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FOR a brand seeking to reach the podcast listening public, there is one thing better than sponsoring a hit series: creating your own. General Electric pulled it off last year with its quaintly named GE Podcast Theater. Its eight part science fiction thriller "The Message," produced with the Panoply podcasting network, hit No. 1 on the iTunes podcast chart and had nearly five million downloads. Now comes "LifeAfter," a futuristic 10 episode drama, the first installment of which was released this month. It tells the story of a low level worker at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is obsessed with the traces of life his dead wife left behind on social media, particularly a fictional audio service. The first episode kicks off with what sounds like an ad for that service but perhaps that's a wink of sorts. As with "The Message," a notable detail in this branding experiment is that the sponsoring brand is, by design, almost never mentioned. Distributing and helping create such "sponsor content" has been part of Panoply's business for a while. Think of it as a variation on the so called native advertising or branded content now so familiar online material flagged as having been paid for, but crafted to resemble editorial content. According to Matt Turck, Panoply's chief revenue officer, the company has produced more than 100 episodes of custom podcast series for brands including Purina, Umpqua Bank, Prudential and Starbucks. "It's been an important part of our business," he said. "It generates revenue and differentiates us in the marketplace." That last part may change: For example, another podcast network, Gimlet Media, now has a unit called Gimlet Creative, which this year created a six episode "branded podcast" for eBay called "Open for Business." Panoply spun out of the podcast unit of the online magazine Slate in 2015, positioning itself as a platform for shows produced with partners like The Wall Street Journal and Vox, as well as its own roster of programs. Relatively quickly, Mr. Turck said, the possibility of sponsored shows was added to the mix. G.E., which previously worked with Slate Custom, the site's sponsored content division, and became intrigued by podcasting, ended up being one of the first examples. But its approach has been distinct. Most sponsored podcasts follow a fairly traditional hosts and interviews format. The decision to turn "The Message" into a multipart series was inspired in part by the runaway success of the true crime podcast "Serial." But the fictional form was an attempt to do something different "a new way of reprising the kind of radio dramas of the '30s, '40s, '50s," said Alexa Christon, head of media innovation for G.E. (The name "GE Podcast Theater" echoes "General Electric Theater," an anthology series on radio and television in the 1950s and early 1960s that was hosted by Ronald Reagan.) What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. One of the plot twists in "The Message" its story unfolded as a fake podcast documenting efforts to decode an alien communique was loosely inspired by sound therapy technology that G.E. is working on. But since that connection is never mentioned, most listeners probably never got it. The name "GE Podcast Theater" is noted at the beginning and end of the series, and on the "cover art" people see when playing an episode on smartphones but that's it. Andy Goldberg, G.E.'s chief creative officer, said this was in line with the company's "branded entertainment" work in other media such as the six episode science series "Breakthrough," made last year in collaboration with the National Geographic Channel. Too many references to the sponsor "turns people off," Mr. Goldberg said. "People knew it was GE Podcast Theater," he said, suggesting that listeners gave the company "a lot of credit" for keeping a light touch. Backing up that assertion is tricky one of the widely noted shortcomings of podcast advertising is the dearth of detailed audience data. Outside of download numbers, Ms. Christon said, G.E. judged the success of "The Message" partly by way of "the organic groups that have sprung up" in places like Reddit, swapping plot theories and even generating fan fiction. G.E. used a similar method to create "LifeAfter." The internal marketing group zeroed in on the company's "Digital Twin" research, which seeks to precisely replicate physical objects (like a specific aircraft engine). Applying that idea to humans was a jumping off point for a fictional story, fleshed out in collaboration with the creative agency BBDO, the agency Giant Spoon and Panoply. Panoply essentially runs the production out of its studios, with its team of sound engineers and producers, helping recruit writers (it brought in the playwright Mac Rogers for "The Message") and voice actors. "This was the most collaborative effort that I've worked on," said Mr. Turck of Panoply. Of course, the success of "The Message" added some pressure. And the more crowded the podcast market becomes including a wave of fiction shows the harder it is to break through. "We've got very high expectations," Mr. Turck said, adding that the first episode of "LifeAfter" cracked the top 20 on iTunes within a week of its release. The most prominent form of podcast sponsorship remains the familiar advertising break, often referring to specific instructions for listeners to get a discount or other offer a direct response style that makes ad performance more bluntly measurable. But Mr. Turck says plenty of clients want to experiment; he points to Prudential's "MoneyMind" project with Panoply, which involves taking a finance themed sponsored quiz on Slate that leads to a podcast episode chosen according to your answers. Some marketers want to brainstorm, others want advice; attitudes vary on formats and how heavy handed the branding should be. The only thing that's consistent, he said, is that "there's just more and more interest." Neither G.E. nor Panoply would disclose specifics about costs, but Mr. Goldberg acknowledges that compared with, say, film or TV, even a slick sounding podcast is "not a massive expense." And despite the challenges in measuring the impact, it also means an opportunity for G.E. to insert itself, however obliquely, into broader cultural conversations: "LifeAfter" will ultimately address such trendy topics as artificial intelligence and the possibility of a "digital afterlife." It's a means, Ms. Christon said, for doing something the best advertising always strives for: "capitalizing on the zeitgeist."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Spotify is finally ready to go public. The streaming music giant filed a confidential registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late December, with the intention of listing its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in the first quarter of this year, according to two people briefed on the company's plans who were not authorized to discuss them. As expected, Spotify will pursue a direct listing of its shares, an unusual process in which no new stock is issued and therefore no money is raised but existing investors and insiders can trade their shares on the open market. Such a listing would bypass much of the bureaucracy of a standard initial public offering, saving the company time and potentially millions in underwriting fees. The move, if it goes forward as planned, would be the most prominent music related listing since Pandora Media's initial public offering in 2011, and would recognize Spotify, which began its service 10 years ago, as a transformative force in the music industry. After some 15 years of decline, revenues of recorded music sales began to recover in 2015, largely thanks to streaming. When it last raised money from investors, in 2015, Spotify was valued at 8.5 billion. Its current valuation is not clear. According to reports, it has been valued at as much as 19 billion, based on private transactions.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The first page of the appeal contains a color photograph of an unidentified Las Vegas casino taken on June 4, the frame filled with an unmasked, cheek by jowl crowd of reveling gamblers (with predictable results: Covid 19 cases surged and the governor soon imposed a mask requirement). The fact that casinos are treated more generously than movie theaters, concerts, museums and churches handed Alliance Defending Freedom its opening. "The Free Exercise clause protects the exercise of religion," the church's Supreme Court appeal began, adding that "no constitutional provision protects the right to gamble at casinos, eat at restaurants, or frolic at indoor amusement parks." This statement of the case obviously appealed to Justice Alito, who began his 11 page dissent with this observation: "The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance." He added, "But the governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities." The state, he said, "blatantly discriminates against houses of worship." Let's assume that opening the casinos was a political and economic necessity for the state. But finding a constitutional violation requires more than clever rhetoric. It requires a very precise chain of analysis, a hard climb that Justice Alito failed to make. His burden was to show not simply that churches are limited to 50 people and casinos aren't, but that the state singled churches out for onerous treatment without reason. Federal District Judge Richard Boulware II, in rejecting the church's request for an injunction, offered the analysis that Justice Alito's opinion skipped over: Other secular entities and activities similar in nature to church services have been subject to similar or more restrictive limitations on their operations. The court notes that church services consist of activities, such as sermons and corporate worship, that are comparable in terms of large numbers of people gathering for an extended period of time to lectures, museums, movie theaters, specified trade/technical schools, nightclubs and concerts. All of these latter activities are also subject to the 50 person cap or remain banned altogether. In other words, it's casinos that Nevada singles out for special treatment, not religion. Invoking the First Amendment's free speech clause, Justice Alito also claimed that the state was discriminating against churches on the basis of their "viewpoint." "Religion counts as a viewpoint," he wrote, a sentence I found baffling. Isn't belief in public health a viewpoint? In any event, he went on: "Compare the directive's treatment of casino entertainment and church services. Both involve expression, but the directive favors the secular expression in casino shows over the religious expression in houses of worship." The contorted effort to shoehorn this dispute into standard free speech doctrine was only a prelude to a further charge: that Governor Sisolak "has favored certain speakers over others." It seems that the governor supported and even took part in a protest after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, a protest that drew more than 50 people and yet was allowed to take place. "Respecting some First Amendment rights is not a shield for violating others," Justice Alito wrote. In other words, the governor of Nevada is not only anti religious but a hypocrite as well. Why does any of this matter? After all, Justice Alito's opinion attracted only two other votes. (Justice Gorsuch filed a separate one paragraph dissent, pithily observing that "there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.") I think it matters because rhetoric like Justice Alito's, by design or not, inevitably places the Supreme Court where it least belongs and where it is least qualified to be, at the center of a national debate over how best to protect the American public from a deadly pandemic. It's beyond dispute that public health has become politicized to a degree that would have been unimaginable just six months ago. Does the court really want to become a part of that politicization by opening its doors to a battle not its own? That even a minority of justices would seize this moment to advance their religious agenda, especially given that agenda's nearly unqualified success in recent years, is deeply unsettling.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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LIZ COOPER THE STAMPEDE at Rough Trade (Feb. 27, 9 p.m.). This lilting Nashville rock trio gives new meaning to the label "easy listening" with their tempered, dreamy psychedelia. Gentle grooves and softly arpeggiated guitars take the place of sprawling, climactic jams, yet their songwriting is taut enough that the audience is never in danger of being lulled to sleep. The band has made refining their live show a priority, touring their songs for three years including as support for Bermuda Triangle, the side project of the Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard before heading into the studio. Their 2018 debut, "Window Flowers," is summery and bright, well suited to mitigating New York's winter chill. 718 388 4111, roughtradenyc.com THE DREAM at the Bowery Ballroom (Feb. 26, 8 p.m.). Praising this producer, singer and songwriter for fidelity to his artistic vision might seem odd. After all, he is responsible for some of the biggest pop hits of the past 15 years, including Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Beyonce's "Single Ladies." In his work as a solo artist, though, the Dream remains steadfast in his commitment to achingly slow, explicitly bedroom ready R B jams. Combining his high, often AutoTuned voice with layers of synths and understated beats, he has made himself into a new model of R B maestro. 212 260 4700, boweryballroom.com JULIA HOLTER at Warsaw (Feb. 22, 9 p.m.). To call Holter a singer songwriter feels reductive, given the wide ranging abstract soundscapes she creates with a nearly endless array of instruments and electronic tools. In her compositions, this California native finds common ground between the baroque and the futuristic, the ancient (her latest album, "Aviary," includes a musical interpretation of a poem by Sappho) and the modern (another track was inspired by Alice Coltrane's "Universal Consciousness"). The one thing listeners won't find in Holter's music is compromise: It's about as unusual and boundary pushing as anything labeled pop music can get, and all the more exciting for it. 212 777 6800, warsawconcerts.com JOHN MELLENCAMP at the Beacon Theater (Feb. 25 27, 8 p.m.). This legendary rock singer and songwriter is best known for his ability to capture the heartland as he describes in his biggest hit, "Jack Diane" in accessible, catchy songs. But since his 1980s heyday, Mellencamp has shed most of the trappings of commercial rock (including his myriad stage names) in favor of more straightforward blues arrangements courtesy of the super producer T Bone Burnett. For his latest album, 2018's "Other People's Stuff," Mellencamp produces and performs, revisiting a number of covers he had previously recorded in the rootsy style that is now his signature. 212 465 6000, beacontheatre.com SON LITTLE at BRIC House Ballroom (Feb. 28, 8 p.m.). The folksy blues put forth by this Philadelphia based singer songwriter, who has also written songs for Mavis Staples and collaborated with the Roots, can be intimate, acoustic and mostly unadorned, or up tempo and groovy, as it is on his most recent album "New Magic." A deep understanding of classic American roots music ties his records together, lending them old school credibility even as the occasional unorthodox production choice gives his work a contemporary feel. The Canadian singer songwriter Melissa Laveaux and the folk singer Christopher Paul Stelling open. 718 683 5600, bricartsmedia.org SON LUX at the Appel Room (Feb. 28, 8:30 p.m.). The art music composer Ryan Lott, the experimental drummer and percussionist Ian Chang and the jazz schooled guitarist Rafiq Bhatia have forged their talents to create airy, unconventional pop under the name Son Lux. Incredibly active as soloists, these artists channel their more esoteric skills into this project, which attracts alternative rock and electronic music audiences as well as aficionados of contemporary composition. In 2018, the trio released their fifth album, "Brighter Wounds," which puts seemingly incongruous sounds like screeching, dissonant strings and bluesy guitar riffs adjacent to one another for a compelling, unpredictable result. 212 721 6500, lincolncenter.org NATALIE WEINER BRITTANY ANJOU at Le Poisson Rouge (Feb. 25, 8 p.m.). This pianist just released "Enamigo Reciprokataj," a debut album with a double meaning: Translated from Esperanto, its title can mean "Reciprocal Love" or "Mutual Breakdown." It makes sense that Anjou would speak in double entendre, in a language that's at once universal and abstruse. The album is full of broadly sourced melodies that are bright and lyrical and quick, and work by their own clever logic. (She has studied jazz in New York, Western classical in Prague, and gyil music in Ghana; she's currently an artist in residence at Kuwait's Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad Cultural Center opera house.) Anjou celebrates the release of "Enamigo Reciprokataj" with Greg Chudzik on bass and Shirazette Tinnin on drums. The bassist Ari Folman Cohen will participate as a special guest. 212 505 3474, lpr.com BRENT BIRCKHEAD at Nublu 151 (Feb. 22, 8 p.m.). When he's not on the road with Lauryn Hill's band, this alto saxophonist is often found in the basement of Smalls, partaking of late night jam sessions with other young jazz improvisers. Struck with bluesy warmth and the relentless swing of Cannonball Adderley, Birckhead's playing has lately established him as one of the most riveting young improvisers in New York. On his impressive debut album, "Birckhead," his R B sojourns and his straight ahead jazz background come to bear, resulting in a sound that skates the divide between svelte swagger and cutting passion. The record finds the young bandleader meditating on romance, personal growth and the travails of his native Baltimore; he will celebrate its release at Nublu with Corey Wallace on trombone, Marc Cary on piano, Jon Michel on bass and Curtis Nowosad on drums. nublu.net PETER EVANS WITH MAZZ SWIFT AND RON STABINSKY at National Sawdust (Feb. 27, 7 p.m.). An unassailable young virtuoso on trumpet, Evans uses extended technique to create some of the most darkly inscrutable music around. At National Sawdust as part of John Zorn's monthly Commissioning Series, Evans presents two sets of original music: a solo trumpet work, and a series of compositions for violin and piano, performed by Swift and Stabinsky. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org LOUIS HAYES at the Iridium (Feb. 22, 8 p.m.). This 81 year old drummer plays straight ahead jazz with a big, broad swing feel, and a built in sense of the Afro Latin underpinnings of jazz rhythm. His mix of nuanced syncopation and raw power helped define some quintessential hard bop groups of the 1960s, led by figures such as Cannonball Adderley and Oscar Peterson. His most recent album as a leader is "Serenade for Horace," from 2017, a tribute to the pianist Horace Silver. He appears here with Vincent Herring on alto saxophone, David Hazeltine on piano and Dezron Douglas on bass. 212 582 2121, theiridium.com IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS, AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS AND NICOLE MITCHELL at Merkin Hall (Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m.). This concert brings together some of the most deeply rooted and wildly inventive storytellers in improvised music. A pianist and vocalist, Myers, 76, was an early member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; she writes and performs music with hard bound connections to gospel and blues, and an expansive approach to improvising. Mitchell, a flutist, became the association's first female chair 10 years ago; her music often deals in grand themes of science fiction and heroism. The group Irreversible Entanglements is a scalding, free improvising quintet featuring the young performance poet Camae Ayewa (known as Moor Mother in her solo work), who draws connections across epochs of African and American history, making sense of trauma and gathering power to take action today. At this Ecstatic Music Festival show, these three acts will perform together for the first time. 212 501 3330, kaufmanmusiccenter.org ARUAN ORTIZ AND DON BYRON at Mezzrow (Feb. 27, 8 and 9:30 p.m.). Two ecumenical improvisers with a mix of jazz vocabulary and classical precision, Ortiz, a Cuban born pianist, and Byron, an American clarinetist, released a powerful album of duets last year, "Random Dances and (A)tonalities." It included takes on pieces by Duke Ellington, Johann Sebastian Bach and Geri Allen, as well as a few twisty, centrifugal original tunes. At Mezzrow, an intimate basement club, they will play repertoire from that album. 646 476 4346, mezzrow.com KAMASI WASHINGTON at the Apollo Theater (Feb. 23, 8 p.m.). Over the past four years, Washington has made greater inroads into the mainstream than any jazz musician of his generation. He's done it by threading together opposing traditions from his native Los Angeles, each with its own surprising resonance today: grooving, dance inflected jazz funk from the 1970s and '80s, and the looser, more expressionistic music of avant garde artists such as Horace Tapscott and Bobby Bradford. At the Apollo, leading a 10 piece iteration of his band, the Next Step, Washington will play selections from his hit albums, "The Epic" (2015) and "Heaven and Earth" (2018). 212 531 5305, apollotheater.org GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO REMEMBERING JONAS: A TRIBUTE TO JONAS MEKAS at City Winery (Feb. 21, 8 p.m.). If you desire another opportunity to honor Mekas's life, Patti Smith, John Zorn, Lee Renaldo, Richard Barone, David Amram and Glenn Mercer are getting together to give you a musical one. Along with the film critic Amy Taubin and other special guests, these musicians are gathering tonight to pay homage to the pioneering filmmaker through song and spoken word. Proceeds will benefit Anthology Film Archives, Mekas's dream home for avant garde cinema that he made real with the help of Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage in 1970. 212 608 0555, citywinery.com DANIELLE DOWLING
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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"O.K., good." That's something people say to signal that whatever has just occurred is sufficient, that it's time to move on. "O.K., good" is also one of the things said in Melinda Ring's "Strange Engagements," a dance work that opened at Danspace Project on Thursday. At the end of a section or two of the 40 minute piece, performed in the round without sonic accompaniment, one of the dancers says, "O.K., good" or announces the title: "This is called 'Strange Engagements.'" What happens between these pauses is indeed strange, at least in a sense. Huddled or clumped, the dancers wriggle and shake, rolling their heads and hips as if in a dark corner of a rave before it develops into an orgy. Periodically, they stomp their feet or clap, as though in sync with some song we can't hear. It's like a silent disco inhabited by people with the oddly loud footfalls of small children. But it isn't nearly strange enough. On her website, Ms. Ring explains that she began by videotaping the dancers' "raw" improvisations, which is easy to believe while watching the final product. She also explains that this unadorned, amorphous seeming movement has been carefully arranged. And this, too, is apparent in the dance, as when everyone snaps into unison or sequences recur or two dancers distant from each other synchronize.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Almost exactly a year ago, on a sticky summer afternoon in Los Angeles, the Clippers staged a news conference for their two new headliners, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. The duo sat on a platform inside a recreation center gymnasium that was packed with fans, reporters and team employees. For a long suffering franchise, the event had the feel of a genuine celebration. Around the city, there were dreams of a Western Conference finals held entirely at Staples Center, the downtown arena the Clippers and the Lakers share. At long last, both teams were championship contenders at the same time, their rosters stacked with glamorous stars. Looking back, the scene that day was like something from a bygone era. It has been a challenging season for the league, and for Los Angeles in particular. Less than two months after an unimaginable tragedy Kobe Bryant, the retired Lakers star, and his 13 year old daughter, Gianna, were among nine people who died in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26 the N.B.A. suspended its season because of the coronavirus pandemic. Staples Center, the site of Bryant's public memorial, has been empty and silent since March. On Thursday night, the Lakers and the Clippers will finally share a court again albeit on the other side of the country and far from their fans inside the league's bubble at Walt Disney World. It is championship or bust for LeBron James. Now 35, and in his 17th season, James showed up to Disney with gray in his ample quarantine beard, and he does not seem to be shying away from the symbolism; he is not young anymore. He has no way of knowing how many more real opportunities he will have to win titles, but he has one right in front of him, this time with Anthony Davis as his running mate. Questions: Avery Bradley, the Lakers' top perimeter defender, opted out of the restart for family reasons, and Rajon Rondo broke his thumb. Rondo could return during the playoffs, and the Lakers have two new pieces who could help along the perimeter: J.R. Smith and Dion Waiters. But do the Lakers have enough depth to compete with the likes of the Clippers? And can James and Davis stay healthy? Davis already got poked in the eye. If either player were to go down, forget those title hopes. The restart has been an adventure for the Clippers. Ivica Zubac, Landry Shamet and Marcus Morris Sr. were late arrivals. Montrezl Harrell, Patrick Beverley and Lou Williams each left to tend to what the team described as family matters. And while the Clippers are finally (nearly) whole, Williams is under a 10 day quarantine for breaking league protocol during his excused absence by stopping for wings at a strip club. The Clippers, though, are built for the playoffs. Questions: Is this the year? For so long, the Clippers scuffled along as one of the league's punch lines. The franchise has never won a championship, let alone made an appearance in the conference finals in its 50 year history. But Leonard is coming off a championship run with the Toronto Raptors, and the Clippers now seem primed for one of their own. Overshadowed by all the hoopla in Los Angeles, the Nuggets battled through the early months of the season. Nikola Jokic, their do everything forward, did not show up for training camp in the greatest physical condition, but he still produced: 20.2 points, 10.2 rebounds and 6.9 assists a game while shooting a crisp 52.8 percent from the field. And there is his on court partnership with point guard Jamal Murray, one of the league's more fascinating works in progress. Questions: Jokic's arrival in Florida was delayed after he tested positive for the coronavirus, but he showed up as a noticeably trimmer version of himself. How will the weight loss affect his play? Will he be nimbler than ever? More important, do the Nuggets have enough firepower to topple the Lakers and/or the Clippers? Jokic and Murray would love to play the role of spoiler. The last time we saw the Jazz, they were at the forefront of a brewing pandemic. Center Rudy Gobert's positive test on March 11 effectively shut down pro sports in North America for several months, and the casual way that he had treated the virus caused friction with teammates, most notably Donovan Mitchell. In truth, their issues had been festering for a while. Questions: Can these guys get along? Does it matter? The Jazz also lost Bojan Bogdanovic, their best shooter, to season ending wrist surgery. But Gobert is one of the league's best defenders, and Mitchell is a dynamic young guard. It is a fragile chemistry experiment that could come together or blow apart. Raise your hand if you thought the Thunder would be 16 games above .500 when a pandemic interrupted the N.B.A. season. Anyone? About a year ago, the Thunder traded Russell Westbrook to the Rockets and Paul George to the Clippers. Most figured that the Thunder were about to embark on a dramatic rebuild, and that Chris Paul, whom they acquired in their deal with Houston, would land with another team. Instead, Paul dedicated himself to the Thunder and even made the All Star team again. The payoff has been huge, as he helped nurture young players like guard Shai Gilgeous Alexander. The mad scientists of the N.B.A. are set to continue with another bold experiment: the small ball lineup the Rockets deployed in February after trading Clint Capela, their starting center, to the Atlanta Hawks. The general idea is to station five players on the perimeter so that they drag their defenders to the 3 point line and give Westbrook seams to drive to the hoop. Critics consider it a gimmick. But when Coach Mike D'Antoni put the system in place, Westbrook was struggling and the Rockets were losing. Questions: James Harden is having another all universe season, scoring a league leading 34.4 points a game, and Westbrook's production improved after D'Antoni went small. But will the Rockets be able to defend anyone in the postseason? How dangerous are the Mavericks? Consider that, according to Basketball Reference, they have the highest offensive rating (116.7) of any team since at least 1973 74. Yes, even better than the Warriors and Rockets of recent vintage. Credit the versatility of Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis. Before the season was suspended, the Mavericks were clicking at an even higher level thanks to the emergence of Tim Hardaway Jr. Questions: For all their scoring pyrotechnics, the Mavericks are a middle of the pack to below average defensive team. There is room for improvement, but it may not happen soon enough for Dallas to be a contender in the bubble. The Grizzlies have been one of the league's more pleasant surprises. Led by the rookie point guard Ja Morant, Memphis has transitioned from the grit and grind era while retaining pieces of its ancestral roots. The Grizzlies still play hard. But they are learning as they go, and they have a young core that could cause trouble. One year removed from advancing to the Western Conference finals, the Trail Blazers were scuffling along before the lockdown even as Damian Lillard (28.9 points, 7.8 assists, 4.3 rebounds a game) crafted one of his finest seasons to date. But the off season departures of Al Farouq Aminu and Moe Harkless hindered the team early, as did the absences of Jusuf Nurkic and Zach Collins. But Nurkic and Collins are healthy again, and Carmelo Anthony showed up to Florida in great shape. Questions: Can Lillard pull off another playoff run for the ages? It has been a disheartening season for the Trail Blazers. Lillard has emphasized that he is in Portland for the long run, but rumors about his future will continue to swirl if the team struggles. Zion, Zion, Zion. Even before Zion Williamson made his long awaited debut for the Pelicans in January, he was the league's most magnetic curiosity. In 19 games before the league shut down, he finally delivered by averaging 23.6 points and 6.8 rebounds per game as the Pelicans chased a playoff spot. They are back in the hunt behind Williamson and a young core that includes Brandon Ingram, a first time All Star this season. Questions: Until Williamson proves he can stay on the court, there will be nagging concerns about his durability. He missed the first three months of the season after having knee surgery. Also, not long after the Pelicans arrived in Florida, Williamson left the bubble because of what the team described as an urgent family member. But he is back, and all eyes will be on him. In Luke Walton's first season as coach, the Kings appeared to be moving in the right direction before the shutdown, winning 13 of their final 20 games. Buddy Hield had begrudgingly moved to the bench, but he was scoring and providing depth. De'Aaron Fox, meanwhile, was continuing to play well as the team's starting point guard, averaging 20.4 points and 6.8 assists a game for the season. The franchise's first playoff berth since 2005 06 seemed within reach. It has not been a vintage season for the Spurs, whose record tying streak of 22 straight postseason appearances is in jeopardy. DeMar DeRozan has been terrific, averaging 22.2 points per game while shooting 52.6 percent from the field. But the Spurs are a poor defensive team, and LaMarcus Aldridge, their starting power forward, had season ending shoulder surgery. Coach Gregg Popovich has suggested that he will use the restart as a chance to develop young players like Dejounte Murray, Derrick White and Lonnie Walker. Questions: What changes await the Spurs? DeRozan could become a free agent. And then, of course, there is Popovich, who, at 71, has not revealed his plans for next season. If he does step down after 24 seasons and five championships, it seems likely that he would try to do it in typical Popovich fashion, with as little fanfare as possible. The Suns started the season hot, then got cold before settling into a steady rhythm of playing fairly mediocre basketball until the pandemic brought everything to a standstill. But mediocrity counts as progress in Phoenix, where Devin Booker, a first time All Star this season, has been doing what he can to drag the franchise toward respectability. Booker is averaging 26.1 points and 6.6 assists while shooting a career best 48.7 percent from the field. Questions: It would take a miracle for the Suns to force a play in series for the conference's final playoff spot. But for a young squad, there is value in spending several more weeks together an experience the Suns can potentially use to build on for next season.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Gil Schwartz, who was head of corporate communications for CBS, wrote a humor column under the pen name Stanley Bing. "I was Zorro, Clark Kent, putting one over on Perry White," he once wrote. Gil Schwartz, the CBS network's longtime chief communications officer who, under the pen name Stanley Bing, skewered corporate misbehavior throughout the business world in columns for Esquire and Fortune magazines, died on Saturday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 68. His wife, Laura Svienty, said the cause was cardiac arrest. For more than 20 years Mr. Schwartz was the tough talking but charming spokesman for CBS and a confidant of its top brass, most notably Leslie Moonves, the chief executive who resigned in 2018 over sexual harassment accusations. But it was as Stanley Bing, an alter ego that he kept secret for many years, that Mr. Schwartz found his greatest renown. A former actor and playwright, he began his witty, often stinging columns for Esquire in 1984, when he was a rising executive at Group W, the television division of Westinghouse Electric. He dreaded what would happen if his bosses found out. "I was Zorro, Clark Kent, putting one over on Perry White," he wrote in an essay for The New York Times Book Review in 2018. "But with this cool little secret came the fear debilitating, crushing, sleep destroying. Because, you know, I simply could not be fired. I had a mortgage, a little girl about to go to a preschool that cost more than my car each year." Mr. Schwartz's second book under the pen name Stanley Bing was published in 1992. Instead of being fired, Mr. Schwartz's bosses seemed to relish his secret identity. In 1992, as he was preparing to promote his second book, "Crazy Bosses," on ABC's "Good Morning America," he outed himself to Burton Staniar, the chairman of Group W. "I laughed hysterically and then attempted to strangle him," Mr. Staniar said in an interview with The Times in 1996. Two weeks later, Mr. Schwartz said, he was promoted to vice president. By the mid 1990s his side gig had become an increasingly open secret, and he seemed more delighted than terrified to be called out. In 1996, after he was named the top P.R. executive at CBS following its acquisition by Westinghouse, he was asked to confirm his extracurricular career. He released a coy statement: "It is inappropriate for Mr. Schwartz to speak on the record, since he is accustomed to disavowing Mr. Bing, other than occasionally impersonating him at parties." By then, he had moved his Esquire column, titled "Executive Summary," to Fortune for twice the money that Esquire had paid him. In Fortune he renamed it "While You Were Out." For one Fortune column, in 2004, he was inspired by an executive suite struggle at Disney between the chief executive, Michael Eisner, and his handpicked president, Michael Ovitz, writing: "Eisner and Ovitz and Ovitz and Eisner. Ovitz and Eisner and Eisner and Ovitz. Bright, shiny stock options tied up with string ... these are a few of my favorite things! Hm? Oh, I'm sorry. I've been singing. This whole two titans locked in mortal conflict thing has got me in a merry mood." He also wrote 12 other books under the Bing pseudonym, most of them humorous riffs about management, including "What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness" (2000) and "Sun Tzu Was a Sissy: Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War" (2004). He wrote three novels, among them "You Look Nice Today" (2003). Gil David Schwartz was born on May 20, 1951, in Manhattan and grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father, Bill Schwartz, was a professor of social work at Columbia University, and his mother, Ruth (Efron) Schwartz, was a social worker. With his parents' encouragement, Gil helped his younger brother, Michael, who is deaf, learn to communicate by speaking evenly to him and moving his lips in a deliberate way so that Michael could read them. "Gil told me because of that demand, he developed what he called his 'radio voice,'" Michael Schwartz, now a law professor at Syracuse University, wrote in an email. After graduating from Brandeis University in Massachusetts with a bachelor's degree in theater arts and English, Mr. Schwartz became an actor and playwright and performed in an improvisational troupe called the Proposition. He founded another improv group, the Next Move. To support himself he took on odd jobs, including driving a taxi and selling typewriter ribbons. But with a wife and two young children and wanting a steady income, Mr. Schwartz turned to a corporate career in 1980, taking a job as a speechwriter for Teleprompter, a cable television company, which was acquired the next year by Westinghouse. He found an outlet for his humor in Esquire, where the articles editor, Dave Hirshey, had hired him a few years earlier to write for the The Daily News's Sunday magazine as a freelancer. Mr. Hirshey recalled that when Mr. Schwartz handed in his first Esquire column, he used the name Stanley Bingham. "I said, 'What was that, your name in the old country?'" Mr. Hirshey said in a phone interview. "It was shortened to Bing, and he started this high wire act of having one foot in corporate machinations and another in business satire." Mr. Schwarz remained the top spokesman for CBS for nearly 23 years, counseling top executives like Mr. Moonves, Peter Lund and Mel Karmazin and overseeing a staff of more than 100 publicists. He performed parody songs at the network's annual affiliates meeting dressed as celebrities like Johnny Cash, Liberace and Gen. George S. Patton. He was, in many ways, an old school public relations executive, doling out information to reporters as easily as he would play hardball with them. Writing as Stanley Bing for Esquire in 1994, Mr. Schwartz described the ideal traits of someone in his job. Referring to one of them, he wrote, "The ability to feel deep, stupid loyalty is a must." His own loyalty was tested in 2018 as accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moonves mounted. According to a draft report of an investigation by outside lawyers for CBS, Mr. Schwartz learned about some of the charges in late 2017, not long after the Harvey Weinstein sex crime allegations broke. Mr. Schwartz drafted a resignation letter for Mr. Moonves, but Mr. Moonves didn't sign it. The report said Mr. Schwartz had not told the CBS board about what he knew. Mr. Moonves did finally step down, in September 2018; Mr. Schwartz announced his retirement that month. "I still have a lot of writing to do," he said in a memo, "in an atmosphere of perhaps some greater serenity." In addition to his wife and brother, he is survived by his daughter, Nina Pajak; his son, Will; a stepdaughter, Rachel Bender; a stepson, Kyle Bender, and two grandchildren.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The night before her wedding, Maya Posey Pierre crouched on the living room floor of her Brooklyn apartment watching YouTube tutorials on floral design. She neatly laid out rows of orange and white roses, which she bought in bulk from Trader Joe's. Armed with floral shears and sheer determination, she got to work. "We wanted to go to an actual florist," Mrs. Posey Pierre, 29, an actress, said. "The only reason we didn't go timing. I believed I could do it, so I told myself, 'I'm going to make it work.'" "Make it work" is the unofficial mantra for many couples who planned their dream weddings for 2020, only to have the coronavirus pandemic turn everything upside down. While some postponed their nuptials to 2021 or beyond, others decided to plow through, emboldened by the "love is not canceled" philosophy that's become somewhat of a rallying cry on social media. "The only thing I had my heart set on was using light on a stairwell," Mrs. Posey Pierre said. "The camera can't see everything, so it doesn't matter if the entire space isn't beautifully decorated, but whatever the camera can see, you want it to look nice." However, she and her husband, Marc Pierre, a high school teacher, live in a 400 square foot Bedford Stuyvesant apartment without stairs. So they reached out to the couple who owns a renovated barn in the nearby South Midwood neighborhood, where Pierre, 28, had proposed on Valentine's Day this year. The owners, who operate the barn as an Airbnb rental, practically insisted that they host their virtual wedding there instead. Mrs. Posey Pierre would get her dramatic, bride coming down the stairs moment. But not without a few headaches. "It turned out to be the most difficult thing because the wires kept getting tangled," she said. "Then literally at the last minute while I was making all these flower arrangements, I remember thinking, 'Flowers on the stairs would be nice.'" Knowing the stairs would be the focal point, the couple added a few finishing touches for softness and warmth, like candles and a gold cake topper from Amazon. On May 24, after exchanging vows, they sat at the dining table to cut the cake and chat with guests, as string lights twinkled behind them. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. For a terrace or rooftop wedding, keep decor lower to the ground to highlight the views, advised Justine Broughal, the founder of Together Events, a wedding and event planning company based in New York and Portland, Ore. "Create your own ceremony scene by repurposing items from your home: a rug to stand on, candles in holders of varying sizes, and a foraged bouquet or boutonniere," Ms. Broughal said. Andrea Loredo Bachalis, 30, a lifestyle blogger, and Peter Bachalis, 33, a financial adviser, did just that for their June 25 wedding, which took place on the terrace of their Chelsea apartment. "I brought some indoor things outside my floor length mirror, and it really made the vibe much better," Mrs. Loredo Bachalis said. "I brought out a clear console table and put that in the middle of the trees." They purchased the Chinese hibiscus trees from a shop in Manhattan's flower district and worked with a florist to create a lush garden feel. Candles and vases that the bride ordered online completed the elegant, botanical inspired look. Another clever internet find was a faux floral collar for Nala, their 5 year old corgi who served as the maid of honor. Mrs. Loredo Bachalis said that the collar looked real in the photos. "In the age of Instagram versus reality, I don't think you have to be so concerned because you can edit some of these things," she said, noting that a friend planning her own at home wedding had placed large fake roses on her rosebush "because all the roses died, and you couldn't even tell." Johanne Piverger Thenor, 38, who owns JP Events Design, was looking forward to celebrating 10 years of marriage. She and her husband, Mills Thenor, 42, who works in sales management, had discussed traveling to Bali, Greece or Italy with their three young children and having a small beachside vow renewal ceremony. When she realized that wasn't going to happen, she began weighing options for their July 30 anniversary. She turned to her business Rolodex of vendors. She called in favors and made 11th hour trips to Home Depot, picking up plywood that her husband crafted into a makeshift flower tunnel for their backyard in West Orange, N.J. "I wanted all you see is flowers," said Mrs. Piverger Thenor. "Like I'm walking in a tunnel of flowers to go to the ceremony. I spoke to my husband, and this happened literally at 7:30 that morning." For the altar, she placed a white drape over piping, which was propped up by stakes in the ground. She used candelabras and vases she already owned to fill out the space. While orchids are her go to flower with clients, she recommends other varieties of flowers for making a statement over Zoom. "If you want something to look bigger than what it is, use hydrangeas," she said. "It will give you that lush look. Mix them with garden roses you can't go wrong." "It was exactly how I visioned," Michelle Barnes said of her stoop wedding to Troy Barnes on July 4 in Brooklyn. Ms. Broughal suggests turning the doorway into a ceremony arch and adding floral pieces to help spotlight a home's architecture. Premade greenery garlands can be attached to railings, columns and a doorway using zip ties and removable command hooks. "Be sure to embrace vertical lines so the viewer's eye is drawn up to you and your partner, rather than dispersing decor horizontally and causing a distraction from the main event," Ms. Broughal said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels says he spent almost the same amount of time designing the Via 57 chair, which will be available for sale in September, as he did the pyramid shaped Via 57 West rental building. Not every building inspires its own chair. But Via 57 West, a 709 unit residential rental tower at 625 West 57th Street in Manhattan, is no ordinary building. So the architect Bjarke Ingels, who designed the structure that seems to defy description it's most commonly referred to as either a pyramid or a hyperbolic paraboloid made a chair to go with it: the Via 57. Created by KiBiSi, the product design company Mr. Ingels runs with two partners, it was manufactured by Fritz Hansen. The chair will be available in September, for 2,756. Mr. Ingels, 41, is one of the most in demand architects of his generation. His firm, Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, is at work on a new campus for Google in Mountain View, Calif., and the redesign of the South Mall campus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. But Via 57 West, where the Durst Organization recently began leasing and move ins are underway, is the Danish architect's first completed building in the United States. He recently answered questions about the building and its chair. This interview has been edited and condensed. Q. How is Via 57 West different from other apartment buildings? A. The building is about creating that corner, and the courtyard. Because of the extreme asymmetry, the southwest corner is the height of a handrail and the northeast corner is the height of a high rise. The courtyard building is at the architectural scale what Central Park is at the urban scale an oasis in the middle of the city. It's communal. I have a feeling that this building will function a little like a social condenser. It might actually be a building where you get to know your neighbors. Q. Why design a chair to go with it? A. We thought there would be something fun about doing it for this project. Arne Jacobsen, the Danish architect some of his nicest work was designed for the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, including the Swan and the Egg chair. It was Fritz Hansen who did that. We came up with this idea of Scan American: If Scandinavia is known for this very simple aesthetic, then American, in the cliche way, could be about comfort. Our first design was almost the idea of a beanbag chair with skinny legs. Q. How did the building inspire it? A. It's not like we wanted the chair to look like the building, or vice versa. In the courtyard, it's really open to one side and really well defined to the other side, which makes it cozy. The chair has a little bit of that. It's an interesting hybrid that's neither an armchair nor just a seat it has a little bit of both. Q. Will the chairs be used in the building? A. Yes, there are going to be a handful of them in all of the common areas. Then, hopefully, it gets a life on its own. Just like the Swan: Even though it was designed for the Royal Hotel, it's not like it needs to only be there. Q. But is there something about it that works particularly well there? A. What I think works well is that it groups together quite nicely. As free standing lobby or living room furniture, it almost forms a mini sofa. You have quite a variety of seating possibilities. Q. What's happening with your other projects in New York? A. We're starting up on the second phase of the BIG U. Not only the East Side we've been working on, which is scheduled to break ground in 2017, but also the south tip of Manhattan, including Battery Park City. Then we're doing the Spiral and 2 World Trade Center; they're in conversation with potential anchor tenants. We're doing a rental building in Harlem, on 126th Street, but we haven't really gone public with it yet.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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THE BUYERS Jim and Denise Burnham were able to find an apartment with room for four. Back before they had children, Denise and Jim Burnham spent three years living in New York. They rented a one bedroom with a balcony for around 3,400 a month in a Midtown West high rise. Both were in the military then, working primarily as Air Force R.O.T.C. instructors. They had traveled the world, living in places as varied as San Antonio and the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, but their favorite place was New York. "It cast a spell on both of us," Mrs. Burnham said. When their New York tour ended in 2010, they were transferred to Fort Meade, near Baltimore, where Mrs. Burnham taught public affairs officers. Mr. Burnham returned to civilian life, and landed a job in operations at a video game company. This time around, the Burnhams who met as cadets in the R.O.T.C. program at Florida State University in Tallahassee had two toddlers, Eli and Zoe. They wanted to rent a three bedroom, with a living area sufficiently large for all four of them, in a child friendly neighborhood with good schools. "I don't know if this is abnormal, but we spend 80 percent of our time in the living room and kitchen area," Mrs. Burnham said, where they like to have friends over and "hang out and play a board game or whatever." A rent of 4,500 a month was "the top of our budget, as in: I hope I budgeted everything else properly," Mr. Burnham said. Now, with toddlers, Mrs. Burnham had a secret dread of having a balcony, something she later realized wasn't worth worrying about. "The reality of the budget canceled that out," she said. The couple contacted Cooper Cooper Real Estate, which a friend had used, and were matched with Sandra Thompson, an agent there. Actually, there was something wrong with it. It had "sweeping views" of traffic jams on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. And it was a two bedroom convertible to three. The chance of renting a true three bedroom "was starting to look very bleak," she said. In Midtown East, a 1940 doorman rental building was a contender. The two bedroom had a beautiful sunken living room. The kids could share the big master bedroom. The building didn't allow temporary floor to ceiling walls, but the Burnhams figured bookshelves would do as dividers. But this location was in the thick of the concrete jungle. The neighbors seemed to be mostly young professionals without children. The feel wasn't homey enough, and they were in no rush to decide. One Upper East Side place was surrounded by scaffolding. One near Morningside Heights had a living area too small for four people, "even with two people being so little," Mr. Burnham said. At that point, Ms. Thompson said, she realized that the bedrooms could be small but that the Burnhams really needed a family area they could all live in. That's what they found in a six story elevator building on the Far East Side. "I was waiting for disappointment, so used to that bait and switch thing," where a three bedroom turned out to be a two bedroom, Mr. Burnham said. But this apartment was different, with three real bedrooms and even a second bathroom. And no balcony. "It answered the mail on all accounts," Mrs. Burnham said. "We had a wish list in our head and Sandra was able to find it." The rent was 4,535. At that point, Mrs. Burnham had started a job at Nalco, an environmental hygiene company, and Mr. Burnham had a verbal job offer from Rockstar Games. They were able to get his written job offer in the nick of time, completing the necessary paperwork before another applicant did. The Burnhams arrived in the spring and what with several months of rent, a security deposit and a broker's fee, "it is like we took a faucet to our bank account like turning a faucet on full blast," Mrs. Burnham said. Upon arrival, they were greeted by the downstairs neighbors complaining about the thump of toddling feet, so they added plenty of rugs with padding underneath. "We understand where they are coming from," Mrs. Burnham said. "We've tried to make some corrections." That's all part of vertical living. Doing laundry in the basement doesn't bother them at all. They happily hoist the stroller up the building's front steps. Nearby John Jay Park, with its big outdoor pool, is like their second home, and "our existence revolves around all the free and fun stuff to do with kids," Mrs. Burnham said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The Munich Security Conference was a depressing gathering this February. Throughout the Cold War and for decades thereafter, Wehrkunde (as the conference was known when it started in 1963) was the premier event for Europeans and Americans committed to NATO, trans Atlantic ties and the West. For decades, Senator John McCain led the American congressional delegation. In his last address to the conference in 2017, McCain won a standing ovation by proclaiming, "You should not count America out, and we should not count each other out." This year's meeting had little of that. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a Trump like speech that shocked a quiet hall. He bullied allies rather than celebrating them, most audaciously by urging European partners to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and join instead what one former European prime minister feared might be a call to war against Tehran. The discussion among Europeans at Wehrkunde was equally disheartening. I spent a few meals listening to Britons and their Continental colleagues debate different Brexit options. In parallel, nervous European liberals dissected the causes of various right wing populists spiking in popularity throughout the Continent. Few had the bandwidth to contemplate the rise of China and Russia. The darkest discussions swirled around the possible collapse of the eurozone and the European Union more generally. Both sets of challenges the future of trans Atlantic relations and the fate of the European Union are real. However, the history of Europe over the last 70 years as traced and explained brilliantly in Ian Kershaw's magisterial "The Global Age: Europe, 1950 2017" should give at least some credence to the argument that things are not as bad as they seem. In synthesizing this period in European history in a long but very readable volume (part of the Penguin History of Europe series), Kershaw reminds us that the Continent has faced other large challenges in the postwar era and survived; that some long term trends of peace, prosperity and democracy are both robust and remarkable; and that individuals have agency, and can alter the course of events they are not mere expressions of those events. On earlier challenges, Kershaw points out that postwar Europeans tackled difficult issues that make some of today's troubles seem more manageable. During most of "The Global Age," Communist regimes loyal to the Soviet Union subjugated millions of Europeans, sometimes through brutal force, as with Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981. Tensions between East and West escalated precariously close to armed conflict, including once in October 1961 when American and Soviet tanks faced off against each other in Berlin. A year later, all of European security was threatened again because of a standoff between Moscow and Washington in faraway Cuba. Today's Europe, thankfully, is not haunted by the specter of nuclear war. The probability of a Russian invasion of a NATO member is low. Domestic politics within European countries also exhibited more uncertainty and instability during that era than many now remember. France cycled through governments at an alarming pace before Charles de Gaulle stepped in, sometimes leaving this major power without a government for weeks. Imagine how 24/7 media would have covered that perpetual crisis? During this "golden age" for Europe, imperial powers had to navigate decolonization. The French wars in Indochina and Algeria and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique were difficult, regime threatening challenges that make the French and Portuguese problems of the present day look comparatively minor. And Europe endured domestic violence during this golden age, be it from the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader Meinhof Group in West Germany, nationalists in Northern Ireland or separatists in the Basque region. Economic setbacks especially in 1973 and 2008 disrupted long periods of growth. Even war, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing, erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. Brexit, immigration, populism and even Jihadist inspired terrorism seem like much smaller challenges than genocide. Serious trans Atlantic divides punctuated this golden era; millions in Europe took to the streets to protest the deployment of American missiles in Europe in the 1980s, and millions more, including almost every leader on the Continent, mobilized against the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Next to these events, Pence's Munich speech will probably become an easily forgettable hiccup (provided nothing more negative happens in American European relations). Flowing next to and around these security and economic crises, Kershaw traces several positive, long term trends in European history from 1950 to 2017 that are downright miraculous. Most important, most of the Continent lived in peace during the Global Age, a sharp contrast to the horrific atrocities chronicled in Kershaw's previous volume in this series, "To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 1949." Second, partly as a consequence of this first achievement, Europeans on average became richer than at any time before. In Kershaw's estimation, the period between 1950 and 1973 was especially prosperous a "golden age" or an "economic miracle" for the western part of the Continent, and even a "silver age" for the Communist bloc. Eventually, as Kershaw celebrates, almost every European country embraced democracy, starting with transitions from authoritarian rule in Greece, Portugal and Spain, and following with an explosion of new democracies in Eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism in 1989. As Kershaw sums up, "Europe is more peaceful, more prosperous and more free than at any time in its long history." Alongside these three positive trends of peace, prosperity and democracy, cooperation among European countries expanded dramatically, culminating in the creation of the European Union and the euro. To be sure, all of these amazing trends have slowed or stalled. Europe has yet to fully recover from the 2008 financial crisis; autocratic restoration looms threateningly on the E.U.'s borders in Turkey and Russia, and even inside the union in Hungary, while liberal democracy has yet to consolidate in several countries in the post Communist world. With the departure of Britain, the European Union is, for the first time, retracting in size. And war returned to Europe in 2014 in Ukraine, where Russian annexation and intervention have sparked a military conflict that has already led to 10,000 lives lost and millions displaced. It would be premature, however, to predict a new negative trajectory. Peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe still have serious momentum. Europe's future is especially hard to predict, as Kershaw emphasizes, because "it is easy to underestimate the role of contingency in historical change." Refreshingly, and against the grain of some current intellectual fads, Kershaw allows for the possibility that individuals not just innate structural forces can shape history. For instance, Kershaw assigns a pivotal role to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in transforming Germany from a Continental menace to an anchor of stability and prosperity. Khrushchev gets a big role in Kershaw's narrative, too, for reducing repression in the Communist world. And Kershaw reminds us that Prime Minister David Cameron's decision to hold a referendum on Brexit underscores how the tactical decisions of individual leaders can have strategic consequences. Kershaw ascribes the greatest agency of all to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. "The magnitude of Gorbachev's personal contributions to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated." This is not to say that Kershaw highlights only the role of political leaders for good and for ill in his narrative. He also brings in the masses, recounting how mobilized citizens destroyed Communism; an entire chapter is devoted to "Power of the People." Kershaw's theory of agency in the making of history allows for a range of possibilities about the Continent's future. European leaders should read "The Global Age" to be reminded of the incredible progress of the last 70 years and told that such progress is something they have the power to sustain through their individual actions. American leaders should also read this book to learn how much better off we have been and could continue to be in concert with a continent of free, secure and prosperous allies.