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"Game of Thrones" has won more Emmys than any dramatic series ever, but that's just one sign of its influence. It is a show whose budgets and scale were once unthinkable for television and now it's become the gold standard. In the eight years since "Game of Thrones" went on the air, the television industry has been upended. We can thank Netflix for that. Consider that in the streaming era, the number of scripted shows airing in the United States has shot up 86 percent, from 266 in 2011 to 495 last year. Yet amid this glut no series has had more influence or created more industrywide envy than "Thrones," which begins its final season on HBO on April 14 . Everyone wants its reach: It's the most popular show in HBO's history and one of the most watched shows of the last decade (when including digital viewership, its most recent season averaged more than 30 million viewers an episode). Everyone wants its scale and scope: The series was one of the most influential in an era where television budgets for dramas have ballooned from 3 million an episode to, in some cases, 10 million or more. Everyone wants its boldness: "Thrones" famously killed off the face of the show, Sean Bean, before its first season was over and has repeatedly redefined assumptions about what's possible on TV, both tonally (sexposition, shocking violence) and technically (dragons, sweeping battle scenes). " We used to have a different experience for movies and the television business," said Gary Newman, the recently departed co chairman of the Fox Television Group. "Now you can feel it melding. I give 'Thrones' a lot of credit for that." And everyone, including newer outlets like Hulu and Apple, have been looking for the next "Thrones," a series that can define a network, and help convince people to hand over 10 or 15 a month for subscriptions. Three years after "Thrones" debuted, Netflix ordered its own high budget epic series "Marco Polo" about the Mongol empire (which was a flop). Amazon bought the TV rights to make a "Lord of the Rings" series and spent north of 200 million to do so (and still needs a script). Apple has a big budget fantasy drama starring Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard about what happens when to humanity after everyone goes blind (which still needs a premiere date). There have been lots of mixed results so far. "It has made everyone say, 'O.K., where is our 'Game of Thrones'? Which is the exact wrong way to find your next 'Game of Thrones,'" said Casey Bloys, the president of programming at HBO. "Just to set out and say 'Well we're going to make our next "Game of Thrones," we're going to do a real giant show with a huge budget,' well that doesn't allow for all the other things that have to go right for a show to really resonate with a viewer." Which is why HBO has been, as Bloys put it, "deliberate" in finding its "Thrones" successor from the universe of George R.R. Martin's books. HBO will shoot a pilot for a "Thrones" prequel, created by Martin and Jane Goldman, in June. Still, "Thrones" has helped open up a big fantasy universe for the network. In the coming months, it will air an adaptation of the controversial epic "His Dark Materials." Likewise, "Leftovers" co creator Damon Lindelof is creating an adaptation of the comic books "Watchmen." And HBO has other science fiction series coming from J.J. Abrams and the "Avengers" director Joss Whedon. If such big ticket genre series were once unthinkable for the network that made "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," well, little of television looks the way it did eight years ago. "Thrones" began in April 2011 on HBO, just a few weeks after Netflix gave a David Fincher directed drama "House of Cards" a straight to series order. Today, Netflix makes more original programs than any studio or network and has spurred the dizzying spike in the number of television series made. It will spend at least 10 billion on content this year. "Thrones," which had a budget that started at 5 million an episode but ballooned to as much as 15 million an episode in the final season, helped create the current era of enormous spending, even for shows without CGI dragons, White Walkers and direwolves. For instance, Apple committed to two seasons of a morning TV show dramedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston that the company has allocated 240 million to make. At the time, Apple made the pledge even though the show had no script. "'Thrones' certainly accelerated it, raising production value to an incredible place," Mr. Newman said. "That used to be reserved just for HBO and that's clearly no longer the case," he continued. "Netflix and Amazon and now even the broadcast networks and the big cable networks like an FX, TNT are doing it. They're all realizing they have to raise their game with things that feel more epic and with greater scope to compete with what HBO and other premium services are doing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The once highly competitive Hamptons art fair season will open July 5, as Market Art Design apparently the last fair standing takes over the Bridgehampton Museum for its annual four day run, with a bigger footprint and with organizers predicting a larger crowd. Art Hamptons, the East End's original art expo, has posted a cancellation notice on its website for a second consecutive year. Art Southampton, which had begun promoting its season on Facebook, removed the notice after inquiries were made, and Nick Korniloff, Art Southampton's director, did not respond to messages asking about the fair's status. The consensus among fair directors, exhibitors and collectors is that the multiple fairs of the past overworked the market. "The thinning out benefits everybody," said Alex Benrimon, sales director of the David Benrimon gallery in Manhattan, who is a return exhibitor. With about two thirds of its exhibitors displaying fine art, Art Market Hamptons, as Market Art Design was originally known, has apparently cornered the market. According to its director, Max Fishko, the art fair will expand its tented footprint this year, occupying 55,000 square feet compared with 35,000 in 2017, and feature 75 exhibitors, up 20 from last year. Mr. Fishko anticipates welcoming 15,000 visitors from July 5 through July 8, when the show closes, compared with about 12,000 in 2017, continuing what he described as the fair's strong year over year growth pattern.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett claimed not to like opera, but they made one anyway, collaborating on "Neither" for the Rome Opera in 1977. The work, for orchestra and a lone soprano, with an 87 word libretto by Beckett, has been called an anti opera, or "an hourlong art song," as The Village Voice put it after its first New York performance. Volatile and violent, it doesn't exactly scream "dance music." But perhaps that was part of the appeal for the choreographer and painter Shen Wei, whose ambitious adaptation of the work, also titled "Neither," had its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday. Mr. Shen, who devised not only the choreography for 11 dancers but also the sets and costumes, has dreamed up a bleak landscape where, as an audience member, it's often hard not to feel as trapped as the performers appear. The stage of the Howard Gilman Opera House is enclosed on three sides by green gray walls. Carved into these and slowly revealed under Jennifer Tipton's sensitive lighting are arched doors that open onto darkness and only selectively let people through. As the dancers, in bands of three, begin to move, the first words of Beckett's libretto materialize on the wall behind them: "to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow/from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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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. With the election two weeks away, late night hosts are getting antsy. Even though Joseph R. Biden Jr. is leading President Trump by 10 points in the latest polls, Stephen Colbert wasn't taking any chances. The "Late Show" host tossed some table salt, knocked on wood and said "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" so as not to jinx the Democrat's chances. "I can't wait for this thing to be over," Colbert said on Monday night. "It's like an upcoming surgery, in that I'm planning on being anesthetized for the event."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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HAVANA Like many of his countrymen, Jorge Angulo hopes the United States will lift the decades old economic embargo against Cuba. But Dr. Angulo, a senior marine scientist at the University of Havana, is also worried about the effects that a flood of American tourists and American dollars might have on this country's pristine coral reefs, mangrove forests, national parks and organic farms environmental assets that are a source of pride here. "Like anywhere else, money talks," Dr. Angulo said. "That might be dangerous, because if we go too much on that side, we lose what we have today." The country is in desperate need of the economic benefits that a lifting of the embargo would almost certainly bring. But the ban, combined with Cuba's brand of controlled socialism, has also limited development and tourism that in other countries, including many of Cuba's Caribbean neighbors, have eroded beaches, destroyed forests, polluted rivers, damaged coral reefs and wreaked other forms of environmental havoc. Already, American corporations are poised to rush into a country only 90 miles from Florida's shores. In March, a delegation from the U.S. Agriculture Coalition for Cuba, an agribusiness group that includes Cargill, the National Grain and Feed Association, the National Chicken Council and other companies and organizations, flew to Havana to meet with Cuban officials. And cruise ship companies and hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton have indicated their enthusiasm. "I can't stop thinking about it," Frank Del Rio, chief executive officer of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, said in an interview. "Cuba and the cruise industry are just a match made in heaven, waiting to happen." Despite modest economic advances in the last 15 years, much in Cuba can seem frozen in time, with crumbling Havana buildings and old Chevys and Ladas serving as markers of how far the country has been left behind. But that also means that much of Cuba's more than 3,500 miles of coastline has remained undeveloped. In Jucaro, on the south coast, weatherworn fishing boats line the harbor, but the condos and souvenir shops that clutter most Caribbean seaside towns are nowhere to be seen. Over the last two decades, Cuba has taken steps to preserve its natural resources and promote sustainable development. Environmental problems remain, including overfishing and the erosion and deforestation left from earlier eras. But the ministry overseeing environmental issues has a strong voice. And since 1992, when Fidel Castro denounced "the ecological destruction threatening the planet" in a speech to the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, a series of tough environmental laws has been passed, including regulations governing the management of the coastal zone. The government has designated 104 marine protected areas, though some still exist only on paper, with no administration or enforcement, and it has set a goal of conserving 25 percent of the country's coastal waters. Yet Cuba's commitment to environmental protection has never been tested, or tempted, as forcefully as it is likely to be should the trade and travel barriers with the United States fall. Despite the thaw between the United States and Cuba, many obstacles to tourism and commerce remain. Congress would have to vote to ease the embargo, an unlikely development during the presidential campaign. And even if the embargo were lifted, Cuba's labyrinthine tax structure, legal system and laws regulating business present their own hurdles. Cuba's green sensitivities evolved as much out of necessity as ideology. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991 and the continued isolation by the United States forced the country to fend for itself. With the tools of big agriculture fuel for heavy machinery, chemical fertilizers, pesticides out of reach, farming moved away from the increased sugar production that characterized the Soviet era, turning more to organic techniques and cooperatives of small farmers. Oxen replaced tractors, and even today, a farmer walking behind his plow is a common sight in the countryside. "Basically, folks said we need the farmers to go out and figure out how we're going to feed ourselves," said Greg Watson, a former agriculture commissioner for Massachusetts, who visited Cuba last fall with a delegation studying sustainable agriculture. At the same time, scientists, who are held in high esteem here, promoted the value of keeping marine resources intact both to draw European tourism, essential for an island country with little domestic industry, and to help sustain the fisheries that formed a vital part of the economy. Cuban officials insist that the country's strong environmental laws and commitment to protecting natural resources will hold up in the face of American money and influence. And they note that Cuba is no stranger to tourism: Europeans, Canadians, Australians and others flock to cafes in Old Havana, visit Vinyales or sun themselves on the beach at Varadero or Cayo Coco, resort areas that already have hotels, developed with the help of foreign investment. "We are not afraid of you coming to Cuba," Jose Ramon Cabanas Rodriguez, chief of mission for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, said at a panel on Cuba and the environment last month. "The conservation of the environment is in our Constitution." But much will depend on the government's determination to see that environmental laws are enforced, said Liliana Nunez Velis, president of the Antonio Nunez Jimenez Foundation for Man and Nature, a quasi independent environmental organization in Havana. "This tsunami is coming," Ms. Nunez said, referring to American interests. And inside Cuba, she added, "An internal tsunami is asking for consumption, consumption, consumption and profit, benefit and profit." How fully the country will pursue development is likely to be a leading topic at the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party next year, said Dan Whittle, a lawyer and senior director of the Cuba program for the Environmental Defense Fund. Within Cuba's government, "there are some who would prefer to move faster than others," Mr. Whittle said, adding that environmental officials in Cuba were trying to identify gaps in oversight and laws that need to be strengthened. "They would like to see the party congress embrace sustainability and sustainable development," he said. Government officials know that they need to be more flexible and efficient in dealing with potential investors, Mr. Whittle said. But, he added, Cuba is also aware of the perils of unchecked economic growth, and some officials consider countries like China, which sacrificed environmental concerns in favor of development, examples of what to avoid. Whether they will have the discipline to do so, he said, remains to be seen. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who has worked to promote collaboration between American and Cuban scientists, said the amount of money that may be available close by "does put them at a choice point, in terms of whether they're willing to sacrifice what they've got environmentally in order to develop and look more like Miami Beach or Montego Bay." Mr. Whitehouse said he suspected, however, that Cuba would wade into American economic waters with caution. "I don't think they're so lustful of development that they will just roll over and completely prostitute themselves to whomever comes by with a checkbook," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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This squishy eight armed machine is the world's first fully autonomous soft bodied robot. Researchers at Harvard University created the octopus by three dimensional printing, using silicone gel, which gives it its flexible, rubbery texture. On Wednesday, they unveiled their adorable step toward the robot uprising in the journal Nature. The scientists said in their paper that their creation could be a foundation for the future of soft bodied robots. Octobot is similar to other soft robots who mimic the movements of animals, such as starfish, squids and octopuses. But while many of those were tethered to a power source, the octobot can move free. It's cordless.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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"The Originals" returns for its last season. And Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a televangelist in crisis in "Come Sunday." THE ORIGINALS 9 p.m. on the CW. This spinoff of "The Vampire Diaries" has been almost as resilient as the supernatural creatures it depicts. After facing potential cancellation and tying up major story lines at the end of Season 4, the CW renewed the drama for one final year. That means the vampire siblings Klaus and Elijah Mikaelson, who were separated at the end of last season, might yet reunite. In this episode, Klaus's daughter, Hope (Danielle Rose Russell), resorts to drastic measures to bring her father back to New Orleans. And RIVERDALE leads in at 8, as tensions rise between Betty and Veronica, and a school production of "Carrie: The Musical" comes under threat. NBA PLAYOFFS On TNT. On Sunday evening, something unusual happened to LeBron James: He lost a Game 1 in the first round for the first time ever. It wasn't particularly close, either, as the Indiana Pacers, led by Victor Oladipo, beat the Cleveland Cavaliers by 18 points. James will surely return invigorated in Game 2, at 7 p.m. on TNT. At 9:30, James Harden and the Houston Rockets will look to win again versus the Minnesota Timberwolves after a Game 1 victory.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Robot vacuum cleaners strike me as an essential appliance for our busy modern lives. The Roomba, made by iRobot, has been my choice. But Liam McCabe, a senior writer at The Wirecutter and Sweethome, the New York Times sites that evaluate products, has been testing these things since 2013 and says there is now a better option. Was the displacement of a Roomba by a rival a really big deal? It was pretty surprising. The Roomba 650 had been the pick since we first had a robot vacuum guide, back in 2012. It was the lowest cost bot that didn't usually get stuck, and was also strong enough to pick up most of the noticeable debris on most floors. They just got undercut. (iRobot this week replaced the Roomba 650 with the Roomba 690, essentially the same robot but now compatible with Alexa and a phone app.) The secret to the Roomba 650 was the navigation. All the other cheap competitors up until recently had poor navigation. They'd get stuck on really basic obstacles like any kind of carpet fringe or stray cable, or just bop around in circles not cleaning anything. A lot of them didn't even have brush rollers, so they didn't do much on carpets. But then a batch of pretty good cheap models popped up. It sort of surprised us. So why did the Eufy RoboVac 11 win?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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In October , the Trump administration announced that the United States would withdraw from Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization known for its World Heritage sites program, by the end of 2018. But that rejection, tied to perceptions of anti Israel bias, has not stopped Unesco from naming a number of American cities to its Creative Cities Network. In November, Kansas City, San Antonio and Seattle joined a class of 64 cities inducted into the program which evaluates applicants in seven different creative fields, including crafts and folk art, design, film, gastronomy, literature, media arts and music. The network, which now includes 180 cities from 72 countries, aims to encourage members to share best practices "to promote creative industries, strengthen participation in cultural life, and integrate culture into sustainable urban development policies," according to a statement announcing the new members. "Being a member of the U.C.C.N. is the starting point of a long journey to which Unesco invites all cities wherever they may be, provided they share the vision of working together to stimulate culture and creativity as motors for sustainable urban development," Emmanuelle Robert, Project Manager for the Unesco Creative Cities Network, wrote in an email. Unlike Unesco's World Heritage Center, which singles out cultural and natural landmarks like the Great Wall of China or the Great Barrier Reef for their universal value to humanity, the Creative City designation is looser and more dispersed. For travelers, a Creative City designation can provide a new lens through which to view a destination. Tucson, recipient of the country's first City of Gastronomy designation in 2015, used it to train attention on its agricultural history, seed banks and locally owned restaurants. (As a possible measure of that new attention, its hotel revenue per available rooms, a marker of hotel performance, shot up 13.5 percent in 2017 over the year prior). "Many of these restaurants have operated for decades and by generations of families," said Brent DeRaad, the president and chief executive of Visit Tucson. "The Unesco designation provided the credibility we needed to convince media, foodies and other discerning travelers to finally visit Tucson." The latest group of Creative Cities ranges far and wide and includes Limoges, France, as a City of Craft and Folk Art based on its famed ceramics. Alba, Italy, synonymous with truffles and Barolo wines, was named a City of Gastronomy. Chiang Mai, Thailand, was named a City of Craft and Folk Art, based on its lacquerware, bamboo weaving and other artisanal work. Bristol, England, home to the Oscar winning animators Aardman Animations and the BBC's Natural History Unit, was cited as a City of Film. Istanbul drew on its historic architecture and craft traditions, as well as its emergence as a contemporary design center to be named a City of Design. Some cities offer guidance to orient travelers to their creative sides. For others, the designation is a push in that direction. The following new American designees represent that spectrum. The application was made by a number of organizations, including a neighborhood association representing Wendell Phillips, the city's African American community. It is home to the 18th and Vine district, also known as the jazz district, where visitors can still hear live music in the Blue Room at the American Jazz Museum. The nearby Mutual Musician Foundation International, a union founded in 1917, still holds jam sessions on weekend nights after midnight. Robert Altman made the 1996 jazz themed film "Kansas City" in the area where the city hopes to see increased investment. "We are hopeful this is a way to get more attention to round out the development going on down there and take some of those properties with old facades and generate some new interest," said Scott Wagner, the mayor pro tem of Kansas City. San Antonio based its pitch as a City of Gastronomy on its long history of settlement tied to its river and natural springs. Spanish colonists drew on these to create irrigation canals that linked their five regional San Antonio Missions, which are collectively a Unesco World Heritage site. Later, German immigrants contributed flour mills and breweries. "Our food here is a composite of all these different cultures German, Spanish indigenous and Mexican," said Elizabeth Johnson, a chef who owns Pharm Table restaurant and worked on the Unesco application. "We made the case that we have all these amazing traditions and we need to protect, reclaim and prioritize traditional foods." It's not hard to find good Tex Mex food in San Antonio, but Ms. Johnson highlights the Pearl Brewery, a former brewing complex now revitalized with distinctive restaurants that include Southerleigh Fine Food Brewery, which makes its own beer amid the historic works. The Native American side of colonial settlement including native food is emphasized on programs offered by Yanaguana Mission Heritage Tours. Seattle has thriving music and culinary scenes, but applied to Unesco as a City of Literature, highlighting its 19 independent bookstores; widespread library system with a central showpiece attraction in the Seattle Central Library, designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas; and the number of nonprofits sponsoring writing workshops and author readings. "We decided on literature because it tells a story about Seattle that maybe people haven't heard before," said Stesha Brandon, the board president of Seattle City of Literature who worked on the Unesco application. While music and dining might be more concrete experiences to hang a trip on, Seattle offers an array of creative programs that show off its literary leanings. The first Wednesday of every month, a silent reading party where people read silently in the company of others takes place at the Hotel Sorrento. Among nonprofits, Hugo House regularly offers author readings, classes, book launches and workshops. Seattle Arts Lectures fills 2,500 seat Benaroya Hall for talks by such authors as Colson Whitehead and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Seattle's bookish character surfaces in other mediums as well. Book It Repertory Theater specializes in adapting full length novels such as "The Maltese Falcon" for the stage. Musicians with the Bushwick Book Club Seattle write and perform songs inspired by a selected book, and encourage audiences to read that book before they attend the show. At any time, visitors can pull up the Seattle Poetic Grid on their smartphones and click on dots on the map that bring up poems contributed by locals related to that area.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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DURHAM, N.C. When you look at a drawing by the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, what do the aggressive whorls and thickets of line suggest to you? The choreographer Doug Varone sees his own dances. That association personal but not merely so, as expressed in a program note is behind his new work, "ReComposed," which had its debut at the Durham Performing Arts Center on Friday as part of the American Dance Festival here. Mr. Varone is uncommonly adept in setting a stage aswirl with lines of energy. Bodies tangle and untangle at high speed, with limbs loosely flying, and if their paths left marks in the air, the result might indeed resemble one of the Mitchell pastels that are the inspiration for "ReComposed." At first, Robert Wierzel's lighting gives the back wall and stage floor the appearance and, remarkably, the seeming texture of a blank sheet of white paper. Later those planes are flooded with oranges and pinks that are sometimes distractingly gorgeous. The costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, black bodysuits that each have a vertical stripe of a different crayon bright hue, are initially sheathed in an outer casing of mesh, eventually shed, that gives the stripes and the moving bodies a powdery look, rather like the smudges and erasures of a pastel. The music, Michael Gordon's "Dystopia," also has affinities with Mitchell's work. Even in a recording, the sound is tremendous, an orchestra swooping and sliding with a sense of barely controlled chaos; it speeds along like a convoy of mutant marching bands driving drunk and crashing into things.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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A skull fragment found in the roof of a cave in southern Greece is the oldest fossil of Homo sapiens ever discovered in Europe, scientists reported on Wednesday. Until now, the earliest remains of modern humans found on the Continent were less than 45,000 years old. The skull bone is more than four times as old, dating back over 210,000 years, researchers reported in the journal Nature. The finding is likely to reshape the story of how humans spread into Europe, and may revise theories about the history of our species. