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Frederick C. Tillis, an American composer who straddled the worlds of jazz and classical music, died on May 3 at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 90. His daughter Pamela Tillis said the cause was complications of a hip operation that he underwent after a fall. Professor Tillis who spent much of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, teaching composition and music theory was known for creating and performing versatile works that spanned American jazz and European traditions. "My influences and inspirations are all over the place," he said in an interview for William C. Banfield's book "Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers" (2003). "What is challenging for me to do is to combine seemingly disparate music traditions and idioms and still speak in a language that musicians and other listeners find interesting." Professor Tillis wrote more than 100 compositions, as well as 15 books of poetry and a textbook, "Jazz Theory and Improvisation" (1977). His work included compositions for piano, voice, orchestra, chorus and chamber ensembles. A frequent source of inspiration was African American spirituals. "Frederick Tillis's 'Spiritual Fantasy Suite' has spirituals as a base, but its soprano and alto saxophones mixed with piano exude Middle Eastern melody with jazz," Bernard Holland wrote in a 2006 review for The New York Times. "What anchors the piece is its eccentric meters and rhythm and the intricate imitative counterpoint." Frederick Charles Tillis was born on Jan. 5, 1930, in Galveston, Texas. He was raised by his mother, Zelma Bernice (Hubbard) Gardner, a domestic worker for a local family, and his stepfather, General Gardner, a contractor for the City of Galveston. He took his last name from the maternal side of his mother's family. His mother told him later in life that she had always wanted to teach. As an adult, Professor Tillis paid for her to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in education from Texas Southern University in Houston. She taught sixth grade at Booker T. Washington Elementary School in Galveston until her retirement. Professor Tillis showed an early aptitude for music. At 12, he began playing trumpet and saxophone at local jazz clubs, where he was billed as "Baby Tillis." He graduated from Galveston Central High School, where he was named a student instructor and assisted the director of the marching band. He won a music scholarship to Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, when he was 16 and had begun teaching in the music department by his senior year. After graduating at 19, he continued to teach at Wiley, embarking on a music education career of nearly 50 years. Professor Tillis met Edna Louise Dillon, a fellow music student, at Wiley, and they married after her graduation in July 1950. They were together until her death in September 2013. In addition to his daughter Pamela, he is survived by another daughter, Patricia Tillis. Professor Tillis received a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1952. He returned there to earn his doctorate after spending four years in the Air Force, where he conducted the 509th Air Force Band. He taught at colleges in Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky before being recruited to teach full time at Massachusetts in 1970. Appointed director of the school's Fine Arts Center in 1978, he helped jump start several university arts initiatives, including what became the Jazz and African American Music Studies and the annual Jazz in July summer intensive programs. After retiring in 1997, he continued writing poetry, composing and playing music professionally until a few years before his death. Professor Tillis pushed for cultural diversity in the music world throughout his academic career. "I don't believe in the ivory tower philosophy of art," he said in 1997. "If you don't get with the people, what are you doing to preserve the vitality of art and culture?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The choreographer Kyle Abraham is changing things up this season. His company, originally called Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, has been rebranded: Just call it A.I.M. As evident at the Joyce Theater this week, he's also introducing outside choreographers. Does the dance world really need another repertory company? Mr. Abraham, through a press representative, said he doesn't have a plan to transition into a repertory group; instead, for this season at least, he wants to feature his dancers in the works of other choreographers to show off their individuality and range. This season, those dance makers chosen because they inspire Mr. Abraham are Andrea Miller, Bebe Miller and Doug Varone. Of course, Mr. Abraham's choreography is on display as well. (And it's increasingly in demand: This fall, he will create a premiere for New York City Ballet.) What the Joyce season revealed, on Tuesday and Wednesday, was how his dancers could be challenged more even by Mr. Abraham himself. In "INDY," his first solo in nearly 10 years, Mr. Abraham circumnavigated the stage with a birdlike swoop; his glorious costume (by Karen Young) a black tunic and pants, with the entire backside covered in fringe revealed a person solid and strong when viewed from the front, but frazzled, even traumatized, from behind. As he moved to a score by Jerome Begin, his accents and corkscrew angles quickened or dissipated with such fleetingness that his dancing carried the sensation of walking on air. Morphing into different personas, Mr. Abraham transformed himself from a voguer, silkily turning the stage into a runway, into an old man and a troubled boy. They were like ghosts trying to escape. Yet for all of its vivid moments of physical poetry, "INDY" drifted into therapeutic territory as an underlying sense of grief emerged through Mr. Abraham's silent screams and sobs. He left a palpable imprint, but the work itself got stuck. The same was true of his other premiere, "Meditation: A Silent Prayer," which took as its subjects police brutality and the recent, senseless deaths of countless African Americans. Text, composed and read in a steady voice by the artist Carrie Mae Weems, listed their ages: "She was 25," "He was 22," "She was 31." There were echoes of "Untitled America," his work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater that explored the effect of the prison system on African American families. In "Meditation," Mr. Abraham drove his point home succinctly, but this foray into social commentary, while serious and timely, was underdeveloped: I was sure the second section was about to start when the curtain fell. Andrea Miller's "state," another premiere, is an all female trio set in what felt like a barren desert. Reggie Wilkins's electronic score gave it a trance sensibility, as the dancers Kayla Farrish, Catherine Ellis Kirk and Marcella Lewis took small rocking steps from side to side. Jose Solis's matching costumes, black briefs with tops that featured a ruffled sleeve, were modern, handsome uniforms. As it developed, "state" maintained its hypnotic polish but never conveyed much more than a mood. Like the works by Bebe Miller (no relation) and Mr. Varone, "state" was lulling and mildly evocative it served as a kind of palette cleanser to Mr. Abraham's more urgent and expressive choreography. The company premieres of Mr. Varone's "Strict Love" (1994) and Bebe Miller's "Habits of Attraction" (an excerpt from "The Habit of Attraction," from 1987) afforded a chance to see a different side of the dancers. The change was most apparent in "Strict Love," set to a recording of a radio broadcast of hit songs, as the dancers captured its highly formal, robotic precision. And his dancers are lovely. Tamisha Guy continues to astonish with her startling ability to marry a sense of power and serenity; she commands the stage most elegantly, with movement that melts off her limbs. And Ms. Lewis, regally unadorned, doesn't comment on what she's doing: It's natural. Mr. Abraham has assembled a strong group. Clearly, he has a lot going for him. I t's just hard to know where he plans on going with it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The magical kingdom of Broadway is shuttered, but our critic returned to it or rather a version of it that opened his eyes, Bette Davis wide, to New York theater. A month into my time of enforced isolation, the hunger hit me hard, as I knew it would sooner or later. I had to revisit the vipers' nest, that dangerous and glamorous cradle of illusions found within one square mile of the cold, concrete heart of Manhattan. I'd been away from my people for too long. And so I returned to the magical kingdom of Broadway, or rather a version of Broadway as it never really was, yet somehow always was and is, and ever shall be, in the minds of many of us who fell in love with the New York theater from a distance. It was time for my fix of "All About Eve." For readers uninitiated in the joys of this addiction, "All About Eve" is the most pleasurable, most quotable film ever created about those who make their living on the stage. This 1950 anatomy of backstage backstabbing tells the story of an aging Broadway star, Margo Channing (Bette Davis, in full sail), whose romantic and professional lives are imperiled by her duplicitous young assistant, the title character (played by a vulpine Anne Baxter). "THESPIS ON THE ROPES; The Theatre Gets a Sock From 'All About Eve,'" read the headline of Bosley Crowther's Sunday column in The New York Times. Crowther, succumbing to the purpleness with which "Eve" tends to infect everyone who sees it, wrote with the excitement of a ringside boxing announcer: "Hollywood, butt of sarcasm from the stage for these many cruel years, has finally sent forth a Goliath that wrings David's impudent neck after tossing his stinging stones back at him with swift and relentless force." But after the dust cleared, it was obvious that theater, the so called Fabulous Invalid, had not only been left intact but was also standing taller than ever. And for many people, including the 10 year old, stage struck me who first saw "Eve" on television with eyes as big and devouring as Bette Davis's the movie became a definitive Bible of this business we call show, as sublime as it is ridiculous. At this point, I should explain what I do for a living or did, before the theaters of New York were shuttered by a pandemic. I shall step aside here to let my vocation be described by one Addison DeWitt, a character portrayed with Oscar winning acidity by George Sanders: "My native habitat is the Theater in it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the Theater as ants are to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field." Though I, too, am a Theater critic and commentator and have been for 26 years at The New York Times I have little in common with Mr. DeWitt other than my nominal profession and a fondness for dry martinis. I do not share his withering trans Atlantic accent, his soigne wardrobe, his social coziness with the people he eviscerates in his column, nor his love for making and destroying reputations overnight. Nor are the show folk I write about much like the egomaniacal, mythomaniacal, dipsomaniacal crew that Addison chronicles. Yet the musky, intoxicating fragrance that permeates "All About Eve" has everything to do with why I came to New York, and how I wound up in my job. There have been cases made for "Eve" as a feminist film, and a misogynist one; as a homophobic work and a font of queer folklore (not mutually exclusive); as a serious slice of cinematic auteurism and a preening piece of unconscious camp. (Impersonations of Davis's Margo were once a staple of drag acts.) There is, inevitably, a fanatic's guidebook, Sam Staggs's "All About 'All About Eve.'" It has also inspired innumerable other works. The international roster of films that offer variations on the central female mentor and protegee relationship at the center of "Eve" are as varied as Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother," John Cassavetes's "Opening Night," Olivier Assayas's "Clouds of Sils Maria," Yorgos Lanthimos's "The Favourite" and lest we forget Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls." There have been literal adaptations, too. The movie has been the basis of a hit musical comedy ("Applause," which opened in 1970, starring Lauren Bacall) and a mixed media deconstruction from the theater experimentalist Ivo van Hove, staged in London last year (starring Gillian Anderson). Neither captured the essence of the original, though. Perky, affectionate and upbeat, "Applause" translated the arrogant stiletto thrust of Mankiewicz's dialogue into the crowd courting bounce of clunkily rhymed song. The van Hove version, while it stuck close to the original screenplay, drained its vitality, creating a defeated kingdom of walking shadows, where artifice had lost its sheen and poseurs could no longer pose with conviction. And shiny artifice is what gives "Eve" its energy. The world of Theater, as Mankiewicz envisions it, is a place where exaggerated style, sweeping gestures and impeccably sharpened zingers are a necessary defense system for people whom Addison characterizes as largely "emotional misfits and precocious children." It is said of Davis's Margo that she "compensates for underplaying onstage by overplaying reality." This makes the characters incredibly entertaining to watch when they feel threatened. Even as a young teenager, I didn't mistake "Eve" for a work of realism. But the New York culture it represented, in which everyone is a self invention and ambition is oxygen, was the place I dreamed of escaping to someday. "We are a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we Theater folk," says Addison, and for me you could also substitute "New Yorkers" for "Theater folk." "We are the original displaced personalities." Such pronouncements exude the blessed reassurance of belonging to an exclusive sect. And perhaps what I love most about "Eve" is its portrayal of the theater as a religion, a celebration of the divine mystery of what happens when a performance onstage catches fire. We never actually see the performance of a play in "Eve," which is probably for the best, although the uncanny fire emanated by Davis's Margo gives you some hint of what she might deliver onstage. Instead, we see people hypnotized by the glow of theater's promise, and listen to their accounts of triumphs past. "Eve," with its multiple narrators, is all about storytelling, too, and mythmaking. That is, after all, why Eve insinuates herself into Margo's life and studies her like "a set of blueprints." The theater struck, self effacing waif she presents herself to be may be an act, but the theater struck part is real. She's not faking it when, taken backstage to meet Margo for the first time, she pauses to gaze out at the empty theater. "You can breathe it, can't you?" she says raptly, "like some magic perfume." I think most of us who came to New York to "make it" in the second half of the 20th century shared some of the wonder and appetite of Eve. Most of us also discovered pretty quickly that we lacked the ruthlessness (never mind the talent) that propelled her to stardom. And the Manhattan of Mankiewicz's movie, if it ever existed, had long ago vanished, like a shimmery Brigadoon. Certainly, that was the case when I arrived in the bankrupt, dirty, dressed down New York of the late 1970s. But the blazing energy of aspiration I felt from the movie was still there cruder, perhaps, but equally exciting. And more than a few of the people I befriended turned out to be "Eve" ophiles, as well. We quote lines from it to one another. The most famous is Margo's warning at the start of her party: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night." But my favorite is Addison's put down of an overwrought Eve: "You're too short for that gesture." Since I rarely fraternize with theater people, my life as a critic has seldom delivered those urbane, exquisitely timed moments that might have come from "All About Eve." So I cherish the few that do. Several years ago, for example, I attended a Park Avenue dinner party where I found myself seated next to a well lubricated, bejeweled woman who was going on about how insufferable a recent, starry production of "Othello" had been, one that I had praised lavishly. Though we had been introduced earlier, she evidently hadn't caught my name, because she ended her tirade by saying, presumably in reference to The Times's rave, "What happened to Ben Brantley?" I responded by turning my place card to her. She didn't miss a beat. "I admire you so much," she said, with a tremolo. Best of all was the time, 12 years ago, when I reviewed Patti LuPone on Broadway as Mama Rose in a revival of "Gypsy." I had been less than enthusiastic about her in the part in an earlier concert version. But she was fabulous this time around. In my review I wrote, "And yes, that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat." The next day a big, beribboned, circular box arrived in my office. Inside was an immense chocolate cowboy hat. The note from LuPone read, "I hope you're laughing." Was she kidding? That was a gift and a gesture worthy of Margo Channing. And for a few enchanted moments, I belonged entirely to the radiant, impossible landscape of "All About Eve."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Trying to salvage a spring and summer of shelved and scrapped scripts, the Kilroys, a group of female identified playwrights and producers, is spotlighting new plays and musicals by female, transgender and nonbinary writers that have had their runs disrupted by the pandemic. More than 140 planned productions by writers ranging from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok to the comedian Sarah Silverman appear on the group's sixth annual list, released on Tuesday. The tally typically counts a few dozen unproduced and underproduced new plays that are nominated by approximately 300 theater professionals. But this year the list isn't curated. Any writer who's had a first or second professional production of their work canceled, postponed or shortened by COVID 19 can submit their information to be included, said Obehi Janice, a playwright and member of the collective, which includes theater artists and producers based in New York and Los Angeles. "It's a rejection of status, which this list has unintentionally been a part of," she said. "We wanted to take a true survey of our community." The list, which takes its name from the subversive World War II graffiti tag "Kilroy Was Here," will be updated each month through the end of the year, she said. (The Dramatists Guild, Theater Communications Group and National New Play Network provided information for the first round.) Several included productions will be familiar to New York audiences: Both Hilary Bettis's "72 Miles to Go..." and Claudia Rankine's "Help" had begun performances at the Roundabout Theater Company and the Shed, respectively. Silverman's highly anticipated musical "The Bedwetter" (co written with Joshua Harmon and Adam Schlesinger) had its April 25 opening date at the Atlantic Theater Company postponed indefinitely. Other plays were aimed for spring at smaller, regional theaters, including Audrey Cefaly's "Alabaster" at Know Theater of Cincinnati and Elaine Jarvik's "Four Women Talking About the Man Under the Sheet" at Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah. Martyna Majok, whose "Cost of Living" was on an earlier Kilroys list, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the play. Her "Sanctuary City" is on the new list after a New York Theater Workshop production was postponed indefinitely. In an interview Tuesday, Majok said she believes that advocacy by the Kilroys has nudged industry gatekeepers to more strongly consider plays by female and nonbinary writers. And she hopes such progress won't be lost to the pandemic. "The cost and, therefore, the exclusivity makes it so difficult for lower income artists to break into theater or to keep going within it," she said. "And I worry that further exclusivity could kill vital stories and perspectives in our cultural conversation." Inda Craig Galvan, a Los Angeles based playwright, had two works on this year's list, "A Hit Dog Will Holler" and "Black Super Hero Magic Mama." She said it's disheartening that productions have been scuttled in a cultural moment perfect for plays that tackle racism and oppression. "It's a great time in our country for these plays to be produced," she said. "But now I'm wondering if they'll ever be produced." She said that, as a writer of color, it's frustrating when spaces are interested in developing her plays or showering them with prizes, but not in actually producing them. "'Black Super Hero Magic Mama' has won, like, every award," she said. "And it's had one full production." Approximately 49 percent of the plays and musicals on this year's list are by writers of color, Janice said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
This second movement of "Untitled America" segues into an electronic score by Raime interspersed with contemporary sounding voices of people recounting the number of years in their prison sentences and how they miss their families. Over this affecting soundscape, Mr. Abraham drapes a loose coil of duets and solos; the layering is sophisticated but ultimately too slack. Mr. Abraham's vocabulary, with its rich mix of street and studio suggesting a body at war with itself, is potent and explosive and wonderfully of the moment, yet his sense of structure seems stuck. The installments keep coming without advancing. Mr. Bigonzetti's "Deep" has almost the opposite flaw. This Italian choreographer, who was recently appointed director of La Scala Ballet, can make a coherent dance with a chic and sparkling surface. The Ailey dancers look terrific in his broken shapes. But what at first appears inventive in the choreography the unusual connections between elbows and stomachs, the feet clasping necks turns out to be mere flash. The way Mr. Bigonzetti takes advantage of the dancers' extraordinary technique comes to feel exploitative. A motif in which a dancer hovers at the edge of something without diving in is all too apt as an encapsulation of the work. "Deep" it isn't. For music, "Deep" uses recordings by Ibeyi, French Cuban twins who sing of Yoruban gods in lightweight, club friendly tracks. The more challenging sounds of Afro Cuban jazz that drive Ronald K. Brown's "Open Door" aren't the only element that distinguishes Mr. Brown's treatment of Afro Cuban material from Mr. Bigonzetti's. Mr. Brown knows Cuba, even if this work isn't one of his most inspired. What's most remarkable is how the Ailey dancers can fully flesh out Mr. Brown's irresistible blend of African and modern and then just as fully inhabit the groove and footwork of the hip hop steps in Rennie Harris's "Exodus." Something subtle in the style of Paul Taylor's tango inspired "Piazzolla Caldera" still eludes them, but they can easily manage the vast stylistic shift between "Untitled America" and Mr. Battle's own "No Longer Silent." That 2007 piece, Mr. Battle's best, could be from the 1930s. Especially because the virtues of that work are so rooted in the past, it is to Mr. Battle's credit that the company he leads no longer looks behind the times.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'AIN'T NO MO'' at the Public Theater (previews start on March 12; opens on March 27). When Donald J. Trump was elected president, a lot of people talked about fleeing to Canada or elsewhere. Few made good on it. But Jordan E. Cooper's play imagines a world where black Americans prepare to depart en masse. Stevie Walker Webb directs a satire in which black lives mobilize. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'ANYTHING THAT GIVES OFF LIGHT' at Joe's Pub (previews start on March 14; opens on March 16). The Highlands of Scotland and the hills of Appalachia unexpectedly collide in this new work presented by the TEAM and the National Theater of Scotland, with music by the Bengsons. Directed by Rachel Chavkin, the play tracks an American woman, who finds herself alone on her second honeymoon in Scotland, and the two men she meets at a pub. 212 967 7555, joespub.com 'BE MORE CHILL' at the Lyceum Theater (in previews; opens on March 10). A favorite of some blissfully uncool young fans, this Joe Iconis and Joe Tracz musical about a teenager who swallows a potentially malevolent supercomputer is booting up on Broadway. Reviewing the Off Broadway production, Ben Brantley called it a "high energy, high anxiety musical." Stephen Brackett directs. bemorechillmusical.com 'HATE ' at the WP Theater (in previews; opens on March 13). The heart wants what it wants, and sometimes it wants what the brain strongly objects to. WP Theater and Colt Coeur present Rehana Lew Mirza's play about a literature professor (Kavi Ladnier) and the novelist (Sendhil Ramamurthy) she may or may not detest. Adrienne Campbell Holt directs. 866 811 4111, wptheater.org 'IF PRETTY HURTS UGLY MUST BE A ' at Playwrights Horizons (in previews; opens on March 10). Tori Sampson makes her Playwrights Horizons debut with a parable of blackness and beauty. Set in the village of Affreakah Amirrorkah, the play is a collision of Greek drama, Brechtian teaching plays and anguished contemporary comedy. Leah C. Gardiner directs a cast that includes Nike Uche Kadri as the town's most beautiful girl. 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org 'KISS ME, KATE' at Studio 54 (in previews; opens on March 14). Brush up on your Shakespeare and your Cole Porter, too, because the Roundabout is reviving this 1948 musical, a metatheatrical riff on "The Taming of the Shrew." Under Scott Ellis's direction, Kelli O'Hara stars alongside Will Chase, Corbin Bleu and Stephanie Styles. Has the show aged poorly or will it be just wunderbar? 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'THE MOTHER' at the Atlantic Theater Company at the Linda Gross Theater (in previews; opens on March 11). Florian Zeller's "The Father," a chilling, brain addling play about dementia, was on Broadway in 2016. Now this earlier drama, about a middle aged woman questioning her reality, arrives Off Broadway. Isabelle Huppert stars as a woman suspicious of her husband (Chris Noth) and her son. Trip Cullman directs. 866 811 4111, atlantictheater.org 'SKINNAMARINK' at the Fourth Street Theater (previews start on March 8; opens on March 13). Before Dick and Jane ran, American children fumbled toward literacy with McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, a few of which are still in use today. In its new show, Little Lord, the plunderer of cultural memory, revisits these primers and the queasy moral indoctrination they taught alongside proper spelling and grammar. Michael Levinton directs. 212 460 5475, littlelord.org 'SURELY GOODNESS AND MERCY' at the Clurman Theater at Theater Row (in previews; opens on March 13). At a struggling Newark school, a neglected middle schooler and a lunch lady form a lasting bond. Chisa Hutchinson's play for Keen Company promises more than the usual R.D.A. of uplift and maybe some cartons of milk, too. Jessi D. Hill directs. Jay Mazyck and Brenda Pressley star. 212 239 6200, keencompany.org 'WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME' at the Helen Hayes Theater (previews start on March 14; opens on March 31). Part constitutional law seminar, part rollicking comedy, Heidi Schreck's show about her fraught romance with the Constitution finds a more perfect home: Broadway. Jesse Green called the play, which also stars Mike Iveson, Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams, "one of those subversive and eye opening new experiences." 212 239 6200, constitutionbroadway.com 'BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK' at the Pershing Square Signature Center (closes on March 10). Lynn Nottage's spiky Hollywood comedy readies for its final close ups. The play, which ranges from 1933 to 2003, weaving in and out of the life of an African American actress, isn't especially tidy, but it's brainy, fizzy and ultimately wrenching in its consideration of stereotype and erasure. 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org 'CHOIR BOY' at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater (closes on March 10). Directed by Trip Cullman, Tarell Alvin McCraney's play about prep school boys warbling their way toward maturity performs its final encores. Although Jesse Green critiqued the flimsiness of the plot and some of the characters, he wrote that "Choir Boy" is "a script, or at least a production, that is far more powerful than its flaws might indicate." 212 239 6200, manhattantheatreclub.com 'MIES JULIE' AND 'THE DANCE OF DEATH' at Classic Stage Company (closes on March 10). Two of August Strindberg's bad romances, running in repertory, reach the end. Ben Brantley wrote that even though neither Yael Farber's adaptation of "Mies Julie," directed by Shariffa Ali, nor Conor McPherson's version of "The Dance of Death," directed by Victoria Clark, kindles Strindberg's "infernal heat," each introduces the audience to a "complex and uncomfortable world." 866 811 4111, classicstage.org 'TRUE WEST' at the American Airlines Theater (closes on March 17). Sam Shepard's tale of brotherly animus and noxious masculinity, produced by Roundabout Theater Company, stages its last showdown. James Macdonald's revival, starring Ethan Hawke as a drifter, Paul Dano as a screenwriter and several houseplants as their innocent victims, moved Ben Brantley to write, "everyday sibling rivalry has seldom felt this ominous." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
I HAVE spent many Labor Day weekends in Edgartown, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard, and one of my favorite activities is looking at the yachts bobbing in the harbor while eating a lobster roll. The smaller ones remind me of the 30 foot Sea Ray that I used to own and still dream of owning again. But like most people, I gawk at the giant yachts, moored in the prime spots on the harbor and wonder who owns them. Boats, like all luxury assets, lost a lot of value during the financial downturn, and demand for even the big ones dried up. But recently, I've been hearing that yacht prices have bottomed out and demand is picking up. And I started wondering how people were thinking about the expenses of yachts, perhaps second only to private jets in my personal calculus of expensive indulgences. After all, it must cost a small fortune to run a grand yacht, from fuel to insurance to crew. But I also wondered if there were any tricks to saving a bit of money here and there that could help the more modest boating enthusiast. Of course, true boaters don't ride the high seas with calculators next to their cocktails. "When we're cruising and burning 100 gallons of fuel an hour, I don't think it's costing me 300 an hour," said Bob Schmetterer, the former chairman and chief executive of Euro RSCG Worldwide, the giant advertising and marketing company, referring to his 80 foot Marlow Explorer. (It holds 3,000 gallons, and he was moored aboard it in Maine when we spoke.) He told me that his yacht, named Blue Moon, was the culmination of years of trading up. He started with a 17 foot boat and went to 22, 27, 38 and 51 feet. In 2006, when he retired, he bought the Marlow. It cost 3.5 million. "It's a great joy to spend time on her," he said. "One of the things we're fortunate about is my wife and I equally love the boat and the yachting lifestyle. We know a few other couples like that, but more often one of them really loves it, and it's a tricky balance." Mr. Schmetterer was lucky in his choice of spouse, but he was wise in gradually buying bigger boats. Many first time enthusiasts rush to buy the biggest boat they can afford, something that experts say is at risk of happening even more now with prices relatively low. "We've seen a substantial deflation of hull values, whether it's the 50 million yacht or the 2 million yacht," said Sean Blue, head of global watercraft at Chartis, the insurance company. "New buyers who are coming on the scene are benefiting by getting a lot of yacht for the money." That has several risks, though. For one, it instills a discount mentality. Mr. Blue's concerns are naturally with insurance: value minded buyers may look for the cheapest insurer and be disappointed if they have to make a claim. Repairing or replacing the engines, for example, costs the same whether you bought the boat new or used. Mr. Blue used the example of my old Sea Ray. It had two engines, and each one would have cost about 15,000 to replace. Some insurers would pay this amount in a claim; others would depreciate the value of the engines based on how old they were. Either way, the owner needs to come up with 15,000 if he wants his boat to run again. Not surprisingly, the buying risks increase with more expensive boats. At the height of the market, buyers were doing whatever they could to move up on the long waiting lists for megayachts, which can take three years to build. Now, with fewer boats built over the last three or four years, buyers need to make sure that the builder is financially sound, exactly because it takes years to build a large yacht. Ron Gong, co head of the Palo Alto, Calif., office at Harris myCFO, a wealth management firm, said he advised clients buying megayachts to use escrow accounts where both parties need to agree to release payments. "You need to have a trusted, informed person such as the yacht architect or a knowledgeable builders' representative to measure progress and determine if the work invoiced has been completed," he said. Another risk is that you buy the wrong boat for the waters where you want to cruise. Jeff Vrana, who oversees one man's five yachts, the largest of which is a 192 foot Lurssen called Ronin, said new buyers might not understand that there are specific yachts for the Bahamas, for example, where the waters are shallower, and the Caribbean, where they are deeper. Mr. Vrana said he would also encourage people to buy a smaller yacht until they understood the real costs of owning a boat. "When you have money to burn and don't mind writing checks for 1 million a month, then buy that 190 footer," he said. When he takes Ronin to Germany from Florida for service this fall, it will cost 180,000 euros in fuel one way and 3 million euros for maintenance work. The cost will definitely be lower for someone with a smaller yacht, but it is relative to the boat's value. Mr. Schmetterer says he has a computer program for Blue Moon that tracks the service the yacht needs based on the number of hours the engines are run. "Boats have complicated systems, and they're exposed to salt and hard waves," he said. And this means the yacht owner has to be vigilant about what may break down and prepared for what can happen. On the largest yachts, a big issue is the crew. Selecting the captain and the chief engineer (who maintains the systems) is crucial. Mr. Vrana, a chief engineer by training, said picking the right ones could reduce annual expenses. The most common measure of a boat's cost is 10 percent of its value per year, but he said the expenses on the five yacht fleet he managed were around 6 to 8 percent. Given that he has 27 crew members, it shows just how expensive having a mini fleet can be. One easy way a crew can save money is by having a fuel strategy. Ronin holds 30,000 gallons. So knowing where to buy fuel that is 10 cents a gallon cheaper will quickly add up. Likewise, a captain and engineer with a good safety record can reduce insurance costs. But the area that even big owners overlook is Internet usage on board. At as much as 8 per megabyte of data, the cost for a weekend aboard with the grandchildren can run 2,000 to 6,000, Mr. Vrana said. The alternative is an unlimited plan, but as he put it, that costs " 5,000 a month to look at Google." Knowing all of these expenses and more, why would anyone buy a boat in this economy? I asked Scott Moore, a retired reinsurance executive, who took up sailing while working in Bermuda in the 1990s. Now retired and living in Darien, Conn., he bought a 36 foot Morris Yacht in the fall of 2006. In June, he traded up to a new 42 foot Morris, with classic sailing lines. The extra six feet cost about 300,000, with a 42 foot Morris selling for about 750,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Before six seasons of premium cable television, before endless reruns on basic cable, before a hit movie and a sequel, before Manolo Blahnik became a household name, before the fan bus tours to Carrie's stoop, the rise and fall of Bleecker Street, and Cynthia Nixon's surprise campaign for governor, before all of that, there was a newspaper column. "Sex and the City" first appeared in The New York Observer on Nov. 28, 1994. The column's author and central character, Candace Bushnell, was then a 35 year old freelance writer with talent and charm and just as much anxiety over whether it was ever going to happen for her. "It" was a lot of things: a successful career as a writer, love, marriage, a closetful of Chanel or even money to pay the rent. One year, Ms. Bushnell said, she earned 14,000 and was thrown out of her sublet. But she also summered in the Hamptons, dated the publisher of Vogue (the real Mr. Big) and socialized with famous writers and rich people. Things did work out. In 1996, the columns were collected in a book of the same name. Two years later came the HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a cultural juggernaut that eclipsed both the book and the column. On the 20th anniversary of the TV show's debut, we caught up with Ms. Bushnell and friends and colleagues from those years to tell the back story of how Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte came to be. And to revisit New York in the mid 1990s, when few had cellphones, downtown could still be dangerous, and the print medium was king. Throughout the 1980s, Ms. Bushnell, a native of Connecticut who attended Rice University and New York University, had written articles for women's magazines including "The Gold Diggers of 1989," about professional girlfriends, for the now defunct Mademoiselle. She also networked, dated and dreamed of publishing a book. Morgan Entrekin, C.E.O. and publisher of Grove Atlantic: I first met Candace through some friends. It was up on this very strange, wonderful place, Fishers Island, in the late '80s. She was a houseguest there with a boyfriend, Jeff Carpenter, an artist. As soon as I met her she said, "I'm a writer." Peter Stevenson, former editor of The New York Observer: We had several mutual friends. We dated for a while. It was lovely and I couldn't keep up with her. At the time I met her, she was living in a studio or one bedroom on the East Side. She was staying at a friend's house. The friend, Anne something, had a magazine called Scene. John Homans, former Observer editor: Candace was always like a character in fiction. She was wisecracking. She was brassy, funny, always smiling. If you called her home number, she'd say, "Hello, Scene." There was no gap between her professional and personal life. Bushnell: I didn't have a place to live. Anne and I made a deal. I had to answer the phone and pretend to be her secretary and I could live there. I slept on a foldout couch. I had no money. I probably made 2,000 a month. When you want to do something, who cares? Yorke: I never visited her at her apartment. I always saw her at someone else's house. Stevenson: Whenever she was paid for a piece, she would be more likely to buy a pair of 800 shoes than go out and stock up the fridge. I remember one of her staples was sardines and crackers. Bushnell: Anne and I really worked. It was the only thing that saved us, otherwise we would have gone crazy. But then at the end of the day, inevitably three or four girlfriends would end up coming over. We'd meet up, have some laughs, and then maybe we'd go out. It was a lot of talking, spilling of our lives: "Hey, this is what happened to me." We were the "Sex and the City" women. We were in our mid 30s. We were supposed to be married. Married or C.E.O.s. And somehow, we just hadn't gotten there. The Observer was then a small but influential weekly broadsheet, published on salmon pink paper by Arthur Carter, an investment banker, and edited for 15 years by the late, great Peter Kaplan. When Ms. Bushnell began writing for the paper in the early '90s, and soon after got her own column, it was a "huge deal," she said not monetarily, but a high profile opportunity to cover wealth and power in New York for a publication that was literary and irreverent. The editors ran "Sex and the City" on the cover, treating dating, gender roles and social change as front page news. Homans: Peter Stevenson, who I hired as a writer, said, "This person Candace has this idea." She had a great story, which was that the Beavers brothers, these Upper East Side socialites who ran the Surf Club, had lived too hard and gone out to Hazelden in Minnesota to dry out. It was exactly what we wanted to do: human stories about glamorous people. It was a fantastic piece. Stevenson: Candace obviously had a lot more to say than just features. Her point of view of New York City and dating and love and romance and money was so dead on. Peter and I came up with this idea that she would report on sex and New York City and society and dating. Bushnell: When I got the column, I felt, "I know what to do with this." If I'd have gotten the column when I was 28, I just wouldn't have known what to do with it. Stevenson: The very first column, she went to a sex club called La Trapeze. It was as awful as you would expect that experience to be. I can't remember exactly how things clicked into Candace transcribing her own transgressions and the foibles of her friends. Homans: If you knew Candace you thought, "This is her diary." Bushnell: There was constant angst. "What's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to all of us whose lives aren't following the script?" I can't say it was bleak because, listen, we had a lot of girlfriends who were having a great time. But this wasn't a group of women that people were saying, "You're fabulous. You go, girls." Instead, we were really considered pariahs. Judy Hottensen, associate publisher, Grove Atlantic: Professional women not marrying at the very earliest age, holding out and having careers, getting married and getting divorced there was a lot of that going on. For women in New York, it was a turning point. That was the column's gravitational pull, and why people related to it. Stevenson: With any editor, your job is to fix the stuff that's broken, and if you have the luxury of time, to make the writer sound like who they are. That's why I miss the telephone so much because you can talk to a writer and they reveal things about themselves they don't even realize. With Candace, you just light the fuse and step away. She has a novelist's heart and a reporter's brain. Bushnell: I changed people's names. I love those characters. Like the two 25 year old girls? The one I call Cici, I won't say who she is today, but she's very successful. Every time I see her, we're laughing our heads off about those stories. Lara Shriftman, public relations executive and author: I'm not Cici. And I wasn't 25 at the time. I was probably 20. What happened was one night we were telling her a bunch of stories of our friends dating in New York in your 20s. We sat down and gave her lots of, "Oh, this happened and that happened." But even the material that we gave her for the column was completely fictionalized. Stevenson: I remember being at a party after the first two columns came out, and this girl was telling everyone she was Samantha. Shriftman: Marina Rust she was Charlotte, maybe? I think Samantha was made up. I can't remember, it was 20 years ago. Bushnell: There were quite a few women who thought they were Samantha. A lot of that is due to the TV show. There's a Carrie in every town and there's a Samantha in every town and I've met them all. Like many young, ambitious New Yorkers in the era before social media, Ms. Bushnell viewed going out as part of her job. On any night of the week, she might attend a book party, a fashion event or go to the Bowery Bar, a downtown watering hole in a converted gas station that appeared frequently in her column. Bushnell: It would be pretty usual to have six to 10 invitations a night. Of course, they'd come in the mail. Because people still sent invitations by mail, not email. And people made schedules. You'd make a schedule of the parties you were going to and in what order. Bret Easton Ellis had a big white board. He'd put all of his events and engagements that he had to go to on it. Eric Goode, owner, Bowery Bar: If I had to characterize who was there, I'd say everybody. Because it was the place of the moment. It was Russell Simmons at one booth, Naomi Campbell at another, Ian Schrager at another. And Candace was part of that posse with Jay McInerney and Morgan. Bushnell: Everybody was from the same world. It was a social world, and it was a world of people who went out a lot. But, really, people talked and talked and talked in person all the time. The talk and the conversation were the entertainment, as I suppose Twitter is entertainment now. Goode: Going out was more relevant than today. Going out was the only way you could meet people and could have sex. It was right before cellphones. I remember in Bowery Bar there was one person with a cellphone. That was Russell Simmons. I thought, 'Oh, my God, this will never catch on.' They were so obnoxious. Darren Star, creator and executive producer of "Sex and the City" (the show): I came to New York to do this CBS series, "Central Park West," which was ultimately not successful. It was an exciting time to be in New York. The city was coming to life again. I met Candace when she interviewed me for Vogue. I remember Candace and Ron going to dinner at Le Cirque, and Ron was wearing a tuxedo. Old New York still felt like it was there. Stevenson: Back then, HBO was still somewhat of an outlier in terms of bombshell TV shows. It wasn't like ABC was going to do it. And nobody really knew anybody who'd had a column turned into a TV show. Star: When we did the pilot, Candace took me on a trip to the Four Seasons Nevis. I remember her saying, "They're going to teach this show at universities." I was, like, "What are you talking about? I hope this show gets on the air." She was very gung ho from the beginning. I was thinking, "Am I going to work again? Are people going to misinterpret this and think it's pornographic?" Bushnell: The premiere took place at Lot 61. Sweetie, we sat on folding chairs, and they had one of those screens that you pull up. No one was, like, "It's going to be a big hit." But it was fun because it was such a New York thing. Stevenson: Even though the TV show after the first season had a whole room of writers, you could still make the point that Candace was the root of the whole thing. The whole thing grew out of her point of view. Star: I knew other single women in their 30s who weren't married who were focused on their careers. But with Candace, especially, not letting a relationship define her, but at the same time wanting to be in love, was such a big part of her. Same with Carrie: She has a tough exterior, but inside she's a romantic. Bushnell: That's all I wanted to do, write books. When I moved to New York, I thought that I was just going to start writing novels and they would be published. And I was 35 and I was really facing, "Am I ever going to write a book?" I put everything in my life on the line so that I can publish a book and somehow make it. You know, that's the thing about "Sex and the City." It's written by somebody who is desperate for a roof over their head, really.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
From 2015: A century after Albert Einstein proposed that gravity could bend light, astronomers now rely on galaxies or even clusters of galaxies to magnify distant stars. PRINCETON, N.J. A century ago, on May 29, 1919, the universe was momentarily perturbed, and Albert Einstein became famous. On Wednesday at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein's intellectual home from 1932 until his death in 1955, scholars celebrated the centenary with an afternoon symposium titled "The Universe Speaks in Numbers." The premise: that nature reveals itself through patterns, which can be described with numbers and probed through problems posed by mathematicians and physicists alike. The event's name was borrowed from the title of a new book by Graham Farmelo, who gave the introductory talk. "This is actually a good story," said Helmut Hofer, a mathematician at the Institute, sitting in his office. Behind him, on the wall, hung an axiom that his wife had found and framed: "Mathematics is such a drama queen. It can't seriously have that many problems." Having the right mathematicians in the company of the right physicists can be quite helpful in solving problems, said Dr. Hofer . Einstein himself apparently had no special plans for what he knew could be a momentous day. He was home in Berlin. He wrote a letter admitting a "blunder" in an ongoing debate with Theodor Kaluza, a German mathematician with a new notion of space time that required five dimensions. He betrayed no jitters about the fact that, on that day in May, two scientific expeditions were finally putting his theory of general relativity to the test. In Sobral, Brazil, and on Principe Island, off the western coast of Africa, two teams were viewing a total solar eclipse; in measuring the deflection of starlight by the sun's gravitational field, they proved Einstein right. Einstein first received word of their preliminary results in September, and wrote his mother with the "happy news." The confirmation was officially announced in November at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, triggering headlines about the ensuing excitement. ("Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations," one headline in The Times noted.) Einstein bought himself a congratulatory violin. One hundred years later, relativists the world over are rejoicing, each in their own way. Katharine Leney, a physicist at CERN, in Switzerland, and the purveyor of PhysicsCakes on Twitter, created a rotating solar eclipse diorama, featuring cake pops of the sun, Earth and moon. The Sobral measurements commonly are assumed to have played a minimal role in verifying Einstein's theory, in part because the photographic plates from the main Sobral instrument were blurry. But in fact, the backup Sobral instrument provided the crucial images, because many of Eddington's photographs from Principe were obscured by clouds and revealed few stars. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The Sobral photographs allowed Frank Dyson, the astronomer and co organizer of the expeditions, to conclude that the results favored general relativity, said Dr. Crispino: "This is common sense to everybody in Brazil. Outside Brazil it is not." Dr. Crispino and Daniel Kennefick, of the University of Arkansas, recently laid out this argument in a paper in Nature Physics. "The role of other astronomers involved has been, so to speak, eclipsed by Eddington's (and Einstein's) fame," they wrote. On Principe Island, there was a multinational extravaganza, coordinated by the Portuguese Society for Relativity and Gravitation; the presidents of Portugal and of Sao Tome and Principe were in attendance. The event included release parties for two new books on the Eddington expedition, one a children's comic strip. And there was a miniature version of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory experiment, "complete with interferometry," noted one of the organizers, Vitor Cardoso, in an email. "To show that Einstein's predictions go beyond light deflection, and that we can test them. This also shows how human ingenuity takes us to amazing new places in science." Earlier in the week, a select group of about 20 relativists gathered on Bom Bom beach to discuss a century's worth of exploration about Einstein's equations of general relativity. "His equations allowed cosmology to become a science," John Barrow, the cosmologist, wrote in an email. "Before him, cosmology was like a branch of art history. You could imagine any type, shape or form of universe you liked." But Einstein's equations, he added, "are more sophisticated than any others in science. They describe whole universes. Every solution of Einstein's equations describes an entire possible universe that is consistent with the laws of physics." Since 1916, Dr. Barrow noted, Einstein's equations matched to astronomical observations have revealed static universes, expanding universes, accelerating universes, and universes that are rotating, oscillating, cyclic, distorted, irregular, chaotic, inflationary, and eternal. Alessandra Buonanno, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, was also on the beach in Principe, where she discussed gravitational waves, another prediction of general relativity. "The waves are like fingerprints of the gravitational wave sources," she said. Dr. Buonanno's research focuses on improving the accuracy of the models of the fingerprints for upcoming observations with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory and Virgo detectors, and for future gravitational wave detectors, such as with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, which will be launched in 2034. "LISA seems very far into the future," she said. "But theoretical models and the required hardware and software need to be developed from now." The Principe proceedings opened with a talk by Clifford Will, a mathematical physicist at the University of Florida, who in 1986 published the popular book "Was Einstein Right?" His centenary talk was titled, "Is Einstein still right?" Ever more so, it seems. The past few decades have seen "an amazing array of experimental tests of general relativity, all of them in agreement with the predictions," Dr. Will said. But the quest continues: "There are still things we don't fully understand. And that's probably likely always to be the case." "The more we keep testing it, the more confidence we have in the theory," he said. "And of course on the other hand, any sort of deviations from his predictions would surely tell us that there is something new to be investigated." Back on the Princeton campus on Wednesday, scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study paused their own investigations to contemplate the numerical nature of the universe. "We are just a bunch of human beings muddling along in a world that's very hard to understand," said mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, the recent winner of the Abel Prize. She was speaking with Freeman Dyson, the mathematical physicist, and Natalie Wolchover, a writer for Quanta. "We put together ideas in our mind and somehow make rules and order," Dr. Uhlenbeck said. "We create mathematics as a language in response to external stimuli." Dr. Dyson likened studying the cosmos to visiting "a zoo full of wonderful creatures." He added: "Most of the mathematicians are busy admiring the architecture, while the physicists are admiring the animals. Which is more important isn't, to me, the interesting question. The interesting question is, Why do they fit together so well?" Edward Witten, Nima Arkani Hamed, Robbert Dijkgraaf and others debated which method of investigation, experimental or mathematical, was better. Those in favor of experiments have been known to regard the hard core mathematical approach as "mathematical masturbation," Dr. Farmelo said "self indulgent, without an obvious payoff for understanding the real world." And the mathematical cosmologists traditionally have viewed their opposites as "ambulance chasers," rabidly pursuing every new experimental clue at the expense of overarching physical ideas. "Einstein was convinced that the royal road to the laws of physics was not through looking at experimental data, but by developing the mathematical content of well established theories," said Dr. Farmelo.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump's re election rally in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday was grist for the late night mill on Wednesday. "He spent most of the time bashing immigrants, journalists and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, everyone watching at home was like, 'Is this a summer rerun? I've seen this before.'" JIMMY FALLON "You know, for all his bad environmental policies, Trump is very committed to recycling his garbage." STEPHEN COLBERT "Usually a re election campaign offers new ideas, new policies to move the country forward, but last night's speech felt like an exact replica of him running in 2016. And when I say 'exact replica,' I mean exact." TREVOR NOAH Trump also said that if he were re elected, he would "come up with the cures to many, many problems, to many, many diseases," including cancer and AIDS. "Wait a second curing cancer is already Biden's thing. You can't just steal Democratic platforms. As Trump 'If re elected, I will cure cancer. And I know I'm just a small town mayor from Indiana, but the top 1 percent control 90 percent of the wealth. I shoveled snow in Newark. I am Elizabeth Warren.'" STEPHEN COLBERT	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