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"The move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university," the letter said, "We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice." While expressing respect for Dr. Sandel's scholarship and teaching, it also chided him, saying, "Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments and provide a diminished education for student in public universities." "My goal is simply to make an educational resource freely available a resource that faculty colleagues should be free to use in whole or in part, or not at all, as they see fit," Dr. Sandel said in a statement responding to the letter. "The worry that the widespread use of online courses will damage departments in public universities facing budgetary pressures is a legitimate concern that deserves serious debate, at edX and throughout higher education. The last thing I want is for my online lectures to be used to undermine faculty colleagues at other institutions." San Jose State philosophy professors said there were no dissenters from the letter. "We don't have any illusions that we'll change the world," said Prof. Tom Leddy. "But our position needs to be heard. It's been amazing to us how quickly we've moved to MOOCs, without faculty consultation. And now the state government's pushing it. It's great to have Professor Sandel's lectures available free online, to use if we want. But if we buy them from edX as the basis for our classes, we would suddenly be second class citizens. I would basically be a teaching assistant, and my students, unlike those at Harvard, could not question their professor." Anant Agarwal, the M.I.T. professor who heads edX, had a different view. "Really, we can think of MOOCs as the next generation textbook, and just as it doesn't take away from a professor to use a chapter of someone else's textbook," he said, "I don't think it takes away from them to use as much or as little of our materials as they want. I really believe it frees them to interact more with their students." Faculty backlash against online courses has spread in recent weeks, as the Amherst College faculty voted against joining edX, and the Duke faculty voted down participation in Semester Online, offered by a consortium of universities. Most faculty objections arise out of concerns about how online courses impinge on the professor student relationship and how they may lead to the privatization of public universities, and the loss of faculty jobs. "I started out very enthusiastic about the democratization of higher education through the global MOOCs, but I've gotten more cautious as my colleagues talk about what it might mean for jobs, at public universities," said one professor, who taught a popular MOOC, but asked not to be named because he said he had not decided whether he would continue to teach them. Many college presidents, too, are MOOC skeptics. In a Gallup poll released Thursday, most of the 889 presidents surveyed said they did not expect online education to solve colleges' financial challenges or improve all students' learning.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Written on Monday, teased with a snippet on Instagram that same day, and then released in full on Friday, Lana Del Rey's "Looking for America" is a rapid response protest song following a slew of mass shootings from an artist whose tortured relationship to an idealized America has always been central to her persona. "Pulled over to watch the children in the park/We used to only worry for them after dark," she sings, lightly vibrating with anger. What makes this protest so striking is that Del Rey sings about the country's fall from grace ("I'm still looking for my own version of America/One without the gun, where the flag can freely fly") with a convincing wistfulness, the sort that jingoists think is all their own. JON CARAMANICA More of Alessia Cara's voice unimpeded, please. "Rooting for You" is lilting and pleasant, a light vamp with some Huey Lewis era digitized saxophone jammed in the middle. Cara has an exemplary voice, and she doesn't have to push hard to extract meaning. "Now I see you're having so much fun/with everyone/you had so much fun making fun of," she sings almost tenderly, as the sarcasm drips off like grease. CARAMANICA Meme first, song second is perhaps the wrong order. The pressure to make "Hot Girl Summer" the new track from Megan Thee Stallion, following her coining and popularizing the titular phrase a special event may have been too strong. Certainly she didn't need Ty Dolla Sign (not by any metric a hot girl) singing about his own pleasure to begin the song. And while the team up with Nicki Minaj is inspired Megan is assertive and plain spoken, Minaj is jubilant the production is bizarrely downcast. It's a missed opportunity, lacking the exuberance of the phrase, the sentiment, the meme and, ultimately, the summer. CARAMANICA "You don't need to give up, that's the beginning of the end," PJ Morton sings, a chorus of falsetto harmonies flickering around him. "You just need to believe like a kid again." Morton is a New Orleans born virtuoso who plays in Maroon 5, and in his own work he runs the influences of Allen Toussaint and Stevie Wonder through a bevy of ideas from R B's more recent decades. All the while he's leaning hard on his buttery, heartfelt singing voice and masterful studio chops. On "Kid Again," with a repetitive chord progression wrapping its arms around him, he insists on idealism and innocence, things that feel like precious commodities today: "You don't need to grow up/You just need to believe like a kid again." GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Lydia Lund and Julia Shapiro's vocals wind around each other, buffer each other, underscore each other as they sing about a boyfriend who was hardly worth the trouble: "His only intrigue was the lack of him/Fill in the blanks with what you see fit." The Seattle band's new self titled album is due in September. CARYN GANZ Stephen Mallinder of the English post punk provocateurs Cabaret Voltaire will release his first solo album in 35 years, "Um Dada," in October. Its leadoff track, the groovy curio "Working (You Are)" is a delightful companion to Marie Davidson's pointier "Work It" from last year, introducing and then quickly retracting a series of ear pleasing, familiar dance music flourishes. In a statement announcing his return, Mallinder wrote of a "false nostalgia about the analogue past," and concluded: "Let the machines talk to each other, let them dance ... they lead, we follow." GANZ At the outset of this 14 minute track, which opens the Gotham Jazz Orchestra's fine new album, "Hiding Out," a quietly suspenseful melodic theme is passed around between flutes and muted brass and cooled down saxophones. A bass line creeps upward, starting to bring a Brazilian maracatu rhythm to life below. Mike Holober's woven composition unfolds across various movements, kicking up dust as it goes along; toward the end, after a snaky, scorching guitar solo from Jesse Lewis, the whole band piles in together, and the rambunctious energy of a street parade or just a lively city block, on any day of the year spills forth. RUSSONELLO
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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What are those primitive looking glasses? Those are Eskimo snow goggles. People always ask about them. They have only these tiny little slits so they won't go blind because they are out in that brilliant snow all the time. It's a wonderful form, isn't it? Is there any theme to what you have collected a through line? We always felt, if we love it and want to live around it, we'll put it together. For instance, on that wall you see something that's gray and unusual looking it's a crinoid fossil from the Cambrian Period, which is over 500 million years ago. It's an animal form, but it looks like a piece of Modern art of some kind. So there's fossils, pre Columbian, Art Nouveau, a Vietnamese Buddha, New Caledonian it's a real mishmosh, an eclectic combination. Have you continued to collect in the 12 years since your husband died? I've bought some, because you still love things, but we collected for a long time, and I lost some of the passion without the inspiration. Everything we collected both of us had to like. He might like some things more than I did and I might like some more than he did, but we both had to like it and want to live with it someplace in order to acquire it. We enjoyed the process of learning about the art and ancient cultures. You seem to have circumvented the craze over Modern and contemporary art. Was that deliberate? Bill loved Rothko, Pollock, Louise Nevelson and all those, but he didn't want to have on the walls things that people would come in and go, "Oh, my God, you have a !" Instead, people could come in and see an African statue or a pre Columbian piece, and we would love it and love to live with it, but it felt a little more subtle to us.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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BERLIN A play based on Adolf Hitler's youth is sparking controversy for an unusual opening night deal: Audience members willing to wear a swastika (provided by the theater) during the performance get in free. Those who prefer to pay full price are asked to wear the Star of David. And the opening night is on the 129th anniversary of the dictator's birth. Producers of the play at the theater in Konstanz, a picturesque city in the south of Germany, say the action is part of an attempt to reinvigorate the national conversation about the dangers of fascism. But the production or collection of Nazi symbols with the intent for distribution or public use is illegal in Germany. The local public prosecutor's office confirmed it had received several complaints in the days before the play's opening on Friday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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In her airy, antiques filled loft in Greenwich Village, Christine Lahti is trying to fight her way out of a box. Her hands pat the empty air in front of her. Then, quickly, she clutches that pesky invisible kite, but it's getting away from her ... woaaaahhhh! I'm waiting for the third move in her arsenal, but I think we've exhausted the possibilities. She is not very good at this. "I really thought I could generate some income being a mime," she says, recalling one tale in her new collection of essays, "True Stories From an Unreliable Eyewitness." This was in 1973, before the awards before the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes and the Broadway accolades before America discovered this actress of quirky beauty, intelligence and wit. All of that would come later. But that day in Central Park, Ms. Lahti made 3.35. Mime career over. Lucky for us. "True Stories" started as readings performed onstage, and became a loosely connected series of essays about family, Hollywood, aging and, most of all, how these life moments charted her evolution as a feminist. It is by turns funny, touching and self revelatory, and not in a typical actress humble braggy way: She can tell stories about herself that are truly toe curling. Did she really approach a random stranger and ask to be relieved of her virginity? (You can imagine how well that went.) The 67 year old actress is at her New York City home while her husband, the director Thomas Schlamme, is filming "The Americans" in Brooklyn. We spoke about the book on a brilliant snowy day, as dozens of candles flickered around us and her S M rope dangled from a rafter. (That is what she called it. It is in fact an art installation. She is no less mischievous in person than on screen.) Below is a condensed version of our conversation. Every mother will appreciate how one of the finest stage actresses of her time was told by her children that her voice was disgusting, and forbidden from singing and dancing in front of them. You write: "Until the little control freaks go off to college, you will be in a song and dance straitjacket." LAHTI: I had to go full awkward, because so much of what is imperfect about me is awkward and embarrassing and hopefully funny. Your book seemed to start off as a traditional memoir, and then it morphed into something else an awakening of sorts that centers on what it means to be a first wave feminist. Is that what happened? LAHTI: I started writing, not knowing what it was going to be. My daughter was sick of me complaining about, you know, "There's no jobs for women over 50, I didn't know there was a shelf life for actresses." Obviously, I was a little naive. And she said, "Stop complaining, stop being dependent on men hiring you, and write some of your stories down." This book is largely about how you evolved as a feminist, which included the rejection of the family model you grew up with: doctor dad beloved by his patients but remote to his family; mother who was sort of an iconic 1950s housewife ... LAHTI: ... who I judged so harshly. I think she was a product of that internalized misogyny many women feel but after her kids left the house she had another life she became a professional painter, and a pilot. None of us have to be stuck. You recount stories of Broadway and Hollywood that remind us of why the MeToo movement was inevitable for example, the day a casting agent assured you a role, when all you had to do was have sex with the directors. Did he really say it that casually? LAHTI: Yes, as if it was an understood thing that I would automatically do that. It wasn't even couched in a joke or an apology. It was really just, "Yeah, here's what you have to do." It was something that we all back then just knew we had to navigate through. And it sounds benign; it's not like they even touched me. But these experiences aren't benign. I think that they break you in some way. Especially when I was young, and I was full of hope and optimism about my worth as a human being and my talent as an actress. All that was disregarded. It dehumanized me in a way that devastated me. But that story was very telling. You walked home 75 blocks raging, vowing no one would ever treat you that way again. LAHTI: And by the time I get home and some man I want to see calls and asks me out, I can't go because I feel like I weigh five pounds too much. That sort of sums up a lot of stuff about how women go through life. Did you still feel vulnerable, even after you got more power in your career? How did you cope with unwanted attention? LAHTI: Early on in my career, if I wanted the job, I would giggle and flirt back, because I wanted the job. But I would leave feeling dirty and disgusted with myself and powerless and dehumanized. But I never had anyone go so far that I would have to say, "No," and, "Zip up your zipper." Maybe I was tall and a little scary or something. You talk a lot about aging in Hollywood, and you write wonderfully about your own struggles about getting plastic surgery: the appointments with the doctor, the breaking of appointments. And you leave us with a cliffhanger. What did you do? LAHTI: I haven't done it yet, but the jury's still out. Yeah, you know, I see cutting, and that's all I see on the screen. I see people with face lifts, and I'm almost just looking at, "O.K., wow, that's a pretty good one. Oh, but her lips aren't quite right. I'm looking at the "work," not the acting. I don't think I've ever seen one that you can't tell. It's a lot of pressure to resist. How many women in Hollywood haven't had stuff done? LAHTI: I think I'm the only one! (Her publicist emails later, to make it very clear that she was joking.) And by the way, I'm not judge y about anybody who does it, because I still might. It's just that I resent the pressure to do it. I resent the need women feel to stay young to be relevant. I resent all that. And I want, somehow, to be valued for other things. I still want that. You won an Academy Award for directing your 1995 short film, "Lieberman in Love." What do you want to be doing now?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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SAN FRANCISCO Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warming up to Bitcoin, a virtual currency that for nearly a decade has been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world. The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin, according to emails and documents viewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the effort who asked to remain anonymous because the plans were still confidential. The news of the virtual exchange, which has not been reported before, came after Goldman Sachs went public with its intention to open a Bitcoin trading unit most likely the first of its kind at a Wall Street bank. The moves by Goldman and Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, mark a dramatic shift toward the mainstream for a digital token that has been known primarily for its underworld associations and status as a high risk, speculative investment. The virtual currency was created after the 2008 global financial crisis by a still anonymous programmer who used the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The idea was to replace the existing banking structure with an online alternative that couldn't be controlled by a handful of powerful organizations. But instead of being replaced, the old banks are beginning to assert their own role in the unorthodox financial world of virtual currency, sometimes called cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin was originally intended to be used by consumers for all sorts of transactions without any financial institutions getting involved it has mostly become a virtual investment, stored in digital wallets and traded on mostly unregulated exchanges around the world. People buy Bitcoin in the hope that its value will go up, similar to the way they purchase gold or silver. Details of the platform that Intercontinental Exchange is working on have not been finalized and the project could still fall apart, given the hesitancy among big Wall Street institutions to be closely associated with the Wild West of virtual currencies. A spokesman said that the company had no comment. Many corporations and governments have expressed interest in the technology that Bitcoin introduced, particularly a form of database known as the blockchain. Some large financial exchanges, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, have already created financial products linked to the price of Bitcoin, known as futures. But the new operation at ICE would provide more direct access to Bitcoin by putting the actual tokens in the customer's account at the end of the trade. ICE has had conversations with other financial institutions about setting up a new operation through which banks can buy a contract, known as a swap, that will end with the customer owning Bitcoin the next day with the backing and security of the exchange, according to the people familiar with the project. The swap contract is more complicated than an immediate trade of dollars for Bitcoin, even if the end result is still ownership of a certain amount of Bitcoin. But a swap contract allows the trading to come under the regulation of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and to operate clearly under existing laws something today's Bitcoin exchanges have struggled to do. The chief executive of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, recently said her company could also create a virtual currency exchange if regulatory issues are ironed out. While several hedge funds have been buying and selling Bitcoin, most large institutional investors, such as mutual funds and pensions, have avoided it largely as a result of similar regulatory concerns. Some Bitcoin enthusiasts have said that its increasing integration into the existing financial system has pulled it away from its founding ideals. Paul Chou, a former trader at Goldman Sachs who set up LedgerX, a regulated Bitcoin exchange that would compete with Intercontinental Exchange, said his company has made a point of focusing on large Bitcoin holders, rather than financial institutions. "The reason we got into crypto was not to partner with a bank, but to replace them," Mr. Chou said, using the shorthand for cryptocurrencies. "We deal with crypto holders directly in a way that really takes advantage of Bitcoin's strengths, while avoiding brokers, banks and other institutions that take multiple cuts of the transaction." Goldman will initially only be trading futures contracts linked to Bitcoin's price. But Goldman executives said they were looking at moving in the direction of buying and selling actual Bitcoins. Intercontinental Exchange's effort, if it pans out, could make Bitcoin available to a much wider and more influential customer base, including other financial firms. Several big corporate names, including the giant technology investor SoftBank, which has stakes in Sprint and Uber, have been in discussions about being involved with the exchange in some way, the people familiar with the project said. But a spokesman for SoftBank said this week that it was no longer involved. LedgerX, the exchange founded by Mr. Chou, is the only exchange that now offers the kind of swaps that ICE has discussed. LedgerX has experienced increasing trading volume in recent months, but ICE would start with an edge because essentially every large financial institution is already hooked into it. The interest in Bitcoin trading illustrates how the reputation of the virtual currency has, after a rocky start, improved. Regulators are currently looking at whether many virtual currencies, including the second most widely used digital token, Ether, have been issued and traded in violation of securities regulations. Institutional investors believe that because of the way Bitcoin was created and structured without any one company or organization behind it it would be on safer ground with regulators. ICE was considering launching a swap contract linked to Ether, but backed away from that because of regulatory uncertainty, the people briefed on the effort said. Mr. Chou, at LedgerX, said he made a similar decision and has delayed creating any products linked to Ether. With Bitcoin, on the other hand, Mr. Chou said that road seems to be clear for big institutions to get involved. "The industry is seeing unprecedented institutional interest for the first time in Bitcoin's history," he said. "I've been amazed that the strongest believers in cryptocurrency often start out the most skeptical. It's a healthy skepticism. But at some point the perception shifts, and for many institutions I think we're finally there."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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MELBOURNE, Australia Bidding farewell to the least impressive decade in its history, American men's tennis is suddenly flipping its script down under. Five American men reached the third round of the Australian Open, the most of any country; in the previous 10 years, that number was never more than two. "It's a good sign," said John Isner, who has led American men's tennis since the retirement of Andy Roddick, who was the last American man to win a Grand Slam singles title at the 2003 United States Open. The surge is particularly surprising after American male tennis players turned in a horrible first week of the season. The United States team lost all three ties it played in the ATP Cup, including a shocking defeat to lowly Norway, which had only one player ranked in the top 300. The two American players who played that week in the ATP tournament in Doha both lost in the first round. "To say the least: very uninspiring," Isner said. "I wouldn't say I saw this coming." The strength in numbers has included seeded players No. 19 Isner and No. 29 Taylor Fritz, and the veteran Sam Querrey, but also considerable surprises. American men achieved the two biggest upsets of the tournament so far on Wednesday evening, with 100th ranked Tennys Sandgren defeating eighth seeded Matteo Berrettini and 80th ranked Tommy Paul beating 18th seeded Grigor Dimitrov, both in five sets. Both took similarly scenic routes to victory. Sandgren had a two set lead over Berrettini before the Italian surged, but clung on for a 7 6(7), 6 4, 4 6, 2 6, 7 5 victory. Paul, playing in an adjacent arena, had also led by two sets to none but was down a break in the fifth set to Dimitrov when he saw on a scoreboard that Sandgren had eked out a victory. "I looked up and I literally saw that Sandgren won his first two sets and lost the next two and then won," Paul said. "And I was like, 'All right, I guess it can be done.'" Paul broke Dimitrov in the 10th game of the fifth set, and ultimately won 6 4, 7 6(6), 3 6, 6 7(3), 7 6(10 3). Paul, 22, was a highly touted junior in his youth, winning the 2015 French Open boys' title. He turned professional later that year, signed as a prized prospect by Roger Federer's Team 8 agency, but struggled to harness the single mindedness required of a touring professional. "It was more where my head was at," Paul said. "I wasn't prepared to travel the world and play pro tournaments and play against guys that devoted their life to it." Paul, who had never won a main draw match at a Grand Slam event before this week, was not re signed by the agency when his contract lapsed in 2018. "I'm more accepting that this is my job, and I've got to do everything I can to succeed," he said. "First year as a pro, second year as a pro, I'd see all my friends having so much fun in college and wish I was there. That's kind of the biggest thing now: all my friends are out of school, in jobs, and now what I'm doing isn't too bad." As he tried to replicate a collegiate lifestyle at tournaments, Paul's sophomoric conduct earned the ire of the U.S. Tennis Association, which passed him up for a wild card at last year's United States Open in favor of several players ranked below him. The snub proved to be a turning point for him. "I felt like I should have been in the main, and I just came into the tournament with a lot of anger, really," Paul said of the U.S. Open. "I guess you could call it a wake up call, but I was just heated." With the guidance of coach Brad Stine, Paul has channeled that heat into a hot streak, winning 19 of 22 matches since New York to break into the top 100 for the first time, years after his junior peers Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe. Sandgren, who unlike Paul stayed under the radar by playing college tennis, said Paul deserved patience as he developed. "When you're young you sometimes don't make the most optimal decisions; everybody's guilty of that to some degree," Sandgren said. "The more disciplined you can be, your odds are better." Sandgren has been more disciplined, but has streaky results. For a player of his low profile, never reaching the Top 40 in the ATP rankings, Sandgren has amassed a remarkable collection of big wins at Grand Slam events, including a run to the quarterfinals here in 2018. His win over Berrettini was his fourth victory against a top 10 opponent at a Grand Slam in six matches, a winning percentage few others could touch. Calling himself a "realist with a pessimistic bent," however, Sandgren sought ways to play down his win over Berrettini. "I'm thinking, 'Well, it's early in the year, and I don't think he'd played an event,'" Sandgren said. "So that's in the back of my head, that he's not match tough. I'm searching for my own asterisks so I can pin myself down a little." Sandgren was particularly proud of his physicality against Berrettini, never flagging in the five set match. After a toe injury last fall, Sandgren spent his off season in the gym, improving his stamina and adding the muscle he said he needed to justify being the only man other than Rafael Nadal to wear sleeveless shirts here. "Well, I've been working out I think I can pull this off," Sandgren said. Reinventing his image among tennis fans may prove even harder work. During his 2018 run here, Sandgren drew scrutiny and criticism for his social media posts, in which he engaged with several far right political figures and theories. After he was eliminated, he opened his news conference with a statement railing against the news media for "demonizing" him. Sandgren said he now followed politics "less passionately." "I'm relatively good at one thing, which is playing tennis," Sandgren said. "I wouldn't want another interest I have, or a hobby and following politics is a hobby to bring that side of me down."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Facebook announced on Friday that it would allow political campaigns and candidates to pay creators for sponsored content on Instagram and Facebook, so long as the posts follow the company's disclosure guidelines. Each piece of sponsored political content must use Facebook's branded content tool, which states at the top of the post that the creator was paid for it and by whom. The announcement followed the news that Michael Bloomberg's campaign had contracted a group of meme creators to post advertisements for his candidacy. After those posts appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, several campaign representatives reached out to Facebook to clarify its stance on how politicians could work with influencers to increase their reach. "After hearing from multiple campaigns, we agree that there's a place for branded content in political discussion on our platforms," a spokesperson for Facebook said in an email statement sent to multiple news outlets. "We're allowing US based political candidates to work with creators to run this content, provided the political candidates are authorized and the creators disclose any paid partnerships through our branded content tools."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Clattering down the wooden steps into her basement, a woman named Angela is fleeing a storm. It's a tornado, she says, talking to ... herself? Nope, she's talking to the audience. Are we meant to be in the basement with her? From our auditorium seats, it doesn't feel remotely like we are. Lauren Gunderson's "Natural Shocks," a monologue starring Pascale Armand in its world premiere production for WP Theater, is an issue play that wants to be socially meaningful, with a would be shocking ending that shatters the metaphor of the storm. I won't give away that twist, though that also means I can't say what the issue is, except that it is feminist. If its storytelling worked, "Natural Shocks" would land potently on multiple levels. Yet this show, directed by May Adrales at the McGinn/Cazale Theater, contains vast stretches of tedium the standard beige variety, not the provocative experimental kind. And its construction is awfully rickety. "Did I mention this is a tornado?" Angela asks, shortly after telling us the first time. "Sorry," she says. "I do that. I rush ahead. You're like: 'You said disaster but didn't specify.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We're all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. Jimmy Kimmel described President Trump's campaign rally in Iowa on Wednesday, a state where coronavirus cases are surging, as a "superspreader" event. "Over the last 24 hours, the positivity rate in Iowa is almost 22 percent. Ten thousand strong were expected tonight, so that'd be, eh, 2,200 infected people," Kimmel said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Quiet fireworks it sounds like an oxymoron. Usually those bright bursts of color come with equally impressive bangs. But some fireworks shows are designed to please the eyes without pummeling the ears. In parts of Europe, quiet fireworks displays have grown increasingly common. In Britain, venues close to residents, wildlife or livestock often permit only quiet fireworks. One town in Italy, Collecchio, passed a law in 2015 that all fireworks displays must be quiet. By relying on rich color effects and tight visual choreography, designers of quiet fireworks programs can forgo the big explosions and still deliver a stunning show. The hope is that softer celebrations mean less stress for noise sensitive children, veterans, older people, pets and wildlife. "We've seen more competitors in the last decade or so," said Rino Sampieri, a senior display manager at Fantastic Fireworks, a company based in England that started selling a quiet fireworks package 30 years ago. "Today, quiet fireworks are part of everybody's inventory." Quiet fireworks are not a new invention. In fact, they are used routinely in classic firework shows as visual effects to accompany the loud bangs. Think of the "comet tail," which shoots into the sky with a trail of sparkles before quietly fizzling out. Or the "flying fish," which features tiny tadpole embers scattering away from a silent burst. What is new is the emergence of a genre of low key, quiet fireworks displays for audiences that want the fanfare of fireworks without the auditory disturbance. From a strictly visual standpoint, there are pros and cons to a quiet fireworks show. Because they do not include big aerial explosions, quiet shows cannot entertain a large audience, said John A. Conkling, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Washington College in Maryland. As a result, traditionally big shows like those on the Fourth of July would need to be divided into smaller viewings. Quiet fireworks can, however, be more colorful. The colors in a firework are packed in pellets called "stars." When certain chemical compounds are heated, they emit signature colors to get rid of their excess energy. For instance, barium compounds emit green, red comes from strontium and blues are made with copper. After a firework explodes, its pellets ignite, burn and generate color as they float through the sky. If that initial burst is too powerful, however, the stars shatter and "you really lose the whole color effect," Dr. Conkling said. The most explosive fireworks, in other words, have only a hint of color. The real promise behind quiet fireworks, however, is the possibility that they could reduce the harmful effects of traditional fireworks, which include stress on animals and damage to people's hearing. Fireworks can cause birds to panic and flee en masse, said Judy Shamoun Baranes, a geoecologist at the University of Amsterdam who has studied the effects of fireworks on birds. In 2011, 5,000 red winged blackbirds fell out of the sky in Beebe, Ark., after fireworks celebrations on New Year's Eve, possibly because the loud noises led them to fly into chimneys, houses and trees. Loud fireworks also scare larger mammals like deer and coyotes out into roads, where they can get hit by cars, said Lisa Horn, the executive director of West Sound Wildlife Shelter in Washington State. Ms. Horn's shelter sees an influx of animals after July 4 each year. July 5 is "always all hands on deck," she said. Pet shelters also claim to take in the most runaway dogs each year on July 5. For people, loud fireworks can lead to hearing loss. The World Health Organization lists 120 decibels as the pain threshold for sound, including sharp sounds such as thunderclaps. Fireworks are louder than that. "They're typically above 150 decibels, and can even reach up to 170 decibels or more," said Nathan Williams, an audiologist at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska. Dr. Williams also sees higher traffic to his clinic after Independence Day. "We usually see a handful of people every year," he said. "In these cases, hearing loss is more likely to be permanent." Children are more vulnerable to hearing loss from fireworks, Dr. Williams added, because they are more sensitive to loud noises. Quiet fireworks are not completely silent, but they are nowhere near the 120 decibel cap placed on consumer fireworks in Britain, said Paul Singh, director of Epic Fireworks in England. The fireworks he uses in quiet shows are softer than the music he plays to accompany the visuals, Mr. Singh said. His company has done quiet firework shows for school groups, senior citizen homes and venues near easily spooked animals like horses. Proponents of fireworks argue that removing the percussive sounds of a fireworks show takes away some of the magic. "Silent fireworks would be kind of like watching fireworks on a computer screen," said Julie Heckman, the executive director of the American Pyrotechnics Association. "It wouldn't be the real experience." Others see it differently. "Maybe, from a consumer enjoyment standpoint, people would enjoy quiet fireworks more," Dr. Williams said. "They can just sit back and watch without covering their ears."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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As a place where millions of young Americans perform and explore their identities in public, TikTok has become a prominent venue for ideological formation, political activism and trolling. It has homegrown pundits, and despite its parent company's reluctance to be involved with politics the service does not allow political ads it has attracted interest from campaigns. It is also a space where people can be gathered and pressed into action quickly. TikTok was instrumental in the organization of a mass false registration drive ahead of a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., where many seats were unfilled. It has amplified footage of police brutality as well as scenes and commentary from Black Lives Matter protests around the world, with videos created and shared on the platform frequently moving beyond it. They carry TikTok's distinctive and wide ranging audiovisual vernacular: often playfully disorienting, carefully edited, arch and musical. It has been suggested by many, including The New York Times, that TikTok teens will save the world. The truth is more complicated. A team of researchers has been analyzing political expression on TikTok since, well, before it was TikTok. While nonusers of TikTok may think it's bursting onto the political stage rather suddenly, and that it has something like a collective political identity, the research gives a different picture. It depicts a diverse, diffuse and not nearly united community of millions of young people discovering the capabilities and limits of a platform that is, despite its many similarities with predecessors, a unique and strange place. In an email exchange, Ioana Literat, an assistant professor of communication and media at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Neta Kligler Vilenchik, an assistant professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discussed the characteristics of political expression on TikTok and why it feels like a novel phenomenon. This interview has been edited. The idea that TikTok is an engine for progressive young politics is gaining some currency among people who don't use the platform. What might outsiders be surprised to find on TikTok, in terms of youth political expression? Is there anything resembling consensus? Ioana Literat: I've noticed this tendency recently, not only on older social media like Twitter but also in the press. It plays into larger debates about youth civic attitudes and especially youth civic attitudes online which tend to verge between utopia and dystopia. On the one hand, youth are hailed (or tokenized think Greta Thunberg and the Parkland youth) as the future of democracy, for whom political expression comes easy. But on the other hand, people are worried about how they don't show up at the polls, or fall prey to misinformation, or don't care about newspapers anymore. And all of these are true; it's not an either/or kind of situation. Neta Kligler Vilenchik: Extreme views, ranging from dystopian to utopian, are voiced not only in regard to youth, but also in regard to any media phenomenon that is significant and new. As early as Socrates's concern that the written word would eradicate wisdom, every new technology has been believed to either be our savior (the internet will bring people around the world into one global community!) or our doom (robots will make us all unemployed!). To me, this continuity is quite reassuring, because it shows us that our fears and hopes are not so much around the traits of the specific new technology, rather they are broad societal fears and hopes that are projected onto whatever technology is new and not yet understood. To most of its adult commenters, TikTok is a big unknown. Dr. Literat: In terms of youth political expression, while there's a dynamic and influential liberal activist community on TikTok, there's actually plenty of conservative political expression, and pro Trump voices definitely find an audience on the platform. We found this to be true in our early research on Musical.ly, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, and it's still true today on TikTok, as we're gearing up for the 2020 election. On TikTok, you can find powerful political statements and activist organizing. You can find young people lip syncing speeches by Trump or Obama (both earnestly and sarcastically). You can also find plenty of racist and sexist content, conspiracy theories and misinformation, and kids showing off their gun collections and posing with Confederate flags. It's hard to refer to what we see on the platform as consensus. Rather, we find that TikTok enables collective political expression for youth that is, it allows them to deliberately connect to a like minded audience by using shared symbolic resources. Dr. Kligler Vilenchik: Shared symbolic resources can be physical (MAGA hats), visual (the closed fist for the Black Lives Matter movement) or hashtags ( alllivesmatter). TikTok specific elements like viral dances, popular soundtracks, etc. are also shared symbolic resources that help facilitate connections and foreground the collective aspects of youth political expression. Are there novel ways in which political conflict unfolds on TikTok? It doesn't seem to be especially well suited to the sorts of conflict we're familiar with on some older platforms. Dr. Literat: There's relatively little crosscutting political talk (i.e. across partisan lines, with politically heterogeneous others). And when it does happen, it's not very productive. It's still a very polarized discussion of us v. them. Something that's pretty special about TikTok in terms of both political expression and political dialogue/conflict is that it's all filtered through young people's personal identities and experiences. Political dialogue on the platform is very personal, and youth will often state diverse social identities e.g. Black, Mexican, L.G.B.T.Q., redneck, country in direct relation to their political views. Not to say that political talk on other social media platforms is not personal, but having done comparative analyses, we're really struck by just how front and center youth identities are on TikTok. Dr. Kligler Vilenchik: If we return to the idea of collective political expression as the ability to speak to a like minded audience through shared symbolic resources, we see that this enables at least the potential for a conversation across political views. So, some users may choose to tag their video with bluelivesmatter and speak to a certain audience. But they can also choose to tag their video with blacklivesmatter, and that way reach a different audience, with a different view. Often this is done ironically, as a parody of others' views (e.g., a video tagged whitelivesmatter that goes on to explain the idea of white privilege), but it may also be a way to spark conversation between sides. Lastly, if you've been able to check in, have you noticed anything surprising about youth expression on TikTok around BLM, racism and policing in the last few weeks? Dr. Literat: The collective aspects of youth political expression which materialize, for instance, in frequently used songs like Childish Gambino's "This Is America" are very salient in the context of BLM related expression on TikTok. Like hashtags, these songs function as connective threads among the videos. At the same time, there is such a wide variety in terms of style and ethos of expression, from anger to silliness to humor, from confessionals to original songs to footage of protests to memes to interviews or oral histories. There's also a sense of generational awareness and generational solidarity, which is connected to this concept of collective political expression. On footage of protests, you see a lot of comments like "Gen Z is changing the world," "our generation is so powerful," "I love our generation with all my heart" which is really interesting because generations, and especially terms like Gen Z or Gen Alpha, are how outsiders (academics, commenters, brands, etc.) usually refer to youth. It may be that youth are reclaiming these terms to assert their agency, or perhaps these larger societal discourses are seeping into youth discourse too. Dr. Kligler Vilenchik: Looking at what's going on in the U.S. right now from outside (I'm in Israel), I'm struck by how these same hashtags are also used by people from outside the U.S. to support the Black Lives Matter movement and also connect it to localized instances of racism and anti government protest. In Israel, protests in solidarity with BLM were infused with the protest of Ethiopian origin Israelis who suffer from racial discrimination and police brutality. This speaks to how TikTok enables young people to connect a personalized political message to a broader political moment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. On Thursday, President Trump responded to Iran's downing of an American surveillance drone by authorizing military strikes, then changing his mind. "Both sides have their stories. Iran says they shot down the drone because it was flying over their country. But America says it wasn't flying over Iran, it was just flying very, very close. Yeah. 'I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you Mom! Iran hit me!'" TREVOR NOAH "But who are you going to believe, Iran or the U.S. government ... is a question that used to be really easy to answer." STEPHEN COLBERT "I don't think America should launch a full out war to avenge a flying Roomba, all right?" TREVOR NOAH "This would be like declaring war over a downed washing machine. But it could happen. Remember, World War I started when an anarchist stole the kaiser's toaster." STEPHEN COLBERT "That's right, Iran shot down an unmanned drone. They said they wanted to send America a clear message. But Trump was like, 'Everyone knows if you want to send the U.S. a message, you do it on Twitter.'" JIMMY FALLON "It's getting serious, though. An Iranian general named Hossein Salami said they're ready for war. Trump's already got troops in Turkey ready for action, but Putin's warning the White House against the conflict. So if you're keeping track, we've got Salami and Turkey on white, hold the Russian." JIMMY FALLON Trump called into Sean Hannity's Fox News show on Wednesday and talked about his re election rally in Orlando, claiming, among other things, that 121,000 people were there so many, he said, that some were turned away. "The city officials in Orlando estimated the crowd at 19,792, so he's only off by about 100,000 people." JIMMY KIMMEL " As Trump: We were begging them not to come so hard that they heard us before we said it and they never showed up, so that's a win." STEPHEN COLBERT "It's exactly like a tailgate party lots of drinking and everyone is cheering for a 300 pound man with possible brain damage." STEPHEN COLBERT Seth Meyers and Rihanna went day drinking together, with the host suggesting names for cocktails based on some of her hits.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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These tracks are narrow and the trains are too, carrying only eight people total, and with riders sitting single file in bobsled style cars that straddle the track and put you right in the middle of it. That may be bad news for those who like to share the experience with a buddy, but if you are in front, it gives the impression that the coaster is all yours. Although only eight people can ride at a time, the trains load quickly. Indeed, in the station, you get in the car while it is slowly moving on the track to keep the flow constantly going in and out. The ride, which is positioned inside of quarry walls and occasionally rises above them and over a man made pond , is both fast and smooth. The track seems like it's barely there, but the compact nature of the ride makes it feel even faster and more immediate. After the first drop, you glide through each element (including an impressive, tightly wound 360 degree roll), never slowing until reaching the too fast conclusion. With this coaster (and the similarly designed RailBlazer at California's Great America), an experience has been crafted to feel more personal than most rides . Take everything you've known about roller coasters and start spinning it that will get you close to understanding what a thrilling surprise a ride like Time Traveler is. This coaster is a huge investment (to the tune of 26 million) for Silver Dollar City, tucked in the Ozark Mountains. It's also a record breaker in a few different ways, billed as the fastest, tallest and steepest complete circuit spinning coaster in the world. I had the benefit of riding it my first time with the 52 Places Traveler columnist Jada Yuan and we basked in its wonders together, including the 10 story drop that starts the ride while your train has already begun to spin. There's a lot going on, but somehow it all makes sense and you're able to keep a sense of where you are in the ride. Sort of. The train has you seated in four person pods with two seats on each side facing away from each other. Mack Rides, its German manufacturer, has programmed the cars to spin in a controlled manner using magnetic technology, so you're not twirling at nausea inducing levels. While that still might sound terrifying, the ride is actually built more for fun and families than it is for sheer white knuckle thrills, and feels more free spirited when it's in action. As the car spins, you have the opportunity to interact with the other riders, which is not common on a roller coaster. I loved being able to see how others are enjoying the 95 foot tall vertical loop along with you. This is a coaster worth repeat rides in the front, middle and back because you really do get three different interactive and physical experiences in each position. The back is the one for those looking for maximum intensity: Having the full weight of the train pull you down the first drop while you're spinning in the back is a priceless feeling. If a mad scientist got his hands on some roller coaster track and started building it using every tool at his disposal, it probably still wouldn't feel as crazy and intense as Steel Vengeance. It's a bit of a Frankencoaster, with wood used from the old Cedar Point coaster Mean Streak and a steel track and layout that have been completely refashioned. The resulting hybrid comes from the same manufacturer as Golden Lasso, Rocky Mountain Construction. While that company has become quite the expert at coaster rehabilitation and reconstruction, it has reached new heights here, creating the world's tallest hybrid at 205 feet (a hypercoaster), with a mind blowing 90 degree first drop. I live for airtime, those moments of weightlessness you feel in your gut that pull you right out of your seat. Steel Vengeance features a whopping 27 seconds of airtime, an astonishing amount for a ride that lasts all of two and a half minutes. And it also manages to pack in four inversions, sending riders twisting through what feel like vortexes of wood and steel. The wood on this ride does a nice job of shielding its elements, keeping riders surprised. It's one of the few coasters I've ridden that dares you not to be completely exhilarated by everything it accomplishes. Ah, the dive coaster. It's a sinister type of ride that takes you up the lift and, right before you go down the first hill, pauses, forcing you to look directly down at your fate. Then comes the plunge. As fun as these coasters are, there are only a handful of them in the United States, and before this year, there were none in California, one of the most coaster populous states. HangTime, a cute little aqua colored sensation, has arrived to change that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Rise and shine: The third day of Paris Fashion Week begins at the Grand Palais for the Chloe show at 10 a.m., followed by a quick Metro or Mercedes ride (depending where you fall in the pecking order) to Carven in the Jardin des Tuileries an hour later. Grab a coffee while you can inside, of course, given the forecast is for yet more driving rain. Then, time for a spot of gothic refinement by Sebastien Meunier, the creative director at Ann Demeulemeester, at 1 p.m. before heading to the Musee d'Art Moderne for the latest by Julien Dossena for Paco Rabanne. The minimalist aesthetic of Mr. Dossena will be at odds with what awaits at 3: the Balmain collection by the Paris king of bling, Olivier Rousteing, at the Hotel Potocki, sported by his Insta troupe of models. Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Joan Smalls all walked last season. It's into the belly of the Palais de Tokyo for Rick Owens at 6 p.m. Two hours later, anyone who has a ticket will be off to Lanvin and the first collection from the house since the creative director Alber Elbaz was ousted last October. The final show of the night is Vetements, the gritty avant garde street label headed by the newly crowned Balenciaga creative director, Demna Gvasalia. Those who can, will be off to celebrate late into the night. The Balmain after party at Laperouse promises to be a particularly good time.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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When 17 year old Darnella Frazier filmed the police killing of George Floyd on her phone in May, her video reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and nationwide protests, even prompting one supporter to name her "the Rosa Parks of her generation." In addition to setting off policy debates about police reform, the protests have also renewed interest in books, visual art and movies, especially documentaries about race and social justice. Ava DuVernay's "13TH," her Academy Award nominated film about the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of African Americans from the end of slavery until today, was originally released in 2016 but has been among Netflix's most watched films, let alone documentaries, in recent weeks. Stanley Nelson's "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," from 2015, about the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and '70s and its continuing influence in American culture and politics, has gotten new life, running as part of a PBS rebroadcast earlier this month and getting showcased on Amazon Prime Video. And on Hulu, "Whose Streets?," the 2018 directorial debut of Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, follows a group of young, Black Ferguson protesters and their families, at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, when a white police officer killed an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in St. Louis. While these films span time periods and political movements, they all share an unflinching commitment to racial justice and depict Black resistance and African American resilience as a powerful strategy against white supremacy. But they also all recognize the entrenched obstacles be it local police forces, F.B.I. surveillance or the National Guard lobbing tear gas against peacefully protesting Americans that are systematically used against African Americans in their long struggle for the full rights, benefits and equal protection under the law to which they are entitled. I met virtually with DuVernay in Los Angeles, Nelson in Martha's Vineyard, Folayan in Philadelphia, and Davis in St. Louis for a lively and powerful discussion on race, the African American documentary tradition, and the power of film in our current moment. These filmmakers all knew one another and were fans of each other's work, so despite the weight of the topic and the tragedy that brought us together, this intergenerational dialogue was intimate and familiar, turning the flattened reality of a Zoom call into a family reunion on a warm, summer day. These are excerpts from that conversation. SALAMISHAH TILLET These days, the moving image has become the primary medium through which most of us interpret African American life and often tragically witness Black death. As documentary filmmakers, how do you think the moving image shapes our responses to racial injustice? Ava DuVernay: Her film "13TH" was meant to be a primer. "It should be an opening to more work and more films, more reading, more learning." Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times STANLEY NELSON Moving images have been in some ways really responsible for people getting out on the streets all over the country. I have 21 year old twins in New York and a 30 year old daughter in Atlanta, and they see things going on in their town, and they want to be part of it. You see that you don't have to start a movement, there's already something happening and you can just join in. And if you look at any of the marches, everybody is filming, everybody has their phone out, so we are going to have a whole bunch of films and images we haven't seen yet. What we've basically seen is the video that was done of George Floyd being murdered. AVA DuVERNAY The murder of him on tape affected me so differently than so many of the other very violent, racist images that I have to watch for my work, thousands of hours of it. There was something about the video of Floyd's killing in the way that it was framed. Center frame, right in the middle of the camera, with the cop looking right at the sister. She's talking to him. Everyone is talking to him, saying, "We see you doing this." Sunglasses on top of the head, hand in the pocket, cavalierly killing this man as he begged for his life. Those images are tough images to watch. NELSON The other images have been on the networks, and I'm glad that they are covering it but I'm surprised they are kind of back from the action. I've heard so many anchors say to their producers or camera people, "Be safe, get out of there now." That's not the documentary tradition that I come from that says, "Get in there." I think that's the difference between the networks and Damon's and Sabaah's film on Ferguson, where they were up close. I remember when we saw the first cut of that film and saw the tear roll out of a cop's eye. They were in their faces. We haven't seen films yet that will emerge from the middle of what's going on, and I think that's going to be amazing to see that stuff. SABAAH FOLAYAN As first time filmmakers, Damon and I were really keen about what a documentary can do. There are these two poles, the informational talking head documentary and the character driven narrative, and there was so much pressure to pick one. There was so much pressure to pick one activist. What we were trying to do was marry a little bit of this larger picture and a lot of this personal and heart work, which is why I came back to the children of some of the activists , which is why I came back to the questions of mental health and personal sacrifice. Damon Davis: As one of the makers of "Whose Streets?" he wanted Black audiences to see themselves. "I hope that we learn that we aren't crazy, the world is." DAMON DAVIS We're learning on the fly. Ferguson was a major flash point for our youth, and we just wanted Black people to be safe. We were trying to make sure that Black folks saw themselves. And we made whatever film we needed to make to protect each other. One thing I personally have learned is it ain't just the state that is hurting Black people. Being out on the street taught me about violence against women, against trans women. And to listen and take leadership from women and queer Black people. Stuff my father didn't have to do when he was a Black Panther. They weren't talking or thinking about these things in the same way. TILLET That brings up another point about your films. How important is history to the story you are telling? Stanley Nelson: Documentaries "allow us to look back." With his film on the Black Panthers, for instance, "I knew how the Black Panther Party was portrayed, and I knew there was a different story." NELSON One of the things that documentary films do is allow us to look back. I knew how the Black Panther Party was portrayed, and I knew there was a different story and that the Panthers were heroes for us, rightly or wrongly. So we wanted to investigate and find out what happened to their legacy. Near the end of us making the film, the Black Lives Matter movement jumped off. I remember the day, we were in the editing room and we were just like, holy crap, this is even becoming more relevant. The Panthers started because of the police violence in Oakland. It was important for us that you understand that it wasn't like there was police violence in 1966 and then it disappeared until 2014 with the killing of Michael Brown . It was a continuum, it had been happening before in 1966 and been happening all through that time. DuVERNAY I've tried to maintain a foothold in both narrative and doc work because they serve different purposes to the same end goal. When you're dealing with layers and layers of interlocking systems, which is criminalization, mass incarceration, policing and racism, you have to fight with multiple weapons, I try to employ everything at my disposal television, film, documentary, narrative. Hell, I'm working on a podcast. But, a big part of documentary film is that you can actually reimagine the production of history. You have to analyze where the silences in those historical narratives are and what's been remembered and what's been forgotten, and what are the inequities that are revealed through the absence of so much. That was really the endeavor that we undertook with "13TH," which allowed me to interrogate the power structures, the systems, and the way that history is produced and just kind of accepted wholesale as the truth and fact. TILLET In "Whose Streets?" you emphasized that Blackness is a diverse identity. You even included a Black queer couple getting married. Why were those perspectives important for you to include it in a film about Black Lives Matter? FOLAYAN It was what was happening. We decided going in that we were going to respect what this movement was trying to say, that our perspective was to trust Black folks, trust our people, and tell the story through their eyes, and so when it became clear that the people who were putting their bodies on the line were also insisting that we look at gender differently, that we treat queer folks differently, that we not ask them to leave their identities behind, we had our mandate. NELSON In "The Black Panthers," we had a whole women's section, and me and the editor who is another Black man pretty much cut it out, and the producer Laurens Grant, who is a woman, was like, "What the hell are you doing? You've got to put that back." She was 100 percent right, and that's what happens when you have diverse people around, right? Black women wouldn't have been there, then the film would have been so much not as good. TILLET Art cannot prevent the real world tragedies that we've recently seen, but what are some lessons we could have learned from your films that shape where we go next? DuVERNAY The thing that challenges me about "13TH" are people like, I watched it, I'm caught up. It was just supposed to be an opening to say, look at all of this history that you weren't taught and you don't know. That whole film was 100 minutes long and it addresses 100 plus years of Black history, and I wanted it to be a primer. The film was very basic for Black people with a certain consciousness, and revelatory for people who have never heard of it. It should be an opening to more work and more films, more reading, more learning. NELSON I've done a bunch of historical films. I think that it's a roller coaster. It's not like this drive that just continues upward to freedom. We want to hope it is, but that's not what it is. We continue to fight, to struggle, and we make change. At this moment, there's so many young people out there, for the first time. And they've just got to keep fighting and understand that it's a long struggle, and I'm happy that it is in their hands. I have a lot of confidence in young people to make change. Sabaah Folayan: Directing "Whose Streets? with Damon Davis, "our perspective was to trust Black folks, trust our people, and tell the story through their eyes." FOLAYAN In "Whose Streets?" you can learn about direct action, militarization, the media, police violence, children's roles in the movement. But if you're going to wait until someone dies to learn about it and then as soon as things cool off it's back to Frappuccinos and gluten free this, that, and a third, we're going to be back here over and over and over again. DAVIS I just hope that Black folks see themselves and love themselves, especially in moments like this. Instead of us trying to teach them everything, check on your folks and make sure your people are all right because all of the gas that we've got to burn to teach these people basic human stuff, just how to be humans, you lose yourself in it. So that's what I hope for the audience we were talking to, that we take care of ourselves, and whatever that might be, and I hope that we learn that we aren't crazy, the world is. DuVERNAY We had to stop our mourning, our rage, our grief, our instinct to survive to educate. Until the society as a whole can give a damn enough about someone other than themselves, particularly Black people in this country, then you know, I think this is just going to be a really interesting time in somebody else's documentary without having the forward movement that we need to see for real change. "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution" is available on Amazon Prime Video. "13TH" is available on Netflix. "Whose Streets?" is available on Hulu, and the filmmakers will be holding conversations on Instagram Live on Friday at 12, 4 and 8 p.m. Sign up at whosestreets.com.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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WASHINGTON Probably, on a long car ride or at a lagging dinner party, you have been asked that trivial query: If you could have been born at any time and place, where and when would you choose? If you're an artist, then at least as a practical matter you ought to consider reincarnating in Florence in the late 15th century. You'd have hit the all time jackpot of patronage and partnerships: Tuscany's economic powerhouse was becoming a cultural capital, and the newly powerful Medicis were ready to bankroll painters, architects, goldsmiths and engineers. You could spend your whole career painting saints, carving statesmen and designing palaces, perhaps splitting the work with your colleagues: Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and a certain left handed upstart from the town of Vinci. Leonardo and those other artists all worked in the same studio in Medici Florence, the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio (circa 1435 1488) . Like most of the top artists during the Renaissance's greatest building boom, Verrocchio was a man of all trades, chiseling marble and casting bronze, painting altarpieces and designing monuments, machinery, theatrical costumes. For the munificent Medicis, he was the artist on call, even unto death: Verrocchio designed their lavish tombs for the family church. And in every innovation more flowing drapery, more dynamic movement, more lifelike faces and hands Verrocchio set the bar for virtuosity that his students tried to ape and exceed. His contemporary fame lags well behind his students', though, and tour groups bee lining through Florence to the Uffizi and the Palazzo Vecchio walk right by Verrocchio's statues and paintings. Might that start to change with "Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence," a fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery of Art here? It's the first solo show ever in the United States for this hinge figure between Donatello and the High Renaissance, and its 50 works especially its sculptures of marble, bronze and terra cotta ought to wake us up to the trailblazer right under our noses. Andrea di Michele Cioni was a boy of the Florentine street, born to a kilnman, apprenticed to a goldsmith. (He adopted the surname Verrocchio in tribute to his master.) He got the attention of the Medicis fast, and by 1465 the family asked him to design a bronze statue of David as a tribute to a Florentine military victory. It was a pricey job even for the Medicis, bronze casting was a lavish expense. But it was also a de facto artistic competition; 30 years before, Donatello had sculpted a slinky, seductive David that was the first free standing bronze statue since antiquity. The Medicis owned that bronze, and the young artist was being asked to measure up. Verrocchio responded with an elegant, rather sassy David, more naturalistic and triumphant than Donatello's downcast Hellenistic predecessor, that sashays over the first gallery of this show. He perches daintily on a marble base, his left elbow cocked out, the head of Goliath at his feet. He wears a skintight jerkin with a plunging neckline, and his nipples are ringed by what look like floral pasties. Beneath his curly hair he wears an arrogant little smirk the smirk, historians suspect, of the young Leonardo, modeling for his master in the studio. This show includes several other small bronzes by Verrocchio, including the recently conserved "Putto With a Dolphin," from 1465 or a little later, which was the first Renaissance sculpture made to be beheld from 360 degrees. The boy's gently torqued body, with his winged torso pointing away from his raised foot, is an early example of the figura serpentinata, or twisting mass, that would become a hallmark of ambitious painting and sculpture in the High Renaissance. His busts in marble and terra cotta, though far less theatrical, display Verrocchio's ability to imbue religious icons with psychological sensitivity, such as a haunted, polychrome Christ that foreshadows that of Leonardo's "Last Supper." As for his monumental sculptures, such as the knockout double figures o f Christ and Saint Thomas at Orsanmichele in Florence, a film here (narrated by Glenn Close!) will give you a taste. Verrocchio also painted, yet here his name pales before his rivals. In 15th century Florence, painting was a collaborative art and Verrocchio relied on Leonardo, Botticelli and the rest to paint in his style, without credit. You can trace the confusion to a passing comment made in Giorgio Vasari's 1568 "Lives of the Artists," the gossipy fountainhead of Renaissance art history. According to Vasari, Verrocchio had been commissioned by an order of Florentine monks to paint a scene of the baptism of Christ. "In this work," Vasari writes, "he was assisted by Leonardo da Vinci, his disciple, then quite young, who painted therein an angel with his own hand, which was much better than the other parts of the work; and for that reason Andrea resolved never again to touch a brush." That painting isn't here, but the climactic room of the exhibition features 11 works on canvas by Verrocchio and his assistants, many on the theme of the Madonna and Child. In one such painting, lent from Berlin and attributed to Verrocchio alone, the Virgin balances her son on her lap against a simple landscape; her hand, gripping his ankle, seems almost animate, while the Christ child, wrapped in his mother's blue mantle, has a sculptural solidity that sets the figure apart from early Renaissance painting. The exhibition's lead curator in Washington is the art dealer Andrew Butterfield. The museum asked him to steer the project after the untimely death of Eleonora Luciano, a National Gallery curator to whom the show is dedicated. While it's unusual for a commercial dealer to organize a museum show, Mr. Butterfield is acknowledged as today's leading authority on Verrocchio, and he has also edited a catalog whose attributions and speculations on who painted what will keep connoisseurs debating for years. (Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery, told The New York Times that Mr. Butterfield has no financial interest in any work in the show, and that his gallery has never owned a Verrocchio.) Strangely, this teacher of Florentine artists died in Venice, where he spent the last two years of his life at work on a lively monument of a captain on horseback another bronze sculpture meant to surpass Donatello's example. An absorbing chalk drawing here, annotated by Verrocchio's handwritten notes for enlargement, may have been used to prepare for the job. Shameful to admit, I spent more time looking at this drawing than I have at the sculpture itself. Twice this past year, while reporting from Venice, I walked right past Verrocchio's crowning glory: too busy, and too star struck by more famous names, to see the master in front of my face. Through Jan. 12 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; 202 737 4215, nga.gov.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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What will happen next? Why is she falling back into his arms when he's sitting there minding his own business? Who would have expected that man with his legs spread eagle on the floor to scurry across it? Why does that group of people stand motionless and then all switch position in a way that transforms them? Why did the mood just change and then change again because of movement alone? The dancing that occupies the stage of the Joyce Theater this week is just dancing. It prompts questions like those above; it supplies no answers. Nobody argues, nobody falls in love, nobody dies. Yet it's pervaded by mystery, drama, wit and, above all, suspense. The choreographer is Merce Cunningham (1919 2009); and to watch this 75 minute "Event," an anthology of his dances performed by the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine, from Angers, France, under the direction of Robert Swinston, is to see again the essential theatricality of Cunningham's work. This program confirms he was one of the supreme choreographers of the 20th century; he remains the greatest choreographer of the 21st century. But it shows Cunningham was a master of theater, too. His work is difficult to watch in the way that the plays of Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter are and rewarding in the same way. His choreography, too, might have been called the Theater of the Absurd because of its non sequiturs, its avoidance of psychological explanation or narrative completeness and its rhythmic concentration of language: in his case, dance language. His dances, though, are much more than studies in absurdism; at their heart is an ardent fascination in human energy, rigorously expressed. The mind behind it is always investigative, tough, wry, sensuous, making "What if?" experiments and conjuring unanticipated patterns and harmonies from them. There are eight dancers in this Angers group: four women, four men. They're given a wide range of ensembles the compositional fun of several trios and quartets often brings the mood into comedy but it's a particular pleasure to see the rich supply of male female duets on display here. This is a form in which Cunningham's invention flowered throughout his career (he trained in ballroom idioms in his youth); something in the juxtaposition of female and male inspired him, more or less invariably, to poetic drama. The duets here remind us that Cunningham often makes as much of a woman's independence as her dependence. In an image during one pairing, the woman's leg soars and her body plunges. The man kneels beside her like a safety net, framing her head and torso with his arms, but does not touch her. Several duets show us man and woman seemingly on different wavelengths: He partners her, or she takes a position while holding onto him, but they are facing in different directions, like a couple. They might at times be a couple who cohabit without always communicating. Sometimes, despite the cool performing manner, the movement is itself funny. In one of those duets in which man and woman seem at close quarters but in separate orbits, he's holding her as if by accident; but suddenly he hops backward and pulls her into hopping after him. It's so unexpected you want to laugh out loud, and yet the duet gives us no time for any single reaction. In other duets, man and woman are in sympathy, sharing the same impulse but expressing it in different parts of the body. He, kneeling, abruptly contracts his lower abdomen; she, balanced on one leg, bends it at the knee. The stage is decorated on three sides by strips of individually colored, patterned fabric that billow in a soft breeze; designs are by Jackie Matisse. The dancers are dressed attractively in shades of gray: mottled, sleeveless hip length tunics and paler tights below. Music, played live by John King and Gelsey Bell, covers a spectrum of sound from tintinnabulations to surreal soprano warbling (Ms. Bell) and noises like an engine's and propeller's made strangely lyrical. Most of the eight performers deliver Cunningham with what may be called a French accent. All have good stage faces and feet, and carry themselves elegantly; no French dancer ever enters the stage as if by accident. In matters of rhythm, turnout of the legs, placement of the hips and use of the torso, at least four don't have the rigor of the Cunningham dancers we used to watch when there was a Merce Cunningham Dance Company. (It closed at the end of 2011, following his behest as stated soon before his death in 2009.) But they're all committed and personable, and one, Anna Chirescu, is first rate; several would surely have caught Cunningham's eye and respect. At all points, they give us the choreography; their manner is both selfless and self revealing. I could identify excerpts from "Squaregame" (1976), "Fractions" (1978) and "Points in Space" (1986); a more complete list is supplied in the Joyce program. But an "Event" is not a quiz. Among the fascinations of this one was how it drew me back as aspects of Cunningham's work in the 1980s. (Mr. Swinston joined the Cunningham company in 1980.) The Cunningham of that era often seemed to be conducting a private dialogue with the two choreographers who influenced him most, and from whose idioms he departed most strongly: Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Here again were Graham related contractions of the torso, but without the Expressionist emphasis that in Graham so often becomes tedious; instead these contractions become pure dance. Here again were Balanchine choreographic devices four men partnering one woman in an extreme version of supported adagio, for example but tweaked, so that the men dance among themselves when not partnering her. How wonderful to be brought the great American dance past by dancers from France. Rich and enthralling fare.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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There is something appealing about the concept of "shared value." The strategy, first articulated by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School and the management consultant Mark R. Kramer, is based on the belief that companies can increase profits and enhance their businesses even as they address pressing social problems. They have good examples. Exxon Mobil put 125 million toward training teachers in science, technology and engineering so that it might have skilled workers to hire later on. IBM joined with New York City to create an innovative, technology oriented high school in Brooklyn. Southwire, a family owned maker of wires and cables in Carrollton, Ga., tackled a shortage of high school graduates for hire by staffing a new factory entirely with students at risk of dropping out, and requiring them to stay in school to keep their jobs. The Southwire initiative, which started in 2007, worked so well that Harvard Business School wrote it up. The students stayed in school, drawn by jobs that paid more than the minimum wage. The county's high school graduation rate jumped 10 percentage points. And Southwire made money. Within five years, the factory was adding 1.7 million to earnings. "If you are creative, you can find ways to create economic value and social value simultaneously," said Stuart Thorn, Southwire's chief executive. "Some stuff that we are doing results in lifting up people that otherwise might not have the opportunity, while the business is also lifting itself up." Such outcomes are promising. Done on a large scale, reconfiguring companies' relations with their multiple stakeholders their workers, customers and communities could, advocates hope, help reconstitute the nation's social fabric. And yet the case for enlisting corporations to address rising inequality and stagnant mobility warrants some skepticism. For starters, social and corporate objectives are obviously not always aligned. If so many so called win win opportunities for companies exist, why haven't more been taken? Harvard Business School is in a privileged position to explore this issue. On Wednesday, it will release a report based on a survey of its alumni a notably well heeled set about their concern over America's lack of shared prosperity. While it offers a case for optimism, it also suggests that executives' enlightened self interest is probably not enough to bring about social change. Surprisingly, perhaps, executives care about such things. Two thirds said it was more important to address poverty, inequality, middle class stagnation or economic mobility than to stimulate economic growth. "There is a compelling new sense that generally very wealthy and senior business leaders are starting to understand this is a significant problem," said Professor Porter, a co author of the study with his colleagues Karen Mills and Jan W. Rivkin. Most interestingly, many executives say they believe the growing gap in income and opportunity is not just bad for the country, it is bad for business, too. It curbs consumer spending, undercuts worker morale and produces political polarization. "Even with their business hat on, the system isn't working for them," Professor Rivkin said. Much of this concern grew out of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. Public frustration over the slow recovery of workers' fortunes while businesses prospered reached the executive suite. And yet Professor Porter argues that executives are driven by a broader set of business considerations. It's about businesses that cannot find skilled workers and realize they have not paid attention to what he calls "the supply chain for skills." It's about companies' realization that low wages can be costly, too, sapping motivation and increasing turnover. Of the respondents to Harvard's survey whose companies employed low wage workers, a third said they had either already increased pay or planned to do so in the coming year. "Companies that have customer facing employees and want to keep them must rethink the issue of worker pay," Professor Porter said. This dynamic offers the tantalizing possibility that multinationals that long ago shed the local bonds that characterized the industrial giants of an earlier era might again anchor their prosperity on the success of American communities, families and workers. Does this add up to meaningful social transformation? While these new business dynamics could add up to powerful forces for change, addressing America's lack of shared prosperity may also require higher taxes, more stringent regulations and other changes that lavishly paid corporate leaders with Harvard M.B.A.s would be unlikely to welcome. Surprisingly, perhaps, one in seven respondents to Harvard's survey acknowledged tax policy had contributed to widening inequality, second only to inadequate education. But weak labor unions and outsize executive pay were nowhere near the top of the list. "I don't see too many people inside companies thinking that pay in some absolute sense is too high," Professor Porter said. There is interest in better tying pay to performance, he added, but "lots of people are still offended by the discussion saying that somebody is getting paid too much." Harvard's survey offers good reason to temper one's optimism: Corporate chieftains are pretty pessimistic, too. More than a third of respondents forecast wages and benefits will be lower three years from now, a bigger share than those forecasting wages and benefits will be higher. Things do not pick up from there. Over half of respondents expect inequality to be worse a decade from now, if the United States sticks to its "current economic and political institutions." Almost half expected poverty to deepen. A quarter expect economic mobility to deteriorate further. (Only one in 10 expected it to improve.) Social change will not happen without profound changes in corporate culture and practice. The growing chasm between the incomes and opportunities of the rich and the rest is not fixable with taxes and transfers alone.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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When Jacob Wang saw reports circulating online recently suggesting that life was getting better in Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, he was irate. Mr. Wang, a journalist for a state run newspaper in China, knew that Wuhan was still in crisis he had traveled there to chronicle the failures of the government firsthand. He took to social media to set the record straight, writing a damning post last month about sick patients struggling to get medical care amid a dysfunctional bureaucracy. "People were left to die, and I am very angry about that," Mr. Wang said in an interview. "I'm a journalist, but I'm also an ordinary human being." China Is Censoring Coronavirus Stories. These Citizens Are Fighting Back. Information about the coronavirus outbreak is not immune from Chinese censors. But more and more citizens are dodging censorship by creating a digital archive of deleted posts. They told us how. Voices like these from Chinese citizens are very rare. People who are willing to speak out about the government's attempts to control news about the deadly coronavirus. They asked to remain anonymous, because what they're doing could put them and their families at great risk. But these people are part of a new wave of Chinese citizens, fighting to get the message out in a country that aggressively censors information. Accounts or messages like these calling for free speech are quickly scrubbed from the internet. Or videos like this, showing people frustrated about life under lockdown. clanging Posted online one day, but gone the next. But the crisis over the coronavirus is changing the landscape, for now at least. Everyday citizens are preserving and reposting information the government doesn't want out there. Experts say this kind of digital resistance is happening at a scale they've never seen before. Social media networks like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. But internet savvy people use techniques that allow them to repost censored content to these platforms, while staying under the radar of authorities. They're creating a visual archive by preserving videos like this one, showing overwhelmed hospitals. screaming And they're reposting people's personal stories. Some are also turning to less obvious platforms, including GitHub, which is a site mostly used by coders. Another taboo Chinese citizens are pushing back on? They're making open and widespread calls for freedom of speech. These were triggered by the death of Dr. Li Wenliang. He was an early whistleblower who warned about the virus, and was punished by officials for speaking out. He died in early February from the coronavirus. Right after his death, the hashtag "I want freedom of speech" started to trend on Weibo, a Chinese social media site. Then, it was quickly censored by the government. Dr. Li's become an icon in the online fight for freedom of speech between censors and citizens. So, who's winning? For now, citizens are staying a step ahead of the authorities. But a renewed government crackdown could test the strength of this digital resistance. Information about the coronavirus outbreak is not immune from Chinese censors. But more and more citizens are dodging censorship by creating a digital archive of deleted posts. They told us how. Chinese journalists, buoyed by an outpouring of support from the public and widespread calls for free speech, are fighting back in a rare challenge to the ruling Communist Party. They are publishing hard hitting exposes describing government cover ups and failures in the health care system. They are circulating passionate calls for press freedom. They are using social media to draw attention to injustice and abuse, circumventing an onslaught of propaganda orders. Many flocked to Wuhan before the city imposed a lockdown in late January, setting up makeshift news bureaus in hotels. Wearing hazmat suits and goggles, they ventured into hospital wards to interview patients and doctors, submitting nervously to tests for the coronavirus after their visits. Some were overwhelmed by the pressures of censorship as well as the atmosphere of death and despair. "You really couldn't sleep at night seeing all these horrible stories," said Mr. Wang, who reported from Wuhan during the lockdown. "It was really upsetting." The journalists' stories have stoked widespread anger in China, painting a portrait of a government that was slow to confront the virus and worked steadfastly to silence anyone who tried to warn about its spread. Profile, a general interest magazine in China, uncovered a severe shortage of testing kits in Wuhan, provoking fury from residents who demanded to know how the government could be so ill prepared. Caijing, a business magazine, published an explosive interview with an anonymous health expert who acknowledged that officials in Wuhan delayed warning the public that the virus could spread from person to person. "Why was no human to human transmission found?" the headline asked. Caixin, an influential newsmagazine, detailed how health officials concealed early evidence that the virus showed striking similarities to severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which caused a deadly global outbreak in 2002 and 2003. "When was the alarm sounded?" it asked. Many people hailed the Caixin report as a breakthrough. "Voices like this are our only hope to shine light in the darkness," one user wrote on Weibo, a popular social media site. Mr. Xi, who rose to power in 2012, has worked to more tightly control the news media than his predecessors, demanding that it first and foremost serve as a party mouthpiece. Under Mr. Xi, the government has moved swiftly to shut down critical reporting during major disasters, including the chemical explosion in the port city of Tianjin in 2015 that killed 173 people. But the authorities have struggled to rein in coverage of the coronavirus outbreak that has affected the lives of 1.4 billion people nationwide, in part because the Chinese public has resorted to innovative methods to preserve a record of what has transpired. "This time the government's control of free speech has directly damaged the interests and lives of ordinary people," said Li Datong, a retired newspaper editor in Beijing. "Everyone knows this kind of big disaster happens when you don't tell the truth." Mr. Xi's efforts to limit independent news reporting could undermine trust in the government, experts say. Many people are furious that the party, facing one of the most severe crises in its seven decade rule, is tightening its grip on power rather than exposing itself to scrutiny. "The Chinese media in the past probably had a room of 1,000 square meters in which to operate," he said. "Now it is left with 60 square meters." Despite the restrictions, many Chinese journalists say they are emboldened and eager to demonstrate that a robust press can hold the government accountable for its mistakes and help China heal. "Everyone is in a state of feeling held back and wronged," said Tenney Huang, a reporter for a state owned publication who spent several weeks in Wuhan. "Free expression is a way for us to fight back." Mr. Huang said that as censorship grew more rampant, journalists would resort to social media and other tools to continue to share their work. "Facts are like firewood," he said. "The more you pile on, the greater the force when a spark finally lights it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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YES, it's a filing cabinet, but the 22 story Yale Club, at Vanderbilt Avenue and 44th Street, is a very nice filing cabinet! That is, it's incrementally more attractive than the rest of Midtown's World War I era buildings. Question: Is "nice" enough for the landmark designation proposed by the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Municipal Art Society? In 1900, the Yale Club opened its doors at 30 West 44th Street in the new club district west of Fifth. Although other clubs went up four or five stories, Yale rose to 11, leaving little old three story Harvard across the street in the dust. "It will be an easy matter to look down upon the Harvard and throw bouquets to them when there is occasion for doing so," a Yale Club member informed The New York Tribune in 1901. Bouquets or not, the history of the club says the building was designed so that it could be converted to bachelor apartments if the venture failed. Vanderbilt Avenue had been a backwater when it ran along the side of Grand Central's great rail shed, but when the railroad finished sinking and covering the tracks in 1912, thousands of commuters streamed across Vanderbilt every day. The first structure to go up in the area, on Madison between 43rd and 44th, was the Biltmore Hotel, designed in 1912. When the Yale Club opened three years later, the Harvard Club found the occasion worthy of a bouquet, sending 100 American Beauty roses with a card reading "To Hell with Yale." Together with the Biltmore and other big buildings sparked by Grand Central, the Yale Club was part of what was called Terminal City. James Gamble Rogers III, an architect and a grandson of the designer, James Gamble Rogers, Yale '89, says that the 1915 Yale Club was also designed for conversion to a hotel. Certainly it was large enough to be a hotel, with 165 bedrooms over 11 floors. Members visited other clubs to determine the most comfortable chairs for the lounges. And, Town Country magazine reported in 1915, "the wood of which the little round tables are made, and the finish applied to them, were the objects of long and careful experimentation by a skilled committee with the result that all sorts of water and any brand of alcohol may be spilled upon their tops without leaving a mark." The club prospered, and hotel conversion proved unnecessary. In November 1923, after a dry spell of a few years, Yale won the annual Harvard Yale game, 13 0, and 500 members spilled out of the club in a gleeful snake dance over to West 44th Street, just in case the Harvard Club had missed the news. The Yale, like all large clubs, is subject to snide remarks from members of smaller clubs about its low bar for admission. Writing in The Architectural Forum in 1926, Alexander Trowbridge (Cornell, '84) recounted a tour of "one of the large college club houses in New York," and a visitor's remark that the place reminded him of the Biltmore Hotel. His host, a club member, said brightly, 'Yes, it is like the Biltmore, although not so exclusive!' " Edward C. Brewster, Yale '32, was in 1969 a member of the Links, Piping Rock and the University Clubs. That year, while president of the Union Club, he told The New York Times, "we want no salesmen here, nobody who pushes himself and barges in," adding, "The Yale Club can absorb that kind, I suppose." A recent proposal for increasing the density of east Midtown has sparked concern about redevelopment, and the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy have proposed landmark designation for not only the Yale Club, but also 16 other structures in the area. These include well known works like Arthur Harmon's influential Shelton Hotel of 1923, at Lexington and 49th (today the New York Marriott East Side). But other proposals include the 1915 office building 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, at 45th Street, and the 1924 Roosevelt Hotel, both typical of the solid, respectable building stock of the Grand Central area. The Yale Club's five story limestone base is attractive, certainly but then limestone is attractive. The brick facade is agreeable but then older masonry structures shine in comparison to those of the glass box era. It has a handsome two story high colonnade on top but lots of buildings have that. The two groups believe the Yale Club should be made a landmark because "it is significant as one of the few remaining buildings of the Terminal City era, and as a fine example of continuity of use." Actually, most of the buildings on the list are still used as originally intended. The Landmarks Preservation Commission received the proposals too recently to have taken any action. And any proposal like the present one will face an uphill battle no cute little brownstones are at stake, no co op's views are jeopardized, no particular ox is gored. If a public debate does come, perhaps it will be argued on the merits something not always seen in the world of historic preservation.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"We can be good together, but only when we really have to be. And I'm slowly figuring out that maybe we don't have to." That's the sound of Van waking up to the reality of her situationship with Earn. It takes her a full day to get there, but she finally arrives. The episode kicks off with Van getting her way ... in more ways than one. Not only is Earn tending to her needs physically, he's also agreed to accompany her to an out of town Oktoberfest gathering that she's been looking forward to. Echoes of "Get Out" ring clear during their drive. They've left Atlanta for the village of Helen (located in Georgia's White County, mind you) and while cruising through the countryside, they very nearly run into a wild boar in the road. (In the film, it's a deer.) Any fears you may have already harbored for this young black couple's safety are now heightened, as you imagine what kind of horrors may await them at their predominantly white destination. But Van's not a bit worried about how the festivalgoers will treat Earn; it's more the other way around. "I just don't think you're going to like it up there," she says, smoking weed to calm her nerves. The moment they arrive at the Bavarian style hamlet, she shakes off her previous concerns and giddily dives right into all the pageantry of the fastnacht festivities. She's ready to show off her dirndl, her braided halo and her German dance moves. She excitedly schools Earn on all the cultural dos and don'ts as they approach the biergarten including a caveat about the possible presence of attendees in traditional blackface. "When you were a kid, didn't you feel weird about that?" he asks incredulously, as two elderly white women gawk at them from the window of a curio shop. "I used to," she replies nonchalantly. "But I'm kind of like the Serena Williams of the festival. They hate, but they can't deny the stats." If you're baffled by the customary games and unsettlingly creepy masks that fill the hall, then you're right there on Earn's wavelength. He was stuck stunned and staring most of the day. Meanwhile, have you ever seen Van smile as much as when she was playing those party games and working that room? She was so at ease and confident, cocky even. That is, until Earn's visible discomfort curbed her enthusiasm. He declined to dress up in lederhosen, wasn't picking up on any of the right social cues and refused to wear a mask like many of the other men. He quickly capitulated on that last one when a handsy reveler mistook his actual face for blackface. Subsequently, he spent the rest of the night donning a Jason esque hockey mask. If you're stranded in a horrific situation, you may as well look the part. "Sometimes I feel like she wants me to be lame," Earn says to Dave, the boyfriend of Christina, Van's friend and the only other biracial woman at the event. That Dave's goofily going along with the event and doing so in full traditional garb yet doesn't feel personally slighted by Earn's comment tells you a lot about his overeagerness. (That he keeps peppering his speech with words like "dawg" and "the whip" says still more.) All the same, he delivers a real nugget of wisdom: "That's what girls do when they like you. They just want to twist their life up with yours, that way it's harder to disconnect." In a last ditch effort to find common ground in such unfamiliar territory, Earn lures Van away from the dance floor for a quiet game of Ping Pong. "It's the only white game I know," he pleads. Here's where things start veering off course. She easily defeats him, but does so in front of an (eerie) audience, bruising his ego. Earn doesn't typically display much of an ego in the first place and her earlier comment about his lack of confidence in the bedroom likely did him no favors. And then the sniping starts. Though he knows she's in her element, he dismisses the festival as stupid. She points out that she acquiesces to his plans all the time, simply to spend time with him. Take last week's strip club outing as one example and Alfred's concerts as another. "You can be real mean," she says, and then walks away. It's not the first time she's said those words to him. But it may be the last. She tries to salvage her night by returning to the festivities, but finds no more comfort in her friend Christina. As it turns out, they're actually more like frenemies not unlike Jayde from last season's all Van episode, "Value." Once again, Van is face to face with a woman from her past who's chosen a different life path, a choice that's driven an unspoken wedge between them. During an introduction to a pair of Christina's white friends, Van is referred to as both "Lotte's mom" and "Earn's girl," but never as an individual in her own right. It rubs her the wrong way, and she wants to get to the bottom of it privately. "Since we were kids, I chose white, you chose black," Christina says gingerly, trying not to anger Van but also being condescending. "It's like you needed that identity." "You literally just told me that I'm going to be a 'baby mama' and that's O.K. because I 'chose black!'" Van snaps. By nightfall, she's lost a friend, a man (probably) and her cellphone, thanks to some traditional German "demon thief" prankster. Her favorite festival has lost its luster and Van's left wandering the streets of Helen, on a tandem phone searching and soul searching mission. A flirty German speaking bartender who had been sending vibes her way earlier sidles up during the phone hunt. Instead of hitting on her (Earn is walking a few steps behind them, after all), he helps her gain some perspective. "You should start a relationship with yourself," he advises. It's good advice: Since losing her job, Van has been floating through life the way Earn does, and we've all seen how that's worked out for him. One of them has to be the adult for their kid's sake, if nothing else. She breaks from the pack to relieve herself in a dark alley, where she's terrified by the sound of a clinking bottle and heavy breathing. A tall figure wearing a monstrous mask is lurking behind her. (They laid the horror tropes on thick this episode.) She decks him, finds her phone nearby and finds the courage to finally speak her truth to Earn. "I want to be in a relationship where I'm valued as a human being and not as an accessory," she says. "This arrangement works for me," Earn replies. Right then and there, you'd think a newly emboldened Van would turn on her heels and leave. Instead, she lets a Ping Pong rematch decide their fate. Her terms: "If I win, then you don't have to see me unless it's about Lotte or money." Much like everything else in his life, Earn doesn't put up much of a fight. If he'd shown the same gusto he did in initiating last week's race against Michael Vick, Van may have seen some proof that his heart was really in their relationship. As it was, he begrudgingly picked up the paddle, she won the best out of five games and finally accepted the truth she'd been avoiding all this time. There's a moment during that final game where Van's lips curl into a determined smirk. It seems less about scoring a point and more about starting down the road to self satisfaction. She looks ready to disconnect. "Are black women considered brunettes?" That doesn't sound like a "high question" at all, Van. Answers, please.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. Think of the miscalculations this guy made. In 2015, the United States and the major European powers agreed to lift virtually all their sanctions on Iran, many dating back to 1979, in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program for a mere 15 years, but still maintaining the right to have a peaceful nuclear program. It was a great deal for Iran. Its economy grew by over 12 percent the next year. And what did Suleimani do with that windfall? He and Iran's supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. This freaked out U.S. allies in the Sunni Arab world and Israel and they pressed the Trump administration to respond. Trump himself was eager to tear up any treaty forged by President Obama, so he exited the nuclear deal and imposed oil sanctions on Iran that have now shrunk the Iranian economy by almost 10 percent and sent unemployment over 16 percent. All that for the pleasure of saying that Tehran can call the shots in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. What exactly was second prize? With the Tehran regime severely deprived of funds, the ayatollahs had to raise gasoline prices at home, triggering massive domestic protests. That required a harsh crackdown by Iran's clerics against their own people that left thousands jailed and killed, further weakening the legitimacy of the regime. Then Mr. "Military Genius" Suleimani decided that, having propped up the regime of President Bashar al Assad in Syria, and helping to kill 500,000 Syrians in the process, he would overreach again and try to put direct pressure on Israel. He would do this by trying to transfer precision guided rockets from Iran to Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria. Alas, Suleimani discovered that fighting Israel specifically, its combined air force, special forces, intelligence and cyber is not like fighting the Nusra front or the Islamic State. The Israelis hit back hard, sending a whole bunch of Iranians home from Syria in caskets and hammering their proxies as far away as Western Iraq. Indeed, Israeli intelligence had so penetrated Suleimani's Quds Force and its proxies that Suleimani would land a plane with precision munitions in Syria at 5 p.m., and the Israeli air force would blow it up by 5:30 p.m. Suleimani's men were like fish in a barrel. If Iran had a free press and a real parliament, he would have been fired for colossal mismanagement. But it gets better, or actually worse, for Suleimani. Many of his obituaries say that he led the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, in tacit alliance with America. Well, that's true. But what they omit is that Suleimani's, and Iran's, overreaching in Iraq helped to produce the Islamic State in the first place. It was Suleimani and his Quds Force pals who pushed Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al Maliki, to push Sunnis out of the Iraqi government and army, stop paying salaries to Sunni soldiers, kill and arrest large numbers of peaceful Sunni protesters and generally turn Iraq into a Shiite dominated sectarian state. The Islamic State was the counterreaction. Finally, it was Suleimani's project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro democracy forces both Sunnis and Shiites in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. As the Iranian American scholar Ray Takeyh pointed out in a wise essay in Politico, in recent years "Soleimani began expanding Iran's imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran's various enemies." It was precisely those Suleimani proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen that created pro Iranian Shiite states within states in all of these countries. And it was precisely these states within states that helped to prevent any of these countries from cohering, fostered massive corruption and kept these countries from developing infrastructure schools, roads, electricity. And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies his "kingmakers" in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump's America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance. On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites yes, Iraqi Shiites burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran's interference in Iraqi politics. The whole "protest" against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this. In a way, it's what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead. I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East. First, often in the Middle East the opposite of "bad" is not "good." The opposite of bad often turns out to be "disorder." Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn't mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 and that is Iran's tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change. Today's Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after. Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the "martyr." The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won't get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran's wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East. And yes, the morning after, America's Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani's death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes their lack of freedom, modern education and women's empowerment that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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If you live in a New York City apartment, it may be on hold, because the city has suspended its composting program (although there are workable alternatives). But if you're lucky enough to have a garden of your own, there's no time to lose. "The answer to so many gardening questions is, typically, 'compost,'" said Daryl Beyers, the author of "The New Gardener's Handbook," published this year. "Whether you're adding it to help improve fertility or water holding ability: Compost, compost, compost. Until people truly grasp the importance of building healthy soil, they will struggle in the garden." Encouraging new gardeners to foster healthy, productive soil and to recycle kitchen and garden waste into compost, as the crux of that effort is Mr. Beyers's favorite part of the class on gardening fundamentals that he has been teaching at the New York Botanical Garden for 10 years. He shared some basic composting advice, as well as his favorite system: pit composting, which doesn't require buying or building anything, but rather digging a series of holes in the ground. Lesson No. 1: Compost Is Not Fertilizer It is decayed organic matter, or humus, that improves soil structure and promotes fertility when added to the garden. It does this by making nutrients and water more available to plants, while creating a living soil hospitable to all the essential organisms whose (mostly unseen) job is to recycle. "Humus happens composting is going on in every field and forest in the world," Mr. Beyers said. "To support our garden soil, we just have to learn to mimic that process." The Recipe Is Simple, but a Little Confusing In short: Mix green with browns, in roughly equal measure. Green is shorthand for nitrogen rich materials like fresh grass clippings or the lettuce plants about to bolt. Brown represents those higher in carbon, like dried leaves or twiggy prunings. Of course, it's not always so obvious, Mr. Beyers acknowledged. "One of most important lessons is to start to understand what's a green and what's a brown," he said. "The way I explain it to my students: If you let it sit on your kitchen counter for a week, does it start to rot? It's probably green. If it dries up, it's brown." (A list of ingredients.) Animals may take an interest in a compost pile. A shovelful of soil and some dry leaves or shredded paper on top of food waste is a deterrent, and tumblers (see below) are the most animal proof device. Any organic in other words, living or formerly living material can be composted, but some of those materials should be left out of home systems. Don't add meat, dairy, eggs or oily foods. Composted manures from herbivorous farm animals like chickens or cows are welcome; those of carnivorous domestic pets are not. Eggshells and fish bones are neither green nor brown, but they are mineral rich and can be added. Mr. Beyers does not add diseased plants or weeds with rhizomes that might re sprout. "I do compost weeds with seeds," he said, "because the heat of the process makes the seeds unviable." He also composts uncoated black and white paper, like newsprint, junk mail or computer paper, and corrugated cardboard (all considered browns), shredding or tearing it up first. Coffee grounds a popular additive among kitchen wastes are doubly confusing. They're brown in color and don't decay if left sitting out, but are actually a green, rich in nitrogen. As Mr. Beyers said, it takes a little homework. Any material will break down faster if it's added in smaller pieces. A whole tomato vine will eventually break down, but cut up first, it moves along faster. Air and just enough moisture are also essential to get microbes working. Sunshine provides the heat. Site your composting setup "in a place that's not superhot and sunny, but also not dank and shady," Mr. Beyers said. During periods of little or no rain, moisten the compost slightly with the hose. "Inoculate your pile or bin for free with an occasional shovelful of garden soil, loaded with the microbes that do the work," Mr. Beyers said. "Later, use some of your finished compost." Closed bins, also called composters, are another small garden option. But don't put a bin or a tumbler in all day sun or the heat buildup will harm the microbes. Open bins, made of wire, wood slats, pallets, concrete blocks or straw bales, are often set up as three compartments, allowing several stages of decomposition. Turning each periodically speeds breakdown. The downside: Unless you're using concrete blocks, you will have to rebuild every few years. Don't Want to Look at the Pile or Use a Bin? Then compost in a pit. Mr. Beyers started pit composting as a renter, worried his landlord would object to a heap of debris visible to neighbors. Then he thought, "Why don't I just dig a hole?'" he recalled. "And it ended up working so well that I've re created it at my own home." Choose a spot where three pits or trenches of equal size can be dug alongside one another. Start with one, perhaps four by four feet, and two feet deep. Pile excavated soil beside the first pit. Begin adding wastes, like kitchen scraps, dry leaves and soil, then fresh weeds, shredded paper and soil, and so on. Start a second pit when the material in the first is about a foot above ground. The average process in Mr. Beyers's Northeast backyard: "If I start Pit 1 in April, and it's full by July, I dig Pit 2," he said. He fills that until about September, but more material is still to come, and Pit 1 isn't ready yet. "So I dig Pit 3. I fill Pit 3 throughout the winter, and by spring, Pit 3 is full, I harvest Pit 1 and start filling it again. And so on." The Laziest Way of All Pile things up in an open heap or, more passively still, do sheet composting or sheet mulching. In recent years, sheet composting has become known as lasagna gardening, but it's an old technique, modeled on the way trees' leaves drop and degrade slowly into the soil. Simply place the compostable material in existing or new beds again, alternating greens and browns. The Payoff: Using Your Finished Compost Unless you have a very big garden and a very big system, demand for compost will exceed supply. "I'm very particular about who gets the compost," Mr. Beyers said, as even his three pit system doesn't yield enough homemade stuff. "I'll top dress my vegetable plants, my dahlias and other flowers, spreading an inch thick around the root zone of each." He happily harvests whenever finished material is ready. "It could be spring, which is great," he said. "But it could be July, and I put it on then, too, focusing on problem areas, where I want to improve soil over time." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Ashley Judd, one of Harvey Weinstein's accusers and a key figure in the MeToo movement, reacted to the Hollywood producer's conviction with satisfaction. But she would have preferred a "restorative justice process in which he could emotionally come to terms with his wrongs." The criminal justice system, she said, was less satisfying than this "more humane" alternative. The MeToo movement reached a milestone when Mr. Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault. The disgraced film producer will likely spend years, if not decades, in prison; his criminal conviction is widely viewed as proof of society's progress on women's issues. But an approach to crime that emphasizes prosecution and incarceration in all cases is not a cure all for a vast and complex problem. For decades, victims' rights advocates, including many feminists, have stood behind the promise prosecutors routinely make to victims: We will absolve your pain by prosecuting your offender to the maximum possible extent. But for many, it is an empty promise. A vast majority of sexual assault cases never see the inside of a courtroom. Some victims, like Ms. Judd, seek restorative justice, a remedy intended to heal victims and prevent reoffending through accountability and restoration not incarceration. The MeToo movement and the publicity of the Weinstein case shed a necessary spotlight on the problem of persistent sexual harassment and misconduct. We agree that society, educational institutions and lawmakers must address sexual misconduct and take measures to prevent it. MeToo has sent the important message that women who report rape should be treated like any other victim. The movement has helped women shed stigma, self blame and trauma and empowered them to speak out. This has moved the needle on gender justice significantly. But for many victims of crime, zero tolerance, broad criminal prohibitions and harsh sentences are not a possible or an even desirable response. Stefanie Mundhenk Harrelson went to the police after she was raped in college by a classmate in 2015. Like an overwhelming majority of reported sexual assaults, her case was never referred for prosecution. Ms. Harrelson came to view the criminal justice system as inadequate. Even if her case had been pursued and resulted in a prison sentence, she said, it would not have helped her heal. Restorative justice, she wrote, paraphrasing a book by Danielle Sered, is preferable because it holds the offender accountable through an acknowledgment of responsibility and expression of remorse for one's actions. The criminal justice system often incentivizes offenders to do the opposite. Sujatha Baliga, who was recently awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant and directs a restorative justice program at the nonprofit Impact Justice, said in a radio interview that she did not report the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. "I did not want my father to be arrested and locked up. I didn't want potential immigration consequences for my family," she said. "I did not want child protective services to become involved and potentially remove me from my home." It is important to listen to these voices. In the MeToo era, there is a widespread presumption that the best way to reckon with sexual misconduct and serve victims' interests is through the criminal system. MeToo has done away with the risible idea that some level of unwanted sexual touching must be tolerated because it is simply not "serious enough" to report. But as more people have been prosecuted for an array of sexually inappropriate conduct, the criminal justice system's shortcomings have become more pronounced. Criminal prosecutions expose victims to a toxic level of stress, if not trauma. The benefit is a potential pound of the offender's flesh. But even in rare cases where perpetrators are convicted and punished severely, many victims report that their experience was retraumatizing and disempowering: Their story was confined to the rigid strictures of a prosecutor's narrative and raked over on cross examination. Of course, advocates argue that the process should be reformed so that victims do not face such scrutiny. But sex offenses carry some of the highest penalties under the law; rape trials will never simply be rubber stamps for the prosecution. Any fair criminal process will subject the victim to unavoidable scrutiny the kind of invasive cross examination experienced by Mr. Weinstein's accusers. Despite its problems, the carceral approach embodied by the Weinstein case has been gaining momentum. In 2018, the California Legislature reacted to the Brock Turner case by mandating state prison sentences for certain sexual assaults. In June last year, Texas increased the severity of charges and penalties for groping offenses. And in September, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, surrounded by celebrities and Time's Up activists, signed legislation extending the statute of limitations to bring certain rape cases to two decades from five years. Some are skeptical about the efficacy of these headline grabbing, tough on crime responses that view victims as a monolithic group who want and need the same thing. Sexual assault victims come from every racial, ethnic and socio economic group. They include members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. They include men. Some victims are undocumented immigrants or have criminal records themselves. Studies show that victims from marginalized groups fare differently and worse at every stage of the criminal process: less likely to be believed by the police, prosecutors and juries. Eight in 10 sexual assaults involve victims and offenders who know each other, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, and one third involve intimate partners. Some of the defendants in these cases are sexual violence victims themselves. Often, they come from the same communities. Many victims, particularly those from communities affected by mass incarceration, do not want to be part of a carceral solution they view as destructive. Either because mass incarceration ravages their neighborhoods and breaks apart their families or because it destines the incarcerated person to return, hardened by prison, to cause further harm. A pilot program called Restore, which operated in Pima County, Ariz., from 2004 to 2007, worked with local prosecutors to offer victims of felony and misdemeanor sexual assaults a restorative justice alternative. A majority who were offered the opportunity to participate accepted. A peer reviewed study of this program showed that of the 22 cases where restorative justice was pursued over three years, 66 percent of felony offenders and more than 90 percent of misdemeanor offenders successfully completed the program. The percentage of victims suffering from post traumatic stress disorder dropped, and nearly all participants "felt safe, listened to, supported, treated fairly, treated with respect." The Restore program ended when the federal grant supporting it dried up. We need more of these programs so that we can study their long term impact, improve them where necessary and make them more accessible to victims who want to participate. MeToo rightly emphasizes victims' healing and accountability for the people who harmed them. All too often, the prosecutorial route achieves neither. Restorative justice may be a way to achieve both.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The actor Woody Harrelson narrates the documentary "Kiss the Ground," a frenetic but ultimately persuasive and optimistic plan to counter the climate crisis. Streaming on Netflix, the film makes a case for the healing power of soil, arguing that its capacity to sequester carbon could be the key to reversing the effects of climate change. Directed by Joshua Tickell and Rebecca Harrell Tickell, whose credits include other socially conscious documentaries such as "The Big Fix" and "Pump," "Kiss the Ground" takes a wide ranging approach. The film begins by examining how tilling and the use of pesticides have led to soil erosion, and then traces the damage done to our ecology, health and climate. The filmmakers find a solution in regenerative farming, an ethical practice designed to restore degraded lands and facilitate carbon drawdown.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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The nine works anchoring Lisa Alvarado's solo show, "Thalweg," at Bridget Donahue aren't definitively one thing or another. They're paintings: brightly colored and abstract, with geometric patterns or expressionistic swaths. They're also tapestries suspended from the ceiling, with fabric backing and trim. Notably, each one is titled "Thalweg (Traditional Object)," after a geological term that has multiple meanings, too, including a line that traces the lowest part of a valley or channel. Visually, they evoke natural elements like water and earth while referring to a number of traditions, among them Mexican textiles and European and American Modernist painting. But they borrow from and build on those sources to become something of their own. Hybridity and in betweenness are central to Ms. Alvarado's practice. In addition to being a visual artist, she plays harmonium for the Natural Information Society, a group founded by her husband, Joshua Abrams, that fuses styles to make experimental, meditative music. Her hanging works take on yet another identity as set pieces for their performances. At Bridget Donahue, the band supplies a droning, transportive audio piece that features the sound of running water a motif that appears visually in four collages of Ms. Alvarado's family photos, showing people of Mexican descent in Texas in the 1930s. Around that time, the U.S. government forcibly deported over a million people, many of them American citizens including members of the artist's family to Mexico, in an act that's euphemistically called "repatriation." It's not really fair to compare Luc Sante's new collages to his better known writing, since he started making zine covers and wheatpaste posters a good five decades ago. But while taking a long break from visual art, he got famous as a social historian: In books like "The Other Paris" and "Low Life," about New York, the Belgian born critic and professor strings together extraordinary quantities of striking detail about poverty, crime and gutter nightlife in what is, after all, a virtuosic kind of collage in its own right. In his first ever gallery appearance, though, one of three concurrent online only shows at James Fuentes Gallery, Mr. Sante focuses on one or two details at a time. Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose. "America Falls" adapts a souvenir photo of a waterfall into a picture of a man sneezing out enormous pathogens or possibly screaming something hateful. "A Stranger in Town" dates back to 2017, but its flaming red skeleton on a black charger now reads as epidemic as well as apocalypse, with an incidental reference, perhaps, to the recent resurgence of American socialism, while "Empty Plinth Society 1," one of several to address the current toppling of monuments, shows an erased General Robert E. Lee still taking up space atop his white horse. My favorite is "Napoleon," a simple superimposition of the French dictator's imperial portrait atop a writhing ouroboros of old timey wrestlers. Brute animal struggle crowning itself with laurel leaves: That's pretty much where we are right now. Wang Xu, an artist who was involved with an alternative art space and residency program called Practice run out of collective artists' studios, left New York in January to celebrate the Lunar New Year with his family in Dalian, China, assuming he would be gone a month. Seven months later, he is still in China, confined mostly to his family's apartment because of the coronavirus. "Dream Animals," a special online presentation of his work on 47 Canal's website, offers a glimpse into his world. "Seven Star Road" (2020), a nearly 13 minute video made in his family's apartment, features close ups of the artist's hands sawing, carving and sanding a piece of stone to create a small sculpture, as well as scenes of people working and moving about the drab cityscape below. The final image is the finished object: "Daydreamer" (2020), a soapstone sculpture of a curled up animal. Other sculptures in the presentation feature real and mythical creatures carved or made with a 3 D printer and which recall figures in historical Chinese art and literature. A series of Wang Xu's short poems on the website underscores our collective, odd and surreal year. One reads, "In an empty station / Anxious people are looking for their return train / Afraid to miss them / At such a moment / We indeed live in a spectacle / Our body is our own monument." This could apply to Wang Xu's sculptures and scenes in the video, but also to the current pandemic, in which fear and confinement are accompanied by opportunities for reflection and poetic reverie.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. With tuition, student loan debt and default rates all spiraling higher, what's not to love about a 10,000 bachelor's degree? In the last two years, two Republican governors Rick Perry in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida have challenged their states' public colleges to develop bachelor's degrees costing no more than 10,000, less than a third of the average sticker price for tuition and fees at a four year public college. Governor Perry said he hoped 10 percent of the state's degrees would meet that goal with online learning and new efficiencies. Governor Scott sought low cost degrees in high demand fields. Democrats were critical of both announcements, calling the idea a gimmick that would lead to a watered down "Walmartization" of higher education. Meanwhile, in California, a Republican legislator has called for a pilot program there. Now the 10,000 degrees are available in Florida and Texas but not for many students, not for many majors and not on the flagship campuses. The original goal was that the degrees would use new teaching techniques and technologies to bring down costs; so far, many of the programs are unchanged. In Florida, the two dozen former community colleges that offer both associate and baccalaureate degrees all volunteered to meet the 10,000 challenge, but several programs are not yet under way. The state universities are not in the program. Broward College, which has 67,000 students, is offering the low cost baccalaureate in its four smallest bachelor's programs middle school math education, middle school science education, information technology, and global trade and logistics and seeking a total of 80 students. Even that may be a stretch. To qualify, students must have a grade point average of at least 3.0 and be Florida residents, in college for the first time, and committed to continuous enrollment. But most Broward students drop out before completing a two year degree. And among those who earn an associate degree, many transfer for their final two years, or have no interest in the targeted majors. "This isn't going to be for the masses," said J. David Armstrong, Broward's president, adding that it would be impossible to offer thousands of low cost degrees unless the state funded the program. Broward designed its programs to confront the dropout problem that plagues community colleges nationwide. Posters on campus exhort students to "Finish What You Start," and to that end, the savings in the affordable degree programs will come in the form of a free last semester. (Broward received no extra money for the program and is paying for it with pre existing tuition waivers.) "I know some places are using front end incentives, but we're using the money as a carrot at the back end, to incent students to complete," Mr. Armstrong said. Randy Hanna, the chancellor of the Florida College System, said that whatever the numbers, the program is an important addition to the system's efforts to promote college access. In fact, the Florida system is already among the cheapest in the nation, with tuition and fees averaging 13,264 for a four year degree. Miami Dade College, the biggest in the system, is offering eight 10,000 bachelor's degree programs to students who graduate from a local high school, enroll full time and have a grade point average of at least 3.0. So far, they have drawn 62 students. Despite the governors' calls for new efficiencies, most of the affordable programs, at least so far, involve re pricing but not rethinking degree programs, according to Daniel J. Hurley, a policy analyst at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Furthermore, he said, whatever the official price, once federal and state aid is taken into account, most students at the Florida colleges already end up paying less than 10,000 for their degrees. Nationally, tuition and fees at a public university cost in state students about 9,000 a year, or 36,000 for a four year degree. Private universities' average tuition is 30,000 a year, or 120,000 for a degree. Room and board add about another 9,000 a year. In Texas, 13 institutions now offer 10,000 degrees. But so far, most of them are based on students' amassing college credits while they are still in high school, or at a community college, whose tuition may not be included in the total. Books are generally not included, either. "There's been an evolution," said Dominic Chavez, a spokesman for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, acknowledging that the first round of programs did not exactly reach the 10,000 goal. But that is changing, he said. In partnership with the faculty at South Texas College and Texas A M University Commerce, the state is building from scratch a degree in organizational leadership that uses online resources and a competency based approach, in which students get credit for demonstrating what they know rather than how many courses they take. "It will cost 6,000 13,000, and be a model to show other institutions that you can create an affordable pathway at your institution," Mr. Chavez said. Mr. Chavez said Texas would use the approaches another Republican governor, Scott Walker, is trying in Wisconsin's new self paced, competency based Flexible Option degrees for working adults an effort President Obama praised in his August push for greater affordability. But many academic leaders, including Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities, still have qualms about the political quest for cheaper degrees. "It's at the lower end of the scale, treating higher ed as a commodity, and I think that's a bad thing, because education is so different from making widgets," Mr. Rawlings said. "It does sound a bit like Walmart." On Broward's Davie campus, news of the low cost degree option is just now spreading, but even in an education class where most students plan to be teachers, there was not much interest. Several students said that financial aid covers much of their tuition, so any small savings would not sway them from longstanding plans to teach elementary school. But two were signing up. Luis Santiago, who planned to be a history teacher, had already been accepted to complete his degree at the University of Central Florida, where tuition is twice as much as Broward's. He now wants to stay at Broward for an affordable middle school math degree. "I like math, and I know there's a critical need for math and science teachers," Mr. Santiago said. "And it would be so expensive to go to U.C.F." His classmate Maggie Biegelsen, 57, who started college after raising three daughters, will also pursue the 10,000 math teacher degree. "I never planned to become a math teacher," she said. "At the start, I had to take remedial math classes, but then I met a professor who encouraged me to stick with the math, and helped me, and next thing I know I'm hearing about the shortage of math teachers, and now Broward offers this program."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Zachary Quinto, who plays an age shifting villain in the new season of AMC's "NOS4A2," had been planning to see a bevy of Broadway shows before the pandemic hit. On the night of March 11, as the coronavirus clamped down on cultural life, the actor Zachary Quinto was in the audience at a Broadway theater, watching the recent revival of "West Side Story." "There was something in the air that felt like a cloud was descending," Quinto recalled, "but it hadn't yet landed." He'd been planning to see a bevy of shows: "Caroline, or Change," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ... "I was in the starter block to go on a marathon," he said. It didn't happen: Broadway shut down the next day. Soon after, Quinto left the city to stay with friends in the Hamptons. He filled the cultural void with movies, books and "Take Me to the World," the Stephen Sondheim tribute that was livestreamed in April ("I just, from beginning to end, watched that without even getting up once"). Quinto, known for playing the sharp minded (and ear tipped) Spock in the most recent "Star Trek" movies, is now on TV in the second season of AMC's "NOS4A2," a supernatural drama that casts him as an age shifting villain who consumes the souls of children. Over the phone late last month, he discussed the cultural content he consumed during quarantine weekends in the Hamptons (he's since relocated to Los Angeles). These are edited excerpts from the conversation. I'm quarantining with some friends who have more 9 to 5 schedules, so the weekends are times when we can all congregate a little more freely. We rewatched "Y Tu Mama Tambien." We rewatched "Talk to Her" Almodovar is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time. I watched this really amazing Chinese film called "Ash Is Purest White." We rewatched "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." I've gone back and revisited some old favorite films, like "Magnolia." I haven't seen it in a long time. What stood out to me this time was the kind of interconnectivity, the universality of mortality, which is a huge theme in that film, and something that a lot more people have been forced to consider and reconcile lately. I definitely watch " RuPaul's Drag Race" every week. I witness so much healing on that show, and so many young people stepping into themselves and creating paths for themselves for success that never would have existed otherwise. I wake up usually between 8:30 and 9. I let the dogs out, run around, feed them. I have a 10 year old terrier mix named Skunk he's a little guy, like 20 pounds. And then in January, when I was in Los Angeles, I found a dog on the street and took him in. He was at the time a three month old shepherd mix who was probably about 25 pounds and now he's a seven month old shepherd mix who's pushing 60, 65 pounds. His name's River. Meditation, for me, is something that's a nonnegotiable. I do it first thing when I wake up. Even when I don't have time, I make time for it. Twice a day. At the minimum, my sessions are 20 minutes. And then depending on what kind of a program I'm doing that day, they can go as long as 55 minutes. On the weekends there's always music playing in the morning. There are a number of people here, so you never know who will connect to the speaker and just start playing music. We try to keep things mellow around the house. So a lot of Joni Mitchell. My friend is really into Ethiopian music. There's an artist whose name is Hailu Mergia I've been listening to a radio playlist of that music. I love Maggie Rogers. I love stuff that's thought provoking but also kind of mellow. Perfume Genius's new album is genius. He embraces the full range of human experience in his music. Resonance is the thing that any artist wants to awaken in somebody, identification with their point of view and their way of communication and his way of communication musically is something that really awakens a lot of parts of me. And then some kind of excursion on a Saturday to the beach, or we'll go on a hike. It's always kind of centered around the dogs. We might throw a game of Monopoly in there. I'll play the banjo at some point during the day, invariably. I've been playing for about six years. I now do at least one lesson a week with my teacher. We video chat, which is actually a really great format for it. A lot of cooking happens Monday through Friday, and then usually at least one night of the weekend we'll order food in and pick it up. That's also a part of really wanting to support local businesses. Every night is about watching something. I've been diving into "The Last Dance," that Michael Jordan documentary. I thought it was beautifully done and really compelling the humanity mixed with the kind of supernatural talent that he possessed, but also that his teammates possessed. I didn't expect to fall so deeply for it. Any Given Sunday (or Saturday?) The days do tend to blur together. If we're not hiking or something, some kind of exercise vibe is important to stay connected and active. I love what's emerging in these online communities, like Ryan Heffington's Sweatfest. I've tried to carve out time to get to books that I either have wanted to read or have been carrying around in my backpack with me for months. Right now, I'm reading "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami. He's such a fascinating, meticulous, thoughtful, imaginative writer. Reading him has opened me up to different aspects of my own psyche and my own kind of spiritual perspective in ways that I wouldn't have necessarily imagined. My next effort is going to be Samantha Power's memoir, "The Education of an Idealist." I've always been a real admirer of hers. And in line with my meditation stuff is some reading that I've been doing of old Indian texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. There remains that kind of "Sunday night, school night" awareness. I think around Sunday night at 10 o'clock, everybody starts to shift back into, "Oh, we should probably start winding this down." A lot of my life has been when I'm not on set for something or in rehearsal for something there's a lot of free form nature to my days. I like the freedom. But I do think there's something nice about resetting the clock each week. I had a rule early in quarantine, which was "no sweatpants before 6 p.m." Sometimes I adhere to that rule, and then other times I'm taking Zoom meetings at 2:30 in sweatpants and a T shirt. The most important thing is that we set goals for ourselves, and then we also understand that we're human, and that we're humans experiencing an unprecedented, unimaginably challenging time right now, universally. And the more we can love ourselves and be patient with ourselves and learn from ourselves through this, the better off we'll all be when we come out of it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Choi Ho sung of South Korea displayed his unorthodox follow through on the second tee during the AT T Pebble Beach Pro Am on Thursday. PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. A few dozen spectators and three grazing deer surrounded the first tee at Monterey Peninsula Country Club on Thursday, craning their necks to get a better look at the players beginning the hole. The foursome included Aaron Rodgers, the Green Bay Packers quarterback who grew up five hours away in Chico, starred collegiately at California and was trailed all day by cries of "Go Bears" which he acknowledged by saying, "Go Bears, but not Chicago." Rodgers, though, was not his group's main attraction, and he was fine with that. In fact, he essentially signed up for a supporting role. Last month, he used his Twitter account to petition to play the first three rounds of the AT T Pebble Beach Pro Am with Choi Ho sung, the 194th ranked player in the world who was making his PGA Tour debut on a sponsor's exemption. Choi's swing was known in the United States long before he arrived at Pebble Beach. It has become a viral sensation because Choi, a South Korean native and a regular of the Japan Tour, is a cross between Chi Chi Rodriguez and Fred Astaire. Choi spins around on his follow through as if his club is his dance partner. His pre swing routine is also unique, resembling an oblique muscle stretch; he swivels to his left and his eyes lock on his left shoulder as he holds his club high, as if to light a kerosene street lamp. He pauses at the top long enough to exhale loudly, making a "shoo" sound before settling over his ball. Jordan Spieth, the three time major winner and the 2017 champion at Pebble Beach, had seen videos of Choi and was among those eager to see him up close. "I actually was fascinated, clearly, by his swing, and the way he moves around," Spieth said, adding: "It's just really entertaining. I think people are really excited to see him this week." Choi, 45, did not take up the game until he was around the same age as the 25 year old Spieth, but he has developed a showman's touch. The bigger the crowd, the more he appears to play to it. Upon being introduced to warm applause on the first tee, Choi bowed to the fans on three sides of the tee box before settling into his pre shot routine. On a different tee, he took his driver head cover, decorated with studded stars, and pretended to give a back rub to Rodgers and Jerry Kelly, the other pro, by brushing it over their sweaters. Later, the other amateur, the actor Chris O'Donnell, was teasing Rodgers about his mustache, which called to mind Burt Reynolds's facial hair in the 1970s film "Smokey and the Bandit." Rodgers looked at Choi, who was standing nearby, and Choi gave him the thumbs up. Choi surprised Rodgers with his English abilities, after Rodgers surprised Choi by greeting him in Korean. Kelly introduced himself to Choi on the practice green with an outstretched hand and a wide grin. "We will have so much fun!" he told him. After the round, Choi broke into a broad smile of his own and said that Kelly had been right. "I think my pairing was just as good as the weather," Choi said through an interpreter, referring to the abundant sunshine and negligible breeze, "and I learned a lot from Jerry Kelly." Choi knows that he has a lot of catching up to do. He was training for a job in the fishing industry, he said, until he lost the tip of his right thumb in a chain saw accident at 23. Doctors reattached the tip, and Choi redirected his focus, landing a part time job at a golf course two years later. It was there that he honed his self taught swing. This is his first trip to the United States, he said, and he arrived with loads of enthusiasm but not a single endorsement. His black cap and turquoise sweater both featured the Pebble Beach Golf Links logo, and his caddie carried a new TaylorMade bag that seemed tailor made for Choi, with a silhouette logo of his follow through, complete with the kick flourish. Choi said he chose his first round outfit purposefully. "I wanted to show my appreciation for the tournament for having me out here," he said, adding, "I'm incredibly grateful, and that's why I'm wearing the logo." The group was led by Jonah Webster, a 16 year old golfer from Sonora, Calif., roughly 170 miles northeast of Monterey Bay. His grandfather, Steve Lee, who walked alongside him Thursday, said Webster had trembled with excitement when he found out he would be carrying the scoring sign for Rodgers, one of his idols, and Choi, whose swing he had watched on YouTube. Lee joked that he had told his grandson to close his eyes when Choi took the club away, because his swing was not exactly something that impressionable youngsters should be trying. "It's fun to pull for a guy who's so unique," Lee said. Outside the ropes, others seemed to share Lee's sentiment. They cheered for every good shot and great escape orchestrated by Choi, who was four over after 10 holes but made three birdies in the final eight to salvage a one over 72. At the end of the second round on Friday, he was tied for 128th place at four over. "I definitely felt the love from my fans," Choi said, "and I felt like that pushed me more to focus on the back nine." Choi's struggles notwithstanding, he at least impressed Rodgers. "He's not a sideshow," the quarterback said. "He can play, and I think it's really good for golf."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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BRUSSELS Jeered by angry protesters demanding an end to austerity and shaken by a resounding rejection of their economic strategy from Italian voters, European leaders gathered for an economic summit meeting Thursday amid few signs that the bloc's policies were healing the twin blights of rising unemployment and recession. Instead of bowing to a rising anti austerity tide, however, leaders seemed determined to stay the course, insisting that only budget cuts and other measures to restore financial stability could return the continent to economic growth and create jobs. Speaking as thousands of protesters gathered just out of earshot in a nearby Brussels park, Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, the body that organizes the leaders' summit meetings, emphasized "green shoots" of recovery and said growth was returning, albeit slowly. Officials of the European Union have repeatedly predicted a return to growth, only to be disappointed by data showing rising unemployment and continuing recession in the euro area. The economy of the 17 member euro zone is expected to shrink for a second consecutive year in 2013, and growth for the whole of the 27 nation European Union is forecast to be about 0.1 percent. Unemployment in Spain and Greece, the hardest hit countries, has soared above 25 percent. Mr. Van Rompuy acknowledged "social distress" and said the success of anti austerity and anti establishment parties in the recent Italian elections was something that the leaders needed to consider. But he insisted that the departing Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, who was roundly defeated in the elections last month, had done "an excellent job" and that Italy and the European Union should "stick to the same general direction of the last 12 months." Italy is effectively without a functioning government after the Five Star Movement, led by Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned activist, made stunning gains in both houses of Parliament in the elections. Five Star has rejected an appeal by the Democratic Party to work together to lead the country. Without an alliance, the Italian government could limp along for as long as a year, political analysts say, before a likely collapse would force new elections. The Brussels meeting is meant to focus on the tougher budgetary oversight agreed upon over the last two years to combat the kinds of extreme debt and deficit problems in many countries that nearly brought down the euro currency union. Leaders were also expected to endorse a strategy that should give France, Spain and Portugal more time to meet their deficit reduction goals, on condition that they stick to a path of cutting debt. Protesters, even if they were aware of such concessions, were clearly unconvinced. "All they do is cut, but we need jobs," said Michael Mercier, a worker at a Belgian prison for juveniles who took part in an anti austerity rally organized by trade union groups in Parc du Cinquantenaire, near the site of the summit meeting and the headquarters of the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm. "This is all the fault of the E.U.," said Mr. Mercier, who added that the way the bloc was run mixed "too many different things in the same big pot, and this causes problems for everyone." One group of demonstrators managed to enter an annex of the European Union's principal economic policy making arm, the European Commission's Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, and staged a protest meeting in the cafeteria. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. "We occupied their building to denounce the misery they are imposing on millions of Europeans," said Michel Vanderopoulos, a spokesman for the group, which organized the protest, called "For a European Spring." He said those who took part came from Belgium, Germany, Italy and Denmark. The annex houses some of the officials who form part of the "troika" of international lenders detested by many people in countries like Greece and Portugal for its role in demanding painful belt tightening in exchange for bailouts. A spokesman for the commission said the protest lasted about 15 minutes and did not involve any violent confrontations. "The Belgian police arrived on scene, and the protesters left of their own accord," the spokesman said. At the meeting, the increasingly acrimonious dispute over austerity pitted those who favor budget discipline the European authorities and leaders of countries like Germany and Finland against countries like France and Spain and groups like trade unions, which favor more government spending to promote growth. The cracks were visible at the same news conference where Mr. Van Rompuy spoke, after a "social summit" of European officials, business groups and trade unions ahead of the main meeting. "The doubt about the benefit of the European Union is showing more and more," said Bernadette Segol, the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation. "The burden is being put on the people. Unemployment is up and up and up every month. When is the growth going to come? What are we going to do to get it?" Ms. Segol called for the political will to increase investment and halt the focus on reducing deficits. She implored the leaders gathering in Brussels to recall that "we are dealing with people; they have feelings, and they also have the right to vote, and this is something that maybe cannot be explained in tables or figures." The dour forecasts have served to sharpen the debate over whether the emphasis on austerity has generated a painful cycle in which government cuts sap tax revenues and consumer demand, worsening an already bleak outlook. The concern about growth and jobs is also prompting a return to calls for Germany, with its strong economy, to do a good deal more to help its struggling neighbors. That is a topic that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has sought to avoid before national elections in September and amid continued concerns among voters that financial support for the euro area from German taxpayers could badly dent the nation's resurgent prosperity. Arriving at the meeting, Ms. Merkel sought to emphasize the efforts the European Union had already made to fight joblessness. "We have decided on a growth pact in the summer of last year, and now this growth pact has to be filled with life," Ms. Merkel said. "The money is there, but it has to reach the people, so the young people in Europe get jobs and we still do everything to become competitive and grow."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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There's a pleasing symmetry to "Dedicado a Max," an episode that could be more accurately titled "A Tale of Two Coots." The bifurcated plot revolves around a pair of ornery old men. Both are natural born fighters who don't like to be told what to do. One is in a house that people want him evicted from, that he refuses to leave. The other is in a house that people want to stay in that he would like to flee. The latter is Mike, who doesn't seem particularly grateful for the lifesaving measures taken by Gus Fring, who has created a makeshift hospital somewhere in Mexico, complete with high tech medical equipment, a surgeon and a housekeeper. Mike's first thought is to escape this idyll. His second is to call Gus and bark: "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?" OK, those are not direct quotes, but they capture the gist. Fring turns up at the end of the episode to explain that he has saved Mike's life because he needs some muscle and smarts in the coming war with the Salamancas. The scene, the finest of the episode, plumbs a theme dear to the show's creators, which also loomed large in "Breaking Bad." Can acts of kindness make up for acts of evil? Is there a karmic ledger that allows this kind of moral accounting, where pluses and minuses are tallied and zeroed out? "The anonymous benefactor," says Mike, all but sneering. "Well that must make you feel pretty good. And is that supposed to balance the scales, make up for everything else you do?" "It makes up for nothing," Fring replies. "I am what I am." This might be a variation of a line by Iago, the ur villain of "Othello," who promises to hide his true self when he says "I am not what I am." Fring is not what he appears to be, either. Or at least there is much more to him than he lets on. This dialogue unfolds next to a memorial to Max Arciniega, the love of his life and the man to whom this health clinic is dedicated. (Hence the episode's name.) So we get an added layer of pathos, not visible to Mike. We are watching a man remember and mourn as he tries to convey an aura of invulnerability. The other coot in this episode is Everett Acker, a.k.a. Mr. Hell No. As his lawyer, Jimmy has an approach to jurisprudence that could be defined as "strict obstructionist," and he finds ever more inventive ways to prevent Mesa Verde's bulldozers from bulldozing. This enrages Kevin Wachtell (Rex Linn), Mesa Verde's chief executive, who is eager to start building his call center and fumes at every delay. Instead of bouncing Kim off the case because her boyfriend is suing the bank, Wachtell keeps Kim in situ, arguing that he wants the best to manage this brawl. This gets awkward fast and eventually Kim's boss, Rich Schweikart, suggests it's time for her to hand off Mesa Verde to colleagues. Schweikart has seen through Kim's ruse she's helping Jimmy undermine Mesa Verde which might explain her reaction. She expresses the kind of rage one feels after getting caught. This leads to the episode's most implausible moment. She follows Schweikart out of her office, down the hall and confronts him in full view of other employees. I can understand why Kim would go all in at this moment. I just don't grasp why she did it in such a public space, instead of conferring in Schweikert's office, per his urging. This is out of character, given Kim's impeccable instincts about professional appearances. So the scene comes across as gratuitously dramatic, at least by the standards of realism set by this show. Let's hope that Kim is a step ahead of all of us and that this was a ploy. While we're on ploys, one of the episode's highlights is the arrival of "Mr. X," a.k.a. Sobchak (played by the "Walking Dead" veteran Steven Ogg), who was last seen in Season 1, getting disarmed and throat punched by Mike as he auditioned for a bodyguard gig. He's far better as a private detective, it turns out. He has been hired by Jimmy, through the "underground Craigslist," to scrape up raw material that could be used to blackmail Wachtell. Sobchak has broken into Wachtell's home and photographed the place. What did he find? Apparently nada. The blackmail approach seems doomed. Then, after Sobchak has been ushered out of the back of the nail salon where this debriefing occurs, Kim looks at some interior shots of Wachtell's home and smiles. She's spotted something incriminating. So here's the question: What is it? The two images that improve her mood both include renderings of Mesa Verde's corporate logo, a horse rising cowboy. One is a vintage black and white, beside family photographs. Cut to Kim, at her office computer, comparing the outline of that photograph to the corporate logo. Then to a Mesa Verde ad, which apparently refers to the year of the bank's founding, 1958. Those are our clues, people, and this is classic "Better Call Saul." The show has a way of turning us all into Watsons to some character's Sherlock. If you have a notion of what made Kim smile, please share. None Broadly speaking, "Better Call Saul" is divided into two strands: a legal plot (about Kim's and Jimmy's travails as lawyers and people) and a narco plot (about Gus's and Lalo's efforts to dominate the local drug market). The last two episodes have leaned heavily into the legal plot, so much so that Lalo has been absent from both, and Hank and Gomez did not appear in this one. As a fan of the narco plot, I hope that Mike's journey from depression and surgery to health and (eventual) vigor will mean it gets at least equal time on the show, perhaps more. Come back, Lalo. We miss you. None We have finally learned what turns Jimmy on, sexually. Role play. He gets a bit hot and bothered when Kim does a fine impression of Wachtell beside his golf course, reacting angrily to news that ground can't yet be broken on that call center. Most role play revolves around archetypes that include such classics as the naughty nurse. Not Jimmy's taste. He's partial to grumpy, middle aged bank executives. "Kevin," he says to Kim, when she's finished with her Kevin impression. "Would you care to take a shower with me?" None In the episode's last line, Fring says he has chosen Mike as his "button man" because Mike understands a crucial concept: revenge. It's a stellar ending, and it strongly suggests that Gus has studied Mike's history enough to know his darkest secret: what Mike did in Philadelphia to avenge his son's murder. None Some parting questions. What is up with Howard and his efforts to recruit Jimmy to his firm? It has to be more than a way to keep Patrick Fabian busy, doesn't it? But what exactly does Howard want? Please share your guesses, about this and other mysteries described above, in the comments section.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The letter was closed with a gold wax seal that said "Agnes." A note was stapled to the envelope. It read: "Please file it unopened, with the date carefully noted. It is the outline for a play, and I have no means of copyrighting it except this way. The material is eminently stealable and I'm discussing the matter with people of similar ambitions." It's a ready made mystery for dance sleuths. The postmark shows it was 1963, and the return address that of the choreographer Agnes de Mille, celebrated for her pioneering use of American subjects both on Broadway and in her ballets and for the way she brought popular dance idioms into theatrical settings. The letter lay undiscovered for decades in the files of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, of which de Mille had been a founding member, until a clear out in 2015 brought it to light.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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On CNN, the legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin was in red alert mode, denouncing President Trump's firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, as "a grotesque abuse of power" and "the kind of thing that goes on in non democracies." Over on Fox News, the mood was more sanguine even celebratory. "This was overdue, and everyone in Washington knows that," Tucker Carlson declared at the top of his broadcast before introducing a series of guests who echoed his excitement. The nation's political divide has been on full display in the news media in the hours since Mr. Comey's abrupt ejection from his post on Tuesday evening and the lines are brighter than ever. By Wednesday, the left leaning HuffPost featured a one word, all capital headline: "Nixonian." The right leaning Breitbart News approvingly declared Mr. Trump's move "the latest in a political outsider's crusade against entrenched Washington." In an interview that dominated its home page on Wednesday, Breitbart quoted a former assistant director of the bureau, James Kallstrom, saying of Mr. Comey, "He threw the reputation of the F.B.I. under the bus." Mr. Kallstrom was also a guest on Fox News on Tuesday, telling the anchor Martha MacCallum that Mr. Comey "danced with the devil." Rachel Maddow's monologue on MSNBC invoked the firing of Archibald Cox, President Richard M. Nixon's special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal, one of many comparisons to Nixon's so called Saturday Night Massacre in the traditional news media. She then raised serious concerns that Mr. Trump was interfering with an investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia. Sean Hannity of Fox News expressed deep gratitude for the president's action "Comey Fired!!! Finally," he posted on Twitter and he said on the air that he hoped Mr. Comey's replacement would reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. Fox News initially reported that Mr. Comey had resigned before correcting itself minutes later to make clear he was dismissed. The Fox News worldview was echoed on Wednesday in the White House briefing room, where Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, defended Mr. Trump's decision and denounced Mr. Comey as having "shown a lot of missteps and mistakes." Ms. Sanders was substituting for her boss, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, who had said late Tuesday that he would be on previously scheduled Navy Reserve duty for the rest of the week. Ms. Sanders, in only her second time at the lectern, was smooth and assured under pressure, mixing her answers with a few deft jokes about her daughter's birthday. Still, she drew some criticism for saying that Mr. Comey had committed "atrocities" while leading the F.B.I., and White House reporters were clearly skeptical about her explanation that Mr. Trump had merely asked Justice Department officials to list their concerns about Mr. Comey in writing, rather than explicitly ordering the director's dismissal. Into this ideological breach came a bracing report on Wednesday from the Pew Research Center that said that Democrats' and Republicans' attitudes toward the news media's role in society were more divided than at any point in the last 30 years. About 89 percent of Democrats said the news media played a watchdog role in holding political leaders to account. About 42 percent of Republicans said the same. That gap 47 percentage points was the widest ever recorded in the Pew survey, which stretches back more than three decades. The gap is also a sharp contrast from only a year ago. In the first months of 2016, 74 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans agreed on the watchdog role of the news media, Pew said. The presidential campaign season and the early days of the Trump administration seem to have fueled this divide. (The Pew survey, conducted March 13 to 27 among 4,151 adults online, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Paul M. Romer and Caroline Weber decided to make a day of it. They exchanged vows at the Anglican Episcopal Church of St. Peter and St. Sigfrid in Stockholm. Later, Mr. Romer, wearing the same white tie and tails, was presented with the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Forgive Paul M. Romer for turning two of the greatest days of his life into a one day event. He was just being economical. Mr. Romer, who was until January the chief economist of the World Bank in Washington, was married Monday to Caroline Weber, an author and full professor of French Literature at Barnard College, Columbia, in a celebration ceremony at the Anglican Episcopal Church of St. Peter and St. Sigfrid in Stockholm. The bride, radiant in an aqua colored caftan by Oscar de la Renta, and groom, stately in white tie and tails, exchanged ceremonial vows before the Rev. Nicholas Howe, an Anglican priest, and 16 family members, including the couple's parents, as well as five of Mr. Romer's six siblings and both of his children. "This came as a total surprise," said Mr. Romer, 63, who learned he had won the coveted award in the quiet of an October morning at the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with Ms. Weber, 49, who was sound asleep when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called with the news. "I kind of nudged Caroline and said, 'Um, sweetie, I just won the Nobel Prize in economics,' and she woke up immediately and was very excited," said Mr. Romer, who also learned that William D. Nordhaus, 77, a member of the economics faculty at Yale, was also a winner of the award. "It was a once in a lifetime moment," Ms. Weber said. "I was absolutely thrilled for him." "On a personal level, one of the most interesting things about winning the Nobel is how happy it made so many people I know," said Mr. Romer, who is currently on a leave of absence from N.Y.U., where he is a University Professor of Economics. "From colleagues at N.Y.U., to the woman who runs the dry cleaner's where I take my clothes, to the doorman down the street who always gives my dogs' treats, everyone just seemed so thrilled for me," he said. "That was something I didn't anticipate." In 2011, Mr. Romer founded the N.Y.U. Stern Urbanization Project, which works with rapidly growing cities to make room for their inevitable expansion. Two years later, he found Ms. Weber. "She helped me discover a side of myself that was hidden," he said. "And she has exposed me to a part of intellectual life that I've had little professional exposure to." In May 2013, Ms. Weber and Mr. Romer were introduced at a Manhattan restaurant as part of a blind date arranged by Donald Marron, the former chairman and chief executive of Paine Webber, and his wife, Catherine. For Ms. Weber, whose first marriage had ended in divorce, it wasn't quite love at first sight. "I had the distinct feeling I had met Paul before," she said. "I just couldn't figure out when or where I had seen him." Nevertheless, they hit it off, and after dessert, Mr. Romer was walking Ms. Weber to her home in Greenwich Village, when he turned to her and said, "Thanks for being so discreet about how I had asked you out before." Ms. Weber was initially taken aback, but then it all started coming back. She soon remembered having met Mr. Romer three months earlier at a pizzeria restaurant in Manhattan. "We were both sitting at the bar, late night, grading papers," she said. "We started chatting, and I thought he was very handsome, but I was dating someone at that time." Before leaving that night, Mr. Romer asked Ms. Weber for her email address for the purpose of sending her information about a public lecture he was scheduled to give at N.Y.U. "I thought she was very attractive, very outgoing and ferociously smart," Mr. Romer said. "But I remember looking into her eyes as she handed me her email address and thinking, 'She's never going to contact me.'" His instincts were correct, as Ms. Weber had decided to move on, but through some quirk of fate, they were back in each other's orbit just three months later, with the Marrons joining them for dinner to help lighten the atmosphere. Mr. Romer's matchmaker had already given him one gift, a donation which breathed into life the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University Mr. Romer is its former director. The institute works with cities and other jurisdictions to improve the provision of local services and effect positive social change. By reintroducing Mr. Romer to Ms. Weber, who was now unattached, Mr. Marron gave him more than just another gift. They began dating immediately, each fascinated by the other's credentials in an arts meets science kind of way. Ms. Weber learned that Mr. Romer, who graduated from the University of Chicago, from which he also received a Ph.D. in economics, is one of seven children born to Beatrice Miller Romer and Roy R. Romer of Denver. His father, 90, once served as governor of Colorado, and was also head of the Democratic National Committee when Bill Clinton was president. He later became the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District and a consultant to the College Board, based in Washington. Ms. Weber, who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and received a Ph.D. in French Literature at Yale, said of the younger Mr. Romer that she was "immediately struck by his incredible intelligence." "I had never been interested in or particularly savvy about economics," she said. "I had briefly worked on Wall Street after college as a very unhappy and unsuccessful investment banker at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, but I had never really followed the economy. "Yet I was really struck by how fluent Paul was in making the economic issues that are of interest to him relevant to contemporary considerations, and relevant to history and to human technological and human cultural development." The more she spoke of him, the softer her voice became, her tone drifting from scholarly to lovingly. "He was also a very kind, very decent, incredibly principled person whose moral compass was front and center," she said. "He was someone who completely accepted me for who I am, with all my quirks and foibles." Mr. Romer was equally impressed with Ms. Weber, the only daughter of Carol C. Weber and Russell J. Weber of Charlottesville, Va., whose parents are both retired professors of organizational behavior at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. He was quick to point out that her latest book, "Proust's Duchess," was published in May (Knopf) to flattering reviews, and was wowed by the fact that she taught her college courses on such topics as 17th and 18th Century French theater and the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment while speaking French. "Just as this is happening, a bicycle comes flying by," Ms. Weber said. "It was just a perfect storm of awfulness that resulted in me tearing all the ligaments in both of my knees." Mr. Romer rushed back to New York by train, and found Ms. Weber in a hospital emergency room, still in much pain. "Poor thing," he said, "it was really tough to see her in that position." He began commuting from Washington every weekend to be by her side, and she has since recovered after two full years of physical therapy, just in time to celebrate two of the biggest days of her life, which, like his, happened on the same day. "On our way to pick up Paul's Nobel Prize, we're stopping off to get married," said Ms. Weber, laughing as she spoke, just before heading to Sweden. She, too, had found her own economical miracle.