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago. The new fossil bolsters an emerging view that our species migrated from Africa in several waves, beginning early in our history. But the first waves of migrants vanished. All humans who have ancestry outside of Africa today descended from a later migration, about 70,000 years ago. Katerina Harvati, lead author of the new study, said it's impossible to say how long the earliest Europeans endured on the Continent, or why they disappeared. "It's a very good question, and I have no idea," said Dr. Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany. "I mean, this is the first time that we've found them." The skull first came to light in 1978, as anthropologists from the University of Athens School of Medicine explored a cave called Apidima, on the Peloponnese. They found fragments from a pair of skulls lodged in the roof of the cave. The researchers freed a backpack size rock containing the fossils, and then struggled for years to extract the bones. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. One of the fossils, called Apidima 1, turned out to be part of the back of a skull. The other, Apidima 2, consisted of 66 fragments from an individual's face. An early study of Apidima 2 suggested the fragments were about 160,000 years old, and so it seemed likely that Apidima 1 had fossilized around the same time. That age made the two fossils much older than the earliest known evidence of our species in Europe. It seemed more likely that the skulls belonged to Neanderthals, who arrived in Europe about 400,000 years ago. The Museum of Anthropology at the University of Athens invited Dr. Harvati, an expert on the shapes of human skull fossils, to take a closer look. She and her colleagues performed CT scans on the remains and then analyzed them on a computer. When the researchers virtually reassembled the face of Apidima 2, they realized they were looking at a Neanderthal. But when the team analyzed the back of Apidima 1's skull, they knew that they were dealing with something different. In Neanderthals and other extinct human relatives, the back of the skull bulges outward. "It looks like when you put your hair up in a bun," Dr. Harvati said. But in our own species, there is no bulge . Compared with our extinct cousins, the back of the modern human skull is distinctively round. Laura Buck, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, said Dr. Harvati and her colleagues made a compelling case. "That very round shape is something we tend not to see in other groups," Dr. Buck said. While Dr. Harvati and her colleagues were analyzing the fossils, Rainer Grun carried out a new study of their age. Dr. Grun, a geochronologist at Griffith University in Australia, analyzed tiny samples of rock retrieved from the two fossils. Apidima 2, the Neanderthal, turned out to be 170,000 years old, just a bit older than the previous estimate. But Apidima 1, the Homo sapiens skull, was at least 210,000 years old some 40,000 years older than Apidima 2. That date makes the skull fragment the oldest modern human fossil not just in Europe, but anywhere outside Africa. The challenge scientists now face is to figure out how Apidima 1 fits into our ancient history. Over the past 20 years, researchers have amassed a great deal of evidence indicating that human populations that live outside Africa today all descended from small groups of migrants who departed the continent some 70,000 years ago. Greece may be a good place to test this idea. Southeast Europe may have served as a corridor for various kinds of humans moving into Europe, as well as a refuge when ice age glaciers covered the rest of the Continent. "This is a hypothesis that should be tested with data on the ground," Dr. Harvati said. "And this is a really interesting place to be looking at."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Today, the fashion flock is off to London for the next round of shows, but let's not forget the last day of New York Fashion Week. Our photographers saw three designers who, while different from each other in many ways, are all quintessentially New York.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The day before its first kickoff of 2020, the Big Ten Conference was still unveiling rules for a football season that had been postponed, revived, truncated and compromised in efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday, the conference announced a "no contest" rule for games canceled if team personnel tested positive for the virus which seemed inevitable because the schedule has no bye weeks and, thus, no wiggle room for last minute changes. The intention is to play nine games in nine weeks to catch up to the three Power Five conferences that have already started. But just over a month ago, no one thought the Big Ten made up of 14 schools across the Midwest and Northeast would be set to begin football on Friday night, with the University of Illinois at the University of Wisconsin, even as the home team's state ranked fourth in the country in per capita cases over the past seven days, and first among the states with Big Ten programs. "Having football while I can't go to class in a way, it's nice that we're having this one thing that's unifying," said Anne Isman, a sophomore at Wisconsin who is living in an apartment in Madison. "At the same time, the timing feels a little off." Fans and parties will be barred from all of the league's stadiums, but the precautions have not fully reassured the mayors of certain Big Ten towns. They know that what happens at the stadiums will be only one part of football's return. Fear of groups breaking recommended social distancing protocols led 12 mayors of areas surrounding 11 Big Ten schools to send a letter to the conference this week, citing concerns about what bringing football back means for college towns as fans congregate to watch games the virus an omnipresent risk freely floating between face paint, beer bottles and potlucks. "We know the history of football games within our cities," the mayors wrote. "They generate a lot of activity, social gatherings and consumption of alcohol." "Madison is a huge football town you feel the environment change, even now, with game day approaching," said Luke Carmosino, a junior at Wisconsin who recovered from Covid 19 in September while in Madison. Pre pandemic, the whole city essentially shut down for games, Isman said, as bars, restaurants and fraternities overflowed with fans from far and wide. Both students expect slips in public health safety compliance during game days. So long as positive coronavirus tests remain low among players, team staff members and officials, the Big Ten intends to push forward, although accomplishing its intended nine games in nine weeks seems unlikely: Other college conferences have had to postpone games because of outbreaks within teams, as has the N.F.L. Already in the Big Ten, Purdue Coach Jeff Brohm won't be on the field this weekend after testing positive for the virus, and some Minnesota players will miss the opener because they had contracted the virus, Coach P.J. Fleck said. "This is how the whole year is going to be, and there are no excuses," Fleck said ahead of Saturday's game against Michigan. "We've got to be able to find a way." The Big Ten was one of the first marquee conferences to postpone college football, initially pushing the season to the spring of 2021, only to reverse its decision in September amid sparring motivations of athletic goals, political arm twisting and coronavirus containment. Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields started the WeWantToPlay petition, which drew more than 300,000 signatures in support of a fall schedule. Parents from 11 of the Big Ten schools sent letters to the conference's commissioner, Kevin Warren, saying that letting their sons play "presents the best environment" for them. Conference officials and schools said that the president's opinion did not factor into their decision; rather, a dip in coronavirus cases, more widespread availability of testing and improved information on myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart linked to the virus, spawned the restart, they said. "It feels like the Big Ten and N.C.A.A. catered to what the nation is feeling rather than what the students at institutions are feeling," Carmosino said. Some Big Ten colleges and their cities had to increase restrictions on students after bringing them back to campus, issuing punishments for crowded parties or moving classes online entirely. Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, issued an emergency stay at home order on Tuesday for the college, effective until Nov. 3. Athletics are exempt from these restrictions. A month ago, Linda Vail, the health officer in Ingham County, which includes Michigan State University, would have recommended no football. But now that case counts in her county are trending downward, with a positive rate below 4 percent, she thinks that as long as fans continue following recommended guidelines, football's return could have a calming effect. "We're all getting a bit fatigued with all the restrictions, but so long as you take precautions even in the small gatherings we can keep pushing case counts down," she said. "We can have this semblance of normalcy."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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In October 1939, about a decade before he was assassinated, Mohandas K. Gandhi issued a warning to his admirers. "Some would like to erect my statue in public places, some others would have my portraits, yet others would proclaim my birthday as a public holiday," he wrote in response to praises he had received on his birthday . "These are days of dissension and discord, I should feel deeply humiliated if my name became in any way an occasion for accentuating them. Avoidance of such opportunities is a real service to the country and to me." Yet of the many things that India's independence leader achieved, curbing the proliferation of his likeness wasn't one of them. His bespectacled face and slight frame have become synonymous with peaceful resistance and civil rights movements around the world. Somehow he has also become an ambassador for Apple and, more recently, a poster boy for the political party that is directly connected to the Hindu nationalist who fatally shot him in 1948. He graces T shirts and mugs and refrigerator magnets. He was on "The Simpsons." His image has been both glorified and trivialized, meme ified, simplified and stretched so far that the man his flaws, complexities, and actual message has been reduced to a cliche, a fictional superhero. "A hyper icon has been created," said Sumathi Ramaswamy, a history professor at Duke University who has researched Gandhi's role in India's visual culture. "He has come to be appropriated even by forces completely antithetical to his message."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Re "Kirk Douglas, 1916 2020: From Spartacus to van Gogh, Leading Man of a Golden Age" (front page, Feb. 6): I see a synchronicity between the death of the storied actor Kirk Douglas and the abasement of a once principled political party, the G.O.P. In the 1960 film "Spartacus," a glorious epic about an ex gladiator who led a slave revolt against Rome, the dramatic climax occurs when Crassus (Laurence Olivier), the victorious Roman commander, issues a bleak choice to the defeated remnants of Spartacus's army: All survivors will be crucified, unless they surrender the person or body of Spartacus. Cleft chinned Kirk Douglas, who plays Spartacus, rises, hoping to spare his comrades from crucifixion. He is immediately joined by Antoninus (Tony Curtis), the "singer of songs," who shouts: "I am Spartacus!" One by one, bedraggled survivors rise to proclaim, "I am Spartacus!" Of 53 G.O.P. senators, only Mitt Romney dared to embrace what could have been the Republicans' "Spartacus" moment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The rap stars Kendrick Lamar and Drake lead the list of nominees for the 2019 Grammy Awards announced Friday, but right behind them is a crop of young and less heralded artists, notably women, after years of friction about diversity, including a major dust up over gender representation after the last ceremony. The Instagram star turned rapper Cardi B, the folk singer songwriter Brandi Carlile, the left of center country singer Kacey Musgraves, and the R B artists H.E.R. and Janelle Monae are among the women who will compete for album of the year against some of hip hop's biggest names. Lamar received eight nominations including his fourth for album of the year for his role as executive producer of the soundtrack to Marvel's "Black Panther," and Drake was nominated seven times in connection with his blockbuster double album "Scorpion" and guest appearances. Rounding out the category is "Beerbongs Bentleys" by the 23 year old rapper and singer Post Malone. But each of the big four general field categories record of the year, song of the year, album of the year and best new artist is dominated by women, including six out of eight acts up for best new artist: Chloe x Halle, H.E.R., Dua Lipa, Margo Price, Bebe Rexha and Jorja Smith. (The others are the country singer Luke Combs and the retro rock band Greta Van Fleet.) Who got snubbed, and whose nomination was a big surprise? See the round table. Neil Portnow, the president and chief executive of the Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, said in a statement that "reflection, re evaluation and implementation" were the "driving forces" behind recent changes to the show's processes, and therefore its nominations. Portnow, who will step down in 2019, drew ire from prominent women in music, some of whom called for his resignation, after the 60th annual Grammy ceremony in January, when he told reporters backstage that women in music needed to "step up" if they wanted recognition in the industry. Amid the backdrop of the MeToo and Time's Up movements against harassment and professional inequality, only one woman, Alessia Cara, won a major award in one of the televised categories this year and Lorde, the only female nominee for album of the year, was not offered a solo performance slot. A report published before the show found that of the 899 people nominated in the last six Grammy Awards, just 9 percent were women. (Portnow later said he regretted his wording, and that his comments had been taken out of context.) In the months that followed, the Recording Academy announced a task force on diversity and inclusion, and made an effort to register new voters, the organization said. It also increased the number of nominees in the major categories from five to eight, in line with recent expansions at the Academy Awards. Brandi Carlile reacts to her 6 nominations: "I've never won anything, not even a karaoke contest." Five of the songs nominated for record of the year, which is awarded to a track's performers, feature women in leading roles: "I Like It," by Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin; "The Joke" by Carlile; "All the Stars" by Lamar and SZA; and "The Middle" by Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey. Also nominated in the category: Childish Gambino's No. 1 hit "This Is America," which went viral via its politically and racially provocative video; Drake's No. 1 single "God's Plan" and Post Malone's No. 1 "Rockstar," featuring 21 Savage. Nods for song of the year went to the writers of "All the Stars," "The Joke," "The Middle," and "This Is America," plus Ella Mai's R B anthem "Boo'd Up," Shawn Mendes's power ballad "In My Blood," and "Shallow," from "A Star Is Born," by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. The 61st annual awards will be broadcast by CBS from the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Sunday, Feb. 10. Notably absent from the major categories is Taylor Swift, typically a Grammys favorite, who has 10 awards, including two for album of the year. Her three times platinum "Reputation," which delved further into an au courant pop sound following her smash "1989," received just one nomination, for best pop vocal album. The category also features albums by Camila Cabello, Kelly Clarkson, Ariana Grande, Mendes and Pink, recognizable stars who were thought to have a chance at nominations in the bigger categories. And Kanye West, who has 21 awards, was nominated in just one category as well: producer of the year, non classical, where he will vie against Boi 1da, Larry Klein, Linda Perry and Pharrell Williams. The nominees for the four marquee awards are split between the hip hop streaming juggernauts and more niche artists. "Scorpion," "Black Panther: The Album," "Beerbongs Bentleys" and Cardi B's "Invasion of Privacy" all topped the chart and have been fixtures on streaming services. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Carlile, who has been nominated just once before (in the best Americana album category), sold only 43,000 copies of her nominated album, "By the Way, I Forgive You," in its debut week, when it reached No. 5 on the Billboard chart. The self titled debut from H.E.R. peaked at No. 47 and does not feature a hit single, while Musgraves who was also nominated for best solo country performance ("Butterflies"), best country album and best country song ("Space Cowboy") has sold barely 100,000 copies of her album of the year contender, "Golden Hour." Monae's "Dirty Computer," another best album nominee, was also a modest seller. In recent years, hip hop and R B, genres that dominate commercially, have been more prevalent in the major Grammy categories, but that has not always translated to wins: Jay Z, the most nominated artist at the ceremony in January, came up empty in eight categories this time, and Lamar, who has now been nominated 37 times and won 12, has lost album of the year three times. (Most recently, the pop/R B singer Bruno Mars took home the big award for his album "24K Magic.") "Black Panther: The Album," which also features the Weeknd and a smattering of West Coast rap, plus elements of African music, could prove a roundabout contender for best album. In the last 40 years, three soundtracks have won in that category "Saturday Night Fever" in 1979, "The Bodyguard" in 1994 and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" in 2002. (The first ever Grammy Award for album of the year went to a TV soundtrack: Henry Mancini's "The Music From Peter Gunn.") As the Grammys grapple with identity, some of the most popular names in music have opted out of the show, whose viewership dropped 24 percent this year to a nine year low. In 2017, Drake, who has 42 career nods, was nominated for eight awards and won two, but declined to appear at the ceremony, saying later that he felt "alienated" from the institution. The next year, the rapper declined to submit his "More Life" project for consideration, following in the footsteps of Frank Ocean, and once again did not attend. The recording academy said it had received more than 21,000 submissions across 84 categories; recordings released from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2018, were eligible. From there, voters are directed to make selections in their areas of expertise up to 15 categories, plus the four general awards to determine the long list of nominees. For many of the major categories, including the big four and genres like rap, rock, R B and jazz, the voters' top 20 picks are then narrowed down by more opaque review committees, which determine the final nominees, with winners selected later by the general membership of about 13,000 voters.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Wombats and koalas stand out as bizarre animals even in a continent famed for bizarre animals. They are also each other's closest relatives. Koalas munch on eucalyptus, resemble living teddy bears and, like Australia's other imperiled native fauna, they need occasional rescuing. Wombats poop in cubes yes, cubes that they leave out and even stack to mark their territory. As for the animal itself, picture chonk incarnate, a burrowing ball of fuzz and fat powered by muscular little stub legs. Now multiply that five times. That's the size of a new long lost member of the same animal group, Mukupirna nambensis, a mega wombat that tipped the scales at well over 300 pounds. Scientists believe it scrounged around in the rainforest soil of Australia some 25 million years ago. "I would compare it to a black bear," said Robin Beck, a paleontologist at the University of Salford in England, who described fossils of the wow inducing wombat on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. The hefty species is the newest member of a supersized menagerie. For millions of years up to the present day, big, unique marsupials flourished on Australia and New Guinea, isolated from the rest of the world. Koalas and wombats are the only surviving remnants of an otherwise extinct group called the vombatiforms, "wombat like" animals that were more diverse than any other type of marsupials. Beyond the new Mukupirna, other extinct vombatiforms got even bigger, like Diprotodon, a herbivore that weighed almost as much as a rhinoceros. Or a mysterious horse sized animal that had a trunk. Or the "marsupial lion," a carnivore comparable to African lions today. "You would think they could do anything, they could take over the world," said Vera Weisbecker, an evolutionary biologist at Australia's Flinders University who was not part of the research team. "They didn't, so that's frustrating." The fossilized remains of Mukupirna nambensis indicated it belonged in a family tree of other large wombat relatives. Because very few high quality fossil sites have been discovered on the continent, scientists have long struggled to learn about these lost animals. Mukupirna, which means "big bones" in the Diyari language spoken near where it was found, languished for decades before being studied. It was dug up in July 1973 by paleontologists working on the dry bed of Lake Pinpa in South Australia. "All of us were desperately anxious to find any ancient fossils of Australian animals, because they are so rare," said Michael Archer, then a doctoral student on the expedition who now works at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The original team held a thin metal rod to drive down into the clay. Sometimes it passed through cleanly. Other times they would hear a clang from buried bone. Nearer to the surface, they uncovered and later published an alien ecosystem: teeth from lungfish, possums and freshwater dolphins; bones from flamingos, kangaroos that galloped instead of hopping and a supersized koala, among others. Big fossils like Mukupirna that clanged against the pole were wrapped in plaster and shipped to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There it sat for over four decades, until Dr. Beck and his colleagues obtained high resolution pictures and looped in Dr. Archer. From its skull, the team found teeth that resembled those of a baby wombat, allowing them to include Mukupirna in a family tree of other large wombat relatives. They also found the animal's arms would have made it an efficient digger, allowing it to scratch around for roots and tubers, although it probably would not be able to burrow like modern wombats. "That would be one hell of a burrow," Dr. Archer said. Other teams are now excavating the same Lake Pinpa site, so more fossils may still be uncovered. But as for whether Mukupirna shared the cubic poop of modern wombats, science hasn't yet offered a definitive answer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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When the Metropolitan Opera began to roll out Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, in 2010, I was a student who spent most of my time at the Met in the Family Circle the uppermost, least expensive seats. The "Ring" I remember was musically imperfect but visually awesome, with moments of stunning grandeur. This wasn't the "Ring" I read about in the press, though. Most of the critics loathed the 45 ton machine at the heart of Mr. Lepage's production: a hulking kinetic sculpture made of 24 planks that spin into a variety of configurations conjuring the dozen plus sets called for in Wagner's four opera saga. (The scenic design is heavily reliant on animating the machine with video projections.) Anthony Tommasini, in The New York Times, called it "the most frustrating opera production I have ever had to grapple with." Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, went so far as to say, "Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history." I have wondered in the years since whether this disconnect between my experience and theirs was simply a matter of perspective. Is it possible that the "Ring" could feel like two different productions depending on whether you're seeing it from up close, where most reviewers sit, or far away? So when the "Ring" returned this season there is one more cycle that continues through Saturday I saw all 15 or so hours of it twice in a row: from the Grand Tier (the third level up) and from the ninth row of the Orchestra section. The short answer is that yes, this "Ring" works best from farther away and, more important, higher up. But the reason reveals how Mr. Lepage's production provides little more than thin spectacle and leaves singers stranded like actors performing against a green screen. Luckily, this run of the "Ring" has been exceptionally well cast, and Mr. Lepage's dramaturgical deficiencies have been more than made up for by, say, Tomasz Konieczny's complexly noble Alberich, or Andreas Schager's comically bumbling Siegfried, or Michael Volle and Christine Georke's heart rending Wotan and Brunnhilde in the final scene of "Die Walkure." And Mr. Lepage's machine's aluminum surfaces amplify what are already powerful voices, allowing singers to penetrate the orchestra even when, under the baton of Philippe Jordan, the playing was at its mightiest. The set has the singer friendly acoustics of the Bayreuth Festival theater where Wagner first presented his "Ring" in the 1870s. From my seat near the Met stage, the voices didn't have to struggle to compete with the orchestra. With some distance, in the Grand Tier, the sound was superbly balanced. That's why I occasionally found myself, despite the ever present machine, focused only on the music. The singers sounded like they were interrogating every syllable of Wagner's libretto even when Mr. Lepage appeared to be looking no further than the description of each scene's setting. Never is Mr. Lepage more ambitious than in "Das Rheingold," the first installment of the "Ring." The machine is restless: wavy as the arpeggios of the prelude bring the Rhine River to life, then reconfiguring itself as fluidly as the opera, which unfolds over four scenes with no break. Which is also what makes "Rheingold" the noisiest of Mr. Lepage's productions. Although the machine is significantly quieter than in the original run nearly a decade ago, it still creaks and sighs from close up, at least. In the Grand Tier, I barely heard a thing. Other aspects of the technology, too, suffer from proximity. From the Orchestra, the projections look pixelated, like a low resolution image blown up, and it's impossible to avoid noticing the ropes that support acrobatic body doubles. You can't see what you wish you could: I nearly missed the giant Fasolt's death, it was so obscured by the machine; and the stage's apron often blocked singers from the waist down. But with some distance, the projections are sharper especially the pebbles of the Rhine, animated to roll around under the Rhinemaidens' fins and acrobatic moments, like the descent into Nibelheim and the crossing of the Rainbow Bridge, inspire awe. With "Die Walkure," Mr. Lepage achieves something more refined while still exploiting the machine's potential. Act I blends analog theater with the virtual: Stage snow falls in the background while, farther downstage, the planks evoke a wood ceiling dimly lit by flickering fire. Siegmund's narrative and Wotan's in Act II is animated by large and clarifying (if a bit obvious) films that cater to the audience in the cheap seats. And from the balcony levels, the "Ring" doesn't get any better than the closing tableau of Brunnhilde asleep on the mountain, surrounded by fire a scene that, up close, allows you to see the singers' facial expressions, but also the woeful digital fire projections. You get the feeling Mr. Lepage had lost faith in his problematic machine or perhaps had run out of time for sophistication by the final two "Ring" operas, in which the planks become little more than a curtain for projections. These two productions all but require distance to tolerate: The forest animations of "Siegfried" have the quality of video games from the 1990s and early 2000s, an era when you might have also seen the spirograph and screen saver ish projections of "Gotterdammerung." In the closing moments of that final opera, a scene in which a cleansing fire and flood devour civilization and offer rebirth, Mr. Lepage comes up only with a wall of water projections and some smoke surrounding statues of gods. This should be the apotheosis of Wagner's epic, but it's the low point of Mr. Lepage's production. No change in perspective could fix that.