For Mercedes Benz, the decision to sponsor a pop festival came down to toilets, dirt and mud. The carmaker, known for supporting elite sporting events like the Masters golf tournament and the United States Open, has been eager to join the growing world of music festivals. Big showcases like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Electric Zoo attract tens of thousands of brand conscious young people all potential customers. But according to Stephanie Zimmer, the head of brand experiences marketing for Mercedes Benz USA, the company largely held off from joining with a festival until it found Rock in Rio USA. The American version of Brazil's biggest pop festival, Rock in Rio, will open in Las Vegas over two weekends in May with a lineup heavy on mainstream acts like Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Sam Smith, No Doubt and Metallica. "We looked, but there wasn't anything that we felt personified the best in class customer experience that Mercedes Benz values," Ms. Zimmer said. Rock in Rio, she added, is "not your typical dust and dirt festival." Part of Rock in Rio's appeal, Ms. Zimmer said, was its location: Rather than an open field lined with portable toilets, Rock in Rio is being built on 40 acres alongside the Las Vegas Strip at a cost of 25 million, paid by MGM Resorts International. It will have six stages, a Ferris wheel, a vendor village and what Roberto Medina, the festival's irrepressible founder, promises will be a V.I.P. section to impress even the pickiest American high roller.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The past five years have been a remarkable time for America's opiate addiction epidemic, now a generation old. The country finally took notice. Media coverage, resources, options, research and acceptance of addicts all of that expanded. All of that has now been paused or limited as the country confronts the coronavirus. As disastrous as the Covid 19 pandemic has been and will be, it is especially painful for those whose lives already revolved around America's long ignored epidemic of opiate addiction. Drug treatment depends to an extraordinary degree on communing with people, sitting down with them in a counselor's office, mentoring others and attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. "Don't isolate," recovering addicts are told. That's because addiction deprives people of connection to others by convincing them that nothing is more important than their own gratification. When we enter addiction, we come to embody the "me first" impulse and become hyperconsumers, obediently consuming one product daily, to the exclusion of all else in life. So simply getting dressed, leaving the house and heading to a counseling appointment can be significant therapy for those imprisoned in addiction. Counselors understand the significance of personal connection. "When you meet somebody in your office and you look them in the eye, shake their hand and offer them a glass of water, you watch the tension leave their body as you engage them," Steve Walkenhorst, a veteran drug counselor in Cincinnati, told me. "They see pictures of your kids on the wall, they relax. All of that stuff is so important." Now personal contact large 12 step meetings and in person counseling appointments has ceased. So have vocational training for addicts and, especially alarming, many detox programs where addicts purge the dope that has governed their actions. Many addicts in recovery found that what jobs they could get with no experience were at the low end of the economy that they can't do at home in restaurants for example. Many have now been laid off. Early reports from areas hard hit by addiction are that relapse has increased in recent weeks. Some addicts have returned to the roots of AA, which began in the 1930s with two men meeting. "There's power in talking," said Will Pfefferman, who runs a large, now suspended AA meeting in Covington, Ky. Some meetings have migrated to online video conferencing platforms, as have county drug courts, where recovering addicts were finding their footing in weekly visits with a judge. Yet many recovering addicts can't afford internet access. And online connections lack the energy of in person meetings. "This is an anxiety producing time," said Michael Botticelli, the former U.S. drug czar, who now runs the Grayken Center for Addiction at Boston Medical Center. "It's way too easy for people with histories of addiction to fall back into that isolation." Our opiate addiction epidemic, I've long believed, is rooted in destruction of community and the culture of isolation that resulted. Many things forged this culture: our own prosperity, a hidden national reservoir of trauma, the anonymity of suburban living, the departure of jobs and disappearance of Main Street from so many towns, our intensified consumer culture and the corporate marketing of legal, addictive substances (sugar) and activities (gambling and social media). Over this, we laid a vast supply of narcotics. First, pain pills were promoted by drug companies and prescribed by doctors coast to coast. Next, traffickers, mostly from Mexico, discovered this new market and happily plied it with heroin, fentanyl and now methamphetamine. So addiction spread, replicating in more desperate and grinding forms the kind of isolation in which many of us already lived. Because it affected so many families unprepared for its ravages, the epidemic inspired many of them to a new compassion and charity qualities they may not have displayed in times when their loved ones weren't among the afflicted. Pandemics, though, touch every one of us. As we understand how we can affect others, and they us, we may rediscover, each of us, our larger social responsibility. While Covid 19 will be crushing to so many of us, it may also instruct us on the importance of community now that we've lost it so suddenly. We see this now as neighbors come forward to support local businesses, their employees and one another. Even so, stress will no doubt push some of us to behave with the same me first self centeredness addicts display, testing our humanity in the process. I saw an Instagram video of a woman who had bought every roll of toilet paper and paper towels at a Dollar Store, flouting it as she loaded her trove into her truck. But I prefer to imagine that this pandemic will permit us, perhaps after unimaginable tragedy, to perceive our common bonds. Americans learned all this after Pearl Harbor. Maybe this pandemic will also make clear, as the opiate epidemic has for some time now, that we are only as defended as the most vulnerable among us. "Asking for grace we're all asking for grace with each other. It's going to be a little messy," Dr. Amy Acton, director of Ohio's department of health, said at a news conference. "Eighty percent of us will be fine. Everything the rest of us do is to protect the most vulnerable. The other 20 percent of us we will get to other side of this and we will stick with you every step of the way." I'll try to remember that. Even as focus turns away from our national addiction epidemic, I'll try to remember, too, what inspires recovering addicts: It is finding that grace with others again. Feeling part of something bigger than themselves that life is about more than relentlessly buying stuff. With all of that comes renewed energy and optimism, and gratitude to walk again among what they once ignored or abandoned. So perhaps we'll come out on the other side of this with the insight recovering addicts gain, and glimpse the addict in all of us. For the pandemic will make us live for a while with the kind of anguished and deadening isolation they feel. And with that as addicts find as they leave dope behind we may rediscover the bounty all around us that we were bequeathed and took for granted. Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles based freelance journalist and the author of "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
"I'm just really looking forward to this play and working with Mamet," Mr. Fishburne said in a phone interview. "He's somebody who's been an inspiration to me both as an actor and as a writer." "The way he uses language is like music to me," he continued. Mr. Rockwell will play Walter Cole (known as Teach), the group's volatile and conniving third member who weasels his way into Donny's scheme and who has been portrayed in previous productions by Robert Duvall and Al Pacino. Mr. Rockwell is returning to Broadway following critically acclaimed film performances, including his Oscar winning role in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." His last Broadway performance was in the 2014 revival of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love." Before that, he acted alongside Christopher Walken in Martin McDonagh's "A Behanding in Spokane." Neil Pepe is onboard to direct the production. The Broadway director is no stranger to Mr. Mamet's work, having previously directed revivals of "A Life in the Theatre" and "Speed the Plow." He's also the artistic director of the Atlantic Theater Company, the Off Broadway theater Mr. Mamet founded in 1985. The play is being produced by Jeffrey Richards, Steve Traxler and Stephanie P. McClelland. Last August, it was announced that Mr. Richards and Mr. Traxler were part of the producing team for an all female revival of a different Mamet play, "Glengarry Glen Ross," that was scheduled to begin performances in May of 2019. In a statement to The Times, the "Glengarry" producing team (which also includes Rebecca Gold) said, "We have deferred the production to the 2020 2021 season" in order to "secure the right theater." The exact dates, full casting, design team and the theater for "American Buffalo" will be announced at a later date.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Q. When I travel, how do I make my iPhone's calendar stop moving the business appointments I originally made at home to the time zone of the city I'm in? I want my phone to act like a paper calendar where an appointment written down for 11 a.m. stays at 11 a.m., no matter where I happen to be. A. Unless you have gone to the Date Time settings and turned off the "Set Automatically" option, the iPhone picks up the time in your current location when it connects to a nearby data network. This can be convenient for traveling because you get the local time instantly. (If your phone does not automatically update even though you have it set to do so, it may also be because of a bug some users have reported in iOS.) If your calendar appointments are shifting to reflect the local time and throwing off your schedule, you can tell the calendar app to ignore the time zone the phone is using. So this means an 11 a.m. appointment made in New York will still be scheduled for 11 a.m. on the calendar, even if the phone's own clock has moved five hours ahead to London time. In recent versions of iOS, go to the Home screen, open the Settings icon and select Calendar. On the Calendar settings screen, tap Time Zone Override. Tap the button next to Time Zone Override to enable it and confirm that the time zone listed below shows your home location where you make all your appointments. Previously scheduled events on the calendar should then stay put, regardless of the time zone the phone is in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In? Nyla Conaway, 19, remembers being "called out" for changing her profile picture on Instagram in solidarity for ... something. She can't quite remember what for, only that an older student she didn't know told her it was a scam. "It just made me feel really embarrassed, like a ton of people had seen it and now I just looked really stupid," she said. Katie Wehrman, 18, still feels guilty for calling out a boy in her high school for something he said about a local politician and L.G.B.T.Q. rights schooling him in an all class Snapchat group. Sophia Hanna, 18, has never been called out herself, but has spent more time than she'd like to admit during this pandemic watching two beauty bloggers call each other out. "It just fires something emotionally," she said, noting that she doesn't even like makeup tutorials. "There's like a dopamine trigger that makes me keep scrolling." The women are students in a class taught by Loretta J. Ross, a visiting professor at Smith College who is challenging them to identify the characteristics, and limits, of call out culture: the act of publicly shaming another person for behavior deemed unacceptable. Calling out may be described as a sister to dragging, cousin to problematic, and one of the many things that can add up to cancellation. "I am challenging the call out culture," Professor Ross said from her home in Atlanta, where she was lecturing on Zoom to students on a recent evening, in a blue muumuu from Ghana. "I think you can understand how calling out is toxic. It really does alienate people, and makes them fearful of speaking up." That perspective has made Professor Ross, 67, an unlikely figure in the culture wars. A radical Black feminist who has been doing human rights work for four decades, she was one of the signatories of a widely denounced letter in Harper's Magazine, for which she herself was called out. "There's such an irony for being called out for calling out the calling out culture," she said. "It really was amusing." "I think we overuse that word 'trigger' when really we mean discomfort," she said. "And we should be able to have uncomfortable conversations." She doesn't believe people should be publicly shamed for accidentally misgendering a classmate, which she once did, leading to a Title IX complaint that was later dismissed; for sending a stupid tweet they now regret; or for, say, admitting they once liked a piece of pop culture now viewed in a different light, such as "The Cosby Show." Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. "If it were on TV right now, I'd watch the reruns," she said. "What I'm really impatient with is calling people out for something they said when they were a teenager when they're now 55. I mean, we all at some point did some unbelievably stupid stuff as teenagers, right?" Professor Ross thinks call out culture has taken conversations that could have once been learning opportunities and turned them into mud wrestling on message boards, YouTube comments, Twitter and at colleges like Smith, where proving one's commitment to social justice has become something of a varsity sport. "I think this is also related to something I just discovered called doom scrolling," Professor Ross told the students. "I think we actually sabotage our own happiness with this unrestrained anger. And I have to honestly ask: Why are you making choices to make the world crueler than it needs to be and calling that being 'woke'?" The antidote to that outrage cycle, Professor Ross believes, is "calling in." Calling in is like calling out, but done privately and with respect. "It's a call out done with love," she said. That may mean simply sending someone a private message, or even ringing them on the telephone (!) to discuss the matter, or simply taking a breath before commenting, screen shotting or demanding one "do better" without explaining how. Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn't mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it. "Every time somebody disagrees with me it's not 'verbal violence.'" Professor Ross said. "I'm not getting 're raped.' Overstatement of harm is not helpful when you're trying to create a culture of compassion." There was call out culture when Professor Ross was young. "We called it 'trashing,'" she said, referring to a term used by Jo Freeman, in an essay in Ms., to describe infighting within the women's movement. "It used to be you'd be calling someone out to a duel. This is how Alexander Hamilton got shot!" Professor Ross said. "What's new is the virality and the speed and the anonymity." She worked to improve the participation of women of color as a program director at the National Organization for Women and is credited, along with 11 others, as having coined the term "reproductive justice" a combination of "reproductive rights" and "social justice" in response to what they believed was missing from Bill Clinton's 1994 health care reform plan. Later, as the program and research director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitored hate groups, she found herself on a mountaintop in rural Tennessee, teaching antiracism to women whose families were members of the Ku Klux Klan. She thought of what her organization's founder, the Rev. C.T. Vivian who had been Martin Luther King's field general told her when she started her job: "When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do." In the early 1990s, Professor Ross accompanied Floyd Cochran, once the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations, on a national atonement tour. "Here's a guy who had never done anything but be a Nazi since he was 14 years old, and now he was 35 with no job, no education, no hope. And we helped people like them," she said. After The Los Angeles Times wrote an article about their unlikely friendship, in 1997, Professor Ross and Mr. Cochran were each paid 10,000 for a Hollywood adaptation option of their story. But when the script came back, there was a fatal flaw: It ended with the two falling in love. "Floyd was married, and I don't fall in love with Nazis," Professor Ross said. Sometime in those years, Professor Ross found herself on a street corner in Janesville, Wis., in the dead of winter, watching as Ken Peterson a defector from the K.K.K. filmed an interview with "The Geraldo Rivera Show." Mr. Peterson and his wife, Carol, had to flee their home quickly, and Ms. Peterson was shivering in the cold. "I stood there for the first half hour watching her, and at some point I made the decision to share my coat with her," Professor Ross said. "I just couldn't maintain that anger, I couldn't maintain that posture." The idea of "calling in" occurred to Professor Ross at a speech she was organizing at Smith in 2015 to honor Gloria Steinem. What was up with all the nastiness she saw on Twitter, she asked a young woman. "Oh, you mean 'calling out'?'' the woman said. She soon assembled a group of students to practice the techniques of "calling in" and took the message on the road. During quarantine this summer, she began offering an online course called Calling In the Calling Out Culture, and is working on a book of the same name. She has also been hired by nonprofits and women's organizations to help them grapple with their own reckonings around race and gender. "I wouldn't call myself a mediator," she said. "I'm like a one time consultant, rearranging relationships. 'We're on Indian land,' 'we've got trans students,' 'we've got buildings named after slave owners.'" The hardest part, she said, is "to convince them is that they aren't each other's enemies." Indeed, after the MeToo movement and global protests of police violence in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, employees have called out bosses, consumers have called out corporations, students have called out peers, and victims have called out abusers. "Folks have figured out that social media shaming and attention makes things happen," said Meredith Clark, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who recently published a study of call out culture called "Drag Them." "It evokes apology from things and places that wouldn't normally enter into that sort of dialogue, and it allows people who otherwise would have no recourse to influence their own experiences." More troublesome, Professor Ross and others agree, is when small infractions become big infractions; when context gets lost and facts are distorted, or it becomes difficult to discern between the two. "These algorithms can't distinguish between outrage and shaming that is proportionate and outrage and shaming that is disproportionate to the original transgression," said Molly Crockett, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University who studies moral outrage online. Back on her Zoom call, Professor Ross pulled up another slide, this one with a photo of Natalie Wynn, a popular YouTuber who has put together a kind of taxonomy of call out culture after being "canceled" multiple times. Its characteristics include presumption of guilt (without facts or nuance getting in the way); essentialism (when criticism of bad behavior becomes criticism of a bad person); pseudo intellectualism (proclaiming one's moral high ground); unforgivability (no apology is good enough); and, of course, contamination, or guilt by association. Katherine Albert Aranovich, a sophomore from Los Angeles, said she has deleted all of her social profiles, to try to be "removed from that negativity." Rebecca Alvara, of Phoenix, described the mental gymnastics of trying to buy herself a hoodie with the image of a band she liked. "I was, like, 'but what if they've done something terrible? And I just don't know about it yet? Should I not buy this?' And so I panicked and I was, like, 'No, it's fine. I don't need it anyway.'" The students are eager to practice calling in, or least trying. But they have questions. Is interjecting calling in? What's the difference between calling in and a regular confrontation? What if calling out in fact is the most effective way to seek progress as with, say, in the case of a public figure? And when is politely trying to "call in" simply no longer effective? "You can't be responsible for someone else's inability to grow," Professor Ross said. "So take comfort in the fact that you offered a new perspective of information and you did so with love and respect, and then you walk away. "We have a saying in the movement: Some people you can work with and some people you can work around. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that the calling in practice means you always keep a seat at the table for them if they come back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Parenting in the Bubble: 'This Is Mom's Job. You Have to Work With Me.' When her soccer team returned to the field in June, Amy Rodriguez had a familiar problem. Alone in Utah with her two sons, she needed to get back to work but had no way to hire child care help because of the pandemic. So Rodriguez did what only felt normal after years of balancing her professional soccer career with being a mother: She set up her 3 and 6 year old sons with blankets, toys and an iPad on the sideline and jogged out for her workouts. The boys were used to being patient. But occasionally Rodriguez had to step away from training with her National Women's Soccer League team, the Utah Royals, to deal with a bloody nose or a sibling squabble. "I've had to talk it over with them," she said. "'This is mom's job. You have to work with me.'" As American professional sports return this summer inside so called bubble environments that limit outsiders, the challenges of parenting in a pandemic already felt by health care workers, first responders and stressed out families have hit home for dozens of elite athletes, and for mothers in particular. Children and families are not allowed in men's league bubbles, partly out of concerns over the size of the operation and its cost. But those decisions, and the different ones in women's leagues, also are a reflection of how American society largely treats child rearing as the responsibility of women even as the workload takes a toll on their careers and mental health. Some N.B.A. and Major League Soccer players have cited family reasons for staying away as their sports have returned. But Rodriguez, her N.W.S.L. colleagues and their counterparts in the W.N.B.A. often have less of a choice; they play in leagues in which athletes rarely enjoy the kind of elaborate (and expensive) support systems required to excel as both athletes and parents. That is why the unusual accommodations they are seeing since moving from team run training camps to league arranged lockdown sites have been a welcome surprise. N.W.S.L. players say it is the first time they have seen the league make real efforts for mothers. A similar shift is underway in the W.N.B.A.'s bubble in Florida, thanks to gains in the league's new collective bargaining agreement with its players. "It shocked me that they even reached out to us," said North Carolina Courage forward Jessica McDonald, who took her 8 year old son to the N.W.S.L.'s summer tournament in Utah. McDonald said she had been reassured early on that she and her son would be comfortable and safe. But she also had another thought: "It was like, really? Where has this support been my entire career?" Candace Parker, the veteran star of the W.N.B.A.'s Los Angeles Sparks, has moved into a two bedroom apartment with her 11 year old daughter, Lailaa, in order to play. To make it work, Parker said she had to piece together child care help from family members over the 40 plus days she expected to be in sporting lockdown. But there was never any question, Parker said, that Lailaa would come. "She had her bags packed before I did," Parker said. "It's always been that way where I'm better when she's here. I don't think the Sparks would want me without her." Terri Jackson, the president of the W.N.B.A. players' union, said that as the plans for a Florida bubble were being drawn up, the league made it clear that it would give priority to mothers, offering them their choice of housing and taking care of some costs that other players are expected to cover. That was a significant step forward, Jackson said. "If you took a historical look across the league, it made you ask: If this is a women's sports league, where are the moms?" she said. "You wonder, how many players that are looking to become moms have we lost? "We should have more Candaces and Lailaas in the league." Unlike the W.N.B.A., which is in its third decade, the N.W.S.L. is still finding its financial footing in its eighth season, and salaries are still comparatively low 20,000 to 60,000 a year. But mothers in the league praised the proactive moves taken by the new commissioner, Lisa Baird, who took charge of the N.W.S.L. in February after it had been leaderless for several years. Baird is also a mother, with a college age daughter who, on the league's shoestring budget, has been helping with child care inside the league's bubble in Herriman, Utah, near Salt Lake City. Even before the N.W.S.L.'s announcement that it would return to the field this summer, Baird held a conference call with the mothers in the league, asking them what they and their children would need to take part. Getting buy in from the mothers was a key part of getting the players association on board, a league representative said. "They're professional athletes, and they take their jobs as moms very seriously," Baird said. "For them, it wasn't, 'Make this special concession.' It was: 'This is what I need. This is part of my job.'" In the N.W.S.L.'s Utah complex, mothers have been allowed to bring along a caregiver. McDonald and Rodriguez are living with their children in an apartment complex, but Stephanie Cox, a player for OL Reign, elected to stay in the team hotel with her daughters, 7 and 4. This weekend, McDonald and her North Carolina teammates will begin the knockout round of the Challenge Cup. As the top seed, the Courage are expected to reach the final, success that will only extend her stay with Jeremiah. But like Rodriguez and Parker and others, she is hoping the bar has been raised for good. "I'm hoping and praying that the way they're treating us is going to carry into our future seasons," McDonald said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
One of the oldest homes in Brooklyn Heights, a Federal style, wood frame house that dates to the early 19th century, with a two bedroom backhouse, is about to go on the market for the first time in nearly 60 years. On a corner lot at 24 Middagh Street in a historic district near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the residence is priced at 7 million. Annual taxes are 21,624. The sellers, Celeste Weisman and her brother, Jared, grew up in the dormered, gambrel roofed house, which was bought by their parents, Eli and Tomi Weisman, in 1958. After their mother, Tomi, died last year, they decided to sell. "It's time for someone else to love it and cherish it," said Celeste Weisman, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, as does her brother. Called "the queen of Brooklyn Heights houses" in the fourth edition of the "AIA Guide to New York City," by Elliot Willensky and Norval White, the three story main house, which is connected to the backhouse by a walled courtyard, retains a Federal doorway with Ionic colonnettes, ornate moldings and a leaded glass transom window. Vintage boot scrapers frame the first stair of the wooden stoop. The Brooklyn Historical Society praised the home as "one of the best reminders of the early days of Brooklyn Heights." Its gray clapboard facade with a maroon door and wooden shutters is a regular photo op on walking tours. "There have been times I'm outside, sweeping or pruning something, and people say, 'Oh, can I take a picture of you on the front steps?' " said Celeste Weisman. Her mother's cat "used to sit in the window all the time, and I'm sure she's in many pictures." The house, which has five fireplaces with wooden mantels, ornate moldings and wide plank wood floors throughout, was once used as a tavern, according to a New York Times article in 1959. The parlor floor has a wide open living area, which was once divided into two rooms, with two fireplaces and a half bath. The kitchen and dining room are on the lower level. Two bedrooms share a bathroom on the second floor. There are three smaller bedrooms that share a bathroom on the third floor, where the floors are flecked with paint Jackson Pollock style, and a ladder that leads to attic space. The backhouse, which was rented out by the Weismans, has a fireplace and a private entrance through a walled courtyard. The family compound is overdue for renovation. "It's more old shoe than glass slipper," said Kevin Carberry, an independent broker who is handling the listing. But for someone willing to do the work, including upgrading the electric and putting in central air conditioning, he said, it's "full of charm and possibility. " "It's been a real source of pride," said Jared Weisman, whose childhood chores included polishing the brass mail slot on the front door. "My parents were kind of middle class and were in the right place at the right time to live in a place like that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Words appeared in the sky, the color of clouds, and then faded into a jumble of letters in the background. It was an ephemeral poem, with lines like "Catch the falling knife" visible for a few seconds through the portal of an iPhone pointed at the skyline above Central Park. This is a piece by the poet and performance artist John Giorno, called "Now at the Dawn of My Life," that's part of a new initiative by Apple called AR T a curation of augmented reality art, featured in a series of guided walks. Apple worked with the New Museum to select the artists: Nick Cave, Nathalie Djurberg, Hans Berg, Cao Fei, Carsten Holler, Pipilotti Rist and Mr. Giorno . Each created an augmented reality work that's been choreographed into the landscape of the tour, playing with the canvas of public space . "The New Museum has always led at the intersection of art and tech and we could not have asked for a better partner in Apple to support the fantastic visions of these pioneering artists," Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said in a statement. Augmented reality can extend an artist's practice into the urban space, she added. The walking tours will be free and open to the public starting on Saturday , and in addition to New York, will be offered in San Francisco, London, Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Each starts from an Apple Store and features the same set of works. The pieces are only accessible at specific locations on the walk, making them installations of a sort, in an open air, virtually accessible exhibit. The initiative also includes a piece by Mr. Cave, "Amass," that will be on view in every Apple store, as well as a lab for those interested in learning more about augmented reality and working with it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In another wild day on Wall Street, stocks climbed, then dropped, then rocketed as traders did a double take on the Federal Reserve's much awaited statement on the economy Tuesday afternoon. The Fed announced that while it would not be coming to the rescue with some new program to stimulate the economy, it would leave interest rates unchanged for a couple of years. That sent stocks tumbling until traders figured out that locked in interest rates and cheap credit could actually give the economy a more solid footing. Minutes after the 2:15 p.m. announcement, the Dow Jones industrial average sped downward 1.7 percent. But stocks soon made a U turn and roared through the rest of trading. For the day, the Dow rose 429 points, or 3.98 percent, to close at 11,239.77. The broader Standard Poor's 500 stock index rose 4.7 percent to 1,172.53. It was the biggest daily gain in both indexes since March 2009, and followed the carnage of Monday's 6.7 percent S. P. sell off, the biggest loss since the height of the financial crisis in late 2008. Following the initial disappointment in the Fed's statement, the move seemed significant: after already cutting the short term federal funds rate to virtually zero, the Fed was effectively telling investors it was now going to keep two year bond rates close to zero as well. As that interpretation spread through markets, investors realized it could provide a big stimulus to the economy and, with bond yields tumbling quickly as a result, encourage investors to hold stocks. "It was quite a violent reaction," said Ron Florance, the managing director for investment strategy at Wells Fargo Private Bank. But it is uncertain whether the euphoria of the late trading on Tuesday will continue, or whether stocks will resume their steep decline of the past couple of weeks. "It's always spurious to try to explain a single day's move," said Rob Sluymer, a technical analyst at RBC Capital Markets in New York. Few believed that after the crazy sell offs in recent sessions and the string of downbeat economic data, the Fed's action on Tuesday meant the long term problems of the economy were over. "The big one out there is, there is still this concern that we could have this double dip recession," said Augustine Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's Analytics. Still, many analysts pinned the rally to the fact that the Fed confirmed that near zero rates are here to stay for another two years at least. That had an immediate impact on the United States bond market. Two year yields on Treasuries swung lower to a paltry 0.19 percent. They had been over 0.4 percent just a few days ago. And yields on 10 year Treasuries, already falling in recent days on investors' search for safety amid the global market turmoil, fell further, to 2.28 percent from 2.32 percent. Those declines, analysts said, left investors with a stark question: Where else could you put your money to earn a decent return? "For all their volatility as we have seen, there is now no other place except stocks," said Todd Colvin, an interest rate strategist at MF Global. Strange as it seems, wild swings like this down sharply one day, up nearly as much the next day are not all that unusual in times of economic uncertainty. Indeed, after the financial meltdown began in September 2008, there were 27 days by the end of the year when stocks rose or fell by 4 percent or more. While 15 of those were down days, what most people forget is that 12 of those were up days. Cumulatively, of course, the declines on the down days exceeded the gains on the up days, and stocks over all dropped 28 percent by the end of 2008. On Tuesday, trading began on an optimistic note as the market rose ahead of the Fed's meeting. But around 2:15 p.m., the phones went quiet on Wall Street trading floors as traders awaited the Fed's decision. Then, after an initial sharp drop, stocks rallied. "The information we got from the Fed is that this is going to be a long term fix to the economy," said Jonathan Corpina, a trader for Meridian Equity Partners on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Trading volume on United States stock exchanges surged to 16.9 billion stocks traded compared with an average daily volume for the year through the end of July of 7.48 billion, according to BATS Trading. According to Bloomberg, investor activity has soared by 50 percent across global markets since late last week. The number of "ticks" a measure of the various offers to buy and sell securities along with those that are actually traded soared to 41 billion across all global equity, fixed income and options markets last Friday. That beat the previous record of 30 billion reached after the Japanese tsunami this spring or the 27.5 billion reached in May 2010 during the "flash crash," said Vipul Nagrath, global head of research and development for Bloomberg. The Fed announcement initially struck many traders as disappointing, since there was no commitment to monetary easing, and the stock market gave up its gains of earlier in the day. But within minutes, a different interpretation began to spread. By promising that short term rates would stay extremely low for nearly two years, the Fed was effectively saying that the value of two year Treasury notes will not fall in that time period. That essentially shoved down interest rates on those two year notes to under two tenths of a percentage point, steering investors to assets that could generate more income like, perhaps, stocks. In normal times, the Fed sets a target for the federal funds rate, and lowers it if it needs to ease credit. With short term rates virtually at zero, that weapon was gone from its arsenal. Now it is taking aim at the two year rate, where yields, already very low, did have room to fall. Mr. Florance said the Fed announcement was basically telling investors they have "access to free money until 2013." "That gives investors a time horizon, and that gives you certainty," he said. The gains in the United States came after stocks in Asia closed mostly lower for the day, and European stocks fell sharply before gaining ground before the close. The Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, closed up 0.3 percent, while the FTSE 100 index in London ended the trading day up 1.9 percent influenced by the better mood in the United States. In trading on Wednesday, markets in Asia Pacific followed Wall Street's lead. In Japan, the Nikkei 225 was 1.15 percent higher around midday, and in South Korea, the Kospi climbed nearly 2 percent. The S. P./ASX 200 index in Australia rose 2.5 percent. On Tuesday, the dollar declined against other major currencies. The euro rose to 1.4235 from 1.4179 late Monday in New York, while the British pound fell to 1.6202 from 1.6318. The dollar fell to 77.12 yen from 77.76 yen and to 0.7288 Swiss francs from 0.7550 francs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
A major bug in Apple's FaceTime app surfaced on Monday that allows anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Mac computer to eavesdrop on other users without their knowledge. Apple said Monday evening that it was aware of the glitch, was working on a fix and would release it in a software update later this week. In the meantime, Apple has turned off Group FaceTime, the feature that allowed for surreptitious listening, which should temporarily resolve the issue. But for those who want an extra layer of security, follow these steps to turn off FaceTime on your devices. Before you do anything, you need to make sure your Apple device was affected by the glitch. It exists on iOS devices with the most recent software updates, starting with iOS 12.1, which was released in October. That release introduced the Group FaceTime feature.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona, which the architect Antoni Gaudi worked on for over four decades until his death, in 1926. It is still under construction. I try to be judicious about which cities I describe as "magical," but Barcelona deserves the word. While Madrid searches for its place among Europe's capital cities, and Seville has its rich history, Barcelona has a particular allure I'd not encountered before. Whether it's an impromptu evening soccer game in an alley deep in the Gothic Quarter, making new friends at a pintxos bar where patrons stand shoulder to shoulder, or thoroughly enjoying the admittedly touristy light and water show at the Magic Fountain near the National Palace, Barcelona's delightful idiosyncrasies and fierce charisma make it an ideal sojourn for any traveler. All you need to really feel like a Barcelonian, my friend Julia Miskevich, a former resident, explained to me, is "good vermouth and pickles." That, and "maybe a cigarette and a very hoarse voice." I found wonderful food and drink in the Catalonian capital (though I skipped the cigarettes), but I made a point of focusing on the creations of the modernist architect Antoni Gaudi, including his enormously popular and uncompleted masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia basilica. And while Barcelona is not cheap, I cut corners where I could and was able to leave after several days with my wallet little the worse for wear. Gaudi grew up about 60 miles down the Balearic coast in the small city of Reus. But he made his name in Barcelona, where he moved in 1868 to study architecture. By the time he graduated, his professional career was already well underway. And while he originally paid homage to the Victorian traditions of his time, he soon began working in innovative and shocking ways, experimenting with materials, colors and geometry, and incorporating inspiration from the plant and animal kingdoms. Gaudi works are now a reliable moneymaker for Barcelona. It's not cheap to go into his buildings: Even Park Guell, a Gaudi creation and public in places, requires timed tickets to gain access to certain areas (7 euros or about 8). There are discounts to be had, but they are limited. By registering your personal information and fingerprint with one of the Citizen Help and Information Offices in town, you receive free entrance to the park and discounts to some museums in the city though not to the other famous Gaudi sites. Which means you'll have to fork over an entrance fee of 22 euros to Casa Mila that's for a ticket for a particular time. (The fee is 29 euros for the freedom to come when you please.) Some Gaudi exteriors can be viewed at no charge, including Casa Mila, a huge structure on the corner of Carrer de Provenca and Passeig de Gracia, which is shaped like a giant sea creature. Or maybe a spaceship. Or maybe a mysterious ancient quarry, as indicated by its nickname, the Pedrera. I did pony up for the admission, and it was worth the price the building was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Commissioned by an industrialist and built when Gaudi was in his creative prime, the structure was designed as apartments. Aspects of the natural and unnatural coexist in a symbiotic paradox: While wholly artificial and flashy in certain aspects, the facade resembles a piece of coral smoothed by the ocean, and the sea creature like figures adorning the rooftop made me feel as if I were inside an aquarium. A promotional video suggests that the house wasn't created by Gaudi, but rather by nature itself, and it's difficult to disagree. Don't forget to make use of the informative audio tour, which is free with admission. Another Gaudi creation I visited, the Guell Palace, preceded Casa Mila by about 20 years, and it shows. Again commissioned by a wealthy industrialist, the mansion lacks the whimsy and playfulness of some of his later works, with parts of the mansion seeming downright gothic and cathedral like (religious services were once held in the palace). The entrance fee is lower than that of Casa Mila, 12 euros. Down the street from the palace is a 365 Cafe, a convenient pit stop for a quick coffee (1.15 euros) and a minicroissant (35 cents). But one does not live by architecture alone. Finding a good cheap place to stay is the challenge. Among the worn, labyrinthine streets of the Ciutat Vella (Old City), decent lodging options can easily run upward of 200 a night. I decided to exchange the convenience of being in the city center to save a few dollars. A Holiday Inn Express in the Sant Marti neighborhood, at 129 per night on Priceline, did the trick. The free breakfast was nice, and the location, a 25 minute walk from Ciutadella Park, gave me an opportunity to see Barcelona the way it was meant to be seen on foot. Still, my Barcelona travel card (14.50 euros for two days' unlimited use of public transport and 21.20 for three days; 10 percent discount if purchased online) came in handy just not as much as I had anticipated. The Barcelona Metro station nearest to my hotel wasn't convenient to most places I wanted to go. I found the bus system more useful, and the travel card seemed to fail when I needed it most most of the night bus routes to my lodgings were run by a private entity, Tusgsal, which didn't accept the card. What was I doing out so late, anyway? Carousing, imbibing, aimlessly walking the dark stone streets, stopping to hear a musician serenading passers by near one of the city's many old churches, or to watch a couple of children re enacting that evening's Barcelona Juventus soccer match against a wall off the Carrer del Carme. An evening might begin at Bar Brutal, a place with plenty of personality and permanent marker on the walls, and thoughtful cuisine that did not break the bank. The codfish served under an impossibly light cloud of fluffy potato (10 euros) was heavenly, and balanced wonderfully with a generous drizzle of citrus oil. A diverse cheese plate (11 euros) with a cow's milk Comte, two goat's milk options and a blue made from sheep's milk, went well with my cheap glass of Saltamarti tinto. "I love a cheese plate," a man named Olivier, said to me from down the bar. He explained that a good plate is like a geographical map you can look at it and say, "This cheese is from this region here; this one from over here." Tapas are a must, of course, and you'll find none better than at Xarcuteria La Pineda, a small store and delicatessen with several tables. Many of the offerings at La Pineda are pintxos (pronounced pinchos), which are a Basque thing snacks with a small wooden stick driven through them (pintxo means spike). I loved my Gilda pintxo (2.10 euros), a couple of fat green olives sandwiching a folded anchovy and chili pepper, as well as a slightly larger bite, a small square of spinach pastry fastened to a piece of artichoke and a sun dried tomato (2.25 euros). Washed down with a bottle of Estrella Galicia beer (1.60 euros), it was the ideal afternoon snack. This was all merely fuel, of course, to continue my exploration of Gaudi. The Sagrada Familia, looming like a castle in the sky, almost blinded me with its prodigiousness when I emerged from the Metro station. Interestingly, Gaudi began his work on this project relatively early in his career, assuming control of its construction in 1883, and worked on it for over four decades until his death. The astonishing basilica, consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, has been in a near constant state of construction and is scheduled for completion in 2026. Its Jesus Christ tower, at 566 feet, will make it Europe's tallest cathedral. And how does it look? Wondrous. Outlandish. Certainly unlike any church I've ever been in. (Admission is 15 euros; add another 9 if you'd like a guided tour.) Jaw droppingly tall columns branch out like trees near the top; the stonework is so clean it looks as if it's folded out of paper; the stained glass windows showcase the spectrum of the rainbow. The building has certainly been divisive. George Orwell called it "one of the most hideous buildings in the world" while Salvador Dali had a different perspective: "Those who have not tasted his superbly creative bad taste," he said, "are traitors." Not quite as well known is Gaudi's Casa Batllo, built between 1904 and 1906, though it might be his most characteristic work. The imaginative, mischievous structure is like something out of "Alice in Wonderland" or Willy Wonka's chocolate factory: Colorful, playful shapes and glittering bits of glass are engaged in a spectacular dialogue with sensual curved woods in a way that seems to perfectly capture the light filtering in from the Passeig de Gracia. Again, Gaudi's respect for nature is clear. Walking through the attic, with its many catenary arches, seems like walking through the rib cage of a whale. The accompanying audio guide (complimentary with the 23.50 euro timed ticket) is a bit breathless at times, but it pointed out something that deepened my understanding of his work: The Casa Batllo, it said, "is a house that is meant to be touched." Suddenly, so much of the design and curvature of the house made sense. I began to focus on the human element of the building: The warmth of the house and its materials. The serpentine wooden railings seemed as if they were meant to have hands running along them. The door handles struck me as clunky and oddly shaped until I touched one; modeled on Gaudi's own hand, it fit my grasp perfectly. It seemed only logical that in one of Europe's most thrilling cities, its greatest architect would focus on the sensual.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The long lists of shows displayed on streaming sites, which seem to grow exponentially by the day, serve to tell you what's on. But in New York City, they also might reveal a bit about the future of your block. Many of the studios that produced the television series, which have turned New York into a small screen production hub, are now planning to open new facilities or expand what's already here, some in parts of the city that have been unfamiliar with such large scale investment. Fueled by a pandemic era demand for stay at home entertainment, and generous tax breaks, the studios are targeting a range of locations in Queens and Brooklyn, including historic red brick enclaves, working class sections of the waterfront, and industrial precincts known not for celebrities, but concrete plants. These areas may not look the same for long. Previous developments of soundstages, as these facilities are known because they are designed to be soundproof, have had transformative effects. The creation of Silvercup Studios in a former bread factory in Long Island City in the 1980s, for example, helped turn that part of Queens into a trendy destination. Originally owned by Paramount, which produced feature films including two starring the Marx Brothers in 1929 and 1930, the company sold the property in 1942 to the U.S. Army, which used it for decades to create propaganda and training films. Jack Lemmon was a star. Years later, at the same address, Lemmon would shoot "Glengarry Glen Ross." After renovating the soundstages, whose main building, a column fronted landmark on 35th Avenue, dates to 1921, Mr. Kaufman took steps to revitalize the surrounding community, which today has schools, restaurants and apartments that would not have otherwise existed, said Hal G. Rosenbluth, the studio's chief executive. Series filmed at Kaufman Astoria, which has what is believed to be the only private outdoor stage, or backlot, on the East Coast, include "Sesame Street," "Flight Attendant" (HBO Max) and "Dickinson" (Apple TV ). "George would always say, 'Once you invest in the community, you help yourself by helping others.' It sounds like a p.r. kind of thing, but it really is a true statement," Mr. Rosenbluth said. Its next project, for which Kaufman Astoria has partnered with Silverstein Properties, is more ambitious. They hope to redevelop a five block stretch south of 35th Avenue into Innovation QNS, a mixed use district with parks, shops and 2,700 apartments. But the city would first need to rezone the area to allow for taller buildings, which could meet resistance. Still, some who have peeked at the plans seem enthused. "It would be mind blowing," said Greg Kyroglou, 44, a resident of Astoria who grew up in the neighborhood and remembers when the area around Kaufman Astoria was bleak. "The studio has been a great asset," said Mr. Kyroglou, now a real estate agent with the firm Modern Spaces. While Kaufman Astoria may sit in an established neighborhood, most soundstages exist on the fringes, on streets that don't see crowds, meaning the sites can feel like they're backstage from the city itself. Two new facilities are planned for just such a stretch, along 19th Avenue in Ditmars Steinway, Queens, which offers scrap metal yards, roofing contractor shops and the entrance to Rikers Island. The first, an 11 stage version from a group that includes Robert De Niro, the actor, director and entrepreneur, will rise on a windswept parcel between the Steinway and Sons piano factory and a skinny creek. Developers, who paid 72 million for the site last winter, hope to break ground in a few months. The other facility will rise inside a factory once occupied by an Asian food wholesaler known for its egg rolls. The studio, at 45th Street, will be operated by Broadway Stages, which bought it for 8.4 million in 2015 and plans to enlarge the property and add higher ceilings, city records show. The Industrial Age is also giving way to the Information Age in the area where East Williamsburg borders Bushwick, at Netflix's site, which is where a printing plant once stood by railroad tracks on Johnson Avenue. Netflix, one of the top creators of original programming, which includes "Orange Is the New Black," "Stranger Things" and "Emily in Paris," intends to have six soundstages there. Netflix plans to rent these new soundstages from Steel Equities, a Long Island developer, which bought the elongated site in January 2019 for 53 million, according to city records. Last month, Steel also purchased another site, at Johnson and Bogart Street, for 20 million, records show, prompting speculation about further expansion. "As long as they don't build tall towers and tear down all the old buildings, it will be fine," Ms. Pacini said. "We don't want to look like Williamsburg." But light technicians, grips and actors won't be the first to gentrify the area, where cement mixers continue to queue at concrete plants. Besides frequenting Ms. Pacini's cafe, young stylish types already hang at restaurants like Rebel Cafe and Garden, which serves "disco fries" and grilled cheese ( 15) in a plant lined yard. As Mr. Steiner sees it, some industries, even white collar ones, are fading in New York, which means content creation for screens large and small is necessary. "It's really critical to the future," he said. New York's 1.5 million square feet of soundstages ranks it third in the country, after California, with 5.5 million and Georgia with 1.8 million, according to an October report from CBRE, the commercial real estate firm. And employment in overall entertainment jobs has increased by 16 percent in New York since 2010, to 358,120, a rise many analysts attribute to soundstage growth, according to CBRE. Soundstage owners report being near full capacity. Steiner Studios' occupancy level is about 95 percent. Of course, coronavirus has taken a toll. New York productions were paused from March to mid July, and soundstages are now operating at only 50 percent capacity under state pandemic rules. But quarantine, at least in the short term, seems to have had some benefits. Video streaming has surged in popularity, up 74 percent nationally in the past year, CBRE said. And a quarter of all TV watching involves streams. Soundstage owners say the industry would be doomed without the hefty public subsidies provided by the state. "Virtually all" of Steiner's clients, for instance, avail themselves of tax breaks, which allow 25 percent of the cost of a large part of a production to be credited back. It's the most generous package in the country, tied with California and Louisiana. "I lose sleep regularly over the thought of what would happen if they were to go away," Mr. Steiner said. Season two of HBO'S "The Deuce," which was partly filmed at Queens's Silvercup Studios, for example, benefited from a 21 million credit in the third quarter of 2019, according to state figures. Created in 2004 and set to expire in 2025, the breaks have so far created a tremendous amount of wealth, officials say. Since their introduction, the state has awarded nearly 8 billion in incentives to 2,200 movies and shows, most of which have been shot in the city. Those productions spent 40 billion and hired millions of workers, according to a spokeswoman for Empire State Development agency, and naturally pay some taxes, too. But echoing the opponents of the deal to bring Amazon to Queens in exchange for 3 billion in breaks, critics call the film incentives a waste of public money because they believe the moviemakers would come to New York anyway. "Saturday Night Live," for example, has collected up to 15 million a year, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group, but is unlikely to ever leave its New York base. The comedy show occasionally shoots at Kaufman Astoria Studios. And with New York already facing a budget hole of billions of dollars, the "film tax credit is a very expensive incentive to provide at a time when New York state is withholding payments to school districts, nonprofits and others," the group said. If the method for luring movies is controversial (along with allowing shoots to disrupt streets and sidewalks), the result still seems to offer some benefits for communities. The eight story charcoal toned building, called Union Crossing, has been slow to lease because of Covid, said Ellen Israel, an agent with JRT Realty Group, which is marketing it. But Ms. Israel envisions companies involved in scenery and lighting as tenants. Asking rents are about 25 per square foot a year. "Silvercup is a known entity, and if you are doing business with them, you don't want to be too far away," she said. "We're trying to create a vibe." In the end, there might be no surer sign of growth potential than the increasing interest from traditional real estate circles. This fall, Square Mile Capital Management, a New York firm that previously had invested in offices and apartment buildings, and Hackman Capital Partners, a Los Angeles company with office properties, snapped up Silvercup for 369.3 million. And the deal is one of several recently for the team that involves film facilities, including California's historic Culver Studios. For its part, Silvercup, whose rooftop sign is visible from Manhattan, has had a string of successes since opening in 1983, including "Sex and the City," "The Sopranos" and "Succession." "I think it's pretty clear that something is going on with streaming video, perhaps accelerated by the impacts of Covid, but probably because of a change in consumer behavior," said Craig Solomon, Square Mile's chief executive. And additional soundstages may be only part of the calculation. Mr. Solomon would not rule out adding apartments or office buildings at or near Silvercup, which in addition to its main location near the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge and its Bronx soundstage, has others in an industrial zone near Calvary Cemetery in Sunnyside. "It's natural to want to continue to grow and benefit from the placemaking aspects of these properties," Mr. Solomon said. "At the end of the day, it's the business we are in." 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
