claims is NSO, which had pledged to move past its record of abetting human rights abuses and be in full compliance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by October. That month, WhatsApp informed the 1,400 victims, which also included diplomats and senior government officials, that NSO had used its service to attack their phones. The recent revelations offer a counternarrative to NSO's stated support for transparency and human rights. The WhatsApp lawsuit contends that NSO's spyware was used against dissidents and journalists in the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, two governments previously caught abusing NSO spyware. It also cites NSO's use in Bahrain, a country where the human rights situation was deemed "dire" by Human Rights Watch. In India, 121 WhatsApp users were targeted with NSO spyware, the messaging service said in a recent letter to the government. Of those, at least 22 were human rights activists, journalists and civil rights lawyers, according to a tally by the news site Scroll.in. A spokesman for the Indian National Congress, a leading opposition party, told reporters last weekend that WhatsApp had informed one of its top leaders, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, that she was among the targets. 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. It's not clear which government agencies in India purchased NSO's spyware. The central government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has repeatedly criticized WhatsApp not NSO or its clients for the breach, but has declined to support calls by opposition parties for a full investigation into who bought and used the spyware. Two clusters of Indians stood out on the target list. One group is active in working for human rights in Chhattisgarh, where the government has battled a Maoist insurgency for decades. The other has connections to left leaning activists whom the government has accused of plotting to kill the prime minister and of inciting violence in Bhima Koregaon, near Mumbai, in 2017. Ankit Grewal, a lawyer for Sudha Bharadwaj, who was arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case, said he started missing calls on WhatsApp last fall. In October, he learned that calls had infected his phone with NSO's spyware even though he never picked them up. "Now I see a pattern," he said. "Other lawyers who were defending activists related to Bhima Koregaon and Chhattisgarh were being targeted. Who else but the government would do it, as we were targeted after the arrests of the activists?" Santosh Bhartiya, a former member of Parliament and the editor in chief of the Hindi language news site Chauthi Duniya, was more mystified as to why he was targeted. Although his news site is critical of the government, Mr. Bhartiya said, he is also well known to top government officials. "I am a journalist, but I am not that kind of journalist that people will do surveillance on," he said. Another target, Shu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist who has been active in Chhattisgarh peace talks, said he had become resigned to government surveillance. What disturbed him most was just how invasive and "vicious" NSO's spyware proved to be. "This is an illegal attack on our fundamental rights, but it's nothing new," Mr. Choudhary said. "It's just that the scope of surveillance is much higher than anything we've experienced before." When asked about the targets in India, NSO repeated the statement it made when the WhatsApp lawsuit was announced: Its technology is used to fight crime and terrorism and is not licensed for spying on human rights activists and journalists. Last June, the United Nations Special Rapporteur David Kaye called for an immediate moratorium on the sale of surveillance technology until rigorous human rights safeguards could be put in place. But since the U.N. has no power to enforce a moratorium, spyware sales continued unabated. In September, NSO published new human rights and whistleblower policies that included a renewed commitment to due diligence and to contractually obligating its customers to restrict the use of NSO's products to the investigation of crime and terrorism. In response to NSO's new policies, Mr. Kaye wrote a letter in October questioning how exactly the company planned to hold its clients to account when its spyware had been so readily misused and when it had no direct way of monitoring how governments deploy its products. "The industry is incredibly opaque and the users are opaque," Mr. Kaye said. "On both sides, the opacity makes it impossible to understand what's going on in this space." Mr. Kaye and others said the WhatsApp lawsuit filed last week could be the beginning of checks in an industry that has had none. The lawsuit is the first case of a technology company holding another to account for exploiting its products for surveillance. Although the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was cited in the suit, does not apply to "lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity" by the government, there is no exception for private actors, like NSO. "I imagine NSO Group is pretty worried about that," Mr. Kaye said. In a demonstration of how seriously it takes the case, Facebook started blocking NSO employees from their personal Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram accounts last week, according to NSO employees' posts in public web forums.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Like many of us, Momona Tamada, 14, has been trying to make the best of a tough year. Sure, the effervescent actress and dancer, who stars as the young trendsetting artist Claudia Kishi on Netflix's summer hit "The Baby Sitters Club," has been shining by most measures but pandemic life requires adaptation. "Personally, I'm not a big fan of online learning," the actress said, in a phone call in late November. In addition to school, she has been auditioning remotely, and taking vocal lessons and dance classes over Zoom. "The screens, they're inverted, so everyone is going in different directions, and it's a bit confusing," she said of ballet. But in some ways, between the demands of school and her career, she had a head start on our new reality. "I had to switch to online last year even before everything kind of went crazy," she said from her home in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she'd been hunkered down with her parents, her younger brother, Hiro, and her puppy, a black Shiba Inu named Miso who is "always doing something funny." Being online early has had its perks. "It definitely helped me find my own pace," Tamada said. "I'm glad that I had a year to kind of get used to it," she went on. "It's a struggle to balance schoolwork and working a lot." She played a young Lara Jean in the popular Netflix rom com "To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You" (2020). And "The Baby Sitters Club" a full hearted, charming and progressive adaptation of the wildly popular Ann Martin book series of the same name was renewed in October for a second season. As for when they'd start filming again, Tamada wasn't sure. "I hope the virus doesn't get worse," she said. "I miss being on set and I miss all my friends." There was a glimmer of normalcy, though, the day we talked. "Today is actually the first day I get to go back to dance," she said with the crackling excitement of someone finally getting to leave her neighborhood. The actress also told me about her recent routines and the cultural items that have been inspiring her in these weird times. These are edited excerpts from our conversation. I woke up and took a shower while listening to the first chapter of the book, "Life as We Knew It," for school. But I have a main book that I'm reading: "Crazy Rich Asians." I love the movie. So I wanted to read the book. And I took my pup on a quick walk. She is still new to this, but enjoying the fresh air. We got her in October, and we're getting her used to kind of socializing with other dogs and other people. She's the sweetest puppy ever, but she is also very smart, actually, and she has a lot of energy. So once she starts running, she can't focus and, yeah, she kind of goes crazy laughs . Then I made a TikTok kind of like my trailer in 30 seconds. I was just piecing together a bunch of funny videos that I found. Personally, I love watching fashion videos and fashion inspiration videos. Also, one of my hobbies is baking, and I just love the short little tutorials. It's so satisfying how cakes are being made, like how they pipe everything out. I think that's what's so cool about TikTok is that you probably never see the same thing twice. It inspires me to maybe make what I saw. I took an online ballet class. I've been dancing since I was 4 jazz and tap are probably my two favorites. But I pretty much do everything. While updating my journal, I listened to an episode of a podcast called "Daily Breath" with Deepak Chopra. That was my first time listening to it, but I love it so far. It's like five to seven minutes, and it brings such a good start to your day. Or I listen to it before I go to sleep and it really calms me down, because sometimes I get very anxious. It's a lot about self love. Almost like meditation. The things that he talks about really resonate with my life. It helps ground me and center me. Before I went to sleep, I studied a script for my audition the next day . It's a long script. I'm happy with how it turned out. I woke up and listened to another episode of "Daily Breath" and to some music on shuffle. Some of the songs that popped up included "POV," by Ariana Grande, "Lovesick Girls" by Blackpink, "Falling" by Harry Styles and "American Boy" by Estelle. I listen to a variety of music, whatever makes me happy. I took some pictures of my pup in Vancouver because it was so nice out and then watched YouTube videos while eating lunch: Michelle Khare's "I Tried Lifeguard Academy" video. Michelle does all these she did like training to be a pop singer and training to be an F.B.I. agent. I think that's so interesting. I can see a little bit into other people's careers and the challenges they have to face to get to where they are. That night, Mom asked me to make pizza dough for our dinner. Yes! I love making dough. Something fun to do with my family. My pizza was so tasty. I'm a bigger baker than a cook, but I totally just try cooking new recipes all of the time. I just go off the fly and think about like, "Oh, maybe this is good together." And usually it's pretty good. I love watching Tasty, that YouTube channel. Then I had an online ballet class after dinner. We played a terminology game in the last few minutes. My teacher had a bunch of, I guess, French terms a word or, like, a move. And we have to define what that means in English. And then she'd mentioned a character from a ballet. For example, she said, "Clara," and we'd say, "Oh, she's in 'The Nutcracker.'" Before bedtime, I played "Among Us" with friends. It's been trending for the past few months, and it's just so fun. It's anonymous, and you can't add people on it, so you're always in a game with new people. (But you can play with your friends by giving them the code.) There's one person that's the impostor, and they go around, like, killing people. It's not as violent as it sounds, I promise. But you have to figure out who the impostor is. And I've played Minecraft since I was like 9. The cast of "The Baby Sitters Club," we used to play all the time on set. It's a collaborative thing. And you get to really just create whatever you were imagining.