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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That scene takes up more than two thirds of the nearly three minute clip, and what follows is a barrage of images. Beverly and her grown friends (now played by the likes of James McAvoy and Bill Hader) reconvene to battle Pennywise yet again. There's a bathtub full of blood and plenty of red balloons, which the psycho circus performer used to lure a young boy to his death in the original 2017 smash "It." Based on Stephen King's novel, that film grossed more than 700 million worldwide, and its young stars (who also include Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things") appear in the sequel and its trailer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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There are literally dozens of new seasonal movies to watch from your sofa. These titles stand out from the pack. After her Philadelphia radio station closes for repairs during the holidays, a D.J. (Keshia Knight Pulliam) must broadcast from festive Bethlehem, Pa., where she works to solve a local mystery and meets a handsome divorce (Michael Xavier) and his matchmaking daughter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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A city panel on Monday night rejected a proposal to stop city mandated school closings in a tense, often raucous meeting, effectively putting any hopes of reversing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's education policy into the next mayor's hands. The proposal would have withdrawn current plans to close, co locate or phase out struggling public schools and also would have placed a moratorium on such future plans until the system, a centerpiece of the mayor's education strategy, could be re evaluated. The plan was sponsored by four members of the Panel for Educational Policy, a school oversight board, who are not administration appointees. But the rest of the panel, chosen by Mr. Bloomberg, voted the proposal down, prompting accusations that the majority members were puppets of the administration. "In 10 years, no one's raised a hand against the mayor, because you know you'll get fired if you do," said Patrick Sullivan, a panel representative from Manhattan. He was joined in supporting the proposal by the representatives of the Bronx and Queens. Brooklyn's representative abstained. In response to Mr. Sullivan, Judy Bergtraum, a mayoral appointee, retorted: "We're here because we believe in what's being done." Several candidates running to replace the mayor have spoken out against the closings, which they say disproportionately affect minority students, wreak havoc on students' academic careers and do not give underperforming schools enough chances to improve. One of those mayoral hopefuls, William C. Thompson Jr., a former city comptroller who previously served as president of the Board of Education, nodded to the importance of the issue among the Democratic candidates. "I'm amazed I'm the only mayoral candidate here this evening," he said during the meeting. "We're waiting for the next mayor I hope it'll be me who'll again believe in our children, believe in our communities," he said at a news conference before the meeting. Soon after, Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, noted that Mr. Thompson himself closed schools during his time on the Board of Education. Also on the agenda for the meeting, which was held at Brooklyn Technical High School, were dozens of proposals to close or phase out schools, or place multiple schools in one building, a practice known as co locating. Twenty two schools were up for eventual closing, including the Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications, named in honor of a popular teacher who was brutally murdered in 1997. Founded with high hopes, the school has struggled recently, and the panel was expected to approve its closing by the end of Monday's meeting. The city decides which schools to rehabilitate, wind down or close based on letter grades that it assigns based on student test scores and other measures. "It should be used as a last resort, not a first option," Dmytro Fedkowskyj, the Queens representative who introduced the resolution, said of the closings strategy. "More needs to be done sooner, when the problems are recognized, not three years later." When Marc Sternberg, a deputy education chancellor, tried to respond, his words were drowned out by chants from the crowd of hundreds of students, teachers and parents, prompting one panel member to repeatedly ask the crowd to be more respectful. "It goes without saying that these are not easy decisions, and there is no joy for me or my colleagues in having to bring these proposals to you this evening," Mr. Sternberg said, adding, "We have a responsibility to act." There may have been a vociferous crowd, but many said the meeting was less well attended than in the past, with the room only half full. Even Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, did not attend, sending a deputy instead.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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In the first chapter of Elizabeth Strout's "Olive, Again," which debuts at No. 6 on this week's hardcover fiction list, the man who will become Olive's second husband writes, "Dear Olive Kitteridge, I have missed you and if you would see fit to call me or email me or see me, I would like that very much." Jack Kennison might be speaking for fans of Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning "Olive Kitteridge," which inspired an Emmy winning HBO mini series and now this sequel. However, like its iconic heroine, this book is capable of standing alone. Strout says she had no intention of revisiting Olive until, one day, she just appeared: "I was sitting in a cafe in Norway not Norway, Me., the country Norway and I saw her so clearly: driving into the marina, getting out of her car. Only this time she had a cane.'" Strout was finishing her sixth novel, "Anything Is Possible," so she couldn't explore the next phase of Olive's life right away. But when she did, she says, "The people showed up rather quickly." One of her goals with "Olive, Again" was to give dignity to the process of aging: "There's a myth out there that when somebody reaches a certain age, they stop growing. I don't think that's true. I think until the last breath people are continuing to grow even Olive, who can be pretty abrasive. In the first book, she took her blows and would try to consider a little bit. In this book, she's considering things even more." Still crotchety as ever and plain spoken to a fault, Olive has evolved in the decade since we last saw her (she's on Facebook!) although "evolve" is not a word she'd use. There's a loneliness to her story, and humor too. As Strout says, "The funny always goes with the tragic. They walk hand in hand."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Mr. Rattner served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration. From left, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, Senator Mitch McConnell, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Senator Chuck Schumer and the White House adviser Larry Kudlow on Capitol Hill on Friday. We All Hate Bailouts, but We Need Them Here we go again. With business activity having declined precipitously, bailouts of troubled companies are appropriately back on the table. Distasteful as they may be, we need rescue plans urgently, for both small and large business, and we need to apply them prudently and wisely. Having experienced the Great Recession as head of President Barack Obama's auto industry task force, I saw firsthand the vast possible consequences of that meltdown. And I learned how private companies should be saved, whether you call them rescues or bailouts. Until Sunday, Washington was moving with commendable alacrity, particularly on the all important one time payments to individual Americans. But then the two parties deadlocked amid partisan wrangling, imperiling the jobs of incalculable millions of Americans. They need to work together to fix a bill whose business related proposals on the table are inadequate, imperfectly conceived and sprinkled with special interest provisions. We're facing an economic disaster that is, by almost any measure, potentially worse than the last one. The 2008 economic cyclone was centered on the financial sector, housing and automobiles. In contrast, the impact of the coronavirus threatens to reach virtually corner of our economy, from the largest travel related companies to the smallest restaurants. Accordingly, we require action commensurate with the scale of the problem and those measures must be as effective as the steps taken last time. It will be expensive. To help those thousands of businesses and restart America's economic machine, I believe we require much more than the 508 billion that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, initially proposed. And we shouldn't be favoring special interests, like the airlines. The bill contains 58 billion just for the airlines, while industries from manufacturing to hotels to energy have weighed in with requests nearing 3 trillion. Boeing alone is seeking 60 billion. Even the Tennessee Distillers Guild wants help. Let's insist on a level playing field. The government should approach allocating the capital as we did in 2009: lending to solvent companies on commercial terms and investing in insolvent ones deemed too important to fail in part by wiping out equity holders. Yes, that may involve the distasteful prospect of temporary government ownership of some companies. We faced that problem with General Motors in 2009 and solved it by limiting government to a passive role and selling the government's stock as quickly as possible. As the 2008 legislation the Troubled Asset Relief Program did, the Senate bill delegates most of the responsibilities for its execution to the executive branch. Democrats feel, with justification, that the Trump administration could turn the money into the equivalent of a slush fund. So we should consider alternatives, like creating a "special master" to oversee the fund or delegating substantial authority to the Federal Reserve, which announced on Monday a wave of lending programs aimed at businesses as well as financial markets. Then there's the question of "conditionality." In rescuing the auto companies, we imposed few other conditions on the recipients. Under the current circumstances, some additional strictures would be appropriate. Companies receiving help must agree to keep all workers on the payroll. Stock buybacks, dividend increases and pay raises for top executives should be banned until the loans are repaid. But we should stop short of other suggested requirements, like the proposal that air service to certain destinations not be interrupted. We also need to keep the swamp from using a tragic crisis to grab goodies. For example, the draft legislation restores the ability of corporations to get tax refunds by applying current losses to past profits. That ability was eliminated in 2017 as part of an enormous corporate tax cut. Now business wants this "loss carryback" one of the few rules that was tightened restored. That amounts to an outright gift to corporate America. Small businesses present another set of equally urgent challenges. Without help, many of them will shut their doors, dismiss their employees and never reopen. For these enterprises, even the 350 billion in aid included in the latest proposal falls grievously short. By presenting certified financial statements, any small business should be eligible to receive an interest free loan equal to three months of payroll and fixed expenses, conditioned on maintaining its work force. These loans would be structured so that if a business failed, the loan would be forgiven effectively, it would become a grant. The Senate bill would not require any repayment. That's a mistake. Businesses that succeed and we need a large majority of small businesses to succeed to achieve an economic recovery should turn over to the government a percentage of their profits until the loan is extinguished. Obviously, administering aid to any significant portion of our millions of small businesses would overwhelm a government bureaucracy. That's why the program should operate through the financial system, paying banks a fee for serving as administrators. We are essentially at a "break the glass" moment like the one that propelled Congress to act in October 2008. Congress needs to act now. Steven Rattner, a counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, is a Wall Street executive and a contributing Opinion writer. For latest updates and posts, please visit stevenrattner.com and follow me on Twitter ( SteveRattner) and Facebook. 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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ELVIS PRESLEY: THE SEARCHER (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; also on HBO streaming platforms. Documenting Elvis Presley's life in a new light is no small feat. But the director Thom Zimny started working on this two part portrait with one goal in mind: The King's music comes first. "The Searcher" is a deeply personal look at Presley's creative process and musical influences, beginning with his childhood in Mississippi to his final recording sessions in 1976. Interviewees like Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Priscilla Presley recount how the rock legend's music was often overshadowed by his image, emphasizing that he was most himself while creating and performing. Fans will surely appreciate the featured tracks; Presley's archivist generously offered 6,000 recordings to choose from. LITTLEST PET SHOP: A WORLD OF OUR OWN 12 p.m. on Discovery Family. This spinoff series shifts focus from the human protagonist in the original "Littlest Pet Shop" to six pet friends in two back to back premiere episodes. A magical portal transports pets to a utopia equipped with ski slopes, animal friendly apartments and a beauty salon where cats offer back massages. The series opens as the Boston terrier Roxie, house sitting for a pop star, is confronted by a group of snobs who may be using her to throw a house party.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Eva Presenhuber, the powerhouse Zurich gallery, has opened a New York outpost in the beautiful space that Karma, the bookseller and gallery, so fruitfully occupied for four years. The inaugural Presenhuber show is the first New York solo of Tobias Pils, an Austrian painter born in 1971 and an exceptional improviser who uses numerous drawing and painting materials but no color. He sticks exclusively to black and white and the grays that those two can yield. Like many contemporary European painters, he dips into the styles and motifs of modernism's heroic early years. (His fellow travelers include Volker Huller, Gert and Uwe Tobias, Tal R, Gerwald Rockenschaub and Katharina Wulff.) Several of Mr. Pils's paintings harbor hints of Matisse like windows, ferns and patterned textiles. The two faces of "Untitled (rome)" evoke those in Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror." A stronger work, "Untitled (arrow)," reads as a strenuous distillation of the shrieking woman of "Guernica" to a stark white geometric shape. The ponderous table shape and jumble of "Untitled (autumn 2)" could be the mother of all Cubist still lifes, while the buoyant "Untitled (Viennese head)" speaks for generations of cartoonish, possibly hat wearing noggins from Klee and Chagall forward. Some canvases seem compositionally confused or too tasteful. But the lack of color adds an implicit gravity to Mr. Pils's peregrinations that slows you down, while also making his shifts in techniques and materials especially clear. Even when he doesn't quite pull things off, it's interesting to watch him try. Rachel Harrison's effervescent exhibition "Prasine," filled with skew whiff sculptures in painted polystyrene, is a paradoxical achievement: It appears totally new by treating originality as a nonstarter. Her gnarled art, entangled as it is with the history of sculpture, is also an act of rollicking invention. As in previous shows by Ms. Harrison, bulky, contorted forms are pigmented with low gloss paint that looks like stucco, and then equipped with strange tackle: a soccer ball, a synthetic wig, an image of George Washington or Marilyn Monroe. The allusions have grown denser, though, and more specifically knotted into art history. "Winged Victory" contains a hot blue mini version of the Louvre's Hellenistic masterpiece and a hot pink tripwire that echoes the minimal art of Fred Sandback. "Every Sculpture Needs a Trapdoor" doubles down: A mishmash of ecru plates is impaled by a cylinder, then suffixed with a photocopied page from an essay on Sandback by the artist Andrea Fraser. Unlike the avant gardists of the last century, eager to lay waste to the past, Ms. Harrison treats masterpieces and mass media alike as simply building blocks, chosen for their personal significance and reworked at will; "Bears Ears," a wild clump of mauve polystyrene, is pierced with a USB flash drive loaded with Harun Farocki's films. How do you create in the face of history, and sidestep pastiche or citation for its own sake? Ms. Harrison answers: by treating information itself as a material to be reshaped and circulated again. Several works feature a fluorescent green, the same color used on film sets to make digital composites a further suggestion that this sparkiest of sculptors sees her art as links in an infinite chain of creation. History does not run on a neat continuum, which is what makes "The Anita Pallenberg Story," a 76 minute film about the Rolling Stones during the 1960s, feel pertinent today. Produced in 2000 by Laura Cottingham and Leslie Singer, the film is now on view at Artists Space in TriBeCa along with photographs and a revised essay by Ms. Cottingham. The Rolling Stones touring the United States is the film's ostensible subject, and Anita Pallenberg, a model and actress who has three children with Keith Richards, is its resident oracle and pop philosopher. Deliciously inexpert lip syncing and acting performances by art world figures give the work an insider appeal: The artist Cosima von Bonin is Ms. Pallenberg; the painter Nicole Eisenman is Mr. Richards; Ms. Cottingham is Mick Jagger and Brian Jones; and the New York gallerist Colin de Land, who died in 2003, and the artist Steven Parrino appear in cameos. The film has a slacker and D.I.Y. patina, but it is also leavened with high cinematic references: Clips from films by Robert Frank, Jean Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder alternate with sections resembling John Cassavetes's cinema verite, the schlock genre of Russ Meyer and art videos by Alex Bag. You see what is at stake politically, however, when the artist Ghada Amer arrives as a journalist, questioning the Stones about their appropriation of African American music, and Ms. Cottingham (as Jones) comments that Mr. Jagger wouldn't go onstage with Janis Joplin because "she's got more rhythm, more blues, more soul, more music and more woman" than he does. At a moment when cultural appropriation is being debated (in the current issue of Artforum, at the Whitney Biennial and with the removal of Sam Durant's sculpture from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center), the Stones, with their supposedly radical gestures, become fall guys for art, as well as foils for thinking about contemporary culture, politics and images. Brian Belott has been collecting children's art as long as he's been an artist (since the mid 1990s), and he's shown his collection, alongside complementary work of his own, at small galleries in New York and Los Angeles. But for Gavin Brown's 18 foot walls in Harlem, Mr. Belott tapped the enormous archive compiled by the psychologist and educator Rhoda Kellogg, borrowing and framing 300 drawings of racecars, dinosaurs and wonky, moon faced people by mostly anonymous boys and girls. The pieces are hung salon style and accompanied by a few dozen of Mr. Belott's own painted copies of still more children's art, as well as a full size, free standing classroom to host weekly art classes for area students. The results are alternately thrilling, tedious and overwhelming. Above all, they're surprisingly tricky to view. Moments of genius are easy to spot: A series of women in the rain, for example, drawn in pencil by one child, made me think of a Calder mobile crossed with a Southeast Asian textile print. But once you start spotting, you've engaged the very critical faculty that extinguishes childhood spontaneity. The adult skills of Mr. Belott's paintings, meanwhile the subtle modulation of colors, the self effacing irony of a motley Pied Piper figure in front of two onion domes or of a scientist surrounded by drooping beakers can't help reading as just a gallery full of reminders that you can't go home again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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LOS ANGELES Hollywood writers reached a tentative deal for a new three year contract with television and movie studios early Tuesday, averting a strike in dramatic overtime negotiations. At nearly 1 a.m. on the West Coast, weary union leaders, including Patric Verrone, the former president of the Writers Guild of America, West, emerged from the offices of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, and said that a favorable contract had been drawn up. In a statement posted on its website, the Writers Guild, West, said it had made "unprecedented gains." It added, "Did we get everything we wanted? No. Everything we deserve? Certainly not. But because we had the near unanimous backing of you and your fellow writers, we were able to achieve a deal that will net this guild's members 130 million more, over the life of the contract, than the pattern we were expected to accept." In a one sentence joint statement, writers and the producers' alliance said that they had secured "a tentative agreement on terms for a new three year collective bargaining agreement." The previous contract between studios and more than 12,000 writers expired at midnight. The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, had vowed to go on strike as soon as Tuesday morning. Union negotiators had locked horns with their studio counterparts all the way through. On Sunday, studios had made a new offer one reflecting improvements in some areas (health care) and scant movement in others (raises for streaming series) and the unions on Monday made counteroffers that held a hard line on multiple demands, according to three people briefed on the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. A deal only started to take shape as midnight approached, with both sides scrambling to find common ground. As the news spread, union loyalists flooded Twitter with messages of relief and self congratulation, even though details of the agreement were few. "Victory!!!" wrote Phillip Iscove, a creator of the Fox drama "Sleepy Hollow." Writers and studios did not see eye to eye on several issues involving technology. Most prominently, writers wanted pay rates for shows that run on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime to be more like those for blue chip broadcast network series. The unions also wanted members to receive bigger residual payments for online reruns of old shows and movies. Another sticking point involved what is known as "span," or how long TV writers spend on each script. There are more shows than ever, but networks are ordering many fewer episodes per season as few as six, compared with 22 or more in the past. At the same time, the episodes that are ordered are taking longer to produce up to three weeks per episode, rather than the usual two. So series writers who are paid per episode are often making less while working more. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. Part of the deal involved a union health insurance plan, which is running steep deficits, in part because it provides extremely generous coverage. Studios agreed to a bailout, while the union agreed to cost saving changes. Under proposals discussed Monday, according to analysts at Moody's, higher compensation for writers would cost some entertainment companies 100 million to 125 million annually for each year of a new three year contract. Unions representing directors and actors "will likely key off any agreement" with writers, adding to cost increases. The actors' contract with studios expires on June 30. As the entertainment capital waited for word on talks on Monday, union members, including one involved with talks, posted messages on Twitter using the hashtag wgaunity. Eileen Conn, whose credits include the Disney Channel series "K.C. Undercover" and the 1990s sitcom "Just Shoot Me," posted a photo of Sally Field as the title character from the film "Norma Rae" and wrote: "We are strong! We are united!" Some prominent politicians joined them. "I stand with the Writers Guild of America for fair pay and decent health care because it's the right thing to do and because Bruce and I can't wait for the next season of 'Ballers' to start," Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on Facebook, referring to her husband, Bruce Mann. Writers last month voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike; 6,310 ballots were cast, representing 68 percent of eligible voters, with 96 percent in favor of a walkout if no palatable deal was offered by studios. A strike would have pitted union writers, whose position has been eroded by reality television, the rise of lower paying streaming networks and reduced output by major movie studios, against entertainment conglomerates like Comcast, the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner. Television talk shows that rely on writers for monologues and skits "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," "Saturday Night Live" would have been affected first, followed by soap operas and some scripted summer series. In the last big Hollywood strike, a decade ago, an enraged Writers Guild walked out for 100 days over pay for digitally distributed shows. Tens of thousands of entertainment workers were idled, and the action cost the Los Angeles economy more than 2 billion, according to the Milken Institute.