Historically, our sun is the only thing guaranteed to be eaten during a solar eclipse. "A frequent theme is 'the gods are angry, man has displeased them and they are taking the sun,'" said Fred Espenak, an eclipse chaser who has traveled around the world for 27 of these events. The ancient Chinese believed it was a dragon who snapped up the sun; the Vikings thought it to be a pair of wolves. This year, when the sun and moon do their celestial two step over the United States on Aug. 21, it will happen around lunchtime in some parts of the country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Current and former colleagues including Elijah Cummings, who died in October and to whom the film is dedicated line up to praise him. Discussing an incident in which Lewis, as one of the Freedom Riders, was beaten bloody in Rock Hill, S.C., the House majority whip, James E. Clyburn, says he has often wondered what might have happened if he had been there, because he was never as tenaciously nonviolent as Lewis was. The documentary is only occasionally less than adulatory, as when recalling Lewis's race for Congress in 1986 against his friend and fellow activist Julian Bond. Although the film uses a conventional format, it makes an urgent argument: that a new wave of voter suppression has threatened the rights that Lewis labored to secure. That context gives older footage of Lewis and Bond encouraging voter registration in 1971 in Mississippi, for instance a renewed power. Rated PG. Racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, FandangoNOW, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
When ads for the Netflix show "Stranger Things" first appeared in 2016, the glowing, blood red, unevenly shaded font that spelled out the title told viewers exactly what they could expect. The retro typeface and a haunting, one minute title video became synonymous with the supernatural thriller series and, as the show gained in popularity, memes centered largely on its instantly recognizable title have become plentiful. "You're dealing with text and how people respond to the font," said Peter Frankfurt, executive creative director on the "Stranger Things" project and founding partner of Imaginary Forces, a visual storytelling and brand strategy company. "None of us ever conceived this would ever be the phenomena that it is." Hollywood has long known this marketing trick, with movie studios strategically choosing fonts, colors and lighting for a film title that will reflect its tone and genre. And in a crowded marketplace, many mainstream consumer brands like Southwest Airlines, Remax and Domino's Pizza have placed more focus on fonts as a crucial part of their marketing. "It's becoming more and more important," added Steve Matteson, creative type director at Monotype, a company that creates, licenses and designs fonts for brands. When Southwest Airlines revamped its brand in 2014, it overhauled its font and logo as part of the upgrade. It wanted to create the image of an airline that cared about customer loyalty one that had heart. So, Southwest changed its all caps Helvetica font to a thicker, custom made Southwest Sans font that included lowercase letters changes meant to convey a softer, friendlier tone. It also added a tricolor heart to the logo, along with the tagline "without a heart, it's just a machine." "Now we have a unique font that really embodies our personality as a brand," said Helen Limpitlaw, director of brand communications at Southwest Airlines. "We're in a very competitive category and we're trying to avoid that sameness." The new typeface now appears on Southwest's planes, ads, airport signage, uniforms, website and in flight items. Before, the colors and fonts used by the airline varied from platform to platform. "The voice felt very fractured, it was a disconnected experience," said Rodney Abbot, senior partner at Lippincott, a brand strategy and design firm that worked with Southwest. A survey of Southwest customers showed that 95 percent found the new identity appealing, according to the National Brand Monitor in 2014. "We've definitely seen an increase in revenue, an increase in bookings and brand momentum," Ms. Limpitlaw said. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Font style, size, shape, thickness, color, and depth all tell a story. "The typeface is an expression of the tone of voice," Mr. Abbot said. Experts say the right fonts can help brands stand out in a competitive market. But they need to know whom they're targeting and what they want to say. "Speaking to a mom is different from speaking to a teenager or a 65 year old retiree," said Frank Liu, chief creative officer at Siegelvision, a branding and communications firm. Monster Beverage is a good example of a company knowing who it wanted to speak to. In 2002, it rolled out its Monster Energy drink logo, which featured three neon green claw marks in the shape of an "M" on a black background, with "Monster" in white Gothic like lettering under it. The eye catching logo and colors exuded energy and youth and connected with fans of sports like snowboarding and Formula One racing, who were its target customers. "The graphics absolutely nailed it for that demographic," said Paul Friederichsen, a partner at the Blake Project, a brand marketing and consulting firm. Now, 16 years later, Monster's logo remains valuable and recognizable. Legacy companies are sometimes nervous about making changes, but they risk stagnating if they don't. "People are afraid to rebrand these days because of the haters out there on the internet who can tear things apart," Mr. Matteson said. When the retailer Gap changed its iconic Spire like font to Helvetica as part of a 2010 rebrand, customers pushed back hard. "The new logo lost all the personality the original mark had acquired over the years and was rolled out without explanation or rationale," said Matt See, senior art director at Siegelvision. "It felt like no thought was put into it." The company ultimately switched back to its original logo. Experts recommended that companies retain font experts and conduct plenty of surveys before making a change. When the real estate giant Remax decided to overhaul and update its logo and font for the first time in 44 years, the company spent two years and surveyed 20,000 people in the United States and Canada before pushing ahead with the changes. "At the end of the day, all of these images were going to be on yard signs throughout the world, so we wanted to be sure that it resonated with the consumer," said Abby Lee, vice president of marketing and media strategies at Remax. "Trying to change a brand after 45 years with 115,000 plus agents out there is quite a task." The company needed the font upgrade because its typefaces didn't translate well in the digital world: The firm's recognizable hot air balloon logo and aging fonts became blurred on mobile devices. This posed a significant problem because 34 percent of current home buyers are millennials a group that relies heavily on digital devices.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
An N.B.A. Veteran Turns Wisdom Into Wins, On and Off the Court He is, after all, the father who used a casual family game night of Uno to invoke Sun Tzu's military teachings in "The Art of War." "I know what color he has in his hand," Iguodala, the Miami Heat veteran, said as he recalled a recent game. "I know what color she has in her hand. I know what card she's about to throw in." Afterward, he told his 13 year old son, Andre II, that his cutthroat mentality had little to do with winning. "I've learned to pick up on my surroundings," Iguodala said. "That's something I've taught him and that I try to teach him. 'When you're watching me play, see how I'm playing, knowing your opponent.' It's like 'The Art of War' and giving him a few tactics on just seeing life a certain way, where you're ultra alert and you try to use those things to your advantage. Data is the key." That philosophy has been vital for the 36 year old Iguodala. Players his age make it this far only by countering the loss of young legs with the wisdom of miles traveled. "There's no such thing as having enough knowledge," Iguodala said. He plays as though he has already witnessed a sequence, arriving with a quick, solid poke of a ball on defense or delivering a pass before a teammate steps into the previously unoccupied space, tendencies learned through a lifetime of studying the game. He credits that knack to playing for hours a day growing up, watching film as a young player, and witnessing up close the work of the league's defensive stalwarts of that era, players like Scottie Pippen, Bruce Bowen and Metta World Peace. "From there, you just store the information, learning the trends of the league," Iguodala said. "Most teams run the same exact plays, so you know where the ball is going before it gets there." The mind set extends beyond the basketball court to entrepreneurial ventures in technology and e commerce, worlds he started exploring before his 2013 trade to the Golden State Warriors solidified his link to Silicon Valley. "The folks that follow the tech space, they all know the data is king and we all know the importance of data," Iguodala said. "And not just the importance of data, but how you use it and how you can use it to expand and build your company." When this year dawned, all data on the basketball side suggested that Iguodala would not figure in the N.B.A. postseason for the first time in a long while. The Warriors traded him to the Memphis Grizzlies last off season, after he had played in five consecutive N.B.A. finals, earning the finals' Most Valuable Player Award in 2015. The trade created a standoff in which Iguodala and Memphis agreed that he would not report to the organization as the Grizzlies found a future home for him. For a while, Iguodala appeared more often at the enterprise software company Zuora, where he serves as a board adviser, than on any N.B.A. radar. "A lot of athletes that do this will stay on what we call the consumer side, the well known brands, Apple, Instagram," said Tien Tzuo, Zuora's chief executive. "I work in more of a space of business applications, business software. It's not as well known. And he just showed an incredibly strong interest in that. It's not something that you might approach as a layman." The Heat acquired Iguodala in a three team trade in February and, as he regained his footing, the coronavirus pandemic suspended the season indefinitely. Iguodala, the first vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, helped coordinate the season's restart in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla., collaborating on protocols for a return and fielding phone calls from concerned players. The N.B.A.'s return featured Black Lives Matter wording near center court, and many players wore league sanctioned messaging on the back of their jerseys. "You do see the sports leagues taking more of a stance," said Iguodala, who chose to have "Group Economics" on the back of his jersey instead of his last name. Iguodala added that for leagues with a majority Black work force, like the N.B.A.: "I think there's a moral compass there. And so you have to take some type of stance. And it's not really a political stance it's a human stance." Then, in August, Iguodala became one of the most vocal players during a series of meetings after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis. The players initiated a work stoppage of playoff games until the league's franchise owners agreed to specific commitments, including searching for ways to provide voting access to underrepresented communities. "How you get so many African American athletes of that wealth to be able to come out stronger as a whole, as a union, that was a beautiful thing, regardless of what people may have thought would happen," Iguodala said. "Just seeing all of us being able to have dialogue, whether we agreed or we disagreed with one another, that was huge." Iguodala ended the season in his sixth consecutive finals, where Miami lost to the Lakers in six games. "The bubble was the perfect environment for us, because of how they mentally train the guys to take on any challenge," Iguodala said. "We were just ready for it, and we made the most of it." Iguodala is also making the most of his off court pursuits. He was an early investor in Zoom, the platform he used to conduct the interview for this article. He joined Comcast Ventures' Catalyst Fund as a venture partner. His goal is to continue educating, creating access for and investing in minorities and marginalized communities. In other words, backing up the message he wore on the back of his jersey. "Professional athletes have too much downtime," Iguodala said. "That's how they get in trouble. What I've been able to do is take that time and find something that's purposeful, and it's a passion, something I really enjoy, and not just monetize it, but also help bring my cohorts into the space with me and help them learn as well." Iguodala and Stephen Curry joined with Bloomberg L.P. in 2017 to create the annual Players Technology Summit, a forum to link athletes with executives in technology and venture capitalism. As Iguodala's basketball career winds down "sooner rather than later" he'll be able to focus on other things, he said he wants to make sure other players recognize their value on and off the court. "We always talk about player health physically and mentally, but ultimately that No. 1 agenda is the dollars and how much can we bring in," Iguodala said. Iguodala pointed to the recent sale of the Utah Jazz to Ryan Smith, the chief executive of Qualtrics, for 1.66 billion. The franchise's previous sale was for 8 million in 1985, when the auto dealer Larry H. Miller bought 50 percent. He later bought the rest of the franchise for 14 million. "Any player in the history of playing for the Jazz organization John Stockton, Karl Malone did any of them benefit from that value increase?" Iguodala said. "Did any of them have skin in the game? No." Just 50 days separated the end of the N.B.A. finals from the start of training camp last week. The N.B.A. faced a significant financial loss if it waited until the next calendar year. "I think players are realizing that we have to stand a little bit more firm with our negotiations, in terms of who's bearing the brunt of the risk when we're put in these tough situations," Iguodala said. "You're asking us to put our bodies on the line and take more of a financial risk."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
While the news media has been focused on the "spat" between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, something much more serious has been taking place between the Sanders campaign and Joe Biden. Not to sugarcoat it: The Sanders campaign has flat out lied about things Biden said in 2018 about Social Security, and it has refused to admit the falsehood. This is bad; it is, indeed, almost Trumpian. The last thing we need is another president who demonizes and lies about anyone who disagrees with him, and can't admit ever being wrong. Biden deserves an apology, now, and Sanders probably needs to find better aides. That said and this is no excuse for the Sanders camp it would be good to have Biden explain why, in the more distant past, he went along with the Beltway consensus that Social Security needed to be pared back. First, about that Biden smear: In 2018 Biden gave a speech attacking Paul Ryan, the then speaker of the House, for wanting to cut taxes on the rich and pay for those tax cuts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. There was nothing in his remarks that should bother progressives. If you want a parallel, it's as if I were to say, "Some white nationalists claim that Jews are responsible for all our problems," and a political campaign put out a release saying, "Krugman says 'Jews are responsible for all our problems.'" Biden did make a misstep in his counterattack, mislabeling the misrepresented video clip as "doctored," but that doesn't mean he's not still due an abject apology. Instead, however, the Sanders campaign has doubled down. Rather than admitting that it smeared a rival, the campaign is going around claiming that Biden has a long record of trying to cut Social Security. There is, unfortunately, some truth in that claim but it doesn't excuse either the original lie or the refusal to admit error. So, about the element of truth in the criticism of Biden: Once upon a time, there was a peculiar consensus among media figures and would be centrists that the long run cost of entitlement programs was America's biggest problem, that Social Security in particular was in crisis and that something had to be done, with the solution including benefit cuts. This consensus wasn't based on hard thinking; it was about the attitude politicians were expected to display. As I wrote way back in 2007, proclaiming a Social Security crisis requiring cuts was seen as a "badge of seriousness," a way of showing how statesmanlike and tough minded you were. The candidate I was criticizing, by the way the guy I said had been "played for a sucker" was a politician named Barack Obama. But Biden was certainly pulled in by that conventional wisdom, too, so it's not hard to find old quotes in which he suggested possible Social Security cuts in the name of fiscal responsibility. But that was then. These days, Biden, like many Democrats, is calling for an expansion of Social Security benefits. That doesn't make his previous statements irrelevant; he should acknowledge that he has changed his position, and his history on the issue is one reason progressives worry that, if elected, he might fritter away his political capital in vain attempts to reach bipartisan compromise. (His role in passing the draconian 2005 bankruptcy bill, which got Elizabeth Warren involved in politics, is another.) None of this, however, justifies the Sanders campaign's lying about recent statements by a man who, after all, may well be the Democratic presidential nominee and who would, whatever his centrist history, be infinitely more progressive than the current occupant of the White House. And the smearing of Biden reinforces the concerns some of us have about Sanders. There has always been an ugly edge to some of Sanders's support, a faction of followers who denounce anyone raising questions about his positions even Warren! as a corrupt capitalist shill. Until now, however, you could argue that Sanders himself wasn't responsible for the bad behavior of some of his supporters. You can't make that argument now. The dishonest smears and the doubling down on those smears are coming from the top of the Sanders campaign; even if they aren't coming directly out of Sanders's mouth, he could and should have stopped them. The fact that Sanders isn't apologizing to Biden and replacing the people responsible says uncomfortable things about his character. I don't want to go overboard here. While there is a Trumpian feel to some of what we're seeing from the Sanders campaign, Bernie Sanders is no Donald Trump. As we've just seen, there are some real issues with the people surrounding him, but they're nothing like Trump's gang of thugs. And in practice a Sanders presidency, like a Biden presidency, would be a vast improvement, morally as well as substantively, on what we have now. But right now, Sanders and his campaign are behaving badly, and they need to be called on it. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
FOR a speed obsessed adolescent, it may be hard to believe that a shrink wrapped sports car is not every driver's object of desire. But the type of car embodied by the BMW 6 Series call it what you will, a Gran Turismo or a gentleman's express once commanded the highest levels of respect. Provocatively styled and emitting satisfied burps from a V 8, or even the occasional V 12, the classic 2 plus 2 luxury liner proclaimed its owner to be a lover of the good life and the fast lane. But in recent years, particularly in the grungier recesses of the Internet, grand touring cars have become as easy a target as the private country club. The peach fuzz ayatollahs of the auto Web, overflowing with opinions, see the luxury GTs from BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Lexus or Cadillac hovering beyond reach and dismiss them as decadent toys for the comfortably retired. Their general wonderment is that anyone would waste money on a powerful car that's not a Porsche 911, a Nissan GT R or a cash torching Italian exotic. They reason that the well preserved buyers of cushier performance models have been addled by Centrum overdoses and CBS sitcoms. And to be honest, the 650i coupes and convertibles, redesigned for 2012, are not my idea of 100,000 perfectly spent either. But you don't have to be a silver haired fox, or a cougar, to grasp the Bimmer's vault on wheels appeal. Today's 6 Series traces its philosophy to coupe models of the same designation sold in 1977 88, though it may not equal that car's timeless styling. The revived 6 Series raced up the sales charts in 2004, despite a polarizing, coffin back shape created by Chris Bangle, the company's design director at the time. In 2005, BMW sold nearly 10,000 of its 6 Series in the United States, but a harsh economy and buyers' short attention spans cut sales to 2,400 last year. The all new 6 Series, which now shares the platform of the 7 Series and 5 Series sedans, is longer, lower and wider, including a nearly three inch stretch in wheelbase and length. Adhering to GT tradition, the 6 Series remains blithely impractical, a stance that may evolve when BMW joins the 4 door coupe trend next year with the 6 Series Gran Coupe. For now, the deep dish rear seats are best reserved for short trips and smaller bodies, even though the 6 Series is longer than many midsize sedans. (The backrest angle has been tilted slightly rearward, BMW says; any gain in comfort is indeed slight.) The company says that the updated body, designed by Florian Wendel of BMW's Munich design studio, is inspired by waves. This departs from its predecessor, which showcased the so called flame surfacing theme of Mr. Bangle, a design language whose merry mix of concave and convex had many auto critics clamoring for censorship. The new car is more streamlined and direct. Its best angle is coming straight at you; a V shape hood and front fenders stack in three levels, hinting at lapping waves. That shark nose hood segues into a large twin kidney grille and a full width maw of air inlets. Combine that bullet train shape with punishing force and technology and the personality seems as icy and numbers driven as ever. When a Jaguar XK driver steps from that romantic machine, you expect to see a bouquet in hand. The 6 Series owner would emerge with a cage full of lab mice that had been exposed to brutal g force experiments. The convertible adds sex appeal with its motorized fabric top, a five layer sandwich that is beautifully fitted and holds weather and noise at bay. The soft top also preserves trunk space, with a surprisingly useful 10.6 cubic feet of top down room (12.3 cubic feet with the roof raised). A thoughtful carryover is the glass rear window, which operates separately from the flying buttressed roof and powers up from the deck to serve as a wind deflector. Coupe or convertible, the BMW's cabin is blanketed in a new level of designer luxury, including my test 650i convertible's ivory and black nappa leather interior. A 10.2 inch screen generously displays navigation, audio and vehicle data. Upgrades naturally raise the price: slick ceramic coated switches are 650, a sparkling 16 speaker Bang Olufsen sound system is 3,700 and a leather swaddled dashboard costs 1,500. If you've guessed that the 6 Series can get freakishly expensive, congratulations. A new entry level model, the 640i, holds the price to 74,475 for the coupe or 81,975 for the open air version. The 640i gets an upgraded version of BMW's 3 liter single turbo in line 6 with 315 horsepower and 330 pound feet of torque. Aided by BMW's 8 speed automatic transmission, that 640i coupe runs from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in a healthy 5.5 seconds, quicker than the last year's V 8 model. As with the 6 cylinder version of the flagship 7 Series sedan, the 640i also whips the V 8 version's fuel economy with E.P.A. ratings of 21 miles per gallon in the city and 31 on the highway. I tested the real brutes, the 650i versions of the coupe and convertible, priced at 83,875 for the coupe and 91,375 for the convertible. My test coupe and convertible each broke the six figure barrier, at 100,825 and 105,025 respectively. The new 6 Series adopts the size down, power up turbocharged strategy that's sweeping the industry: BMW's 4.4 liter twin turbo V 8 spins up 400 horsepower and 450 pound feet of torque. That's 40 more horses and 90 more pound feet than the 4.8 liter V 8 used previously. The result is a roiling ocean of power, available any time your right foot opens the floodgate. BMW says the V 8 coupe or convertible will surge to 60 m.p.h. in 4.9 seconds, a half second quicker than before. The mileage rating is 15 m.p.g. city and 23 highway. An M6 version, coming in 2012, will have a twin turbo V 8 producing roughly 560 horsepower. Yet I'm not sure why anyone would need the M, as the 6 already offers admirable power for a GT. One might reasonably expect the hefty 6 (4,200 pounds for the coupe and 4,497 pounds for the ragtop) to feel doughy, but that's not the case. It bends the laws of physics in the manner of other big Bimmers, applying electronic wizardry to tame challenging roads with unimaginable poise. Toggling the switch of the standard Driving Dynamics system tweaks the reactions of the throttle, electric steering, adaptive shock absorbers and a stellar automatic transmission. Choose Active Roll Stabilization for 2,000 and a set of hydraulic actuators will tighten the antiroll bars for uncannily flat cornering, then loosen them for straight line ride comfort. Another 1,750 brings Active Integral Steering, which quickens the steering ratio for low speed maneuvers and adds rear axle steering for improved stability. With both of those optional onboard systems, along with chunky 20 inch wheels and tires, the 650i felt unflappable along Route 301 near Carmel almost an affront to the nearby Chuang Yen Monastery, whose Buddhist monks might take one look at the lavish BMW and advise, "Peace comes from within, do not seek it without."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
In recent years, several properties have opened at airports around the globe with attractive amenities, sleek design and tasty food. They're welcoming hotels for travelers to spend a night or even a multiday layover. "The old stereotype used to be that airport hotels were dumpy or staid," said Reneta McCarthy, a senior lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. "That's no longer the case, and you see many more interesting and vibrant properties, most notably from companies who want to reinvigorate their brands." An artistic experience close enough for a layover Ms. McCarthy recently stayed at The Westin Denver International Airport, one such hotel. "It was such a happening spot with an airy lobby and had a unique design sensibility," she said. "I would definitely go back and recommend it to others." The hotel is in a building designed by the architecture firm Gensler and is LEED platinum certified. Its design is meant to resemble the wings of a bird; the building has a curved shape that swoops down in the middle, revealing views of the adjacent terminal, while the glass curtain walls reflect the sky. The Westin commissioned three artists to create the large scale works in and around the property. One of them is Patrick Marold, a local artist, whose sculpture "Shadow Array," is made with 236 beetle kill spruce logs from Southern Colorado and is situated outside.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
From about 40,000 Japanese yen, 335 at 120 yen to the dollar. The Andaz Tokyo occupies the top six floors of the new 52 story Toranomon Hills skyscraper. Opened in June 2014, the 164 room property is the first Tokyo location from the Hyatt owned Andaz boutique brand, which is known for integrating local elements into a hotel's decor. Here, for example, a singular bonsai tree sits in the soaring lobby, while elegant washi paper artworks adorn elevators. The seamless service reflects a redefined version of luxury in which guests are welcomed with drinks at smooth walnut tables in the lounge instead of standing at a check in counter. The centrally located property is in a quiet business district between Shimbashi and Roppongi. The nearest Tokyo Metro station, Toranomon, is a five minute walk away. My spacious 48th floor room, a Tower View King, was a study in harmony. Large windows framed a showstopping view of the Tokyo Tower and the glittering skyline. The startlingly comfortable low bed faced the windows, not the superfluous flat screen TV. There was a long gray couch by the windows my preferred perch for admiring the mesmerizing view as well as a handsome wooden desk, a low table and a maroon leather armchair. Moss colored carpeting was reminiscent of a Zen garden, while white wall panels evoked traditional fusuma partitions. Additional adornments were minimal but carefully chosen, such as a woodblock print and an art tome about the Edo era artist Katsushika Hokusai. Nearly as large as the room, the bathroom had sliding partitions and a beautiful walnut vanity. In a nod to Japanese bath culture, a deep circular tub was contained inside its own compartment alongside a rainfall shower. Artfully arranged amenities included sachets of bath salts in a seasonal "winter yuzu" scent. Other luxuries included fluffy robes, slippers and traditional cotton pajamas called yukata. Best of all was the high tech Toto toilet that opened, closed and flushed automatically, suggesting that the height of civilization is never having to touch a toilet (with your hands).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The best, perhaps the only reason to see "The Artist's Wife" is Lena Olin, an actor incapable of giving a so so performance. As Claire, though, the devoted spouse of the title, even Olin is unable to salvage this pulpy portrait of a onetime artist who has laid aside her own talents to enable those of her husband. As the gorgeous handmaiden to Richard (an enjoyably tetchy Bruce Dern), a celebrated painter, Claire runs errands and fills the refrigerator in their Hamptons home with healthy produce. But Richard is becoming forgetful and inappropriate with his art students, his crustiness erupting into tantrums and the canvases for an upcoming exhibition standing accusingly unfinished. His diagnosis of Alzheimer's sends Claire to New York City to persuade Richard's long estranged daughter, Angela (Juliet Rylance) a resentful single mother to reconcile with her ailing father.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Thousands of people took in the bronzed, glacial grandeur of Philip Glass's "Akhnaten" at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday evening. A couple of miles downtown, a far smaller group heard a very different Glass lively and sly; intimate and changeable as Maki Namekawa gave the American premiere of his new piano sonata , his first venture into that genre, at the Morgan Library Museum. Mr. Glass may not care about his legacy, but he's hardly unaware of the dynamics that shape a composer's reputation. "If I'm to be remembered for anything," he is quoted as saying in the program notes at the Morgan, "it might be for the piano music, because people can play it." As his career took off, he was increasingly asked to play solo concerts. So, simply enough, he began to write piano pieces to perform at them. For a while, he kept these mainly for his own use; if people wanted to hear them, he reasoned, they'd have to hire him. And, as he observes, they were eminently playable; while a good pianist, Mr. Glass was never a virtuoso. These works like the first book of etudes, the five parts of "Metamorphosis," " Mad Rush " have since been published and widely recorded, and they are what Mr. Glass means when he says that his piano music is what's most likely to be remembered among his massive output. But gradually, and especially over the past decade, his piano compositions moved beyond the level of what he could plausibly perform, their technical demands perhaps culminating at least for the moment in the new sonata.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A few years ago, when some photos by Times photographers adorning our office walls were swapped out for others, I found one headed for the dumpster. It captured the scene when Andy Card came over to whisper to George W. Bush, as he read "The Pet Goat" to schoolchildren in Sarasota, that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. It was such a pivotal moment in this country's history, it seemed too important to toss. So I hung it in my office. But then three days later, I had to get rid of it. The look in Bush's eyes was so disturbing, I couldn't bear to see it anymore. He looked frightened, like a horrible bill had come due and he was utterly unprepared to pay it. He looked like what he was: a man who had been winging it for the first half of his life, playing and swaggering around while he relied on his daddy and daddy's friends to prop him up. W. was shaken to the core, and that left him vulnerable to being influenced by the older advisers around him with their own crazy agendas. America is still paying for the dreadful decisions that came after that moment. The same blend of arrogance and incompetence informed the Bush administration's handling of Katrina the earlier lash of nature that exposed the lethal fault line between the haves and have nots. W. retreated to clinical states' rights arguments as a beloved city drowned. Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states' rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment. Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear. "I would leave it up to the governors," Trump said Friday, when asked about his government's sclerotic response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home. The Los Angeles Times reported that two months before the virus spread through Wuhan, the Trump administration halted a 200 million early warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic. The name of the program? "PREDICT." It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but this virus loves it. At Thursday's briefing, Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who barely two weeks ago became the head of the administration's supply chain task force, added to the confusion when he defended the government's decision to send the supplies governors are pleading for to the private sector first. "I'm not here to disrupt a supply chain," the admiral said. Trump was elected to disrupt things. So disrupt. The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic. With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, "Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means." Our doom, perhaps? Trump's most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame shifting and nepotistic. At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner. Where's our Mideast peace deal, dude? Surely Trump did not think giving Kushner a lead role would inspire confidence. This is the very same adviser who told his father in law early on that the virus was being overplayed by the press and also urged him to tout a Google website guiding people to testing sites that turned out to be, um, still under construction. Now he is leading a group, mocked within the government as "the Slim Suit crowd," that is providing one more layer of confusion and inane consultant argot to the laggardly, disorganized response. From the lectern, Kushner drilled down on his role as the annoying, spoiled kid in every teen movie ever made. "And the notion of the federal stockpile was, it's supposed to be our stockpile," he said. "It's not supposed to be the states' stockpiles that they then use." That's the way the Trump Kushner dynasty has approached this whole presidency, conflating what belongs to the people with what is theirs. Trump acts like he has the right to dole out "favors," based on which governor is most assiduous about kissing up to him. On Friday, the administration changed the wording on the Department of Health and Human Services website about the stockpile to be matchy matchy with Kushner's cavalier dismissal of the states. It was typical of Trump's muddled message that on Friday, as the C.D.C. issued new guidelines to wear masks, the president said: "You can wear 'em. You don't have to wear 'em," adding he had no intention of wearing one because "Somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the great Resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask" did not gel with his image of greeting "prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don't know somehow, I don't see it for myself." Trump's eyes may not have the same fearful look that W.'s did. But ours do.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
PRAGUE Walking the creaking floors of a 17th century building perched on the same hill as Prague Castle, John Mucha led an informal tour through the house where he has lived nearly all his life. The walls are adorned with works by Mr. Mucha's grandfather, the Czech Art Nouveau painter and designer Alphonse Mucha, part of a collection that includes posters of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt with coiled hair and flowing robes. There are more than 3,000 of his grandfather's works in the family collection, and Mr. Mucha, 68, has made it his life's mission to preserve them. Which is why he is taking the city of Prague to court. Mr. Mucha along with local art restorers, conservators and historians passionately opposes the city's plan to take his grandfather's masterwork "Slav Epic" on tour internationally for the first time. "Slav Epic" is a cycle of 20 large canvases shown since 2012 at the Veletrzni Palace, part of the National Gallery here, depicting the mythology and history of Czech and other Slavic peoples. Completed in 1928, it was given to Prague by Alphonse Mucha over the 18 years it took to create. Today, the works are strongly linked to Czech identity, having survived near destruction during World War II and under communism. Last month, the Prague City Gallery, caretaker of the works, announced that the city had signed off on a three month loan to the National Art Center, Tokyo, starting in March, as part of the center's year of Czech culture. With individual pieces of "Slav Epic" standing well over 20 feet, experts have said that the works are simply too big to move internationally without damaging them. For Mr. Mucha, this is too much of a risk to take. He also says it is a violation of a 1913 agreement between the artist and his benefactor, the American philanthropist Charles R. Crane, who financed the creation of "Slav Epic." The agreement stipulates that the works be donated to Prague on the condition that the city build a permanent facility to house them a promise that, nearly 90 years after the cycle's completion, has not been kept. For this reason, Mr. Mucha said, he is asking the courts "to confirm that the deed of gift was not done," and that it is invalid. In a lawsuit filed in his name against the city of Prague, he is asking that ownership of the works be transferred back to the Mucha estate. Court hearings are set to begin Jan. 18. But "Slav Epic" is widely seen as Mucha's masterpiece, and its insurance value is at least 10.8 million euros, or roughly 11 million at current exchange rates, the Czech news media reported in September. "He is referred to as kind of a godlike figure," said Gabriel Weisberg, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, adding that Mucha contributed to the revitalization of the color print revolution during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prof. Karel Stretti, who leads the restoration department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, said the largest of the "Slav Epic" pieces measures 26.5 feet by 20 feet, meaning handlers would have to remove it from its frame and roll it up, which could crack the paint. "The nature of the works egg tempera on a hemp canvas and the way it may be insulated makes them particularly vulnerable," the professor added. In 1921, five canvases were sent to New York and Chicago at the behest of Mr. Crane. The works returned with minor blemishes and the city of Prague advised in 1936 that they were not be moved again, according to letters Professor Stretti showed to The New York Times. During World War II, the "Slav Epic" paintings were nearly lost forever. Mucha was interrogated by the Gestapo, accused of being a nationalist and a Jewish sympathizer, shortly before his death from pneumonia in 1939. The canvases were then rolled up and hidden in a local school to keep them out of the hands of the Nazis. They would not be seen again until the 1960s, when they were exhibited in a castle near where Mucha was born. They were moved to Veletrzni Palace in 2012. "Political and economic interests should not be placed ahead of the interests of our culture," the professor said. Neither the city of Prague nor the National Art Center in Tokyo responded to inquiries about how much the center would pay for the loan. Jan Wolf, Prague's councilor in charge of culture, who is responsible for the loan, declined requests for an interview. The Prague City Gallery, which is controlled by the City Council, has sought to reaffirm its decision to lend the paintings, saying in an emailed statement last month that Mucha had wanted "to show the importance of Slavic history to the widest possible audience, not only in Europe but also overseas."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Lanvin, one time fairy tale of French fashion, has flipped and flopped (more often flopped) so many times since Alber Elbaz, the creative director who gave it modern meaning, was fired in 2015, that it has lost almost all identity: going romantically cool under Bouchra Jarrar; weirdly 1980s under Olivier Lapidus; and then silent while a new owner, management team and designer Bruno Sialelli, an unknown barely into his 30s got settled. On Wednesday, in the vaulted environs of the Musee de Cluny, a.k.a. France's National Museum of the Middle Ages, amid plinths with ghostly carved pillars representing civilization long ago, the oldest French fashion house in continuous existence tried once again for, if not a happy ending, at least a new chapter that someone might want to read. Welcome to Lanvin, the millennial version. There were so many plotlines going on, it was a little hard to follow.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In this, the hour of the annual tuition bill, the season of the fiscal cliff, let us pause to gaze in wonder at a true curiosity: the tax break for people who send their children to private or religious schools for kindergarten through 12th grade. If you're not familiar with it, you're not alone. Plenty of otherwise savvy tax professionals and financial planners don't know much about it, either. It's called the Coverdell Education Savings Account, and there is nothing else like it. The Coverdell lets people put away up to 2,000 each year in an investment account. While the contributions are not tax deductible, you don't pay any taxes on the earnings you take out as long as you use them for tuition or other qualified expenses, including those for elementary or secondary education. Even with that annual contribution limit, the tax savings can add up to thousands of dollars for people who are persistent savers. Now, however, the question is whether this quirk will last. As with a lot of things in the tax code, the Coverdell tax break for elementary and secondary tuition costs is scheduled to expire on Dec. 31, absent some legislative action in Washington. Whether you want to root for its continued existence may depend on your political outlook. The years of debate over whether this tax break should have come into existence in the first place featured some of the most colorful political rhetoric in recent history. The late Senator Paul Coverdell, a Republican of Georgia, for whom the accounts were eventually named, locked horns with President Bill Clinton in 1997 over Mr. Clinton's threat to veto the senator's effort to create accounts that would give tax breaks to parents who steer their children away from public schools. Senator Coverdell said the threat, which the president later made good on, was "almost a Pearl Harbor for education reform." Why was the president so opposed? Cue the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who said in 1998 that he believed that an account like the one that Senator Coverdell had proposed "hangs the sign for all to see on the front door of public schools of America, 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Get out while you can.' " Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the House, had seen the accounts much differently one year earlier, speaking of "parents and children who want the right not to be destroyed by bad schools." He and Senator Coverdell finally got their way in 2001, when President George W. Bush signed a bill allowing holders of what became known as Coverdell accounts to use the earnings for kindergarten through 12th grade education, albeit with a 2,000 annual contribution cap. "In terms of a financial benefit, you're talking de minimis," Joe McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, said this week. "But in terms of its historical importance, it carried a lot of weight. As far as I know, it's the first federal tax relief specifically helping parents with kids in religious or independent elementary and secondary schools." Despite the Coverdell's status as a sort of totem of school choice advocates, no one has figured out just how many people are using the accounts to pay for a primary or secondary school education today. The Internal Revenue Service does not know, and neither do the big brokerage firms like Charles Schwab and Merrill Lynch that offer Coverdells. What we do know is that overall use of Coverdells, which people can also use to save for college, has been falling quickly, declining from 985,000 tax returns mentioning contributions to Coverdells in 2005 to 644,000 in 2009, according to a brief released this week by the Joint Committee on Taxation. The committee said the decline was probably because of the low Coverdell contribution limits compared with other tax advantaged ways of saving for college, like 529 accounts. That said, it's possible that many more people would be in on the Coverdells if they knew about the tax breaks for parents with children in private or religious schools. Here's how those tax savings break down, according to Jason Derbyshire, business development manager for the company that makes TradeLog accounting software for active traders and investors. If parents saved 2,000 for each of 16 years in a normal brokerage account, earned returns of 6 percent for each year (a realistic return for someone in a mix of stock and bond index mutual funds who rebalances annually) and then pulled the entire balance out in the summer of the 17th year, they'd end up with 54,425.76. Those 16 annual 2,000 contributions mean their cost basis for capital gains tax calculation purposes would be 32,000, leaving them with a 22,425.76 capital gain. In a normal taxable brokerage account, the long term capital gains tax would be 15 percent of that gain for most parents, or 3,363.86. In a Coverdell, however, the account holder pays no taxes as long as the money is used for a qualified education expense. And every little bit helps when facing down an annual bill for, say, 51,025 for boarding students at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N.J., or over 25,000 for many private day schools around the country. The tax savings would be higher if the account earned more than 6 percent, if capital gains tax rates increased or if the account owners let it grow longer than 17 years by changing the beneficiary of the Coverdell from the oldest child to the youngest one. And lest you think that Coverdells are merely a plaything for the private school parent, Christopher E. Condeluci, a lawyer at Venable in Washington and a former tax and benefits counsel for the Senate Finance Committee, points out that parents of children in public schools can use the accounts in several ways, too. The Internal Revenue Service Coverdell rule book notes one nearly universal possibility: using account distributions for computers and Internet access. Then, there are the more complicated tax maneuvers that some people have tried in order to use a Coverdell. The rules prohibit contributions from people who have modified adjusted gross income of more than 110,000 for singles and 220,000 for couples filing a joint return. But the regulations did not specifically prohibit wealthier parents from giving gifts to their minor children to open their own accounts, and the I.R.S. does repeatedly point to beneficiaries' ability to make contributions on their own behalf. People wealthy enough to consider this kind of fancy footwork probably ought to pay an experienced tax accountant to review it. If you're new to this Coverdell private and religious school angle, you may well wonder why you'd want to bother opening an account now because of the uncertainty around the tax rules come Dec. 31, 2012. One potential reason is that Representative Ann Marie Buerkle, a Republican from New York, has introduced legislation with Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania, proposing to raise the annual contribution limit to 10,000. The odds are probably long here given the continuing federal deficit troubles. "I don't see how they can afford something like that these days," said Joe Hurley, founder of the savingforcollege.com Web site. At the opposite extreme, legislators may allow the tax free savings for kindergarten through 12th grade education to expire at the end of 2012 and let the annual contribution cap for higher education savings fall to 500 to pay for higher priority tax breaks. Then again, Coverdells probably aren't costing much now in the broad scheme of things. In 2010, the Joint Committee on Taxation predicted that the tax breaks this year would deprive the United States Treasury of just 17 million. Robert Enlow, president of the Foundation for Educational Choice, doesn't see the Coverdell break going away. He points to the many pieces of legislation that states have passed in support of vouchers or other means of allowing parents more control of where their children go to school as evidence that the political winds are at the back of those who want to keep using Coverdells for public and secondary school tuition. "People are tired of ZIP code assignment in public schools, and that's a bipartisan desire," he said. "The current system is seen as having such an unfair impact on low income families, and things like Coverdells, vouchers and tax credits really are being seen as ways to shake the system up a little more." If he's wrong, however, it's no great loss for Coverdell account holders. Even if they lose the ability to use their tax free earnings for elementary or secondary school costs, there's always college, and they could keep contributing toward that goal if they wished. With tuition continuing to rise to levels that boggle the mind, parents across a range of income levels will need all the tax breaks they can get.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Re "Anxious Times for 'Visible Jews' as Communities Clash" (news article, Feb. 17) and "I Am a Haredi Jew, Not an Extremist" (Op Ed, Feb. 21): As a secular Jewish woman, I can dwell on the seemingly vast distance between my conservative Jewish upbringing and that of Haredi Jews. But now is the time for secular Jews to reach across that distance and build connection and solidarity. After all, although anti Semitism takes different forms, it affects all of us. Last year, as I dropped my 2 year old at his small neighborhood Jewish preschool in brownstone Brooklyn, I pulled back a makeshift covering on the door to find a swastika there, discovered (and covered up) by staff members minutes before morning drop off. As a deputy commissioner at the New York City Commission on Human Rights, I helped develop a recent public awareness campaign to combat anti Semitism. It features the names and faces of both Haredi and secular Jews smiling proudly at the camera. It was intentional, and no small feat, to make sure that New York City's diverse and beautiful mosaic of Jewish communities were represented side by side. No matter the particulars of what may divide us, our shared heritage and common threat must unite us to say that we belong here and that anti Semitism does not.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