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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Samia was an influencer before she could talk. Her parents, Adam and LaToya Ali, are influencers themselves and began chronicling Samia's impending arrival on YouTube and Instagram in 2014, once Ms. Ali learned she was pregnant. "Samia's birth video is on YouTube, so she's pretty much been born into social media," Mr. Ali said. Samia is now 4 and has 143,000 followers on Instagram and 203,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her feeds are mostly populated with posts of her posing and playing, but they also feature paid promotions for brands like Crayola and HomeStyle Harvest chicken nuggets. There are instances when "Samia can't verbatim get the message out," Mr. Ali , who lives in the Atlanta area, said of the promotional posts. "Sometimes, their talking points are not kid talk, so LaToya would need to appear, or myself, to relay those because those are key deliverables that the brands want." Welcome to the world of kidfluencers. Brands have flocked to influencers individuals, famous or not, with large followings on social media for years, hoping their online popularity will prompt their fans to buy the products they vouch for. Then child influencers started appearing on their parents' profiles, a surreal but seemingly harmless offshoot of this phenomenon. Now, advertisers like Walmart, Staples and Mattel are bankrolling lucrative endorsements deals for toddlers and tweens with large followings and their own verified profiles on YouTube and Instagram. As a result, children too young to make their own accounts on the platforms are being turned into tastemakers. Instagram, owned by Facebook, and YouTube, which is part of Google, are designed for adults in large part because of a federal privacy law that protects children under 13. Bios for many of the younger influencers on Instagram note that the pages are "run by parents," and YouTube channels are presumably registered to their guardians. And as TV ratings continue to fall and children spend more time online, advertisers are spending more money to reach them there. "The fact that brands are using actual children as influencers is a very clear sign that they're targeting children that they know are on these platforms," Mr. Golin said. That can mean big money for the families of kidfluencers. Kyler Fisher, the father of 2 year old identical twins who have more than two million followers on Instagram, said a sponsored post on the girls' account could fetch between 10,000 and 20,000. The twins, Taytum and Oakley, have promoted car seats and Carnival Cruise Lines on Instagram. They are also central to the success of their parents' YouTube channel, Kyler Mad, which has about three million subscribers. Promotions on the family YouTube channel can draw 25,000 to 50,000. Fans are so interested in the family that their third child, due the first week of March, already has 112,000 Instagram followers. "My kids complete the package, man," Mr. Fisher said. "If we didn't have the girls, I can't imagine being as far as we are." Brands are also pursuing children with smaller followings . The toy company Melissa Doug emailed parents about a six week influencer campaign last summer, offering payments and free toys for weekly Instagram posts of their children "having fun with the toys!" The company said it would pay 10 per 1,000 followers for individual Instagram posts and 5 per 1,000 followers for Instagram Story posts. The rise of this kind of advertising has raised questions involving fair compensation, oversight and work permits, especially since child labor guidelines vary by state. 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. Andrea Faville, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that the site didn't allow anyone under 13 to make or own accounts and that it worked "closely with experts, nonprofit organizations and others in our industry to protect families using our services." YouTube came under fire last month after lewd comments by pedophiles were discovered on innocent videos of children; the company has since said it will suspend comments on most videos of minors. Some channels that can "demonstrate a low risk of predatory behavior" will keep comments but require moderators, the company said. It remains to be seen if disabling comments will hurt the kind of connections kidfluencers try to establish with their fans. Sravanthi Dev, a spokeswoman for Instagram, said that while the platform prohibited users 12 and under, their parents or representatives could create profiles for them "as long as it is clear in the bio information that the account is run by the parent or representative." Michelle Foley's 6 year old daughter, Ava, and her best friend, Everleigh , also 6, have more than a million followers on their shared Instagram and YouTube accounts. YouTube's analytics say Ava and Everleigh's viewers are largely between the ages of 25 and 44, Ms. Foley said, but she said she thought the core audience was between 8 and 18. "When we go out, parents never know who we are, but kids do," Ms. Foley said. Alex Chavez Munoz, a founder of Viral Talent, which works with child influencers, also disputed the data. "When you see the analytics of a kidfluencer channel, the dominant audience is 25 to 34 year old women," Mr. Chavez Munoz said. "That's obviously not the case. The case is that the child is watching it on their parents' device." In December, a 9 year old kidfluencer known as Txunamy shared a photo on Instagram and asked her more than two million followers to comment on it and share their ages. Thousands of replies flooded in: 9, 10, 11 years old. Captiv8, which connects brands with influencers, found more than 3,100 Instagram influencers, from a sample of 1.2 million accounts, who are likely under 13 based on terms in their bios like "managed by mom." (Instagram has more than a billion users.) Each account had at least 1,000 followers. On YouTube, the much bigger kid influencer destination, there are toy accounts like Ryan ToysReview, whose young star earned 22 million in a year, according to Forbes. But children, under their parents' watch, are also building followings on YouTube and Instagram as gamers, video bloggers, fashionistas, mischievous toddlers and personalities who anchor family channels, which are often a cross between reality TV, pranks and random skits. YouTube accounts can also bring in serious ad dollars without brand deals, which are shared with the site. At that point, "we were like, 'We should start a YouTube,' but they couldn't talk," she said. "So then we kind of waited for them to start talking." The girls also have their own separate Instagram accounts. Everleigh's sponsored posts have included promotions for toys ("I'm excited to share that the new PAW Patrol Mighty Pups line is available exclusively at Walmart!") and Disney dolls ("Everleigh is in LOVE with her Fancy Nancy dolls!"). The girls have made celebrities out of the rest of their families. Ava's 1 year old brother has 148,000 Instagram followers, and Everleigh's newborn sister has a million. Recently, Everleigh started a YouTube channel, Everleigh Opens Toys, and Ava is interested in making one, too, Ms. Foley said. "If it wasn't for Everleigh and Ava, I would not have what I have today," she said. Brands want to team up with children for the same reasons they want to work with older social media personalities their follower counts, the ability to post more quickly than traditional ad agencies, the way the posts feel like recommendations from a friend. But advocates say these techniques can deceive children, who are in the early stages of understanding and recognizing advertisements. Children's television, overseen by the Federal Communications Commission, has rules that separate ads from content and limit product placement and promotions by a program's host or characters. The internet doesn't. "It is very manipulative of young children," said Kathryn Montgomery, a professor emerita at American University's School of Communications. "With this form of promotion and advertising, there is a purposeful blurring of those lines." Ava and Everleigh's YouTube channel peppers sponsored videos among dance battles and hangouts with other influencers. Ms. Foley said the family could get 10 email requests a day from brands. The girls posted a 10 minute sponsored video for Mattel in November titled "First Sleepover Opening Giant Presents!" An adult asked the children, clad in matching pajamas, about their holiday wish list, which was "Barbie everything!" They appeared to sleep, then woke up, squealing, to wrapped Barbie merchandise. Mattel declined to comment on its child influencer strategy. In an advertorial video for Staples, Txunamy declared her excitement about back to school shopping at the chain, then showcased her "haul." "Whenever we work with younger influencers, all contracts and negotiations are conducted through their parents or talent agencies directly representing them," said Meghan McCarrick, a spokeswoman for Staples. Social media stars aren't typically considered actors under the law. In California, a portion of child actors' earnings are set aside in a trust based on the decades old Coogan Law, named for a former child star whose parents spent all his money by the time he turned 21. Similar trusts are required by New York, Louisiana and New Mexico. For kidfluencers, it's usually a voluntary decision by parents to create these accounts. Several families said they had established the accounts after working on traditional TV shows or national commercials. As for the children, it can be tough for them to understand how much of a fuss they're creating. Samia's father, Mr. Ali, said, "She doesn't have a concept of viral or 'views,' so it's almost like, for her, walking into an experiment to learn something it's more of us giving her a task or assignment, where she has something to conquer." He added, "We'll know when she gets a sense of her following and let her know what this all means."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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LOS ANGELES A light rail train barrels along the curving west edge of Los Angeles State Historic Park, a spit of land here just north of Chinatown. It roars by so close that it feels like the audience watching "Sweet Land," the bewildering, ghostly new opera being put on in the park, could reach out and nearly touch it. The train becomes almost a character in the opera. You feel a rush of anxiety and thrill every time the tracks start whistling. And the cacophony of each brief passing both overwhelms and underlines the "real" performance. As it kept whooshing past last weekend, I started to think about who was inside and who was driving. Where was it coming from? Where was it going? "Sweet Land" is the latest endeavor of the Industry, the Los Angeles company founded by the director Yuval Sharon and dedicated to an alternative vision of opera. Its productions sprawl well clear of traditional theaters. "Invisible Cities" (2013) was heard over headphones in Union Station, performed by singers indistinguishable from ordinary travelers. "Hopscotch" (2015) put musicians and audience members into 24 cars driving around downtown. Different people had vastly divergent experiences of these pieces, which asked how much of any performance is defined by the perspective from which it's consumed. And by the environment in which it takes place: next to that barreling Gold Line train, when it comes to "Sweet Land," in a park recently built on land that was once acorn fields, a Tongva settlement and a rail yard, near which Chinese men and boys were killed in a 19th century lynching. It's a richly suggestive site for a reflection on the winning of the West, a story that is really many stories, variously exposed and submerged. To tell them, or at least evoke them, "Sweet Land" has enlisted an unusually large group of central collaborators: a pair of directors (Mr. Sharon and Cannupa Hanska Luger); composers (Raven Chacon and Du Yun); and librettists (Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney). Coming from different ethnic, racial and artistic backgrounds, they offer a sort of American utopia: a panoply of traditions that intermingle to the point that it's hard to tell one contribution from another even as each retains equality and integrity. The audience enters the park and is ushered toward a theater, one of three roughly constructed, temporary open air structures built for the production. Through a scrim, there's a dim view of the northern side of the park, still a construction site, and the bridge beyond over the Los Angeles River. Musicians lightly tap on metal. Individual voices chanting, ululating, cracking, squealing, howling gradually emerge over speakers, as does a soft, smooth choral harmony underneath. Here, the opera's first part, "Contact," establishes the rough outline of the stylized, mythlike story, told with gnomic economy. A group of Arrivals, singing a blurry version of a religious hymn, comes ashore amid a blast of electronic noise and quivering flute. They are greeted as guests by the native Hosts. The audience is separated into two tracks "Train" and "Feast" each of which has a dedicated in the round theater and a separate story. (Over a pair of performances, I was able to experience both.) "Train" is like an abstraction of missionary driven westward expansion; an ominous drone is punctuated by ripples of percussion as the Hosts teach the Arrivals words and skills. There is building; there is a murder. Both tracks come together outside in the chilly darkness for "The Crossroads," before splitting again for "Train 2" and "Feast 2." Time has moved forward during the interlude. The "Feast" banquet is now a catering hall, complete with chafing dishes, for the wedding of Arrival and Host, and the desperately brassy "Train 2" conjures the chaotic world of contemporary consumerism, mounting to cries of despair from both voices and orchestra. Then the audience reunites back in the "Contact" space for the final part, "Echoes and Expulsions." All this, in barely 80 minutes. Despite the ad hoc architecture and the D.I.Y. aesthetic particularly the costumes, a mixture of neon knits and thrift store finds there's a sense of extravagance in the marshaling of dozens of artists and so many technical challenges for something that passes so quickly. Quickly, yet in epic style. I've rarely taken in a work that's so grandiosely modest. The vocal lines tend toward passionate extremity as the instruments seethe underneath. Our guides throughout are two figures, both called Coyote: part human, part animal, part eternal beings who communicate in nearly wordless moans, hums, cackles, clicks and giggles. They take center stage in "The Crossroads" alongside the evil spirit Wiindigo. As projections play on a mist of water, their voices rise to a guttural roar before Wiindigo chokes out the phrase "Go back to where you came from," perhaps American racism's most notorious line given darkly witty dual meaning here as an instruction for the audience to return to the theaters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Kanye West has talked a big game about running for president, but it's his sister in law Kourtney Kardashian who is participating in the American legislative process. On Tuesday, she will participate in a briefing on regulatory reform of the cosmetics industry, along with Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and members of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. After the briefing, they will take questions from congressional staff members. "For too long, cosmetics companies have not had any requirement to verify the safety of their cosmetic and personal care products," Representative Pallone said. "This simply cannot continue and I'm pleased that Kourtney is here today to lend her voice to those supporting cosmetics reform." A significant portion of the Kardashian empire rests on the cosmetics industry. Kim Kardashian West and her sister Kylie Jenner helm namesake beauty lines, KKW Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics. Kourtney Kardashian's appearance on Capitol Hill coincides with the release Tuesday of a collaboration between her and Ms. Jenner, to be released through Kylie Cosmetics. In 2017, Women's Wear Daily reported that the company had sold 420 million worth of cosmetics within its first 18 months.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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The first of a new class of drugs to prevent migraines was approved last week. The medication, called Aimovig, reduces the frequency of migraines among those severely afflicted, but the drug rarely prevents these episodes altogether. One expert called it "progress but not a panacea." Migraine is the most disabling neurological disease in the world among people under age 50, beating epilepsy, strokes and chronic back pain. Yet many who have migraines don't realize it or ever mention their symptoms to a doctor. How do you know if you have migraines? Migraines are not just headaches. It is diagnosed in patients only if they have had a minimum of five attacks, each lasting four to 72 hours. Each attack has to include at least two of the following symptoms: throbbing headache with pain that is moderate to severe, that worsens with activity, and is only on only one side of the head. Also, a person suffering a migraine attack is nauseated or abhors sound or noise. What about auras? Are they part of a migraine? Sometimes, but not always. About 20 percent of migraine patients get an aura before the headache. Auras involve distortions of vision. People see jagged lights or have blind spots in their visual field. But auras can take other forms as well: a prickling pins and needles feeling on parts of the body, speech disturbances, distortions of sounds. Some get auras without a headache or only a mild headache. Auras actually involve different areas of the brain than migraines, and it is not clear why they are linked to migraine headaches. They can start in childhood, although they usually begin in adolescence or young adulthood. They strike nearly one in five women worldwide, one in 16 men and one in 11 children. One out of four households has at least one member with migraine. The condition seems to spring from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. There is nothing a person can do to reduce the odds of developing migraine. Why do more women than men get migraines? Is it because of hormones? Possibly, but no one knows for sure. Estrogen the hormone that is abundant in women before menopause and present in much lower amounts in men is one factor in migraines, although not the only one. Migraine attacks seem to be more frequent and severe when estrogen levels change during puberty, menses, the first trimester of pregnancy and the years before menopause. Why do patients and doctors so often not realize a person's headaches are migraines? They often think the headaches are caused by tension, stress or dehydration, or that they are "sinus headaches" a category that doesn't exist. "Sinus headaches are an invention of Madison Avenue," said Dr. Stewart Tepper, professor of neurology at Dartmouth College. "If you go to Europe, they don't know what you are talking about." The runny nose and tearing eyes that accompany a headache can be migraine symptoms, he said. In one study, 88 percent of patients with self reported sinus headaches or a physician diagnosis of sinus headache actually were having migraines. Misdiagnoses abound. In another study, primary care providers who diagnosed a patient's headaches as something other than migraine were usually wrong. Even patients with chronic migraines, defined as at least 15 headache days a month, are often not correctly diagnosed. One large study found that only 4.5 percent of people with chronic migraine had spoken to their doctors about their symptoms, gotten an accurate diagnosis and received appropriate care. What works and doesn't in treating migraines? Over the counter pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen usually don't work. Sinus drugs also tend to be useless. And no treatment always prevents migraines. Patients usually find a drug, combination of drugs or device that helps shorten the severity and duration of migraines. The options include a class of drugs, triptans, that help about 60 percent of patients. They are generic and come with prices ranging from about 11 for nine pills to 70 for two injections to 428 for a supply of six nasal sprays. Devices include Cefaly, which attaches like a rhinoceros horn to the forehead and transmits electric pulses to a nerve beneath the skin. It costs 550. GammaCore is a nerve stimulator that costs 575. It's held at the neck and transmits electric signals to a nerve there. Another device that helps some patients is Spring TMS. It is held at the back of the head. Patients press a button and it sends a quick magnetic pulse into the brain. It rents for 150 a month for first three months, 220 a month afterward. The newly approved drug, Aimovig, by Amgen and Novartis, is the first drug specifically designed to prevent migraines. It is injected once a month with a device similar to one used to inject insulin. Its list price is 6,900 a year. Botox also can reduce the frequency of migraines, but it is even more expensive and approved only for chronic migraines, defined as at least 15 days of headache per month at least 4 hours per day. The drug costs about 6,000 a year. Although private doctors can administer it, most don't for administrative reasons, Dr. Tepper said. So most patients have to go to medical centers for injections every 12 weeks. With the costs of storage and fees for hospital, nurse, doctor and room, it can cost 15,000 or more per year, he said. Other generic drugs that can reduce migraine frequency include antidepressants, epilepsy drugs, and a type of heart drug beta blockers that slow the heart rate and reduce blood pressure. Side effects can be significant. With topiramate, or Topamax, an epilepsy drug, they can include cognitive and mood changes, weight loss, allergic glaucoma, loss of sweating, kidney stones, and tingling of hands and feet. What do patients say about migraines? The pain can be terrible. Dr. Amaal Starling, a migraine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, comes from a family of women who get migraines and she gets them herself. Hers began with an aura that manifested as blind spots that lasted 10 to 15 minutes. Then a pounding headache began. "Lights were so bright I couldn't keep my eyes open," she said. "Even quiet voices sounded like loud echoing voices and made my headache worse." When she was in college, she began having migraines every other day and sought help at the health center. A doctor told her the headaches were caused by stress. He advised her to take less difficult courses and drink more water. Finally, in medical school, she took a pharmacology course and learned about triptans. "I went to a doctor and said, 'I think I have migraine, I want to try triptans.' And I told my family members to try triptans. Now we all take them." Lisa Johnson, 57, a commercial real estate manager in Quincy, Mass., said her throbbing headaches began when she was a teenager. Even a normal speaking voice worsened the pain. So did bright light. Each headache lasted four or five days. She'd get a reprieve for a day or so, then the next headache would start.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Gyorgy and Marta Kurtag, who made music together for seven decades, at the Budapest Music Center in 2018. Of one of their concerts, a critic wrote, "You felt that you were eavesdropping on an intimate family affair." Marta Kurtag, a pianist and teacher who shared a 72 year collaboration with her husband, the prominent avant garde composer Gyorgy Kurtag, profoundly influencing his work and joining him in dual recitals that acquired a legendary reputation in their later years, died on Oct. 17 in Budapest . She was 92. Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Budapest Music Center , a performing arts complex where she lived with Mr. Kurtag in an apartment. "Occasionally I have had the feeling that, to the world at large, I only exist as the wife of Gyorgy Kurtag and not an independent being," Mrs . Kurtag said in the notes for her only solo recording, an account of Beethoven's "Diabelli" Variations, which was recorded in 1999 but not released until 2009. "That is not a bad thing, indeed it's very good, of course, even though it has at times been the cause of tears," she continued. "But I felt the need to set down the work, to show who I am, and what I know about it." Mrs. Kurtag knew a lot. She played a pivotal role in Hungarian musical life as a piano teacher first at the Bela Bartok College of Music in Budapest, from 1953 to 1963, and then, after 1972, on the faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, Hungary's storied conservatory, from which she had graduated in 1952. A pianist of considerable skill and insight, she had a solo career of her own in Eastern Europe. But even her own understanding of the pieces she played was, she wrote, the product of a lifetime of joint effort that started with her marriage in 1947. "Right from the beginning Gyorgy and I divided the repertoire between us," Mrs. Kurtag said in her notes. "If I played Schumann's F sharp minor sonata, he would play Schumann's G minor sonata; if he played the five part C sharp minor fugue from 'The Well Tempered Clavier,' I would play the five part B flat minor fugue. If he played the Eroica Variations at his graduation concert, then a year later I played the Diabelli Variations at mine." Her performance of the Diabelli Variations in 1952 was thought to be the first in Hungary since World War II. When it came time for her to study that work, she said, "We had to resolve by ourselves the special problems of interpretation required by the variations." "I use the plural as always," she wrote, because "we have worked together throughout our long lives since." Mrs. Kurtag's contribution to her husband's success long went unacknowledged. She was always central to his life as a muse, a critic and a performer, but her role became noted as such only later even by Mr. Kurtag himself . Speaking to The New York Times about his much delayed only opera, "Endgame," based on the play by Samuel Beckett, which had its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 2018, Mr. Kurtag said his wife had become indispensable to completing the work . "At the end," he said, "she didn't just have thoughts on orchestration; she was composing the music." "The deep love that glows through his music" was most likely "an expression of his extraordinary relationship with his wife, Marta," the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said in a citation when she nominated the couple for the Franco Buitoni Award, which they received in 2017. "They live music together," Ms. Uchida, who has performed Mr. Kurtag's music, said. The joint piano recitals Mrs. Kurtag performed with her husband were crucial to her growing international prominence. "You felt that you were eavesdropping on an intimate family affair," Alex Ross, of The New Yorker, wrote of a concert in Vienna in 2006. "Like some sweet old couple in a movie, the Kurtags smiled at each other and allowed their bodies to sway with the music, apparently oblivious of the packed hall of new music aficionados watching them. "But what playing!" Mr. Ross added. "To close, the Kurtags performed an arrangement of the opening movement of Bach's cantata 'Gottes Zeit ist Die Allerbeste Zeit,' which was how else to put it? one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard." Often given at an upright piano with its soft pedal permanently depressed, the unassuming but intense concerts interwove similarly otherworldly transcriptions of works by Bach with the two and four hand aphorisms of "Jatekok" ("Games"), pieces that Mr. Kurtag has written throughout his life, often with Mrs. Kurtag in mind. The combination of Bach, Kurtag and Kurtag was "itself a composition, with a rationale that goes on disclosing itself," Paul Griffiths wrote in a Times review of their recording of "Jatekok" pieces, released on ECM in 1997, which has acquired a devoted following. A 2016 compilation on BMC documents tapings of the "Jatekok" that the couple made together over the years for Hungarian Radio. Marta Kinsker was born on Sept. 30, 1927, to a Jewish family in Esztergom, Hungary, a historic city on the Danube River 30 miles northwest of Budapest. Her father, Armin, was a civil engineer, and her mother, Borbala Stern , was a teacher. Marta began studying piano at age 5, and showed enough promise at 11 to be sent to Debrecen, near the Romanian border on the east, to continue her studies. Already at risk after World War II had broken out, Jews faced increasing repression there from a regime allied to Germany. Her father urged her to flee. With forged papers and the help of a Zionist group, she crossed into Romania. Left behind, her parents and her brother perished.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Biden once said that if he and Trump were in high school, he'd "take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him." Noah thinks a public fight benefiting a charity is in order. Jay Leno Is Not Into Edibles The former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno made a return visit, introduced as an angry man Jimmy Fallon had seen shouting outside. Once on stage, Leno ranted about American fast food, the obesity epidemic and the pointlessness of edible underwear. "There's no other country in the world where people eat other people's underpants. Even the Taliban did not eat other people's underpants. I mean, why do we have this product? Are we so bored with lovemaking? Have we become that lazy? 'You know, honey, I'd like to have sex. I'm also hungry. I don't want to get up. Hey, let's just eat each other's underpants!'" JAY LENO "When asked about Joe Biden running for president, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris said, 'Come on in, the water is warm.' That's what she said. That's a true quote. That's what she said. Then Bernie Sanders said, 'That's because I may have peed in it.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "Get this: Biden already has special campaign merchandise for sale on his website. Take a look. There's Joe Biden mugs. Biden pins, Biden tote bags and, of course, Biden massagers." JIMMY FALLON "It was reported today that Joe Biden is leading Bernie Sanders by eight points. Yeah, no, no, not in the polls in their weekly game of shuffleboard." CONAN O'BRIEN " Biden spent eight years as America's vice president and surprise masseuse, but before that, he had a whole career that you might not know about. You know, kind of like how some people only know Billy Ray Cyrus from Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' remix. And like Billy Ray, Biden was doing his own thing for decades before he was made cool by a young black man." TREVOR NOAH After several days of mentioning (for some reason) Dead or Alive's catchy 1985 hit "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)," Jimmy Fallon enlisted Paul Rudd for a shot by shot re creation of the video. It was their third video remake, and they spent most of Wednesday shooting it the same day Wu Tang Clan was performing on "The Tonight Show." "I wanted to meet Wu Tang Clan so badly, but I wouldn't leave the room," recalled Rudd, who had put on a goth pirate get up complete with eye patch. "I thought, 'I'm not. I don't want to meet Wu Tang Clan like this.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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OCEAN'S TWELVE (2004) 7:15 p.m. on AMC. This summer's slate of popcorn movies has been drastically reduced by the pandemic but Steven Soderbergh's sequel to "Oceans Eleven" could provide some of what moviegoers may be missing. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called this crime comedy an "enjoyable, unabashedly trivial caper flick." George Clooney returns as Danny Ocean, the leader of a gang that specializes in baroque heists. This time, his team is scheming to pay off the casino owner they robbed in the first film. To come up with the money, the crew relocates to Europe, where they quickly find themselves in competition with a master thief. POV: AND SHE COULD BE NEXT 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The United States is rife with uncertainty as it approaches the 2020 election in November. Recent protests against police misconduct and the coronavirus pandemic have introduced new questions about what direction the country will take. This two part documentary by Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia looks to the recent past to look forward. It focuses on the midterm elections of 2018 and the contributions made by women of color as candidates, organizers and guiding voices to the fight for greater equality and improved democratic representation. But it also offers a broader look at the development of this generation of leaders and suggests that its members have only just begun to make their mark. The second installment airs on Tuesday.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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How to watch: From 3 a.m. Eastern to noon on Tennis Channel, and from noon to 3 p.m. on NBC; Streaming on the NBCSN app. The French Open begins on Sunday, with the first round matches spread across three days instead of two in a departure from tradition. While some things have changed, the high level of play and the familiar faces are returning. Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka will be the marquee matchup around midday for U.S. audiences, but look out for a few more stellar matches to get this edition of Roland Garros off to a good start. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are at best a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Murray and Wawrinka last met at a Grand Slam in the semifinals at Roland Garros in 2017. Wawrinka, the 2015 French Open champion, persevered in five sets. Now, with both major winners still recovering from lengthy injury spells, they meet in the first round. Wawrinka skipped the United States Open to play preparatory tournaments on red clay, winning a challenger level event in Prague in August before withdrawing from the subsequent Prague Open in the quarterfinals. After a first round loss to an Italian youngster, Lorenzo Musetti, at the Italian Open, Wawrinka will be looking for a quick turnaround. Murray, a three time major champion, has always been known for his ability to grind away at opponents. At the U.S. Open this year, his first Grand Slam singles event following his return to the tour after hip surgery, he was true to form, winning a tough five set match against Yoshihito Nishioka. Although it was a vintage performance from Murray, he lost in the second round to Felix Auger Aliassime in three sets, clearly struggling with the effects of his previous slog. Although Murray has beaten Wawrinka in most of their encounters, Wawrinka holds a 3 1 lead on clay. Wawrinka's advantage will only be enhanced by his recent play on clay, while Murray has focused on hardcourts for the past few months. Expect a battle of high quality tennis fueled by a rivalry built on bigger stages. David Goffin, ranked No. 12, lost in the round of 16 at the U.S. Open to a surging Denis Shapovalov in four sets. Goffin has consistently stayed in the top 25 since 2014, but he has not won a title since 2017. A runner up at the ATP Tour Finals in 2017, Goffin seems to keep scratching the surface of being a top tier player. He has fallen short so far, and the next generation may usurp him. Among that generation is Jannik Sinner, who is 19. The exciting Italian prospect is ranked 74th but has an impressive record. At the Italian Open, he dispatched Benoit Paire in two quick sets before overtaking the world No. 6, Stefanos Tsitsipas, in three sets. He lost in the third round to Grigor Dmitrov in another tough three set match and appears entirely unfazed by the records of the titans whom he has started to play regularly. Sinner won the only previous meeting between the two, on hardcourts in Rotterdam earlier this year. But in the five set format of the Grand Slam tournaments, Sinner has not proved able to last. For Goffin, the physical and mental test of a marathon may be to his advantage. Coco Gauff, the young American star, had her worst Grand Slam performance at this year's U.S. Open, losing in the first round to Anastasija Sevastova. To think that Gauff, at 16, could be genuinely disappointed with a first round loss is a testament to her skill. Johanna Konta does not take Gauff lightly. "It doesn't matter if she's 14 or 40," Konta said. "I think she's there for a reason. It's going out on court respecting the player that I'm about to play. I'm going to be playing against the tennis she brings, not her social media following, not her persona." For Konta, ranked No. 13, the French Open has been a strange tournament. Having competed at Roland Garros five times, she lost in the first round on her first four attempts and then surged to the semifinals in 2019 before losing to Marketa Vondrousova in two very tight sets. Konta's style focuses heavily on offense, which generally suits her on the faster surfaces. Gauff, playing in her first French Open, will have a slight advantage with her counterstriking and her consistency, which allows her to draw out longer points and force errors. Even for casual fans, this will be a matchup well worth watching. Simona Halep, the top seed and the 2018 Roland Garros champion, comes into this year's French Open as a clear favorite. She skipped the U.S. hardcourt swing this summer, citing concerns over handling of health protocols, and stuck to her favored surface. She has won two clay court tournaments in succession, the Prague Open and the Italian Open, demonstrating along the way that she could dispatch rivals like Garbine Muguruza and Karolina Pliskova with relative ease. Halep's short, angled shots are supremely effective on clay and can pull even the most mobile opponents into awkward positions on the court. That will create many problems for Sara Sorribes Tormo, whose speed is not up to par with that of the top players.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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At the Prado, Love That Now Dares to Shout Its Name MADRID The term homosexuality was first coined at the end of the 19th century, by which time the Prado Museum here had almost finished assembling Spain's largest art collection. Yet homosexuality has always been present within the Prado, Madrid's flagship museum, in ways that it has now chosen to highlight for the first time, in a new show called "The Other's Gaze. Spaces of Difference." The exhibition allows visitors to look at the ways homosexuality features not only within some specific paintings and sculptures, but also within the lives of the works' artists and patrons. "The Prado is much more than a national museum, because we get visitors here who come from countries that don't always recognize what is normal, countries that really belong to the third world in terms of human rights," said Jaime de los Santos, who is responsible for culture and tourism within Madrid's regional government. Miguel Falomir, the Prado's director, said his museum wanted to demonstrate that it was "open to all sensitivities" and sexual orientations. This exhibition, he said, "should probably have been done 10 years ago, but it's never too late." And while he had braced himself for criticism from the more conservative elements of Spanish society, no dissent had been voiced so far, he said. "This country has luckily changed," he added. Other museums are also now exploring homosexuality in art. The Tate Britain in London is now hosting an exhibition, "Queer British Art, 1861 2017," to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in England. And coinciding with the World Pride festival, the Thyssen Bornemisza, another of Madrid's prominent museums, is highlighting sexual orientation in a show called "Inclusive Love." During a tour of the Prado's show, Carlos G. Navarro, one of its curators, explained how artists drew on mythology and biblical episodes to incorporate homosexuality into their works while trying to circumvent censorship. Initially, such art was then often kept out of bounds in private royal chambers, like the Parada Tower, a hunting pavilion built by King Philip IV on the outskirts of Madrid. One of the pavilion's masterworks, which now hangs in the Prado's main gallery, is "The Rape of Ganymede," by Peter Paul Rubens, in which the artist shows Ganymede and a quiver of arrows in a juxtaposition that suggests anal penetration, Mr. Navarro explained. "Such themes weren't discussed by art historians until recently," he added. Some of the show's works focus on the persecution suffered by artists, often fomented by rival painters. In 1603 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was put on trial for sodomy, then a capital crime. Caravaggio's painting "David With the Head of Goliath," which now hangs in the Prado, is believed to have been acquired first by Juan de Tassis, a nobleman who was accused of sodomy. "You have some really special triangular relationships, between a work, its artist and its collector," Mr. Navarro said. There are works that explore cross dressing and transgender issues, which were also themes developed in the literature of Spain's Golden Age. In 1590 Juan Sanchez Cotan painted his "Bearded Lady of Penaranda," probably not as a medical curiosity, but more likely to warn men about effeminate behavior, Mr. Navarro said. Female artists are barely represented in the Prado, which only last year held its first exhibition devoted to a woman, Clara Peeters, a Flemish still life painter. But for this show's advertising poster, the curators selected a lion's portrait painted by Rosa Bonheur in 1879. Fascinated by animals, Bonheur obtained a cross dressing permit from the French police, allowing her to wear trousers and other men's clothing to gain access to cattle ranches and fairs where women were not welcomed, but whose cows and horses she wanted to paint. "You normally think of female artists in the 19th century as painting kittens, but she was very different," Mr. Navarro said. The lion is strikingly realistic and unmissable, once it is found, buried in one of the lower floor rooms of the museum.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Tourism, which grew faster than the global gross domestic product for the past nine years, has been decimated by the pandemic. Once accounting for 10 percent of employment worldwide, the sector is poised to shed 121 million jobs, with losses projected at a minimum of 3.4 trillion, according to the World Travel Tourism Council. But in the lull, some in the tourism industry are planning for a post vaccine return to travel that's better than it was before March 2020 greener, smarter and less crowded. If sustainable tourism, which aims to counterbalance the social and environmental impacts associated with travel, was the aspirational outer limit of ecotourism before the pandemic, the new frontier is "regenerative travel," or leaving a place better than you found it. "Sustainable tourism is sort of a low bar. At the end of the day, it's just not making a mess of the place," said Jonathon Day, an associate professor focused on sustainable tourism at Purdue University. "Regenerative tourism says, let's make it better for future generations." Regenerative travel has its roots in regenerative development and design, which includes buildings that meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design or LEED standards. The concept has applications across many fields, including regenerative agriculture, which aims to restore soils and sequester carbon. Having a truly regenerative travel experience may be a unicorn, but a few operators are pointing the way. Regenesis worked on the development of Playa Viva, a small resort south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on the Pacific Coast, which opened in 2009. The firm's assessment of the more than 200 acre property took in the beaches, the bird filled estuary and ancient ruins as well as the problems of turtle poaching and poor schools in the village. Ultimately, the small town of Juluchuca became the gateway to the property; an organic agricultural system benefited both the property and local residents; and a 2 percent fee added to any stay funds a trust that invests in community development. "Rather than a resort helicoptering in and taking up land, they said, 'We are the village,'" Mr. Reed said. "It's a paradigm shift." Playa Viva is one of 45 resorts belonging to Regenerative Travel, a booking agency that vets members based on metrics such as carbon usage, employee well being, immersive guest activities and sourcing local food. To date, qualifications for membership have been handled internally, but in September the company plans to launch a benchmarking system to demonstrate their regenerative progress. OneSeed Expeditions, an adventure tour operator based in Denver, aims to couple travel with economic development. It uses 10 percent of its proceeds to provide zero interest loans to local nongovernmental organizations where it operates in places like Nepal and Peru. The local groups then issue microloans to community entrepreneurs in businesses such as farming and retail. "The areas of greatest need are not necessarily in areas of the greatest tourism attractions," said Chris Baker, the founder of OneSeed Expeditions. "We want to use tourism to be able to benefit people outside of those areas." Regenerative tourism addresses impacts holistically, from destination and community perspectives as well as environmental. Intrepid Travel, the small group tour company that, until the pandemic, ran more than 1,000 itineraries globally, has been carbon neutral since 2010. This year it extended its pledge to cover 125 percent of its carbon emissions. "There's this notion that business success means you have to do harm to the world," said James Thornton, the chief executive of Intrepid Travel, which became a B Corporation, an entity dedicated to benefiting workers, customers, the community and environment, as well as shareholders, in 2018. "When the new normality returns, it shouldn't come at the expense of sustainability." For example, the current recession may have bought Hawaii a few years before its tourism figures return to what they were in 2019, when 10 million travelers visited the islands and that was up from 6.5 million a decade earlier resulting in painfully long queues to climb Diamond Head at sunrise. In a 2018 survey by the Hawaiian Tourism Authority, two thirds of respondents agreed that "This island is being run for tourists at the expense of local people." "We have the curse of a strong brand," said Frank Haas, a former vice president with the Hawaiian Tourism Authority and an independent tourism consultant. "We're so well known as a sun destination that people overlook the other aspects, the Hawaiian culture, the royal past, the interesting geological and natural attractions." He thinks it will require more coordinated management currently, a variety of federal, state and local authorities regulate parks and facilities like airports as well as creative entrepreneurs to expand cultural tourism by appealing to travelers interested in food, art, history or music. Determining what makes a place better and who makes that decision requires local involvement, according to regenerative tourism proponents. VisitFlanders, the tourism organization representing the Northern Belgium region, used local input to rethink its mission, repositioning its stance from growing travel for the sake of the economy to creating an "economy of meaning," according to its master plan. That includes, among other initiatives, linking visitors with locals who share their passions for things like history or food and making storytelling central to sites like its World War I battlefields. "We've managed to shift the thinking from having their primary objective be about growing the numbers, to creating flourishing destinations, flourishing communities and having them say what kind of tourism they want," said Anna Pollock, the founder of Conscious Travel, an education and consulting enterprise devoted to positioning travel as a force for good, who worked with VisitFlanders. Ms. Pollock believes regenerative travel is a supply side concept that asks operators to do more for the environment and community than they take from them. But travelers play a key role in demand. "Become mindful of the fact that your trip is going to have a set of costs associated with it, which needs to be paid by somebody," she said. "In the same way you think, 'Should I buy that cheap T shirt from the dime store down the road?,' knowing it's created by semi slave labor. Now you're thinking consciously about who do I buy it from and is it quality." The experience of the pandemic when many are discovering the power of their pocketbooks in supporting local businesses like bookstores and restaurants is, perhaps, the most instructive in demonstrating sustainability, even if the travel involved is within a few blocks of home. "Travel is an important vote of your principles," said Mr. Baker of OneSeed. "When you decide to put your time and resources into a trip, you're affirming that's the type of business you want out there." Sustainable travel, let alone regenerative travel, will still have to find solutions to the carbon emissions produced by air travel. Until the economy recovers, there's likely to be less travel, more local travel, or slower travel by car, train, bike or foot. This moment of reflection, say proponents, is where regeneration begins.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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A crazy optimist might have hoped that the impeachment trial, gutted though it was by Senate Republicans, would chasten rather than embolden President Trump, prompting a new judiciousness in his execution of his duties. Forget about that. His naming of Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany, as acting director of national intelligence has completely dashed any such hopes. Mr. Grenell has no experience as an intelligence officer at any level, nor has he overseen a large government bureaucracy. He has served in government only as communications director for the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the George W. Bush administration, and since May 2018 as ambassador to Germany. (In the interim, he founded and ran a public affairs consultancy, advising and commenting on Fox News.) As usual, Republican senators privately advised the White House against the appointment, urging the president to select an intelligence professional instead. To get around Senate opposition, Mr. Trump chose to accord Mr. Grenell only "acting" status, circumventing Senate confirmation. By now, we're used to this president naming unqualified loyalists to high positions. But this is not just another disparagement of the separation of powers. Within the executive branch itself, it is a calculated insult to the integrity and professionalism of the U.S. intelligence community, one that threatens to further impair the function of sound intelligence collection and analysis that is, to inform U.S. policy and to politicize the relationship between the White House and intelligence agencies. As an ambassador, Mr. Grenell at least was a consumer of intelligence. That might theoretically afford him a minimal degree of applicable experience. But he has been egregiously incapable of observing the boundary between his diplomatic role as ambassador, on one hand, and political interference in the internal affairs of allies, on the other. A day after taking office as ambassador, Mr. Grenell admonished German companies to stop doing business with Iran, overstepping the basic boundaries of his diplomatic role. The following month he told Breitbart News that he wanted to empower "conservatives throughout Europe," impugned the "failed policies of the left," and characterized Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria, then in a coalition with a far right political party, as a "rock star." Last year he directly threatened German companies involved in constructing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline with sanctions. Evidence shows he can't even do his basic job: An extensively sourced 2019 profile in Der Spiegel indicated that he generally ignores the factual dossiers prepared for him at the embassy. With this recent record, there is virtually no chance that Mr. Grenell will be able to discern, let alone stay inside, the line between objectively providing intelligence and tendentiously supporting the president's policies. That, of course, appears to be Mr. Trump's hope and intention. From Mr. Trump's standpoint, Mr. Grenell's key qualification is that he is a shill for the president, a shameless political advocate. For this president, shamelessness and personal loyalty are paramount virtues. Mr. Grenell's appointment also makes brazenly obvious what was already quite clear: that the president sees impartial intelligence an impediment to the implementation of his policies unless it caters to his own political biases and often counterfactual contentions. Among those biases is his sympathy for far right influences in Europe, which Mr. Grenell publicly and emphatically shares. Neither the president nor his new intelligence chief is likely to focus sufficiently on the rising threat of transnational right wing extremist groups. The dubious contentions include the president's view, contrary to U.S. intelligence assessments, that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Mr. Grenell has shown perhaps a little more finesse. In a 2016 Fox News opinion piece, he merely minimized Russian meddling in American political processes as a longstanding practice that should come as no surprise and was not especially significant. The practical upshot, however, is the same: Mr. Grenell, like Mr. Trump, does not rate Russian efforts to manipulate American elections a pressing national security concern. From this perspective, Mr. Grenell's appointment as the country's highest ranking intelligence officer looks intended to ensure that any U.S. intelligence assessments and warnings of Russian meddling in the 2020 election are downplayed and withheld from Congress, if not completely suppressed. Mr. Trump was reportedly angry for political reasons that intelligence analysts briefed the House Intelligence Committee last week, telling them that Russia was interfering in the 2020 election in an attempt to get him re elected. The president feared that Democrats would weaponize the information and registered his displeasure with the outgoing director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire. The fox in the henhouse metaphor may be a tired one, but Mr. Trump has revitalized it, implicitly tasking one appointee after another to subvert the very agency he or she is supposed to oversee and sustain. Mr. Grenell is only the latest example. Having thoroughly politicized his position as a diplomat, he is now poised to do the same for the entire U.S. intelligence community. In terms of process as distinct from substance, the outlook is similarly bleak: Mr. Grenell recently applauded the president's unrestrained tweeting after Attorney General William Barr considered one of Mr. Trump's staunchest bureaucratic allies had criticized the practice. It's hardly fanciful to imagine the president commanding his new acting DNI to provide tailored intelligence that he can include in a provocative tweet, and readily getting it. To make matters worse for the national security bureaucracy, Mr. Grenell will continue to serve as ambassador to Germany while trying to direct and coordinate the United States' vast and complex array of intelligence agencies. Thus, in a single stroke, Mr. Trump has appointed an official who is unsuited to the job and has rendered it circumstantially impossible for him to do that properly, even if he had the ability. This absurdly cavalier arrangement, even if it lasts just a few months, manages to denigrate the role of both the State Department and the intelligence community. Mr. Trump's contempt for and evisceration of the interagency process putatively coordinated by the National Security Council staff serially showcased, last month with the strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani are again on display. And his increasingly autocratic inclinations ominously shine through.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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WASHINGTON In an effort to curb what many consider the worst public health drug crisis in decades, the federal government on Tuesday published the first national standards for prescription painkillers, recommending that doctors try pain relievers like ibuprofen before prescribing the highly addictive pills, and that they give most patients only a few days' supply. The release of the new guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ends months of arguments with pain doctors and drug industry groups, which had bitterly opposed the recommendations on the grounds that they would create unfair hurdles for patients who legitimately have long term pain. In the end, the agency softened the recommendations slightly but basically held its ground, a testament to how alarmed policy makers have become over the mounting overdoses and deaths from opioid addiction. Opioid deaths including from heroin, which some people turn to after starting with prescription painkillers reached a record 28,647 in 2014, according to the most recent federal statistics. "It would be hard for me to overstate how thrilling it is to read these guidelines after all these years," said Dr. Carl R. Sullivan III, director of the addictions program at West Virginia University, whose state has been a center of the epidemic. "This is a very big deal. These prescribing practices have been an embarrassment for so long." The guidelines are part of a growing backlash against practices developed two decades ago, when doctors across the country began prescribing opioids for routine pain amid claims by pharmaceutical companies and some medical experts that they could be used to treat common conditions like back pain and arthritis without addiction. Those claims ended up in court and were found to be false. Since then, opioid painkillers like OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin have become the most widely prescribed drugs in the country, with sales of nearly 2 billion a year, according to IMS Health, a research firm that collects prescribing data. But the thinking about the drugs has changed, and the guidelines reflect that. "It has become increasingly clear that opioids carry substantial risk but only uncertain benefits especially compared with other treatments for chronic pain," Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., said on a phone call with reporters. The federal government has lagged the states in its response to the opioid epidemic. Many have already set out rules for doctors to follow, as have some professional medical societies. So proponents of national guidelines applauded their release, which they said was overdue. "This is the first time the federal government is communicating clearly to the medical community that long term use for common conditions is inappropriate," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the head of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. "It's one of the most significant interventions by the federal government." Although the federal guidelines are nonbinding, they are important because they are now the broadest blueprint in place addressing opioids use. Some observers said doctors, fearing lawsuits, would reflexively follow them, and insurance companies could begin to use them to determine reimbursement. "These will not be seen as voluntary," said Myra Christopher, the director of the Pain Action Alliance to Implement a National Strategy, a coalition of medical and patient advocacy groups focused on chronic pain care that had opposed the guidelines. "These will become the definition of the standard of care, because of the clout of the Centers for Disease Control." The guidelines recommend what many addiction experts have long called for: that doctors first try ibuprofen and aspirin to treat pain, and that opioid treatment for short term pain last for three days, and rarely longer than seven. That is far less than current practice, in which patients are often given two weeks' or a month's worth of pills. The recommendations are meant for primary care doctors, who prescribe about half of all opioids but often have little training in how to use them. They call for patients to be urine tested before getting prescriptions and for doctors to check prescription tracking systems to make sure patients are not secretly getting medicine somewhere else. They do not apply to prescriptions for patients receiving cancer or end of life treatment, or to patients who have had surgery. Supporters said the guidelines could also affect dental practices. In a study of more than two million patients undergoing surgical tooth extractions covered by Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, researchers at Harvard University found that nearly half of the patients were dispensed an opioid, including 61 percent of teenagers. But some doctors groups were worried the guidelines would have unintended consequences for people like cancer survivors with continuing pain who were no longer able to get their medicine. The American Medical Association said in a statement "we remain concerned," saying the science justifying some of the recommendations was sparse, and that the guidelines conflict with some state laws. (The C.D.C. said state laws would pre empt the national guidelines because the guidelines are nonbinding.) Many groups who have vociferously opposed the development of the guidelines struck muted tones after their release. Robert Twillman, the executive director of the American Academy of Pain Management, said "the numbers are still arbitrary," referring to the recommended limits for daily dosage and days of treatment, but added that "on the whole, it's not bad." The Washington Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has filed friend of the court briefs supporting positions taken by pharmaceutical companies, had threatened to sue the C.D.C. to block it from issuing the guidelines, saying that the agency had failed to follow federal rules in developing the proposal. Richard A. Samp, the group's general counsel, said Tuesday that it was still reviewing its legal options but did not believe that the C.D.C. had addressed its concerns. Dr. Frieden said the guidelines were meant to be "a tool for doctors and for patients to chart a safer course," describing them as a benchmark for medical practice, not an unbending dictate. For years, doctors, regulators and pain treatment advocates were deadlocked over how to address the opioid crisis. But a soaring death toll and new data showing risk seems to have broken that logjam.