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Sandra Day O'Connor retired from public life earlier this year, announcing that she had dementia a rare public acknowledgment. Dementia Is Getting Some Very Public Faces The spouses arriving for the Wednesday afternoon caregivers' class at the Penn Memory Center in Philadelphia had something on their minds even before Alison Lynn, the social worker leading the session, could start the conversation. A few days before, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had released a letter announcing that she'd been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease. "As this condition has progressed, I am no longer able to participate in public life," she wrote. "I want to be open about these changes, and while I am still able, share some personal thoughts." It meant something to Ms. Lynn's participants that the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court would acknowledge, at 88, that she had the same relentless disease that was claiming their husbands and wives (and that killed Justice O'Connor's husband, too, in 2009). "There's so much stigma," Ms. Lynn said. "Caregivers feel so isolated and lonely. They were happy that she would bring light and public attention to this disease." Justice O'Connor had joined a growing but still tiny group: public figures who choose to share a dementia diagnosis. The breakthrough came in 1994, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan released a handwritten letter disclosing his Alzheimer's disease. "In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition," the former president wrote. "Perhaps it will encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families who are affected by it." Musician Glen Campbell and his family reached a similar decision in 2011, announcing his Alzheimer's diagnosis, and several farewell concerts, in a magazine interview. The concerts became a 15 month tour and an intimate, unflinching documentary. Pat Summitt, who coached championship women's basketball teams at the University of Tennessee, went public in 2012 with her early onset Alzheimer's disease, an uncommon variant. Actor Gene Wilder's family waited until his death in 2016, explaining that they feared children might be disturbed by an ailing Willy Wonka. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. One might question what such actions actually accomplish for the people coping with dementia and those who shoulder their care. It's hardly an obscure condition. About 5.7 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, the Alzheimer's Association estimates. That represents just 60 to 80 percent of people with dementia, which takes multiple forms. Though dementia r ate seems to be declining, possibly because of rising education levels and better treatment for conditions like hypertension, both of which seem to help prevent dementia. But the number of Americans affected will continue to grow as the population grows and ages. Already, Alzheimer's has become the fifth leading cause of death for those aged 65 and older and the only one for which medicine can't yet offer prevention or treatment. One promising drug after another has proved ineffective in clinical trials. How can "raising awareness" make any difference? But researchers and advocates argue that Justice O'Connor's forthright statement does serve a positive purpose. Among her Penn patients, "a strong majority are hesitant to share the information with other people," Ms. Lynn said. They worry that others will treat them with pity or condescension, that their friends will drop away and their social lives shrivel all justifiable fears. People often do withdraw as their neighbors and friends grow progressively more demented. But patients also think, "If someone very well known can say she has this, it might be O.K. for me to say it, too," Ms. Lynn said. Openness about dementia, instead of hiding it, could lead to earlier diagnoses, said Shana Stites, a clinical psychologist and researcher at the Penn Memory Center. She ticked off several ways that can help. "A diagnosis explains what's happening, why you're not remembering, why you're behaving this way," Dr. Stites said. As dreaded as that news may be, patients and those around them sometimes feel relieved when their problems acquire a name and a medical label. Moreover, when people avoid knowing, "it takes away the opportunity for the family to get prepared, for the person and the family to educate themselves," said Beth Kallmyer, vice president of care and support at the Alzheimer's Association. Early diagnosis can benefit research, too, which increasingly focuses on people in the beginning stages of disease. That requires diagnosed participants willing to enroll in clinical trials. Finally, "public figures who come forward do a lot to normalize the condition," Dr. Stites said. "Yes, this happens. It's reality." Let's not prettify that reality. True, people may have several years after diagnosis in which to enjoy their lives, to remain productive and engaged, before symptoms intensify. But dementia is a terminal disease, one whose burdens can overwhelm family caregivers. It robs patients of their identities in a way few other illnesses do, sometimes causing loved ones to mourn them while they're still living. That shouldn't make it a source of shame, a whispered about disease, as cancer was 60 years ago or AIDS was 30 years ago. Yet even many physicians evade the disease , Ms. Kallmyer pointed out. In a 2015 analysis of Medicare data, commissioned by the Alzheimer's Association, doctors delivered a diagnosis of the condition to fewer than half of Alzheimer's patients or their caregivers . He continued teaching until May, when he retired on disability. Neither he nor Ms. Dunbar, 56, a nurse practitioner, regrets their disclosure to their children, to colleagues and friends, to a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer (where, coincidentally, retired sports columnist Bill Lyon also has been writing about his Alzheimer's diagnosis). "It's been beneficial to us as a family," Ms. Dunbar added. "It's made us feel encircled by a community that understands." Researchers, including Dr. Stites, have been exploring the stigma of dementia, hoping to identify contributing factors and to change the way the public regards the disease. In the meantime, having people around us, famous or not, talk frankly about dementia may render the supposedly unspeakable a more everyday occurrence. Because it is one. "The benefits, what this does for others living with the disease, the example it sets for the general public it's crucial," Dr. Stites said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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There are many reasons Jenny Slate is a distinctive performer her voice, her balance of liveliness and calm but one of her more practical gifts onscreen is that she nails millennial professional anxiety, acting in the registers between deference, exhaustion and indifference. In the travelogue drama "The Sunlit Night," she plays Frances, an artist who takes on a summer apprenticeship in remote Norway. The film begins with a critique of Frances's paintings; her work is deemed cold and impersonal, like hotel art. Seeking an escape, Frances finds a gig and a kindred spirit with Nils (Fridtjov Saheim), an established artist who has plans to paint himself out of a dry spell by completing a barn for an art institute in Norway. As Frances labors on Nils's project, she ponders her own paintings and pursues muses that might deepen her disengaged work.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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TIGERTAIL (2020) Stream on Netflix. This family drama from the "Master of None" co creator Alan Yang darts between two eras and three languages to tell the story of Pin Jui, a man who leaves behind his lover in Taiwan to emigrate to the United States. It casts three actors (Tzi Ma, Hong Chi Lee and Zhi Hao Yang) as Pin Jui at different ages, exploring the way the international move shapes his life and evoking the work of Asian filmmakers like Wong Kar wai and Hou Hsiao hsien. "It's using classic techniques to tell a modern story that I hadn't seen before," Alan Yang said in an interview with The Times. IN THE DARK 9 p.m. on the CW. Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), the 20 something at the center of this dramedy, spent the series's first season solving a murder mystery. In Season 2, Murphy deals with the fallout of the cracked case while getting wrapped up in another dangerous pursuit, as she's forced to use the guide dog school she runs with her roommate (Brooke Markham) and her boss (Morgan Krantz) to launder drug money.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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If you've made it this far without watching "Fleabag," which won four Emmy Awards last year, I'm not even mad I'm impressed. But it's time to dive in. The show's creator, Phoebe Waller Bridge, stars as a young woman grieving the deaths of her mother and her best friend. She masks her melancholy with a reckless joie de vivre, narrating her exploits to the camera as she goes. The viewer is her closest confidant until she meets an unlikely match in the second season. "Fleabag" is quite simply a perfect show, a stunningly effective character study that's as funny as it is devastating. The only drawback to this fever dream of a satire from 2004 is that it's only six episodes long. Written by and starring Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade, "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is a show within a show presented from the perspective of the title character, a horror author who unveils an extremely low budget television show he produced in the 1980s but that never made it to air. I won't spoil the hilariously nutty details, but if you dig the offbeat sensibility of Adult Swim, give it a try. The central shtick of "Peep Show" was a harbinger of things to come. With a stream of consciousness voice over narration, the show toggles between the points of view of freeloader Jeremy (Robert Webb) and strait laced Mark (David Mitchell), two sad sacks who live in London. It's almost like watching someone go live on Instagram, only this show is reliably entertaining. "Peep Show" ran for nine seasons, beginning in 2003, a rarity for British television. If the cringe comedy of "The Office" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm" suits you, this is your next binge. Where to stream: Hulu and Amazon. Before Armando Iannucci made "Veep," he created "The Thick Of It," a savage political satire set among the bumbling employees of the fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship in the British government. "Veep" fans will recognize the show's mockumentary style and never ending stream of florid insults, which flow with particular vigor from Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the director of communications. The show's vision of organizational incompetence can feel quaint, but its wicked humor is as sharp as ever. Where to stream: Amazon and BritBox. This epic, lavishly produced show spans many of the decades of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. The creator Peter Morgan has five seasons planned, and the three that have so far been released provide a juicy peek under the hood of the monarchy, from the queen's marital problems to her sister's alcohol abuse. "The Crown" is beautifully acted (Claire Foy plays Elizabeth in the first two seasons, with Olivia Colman taking over in the third) and smartly plotted, as each episode juxtaposes a national crisis with the characters' personal struggles. The upcoming season will have Gillian Anderson playing Margaret Thatcher and introduce Princess Diana. "Ab Fab" has been revived a couple of times in the 21st century, but its original mid 90s run is a crown jewel of British comedy. The show centers on two middle aged fall down drunks, the publicist Edina (Jennifer Saunders) and her best friend the magazine editor Patsy (Joanna Lumley), who use their income and shaky society status to score drugs, attend parties and generally attempt to relive their swinging sixties youth. Their foil is Eddy's long suffering daughter, Saffron (Julia Sawalha), who rebels by being as conventional as possible. Both Saunders and Lumley are experts in physical comedy, and you might just find yourself echoing their refrain of "darling, darling!" Where to stream: Netflix, Amazon, BritBox and Hulu. Created by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci, "The Day Today" is a satirical news program that continues the great British tradition of skewering the country's own pretensions. Like "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace," the show ran for just one, six episode season, which is available in its entirety on YouTube. It dates back to 1994, so American audiences might find some of the references a tad obscure, but most of it lands anyway, thanks to the contrast between the familiar rhythms of a nightly news broadcast and the delirious absurdity of the news items in question. Fans of "Mr. Show" will find plenty to appreciate in a program that takes silliness so seriously. "Downton Abbey" feels incredibly "pre 2016," an escapist fantasy whose major continued tension is whether a wealthy English family will lose their favorite house. The show follows both the fictional Crawley family and the household staff they employ to maintain their enormous country estate. Although "Downton Abbey" ran for six seasons between 2010 and 2015 (a movie was released in 2019), the first three are the show's prime. You might even find the second season, which partly takes place during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, oddly comforting. This BBC series from the '80s and early '90s, based on a character who appears in several Agatha Christie novels, is gentle and slow, with just enough humor and intrigue to keep your attention. It's hard to find a contemporary series that has the patience of a show like "Miss Marple." Joan Hickson plays the title character, an older woman who lives alone in a fictional English village and works as an amateur detective, assisted in the art of forensic investigation by a lifetime of small town living. There's something particularly comforting about watching a hyper competent, unassuming woman quietly figure things out while life bustles on around her. If you're looking for a fulfilling and uplifting show to binge in a day, grab a "Banana." Created by Russell T Davies, the brain behind "Queer as Folk," "Banana" is an eight part anthology series that follows a loosely connected group of queer youth living in Manchester. Their circumstances are generally precarious, but the show has a joyful tone and a sly sense of humor. ("Do I look like a vegan?" one character asks. "You do have very sad eyes," another answers.) Like "High Maintenance," "Banana" has an economical, and often surprising, mode of storytelling, and you learn everything you need to know about these characters in just a few minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times The Pandemic's Hidden Victims: Sick or Dying, but Not From the Virus Maria Kefalas considers her husband, Patrick Carr, a forgotten victim of the coronavirus. In January, Mr. Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University, suffered a relapse of the blood cancer that he has had for eight years. Once again, he required chemotherapy to try to bring the disease, multiple myeloma, under control. But this time, as the coronavirus began raging through Philadelphia, blood supplies were rationed and he couldn't get enough of the transfusions needed to alleviate his anemia and allow chemo to begin. Clinic visits were canceled even as his condition worsened. For Mr. Carr and many others, the pandemic has shaken every aspect of health care, including cancer, organ transplants and even brain surgery. On April 7, Mr. Carr began receiving home hospice care. He died on April 16. He was 53. The pandemic "expedited his death," Ms. Kefalas said. "I'm not saying he would have beaten the cancer," said Ms. Kefalas, a professor of sociology at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "I'm saying it wouldn't have been four months, this precipitous decline, fighting for blood, fighting for hospice nurses." "People like my husband now are dying not because of Covid, but because the health care system just cracked open and swallowed them up," she said. Beds, blood, doctors, nurses and ventilators are in short supply; operating rooms are being turned into intensive care units; and surgeons have been redeployed to treat people who cannot breathe. Even if there is room for other patients, medical centers hesitate to bring them in unless it is absolutely necessary, for fear of infecting them or of health workers being infected by them. Patients themselves are afraid to set foot in the hospital even if they are really sick. Early on, as the epidemic loomed, many hospitals took the common sense step of halting elective surgery. Knee replacements, face lifts and most hernias could wait. So could checkups and routine mammograms. But some conditions fall into a gray zone of medical risk. While they may not be emergencies, many of these illnesses could become life threatening, or if not quickly treated, leave the patient with permanent disability. Doctors and patients alike are confronted with a worrisome future: How long is too long to postpone medical care or treatment? Delaying treatment is especially disturbing for people with cancer, in no small part because it seems to contradict years of public health messages urging everyone to find the disease early and treat it as soon as possible. Doctors say they are trying to provide only the most urgently needed cancer care in clinics or hospitals, not just to conserve resources but also to protect cancer patients, who have high odds of becoming severely ill if they contract the coronavirus. Nearly one in four cancer patients reported delays in their care because of the pandemic, including access to in person appointments, imaging, surgery and other services, according to a recent survey by the American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network. Tzvia Bader, who leads the company TrialJectory, which helps cancer patients find clinical trials, said frightened patients had been calling to ask her advice about postponements in their treatment. One woman had undergone surgery for melanoma that had spread to her liver, and was due to begin immunotherapy, but was told it would be delayed for an unknown length of time. "She says, 'What's going to happen to me?'" Ms. Bader said. "This is not improving her chances." And some clinical trials, where cancer patients can receive innovative therapies, have been suspended. "The mortality of cancer has been declining over the last few years, and I'm so terrified we are going backwards," Ms. Bader said. Many hospitals have postponed surgery for breast tumors, an unsettling decision for women eager to have the cancer removed. But oncologists say that for most cases of breast cancer, unlike more aggressive malignancies, there is no harm in waiting for surgery, because the regimen can be changed. "We can safely give drugs first and start the surgery later," said Dr. Larry Norton, medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. "The current crisis will be under control, and they can come back later." The drugs include hormone blocking medicines or chemotherapy, depending on the type of tumor. Even before the pandemic, some treatment plans called for drugs first and surgery later. But patients first may need some convincing that it's OK to change the plan. Women scheduled for radiation may also be able to wait, according to Dr. Sylvia Adams, director of the breast cancer center at NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center. But she added in an email: "Patients who need radiation urgently (such as for brain or spine metastases from breast cancer) will be able to undergo radiotherapy. Radiation oncologists are also trying to use shorter regimens whenever possible to minimize the number of trips a patient must take for radiation." The American Society of Breast Surgeons on April 7 posted guidelines on its website to help doctors decide when it is safe to delay treatment. Experts on lung cancer also describe a trickle down effect of Covid 19. Dr. Jacob Sands, a thoracic medical oncologist at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said concerns that temporary side effects of some chemotherapy regimens could leave patients more susceptible to the coronavirus were leading some doctors to choose different treatments. A C.D.C. study finds stillbirths are higher in pregnant women with Covid. Canada expands its list of vaccines accepted for travel. For example, he said, a certain course might have more benefit but also more complications, such as fever, which would require a visit to the emergency department. But now, in hard hit regions like Boston and New York, oncologists are leaning toward an alternative regimen, which might be slightly less effective but would also be less likely to send the patient to the hospital. Similarly, he added, radiation oncologists are finding ways to allow patients to finish treatment with fewer trips to the hospital. Patients who have already been treated and were to be monitored every six months are having their appointments delayed for a month or two. Dr. Sands emphasized that all such decisions were tailored to each patient and fell within long established, safe parameters. But what concerns him most is the postponement in the hot zones of early detection programs to screen high risk people for lung cancer, because of the fear that by coming to a clinic, patients could be exposed to the virus. Finding lung cancer early can be a game changer, he said. Organ transplants have also been profoundly affected. "The number of potential people that could be organ donors is now significantly reduced," said Helen Irving, the chief executive officer of LiveOnNY, which coordinates transplants from deceased donors on the East Coast. Donors are brain dead and on life support, often from accidents or overdoses. Now, many possible donors have become infected, so their organs cannot be used. "Normally we would follow about 20 to 25 referrals a day," Ms. Irving said. "That is now down to six or seven that are non Covid and potentially with an injury that would allow them to become an organ donor." In addition, family members are not present to give the required consent for organ donation, because hospitals have banned visitors. "We're finding ourselves more and more in the situation of talking to families over the phone," Ms. Irving said. "It is absolutely something we would not want, ever. We've always spoken face to face." Even so, relatives do agree to donate. "Every family that has said yes to us had said yes because what they are witnessing is such grief, such a surreal situation," Ms. Irving said. "We are surrounded by death and dying every day on the news, and this is one opportunity to save a life. They are saying, 'Thank you for still doing this; in all this we can save a life.' I'm hearing that from physicians, making referrals, too: 'Thank you for saving lives when all we're doing is losing them.'" But the numbers are way down. Normally, LiveOnNY has about 30 organ donors a month, resulting in about 75 transplants. Now, there are about 25 percent as many donors. "We always said we were looking for a needle in a haystack," Ms. Irving said. "Now we're looking for a needle in 500 haystacks." In recent years, many transplants have come from living donors who give up one kidney or a lobe of the liver. Most of those transplants have been postponed. Coming into the hospital puts both the recipient and a healthy donor at risk of infection, and the operations require a ventilator for each patient during surgery. Recipients have a higher than average risk of becoming infected, because of the immune suppressing drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection. "We have living donors whose cases have been delayed," said Dr. Kasi McCune, a surgeon who performs kidney transplants at Columbia NewYork Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. "The patients we have talked to have been easygoing about it. They don't want to be immuno suppressed at this time either." Before the pandemic, there were about 750 living donor kidney transplants a week in the United States, Dr. McCune said. By late March, it dropped to 350 and kept rapidly declining. "We understand that patients with Covid are the priority, but somebody that has end stage liver disease can die as well," she said. In some regions where Covid patients have overwhelmed hospitals, operating rooms have been converted to intensive care units, and that has limited the availability of sites to remove organs from deceased donors. Cases with living donors are also affected, because both the donor and recipient need intensive care after surgery, and many of those beds are now occupied by Covid patients, Dr. Martinez said. At least 10 people from Florida, New York and Kentucky who need liver transplants and have living donors have asked if they could have the surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, according to its chief of transplantation, Dr. Abhi Humar. "Compared to other places, epicenters such as New York, this has been relatively a spared area," Dr. Humar said. Patients having kidney transplants risk contracting the virus at the hospital. But people with kidney failure risk exposure several times a week at dialysis centers, and dialysis patients have high odds of severe disease from the coronavirus. Neurosurgery is also taking a back seat to the virus. "My department has 65 surgeries on the schedule," said Dr. David Langer, the director of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Neither he nor other neurosurgeons have operated in weeks; they have been redeployed to the I.C.U. to take care of coronavirus patients. Dr. Lowell has struggled to obtain treatment for his own wife. Shortly before the virus hit New York, she had back surgery and then developed a complication called a seroma, which flooded her abdomen with several liters of fluid. The specialist who could drain the fluid did not want to bring her in, afraid of exposing her to the virus. Finally, it was scheduled for April 21. She has waited more than a month. "Any other time, this would have been done the same day," he said. Some of his patients have had far more serious problems, he said. One called him, saying she felt depressed and weak, and couldn't eat. They were communicating via telemedicine, which Dr. Lowell like many other doctors in the New York region has been using to avoid in person visits that could spread the virus. In the past, her tests suggested that she was prone to a blood cancer, multiple myeloma. Listening to her, seeing her on his screen and knowing her history, Dr. Lowell suspected a serious illness, possibly the cancer. He told her that, and urged her to go to the hospital. The patient, who was 60, declined, fearing she would contract the coronavirus. Five or six days passed, and her husband called, saying she felt even worse. Again, Dr. Lowell implored them to go to the hospital. Again, she refused. A few hours later, she died. "I have no idea why," Dr. Lowell said. Some of his other patients with serious illnesses have also refused to go to the hospital, for the same reason. One who wanted to go, and whose family called 911, was urged by paramedics to stay home because the hospital was overwhelmed by coronavirus cases. He did stay home, and died a few days later. "I'm a primary care doctor," Dr. Lowell said. "I'm totally hogtied trying to take care of people. It's sad. It brings tears. We're all on the front line."