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Neil Blumenthal, 37, a founder of the eyeglass brand Warby Parker, keeps a hectic work schedule, but his mornings are ruled by his children: Gemma, 2, and Griffin, 6. While he makes breakfast in the family's Greenwich Village apartment, his wife and fellow entrepreneur, Rachel Blumenthal, attends a workout class. Here's how he stays in shape with minimal effort and other life hacks. Since having kids, I no longer need an alarm clock. My 2 year old usually starts yelling, "Daddy!" anywhere between 6 and 7 a.m. She's in a crib. I go and get her out of bed. Thankfully my 6 year old is starting to get himself dressed. I am on breakfast duty. My life hack is to make enough hard boiled eggs in the beginning of the week so you have them for the whole week. My other specialty is French toast. I am not eating what the kids are eating, though. I'm usually just drinking water. I've always been a big water drinker. Also I'm not terribly hungry in the mornings. I also do no caffeine. I've never had a cup of coffee. I don't need it or crave it. On the breakfast thing, actually, I once met Hugh Jackman and he was telling me how he prepared for the Wolverine movies. He would fast 12 to 14 hours between meals. It's all about your gut and biome, and it's healthier to give your gut a break. So I've fooled myself into thinking that if I don't eat until midmorning, I'm fasting basically seven to 12 hours. The only thing is the Wolverine look is definitely not happening yet. While the kids are eating, I do my New York Times seven minute workout in whatever I wore to bed. In all honesty when the workout came out in 2013, that was right when my son was like 2 years old. It was very difficult to work out, and this was the promise of being in decent health: doing interval training in seven minutes seemed too good to be true. I was happy to embrace it, and all my friends still make fun of me for that. It's not like playing an hour of basketball, but you definitely do feel it. Often Griffin and Gemma will jump in and do some situps or jumping jacks with me. Gemma will sometimes get on my back for the push ups. I prefer shaving oil to shaving cream. I find that I've got dry, sensitive skin, so that tends to protect my skin better. Dermalogica has a great one. Then I use the Bumble Bumble Curl Conscious Defining Creme on my hair. I don't spend a lot of time. I grab a pair of jeans, a crew neck navy sweater and Air Max 1s and I'm good to go. I'm into sneakers, but also more into just Nike as a brand, frankly. I love how they have scaled with integrity. I believe they have had a really positive impact on culture, whether it's women in sport or equality of all sorts of types. I'm usually looking at my iPhone scanning for any urgent emails as I'm walking from room to room, getting ready in the morning. I'm usually checking email till late at night, too, so there are no real surprises. It's never off. That's perfectly appropriate for some people. I think some people will optimize for balance, so they think a lot about work life balance. My wife and I think more about work life integration. We're both entrepreneurs. She has a start up called Rockets of Awesome. I also got some good advice from Walter Robb; he's a co founder of Whole Foods. I asked him, "What do you say when you get asked that question about how to find work life balance?" He said, "I tell people it's the wrong question. I don't optimize for balance. I optimize for impact."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A decade ago, shortly before their daughter, Caitlin Heising, started her freshman year at Brown University, Liz Simons, a former teacher, and her husband, Mark Heising, the founder of an investment firm, established the Heising Simons Foundation, a family philanthropy focused initially on education, climate and the physical sciences. "I've always asked a lot of questions and have always been curious about what my parents were working on," said Ms. Heising, who spent the summer before her sophomore year working at the foundation's office in Los Altos, Calif. At school, she was ineluctably drawn to courses that dealt with philanthropy, human rights and the role of international nongovernmental organizations. After graduation, with her parents' enthusiastic assent, Ms. Heising joined the foundation's board. "I had brought up the idea, but I don't think I would have been as excited about it if I didn't get the sense that they were open to my bringing my own ideas and passions as a board member," she said. "Not necessarily to come in and shake things up drastically but to come in with new ideas. One of those new ideas led to the foundation's budding program in human rights. "It's smaller than our other programs," Ms. Heising, 27, said. "But it's developing, and there's room to grow." She can count on the support of her parents, materially and otherwise. Ms. Simons has accompanied her daughter on Human Rights Watch visits to the San Quentin State Prison and Tijuana, Mexico. "I've been really grateful to have the opportunity to work with Caitlin and learn from her," Ms. Simons said. It doesn't always go so smoothly. The leaders of family foundations who have spent a lifetime funding things dear to their hearts the symphony, the botanical garden, arts education, the United Way often learn that their children and grandchildren have their own ideas and pet causes. And the younger generation may feel that the family patriarch and matriarch are set in their ways and turn a deaf ear to other input. There are a lot of dollars at stake. A 2014 report by the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College estimated that 59 trillion would be transferred to the next generation from 2007 to 2061. Lifetime giving to charity in that same period is pegged at 20.6 trillion. It used to be that the philanthropic baton would be passed to the next generation when the parents died. In the past, fewer generations actively worked together. But with longer life spans, "there are several generations in the philanthropic space at the same time and around the table at the same time," said Sharna Goldseker, the founder and managing director of 21/64, a consulting firm that focuses on next generation philanthropy. There may well be agreement among the generations about the importance of giving, but also disagreement about who to give to and how to give it. "The expression of a different philanthropic interest is a balancing act for the next generation," Ms. Goldseker said. "How do they honor their legacy and deal with what they see as the needs of today?" That the younger generation might not share the older generation's ideas about giving, that they might want to focus on different causes makes perfect sense, said Michael Moody, who holds the Frey Foundation Chair for Family Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Mich. After all, they grew up at a different time in a different world. "The emergence of environmentalism in the '60s, civil rights and the women's movement meant that the younger generation was more interested in giving to them rather than to the Junior League," he said. Geography also plays a role. If, for example, the foundation is focused on the local community "and the family is far flung, it will be hard to get the next generation engaged," said Professor Moody, an author, with Ms. Goldseker, of the book "Generation Impact: How Next Gen Donors Are Revolutionizing Giving," expected in October. It could also come down to that most basic of explanations: different strokes for different folks. "Individuals have different interests, and individuals within families have different interests," said Tracy Mack Parker, chief executive of the Philanthropy Workshop. "Sometimes, the younger generation steps up early and wants to get involved and do research and put in the time. It can also be the case the younger generation is too busy raising families and building their own careers, and it's a challenge for the first generation to respectfully get the younger generation involved and participating." "What we try to do," she said, "is to encourage families to identify certain core values that could cut across all the philanthropic work they do and come up with a vision for a world they want to see." Unfortunately, in some instances, there's a dominant wealth creator "who is confident that he or she knows where the money should go and isn't questioning it very much," Ms. Parker said. "If members of the next generation with different ideas feel they're butting up against a wall, they'll work on their own giving rather than participating in the family giving." In a growing trend, those strong minded wealth creators may decide to spend the foundation's resources in their lifetime so they can see the impact while they're alive. Discretionary funds are a useful option when consensus is hard to come by. "They allow individual family members to give to their pet organizations," Mr. Moody said. Sometimes the answer is multiple funds or foundations. In 2004, Roxanne Quimby, a founder of the personal care company Burt's Bees, created the Quimby Family Foundation, encouraging the involvement of her adult children Hannah Quimby and Lucas St. Clair. "My mother engaged with us in an open, flexible way, making sure from the get go that the focus of the foundation was something we cared about," said Hannah Quimby, 38. Together, they settled on two broad areas for their philanthropy: arts and the environment. Subsequently, Mr. St. Clair became more involved in another of his mother's philanthropic endeavors a foundation to create a national monument in Maine, the family's home and Hannah Quimby became increasingly engaged with the family foundation. "What happened with time is that I crafted our mission to be a little more focused," she said. "My mom let me do that and then she said: 'You know what? I want to fund the arts and I want to run things the way I want to run them, and I don't want to read a ton of grant applications,' so she created a third foundation." Frequently, the differences in giving are more about style than substance. The next generation may be as dedicated as their parents about contributing to their alma mater. "But the older generation may write a check and have a building named after them," Professor Moody said. The younger generation, which tends to be more hands on, "will want to write a check to create a scholarship for minority students and then become a mentor and engage with the student who is receiving the scholarship," he said. But even when the causes are different, there may be considerably more generational overlap than first meets the eye. Ms. Goldseker of 21/64 recalled a patriarch who was setting up a foundation to finance local scholarships as a way to give back to the community where he had earned his wealth. His grandchildren, to his frustration, were interested in making microcredit loans to people in developing countries. Ms. Goldseker handed the grandfather and grandchildren sets of 25 cards, each marked with words like "integrity," "justice," "opportunity," "compassion" and "self reliance," and asked them to prioritize the values that animated their philanthropic decision making. "When they showed their cards, all of them had 'opportunity' on the top, and I think the grandfather was very struck by how his values had been transmitted to the next generation," Ms. Goldseker said. "The grandchildren had internalized those values, but they were applying them in a different way because they'd grown up in a different world in a different time. "He'd wanted to create opportunities by creating scholarships in his community, and now he realized that offering microloans was creating opportunities for people in Africa." Ms. Simons of the Heising Simons Foundation found a similar link between her focus on early childhood education and her daughter's human rights advocacy. "Children who have this experience are less likely to go to jail and less likely to have the problems of those who didn't have the benefit of early learning." She added: "As I've thought about this, I've seen the connection with Caitlin. Education is a human right."