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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A roundup of motoring news from the web: The prototype 2009 Corvette ZR1 known as the Blue Devil was the first car pulled out of a sinkhole at the National Corvette Museum that devoured eight of the fiberglass sports cars last month. Although the sinkhole was about 30 feet deep, the car emerged virtually unscathed museum staff started it and drove it about 20 feet without much trouble. Other Corvettes are being pulled from the hole this week. (Vette Magazine) The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday finalized more stringent standards for tailpipe emissions and for the amount of sulfur allowed in gasoline. The stricter rules, called Tier 3, were pushed forward by the Obama administration, aimed at cutting some pollutants by as much as 80 percent between 2017 and 2025. (Automotive News, subscription required) Ford says that by the end of the year it wants to have a network of 1,500 body repair shops capable of fixing its new aluminum body F 150 pickups. Ford said it would focus mainly on dealerships with large body shops, and many dealers told Automotive News that although Ford claims an aluminum specialized repair bay would cost 30,000 to 50,000 to install, the actual price was closer to 70,000 each. (Automotive News, subscription required) Although Alfa Romeo had plans to build a roadster based on a Mazda MX 5, Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive of Fiat Chrysler which owns Alfa may have had second thoughts. Mr. Marchionne, backing up a statement he had made to The Financial Times last year, said at the Detroit auto show this year that Alfa Romeos were to be built in Italy. There is a chance, according to Automotive News sources, that the Mazda based roadster may go to the automaker's Fiat or Abarth divisions. (Automotive News Europe, subscription required)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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When Americans recently learned how little President Trump has paid in taxes in the past 15 years and how he benefited from financial maneuvers, it reinforced the widespread belief that the rich don't pay their fair share. Lost in the outrage is the fact that the tax provisions that allowed Mr. Trump to trim his tax bill were probably not illegal or the results of tax schemes concocted by anti tax legislators. Those provisions, and many others like them, delivered exactly what their drafters intended: They are engineered to benefit certain kinds of taxpayers and most Americans are not among them. There are many aspirational visions for the tax code. If yours is a wildly complex, 2,600 page code of rules and frustration, you win, because that's what we have now. If you desire a federal tax code that's an archaeological record of special interest politics, chiseled out over time with giveaways under the cover of achieving social goals like subsidized child care, homeownership, health care, higher education and more, you win again. But if your vision is for a more equitable system that can actually be enforced by the I.R.S., what we really need is a simpler and fairer tax code. Some of the current rules are good, but many are political giveaways to special interests. Telling those rules apart is actually harder than it seems, but there are some obvious places to start. The beneficiaries of the tax code's complexity are the well to do and well connected individuals and corporations who work hard to create and expand loopholes and can afford accountants who can take advantage of the intricacies. Politicians, rewarded with campaign contributions, are clear beneficiaries, too. This results in hundreds of tax credits, deductions and special tax rates, including those used by Mr. Trump. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." The losers are most Americans, who have no clue what's in the tax code and collectively spend about eight billion hours a year complying with its filing requirements. A good place to start simplifying is to get rid of tax privileges granted to politically favored special interests. Listing all of them would be an impossible task, but there are candidates for elimination that enjoy at least some degree of bipartisan support. Since 1913, interest on municipal bonds issued by state and local governments has been exempt from federal income taxation. It is a favorite loophole for wealthy taxpayers, who invest in them. It is also a delight for Wall Street, which profits from all the municipal bond issuing and trading. Getting rid of even one of these deductions is hard. The state and local tax deduction (or SALT) deduction benefits mostly high income taxpayers. Even many Democrats, who are quick to complain about the rich not paying their fair share, fervently support it. In a rare exception, the Republican tax reform act of 2017 capped the SALT deduction at 10,000 (previously, more than 88 percent of the benefit flowed to people with incomes in excess of 100,000). But the fight isn't over. Covid 19 relief bills adopted in the Democratic House include a temporary repeal of the 10,000 SALT cap; it was not the only recent attempt by Democrats to give a billion dollar tax break to high earning households Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was part of a similar effort earlier this year. (Negotiations over a new relief bill that may or may not take up the SALT deduction continue.) Yet calls to end all tax deductions, credits and exemptions can be problematic, too. In some cases, what look like "giveaways" to businesses like a loss carryback, which allows them to smooth out their tax bills over multiple years actually represent good policy. In Mr. Trump's case, the public doesn't know enough to judge whether he abused the exemption or is simply a terrible businessman. But we wouldn't want to tax a business that made a 1 million profit this year if it lost 1 million annually over the previous two years. Since it's still losing money overall, it should be able to average its profits. And we wouldn't want to tax entrepreneurs and start ups at higher rates than we tax established businesses like Amazon and Walmart. The same is true for those who assume it is easy to know which business expenses are acceptable or objectionable. For instance, if the C.E.O. of a company flies to Paris for a meeting with clients on Friday but decides to stay the weekend as a tourist, it seems wrong for this person to deduct the cost of extra hotel nights. But what if the cost of staying the weekend is actually less than the cost of staying for just one night? Which one does the C.E.O. deduct? Or how should we distinguish the cost of hair and makeup for a TV show from the cost of a hair stylist for everyday life? No matter what the tax system is, as long as we tax businesses, figuring out what counts as a legitimate expense and what doesn't will often create challenges. Yes, there will be some abuses, but alternatives to this model are also bound to be disastrous. And the incentives to take advantage of preferences (and the incentives for lobbyists to create them) are higher when tax rates go up something that Joe Biden and his team may want to keep in mind if they're in charge next year. My ideal tax code would eliminate the double taxation of income taxing the same dollar of income twice (or more). A typical example: taxing corporate income first through the corporate income tax and second through the individual income tax on dividends and capital gains. My tax code would restore "horizontal equity," meaning that taxpayers making the same income pay the same amount of taxes. It would also broaden the tax base and lower rates. Many of these goals can be achieved by eliminating tax preferences that tilt the playing field in favor of politically connected interest groups. Finally, this tax code wouldn't be used to incentivize certain behaviors, which is a poor way to achieve these goals. If we want to encourage certain objectives, do it transparently through subsidies. The sad truth is that we'll never have an honest conversation about taxes as long as we don't recognize that the tax code is an imperfect product of politics and so must also be reformed through the political process. Veronique de Rugy ( veroderugy) is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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"Stairway to Heaven" is an original no new trial needed. That is the upshot of an appellate court's decision, announced Monday, which upheld a jury's verdict that Led Zeppelin's 1971 classic did not copy "Taurus," a much lesser known song by the guitarist and singer Randy Wolfe that was recorded in 1968 by his band, Spirit. Although Led Zeppelin had been accused of plagiarism plenty of times before, the "Stairway" case came under close scrutiny in the music industry both because the song is the band's signature accomplishment an eight minute odyssey that by some estimates has earned more than 500 million and because it followed another closely watched trial, over Robin Thicke's song "Blurred Lines." In that case, Thicke and Pharrell Williams, the song's principal writers, were ordered to pay more than 5 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, a decision that many songwriters, lawyers and academics have criticized as harmful to creativity. In 2016, a jury in the "Stairway" case found that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, the song's two credited writers, did not infringe on the copyright of "Taurus." The band's lawyers argued that what little the two songs had in common a chord progression and a descending chromatic scale were musical elements too basic to be protected by copyright. A musicologist testifying on Led Zeppelin's behalf said that similar patterns have popped up in music for over 300 years.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Changes loom near remote Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. It's a rough region of 1,000 foot cliffs and canyons, two wild rivers the Green and the Yampa ancient rock art and archaeological evidence of 10,000 years of human history. The park, which straddles the Utah Colorado border, affords visitors backcountry camping, white water rafting and, most famously, spectacular dinosaur fossils. The Bureau of Land Management has announced that in December it will auction gas and oil drilling rights on 94,000 acres, or 146 square miles, of land, some of it near the park's entrance road. Pumpjacks, drill rigs and other equipment would be visible from the park's visitor center, which is 2.5 miles from one lease parcel, according to critics. The B.L.M. has said that equipment would not intrude on the average visitor's field of view. The agency said it would take steps to minimize visibility, including light shields, noise mufflers and "placement of exhaust systems to direct noise away from noise sensitive areas" and "avoiding unnecessary flaring of gas." Ozone pollution from such energy development already exceeds federal Clean Air Act limits in the monument area. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican who supports fossil fuel development on public lands, initially said he worried that the new leases would bring eyesores too close to the park. "The state wishes to ensure leasing of these parcels does not impact visual resources or cause light or sound disturbances," he said in comments submitted to the B.L.M. in July. The monument's National Park Service administrators have also expressed concern about dust, night lights, air and water pollution and threats to endangered species. The 330 square mile, high desert park is visited by about 300,000 people a year. It was designated a national monument by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, using powers granted him under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The new drilling leases pivot away from a policy begun during the administration of Barack Obama, in which the Park Service and the B.L.M. collaborated to avoid visual and environmental impacts from industrial development on public lands near parks. The national monument, administered by the park service, is surrounded by federal public lands administered by the B.L.M. Both agencies are within the Department of the Interior. More gas and oil drilling is part of the Trump administration's announced goals of what the president has referred to as "energy dominance." The Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, has said that "oil and gas production on federal lands is an important source of revenue and job growth in rural America." In response to the concerns expressed by Mr. Herbert and others, the B.L.M. has deferred action indefinitely on about 1,600 acres near the park that had been proposed for leases, and said that it will try to mitigate impacts at the monument from drilling activity on the remaining areas near the park. The governor's office declared that it was satisfied by the changes. "Thank you BLMNational for listening to our concerns about protecting the visitor experience at DinosaurNPS," Mr. Herbert said on Twitter. Others are unhappy. Critics say the shift is emblematic of changes that will affect a wide range of other parks and monuments, as well as those who visit them. David Nimkin, a senior regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, said in a statement that the planned energy development "has the potential to do harm to We cannot keep Dinosaur the wild and wonderful place it is if we allow oil rigs on its borders." Some of the leases, he said, "are within the direct view of the park's Quarry Visitor Center and the world famous Carnegie Fossil Quarry. It would also threaten the health of the Colorado River system and could further reduce air quality at Dinosaur, all while adding intensive industrial traffic to the park's access road." Mike Murray, who worked as a national park administrator and ranger for 34 years, cited a range of threats to the parks and the visitor experience. In an interview, he said the decision to auction drilling rights at Dinosaur National Monument was "indefensible," part of a new wave of "signs and signals" about the administration's policy intentions. He is a spokesman for a group of park service retirees called the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks. Outdoor related businesses near the national monument expressed a range of concerns in comment letters filed with the B.L.M. Two mountain biking trade associations said that gas and oil drilling "could also put at risk sensitive water resources and threaten other important values such as clean air, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, recreation viewsheds, and the cultural vitality of rural communities." The National Outdoor Leadership School, which runs training programs in the area, commented that "lease and subsequent development of these parcels will have a serious impact on the river experience. Any new natural gas wells and related infrastructure on this parcel would likely be within view of the river during construction, and within earshot of the river throughout the life of the wells. Such intrusions will doubtless impinge on the river traveler's experience and degrade the outstanding values provided by the Green River." Mr. Murray said the Dinosaur case is only one example of Trump administration decisions that will harm national parks and monuments. In August, the retirees' group sponsored a letter to the administration, signed by 350 former public employees, including many park administrators. It objected to proposed oil and gas leases on federal land that it says are "adjacent or in proximity" to several other sites: Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Hovenweep National Monument and Fort Laramie National Historic Site. Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift did not respond to several requests for comment. The Vernal, Utah, field office of the B.L.M and the agency's Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C. offices also declined to comment. The Dinosaur monument's pitch black night skies and silent soundscapes have been protected by the park service since its creation, Mr. Murray said. He said that visitors will now see "oil rigs instead of a pristine landscape." The risk of toxic industrial spills, leaks and accidents leading to polluted air and water will have arrived along with the energy development opportunity, he added. "We're incredibly concerned about the direction that the White House is taking with national parks and public lands" in pursuit of energy development and other goals, Kristen Brengel, vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, said in an interview. "We are seeing significant rollbacks of wildlife, drilling, water and conservation policies from prior Republican and Democratic administrations. This is a sea change, and they are taking no prisoners. Even national parks aren't sacred for this administration." Mr. Zinke recently completed a review requested by Mr. Trump of large national monuments created by his predecessors Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama. The resulting recommendations have not yet been officially made public.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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WASHINGTON China's technological ambitions are eliciting rare bipartisan agreement in Washington, with lawmakers considering investing tens of billions of dollars in America's semiconductor industry over the next five to 10 years to help the United States retain an edge over Beijing. A bipartisan measure introduced this week is one of several proposals that would provide substantial funding for the semiconductor industry, which manufactures chips that serve as the tiny brains or memory of electronic devices from smartphones to fitness trackers. The efforts reflect a shifting consensus in Washington, as lawmakers look to more expansive government intervention in private markets to help American firms compete. That includes Republicans, who have long criticized government led industrial plans as inefficient and redolent of communism but have watched with dismay as such efforts in China have allowed it to dominate industries from steel and solar panels to shipbuilding. The future of the semiconductor industry is viewed as particularly significant because it is a foundational technology that can give nations an edge in innovation. China has been shoveling billions into developing its own chip industry, which has long been dominated by the United States and has helped propel a boom in 5G technology, artificial intelligence and robotics. Semiconductors are still one of America's largest exports, and American companies that design and sell chips still account for nearly half of global revenue in the sector, the greatest share of any country. But the United States only accounts for around 12 percent of global semiconductor production capacity. Decades ago, domestic designers began turning to foundries in places like Taiwan and South Korea to manufacture their chips. While past government subsidies have largely focused on chip research, the latest bill puts a heavy emphasis on domestic manufacturing. A centerpiece, which would put more than 22.8 billion toward the industry, is a new trust fund for federal grants to match state subsidies to encourage new factories. As much as 10 billion a year could be placed in the fund, with the money to come from the import tariffs the administration has placed on China, rather than a congressional appropriation. The legislation is co sponsored by Senators John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, and Representatives Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, and Doris Matsui, Democrat of California. It could be rolled into the next economic stimulus package or a defense bill that may be considered this summer. The measure follows a bill introduced in late May by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, that would expand the National Science Foundation and increase funding by 100 billion over five years in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced manufacturing. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is also working on a bill to fund the chip industry. "One of the biggest weaknesses in the American economy is the decline of our scientific and innovation industrial base, and we must invest in academic institutions and industries to rebuild it," Mr. Schumer said. "There's bipartisan support to do so and it's growing each day." The shift in Congress mirrors one in the Trump administration, which has rejected traditional Republican support of free trade in favor of a more managed approach to compete with China. Mr. Trump's advisers have zeroed in on the semiconductor industry, which was born in the United States but has partly migrated to Asia in recent decades, as the test case for their plan to use trade and technology policies to return manufacturing to American shores. 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. Though the election is fast approaching, officials in the Trump administration have only just begun to implement that plan. Over the last year, they have introduced a variety of measures aimed at cutting Chinese companies off from American technology exports and investment opportunities and crippling the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which they view as a national security threat. Mr. Trump also waged a prolonged trade war against China placing tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, including high tech ones as he pressed the country to sign a so called Phase 1 trade deal. But the administration has done little to build up other companies that could compete with Huawei and other Chinese technology leaders. As a result, American efforts to get countries around the world to excise Huawei from their telecom networks have been largely unsuccessful. For many months, officials in the Departments of Defense, State and Commerce have been trying to woo chip makers including Intel, Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to expand their manufacturing footprint in the United States. In May, T.S.M.C. announced plans to build an advanced chip facility in Arizona. That plan is contingent on securing funding from Congress, which would likely come through the bill introduced this week. Officials from the Department of Commerce and State, who helped negotiate with T.S.M.C., have been in talks with Congress to create a standard package of incentives that could be offered to attract other chip suppliers. In a meeting at the White House last Thursday, senior officials discussed incentives that could bring chip manufacturers onshore. Besides recent tensions with China, industry executives say the bipartisan support for the bill was also fueled by the coronavirus and its aftermath, which underscored the dangers of relying on a distant electronics supply chain. "It may be the silver lining out of this whole unfortunate pandemic," said Thomas Caufield, the chief executive of GlobalFoundries, which has invested 15 billion in manufacturing facilities that include a large factory near Albany, N.Y., and facilities once owned by IBM. "It's time to think differently." China still lags in the production of the most advanced semiconductors, but its technology is improving quickly. The Trump administration has warned that China is using subsidies, targeted investments and cybertheft to try to gain a technological edge. Administration officials and others in Washington also believe that Taiwan, a major supplier of advanced chips, is vulnerable to Chinese invasion or influence, one motivation behind trying to bring T.S.M.C.'s manufacturing to the United States.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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She soon gets a chance to prove her mettle when she and three fellow students are abducted by treasure hunters trying to track down Dora's parents (Michael Pena and Eva Longoria) , who are searching for a lost Incan city of gold named Parapata. The Indiana Jones style high jinks that ensue don't quite have the visual verve or breakneck pacing of a "Raiders of the Lost Ark," or even a "National Treasure," but they're invigorated by the film's cheekiness. Dora has to help a clueless classmate dig a "poo hole" in the jungle. Later, the kids are intoxicated by giant spores and hallucinate that they've become animated versions of themselves. There are jokes about neurotoxicity and dysentery. Somehow, it all works. That's because the film's freewheeling, what if quality never becomes meanspirited or gross. The director James Bobin (who achieved a similarly good natured silliness with his 2011 reboot of "The Muppets") has a casual style that serves the material well: Nothing is ever too urgent or too lackadaisical. This is a deceptively tough balancing act. Get too loose and the movie will turn into a bunch of limp comedy sketches; get too realistic, and it will lose any sense of what makes Dora such a beloved and timeless character. Like a child unwittingly navigating a jungle full of booby traps and deadly creatures, the film walks a treacherously fine line without ever seeming to break a sweat. Dora and the Lost City of Gold Rated PG for mild jungle action and a cavalier attitude toward inflammatory bowel diseases. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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By now, there is no mistaking works by Cindy Sherman her signature as both photographer and subject, her over the top outfits and constantly transforming face. But it is rare to see them gathered in one intimate space, as they now are at the Mnuchin Gallery. Looking back over 30 years, "Cindy Sherman: Once Upon a Time, 1981 2011" bills itself as Ms. Sherman's first historical exhibition in New York City since the Museum of Modern Art's 2012 traveling retrospective. The exhibition starts with Ms. Sherman's "Centerfolds" series, which depicts women reclining, fully dressed, as they appear lost in thought. It continues with examples from her "History Portraits" series, pastiches of various historical styles in gilded frames, and with highlights from "Society Portraits," featuring stereotypes of wealthy and heavily accessorized women in stately settings. (Through June 10, mnuchingallery.com.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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If the livestreamed show "Zoo Motel" were happening in person instead of on our computer screens, we would probably get a neat little packet of items upon arrival at the theater. In this isolated world of virtual performance, that packet comes instead as a preshow email attachment. It's up to us to print the items out: a "room key" and a welcome brochure, an evacuation map, a sheet of motel stationery that sort of thing. The midcentury design is cool, which makes it a fun assignment. Also, we're told to rustle up a deck of playing cards. It's clever, getting the audience involved in the performance before it begins; it's more active than simply being sent stuff, as happens with other livestream theater pieces like "The Present." And if we look closely at the map, the kind that shows how to escape the building in an emergency, it piques our curiosity. There seems to be no exit. Shades of Sartre? Perhaps though I don't think "Zoo Motel" means to remind us that hell is other people. I'm sorry to report, then, that it does. Well, purgatory anyway.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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For the first time in over a decade, a contest to award the worst sex writing in the English language will not deliver a winner to the public, a relief for readers left mortified by the annual selection and sad news for the world's connoisseurs of cringe. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award is canceled. The editors who run the contest announced the decision on Tuesday on the website of their magazine, Literary Review, saying that the year 2020 has been unpleasant enough without their contribution. "The judges felt that the public had been subjected to too many bad things this year to justify exposing it to bad sex as well," the statement said. "They warned, however, that the cancellation of the 2020 awards should not be taken as a license to write bad sex." Staff members for the Literary Review, a British magazine not to be confused with a New Jersey based publication of the same name, have curated terrible sex writing for almost three decades. The award's purpose, according to the magazine, is to honor the year's "most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description" and to draw attention "to the poorly written, redundant or downright cringe worthy passages of sexual description in modern fiction."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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In the fifth floor studios of City Center on Friday, Miro Magloire was sharing statistics about what his New Chamber Ballet had accomplished in the 10 years, "pretty much to the day," since the company first performed there. The largest sum was large indeed. The number of ballets presented, almost all of them premieres: 93. Both that total and the troupe's longevity are big achievements based in modesty. The works are many but short. The dancers are few: only four on Friday, all women. Doing without sets and theatrical lighting, the company is extravagant only in live music of high quality, but never with more than two musicians. It's all unassuming a tone continued in Mr. Magloire's charming introductory speeches, which can expand to cover the minimal theatricality of costume changes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Former President Barack Obama shared his summer reading list on social media on Wednesday, offering a mix of novels, short story collections and nonfiction for anyone, in his words, "looking for some suggestions." The list covers both new releases and older works from authors such as Tea Obreht, Colson Whitehead, Ted Chiang, Haruki Murakami, Dinaw Mengestu and Hilary Mantel. Mr. Obama started with an invitation to read works by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who died last week at the age of 88. "Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Sula, everything else they're transcendent, all of them," he wrote. "You'll be glad you read them." The former president presented the author with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Mr. Obama's interest in reading has been well documented. The former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani reported at the end of Mr. Obama's presidency that he would read for about an hour on most nights. Mr. Obama said that reading fiction left him "better able to imagine what's going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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WASHINGTON President Obama is traveling to the shadow of Wall Street on Thursday to counter what he calls "the furious efforts of industry lobbyists" trying to weaken or kill new financial regulations that he says are needed to stave off a second Great Depression. As the Senate debates how to rewrite rules governing the financial industry, Mr. Obama will lay out the elements he insists must be in any legislation to get his signature. Among them are more consumer protections, limits on the size of banks and the risks they can take, reforms on executive compensation and greater transparency for controversial securities known as derivatives. In flying to New York City, the president wants to confront the financial industry more directly through a sharp speech just a few minutes' subway ride from Wall Street, and with some of its leading corporate titans in the audience. After castigating their "failure of responsibility" in recent years, he intends to call on them to stop resisting tighter regulation through the army of lobbyists now staked out on Capitol Hill. "I am sure that many of those lobbyists work for some of you," Mr. Obama plans to say, according to excerpts of the speech provided by the White House for release on Thursday morning. "But I am here today because I want to urge you to join us, instead of fighting us in this effort. I am here because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of our financial sector."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Beat Festival (Thursday through Sept. 19) This festival of site responsive, Brooklyn bred performance fans out across the borough for a fourth year. It begins on Thursday at 7 p.m., when all of the festival's artists takeover the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park. Visitors can set out in search of Brooklyn's Finest Dance Company, Jamal Jackson Dance Company and the dance hall choreographer Blacka Di Danca, among other performers stationed throughout the building. At various times and locations; a full schedule is at beatbrooklyn.com. (Siobhan Burke) Lucinda Childs (Thursday through Sept. 12) It's worth the trip to Philadelphia for a glimpse of "Available Light," a rarely seen 1983 collaboration between the choreographer Lucinda Childs, the composer John Adams and the architect Frank Gehry. The FringeArts Fringe Festival hosts the revival's only East Coast appearance (its next stop is Berkeley, Calif. in February), with Mr. Gehry's two tiered stage recreated at the cavernous Drexel University Armory. At 8 p.m., 32nd Street, at Cuthbert Street, 215 413 1318, fringearts.com. (Burke) DanceNow Joe's Pub Festival (Wednesday through Sept. 12) The latest edition of this extravaganza is a reunion of sorts. The presenter DanceNowNYC honors its 20th anniversary by bringing back artists it has supported over the past two decades (including different M.C.s each night), for a total of 50 acts throughout four evenings on the tiny Joe's Pub stage. Wednesday's lineup includes festival veterans like the Bang Group, Jane Comfort and Mark Dendy, alongside relative newcomers like Jordan Isadore and Raja Feather Kelly. On Thursday, for the first time in 15 years, Heidi Latsky and Lawrence Goldhuber join forces as the tall and small duo Latsky Goldhuber. At 7 p.m., Joe's Pub, at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village, 212 967 7555, dancenownyc.org. (Burke)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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new video loaded: Travel Postcard: The Revival of Detroit
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Inspecting a bridge near Wilmington, Del. Some economists say the decline in government spending has hurt the recovery. WASHINGTON Recessions are always painful, but the Great Recession that ran from late 2007 to the middle of 2009 may have inflicted a new kind of pain: an era of slower growth. It has been five years since the official end of that severe economic downturn. The nation's total annual output has moved substantially above the prerecession peak, but economic growth has averaged only about 2 percent a year, well below its historical average. Household incomes continue to stagnate, and millions of Americans still can't find jobs. And a growing number of experts see evidence that the economy will never rebound completely. For more than a century, the pace of growth was reliably resilient, bouncing back after recessions like a car returning to its cruising speed after a roadblock. Even after the prolonged Great Depression of the 1930s, growth eventually returned to an average pace of more than 3 percent a year. But Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, citing the Congressional Budget Office, said on Wednesday that the government now expected annual growth to average just 2.1 percent, about two thirds of the previous pace. "Many today wonder whether something that has always been true in our past will be true in our future," Mr. Lew told members of the Economic Club of New York. "There are questions about whether America can maintain strong rates of growth and doubts about whether the benefits of technology, innovation and prosperity will be shared broadly." Lawrence H. Summers, formerly President Obama's chief economic adviser and now a leading member of this Cassandra chorus, has warned that growth may fall short of expectations unless the federal government increases its spending on things like upgrading deteriorating roads and bridges and the development of new technologies. "A soft economy casts a substantial shadow forward onto the economy's future output and potential," he said in a speech in April. The pessimism is a striking departure from economic orthodoxy. Recessions cause considerable suffering, including permanent disruptions to individual lives, but most economists have long asserted that recessions do not reduce the economy's capacity to supply goods and services. Some economists still expect a complete recovery. They say it takes a long time to recover from financial crises, and that the healing process has been set back unexpectedly by cuts in government spending, by Europe's woes and, most recently, by a hard winter. Other economists, also committed to the orthodox view of recessions, argue that the slower growth is here to stay, but say that it is the result of longer term trends that predate the recession, like fewer Americans entering the work force and less innovation. "We have recovered" from the recession, said Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University. "We just don't like what that looks like." The emerging view espoused by an eclectic range of economists including Mr. Summers; Paul Krugman of Princeton and an Op Ed page columnist for The New York Times; and Robert E. Hall of Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institution accepts that slower growth is partly the result of long term trends. It is an unfortunate coincidence, in effect, that just as the floor was giving way, the ceiling was falling, too. But these analysts also see mounting evidence that recessions, and slow recoveries, can have enduring consequences. Since 2007, the Congressional Budget Office has cut its estimate of potential economic output in 2017 by a total of about 7 percent, or 2,500 per American. The budget office says the recession is responsible for a quarter of the cuts. It attributes the rest to long term trends. An analysis published last month by Mr. Hall argued that the recession played an even larger role. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Much of the scrutiny has focused on the labor market. The share of adults with jobs fell sharply during the recession and has rebounded only slightly because many people have simply stopped looking for work. The situation is likely to improve somewhat as the economy gains strength, but part of the decline is tied to factors that are more permanent. They include the share of Americans claiming federal disability benefits, which rose sharply in recent years. Few of those people will ever return to the work force after receiving benefits. At the same time, fewer immigrants have been arriving. There are almost two million fewer people over the age of 16 than the federal government had projected back in 2007. The recession also reduced the number of future workers. The birthrate has declined each year from 2007 to 2012, the most recent for which data is available. Economic prosperity is determined not just by the number of workers but, even more important, by their output per hour of work. There is growing speculation that decisions made in the wake of the recession have weakened that output, too. Government spending and public investment has fallen by almost 8 percent, the largest decline in more than half a century. Corporate investment has also been lackluster. As with the labor market, there is a clear short term problem and also a long term trend. John G. Fernald, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a leading expert on productivity, argued in a 2012 paper that the growth of productivity had slowed as companies completed a cycle of technological investment. But in a much discussed paper last year, three senior Fed economists argued that productivity growth could take a long term hit because fewer businesses were being created and existing ones were spending less on research and development. This view remains controversial. "Productivity forecasts have had no success historically," Mr. Hall wrote in his recent analysis. "Whether the return to a normal economy will result in a catch up in productivity growth in the longer term is an unsettled question." Another unsettled question is whether the federal government can help. Gauti Eggertsson and Neil Mehrotra, economics professors at Brown University, argued in a recent paper that the combination of the financial crisis, fewer workers and rising income inequality could leave the economy in a state of "permanent recession." The paper, which sought to formalize recent conceptualizing about so called secular stagnation, argued that in a normal cycle, falling interest rates would eventually generate sufficient demand to restore the economy to its historical growth rate. But the Fed has held interest rates near zero since late 2008 and there has been no such rebound. The researchers concluded that the economy might experience "a permanent slump in output" without bold new measures to spur investment, like a large increase in government spending or higher inflation. Mr. Lew, the Treasury secretary, argued on Wednesday that smaller steps, like increased immigration and improved education, could help too. "The choices we make over the years to come can alter this projection" of slower growth, he said. There is little prospect a divided Congress will embrace either approach, but there are still some reasons for optimism. For all his doubt about the current outlook, Mr. Cowen, author of "Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation" (Dutton, 2013), expects that some existing innovations, and some as yet undreamed, will eventually drive faster growth.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Many of us think of the holidays as the giving season. I think of it as the stalking season. That's because I have been relentlessly followed online by advertisements for shapewear. The emails have poured in, and every sales site I frequent Zulily, MyHabit, Ideel has touted their wonders. At this time of year, there are ads for everything, but this clothing category seems particularly egregious. Is it my imagination, or is my inbox trying to tell me something? Something like, "Hey, Lardo! The DVF wrap dress that looked so sleek last year? Now it makes you look like Divine. But don't worry. We're here to help." While the people at Spanx won't say when their sales peak, they do confess to making a special push for "holiday dressing" which often means form fitting, pricier clothes. And that means that the love hate relationship many women have with their "sculpting" undergarments is particularly fraught this time of year. For year round wearers, holidays are simply business as usual. "How can you even be asking me this question?" shouted Jennifer Lupo, a New York lawyer who is to Rago Shapewear what Anna Wintour is to sunglasses. "No woman should ever leave the house without Lycra on her thighs. I don't want to see my own cellulite, so why would I want to see yours?" Aviva Drescher, a former "Housewife" of New York, shared her best shapewear tip. "The secret to Spanx is double Spanx," she said. "You have to wear two at a time for serious sucking in." For some, the uses of these undergarments surpass the simple compression of flesh. "They were great, one, when I fell and broke two ribs, and, two, when I had my spleen removed," said Lynn Weddington Tucker, a retired public relations consultant in New York. Diane Clehane is the Lunch columnist for FishbowlNY on Adweek's website, where each week she bears witness to "thousands of dollars of Spanx in one room" at the media hot spot Michael's. "I can't imagine leaving the house in a dress without them," she said. "If they made one I could put over my head, I would." And then there are those who argue that comfort is paramount. As one friend put it: "I'm 51 years old and I deserve comfort over vanity. In fact, I've earned it." Interestingly, Liz Lange, the woman who changed the way pregnant women dress (from muumuus to clothing that clings), can't stand anything that clings to her. "I know I'm in the extreme minority, but I just can't wear anything like this," she said. "Even tights in the winter: too itchy, too constricting." But many women find themselves caught in the middle; constricted, if you will, by the demands of partygoing, when everyone looks just a little more soignee than you do. It's the reason we rely on our shapewear. Until we don't. "I have actually gone into a host's bedroom with a scissors and cut them from my body," said Lauren Lowenthal, a founder of an academic coaching company in New York. An informal survey on Facebook reveals that a surprising number of garments have met the same fate. Gaylen Ross, a documentary filmmaker in Brooklyn, said she felt bad about it, though. "I have a feeling Spanx have a half life of 2,000 years," she said. Lisa DePaulo, a writer, said she believes that sometimes her shapewear is out to get her. "How about when you're thinking you look great, and you suddenly realize your cami is slowly rolling up your torso?" she said. "I can't tell you how many parties I've come back from and I'm hiking them down in the cab." Part of the problem is that in the Venn diagram of "Looking Good" and "Looking Sexy," shapewear is nowhere in the intersection, as Tina Fey famously demonstrated when, stunning in her slinky dress on a David Letterman farewell show, she then stripped down to her Spanx. Declaring that she was conforming to gender norms for his benefit, she nevertheless wanted him to know the "contraptions" under her dress were "almost medical." Yes, Chrissy Teigen posted a photo of herself at the gym in Spanx in lieu of underwear, and yes, yes, Kylie Jenner posed in her Flat Out Flawless Mid Thigh Body Shaper. Have we mentioned that these women weigh approximately 70 pounds? Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder and owner of Spanx, is fond of saying that your clothes are the art and Spanx is the canvas, and if you don't have the right canvas, it can affect the painting. Fair enough. But no matter how much shapewear improves the lines of the clothes, they will never be mistaken for corsets or knickers or other thrilling Victoriana. "There is simply no sexy way to remove them," said Margaret Kranyak, a San Francisco native. And when you are looking to get lucky at a party, this is a genuine consideration. Ellen Stimson, a writer in Vermont, said: "The sexy promise of the dress is ruined when you take it off and look like an ad for an orthopedic catalog. Better to jiggle now ... and later." The men who weighed in on this subject seemed to agree; the phrase "I don't want to be thinking of my grandmother" was used more than once. "The body is fine the way it is," said Cary Raditz, an institutional investor strategist in Maryland.
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Style
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Book your accommodations through Airbnb and be sure to take out the garbage. If you really want to get a feeling for a city, my experts agreed, do not stay in a hotel. Hotels cater to what they think are your tastes and go out of their way to make you comfortable. Instead, find an actual home that allows you to experience genuine life. Stumble around during a power failure. Take a shower without hot water. Sort the trash; did the neighbors give you the stink eye? Recycling regulations vary from country to country but can be astoundingly complex. Japan has eight categories of trash, including combustibles, noncombustibles, plastics and plastic bottles. If you don't put the right detritus in the right bag, your garbage may be publicly branded with what one expatriate blogger in Nagoya described as "the red sticker of shame." Stop by a local grocery store. Did you find peanut butter and Pop Tarts? Of course not, but even if it's hard to imagine life without typical American foodstuffs, don't despair. George Eves, the British raised, Amsterdam based founder of Expat Info Desk, a website that produces guides for expatriates, said that a growing number of non American businesses cater to American tastes. Mr. Eves singled out My American Market, a French website that sells Dr Pepper, jelly beans and Aunt Jemima syrup among its 900 products. Despite such bounty, there will be difficult to sate cravings that a brief vacation may not reveal, so think hard about what you may miss. A Quora survey answered by 26 American expats pinpointed Mexican food as the No. 1 yearning. For those serious about Cape Breton, Mr. Calabrese warned that the nearest Ikea is a 20 hour drive. (Though another is opening in Halifax, only five hours away.) It's the best way to get a sense of the local topography and find out where everyone goes on weekends. Keep in mind that gas prices are all over the map. The highest price is in Hong Kong ( 7.19 per gallon), the lowest in Venezuela (4 cents per gallon). A study by the traffic app Waze, based on data from 50 million drivers, rated the Netherlands the best country overall for driving, El Salvador the worst. Take off your jacket and imagine the sun beating down on you in midsummer 20 years from now. What may seem like a pleasant climate in spring may be a sopping inferno in summer or cryogenic tank in winter. "If you've never lived by the Equator, you may find you hate being in air conditioning all the time," said Mr. Eves, who has lived in India, Poland, South Africa, Russia and Ukraine, among other places. There's also global warming to consider. Prognosticators say the countries that will endure it best have both fortunate geographic locations and strategies for mitigating the impact. A University of Notre Dame index put Germany and Iceland at the top of the list, Chad at the bottom. Tour the local institutions: real estate offices, international schools, houses of worship but not the hospital, if you can help it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Hiking through Forest Canyon Pass, nearly 11,500 feet above sea level, is a little like jumping into an ice cold pond: It's sobering, invigorating and takes a little getting used to. When I wasn't catching my breath because of the altitude, I was taking in the picture book panoramas of Rocky Mountain National Park. It's tough to beat a visit to Boulder, Colo., if you're looking to get back to nature easy access to several national forests and one of the finest national parks in the country helps but you don't actually have to leave the city at all to experience some exceptionally fine hiking and outdoor activities, as well as some satisfying dining experiences. Boulder is, however, an expensive city. Its real estate costs are some of the highest in the nation, and with Google and Amazon increasing their presence in town, that issue is not likely to go away anytime soon. Fortunately, I was able to get the most out of Boulder for a minimal amount of cash during a visit in July. I flew into Denver International Airport and, faced with high on airport rental car costs, opted to make the somewhat long trek via rideshare to a downtown Avis location. My 42 per day got me a shiny new Subaru Outback (it would not be the last one I saw during this Colorado sojourn). On my way north, I stopped in the town of Louisville at Moxie Bread Co, a top notch bakery that uses organic heirloom wheat. I arrived near closing time, when most of the items were sold out the friendly guy behind the counter took pity on me and gave me a free coffee. The flaky croissant ( 4.50) was excellent, as was a seedy, slightly tangy loaf of millabrod bread ( 6). I headed for the popular Chautauqua Park in the southwest corner of town. At the base of Green Mountain, it offers easy access to trails and hiking up into the famous Flatirons, numbered and distinctive sandstone rock formations on Green Mountain's eastern flank. Parking at Chautauqua can be as taxing as the hike itself, and not cheap, at 2.50 per hour. I got there a little before 5 p.m., when the crowds thin a bit and payment is no longer required to park, and still got in a couple solid hours of hiking before it got dark. Ascending via the Chautauqua Trail, I took in impressive views of downtown Boulder, which had just begun to clear up after an afternoon of rain. How the Flatirons got their name became clear as I made my way up the First Second Flatiron Trail. A seemingly endless cascade of large pinkish brown stones led upward into the trees and brush. Mottled with a spray of green gray lichen, they nearly resembled a camouflage pattern. I stopped at some point during my ascent and looked toward the southeast, where in the distance, a small rainbow was peeking through the clouds out over downtown Denver, about 25 miles away. Hiking is not the only way to get your outdoor fix, however. A different day, I found myself out at the Boulder Reservoir, having purchased a Groupon coupon for a two hour stand up paddleboard lesson from Rocky Mountain Paddleboard ( 39). No one else had signed up , so I had a private lesson with my capable instructor, Graham Oakley. Let's just say my balance isn't the best. As I explained to Graham, I'd tried surfing a number of times and failed fairly spectacularly. "That's O.K.," he said, noting that some surfers will derisively say, "If you can't get up, turn to S.U.P." (stand up paddleboarding). To have the true mountain experience, though, hop into your car and head northwest to Rocky Mountain National Park. As your cell service drops, your spirits rise as the awe inspiring Rockies envelop you. Horseback riding aficionados can stop at Dao House for a two hour ride through the Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs ( 63). My group's guide, Wes, was a bit stiff at first, but channeled his best Gene Autry once we got going into our trek with a full throated rendition of "Back in the Saddle Again." A quick jog through the town of Estes Park lands you at Beaver Meadows Visitor Center (the building itself is lovely, and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright's firm, Taliesin Architects), beyond which you'll have to pay the 25 park entrance fee. You'll want to pick up the 80 American the Beautiful annual pass if you plan to make more than three national park visits during the year. Drive up the beautiful, winding Trail Ridge Road up toward the summit, which exceeds 12,000 feet, and take in all nature has to offer: the alpine tundra, lava cliffs and rock laid bare by 70 million years of geological activity, and the lush, verdant green of the forest below. I pulled into the Alpine Visitor Center past the summit (be warned that parking can be a battle) and crossed the road to follow the Ute Trail, which loops around to Milner Pass at the southwest end of Poudre Lake. I spent the next few hours hiking most of the 4.1 mile trail and then doubling back. Bring plenty of water the hike isn't difficult, but the sun is strong and the air is thin. But the pristine mountain panoramas are unmatched, and I came across only a handful of people on my hike. There were animal sightings, too, including mule deer and many cute yellow bellied marmots. If you need something a bit more down to earth, Boulder can accommodate that, too. I came into town during the Pearl Street Arts Fest, and spent an afternoon perusing the different paintings, jewelry and handicrafts created by the dozens of different vendors set up on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall. There were carved wooden utensils from Jim Talley, upcycled pieces from Bernadette's Handmade Jewelry, prints from Craig Peterson created on coffee stained paper, and playful robot centric art from Lauren Briere. Some of the art was well beyond my budget. But I eventually settled on a dreamy print ( 50) titled "Angeles" from Noelle Phares, who strikingly incorporates her environmental science background into her art. For art in an indoor setting, check out the University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum, a small but excellent museum on the school's campus. Parking isn't free, but the museum is. Boulder's activities are sure to make a visitor work up an appetite fortunately there are a number of great food options. My friend Emily, who runs a local theater company, took me for one of her favorite pizzas in town, a 14 Atomica Pie slathered in Italian sausage, red pepper and garlic at Proto's Pizza in North Boulder. I, in turn, took her to the slightly more upscale Basta for a delightful Daisy ( 15) a wonderful Neapolitan style margherita pizza and a tasty 14 little gem salad with yuzu and hazelnut.