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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Travelers to the Pacific Northwest are sometimes lured by postcard promises of orca whales or the Space Needle against a backdrop of lofty peaks. But what too few tourists learn is this: The massive dome of Mount Rainier arguably the showiest of Washington State's majestic Cascades is best beheld not from Puget Sound but from the high desert east of the mountains. There, from points up and down the Yakima Valley, Rainier and its sister summit, Mount Adams, loom like giant snow cones above swaths of irrigated farmland and sagebrush covered range. A world away from Seattle, the "dry side," as it is known to Washingtonians, is home to more tractors than Teslas. In addition to broad vistas and respite from rain, the region boasts a booming wine industry: The pioneers who first took a chance on planting Vitis vinifera in a place where Concord grapes were king have in one generation seen the number of wineries in Washington State swell from a handful to nearly 1,000. Seattleites increasingly find sport in seeking out a few rays of sunshine and returning with a few cases of wine. Napa it is not. Loamy soil, prodigious snowmelt and lots of sunshine sustain a richly diverse agriculture whose color and character seem more aligned with parts of the Midwest than the "Left Coast." Roughly 75 percent of the nation's hops are grown here, and the loopy architecture of hop yards a giant cat's cradle of stilts and strings is a common sight. Pink Lady apple trees, pruned like poodles, rival the topiaries at Versailles. The valley is also the nation's leading producer of spearmint and peppermint oil; carpets of dark green leaves, destined for toothpaste and chewing gum, line the roadsides. At the Darigold dairy plant in Sunnyside, legend has it that the annual production of cheese blocks, if stacked vertically, would exceed the elevation of Rainier (14,411 feet). Visitors to the region are in for a treat even before they get there: The drives from Seattle, over the shoulder of Rainier, and from Portland, Ore., up the mighty Columbia River Gorge, feature scenes that look like pages ripped from a grade school geography text. From Seattle, consider a detour onto the Yakima River Canyon Scenic Byway. Along the route, the Roza Dam, built in 1939, diverts the irrigation water that makes it all possible. (Flights into Pasco, where the airport has just undergone a major expansion, can offer glimpses of waving wheat and black polka dots that are Angus cows.) I first came to the valley in the early 1980s, when my sister and her husband started a small winery there. At a lawn party to mark the release of their first merlot, we ate sweet native shrimp that my brother had netted in Puget Sound; tender asparagus from a nearby farm stand (locals will not eat asparagus unless it is picked that day); and little lamb chops, grilled to perfection by a friend whose Spanish ancestors ran sheep in Eastern Washington in the early 1900s. I have been returning as often as I can ever since. My first stop was Barnard Griffin, a trailblazer founded in 1983 on the outskirts of Richland, in the shadow of Badger Mountain. I piggybacked on a bus tour tasting in full swing, and took special note of the winemaker Rob Griffin's peachy 2014 chardonnay, which scored 94 points at the San Francisco International Wine Competition (I did a double take at the price, just 14), and his juicy 2015 Sangiovese rose, which won the "pink" sweepstakes award at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. I sampled six wines (the tasting fee of 10 is refunded if you buy wine). The Kitchen, next to the pergola fronted tasting room, serves a "farm to fork" menu Tuesday to Saturday, starting at noon. I poked my head into db Studio, where Mr. Griffin's wife, Deborah Barnard, makes exuberant art glass and teaches classes to aspiring glaziers. Up the road in Benton City, high above the modest stucco bungalows that skirt the base of Red Mountain, is the glamorous Col Solare, a joint effort of the Italian wine giant Marchesi Antinori and Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the largest producer in the state. I joined a tour that began in the vineyard out front, where our guide joked about the winery's "lakefront property," an allusion to the cataclysmic Missoula floods that deposited local sediments favorable to growing grapes. The wines red and red only are made from Bordeaux varietals (and a touch of syrah); they command big prices and get big scores. In the svelte tasting room, a flight of three wines was 17 (the selection included the formidable 2012 and 2013 Col Solare blends, which retail for 75). Darel Allwine oversees the winemaking; his 2014 Shining Hill, at a lower price ( 40), had notes of Bing cherry and licorice. For snacking, marcona almonds seasoned with white truffle salt are 9; the charcuterie plate is 24. Moving on up to Prosser, I crossed the railroad tracks near the Tree Top fruit processing plant to Mercer Estates. The Mercer family has farmed in the valley since the 1880s but has only lately come to winemaking; they grow every grape that goes into their proprietary wines, mostly on the pretty slopes and plateaus of the nearby Horse Heaven Hills. The winemaker Jessica Munnell, who is native to the valley, makes some beautiful reds, but I especially liked her brisk sauvignon blanc; cantaloupe scented viognier; and super fruity Grenache rose. Mercer has come away from the annual wine competition at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo with a trove of prizes saddles, bridles and ornate silver buckles; these add a certain dash to the handsome tasting room, where the fee to taste is 5. I headed next to the top of the valley, to Treveri Cellars, known for its sparkling wines. With the stone and timber heft of a ski lodge, the tasting room was at capacity at noon (a glorious outdoor patio, bubbly cocktails and a "small bites" menu are draws). Jurgen Grieb, the winemaker, studied methode champenoise in his native Germany; he makes impeccable effervescent versions of riesling, gewurztraminer and Muller Thurgau (as well as traditional blanc de blancs, blanc de noirs and a delicious sparkling rose of chardonnay and syrah). At 15 to 20, these are bargain bubbles. Once a month, visitors can tour the facility and disgorge their own bottle before taking it home ( 50, by appointment). Just beyond Treveri, a single track road leads through cherry and nectarine orchards to Owen Roe. A striking barn red metal building, set in a cup shaped dale, houses the winery and tasting room. The surrounding slopes are studded with volcanic outcroppings and planted with roller coaster rows of red wine grapes. The winemaker David O'Reilly, who has a devoted following for his Oregon pinot noirs, blended his first Washington wines here in 2013. I tasted a flight of five wines for 10, which I applied to a bottle of his dense, luscious 2013 Union Gap Vineyard syrah ( 55). Bottlings fall into three price tiers, and while many of the names are a hoot the value driven Corvidae line honors the pesky crows and magpies that raid the vineyards with wines called Mirth and WiseGuy the pursuit of quality is serious. Picnicking is encouraged (a commercial kitchen is in the works). A tour of the winery, by reservation ( 20), includes a private tasting and a ride through the estate's organically farmed vineyard in an all terrain Pinzgauer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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How to take on a one ton gorilla? We sent both of our chief critics to "King Kong," the 35 million, Australian born musical that opened Thursday night at the Broadway Theater. Far from Skull Island and the wrath of Kong, they huddled to talk it out. BEN BRANTLEY Hello, Jesse. Though I'm not in a playful mood this morning having just seen the spirit crushing "King Kong" what if we begin this dialogue with a game? Imagine you are on the street, having just left the theater, and are asked by a television interviewer to describe your response in one word. Well? JESSE GREEN It can't be printed here, and I'm not even sure it's one word. (It starts with "ape.") So I guess I'll go with "ugh." BRANTLEY I understand what you're saying. Since screaming is such a big part of the show, mine would be "aaaaaaaaargh." GREEN We were hoping in reviewing this together that one of us might have something nicer to say than the other one does. But it looks like our opinions rhyme at least as well as most of the lyrics in the show. BRANTLEY You mean like, "But this is not the end of me / 'Cause this beast is clemency"? GREEN When I see a musical drawn from a work in another genre in this case the 1933 movie and its novelization one thing I look for is the added value. What is gained in bringing "King Kong" to the stage? Certainly not provocative or insightful songwriting. The score is a hodgepodge of soundtrack style murk by Marius de Vries and a clutch of no profile songs by Eddie Perfect, whose score for "Beetlejuice" is heading toward Broadway even as we speak. Did you think the music added anything? BRANTLEY No, but I think you're missing the point. The only reason for this "King Kong" to exist is its title character. So before we eviscerate the show, directed and choreographed by Drew McOnie, shall we briefly praise the animatronic ape (designed by Sonny Tilders)? BRANTLEY Yeah, I thought of a (barely) animated gargoyle from the Notre Dame cathedral. Disney casting agents, are you listening? What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter GREEN The adapters of this "King Kong" seem to have two stories they wanted to tell. One is a morality tale about the evil of trapping a living being in a cheap entertainment scheme. To judge from my own misery in the audience, I'd say this is a theme they mastered. BRANTLEY And the other theme, would that be the equation of ape in captivity with the oppression of women? GREEN Yes. A feminist angle is attempted, not very convincingly. When the plucky farm girl Ann Darrow (Christiani Pitts) arrives in Manhattan intent on making it big in showbiz, it's with an explicit streak of post liberation consciousness. "At least I'm not some man's property," she sings in a song called "Queen of New York." BRANTLEY And when Kong dragged from his native Skull Island to Depression era New York by the cynical, selfish and typically male showman Carl Denham (Eric William Morris) has escaped from the theater where he's been put on exploitative display, she sings a battle hymn of sympathy to him. ("From birth we've both been playing a game we cannot win / We'll never break the lock or ever leave the box the world has put us in.") GREEN A car wreck of cliches like that simply can't put a feminist story across meaningfully. Or any story, really and that's a bigger problem than the bad score and sluggish 20 foot marionette. I find it hard to believe that the book is by Jack Thorne, who won a Tony Award last season for writing "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." GREEN Mr. McOnie certainly had them working frantically. During the musical numbers, which feel relentless, the ensemble comes off as a troupe of overstimulated mimes playing charades. But here's my question for you: Was there anything, aside from Kong's two or three expressions, you actually enjoyed? BRANTLEY Not really. I kept hoping a higher camp factor might kick in. When poor Ann is taken to Kong's lair, and makes quips about his housekeeping and bachelor ways, I longed for the reincarnation of Madeline Kahn, who made such blissful hay out of similar material in "Young Frankenstein." GREEN The camp here is all accidental. The Skull Island jungle looks like green spaghetti with phlegm balls. (The scenic and projection designer is Peter England.) But the oppressiveness of the music and the over intensity of the staging never allow you to laugh at, and therefore enjoy, the ludicrousness of the story. BRANTLEY Agreed. By the way, if you look at accounts of the Australian incarnation of five years ago, which had a book by Craig Lucas, it featured several more characters, including a love interest for Ann. In this version, there are effectively three central human characters: the agency seeking Ann; the chauvinist, bad mogul Carl; and (oh, dear) his put upon, slow witted, golden hearted assistant, Lumpy (Erik Lochtefeld). GREEN The bevy of previous authors discarded in the course of the musical's development dodged a bullet here. But Mr. Lochtefeld actually manages to give a sincere and human scale performance, even if most of what he has to say is maudlin hogwash. BRANTLEY Yes, even the screams lacked eloquence. Fay Wray, the star of the original, is best remembered for her earsplitting howls of terror when she's in the big guy's clutches. But our intrepid Ann is incapable of screaming in fear. Instead, she roars, and that's what attracts her soul mate Kong to her. Unfortunately, I didn't hear a lot of Katy Perry power in Ms. Pitts's scream.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Ever since the 2016 election, observers like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt speculated that Donald Trump could undermine American democracy and move the country in an overtly authoritarian direction. That possibility grew more plausible over the years of the Trump administration, as he sought to undermine a growing list of American institutions that stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media (which he branded "enemies of the American people") and of course the integrity of elections themselves. Trump made his authoritarian instincts clear by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the 2020 election. Ruth Ben Ghiat contributes to this literature in a book that compares Trump to a wide variety of earlier strongmen, including Mussolini, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, Muammar Qaddafi, Silvio Berlusconi and Mobutu Sese Seko, as well as contemporaries like Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and others. The author, a historian who has written previously on Italian Fascism, is at her best when describing the history of Mussolini's rise, and the way that insouciant Italians and foreign powers facilitated it. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of November. See the full list. Unfortunately, Ben Ghiat provides no conceptual framework for distinguishing between different types of strongmen, and gives us very little insight into Donald Trump beyond what is already widely known. What we get instead is an endless series of historical anecdotes about a heterogeneous collection of bad leaders ranging from democratically elected nationalists like Modi to genocidal fanatics like Hitler. What sense does it make to put Silvio Berlusconi in the same category as Muammar Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein? Berlusconi may have been sleazy, manipulative and corrupt, but he didn't murder political opponents or support terrorism abroad, and he stepped down after losing an election. Ben Ghiat notes that many strongmen came to power in the 1960s and '70s through military coups, but that today they are much more likely to be elected. Wouldn't it be nice to know why coups have largely vanished? Ben Ghiat's case selection seems quite arbitrary: For example, strongmen of the left like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez or Ecuador's Rafael Correa are not included, nor are women like Indira Gandhi. If we are focusing on populists in democratic countries, why include autocrats who never faced an election? An analytical framework would allow us to understand how strongmen differ from one another, rather than lumping them into a single amorphous category.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The first 1 million Caplow Children's Prize was won by a Pakistani pediatrician who hopes to save hundreds of newborns in one Karachi neighborhood. Dr. Anita Zaidi, one of the first doctors trained by Pakistan's Aga Khan University and who has additional degrees from Duke and Harvard, beat 550 other entries, including those from major charities like Doctors Without Borders. The neighborhood she plans to help, Rehri Goth, is a fishing village facing a mangrove swamp. Even though it is within the borders of Pakistan's financial capital, one of the world's largest cities, its residents are so poor and so cut off from medical care that 11 percent of local children die before age 5 usually during birth or in the first month after it. "The population lives in scattered clusters and is very poorly linked to public transport," Dr. Zaidi said. Most cannot afford any kind of private transportation, so mothers are forced to give birth at home. If a crisis like obstructed labor or hemorrhage develops, little can be done.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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RAPHAELLE BOITEL at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J. (Feb. 9, 8 p.m.; Feb. 10, 3 p.m.; Feb. 14, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 17). As part of Peak Performances, Boitel, a contortionist and aerialist, presents the United States premiere of her philosophical "When Angels Fall," which looks at the state of the environment using a blend of circus, dance and theater. This theatrical world, for which Tristan Baudoin designed the set and lighting, comes to life with objects including half cranes, half articulated arms, ropes and lamps and, of course, performers. As Boitel states in a press release, her company of acrobats "imagine a place where humanity, realizing its own fragility, clings to life." 973 655 5112, peakperfs.org FRIDAYS AT NOON at the 92nd Street Y (Feb. 8, noon). Eva Yaa Asantewaa, a writer and the curatorial director at Gibney, presents "Into the Mystic," an afternoon of dances that engage the psyche, the soul and the spirit. Here, she features works by Zave Martohardjono and Iele Paloumpis, two choreographers who explore mysticism through dance. Martohardjono, a Southeast Asian gender queer trans artist, looks at how healing practices and storytelling can be used in contemplating identity, while Paloumpi focuses on kinesthetic awareness, tarot and herbal medicine, among other practices. 212 415 5500, 92y.org
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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For "The Shapeless Unease," named for a phrase given to Harvey's anxiety during a sermon delivered by an admiring Episcopalian priest to a congregation in North Carolina, plumbs the amorphous muck, the utter vertigo of "a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded." If "writing is dreaming," as the author suggests further, then not being able to sleep, a necessary condition for dreaming, is like a terrible writer's block. A year might be a handy if arbitrary length for a memoir or novel, but a sleepless night stretches out like a blank page, the inability to fill it a writhing stasis. Most literally, Harvey's book is about time not in the peppy, "it's arrived" sense of those words, but in "its perpetual nagging. Time kicks, kicks, kicks its way in with the tip of a toe," she writes. "Time, not life is what we live. Time, not life is what runs out." It has run out for her cousin Paul, whose death (he was epileptic) prompts agonized and unflinching reflection. It ran out for a childhood dog, whose neglect in the aftermath of her parents' divorce haunts her still. Or are physical causes preventing her from dropping off: Menopause, perhaps? she wonders, consulting doctors who seem to have no definitive answers, only drugs that offer but fleeting relief. Nutritional deficiencies? She is lectured about poor "sleep hygiene," that increasingly common and loathsome phrase that suggests failure to achieve drift off is a consequence of one's own bad habits. We might indict too much time online, staring into screens' sickly blue light. What is the internet, after all, if not shapeless unease? "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day," F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. On the computer, more than the television with its soothing programming units, it is always three o'clock in the morning somewhere, less electronic hearth than garbage fire. Harvey is aware hers is a first world problem, a kind of luxury "What pea disrupts your sleep, princess? A passing Audi?" she imagines one physician thinking but also a deprivation of something absolutely essential, mad making. Encouraged to have a "yes" mentality, she repeats the word in bed for hours, a latter day Molly Bloom, merging it with the "eyes" she can't effectively close. "The Shapeless Unease" considers science and spirituality but ultimately rests, as it were, on language: its limits, and its possibilities. Harvey appeals to science and spirituality but is most soothed by poetry, by Philip Larkin's conception of existence as "the million petalled flower / Of being here." If you too are a member of this lonely, late night club that no one wants to belong to, you will find solace in his words, and hers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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NEW DELHI Tensions between Indian and Chinese troops have simmered since early May in the remote, high Karakoram mountains that separate India's northern Ladakh region from the alkaline desert of Aksai Chin, which is claimed by India but controlled by China and abuts its Xinjiang province. It is a forbidding landscape of cold deserts, snow capped peaks, sparse vegetation and freezing temperature about 14,000 feet above sea level. On Monday evening, in a brutal hand to hand battle, Chinese soldiers killed at least 20 Indian soldiers with wooden staves and nail studded clubs, in the severest escalation of the dispute on the Sino Indian frontier in decades. British colonial authorities bequeathed India a border with China that was neither delineated on a map nor demarcated on the ground. After China invaded Tibet in 1950 and the two Asian giants sought to formalize their frontier, the territorial dispute emerged. The Sino Indian border dispute involves about 13, 500 square miles in Ladakh and Aksai Chin and about 35,000 square miles in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet. In 1962, the border dispute flared into a war. China won conclusively but retreated after a cease fire to what were broadly its prewar positions. That de facto border, which is called the Line of Actual Control, is patrolled by both armies. Occasional unarmed clashes have taken place over the years despite five agreements aimed at reducing the risk of combat. China has built a network of roads and tracks on its side of the Line of Actual Control, but the Chinese military has consistently objected to India's far slower but steady improvement of borderland infrastructure. One of the key Indian projects is the construction of the Darbuk Shyok Daulat Beg Oldi road in Ladakh, cutting through treacherous mountain ridges as high as 16,000 feet. The road runs almost parallel to the disputed border with Chinese controlled Aksai Chin and reaches Daulat Beg Oldi, an Indian military base and landing ground for the Indian Air Force, about 12 miles from Karakoram Pass, which separates Ladakh from Xinjiang. The road, which includes 37 bridges built over snow fed rivers, took 19 years to construct, providing India the ability to move its troops with much greater speed toward Aksai Chin and Karakoram Pass. On Oct. 21, India's defense minister, Rajnath Singh, inaugurated a major bridge on the road, which made it completely operational even in the summer melt, when the rivers are in spate. China saw the road as reducing the power asymmetry between the two countries and threatening its interests. Two and a half months earlier, an aggressive political move flaunting the muscular nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "New India" had not gone unnoticed in Beijing. On Aug. 5, Mr. Modi's government unilaterally abolished the constitutionally guaranteed semiautonomous status of the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir, which is disputed among India, Pakistan and China. Mr. Modi also bifurcated the state into two federally administered territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. India's home minister and Mr. Modi's confidante, Amit Shah, insisted in the Indian Parliament that both Pakistani controlled Kashmir and Chinese controlled Aksai Chin belonged to India. Beijing objected. Hua Chunying, a spokesman for China's foreign affairs ministry, described Mr. Modi's move as undermining China's territorial sovereignty and warned, "Such practice is unacceptable and will not come into force." New Delhi ignored it. In November, Survey of India, the cartography department of the Indian government, published new maps of Ladakh and Jammu, and Kashmir. The new official map continued the tradition of the Indian claim on Aksai Chin by placing it within the boundary of Ladakh. In the high altitudes around the disputed Indian China border in the Ladakh region, the bitter winter stretches until April and even May. In between, the coronavirus pandemic took over the world. But Beijing had neither forgotten nor forgiven. Between May and June, the Chinese military seized about 40 square miles of Indian territory, including an area known as the Galwan River valley. The high ridges of the Galwan valley overlook the strategic Darbuk Shyok Daulat Beg Oldi road leading toward Aksai Chin and Karakoram Pass. The seizure of the Galwan River valley allows the Chinese Army to watch the road and, when necessary, bring down artillery fire to preclude its use, rendering a significant strategic asset inoperative. India protested. On June 6, Indian and Chinese military officers started talks to de escalate the crisis. The Chinese agreed to vacate some positions. On the evening of June 15, an Indian Army patrol set out to verify whether the Chinese had withdrawn from positions on the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control. According to the Indian officials, the Chinese had not withdrawn as agreed, and several hundred Chinese soldiers ambushed the Indian patrol. The Chinese claim they were on their own side of the Line of Actual Control when the Indian soldiers crossed over and attacked them. While both Indian and Chinese soldiers carry weapons when they patrol the border, it has been a longstanding practice, in accordance with agreements signed by the two countries in 1996 and 2005, not to use firearms during patrol clashes. Brutal hand to hand fighting followed in which the Chinese killed at least 20 Indian soldiers , pushing some of the wounded over the steep cliffs overlooking the Galwan River. Beijing has admitted that there were Chinese casualties but has not given any details. New Delhi has not officially claimed any count of Chinese casualties either, but the Indian press and social media claim, with no evidence, that 43 Chinese soldiers were killed. A shocked and stunned New Delhi took a full day to release statements acknowledging the debacle. In sharp contrast to the bellicose Indian statements that follow attacks by Pakistani militants, the Indian government's reactions were mild, almost careful not to offend China. Only on Wednesday did Mr. Modi discover his voice and declare that "peace loving" India would ensure that the deaths of its soldiers would not go in vain. India's foreign minister, who rarely holds back in railing against Pakistan, was restrained in his criticism of Beijing and agreed with his Chinese counterpart to "cool down" tensions on the ground "as soon as possible." The reasoning was underlined by Rajiv Pratap Rudy, a spokesman of Mr. Modi's party, who argued on television that the confrontation was "with China, not with Pakistan." With China not stepping back from the territory it has captured and the deaths of Indian soldiers, India's beleaguered opposition parties are cornering the government and asking: Can Mr. Modi, who makes political capital out of his muscularity in dealing with Pakistan, adopt an entirely different set of standards in dealing with China? Over the years, Mr. Modi has invested a great deal of personal and political capital into building a relationship with President Xi Jinping, whom he hosted in his hometown, Ahmedabad, during a state visit to India in 2014. Mr. Modi also set up India as a soft target through his pusillanimous handling of an earlier border crisis in 2017 at Doklam, at the disputed tri junction of China, India and Bhutan. This ended without bloodshed after a 73 day eyeball to eyeball confrontation between Chinese troops and the Indian Army. New Delhi was content with taking political credit for resolving the Doklam crisis peaceably, but the Chinese military violated the "mutual withdrawal" by sending troops and equipment back into the disputed area. Mr. Modi's government chose to do nothing about the remilitarization of Doklam by the Chinese military. Beijing could have drawn a lesson from it: Seize disputed territory at multiple points, withdraw from a few places, and let New Delhi claim that as a victory. New Delhi's diplomatic behavior has been thoroughly subservient to China since the Wuhan summit, with no significant criticism of China over Taiwan, Hong Kong, the coronavirus pandemic or Mr. Xi's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. India's opposition parties are portraying Mr. Modi's embrace of Mr. Xi as a grave misjudgment. The outrage over the killing of Indian soldiers leaves Mr. Modi's strongman image dented and confronts him with the difficult choice of appearing to stand up to China while preventing a full scale war. Mr. Modi's party has responded by aggressively arguing that the fallen Indian soldiers killed 43 Chinese soldiers, despite the absence of any proof. For Mr. Xi, the agreement reached with Mr. Modi at Wuhan in 2018 to rein in their troops and to resolve border tensions through peaceful negotiations seems to have been clearly expendable. The Chinese president's image has been dented by his handling of the coronavirus outbreak; the setback in Taiwan, where pressure and subliminal military threats resulted in the re election of the anti unification president, Tsai Ing wen; and Beijing's failure to clamp down on anti China protests that continue roiling Hong Kong. Given China's growing incursions in the Senkaku Islands, claimed by both China and Japan, its increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea and the new security law in Hong Kong, Mr. Xi would not have lost much sleep over violating the five border agreements signed with India between 1993 and 2013. Some analysts believe that just as Mao Zedong strengthened his control over China by going to war with India in 1962 and crushing it militarily, Mr. Xi is burnishing his strongman image by slapping down an India that is growing uncomfortably close to the United States. Mr. Modi, his China policy in tatters, confronts the question, should New Delhi accept assistance from Washington to handle the crisis? Since May, American political officials have communicated Washington's support to New Delhi repeatedly, but Mr. Modi has replied that India is capable of handling the situation and that diplomatic and intelligence support from Washington would suffice. Mr. Modi rightly understands that Beijing would regard as "anti China" any overt Indian embrace of the United States or strengthening of New Delhi's ties with the Quad, the diplomatic grouping of the United States, Japan, Australia and India. For the Sino India border, the current tensions have destroyed the existing playbook, which had maintained peace since 1993, when the two sides signed the Border Peace and Tranquillity Agreement. If China withdraws from the Indian claimed territory it has occupied, the two sides could negotiate new border agreements and operating procedures. But if China holds on to what it has gained, India would most certainly shift more overtly toward Washington. Ajai Shukla, a retired Indian Army colonel, is a consulting editor for the Business Standard newspaper in New Delhi. 