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Credit...Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times At a recent gala benefit for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Agnes Gund accepted an award for her achievements in philanthropy and did something fairly unusual among people in her social set: She barely spoke about herself. Instead, Ms. Gund used her six minutes at the lectern to praise the museum for its contributions to culture and toasted her fellow medal recipients the curator Thelma Golden and the sculptor Richard Serra whose work enriched her life. Ms. Gund, 80, is patently uncomfortable accepting awards. She worries that she is going to sound foolish, or look vain. In the 1970s, she started Studio in a School, a highly successful nonprofit that brought arts education to public schools all over New York City. In the '90s, she served as the president of the Museum of Modern Art. Her tenure there is often considered to be the museum's "golden era," according to Bob Colacello, the Andy Warhol biographer, who sits on the boards of numerous arts organizations. Bill Clinton gave her the National Medal of the Arts in 1997. Michael Bloomberg has described her simply as "the best." Yet she still frets about being just another rich person who lives in a high floor Park Avenue apartment, surrounded by modernist masterworks. When people ask why she is a philanthropist, her answer is always the same: "guilt." Three years ago, Ms. Gund went to see Ava DuVernay's documentary "13th." She was so disturbed by its message about America's racist system of mass incarceration that she went home, removed her most prized painting by Roy Lichtenstein from the walls, and sold it to Steven Cohen, a hedge fund investor, to the tune of 165 million. Then, she took her money from that and with her friend Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation started "Art for Justice" that would serve as a bank and provide funds for artists in prison and for organizations working in the arena of criminal justice reform. (She has already funded it in excess of 100 million.) Aggie, as she is referred to by all of her friends, didn't love having to call Dorothy Lichtenstein, the widow of Mr. Lichtenstein, to explain that one of Roy's most important paintings (its title is "Masterpiece") was going to a private collector rather than a museum. But that, she could deal with. Because there really wasn't another solution. Agnes Gund may not have much more left to give. Her cash reserve has shrunk after a lifetime of giving to AIDS research, abortion rights groups and arts organizations, among many others. The valuable paintings in her home by artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly have mostly been promised to museums. If only there weren't a journalist walking around the Getty Center asking people questions about her, stalking her for a profile she hadn't agreed to, didn't want written and probably would just end up filled with misquotes and half truths. If only she could avoid that. "What are we doing here?" Aggie Gund said. It was late October and Ms. Gund was seated in her living room playing the part of barely willing subject, flanked by her daughter Cat, who is a documentary filmmaker, and Mr. Walker. Over the fireplace, where the Lichtenstein once lived, was a painting by the African American artist Stanley Whitney. To her left was an Alexander Calder sculpture. In September, she received her medal from the Getty. In October, she and her daughter Cat accepted an award from the photography journal Aperture. Later this month, The Wall Street Journal will honor Ms. Gund at its annual Innovator Awards. Never mind that for much of the last year, she could barely walk, thanks to a broken foot. Or that because of allergies, her nose never stops running. "The other day," Ms. Gund said, "I stepped into the elevator and said, 'I have this cocaine habit.' There were about six people and they just looked so startled." Her disinclination to speak about herself is at the heart of why people clamor to celebrate her. Because all this occurred while protesters were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unfurling banners and scattering pill bottles inside the Sackler Wing, which is named for the family that owns Purdue Pharma, the company that makes the powerful painkilling drug OxyContin, and who are at the heart of the American opioid epidemic. Similar controversies ensued over the naming of a plaza out front at the Met (for the conservative billionaire David H. Koch) and the flagship building of the New York Public Library in Midtown (for Stephen A. Schwarzman, the private equity investor). Not long after the Met cut the ribbon on Mr. Koch's 65 million plaza, the museum announced it was eliminating up to 100 jobs, affecting people in administrative, conservation and curatorial positions. The New York Public Library accepted 100 million from Mr. Schwarzman to help transform its headquarters and then announced that three million of the books inside were going to be shipped off to a storage facility in New Jersey to save money. (After an uproar, the library backpedaled.) The rightward political leanings of Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Koch fed civic antipathy, but so did the seeming focus on capital improvements over art, books and after school programs, the sort of projects Ms. Gund has spent a lifetime working on. Indeed, in 2014, while Ms. Gund was serving on around a dozen committees at MoMA, including her current position as chairman of MoMA PS1, she publicly rebuked the museum over its second expansion plan in under a decade, telling The New York Times that "there are a number of us on the board who don't want to see the museum become a mere entertainment center." This, according to Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA, was hardly the first "intense" disagreement he has had with Ms. Gund over the years. He still thinks she was wrong to oppose the plan. But that did not change his estimation of her as an "extraordinary figure at MoMA," a person whose "moral compass" and "generosity of spirit" is "astounding." The death of David Rockefeller in 2017 at the age of 101 also helped fortify Ms. Gund's legend. With him gone, she has become the good witch of Park Avenue, torchbearer for the obligation of the rich in an era dominated by vanity and hypocrisy. Though she perhaps enjoys attention a little more than she allows, Mr. Walker said, she is still not "guided by narcissism or self congratulatory thinking." "I think there is something very satisfying for Aggie at this stage of her life to be breaking new ground in philanthropy and the arts and to be recognized for it," he said. "But I also think she is still the little girl who feels that she is not fully worthy. Like many amazing women, she has been conditioned to see the world through the eyes of men and the things they valued." Ms. Gund grew up in Cleveland, where her father, George Gund, was the president of the Cleveland Trust Company, one of the nation's largest banks. He didn't get married until he was 48 years old, Ms. Gund said, and there were whispers that he was gay. What Ms. Gund said she knew was that "he didn't like women so much, and I was one of those, so he didn't like me." In the early 1950s, Ms. Gund was sent to Miss Porter's School. She was more popular with the maids than the students, who, she said, "were faster than I was." After graduation, she went to Connecticut College, studied "not that hard," she said, and married Albrecht Saalfield, the father of her four children. In 1966, Ms. Gund's father died of leukemia. She was pleasantly surprised to find out she had been included among her brothers in his will and decided to start buying art. Her first major acquisition was a Henry Moore sculpture of a horse. "But the children were playing on it so I gave it to the Cleveland Museum," she said. After that, she acquired work by Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg and Mark Rothko. All became close friends of Ms. Gund's, except Rothko. He was already dead. In the early '70s, Mr. Saalfield took a job as the headmaster of a school in Greenwich, Conn. Soon, Ms. Gund was going into Manhattan to visit museums and meet artists at their studios. In 1976, she joined the board of MoMA. A year later, she started Studio in a School. Still, she was haunted by what Cat called "the presumption of dilettantism" that is attached to society wives. Her husband wasn't eager to see her life expand. "He was certainly not encouraging her potential," Cat said. In 1978, Ms. Gund headed to Harvard (where she was a legacy). Two years later, she got a master's degree in art history, obtained a divorce and moved to New York City. "She completely supported my dreams and my aspirations," Ms. Golden said. "Her support was steadfast." And in recent years, Ms. Gund's interest in racial justice issues took on a more personal component, as her daughters Cat and Jessica both ha ve black children. It didn't bother Ms. Gund at all that Cat came to identify as queer. Though she was a little sad Cat didn't come out as well as a debutante. "Can you see it?" Cat said, laughing. "I haven't worn a dress in 40 years." Every year, Aggie sends out a family Christmas card. Photographers like Annie Leibovitz and Lyle Ashton Harris take the portrait. Gordon Davis, the first black president of Lincoln Center, said that receiving it is a little like getting the annual bulletin from the United Nations. When her black grandchildren were toddlers, people on the Upper East Side smiled and said hello to them, treating them as if they were the cutest things in the world. Now, they are tall young men who sometimes wear hoodies. Ms. Gund has seen the suspicious looks they get walking down the street. It's even different, she said, for Jessica's children, who are darker skinned than Cat's children. "Catherine's kids are more 'acceptable,'" said Ms. Gund, whose insights about racism and sexism deepened her relationships with the artists she championed. But Ms. Gund is beloved by the support staffs of the organizations she donates to. Tunji Adeniji has overseen security at MoMA since 2008. "I have never met anyone like Aggie," Mr. Adeniji said. "She sees a security guard before she sees a director, she sees a housekeeping person before she sees a chief, and the collection MoMA displayed this spring reflects that. Usually, big collectors go for Picasso, Van Gogh, maybe Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. She's bringing in people who are not as recognized. That's what the collection in the galleries reflected." Still, that exhibition of Ms. Gund's gifts nearly didn't happen. According to Ann Temkin, who curated the show, Ms. Gund spent months hemming and hawing about whether she wanted the show to take place. Was her collection really important enough to warrant this attention, she asked? Couldn't they find a way to display the artists she loved without placing her at the center of things? "What we needed to persuade her of was that this was about the art and not about her," Ms. Temkin said. "And we had to ask a few of her