An opportunist who parlayed a sort of social media telegenic glow into a music career, a curio who embraced a quixotic anti style and became a regular fixture on the Billboard charts, 6ix9ine has become one of the emblematic rappers of the SoundCloud generation, even if rapping itself isn't of much interest to him. He is a snoozy lyricist, almost wholly uninterested in narrative, complexity or even the basic tenets of rhyme. Instead, he emphasizes texture and intensity typically, he's screaming in a static y rasp, an approach that suggests abandon, and potential mayhem just around the corner. But as much as he is a musician, he is an actor, with a carefully cultivated online personality designed for maximum shock. And as much as he is an actor, he is facing real world consequences for real world actions: He pleaded guilty to a 2015 charge of use of a child in a sexual performance, for which he recently received four years probation. And earlier this month he was arrested on federal racketeering and weapons charges, among others. (6ix9ine, 22, pleaded not guilty on Monday.) His trial is scheduled to begin in September 2019; he remains in custody today. Amid this chaos, his second album, "Dummy Boy," was officially released Tuesday. (It leaked online a couple of days prior.) It feels less like a blueprint for 6ix9ine's future in music and more like a retrospective of an especially bizarre time in hip hop. The rapid rise and sudden fall of 6ix9ine: Read the story. "Dummy Boy" presents a rapper who always sounds as if he is getting away with something. It starts at the album cover, which features a cartoonish illustration of 6ix9ine grinning as he expels rainbow colored urine onto the floor. And it extends to the songs, many of them previously released, which show a fluid artist less interested in cementing his most provocative choices recovering the raw tension of peak era DMX or M.O.P. than in bending to the moment. That makes the energetic but scattered "Dummy Boy" far less rowdy than his first full length release, "Day69," which was filled with short, punchy scraps of songs that defied many rap conventions. If heavily AutoTuned vocals are what the moment requires, as on "Tic Toc" and "Feefa," then he'll do that. If whisper rapping with Nicki Minaj will grab people's attention, as he does on "Fefe," then he'll do that. If sing rapping in Spanish is expedient as on "Bebe" and "Mala," a pair of duets with Anuel AA then he'll do that, too. He still shrieks there are some Busta Rhymes isms on "Waka," and "Tati" is full of clipped threats but his penchant for pandemonium is largely expressed in his preference for peculiar and irregular sounds: the pealing siren on "Stoopid," or the quasi steel drum on "Kika." (The producers are an eclectic bunch, including Murda Beatz, Scott Storch and Take A Daytrip.) 6ix9ine also appears to understand that a little 6ix9ine goes a long way; often he sounds like an accent piece on his own album. "Feefa" feels like a Gunna song that happens to feature 6ix9ine; "Waka" feels like an A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie song that happens to feature 6ix9ine. The exception, surprisingly, is "Kanga," which features a happy to play second fiddle Kanye West. What may end up being the lasting impression of this album, however, is the strain of anxiety that runs through it about the affiliations 6ix9ine made with the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods. Last month, when a judge sentenced him to probation, he was barred from publicly affiliating with the gang, whose members had become key figures on the rapper's team. Their relationship deteriorated further after a shooting at a Manhattan restaurant, and 6ix9ine renounced them in a radio interview. Before 6ix9ine's arrest, the F.B.I. warned him that he was being targeted by his former associates; now he is being charged alongside Kifano Jordan, known as Shotti (or Shottie), a Blood who had helped manage his career since 2016. On "Kika" and "Kanga," other people performatively interrupt 6ix9ine, preventing him from mentioning the gang's name. This may be out of concern for how it might affect his legal situation, or it might represent legitimate frustration at the tensions that tore apart him and his crew. On "Feefa," he laments old friends that once "was my bros, but they changed though." At the song's end, in one of his calmest moments, he raps, "I'm stressing/Mama saying, 'Don't cry, count your blessings.'" Or maybe this, too, is a performance, a convenient show of regret from an artist who thrives by molding himself to the moment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A man in a Saudi hospital has pneumonia. The patient in the room next door gets sick, and before anyone realizes what is happening he infects seven others, each of whom infects at least one more. An outbreak is born. A detailed investigation of the viral illness first detected last year in Saudi Arabia has revealed the chilling ease with which the virus can spread to ill patients in the hospital and its ability to infect some close contacts like hospital staff and family members who were in good health. A report on the investigation published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine pinpointed the time it takes for a person to get sick after being exposed to the virus, a median of 5.2 days. The disease has now infected 64 people and killed 38 in eight countries. Saudi Arabia has had the most cases. The United States has had none. The disease was first recognized in Saudi Arabia last September, and was later named MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome. It is caused by a coronavirus, a relative of the virus that caused SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which originated in China and caused an international outbreak in 2003 that infected at least 8,000 people and killed nearly 800. MERS has not spread as rapidly or as widely as SARS did. The first few MERS cases seemed to pop up sporadically and mysteriously, and at first doctors did not think the disease was contagious. But over time it became apparent that patients in hospitals could infect one another, and that family members and health workers could sometimes contract it, too. The apparently high death rate from the disease has worried health experts. More than half of the confirmed cases have been fatal. However, it is possible that milder cases have gone undetected and that the disease is not as deadly as it may initially appear, said Dr. Trish M. Perl, an author of the new report, and a senior hospital epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who traveled to Saudi Arabia to investigate the outbreak. But Dr. Perl added: "I'm very concerned about the amount of transmission we've witnessed in health care facilities, and the severity of disease we witnessed. And you're helpless. There's nothing to offer these patients." Dr. Perl, who also helped track the SARS outbreak in Toronto, said the new disease was very much like SARS, "almost scarily close." One patient infected seven others, somewhat reminiscent of the SARS phenomenon in which some patients were "superspreaders" who infected dozens of other people. But it is too soon to tell whether that kind of transmission will continue to occur with MERS, Dr. Perl said. Although many experts say global health authorities have gotten much better than in the past at detecting and investigating sudden disease outbreaks, Dr. Perl said they still were not responding quickly or effectively enough. "It's deja vu," she said. "How many times do we have to do this before we start having surveillance strategies to protect ourselves? Have we lost our way? This has been dragging on since September. There's been a lot of wringing of hands. We haven't learned from our past mistakes." So far, according to the World Health Organization, all the cases have originated in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Four other countries, Britain, France, Italy and Tunisia, have found cases in returning travelers and their close contacts. In May, Saudi health officials invited Dr. Perl and a team of international experts from Britain, Canada and the United States to help study the outbreak. The team focused on 23 cases that occurred from April 1 to May 23 in four hospitals in Al Hasa, an eastern province of Saudi Arabia. So far, 15 of the patients have died. Team members visited the hospitals and pored over medical records to map the path of the virus. Most of the cases occurred in people who had other underlying illnesses and shared hospital rooms or wards with patients who had MERS. But several cases occurred in relatives who visited them, or hospital workers caring for them. Although the new disease spread in hospitals, it did not arise there. The first cases came from people who were exposed elsewhere, perhaps through foods or animals. But researchers still do not know the source of the MERS virus or how the first patients contracted it information essential for telling people how to avoid it. The SARS virus is thought to have originated with bats, and scientists suspected that the same might be true of MERS, and that people might have contracted it from eating dates that had been contaminated by bats. But so far, no bats or any other animals have been found to be infected, according to Dr. Alimuddin I. Zumla, an author of the study and a professor of infectious diseases and international health at University College London Medical School. "They have looked at over 200 animal species in the kingdom, thousands of samples from bats, cats, camels, other animals," Dr. Zumla said. "Unfortunately, at the moment there is no link." He said air conditioning systems and water supplies were also being checked. More than twice as many men as women have contracted the disease. Researchers do not know why. "I don't think the virus prefers any gender," Dr. Zumla said, adding that he suspected that Saudi women might be protected by their veils, which cover their mouths and noses and might help keep the virus out. Health officials are not recommending travel restrictions, but Dr. Zumla said that Saudi health officials had begun screening visitors for symptoms of the disease, like runny noses, coughs and fever. He said health experts would be increasingly concerned as the time nears for the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. "Four million pilgrims from 182 countries are coming to Saudi Arabia in two months' time," Dr. Zumla said. "I am worried, as a physician."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Francois Pinault, one of France's richest men, is investing nearly 170 million in the Bourse de Commerce. Works from his own collection are set to go on display starting in 2020. PARIS Early next year, after a nearly 170 million redevelopment, Paris's 130 year old Bourse de Commerce will reopen as a contemporary art museum. Unlike the world famous state funded museums nearby against which it hopes to measure up namely, the Louvre and the Pompidou Center this one will be financed by one man: the French billionaire Francois Pinault, whose collection consists of about 5,000 works by artists such as Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman. Mr. Pinault, 82, is the founder of the company that eventually became the Kering luxury goods group. His family holding company also controls the auction house Christie's, among several other assets . He already has two exhibition venues in Venice. Now he's transforming the Bourse a circular exchange building where wheat, sugar and other commodities were once traded into the latest and most conspicuous vitrine for his collection. In a recent interview after he toured the Bourse construction site, Mr. Pinault boldly positioned his future space among Paris's leading cultural landmarks. "Near here, there's a great museum, the Louvre, which I'm not going to try to imitate: That would be pretentious," he said. "And not far away, there's the Pompidou Center, a great museum of the 20th century." "What I would like is for the Bourse de Commerce to be a place to show the art of today," he added. Mr. Pinault said that the Bourse "could be an interesting complement to existing institutions," because French museums had slow decision making processes that made it hard for them to buy contemporary art: Prices can quickly inflate while curators and administrators debate acquisitions. "Only a madman like me can decide to buy them fast," he said. From afar, the iron domed Bourse set in the onetime market quarter of Les Halles looks like just another 19th century Paris edifice. But inside, the listed building (inaugurated in 1889, the same year as the Eiffel Tower) is unexpectedly monumental, with a vast rotunda and a high cupola that recall the Pantheon in Rome. The Pritzker Prize winning architect hired to lead the transformation, Tadao Ando of Japan, said in an interview that he wished to preserve that Pantheon like feel because he was a longstanding admirer of the nearly 2,000 year old Roman monument, with its high dome and central opening that let in the sun and the rain and made the visitor feel one with nature. Pierre Antoine Gatier, a state appointed architect in chief who oversees works on national monuments, said that Mr. Ando was "respectful" of the existing building and that the Japanese architect did not wish his contemporary intervention to be "visible from the outside." Mr. Ando said he felt "a sense of anxiety" as an architect because of the building's proximity to other great museums. "Paris is a center of world culture, so when you're in the heart of Paris, you have to live up to the task," he said. "This is no ordinary architecture project. It's much more than that." Asked if displaying his own collection in a museum in central Paris indicated an oversize ego, Mr. Pinault said that he had an ego "just like everybody else" but that he never forgot his "humble origins" as a timber merchant from Brittany, northwestern France. He recalled that when he was a child, his grandmother told him to keep his ego in check, otherwise it would "grow like a man's beard." The Bourse will stage around 10 shows a year, involving works from Mr. Pinault's collection as well as loans, according to Jean Jacques Aillagon, the billionaire's cultural adviser and a former French culture minister. In late 2020, the Bourse and the Pompidou will team up for a dual venue exhibition of a male artist whom Mr. Pinault described as world famous but declined to name. Referring to that plan, Mr. Aillagon said, "Public institutions no longer have this absolute mistrust of private ones." Mr. Pinault dismissed comparisons with the Fondation Louis Vuitton, saying that that building was mainly a venue for large loan exhibitions. As for Mr. Arnault himself, Mr. Pinault said that he was not a "rival," but a "business competitor, which is not the same thing." "There's no competition between us when it comes to art," he added. "No knives drawn!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the past five weeks, you've seen America inaugurate a president, march for women's rights, protest an immigration order and debate a Supreme Court nominee. Even if you've only occasionally peeked at the news, the shock of so many updates may have left you reeling. This is the moment for a self care vacation, especially one where the focus isn't on screens. But it sounds easier than it is. "Being so technologically connected all the time, as many of us are, is overwhelming, and a break is a way to show yourself some love," said Miriam Geiser, a travel consultant with KK Travels Worldwide in Chicago who has planned self care getaways for clients and has taken several herself. "A self care vacation is about slowing down and nurturing yourself so you feel truly mentally and physically rested at the end," she said. Here is advice on how to take such a trip. D.I.Y. a Digital Detox You don't have to camp on a remote island to shed your devices. Leave your laptop and iPad at home, and lock your cellphone in your hotel room safe, using it only for emergencies. Sometimes, just the idea of cutting the cord can lead to anxiety, and the first few hours of such a trip can feel stressful, but Ms. Geiser said that many of her clients who have taken digital detox trips report feeling liberated and peaceful by the second day of their vacation. Suggested destinations: Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, Calif.; and any national park within driving distance. Painting Away the Pressure You don't have to be Picasso, but a vacation incorporating art can inspire creativity in your everyday life, according to Susan Sparks, a travel adviser at Points of Interest Travel in Aspen, Colo. "Art is a way to express yourself and go beyond your usual spectrum, and that can be very reviving," she said. Many resorts and spas around the world offer art classes, ranging from a few hours to several days, in painting, sculpture and collage. Suggested destinations: Vik Retreats in Uruguay; Ojai Valley Inn Spa in Ojai, Calif.; and Sundance Mountain Resort in Sundance, Utah. Immerse Yourself in Nature There's nothing more relaxing, according to Ms. Geiser, than being surrounded by nature. Hearing the sound of crashing waves or chirping birds and insects, taking in a beautiful vista on a pristine lake, smelling the flowers of a tropical garden or feeling the warmth of the sunshine on your skin stimulate the senses in a positive way and take you away from the hubbub of your daily life. Spend your days on a nature focused trip, going on hikes, bike rides and walks, or consider kayaking, fishing, horseback riding or snowshoeing. Suggested destinations: Lake Kora in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York; the Resort at Paws Up in Greenough, Mont.; Jade Mountain Resort in St. Lucia; Minaret Station on South Island in New Zealand. Savoring Rather Than Stress Eating Food cooking and eating it can actually be a destressor, Ms. Sparks said. "Cooking, even if you only do it for a few hours, shuts off your brain, and at the end, you have a meal that you put your heart and soul into," she said. Weeklong cooking holidays abound around the world. Suggested destinations: Mamma Agata, a cooking school on the Amalfi Coast of Italy; and Ballymaloe Cookery School in County Cork, Ireland. Many hotels also offer half and full day cooking classes. The Wellness Retreat Route The singular focus of these means that they do often work. Some retreats are meant to be a lifestyle overhaul with medical professionals who complete a comprehensive diagnostic analysis and provide a customized road map to improve your health. Other programs are more focused on detoxes or cleanses, and others still are spiritual in nature, offering daily yoga or meditation. No matter the approach, you'll return refreshed. Suggested destinations: The Ranch at Live Oak in Malibu, Calif.; Golden Door in Escondido, Calif.; Como Shambala in Bali; Chable Resort Spa in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Ms. Kelly's first "Today" hour, which featured as its main guests the cast of the rebooted NBC sitcom "Will Grace," had an audience of 2.9 million viewers. The next day, 2.6 million viewers tuned in. By week's end, the number had fallen to 2.3 million. With its host reportedly making a salary of 17 million a year and a new set having been constructed within NBC's Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, "Megyn Kelly Today" is more costly than the previous 9 a.m. segment of "Today." Losing viewers, in the long run, would be a problem. Ms. Kelly's first week was highly scrutinized, and the early reviews for the show were brutal. She addressed them at the end of her hour on Sept. 29, saying, "It's been very exciting, it's been so educational, I've been just so delighted by the media response, which is really" she shook her head before continuing "no." After a breath, she added, "The viewer response has been awesome!" As Ms. Kelly moved away from the sometimes prosecutorial persona she inhabited during much of her tenure at Fox, there were a few bumpy moments. The "Will Grace" star Debra Messing said after appearing on the show that she regretted having done so. Jane Fonda blanched when Ms. Kelly asked her to talk about plastic surgery procedures she has had. And a vulgarity uttered by a cameraman who inadvertently walked into a shot went viral. Another awkward moment came on Oct. 3, two days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, when Ms. Kelly cut off Tom Brokaw, the former longtime NBC anchor and network eminence, as he went into a lengthy discourse on gun rights and the National Rifle Association.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Adam Levine of Maroon 5 performing in Houston last year. The group is among the bands and celebrities using chatbots to communicate with fans through Facebook Messenger. In January, Christina Ausset, a 24 year old Maroon 5 fan in France, spotted an enticing Twitter post from another of the band's followers: "I just had a conversation with Maroon 5! Awesome!" The interaction, it turned out, had been conducted on Facebook Messenger with Maroon 5's chatbot an automated program designed to respond to basic commands. Not exactly a conversation with Adam Levine, Ms. Ausset noted, but it didn't matter. She now happily talks to the bot, too. "Having Maroon 5 on Messenger," she wrote in an email, "makes you feel really close to your favorite artists!" For celebrities who already use Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat to lend a personal touch to their interactions with fans, the next frontier of social media is a deliberately impersonal one: chatbots, a low level form of artificial intelligence that can be harnessed to send news updates, push promotional content and even test new material. In the music world, "bot" is often a dirty word, conjuring up the tools used by high tech ticket scalpers. Yet 50 Cent, Aerosmith, Snoop Dogg and Kiss have all deputized chatbots as their automatic, ever alert greeters on Facebook Messenger, handling the flood of inquiries that would overwhelm any human. When someone connects to Maroon 5 on Messenger, a text bubble pops up: "Hi," it says, "I'm the Maroon 5 bot. Want to be the first to know when we release new music?" A series of questions with multiple choice answers follows, leading the fan down a path lined with emojis and video clips; social media links then point other fans back to the bot. It is a purposely simple interaction, created through technology developed by a start up named Octane AI. Yet even in their programmed responses, chatbots can convey human personality, said Christina Milian, a singer and actress who has been among the earliest proponents of the technology, and helped found Persona Technologies, an Octane competitor. "I feel like it's personal," Ms. Milian said of her own chatbot. "It's definitely in my words. It's how I talk. My fans know how I talk." But Ms. Milian said her bot's intelligence surprised even her. "When I'm communicating with my own chatbot," she said, "sometimes I see something and I'm like, 'Oh, that's so me!'" The chatbots may also offer a glimpse of the music industry's future, which is already beginning to involve virtual reality concerts, playlist algorithms and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, said Cortney Harding, a consultant to music technology companies and the author of "How We'll Listen Next: The Future of Music From Streaming to Virtual Reality." "As A.I. develops, everything is going to go into a mixed reality world," Ms. Harding said, "where you could dial up a hologram of your favorite pop star and have 'real conversations' with the artificially intelligent version of that person." 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. Octane AI, founded about a year ago, is one of a handful of technology companies tailoring these programs to the entertainment industry, with clients including Interscope Records, the label behind Maroon 5 and 30 Seconds to Mars. Matt Schlicht, Octane AI's chief executive, said that with more than a billion users, Messenger the chat app connected to Facebook was too large for celebrities to ignore. And once they are paying attention, his company's bots can help them make efficient use of it. "Right now people are looking at bots and saying, 'I don't know, maybe they're cool, maybe not,'" Mr. Schlicht said. "But based on the data we're seeing, it's not crazy to think that a year from now it's going to be their No. 1 distribution channel." Chatbots have become a common part of online interaction for major consumer companies; Domino's, for example, lets customers use one to order a pizza. They have quickly spread since April of last year, when Facebook made it possible for developers to build bots on Messenger. The change made Messenger a more useful channel to broadcast information to numerous recipients, and for many artists and marketers it solved a frustrating problem: As Facebook has grown, its news feeds have become more crowded not to mention pruned by algorithms making it harder and harder to reach followers. Chris Mortimer, the head of digital marketing at Interscope, said Messenger was now a critical way for his artists to reach their fans. "Right now, a Facebook Messenger inbox is what an email inbox was before the spammers got to it," he said. Octane AI's clients say response rates to its chats are extraordinarily high. According to the company, when its bots send a new notification, 50 to 75 percent of its subscribers open the message and click a link within 10 minutes. Bots have become popular for musicians even though they have been slow to catch on over all; at a conference in September, a Facebook executive called the technology "overhyped," and said that early examples were unimpressive. Still, Ms. Milian said her Messenger account had attracted two million people since she introduced her bot in October. Maroon 5 also demonstrated its value for commercial research. In February, a day before the band released its single "Cold," it sent a 10 second clip of the song to its chatbot followers. Within 24 hours, fans sent 100,000 messages to the bot, and shared the clip widely on social media. "You can get pretty strong sentiment analysis in a snap," said Ben Parr, Octane AI's chief marketing officer. Chatbots' high engagement rates may be helped by their novelty. But as they spread, they will have to be reconciled with the sour perception of bots among the general public, which has been building for years because of the use of bots in fake social media accounts and, especially, ticketing. Bots have become such a scourge in the global scalping market that last year President Barack Obama signed a federal bill outlawing their use in buying event tickets. "I hate the word bot," said Josh Bocanegra, Persona's chief executive, who founded the company with Ms. Milian. "It's never been associated with anything positive." Mr. Bocanegra entered the business last year, after making a Selena Gomez bot to entertain his daughter. Persona creates custom chatbots for clients including Snoop Dogg and one for the "50 Shades Darker" character Christian Grey, which tells fans that if it cannot trust them, "I'll have no choice but to spank you." Bocanegra said a basic bot could be ordered for 2,500 plus maintenance charges. Octane AI, which lets anyone use its technology to build a bot, does not charge for its services. The company is supported by 1.6 million from investors including the venture capital firm General Catalyst, and says it will introduce revenue generating features soon. So far, the bots' ability to create interactions with pop stars even if those interactions are programmed in computer code has been enough to intrigue fans. Sue Winett, a Maroon 5 fan in the Los Angeles area, proudly notes that at age 61 she is far older than the average admirer of the band. But she said that her love of the band had led her to all forms of social media her Twitter handle is AdoreAdamLevine, after the band's lead singer and that aside from a few kinks in the programming, she was enjoying the band's chatbot. "I know it's a robot," Ms. Winett said. "Does it creep me out that it's a robot? No."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"Here, I can do what I love the most, serve the company and its needs," said Alexei Ratmansky, the artist in residence with American Ballet Theater. On a recent afternoon, the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky stood at the front of a large studio at American Ballet Theater, preparing to run through, "The Seasons," his latest ballet for the company. He said a few final words to the dancers: "Remember, there is a mystery about the seasons, a divine energy. It's more than pretty dances. There is an inescapable force that makes these things happen." The dancers found their places, and the room went quiet. Then the rehearsal pianist, Jacek Mysinski, began to play the first glistening notes of the Glazunov score. The dances unspooled one after another with a kind of inexorable momentum: a small ensemble driven by the winter wind, a solo full of footwork as sharp as shards of ice. Each section embodied a quality drawn from nature; solos and duets highlighted the attributes of the individual dancers boldness, sensuality, attack, lyricism. By now, some Ballet Theater dancers have spent their entire careers performing his dances; the famously difficult choreography has shaped their technique and stage personas. "The other day," Kevin McKenzie, the company's artistic director, said in his office near Union Square, "they were rehearsing 'On the Dnieper'" Ratmansky's first ballet for the company, out of repertory for almost a decade "and I asked myself, 'Why does it look so different now?'" He said he realized that no one in that original cast had ever worked with Mr. Ratmansky they were strangers to each other. But now "the ballet can come to to life in a way it never could have before," Mr. McKenzie added. "Through working with him, the dancers have come to know themselves and what they're capable of." Mr. Ratmansky's decade long tenure at Ballet Theater is also the longest period he has spent in one place since leaving his home city of Kiev, Ukraine, for ballet school in Moscow. His career has zigzagged across continents and straddled the end of the Soviet Union: He went from Moscow back to Kiev; then Winnipeg, Canada; Copenhagen; and back to Moscow, where he directed the Bolshoi Ballet for five years beginning in 2004. A few days ago, Mr. Ratmansky, 50, reflected on his relationship to the company and to New York, and on his own evolution as a choreographer over the past decade. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. When you first came to Ballet Theater, did you think you would stay as long as you have? It's surprising even to me! Before I came to New York there was a pattern in my life. Every six or seven years, or even less, I felt like I need to start anew. First, as a dancer, I was looking for interesting repertory, then I was looking for a place to choreograph. And then I was invited to direct the company in Moscow. But here, I can do what I love the most, serve the company and its needs, which is very important, but also pursue projects that are interesting and inspiring in other places. It feels like the right balance. How has your relationship with the dancers evolved over that time? The first experience with "On the Dnieper" 2009 we were trying to impress each other. The next one, "Seven Sonatas," was probably the most difficult. It was like we didn't understand each other. I think it was about breaking old habits. Before my eyes, the company switched its focus, from a company of international stars to a real company with its own dancers. I think it was a healthy transition. It took time to give fruit and I think it's beginning to pay off. There are dancers in the company now, like Catherine Hurlin and Tyler Maloney, who I've worked with since they were kids in the company school. They understand my style really well. What aspects of New York have fed your imagination? Exhibitions. The Metropolitan Museum. Sometimes I go every week. Lately I've mostly been visiting the Roman and Greek antiquities. And the Asian collection. You can keep going back for years and always discover new things. Do you feel like an American now? I do. But in my life I've been from somewhere so many times. At the Bolshoi school I was from Kiev. In Kiev, I was from the Bolshoi School. Then in Canada, my wife, Tatiana, and I were from Ukraine; in Denmark we were Russian. In Moscow we were from Denmark. My roots are Russian Jewish, and my native language and schooling is Russian. But I vote in New York. So that's the mixed salad. In your time here, you've worked with both Ballet Theater, your home, and City Ballet. Do you choreograph differently for the two companies? I think that you come into the studio and see the dancers and you play to their strengths. City Ballet is a unique company, because of the Balanchine technique. They have that speed and musicality. Ballet Theater is a bit more like a traditional European opera house with different ballets, different styles and a more traditional ballet hierarchy with principal dancers at the center of a big work. How do you think you have evolved as a choreographer over these 10 years? At the moment I'm under the influence of classicism. There was a time when I tried to develop my own language, but it felt limiting. Now I think it's all right to use the classical vocabulary. Because it works. Hundreds of thousands of dancers every day do these exercises, which are full of beautiful, effective steps, refined by generations and generations. Since arriving in New York, you've made ballets to Shostakovich, Leonid Desyatnikov, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and other Russians. What keeps bringing you back to this music? I know it better, and maybe it's in the blood, I don't know. Maybe it's my upbringing. It's not a nationalistic thing, it's just that the pool is so rich. I have a list of music that I want to use, but I'm nearing the end of it. I'd like to choreograph more to Leonard Bernstein; I think he is remarkable. And I love baroque music, and French music. You've recently begun restaging works by the 19th century choreographer Marius Petipa, using archival materials. What spurred this new interest? Partly because I think it's not right to overwhelm the repertory of the company with my own work. This encouraged my interest in staging classics, which is completely different from my own work. Even though my taste as a choreographer is of course reflected in the reconstructions that I do. They're my productions, but the choreography is Petipa. It's more Petipa than other productions of Petipa! These productions also inspire my original work. "The Seasons" definitely feels inspired by Petipa; do you think of it as an extension of your exploration of his style? Yes! The music, by Alexander Glazunov, was composed for Petipa. I took Petipa's plan for the ballet and thought, it works perfectly. It's all very clearly laid out. The number of soloists and groups, the kids. Also, when Petipa made it he was working as a ballet master in chief, showing off the company. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to celebrate the company and use as many soloists as I could. The other thing I wanted to celebrate with this ballet is the classical vocabulary. That's my little secret celebration. In 2009, when you became artist in residence at Ballet Theater, you barely knew the company. What made you take the job? It was something like destiny, from my point of view. When the negotiations with N.Y.C.B. fell apart, the next morning I got a call from Kevin inviting me. It was something I didn't expect at all. He took a leap of faith. Another moment was when I first visited A.B.T. studios and I was introduced to the company. They didn't know me. They had never worked with me. But they trusted me. And that's really important. When you feel that, you want to serve.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
As the hype around virtual reality pushes its way into the mainstream, big brands are increasingly looking for ways to incorporate it into their marketing. Yet there are also pitfalls from cost to tepid audience reaction that make the decision to enter the virtual reality world a bit more complicated than it may first seem. "You don't jump at every shiny new object," said Mike Bloxham, a senior vice president at Frank N. Magid Associates, a market research and consulting firm. Virtual reality videos, which give users a sense of being transported to another place, where they can walk around and interact with that environment, often start at 500,000 each to make, according to Forrester Research. And if a company tries to trim back on some of the niceties with an eye toward the budget, the target audience can quickly take note. For instance, Charlotte Tilbury's 360 degree video for its Scent of a Dream fragrance was criticized by commenters on YouTube for lacking a story line. "Let's hope it smells better than the advert looks," one person wrote. The e commerce giant Alibaba created a virtual shopping mall in November, which fell flat. "Why would you do something in V.R. that you could do easier in real life?" asked Stephanie Llamas, a vice president at SuperData, which provides data for the digital gaming industry. The key, marketers and researchers said, is connecting with people emotionally and offering them an experience they wouldn't normally have in the real world. "It's about the adventure," not pushing products, said Kyle Taylor, a partner at Fact Fiction, an advertising agency based in Boulder, Colo. Dos Equis, the beer maker, created one of the more elaborate virtual reality experiences with its 2014 "Masquerade Party." Viewers were transported into a party that included flamethrowers, acrobatic dancers and a dominatrix, and interacted with other guests to solve the evening's mystery. More than 27 million people viewed the online interactive film. It wasn't about selling beer, said Ari Kuschnir, the founder of M ss ng P eces, the production and entertainment company that produced the video. "It was about taking you on a journey and making you feel something." "To give that experience, that jolt of adrenaline" is unique, he said, adding that "nobody in their right mind is ever going to do that" in the real world. Sometimes companies experiment with augmented reality, which drops virtual objects into a viewer's field of view, and 360 degree videos, which show all angles of a scene but don't allow interaction, before diving into the more expensive world of virtual reality. A 360 video generally costs between 10,000 and 100,000. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. In 2016, Excedrin unveiled "The Migraine Experience," an augmented reality video that gave a person, wearing a virtual reality headset, the experiences of blurred vision, disorientation, sensitivity to light and other problems that people with migraines face without the pain, of course. "Folks were feeling that nobody really understood what it was like to go through a migraine," said Scott Yacovino, senior brand manager of Excedrin at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. "This video accomplished this in a way that regular ads could not." Excedrin sales rose 10 percent after the campaign in 2016, Mr. Yacovino said, compared with a 1.5 percent industrywide increase. When virtual reality works, there is no doubt that it can draw attention. When Lenovo Software used a virtual reality video to promote its Lenovo Unified Workspace at the Gartner Symposium trade show in 2016, some people returned to the company's booth three or four times to watch it. More than 500 people spent, on average, 12.5 minutes with the video at the conference, and the company wound up getting more than three times as many leads as it had at previous conferences, said Sal Patalano, Lenovo's chief revenue officer. Certain sectors, like travel and entertainment, have had the most success with virtual reality advertising. Marriott International was an early and successful adoptee of virtual reality with its Teleporter booths in 2014. Guests, fitted with Oculus Rift headsets, would step into the booth and be virtually transported to far flung cities from a black sand beach in Maui to the top of Tower 42 in London. The booth also featured blasts of wind, heat and mist to deepen the physical experience. "V.R. helped us tell a story and inspired people to travel," said Karin Timpone, Marriott's global marketing officer. This summer, Marriott will roll out its latest venture: an "In the Moment" series of virtual reality videos on social media, which take people on hosted tours of Marriott Properties and its reward program's "Once in a Lifetime" events. And then there is the N.B.A., which in September released "Follow My Lead: The Story of the 2016 N.B.A. Finals," a 25 minute virtual reality documentary. Viewers got so close they could see the sweat on the face of Cleveland Cavaliers Coach Tyronn Lue. Reaction was rapturous, and it again showed the virtues of virtual reality if executed correctly. "It was access that otherwise wouldn't be available unless you're LeBron James," Mr. Taylor said. "And that's where it becomes extremely powerful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
For as long as I've been professionally acquainted with him, John Pierson has been an unusually energetic guy. In his early line of work, as a sales agent for independent movies, one had to be unusually energetic, with the travels, the marathon deal negotiating sessions, and all the eccentric and sometimes volatile personalities at play. In the mid 90s he shifted from making deals to chronicling the deals he'd made and the people he'd met along the way. His 1996 book, "Spike, Mike, Slackers Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema." (reissued in 2004 as "Spike, Mike Reloaded") told of his adventures with Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, Jim Jarmusch, Rose Troche and other filmmakers whose careers Mr. Pierson assisted and kick started. After it was published, Mr. Pierson began producing and hosting an unusual TV program "Split Screen," which had its premiere on IFC in 1997. Over four years he made more than 60 half hour episodes containing freewheeling informative interviews and video essays covering a wide range of topics in American indie film. "Split Screen" served up many of what you might call the usual suspects Mr. Smith, whose outrageous 1994 no budget comedy "Clerks" remains an American indie landmark, showed up early and spoke freely and at length. But "Split Screen" approached familiar figures from unusual angles. An episode from 1999 features Christopher Walken and Julian Schnabel giving cooking tips and sharing a meal with John Ciarcia, known as Cha Cha or the Mayor of Little Italy. The show also made room for, say, a segment in which John Waters exchanged notes with the gore schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis and an entire episode about animals in film. Mr. Pierson had long hoped to find a permanent home for the series on physical media, or elsewhere, and times being what they are, he's gone with "elsewhere." "Split Screen" now resides on the Criterion Channel of the streaming site FilmStruck, and Season 10 is scheduled for a Jan. 13 premiere there. The division of seasons is somewhat arbitrary, but at six episodes per season (five standard episodes, and one subtitled "Projections," which focuses on a single film or filmmaker), it's a reasonable system for mini binge watches. Mr. Pierson has taped brand new introductions for each season. (The Christopher Walken cooking segment opens Season 9.) The show took up the "guided tour" theme of Mr. Pierson's book by depicting the host tooling around the country in an RV. One running joke was to "park" the vehicle outside New York's Ziegfeld Theater starting three months before the 1999 opening of "The Phantom Menace," the "Star Wars" episode. (Also noteworthy are Mr. Pierson's casual wear choices, which the host cheerfully recognizes as appalling. The pullover he sports in a "Projections" interview with the actor and screenwriter Buck Henry, in Season 10, is particularly vivid.) Mr. Pierson's passion for his brand of cinema is a palpable thread throughout. It's infectious, and the segments produced by other film folk that Mr. Pierson picked up along the way testifies to that; their work has the same informed, fervent quality. "I had to cobble the first 10 episodes on my own, for the most part, with my wife, Janet, helping," he said. (Janet Pierson is now the chief programmer of the film section of South by Southwest, the annual festival in Austin, Tex.) "Most of the ideas were things I myself was wildly enthusiastic about," he continued. "But there was a pool of larger people coming to me with their ideas, and the point of the whole show was to spread that enthusiasm around I've sometimes described myself as the Johnny Appleseed of this world. So when people who were capable came to me with ideas they loved, but I might not have had the same personal attachment to, I was beholden to give them opportunities to create segments around stuff they loved." After years of pursuing the Criterion Collection about putting together a DVD or Blu ray package of the show, Mr. Pierson eventually had to accept that TV content was, with one or two exceptions, not something that Criterion did. That changed when Criterion teamed up with Turner on the FilmStruck site. "The show fits really well with what the site does; it's a very happy home for it," he said. Once the determination was made, Mr. Pierson was slightly surprised that the site insisted on putting up all 66 episodes over a period of time. While the show is, by definition, of a certain age, it's not as dated as it might have seemed, in part because Mr. Pierson rarely did segments based entirely on time specific pegs. And almost all the individual films and filmmakers he focused on turned out to have staying power. (In this sense, the series is a good companion to "Cineastes de Notre Temps," the French TV documentary series that ran from 1964 to 2009; right now three episodes of that show are on FilmStruck's Criterion site.) When I spoke to Mr. Pierson on the phone from his home, where he says he's keeping busy cooking for his wife while she prepares the slate for the next SXSW, I asked his veteran's view of what streaming is doing for indie movies today. He expressed some skepticism. "As someone who began as a sales agent, I'm an empiricist. So I find it frustrating to have no idea of how many people are watching anything across the streaming spectrum. Back in the day, if someone said, 'Hey my film's doing great,' you could verify if they were delusional or right. Now, who knows?" Streaming services don't gauge their success according to ratings, or box office numbers, because they don't need to. But Mr. Pierson sees in this business model not just great potential for exposure, but great potential for anonymity. "What's notable to me, too, is that you once could gauge things to the degree by which they got traction in the general cultural conversation," he said. "When you could have any newspaper in America riffing in headlines on 'sex, lies, and videotape' or 'Slacker,' and 'Do the Right Thing,' you could feel how those filmmakers are penetrating the culture. You can tell that it had gotten outside the indie community echo chamber. In the current landscape, I find myself in the dark, but thinking maybe the cultural impact has been lessened." My own feeling is it's too soon to tell, and that's one thing I'll be exploring in future columns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Let's make the most of this beautiful day": A touching documentary on Mister Rogers airs on HBO and PBS. And the third season of "One Day at a Time" lands on Netflix. WON'T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR? (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO and PBS (check local listings); stream on HBO platforms. Grab those tissues! This portrait of Fred Rogers by the documentarian Morgan Neville ("20 Feet From Stardom") reveals a man who genuinely sought to connect with children. With the help of friends, puppets and guest stars, the host used his quirky TV program "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" to educate youngsters on weighty issues like death, divorce and racism. Neville digs up tear jerking moments from the show, and reintroduces the man behind Mister Rogers, one who thought children's programs were too violent or condescending and who persevered despite criticism from politicians and skeptics. In addition to this HBO debut, the movie will broadcast on PBS's "Independent Lens" in honor of Mister Rogers's commitment to public programming. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. A number of celebrities including Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga have done it. Now it's Halsey's turn. The pop star is serving double duty as host and musical guest on "S.N.L.," months after the release of her ubiquitous single, "Without Me."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
At the upriver end of the River Walk in San Antonio is the Hotel Emma, a 146 room boutique hotel that upends visitors' perception of this low key city. The hotel was refashioned from a section of the Pearl Brewery, an imposing 1894 building. Victorian style isn't always easy to make unfussy, but the design firm of Roman Williams created a sleek makeover of the property, which opened in late 2015. The luxurious lobby still holds industrial touches, like an apple red ammonia compressor and the room's original cooling fans. Old beer vats have been made into surprising round banquettes inside the lobby bar. The hotel is part of the commercial Pearl Brewing complex, which includes the Culinary Institute of America, more than a dozen boutiques and about 20 restaurants. Since early this month, private in room spa treatments have been offered to hotel guests from the new Hiatus Spa Retreat next door. The seven story hotel stands at the north end of the River Walk, once a pedestrian dead zone, which has emerged as the happening, 16 block Pearl District. The San Antonio Museum of Art is a waterside stroll, a half mile away. The heart of downtown is about two miles south along the walkway. Rio taxis stop outside the waterfront hotel for guests who would rather cruise there by boat. With its black four poster bed, leather chairs and simple mesquite table, our room was more subdued in design than the splashy lobby. My husband and I found our room on the small side but barrel vaulted concrete ceilings soaring 15 feet opened up the space.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