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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When it comes to glamorous drag, men who impersonate women have traditionally had an unfair advantage over their female counterparts. Just think of the boundlessly flamboyant options available for guys to transform into gals: baubles, boas, high heels, bouffants, ad infinitum. As for women doing men, what's their choice, really, beyond business suits and sloppy sweats? "Eddie and Dave," the larky if bloated sketch of a bio comedy that opened on Tuesday at Stage 2 of the Atlantic Theater Company, helps to correct that imbalance. Its title characters, based on the original guitarist and lead singer of the chart topping band Van Halen, are indeed men portrayed by women. But these figures hail from the 1980s, a decade in which big hair and glam metal rock ruled the airwaves. The professional (and often offstage) attire of the male musicians who practiced this earsplitting art embraced a peacock panoply of baubles, boas, high heels and, yes, bouffant coiffures. And it was a look worn not with Dietrich style elegance, but with swaggering and sweaty machismo. The female cast members of "Eddie and Dave," written by Amy Staats and directed by Margot Bordelon, appear to be having a high old time finding the testosterone within their characters' teased hair. Swathed in costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) that might have come from a Ziegfeld girl's trunk and wigs (by Cookie Jordan) that could house a family of squirrels, the angry young rockers of this rambunctious play demonstrate that wearing sequins and fishnets is no guarantee against bad boy behavior.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The move, a day after the Metropolitan Museum of Art said that it would stay closed at least until July and expected a nearly 100 million shortfall, is another stark sign that even the country's richest cultural institutions face a profound threat from the outbreak. The opera company's orchestra, chorus and stagehands will not be paid past March, though they will retain their health benefits. "We're doing the best we can under a horrendously difficult situation," Peter Gelb, the company's general manager, said in an interview. "As far as our union employees are concerned, we are trying to do the best we can by them, given the financial constraints that we have." Leonard Egert, the national executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing the Met's chorus, soloists, stage directors and others at the opera house, said: "We recognize it's unprecedented times. We appreciate the Met keeping health insurance coverage for full time artists. But it's a devastating mental and financial toll on our artists." "If I had to sum it up," he added, "the consensus is: We're disappointed, we're upset, but we understand." While some losses of ticket and fund raising revenue will be mitigated by lower operating expenses, Mr. Gelb said that the decision to scrap the season, originally scheduled to end on May 9, would expose the Met to a net shortfall of 50 million to 60 million. The company announced an emergency effort aimed at raising that amount, with initial pledges from board members of 11 million. Mr. Gelb added that he would forgo his salary until operations returned to normal. Pay will be cut by 25 to 50 percent for senior management, and by 10 percent for non senior administrative staff making more than 125,000 a year. There are no planned salary cuts for those making less than that, and no plans for layoffs of administrative staff. Last week, the Met canceled performances through March 31, part of a wave of temporary closures of theaters and concert halls around the world in response to the outbreak. But after the Centers for Disease Control recommended on Monday that gatherings of more than 50 people be avoided for at least eight more weeks, organizations began to extend those closures. Carnegie Hall canceled its performances through May 10, and Adam Crane, a spokesman for the New York Philharmonic, said in an email that the orchestra "will be making a significant announcement at the beginning of next week regarding the status of the rest of our season." Throughout the country, arts organizations that have been shut by the pandemic have been dealing with the question of how to compensate employees. Some have chosen not to invoke what are known as contractual "force majeure" clauses, which give institutions substantial latitude to withhold compensation if they have been closed by forces beyond their control. "We're negotiating with companies around the country," said Mr. Egert of the union. "And they've really ranged. Some of the smaller companies, like Sarasota Ballet, are paying all of their artists through the season." But Mr. Gelb said that would be impossible for an opera company the size of the Met, which despite its 308 million annual budget has little financial cushion. (Its endowment, valued at 284 million in 2018, is less than a tenth the size of the Metropolitan Museum's.) "We are not laying people off," Mr. Gelb said. "We are continuing to give them health benefits. Our operations have been suspended, and we cannot afford to pay them. We would go out of business in a matter of weeks, and that's why these contracts have force majeure clauses in there." Jessica Phillips, a Met clarinetist, said the loss of pay was making her reconsider her plans to get married in Nova Scotia in August; instead, the wedding may be held at City Hall. Some colleagues had it worse, she added, including one who has to move back to Costa Rica for the time being. She said she understood the Met's decision and appreciated that she still had health coverage. "We're looking down the barrel of a global health crisis," she said. Classical music and grand opera, labor intensive and expensive to produce, are particularly vulnerable to downturns, and institutions of every size are now contemplating not just the loss of their spring seasons, but also summer activities, particularly if rehearsals cannot begin as scheduled in May or June. "Once you're over the disappointment of artistic cancellations," Marc Scorca, the chief executive of Opera America, a trade organization, said in an interview, "you're looking at the viability of institutions." Referring to the recession that began over a decade ago, he added, "There are companies, just as in 2008 to '09 there are some that have some fundamental health and weather through it. Some were held together by Scotch tape, and the Scotch tape came loose. And no doubt that is going to be played out again." Michael M. Kaiser, the chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland, said that midsize organizations faced the greatest risk. "The largest organizations, as horrible as it's going to be, they will not go bankrupt," he said in an interview. "They will figure out a way through this. As scary as it must be, that's the Met Opera." But extended closures in the past have had long term effects on the Met. A three month labor battle in 1969 caused nearly 20 percent of its subscribers to cancel, and it took the company years to recoup the losses, a situation repeated after a lockout in 1980. There was also labor unrest, though no lockout, in 2014, when the company won concessions from its unions that it said were necessary for its survival. Since then, the Met has weathered sexual abuse allegations that led it to fire its longtime music director, James Levine, and successfully introduced his successor, the conductor Yannick Nezet Seguin. This year the company introduced Sunday matinees; and two new productions, the Gershwins's "Porgy and Bess" and Philip Glass's "Akhnaten," were box office hits. In November, though, the outlook on the company's "A" credit rating was revised to negative by S P Global Ratings, which warned of "weak balance sheet metrics" and noted that the endowment was "low for an organization of its scope." But Mr. Gelb pointed to the strength of the company's board, which has enabled it to weather past crises. "We're looking at this as a temporary emergency," he said. "I believe that the Met will rebound. It must rebound."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The beleaguered euro zone remains stuck in recession, according to data published Tuesday, increasing pressure on the European Central Bank to find a way to stimulate growth soon. Stock and bond markets rallied on hopes that the E.C.B. would cut the benchmark interest rate for euro countries as early as next week. On Wall Street, the Standard Poor's 500 stock index, the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index all closed with gains of more than 1 percent, while the 10 year Treasury bond yield touched 1.645 percent, the lowest intraday level since Dec. 12. Separately, the Dow Jones industrial average skidded more than 150 points briefly in mid afternoon before recovering after the Twitter account of The Associated Press was hacked and a fake tweet about an attack on the White House was posted. But outside of trading rooms, the European data were not likely to inspire any joy. Besides pointing to continued decline in the euro zone economy, the survey of purchasing managers by Markit, a research firm, showed that Germany could be slipping into recession. Germany has served as the main counterweight to economic malaise elsewhere in the euro zone, and a prolonged slowdown could delay a recovery on the whole Continent. The Flash Germany Composite Output index issued by Markit fell to 48.8 in April from 50.6 in March, a six month low. A reading below 50 is considered a sign that the economy is likely to contract. For the euro zone as a whole, the corresponding index was unchanged at 46.5, confirming that the region remains in a rut. The German economy shrank 0.6 percent in the last three months of 2012. Another negative quarter would push the country into recession and present a problem for Chancellor Angela Merkel as her party campaigns to remain in power in elections this autumn. Meanwhile, the stubborn slowdown in the euro zone is likely to further inflame the debate about how much more austerity troubled countries in Europe can take. Many political leaders are arguing for a greater emphasis on growth. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said in Brussels on Monday that while countries need to continue cutting government debt and budget deficits, ''we need to complement this with proper measures for growth.'' In Europe's most troubled countries, there was little sign of a turnaround in growth. Economic activity in Spain declined 0.5 percent in the first three months of this year, the Bank of Spain said in a preliminary estimate Tuesday. Still, markets cheered the pessimistic survey results because of expectations that they would prompt the E.C.B. to cut interest rates or take other action when its policy making board meets May 2. On Tuesday, the central bank of Hungary, which is not a member of the euro zone, cut its main interest rate to 4.75 percent from 5 percent. It was the bank's ninth rate cut in as many months. The benchmark French stock market index, the CAC 40, finished the day 3.6 percent higher, while the interest rate on France's 10 year sovereign bond hit a record low of 1.706 percent. Other major European stock indexes posted gains of more than 2 percent while bond yields fell. For France, the Markit output index rose to 44.2 in April from 41.9 in March, indicating that the pace of decline was slowing in the euro zone's largest economy after Germany's. But that tidbit of good news was clouded by a drop in the separate Insee indicator of the French business climate. 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. The decline in optimism among German purchasing managers might be the result of a deceleration in the pace of growth in China, which in recent years has become one of the most important markets for German products like automobiles and machinery. China has helped to compensate for weak demand in the rest of Europe. Mr. Schonbeck said that there were signs that China was picking up again because of new political leadership, while demand was strong from countries like Russia, India and the United States. But he added, ''Demand is slowly decreasing in Europe.'' In general, German companies may be suffering from uncertainty about which way the world's major economies are going, said Ralph Wiechers, chief economist of the German Engineering Federation, an industry group in Frankfurt that represents makers of machine tools and high priced industrial goods. ''The mood is cautious, neither euphoric nor skeptical,'' Mr. Wiechers said. ''People are waiting to see.'' Even if Germany is merely treading water, that is still bad news for the rest of the euro zone. The resilient German economy has played a crucial role in compensating for the swath of economic woe that runs from Cyprus to Ireland by way of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. ''The German economy may not be as strong as we thought,'' Marie Diron, a senior economic adviser to the consulting firm Ernst Young, said by e mail. Members of the Governing Council of the E.C.B. had already hinted that an interest rate cut could be imminent. Mario Draghi, the president of the E.C.B., said earlier this month that policy makers were ''ready to act.'' The new data Tuesday further raised expectations that a cut in the benchmark interest rate, already at a record low of 0.75 percent, could come when the Governing Council meets next month. ''It is no longer a matter of if but when the E.C.B. will be cutting rates,'' analysts at Nomura said in a note to clients Tuesday. It is also possible that the E.C.B. could look for other ways to ease a credit crunch in countries like Italy and Spain, though it is not clear what other options are available. Mr. Draghi has often said that low official interest rates have not benefited companies in the troubled countries because banks remain too reluctant to lend. Mr. Draghi has predicted that the euro zone would begin recovering gradually later this year. But if the rebound takes longer than that, it could have political as well as economic effects. Prolonged economic pain would make it that much more difficult for Italy to form a stable government, and could weaken Ms. Merkel, the German chancellor, in national elections this autumn. While Ms. Merkel has a solid lead in polls, she does not have enough support to win an absolute majority in the Parliament. A weaker showing would force her to share more power with her coalition partners. At the same time, German unemployment remains low at 5.4 percent, compared with a record high of 12 percent for the euro zone as a whole. Many German managers remain relatively optimistic. Johann Sailer, managing director and owner of Geda Dechentreiter, a German maker of elevators used on construction sites and drilling rigs, said that demand in the construction industry was still good but that the pace of growth might have slowed for some companies. ''They have a lot of work,'' he said of companies in the building industry. ''It's moving a little bit sideways at the moment, but I don't see any dramatic slowdown.''
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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MOSCOW Yekaterina V. Bulgakova gushed about the cozy one room apartment that she and her boyfriend share, and particularly about the way they could always cover the rent: by charging it on credit card. "Our salaries don't go far enough" to pay for housing, food and other necessities every month, Ms. Bulgakova, a tattoo artist, said. She earns about 35,000 rubles, or 560, a month, which she considers a good paycheck for a young person. Her boyfriend, a naval cadet, receives a monthly military stipend of 480. Together, their income is above the average monthly wage in Russia of about 735, and it usually covers their expenses. But every few months, Ms. Bulgakova has a drop in business. That's when she relies on her credit card from Tinkoff, a large private bank. "Nobody wants to go into debt," Ms. Bulgakova, 21, said. Yet millions of Russians like her are doing just that, spurring a boom in consumer lending. The growth in such lending has alarmed some economic policy officials, who note that a growing number of Russians are using a quick swipe of plastic or relying on payday lenders to cope with hard times brought on by Western sanctions and slumping prices for oil, one of the country's major export commodities. The spending has lifted the economy but with ballooning consumer debt that could help start a recession. Since the onset of Russia's military interventions in Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions, total outstanding personal debt among Russians has roughly doubled, according to the country's central bank. Outstanding average debt per person has reached about 3,300, according to the National Association of Professional Collection Agencies, a trade group whose membership has grown by a third since the crisis began in 2014. Some independent and government economists say that the personal credit industry has found a mother lode in a population that was wholly debt free when it entered the capitalist era a generation ago. Others warn that the industry's expansion is unsustainable. Elvira S. Nabiullina, the central bank's chairwoman, has played down the problem while also imposing some regulatory restrictions to slow consumer lending. "It's absolutely wrong to think that already now we have risks to financial stability or a risk of a bubble," Ms. Nabiullina said at an economic conference in St. Petersburg last month. The central bank has tried to cool the market by raising so called provisioning requirements that dictate how much money banks must set aside to insure against defaults and by capping the amount of interest that payday lenders can charge at 1 percent per day, still a steep 30 percent a month. 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. Debt payments are taking a bite out of some slim paychecks: Low income households spend an average of 8 percent of their monthly incomes on debt payment, according to the central bank. Surveys show that most borrowers are 25 to 35 and that they are taking more than three loans from different sources, according to Vladimir Tikhomirov, the chief economist at BCS Global Markets. There were warnings from others at the St. Petersburg conference, where Russian officials laid out their economic priorities for the year. Andrey R. Belousov, an economic adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin, said the debt market was "overheating." Maksim S. Oreshkin, the minister of economy, warned that the surge in short maturity consumer debt could bring on a recession within two years. "You had a similar story in the United States," with debt rising faster than salaries before the recession in 2008, Mr. Tikhomirov said. In the first quarter of 2019, real incomes fell 2.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. Over the same three months, the amount of newly issued unsecured consumer debt rose 22 percent. For some Russians, personal debt is akin to the garden plots of their parents' generation. In that era of post Soviet economic depression, many families short on money grew their own food, transforming their kitchens into storerooms of pickled vegetables, dried mushrooms and sacks of homegrown potatoes. Despite the wretched poverty of those years, Russians entered the country's capitalist era with some advantages. Families had no debt, and virtually every adult wound up owning the property where they lived. But they were also unschooled in matters of lending or in calculating reasonable levels of debt. And they were unprepared for a rush of predatory lenders offering quick loans burdened with high rates. At the end of 2018, there were 2,002 payday lending companies in Russia, with many operating from storefronts in provincial towns and offering one month loans with interest rates compounded daily. Established banks joined in, offering loans and credit cards with quick approvals. Igor Kostikov, chairman of the Union for Protecting Financial Consumers, an advocacy group for debtors, said that poor Russians were accumulating payday lending debt. "They are getting deeper and deeper in trouble," he said. "The poorest will not be able to repay." On Vkontakte, a social media site, Russians swap stories of debt and bankruptcy, revealing the naivete of their experience with debt. One user, who identified herself as Helga, wrote seeking free legal advice. "Respected lawyers! I have an opportunity to take a loan of three to five million" rubles, or 48,000 to 80,000. "If I take it out, pay a few times, and then declare bankruptcy, what problems might arise?" She mused about possibly using the money for a down payment on a home. Helga's optimism might be crushed if she considered the realities of debt collection. Russian debt collectors are notoriously violent. The state allows court bailiffs with minimal oversight to enter homes to confiscate televisions or other valuables to offset debts. Scofflaws face harsh punishment, including a ban on foreign travel. Ms. Bulgakova knows credit can cause trouble, but she and her boyfriend believe that they can stay afloat. She likened their experiment with debt to her approach to tattoos. "We are trying this out on our own skin," she said. Credit has helped them afford their St. Petersburg apartment, and comfort is important in these uncertain times. So far, she has paid off her debts promptly. "I want to say thanks that I can at least keep up this lifestyle" by using credit, she said. "But it would be better if I didn't have to."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Read all of our classical coverage here. Listeners! We who cover music for The New York Times do not, I am here to inform you, always agree. For example, some of us love Leonard Bernstein's "Mass." Some of us hate it. Well, that's what makes horse racing, as my grandmother says. I've gotten emails from readers pleased by my negative take on the "Mass" performance this week at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. I've gotten some angry notes, too! ("You seem to dislike Bernstein, religious faith, and youth," wrote one Lennyite.) While "Mass" is not my favorite piece of music, not by a long shot, there are parts I think are lovely though more so in recordings (Yannick Nezet Seguin's recent one with the Philadelphia Orchestra makes an impressive case) than in the wan performance at Mostly Mozart. I went into "Mass" with an open mind. I had never heard it all the way through; listening to recordings always ended early, in exasperation. And after seeing Mostly Mozart's staged performance being confronted with its ersatz counterculture, unwieldy structure, and, worst of all, Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz's cheap rhymes and sentimentality I'm no closer to appreciating it. (The work is divisive, though somehow not in a way that leads to interesting arguments.) But I must give credit where it is due. There are moments of real beauty in "Mass," and the greatest of them is also the most spare: "Our Father," a heavenly vocal solo for the Celebrant. And I mean solo; there's not even orchestral accompaniment. The brief passage is heavenly on its own terms, but it's also a welcome break, landing somewhere between the boisterous Offertory and "Dona nobis," a rowdy peace rally by way of "Godspell." JOSHUA BARONE "Mass," Bernstein's most personal and ambitious piece, has divided listeners since its 1971 premiere. The members of the various choruses take the roles of confused, agitated participants in a mass service led by a tormented Celebrant. I was moved to see all the choristers immerse themselves so viscerally in the piece for the Mostly Mozart presentation, especially the earnest singers of the Young People's Chorus of New York City. For years the members of that impressive ensemble have routinely performed pieces that ask them to take chances, emboldened by artistic director Francisco J. Nunez. Here are some young men from the chorus in Tokyo during a 2013 Asia tour performing "Take This Hammer," a prison work song. You hear them striving for a vocal heft that's a little beyond their years. Still, they sing with inspiring grit to convey the music's barely concealed bitterness, all the while dancing the jagged movements of Jacquie Bird's choreography. Bernstein would have loved it. ANTHONY TOMMASINI Whenever possible I spend a week of my summers at a chamber music course in Bennington, Vt., swapping my critic's pen for a violin bow. It's a joyful experience but humbling, too, as I struggle to match the sounds I produce to the ones I hear in concerts all year long. An embarrassingly large chunk of my coaching sessions are given over to tweaking the intonation of, say, Debussy's String Quartet. So it was with awe and a pang of envy that I listened on Wednesday to the premiere of Reza Vali's "Ormavi," performed by the Carpe Diem String Quartet, whose members are here on the faculty. The work takes its title from a 13th century Persian music theorist and uses some of the ancient modes he codified. Where the Western scale is broken down into 12 equidistant steps, these modes are built from irregular intervals requiring the performers to internalize spaces that differ microscopically from the quarter tones sometimes called for in contemporary compositions. The resulting music was vibrant and richly expressive, with the quartet often acting as a single multihued instrument. Much of the music plays with and slyly undermines the concept of unison, with players tracing almost identical melodic contours or sustaining high pitches a hair's width apart. The resulting interference created washes of brilliant, throbbing color. Delicate pizzicato movements evoked the filigree wisps of Persian calligraphy. The Carpe Diem players turned in a fiery and flexible performance that was astonishingly free given the unfamiliar tuning system. Here were four musicians who had thrown their hard won concepts of Western intonation overboard in order to learn a new language to the point beyond fluency, where they communicated with eloquence and zest. CORINNA da FONSECA WOLLHEIM The guitarist Mary Halvorson can be difficult to keep up with. But it's fun to try. Through Sunday, at the Village Vanguard, she is appearing with her partners in the collaborative avant jazz trio Thumbscrew. The group just