staff and friends to join us in our efforts." One of these people was Mr. Walker. He told her, basically, to get over it. That was more or less the same message delivered by Craig Starr, a gallery owner who frequently serves as Ms. Gund's escort on the benefit circuit. "I just kept telling her she had to do it," Mr. Starr said. Once the matter was settled, the museum approached again. It wanted to honor Ms. Gund at its benefit as well. This was a bridge too far, until the museum agreed to invite the security guards and support staff to the after party for free. "This had never happened," Mr. Adeniji said. "It's normally 75." Meanwhile, Cat Gund turned her mother into the reluctant subject of a new documentary she is producing and directing. One scene in the trailer takes place in the back of a town car on the way to an Art for Justice board meeting. In it, Cat asks her mother what she would most like the reaction to be. "I hope that the film will not be seen by too many people," Ms. Gund says. Recently, as Ms. Gund has taken to selling off more of her paintings to bankroll her most important causes, she has begun expressing regret about not entering into the family business. It would be nice at this stage in her life to have a little more money, she said during our interview. Like her brothers do. Cat looked perplexed. "What would you do with it?" she asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Yesterday's satire is today's news. It is one of the iron laws of reality in 2020, and it was awkwardly proved by the weird, recursively ironic reunion "30 Rock: A One Time Special" Thursday night, in which a sitcom that spent years spoofing corporate TV's desperate salesmanship took part in the big shill seriously. But jokingly. But seriously. The resulting grab bag of scenes, padded out generously with ads for NBCUniversal TV and its new Peacock streaming service, was the sort of Frankensteinian synergy that the "30 Rock" exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) might have dreamed up: an hourlong, sporadically funny grinfomercial that occasionally recalled how good the show was at its best, but mostly underlined how long ago its cultural moment had passed. Like much pandemic TV, this was not something the public would ever have seen in normal times. The special took the place of the annual "upfronts," the springtime song and dance shows networks put on for advertisers in Manhattan theaters in order to tout their new series and woo companies into buying airtime. The upfronts often feature skits, live or recorded, in which the network talent is drafted to perform for the suits. The bits are loaded with ad business references, and the cringes generally outnumber the yuks, but there's at least a feeling of exclusivity: You, the ambassador of corporate America, are being feted like the king who pays for the jesters' bells. And look, at 4 in the afternoon in a room of midlevel executives looking forward to free drinks at the after party, all of this would have killed. At 8 p.m. Eastern in those markets where affiliates had not pre empted the special because it promoted a streaming competitor it was ... nice, for a while. The cold open, in which the producer Liz Lemon (Fey) has a Covid rage run in with an unmasked New Yorker, was classic "30 Rock," right down to the callback line: "Another successful interaction with a man!" Unlike some pandemic inspired reunions, the special managed to re create, briefly, the feel of an actual episode, partly because of a decent standard of production (which relied generously on green screen and on cast members' families), partly because the forced isolation of quarantine meshes well with a breakneck comedy that always relied on brief cutaway jokes. The best material was front loaded into the beginning: the chemistry, even over teleconferencing, of Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski; Jack slapping Liz through a new feature of his iPhone 40 (in a gag that tweaked Peacock for not having the rights to "Friends"); a fantastic throwaway bit in which Tracy Jordan (Morgan) reads the entire dictionary in front of a green screen so that his acting can be rendered by computer. But as the plot kicks in the sketch show "TGS" is being rebooted at the behest of the NBC page turned boss Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer, also playing his own lovelorn assistant) the gags become weaker and the plugs denser. You become aware, like a peacock in gradually boiling water, that you are not just watching a skit about a corporate stunt; you are immersed in the stunt itself. There is comedy, kind of, in watching Tracy Jordan read you a list of ad sales talking points. But it's still, ultimately, only as fun as being read a list of ad sales talking points can be. (Dealbreaker! Shut it down!) And the copious in house promos, which would have been unremarkable at an industry confab in Radio City Music Hall, broke the rhythm and undercut the satire with dead earnest flogging. Since so many spots were for programming that is theoretically available only in a misty future when normal ish life returns a sitcom with Kenan Thompson and Don Johnson, the 20 who knows? Tokyo Olympics it lent the whole production a surreal undertone of forced optimism. I watched the special twice on Thursday night, once live, once with my family, who wisely fast forwarded through the ads. It played better the second way. But you could also see more sharply how the special deteriorated as it went on, as if the writers had a half hour of material and an hour to fill. In theory, "30 Rock" was the perfect brand for the job. From 2006 to 2013, it bit the hand that feeds as lustily as Liz chomps into a block of night cheese. It cast company talent in gently mocking cameos, as the special did with stars including Khloe Kardashian and Jimmy Fallon. It made comedy out of real life corporate mandates, as in "Greenzo," an episode about an environmentalist mascot that came out of an actual network wide "Green Is Universal" programming requirement. When the show moves from biting to gently nibbling the hand that feeds, you lose a certain energy. Beyond that, the special showed that, however gut busting "30 Rock" remains in reruns, its arch, lighten up Francis comedy is a product of a very specific era that does not time travel well. We already saw an example of this when the show shelved several old episodes that featured blackface, the '00s "edgy" comedy writer's go to answer to "What's the most excruciatingly inappropriate thing we can have a character do?" (It's telling that so many examples in "The Office," "Community" and "Scrubs" as well came in marquee NBC sitcoms.) The special seemed to allude to this when Jenna Maroney (Krakowski, who was in some of the blackface instances) halfheartedly apologized to the "This Is Us" star Mandy Moore after being "canceled" for a scatological offense, saying, "The late 2010s was a very different time." It is a different time now, in many ways that the highly meta, low stakes comedy of "30 Rock" feels unequal to. The big hearted comedy of "Parks and Recreation" an NBC sitcom of its time in a different way adapted to the big emotions of the pandemic in its own reunion. But global health crisis or no, it's hard to imagine how the razor edged cynicism of "30 Rock" which spoofed media synergy and amorality as ridiculous but inept would fit into a moment when the actual president is a crossover character from an NBC reality show. Of course, Fey and her crew are smart enough to know exactly this and to work it into the special. The hour ends with Liz insisting to Jack that she has too much artistic integrity to write his remarks for a sales meeting. She turns to the camera and winks, then gets a cramp in her eye. But we already knew it was possible to wink so hard you injure yourself. We'd spent an hour watching "30 Rock" do exactly that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Think about the ways in which gender inequality is perpetuated. Formal structures like laws and policies certainly play a role. But it's also reinforced by millions upon millions of routine encounters between everyday people between husbands and wives, employers and employees, candidates for office and the people determining their "electability," village leaders guarding traditional norms and the young women who would challenge them. When enough of us are determined to be a voice for change, it sets the stage for broader transformation. One example, of course, is the millions of people around the world who, by sharing their MeToo stories, have put systemic problems in the spotlight and amplified pressure on business and government leaders to be part of the solution. It is against this backdrop that, in July, representatives from all over the world will come together in Paris to mark the 25th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing where Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed "women's rights are human rights" at an event called the Generation Equality Forum. The forum aims to convert the current energy and attention around gender equality into tangible gains for women and girls everywhere. In the two decades since my husband, Bill Gates, and I started our foundation, I've come to understand that events like this are valuable opportunities for the world to agree on a shared set of goals and for business and government leaders to rally to meet those goals by making ambitious financial and political commitments. While such commitments are important (not least because they invite public accountability) living up to those aspirations in our private actions is, too. And that's where you come in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
This Is Not the America These Au Pairs Were Expecting In early March, Ana Flavia, 23, traveled from her hometown, Sorocaba, Brazil, to Oakland, Calif. She was there to be an au pair to two girls, ages 6 and 11, and get a taste of America from living with them and their parents, a Chinese mother and a German father. When Ms. Flavia agreed to the gig in January, she had grand plans. When the girls were in school she would explore San Francisco, basking in the Golden Gate Bridge and walking around the quirky neighborhoods. Weekends would be for bucket list trips: hitting the Strip in Las Vegas and driving down Route 1 to Los Angeles. "I would love to visit Hawaii, maybe Honolulu," she said. "I love views with beaches and mountains." But the coronavirus pandemic was just around the bend. She arrived in Oakland one week before shelter in place orders took hold. Ms. Flavia spent the first three months helping her young charges deal with the strange new world of learning online. "There are some things they can't do," she said. Now, with school out of session, it's about filling the days and coming up with activities to do around the house, since most of the city still isn't open. "Sometimes it's boring," she said. "Some days it's a roller coaster. We have good days and bad days." Even when she's not working, she's stuck in the house. Rather than dining out, exploring all the great food in her area, she's spending every meal with her home parents, who are strict about healthy eating. "They don't use sauce and sugar," she said. "Sometimes I need sugar and salt." Every year there are approximately 18,000 au pairs in the United States, mostly young women from across the globe looking for an opportunity to improve their English, make some money ( 175 200 per week, on average) and explore American cities and culture. Most au pairs have contracts arranged by agencies that stipulate how much they can work, usually 