OAKLAND, Calif. The docks at the Port of Oakland are a tangle of cranes, shipping containers, railroad tracks and snaking lines of trucks waiting to load and unload cargo. Streamlining this kind of traffic is one of the few ideas Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on. Mrs. Clinton has said that if she is elected president, her administration will seek to spend 250 billion over five years on repairing and improving the nation's infrastructure not just ports but roads, bridges, energy systems and high speed broadband and would put an additional 25 billion toward a national infrastructure bank to spur related business investments. Mr. Trump said he wanted to go even bigger, saying his administration would spend at least twice as much as Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump, taking a page from liberal economists, said he would fund his plan by borrowing several hundred billion dollars, but has offered no specifics. Mrs. Clinton's more detailed proposal, by contrast, would be paid for by a business tax overhaul aimed at collecting additional revenue from companies that have parked assets abroad. Still, the candidates' agreement, combined with growing accord among economists that increased spending on infrastructure could invigorate the American economy and raise overall living standards, has led to a cautious optimism that some sort of big public works push is coming, regardless of who is elected. "The next administration will be in prime position to deliver on a comprehensive infrastructure plan," said Tom Jensen, vice president for transportation policy at UPS. Infrastructure spending, unlike many other forms of government outlays, holds the power to give the economy a sustained lift for decades down the line. First comes the addition of jobs particularly the kinds of higher wage blue collar jobs that have been lost in recent years and spending on products like concrete and steel to build new roads and repair worn out bridges. After that initial jolt, the economy would continue to reap the important but harder to measure benefits of fewer delays, faster internet connections and more reliable power. You can see much of that here at one of the nation's busiest ports, an export hub that sends tons of important California products like Napa Valley wine, Central Valley almonds and Silicon Valley Teslas to China's growing middle class. Aiming to gain other ports' market share, Oakland has embarked on a number of projects some big, some small to add cargo and speed things up. There are new traffic reducing measures, such as an appointment system for trucks picking up cargo and extended hours at its largest terminal. It is also working on several infrastructure projects: This year, the port applied for a 140 million federal grant to build a bridge over a choked intersection where trucks waste time waiting for trains to pass. A half mile away sit 14 new rail lines that are part of a new operation where shippers can transfer products from one container to another without leaving the port. Shipping companies often make these transfers at off site warehouses wasting more time and money. The Port of Oakland, which acts as a landlord, is hoping its investment will entice companies to move more cargo to its docks. This would not just give the port more rent. The economy would also gain additional jobs as private sector shippers added their own money to erect buildings near the port's rail connection, and fill them with machines. The federal government, with its wide latitude to spend on ambitious projects, is in a singular position to make investments no one else will. But the government's power to act has also set off a robust debate about how much more it should spend on infrastructure and how it should be funded. Spend too little, and the nation's backbone deteriorates and the cost of future repairs mounts. Spend too much too fast, and the government could crowd out private investment, possibly leading to higher inflation and pushing up interest rates. Today, with maintenance lacking and interest rates low, a host of influential economists, including Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, argue that America's need for better infrastructure is so great that it could increase its debt load and still come out ahead. In a telephone interview, Mr. Summers laid out his case: The federal government can borrow at something like 1 percent interest a year, and through enhanced productivity it would reap something like 3 percent a year in higher tax receipts. Others argue that any rise in infrastructure spending should be paid for through a tax increase or budget cuts elsewhere. That view was bolstered by a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, which concluded that while federal investment increased productivity, that did not automatically mean the nation would be better off by borrowing to fund such investment. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Decades ago, the federal government spent big. The Interstate System of highways spawned new suburbs, and transportation grants helped build rail networks like the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, whose commuter trains hum past the Port of Oakland as they travel to and from San Francisco. Now the United States has more people and a bigger economy. But relative to its gross domestic product, the nation spends only about half as much on infrastructure as it did during the 1950s and '60s. The result is that, like the population itself, America's roads, bridges and power plants are aging. That's one reason the American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent report card on infrastructure, gave the United States a D plus despite the extra infrastructure spending that flowed from the big 2009 economic recovery act. The costs are substantial, if hard to see. Neglect the water system, and you may have leaky pipes and larger bills, or even lead contamination. Rough roads equal more flat tires. Substandard internet connections add to the isolation of rural communities. Each day, UPS drivers in northern New Jersey and New York City lose an average of 16 minutes often much longer to heavy traffic. Six years ago the company started dispatching an additional 61 drivers to make sure everyone hit their stops, and it would need more drivers if traffic got worse. Of course, even if tens of billions of dollars more were set aside for road improvements, that would not on its own guarantee that traffic congestion would ease. Infrastructure may be among the most bipartisan of federal spending areas, but politics in general can be a problem. One of the persistent criticisms from economists is federal lawmakers' tendency to spread cash across the country instead of focusing on places where the economic payoff would be greatest. And apart from the debate over how to pay for national upgrades, there is the question of how much can be gained from additional infrastructure spending versus how much can be gained by making better use of what is already in place. Clifford Winston, an economist at the Brookings Institution and a longtime critic of how the government builds and runs the nation's transportation infrastructure, laid out a long list. An increase in infrastructure spending would still lift the economy, Mr. Winston said, "but my God, wouldn't it be so much better if we were more thoughtful about what we do with the money we have?" This, at least, is where the nation's D plus grade turns out to be good news. Economists say infrastructure's productivity lift is greatest when investment is being raised from low levels. Put another way: The more broken down the nation becomes, the harder it is to find something that does not need to be fixed. "We're not talking about bridges to nowhere," Mr. Summers said. "We're talking about bridges that are on the verge of collapsing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
PARIS If anatomy is destiny, Rick Owens's show, held Thursday amid a selection of provocative paintings by the poet John Giorno and the artist Chan Aye at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris's premier contemporary art museum, is destined to be remembered for some startling glimpses of the male anatomy. Phone cameras rapidly clicked and viewers began nudging one another when, roughly midway through the presentation, a group of models came stomping down the runway in tunic like garments strenuously deconstructed and rearranged so what would be a lapel or collar formed a tube or keyhole near the crotch. Shifting in motion, the garments revealed that, beneath the tunics, the models were as nature made them. Who knows why, but Paris uniquely provides for moments like this one, with more ideas generally encountered during a day here than a week in Milan or New York. There were others in what was actually a fairly conservative show for Mr. Owens: one involving a series of somber double breasted coats of wool or leather, deeply notched at the sides or billowing from the yoke; of unusually plausible for him bifurcated footgear; and of itchy looking boiler suits knitted as if by some demented granny. Others, like Miuccia Prada, have recently been toying with these notions, showing clothes for both men and women at the same time and on models of vaguely indeterminate sex. Raf Simons did something similar for his presentation on a cold evening in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Viewers crowded around a raised steel platform to view models wearing, mostly, sleeveless cotton coats or gilets of nearly floor length, many covered with slogans and cartoon graffiti, gliding past to an aural backdrop of Deep Purple's "Child in Time." Though this was the first time the designer used women in a Raf Simons show, that particular novelty wasn't the point he seemed to be trying to make. The pale scrawny boy models, hair slicked down like geeks, looked fairly interchangeable with the pale scrawny girl models like the Belgian Hanne Gaby Odiele. All had the same uncooked look of late adolescence, a time when everything to do with future sexuality still seems in germination. Seated among the European heartthrobs like Luke Evans, Francesco Scianna and Louis Garrel at Valentino was Stromae, the striking looking Belgian musician who became a viral sensation with videos in which his gender was so stylized as to be beside the point. Though now dating a woman, in early interviews Stromae, whose name is Paul Van Haver, maintained a deliberate ambiguity about his sexuality. That would seem to make him an ideal customer for Valentino, whose collection last season in which men's suits were cut like pajamas and girly butterflies were embroidered or printed onto everything was an aesthetic success and also a commercial one. Though referring to sartorial and not societal codes, the Valentino co designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, might as well have been talking about erosion of fixed social boundaries when, in a backstage interview, she said, "You have to know the rules and then you can break them." With that in mind, she and Pierpaolo Piccioli delved into the history of Serge Diaghilev and les Ballets Russes to design a collection that also was a collaboration with Esther Stewart, a 26 year old Melbourne based painter whose color block paintings the Valentino designers discovered on the Internet. Despite everything we imagine we know about the web, it still seems too little appreciated how powerfully it has affected every kind of orthodoxy. In the decontextualized and value neutral ether, all things have a kind of equivalency. Mr. Piccioli and Ms. Chiuri referred to this as "contamination." Thus, when Mr. Piccioli said he liked to "go deep in our research so the work is a reflection of our times," as he did this week, he meant perhaps that if you allowed your imagination to become infected with the atmosphere of 1920s Monte Carlo, added a dose of Dolce Vita Italy of the '60s, threw in some Josef Albers and abstracted imagery from the long, rich history of military camouflage, you might end up with a well judged selection of beautifully cut and paneled coats. Some reprised the butterfly theme, rendering them in nocturnal colors as moths. One recycled from a previous collection an owl that spread its wings over the yoke and across the shoulders. One was patterned with a planetary constellation. Throw one any of them over the conservatively narrow trousers the pair also showed, or else slip into one of the capes the Valentino designers somehow made look plausible and you're ready to go out into the world looking as chic as Stromae, a fine figure of a man or whatever else you feel like calling yourself that day. "If you can change aesthetic values, you can change the values of society," Mr. Piccioli said backstage, and that thought echoed in mind the following afternoon backstage at the stark glass structure where Louis Vuitton is held each season, set in starkly unfriendly Parc Andre Citroen. No one in Judy Blame's early days could have predicted that his random seeming agglomerations of buttons, lanyards and dangling keys would one day be sold at the hundreds of boutiques owned by the venerable 160 year old French fashion house. "I arrived with one piece of rope and this is what I ended up with," Mr. Blame said as he fingered a safety pin brooch that will be sold in limited edition. Similarly, it is hard to imagine Mr. Nemeth, who died in 2010, envisioning that his elegantly gestural drawings of intertwined ropes might one day turn up as the dominant motif in a collection shown on a runway in front of guests like Marisa Berenson, Bryan Ferry, Michael Stipe, the French actor Jeremie Laheurte and a notably giddy Kate Moss. Deploying the many resources of one of the world's largest fashion multinationals, Mr. Jones turned out a collection notable for the deceptive unobtrusiveness of its techniques. A simple looking car coat was, in fact, laser cut shearling. A pair of what looked like printed hippie trousers had been created using a rare method of weaving paper into cloth. Nemeth motifs were carved or embroidered or woven or printed onto everything, including a one off carrying case wrapped and lined in blanket wool. "The more personal I make a collection," Mr. Jones said when asked how he squared influences like Mr. Blame and the outre performance artist Leigh Bowery with a Louis Vuitton aesthetic, "the more it sells." Use what's there, in other words. Use what you know. Both Phillip Lim and Dries Van Noten did as much in their respective collections, one held in a former convent, the other in a vast shed housing a railway service yard in a remote district of Paris. What was most striking about Mr. Van Noten, whose designs are consistently among the more covetable, is how the proportions and shapes he deploys instinctively reflect how many young men already dress. The doubled khaki trousers, one atop the other, were reminiscent of pants pulled on over pajamas. The many kilts atop trousers seemed to formalize the way skateboarders knot a shirt at the waist like a skirt. It would be a surprise in a show by a designer of Mr. Van Noten's assurance if the detail and ornamentation were less than fastidious, and as proof the final look in the show was a coat with a metallic silver pattern as crisp as a newly minted coin. "I've always been obsessed with knots," Mr. Lim said backstage before his 3.1 Phillip Lim show. Most designers are collectors and, as it happens, Mr. Lim collects, among other things, carabiners. These indispensable mountaineering tools inspired him when he was designing the current collection, Mr. Lim explained. So, too, did a core tenet of climbing. "The minute you doubt, you fall," said the designer, whose doubt free collection of jackets, some sleeveless, and coats came equipped with utility straps and carabiners used as belt fasteners, as though urban streets were the Dawn Wall at Yosemite. The collection was no less strong for being restrained, almost quiet, and for deploying the muted colors this designer prefers. As in past, the designer included boiler suits, a personal favorite. Unusually he also threw in some welcome humor. A sweatshirt with the look of a souvenir had an extraplanetary motif with the jaunty legend: "Climb Jupiter" and, underneath, the triumphant words, "I DID."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, second from left, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, left, discussed the Greek debt with other leaders. FRANKFURT The Group of 20 summit meeting in Cannes was supposed to be a chance for Europe and the event's host, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, to shine. Instead, the two day meeting is coming at an extraordinarily dark time for the Continent, with Europe in political disarray, its economy tipping into recession and the future of the euro zone in doubt. If anyone can afford to strut on the beaches of the Cote d'Azur during the meeting on Thursday and Friday, it should be the fast growing developing countries, especially China, but also India, Russia and Brazil. The balance of power has shifted so rapidly that Europe is now asking them for money, and they are in a stronger position to push their views on trade rules and other issues. But the leaders of the big emerging economic powers of the world are not likely to be crowing. Not only do they face vulnerabilities of their own, like worrisome levels of inflation in China, but they also do not want to see their best customers struggle economically, especially when another crucial outlet for their exports the United States is also suffering. "China is going to be in a pretty good position," said Uri Dadush, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "But don't interpret that to mean that China is happy with all this. China is part of the world economy." That was the sentiment that President Hu Jintao of China expressed in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro this week. "China sincerely wishes to see stability in the euro zone and the euro," he said. Typically, Group of 20 summit meetings are an occasion for the host leader to appear statesmanlike and push pet issues. Mr. Sarkozy had originally intended the Cannes meeting to focus on his call for changes to the international monetary system, in a bid to reduce exchange rate fluctuations and give the euro and other currencies more status compared with the dollar. In character for the frenetic French president, the agenda also contains an ambitious list of other goals, including changing bank regulation, as well as dealing with unemployment, corruption, tax evasion, food security and global warming. Mr. Sarkozy's schedule even includes a meeting on Thursday morning with Bill Gates of Microsoft to discuss development financing. There will undoubtedly be pronouncements on many of these issues. Most of the work on such questions is done in advance by lower level officials. The summit meeting, which begins with a working lunch Thursday, is to a large extent a photo opportunity at which leaders issue communiques that were agreed upon well ahead of time. But events this week have forced Mr. Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, to become mired in Greek politics when they would rather that their constituencies see them appearing on the global stage with President Obama or Mr. Hu. Mr. Sarkozy and Mrs. Merkel met in an emergency session Wednesday afternoon with the heads of European Union institutions and the International Monetary Fund to discuss the Greek situation. In the evening, they met with President George A. Papandreou of Greece, who had declared Monday that he would let his people decide in a referendum whether they supported his tough minded, often painful efforts to keep Greece afloat. The proposal, which could lead to Greece's withdrawal from the euro zone, upset financial markets and undermined the latest European rescue plan. With the Greek government struggling to stay in power, it is not clear what answers Mr. Papandreou can offer before the referendum, even if he survives a confidence vote in Parliament scheduled for Friday night. He pledged to hold the referendum by Dec. 4 or 5. Officials said that until Greece's commitment to the plan to fix its budget overruns is clear again, the country is unlikely to receive an 8 billion euro ( 11 billion) aid installment, due this month, which is needed before the end of the year to pay bills and salaries. A spokesman for the German finance ministry said Greece apparently has enough money to keep running until mid December, when it has to redeem more than 6 billion euros in debt. Meanwhile, the relentless flow of negative economic news continued. A survey of managers in manufacturing, published Wednesday, pointed to a decline in European output during the last three months of 2011. The biggest drop in sentiment came in Italy, further heightening fears that a combination of slow growth and political paralysis could make it impossible for that country to continue to service its debt. While markets recovered some of the ground they lost earlier in the week, investors' unease was apparent when the European Financial Stability Facility pulled back from a planned 3 billion euro deal to issue 10 year bonds to help finance Ireland's bailout because of a lack of buyers. As part of the overall European effort to maintain stability in the euro zone, the facility is to be enlarged from 440 billion euros to 1 trillion euros and provide "risk insurance" to new bonds issued by struggling euro zone countries. The last minute cancellation of the small and normally routine operation is "indicative that there is a huge amount of uncertainty out there which hasn't been helped by the Greek decision," said Nick Matthews, senior European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland. "A week ago we thought we had a grand plan." Contributing to the spirit of turmoil, the Occupy Wall Street movement is expected to inspire a robust turnout for protests against the Group of 20 in nearby Nice. "The timing is not good for the French president," said Gregory Chin, a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. The agenda "raised too many expectations instead of delivering on the core issue of global growth," Mr. Chin said by telephone from Cannes. With the advanced industrial countries weakened, they will be in less of a position to pressure China on perennial issues like its undervalued currency or the need to increase domestic consumption and reduce its trade surplus. China will be in a better position to promote the issues it cares about, like a greater voice in the I.M.F. But China will face restraints in deploying its power. For one thing, to do so would mean accepting more global responsibility. "They'll keep trying to free ride as much as possible to focus on their internal challenges," said David Shorr, a policy analyst at the Stanley Foundation, an organization in Muscatine, Iowa, that promotes international cooperation. "The U.S. will keep nudging them to shoulder more responsibilities as a rising power." Despite its growth, China has serious internal problems, including credit and housing bubbles in some regions, overindebted local governments and rising wages that make it harder to compete with nations like Indonesia or Vietnam. "They come across as cocky sometimes," said Mr. Dadush of the Carnegie Institute. "But they are very aware they don't want to push their weight around. They have their own issues to deal with."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Dive into the coral reefs of Southeast Asia or Australia and you'll likely spot a wrasse. But which of the hundreds of kinds of wrasses will you see? These fish can be an inch to more than eight feet in length. They can be skinny like cigars or hefty like footballs. Some are somber colored; others look like they're attending a rave. Different species have their own creative feeding strategies: humphead wrasses crush shellfish; tubelip wrasses slurp corals and cleaner wrasses act like carwashes, eating parasites and dead tissue off other sea creatures. This spectacular diversity stems from wrasse ancestors that migrated from the prehistoric Tethys Sea to the area that now bridges the Pacific and Indian Oceans. There, in a vast and vibrant cradle of coral reefs, they settled and steadily diversified over tens of millions of years. Their story fits into a larger pattern. This region, the Central Indo Pacific, has become the hot spot with the most biodiversity in Earth's oceans because many ancestors of today's marine life colonized it so long ago, according to a recent paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Imagine a Republican senator uncertain whether to vote for the Supreme Court nominee that President Trump is poised to put forward. He is part of a select group, our senator; perhaps we can even guess how many children and grandchildren he has, how steeply his hair still rises from his brow, how close he once came to being president himself. Here is how he might consider the problem. On the one hand there is the threat of what keeps being called a "legitimacy crisis" should Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday, be quickly replaced by a conservative jurist. It would be Donald Trump's third appointment following a presidential election in which Senate Republicans declined to vote on Barack Obama's final nominee. Trump did not win the popular vote in 2016; his Senate coalition doesn't represent a popular majority. In replacing Ginsburg he would be altering the balance of the court more decisively than with his previous picks, both of whom took seats from Republican appointees. And he would be doing so in a country that's already polarized, maddened, suffused with hysteria. The madness around Supreme Court battles has been building steadily since Robert Bork's defeated nomination in 1987, and at some point it has to be defused. If someone which means some Republicans, at the moment, because the power is in their hands doesn't find a way to de escalate, to concede some ground, then the court and even the Constitution could be in the gravest sort of peril. That's the situation as understood on the left and much of the center. But our senator is a Republican senator, mindful of his own coalition's views. He knows there is more than one way for an institution to lose legitimacy, and that for many conservatives the high court eviscerated its own authority decades ago, when it set itself up as the arbiter of America's major moral controversies, removing from the democratic process not just debates about sex and marriage and school prayer but life and death itself. Those "many conservatives" include this columnist. Since I became opposed to abortion, sometime in my later teens, I have never regarded the Supreme Court with warmth, admiration or patriotic trust. What my liberal friends felt after Bush v. Gore or after Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation or in imagining some future ruling by Amy Coney Barrett, I have felt for my entire adult life. And our Republican senator knows that this feeling has sustained itself because the conservative effort to change the courts was balked and limited, over and over again, despite many seemingly no doubt electoral victories and sweeping presidential mandates. For decades, conservatives elected Republican presidents, Republican presidents appointed Supreme Court justices and yet about half of those justices turned out to be either outright judicial liberals or "swing" votes who always seemed to swing toward social liberalism. So if it seems unfair and delegitimizing to liberals today that a president without a popular vote mandate should be able to appoint the successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, conservatives might respond by asking what democratic "fairness" delivered David Souter and John Paul Stevens to a combined 54 years on the court as Republican appointees? Or what "fairness" made Anthony Kennedy rather than Antonin Scalia the dominant judicial figure for the decades that followed Ronald Reagan's presidential landslides? And further, what would it say to the millions of voters who have supported the Republican Party almost exclusively because of judicial politics for decades, for a situation to come along where there is no constitutional bar to appointing Ginsburg's successor, and then Republican senators simply cede the opportunity, extracting at most a vague no future court packing promise in return? At least with Souter, the seat wasn't ceded to liberals on purpose. That's what our senator encounters when he inclines his ear rightward. But if he has wisdom, he can also sense in the clashing arguments a substrate of agreement a shared recognition that a system in which the great questions of our country are settled by the deaths of octogenarians is too close to late Soviet Politburo politics for comfort, a shared acknowledgment that too much deliberation that belongs in other branches is being shunted to the Supreme Court. The question is what, if anything, would need to happen to make that substrate the foundation for a better system, a decisive change in judicial appointments and a step back from juristocracy. One answer, the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" answer, is that a brave stand in favor of bipartisanship by a few Republican senators might set the stage for a return of wise man politics, in which various reforms proposed for the Supreme Court shorter terms, rotating appointments, a larger bench appointed by bipartisan committee could be pushed through by Republicans and Democrats together, in a Joe Biden presidency or thereafter. The message of the stand would be, let's not do this, but its goal would be to get both parties to say, let's never get in this situation again. But that might be an idealist's fancy. Suppose that Ginsburg isn't replaced this fall, Biden is elected, and he fills her seat and then replaces at least one conservative justice as well, flipping the court back to liberal control. The Democratic incentive to reform our juristocracy would diminish or evaporate, and liberalism's self understanding as the party of hyper educated mandarins would come back to the fore, making progressives enthusiastic about judicial power once again. Meanwhile, conservatives would have all of their suspicions about establishment Republicans confirmed yet one more time, and they could add the Supreme Court to the lengthening list of elite institutions in which cultural liberalism's power seems more consolidated every day. The likely result would be a right wing coalition that's angrier and Trumpier than the G.O.P. that nominated Trump himself four years ago. So our imagined Republican senator's reward for his high minded vote could easily be a longer term defeat for moderate conservatism: The judiciary would be handed over to ambitious liberals, and his own party would become more populist, paranoid and hostile to any form of compromise. Whereas if he voted to confirm, then the worst case scenario, the threat that Democrats are waving, would probably be an attempt at court packing in a Biden presidency, or perhaps in a Kamala Harris presidency down the line. Such a development would no doubt make Twitter unbearable and inspire Republicans to their own round of angst about legitimacy and norms. But once you recognize the current system's brokenness, it's not clear it would be all that terrible a fight to have. For one thing, to fight a battle over the court on those terms would commit the Democrats decisively to the position that the courts should be under small d democratic control, rather than allowing them to replace Ginsburg, breathe a sigh of relief and revert to a liberalism of philosopher kings (and queens). For another, if an era of court packing tit for tat weakened the high court, making its members more cautious and its decisions appear more overtly political, then that could have one of two positive consequences: It could push some power back toward the legislative branch, where under our constitutional schema it still formally belongs, and it could eventually push the warring parties toward an exhausted stalemate, from which bipartisan court reform might be more likely to emerge. Of course I am speculating, but my point is to suggest the inherent unknowability of some "what's best for the republic" outcome as our Republican senator contemplates his vote. It might be that a high minded renunciation of power saves us from a crisis ... but it might just as easily be that the only way out of the crisis is through, meaning for both sides to contest frankly for the power to change a broken system, and to look for new norms on the other side rather than propping up old ones that clearly don't work anymore. And the unknowability means that the decision is probably better reduced to its simplest form. All that our senator knows about this vote for certain is that it will give one of the (unfortunately) most powerful offices in America to either the person nominated or some person chosen by the current Democratic nominee. If the person nominated seems like a better choice to be entrusted with that power, then despite all the atmospherics, there's a clear case for voting yes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on Foreclosure The Obama administration's main program to keep distressed homeowners from falling into foreclosure has been aimed at those who took out subprime loans or other risky mortgages during the heady days of the housing boom. But these days, the primary cause of foreclosures is unemployment. As a result, there is a mismatch between the homeowner program's design and the country's economic realities and a new round of finger pointing about how best to fix it. The administration's housing effort does include programs to help unemployed homeowners, but they have been plagued by delays, dubious benefits and abysmal participation. For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months. As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants. "So far, I think the public record will show that programs to help unemployed homeowners have not been very successful," said Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, an executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Data released last week suggests that the administration's task is only growing more difficult as the problems created by unemployment and housing persist. New job growth in May was anemic, and unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday. Earlier in the week, a widely watched index found that housing prices had dropped to their lowest level in nearly a decade. And while the rate of homes falling into foreclosure has slowed, the reason is delays in processing foreclosures, not a housing recovery, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosures. There were 219,258 foreclosure filings in April, the latest month available. Critics of the Obama administration's approach to preventing foreclosures have pressed for two years to get officials to focus more of their attention on unemployed homeowners, with meager results. As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given 46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about 1.85 billion. Morris A. Davis, a former Federal Reserve economist, estimates that as many as a million homeowners slipped into foreclosure because of insufficient help for the unemployed. "The money was there and they didn't spend it," said Mr. Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. "I don't mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged." Administration officials said their programs have had a positive impact, albeit not as large as they had hoped. But they say that the problems of unemployment and negative equity on homes are not easily solved. They also say programs to curb foreclosure are voluntary, so they are limited in how far they can push mortgage servicers and investors, who often make more from foreclosures than from offering aid. "We are trying to be careful in designing programs that at the end of the day aren't just about spending money but getting people back on their feet," said James Parrott, a senior advisor at the White House's National Economic Council. President Obama has been scrambling to curb the number of foreclosures ever since he arrived at the White House. At the start of 2009, the administration announced its primary foreclosure prevention initiative, the Home Affordable Modification Program. It provides incentives to banks to modify mortgages, reducing monthly payments for eligible homeowners. The administration said the program would help three million to four million homeowners, but so far, only 670,000 homeowners have received permanent modifications. In addition, the program was primarily meant for homeowners with risky mortgages; jobless owners are often ineligible because some payment, albeit reduced, is required. Administration officials said the program was helping homeowners whose income had been reduced. Sixty one percent of homeowners who received permanent modifications listed "curtailment of income" as their reason for applying, though it is not known how many of them are unemployed or simply had their hours or pay reduced. The Department of Housing and Urban Development received 1 billion as part of the financial regulatory reforms that passed last year to help unemployed homeowners. That money will be used to provide government loans to unemployed homeowners for up to 24 months. Though the program was announced last fall, so far applications are being accepted in only five states; the others are delayed because of "implementation challenges," a H.U.D. spokeswoman said. Critics do acknowledge one bright spot the Hardest Hit Fund, a federal program that will provide 7.6 billion so that some states can administer their own programs for struggling homeowners. Of that, 70 percent will be directed to unemployed homeowners, said Andrea Risotto, a Treasury spokeswoman. So far, 455 million has been spent. Over the last several years, academics, housing groups and government economists offered proposals to Treasury officials to help the unemployed avoid foreclosure. One, which Mr. Fuhrer of the Boston Fed helped write, called on the government to provide loans, or grants, to unemployed or underemployed homeowners to make up for the amount of income they lost. The loan would have to be repaid once the homeowner found a new job. Another proposal, by a non profit group called the PICO National Network, a coalition of faith based community organizations, would have allowed unemployed homeowners to postpone much or all of their mortgage payments for a year or more. But administration officials have balked, arguing that regulators and "other industry stakeholders expressed strong reservations" about allowing unemployed homeowners to extend payments for longer terms, according to a Dec. 23 letter that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner sent to Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachussets, who had pressed for measures that would more directly aid the unemployed. The debate is largely playing out on the sidelines of partisan Washington politics, since Republican lawmakers have made clear they would like to get rid of anti foreclosure programs altogether, and would certainly block any new programs. Instead, it is largely setting Democratic leaning homeowner advocates against Administration officials over how best to spend money already appropriated. Administration officials maintain that the decision on whether to offer mortgage relief to homeowners ultimately was up to mortgage servicers and investors, not the government, which can provide incentives but not compel action. . "We as an administration have limited levers," Mr. Parrot said. "We can push them on the margins." But Lewis Finfer, a PICO organizer, said he could not understand why the administration had not been more receptive given the extent of unemployment. "We have a program to deal with this," he said. Many unemployed or underemployed homeowners said they would welcome an extended break in mortgage payments. Mary Ernest, 51, of Blackstone, Mass., lost her job as a school aide and said she has been "reduced to begging, more or less," to keep her home. Adam Heyman, 41, of Chelsea, Mass., scraped together enough money to pay the mortgage on his condominium for about 18 months. Though he finally got another full time job, his bank had already foreclosed on his condo. "If I had a way to slow down the process or stop it for a while, that would have been nice," Mr. Heyman said, adding, "Now I can certainly afford to pay."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
GENEVA Global trade ministers on Friday approved Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization, giving Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin a victory on the international stage at a time of rising domestic opposition to his hold on power. The Nigerian trade minister, Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga, struck a gavel to announce that the W.T.O. trade ministers' meeting here had accepted the bid. Because the organization operates by consensus, Russia had to first reach bilateral agreements with 57 of its current 153 members to secure their support. "This result of long and complex negotiation is favorable both for Russia and for all our future partners," President Dmitri A. Medvedev said in a statement read to the conference by the first deputy prime minister, Igor I. Shuvalov. He called on world leaders to continue working for freer and fairer trade, adding: "Russia is ready to contribute as much as possible into this work." The W.T.O. sets the rules governing global commerce and provides a forum for resolving disputes. Membership ends the anomaly of having Russia, a leading oil and natural gas exporter as well as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, outside the world trade system. Russia, with a population of 140 million, is the last major world economy to join the organization. The W.T.O. says that with Russia's accession, more than 97 percent of all world trade will take place among member countries. It had been about 95 percent. Pascal Lamy, the W.T.O. director general, said that the agreement would "cement the integration of Russia into the world economy" and that it "affixes the W.T.O. quality label to the Russian Federation." Likening Russia's long journey to membership to a marathon, he also warned that "once you cross the finish line, attention immediately changes to the future, to implementation." Mr. Putin can point to joining the W.T.O. as a sign that Russia is taking a bigger role on the global stage, even as his government confronts signs of burgeoning political discontent in the country's large cities. During an interview, Andrei A. Slepnev, the Russian official who oversaw the negotiations, credited Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev for getting the deal done, and noted that Mr. Putin had referred to it Thursday as "a victory for Russia." In seeking membership, Moscow has had to bring its laws into conformity with W.T.O. rules, but it stands to gain as much as one percentage point in annual economic growth, according to some estimates. Membership is also expected to shine light on the regulations and corruption that dog the Russian economy. Other W.T.O. members will benefit from a near term reduction in tariffs on their exports once the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, ratifies the deal. But businesses in the United States will remain captive for now to the Jackson Vanik amendment, a relic of Cold War politics, under which U.S. trade with what was then the Soviet Union was tied to the Kremlin's willingness to allow Jewish emigration. On Thursday, the administration of President Barack Obama filed a letter with the W.T.O. saying it could not offer so called permanent normal trade relations with Russia; Moscow in turn said it would not extend such treatment to the United States. America has issued similar letters in the case of other nations, including Romania and Vietnam, only to have Congress give its approval to improved relations weeks later. The Obama administration has called for the repeal of Jackson Vanik, saying trade with Russia would have a positive effect on its human rights record. The law is in conflict with U.S. international obligations, as W.T.O. rules require that nations extend most favored nation status to all members. Asked if he thought the amendment would prove a lasting impediment to U.S. Russian trade relations, Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade representative, said, "We hope not." Mr. Slepnev said the Jackson Vanik obstacle was "a technical question. We believe the American administration will work out an agreement with Congress in the next half year." Russia's odyssey to join the W.T.O. began in 1993, when Boris N. Yeltsin was president. Ambivalence and outright opposition in Russian government and business circles led the process to drag on as the country slowly moved away from its Soviet style planned economy. War with Georgia in 2008 and an unsuccessful attempt to jointly enter the W.T.O. with Kazakhstan and Belarus further delayed Russia's accession. The final breakthrough came in November with an agreement between Russia and Georgia, under which the uneasy neighbors agreed that a Swiss company would monitor trade between them. Economists expect membership to have only a limited effect on the domestic economy in the short term, as the government has said that it will invoke rules allowing a transitional period to protect strategic industries, including automaking, from foreign competition. Over the longer term, however, the effects could be significant, as Russia benefits from more foreign investment and corrupt business practices are exposed. The pain of adjustment could be significant in those industries that have made little progress in modernizing in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with nimbler global competitors eventually grabbing market share at the expense of entrenched local interests. Dominic Fean, a researcher at the Russia/New Independent States Center at the French Institute of International Relations, said that Russia's so called monotowns 460 towns in which a single, often outmoded industry or factory dominates the local economy and job market stood to suffer as the economy is opened up. If that happened, it could undermine the social pact under which the Russian populace has traded away some of its political freedom in exchange for economic growth and stability. The accession story led the news on Russian state television, ORT, though with a report that debated whether joining would in fact benefit the domestic economy, particularly the automobile industry that will face more competition for its Ladas and Volgas. Elvira Nabiullina, Russia's economic development minister, said that she expected Russia's petrochemical, metals and steel industries to get an immediate boost, as they currently suffer from discriminatory treatment in export markets that costs Russian business more than 2 billion a year. She acknowledged that other sectors would feel pressure. "But it's necessary," she said, 'because we're carrying out our economic diversification policy." Already on Friday, Russia was shaking up the organization, with a Russian journalist suggesting at a news conference that perhaps it was time to add Russian to the W.T.O.'s three official languages, English, French and Spanish. Mr. Lamy, who had been speaking English, switched to French to explain that it would cost 13 million or more a year to add another language for an organization with "zero budget growth," not to mention that China and Arab members would demand a full United Nations type language system. "And as you know, the W.T.O. is a consensus organization," he said, and all of the members would have to agree to bear the cost.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Millions of years ago, on a mud flat somewhere in Cretaceous Utah, a group of Utahraptors made a grave mistake: They tried to hunt near quicksand. The pack's poor fortune has given modern paleontologists an opportunity to decode the giant raptor its appearance, growth and behavior but only if they can raise the money. Enter "The Utahraptor Project," started on GoFundMe last year with a 100,000 goal. It offers backers access to a field worker's blog, a live "Raptor Cam" and digital models of the find put together through the process of photogrammetry. While it is far from reaching its goal, the team is optimistic. Utahraptor, 23 feet long and weighing over a ton, was one of the largest dromaeosaurs, feathered, sickle clawed dinosaurs closely related to birds. Since its discovery in 1991, it has been the subject of a popular novel, assorted documentaries and tie in toys from "Jurassic Park." But for all its fame, the predator has been known primarily from only a few remains. That changed in 2001, when a geology student found a leg bone emerging from a hillside in the Cedar Mountain formation in eastern Utah. Over 12 field seasons, a team of paleontologists with the Utah Geological Survey found an ever expanding tangle of bones in the 126 million year old rock. When the final slab of sandstone was removed in 2014, said Jim Kirkland, Utah state paleontologist, it weighed nine tons and contained the skeletons of a herbivorous dinosaur, a 16 foot adult Utahraptor, four juveniles and a recent hatchling. The block proved too heavy for the lab at the University of Utah, and in 2015 ended up on reinforced floors at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point. Mr. Madsen, then an employee of the Utah Geological Survey with experience preparing fossils at Dinosaur National Monument, began the long process of cleaning the bones. Two months later, he had been laid off: The agency's budget, which is partly funded by the proceeds from drilling on state land, was hit hard by the 2014 plunge in oil prices. There wasn't any money to pay him. Without Mr. Madsen, the Utahraptor block sat in limbo. Attempts to find outside funding didn't go well, Dr. Kirkland said: The Museum of Ancient Life declined to help raise money for the block over concerns it would conflict with the museum's own fund raising efforts. With attempts to get corporate sponsors coming to nothing, Mr. Madsen suggested a crowdfunding campaign to pay for the setup and hours of labor needed to properly document the fossils. The Utahraptor Project has attracted interest from dinosaur enthusiasts on social media and paleontology blogs. But while donations ranging from 5 to 1,500 have trickled in, the campaign has raised only 15,150 over the past 10 months. That is enough to buy some basic tools and begin work, Mr. Madsen said, but not enough for the team's more ambitious goals. Mr. Madsen has yet to be paid for his efforts. "I'm in a personally awkward place doing this crowdfunding thing, not least of which because I'm asking for money to pay myself for this work." The contents of the block already offer some intriguing possibilities, Dr. Kirkland said. They represent the remains of predators that stumbled into quicksand while pursuing trapped prey, one of the first such cases in the fossil record. Dr. Kirkland wants to determine whether each of the seven animals arrived at different times, or whether a single pack was buried at once. If the bones are interlaced, or show signs of equivalent amounts of weathering, that would be good evidence for a rich family life for Utahraptor. Other paleontologists are watching the project with interest. "We already know there are many bones in this block which fill in the anatomy of Utahraptor, but there are probably plenty more surprises in there," said Tom Holtz, a University of Maryland paleontologist specializing in predatory dinosaurs. "We won't know until the lab has worked its way through the rock." Future plans for the campaign include a panel at the Salt Lake Comic Con next month, said B. J. Nicholls, the social media coordinator for the project. Organizers hope the publicity will help drive donations; the search for corporate sponsors continues as well. For Dr. Kirkland, Utahraptor is part of his legacy: he named the species and has long been associated with it. For years, he has dreamed of a state park with the Utahraptor block as its centerpiece. But he will settle for making sure the find is treated properly before he retires. "We can't do this over again," he said. "We may never find another site like this. I'd rather let it sit than not do it with the very best data collection and the finest preparators we can have work on it." "We worked to get this block down the hill for 10 years," he added. "We can't screw it up."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When word spread this year that Randall Arney, the longtime artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, would be moving on, the company lauded his leadership, saying that he was stepping down after "varied and numerous" contributions. But in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Mr. Arney described his departure as anything but voluntary, saying that the theater's two chairwomen presented it as a fait accompli in a 10 minute meeting that left him "stunned and shattered." In the suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Mr. Arney, 61, said that the decision in February not to renew his contract, which came months after he disclosed the onset of a medical condition, was the result of age and disability discrimination. He also accused the chairwomen of claiming falsely that he had agreed to leave after a series of conversations about how to best prepare the theater for the future. "The Geffen stripped an award winning and esteemed artistic director of control of the final decades of his career by refusing to renew his contract because of discrimination," the lawsuit stated, adding that Mr. Arney had also been libeled and slandered by officials at Geffen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