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Travel
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For several years, Christina Giannini had kept one eye on the lookout for an apartment to buy. "You want to feel like your life is together, like you have control and roots," she said. "There's a lot of things you can't control, so in the meantime you work hard and set goals. Owning an apartment was a big goal for me." As a renter, she spent a decade in Hoboken, N.J., and then two years in a midrise building in the West Village. But the neighborhood was noisy and the sidewalks crowded. She had mice. So she moved last year to a one bedroom in the New York by Gehry skyscraper downtown near City Hall. She paid more than 5,000 a month for 700 square feet. Ms. Giannini, who is from Long Island, loved the building's lively lobby and friendly doormen. "I made a lot of good friends there," she said. But her apartment was on the 42nd floor so high that she was alarmed by the whistling wind. The building was in a flood zone, and during Hurricane Sandy the power went out; lighting the way with her iPhone, she climbed all the way up with her ori pei, Louis, then climbed back down and stayed with a friend uptown until the elevators were restored. After that, she resolved to get serious about buying. She wanted a two bedroom in a pet friendly building. "I am not into that whole modern window thing I like prewar," said Ms. Giannini, 40, who works at a financial institution in Midtown. The price had to be less than 1 million, to avoid the mansion tax, which the buyer pays on transactions of 1 million or more. Late last fall, Ms. Giannini began the hunt with a former colleague, Gina M. Kuhlenkamp of Coldwell Banker Bellmarc. They focused on the Upper West Side, with its beautiful rows of brownstones. For 950,000, with monthly charges in the 1,200s, a duplex condominium on a lovely tree lined block of West 76th Street had a large private roof terrace. But inside, it was only 800 square feet in size. Ms. Giannini found the layout impractical, all stairs and closet doors. "It was like a weird loft thing," she said. With so little wall space, "you wouldn't even know where to put furniture." The place later sold for 875,000. Nearby, on West 77th Street, she went to see what 1.3 million would buy. The 1,300 square foot duplex, with monthly charges in the mid 900s, had a backyard, but Ms. Giannini found the first floor dungeonlike. "I felt like things could come in off the street," she said. A well priced co op 749,000, with maintenance in the high 700s on far West 96th Street turned out to be across from a gas station. "If you had car problems, it was great because it was all car repair, car rental, car everything," she said. "The apartment was really nice, but the location was depressing." It sold for the asking price. This past winter, Ms. Giannini went to an open house for a beautiful prewar co op on West 95th Street, listed at 899,000, with monthly maintenance of 1,300. A crowd, mostly couples, had assembled in the lobby. Ms. Giannini took one look around and almost gave up. The open house was so jammed, everyone had to take a number. "That is when the alarm went off," Ms. Kuhlenkamp said. Ms. Giannini worried that the market was tightening, with pent up demand and shrinking inventory. "I feel like I was on the cusp of crazy, the timing," she said. Within weeks, the apartment was in contract, selling for 1.2 million. So Ms. Giannini shifted her hunt to the Upper East Side, where there was more inventory. She loved a two bedroom apartment in Carnegie Hill on a quiet block in the East 90s. The asking price was 775,000, with maintenance in the low 900s. Ms. Giannini bought the place for 980,000 and arrived last month. She enjoys the calm of her new part of town, though the streets seem to close up early. Downtown, "getting dinner, you could walk around later and get what you want," she said. In Carnegie Hill, "at 10:30, it's like oh, no more dinner." She has to figure out where Louis will play, too. No dog run seems convenient, and her pup seems antsy. "He has more friends downtown," Ms. Giannini said. She looks forward to the renovations. The four small window air conditioners she bought from the outgoing tenant for 1,300 are so loud they sometimes drown out the doorbell, and the windows are bolted shut, so there's no fresh air. "I need to work on all this stuff," she said. "It is always an adjustment you get a little bit of anxiety. I am living in the mess right now. I am trying to be patient, because I know my apartment is going to be really nice. But it takes some time."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Gritty, the furry Philadelphia Flyers mascot who took the sports world by storm last year, has always played by his own rules. The 7 foot tall, googly eyed creature with "bully" tendencies has become famous for tackling the on ice entertainment during intermission and fighting opposing teams on Twitter. Now, one family says Gritty took his act too far. The mascot is under investigation by the Philadelphia police after a family accused him of punching a 13 year old boy in the back during a fan event in November, the police said on Wednesday. "The investigation is active and ongoing," the department said in a statement. The costumed character, bright orange with a wild beard and a hockey helmet, was posing for photos with season ticketholders at the event at the team's arena, the Wells Fargo Center. The family of Brandon Greenwell, 13, said Brandon patted the mascot on the head after his picture was taken, and Gritty responded by standing up and punching the boy in the back with a running start. Chris Greenwell, Brandon's father, said a chiropractor found a week later that Brandon had a back bruise. Chris Greenwell contacted Comcast Spectacor, the company that owns the Flyers, to resolve the issue, but filed the police report Dec. 21 because he wasn't satisfied with the results.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Vancouver, with its snowcapped mountains and sleek, squeaky clean downtown can seem to a new visitor to be lacking in urban grit. Which is exactly why for Sara Harowitz, a Vancouver native, the once blue collar district of Hastings Sunrise has so much appeal. Today, the area is a mix of on trend eateries and boutiques as well as mainstays from its humbler days, and Ms. Harowitz loves the variety. "It's unpolished, it's working class, it's a real Vancouver neighborhood," says Ms. Harowitz, who edits the online lifestyle journal Basenotes, which explores wellness and female centric travel, beauty and sustainability. For the past three years, she has rented the top floor of a cozy house in the area with her long term boyfriend, a craft brewer. "There are places that are opening that are trendy and design forward, but it hasn't lost the Polish sausage place and the local market. It feels like home." Here are her top Vancouver spots.w There are trendier java joints in Hastings Sunrise, but East Cafe, with its homey decor, laid back baristas and commitment to pulling perfect shots from its vintage turquoise espresso machine, is where Ms. Harowitz prefers to get her caffeine fix. "It's unpretentious and cozy," she says. "I love places that are design forward but I also love a place where I walk in and it just is what it is."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Eating at a hotel restaurant in Lisbon is often a formal, expensive affair, the exact opposite of what Alexandre Martins, the chief executive of the Internacional Design Hotel in the Baixa neighborhood, was aiming for when he opened Bastardo in September. The brightly lit, 50 seat space has a colorful Pop Art aesthetic: mismatched tables and chairs, Lego block bread baskets and paper settings in bold font declaring "on this magic place mat calories don't count," and prices to match. The menu, too, is playful, though with links to classic Portuguese cuisine. It starts with a cocktail list featuring ingredients like Gummi Bears and cotton candy, as well as the Speedy Gonzalez, a tequila concoction served with caramelized pineapple blowtorched by the bartender. "We want people to have fun," Mr. Martins said. "And we want social interaction." Perhaps this is why, during my early spring visit, our starters arrived with shots: two miniature Bloody Marys accompanying tempura green beans and codfish fritters, and two tiny glasses of port beside melted sheep's milk cheese with tamarillo jam to spread on toast. Some dishes, though, seem designed to be more Instagram friendly than satisfying. Take the French fries that accompanied one entree. They arrived in McDonald's classic red and yellow packaging but bearing the name Bastardo. Unfortunately, the fries themselves were indistinguishable in taste from the fast food version. (Some improvement would have been welcome.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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Prairie dogs with a taste for peanut butter, scientists reported recently, can now be vaccinated against plague the Black Death that killed much of Europe centuries ago. Plague, which arrived in the United States through San Francisco in 1900, has persisted in rodents in the American Southwest. Their fleas may carry the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which causes the illness, and the parasites sometimes bite pets and humans. Last week, New Mexico reported its third human case of plague this year. (The once unstoppable disease can be cured with antibiotics if it's caught early.) Wildlife officers sometimes try to control plague among prairie dogs by dusting their colonies with insecticides. But that is labor intensive, and pesticide resistance in some fleas has been reported.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Making Sense of 'One of the Most Baffling Animals That Ever Lived' None An artist's rendering of the Triassic Era aquatic reptile Tanystropheus. Its nine foot neck contained only 13 vertebrae. Nearly 250 million years ago, a very odd reptile patrolled the shorelines and coves of the Triassic Alps. Called Tanystropheus, it had a toothy head and a body echoing that of modern monitor lizards. But between them stretched a horizontal, giraffe like neck. The question of how this 20 foot creature used that nine foot neck has bedeviled paleontologists for over 100 years, and it is seen as "one of the most baffling animals that ever lived," said Stephan Spiekman, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. "How could this animal even breathe or swallow? And then there is the evolutionary question: Why on earth did this animal evolve this ridiculously long neck?" But research published last week in Current Biology, including a new reconstruction of its skull, shows evidence that its body was primed for an aquatic hunting strategy and that the creature came in two varieties: regular and miniature size. Tanystropheus was initially described in the 1850s, based on a few tubelike bones. Only in the 1930s, when more complete fossils emerged from the Monte San Giorgio in Switzerland, did scientists realize they were looking at neck vertebrae from a strange reptile whose way of life they couldn't figure out. A digitally reconstructed skull of Tanystropheus, made from C.T. scans of crushed skull pieces. It took decades until the paleontologist Karl Tschanz showed in 1988 that ribs underneath the neck vertebrae interlocked, forming a horizontal and extremely stiff neck. That suggested an aquatic lifestyle, Mr. Spiekman said, because such an unbending neck would have made life on land inconvenient. But paleontologists continued to argue whether Tanystropheus actively pursued underwater prey or perched onshore, using its long neck like a fishing pole. To make matters more confounding, digs had found multiple skeletons of smaller Tanystropheus on Monte San Giorgio. If they belonged to juveniles, as some suggested, why did they have different teeth? Mr. Spiekman's team sought answers first by CT scanning a specimen of Tanystropheus' head from a Zurich museum, and reconstructing it, which proved difficult because "all the bones were jumbled together, and because the skull of Tanystropheus is very different from other reptiles in many respects." "I very clearly remember the day the model was finished and I was the first to see the face of this animal after 242 million years," he said. The reconstructed skull revealed several aquatic adaptations: nostrils positioned on the top of the snout, like a crocodile, and long, curved fangs. Instead of pursuing prey actively, Mr. Spiekman said, it probably ambushed them in murky water, lunging forward with its long neck to snap up fish. Smaller specimens of Tanystropheus turned out to be a separate species, not juveniles of the larger specimens. To test whether the bones of the smaller Tanystropheus belonged to juveniles or a separate species, the team studied thin sections of bone prepared by Mr. Spiekman's supervisor and co author, Torsten Scheyer. A close look at the little bones' interior revealed clear signs of a fully grown adult. That meant that two distinct species of Tanystropheus were coexisting in the same waters: one large, one mini. The two closely related animals seem to have gone after different types of prey, the team reports, in an example of the phenomenon known as niche partitioning. The larger animal newly named Tanystropheus hydroides used its spiked teeth for hunting fish and squid; the smaller species' teeth point toward a diet of marine invertebrates such as shrimp. With two mysteries solved, Mr. Spiekman and his team hope to take a fresh look at the biomechanics of the jaws, and that long, strange neck. "People always thought that Tanystropheus was an evolutionary dead end," he said. "But the fact that Tanystropheus evolved into different species with very different lifestyles indicates that Tanystropheus and its neck were quite successful in evolutionary terms."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The judge in a contentious lawsuit that tried to stop the long in the works merger between T Mobile and Sprint is planning to rule in favor of the deal, according to three people briefed on the matter. The verdict, expected Tuesday, will come at the end of an unusual suit filed in June by attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia. The challenge came after federal regulators gave their blessing to the deal, which would combine the nation's third and fourth largest wireless carriers and create a new telecommunications giant to take on the two largest, AT T and Verizon. The states argued that the combination of T Mobile and Sprint would reduce competition in the telecommunications industry, lead to higher cellphone bills and place a financial burden on lower income customers. Judge Victor Marrero of United States District Court in Manhattan presided over the case. Final arguments took place last month. None of the parties have read the ruling yet, the three people said, leaving open the possibility that the decision includes conditions or restrictions. Both companies are planning to make announcements on Tuesday, the people said. Shares in Sprint shot up more than 60 percent and T Mobile stock rose about 10 percent in aftermarket trading.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The title page for an unpublished manuscript related to Malcolm X's autobiography, one of several long rumored fragments that were sold on Thursday. For a quarter century, they have been the stuff of myth among scholars: three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," reputedly cut from the manuscript after his assassination in 1965 because they were deemed too incendiary. Their possible existence was first teased at in 1992, when a private collector at an estate sale scooped up material belonging to Alex Haley, Malcolm X's collaborator on the book. Years later, one biographer was allowed a 15 minute look at some of the papers, but otherwise they have been mostly locked away, surrounded by a haze of cultivated mystery. But now the unpublished material, or at least some of it, has suddenly emerged and was offered for sale Thursday at a Manhattan auction house, along with another artifact that scholars have never seen: the manuscript for the published book, which bears dense traces of Mr. Haley's and Malcolm X's complex negotiations over the finished text. At the auction, an unpublished chapter called "The Negro" was picked up by the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for 7,000. There were no offers on the manuscript for the published version, which had an opening minimum bid of 40,000. But after some hushed conversations in side rooms, it was announced that the Schomburg located on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, and already home to a large collection of material that had been held by Malcolm X's family had acquired the manuscript for an undisclosed sum, along with nearly a dozen unpublished fragments that had also gone unsold. "'The Autobiography' is one of the most important books of the 20th century," Kevin Young, the director of the Schomburg, said after the auction. "To have the version with Malcolm X's corrections, and to be able to see his thoughts taking shape, is incredibly powerful." The manuscripts were included in a sale of African American historical artifacts by Guernsey's auction house. The sale also included an item that had attracted considerable media interest in recent years: a Detroit house associated with Rosa Parks that had been bought by an artist, disassembled and shipped to Germany, then shipped back again for sale. (The house, which had a minimum price of 1 million, received no bids.) But it was the appearance, with little advance fanfare, of the Malcolm X material that caused a stir among scholars, some of whom expressed alarm before the auction that manuscripts that had been locked away by one private collector might disappear into the hands of another. Jeanne Theoharis, a biographer of Rosa Parks who has written about conflicts with her estate over access to Parks's archives, expressed relief that the Malcolm X material had gone to the Schomburg, where it will be available to researchers, and not a collector. Too often, said Dr. Theoharis, who attended part of the auction, "whoever has money can buy what they like, scattering it to the winds." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Komozi Woodard, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College who is writing a book about the final year of Malcolm X's life, said he was "shocked" when he learned about the auction earlier this week. "If we're trying to figure out where Malcolm would have taken us, some of those papers have clues to that puzzle," he said. Since Malcolm X's assassination by members of the Nation of Islam, there have been battles over the meaning of his life, in particular its tumultuous last year, when he broke with the Nation of Islam, traveled to the Middle East and renounced his philosophy of racial separatism. There have been equally fierce battles over his literary remains. Papers removed from his family's home by one of his daughters and later seized by owners of a storage facility were nearly auctioned in 2002, before scholars and family members organized an effort to have the collection placed intact at the Schomburg Center. The manuscripts for "Autobiography" remained in the possession of Alex Haley, and when he died, they went to auction to settle claims against his estate. They were sold for more than 100,000 to Gregory Reed, a Detroit area lawyer who has represented Rosa Parks and various Motown musicians. The material landed at Guernsey's as part of a complex bankruptcy proceeding involving Mr. Reed. Over the years, Mr. Reed had offered teasing glimpses of the missing chapters, which he said were titled "The Negro," "20 Million Muslims" and "The End of Christianity." The scholar Manning Marable, in the run up to the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning 2011 biography of Malcolm X, described meeting Mr. Reed in a Detroit restaurant and being given a mere 15 minutes to look at some unpublished pages. Dr. Marable (who died just before his biography was published) said it was unclear why the material had been cut from the book, which was published after Malcolm X's death. But he emphasized how the book had been profoundly shaped by Mr. Haley's own integrationist, liberal Republican point of view. "He was deeply hostile to Malcolm's politics," Dr. Marable said in a 2009 interview. In 2010, Mr. Reed read excerpts at an event at the former Audubon Ballroom (now the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Center), promising that the three chapters would be published soon. "There was not much revelation," he said. "I left thinking to myself, I don't think this is going to be what people think it's going to be." Jason Anthony, a literary agent for the Malcolm X estate, said he did not think there had been any recent discussions with Mr. Reed about publishing the material, which would require the estate's permission. It remains to be seen what scholars will make of the material and how it relates to Mr. Reed's longstanding claim of having found three missing chapters. The manuscript for the published book, held in a black binder, is missing some pages. There are a number of unpublished fragments, including some that Guernsey's offered as single pages or slips of paper that bore marks where staples had held them to another page. (Most of these went to the Schomburg Center.) But only one item the 25 page typescript of "The Negro," bought by the Schomburg for 7,000 resembles a full chapter. In others, he affirms Malcolm X's comments, as in a passage describing corruption in "some of America's topmost white circles," where he pencils in "I know!" As for "The Negro," it begins with a blast: "The Western World is sick. The American society with the song of Christianity providing the white man with the illusion that what he has done to the black man is 'right' is as sick as Babylon. And the black man here in this wilderness, the so called 'Negro,' is sickest of them all." The text, which appears to have been written before Malcolm X's break with the Nation of Islam, makes little reference to his own life story. Instead it gives a broad, unsparing analysis of what he considered the hypocrisies of white America and the delusions of "integrationist" blacks a word he repeatedly puts in scornful quotation marks who seek its acceptance. "We are like the Western deserts; tumbleweed, rolling and tumbling whichever way the white wind blows," he writes. "And the white man is like the cactus, deeply rooted, with spines to keep us off." Mr. Ali, who is now an oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society, said that the manuscripts, taken together, could help shed light on the way Malcolm X's purpose for the autobiography changed over time, as his ideas, and his relationship with the Nation of Islam, changed. As for cutting "The Negro" and other alterations, he said he took a "softer" view of Mr. Haley's editing than Dr. Marable had. "Haley was trying to write a story using the conventions of narrative," he said. "At some points, his problem with Malcolm was that he was speechifying. But Malcolm's objective was to speechify, to present his arguments."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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If the French Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who bought Sotheby's in June in a deal worth 3.7 billion, needed proof that auctions are unlike any other business, he got a clear introduction to that reality during this week's unpredictable sales. On Tuesday night, Sotheby's saw a 40 percent drop in its Impressionist and modern art sales compared with the equivalent sale last May. By Thursday, the auction house was heartened by the 270.6 million total of its contemporary art sale though that, too, was 28 percent lower than the spring total. To drive home the fickleness of the salesroom, Christie's, on Wednesday, achieved an auction high for an Ed Ruscha work, fetching 52.5 million for the Prince of Pop's 1964 word painting "Hurting the Word Radio 2." The following night, Sotheby's, on the other hand, couldn't even manage to sell Mr. Ruscha's egg yolk on silk, "She Gets Angry At Him," from the collection of the designer Marc Jacobs. Ultimately, the auction house brought the piece back to the block as the last lot of Thursday evening and sold it for 1.7 million, below its 2 million low estimate. "The art business is not something you can equate to any other business," Helly Nahmad, a New York dealer, said. "They're not selling stocks and bonds here. They're selling fine art." This week's sales provided ample evidence of why the art market continues to defy predictions and to confound those looking for results they can count on. This auction season was buffeted by uncertainty around geopolitical trends. Collectors held onto their best material but, at the same time, buyers were still willing to pay top dollar for the best works that did emerge. The auction houses suffered in the absence of any major estate sales. On the other hand, they benefited from the seemingly insatiable appetite for blue chip works of contemporary art. In the end, as in recent years past, dealers, collectors and the auction houses themselves were able to end the week trumpeting the results as proof of a resilient market. "A lot of people bidding a lot of money on a lot of paintings," said Marc Glimcher, president and chief executive of Pace Gallery. "It was a strong sale. Everybody's happy." Mr. Drahi, who took Sotheby's private in a surprise deal and recently appointed Charles F. Stewart from Altice USA as his chief executive is expected to try to streamline Sotheby's, paring down costs at the auction house and emphasizing digital development. But art experts also caution that applying standard business practices has been tried before and may continue to prove challenging. The particular alchemy of the auction world depends on personal relationships with collectors, on auction specialists with years of expertise and on the serendipity of a live sale in which bidders decide often in the heat of the moment to go to the mat for the same object. That type of frenzied excitement was evident on Thursday night at Sotheby's, as bids came fast and furious for Kerry James Marshall's "Vignette 19" park scene of 2014, propelling the final price to 18.5 million well over the high estimate of 7. 5 million. (Though shy of the painter's top auction price of 21.1 million last year for "Past Times," bought by Sean Combs.) Four bidders also competed for Mr. Marshall's 2013 painting, "Small Pin Up (Lens Flare)," which sold to the Los Angeles dealer Stavros Merjos for more than twice its low estimate: 5.5 million. Mr. Marshall's mentor, the late printmaker and painter Charles White who last year was the subject of a MoMA retrospective also had a big night, his first in a Sotheby's evening sale. Mr. White's poignant and impressively large 1953 charcoal drawing went for 1.8 million against a low estimate of 500,000, setting a new auction high for the artist. Called "Ye Shall Inherit the Earth," the drawing shows Rosa Lee Ingram, an African American woman who became an icon of the social justice movement. In the late 1940s she was accused, with her two sons, of killing a white sharecropper. All three were sentenced to death, but after a public outcry, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The strength of these artists Thursday night was emblematic of a growing interest at auction in artists of color. An abstract painting by Norman Lewis, "Ritual" from 1962, sold for 2.8 million, a record at auction for the artist's work. Works by Mark Bradford brought strong prices at both Christie's ( 7.54 million) and Sotheby's ( 5.8 million). Last month at a Phillips sale in London, a sculpture by Simone Leigh set a new auction high for the artist at more than 215,000 on a top estimate of about 74,000. "African American art is strong at the moment," the dealer Christophe Van de Weghe said. "The auction houses have struggled to find good material. People don't want to sell their paintings. But when the auction houses find good things, they fly." At the same time, the more obvious trophies were also in high demand. Three abstract paintings went to Asian bidders. Willem de Kooning's large scale abstract, "Untitled XXII" which was sold by the New York art dealer Bob Mnuchin and had never before been offered at auction went for 30.1 million, having been guaranteed by a third party to sell at 25 million. The different results at Sotheby's and Christie's contemporary sales made clear how dependent auction houses are on the quality of the consignments they are able to corral each season. All but four of Sotheby's lots were successful, with 70 percent selling for hammer prices above their low estimates. The previous evening at Christie's, 40 percent of the material sold below estimate. "Maybe they had a more interesting mix of things," said the art adviser Nancy Whyte, speaking of Sotheby's. At Phillips earlier on Thursday night, the total results were healthy, if not exactly effervescent: 108.1 million, up slightly from May's sales. "Everyone is a little apprehensive at the moment," said Frances Beatty, a New York based art adviser. "Art is very easy to buy, but not so easy to sell." One of the most remarkable signs of nervousness in the current market is the fact that auction sales of works by the American graffiti artist and designer KAWS ( 70.6 million) were higher in the first half of 2019 than those of the art market powerhouse Jean Michel Basquiat ( 65.6 million), according to Artnet's latest Intelligence Report. T he Phillips sale included Mr. Basquiat's red dominated 1981 canvas, "The Ring," showing one of the artist's trademark boxers in polka dot shorts triumphantly holding a spear above his head. Guaranteed to sell for at least 10 million, the painting went to the art adviser Abigail Asher for 15 million, with fees.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Mike Vavalle, 37, likes to joke that being the clubhouse manager for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, a Class AA affiliate of the Mets in Binghamton, N.Y., is really just "glorified babysitting." In the spring and summer, he keeps the NYSEG Stadium clubhouse clean and outfitted with meals and snacks. He washes players' uniforms. He even runs errands for Rumble Ponies players, who are often at the stadium from midmorning until late at night and don't have time to, say, drop off a rent check. The days are long, but there are perks: Sometimes Mr. Vavalle gets to "babysit" future celebrities, or current ones. His most famous charge? Tim Tebow, the former N.F.L. quarterback who has been playing minor league ball with the Mets organization since 2016. "Right now, we're fine," he said. But if there's no baseball for the rest of the year, "It could make the fall and winter a little tougher. I'm nervous, a little bit." Much has been said about how the Covid 19 pandemic and the measures taken to prevent the spread of disease could hobble the national and global economy. Already, the numbers are staggering: The U.S. unemployment rate in May was 13.3 percent, higher than in any recession since World War II. But we also need to understand how the coronavirus has affected smaller economies local ones, in which an interruption to one business could leave everyone who depends on it for money suddenly empty handed. Every spring and summer, the business of baseball employs multitudes. Tens of thousands of people collect paychecks working for minor league baseball teams and stadiums. This year, many of those workers are without some or all of their usual income. In towns like Binghamton where, in a normal season, hundreds of locals would be on the Rumble Ponies' payroll the downstream economic effects of the season derailed by Covid 19 are rapidly becoming apparent. Perhaps the most obviously disadvantaged parties when a baseball season vanishes are the players. And indeed, the life of a minor league ballplayer wasn't all that glamorous to begin with. Because the season was suspended before spring training ended, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies never had an official 2020 roster. But Stefan Sabol, 28, played five seasons with the Mets minor league organization, the last of which was in Binghamton in 2016. Money was tight that summer. His paychecks, he recalled, were somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 a month before New York's famously high tax rates kicked in. But while Major League Baseball pays the players and coaches, the rest of a minor league franchise is largely local and self sustaining; it's kept afloat primarily by retail, sponsorships and ticket sales. In Binghamton, the first has taken a big hit. The other two have essentially evaporated. Jessica Swartz, the Rumble Ponies' director of merchandise and retail sales, said her department has managed to bring in "at least 60 percent" of what they would be making in a normal year by running promotions online. But Kelly Hust, the director of business operations, said that's basically the only money coming in. "We can't operate," Ms. Hust said. "We have no games." In a normal baseball season, some 300 employees are on the Rumble Ponies' payroll, and by this point in the year, the season would be in full swing. Instead, the payroll has dwindled to just nine or 10 full timers, by Ms. Hust's estimate. The seasonal workers, she said, are "probably all trying to get unemployment." Stephen Spero, 69, has spent the last six summers working at NYSEG Stadium as an usher a job he loves because it allows him to watch baseball while meeting people and getting a little exercise. This spring has been "not as interesting," as he's mostly been at his home with his wife "watching too many British crime dramas." Mr. Spero is retired, and the income he makes from gigs like ushering isn't the incentive so much as the work itself is, he said. Still, it's nice to have a little extra cash on hand. For Colin Perney, however who has about one more week of teleconferencing into classes before his sophomore year of high school officially ends the loss of a baseball season could effectively mean the loss of any income all year. Mr. Perney, 16, spent the last two summers working as a batboy. In 2019, he made close to 1,700.There are few opportunities for him to make money now. Most of the places he'd like to work besides the stadium, he said, told him he had to be 18. The Colonial a bar near the stadium, where the wait for a table can be upward of 45 minutes on a game night has also felt the effects of baseball's absence. Jordan Rindgen, 31, a co owner of the bar, was hoping to do big business in mid July, when Binghamton was supposed to host the Eastern League All Star Game. "Such a huge influx of people coming in from out of town, that always helps," Mr. Rindgen said. Instead, he spent his early spring laying off the entire front of house staff. (Mr. Rindgen was eventually able to bring many staffers back: Takeout and delivery have been bringing in some revenue, and he and his co owners started a fried chicken pop up restaurant using the bar's Paycheck Protection Program money, rehiring several staffers to work in it.) Mr. Szczesny has his doubts as to whether NYSEG Stadium, or any North American stadium, will hold baseball games this year. There are rumors that even if the major league games come back, there won't be a minor league season. But much of the Binghamton baseball community remains optimistic that a 2020 season will happen, somehow. Mr. Spero checks online for updates on the negotiations to restart the season at least twice a week; he'll be at the ready the day the park opens back up, he said. Mr. Vavalle, meanwhile, checks for updates every day. Note: The photographs in this story were made by merging three photographs into one. The combination includes one image of the subject and a second image of the same setting, without the subject, flipped horizontally and placed on the canvas twice, on either side of the subject. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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On stage at the Slipper Room this month, Lilly Hayes, the performer known as Miranda Raven, kicked off her black moon boots before zipping out of her astronaut costume to reveal a pair of jeans, white button down shirt and denim jacket the signature look of River Song, a character from "Doctor Who." The theater that Thursday night was filled with fans of the BBC series Whovians, as they call themselves hooting and applauding at a noise level befitting a boxing match, as Ms. Hayes unabashedly jumped, swiveled, rolled on the floor and shimmied her way around the stage in time with Pink's "Trouble." By the end of the song, her jeans, shirt, jacket and space gear strewed the floor. Ms. Hayes was naked, holding up two black signs that said "Spoilers" River Song's catchphrase over her breasts and pubic area. Welcome to nerdlesque, the geeky, pop culture offshoot of burlesque that grew out of the art form's 1990s renaissance. Rather than luring crowds through feminine beauty and glamour, nerdlesque, which has been compared to fan fiction, lets them revel in their nerdoms among like minded people. It has gained such a following in New York City that it got its own festival in 2014. Hotsy Totsy Burlesque, which hosted the tribute to "Doctor Who," has a lengthy catalog of shows that riff on movies, books and recent TV hits like "Mad Men" and "American Horror Story," as well as classics like "The Muppets" and "Golden Girls." Its Harry Potter tributes this year's was "Harry Potter and the Cursed Pastie: Parts Left and Right" sell out, and every December the group skewers "The Star Wars Holiday Special," the ill fated 1978 TV movie George Lucas would surely like to forget. And if not everyone in the audience understands the inside jokes, deep cuts and nods to source material, that's O.K. the performers' sincerity and the audience's excitement are entertainment enough. Last summer, the Brooklyn based Metropolis Burlesque held a show celebrating the Netflix series "BoJack Horseman" at the Slipper Room. The performer known as Petite Renard, who withheld her name out of concern for her personal safety, began her act by pretending to snort coke off a tray before stripping down to a purple muffin shaped merkin to the Dandy Warhols' "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth." The references delighted fans in the audience, who instantly recognized her as one of the show's characters: Sarah Lynn, a drug addicted, former child actress who released a highly sexualized single titled "Prickly Muffin." And for non fans, it was still an opportunity to see a curvy woman's nearly naked body. The burlesque performer known as Moe Cheezmo, who did not want to reveal his name for fear of losing his job, said the appeal of nerdlesque for fans is that it is more fun and risque than just talking plot points and exchanging finale predictions. "If you're doing a staged version of a 'BoJack Horseman' fan fiction, no one is going to come to that," he said. But put nudity into the mix, and you're giving people a forum for a kind of sexual exploration that seems less lewd than a strip show. "They can square it in their head with their own value system," he said. "I'm not going to exploit people who are taking their clothes off," he added, "I'm going to support my fandom." Until 1942, burlesque in New York City was defined by glamorous women performing strip teases. That's when the last burlesque house shut down, following Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia's lengthy campaign to rid the city of vice. In the late '90s, as Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani fought a battle similar to his predecessor's, artists were reviving burlesque and transforming it into an outlet for self expression and social commentary. Its goals were no longer solely to satisfy the male gaze or provide an escape from reality. It became a kind of performance art. Neoburlesque, as it's known, also embraced performers whose bodies, sexual identities and ages weren't often seen onstage. This is even more the case with nerdlesque. When Cyndi Freeman, a writer and podcast producer who plays the ditsy, pink haired Cherry Pitz in Hotsy Totsy shows, joined the burlesque community a decade ago at 43, it was a defiant act against ageism and a declaration of pride for her body. "I was hearing people say, 'You're too old,' " she said. But she was adamant: " 'This is what I'm going to do.' " Ms. Freeman and her husband, Brad Lawrence, put on monthly nerdlesque shows at the Slipper Room, on the Lower East Side, which has served as a home to neoburlesque since 1999. Mr. Lawrence wrote in an email that, aside from some gentle ribbing, relationships between nerds like him and the more avant garde performers have been supportive. "But maybe I just never cared enough to find out that people were genuinely mad because I was having too much fun." At the end of the "Doctor Who" show that night, Ms. Freeman, wearing her signature pink bouffant wig, seductively removed her fishnet stockings, black tutu and silky blue corset which recalled the police box the Doctor uses for time travel to reveal a black thong and light up nipple covers. A few minutes later Mr. Lawrence, dressed as the Tenth Doctor, re emerged for some witty banter and Whovian humor. Almost nonstop for the duration of the act, the crowd screamed for more more skin, more dancing, more merriment, more nerdiness. Before the performance, Mr. Lawrence had considered why people came to these shows. "Life is hard, and work is tedious," he had said. Fans watch a funny strip tease with their favorite characters, they laugh, they drink. "They feel better at the end of it. If that is the only thing I can contribute to the world, that's fine."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The popularity of the long running animated series "The Simpsons," "South Park" and "Family Guy" defied the common perception that cartoons are just for kids. In fact, some of the best American animated shows of recent years have featured cultural references and subject matter best appreciated by viewers who've lived long enough to get the jokes and who are mature enough to understand the emotions and experiences the series' creators are exploring. Here are 11 sophisticated, hilarious and sometimes even philosophical shows for adults to stream ... but only after the youngsters are in bed. Stream it on DC Universe; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. One of the most recent animated shows "for mature audiences only" is also one of the most gleefully vulgar. Kaley Cuoco (of "The Big Bang Theory" fame) gives a fantastically foul mouthed voice performance as Harley Quinn, the deluded ex sidekick of the supervillain the Joker. Made for Batman fans who have a sense of humor and who have a high tolerance for blood splatter and profanity the hilariously irreverent "Harley Quinn" looks like an ordinary superhero cartoon but is spiked with jokes about the twisted psychology of caped crusaders and their maniacal archenemies. Stream it on Hulu; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. As clever as it is controversial, this freewheeling satire starts with the basic concept of "Back to the Future" with a mad scientist and his teenage sidekick, hopping through time and space and then quickly becomes a ferocious and hysterically funny critique of fantasy adventure stories. As the drunken super genius Rick and his gung ho grandson Morty swing through one reality bending caper after another, they leave massive destruction in their wake, in densely packed stories that are framed by the creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon's knowing and nihilistic take on science fiction. (Read the New York Times review.) Stream it on Hulu; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. Not to diminish the legacy of "The Simpsons," but "Futurama" may be the best TV show that the producer Matt Groening has ever made. Set in the 31st century, this loving spoof, which was canceled after four seasons on Fox and later revived by Comedy Central, features smart riffs on classic science fiction tropes like robot uprisings, ecological disasters and alien invasions. But at heart this is a charming and wise commentary on existence itself, with a cast of freaky characters humans, extraterrestrials, machines and mutants who react to the wonders of their world with the same blase, self interested attitude that seems to dominate life in any era. (Read the New York Times review.) In the decade after "The Simpsons" became a hit, TV producers tried and mostly failed to emulate its success. The most enduring "Simpsons" inspired series was "King of the Hill," created by Mike Judge (the creator of "Beavis and Butt Head") and Greg Daniels (a writer for "The Simpsons" who later was a creator of NBC's "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation"). This amiable domestic sitcom, set in small town Texas, arrived in the late 1990s, at a time when America's regional and political divisions were getting harder to ignore. "King of the Hill" presents a nuanced portrait of a deep red state, where the propane salesman Hank Hill tries to cling to his old fashioned values while acknowledging that times are changing. Stream it on Hulu; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. In a quaint oceanfront neighborhood, Bob Belcher struggles to keep his hamburger restaurant going, with the help of his eternally optimistic wife, Linda, and their three eccentric kids: the boy crazy Tina, the impulsive Gene and the benignly mischievous Louise. With just that simple premise, the "Bob's Burgers" creator Loren Bouchard has produced some of the funniest, sweetest and most imaginative TV comedy of the past decade. With the help of some colorful animation and the occasional catchy song these unassuming 22 minute stories about school, holidays, family gatherings and cooking play like rich sagas, full of life and wit. (Read the New York Times review.) Buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. "Bob's Burgers" fans should venture further back into Bouchard's career and watch the show he created with Brendon Small, about a preteen boy (voiced by Small) who works through his anxieties by making microbudget films with his friends. "Home Movies" isn't as polished as "Bob's Burgers." The animation and character designs are cruder and the stories are more loosely plotted, with a lot of improvised dialogue. But some voices will sound familiar (in particular that of the comedian H. Jon Benjamin, who plays multiple roles on both shows); and "Home Movies" similarly derives humor from everyday life. Stream it on Hulu; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. Benjamin has become one of TV animation's more prolific and recognizable voice actors. His deep, growly, deadpan tones are flexible enough that he can play both ordinary schmoes and in "Archer" a hard boiled secret agent who loves Burt Reynolds movies and sophomoric sexual innuendo. "Archer" works as both a stylish parody of spy thriller cliches and as a legitimately thrilling action adventure show. But it's primarily a dark, raunchy comedy, featuring very funny actors whose characters approach the job of international espionage as just another dreary office gig, full of annoying co workers and mundane hassles. (Read the New York Times review of Season 7.) Stream it on Hulu; buy it on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu or YouTube. Before "Archer" or "Rick and Morty," the Adult Swim series "The Venture Bros." was already delivering savvy pulp parodies laced with impressively obscure pop culture references. Loosely based on "Johnny Quest," Fantastic Four comics and many other action adventure stories about heroic families, "The Venture Bros." imagines iconic cartoon and comic book characters as older and embittered, embarrassed by their mixed legacies. Throughout the series, the creator Christopher McCulloch (credited as his pseudonym, Jackson Publick) references a larger, long vanished mythology, borrowed from the best of old genre favorites. The show suggests that sometimes even years of honor and glory can leave heroes feeling hollowed out.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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LENOX, Mass. There are really two Tanglewoods here in the bucolic Berkshires. One is the popular summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The other is the less known Tanglewood Music Center, the orchestra's prestigious training institute for exceptional student performers and composers. But during a few densely scheduled days every summer, the Tanglewood Music Center takes center stage to present the Festival of Contemporary Music. This year's edition, directed for the second consecutive year by the composer and conductor Thomas Ades and spread over five days, was no exception. On a recent visit, I attended both festival events and Boston Symphony programs a total of eight concerts in three days, an exhilarating immersion in the two Tanglewoods. Before Saturday night's Boston Symphony concert at the open air Shed, the festival presented a program at the smaller Seiji Ozawa Hall performed by students along with members of the New Fromm Players, a contemporary music ensemble comprising recent alumni of the Tanglewood center. Though billed as a "prelude," it was a substantive 90 minute program with challenging works by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Chaya Czernowin and Poul Ruders (whose latest opera, "The Thirteenth Child" recently premiered at Santa Fe Opera). Mr. Ruders's String Quartet No. 4 (2012) was especially striking in the incisive performance here. This 30 minute work exemplifies the composer's postmodern style, juxtaposing gritty harmonies, fiendish outbursts, dancing episodes and radiant lyricism contrasts so sudden they can seem like non sequiturs. A busy Sunday began at 10 a.m. with an ambitious contemporary music program that drew a sizable, and intrepid, audience to Ozawa Hall. Andrew Hamilton's "music for people who like art" used obsessively repeated phrases ("art is art" is repeated 81 times) from "25 Lines of Words on Art Statement" by Ad Reinhardt, sung by the soprano Anna Elder backed by a large, percussion heavy ensemble conducted by Jack Sheen. The plucky music is driven by pummeling, often blasting bursts of clipped phrases. The affecting piece in the concert was Nathan Shields's "Commedia," receiving its American premiere. Scored for a chamber orchestra, this is an alternately kinetic and reflective work in the spirit of composers, like Schumann and Stravinsky, who evoked commedia dell'arte in their music. That afternoon, Mr. Ades led the Boston Symphony in a program that opened with Ives's "Three Places in New England" and included two Beethoven staples. The superb Inon Barnatan was the soloist in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, capturing both the majestic and mercurial elements of this great work. Then Mr. Ades led a penetrating account of the "Pastoral" Symphony, conducted with the insights of a fellow composer calling fresh attention to inner details and overarching structure. Later, as part of the festival's Silent Film Project, there were screenings of scenes from classics by Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang and others, with students playing scores composed (in less than two weeks!) by a roster of composers from the Tanglewood center. Several took counterintuitive approaches, writing music that avoided the predictable and genuinely sounded contemporary. The event took place in the all purpose Studio E of the impressive new Linde Center for Music and Learning at Tanglewood, a facility that will specialize in informative public events like this one. Then, at the Shed that evening for my fourth concert that day Yo Yo Ma played Bach's six solo cello suites, part of his two year project to play the complete suites 36 times across six continents. Through related "days of action," Mr. Ma is trying to bring people together to address social issues and "think differently about the role of culture in society," as he describes. Bach surely imagined that these intimate suites would be performed, if at all, in small, homey spaces. Mr. Ma, using subtle amplification within the Shed as well as the routine sound system for listeners on the surrounding lawn, performed the works for a combined audience of 12,766, according to Tanglewood officials. Yet he drew listeners in and made the vast space feel intimate. His performance, it goes without saying, was magnificent. Some passages were played with hushed pianissimos and uncommon delicacy; livelier dance movements truly jostled along. Speaking to the audience, Mr. Ma paid tribute to those in attendance who had come together to devote collective attention to Bach's profound suites, which he played over two hours without an intermission. For an encore, he was joined by his friend James Taylor for a rendition of "Sweet Baby James" the only "suite," Mr. Taylor quipped, that he would ever compose. The festival ended at Ozawa Hall with the Tanglewood Music Center's orchestra in a program of audacious works, beginning with Gerald Barry's "Canada," a puckish piece that appropriates text from the prisoners' chorus of Beethoven's "Fidelio" to create a riotous melange of sputtered words, high pitched shouted singing and coruscating blasts from the orchestra. The tenor Charles Blandy was the fearless soloist; Nathan Aspinall conducted. Killian Farrell led a textured account of Mr. Knussen's "Whitman Settings," which featured two fine sopranos (Elizabeth Polese and Margaret Tigue) sharing the solo part. It was fitting that the festival ended with Mr. Ades leading his "Asyla," a rambunctious, wildly colorful piece that had its acclaimed premiere in 1997 when Mr. Ades was only 26, not much older than the average age of the players in this summer's Tanglewood center orchestra.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Who says that Sleeping Beauty needs a prince? Not the choreographer and director Katy Pyle. In her "Sleeping Beauty the Beast" a two act labor of love that opened the La MaMa Moves! Festival on Friday the young heroine falls in love with a masculine woman, a union organizer in a Gilded Age garment factory. Revision is the mission of Ballez, Ms. Pyle's company of lesbian, gay and transgender performers, who rewrite fairy tale story ballets to include people who self identify the same way. Its adaptation of "Sleeping Beauty" is conceived with impressive thoroughness and many delightfully apt, even brilliant choices. By setting the 16th birthday of the heroine (Aurora) in a Lower East Side garment factory in 1893, close to the premiere date of the Tchaikovsky scored Russian ballet, the Ballez production honors the original while slipping in some local labor history. And her 100 year slumber lands the story in the AIDS epidemic, movingly represented by a corps of Dying Swans in a lesbian nightclub, frighteningly vulnerable in nothing but white briefs, expiring one by one. Most important and affecting, this "Sleeping Beauty" preserves the core story of a girl's sexual awakening, but colors it differently by splitting it across the confusions and anxieties of two very different eras. The scale of the production is also exciting. The cast of two dozen is supported, during the first act, by 18 members of the Queer Urban Orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky right next to or under your seat. For the second act, everyone moves from the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa into the Downstairs Theater in the basement, a shift of location that nicely physicalizes the leap in time and adds to the feeling of a big event.