45 hours a week, so they have time to be free and go on adventures. Those in America during the pandemic, however, have had a scaled back experience. Personal travel has been considerably curtailed, as has socializing with other au pairs and locals. Au pairs are spending much more time with their host families than they anticipated. And they've gotten a crash course in national and state politics, sometimes muddling their views of Americans and the American dream. "My Brazilian culture, every time we are together we hug and touch," Ms. Flavia said. "We have a stereotype of Americans as being colder. It seems true, but I can't tell if they are like this because of the coronavirus. I miss feeling warm with someone." The pandemic has been particularly tough on new au pairs. They've had to adjust to their host families with little space. Yilin Gu, who uses the name Erin with English speakers, is 26 and from Tongxiang, a city in the south of China near Shanghai. In March she moved in with a family in Dallas, with two boys, 5 and 2. The house was crowded. The former au pair, also from China, was still living there because of travel restrictions. The youngest son kept asking for her instead of Ms. Gu, especially in the mornings. There was also a live in grandmother who loved to "chatter," Ms. Gu said. "When I'm taking care of the kids, she starts telling me the kids need to drink milk, milk, milk, and that those chicken nuggets aren't healthy." Ms. Gu thought about returning to China, something friends were doing, especially because the pandemic is under better control there. But she decided against it. "I want to explore the cities and learn the culture and perfect my English," she said. "If I stopped my journey now, I would feel I didn't finish my purpose. I would have regret." She moved into a hotel to await her next assignment, putting a profile up on her agency's website and interviewing with interested host families. "For me it's not weird being in a hotel alone," she said. "It's less stressful than being in a house." In early June she flew to New York City to start her work with a new host family. Later that month, President Trump issued an executive order banning the J 1 visas that enable au pairs to live and work legally in the United States. Ms. Gu and others already here feel fortunate to already have secured their paperwork. But some nearing the end of their term have felt frustrated about not getting to say goodbye to their friends in person or jet off on the kind of last minute adventures that often serve as a punctuation mark to the experience. Andrea Ibanez Granizo, 24, is from Madrid, and has been working for a family in Marin County, outside San Francisco, for over two years. Before her recent return to Spain, Ms. Granizo was scheduled to take what au pairs call "a travel month." "My host family pays for my food, my toiletries, everything I need," she said. "All my salary, I have saved for this." She was booked to go to Chicago, Dallas, Hawaii and Las Vegas. "It was saying goodbye to America in a big way," she said. She especially needed this trip to change her perception of America, something the pandemic has eroded. "As a European and a Spaniard I came here with this idea of America that I saw in the Hollywood movies, that here everything is possible, everything is so good," she said. "Now with the pandemic it's like, 'Oh, my God, they were not ready at all.'" "Being an American really isn't an advantage anymore," she added. It doesn't help that her friends from Spain were texting her to jokingly check if she's taken her daily dose of bleach. (The agency offered to extend her term, but she returned home earlier this month instead.) Other au pairs feel America is a better place to be in the current crisis. The coronavirus has worsened dramatically in Brazil, where Ms. Flavia's parents run a store selling kitchen items. "If my parents have problems in Brazil, I can help them," Ms. Flavia said. "The dollar is high. I can send them money." Valeria Rodriguez, 26, an au pair from North Coahuila, Mexico, has her hands full in Tampa, Fla., looking after four children, 5, 3, 2 and 1. "Before coronavirus, I could do all my activities. I could go out with my friends and have a quiet dinner," she said. "Now all four kids are home all day, and I have to keep them busy, and life has changed. Every 15 or 20 minutes I need a new activity." "They bore so fast," she said, laughing. Still, Ms. Rodriguez is happy to be in Tampa, even though rates of infection are skyrocketing. "We go to the bars and the beaches here, but with precautions," she said. And Ms. Flavia managed a visit to Las Vegas for the Fourth of July weekend, though it wasn't a wild experience because she upheld social distancing. "When I got back I did the Covid test and was negative," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Volkswagen on Monday halted production at its plant in Kaluga, Russia, for 10 days because of poor sales and a generally weak economy there. VW opened the plant in 2009, and although it had planned to build 150,000 vehicles there this year, the automaker said this week that production would fall to 120,000 units. (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required) BMW announced pricing Tuesday for its 2015 2 Series convertible. The 228i, which is scheduled to be available in the United States at the beginning of next year, will start at 38,850, including a 950 destination charge. (Edmunds) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating 160,000 Dodge Caravan minivans from the 2007 model year for a defect that causes engine stalling. The safety agency has also received 45 similar complaints about Chrysler Town Country minivans from the 2004 5 model years. (Reuters) The Nevada State Legislature is considering offering Tesla Motors 1.3 billion in tax breaks and incentives as the electric carmaker prepares to build its planned 5 billion battery factory there. Gov. Brian Sandoval said Nevada faced "the worst economic crisis in the history of the state" and that the factory provided an extraordinary opportunity to create thousands of jobs. (CTV News)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
If you've seen only ash aired Beijing, or that architectural Oz, Shanghai, you haven't seen China. Most of the country is wide open space, green and blue: hills, plains, water. And it was an escape to that openness that some Chinese urbanites clerks pinned to desks, scholar officials swimming in a shark tank imperial court yearned for in centuries past. Their dream was to sit in on a terrace halfway up a mountain, with tea steeping, an ink brush at hand, a friend at the door and a waterfall splashing nearby. Not just for vacation. Forever. One way they could live the dream was through images of the kind seen in "Streams and Mountains Without End: Landscape Traditions of China" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show, in the Chinese paintings and calligraphy galleries, is technically a collection reinstallation spiced with a few loans. But the Met's China holdings are so broad and deep that some of the pictures here are resurfacing for the first time in almost a decade; one is finally making its debut a century after it was acquired. And there's more than just painting on view. A longing for the natural world, or some version of it, real or ideal, saturated Chinese elite culture. Images of it turned up everywhere on porcelain vases, cloisonne bowls, silk robes and jade sculptures. The most effective medium for imaginatively entering a landscape, though, was painting, and specifically in two forms, the hanging scroll and the hand scroll, both traditionally done in ink on silk. The show opens with a hanging scroll: vertical, monumental, as tall as a door; you can see it, and read it, from a long gallery away. Titled "Viewing a Waterfall From a Mountain Pavilion" and dated 1700, it's by Li Yin, a talented jobber who supplied art for the Qing dynasty equivalent of McMansions. The scene depicted is a narrow rocky gorge in which we, as viewers, are positioned low and looking up. A bit above us is a peaked roof pavilion on a rock. Two men stand on its terrace taking in the scene. And quite a scene it is. And it's charged with a weird, creaturely energy. Trees claw the air like dragons. The rock the pavilion rests on looks like some giant pachyderm. The world isn't just alive here; it's sentient, reactive. The men on the terrace appear unperturbed, but surely inwardly, like us, they're thrilled. Hanging scrolls deliver their basic image fast pow! then leave you to sort out details. A second form of landscape painting, the hand scroll, operates on a different dynamic. When viewed as intended, slowly unrolled on a tabletop, one section at a time, it's a cinematic experience, about anticipation, suspense, what's coming next. There's a classic 15th century example in the show's opening gallery called "The Four Seasons," by an unidentified artist. If "Viewing a Waterfall From a Mountain Pavilion" is a dramatic ascent, "The Four Seasons" is a cross country hike. Over its horizontal length of almost 36 feet it takes you countless miles and through a full year. At the Met, it's displayed unrolled, so you get the idea of a panorama right away. But the real pleasures lie in walking the walk. The journey starts from the far right. It's spring, and sights come fast a tiny waterfall, budding trees, a curl of smoke. Then you see summer workers hauling a boat by a whisker fine rope. Mountains loom, contoured like muscles; they're worth a pause. Then openness. Sky, sky, sky, until its whiteness shades into autumn mist, which shades into what may be an iced over lake. Winter: scratchy trees; hunkered down houses; lamps in windows. And all the way to left, at the scroll's edge, a bridge ends mid arch, leading where? Back to Spring. The stylistic variations possible within these two formats are practically endless. So are the thematic uses personal, historical, political and practical to which landscape images can be put. Joseph Scheier Dolberg, an assistant curator in the museum's Asian art department, has designed the show to give a sense of all this. In a section called "The Poetic Landscape," he links nature painting to Chinese literary tradition. Common to both was a goal of making mood existential atmosphere primary content. A 14th century hanging scroll by the Yuan painter Tang Di is based on a couplet by the famed poet Wang Wei (A.D. 699 759). Wang's poem is telegraphically stark: I walk to where the water ends And sit and watch as clouds arise. Some poem picture pairings play with contrasts. Another great early poet, Li Bo (701 762), wrote about a journey he took to Sichuan, anciently known as Shu. The trip, as he described it, was a killer, up hellish mountains, along terrifying, sheer drop paths. But a painted response to his poem by the 18th century artist Gu Fuzhen makes the experience feel festive, fun. In Gu's hand scroll "The Road to Shu," the mountains are toasty brown and shaped like scones, sweet enough to eat. No culture has ever been more history obsessed than China's. And as time went on, landscape images were less and less based on nature observed and more and more on old paintings. The Ming dynasty artist and theorist Dong Qichang (1555 1636) systemized a practice of simultaneously channeling and customizing the work of past masters. And in a section of the show, "The Art Historical Landscape," Dong presides over a star studded echo chamber of acolytes, who emulate him emulating earlier art. As cities grew larger and more crowded, and a socially aspiring merchant class came to power, the