released a pair of albums: one set of originals, titled "Ours," and another of covers, called (you guessed it) "Theirs." During the first set at the Vanguard, on Wednesday night, one highlight was "Snarling Joys," a composition of Ms. Halvorson's, in which one of her flintier electric guitar tones takes flight over grooves played by the bassist Michael Formanek and the drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Of all the miracles Haydn gives musical voice to in his oratorio "Die Schopfung" ("The Creation"), none is more unfathomable than the first: creating something out of nothing. His Classical era solution, to begin with a formless chaos of musical fragments that elude resolution, still shocks and disorients even after the many generations of musical rule breakers who followed him. For his staging of the choral work, which came to the Mostly Mozart Festival this week, Carlus Padrissa of the Catalan theater collective La Fura dels Baus depicted that chaos with projections of wisps of clouds and cosmic dust coming together and breaking apart, as a flock of white weather balloons began to form into something suggestive of DNA molecules. The stage pictures left plenty to the imagination more steampunk than slick tech. It did not always work for me. But I loved the big payoff on Day 1, when all that formless chaos condensed and exploded in a boffo Big Bang moment. There was suddenly light. And it was good. MICHAEL COOPER Last week, in advance of Jean Efflam Bavouzet's recital at the Kaye Playhouse, I wrote that this acclaimed French pianist's playing is "so musical and elegant you sometimes don't notice its brilliance." Well, after his performance on Wednesday, part of the International Keyboard Festival and Institute, I may have to rethink my earlier assessment. His playing was almost defiantly brilliant, more exciting than elegant, especially in Schumann's gnarly Sonata No. 3 in F minor, subtitled "Concerto Without Orchestra." In this four movement, 30 minute score, Schumann tries to channel his fantastical imagination into complex, contrapuntally intricate forms. Mr. Bavouzet tore through the piece with abandon, dispatching tangles of lines and chords with flinty power. In the second half he played three early Debussy works and seven of that composer's late, enormously difficult Etudes. He has recorded Debussy's complete piano works on a five disc set released in 2012. Here he is during the International Keyboard Festival's 2013 season, playing Debussy's prelude "Feux d'Artifice" ("Fireworks"), a crackling and, yes, brilliant performance. ANTHONY TOMMASINI One distinction of Andris Nelsons's tenure at the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been his commitment to playing opera, whether Wagner, Strauss, or, last weekend at Tanglewood, Puccini. Some of those performances have been electrifying, others merely middling. "La Boheme" on Saturday, tidily directed by Daniel Rigazzi and sumptuously played by the orchestra, was neither here nor there. Jonathan Tetelman stepped in for the Bayreuth bound Piotr Beczala as Rodolfo, and he did an admirable, accurate job. There was strength luxury, even away from the headline roles, with Susanna Phillips (Musetta), Luca Pisaroni (Colline), Elliot Madore (Schaunard) and Franco Vassallo (Marcello) all in fine fettle. Alas, Mimi one fears for Kristine Opolais, whose voice has become worryingly pallid. When it rains, it pours: Her big aria, "Si, mi chiamano Mimi," was drowned out by a Tanglewood thunderstorm. DAVID ALLEN Our reporter Jennifer Schuessler wrote two weeks ago about the lawsuit served on the Boston Symphony by its own principal flutist, Elizabeth Rowe, who is suing for pay equal to that of the man who sits next to her, the oboist John Ferrillo. Reaction to that remarkable personnel development has been polite compared to the ugly recriminations bouncing around the local press about James Burton's efforts to improve the all volunteer Tanglewood Festival Chorus, whose founder and only previous director, John Oliver, died in April. Whether Mr. Burton has gone about this much needed work in the right way, I don't know, but the chorus sounded tighter in "La Boheme" and Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" last weekend than I have heard it in a while. There's more, promising work afoot, too. Mr. Burton is a former choral director of the Halle Orchestra, and, as he did in Manchester in 2002, he has quickly formed a youth ensemble in Boston, the Boston Symphony Children's Choir. They made a delightful little debut on Sunday afternoon, singing predominantly new music by the likes of Ned Rorem and Nico Muhly. DAVID ALLEN
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Kaija Saariaho, whose Noh inspired opera "Only the Sound Remains" comes to Lincoln Center's White Light Festival on Nov. 17 and 18. "The Noh is unquestionably one of the great arts of the world," the poet Ezra Pound wrote in 1916, "and it is quite possibly one of the most recondite." Over the 20th century, this traditional Japanese theatrical form went from little known to practically ubiquitous. Its scenic austerity, symbolic gestures and ritualized drama captivated artists. The long list of playwrights and composers looking to Noh for inspiration includes Samuel Beckett, Harry Partch, Bertolt Brecht and Benjamin Britten. And, now, the composer Kaija Saariaho and the director Peter Sellars. Their most recent collaboration, "Only the Sound Remains," an operatic reinterpretation of Pound's translation of two Noh plays, arrives for its American premiere in Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, on Nov. 17 and 18. "Pound's language is very fresh and surprising because, in fact, he didn't speak Japanese," she said in an interview. "It's his interpretation of those stories. And the way he is describing the natural elements and the light, and has words like 'color smell' it all has directly to do with my music." Both of the one acts that make up the work "Always Strong" (originally "Tsunemasa") and "Feather Mantle" (originally "Hagoromo") dramatize encounters with the invisible world. In "Always Strong," a priest summons the unhappy spirit of a young lute player and performs a religious service using the ghost's instrument. "Feather Mantle" depicts a fisherman's argument and eventual reconciliation with a tennin, or angel, whose robe he has found and intends to keep. Ms. Saariaho has conjured luminescent sonorities and ethereal textures from an ensemble of flute, string quartet, percussion and kantele a type of Finnish zither akin to the Japanese koto, its inclusion inspired by Pound's evocative description of the lute in "Always Strong." "The bass strings are something like rain; the small strings talk like a whisper," a vocal quartet sings delicately above trilling strings and piccolo, while the kantele creates a resonant cascade of sound. The bass baritone Davone Tines represents the human roles; the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, supernatural ones. In "Feather Mantle," real time electronic manipulation spins out the angel's voice into reverberating crystalline shards. Ms. Saariaho and Mr. Sellars have collaborated for years, but their turn to Noh was not an obvious choice. Although Mr. Sellars had staged "Hagoromo" in the 1980s, and Ms. Saariaho set two of Pound's austere "Cantos" in her chamber piece "Sombre," their earlier stage works, like "L'Amour de Loin" and "La Passion de Simone," focused on women. As they searched for a new subject, though, Ms. Saariaho was looking for something entirely different, something suitable for an intimate chamber ensemble with electronics. "Something like a fairy tale or traditional story," she said. Mr. Sellars proposed Indian texts; Ms. Saariaho felt they didn't resonate with her music. But when they arrived at Pound's Noh translations, it felt like a match. Pound's translations also came about through collaboration. In 1913, he acquired a cache of the papers of Ernest Fenollosa, an American expatriate who had undertaken a prolonged study of Noh as an academic in Tokyo. Pound worked alongside W.B. Yeats as he refined Fenollosa's rough, often fragmentary translations. What Pound discovered in Noh echoed of his own developing Imagist aesthetic: suggestiveness, allusion, the static intensification of a single image that unifies each play. (Red maple leaves and a snow flurry. Pine trees. A heavenly mantle of feathers.) What he missed was the plays' religious subtleties, their references to Buddhism and Shintoism. Critics and scholars faulted him for misunderstandings, inaccuracies and omissions. Despite these flaws, Mr. Sellars sees Pound's work and the broader artistic ferment of early 20th century modernism as transformative. "Pound and Yeats are inventing 20th century theater in the process of total cultural misunderstanding," he said in an interview. "Strangely, their getting it wrong is the way to some kind of new right." Both he and Ms. Saariaho emphasize that their touchstone is as much Pound as Noh, if not more so. "We're not in any way imitating Japanese Noh performance," Mr. Sellars said. "We're recontextualizing it in the modern sense that Pound's translation is, to use his beautiful phrase, 'a film of a dream.'" Absent the masks, gestures and other resources of traditional Noh, however, the piece poses a challenge for performers and audiences. "If you think about the classic Noh plays," Ms. Saariaho said, "there is not so much going on onstage." This is ideal for Ms. Saariaho's translucent music, said Susan McClary, the musicologist and author of the coming book "The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music." "The motions on the stage are very slow and don't really shape up into plot," Ms. McClary said. "So you're thrown back on the music. If you can give yourself over to that music, it is a magical experience of the kind that the mortals are having in the opera." After its premiere in Amsterdam, in 2016, Mr. Sellars revised and reshaped his production. The piece finally settled, he said, during a run in Paris. "The ghosts of the Palais Garnier were with us," he recalled of the city's ornate opera house. "You could feel Stravinsky and Massine and Benois and Picasso and all those people in the room with us. To perform this music in that place on a bare stage with the ghosts was overwhelming."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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In Silicon Valley, people famously work long hours. Do what it takes. Perfect that gadget or widget. Help your wealthy venture capital backer raise the money necessary to buy that sweet summer villa on Capri. But in recent years, work life balance has become a cause celebre among tech workers, who are questioning whether a shot at the brass ring is really worth it if you don't get to see your children grow up. The recent exaltation of parenthood by star executives like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has amplified suspicions that you can work hard while living well.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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NEW DELHI When India's finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, flew to Chicago recently to address a group of American executives, it was to deliver an urgent message: India is still open for business. Usually a cautious speaker who offers only vague promises, Mr. Mukherjee eagerly promoted specific new deals from New Delhi, where the national government has become alarmed by the sudden slowdown of India's economy. He listed pro business policies his government recently approved or soon would: foreign individuals could invest directly in the Indian stock market; overseas specialty retailers like Gap could open wholly owned stores in the country, and bigger retailers like Walmart would soon be admitted. And though Mr. Mukherjee did not cite it, he could just as easily have mentioned a proposal the cabinet is considering to let foreign airlines buy as much as a 49 percent stake in India's airlines. "I urge you to seize this moment and contribute to our collective prosperity in the times to come," Mr. Mukherjee told his audience, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Skeptics wonder, though, whether Indian politics will really allow Mr. Mukherjee and his boss, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to force significant change on the nation's hidebound protectionism. But there is no question that after years of taking rapid economic growth for granted, the government is finally awakening to the need for new policies and greater foreign investment. The change is occurring as analysts and India's central bank conclude that growth which was at 8.4 percent or higher for much of the last decade will fall sharply to 7 percent in the current fiscal year and remain sluggish in the next one, which begins in April. The signs of new salesmanship from Mr. Mukherjee are a notable departure from his demeanor, and that of other Indian officials, for much of 2011, even as their economy was slowing and inflation was gathering steam. Preoccupied by a big anticorruption protest movement and internal bickering among politicians, officials tended to dismiss the gloomy data as unimportant or as temporary setbacks. But this year, Indian leaders have begun publicly acknowledging the nation's economic problems. "The growth slowdown was a nice wake up call for us," Kaushik Basu, the chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry, said in an interview. Although Mr. Basu noted that some of the slowdown could be attributed to global economic problems, policy makers now recognize that "decision making had slowed down, reforms had slowed down," he said. "This has the saving grace of avoiding the trap of denial, which is always a risk in policymaking." And so officials are pushing ideas that would have seemed anathema just a few months ago including the proposal to let foreign airlines buy big stakes in Indian airlines. While nationalist sentiments have long blocked such a move, steep losses at some big airlines, including Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways and state owned Air India, seem to be forcing policy makers to reconsider. A new aviation minister, Ajit Singh, who joined the government in December, has been pushing the foreign investment proposal since a severe cash squeeze at Kingfisher late last year forced the airline to cancel scores of flights and delay paying salaries to pilots and other employees. Many analysts say the company, which is owned and run by the flamboyant liquor baron Vijay Mallya, probably cannot survive unless it finds new investors. Before Kingfisher's troubles became big news, bureaucrats quibbled for months about whether foreign airlines should be allowed to buy stakes of about 25 percent. Current rules do not allow any investment by foreign airlines in Indian carriers although other foreign investors can own up to 49 percent. Soon, the Indian cabinet is expected to consider letting foreign airlines also invest at that level. In January, the government began allowing retailers that sell just one brand of products, like Gap or Nike, to open wholly owned stores in India as long as they buy 30 percent of their goods from Indian artisans and small Indian companies. The chief executive of Ikea, the Swedish furniture and furnishing retailer that has long hoped to set up stores in India, publicly balked at the 30 percent requirement, saying it might force Ikea to table its India plans. That prompted the Indian commerce minister, Anand Sharma, to meet in Paris with the Ikea chief, Mikael Ohlsson, hoping to allay his concerns. It is unclear how effective that was, or what potential inducements Mr. Sharma might have offered. But according to the government's account of the meeting, Mr. Ohlsson told Mr. Sharma that he would soon return to India to speak to officials. An Ikea spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment. Investors and analysts said they were heartened by the single brand decision, which was quickly followed by Starbucks's announcement that it would proceed with long simmering plans to enter India even though its initial venture, this year, will be in collaboration with the Indian conglomerate Tata. But many India watchers say they remain unconvinced that Indian leaders can push through bigger changes such as opening India to multibrand retailers like Walmart or revamping government policies that have prolonged market and agricultural inefficiencies by awarding 33.8 billion a year in subsidies for food, fuel and fertilizers. The steps that have been taken indicate "some appetite for economic reform," said Mark Martyrossian, a fund manager for Tiburon Partners, a London based firm that has invested in Indian companies. But he predicted the process would be slow and painful because of the "vested interests at play." Skeptics point to the politically disastrous effort by the government late last year to open India's 500 billion retail market to foreign companies. Less than two weeks after Prime Minister Singh's administration announced that it would admit big retailers like Walmart and Tesco, it indefinitely suspended the decision. The reversal occurred after a Singh government ally the Trinamool Congress led by the firebrand politician Mamata Banerjee threatened to withdraw its support. Losing Ms. Banerjee's backing could have forced the government to hold new national elections more than two years ahead of schedule. Ms. Banerjee and other opponents of the retailing plan argued that foreign merchants would hurt small shopkeepers. Proponents, including Mr. Mukherjee, the finance minister, struggled to make the counter argument that foreign supermarkets would help farmers who must sell their produce to an oligarchy of Indian wholesale traders. "It's really going to be an uphill battle to convince investors that India is the place to come to," said Eswar S. Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University who often advises the Indian government. "The sense right now is that one politician's whims can very easily close arms that have been opened with great difficulty."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. Central bankers who gathered here to discuss better ways of jump starting slow economic growth received a surprising message from their lunchtime speaker on Friday: Stop. You're making things worse. Christopher A. Sims, a Nobel laureate in economic science, told the annual conference that increased government spending was required to lift the world's major economies from stagnation. The pursuit of innovations in monetary policy, he said, is diverting needed attention from the inaction of fiscal policy makers. "So long as the legislature thinks it has no role in this problem, nothing is going to get done," said Mr. Sims, a professor at Princeton. The best hope, he said, "is that people at central banks are willing to say publicly that this is what is necessary." Developed nations have leaned heavily on their central banks since the 2008 financial crisis. The United States, Europe and Japan have all relied on low interest rates to encourage increased spending by businesses and consumers even as government spending has remained relatively austere. Mr. Sims is among a growing number of experts who warn that this experiment has reached its limits. The central banks have pushed rates to historically low levels. The European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have even imposed negative interest rates, effectively taxing savings to encourage spending. Yet job growth and inflation remain stubbornly weak. Benoit Coeure, a European Central Bank official, drew laughter from the audience when he noted the "good news" that eurozone inflation had doubled last month from an annual rate of 0.1 percent up to 0.2 percent. In the United States, the Federal Reserve responded to the crisis more forcefully than other central banks, and the federal government initially spent more freely. Yet here, too, growth remains slow, inflation remains weak and millions of middle age people are no longer working. Mohamed A. El Erian, the chief economic adviser at Allianz, warned in a recent book, "The Only Game in Town," that time was running out. If developed nations do not increase spending and pursue structural reforms in the next few years, Mr. El Erian predicted, they will be locked into a new reality of slower growth. Moreover, he said central banks would be handicapped in fighting future crises they have little room to cut rates should economic conditions deteriorate. "It is dangerous to continue to focus the debate on what central banks can do," Mr. El Erian, who is also the head of President Obama's Global Development Council, wrote Saturday in an email. "What is needed not only in the U.S. but even more in Europe and Japan is a policy pivot away from excessive dependence on central banks." Central bankers profess to regard this pessimism as overstated. Janet L. Yellen, the Fed's chairwoman, and the heads of other major central banks have repeatedly urged lawmakers to lend a hand albeit with considerable diffidence. However, they also describe their own efforts as effective even without fiscal support. They are increasingly resigned to slower growth and lower interest rates, yet they insist they still have the means by buying government debt, for instance to help reverse future downturns. "Even if average interest rates remain lower than in the past," Ms. Yellen said at the conference, "I believe monetary policy will, under most conditions, be able to respond effectively." The annual meetings here, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, often mix technical discussions and loftier debates. This year, as academics presented proposals for minor improvements in the mechanics of monetary policy, some in the audience suggested that monetary policy makers should be spending less time talking about themselves. Peter Blair Henry, the dean of the Stern School of Business at New York University, asked a panel of central bankers whether they were doing enough to explain the limits of their own powers, to focus the public on the importance of fiscal policy. "Everyone is sort of waiting for the next pronouncement about monetary policy when that's really not the central issue," Mr. Henry, an expert on international development, said in an interview. "I think it's important to communicate the limitations of what central bank policies can actually do to drive long run growth. Central banks have done a real good job restoring stability, and we're at a point now where most of what needs to happen, needs to happen through structural reform." Ms. Yellen and other central bankers do make this point with some regularity, but they also tend to do it with considerable circumspection. On Friday, Ms. Yellen waited until the final paragraphs of her speech to mention that "fiscal policies and structural reforms can play an important role in strengthening the U.S. economy." Both Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have called for increased government spending in areas including infrastructure. Those plans, however, would require support from Congress, where Republicans, worried about the federal debt, have prevented spending increases in recent years. The debt already is large by historical standards. And running up the tab during a period when the economy is growing, if slowly, may make it harder to spend freely during a future recession, when the need for government stimulus is more acute. But Douglas W. Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, argued in a recent paper written with Louise Sheiner, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, that the sensible solution is to spend money now and deal with the debt later. "A rush to reduce budget deficits after 2010 was the biggest error in this downturn," Mr. Elmendorf, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said in a May presentation on the nation's economic woes. Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, chose this conference two years ago to declare that European governments should increase fiscal spending even as the bank expanded its own stimulus campaign. (Such spending would be "helpful," he said, in the understated language of a central banker.) But that speech and subsequent pleas have not produced any noticeable effect on Germany, the country whose trade surplus is at the heart of Europe's problems. At this year's conference, Mr. Coeure described the efforts of European governments as "half baked and halfhearted." But he made clear that the E.C.B. would press on by itself.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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"There were 12 candidates onstage an all time record, which is a little weird. I mean, candidates aren't supposed to multiply as the debates go on. So, please, America, remember to have your candidate spayed or neutered! We can't handle any more." TREVOR NOAH "Why are there 12 candidates? In the last debate, there were 10. You can't subtract candidates and then add some back. Have you ever watched a reality show or sports? You don't go to the Final Four, then suddenly you're back to the Elite Eight. It's not the way it works!" JIMMY KIMMEL "If you ask me, I think the Democratic Party is just too nice. That's how this happened. Like, the G.O.P. would never do this. They're literally canceling entire primaries right now to lock out other candidates. Meanwhile, the Democrats are like a nightclub on a Tuesday: everyone gets in. It's just like, you know, yeah, it's just like: 'Six guys in sandals? Come on in!'" TREVOR NOAH "Amy Klobuchar is still she's eight laps behind and stopped to have lunch, she's still in the race!" JIMMY KIMMEL "And what's especially difficult is that most of these candidates won't even become president, so they're abandoning their families for nothing. That's got to be a hard talk to have with your kids. Just like: 'Hey, buddy of course, Daddy wants to see you grow up, but he's got to spend the next two years interrupting people in diners, you know, and and kissing other people's kids.'" TREVOR NOAH