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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On the dinner plate that is planet Earth, there exists a veritable buffet of viruses an amount of biomass that is the equivalent of about 25 billion human beings. So perhaps it's a bit baffling that scientists have yet to pinpoint a species that deliberately eats viruses for energy. But mounting evidence suggests that at least one group of organisms might nosh on nutrient rich viruses: protists, microscopic and often single celled organisms that scientists have struggled to place on the tree of life. Like viruses, protists seethe in seawater by the billions and trillions and some might slurp up marine viruses, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. If the findings pan out, they could help flip a centuries old dogma on its head: Rather than acting only as disease causing agents of chaos and snuffing out life, viruses might in some cases play a role in fueling and sustaining it. The new study alone can't nail the consumptive connection between protists and viruses, said Rika Anderson, a microbial ecologist at Carleton College in Minnesota who was not involved in the study. But protists have been found in a mind boggling array of habitats, from the rotting stumps of trees to animal guts, and may have evolved at least as many strategies to keep themselves fed. "They are kind of eating everything," Dr. Anderson said. "I wouldn't be surprised if viruses were being consumed." A team led by Ramunas Stepanauskas, a microbial ecologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, started the project more than a decade ago. They initially intended to study the prey preferences of marine protists, many of which chow down on bacteria. "The current dogma is that protists eat other single cells," Dr. Stepanauskas said. But after repetitive rounds of analysis, the researchers were surprised and disappointed to find that there wasn't a whole lot of bacterial material to be found. Instead there were viruses of all shapes and sizes, sometimes gunking up cells by the dozens. Protists from two groups, choanozoa and picozoa, were never found without viral genes in their cellular cargo. It was a bizarre discovery, said Julia Brown, a microbiologist at Bigelow Laboratory and the study's first author. But as far back as the 1990s, researchers had posited that some protist species might be capable of co opting viruses for food. In some early experiments, scientists slurried the two types of microbes together in the lab to see if the protists would consume and digest the viruses, Dr. Brown said. But despite encouraging results, this line of inquiry has been paid relatively little attention in the years since. "It just sort of fell off the map," she said. Dr. Brown said genetic experiments that examine one cell at a time could help bolster the case for viral consumption, because they could show what protists have eaten under natural conditions almost like examining the stomach contents of a predatory wild animal. "We get to catch them in the act of whatever they're doing," she said. Technologies precise enough to accomplish this have come into use only in recent years. "This is a particularly nice technical feat that they pulled off," said Rosie Alegado, a microbial oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who was not involved in the study. Still, finding viral genetic material in or around a cell doesn't guarantee that a virus was once lunch. For example, some of the viruses might have infected the protists or simply become stuck to the surfaces of the cells. But Dr. Brown and Dr. Stepanauskas said that some types of viruses were found only in certain groups of protists, hinting that the interactions weren't just happenstance. And many of the viruses identified are thought to be capable of infecting only bacteria, not protists. Another possibility is that the viruses had infected bacteria that were then gobbled up by protists, creating a sort of microbial turducken. But viral and bacterial genetic material didn't always track together, Dr. Brown said, hinting that some protists might have skipped the middleman and gone straight for the viral vittles. Henry N. Williams, a microbial ecologist at Florida A M University who wasn't involved in the study, pointed out that some protists might ingest viruses incidentally. (Even humans unknowingly swallow gobs of viruses every day.) "The protists may be in a highly grazing mode much of the time," he said. Anything in a protist's path within a certain size range could be downed like so much debris, with little nutritional consequence. And if viruses do appear on the protist menu, it remains unclear whether they're a main course or a paltry side dish. Some protists could occasionally snack on viruses as part of a diverse diet, while others feast on them exclusively. Dr. Stepanauskas said that because of their extremely petite size, picozoa which are less than three micrometers across, or about one thirtieth the width of a human hair might eat only viruses. "They may not even be able to consume larger particles," he said. Curtis Suttle, a microbial ecologist who led several early studies on protists that might eat viruses, said his team's unpublished experiments suggested that certain choanozoa could be die hard virovores, too. So while viruses might get a bad rap, Dr. Suttle said, "they're fantastic nutritional sources."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Allegations of illegal marketing tactics. More than 500 cases of severe lung illness in 38 states. Eight deaths . A proposed federal ban of most flavored e cigarettes, and new efforts in many states to counter an epidemic of youth vaping. There's been an avalanche of vaping news this month, which leaves many users facing a crucial question: Is it time to quit? Here's a look at the issues. First, how big is vaping? E cigarettes swept onto the market about a decade ago. They're now a 2.6 billion industry in the United States, and roughly 20,000 vape and smoke shops have sprung up across the country in the past few years. There is also a thriving black market for vape pods. A survey last year found that 10.8 million American adults used e cigarettes and that more than half were also smoking cigarettes. E cigarettes have become especially popular among teenagers. Preliminary results from an annual survey sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and released on Wednesday found that one in four 12th graders said they had vaped in the previous month, a sharp rise from the previous year. Young people are especially susceptible to nicotine addiction and may be more likely to take up regular cigarettes once they are hooked. There was an idea for a while that e cigarettes, because they don't generate smoke and tar, were safer than smoking cigarettes, or at least that they could help a smoker shift to a less dangerous alternative. But the mysterious spate of illnesses thrust concerns about vaping's health effects into the spotlight. Many of the people who got sick were vaping THC, and the authorities are investigating what else black market pods contain. Read more about the surge of severe lung ailments that has baffled doctors. Dr. Albert Rizzo , chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, noted that the organization's opposition to vaping predated the outbreak. He disputed the perception that e cigarettes are a safer alternative, and pointed to the lack of information about what chemicals they contain and the paucity of research about the effects of vaping. "To say that something is safer than a product like cigarettes that kills seven million people in the world each year because of tobacco related disease, and half a million people in this country, is not saying a lot," Dr. Rizzo said. The rise of vaping comes after at least two decades of great success in decreasing smoking rates across the country, and has health experts concerned that those gains could be reversed. Most e cigarettes contain nicotine, which is highly addictive and especially harmful to young people, whose brains are still developing. (The human brain is still developing until you turn 25 or so.) Nicotine can harm the parts of the brain that handle memory, attention and learning. It's also illegal for minors to vape. ( A growing number of states have even raised the vaping age to 21.) And using e cigarettes may make teenagers more likely to smoke real cigarettes in the future. Dr. Rizzo noted that the vast majority of current smokers became addicted before they were 18. Read more about how states are responding to the rise of vaping. Some people may not realize how much nicotine they're ingesting as they puff away. A typical pod made by Juul can contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes and is designed to last for about 200 puffs. "We have a whole new generation of young people in high school and middle school that are now nicotine addicted," Dr. Rizzo said. "We don't know what the dangers of e cigarettes are." While many people use e cigarettes to inhale nicotine, some use it for THC, the high inducing chemical found in marijuana. A large portion of the recent cases of lung illness were in patients who vaped THC. The Food and Drug Administration said that a significant subset of samples of vaping fluid used by sick patients also contained a compound called vitamin E acetate, which has been a subject of further investigation. The F.D.A. has warned people to avoid vaping THC. A minority of the people who got sick said they had used e cigarettes containing only nicotine but there were also concerns that some young people were not being entirely forthcoming about their vaping habits. Public officials are warning people not to vape Public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that people refrain from vaping as the agency investigates the illnesses. They stressed that young people, pregnant women and nonsmokers should never vape. They also cautioned people who do use e cigarettes to monitor themselves for symptoms of lung illness, like coughing and chest pain. An editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine this month stated bluntly that doctors should discourage people from vaping and reiterated that e cigarettes should never be used by nonsmokers. The acting commissioner of the F.D.A., Dr. Ned Sharpless, has said that the issue of tobacco control in the e cigarette era keeps him up at night. The agency got authority over what it calls "electronic nicotine delivery systems" only in 2016, and is now working on new research and regulations. In a statement, Dr. Sharpless noted the inherent paradox of e cigarettes: While they were pitched as a way to get smokers to stop lighting up, they hooked a new generation that may end up smoking traditional cigarettes to get that fix.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Mercedes says both versions of the engine were developed especially for the GT. The engine is in front, but closer than usual to the middle of the car, and the 7 speed dual clutch automatic transmission is at the rear axle, for better weight distribution. The engine and suspension are made from aluminum to reduce weight and improve cornering characteristics. The GT is also equipped with a number of electronic devices for better performance and handling, including an electronically controlled locking differential, electronically controlled damping with three selectable modes comfort, sport and sport plus and, on the GT S, engine and transmission mounts that change stiffness to suit either comfortable cruising or aggressive track driving. The GT will come with 14.2 inch disc brakes on all four wheels, while the GT S will benefit from larger 15.4 inch brakes. Accordingly, the GT will sit on 19 inch wheels and the GT S will wear 20 inch wheels. Mercedes has not announced pricing for the 2016 GT and GT S, but says the GT S will be available in the United States in the spring of 2015. The GT will arrive in 2016.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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The quirky Bay Area city has changed a lot over the years, but its particular brand of nonconformity is still on view for travelers including those without a lot to spend. At the Cheese Board on Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley, Calif., which opened as a small storefront in 1967, you can still get a sense of how things used to be. During a recent visit, a long queue of people snaked out the front door of the pizzeria, which serves one variety of vegetarian pizza daily no substitutions, please. The line was long, but moved quickly, and the sidewalk benches in front were packed with people chatting and noshing on slices smothered with bell peppers, Valbreso feta cheese and briny olives. Inside, a local band The Tear Jerkers played a cover of "The Wind Cries Mary" in front of a big banner reading "Smash the Patriarchy!" The general feeling was one of welcoming and openness: Good community, good music and good food. The city of Berkeley is different now, of course, than it was during the days of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. The average home price is 1.3 million. Income inequality is a major problem, affecting full time residents and students at University of California, Berkeley still very much the nerve center of civic life alike. But Berkeley makes an extraordinary effort to stay true to its freethinking, iconoclastic roots. That it happens to have great food, live music and outdoor activities makes it a perfect place for a quick Bay Area getaway. Doing Berkeley inexpensively can present a minor challenge. But during the course of a few days there, I figured out some ways to get a good return on my dollar. But where to start? Berkeley is pretty manageable on foot, and a good walk around will give you a sense of its geography, from the San Francisco Bay to the Berkeley Hills farther east. Explore beyond the main drags of Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues and discover the other fun pockets of activity throughout the city along Fourth Street in Northwest Berkeley, for example, or at Ashby and College Avenues in the Elmwood District. Berkeley's particular brand of nonconformity was apparent throughout my trip; I first encountered it while getting a pizza one evening at Emilia's Pizzeria, where Keith Freilich rolls out 18 inch, custom made, New York style pies. Unlike most takeout places where you place your order and then pick it up, at Emilia's, you call the same day to reserve a particular pizza. And the supply on a given day is finite. When I checked the website, the next unreserved pizza was around 8:30 p.m. I called and snagged it, ordering a Gina Calabrese ( 28, including tax) with Calabrian chili, onion and sopressata. The shop itself is fairly bare bones there's little else but Mr. Freilich monastically making pizzas alone at a steady pace. The pizza itself, enough for three or four people, was very good, particularly the dough, which had just the right amount of char and chew. While Berkeley is known for spearheading the California cuisine movement (more on that below), sometimes you just need a good hot dog. Top Dog, open since 1966, slings some of the best encased meats in the area. I bought a regular frankfurter and spicy hot link for 3.50 each, dousing them in mustard and onions at the self serve condiment bar (the garlicky, snappy hot link was particularly good). I asked the guy behind the counter for a receipt and he tossed a small booklet and pen onto the counter: "Sure man, just put down whatever you want," he said. On a different part of the spectrum, we have Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, opened in 1971 as a marriage of French technique and local, high quality ingredients. It's frequently credited with pioneering the idea of California cuisine, and the idea that produce heavy, seasonal menus are best. The restaurant is on the expensive side you can expect to pay between 75 and 100 a person in the downstairs restaurant. But there is a workaround: the less formal upstairs cafe, surrounded by the pleasing lines and dark wood tones of a Prairie style home. I ordered the menu du jour a 32 three course lunch, the highlight of which was a plate of perfectly roasted asparagus served with savory lentils, cilantro rice and chard. A central tenet of California cuisine is the value of good product above nearly all else a principle you'll notice everywhere in the city, from the famous Berkeley Bowl grocery store in South Berkeley to Monterey Market farther north, which is smaller, but also excellent. There and at the farmers' markets, of course (there are a few, but the big downtown market takes place just west of the university on Saturdays) it's possible to revel in the glory of California organic produce. During my springtime visit, that included sangria colored orach leaves ( 5.98 a pound), fiddlehead ferns and beautiful wood ear mushrooms (both 15 a pound). The intersection near Monterey Market has a life of its own, with cute shops and stores to explore. I stopped into the Country Cheese, a quirky old market down the street, and picked up a nice chunk of raw cow's milk cheese from Joe Matos Cheese Factory in nearby Santa Rosa that happened to be on sale for 5.84. What better to pair that with than a loaf of fresh bread? A few doors down at Hopkins Street Bakery, I paid 4.25 for a loaf of crusty multigrain bread (and I couldn't resist buying a 3 hamantash to snack on). If you're looking to sample Asian cuisine, Vik's Chaat on Fourth Street does excellent Indian street food in a large space that contains both a restaurant and market. The dahi papdi chaat ( 7) is a glorious mess flat papdi chips served in a big bowl of garbanzos, yogurt and sweet tamarind chutney. Up on Ninth Street, the recently opened Funky Elephant is a good option for Thai cuisine. I particularly enjoyed the nam kao todd a salad of crispy jasmine rice with fermented pork and pig skin ( 12). What may have been the most fun dining deal, though, came at the most unlikely of places. Ready? It's the Faculty Club on the Berkeley campus. When my brother, Loren, and I went one day for lunch, we thoroughly enjoyed it. You don't have to be affiliated with the university to eat there, and while it's not exactly destination dining, it's a great place to stop if you were planning to take a look around the campus anyway which you should. The interior is somewhere between the Great Hall at Hogwarts and Great Northern Hotel from "Twin Peaks" antlers above the fireplace, vaulted ceilings and plenty of long wooden tables. In the Kerr dining room, we sat down and shared a thick, juicy burger ( 9.95) and a soup and salad combo ( 11) with club sandwich and Southwestern style chicken soup. Beyond the Faculty Club, any exploration of the Berkeley campus should include Sather Tower, or the Campanile, a 1914 landmark that's one of the tallest clock and bell towers in the world ( 3 admission). I rode the elevator to the top of the 300 foot structure and was rewarded with a great panorama of the surrounding campus. As far as views go, it's tough to beat, but the Lawrence Hall of Science, perched high above the city, managed to top it. The science center ( 12 admission for adults, 10 for children) is a good place to take the kids, with 4 planetarium shows and fun exhibits like a giant six foot sphere on which planetary data is projected. Another contender for best views are the hills that buttress Berkeley, also worth exploring for the Craftsman and classic wood shingled houses that help give the city its character. There are a number of small, peaceful parks to visit that even provide opportunities for some low key rock climbing. Indian Rock Park was a favorite among those I visited, with easy bouldering and rewarding vistas at the top. (Nearby Grotto Rock Park was not as nice when I visited it was covered in broken glass.) If you're really looking to get into nature, though, a trip to nearby Tilden Regional Park is a necessity. With nearly 40 miles of trails in the 2,000 plus acre park, I found it an ideal place to hike one sunny afternoon, amid Zen like placidity and crisp, clean air. Every budget savvy traveler knows there's nothing better than free, as the parks are. But Dollar Day Sundays at Golden Gate Fields, which straddles the border of Berkeley and Albany, comes very close. Almost everything costs a dollar: admission, programs, hot dogs even parking and beer. It's cheap beer, granted, and the hot dogs are not exactly Top Dog quality, but it's tough to complain when you're paying for everything with pocket change. I took my whole family there one Sunday afternoon to eat, enjoy the festive atmosphere and watch the races. Unfortunately, our betting wasn't as lucrative my 2 exacta box bets in the fourth and fifth races didn't pan out. Afterward, I headed to nearby Albany Bulb, a former landfill turned park, for an entertaining and unconventional hike. The reclaimed space, which crops out into the Bay, has different graffiti and public art exhibits, like a driftwood dragon looking out over the water. For art in a more conventional setting, head to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, located close to campus. Admission ( 13 for adults, free for Berkeley students and staff) includes numerous excellent exhibits, many of which focus on forces that have shaped the lives of Bay residents over the years: Powerful and unsparing photos from Joanne Leonard cataloged lives of West Oakland and Berkeley residents in the 1960s and 70s; and there were lithographic prints from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and founder of City Lights bookstore across the water in San Francisco. If you feel like doing some shopping on your trip, the city is happy to oblige. Get your vinyl fix at the original Amoeba Music on Telegraph, or go down the block to the older Rasputin Music. Tail of the Yak, a small, eclectic shop where you ring a buzzer to get in, is delightful. There's no particular rhyme or reason to the goods on sale at the nearly 50 year old boutique, yet it all fits a congruent aesthetic: lavish, colorful and playful. Oh, and there's a huge cage in the store with live doves. But the place that captured the Berkeley spirit as much as any place I went was Urban Ore; part salvage yard, part thrift store, it's one of the most incredible places I've visited for recycled and upcycled goods. From clothing to electronics, an entire section of loose doors (yes, doors) and a yard full of toilets and sinks, you can easily spend a few hours there. It's eclectic, a little chaotic and inimitable just like Berkeley itself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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If you've been keeping an eye on the ground beneath your feet, you may have noticed an explosion of pattern. It can be seen in public spaces like the Manhattan restaurant L'Amico, designed by Creme; and the Hotel Van Zandt in Austin, Tex., designed by Mark Zeff. And in private spaces, too, like the New York apartment of the actors Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, designed by Ashe Leandro and featured earlier this year in Architectural Digest. What all these spaces have in common is flooring made from encaustic cement tile, a material that has been produced in a multitude of colors and patterns since the 19th century, but which was relatively uncommon in the United States until a few years ago. Now its striking look and chalky matte texture are catching on, and a growing number of manufacturers are giving the product a contemporary update. Caitlin and Samuel Dowe Sandes, an American couple who founded the cement tile company Popham Design in 2007, recalled the moment they discovered the material after moving to Morocco. "We were instantly taken with the medium and the possibilities," Ms. Dowe Sandes said. "The U.S. doesn't have the same history with the product that Europe does, where you sometimes see 150 year old cement tile floors." They were right. "It has been taking off, especially in the U.S.," she said, and sales have been growing by about 40 percent a year. The company opened its first independent boutique in Paris last year; in the United States, Popham's products are available through Ann Sacks, and Popham is in the early stages of planning an American outpost. Among Popham's fans is David Neff, 40, a Brooklyn based architect. After he and his brothers bought a weekend house in Quogue, N.Y., last fall, he put patterned cement tile at the top of his renovation wish list. "Popham Design has about 100 patterns and 100 colors, and it's made to order, so you can assign any color to any pattern," Mr. Neff said. "I spent days staying up until 4 or 5 a.m., playing with different patterns and color combinations on my computer." He also liked the tile's texture. "There's a trend away from glossy, shiny surfaces, and toward matte surfaces, and this fits right in," he said. "It feels nice on the feet, and has a little more grip." Mr. Neff used eight patterns to cover the kitchen backsplash, a fireplace surround and the floors and accent walls in three full bathrooms and a half bath, spending about 20 to 25 a square foot. "I could have done simple white subway tile for a fraction of that, but I did the math and figured I'd be spending an additional 12,000 that would really take the house to another level," he said. "It's one of the places I decided to splurge, to give the house more character." Popham is just one of many companies offering cement tile to American consumers. Others include Cement Tile Shop, Cle, Exquisite Surfaces, Granada Tile, Mosaic House, Villa Lagoon Tile and Waterworks. And as more companies seek to develop patterns of their own, the designer pile on has been fierce. Cle has introduced a line featuring patterns by artists and designers like Erica Tanov, Gachot and Smink Things. Ann Sacks has developed a line with Martyn Lawrence Bullard, a designer whose clients include Elton John and Tommy Hilfiger. And the hugely popular design firm Commune, whose projects include Ace Hotels in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif., introduced one collection with Exquisite Surfaces and has a second in the works. As Roman Alonso, a founder of Commune, explained: "Cement tile communicates something completely different than ceramic tile: It's a vibe that's more Mediterranean. We like it a lot because you can also use it indoor outdoor" with kitchens flowing seamlessly into outdoor patios. But simply getting your hands on it doesn't guarantee a beautiful floor. Cement tile is a very different product from ceramic tile, said Deborah Osburn, who founded Cle in Sausalito, Calif., four years ago, and sells the tile for about 10 to 30 a square foot. It's made in a different way, and has to be handled in a different way a point that contractors who haven't encountered it before may not understand. It's critical that cement tile be sealed after installation, much as marble countertops are, and kept clean until then. "One consideration we deal with constantly," Ms. Osburn said, "is inexperienced contractors who'll slap the grout all over the tile, which can stain the surface." And even after it's sealed, she continued, cement tile will develop a patina, a change that some homeowners appreciate more than others. For those who don't, the tiles can be sanded and resealed, a process similar to refinishing a hardwood floor. Erna Akuginow, 66, and Geoffrey Haines Stiles, 67, saw for themselves how installation can go awry after they and their architect chose cement tile for their kitchen during the renovation of their Jersey City loft last year. The tile, from the Cement Tile Shop, set them back about 4,300 (or about 15 a square foot). "You need an installer who's familiar with it," said Ms. Akuginow, who produces science documentaries with Mr. Haines Stiles. "Our guys were not." When they were done, the new floor looked "gloppy," she said. Hoping it wasn't ruined, they had the installers return, strip the floor and reapply the sealer. This fixed the problem. Now Ms. Akuginow and Mr. Haines Stiles couldn't be happier with their choice. "We like the look of it: It's modern, but not too shiny or glitzy," Ms. Akuginow said, adding that it's also comfortable underfoot. "I've lived in a lot of different houses, and had a lot of different things on the floor," she said, including wood and granite, but no other material has been as pleasing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A band will once again take the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show. The pop group Maroon 5 is scheduled to headline the annual 13 minute extravaganza this February at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., according to two sources familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak on the record. The N.F.L. said in a statement: "It's a Super Bowl tradition to speculate about the performers for the Pepsi Halftime Show. We are continuing to work with Pepsi on our plans but do not have any announcements to make on what will be another epic show." Super Bowl LIII (or 53) will be played on Feb. 3, 2019, and broadcast by CBS. Maroon 5, led by the singer Adam Levine, who moonlights as a coach on NBC's reality singing competition "The Voice," currently has the No. 2 song on the Billboard Hot 100 with "Girls Like You," featuring the rapper Cardi B. Since 2002, the Los Angeles band has released six albums, each of which has gone platinum, including "Red Pill Blues" last year. The group's best known singles include "She Will Be Loved," "This Love," "Payphone," "Moves Like Jagger" and "Don't Wanna Know," featuring Kendrick Lamar. In a 2015 interview with Howard Stern, Mr. Levine said that the band was on a "short list" to play the halftime show, adding, "we very actively want to play the Super Bowl."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Freshman year is critical, but not for the reasons most students (and their parents) imagine. American students have the luxury of a long horizon to settle on good classes, select a major and chart a career; there's plenty of time to make academic mistakes and recover from them. But it's important to set off on the right foot in one respect: making friends. At the start of freshman year, there's a window of opportunity, when customary rules about social interactions are suspended, and when it seems perfectly normal for someone to sit down next to you at lunch or in class and strike up a conversation. Social inhibitions tend to dissolve when a group of strangers enters a new environment. Think of adults on a cruise, teenagers at a summer camp, or Chaucer's garrulous pilgrims, chatting and revealing volumes about themselves. The bond is all the more guaranteed when facing a shared hardship say, the boredom of freshman orientation sessions or the stress of placement exams. But after that critical window, a curtain begins to fall on the welcoming social scene. In my experience, which includes serving as master of a residential college at both Yale and Harvard, this tends to occur about three weeks in. Attitudes begin to solidify. Friendships become fixed. And behaviors that initially seemed open and generous might come to feel forced, or even a little creepy. It turns out that we are hard wired to seek and make friends in novel, stressful circumstances. Students naturally assemble themselves into elaborate social networks and not just Snapchat, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter. Our modern technology is merely put into the service of more ancient and powerful impulses. In fact, studies that my colleagues and I have conducted of face to face social networks of college students and of the Hadza hunter gatherers of Tanzania reveal that, in fundamental ways, they are not very different. Whether in a college dormitory or on the African savanna, living as they might have 10,000 years ago, people form the same sort of network one or two best friends, in a group of five to six close friends, within a still broader group of 150 people. And the intricate structure of these friendship webs is similar too. The networks we form obey certain mathematical and sociological rules, and they have profound influence on our lives. Whether students feel happy or sad, or catch the flu, or learn new things can all depend, in significant measure, on their ties to one another. The network pictured above represents 105 students at a Northeastern university. Every dot is a person, and the ties between the dots are friendships the students have identified. Now consider an outbreak of H1N1 flu, as we did at Harvard College in 2009. Students A and B each have four friends, but Student B is at greater risk for infection than A because A's friends are all friends with one another, forming an insular community, whereas B's friends have friends who are farther away in the network and so can carry germs from a greater social distance. Still, B is at lower risk than D, who has six friends to B's four. Of course, if you are in the center of a network like C, whose six friends all in turn have many friends you are much more likely to catch the flu than individuals with the same number of friends but located on the social periphery, like D. So, in the case of flu spreading in a population, it would be best to be Student A. On the other hand, if useful information (about cool classes or hot parties) were spreading through the network, it would be best to be Student C. We acquire other properties from our friends, in what is known as "peer effects." The economist Bruce Sacerdote showed that roommates at Dartmouth, who are randomly assigned to live together, affect each other's grade point average and the effort put into studying, for better or worse. Other studies have found a correlation between being happy and having happy friends (and the inverse) as well as a likelihood that a student will binge drink if a roommate does. But something more is going on in social networks. The actual mathematical structure of the social ties also seems to matter. In our lab experiments, we have created artificial networks by defining ties between research subjects and specifying permissible paths for them to communicate online. When we change the particular arrangement of the social ties within the group, we have been able to affect whether the groups behave altruistically or selfishly in one exercise, whether the group shared money from a supply we gave them or, conversely, contributed nothing. Same people, same number of social ties; different social structure, different behavior. An analogy: If you connect carbon atoms one way, they form graphite, which is soft, dark and suitable for a pencil; connected another way, they form diamond, which is hard and clear. Same atoms, different connections, different properties. To elicit an optimal amount of altruism in the group, there seems to be a sweet spot between rigidly forced and overly fluid connections, both of which foster less altruistic behavior. When research subjects were not allowed to make their own connections or to cut ties to people who bugged them, they behaved less kindly. At the other extreme, when the people to whom they were connected came and went quickly, the group also behaved less kindly perhaps too much "social fluidity" made the group less appealing to invest in. Humans are hard wired for friendship in one final way: We like the company of people we resemble, a property known as homophily. We evolved as a species by preferring those with shared objectives all the better to coordinate a hunt for a mammoth. But natural selection has equipped us with a taste for similarity at a cost: the loss of new insights and information that lead to innovation. One of the most dispiriting things I have observed as a faculty member is that, despite herculean efforts to curate diversity in the student body through the admissions process, students often restrict themselves to social groups defined by narrow traits. In dining halls, swimmers sit with swimmers, computer scientists with computer scientists, conservatives with conservatives, Latinos with Latinos. So what does all this mean for incoming freshmen? It means that you may be considerably happier in a dorm where people can change roommates should things go bad, but where it's not too easy to do so. And that befriending different kinds of people people with a different religion or major, say is indeed a good thing. Students learn as much about themselves and about the world from the informal curriculum provided by their friends as they do from the formal curriculum provided by the faculty. Once you get to college, you can hang out with anyone you want to, and you can be whoever you want to be, not just the person you described in your admissions essay. Take advantage of the first few weeks, reaching out while everyone is fresh and new, to make and, yes, break some friendship ties.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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During her six years of graduate school in New York, Tracey Van Kempen lived in student housing. The building on the far East Side allowed pets, so Ms. Van Kempen shared a small studio with her poodle, Wesley, and her cat, Charlie. The tiny kitchen frustrated her, with its electric stove, dorm size refrigerator and minuscule square of counter space. Cooking, which she normally loved, was a chore. "I had to levitate things to cook," she said. Last winter, Ms. Van Kempen prepared to graduate from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences with a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and to start a job as the assistant medical director at a medical advertising agency. She would need to vacate student housing. Still, because she had never apartment hunted in the city before, she "had no idea what to expect," Ms. Van Kempen, 32, said. A grad school friend connected her with Erica Geller, an agent at Bond New York, which "made things less scary." Ms. Van Kempen was reluctant to be too demanding, largely because she was already limiting herself to a pet friendly building. "There could be only so many deal breakers," she said. On East 96th Street, a large alcove studio in an elevator building was renting for 1,775 a month. But it was on a busy cross street near Metropolitan Hospital Center. "I had just been living with ambulances and I wasn't too keen on continuing that trend," Ms. Van Kempen said. What's more, in a large studio, she couldn't figure out how to arrange her furniture. "I need the walls to be able to organize my life inside of them," she said. "I need a fair amount of structure in order to be productive." On East 78th Street she saw a one bedroom for 1,875 a month. Both kitchen and bedroom were tiny. "There was a limited way you could set it up to not block the entrance to the bathroom and closet," Ms. Geller said. Ms. Van Kempen wavered on a 1,900 a month one bedroom in an elevator building on East 74th Street. The kitchen was handsome, and it had a built in microwave and a dishwasher. She didn't think her bed would fit in the bedroom, which was seven feet wide. She thought she could find something better. "I wanted this to be a really great place that I could settle in for a while," she said. In Ms. Van Kempen's price range, some problem always appeared, such as a tiny bedroom or too little light, Ms. Geller said. "When I felt we had exhausted the marketplace, Tracey gave me permission to raise her budget to 2,300." The two women went to a listing in a walk up building on Second Avenue in the high 80s. The rent was 2,250 a month. The third floor railroad apartment, long and skinny, ran the length of the building. The living room, which faced the avenue, opened to two inner rooms and a spacious kitchen. Ms. Van Kempen loved the space, but was still holding out for an elevator and a laundry room. She visited a co op building on East 79th Street with two units for rent. A studio for 1,900 a month had a great kitchen, whereas a larger one bedroom, for 2,300 a month, had a small kitchen. "The kitchen sink was smaller than most bathroom sinks," Ms. Van Kempen said. "I saw the size of that sink and thought, no way." The one bedroom had no dishwasher, either just the usual "three piece kitchen on the side of the living room fridge, sink, stove," Ms. Geller said. "We were talking about washing pots and pans, and it would make her day to day life very difficult." By now, Ms. Van Kempen knew she shouldn't hesitate on a place she liked. She no longer cared about an elevator. A laundry room was also easy to forgo laundromats were in abundant supply on the Upper East Side. The one bedroom on 74th Street was long gone. "After seeing what is possible for the money, the small bedroom starts looking really good," Ms. Van Kempen said. "I was too inexperienced to realize how fantastic that apartment was. That was the one that got away." So she decided to take the railroad apartment on Second Avenue. The broker fee was 15 percent of a year's rent, or a little over 4,000. Ms. Van Kempen arrived in the winter, adding some hand me down furniture from relatives. Now, she revels in her space, as does Wesley, who loves to chase throw toys. She uses one inner room as a bedroom and the other as a den. The bathroom has limited storage, "so that's been an ongoing mini struggle," she said. The shower door doesn't open fully it hits the sink but it opens enough to let her through. She is thrilled to have a large kitchen, and to be done with an electric stove. "I've been back to my old ways of cooking a lot, which has been great," she said. Making grilled cheese was a small triumph. "It was, 'Yes, this is how grilled cheeses are supposed to look,' not done unevenly." She is able to have friends over for dinner, too. Not long ago, "four of us were sitting in the kitchen after dinner playing a board game," she said, happy that "I am in New York City sitting around a normal size table in the kitchen, and there's plenty of room for everyone."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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SAN FRANCISCO FireEye, a cybersecurity company that has been involved in a number of prominent investigations, including the 2016 attack on the Democratic National Committee, alerted Facebook in July that it had a problem. Security analysts at the company noticed a cluster of inauthentic accounts and pages on Facebook that were sharing content from a site called Liberty Front Press. It looked like a news site, but most of its content was stolen from outlets like Politico and CNN. The small amount of original material was written in choppy English. FireEye's tip eventually led Facebook to remove 652 fake accounts and pages. And Liberty Front Press, the common thread among much of that sham activity, was linked to state media in Iran, Facebook said on Tuesday. Facebook's latest purge of disinformation from its platforms highlighted the key role that cybersecurity outfits are playing in policing the pages of giant social media platforms. For all of their wealth and well staffed security teams, companies like Facebook often rely on outside firms and researchers for their expertise. The discovery of the disinformation campaign also represented a shift in the bad behavior that independent security companies are on the lookout for. Long in the business of discovering and fending off hacking attempts and all sorts of malware, security companies have expanded their focus to the disinformation campaigns that have plagued Facebook and other social media for the past few years. Founded in 2004 in Milpitas, Calif., FireEye has a work force of about 3,000 people, a fraction of Facebook's. But it employs security analysts with particular skills, including employees who are fluent in English, Arabic, Russian, French and Italian, helping them to identify and track misinformation around the world. Lee Foster, the manager of FireEye's information operations analysis team, described in an interview with The New York Times how his company spotted the Iranian disinformation campaign. He declined to say whether his research into the Iranian campaign was on behalf of a particular client because FireEye has a policy against naming who it is working with. "It started with a single social media account or a small set of accounts that were pushing this political themed content that didn't necessarily seem in line with the personas that the accounts had adopted," said Mr. Foster. Many of the fake accounts, which sprawled across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit, shared content from Liberty Front Press. Over two months, Mr. Foster and a small group of analysts mapped the connections between the accounts and unearthed more of them. The evidence pointed toward Iran. A website for Liberty Front Press was initially registered to an email linked to ads for web designers in Tehran before being switched to a registrant purportedly based in San Jose, Calif. The web designer email had also been used to register another news site. That site, in turn, was associated with a number of email addresses linked to even more inauthentic news sites. Digging deeper, FireEye found that many of the Twitter accounts sharing Liberty Front Press content were linked to Iranian phone numbers, although the profiles claimed to be operating in the United States. Stepping from fake news site to news site and from Twitter to Facebook, FireEye pieced together a campaign that tried to influence audiences in the Middle East, as well as in the United States, Britain and Latin America. The analysts were careful to collect data without being noticed. "I have to be conscious about tipping off the operators of this," Mr. Foster said. "I want to make sure I've got everything, so we don't deal with one small component of the threat and we find out there's this whole other cluster of it." Iran's cyber capabilities have grown in recent years and Iranian hackers have been blamed for a number of significant attacks. Earlier this year, federal law enforcement officials said nine Iranians were behind intrusions at American government agencies, universities and private companies. Those loose affiliations make it difficult to pinpoint which attacks are directed by Iranian authorities. FireEye's information set off Facebook's own investigation, which uncovered three other Iranian disinformation efforts and another that appeared to originate in Russia. One of the Iranian campaigns Facebook discovered dabbled in a mix of misinformation and more traditional hacking, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote in a blog post. "They typically posed as news organizations and didn't reveal their true identity," he said. "They also engaged in traditional cybersecurity attacks, including attempts to hack people's accounts and spread malware, which we had seen before and disrupted." The Russian pages discovered by Facebook were unrelated to FireEye's research. Facebook said the accounts were linked to people that law enforcement in the United States had identified as Russian military intelligence. Unlike other fake pages that have been attributed to Russians over the last year, those accounts posted content focused on politics in Syria and Ukraine. FireEye's information operations analysis team was formed in 2016, when hacked emails from several political figures were beginning to appear on the site DCLeaks. "All through that period, we were tracking the Russian effort to influence U.S. elections," Mr. Foster said. "Obviously, social media is a very important kind of medium by which these campaigns are undertaken." Mr. Foster had been tracking influence campaigns long before they became a major narrative in American politics. He previously worked at iSight Partners, a cyberintelligence firm acquired by FireEye in January 2016, where he tracked so called hacktivist groups like Anonymous. An attack on Sony's computer network by North Korean hackers in 2014 put cybersecurity companies on notice that they had to pay more attention to information warfare. The Sony intrusion was destructive to technical systems, "but there was more to it than that," Mr. Foster said. "It was about conveying a message and trying to influence an audience." In time, "we realized there was a bigger kind of potential threat there that we need to address," he added. The Sony attack was also a game changer for governments and other major companies, said Graham Brookie, the director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, which has analyzed misinformation on Facebook. Thousands of embarrassing emails between Sony executives were dumped online. The hackers also stole employees' personal information, including Social Security numbers, and wiped Sony's servers. The incident prompted officials in the United States to establish protocols for sharing information about cybersecurity threats and influence operations, Mr. Brookie said. But information sharing still seems to have its limits. Unlike Facebook, Twitter did not receive advance notice from FireEye about the fake Twitter profiles the security company had uncovered. Several of them were still live Tuesday night, hours after Facebook's announcement. Twitter has since suspended 284 accounts based on the information revealed by Facebook and FireEye, the company said in a tweet. As internet outlets struggle to keep up with influence campaigns, Mr. Foster believes complex disinformation schemes will become more common. "What this is great for demonstrating is, it really doesn't matter what the political goals or ideological goals are, these techniques are seen as an attractive way to try to achieve them," Mr. Foster said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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George Benson is many things to many different people, but he's a jazz musician at heart. The 77 year old guitarist and singer has traversed the worlds of pop, R B, soul and, of course, jazz, tasting success while also learning how to field any criticism that came from changing his sound along the way. His career has been helped by an unwavering faith in his creative vision and bonds with influential figures that became pivotal to his development. He started out seven decades ago, playing the ukulele in his native Pittsburgh, home to a rich cornucopia of elite Black talent: Art Blakey, Lena Horne, Ray Brown, Paul Chambers. In a recent phone interview, he recalled how Eddie Jefferson, the pioneer of vocalese who wrote jazz standards like "Moody's Mood for Love," recognized his own potential for vocals while performing on a street corner, and prompted Mr. Benson, then 7 or 8, to sing "I've Got the Blues." "Pittsburgh was the last big stop," before headed to places like New York, Mr. Benson said. "It had a lot of musicians there who were trying to prove themselves, trying to learn how to play." Over the years, Mr. Benson collaborated with Freddie Hubbard and Minnie Riperton, and later with Mary J. Blige, Jill Scott and Gorillaz. However, it was the release of his three times platinum 1976 album "Breezin'" that brought him his greatest commercial success and multiple Grammys. It was a rare feat for a largely instrumental record to make the pop and R B charts then, but critics still took umbrage with his early ascension into smooth jazz. With "Weekend in London," Mr. Benson's first live album in 30 years, due Friday, he not only honors his unique musical path, but also credits those along the way that have shaped him and his career which includes audiences. "They're right down your throat," he said of playing the intimate club Ronnie Scott's, where the set was recorded, "but I can look into their faces and see the happiness or the response by what they're hearing on the bandstand." These are edited excerpts from the conversation. How was Wes Montgomery pivotal for you? When Wes Montgomery came to Pittsburgh, I had to meet him, because I had heard about him when I was a little boy. They told me there was a guy who played guitar like nobody else, that he played with his fingers, but he actually played with his thumb there was no pick in his hand. So when I met him, I asked him if he would teach me something and he said, "No." He was the first guy who said no. I was a teenager then, maybe 17 years old. I said, "Why not?" He said, "I'm still trying to learn how to play myself." And that really got to me. Laughs He's the greatest guitar player in the world and he's trying to learn how to play? I understood later what he was trying to say, because I feel the same way. You know, people ask me about the guitar and I say, "Man, I'm still trying to get it together myself, trying to learn this instrument." But that's how him and I met, and we became very good friends. Years ago, I was supposed to play him in this movie. His story was incredible. His career grew up commercially on records, like "Goin' Out of My Head," "Windy," "Tequila" and all those wonderful records he made, in addition to all the great jazz records he had made. But when he came home to play in Indianapolis, every time he played a commercial tune, the audience booed. I couldn't even imagine it. And the reason is the only Wes Montgomery they knew locally was a jazz guitar player. And so when he became commercially successful, naturally this was a lash back by the people: "Well, I want him to play more jazz." People always want what they don't have. It's the critics' job to dissect things. And to dissect it pretty much the way they want, but that's not the reality. The reality is you got a record that would have gone on the shelf unnoticed. Now it's selling in the hundreds of thousands. And then you analyze it: Who do we make records for critics or the people, who go to the store and spend their hard earned money to buy it because they like it? So believe me, I never made a big to do out of it. But it helps me to remember this. I once did a recording with Frank Sinatra, and he called me over. I didn't even think he knew who I was. He said: "Mr. Benson, your guitar playing, we all know and we love that. But I love your voice too." When he said that to me, I dismissed all those bad reviews of music, talking about my voice and treating me like a dog. Sinatra said he loved my voice. That's it! How did you come up with the overall concept for "Breezin'"? One great thing I learned when I played with the Jack McDuff Quartet that's the guy who took me out of Pittsburgh when I was 19 years old, and I was on the road with him for two and a half years he did what you call a head arrangement on everything, something off the top of his head. And he threw it together and we all learned it the way he wanted us to learn it. And it worked. So I was in the habit of doing that. Everything you hear from me usually comes basically off the top of my head. Like "On Broadway," when I first told the band I was going to change the arrangement to boom, boom, boom boom boom boom, my bass player said, "George, that won't work." And I lashed back. I said, "Man, you weren't even born when this song came out." I said, "Can you just do it like this, just this one time?" And the record came out, and it became a smash. Laughs Stevie Wonder's "Songs in the Key of Life," which you played on, was another seminal album of that era. First of all, his wife Syreeta was from my hometown. I believe he came to Pittsburgh to see her. And whenever I was there, he would come down to this jazz club and sit in with me. And here's the surprise: Nobody believed he was Stevie Wonder! Laughs He looked like him, sang like him, talked like him. But they just couldn't believe that Stevie Wonder was sitting in at a jazz club on one of my gigs. I was a nobody then. A few years later, my career blew up, and he invited me to be on that album. And he's one of the great geniuses of our time. You know, whatever he does, his playing as a pianist is innovative, warm, romantic and funky. His voice is unbelievable. He's got power, even though sometimes he sings very soft, the power never leaves either in the way he approaches things, his phrasing, or in the lyrics that he's writing to go along with those incredible melodies that he puts together. He's slow in getting things done, but that's why his stuff is always so good, 'cause he thoroughly thinks things out. He doesn't throw music together. So I learned a lot just from hanging out with him.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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