age old custom of building private formal gardens enclosed, compressed, designer landscapes gained popularity. Such gardens became frequent subjects of paintings, and two examples in the show are notable. One, a small, crinkly hand scroll by a 19th century artist named Yang Tianbi is on first time view at the Met, though it's been in the vaults for ages. It was the first Chinese painting the museum ever acquired, though it did so almost by accident. The painting made an inconspicuous arrival in 1902, rolled up and stuck in a brush holder that had come with a cache of jade carvings. Now, 115 years later, it takes a public bow. A second, much larger hand scroll, by the contemporary Beijing painter Hao Liang (born 1983), came to the collection just this year, and it's an arresting sight. An extended, ghostly gray, almost anime style vision of mythical gardens past including Wang Wei's it ends with a garish 21st century development: a garden as an amusement park, with an immense, robotic Ferris wheel spewing riders off into space. The art in the show's concluding section, "The Riverscape," is historical but feels familiar, like recently heard news. No more poetry, or, not much. Here the image of nature is a political tool: a survey map, a surveillance device, a deed of ownership. In a supersized 18th century hand scroll, one of a set of 12 titled "The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour," documents a real event, an imperial tour that took place in 1751. In the painting, the great ruler shows up in the provinces, somewhere along a rain swollen Yellow River, to ceremonially review a flood prevention project. The visit draws a strangely dutiful, cheerless local crowd. It's as if everyone knows what's really happening a leader is reasserting a claim to his realm; to his own, personal streams and mountains without end. And yet, as everywhere in this lovely show, nature has a final word. The emperor, doing his emperor thing, is little more than a dot against the river behind him, which rolls on.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
T shirts on display at the Westfield Garden State Plaza shopping center's Hot Topic. The store, now in its 30th year, has become a haven for merchandise tied to a wide range of fandoms. On a recent afternoon, the Hot Topic store at the King of Prussia Mall, outside of Philadelphia, teemed with teenagers, 20 somethings and stroller pushing parents. The shoppers sifted through racks of "Harry Potter" plush dolls, "Riverdale" sweaters and "Kiki's Delivery Service" jewelry, seeking the perfect physical manifestation of their or their child's fandom. Demitri Benton, 19, of Reading, Pa., had come to browse the shop's "Deadpool" offerings. "It's usually the first or maybe second place I come to," he said. "It has so many things that you probably wouldn't be able to find in any other store as far as, like, anime, video games, TV shows." Former mall goths, punks and emo kids may remember the store differently. In the '90s and early aughts, one did not so much enter as descend into Hot Topic. The suburban shopping center staple was dungeonlike, with hellish gates that led shoppers into a dark commercial corridor. Inside, a wall of T shirts emblazoned with the names of rock bands and irreverent sayings was flanked by piles of studded belts and rubber bracelets. Manic Panic hair dye could be purchased in a wide range of parent infuriating hues. Often the shopping experience was set to a blaring soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails and My Chemical Romance (whose frontman fun fact once worked at Hot Topic). The massive T shirt display is still there, and so is much of the infernal darkness. "Literally I have seen people run to the door, and their parents steer them away and say, 'They worship Satan, we can't go in there,'" said Alexis Monkiewicz, a key holder at the King of Prussia location. But these days, the store known for inciting parental panic is also home to a dizzying array of obsessions. There's merch for die hard fans of BTS, Billie Eilish and Black Sabbath stocked alongside collectibles designed for those who love My Little Pony, Care Bears and the Disney princesses. They've even turned the lights up a bit. The company's sustained brick and mortar presence may also indicate its health amid reports of record high mall vacancies and closures. Hot Topic currently operates 676 stores in the United States and Canada, up from 662 locations in 2014 , in addition to an online store where one can buy goods from hundreds of entertainment franchises. In a 2018 report, the youth marketing research firm YPulse found that Gen Z and millennial shoppers deemed Hot Topic the top retail destination for "unique styles," with Nike coming in second. "What Hot Topic has managed to do really amazingly and quietly is to pivot their products and their brand perception to cater to the next generation and what they're most interested in," said MaryLeigh Bliss, the vice president of content at Ypulse. "They have completely kept up with what young consumers want." Steve Vranes, the C.E.O. of Hot Topic since June 2016, said that he had watched the company's evolution "from afar" through his work in retail before he joined the company. His resume includes the children's clothier Gymboree and Urbio, a design company that manufactures vertical gardens. "I knew it had changed a little bit and had gone from being considered solely as more of a goth brand to really evolving to be a much broader set of products over time," Mr. Vranes said. "It's kind of organically continued to change all the time, and I think that's part of why we're successful. We continue to question every single year, 'What do customers want that they're not getting anywhere else?'" What they want, it seems, is merch, and Hot Topic has plenty. According to a company representative, more than 75 percent of Hot Topic's products are the result of agreements with intellectual property owners, including record labels and entertainment studios, to license their official merchandise. That means you can buy an Ariana Grande "Sweetener" T shirt on the artist's website, if you want. Or you can buy it on hottopic.com, where you won't get a digital album download with your purchase, but you'll spend less money. Hot Topic has always been home to affordable fan gear. Orv and LeAnn Madden, who started the store out of their Southern California garage in October 1989 , sold "The Nightmare Before Christmas" stockings and "South Park" stickers when those franchises had but nascent fandoms. Hot Topic was also among the first youth retailers to offer plus size options , which sold so well that the company started a plus size label, Torrid, in 2001. Seeing a growth opportunity, Sycamore Partners spun off Torrid into its own company in 2015. (Such investments have been key to Sycamore's success and caused the ire of some interested parties. Hot Topic Inc. bondholders sued Sycamore in 2017 for what they described as an "insider scheme" to profit from the company's "crown jewel.") Hot Topic's wholesale catering to fans likely began around 2004, said Ed Labay, the vice president of merchandise. That was the year "Napoleon Dynamite" became a cultural phenomenon Hot Topic's "Vote for Pedro" T shirts flew off the shelves and when, Mr. Labay said, "we really started to see these pop culture moments hit in a much bigger way than I think they ever had before." The company experienced another surge in 2008, when "Twilight" fans were treated with in store events and merchandise around the first film's release. But even Edward Cullen couldn't inoculate Hot Topic against the retail apocalypse that has roiled physical stores and shopping centers since the Great Recession. That same year, the company announced a music discovery platform, ShockHound, which never took off and cost the company at least 3 million. In late 2010, The Los Angeles Times reported on a financial dip at Hot Topic that led to staff cuts and store closures. "Hot Topic was not immune to the broader consumer spending slowdown during the recession," Mr. Vranes said. Ultimately those losses were cause to think bigger, not smaller. In 2012, Hot Topic began a partnership with Her Universe, a women's wear company for "fangirls," then acquired it in 2016. In 2015, Hot Topic Inc. founded BoxLunch, another chain offering licensed and unlicensed fan merchandise. The brand also established a presence at Comic Con in San Diego, Los Angeles and New York. For years, Hot Topic has been a sponsor of a "geek couture" fashion show at San Diego's Comic Con with Her Universe. The expansion of Hot Topic's mandate has helped keep the company afloat in an uncertain retail landscape. It is also evocative of a cultural shift: Now people can be a part of many fan communities, even seemingly divergent ones, and be taken seriously. "When we were in our early teens, you had to label yourself as something. You were a punk, or a jock, or you listened to hip hop. That was your whole identity," said T.J. Petracca, a founder of the roving party Emo Nite, which licenses some of its merchandise to Hot Topic. These days, he said, "if you like Drake, you can also like Panic! at the Disco. There's not as much separation as there used to be." The specific density of objects and apparel within the stores conveys that, too. Mr. Labay likened Hot Topic's layout to the inside of "a teen's mind," or a constantly updating social media feed. Mr. Vranes said that the store "is a reflection of all of the changes from a content perspective, and all of the access that fans have to these different properties and bands and artists and shows." (His fandom of choice is "Game of Thrones.") The conversations between fans and Hot Topic can be highly specific. In the fall of 2018, the retailer caused a stir by listing a T shirt on its website as "Destiel": a portmanteau of two "Supernatural" characters, Dean and Castiel, whose onscreen chemistry is the subject of much fan fiction, as well as contention. Hot Topic was seen to be taking a side in the dispute by naming the shirt Destiel, and fans feverishly discussed whether the show would pursue a more explicit Destiel story line, said Rachel Aparicio, a media and gender studies scholar at Kresnicka Research Insights, and a "Supernatural" fan herself. "It definitely signaled a shift to me in watching how the company is engaging with fandom, and doing it at a level that is very insider with something like that," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Russian financier Andrey Vavilov sold his full floor penthouse on the 78th floor of the south tower of the Time Warner Center, which he bought through a separate company six years ago, to a mystery buyer for 50,917,500 a transaction that yielded a tidy profit, though far less than he initially planned, and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. Mr. Vavilov, 54, who served as the deputy finance minister during the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin and made a fortune when the oil company he acquired was taken over by a state controlled enterprise in 2003, had bought the 8,274 square foot apartment, PH78, at 25 Columbus Circle, for 37.5 million in June 2009. He also purchased a storage unit on the second floor, for 82,500, which he sold for the same amount. The sale also represented the highest price ever paid for a condo at Time Warner, according to Daniel Levy, the chief executive of CityRealty, which tracks condominium and co op sales. "The previous record was the same apartment six years ago," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