TOKYO Daisuke Horii just collected his summer bonus. It was only slightly more than last year, but enough to compel the 34 year old shopping mall clerk to Tokyo's electronics district to look for some high end speakers. "Things are generally looking brighter, aren't they?" Mr. Horii said, as he scrutinized, then dismissed, cheaper alternatives at the bustling Yodobashi Camera electronics store. The Bose ones he has his eye on, which he'll hook up to his TV, go for about 400. "I don't really need it, but I want it," he said. "A good economy means you can buy things you don't really need." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's bid to revive Japan's deflated economy hinges on consumers like Mr. Horii starting to feel flush enough to start splurging on the finer things in life. A wide recovery in consumer spending has been the weakest link in "Abenomics," the bold economic stimulus strategy that Mr. Abe has pushed since taking office in late December. Abenomics has already brought big profit bumps to the nation's exporters, thanks to a yen made weaker by Mr. Abe's aggressive policies. He found a kindred spirit in Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan's new governor, who has committed the central bank to easing the money supply and reinflating the economy. Stock markets have rallied, as foreign investors jumped back into a country they had all but written off for its seemingly unshakable stagnation. Numbers released on Friday by the government provided more proof of Japan's corporate recovery. Industrial production rose by a robust 2 percent in May from the previous month. Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei index climbed 3.5 percent Friday on the strong showing. Reversing a 15 year long slide in prices, which Mr. Abe has singled out as both a cause and a symptom of waning profits, wages and consumption, is a tougher order. For companies to feel confident enough to start raising prices, Japan's consumers have to start spending again, and data confirming that trend is still mixed. "We are comfortable with our view that the uptrend of consumption continues," Masamichi Adachi, Tokyo based economist at JPMorgan Securities Japan, said in a note Friday. "An expected rise in summer bonuses, paid in June and July, and improvement in general sentiment are the main reasons," he said. There are some signs that after years of penny pinching, conspicuous spending is on the rise again in Japan. But for now, it is starting at the very top, among the financiers, professionals and other well to do Japanese who have benefited from the recent stock market gains. Sales of Ferrari cars in Japan have jumped almost 20 percent so far this year, figures from the Japan Automobile Importers Association show, thanks to this newfound exuberance among the nation's rich. "We've seen confidence start to explode over the last months," said Herbert Appleroth, chief executive of Ferrari Japan. "We're seeing some of the highest growth in the world here." At the Hankyu Umeda department store in Osaka, sales of luxury watches, jewelry and other luxury items are surging, which lifted overall sales in May by 63 percent compared with the previous year, the sixth straight month of double digit increases. "Japanese shoppers are tired of cheap," said Keiji Uchiyama, manager of the marble floored store, brimming with imported fragrances, pastel macaroons and slick designer bags. "They've scrimped for so long, but now they've had enough," he said. Nobuko Kido, 61, and Ikuko Hatanaka, 60, both full time homemakers, said that the recent positive media coverage of the economy alone made them less guilty about splurging at the department store. Ms. Kido had just spent 60,000 yen ( 612) on a small handbag from the Italian luxury fashion house Etro. "There's a feeling that the economy is finally picking up," said Ms. Kido, whose husband is a trading company executive. "Or maybe it's just an excuse I will tell my husband." It is a striking return to form for Japan's consumers, known for their profligate spending in the bubble years of the 1980s. But Japanese consumers hunkered down in the 1990s and in this decade as they adjusted to a deflationary economy and dire expectations for future growth. Some patrons of department stores like Hankyu Umeda, once the epitome of luxury and good living, ditched its polished boutiques and headed to discount stores. As deflation became entrenched, consumers adjusted accordingly. Instead of splurging on a bottle of Chanel fragrance, they started to buy perfume by the ounce from peddlers online. Companies adjusted, and designer denims gave way to no frill jeans that went for 10 instead of 100. Consumers began visiting Japan's ubiquitous 100 yen shops, Don Quijote discount stores or even the Hard Off recycled merchandise stores. Consumers grew accustomed to expecting that the longer they waited, the cheaper goods would become. And they held back on spending. That led to even less demand and more years of deflation. The challenge for Mr. Abe has been to reverse those entrenched expectations. For now, he is helped by a weak yen, which inflates the price of imported products. And enthusiasm over signs of life in the stock market, as well as over expectations for a recovery, are lifting spirits. Kozo Sushi, a nationwide takeout sushi chain, said this week it was lowering prices at the cheaper end of its menu to 399 yen ( 4), but would add a new superpremium meal, which costs 1,189 yen ( 12) and comes with more delicacies. "Abenomics is benefiting only the lucky few, so we didn't want anyone to feel left out," said Akira Tashima, a Kozo Sushi spokesman. "If you're one of the lucky ones, we have snow crab for you. If you need to save, we also have plain tuna."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
BIG CAT COUNTRY 8 p.m. on Smithsonian Channel. This new nature series centers on two prides of lions along the Luangwa River in Zambia, dramatically narrating their hunts and power struggles. (An example: "A herd of buffalo is coming to drink. The herbivores don't see the lions ... Until it's too late.") In other words: "Cats" this is not. WATCHMEN (2009) 6:30 p.m. on IFC. Those who watched HBO's recent, radically reimagined TV riff on Alan Moore's "Watchmen" graphic novel can see a very different take on the material in this film adaptation, which was directed by Zack Snyder. With a cast that includes Billy Crudup and Carla Gugino, this version adheres more closely to the graphic novel than HBO's version but wasn't nearly as well received by critics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Hi everyone! I'm Sheera Frenkel, your friendly cybersecurity correspondent. To do my job, I have to spend a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter. And the more time I spend studying those sites, the less I find myself actually using them. Which brings me to the tech news for this past week in which everyone seemed to be obsessed with who was, or wasn't, allowed on Twitter. Mr. Jones and accounts associated with his media website Infowars were booted from Apple, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms last week for violating policies against hate speech. But Twitter did not ban Mr. Jones and Infowars, saying they had not violated its policies. Yet Twitter struggled to define its policies to my colleagues Cecilia Kang and Kate Conger when they visited the company last week. After journalists turned up examples of Mr. Jones's tweets that contravened Twitter's rules, the company said on Tuesday that it would suspend him from the platform for seven days after he tweeted a video calling for his supporters to get their "battle rifles" ready against the media and others. But the move was a temporary fix, and we still don't know what exactly Twitter will and won't allow on its service. That brings us to our next big Twitter question: Was Tesla chief executive Elon Musk on drugs when he tweeted on Aug. 7 that he was taking his company private? I'm asking thanks to rapper Azealia Banks, who took to Instagram this past week to recount how she had spent the weekend at Mr. Musk's house waiting to record an album with his girlfriend, the electronic musician Grimes. Grimes, Ms. Banks said, never showed up. Then Ms. Banks dropped this bombshell: "Lol I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend for being too stupid to know not to go on Twitter while on acid." That immediately caught the attention of Tesla fans who were struggling to make sense of what was going on after Mr. Musk had announced on Twitter that he had secured funding to take the electric car maker off the public market at about 420 per share. The casual way in which Mr. Musk just tweeted the news out without regard to process raised a kerfuffle. And last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission served Tesla with a subpoena to learn more about the circumstances of the tweet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When the founders of Credo, a beauty boutique that opened in New York last week, were planning how the store should look, they checked out other green spaces ones that sold, say, yoga mats made of recycled rubber and thought a lot about the differences between a Tesla and a Prius. "We wanted to be Tesla," said Annie Jackson, Credo's vice president for merchandising and planning. "We didn't want the terrariums and the Zen music in our store." What Credo, a Sephora like one stop shop that opened its first outpost in San Francisco last June, is selling is face creams and eyeliners from companies that don't use any of the ingredients it says are harmful, like formaldehyde or parabens. The list bans 23 groups of ingredients, like animal products and phthalates, a class of plasticizing chemicals. But what Credo is really selling is the idea of switching up your beauty routine to one that seems healthier in a way that won't take you far out of your comfort zone, much as Whole Foods did with groceries or Gwyneth Paltrow does with everything. This is the kind of wellness aimed at those who recycle their Nespresso pods. In general, when it comes to knowing if what is in your moisturizing balm is bad for you, it's a murky, marketing driven world. The Food and Drug Administration oversees only certain topical products like sunscreen, and other than requiring that labels don't misstate benefits, it lets the beauty industry regulate itself. Words like natural, nontoxic and safe have no official or legal meaning when it comes to cosmetic labeling, and dermatologists routinely caution that people can be allergic to any ingredient, natural or not. "We want you to buy all of the brands you love and then buy ours," he said. "We don't want to dis the brand you love." The new store, at 9 Prince Street in NoLIta, is marked by a bright blue storefront, with windows big enough to please any exhibitionist. In the airy, whitewashed space, blond wood display cases are stocked with artisanal products, all with sleek logos and modern wrapping skin care on one side of the store, makeup on the other. Nothing is made of hemp. Some brands tend to have personal back stories, like Suntegrity Skincare, a line of plant derived sunscreen that was developed after the founder's mother died from skin cancer. The green skin care doyenne Tata Harper's line is front and center, and there are hard to find natural products like gel eyeliners (made by Evelyn Iona) and roll on deodorants (from True Organic of Sweden). Credo also carries kohl eyeliners and glossy eye shadows by the makeup artist Jillian Dempsey (she's planning to sculpt a display case for the products herself). "We don't spend a lot of time going off on a tangent about why it's good for you," Mr. Batra said. "You just come in, say you want a good moisturizer and SPF, and we get you a good moisturizer and SPF." The store also offers brow waxing, mini facials and makeup touch ups.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The United States government sent a letter to Sweden warning of "negative consequences" in the relationship between the countries if Sweden did not release the rap artist ASAP Rocky from prison. The rapper, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, went on trial for assault this week along with two other men, David Rispers and Bladimir Corniel . They were released on Friday at the conclusion of the trial while a verdict is pending. The letter, which was dated July 31, was signed by Robert O'Brien, special envoy for hostage affairs. Mr. O'Brien wrote to Swedish officials that "the government of the United States of America wants to resolve this case as soon as possible to avoid potentially negative consequences to the U.S. Swedish bilateral relationship," according to NBC News, which obtained a copy of the letter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Andrew DiFeo can remember a time, just four years ago, when he could hardly keep enough cars on the lot at his Hyundai dealership in Florida. Gasoline was selling for 3.50 or more a gallon, Americans were looking for good fuel economy, and Hyundai seemed to have the answer. The feature loaded Sonata sedan and the smaller Elantra were pulling buyers away from Toyota, Ford and other competitors. A shipment of Sonatas to Mr. DiFeo's lot in St. Augustine would be bought up in a week or two. Hyundai's American market share hit an all time high, about 5 percent, and the company was setting its sights even higher. "We had a lot of things going right in that time frame," Mr. DiFeo said. It is a far different story today. With gas prices lower, consumers have turned to roomier models like trucks and sport utility vehicles. Cars and compacts are less in demand and Hyundai's fortunes have fallen sharply. On Thursday, Hyundai said sales in May had tumbled a surprising 15 percent. After rising eight years in a row, overall sales at the company have fallen 4.8 percent this year, and its share of the market declined to 4 percent in May. Over all, auto sales in May fell 0.9 percent, to 1.5 million cars and light trucks. It was the fifth consecutive monthly decline and further underscored that the auto industry is slowing down after seven straight years of growth. Michael J. O'Brien, Hyundai's vice president of corporate and product planning in the United States, acknowledged that the company's car heavy model line was out of step with consumer tastes. "We have work to do," he said. "We are very well aware of where the market is." Hyundai attributed last month's sales decline to a reduction in sales of cars to fleet customers like rental car companies. But sales of its Santa Fe S.U.V. also slumped. And in a clear sign of a soft sales market, the company is offering heavy discounts. This week, for example, Grappone Hyundai in Bow, N.H., was advertising a fully loaded 2017 Sonata for 26,346 more than 9,200 below its list price. Other models had discounts of 4,000 to 6,000, price cuts that would have been unimaginable five years ago. "This seems to be resonating with the public," said Larry Haynes, president of the Grappone Automotive Group. "It's definitely helping us." The price cutting is taking a toll, though. The company blamed sales incentives in the United States for a sharp drop in earnings in the fourth quarter of 2016, and cited them as a factor when it reported another decline in the first quarter of this year. The American consumer's swing toward bigger vehicles is one of the biggest changes automakers have seen in decades. Just four years ago, vehicles classified as light trucks, which include S.U.V.s and most crossovers, made up half of the American market. In the first five months of this year, 62 percent of all new vehicles sold were from the category. The trend is roiling big parts of the industry. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles stopped making small and midsize cars last year and is converting two idled car plants to make Jeeps and trucks. A year ago, Ford Motor announced it would build a new small car plant in Mexico, then canceled the plan in January. The company came under heavy criticism from President Trump for investing in Mexico, but finally said it no longer needed the additional production capacity because of falling demand for small cars. Hyundai, based in South Korea, has taken hits in two ways. The company's affiliate, Kia, also relies on small and midsize cars for most of its sales. So far this year, Kia's sales in the United States have fallen 9.8 percent. Hyundai owns a large stake in Kia. They develop new models jointly and share a factory in West Point, Ga. Hyundai's troubles may also linger for some time. Other automakers caught flat footed by the shift have spent the last few years adding more S.U.V.s, especially the lighter crossovers. Volkswagen, for example, has long relied on sales of its Jetta and Passat sedans. But it added a redesigned Tiguan S.U.V. last year, is rolling out a hulking model called the Atlas this year and has a compact crossover coming next year. In contrast, Hyundai has invested in the wrong direction. The new models it is now rolling out include two luxury sedans sold under the Genesis brand name; the Ioniq, a hybrid compact; and a redesign of the midsize Sonata, due next year. All are in segments whose sales are declining. In the first three months of the year, luxury car sales fell 12 percent, according to the researcher Autodata. Sales of midsize sedans like the Sonata fell 17 percent. The new cars will sell well, Mr. O'Brien said. "At the end of the day, there's still plenty of volume in the sedan area," he said. He added that the company was working to increase production of its existing S.U.V.s the Tucson, Santa Fe and Santa Fe Sport. It typically costs about a billion dollars to develop a car from the ground up. The Ioniq was designed to compete with the top selling hybrid, the Toyota Prius. The Ioniq is rated to go 55 miles on a gallon of gasoline three more than the Prius. Even so, the Hyundai car faces considerable headwinds because fewer Americans are interested in hybrids. Prius sales are down 17.8 percent this year. Nevertheless, he said he felt Hyundai was poised for a resurgence. A new small S.U.V., the Kona, should arrive next year, followed by a redesign of the Santa Fe Sport then and a new large S.U.V. "I think those vehicles will really make an impact," he said. "Right now, we just have to stay focused until we get to that point."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The deaths of the designer Kate Spade and the chef Anthony Bourdain, both of whom committed suicide this week, were not simply pop culture tragedies. They were the latest markers of an intractable public health crisis that has been unfolding in slow motion for a generation. Treatment for chronic depression and anxiety often the precursors to suicide has never been more available and more widespread. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week reported a steady, stubborn rise in the national suicide rate, up 25 percent since 1999. The rates have been climbing each year across most age and ethnic groups. Suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in the United States. Nearly 45,000 Americans killed themselves in 2016, twice the number who died by homicide. After decades of research, effective prevention strategies are lacking. It remains difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict who will commit suicide, and the phenomenon is extremely difficult for researchers to study. One of the few proven interventions is unpalatable to wide swaths of the American public: reduced access to guns. The C.D.C. report found that the states where rates rose most sharply were those, like Montana and Oklahoma, where gun ownership is more common. It is predominantly men who use guns to commit suicide, and men are much less likely to seek help than women. The escalating suicide rate is a profound indictment of the country's mental health system. Most people who kill themselves have identifiable psychiatric symptoms, even if they never get an official diagnosis. The rise in suicide rates has coincided over the past two decades with a vast increase in the number of Americans given a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, and treated with medication. The number of people taking an open ended prescription for an antidepressant is at a historic high. More than 15 million Americans have been on the drugs for more than five years, a rate that has more than tripled since 2000. But if treatment is so helpful, why hasn't its expansion halted or reversed suicide trends? "This is the question I've been wrestling with: Are we somehow causing increased morbidity and mortality with our interventions?" said Dr. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and now president of Mindstrong Health, which makes technology to monitor people with mental health problems. "I don't think so," Dr. Insel continued. "I think the increase in demand for the services is so huge that the expansion of treatment thus far is simply insufficient to make a dent in what is a huge social change." Drug trials and other randomized studies are virtually useless for capturing measurable effects on suicide. Most drug trials explicitly exclude subjects deemed a suicide risk; even when they don't, the studies don't last long enough to say anything definitive about who commits suicide. But one recent study, by Danish researchers, supported the benefits of therapeutic intervention. Using detailed medical records, the investigators studied more than 5,500 people who had been treated for deliberate self harm, including cutting and clear suicide attempts. Over decades, the portion of those people who got psychotherapy at suicide clinics were about 30 percent less likely to die or commit further self harm than those who did not. "I personally think that it's the quality of care that matters, not the quantity," Dr. Insel said. "We need more access, better measures and better quality of care." But in this country, many of those who commit suicide have received little or no professional help. Indeed, they rarely tell anyone beforehand of their plan when there is one. Often the act is impulsive. According to Matthew Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard, the wide majority of people who die by suicide "explicitly deny suicidal thoughts or intentions in their last communications before dying." Andrew Spade, Ms. Spade's husband, said she had seemed fine when he'd talked to her just before her suicide. Mr. Bourdain was filming one of his clever, humorous shows in Strasbourg, France, when his body was discovered. The rise of suicide turns a dark mirror on modern American society: its racing, fractured culture; its flimsy mental health system; and the desperation of so many individual souls, hidden behind the waves of smiling social media photos and cute emoticons. Some experts fear that suicide is simply becoming more acceptable. "It's a hard idea to test, but it's possible that a cultural script may be developing among some segments of our population," said Julie Phillips, a sociologist at Rutgers. Prohibitions are apparently loosening in some quarters, she said. Particularly among younger people, Dr. Phillips said, "We are seeing somewhat more tolerant attitudes toward suicide." In surveys, younger respondents are more likely than older ones "to believe we have the right to die under certain circumstances, like incurable disease, bankruptcy, or being tired of living," she said. The cultural currents that deepen despair and increase the chances of suicide have long been staples of sociological debate. The social scientists Christopher Lasch and Robert Putnam identified postwar influences that have corroded the fabric of local everyday life the block parties, church meetings, family barbecues and civic groups that once bound people against solitude and abandonment. More recently, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton have argued that the hollowing out of the economy and loss of middle and working class supports, like unions, have contributed to a broad increase in self reported pain in those groups, both mental and physical. The aggressive marketing of opioids by Purdue Pharma and others eased some of that pain and helped create a generation of addicts, tens of thousands of whom die each year. Opioids are the third most common drugs found in the systems of suicides, after alcohol and anti anxiety medications like Xanax, the C.D.C. reported. A decline in marriage rates has likely played a role, as well. In her research, Dr. Phillips has found that in 2005 single middle aged women were as much as 2.8 times more likely to kill themselves than married women, and their single male peers 3.5 times more likely than married men to do the same. "In contrast to homicide and traffic safety and other public health issues, there's no one accountable, no one whose job it is to prevent these deaths no one who gets fired if these numbers go from 45,000 to 50,000," Dr. Insel said. "It's shameful. We would never tolerate that in other areas of public health and medicine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
BONDING Stream on Netflix. "Grad school waits for no dominatrix." That's the last line spoken by Tiff (Zoe Levin) in the first episode of this dark comedy series, but it could also be read as a tagline. The series centers on Tiff, a grad student who works in a sex dungeon to support herself, and Pete (Brendan Scannell), her initially unknowing best friend who quickly becomes her knowing business partner. The series was created by the actor Rightor Doyle ("Barry"). Its first episode leans into self aware and surreal humor. IT FOLLOWS (2015) Rent on Amazon and iTunes. David Robert Mitchell's "Under the Silver Lake" opened to shaky reviews last week, but high expectations preceded its release: This breakthrough horror feature from Mitchell was received euphorically by many critics when it came out in 2015. Set in a Detroit suburb, the film follows Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19 year old who is haunted by a curse that is spread by people having sex. "'It Follows' abides by a principle that few horror movies have the courage to embrace: The unknown is the unknown," Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times. "Clues to the source and motives of this menace are dropped, but they don't add up. Like the evil in a David Lynch horror film, it is out there in the night, waiting to get you."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Rubella Has Been Eliminated From the Americas, Health Officials Say Rubella, a disease with terrible consequences for unborn children, has finally been eliminated from the Americas, a scientific panel set up by global health authorities announced Wednesday. The disease, also known as German measles, once infected millions of people in the Western Hemisphere. In a 1964 65 outbreak in the United States, 11,000 fetuses were miscarried, died in the womb or were aborted, and 20,000 babies were born with defects. "Although it has taken some 15 years, the fight against rubella has paid off," said Dr. Carissa F. Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, which made the announcement in conjunction with the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unicef and the United Nations Foundation. "Now, with rubella under our belt, we need to roll up our sleeves and finish the job of eliminating measles, as well." The Americas region is the first World Health Organization region to eliminate rubella. The European region which includes Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia hopes to follow next. Some regions are still not close enough to set firm target dates, so there is no chance that the disease will be eliminated worldwide before 2020, said Dr. Susan E. Reef, team lead for rubella at the C.D.C.'s global immunization division, who joined in the announcement. Around the world, about 120,000 children are born each year with severe birth defects attributed to rubella. Two other diseases were first eliminated in the Americas: smallpox in 1971, and polio in 1994. Smallpox is now eliminated worldwide. Polio is nearly gone, but has clung on stubbornly for decades; almost all remaining cases originate in Pakistan. Although rubella usually produces only a relatively mild rash and fever in children and adults, it is devastating to fetuses in the first trimester; many are born deaf, blind from cataracts and with severe permanent brain damage. The last endemic case in the Americas was confirmed in Argentina in 2009. It took six more years to declare the disease eliminated because its symptoms are harder to detect than, for example, polio, which causes paralysis, or smallpox or measles, which cause intense, easily diagnosable rashes. A poster from Chile encouraging vaccinations. The campaign to eliminate rubella was formally declared in 2003. Public health authorities had to review 165 million records and do 1.3 million checks to see if any communities had rubella cases. All recent cases had to be genetically tested at the C.D.C. to confirm that they were caused by known imported strains of the virus, not by quietly circulating domestic ones. As with measles, there is no cure for rubella, but the disease is prevented by a very effective vaccine. In the United States, the shot usually contains three vaccines and is known as M.M.R., for measles, mumps and rubella. Measles cases in the United States have surged recently because some parents who believe, contrary to scientific evidence, that the measles vaccine causes autism do not let their children receive the shot. Endemic measles was eliminated from the hemisphere in 2002, but imported cases can surge in pockets of unvaccinated children, as happened last year in an outbreak that began at Disneyland in California. Rubella is less contagious than measles, and the vaccine for it is somewhat more effective, so the rare imported cases have not spread as rapidly. The rubella vaccine was first developed in 1969 by Dr. Maurice Hilleman, a prolific vaccine inventor. In 1964 65, a strain of the virus from Europe caused an epidemic of an estimated 12.5 million cases across the country. Of the 20,000 infected infants born alive, 2,100 died soon after birth, 12,000 were deaf, 3,580 were blind, and 1,800 had permanent mental disabilities. Perhaps the most famous American rubella victim was the actress Gene Tierney. In 1943, newly pregnant, she volunteered to be in a show at the Hollywood Canteen, a film industry nightclub for American troops. She caught the disease that night, and her daughter Daria was born weighing only three pounds, deaf, with cataracts and with brain damage so severe that she never learned to speak. According to Ms. Tierney's biography, two years later, at a tennis match, she met a fan, a former member of the Marine Corps Women's Reserve, who said she had slipped out of a rubella quarantine to go to the Canteen that night. "Everyone told me I shouldn't go, but I just had to," Ms. Tierney recalled the woman telling her. "You were always my favorite." Ms. Tierney wrote that she was too stunned to answer. Agatha Christie used that story as a plot device in "The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side." In it, an actress murders the woman whose thoughtlessness destroyed her child. The campaign to eliminate rubella in the Americas was formally declared by the Pan American Health Organization in 2003, but many countries had long suppressed their outbreaks through various campaigns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
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 ... 20 minutes and a cool kitten A scene from "Pete the Cat." (Pete's the blue one.) 'Pete the Cat' When to watch: A new season arrives Friday, on Amazon. I still have a song from this show's Valentine's Day special stuck in my head "I like that you like the things I like" is a dangerous truth, "Pete the Cat" so a new batch of episodes is a blessing and a curse for anyone prone to ear worms. This sweet show, based on the popular book series, follows Pete and his critter buddies, who like adventures, making music together and helpfully articulating their emotions so that children can practice what to do when they feel nervous or sad. Some kid shows are hectic to the point of discomfort, but "Pete" is mercifully chill. 'Black Monday' When to watch: Sunday at 8 p.m., on Showtime. Coronavirus delayed postproduction on Season 2 of this energetic Wall Street comedy, so after six episodes aired earlier this spring, the show took an unexpected break. Now the final four episodes of the season are here, and thank goodness if ever there were a moment for a show that includes tap dance offs and recreational consumption of giraffe laxatives, it would be now. Usually I hate when shows overdo their characters' Halloween costumes, but "Black Monday" is set in a slightly zanier world, and thus seeing Mo and Dawn (played by Don Cheadle and Regina Hall) and everyone else go all out feels more fitting. ... several hours, and I'm moving to the woods; farewell The survivalists of Season 6 of "Alone." 'Alone' When to watch: Now, on Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. The seventh season of this wilderness survival show is currently airing on Thursdays at 9 p.m. on History, but if you want to binge previous seasons, they're scattered on multiple subscription platforms. Some episodes are available on the History website; Seasons 1 and 2 are on Amazon; Seasons 3 to 6 are on Hulu; Season 6 is on Netflix, but don't worry about picking the "right" season to start with. Contestants are dropped off in remote locations with 10 survival items of their choosing, and if they make it 100 days, they win 1 million. Participants film themselves, which is different from most other survivalist shows, and things can get pretty dangerous. If you're cooped up and fantasizing about the outdoors, or if you've hit your limit of together time and are fantasizing about genuine solitude, watch this.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The House They Weren't Going to Buy Josh Kay and Susana Simonpietri, the husband and wife partners of the Brooklyn interior design firm Chango Co., had plenty of reasons to buy a second home in East Hampton, N.Y. "We've been working out in the Hamptons pretty consistently since 2008," said Ms. Simonpietri, 38, adding that whenever she had to meet clients or supervise contractors, "I'd drive six hours, there and back, in a day, which was not great." They also loved the beachy feel and creative history of the area. But when she and Mr. Kay, 45, visited in March of last year, the timing was wrong to buy a house. They were in the middle of renovating their brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant, Ms. Simonpietri was pregnant with their first child, and they were about to leave on a trip to Paris. The appointments were just to get a feeling for the market or, at least, that's what she told Mr. Kay. "He said, 'As long as we're just looking,' " she recalled. But then they saw a house that seemed ideal for them: a 2,100 square foot, cedar shingle saltbox built in 1973, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a pool, in the Springs hamlet of East Hampton. "It had some really cool things that we saw right away," Ms. Simonpietri said. "The living room was a double story space with these super skinny 1970s windows flanking the fireplace." The interiors had been updated over the years in ways the couple didn't like, but they were used to making cosmetic changes. "We thought we could just turn it into a white box, and add our stuff," Ms. Simonpietri said. It was Mr. Kay who finally asked the question while they were driving back to Brooklyn: "So are we going to make an offer?" They did, and negotiated the contract from Paris, before closing last June for about 750,000. Expecting the arrival of their baby boy, Oliver, that August, they moved to renovate the house quickly, while attempting to keep costs low. With the general contracting company Craft Builders, they enlarged an opening between the living room and dining area, tore out carpeting in the master bedroom and removed the kitchen's upper cabinets, counters and floor. They installed hardwood flooring where it was lacking; V groove paneling, open shelves and Carrara marble counters in the kitchen; and new bathroom vanities. Then they washed nearly the whole interior in a wave of Benjamin Moore Decorator's White paint not just the walls and ceilings, but also the floors, the brick fireplace, the kitchen's cherry base cabinets and even the bathroom tile. The work was done in three weeks at a cost of about 70,000, and Mr. Kay and Ms. Simonpietri moved in with furniture and accessories they had bought in the preceding months, during their travels: rustic 19th century chairs and a giant illuminated S sign from their trip to Paris; a living room sofa, rugs and baskets (which they transformed into pendant lamps for the dining area) found during a business trip to High Point, N.C.; and vintage pieces from online auctions, including a pair of beaten up oversize coffee tables once owned by Tommy Hilfiger, from Julien's Auctions. They agreed to leave their yard as it was, and thought they were finished by early July. But just as they were settling in, they heard chain saws nearby. Hoping that the people making the noise might be receptive to trimming a few overgrown trees and weeds, Mr. Kay set off to find the source. The workers wielding the chain saws, employees of the landscaping company Tri R, were not only willing to clear some brush, but also agreed to undertake additional work for Mr. Kay and Ms. Simonpietri. Before long, the simple trimming job had evolved into a complete overhaul of the landscape. Over the course of the summer, the company cut down trees, graded the yard, put down sod, put in a new gravel driveway, installed cedar fences and bluestone paths, added landscape lighting and planted evergreens, bushy grasses and lavender. The work cost another 70,000 or so. "The lesson here is don't follow the chain saws," Ms. Simonpietri said. Still, they have no regrets about buying a house they didn't intend to buy or doing landscaping they hadn't planned on. "It's what we'd hoped it would be," Mr. Kay said of the end result. "It's just so quiet and mellow." As Ms. Simonpietri put it, "We go there and our minds get reset."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013) 7:40 p.m. and 11:20 p.m. on FXM. Audiences will have to wait until the New York Film Festival opens in September to see "The Irishman," Martin Scorsese's much hyped return to the gangster crime genre. For now, they can revisit this movie, the director's lampooning of white collar crime. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the real life former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, seen here as the yacht riding, wine gulping figurehead of a brokerage firm whose lifestyle is fueled by fraud. Along with a partner played by Jonah Hill, he rides a roller coaster of bad form that culminates in a Quaalude impaired Lamborghini ride. "From its opening sequence a quick, nasty, unapologetic tour through its main character's vices and compulsions, during which he crash lands a helicopter on the grounds of his Long Island estate and (not simultaneously) shares cocaine with a call girl in an anatomically creative manner to its raw, chaotic finish, 'The Wolf of Wall Street' hums with vulgar, voyeuristic energy," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. "This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess," he added, "but it is never less than wide awake." FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998) 10:45 p.m. on Showtime. A similar kind of addled excess (and, perhaps, fetishization of bad behavior) can be found in this movie, Terry Gilliam's take on Hunter S. Thompson's formative book of gonzo journalism. Johnny Depp stars opposite Benicio Del Toro in a hallucinatory spree through Sin City. Like "The Wolf of Wall Street," its drugged out sequences can inspire laugher and nausea in equal measure.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Science does know, actually. Trump has argued that California's fires could be addressed by better forest management. "You gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests," he said last month. He's not totally wrong. Experts do say that improved management would mitigate fires (though they prescribe managed burns rather than whatever "cleaning floors" might mean). But that is far from the whole story. A barrage of scientific evidence shows that climate change has intensified droughts and hotter, drier weather across the Western United States, which has made brush, trees and other organic matter more combustible. According to one study, between 1984 and 2015, climate change contributed to the near doubling of the geographical area vulnerable to wildfires in the West. To put it in a way that might register with the president: We now have twice as much floor to clean. If you live in the West, the connection between climate change and fire is unavoidable. A month ago, we suffered a record breaking heat wave that baked the earth into kindling. Then the match was struck. The Bay Area woke up to a sky flashing blue with dry lightning lightning unaccompanied by rain. Nearly 9,000 strikes hit the ground, sparking fires across the region. Can the climate denying right really continue to ignore this basic cause and effect? Trump's brand of denial is hardly unique. In some ways, it is embedded in our political system. Trump has ignored climate change because it's been politically easy to do so. The effects of climate change are imprecise, and in the case of the wildfires, they're almost not his problem, as the Electoral College allows him to write off the West Coast entirely. (Trump often tweets as if "blue states" are not even part of the country.) The political challenges will remain even if Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats gain control of Congress. Environmental legislation is difficult: It imposes identifiable short term costs and inconveniences on people and businesses in return for long term benefits for society as a whole. It may seem that passing rules to protect the earth would require unusual political courage. But we have tackled these problems before. The late 1960s and early 1970s were no model of political comity in the United States; that era, like ours, was a time of intense polarization, with a citizenry restive for change. But according to a fascinating history of the Clean Air Act by Brigham Daniels, Andrew P. Follett and Joshua Davis that was published recently in the Hastings Law Journal, Richard Nixon and Democrats in Congress passed the law precisely because Americans had become so cynical about their government. Lawmakers saw fixing the environment as a difficult goal they could nevertheless achieve: "Vietnam, civil rights, and Soviet tension may all have been out of reach, but cleaning the air seemed to be attainable, and gains could be measured and seen," the authors write.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Violette Verdy, a French born ballerina who became one of New York City Ballet's most acclaimed stars by bringing her deep musicality, effervescent presence and theatrical flair to George Balanchine's plotless ballets, died on Monday in Bloomington, Ind. She was 82. Her cousin Annick Horville Chateaureynaud said she died after a brief illness. Ms. Verdy lived in Bloomington and taught at Indiana University there. She had earlier directed the Paris Opera Ballet and the Boston Ballet. When Balanchine invited Ms. Verdy to join his 10 year old company in 1958, even she was surprised. Her personal style of inflected dancing marked by accents, technical brio and hints of occasional drama seemed antithetical to the straightforward pure movement style that Balanchine promoted in City Ballet as choreographer and artistic director. As she often recalled, she felt she would not fit in with the company's long legged, fleet footed female dancers, who were encouraged to "just dance," as Balanchine reportedly wished. These dancers were Borzois, she feared, and she would be a French poodle. Yet today Ms. Verdy remains memorably identified with key roles she created in Balanchine ballets like "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux," "Emeralds," "Liebeslieder Walzer" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." When Jerome Robbins returned to the company in 1969 after a long absence, he immediately created similar signature roles for her in "Dances at a Gathering" (with its mysterious girl in green solo) and "In the Night." When she joined City Ballet, Ms. Verdy was 25, a child prodigy turned ballerina with an international reputation in Roland Petit's experimental ballets in France, some experience in the 19th century classics and a season of performances with American Ballet Theater In 1957 58. Rather than being a disadvantage, this background may have attracted Balanchine. "Balanchine wanted her because she brought to his company something it didn't have,'' Mr. Petit says in Dominique Delouche's documentary "Violette et Mr. B." "She was unique, but she had what exceptional female French dancers all had at that time: theatrical alchemy." She was also linked to Balanchine through the Russian training he shared with the teachers she had in Paris: Carlotta Zambelli, a former star of the Paris Opera Ballet, and Rousane Sarkissian, a noted Russian emigre teacher known as Madame Rousane, who studied with the Russians Ivan Clustine and Vera Trefilova. Another of her teachers, Victor Gsovsky, trained in Leningrad. Not only did Ms. Verdy fit into City Ballet; her trademark qualities also influenced Balanchine's choreography. He used her clarity and the impressive articulation in her legs and feet in "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux" to produce what she called "something to be joyous with." Praising her gift for reflecting musical phrasing in her dancing, Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, "Just to see her phrase music is an experience akin to hearing a great pianist." Violette Verdy was born Nelly Armande Guillerm on Dec. 1, 1933, in Pont l'Abbe, a French seaside town in Brittany. Her father, Renan Guillerm, died a few months after her birth; her mother, Jeanne Chateaureynaud, was a schoolteacher who thought ballet lessons would suit her vivacious daughter. Determined to seek out excellent teachers, Mrs. Guillerm and Nelly moved to Paris in 1942 at the height of the wartime German occupation. Madame Rousane became Nelly's main teacher, and by the mid 1940s her classes included French ballet's new creative talents, Roland Petit, Jean Babilee and Maurice Bejart. Petit's choreography, with its poetic themes of postwar disillusion or witty social allegories, created a sensation with his company, Les Ballets des Champs Elysees. Nelly and Leslie Caron joined the troupe as teenagers shortly after Nelly made her professional debut in 1945 in "Le Poete," Petit's tale of an alienated poet. Along the way, Nelly turned to acting, appearing with the company of the famed actors Madeleine Renaud and Jean Louis Barrault in Henry de Montherlant's play "Malatesta." At 16 she acted in a French feature film about a dancer's macabre fantasies. The film was released in the United States in 1950 as "Dream Ballerina," but not before the director, Ludwig Berger, insisted that she choose a stage name. From then on, she performed as Violette Verdy (a name reportedly invented by Petit to suggest a flower and the composer Verdi) and concentrated on a dance career. Petit formed a new company, Les Ballets de Paris de Roland Petit, in 1948 and reorganized it in 1953, the year his bitter fantasy ballet, "Le Loup," made Ms. Verdy an international star. She portrayed a bride whose husband tricks her into living with a wolf. Petit's fable, based on a libretto by the playwright Jean Anouilh, contrasted the gentleness of the beast with the prejudice of a society that kills those who upset established order. After a United States tour with London Festival Ballet in 1954 and guest appearances with La Scala and Ballet Rambert in London, where she danced her first "Giselle," Ms. Verdy joined American Ballet Theater in 1957. She performed in Antony Tudor's ballets, Birgit Cullberg's dramatic "Miss Julie" and, by contrast, Balanchine's neoclassic, plotless "Theme and Variations." With New York City Ballet, she danced more than 140 ballets, both old and new. Her dynamism added exuberant depth to the Dewdrop role in "The Nutcracker," while a turn of her head could signal rapture in "Liebeslieder Walzer." The extraordinary solo Robbins created for her in "Dances at a Gathering" had her suggesting steps and gestures without executing them fully, communing in a private language. A different mystery pervaded her big solo in "Emeralds," the first part of Balanchine's "Jewels." Here, unusually, all was arm gesture, part of a beautiful flow.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
CHICAGO A growing number of economists have found that many cities and states have considerable room to raise the minimum wage before employers meaningfully cut back on hiring. But that conclusion may gloss over some significant responses to minimum wage increases by individual employers, according to two new studies. And those reactions may, in turn, raise questions about the effectiveness of the minimum wage in helping certain workers. The findings, presented over the weekend at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the nation's premier gathering of academic economists, come as many cities and states are raising their minimum wages. California and New York last year approved gradual increases to 15 per hour. Proponents argue that raising the minimum is one of the most practical ways of improving living standards for the working poor and reducing inequality. To test that proposition, John Horton of New York University conducted an experiment on an online platform where employers post discrete jobs including customer service support, data entry, and graphic design and workers submit a proposed hourly wage for completing them. Mr. Horton, working with the platform, was able to impose a minimum wage at random on one quarter of about 160,000 jobs posted over roughly a month and a half in 2013. If a worker proposed an hourly wage that was below the minimum, the platform's software asked him or her to raise the bid until it cleared the threshold. In some cases the minimum wage was 2 per hour, in some cases 3, and in some cases 4. At first glance, the findings were consistent with the growing body of work on the minimum wage: While the workers saw their wages rise, there was little decline in hiring. But other results suggested that the minimum wage was having large effects. Most important, the hours a given worker spent on a given job fell substantially for jobs that typically pay a low wage say, answering customer emails. Mr. Horton concluded that when forced to pay more in wages, many employers were hiring more productive workers, so that the overall amount they spent on each job changed far less than the minimum wage increase would have suggested. The more productive workers appeared to finish similar work more quickly. The traditional way most studies determine if employees are hiring a different kind of worker after the minimum wage rises is to consider certain characteristics, like race, age and education level. The problem is that one worker can be much more productive than another with the same demographic profile, potentially masking the productivity upgrade that Mr. Horton documents. He was able to overcome this problem because the platform gave him access to precise data reflecting productivity, like past wages. When the minimum wage increased, employers tended to hire workers who had earned higher wages in the past, suggesting that they were looking for a more productive work force. If the pattern Mr. Horton identified were to apply across the economy, it would raise questions about whether increasing the minimum wage is as helpful to those near the bottom of the income spectrum as some proponents assume. The higher minimum wage could cost low skilled workers their jobs, as employers rush to replace them with somewhat more skilled workers. "There's nothing about my paper that says raising the minimum wage is a bad idea it may be that the trade off is worth making," Mr. Horton said. But there is "this consideration we probably haven't considered." Some economists are skeptical that employers would respond the way Mr. Horton describes if an entire city or state increased its minimum wage, as opposed to just a single employer or subset of employers. "This experiment is probably telling us much the same thing," Mr. Dube added in an email. "But if we want to know what would happen if N.Y. or C.A. raised its minimum wage to 15/hr, I doubt that this online experiment neat as it is will shed much light." When the minimum wage goes up for everyone, it is not so easy for employers to substitute better skilled workers because the new minimum would not offer a more attractive wage. In many cases, more highly skilled workers see their wages rise after minimum wage increases to keep them above the new minimum, making it all the more difficult to lure them away. Zane Tankel, chief executive and equity partner in a group that owns and operates several dozen Applebee's restaurants in the New York City area, said replacing low skilled workers with higher skilled ones after the state's recent minimum wage increases is "not something that we try to do." Mr. Tankel argued that differences in the productivity of low level workers in his industry are not very big. "It's just a lot more money for the exact same job description," he said. He is accelerating automation in his restaurants, including tablet devices for ordering certain items and payment, to offset the costs of the higher minimum. Mr. Horton is quick to acknowledge that there are many reasons his experiment might not capture employer behavior in the wider economy. But he says a higher minimum wage could attract more highly skilled workers who were not previously in the labor market say, college students. At the same time, less skilled workers might lose their jobs and drop out of the labor force. More broadly, he said, the contribution of his paper is to show that one impulse of many employers in the face of a minimum wage increase will be to find more productive workers, even if there are limits on how much they can follow through on this desire. "There are lots of reasons to think this is probably happening and we haven't detected it because we don't have the data," he said. "I know in my career, people have fine grained opinions about who's better than who, and we talk about them endlessly. We're constantly ranking. But when we talk about other labor markets, we pretend the same distinctions don't exist."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Debra Weiner is interviewing 100 newsmakers, thought leaders and other people who've made an outsize difference about the most valuable thing their parents taught them. Following are excerpts from a few of those stories, edited and condensed. Creating Something Out of Nothing An interdisciplinary artist whose work is in the collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, among numerous other major art institutions. My mother once told me how she came home from work one day and the only food we had in the house was popcorn. I'm sure she was thinking, "OK, what am I going to do? How do I camouflage this from my children? I've got to come up with a plan." So she said, "Oh my God, we're going to have a party! And we're going to make popcorn! And we get to watch a movie!" We got all excited and crazy and didn't think twice about not having enough food. Yes, I could open the refridge and see nothing in there. But for some reason, it just wasn't registering, I think because she'd come up with this celebratory party around popcorn and had created something extraordinary. It applies to everything. Growing up, I would make my mother stuff 24/7 things like halter tops and macrame accessories back in the day, all of which she wore proudly, or just something simple like a card. But whatever it was, my mother never said, "Thank you sweetie. It's cute. I like it. Love you." Her response was always so exaggerated, so enormous in terms of intensity that it made me feel like it was the most extraordinary thing she'd ever had in her life. And that's what she gave me this sort of knowledge, this kind of magic to create something out of nothing by restructuring, redesigning, reimagining what can happen in a moment and then walking into it. It's really about making the moment matter and how you bring clarity to whatever that is, good or bad. If you're down, honey, be down in the moment. Get a clear handle on it and step into it. It's all part of the world. You just have to walk into it. And oh my God, the liberty around that is phenomenal, because it's endless. Author of the novel "Call Your Daughter Home" and an award winning television producer. My mother is a recovering alcoholic, and I think it's important to note that she was 16, a sophomore in high school, when she got pregnant with me. My father was 19. They ran away to Tennessee to get married because nobody in Kentucky would marry them. They lasted about 12 years. When they first split up, my mother wasn't making any money and she was a mess. We were on food stamps. She would disguise herself, wear a wig and scarf and glasses, and go downtown to shop for groceries because she didn't want anyone to know. And she really started drinking a lot. It wasn't every day, but you never knew when it was going to happen. She would call to say, "I've only had a couple drinks. I'll be home soon." And soon would mean 3 or 4 or 5 in the morning. I don't know how bad it got for her because I didn't want to know, but there were blackouts and a car accident that she didn't remember. It was a Saturday morning and she woke me up. She was hung over and crying and I remember going outside, walking around the car and seeing the whole front end bashed in, but I didn't see any blood. And there was a suicide attempt when I was 14. I didn't understand why anybody who had two kids would do something like that. So it was a dark time. Later, once I joined Al Anon, when my son was born, I realized alcoholism is a disease and she just didn't have any control over it. But in spite of the difficulties growing up with an alcoholic parent, in spite of the difficulties of having really young parents, the thing I learned from my mother was the courage to change. She ended up getting her high school diploma, she quit drinking, quit smoking, and became an incredibly successful real estate agent in Kentucky. And that was a real gift to me, because seeing her forge her way through life, I knew I could forge my way. I thought, if she can change her life, I can change mine if I really, really want to. After I had my daughter, I stepped away from the entertainment business for a year and went to work as a grief counselor at the Grief Recovery Institute. And what you learn in this program is that even if you've been victimized beyond your wildest imagination, hanging on to that victimization is your responsibility. It's something you can change. Once I was able to shift and look for whatever I could to take care of on my side of the street, my whole life my marriage, my finances, everything changed. I thought, if my mother had the courage to quit what had wreaked so much havoc in her life and ours and reinvent herself, I could certainly have the courage to leave an unhappy work situation and do something I've always wanted to do. And it's happening. A few years ago, I wrote a novella that led to a full novel, which was published in June. I mean, change is inevitable for all of us, but looking at your patterns of behavior and choosing to do something about them takes a lot of honesty, which is scary. Seeing something that's not good and leaving it behind, in the hope you can make something better, I think that's courage. Stepping out in faith, for me it's critical. A featured dancer with the Joffrey Ballet who began her professional ballet career at age 17, and counted Rudolf Nureyev among her partners. My mother was a waitress in some Italian restaurant and my father was a trumpet player in a band a pit in a burlesque house in Miami. We were probably really poor. We had a very tiny house; they were just scraping. But my mother wanted something special, something big for me and my sister, and a couple of dollars every week went into the pot to help the kids do X. In my world, they decided it was going to be dance. I started out at 6 in one of these tap jazz acrobatic ballet classes that taught you not much of anything but everything in an hour once a week. The other six days, I would practice every afternoon for half an hour. So right away I learned about discipline. It was huge in our house. I always called it "the big D." Before you do your homework, as soon as you come home, put on your tap shoes and tap in the little six foot kitchen, back and forth. "OK, again," my mother would say. "Again. OK, repeat." Later, it became practice in the carport. My dad brought out a piece of plywood and attached a little barre to the house so that I could practice my ballet. Again it was first you practice, then homework, then if there's time you can play a little. It was fine with me. I really loved it. My sister was killed in a car accident when she was 18. She had just entered into the University of Miami and was a beauty queen, a soloist baton twirler, and had this television program, a live talk show, that she did on Saturdays. Life ended up falling apart for my mother and she was never the same. She was terrified the same thing would happen to me. I was 10, and from that point on "the big D" became even more important. Everything came onto my shoulders. I had to make it. It was like, "Whew, this thing better work because they don't have my sister any more." It wasn't some tragic play where it never happened. I danced on stages in great opera houses around the world. It was big. It was wonderful. But only when I deserved it did I get it. My last five years of dance, I was saving every penny. I wasn't like some scrounge that ran around without proper clothing, but you can't dance forever, and I always wanted to go to college. At 38, I went to N.Y.U. and on to Columbia for a master's degree. So "the big D" came through in that area, too. If you don't have discipline, you can easily fall apart or sort of chuck it and not try for it. But if you don't do it today, it might not be there tomorrow. I mean, it can be a wonderful life, but things happen and sometimes life gets cut short. So if something comes across your little plate, you got to grab that cookie.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