CAMERON PARISH, La. The oil patch is a world of risk takers, but few are as daring as Charif Souki, the chairman and chief executive of Cheniere Energy. A decade ago, Mr. Souki warned of an impending natural gas shortage, and set out to build a network of gas import terminals after none had been built in a generation. He lured Chevron and the French oil giant Total into signing long term use agreements, and Cheniere's stock price rocketed from less than 1 a share in 2002 to more than 40 in three years. But the sudden boom in gas drilling that took off around 2005 created a glut, ruining Mr. Souki's dream. Cheniere's stock price collapsed to 2. And he managed to complete only one terminal, at a cost of 1.4 billion, that stands idle much of the time. Now he is trying to recoup his investment by making the opposite bet: that he can profitably export cheap American natural gas to Europe and Asia, where prices are roughly twice as high. Mr. Souki intends to sink at least another 3 billion into Cheniere's terminal of docks and storage tanks, located in an alligator infested marsh here near the Texas border. Cheniere plans to install two, maybe four, giant refrigeration units capable of cooling methane gas into liquid for shipment on giant cargo ships. Currently, only one American terminal, built in Alaska 30 years ago, can do that. "If you keep digging, digging, digging, you find something," said Mr. Souki, 58, who in a varied career has invested in real estate in Paris, hotels in Hawaii and natural gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico. A Lebanese immigrant and former investment banker with a taste for double breasted suits in a world of cowboy boots, Mr. Souki thrives on the sheer excitement of speculation. Citing a quote that he once heard, attributed to a racecar driver, Mr. Souki said, "If I'm not making mistakes, I'm not driving fast enough." If Cheniere can obtain the necessary regulatory approval and financing, Mr. Souki says he can start exporting gas as early as 2015. He predicts he will eventually be able to export two billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas a day from his facility, or about 3 percent of current domestic gas production. As other companies like Freeport LNG join Cheniere in exporting liquefied natural gas, Mr. Souki says the United States has the potential to become a premier global provider, capable of exporting 10 billion cubic feet a day, roughly the amount that Britain consumes. "This is somebody who basically enjoys being on a roller coaster," said Fadel Gheit, a senior oil analyst at Oppenheimer Company. "It is more likely to see snow in New York in July than to see exports of gas from L.N.G. terminals in the United States." But gas producers desperately looking for ways to raise prices view Mr. Souki as a hero, and enough investors like his ideas to reward Cheniere's stock with a modest rebound. Shares closed at 6.62 on Thursday. "You have to have self confidence to be out there alone when most people say you are wrong," said Aubrey K. McClendon, chief executive of the Chesapeake Energy Corporation, the second biggest domestic gas producer, who has pledged large shipments for Cheniere to export. "He's going to be successful and it's going to be great news for the U.S." When Mr. Souki set out to build at least three liquefied natural gas import terminals, bankers were so skeptical initially that he was forced to borrow 30,000 from Cheniere's president to meet payroll. The company persevered, but Mr. Souki had to settle for one terminal. Over time, Sempra Energy and Exxon Mobil also bought into the idea of building terminals on the gulf, and Chevron and Total signed 20 year agreements guaranteeing Cheniere payments of more than 250 million a year for use of half the Louisiana terminal capacity. The other half was intended to give Cheniere the opportunity to trade gas on the spot market. But new drilling techniques opened up vast shale rock fields to gas prospecting over the last few years, bolstering domestic production and adding a century or more of reserves. That has made the import terminal a disappointment. Meant to receive 30 tankers a month, it only received a dozen all of last year. Much of that business was simply temporarily storing gas for re export. Mr. Souki has plenty of excess capacity to provide similar long term contracts to other companies interested in export. As long as he can complete definitive long term agreements, he says, finding the financing to build out the terminal should be easy. The central assumption behind the export strategy is simple: American gas prices are destined to be cheaper than European and Asian prices for years to come. At today's prices, companies would be able to buy American gas at 4.35 per million British thermal units, and then sell the same gas in Europe or Asia for roughly double that price, since long term contracts globally are still largely tied to high benchmark oil prices. With those spreads in mind, Morgan Stanley, ENN Energy of China, Gas Natural Fenosa of Spain, Sumitomo of Japan and EDF Trading of France have entered into memorandums of understanding with Cheniere to reserve processing capacity for export. "We have more interest than capacity because the arbitrage is so clear," Mr. Souki said. The Energy Department has granted Mr. Souki a permit to export gas to free trade partners, and is expected to grant him a second permit to export to other countries, including China, in the coming months. Other regulatory hurdles for construction will probably not be burdensome, he said, although at least one industrial consumer group is raising concerns that more exports could increase gas prices for Americans. Mr. Souki's plan "can be made to work," said Nikos Tsafos, a gas expert at PFC Energy, a consultancy firm. He warned, however, that as more companies began exporting American gas, it could pull the price of the commodity up in the United States and push it down in international markets. Skeptics predict that the current gas glut in the United States will spread around the world as shale is drilled in Europe and Asia, major producers like Russia increase exports and more L.N.G. export terminals are built in the United States. "For heaven's sake, Israel just discovered 16 trillion feet of gas," said Mr. Gheit. "Indonesia, Qatar, Algeria, Nigeria and now Israel can all sell cheaper than the U.S." Still, Mr. Souki has made believers of some influential investors, like the Blackstone Group, which invested 250 million in the form of a convertible debt security in the company in 2008 and remains one of its largest share owners. "You've got to give Charif credit," said Dwight Scott, a Blackstone senior managing director. "He has built a very good asset there, and he has not let the changes in the market stop him." But even Mr. Souki admitted that the economics and global politics that underpin the spread between oil and gas prices were too unpredictable for him to pronounce complete confidence in his new plan. The other day, as he stood in the terminal control room here watching operators working on a bank of computer monitors, he recalled that "I was convinced we would use this facility at full capacity." "History has demonstrated that, with all the facts in, in two years I could be totally wrong," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Alerts sound about 10 times an hour on Kris Andersson's phone, but the multitasking performer may be keeping the paper industry in business, as well. Along with writing and starring in his solo show, "Dixie's Tupperware Party," Mr. Andersson has also been its booker, producer and promoter. And he does it all with a paper daily planner. Mr. Andersson never intended to write a play, let alone handle the business of one. It was a series of unexpected events and a friendly dare that started his evolution into Dixie Longate, a feisty redhead with a penchant for Jell O shots and foul language who has toured the country for nearly a decade, peddling kitchen storage. "Dixie's Tupperware Party" kicks off its 10th year on the road in May, with bookings set for the rest of the year making Mr. Andersson one of the rare actors to parlay a single character into a career. Dixie came into being when Mr. Andersson's roommate hosted a Tupperware party at their Los Angeles home. A friend suggested that the actor start selling Tupperware himself; another friend dared him to do it in drag. Mr. Andersson accepted the challenge, borrowed a wig and boots and began his transformation into the raunchy and energetic traveling Tupperware saleswoman Dixie. "It was a completely horrible, haphazard look," he recalled, comparing the hairstyle to roadkill. "I refined her over time." Tupperware sales skyrocketed, and a friend of Mr. Andersson's, the director Tomas Caruso, suggested he adapt the party into a stage show, which eventually had its premiere at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. He then spent a few years selling Tupperware establishing himself, he said, as the No. 1 sales representative in both the United States and Canada while developing the show. In 2007 he took up residence for three months at Ars Nova, an incubator for young talent that has gone on to help jump start Bridget Everett, Billy Eichner and the current Broadway musical "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812." Dixie's Ars Nova engagement was directed by Alex Timbers, who later oversaw the innovative productions "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" and "Peter and the Starcatcher," both of which transferred to Broadway after smaller scale runs. Mr. Andersson took Dixie on tour in 2008, and with the help of booking and press agents, landed gigs for the next two years. He recalled: "When the booking company said, 'It's looking like we're not going to book that much more,' I said, 'Great. I'm going to take a shot at it.'" "I thought, 'This can't be that hard,'" he added. "Somebody's a tour booker, a manager, an agent. They're not born with it. They go to school, they learn. If someone else can do it, I can do it." Multitasking is nothing new to Mr. Andersson. In fact, it's reminiscent of his childhood: He worked his first paper route when he was 8 and consistently held part time jobs through his adolescence. Now, at 47, he is co owner and co producer of a production company called Down South, which he describes as "the umbrella of all things Dixie." What that means is hard work. For nine years, he has cold called arts centers and performing arts spaces to get bookings. Some cities have been so welcoming that a sequel was called for in 2014: "Dixie's Never Wear a Tube Top While Riding a Mechanical Bull (And 16 Other Things I Learned While I Was Drinking Last Thursday)" does away with the Tupperware sales and dives into the character's personal life and philosophies. "You'd think, 10 years in, that people know the show, it's easy to get in any market, and it's not," he said. "Unless you're one of the big, big shows, you're still constantly knocking on doors." Drag performances have inched closer to the mainstream since Mr. Andersson introduced Dixie, which cuts both ways. A one man show with a set that can be packed into a Tupperware bin, "Dixie's Tupperware Party" isn't costly to produce, and Mr. Andersson has worked determinedly to establish its name recognition. He knocked on doors in Nashville for four years until "Dixie" was booked there. But despite a national presence, investors were reluctant to back Mr. Andersson for an Off Broadway run of "Dixie's Tupperware Party" last September. He had hoped to bring the show, which has been updated since Ars Nova, back to New York. "They just weren't interested," he said. To expand his audience, Mr. Andersson recently signed with the Gersh Agency, where the agent Matt Charkow will help book "Dixie's Tupperware Party" into new spaces. "We've been able to place the show outside of the standard theatrical model that Kris has been accustomed to," Mr. Charkow said. The coming tour includes one night bookings along with lengthier runs at theaters, casinos and festivals. It cost 40,000 to produce "Dixie's Tupperware Party" at Ars Nova for the three month run, Mr. Andersson estimated, a total he "couldn't even imagine" then. His touring advances at first totaled 25,000, but have grown over the years as high as 150,000 in a market. (His show runs about 90 minutes, and audiences can be as large as 1,500.) Now that he's signed with Gersh, Mr. Andersson is relieved to have some more time on his hands. In the past he would spend several weeks in one city cultivating his fan base; now the stops are shorter with more cities on the itinerary, a cross between theater and stand up comedy gigs. Determined to stay relevant, Mr. Andersson interacts with fans through grass roots marketing and social media. "It's one thing for an agent to be out selling a show," Mr. Charkow said. "It's another to actually be the character, and be in the trenches, so to speak." It's the force of that character who won't easily take no for an answer that makes Mr. Charkow's job a little easier. "She's going to find her way to where she needs to go," he said, "one way or another."