NOT all Deux Chevaux were underpowered and inexpensive. In the 1960s, Citroen built the Sahara, which offered twice the horsepower at nearly twice the price of a regular 2CV. The Sahara's main attraction was 4 wheel drive, though it was done the hard way: with two engines and two transmissions. The Sahara was designed as a relatively simple off road vehicle. Many were used by French companies exploring North Africa for oil and minerals. A 1962 road test in Popular Mechanics reported a top speed of 65 m.p.h. with both engines running; on one engine, it was capable of barely 40 miles an hour. Saharas seldom change hands. But when they do, the price is higher than the 20,000 that Noel Slade, owner of Eurocar Imports in Toms River, N.J., asks for a standard 2CV.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
In the opening scene of "Double Lover," its protagonist, Chloe (Marine Vacth), is seen getting her hair cut. Her wet hair, pale face and the gray background impart a simple elegance to the sequence. The following scene takes place in the bleaker confines of a gynecologist's office. In one shot, the screen fills with the colors pink and silver. Viewers may wonder exactly what they are seeing at first, but as the camera zooms out it becomes clear: a speculum seen from the point of view of a doctor conducting a vaginal examination. The shot dissolves into a geometrically corresponding close up of Chloe's eye. The straightforward explicitness of the imagery is a hallmark of Francois Ozon, the film's director (his best known films include the thrillers "See the Sea" and "Swimming Pool"); the juxtaposition is very Georges Bataille (he wrote a piece of outre eroticism titled "Story of the Eye"). Some might say it's all very French, and perhaps it is. But it does make one sit up and take notice. The clever thing about it is that it's not until the movie is almost over that the viewer can fully understand this imagery as something more than an effective, but perhaps idle provocation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
TEQUESTA, Fla. On their way home from an SAT tutoring session, the Van Dresser twins, Alexandra and Samantha, 17, popped into Tan Fever Spa, a small family owned salon tucked into a strip mall between a bar and a supermarket. They wanted to get tan before the prom, and the salon was the perfect combination of fast and cheap: Twenty minutes in a tanning bed cost just 7. "It's the quickness of the tanning bed," Alexandra explained one afternoon last year. "We don't have time to lay out on a beach." Indoor tanning might seem like a fashion that faded with the 1980s, but it remains a persistent part of American adolescence, popular spring, summer and fall but especially in winter, when bodies are palest. Salons with names like Eternal Summer and Tan City dot strip malls across the country, promising prettiness and, in some cases, better health, despite a growing body of evidence that links indoor tanning to skin cancer. Here in the Sunshine State, there are more tanning salons than McDonald's restaurants, CVS stores or Bank of America branches, according to a 2014 study by University of Miami researchers. For decades, researchers saw indoor tanning as little more than a curiosity. But a review of the scientific evidence published last year estimated that tanning beds account for as many as 400,000 cases of skin cancer in the United States each year, including 6,000 cases of melanoma, the deadliest form. And clinicians are concerned about the incidence rate of melanoma in women under 40, which has risen by a third since the early 1990s, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. (Death rates have not gone up, however, a testament to earlier detection and better treatment.) "We're seeing younger and younger patients coming to us with skin cancer," said Dr. Eleni Linos, assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco. "That is a new phenomenon." And more than 40 states now have some sort of restriction on the use of tanning salons by minors, according to AIM at Melanoma, an advocacy and research group based in California, the first state to adopt a ban on minors in 2011. At least nine states plus the District of Columbia (pending congressional approval) have passed such bans, even Republican controlled Texas, where antipathy to government regulation runs deep. "The tide is turning," said Samantha Guild, director of public policy at AIM. "States are saying: 'We don't have to go out on a limb on our own. There's broad support for this issue.' " For the first time, new federal data has documented a decline in the use of indoor tanning among teenage girls, dropping to about a fifth of them in 2013, from a quarter in 2009. Gery P. Guy Jr., a researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who analyzed the data, which was released in December, attributed the decline to greater awareness and tougher laws. Even so, public health experts say tanning remains a persistent problem, especially among white teenage girls, a full third of whom say they have tanned indoors, more than the share who smoke cigarettes. There were about 14,000 salons across the country as of early 2014, according to John Overstreet, executive director of the Indoor Tanning Association. That does not count tanning beds in gyms and beauty parlors. The number is down by about a fifth in recent years, he said, as the recession eroded young women's disposable income and the tax imposed under the new health care law squeezed salons' profits. Mr. Overstreet argues that there is no science that conclusively links moderate, nonburning ultraviolet ray exposure to melanoma. His organization's mission, according to its website, is "to protect the freedom of individuals to acquire a suntan." "There's no longer a question of whether UV is important," said Dr. Gershenwald, the medical director of the Melanoma and Skin Center at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "Genomics has been transformative in our understanding of melanoma." The problem with indoor tanning, researchers say, is that many of those who do it, do it a lot. The federal government has collected data on tanning among high school students only since 2009, but researchers were surprised at the findings: Among those who used tanning beds, more than half had used them 10 times or more in the past year, according to Dr. Guy. Alan Geller, a senior lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, "We've been astounded by how many young people are using tanning beds and how often they are using them." Heather Champion, who manages a beauty salon in Palm Beach, Fla., said she had tanned so often in high school in upstate New York that her tanning card, which listed her visits, often needed additional pages, like a world traveler's passport. "There were some days I would go twice," she said. Four years ago, at age 26, she learned she had melanoma. The doctors caught it early and removed the cancer, but she still has to monitor her skin. Now she looks at herself in family pictures from those years and cringes. "I was so much tanner than everyone else. It's just weird." There is strong peer pressure to be tan, particularly in small town high schools. Sarah Hughes started tanning at 16, during beauty pageant season in her hometown, Dothan, Ala. She often tanned five days a week, paying with money earned working at Pier One Imports. In her senior year, she got a job at a tanning salon so she could tan for free. "Living in a small town in southern Alabama, you don't want to be the oddball out," said Ms. Hughes, who is now 30 and works as a loan processor in a bank. Over time, she came to crave it. "People did drugs. People had eating disorders. I tanned," she said. Joel Hillhouse, director of the Skin Cancer Prevention Laboratory at East Tennessee State University, said such compulsive behavior is not uncommon. A small share in a survey he conducted even admitted to stealing money and breaking into tanning salons to tan. "Living in a small town in southern Alabama, you don't want to be the oddball out," Ms. Hughes said. "People did drugs. People had eating disorders. I tanned." Ms. Hughes stopped tanning at 25 when a doctor diagnosed advanced melanoma. A tumor on her left leg had grown down into her muscle and, eventually, her lymph nodes. In all, she had 33 spots removed, including eight melanomas over two years, a searing experience. She survived. Brandi Dickey, from Fort Worth, did not. Her mother, Paula Pittsinger, blames the near constant tanning from the age of 14 to 28, when she was found to have a particularly aggressive form of cancer that eventually spread throughout her body to her brain. She died in October at 33 after 18 surgical procedures, including six on her brain. There was no history of melanoma in her family. "When you see the impact, the brain surgeries, the scars, when you see what tanning has done, it has got to hit home that it's just not worth it," Ms. Pittsinger said. It was not always desirable to be tan. For generations, parasols and the pale skin they protected were signs of upper class privilege. Being tan was like having calluses something associated with working class people who toiled in jobs that exposed them to the sun, according to "Suntanning in 20th Century America," a social history of tanning by Kerry Segrave, published in 2005. But in the early 1900s, the medical profession began to promote the health benefits of tanning. Workers were increasingly moving into factories where complexions grew pallid, as the upper classes spent more time outside playing sports. By the 1920s, a tan had become fashionable, surfacing in conversations among affluent society types in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. A character, Maury Noble, mused in "The Beautiful and Damned," published in 1922: "I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze, if I remember rightly." "The 1929 girl must be tanned," an article in Vogue proclaimed, Mr. Segrave reported. Indoor tanning exploded in popularity in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Dr. June K. Robinson, a professor of dermatology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, remembers being handed a bright orange flier for free tans in downtown Chicago in the early 1980s. "I'm waiting for the light to change, and I'm saying to myself this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of," she said. "I'd love to stop tanning, but I can't," said Madison, who asked that her last name not be used because she felt self conscious about the issue. "Confidence is such a touchy aspect of a girl's life. It takes a lot of time and practice. I'm just not there yet." The C.D.C.'s national youth survey found that indoor tanning often goes along with binge drinking and unhealthy weight control practices. Among teenage girls, it was associated with illegal drug use and having sex with four or more partners, and among boys with the use of steroids, daily cigarette smoking and attempted suicide. Boys also tan indoors, but their numbers are a small fraction of the total. Some experts say combating the problem is a matter of raising awareness about the dangers of tanning. But many women said in interviews that they were aware of health risks but cared more about how they looked now. "If I get skin cancer I'll deal with it then," said Elizabeth LaBak, 22, a student at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. "I can't think about that now. I'm going to die of something." The Van Dresser twins in Florida say they slather their moles with sunscreen before they get in a tanning bed. They even joined a melanoma awareness club in their high school. But the pressure to be tan is strong, and they find it hard to resist. "It's what teens do," Samantha said. "Especially in Florida." The new state laws restricting tanning by teenagers seem to be having some effect. According to Dr. Guy, the C.D.C. researcher, female students in states that require a combination of parental permission or other age restrictions are 40 percent less likely to tan indoors. Ms. LaBak, the college student from Massachusetts, said fewer women on campus tan now. "All the Victoria Secret models are pale now," she said. Even so, salons persist. About half the country's top 125 colleges have tanning beds on campus or in off campus housing, University of Massachusetts medical school researchers reported in October. But Ms. LaBak's favorite spot, Beach Club Tanning, a salon in a strip mall next to a CVS and a Big Y grocery store that offered 2 tans, has closed, and "now there's no place that's cheap enough," she said. "The tanning thing is like the smoking thing," she said. "Everyone used to smoke. And then they said, 'You'll die of lung cancer.' That's what's happening to tanning."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Chinese and Japanese have left distinctive marks on Peruvian cuisine immigrant laborers having brought the wok and knife techniques that led to national dishes like lomo saltado and tiradito. But long before that, Lima's culinary influences were derived from the Spanish and African slaves who cooked in their kitchens. This type of cooking, called criollo, is still around, but it is found far more frequently in the kitchens of Limena grandmothers than in restaurants. Isolina, a stylish tavern in Barranco that opened in January, is an attempt to rectify this. "The tendency for me is to look back," said Jose del Castillo, the restaurant's chef and owner. "This is food that doesn't go out of fashion." During a recent lunch, when this heavy, hearty fare is traditionally eaten, my wife and I stopped in the downstairs bar area, with its painted tile floors and shelves lined with glass jars of pickled aji amarillo and turnips. We had a signature cocktail, the Capitan Oroya, with pisco, red vermouth and red wine, along with an IPA from the local brewery Maddok. Afterward, we moved upstairs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Of course, it takes two. "The fact that other team members returned the handshake shows that the regular information on the distance and hygiene rules must be even more intense," the team said in a statement. And in another setback for German soccer, which is expected to get the go ahead from German authorities on Wednesday to restart on May 15, Erzgebirge Aue, a second tier club, sent its entire team into isolation after a staff member tested positive. We've been following the travails of Australia's National Rugby League as it tries to restart on May 28: players being fined for violating social distancing, other players coming down with flulike symptoms. In the latest blow, a city where a team had planned to train decided to yank away the welcome mat. The Melbourne Storm had expected to start training in the city of Albury in New South Wales, Australia, on Wednesday. But the City Council rejected the plan on Tuesday, citing health concerns. The state of Victoria, where the Storm are based, had already ruled the team could not train there, either. Craig Bellamy, the team's coach, said that he was itching to get started ... somewhere, anywhere. "I think we are going to be able to start contact on Saturday," he told News.com. "You'd love to be able to start it on Wednesday. We're not going to just let them go bashing into each other straight away. They are going to have to let their bodies adjust, but come Saturday I think there's only about two and a half weeks before the first game."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Mr. Goodman is a professor at New York University School of Law, where Ms. Schulkin is a student. How Trump and His Team Covered Up the Coronavirus in Five Days The strongest critics of the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic point to its flat footedness and the consequences of time lost. But the full account looks worse. Over the last five days of February, President Trump and senior officials did something more sinister: They engaged in a cover up. A look at this window of time gives insight into how several members of the president's team were willing to manipulate Americans even when so many lives were at stake. The recent reports that the president wanted to fire the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's top expert on viral respiratory diseases, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, during this period helps put the pieces of the puzzle together. What was her offense to the president? In a conference call with reporters on the final Tuesday of the month, Dr. Messonnier spoke frankly. "We want to make sure the American public is prepared," she said, then put it in personal terms by saying what she told her children that morning: "We as a family ought to be preparing for significant disruption to our lives." At the time, senior officials knew the coronavirus was an extreme threat to Americans. Thanks to information streaming in from U.S. intelligence agencies for months, officials reportedly believed that a "cataclysmic" disease could infect 100 million Americans and discussed lockdown plans. The warnings were given to Mr. Trump in his daily brief by the intelligence community; in calls from Alex Azar, the secretary of health; and in memos from his economic adviser Peter Navarro. The same day that Dr. Messonnier spoke, the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence raised the warning level inside the government to WATCHCON1, concluding that the coronavirus was imminently likely to develop into a full blown pandemic. But the White House did not want the American public to know. The president's stated concerns were specific. He didn't want to upset the markets or China during trade talks, and it appears he may have also simply been in denial, counting on his personal hunches and luck. So the president's top advisers took to the airwaves with a united purpose: to deny the truth. That Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Azar appeared at a news briefing, public health professionals including Dr. Anthony Fauci behind him, and discussed Dr. Messonnier's comments. "We're trying to engage in radical transparency with the American public as we go through this," he declared. But within 20 seconds of that statement, he uttered state propaganda. "Thanks to the president and this team's aggressive containment efforts," he said, coronavirus "is contained." That same day, Larry Kudlow, the president's National Economic Council director, in direct response to Dr. Messonnier's comments, told CNBC: "We have contained this. I won't say airtight, but pretty close to airtight." The following day, Defense Secretary Mark Esper spoke to the military. In a video conference with American commanders around the world, he instructed them to give notice on decisions made about how to protect their personnel from the virus if doing so might "run afoul of President Trump's messaging," according to a New York Times report. That Wednesday, the president used the day's news conference by the coronavirus task force, with Dr. Fauci alongside him, to lie to the public. "You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That's a pretty good job we've done," he told the American public. He and Mr. Azar would continue to make such assurances over the next two days Mr. Azar in remarks before lawmakers and the president in statements from the White House and bellowed at political rallies. At the end of the five days, Dr. Fauci spoke on the "Today" show in public messaging that would later become controversial. The question was put to him in terms Americans could easily appreciate: "So, Dr. Fauci, it's Saturday morning in America. People are waking up right now with real concerns about this. They want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits and, if so, how?" Dr. Fauci offered a nuanced reply: "No. Right now, at this moment, there's no need to change anything that you're doing on a day by day basis. Right now the risk is still low." He added, however, that this could change. Dr. Fauci might now regret how he tried to thread the needle, but he also knew to expect the question and he repeated the party line. In effect, for five days, the president along with some of his closest senior officials disseminated an egregiously false message to Americans. The messaging would continue well beyond those days until the stark images of refrigerated morgue trucks and spiked lines on colored graphs showed the escalating numbers of cases and dead. Understanding this playbook is not only important in its own terms. It goes to the heart of whether Americans can trust this administration in the months ahead when they must make life or death decisions about how to protect their health and when to reboot the economy. Ryan Goodman, editor in chief of Just Security, is a professor at New York University School of Law, where Danielle Schulkin is a third year student. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
NOW LIVES In a prewar studio apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with his girlfriend, Marisa Richter. CLAIM TO FAME Anthony Naples is an up and coming dance music producer as well as an in demand D.J. who has played at clubs all over the world like Fabric in London and Panorama Bar in Berlin. He has also toured with the British electro rock auteur Four Tet. BIG BREAK In 2010, he impulsively sent his first track, "Mad Disrespect," a simmering house song with complex percussions and soulful vocals, to Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter, the D.J.s behind the trendy Mister Saturday Night and Mister Sunday parties in Brooklyn. Mr. Harkin and Mr. Carter loved the track, and released his first E.P., "The Mad Disrespect E.P.," on their label in 2012. The two also introduced him to Four Tet (his real name is Kieran Hebden). LATEST PROJECT His debut album, "Body Pill," will be released this week on Four Tet's label, Text Records. Recorded on Mr. Naples's home computer, the eight song album is a deft, sophisticated dance effort that sets arrhythmic synths and atmospheric textures against laid back beats. "New York was an influence, and the ambience of the city is an electric hum," Mr. Naples said. "I was trying to capture that sort of warmth."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A CNN reporting team was arrested live on television early Friday while covering the protests in Minneapolis, an extraordinary interference with freedom of the press that drew outrage from First Amendment advocates and a public apology from Minnesota's governor. The CNN crew, led by the correspondent Omar Jimenez, was released by the police in Minneapolis after spending about an hour in custody. In the moments before the 5 a.m. arrest, Mr. Jimenez could be heard calmly identifying himself as a reporter and offering to move to wherever he and his team were directed. "Put us back where you want us, we are getting out of your way, just let us know," Mr. Jimenez told the police officers, who were outfitted in riot gear, as the network broadcast the exchange in real time. "Wherever you'd want us, we will go." Instead, he and his team Bill Kirkos, a producer, and Leonel Mendez, a camera operator had their hands bound behind their backs. Their camera was placed on the ground, still rolling; CNN anchors watching from New York sounded stunned as they reported on their colleagues' arrests. It is common in autocratic countries for journalists to be swept up in arrests during protests and riots, but rare in the United States, where news gathering is protected by the First Amendment. Lawyers at CNN reached out to the Minnesota authorities, and the network's president, Jeffrey A. Zucker, spoke briefly on Friday morning with the state's governor, Tim Walz. Mr. Walz told Mr. Zucker that the arrest was "inadvertent" and "unacceptable," according to CNN's account of the call. By about 6:30 a.m. local time, the crew had been released and was back on television. "Everyone, to their credit, was pretty cordial," Mr. Jimenez said of his interaction with the police officers after his arrest. "As far as the people that were leading me away, there was no animosity there. They weren't violent with me. We were having a conversation about just how crazy this week has been for every single part of the city." At a news conference on Friday, Mr. Walz issued what he called "a very public apology" to CNN for the morning's events, saying, "I take full responsibility; there is absolutely no reason something like this should happen." His voice emotional at times, Mr. Walz said he believed that allowing journalists to bear witness to the protests, and the police's handling of the situation, was a critical component of restoring public trust. "We have got to ensure there is a safe spot for journalism to have the story," the governor said, adding, "Not because it's a nice thing to do. Because it is a key component to how we fix this."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"I am short. And loud," the children's book author says. "I think of myself as an enormously lucky person: I get to tell stories for a living." Her latest story, "A Piglet Named Mercy," enters the picture book list at No. 5. On her website, DiCamillo writes movingly about how she became a writer, remembering a college professor who told her class, "That's what writing is all about. Seeing. It is the sacred duty of the writer to pay attention, to see the world." The lecture didn't make much of an impression on her. "I didn't want to see the world. I wanted the world to see me. Not until years later when I finally made a commitment to writing, when I was fighting despair, wondering if I had the talent to do what I wanted to do, did those words come back to me. And what I thought was this: I cannot control whether or not I am talented, but I can pay attention. I can make an effort to see." It turns out that a lot of novelists use their websites to talk frankly about how they became writers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Latin Grammy Awards have established themselves over two decades as a flashy, hip pumping, over the top Las Vegas extravaganza. Under pandemic conditions, the 21st annual show, which will be broadcast Thursday night on Univision, will be far different. Still, many of the top nominees are familiar past winners, among them the Spanish songwriter Alejandro Sanz, the Colombian songwriters Juanes and J Balvin, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente, the Argentine songwriter Fito Paez and the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny, who has the most nominations this year. They will all be performing, without live audiences, on this year's broadcast. For occasional listeners to the broad spectrum of Latin music, the Latin Grammys provide rare prime time United States television exposure, and often an introduction, for performers who have already built large followings on their own. Three of the 10 nominees for best new artist will step into the spotlight Thursday night: the Puerto Rican songwriters Anuel AA and Rauw Alejandro and one of the Latin Grammys' best discoveries, the 25 year old Argentine songwriter, singer and rapper Nathy Peluso, who just released her debut album, "Calambre" ("Shock"), in October. In the album's cover photo, Peluso is leaping in midair, holding an electrical cord and dressed in bandages. "That's the feeling," she said. "I'm injured but I'm still rocking it. I'm still working on me. I'm still in the battle." She spoke via Zoom from Buenos Aires, where she was rehearsing for her Latin Grammys performance. She kept a browser window open to a translation program to occasionally make sure she had the right word in English. The Latin Grammy Awards, whose 22nd edition was held in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Nov. 18, is a yearly celebration of Latin music. Learn more about the artists and songs that were honored this year: None Who Won? Here is the complete list of winners. Song of the Year: "Patria y Vida," a Cuban rap song that became a protest anthem, won the prestigious award. Leading Man: Find out what's behind the indelibly catchy songs of the Colombian singer Camilo, who tied for most awards with Juan Luis Guerra. Chilean Songwriter: Mon Laferte, who won for best singer songwriter album, wants her art to transmit all the feelings. Instead of choosing a single musical path for her first international release, Peluso chose a dozen at once. Her songs delve into reggaeton, salsa, funk, hip hop and pop, invoking eras from the 1970s to the 2000s. One track earned her a nomination in the best alternative song category, for "Buenos Aires," a languid R B ballad about loneliness and yearning that has jazzy harmonies and a hip hop undertow. "She's really inspired by a lot of music," said the album's main producer, Rafa Arcaute, by phone from Miami. Arcaute, who is Argentine, has won multiple Latin Grammys for his work with Calle 13 and is nominated again as producer of the year, an award he won in 2016. "She is super, super young, but in terms of music she is really mature a young girl with an old mind," he added. "And at the same time she has an innocence, a sense of discovery. She knows a lot of music, but at the same time is in the process of discovering everything. She really knows the value of the music." "I find different women inside me, different voices," she said. "I really love to investigate characters." Peluso was born in Buenos Aires and moved with her family to Spain when she was 10. "I always felt like an outsider, because my parents were so Argentine," she said. "In Barcelona, my friends were from Colombia and Puerto Rico, and I was learning about all their cultures. I was crossing barriers all the time. I lived with the feeling that I am a nomad. With my career I'm always traveling, I'm always in a different place, but my soul is my home." She knew, early on, that she wanted to perform. She studied audiovisual communication, dance and theater, and as a teenager she sang covers of Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone in hotels and restaurants. For a while she supported herself as a street performer in Madrid, set up with a keyboard and typing what she calls "fast poetry" for cash: "Give me a word and I'll write a poem in two minutes," she said. "I started to see I was good. So I started to put music to these poems. How can I sing this? No, I can't sing this, because it's too strange. But I can rap it! So I started to rap these poems with lo fi beats." In 2017, she released an EP of those raps, "Esmeralda," and a no budget video for the title song; it now has 8 million views on YouTube. She followed the EP with a single: the spiraling, furious, trap tinged breakup song "Corashe." The word was her own twist on the Spanish word "coraje": "courage." And she bent its syllables because the standard word was "boring," she said. "Coraje is different to say from corashe," she explained. "The way the word inserts in your mind is different. Like when you play an electric guitar, it is different from a classical guitar. 'Corashe' doesn't exist in a language but it's a good sound." The song carried Peluso to tours, to a second EP ("La Sandunguera") and to a contract with a major label (Sony), along with fashion deals including an Adidas endorsement. Working with Arcaute, Peluso assembled "Calambre" in Spain, Miami, Los Angeles and Argentina, often working remotely before and during the pandemic. They enlisted far flung collaborators like the hip hop producer Illmind, the Puerto Rican salsa mainstay Ramon Sanchez and the horn section arranger Michael B. Nelson, who often worked with Prince. But Peluso recorded "Buenos Aires" with the musicians who had backed the beloved Argentine rock songwriter Luis Alberto Spinetta, who died in 2012, at the Buenos Aires studio he had used for many years. Arcaute, who had also been in Spinetta's band, said the musicians were returning to that studio for the first time. "It was a really special session, super emotional," he recalled. The album concludes with another Argentine connection: "Agarrate," which starts as a mournful tango bolero complete with a bandoneon, the definitive tango accordion before suddenly shifting gears into aggressive hip hop. It leaps from heartache to revenge. "I really need to inspire the girls," Peluso said. "Like, OK, we are broken now. You can be broken and you can share everything. Being broken, it is learning, you can be inspired. And then you've got to know that we are going pa'lante. We are going forward."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Printing presses are few, and high quality paper stock is hard to find. In Lagos, the country's largest city and the hub of its fashion industry, consistent electricity is an issue, with power going in and out throughout the day. And there is no formal distribution network, beyond selling the publications in a select few chain outlets or at major airports. Many magazines rely on street vendors to sell single issues to commuters stuck in the notoriously slow Lagos traffic along thoroughfares like Obafemi Awolowo Way in the city's Ikeja section. The transactions are clumsy: Customers quickly throw money out their car windows before traffic picks up and they move on. Beyond all the logistical hurdles, roughly 87 million people in Nigeria out of a population of around 200 million live below the poverty line. But thanks to industries like oil, the country is also awash in wealth and opulence, and luxury brands are eager to establish firmer footholds there . So the Nigerian fashion magazine industry has found a receptive young readership. People turn to the publications looking for the latest news about movie stars, Afrobeats artists, fashion models, social media personalities and African reality TV figures, along with events like Fashion Week in Lagos last month. And it has benefited from the cultural cachet that Nigerian fashion and entertainment have built up around the globe. Performers like Wizkid, Tiwa Savage and Davido have made Afrobeats, a musical style influenced by Caribbean, hip hop, electronic and highlife music, popular worldwide. And Nollywood, as the Nigerian film industry is known, generates close to 700 million a year. Nigerian designers have gained international recognition with a style sense that is inherently cultural. Amaka Osakwe's women's wear line Maki Oh has dressed boldface names like Michelle Obama, Lupita Nyong'o and the Nollywood star Genevieve Nnaji using adire, a distinctive hand woven dyed cloth from southwest Nigeria. On her Instagram page, the Nigerian born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie showcases photos of herself in colorful, eye grabbing outfits, along with the hashtag MadeinNigeria. Another influential designer, Duro Olowu, who has dressed notable figures like Solange Knowles and Mrs. Obama, was born in Lagos and often posts inspiration from his home country on Instagram. "In Lagos, the average girl on the street is wearing leopard print leggings, a red top and a big turban and she just doesn't care," said Bolaji Animashaun, founder of The Style HQ, a Lagos based fashion and lifestyle website. "Our fashion is not soft. There's something in us that is always fighting, and it comes through in our style." Here are four entrepreneurial women, ranging in age from 28 to 61, who are leading publications both new and old to capture this cultural milieu. In doing so, they are serving a wide audience throughout the African continent and within diasporic enclaves in the United States and Britain and telling the story of Nigeria to the world. When Betty Irabor started Genevieve in 2003, advertisers paid little mind to women's magazines. "The Guardian, Punch, Vanguard," Mrs. Irabor said, referring to the publications that drew ad dollars. "It was very business and hard news focused, and very little money was dedicated to lifestyle and fashion pages." And so, as a member of Lagos's elite Mrs. Irabor, 61, has been married to the media personality Soni Irabor for 35 years she leveraged her personal contacts with advertisers to secure funding. Even those who agreed thought Genevieve would be short lived. "Magazines here come and go every day," she said. Fifteen years later, the publication is one of Nigeria's leading women's magazines and has a staff of 14 working from its headquarters in Lagos's Lekki neighborhood. It publishes 10 issues a year, retailing for 1,000 naira, or about 2.80. The covers are glitzy and celebrity driven: Its July/August edition featured the Nigerian actress Adesua Etomi, who starred in the Nollywood hit "The Wedding Party," and the film veteran Joke Silva graced September's cover. As publisher, Mrs. Irabor has become a celebrity of sorts herself; she was recently part of a Lancome ad campaign. The magazine has placed an emphasis on its digital operations, the better to serve an increasingly younger audience that wants round the clock coverage of celebrity news. And it is a family affair. Mrs. Irabor's daughter, Sonia, 28, is an editor at the magazine, helping her mother stay abreast of what topics will appeal to young, cosmopolitan Nigerian professionals. Sonia's confirmation name is also what gave the publication its title. Her latest endeavor is Today's Woman, a lifestyle and news magazine that publishes 10 times a year. Today's Woman has also developed an app that costs 500 naira a month, or about 1.40. The app allows the magazine's online audience of 200,000 plus readers to share content with one another. Instead of featuring celebrities, its covers usually highlight topics many in Nigeria still consider taboo; articles like "Drug Abuse Is Closer Than You Think" and "Say No to Domestic Violence." "No one was really addressing these problems," she said. "Beyond the fashion, we're insistent on addressing things that should matter." Ms. Onyenokwe remains committed to the magazine, but her plans for living a more relaxed lifestyle seem laughable now. "My kids all say that I work harder than I've ever worked before," she said. "But I believe in the importance of shining a light on important issues and just telling the story." 'If African women are to be empowered, we're going to need men to do their part.' "I come from a very entrepreneurial family, so making something out of nothing was never a foreign concept to me," she said. Her quarterly magazine, focused on celebrity and lifestyle news, now has a circulation of 1.4 million, making it one of the most read periodicals among women in Africa. It has offices in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Britain, with plans to expand to the United States. It also places a premium on fostering a sense of intimacy with its audience. It hosts an annual Glam Africa gala, as well as smaller events throughout the year usually brunches and tea parties that often attract professionals with disposable income like doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. They are sponsored by European beauty brands like Schwarzkopf Got2b. Recently, the magazine began a "Beyond Beauty" campaign featuring Britain based social media influencers and bloggers sharing their experiences with self acceptance and self worth. At one event in London, a panel of women discussed their experiences with conditions like alopecia, in which a person loses her body hair, and vitiligo, in which the skin loses pigment, causing discolored patches. One panelist shared her struggles with discrimination based on skin tone, and another with the visible injuries she experienced from a burn accident. Ms. Onwutalobi, 28, leads the magazine from its headquarters in the fashionable Shoreditch neighborhood in London, where she has lived since leaving Nigeria at 17. Every other month or so, Ms. Onwutalobi travels to the magazine's offices in Africa to meet with potential advertisers, scout for writers and broker partnerships with local vendors. The majority of her staff is younger than 30, but when Ms. Onwutalobi has meetings with people outside the magazine, she is often the youngest executive in attendance. "Being a woman, a young woman, it's hard for people to listen to you," she said. "Hands down, the hardest thing is getting men to listen to me. Sometimes, I have to spend an hour getting the men in the room to see me as an equal. It's frustrating." Exquisite covers fashion and celebrity news for an audience of primarily middle income and affluent women in Nigeria. Its quarterly print publication has a circulation of about 10,000, but its website has 152,000 subscribers and gets about a million visits each week. It is also distributed through an email newsletter and the message platform WhatsApp, which is used widely in Africa. When the supermodel Naomi Campbell arrived in Nigeria this year and expressed a desire to see Vogue magazine begin an African edition, Ms. Onasanya like many others in the Nigerian fashion community disagreed. "I am a Vogue fan," she said. "But starting a Vogue Africa seems a bit unnecessary, almost like reinventing the wheel. We have Lagos Fashion Week now; we have a thriving community of local designers and models, all with their ears to the street, so we're not lacking in content." The magazine has a team of 11 and now has its own awards event: ELOY Exquisite Ladies of the Year, which honors African women. It also holds two fund raising walks to raise awareness for cervical cancer, a disease that kills one women every hour in Nigeria. "Finally, people ourselves included are realizing our value and how important showing Africa's talents to the world is," she said. "I can't wait to see what's next."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Concrete and a very large 3 D printer could revolutionize home building and more news about design world events, products and people. The San Francisco designer Yves Behar has been using 3 D printing technology since the 1990s. So he's not as surprised as perhaps the rest of us would be to learn that soon you'll be able to 3 D print not only a house but an entire village. Mr. Behar's firm, Fuseproject, teamed with New Story, a nonprofit that develops housing solutions for the developing world, and ICON, a construction technologies company, to build 50 houses for a community of farmers and weavers in Latin America (the exact location is not being disclosed until the construction phase). "You can shape the walls to have different functionality; you can create a shower stall that doesn't have sharp corners," Mr. Behar said, adding that homeowners can specify a two bedroom or three bedroom plan and the exterior concrete can be tinted different colors "so it doesn't become that cookie cutter look." The printing, which will be done on site, is to begin this summer, and each building will take roughly 24 hours to print. Philippe Starck's In Vitro collection for Flos includes one lamp that uses rechargeable batteries. At Euroluce, the Milan lighting show last month, cordless lamps could be found in the booths of Hay, Pablo, Innermost, Davide Groppi, LZF and Ambientec, a Japanese company that makes portable lights. The reason for this plenitude: ever improving rechargeable batteries. While naysayers point to the environmental harm that batteries cause, the French designer Philippe Starck is philosophical. "The more we liberate ourselves from objects surrounding us, the freer we feel," said Mr. Starck, whose new In Vitro lighting collection for Flos, above, includes a glass cordless table lamp that can travel outdoors and stay charged for up to 24 hours. "Tomorrow morning, we will focus on solar powered battery, tomorrow evening on hydrogen batteries, the day after tomorrow you will have organic batteries, and the day after tomorrow evening you will have riskless nano atomic fusion batteries. Afterwards, we will probably have light without the lamp." Available later this year; usa.flos.com. The Not So Good Place: When Great Ideas Go Bad "Nice Try" is what the real estate and home design website Curbed is calling its new podcast about failed utopias, real and imagined, from Jamestown to Biosphere 2. Its host will be Avery Trufelman of "99% Invisible," a podcast that examines the design of everyday things (AIDS ribbons, bar codes), and its wildly popular six episode spinoff, "Articles of Interest," which explains the back story of fashion items. She is still putting together the new series, which will have seven episodes, so she doesn't yet have a favorite folly. But Ms. Trufelman said what most intrigued her about her reporting was the idea that failure is in the eyes of the beholder. "I live in the Bay Area," Ms. Trufelman said, "where we worship at the altar of failure. I feel like a lot of what these stories tell us is that it's a continuum: Things rise and fall and get perverted and they change. I love that we're starting the story with Jamestown. And that's how we end that episode, by asking: Was it a failure? Failure for whom?" And what about that even grander experiment, the United States, for which Jamestown is a proxy? A failed utopia? "I think there's still hope," she said. "I think America has time to redeem itself." "Nice Try" is to begin May 30, and can be found each week on Curbed, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. Installed in the Da Monsta gatehouse and subterranean Painting Gallery, "Gay Gatherings" examines the history of the entire rambling Glass House property as an intellectual salon nurturing a select group of gay male cultural powerhouses. In addition to Mr. Johnson and his partner, the art curator and collector David Whitney, the members included the New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein; the composer John Cage and his partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham; and the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Organized by Thomas Mellins and Donald Albrecht, and designed by Pure Applied, the show maps the interactions of the eight men throughout the compound and in their extensive offsite collaborations. The exhibits include vintage films, postcards, paintings and photographs (by David McCabe, Christopher Makosand others). Much changed in the political and cultural landscape in the 20 years separating Mr. Johnson's protected stone walled enclave from the grass roots events of Stonewall, Mr. Albrecht noted. The artistic contributions of gay men "were increasingly acknowledged within mainstream culture, particularly through the generation bridging work of Andy Warhol," he said. "Gay Gatherings" is an intimate look at a handful of men who drove some of the more rarefied aspects of that transformation. Through Aug. 19, theglasshouse.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