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The internet can make you feel like you have all of this control over the political Wait, sorry. How does this wait. Did I just lose? "Internetting with Amanda Hess." (ALL IMAGES SOURCED FROM THE INTERNET) "Pokemon Go to the polls." Hillary Clinton was famously one of the least charismatic politicians. "I'm just chillin' in Cedar Rapids." But on the internet, her image took on a life of its own. It's almost as if Hillary's fans breathed charisma into her on social media. Hillary often seemed at her most charismatic in GIF form, when her most charming moments could be put on endless loop and passed around as totems of her character. Meanwhile, Hillary's detractors were working in the opposite direction, isolating moments that made her look deranged, ugly and sick. This is political candidate as avatar. We're no longer just analyzing how candidates express themselves. We want to express ourselves through them. On the internet, our support of candidates is being encoded through these moments where they seem to represent us, not as actual political representatives voting for our interests, but as people acting how we'd like to imagine ourselves acting. "I'm reclaiming my time, yeah." Memes put a new twist on the old idea of charismatic authority in politics. Charismatic leaders used to imbue themselves with mythos, claiming to possess special qualities and cults of personality around themselves. But on the internet, a lot of that work has been transferred to citizens who take their leaders' tics and blow them up into superhuman form. And as they do it, they're creating really strong tribal and emotional ties around those personalities. If you make a meme about a candidate and then they become president, it can feel like you created a piece of the presidential persona, like a part of you is president. Memes give us the power to build leaders' personalities or destroy them. We used to talk about gaffes. The idea seems quaint now. "Grab and grab and grab." "Grab and grab." There's no longer any fixed idea of a candidate to be disrupted by a gaffe. "Such a nasty woman." Our conception of politicians is now made up of sets of competing polarized memes. Any moment can be manipulated into a positive or negative, depending on your allegiance. And because memes can morph to accommodate almost any position it's easier than e ver to take candidates' images and twist them to our own ends. Facts don't matter to memes. The meme of this confused blond lady started out as pictures of a Brazilian soap actress contemplating her character's inner turmoil in jail. But when people started superimposing math equations on her face, she turned into a symbol of confusion or deep conspiratorial calculations. The Babadook was a horrifying movie villain before he was pushed in front of a rainbow flag and restyled as a fabulous gay icon. Because memes don't need to grapple with reality, they spread a lot faster than typical forms of political speech. And in presidential politics, we've never seen anyone benefit from this more "You are fake news." than Donald Trump. Trump had no clear ideology, the vaguest sketches of ideas, a bottomless thirst for attention, and a flair for drama: the perfect base for endless meming. His campaign rallies became like incubators for ideas with viral potential. Think about the defining meme of Trumpism. "We need to build a wall." "We need to build a wall." It never made any practical sense that the United States would build a 2,000 mile wall and that Mexico would pay for it, but "A big, beautiful wall." Any time reality tried to get in the way, Trump would double down on the meme. "10 feet higher." "The wall just got 10 feet higher." For his biggest fans, Trump himself is the ultimate meme. They've become so invested in promoting his persona that his promises have become almost irrelevant, like outdated versions of a meme that have been replaced by the next amusing thing. That's the seductive danger of democracy as meme. It can make us feel like we have more personal control over a politician, but it's the politician who is seizing the real power, becoming immune to criticism and less accountable to us. Next time on "Internetting" Why beauty apps make you feel ugly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source A mysterious bacterium found in up to half of all colon tumors also travels with the cancer as it spreads, researchers reported on Thursday. Whether the bacterium, called Fusobacterium nucleatum, actually plays a role in causing or spurring the growth of cancer is not known. But the new study, published in the journal Science, also shows that an antibiotic that squelches this organism slows the growth of cancer cells in mice. Scientists are increasingly suspicious that there may be a link: another type of bacteria has been discovered in pancreatic cancer cells. In both types of cancer, most tumors host bacteria; however, only a small proportion of the cells in any single tumor are infected. "The whole idea of bacteria in tumors is fascinating and unexpected," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a colon cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins. The colon cancer story began in 2011, when Dr. Matthew Meyerson of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Dr. Robert A. Holt of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia independently reported finding Fusobacteria, which normally inhabit the mouth, in human colon cancers. That instigated a rush to confirm. Researchers around the world reported finding Fusobacteria in colon cancers, but their work only raised more questions. The new paper, by Dr. Meyerson and his colleagues, provides some answers. The group looked at human colon cancers that had spread to the liver. The liver tumors were surgically removed and examined as long as two years after the patient's initial colon cancer surgery. The tumors that had been infected with Fusobacteria in the colon continued to be infected even after spreading to the liver, the researchers found. Liver cancer cells containing the bacteria did not appear to be newly infected, Dr. Meyerson said. Colon tumors that did not originally have the bacteria did not have them after spreading to the liver. The researchers also looked for the bacteria in cancers that arose first in the liver, not in the colon. They found none. "By far the most likely explanation is that the cancer metastasizes to the liver and carries this microbiome with it," Dr. Meyerson said. "The bacteria are not there by chance." "It's kind of amazing that the bacteria are such an integral part of the cancer," he added. Dr. David Relman, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at Stanford and the Palo Alto VA, agreed: "This really suggests they may be traveling with the cancer." Dr. Meyerson and his colleagues also transplanted human colon cancers into mice. The cancers grew. The scientists plucked out pieces of the tumors and transplanted them to other mice, where once again they grew. The researchers did this repeatedly, moving the cancers through four generations of mice. The Fusobacteria remained with the cancers. Yet when they treated the mice with an antibiotic metronidazole that kills Fusobacteria, the tumors grew much more slowly. As a control, the researchers treated some mice with erythromycin, an antibiotic that Fusobacteria resist. Tumor growth was unaffected. So should colon cancer patients whose tumors contain Fusobacteria take metronidazole? Should scientists be racing to develop a vaccine against Fusobacteria to prevent colon cancer? Not so fast, said Emma Allen Vercoe of the University of Guelph, who is studying the bacterium's role in colon cancer. The problem with antibiotics is that they kill lots of bacteria, not just Fusobacteria. The other species may be important, Dr. Allen Vercoe said, and may even slow the progression of colon cancer. "We don't know enough yet to be able to predict the effects of a given antibiotic, and since everyone has a different gut microbiota, such a therapy will likely be hit and miss," she said. Another problem, said Dr. Holt, is that patients would have to take the antibiotic indefinitely, because Fusobacteria are constantly being reintroduced into the mouth. If a person stopped antibiotic treatment, the bacteria could once again get into their tumor cells. As for a vaccine, Dr. Allen Vercoe said, not all strains of Fusobacteria are linked to cancer. "Of the few strains that are, there is no clear consensus on why they are behaving pathogenically," she added. "And so there is no clear target for a vaccine strategy." Dr. Vogelstein suggests that instead of directly causing cancer, Fusobacteria might be altering patients' immune response and perhaps their response to treatments that use the immune system to destroy cancers. Alternately, perhaps the bacteria are acting more directly by secreting chemicals that spur growth in nearby cancer cells, Dr. Relman said. "It is not unreasonable to say Fusobacterium is promoting or contributing to colon cancer," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The National Gallery of Art in Washington announced it will return a pastel drawing by Pablo Picasso, "Head of a Woman," to the heirs of a prominent German Jewish banker who was persecuted by the Nazis. The 1903 Blue Period pastel of a dark haired, unsmiling woman her identity is unknown is one of at least 16 masterpieces that the banker Paul von Mendelssohn Bartholdy sold in the months after the Nazis seized power and before his death in 1935. A relative of the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was ousted from the Central Association of German Banks and Bankers in 1933 and from the board of the Reich Insurance Office in 1934. The family bank was "aryanised" transferred to non Jewish ownership in 1938. "Head of a Woman" was sold to the dealer Justin K. Thannhauser in 1934. The National Gallery of Art says it acquired the pastel as a donation in 2001.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design

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