So the Ivanka Trump brand is over: kaput, shutting down, soon to be no more. Really? Don't be silly. The Ivanka Trump brand is alive and well and working in the West Wing as a special adviser to President Trump. It's the Ivanka Trump fashion line that is closing, as announced on Tuesday by the first daughter. The one was only ever a shadow expression of the other or rather, a homage of sorts to what she liked to wear. Which was exactly the problem. The company was based on the premise that there was a group of women who would want to buy, with hard dollars and cents, the image Ms. Trump herself was selling to the world. The one she disseminated so relentlessly via guest appearances on her father's television show and stories in Vogue and books and on her own Instagram page: Herself as the glassy blond embodiment of the woman who had it all a big job, family, a perfect blow out, time to exercise. The promise for sale was that you could try this image on with the ease of slipping on a power sheath dress. It's the promise of every celebrity or personality driven fashion line. It's why Uniqlo was willing to pay so much for Roger Federer to become a brand ambassador; why Coach wanted to team up with Selena Gomez. Why so many actors and athletes now see their next career step as clothing, and why so many are willing to back them in that move. It's not about aesthetic vision or achievement. Certainly, Ms. Trump's clothing and accessories, polished and derivative as they were, weren't changing anyone's ideas about the ways fabric related to the body or the possibilities of form. The brand equity and value lies with the fame and myth of the personal brand, not the fashion brand. There's a reason, after all, Ms. Trump did not name her line Gilded Futures, or some other such vague, kitschy title. And there's a lesson in the last year and a half of this line for anyone who is tempted to conflate life and a shell pink car coat.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Wilfredo Avelar, the chef de cuisine and a New Orleans native, has worked at every New Orleans restaurant owned by Mr. Lagasse. At Meril, Mr. Avelar has relished being able to drive the creative process in the kitchen. "One of the things we did was take the tamale, a delicacy popular in Central America, where my family is from, and mix it with boudin, a product that we love here," he said. "We have a pasta section on the menu, but we're thinking about having bowls, with shrimp and grits and jambalaya. We're not limiting ourselves." During a recent visit, the atmosphere was jovial. Reclaimed wood is a prominent interior element, giving off a modernist vibe. I was promptly seated in front of the open kitchen, where I felt immersed in the inner workings of the restaurant. On the cocktails menu, the specialty drinks are numbered, something that was deliberate. "I didn't want to have gimmicky names," Mr. Lagasse said, adding that he pushed for genuine ingredients. "If we're making a drink with mint or wheat grass, we are going to use the real stuff." The No. 11 cocktail, with vodka, Aperol, lemon juice and house made lavender syrup, and the classic Hemingway daiquiri, were both refreshing and strong. The buttermilk biscuit, with foie gras butter and blackberry preserves, was outstanding: soft and generously sized. The zucchini, with toasted garlic and lemon zest, was flavorful; the Spanish style croquettes, with ham, manchego and piquillo pepper sauce, were crisp and delicious.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Don't Like What You See on Zoom? Get a Face Lift and Join the Crowd None Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times A growing number of people, stuck at home and tired of staring at their own haggard faces on Zoom, are finding a fix: face and eye lifts, chin and tummy tucks and more. At a time when many medical fields are reeling from lockdowns when lucrative electives work was postponed, cosmetic surgery procedures are surging, practitioners say, driven by unexpected demand from patients who have found the coronavirus pandemic a perfect moment for corporeal upgrades. "I have never done so many face lifts in a summer as I've done this year," said Dr. Diane Alexander, a plastic surgeon in Atlanta. She said she had performed 251 procedures through the end of July from May 18, when her clinic opened back up for elective surgery. "Pretty much every face lift patient that comes in says: 'I've been doing these Zoom calls and I don't know what happened but I look terrible.' " "This is the weirdest world I live in," Dr. Alexander added. "The world is shut down, we're all worried about global crisis, the economy is completely crashing and people come in and still want to feel good about themselves." One of her patients, a 55 year old woman named Joanne who asked that her last name not be used because she feared seeming vain, said she considered getting work done on her face for years. But the pandemic finally made it possible because she could conceal the bruising and swelling during her recovery period. "Knowing everybody is staying in, wearing a face mask, not coming out due to social distancing, made it the spot on right time," she said. "Not one friend knows I've done it. Family members don't know and my sister and mom don't even know." The trend is, in many ways, surprising in a tough economy. Cosmetic surgery generally isn't covered by insurance, so procedures can cost as much as 25,000 for a full body makeover tummy, breasts, face and less for piecemeal work, like 3,300 for eyelid surgery and 10,000 for breast lift and enhancement. Patients say they're diverting funds they might have spent on travel, concert, sports tickets, or other pleasures in their pre pandemic lives. Since insurers generally don't pay, it's difficult to track the precise number of cosmetic procedures being done. Dr. Lynn Jeffers, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said nationwide "demand is definitely busier than what we had expected," though she added: "What we don't know is if the pent up demand is transitory, and will go back to normal, or will even dip." Before Covid 19, invasive cosmetic procedures like face lifts had been declining in favor of more minimal enhancements, like Botox injections, fillers and other skin tighteners. Since 2000, the number of injectable procedures has risen by 878 percent, according to the plastic surgeons society, while the number of eyelid surgeries has fallen by 36 percent and face lifts by 8 percent in that period. Colleen Nolan, executive director of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, another professional organization, said she'd heard from surgeons around the country that patients were opting for more invasive procedures now than in the recent past. "They were going for fillers and Botox because they didn't have any down time," she said of patients. "Now they realize they can have the procedure and privately experience it." The solitude of quarantine was precisely what motivated Patrice Solorzano, 62, who spent 20,000 on a procedure known in the business as a "mommy makeover" a tummy tuck, and breast lift and enhancement. She underwent surgery on June 26, followed by a two week recovery in her home outside Dayton, Ohio. By the second week, she said, "I was fine. I popped myself up, got to the workstation and went back online." Ms. Solorzano, who oversees 160 people in 25 locations around the world as a military contractor working on account management for the Air Force, said the expense wasn't a financial burden in part because she wasn't spending as she otherwise might. "I definitely don't spend it on gas," she said. "We don't go to the mall and don't really go shopping." She spent another 10,000 on a breast lift and enhancement for her daughter, Jena Solorzano, 24, who said she was heading off to law school and thought this moment was ideal to tackle a body image issue that has nagged at her for years. She partly blamed social media for wanting the work done. "It doesn't help that every single social media page has a gorgeous woman or a beautiful man on it," she said, adding: "Covid 19 actually gave us the perfect opportunity to get a more drastic surgery." The loneliness of quarantine has also motivated some people. A second patient of Dr. Alexander in Atlanta said that she got a face lift not only because she had time to recover but also because she had come face to face during Covid 19 with a solitary life. "I have great girlfriends but they have husbands, and it does get lonely. I realized I really want to meet somebody," said the woman, 57, who is divorced. She asked that her name not be used in a newspaper article because "it feels very vain to being going in and doing something cosmetically when so many people are struggling." Some plastic surgeons said some patients tell them that they want their faces now to match newly in shape bodies since they've had time, for instance, to take 10,000 steps each day. Other surgeons said that they've gotten a lot of interest from people who spent the early part of the pandemic sitting inside and snacking on junk food. Dr. Amy Alderman, another plastic surgeon in Atlanta, said that many of her patients have gained 10 to 20 pounds while shut in at home. "It's a common theme," she said. "I don't know if that's what's driving them here. They're saying: 'As long as you're doing my breasts, could you do a little lipo?'" Dr. Alderman said she's been shocked that the industry, and her practice, hasn't seen an economic backlash. She said she figured "patients would be a little hesitant spending between 6,000 and 25,000." "But I can't keep up with the demand," she said. "I haven't had an unfilled minute in the operating room. And I'm booked through September."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Mr. Phillips, whose earlier works include "Capsule 33" and "Red Eye to Havre de Grace," is an ingratiating writer and performer. He needs little by way of props to evoke a trip on a ferry crossing the Mediterranean, riding shotgun on a Colombian motorcycle taxi or trying to sleep in a cramped compartment on a Balkan Express train. He also eases in and out of different languages, peppering the script with Spanish, Portuguese, Czech and French, among others. Throughout, the staging by Tatiana Mallarino (Mr. Phillips's wife) moves with a fluidity at odds with the travel mishaps, which are related with dry humor. A recurring gag involves Ace of Base's "All That She Wants," the Europop hit that had no problem ignoring custom checkpoints to spread with the ineluctable ease of a virus back in 1992. Then again, the stamps in the Passenger's passport have a more lasting presence than his anecdotes, because the genial, light footed show retreats every time things get sticky or uncomfortable. And when borders come up nowadays, unsettling matters are hard to avoid. Flying into Liberty International Airport in Newark from Bogota, the Passenger is detained five hours by Homeland Security for unclear reasons. Not much is made of it. The show which was added to the New York Theater Workshop season as a late replacement for Martyna Majok's delayed "Sanctuary City" has been slightly revised since it was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015. A new story is about trying to attend a Live Aid like concert held in February 2019 in Cucuta, a Colombian city next to Venezuela. But over all Mr. Phillips steers clear from obvious topical references until the very end, which takes place between Mexico and the United States. The Passenger tells of becoming a "dental refugee" when he has to get two molars removed in Ciudad Juarez because it is much cheaper than in the United States. He meets a man named Pablo who was once caught in the net of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, then goes on to imagine the point of view of an American Border Patrol agent sitting in wait by the Rio Grande, watching for people trying to cross. The oddly gentle conclusion seems to suggest that we are all parts of a cosmic whole where borders mean little. Alas, being starry eyed seems less poetic than naive nowadays.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
We may not yet know who won the presidential election, but everyone knows that the Supreme Court now has a conservative 6 to 3 majority. And that the Senate's Republican majority's hardball tactics, driven by blatant cynicism, achieved that result during an amazingly compressed period of not even six weeks from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death in mid September until Justice Amy Coney Barrett's installation a week before Election Day. For most of the period, culminating with the new justice's klieg lit nighttime photo op with the president on what I've taken to calling the White House's Mussolini balcony, the question was, "Can this really be happening?" Now comes the next question: What does it mean to have a bloc of six? By that, I'm not suggesting there won't be conservative outcomes in case after case. There will be. Nor am I suggesting that when the Supreme Court decides a case, the bottom line doesn't matter. Of course it does. But the route the court takes to reach that bottom line is also highly consequential. By choosing one and not another, the court validates some lines of legal argument and forecloses others, with profound implications for the next round of cases. And when the routes to a common destination diverge when the majority fractures over what theory to invoke or how far to run with it it will raise questions about what message the court is sending and what it is prepared to say or do next. The first day of the current term, Oct. 5, offered a powerful example. All eight justices who were then sitting agreed not to hear an appeal from Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who, in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2015 decision on the right of same sex couples to marry, claimed a religious right not to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. The justices' refusal to hear the appeal left intact a federal appeals court's ruling that Ms. Davis is not entitled to immunity from suit by two same sex couples she had turned away. The Supreme Court's action, one of hundreds of similar denials the same day, might have attracted little attention except for an unusual "statement" issued by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. They had dissented from the court's same sex marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, and their four page statement was a shrill irredentist attack on what they labeled "this court's alteration of the Constitution." The two said they agreed that Ms. Davis's appeal in its current preliminary posture was unsuitable for Supreme Court review. But they went on to say: Nevertheless, this petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell. By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix. There are a few things to note about this. Chief Justice John Roberts, himself a vigorous dissenter from Obergefell, didn't sign the statement. Neither did Justices Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh, two appointees of President Trump who were not on the court that decided Obergefell. Of five conservative justices, then, three chose not to put the court's adherence to the precedent in play a month before the presidential election, while two picked precisely that moment to make a gratuitous and astonishingly aggressive move. So what exactly was on display here? Were we seeing a conservative bloc, or a disparate group of five conservative justices, three conducting the court's business in a normal manner while two used a failed petition as a platform for inviting an interested public to hurry up and bring the court a better case? And where, had she been on the court at the time, would Justice Barrett have been? I offer the Kim Davis case as one example, not a template. It would be dangerously premature to assume that any of the other conservative justices will prove a reliable ally of what I take to be the chief justice's effort to steer the court away from the edge of a right wing cliff. One case in point reached the court in late spring, a challenge to a government order limiting attendance at religious services to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. In this case from California, the first of several, four conservative justices voted to block Gov. Gavin Newsom's order. While they lacked the necessary fifth vote Justice Barrett was not yet on the court Justice Kavanaugh wrote an opinion explaining his view that the order amounted to unjustified discrimination against religion. His opinion impelled Chief Justice Roberts to explain, in support of letting the governor's order stand, that he didn't plan to have the Supreme Court become the country's public health authority of last resort. A case that shouldn't have been polarizing provided a disquieting display of polarization. Then came the flood of election cases seeking the court's intervention in disputes about extensions of time for ballot counting and other accommodations because of the pandemic. In cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Justice Kavanaugh proved to be the chief justice's ally; only Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch voted to take up the Republicans' cause and block the accommodations. In a case from Wisconsin, however, all five conservative justices voted to deny a Democratic request to resurrect an extended deadline that a federal appeals court had blocked, leaving Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor in dissent. But the five were far from united. Chief Justice Roberts wrote a one paragraph explanation for his vote in this and, by implication, the other cases. He was willing to defer to state courts and state election agencies, he said, but not to interventions by federal courts. Justice Kavanaugh went much further, with an 18 page opinion that left election law experts scratching their heads over its claim of expansive federal court power to second guess the way state courts handle their own state's election disputes. In making his argument, Justice Kavanaugh became the first justice to make liberal use of Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election by blocking the Florida Supreme Court's recount order while George W. Bush maintained a microscopic margin over Al Gore. So now there are six. Will the fractious five become a calmer, more unified six? Assuming the answer is no, where does the new court find John Roberts at the start of his 16th term as chief justice? Ruling from the center in the term just past, he enjoyed his most consequential year ever; with four justices to his right and four to his left, both factions needed him, and he was able to fashion the term largely in his own image. With John Roberts no longer the essential justice, it will be fascinating to see, and highly significant for the country, whether he remains at least a relevant one. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
From the stage, he told Ms. Herzfeld that a couple of months ago, he had performed with some of her students at a benefit concert for Parkland. "For us, it was a life changing experience to see these inspiring young people channeling their intense feelings of hurt and rage and sorrow into art," he said. One of those students, Tanzil Philip, reached out to the Tonys, asking to appear on the telecast, Mr. Morrison said. "The Broadway community showed up in our time of need and brought some much needed light into the dark," Mr. Philip had written. "Well, Tan, rather than inviting you on to this stage to say thanks to us, our Broadway family wants to give and say thanks to you, by sharing the stage with you and your classmates," Mr. Morrison said. In her speech on Sunday, Ms. Herzfeld said: "I remember on Feb. 7, in a circle with my students, encouraging them to be good to each other," she went on. "And I remember only a week later, on Feb. 14, a perfect day, where all these lessons in my life and in their short lives would be called into action." "We all have a common energy," she said. "We all want the same thing. To be heard. To tell our truth. To make a difference. And to be respected. We teach this every day in every arts class." In February, just a week after the shooting, Ms. Herzfeld's students performed "Shine," an original song, at a CNN town hall meeting on gun violence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Michael Oreskes, a former senior editor at The New York Times and The Associated Press, has been appointed senior vice president and editorial director at NPR, the public broadcaster announced on Thursday. Mr. Oreskes was most recently a vice president and senior managing editor at The A.P. Before that he was executive editor of The International Herald Tribune, and a deputy managing editor at The Times. He will start his new job at the end of April, working with 200 newsrooms and 1,500 journalists at NPR member stations, the network said in a statement. Jarl Mohn, the president and chief executive of NPR, said Mr. Oreskes brought "a unique perspective on how to cover the most important stories of the day and an understanding of the issues that are being overlooked or not reported well."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The three skulls were unlike hundreds of others in the 16th century mass grave uncovered at the San Jose de los Naturales Royal Hospital in Mexico City. Their front teeth were filed decoratively, perhaps as a ritual custom, unlike those of "los naturales," the Indigenous people who made up the majority of bodies at the colonial burial site. Archaeologists concluded the three individuals were most likely enslaved Africans, but they needed more evidence to be certain. Now, researchers have extracted genetic information from the individuals' teeth, confirming they were Africans, perhaps among the earliest to be stolen from their homeland and brought to the Americas. "We studied their whole skeletons, and we wanted to know what they were suffering from, not only the diseases but the physical abuse too so we could tell their stories," said Rodrigo Barquera, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. "It has implications in the whole story of the colonial period of Mexico." The findings, published Thursday in Current Biology, offer a glimpse into these people's lives before their forced voyages and add insight into the infectious diseases that the trans Atlantic slave trade may have brought into the New World. In 1518, King Charles I of Spain, authorized the direct transportation of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. In 1542, he enacted Las Leyes Nuevas, "The New Laws," which prohibited the colonists in the Viceroyalty of New Spain from using Indigenous people as slaves. The law liberated thousands of Indigenous laborers, but increased the demand for enslaved Africans, Creoles, mulattoes and other African descended people to work as servants, cooks, miners and field workers. Between 1518 and 1650, some 120,000 enslaved Africans arrived in what is now Mexico. Spanish colonists already demanded these groups because they believed they fared well against diseases brought over from Europe such as smallpox, measles and typhoid fever, which along with the brutal European conquest had nearly eliminated the Indigenous population. The San Jose de los Naturales Royal Hospital was created around 1530 to serve exclusively Indigenous patients, many of whom were dying in smallpox outbreaks. The three Africans were also treated there. When they died, they were buried alongside the Indigenous people. Perhaps all were victims of an epidemic, Mr. Barquera said. "We don't know exactly if they were 'negros esclavos' or 'negros libre,'" said Lourdes Marquez Morfin, an archaeologist at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, referring to the distinction then made between slaves or freemen. But the trauma etched in their skeletons suggests they were slaves. "One had these gunshots," said Mr. Barquera, referring to five pieces of buckshot in the man's chest cavity. "You could see that the bone was stained with a copper greenish pigment because the bullets stayed in the body of this individual until he was dead." Some of the men showed signs of nutritional deficiencies, skull and leg fractures and shoulder deformities, suggesting they performed backbreaking work and suffered harsh physical abuse. The men all died between the ages of 25 and 35. Mr. Barquera and his team removed a molar from each of the three skulls to extract and analyze their DNA. The genetic signatures obtained from the molars showed the three men had their origins in Western or Southern Africa. They also found isotopes on the teeth that further indicated they were all born and grew up outside of Mexico. "It was hypothesized that maybe they were descendants of Africans and Native Americans or Africans and Europeans, but that's not the case," said Mr. Barquera. The team also sequenced the genome of pathogens recovered from the skeletal remains. One of the men was afflicted with the virus that causes hepatitis B, and another had a bacterium that causes the skin infection yaws, a disease similar to syphilis. The findings provide some of the earliest known examples of those pathogens in human remains in the Americas, as well as the first direct evidence from the early colonial period that pathogens from Africa may have been brought to the Americas, said Johannes Krause of Max Planck and Mr. Barquera's co author. Mr. Krause added it is possible the men caught the diseases while on the overcrowded transoceanic voyages. "We are always so focused on the introduction of diseases from the Europeans and the Spaniards," Dr. Krause said, "that I think we underestimated also how much the slave trade and the forceful migration from Africa to the Americas contributed also to the spread of infectious diseases to the New World." The paper "does a really nice job of putting together archaeological, osteological, molecular and isotope data to provide insight into the lives of early colonial likely enslaved Africans," said Anne Stone, an anthropological geneticist at Arizona State University who was not involved in the research. Hannes Schroeder, an archaeologist from the University of Copenhagen said the study's multiple lines of evidence "paint a very detailed picture of the lives of these individuals, their origins and experiences in the Americas, that reminds us once again of the cruelty of the trans Atlantic slave trade and the biological impact it had on individuals and populations in the New World."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Each new Kane associate prompts a set of flashbacks, and it's always interesting to look for where the narrating character is positioned within those scenes, which at times emphasize the subjective perspective. The flashbacks are broadly but not strictly chronological, so that the written memories of Thatcher (George Coulouris), the banker who became young Kane's guardian, can end in 1929, when Kane's newspaper empire suffers a crash related setback, and the movie can double back, in a flashback related by Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane's general manager, to his boss's first day running his first paper. The story of Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore), and her disastrous debut as an opera singer is related first by Kane's friend Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), and then revisited from Susan's point of view. Few films have so fluidly intermingled the demands of character and story or shifted perspectives so deftly and economically. Nothing is ever unclear. Welles's use of shadows and low angles have led some observers to categorize "Citizen Kane" as a film noir. But its most celebrated photographic device is deep focus, a technique that allows the foreground and background to be seen clearly at the same time, and that became closely associated with Gregg Toland, the film's cinematographer. For example, a number of deep focus shots show characters in the foreground discussing Kane's fate as Kane oblivious or powerless is seen in the background. This happens early when Kane's mother (Agnes Moorehead) signs over custody to Thatcher, and Kane as a child is seen in a distant window playing in the snow. It happens a few minutes (and 58 years) later, in the 1929 scene, when Kane is forced to relinquish ownership of newspapers to Thatcher. When Kane celebrates his complete acquisition of the staff of a rival paper, The Chronicle, Jed questions the newsmen's loyalty to Kane's brand of muckraking. "There's always a chance, of course, that they'll change Mr. Kane, without his knowing it," he says to Bernstein, as Kane dances in the background, unaware of their conversation. Welles was so appreciative of Toland's contributions that he put the cinematography and directorial credits on the same credit card. But it's also worth paying attention to the film's optical effects and editing, particularly its magical transitions. (The editor was Robert Wise, the future director of "The Sound of Music.") The opening sequence uses a series of dissolves to bring viewers closer and closer to Kane's lighted room at Xanadu, his sprawling estate. Dissolves that show young Kane's abandoned sled getting covered in snow end on wrapping paper that contains a new sled, a Christmas present. Later on, a photograph of The Chronicle's newspaper staff dissolves into the staff being photographed this time in the employ of Kane's Inquirer, with Kane suddenly stepping in front of them. In other scenes, such as when a stagehand holds his nose at Susan's singing, multiple shots have been combined to look continuous.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has always been known for her sensitivity to music, visualizing sound in ways both mathematical and mystical. But in her 2013 "Vortex Temporum," she delves more deeply than ever into the relationship between music and movement, musician and dancer. An interpretation of Gerard Grisey's score of the same name, "Vortex Temporum" brings together seven dancers of her company, Rosas, and seven members of the contemporary music ensemble Ictus, setting them all in motion (even the grand piano dances) on a stripped down stage. This intimate conversation between choreographer and composer seemed to merit a conversation between critics versed in different ways of listening and looking. Siobhan Burke, a dance critic, and Corinna da Fonseca Wollheim, a music critic, saw the United States premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday and discussed it afterward. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation. SIOBHAN BURKE I wasn't too familiar with Grisey before this show. Had you heard "Vortex Temporum"? CORINNA DA FONSECA WOLLHEIM I had, but in this kind of spectral music, a recording often fails to render the textural richness of the music. On Friday, I found the Ictus performance incredibly sensual and, near the end, profoundly moving. BURKE You mentioned before the show that you'd be looking for visual analogies to the music. I saw a lot of those. What about you? DA FONSECA WOLLHEIM I found analogies between certain elements of the music and the dance, but ultimately felt that Grisey's emotional arc wasn't reflected in a truly satisfying way in the choreography. But there were many literal translations from sound into movement: crisp jumps corresponding to jabbing high notes in the flute or piano, or a floppy limbed, languid pirouette accompanied by fuzzy toned harmonics in the strings. More generally there was a really quite beautiful manifestation of resonance as movement in the way a gesture done by one dancer would set off smaller movements in another dancer: a subtle incline of the head; a knee floating up. And toward the end, when the "vortex" seems to pull players and dancers backward in time, with measured chords crab walking down the piano's keyboard, there was the spiral drawn by the dancers as they walked and jogged, often backward, in circles. BURKE I also admired the "resonance as movement," or what I thought of as ripple effects: one action instigating another and another, in what looked like totally natural succession. And I appreciated the clarity of the beginning, given the complexity of everything that followed: how the musicians performed first, alone, and then the dancers took their places, moving in silence, before everyone joined together. We had a chance to process just music and just movement, before taking in both at once. But let's go back to the emotional arc. DA FONSECA WOLLHEIM What happens in Grisey's piece is that after long stretches dominated by isolated starburst chords, the music develops a strong pull. It's that downward momentum suggested by the title. It seemed faintly ominous. But then, at the "bottom" of it all, were these incredibly fragile, human sounds: the wind players' breath, amplified through their instruments, and deep thudding notes low in the piano that sounded like a steady heartbeat. In that moment, all the music's complexity pulled back to these incredibly simple and profoundly human sounds. But while the coils of dancers slowly unfurling during this time were very pretty, I couldn't help feeling that they were reflections more of the geometry of the music than its emotional trajectory. In the expressionless faces of the dancers, and the cool distances between them, I never quite saw the human dimension. Speaking of distance, can we talk about that one outright funny moment? When the pianist and one of the male dancers had this little jostle over possession of the piano bench? BURKE I wanted to think it was funny, but I just wasn't feeling it. I read that each dancer was assigned to respond to a different instrument, and I thought their tussle took that one to one correspondence too far. DA FONSECA WOLLHEIM Aha! That thought that there was a one to one correspondence dawned on me only very late in the show. BURKE I love your description of the music's progression, especially what happens at "the bottom." And I think De Keersmaeker was definitely responding to its geometry; I sometimes get distracted imagining all the math behind her movement. But to me the dancing, though not overtly emotional, was as human as the music, partly because of its simplicity: walking, running, skipping. And also because of the intensity and spontaneity that the dancers brought to such elemental ways of moving. When one of them broke into a sprint around the outer edges of the space, there was feeling in her sheer force.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
It was very hot last Tuesday night in the SoHo apartment of Jenna Lyons and Courtney Crangi, and not just because it was about 80 degrees outside and the air conditioning unit was not up to the job. It was hot in the metaphorical sense, with the living room filled with members of the old guard more famous for their actual names than their social media handles. Tina Brown, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, George Soros: people like that. They had gathered into the you'll never have this level of good taste so don't even try apartment of Ms. Lyons, the president and creative director of J. Crew, and her girlfriend, Ms. Crangi, an owner of Giles Brother, a jewelry company. The guests drank white wine and rose as the elevator door opened and opened again, delivering into the open space a cross section of cognoscenti. Baratunde Thurston, the writer and a recently departed producer for "The Daily Show," huddled by the kitchen with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Stewart, the founding executive director of Civic Hall Labs, a nonprofit organization focused on technology and design. Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, held court from a couch by the windows. Mark Ruffalo, a star of the Oscar winning ode to journalism "Spotlight," was in attendance as well. The occasion was the publication of "The World According to Star Wars" (Dey Street Books), by Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and a former Obama administration official. It brings together themes from the "Star Wars" saga and the story of how it came to be, using that as a lens to look at the world. It's "Freakonomics" meets the Death Star, if you will, with meditations on the bonds of fathers and sons. The majority of Professor Sunstein's previous books, with titles like "Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State," fall into the academic category. For the latest one, he has appeared on "Morning Joe" and the BBC. The Atlantic ran an excerpt. HBO bought the option. "Usually, to promote a new work, I'll aspire to be published in the Columbia Law Review or the Stanford Law Review and to have at least five really enticing footnotes," he said, seeming very amused by it all. Professor Sunstein's Harvard website C.V., which is 27 pages, lists him as an author or co author of some 40 books. (This guy writes like he's running out of time.) Among them are a few that veer into popular culture, like 2008's "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness," written with Richard H. Thaler. But "The World According to Star Wars" is an outlier. When he discussed the idea with academic publishers, he said they appeared puzzled and unenthusiastic. "Academics don't think it's an extremely impressive project for their colleague to embark on," Professor Sunstein, 61, said a few weeks before the party, over coffee at the Harvard Club in New York. Even his wife, Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, initially was not sold on her husband's increasingly public foray into "Star Wars" geekdom. At United Nations functions, for instance, he would draw foreign dignitaries into discussions of the gross domestic product of the Galactic Republic. Last year, he told her of his plan to liken the blockbuster film franchise to constitutional law in a speech he was about to give at the graduation ceremony for the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her worries increased. As he worked on his commencement speech, she was writing one of her own for Penn's undergraduate ceremony. "This is what passes as date night at the Power Sunstein household," she said. Professor Sunstein's talk turned out to be a success, and his wife was on board when he decided to give book length treatment to the ideas rattling around in his brain. Professor Sunstein developed a new interest in "Star Wars" after introducing the series to his son, Declan, 7, and witnessing how it became a touchstone for them. He wrote in celebration of this bond with his son and in homage to his father, who died when Cass was 26. The book party was in the very spot where the seed for the project was planted. One night last year, the Sunstein Powers were watching an awards show at the Crangi Lyons apartment when Ms. Crangi suggested to Professor Sunstein that he rewatch "Star Wars" with Declan. She even sent him home with a DVD. Ms. Crangi has seen the various films some 150 times. "It sent me on a path of being obsessed with science fiction and an intergalactic economy," she said at the party. Nearby, Dr. Kissinger was holding forth on something or other as the biographer Mr. Isaacson told Ms. Brown, making a reference to her husband, the author and editor Harry Evans, "I remember seeing you on the back of Harry's motorcycle." Ms. Brown laughed gaily. Rory Lyons, a former insurance broker at Lloyd's of London (and the father of the party's co host Ms. Lyons), paused in the middle of the room to say: "I'm hoping to challenge Dr. Kissinger to a game of who's been to more countries. Do you think he would have been to Iran? I've been to Iran. What possible business could have taken him to Scandinavia?" Ms. Nevins, of HBO, was sitting on a couch, taking it all in. When a bearded man got off the elevator, she nodded her head toward him and said, "If a bear was a man, he would look like that." Then she added: "Don't quote me too much because I never know what I'm actually saying." But she kept talking, noting that she wasn't exactly sure what would come of HBO's option on the book. "It's fun to think of popular culture as profound," she said. "It gives popular culture a pass, and it's invigorating." When the time came to introduce the guest of honor, Ms. Lyons asked people to quiet down. A hush fell over the room, except for an insistent low rumble that you could hear above the hum of the air conditioner. "Who is still talking?" she called out. He took the admonishment diplomatically, and Ms. Lyons said of Professor Sunstein, "He actually has managed to write a book in the time that I I don't know maybe painted my nails." Professor Sunstein stood before the guests. In a talk that lasted not quite 10 minutes, he connected the dots between a "testy" email he accidentally sent to the entire Obama campaign staff in 2008, his friendly relationship with Dr. Kissinger, Harvard's squash team and his nearly eight year marriage to Ms. Power. He also praised the ability of the "Star Wars" creator, George Lucas, to meld the mythologies of many religions and cultures into a sweeping tale that he characterized as "extremely silly and very deep."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The insatiable American appetite for British drawing room comedy is well nourished in "The Roundabout," a revival of J. B. Priestley's 1932 comedy at 59E59 Theaters. This sparkling, impeccably staged play produced by the Cahoots Theater Company, the Other Cheek and Park Theater as part of 59E59's Brits Off Broadway program will be catnip to "Downton Abbey" devotees, with equal doses of humor and insight. This being a social mosaic of sorts, plot threads and characters abound, so bear with me. It begins with the harried Lord Kettlewell (Brian Protheroe), who is having a stressful Saturday. The Great Depression is afoot, and "strictly speaking, there isn't a money market any longer," he says, adding, "Take America." And his long absent daughter, Pamela (Emily Laing), an Oxonian returning to Britain from time abroad in Russia (working for the Red October Candy Factory), has arrived unexpectedly with a friend, the slovenly Comrade Staggles (Steven Blakeley), another British Communist. Attired in gender neutral proletarian garb, the headstrong Pamela thinks it's time to return to the nest, but Lord Kettlewell, separated from Pamela's mother, Lady Kettlewell (Lisa Bowerman), is skeptical. Fortunately, a good friend the acerbic, mildly effeminate Churton Saunders (a delightfully droll Hugh Sachs), called Chuffy is there to offer counsel and sympathy. Still with me? Because Lord Kettlewell's day is just beginning. Lady Knightsbridge (Richenda Carey) a sniffling hen shorn of her wealth, soliciting employment for her newly strapped upper crust friends has invited herself over for lunch. ("Communists, eh?" she asks Lord Kettlewell. "Is there any money in it?") Also on hand is Farrington Gurney (Charlie Field), a young, aggressive capitalist who covets Pamela. And Lord Kettlewell's mistress, Hilda Lancicourt (Carol Starks), is coming, as is Lady Kettlewell, at her daughter's invitation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
THE French aided the Americans in their revolution against their British oppressors. Now Benoit Pous Bertran de Balanda, the descendant of a French general who fought for the Americans, is trying to help his wealthy countrymen escape what he calls the tyranny of a new Socialist government primed to severely tax the rich. And France's loss could be New York's gain. Mr. Pous Bertran de Balanda, 30, is a broker for wealthy French clients looking to buy apartments in Manhattan. With the election of the Socialist Francois Hollande as president this month, the wealthy in France are suddenly scrambling for places to stash their money for a while. Well heeled French citizens are scouring real estate opportunities in neighboring countries like Britain and Switzerland. The United States particularly New York and Miami is also drawing French investors looking to pick up rental properties or pieds a terre, brokers say. In recent months, as Mr. Hollande's victory appeared more possible, the French stepped up their house hunting visits to New York, several brokers said. These are not billionaire Russian oligarchs with blank check budgets on the hunt for trophy properties. The French buyers most active in recent months are generally looking at properties between 500,000 and 5 million, brokers say. What the French are so concerned about is Mr. Hollande's campaign vow to tax income over 1 million euros at a 75 percent rate. The Socialist government, trying to put a dent in France's 1.3 trillion euro debt, has said it will also raise the tax rate on capital gains to the same level as the tax on ordinary income. "So there would not be any kind of advantage to invest in something in France, in the stock market or real estate," said Mr. Pous Bertran de Balanda, who runs Black Tulip Capital, a New York based real estate asset management company he started last August that helps clients find properties and manages them. To Mr. Pous Bertran de Balanda and other wealthy French people, the news feels like a rerun of 1981, when President Francois Mitterrand decided to nationalize several big companies and raised taxes (though both moves were later reversed). And after the tax policy flip flops by President Nicolas Sarkozy over the past five years he gave the wealthy tax breaks only to raise taxes two years later many in France see their own market is too volatile, and are searching for a safe haven. The flagging euro and the economic struggles in Greece, Italy and Spain have only further shaken their confidence in investing at home. Last month, a Parisian couple in their 50s decided to buy a 4 million waterfront house in Miami after first considering Cannes, said Christophe Bourreau, a French broker with Barnes International who is now based in New York. "They feel like the new president is hunting the wealthy," Mr. Bourreau said, "and that the sooner their money is out of France the better." The window may close soon: Mr. Hollande has said he will look to put his tax plans in place this summer, after parliamentary elections next month. Many in the new wave of French buyers who have descended on Manhattan are focused on finding something downtown and have been frustrated by the lack of inventory, said Edward Johnston, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens. Others are looking near Central Park and Columbus Circle, with buildings like the Sheffield, at 322 West 57th Street, and the Setai Fifth Avenue drawing multiple visits, brokers said. Deborah Gimelson, another broker at Brown Harris Stevens, said that in the last two weeks she had shown three different French bankers a duplex town house in the East Village that she is co listing for 2.95 million. One made an offer on the home but was outbid, she said. She said she suspected that the property itself with an enclosed porch that looks out on a garden that "feels like parts of Paris," she said had something to do with the visits. But they were the first French buyers she had seen in 10 years. "Whether they are French, Italian or Greek," she said, "people from Europe want to put their money here. We are seeing a lot more people come out of those countries than in a long time." Mr. Johnston says the city is seeing a "massive influx of people" from France. He has taken five groups on visits since the beginning of the year. "They are serious buyers," he said, although "they are not quick to act." Mr. Pous Bertran de Balanda said he had about 20 French clients looking for condo apartments to buy in New York. He has been suggesting that they consider the Trump SoHo, the hotel condo property. It offers "fractional occupancy" to owners, who can use the apartment for up to 120 days a year and have it rented out as a hotel suite the rest of the year. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The French invasion is poised to give Trump SoHo a needed boost. The 46 story project has been a source of tension in SoHo. Some residents have grumbled that it is an out of place abomination, towering over the surrounding low rise structures. Amy Williamson, the development's vice president for sales, said Donald J. Trump had taken advantage of a zoning loophole that had not anticipated the "hybrid" between a commercial and a residential building, enabling it to be built to 46 stories. Trump SoHo has done well as a hotel, Ms. Williamson said. But it has struggled as a condominium development. About a quarter of the 391 residences have been sold or are under contract since 2007, she said. Prices range from studios starting at 995,000 to penthouse suites starting at 2,966,250.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A dozen years ago, the University of Washington barred athletic coaches from having contact with anyone in the admissions department. With a move that now seems prescient, two new administrators supervising athletics sought to allay any concerns that coaches could put undue pressure on admissions personnel. The change also brought more oversight to athletics, in this case through a committee of senior faculty members, deans and other university representatives. The previous arrangement, said Philip Ballinger, an associate vice provost now overseeing admissions, "didn't have sufficient transparency; it didn't have enough eyes on it." The leeway coaches get in recruiting has long been a point of discussion in higher education circles. But after federal investigators last week revealed a broad admissions cheating scandal, a number of colleges began asking hard questions about how they evaluate athletic applicants and oversee the chosen few whom coaches recommend for admission. In what prosecutors described as the biggest case of admissions fraud they had investigated, 50 people were accused in a scheme that involved paying bribes to coaches and to people who monitor admissions tests in order to fraudulently get the children of wealthy patrons into some of the nation's most elite colleges. Some students were accepted as recruited athletes even though they did not play the sports described in their applications. They gained an advantage through the widespread practice of allocating a certain number of admissions spots to athletes who might not get in otherwise. This process has been followed for decades in the pursuit of competitive teams, which burnish a university's reputation, inspire alumni loyalty and often help with fund raising. Now, the fraud case has sent a thunderbolt through the higher education community. "Every college president in America called his athletic director the morning after that admissions fraud story broke and asked: How do we make sure this doesn't happen at our school?" said Bill Martin, the athletic director at the University of Michigan from 2000 until his retirement in 2010. "And certain athletic directors were smart enough to call their presidents first to insist that they were going to start verifying the status of every admitted recruited athlete." Indeed, at Yale University, where F.B.I. investigators say the longtime women's soccer coach accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars to facilitate the admission of a recruit who did not actually play soccer, the university president, Peter Salovey, announced late last week that new oversight policies had already been put in place. The Yale athletic director will begin reviewing every proposed recruit's credentials before admission, and recruited athletes who fail to make a team after they arrive will receive "close scrutiny," a university statement said. A broad overhaul of athletic admissions systems in Division I, the highest level of N.C.A.A. competition and the level the colleges in the scheme compete in, has been overdue, according to several athletic administrators interviewed in recent days. Battles over blue chip recruits in football and basketball already tend to be heavily scrutinized. In those upper echelon sports, if there is money changing hands, it is from coaches to recruits, not the other way around. But in the lower profile sports like crew, volleyball, tennis and soccer often called the Olympic sports there has been more room for bribes and exploitation. And the most common route in such a fraud is to designate a phony athletic prospect as a "recruited walk on." In nearly every case of counterfeit athletic credentials cited in last week's indictments, from Stanford to Texas to Yale, the prospective athlete appeared to be filling the nebulous role of recruited walk on. Such applicants are not even assured a spot on the team. But they are often on a list of five to 20 athletes it varies from sport to sport that a coach is permitted to submit to the admissions department. The two daughters of the actress Lori Loughlin, who was charged in connection with the fraud case last week, were passed off as crew recruits despite never having competed in the sport, according to federal prosecutors. "When the rosters are that big, like they are in women's crew, I could see where it would be possible for a coach to slip in an unqualified person as a recruited walk on," said Martin, who added that Michigan annually audited team rosters. The recruitment of athletes in such sports may be an even bigger factor in the admissions process at colleges in the N.C.A.A.'s lowest tier, Division III, where athletic scholarships are forbidden. Division III is also the largest tier, with nearly 450 institutions, including many of the country's most selective small liberal arts colleges, where acceptance rates can be as low as 15 percent. These colleges might field as many as 30 teams from enrollments as small as 2,000, with varsity athletes, many of them afforded an advantage in admissions, making up 30 percent to 45 percent of the student body. These small colleges, like the largest ones, also give preferential treatment to applicants who excel in music, the arts and a host of other skills. There are also allowances for students from the least populated states. More than 50 people charged. In 2019, a federal investigation known as Operation Varsity Blues snared dozens of parents, coaches and exam administrators in a vast college admissions scheme that implicated athletic programs at the University of Southern California, Yale, Stanford and other schools. The linchpin. William Singer is an admissions counselor at the center of the scheme. He led an elaborate effort to bribe coaches and test monitors, falsify exam scores and fabricate student biographies. He has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government. He has not been sentenced. The parents. Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among the more than three dozen parents many of them wealthy and powerful charged in the case. A private equity financier and a former casino executive, who were found guilty on Oct. 8, 2021, were the first to stand trial. The former C.E.O. of Pimco has received the harshest sentence so far. The coaches. The case also involved athletic coaches from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, including Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer and Yale women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith. Mr. Vandemoer, who was among the first to take a plea deal, has written a book detailing how he was duped by Mr. Singer. "Admissions is filling all the different buckets," said Wendy Smith, the athletic director at Haverford College, a highly rated institution near Philadelphia. "And our athletes are right in there. We are not in any way gaming the system. They are absolutely on par academically." The cost of fielding a successful sports team in the ultracompetitive college athletic landscape often leads to other troubling conflicts of interest. In the Ivy League, for example, most coaches are responsible for fund raising that bridges the gap between support from the college and the true price tag of competing successfully. That can lead to uncomfortable decisions about composing a team, especially since athletes' families often become the leading donors. "You have a family who will give you 25,000, but then you are not going to play their daughter?" said Paul Wardlaw, who was the women's tennis coach at Brown University for 14 years. The high percentage of recruited athletes at some colleges, particularly smaller ones, has other consequences, some of them at odds with institutional ambitions for a diverse student body. Because success in youth sports today often comes more easily to affluent families who spend copiously on private instruction, the rosters of college teams have become predominantly white nearly 80 percent at some small schools. In the end, some in the higher education community believe that last week's admissions fraud scandal, while an embarrassing lesson in what policy changes need to be made, is nevertheless creating a false impression of the state of admissions procedures at American colleges. "There is now this notion that admissions is a competitive cesspool, and it's not," said Michael Reilly, the executive director of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. "In fact," Reilly added, "most campuses nationwide fail to meet their enrollment goals. But then we have this segment that's highly competitive and has created a completely different dynamic. If I were on those campuses, I'd be sitting down and saying, 'Let's rethink how we're doing this.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Earlier this week, it looked as though the London fair might still go forward, even though major publishing companies, including Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Simon Schuster, as well as Amazon and several literary agencies, pulled out. Reed Exhibitions, which organizes the event, announced its decision to cancel on Wednesday. "The effects, actual and projected, of coronavirus are becoming evident across all aspects of our lives here in the U.K. and across the world, with many of our participants facing travel restrictions," Reed Exhibitions said in a statement. "We have been following U.K. government guidelines and working with the rolling advice from the public health authorities and other organizations, and so it is with reluctance that we have taken the decision not to go ahead with this year's event." The London fair typically hosts more than 25,000 authors, publishers, agents and other industry professionals, and has become a crucial international marketplace for the sale of foreign rights and other deals. Some other industry events are moving ahead this month. The Association of Writers Writing Programs said on Monday that it would still hold its conference in San Antonio next week, despite the mayor declaring a public health emergency and some literary groups and presenters saying they would not attend. In a statement, the organization said it would be increasing the amount of hand sanitizer available, and also issued guidelines that "this will be a handshake free, hug free conference." Even with those precautions, some writers and publishers were critical of its decision.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books

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