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The Sarah Lawrence College Dance Program which was led during its formative decades by Bessie Schonberg, for whom New York's dance awards, the "Bessies," are named announced a new director this week: John Jasperse, the choreographer and dancer. Mr. Jasperse, who graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1985 and went on to form his own dance company, will succeed Sara Rudner, who has led the program since 1998 and plans to continue teaching, the college said. He will begin in the fall. "The critical thinking that Sarah Lawrence nurtured in my time as a student has served me well, both in my practice as a dance artist and as a citizen," Mr. Jasperse, whose company is now called John Jasperse Projects, said in a statement. Ms. Rudner said in a statement that she was eager to work with Mr. Jasperse, describing him as "a master choreographer and teacher who has the skills and 'smarts' to enliven and enrich not only dance at our college, but to provide leadership in interdisciplinary pursuits."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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LOS ANGELES Nickelodeon will make a "SpongeBob SquarePants" spinoff for Netflix as part of a multiyear content production deal that reflects the pressure on Netflix to fortify itself against new streaming competition, notably Disney Plus. Netflix and Nickelodeon announced a deal on Wednesday for Nickelodeon to create and produce original animated feature films and television series based on Nickelodeon's library of characters. Shows based on completely new characters are also part of the agreement. The companies gave no specifics on characters, the number of shows or how many years. But the partnership involves a music based project centered on Squidward, the malcontent anthropomorphic octopus on "SpongeBob SquarePants," according to two people briefed on the matter , who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss still private details. The people said the overall deal was worth more than 200 million to Nickelodeon. Disney Plus, Disney's streaming service, became available on Tuesday. In a statement on Wednesday, Disney said 10 million people had signed up for the service, surpassing analyst expectations.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Jane Birkin was the longtime muse and partner of the classic French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. And from the moment they recorded "Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus," a cheerfully (and explicitly) erotic duet that became a major succes de scandale, she became one of his greatest interpreters. Even after their breakup, she continued to sing the songs he wrote for her in her delicate, vulnerable voice. Ms. Birkin enjoyed an acting career that took her from a bit part in Antonioni's "Blow Up" to film and stage work with Agnes Varda and Patrice Chereau. And, of course, her beauty and style transfixed generations of fashionistas, and inspired the pricey Birkin bag from Hermes. Now, at 71, Ms. Birkin is taking on a new challenge. She recently recorded a set of Gainsbourg songs, accompanied by a full orchestra, for the album "Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique," and is now on a world tour with them that will bring her to Carnegie Hall on Thursday. You're really the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame. What is it about his songs that continues to fascinate? I would have thought that he was probably France's most modern writer: He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter. He didn't just have one phase, like other great French writers, who stayed in the same sort of mode. He never stopped running ahead. It was amazing that he was popular at all, given that he was so far ahead of his time. He wrote for me from 1968 until the day he died in 1991 . They're not always the most well known, the songs that I sang, but they're among the most beautiful. And the most tear jerky, in a way, was when I left him. Why he went on asking me to interpret the songs that I had inspired I don't know but perhaps he knew that I'd be faithful at least to that. The idea of taking the songs which are so rooted in different styles, from pop to chanson to ye ye to reggae and making them orchestral sounds counterintuitive. But I understand classical music was important to him. How so? A lot of the songs he wrote, not only for me but for others, were from classical music. So "Jane B." was Chopin. Whenever he wanted to give us something really beautiful, he sometimes wrote it on classical music perhaps out of a sort of modesty, of always being so admiring of classical work that somehow he wanted to give us the best. From his pianist days he was a pianist at a bar in Le Touquet a seaside town in northern France , and his father was a classical musician it was from his upbringing that he knew so much about classical music. Brahms was "Baby Alone in Babylone." Did he listen to much classical music? He did when his mother died. He had bouts of wanting to be sad, and then he would put on classical music. Glenn Gould he always had under his elbow. And he had, on his little table, a picture of Chopin, and Chopin's hand. Is it harder or simpler to sing songs that were written for you, that must bring up so many memories? When he first gave them to me, they were personal and then I was not necessarily the best receiver. I sometimes thought that he had a hidden message. And, actually, when I listen to the words now, they're even more beautiful than I understood then. Many sad things have happened now, like Kate one of her daughters, who died in 2013 . So if I think of anything, I sometimes think of her. It sounds as if this project had its roots in that tragedy. I wasn't very good on my own. I didn't know what to do. I realized the importance of going into other people's lives, of going to the cinema I'd sometimes see three, four films a day, sometimes see two, three plays a week. To understand other people's stories, not to think about yourself so much. It helps, other people's stories. Somehow singing Serge's songs, and knowing that people would have memories, probably about when I sang them first, that's rather nice. What was it like recording a sexually charged song like "Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus," knowing it was written for Gainsbourg's ex, Brigitte Bardot, who did not want their recording of it released because she was married to someone else? Was that strange? No, no I didn't want anybody else to sing it! Serge rang me up years after that and he said, "I've got some bad news for you." And I said: "What? Say it quickly, then." And he said, "Brigitte's been on the phone and she wants to bring out 'Je T'Aime' her version." I remember thinking that that was quite just and proper, because it was her song. I still find her version very troubling it's a lovely and gorgeous version so, if anything, I have to thank her for not wanting it to come out. I understand you plan to publish your diaries? Yes, I'm trying to translate them into French, even now. There are funny things, charming things with Serge but pretty depressing personal stuff. It was much more about how disheartened I was, of not being pretty. From the outside looking in, that's hard to believe. Few people have been more glamorous, or more universally considered beautiful. I know it must be annoying when people say that I've read about really beautiful people saying, "Well, I didn't think I was much," and I think, "Oh God, with looks like that, I could have sunk a ship." It's true that if you're not with the person you love, and they're not looking at you, then it doesn't matter what you look like.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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The marquee of the Helen Hayes Theater, promoting the building's new nonprofit owner, Second Stage, and the production that opens next month, "Lobby Hero." George Etheredge for The New York Times The theater was so small, it was named the Little Theater. That was 106 years ago, and since then it has been reincarnated many times renamed, repurposed, rehabilitated. Now known as the Helen Hayes Theater, the smallest house on Broadway is about to reopen yet again, this time run by a nonprofit, becoming the sixth of today's 41 Broadway theaters to operate outside the commercial marketplace. The 589 seat playhouse has a new mission: Second Stage Theater, the nonprofit group that now owns the structure, says it will be used to present work by living American playwrights, a form of counterprogramming at a time when Broadway is dominated by musicals, revivals and British imports. A city landmark, the theater, at 240 West 44th Street, has a new look that reflects the contemporary aspirations of Second Stage and the simple benefits of modernization. Long said to have the worst dressing rooms on Broadway, the Helen Hayes has been renovated to remedy that situation, as well as to expand the bathrooms substantially, enable access for those with disabilities and add better equipment for maneuvering sets. The remodel is by the architect David Rockwell, who is also a Broadway set designer. He has sought to preserve the building's history (for example: molding that depicts angels holding garlands) while adding what he calls "contemporary language." The most visible example is the design of the theater's side walls, which he has covered with a pixelated blue ombre riff on a Francois Boucher tapestry depicting Bacchus and Ariadne a nod to a set of fabric reproductions of Boucher tapestries that once adorned the theater walls. "We didn't want it to look like the other theaters," said Carole Rothman, Second Stage's longtime artistic director, "and we don't think it does." The project has been in the works for a decade, delayed by the unexpectedly long run of "Rock of Ages" at the theater, followed by litigation over the sale. The price tag ballooned to 64 million, about 83 percent of which has been raised much of it from the city, foundations and individual donors, with the addition of substantial revenue from transferring an adjacent alley to Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns the neighboring St. James Theater and is using the space to expand its stage as it prepares to mount Disney's "Frozen." The Hayes, which will be renamed if and when a donor steps up to buy the rights, held a dedicatory lighting ceremony Monday morning. Its first post renovation show "Lobby Hero," written by Kenneth Lonergan ("Manchester by the Sea") and starring Chris Evans ("Captain America") is to begin previews March 1 and to open March 26. "Lobby Hero" is to be followed this summer by a production of "Straight White Men," written by Young Jean Lee and starring Armie Hammer ("Call Me by Your Name"); the play will be the first by an Asian American woman presented on Broadway. Winthrop Ames, a wealthy producer, director and playwright, built the Little Theater, in 1912, as an elegant and intimate playhouse, with no balcony, 299 seats, a ticket price set at a steep 2.50, and the goal of creating "a place of entertainment for intelligent people." The building, designed in a neo Georgian style, with a red brick facade, by Ingalls Hoffman, was a visual contrast with the more ornate Beaux Arts and classical theaters that dominated Broadway. And it had some unusual features, including a custom designed seat up front to accommodate J.P. Morgan. Its first play was a comedy, "The Pigeon," by John Galsworthy; President Woodrow Wilson was an early patron. The building has been in consistent use for stage performances since 1974, and was christened the Helen Hayes in 1983, after another theater named for the actress was torn down. Among the building's best known productions was "Torch Song Trilogy," by Harvey Fierstein, which ran there from 1982 to 1985 and won the Tony Award for best new play in 1983. The theater had a long running hit with "Rock of Ages," from 2011 to 2015 (after an initial two years at the Brooks Atkinson Theater), delaying the Second Stage purchase as that musical became an unexpected destination for hard partying theatergoers. The theater's final production before it closed for the current renovation was "The Humans," by Stephen Karam, which won the 2016 Tony Award for best new play.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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The new documentary " David Crosby: Remember My Name " finds its subject in fine voice. A graying walrus of a man who favors knitted skullcaps and blue jeans held up with suspenders, he is a prodigious talker and still a terrific singer, having lost remarkably little of his vocal range after more than a half century of not always taking the best care of himself. The anxiety latent in the title of the film, directed by A.J. Eaton, seems misplaced. Crosby's name is affixed to two supergroups one with Neil Young, one without whose close harmonies and open chord, acoustic guitar driven sound are fixtures of many a parental and grandparental playlist. Teach your children well! You'll hear some of the classic CSN and CSNY hits, as well as some from the Byrds, Crosby's first important band, wrapped around stories and gossip from the old days. Monterey Pop. Woodstock. Laurel Canyon. Among Crosby's talents was a knack for being in the right place at the right time, surrounded by musicians and hangers on who could be counted on to keep the jam sessions and parties going. Though the camera follows him out on the road in 2017, during a solo concert tour, the emphasis is on the glory years of the late '60s and '70s, and on the train wreck that followed. The present day interviews are conducted by Cameron Crowe (a producer of the film), who as a young music journalist was around for some of the highs and the lows. (At one point he plays a recording of a conversation with Crosby from 1974.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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To the immune system, not all germs are equally memorable. But our body's cells seem to be seriously studying up on the coronavirus. Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the virus are now starting to see encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people who developed only mild symptoms of Covid 19, a flurry of new studies suggests. Disease fighting antibodies, as well as immune cells called B cells and T cells that are capable of recognizing the virus, appear to persist months after infections have resolved an encouraging echo of the body's enduring response to other viruses. "Things are really working as they're supposed to," said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona and an author on one of the new studies, which has not yet been peer reviewed. Although researchers cannot forecast how long these immune responses will last, many experts consider the data a welcome indication that the body's most studious cells are doing their job and will have a good chance of fending off the coronavirus, faster and more fervently than before, if exposed to it again. "This is exactly what you would hope for," said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on another of the new studies, which is currently under review at the journal Nature. "All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response." Protection against reinfection cannot be fully confirmed until there is proof that most people who encounter the virus a second time are actually able to keep it at bay, Dr. Pepper said. But the findings could help quell recent concerns over the virus's ability to dupe the immune system into amnesia, leaving people vulnerable to repeat bouts of disease. Researchers have yet to find unambiguous evidence that coronavirus reinfections are occurring, especially within the few months that the virus has been rippling through the human population. The prospect of immune memory "helps to explain that," Dr. Pepper said. In discussions about immune responses to the coronavirus, much of the conversation has focused on antibodies Y shaped proteins that can latch onto the surfaces of pathogens and block them from infecting cells. But antibodies represent just one wing of a complex and coordinated squadron of immune soldiers, each with their own unique modes of attack. Viruses that have already invaded cells, for instance, are cloaked from antibodies, but are still vulnerable to killer T cells, which force infected cells to self destruct. Another set of T cells, nicknamed "helpers," can coax B cells to mature into antibody making machines. Antibodies also come with an expiration date: Because they are inanimate proteins and not living cells, they can't replenish themselves, and so disappear from the blood just weeks or months after they are produced. Hordes of antibodies appear shortly after a virus has breached the body's barriers, then wane as the threat dissipates. Most of the B cells that produce these early antibodies die off as well. But even when not under siege, the body retains a battalion of longer lived B cells that can churn out virus fighting antibodies en masse, should they prove useful again. Some patrol the bloodstream, waiting to be triggered anew; others retreat into the bone marrow, generating small amounts of antibodies that are detectable years, sometimes decades, after an infection is over. Several studies, including those led by Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Pepper, have found antibodies capable of incapacitating the coronavirus lingering at low levels in the blood months after people have recovered from Covid 19. "The antibodies decline, but they settle in what looks like a stable nadir," which is observable about three months after symptoms start, Dr. Bhattacharya said. "The response looks perfectly durable." Seeing antibodies this long after infection is a strong indication that B cells are still chugging away in the bone marrow, Dr. Pepper said. She and her team were also able to pluck B cells that recognize the coronavirus from the blood of people who have recovered from mild cases of Covid 19 and grow them in the lab. Multiple studies, including one published on Friday in the journal Cell, have also managed to isolate coronavirus attacking T cells from the blood of recovered individuals long after symptoms have disappeared. When provoked with bits of the coronavirus in the lab, these T cells pumped out virus fighting signals, and cloned themselves into fresh armies ready to confront a familiar foe. Some reports have noted that analyses of T cells could give researchers a glimpse into the immune response to the coronavirus, even in patients whose antibody levels have declined to a point where they are difficult to detect. "This is very promising," said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the coronavirus in rhesus macaques but was not involved in the new studies. "This calls for some optimism about herd immunity, and potentially a vaccine." Notably, several of the new studies are finding these powerful responses in people who did not develop severe cases of Covid 19, Dr. Iyer added. Some researchers have worried that infections that take a smaller toll on the body are less memorable to the immune system's studious cells, which may prefer to invest their resources in more serious assaults. In some cases, the body could even jettison the viruses so quickly that it fails to catalog them. "This paper suggests this is not true," Dr. Iyer said. "You can still get durable immunity without suffering the consequences of infection." What has been observed in people who fought off mild cases of Covid 19 might not hold true for hospitalized patients, whose bodies struggle to marshal a balanced immune response to the virus, or those who were infected but had no symptoms at all. Research groups around the world are continuing to study the entire range of responses. But "the vast majority of the cases are these mild infections," said Jason Netland, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on the paper under review at Nature. "If those people are going to be protected, that's still good." This new spate of studies could also further assuage fears about how and when the pandemic will end. On Friday, updated guidance released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was misinterpreted by several news reports that suggested immunity against the coronavirus might last only a few months. Experts quickly responded, noting the dangers of propagating such statements and pointing to the wealth of evidence that people who previously had the virus are probably at least partly protected from reinfection for at least three months, if not much longer. Considered with other recent reports, the new data reinforce the idea that, "Yes, you do develop immunity to this virus, and good immunity to this virus," said Dr. Eun Hyung Lee, an immunologist at Emory University who was not involved in the studies. "That's the message we want to get out there." Some illnesses, like the flu, can plague populations repeatedly. But that is at least partly attributable to the high mutation rates of influenza viruses, which can quickly make the pathogens unrecognizable to the immune system. Coronaviruses, in contrast, tend to change their appearance less readily from year to year. Still, much remains unknown. Although these studies hint at the potential for protectiveness, they do not demonstrate protection in action, said Cheong Hee Chang, an immunologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new studies. "It's hard to predict what's going to happen," Dr. Chang said. "Humans are so heterogeneous. There are so many factors coming into play." Research in animals could help fill a few gaps. Small studies have shown that one bout of the coronavirus seems to protect rhesus macaques from contracting it again.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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In response to an executive order from President Trump condemning the destruction of historical monuments during recent racial justice protests, the National Endowment for the Humanities is allocating 90,000 to repair or rebuild damaged statues, including one of Christopher Columbus that was toppled in Baltimore. The agency said on Friday that it was providing funds for the restoration of three statues that were damaged during protests over the summer: the Baltimore monument to Columbus, which was tossed into the city's Inner Harbor on the Fourth of July; a statue of an abolitionist and Union Army colonel, Hans Christian Heg, in Madison, Wis.; and a replica of a 19th century statue in Madison called "Forward." The N.E.H. said it would also help fund a new bronze of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, N.Y. A statue of the famed abolitionist was destroyed in the city in July but was quickly replaced. After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, demonstrations erupted across the country, and protesters aimed to take down public statues, reinvigorating a debate over whether monuments to national leaders with complicated or violent legacies should stand. Demonstrators targeted monuments to the Confederacy in particular none of which were included in the N.E.H.'s latest funding package. Mr. Trump's executive order, issued on July 3, called the destruction of monuments an "assault on our collective national memory" and created a task force devoted to "building and rebuilding monuments to American heroes." The chairman of the N.E.H., Jon Parrish Peede, was named a member of that task force. The funding came from what the agency calls a chairman's grant, which is often used to safeguard cultural artifacts during emergency situations like hurricanes. Statues of Columbus have been targeted across the country because of his role as a European colonizer whose journeys led to the decimation of American Indigenous populations, but any plans to take down monuments to him often draw pushback from Italian American organizations. The fate of the Columbus statue in Baltimore had been unclear. After protesters took down the statue, near the city's Little Italy, and dragged it into the water, a group of Italian Americans fished the marble chunks out of the water and kept them in a private warehouse, The Baltimore Sun reported last month. Now, they'll have significant help restoring the statue. Some episodes of monument destruction were harder to square with the messaging of the protesters. In Rochester, the authorities puzzled over who had torn down the Douglass statue after it was discovered on July 5 near a river gorge. Mr. Trump called the perpetrators "anarchists," but the police said they had no evidence to confirm that. The N.E.H. said the funds would go toward Rochester Community TV to support the creation of another statue of Douglass, who lived in the city for about 25 years. It said a possible site for the statue would be the Rochester airport. In Madison, the statue of the Union Army colonel and "Forward," which depicts a woman standing at the prow of a boat and clutching an American flag, had been taken to Detroit for repair, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this month. The statues will be reinstalled on the state Capitol's grounds. The N.E.H. also announced on Friday that 30,000 would be allocated to the digitization of archival materials documenting Bronx Community College's Hall of Fame for Great Americans, an open air colonnade lined with busts of historical figures like George Washington Carver and Edgar Allan Poe; the digitized materials are meant to be used for educational purposes while the colonnade is closed during the pandemic.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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In her parting remarks to her staff this week, Elizabeth Warren took a moment to talk about the lasting mark her candidacy had left on the race. "You know, a year ago, people weren't talking about a two cent wealth tax, universal child care, canceling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap or breaking up big tech," she said. "And now they are." She's right particularly about child care. Ms. Warren led the pack by putting out a groundbreaking proposal for public child care last February; Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg eventually followed suit. Three candidates with universal child care plans may not sound like all that much but consider that before this race, no major candidate running for the White House had mentioned universal child care since the 1970s. That three top tier contenders had competing plans demonstrates that this issue is an increasingly salient one for American voters. Child care is also an increasingly dire crisis facing the country one that demands an equally aggressive response. Of course, two of those contenders have left the race; the Democratic primary has essentially narrowed to a two man contest between Mr. Sanders and Joe Biden. But where is Mr. Biden's plan for how to address the broken child care system American families face? Without one, he risks being out of step with this historic moment. It wasn't so long ago that the notion of not just universal child care but publicly run universal child care was downright mainstream. The United States has had such a system in place before: During World War II, as men were shipped off to fight abroad and women were called to work in factories, President Franklin Roosevelt funneled funding from a wartime infrastructure bill to creating and running a network of child care centers. They cost about 10 a day in today's dollars for 12 hours of care year round, and the quality was high. They attracted qualified, trained teachers and had low child to teacher ratios. Mothers loved them. In exit interviews in California, women gave them a nearly 100 percent satisfaction rating. They also improved children's education, employment and earnings later in life, while increasing how much their mothers were able to work. But while child advocates lobbied to keep the program in place after the war, President Harry Truman shut it down as soon as Japan surrendered. 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 idea of enacting a federally funded universal child care system didn't disappear, however, and it nearly became a fixture of American life in the 1970s. As more women entered the paid work force, and research started to coalesce around the importance of early education for children's development, Congress drafted legislation in the late 1960s that would create a federally funded but locally administered network of child care centers. It was a bipartisan initiative, one that, at first, President Richard Nixon seemed to support. He himself had called for "a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life." The legislation passed in 1971. Then Nixon did a 180 at the behest of his special assistant Pat Buchanan, who told me in 2014, "My view back then was that it was philosophically out of the question for the Nixon administration to support a major new welfare program." Nixon issued a scathing veto that called it "family weakening" and "truly a long leap into the dark for the United States government," comparing it to communism. The toxicity of his words infected the debate over child care for decades and helped bury the history of public child care in America. The 1980s and '90s were consumed with stories of satanic rituals at day cares and studies claiming that child care would ruin children. Even as recently as 2016, the Republican Party platform initially opposed universal preschool because it "inserts the state in the family relationship in the very early stages of a child's life." But it's an issue that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore. The cost of child care has increased nearly exponentially in recent decades, far outpacing inflation. Now it consumes more of the average family's budget than health care, transportation or food, and in most places it rivals housing, too. Full time center care often costs more than tuition and fees for public college. That money still doesn't buy quality, though. A 2006 survey found that fewer than 10 percent of American day care centers provided high quality care. And that's for the families lucky enough to get their child a spot: More than half of Americans live in a neighborhood without enough child care seats for all the children who need them. Even the Democratic presidential hopefuls who didn't release plans as detailed and bold as Ms. Warren's or Mr. Sanders's talked about child care. Amy Klobuchar sponsored the Child Care for Working Families Act, a Democratic proposal in Congress with similar aims of universal coverage. Mike Bloomberg's early education plan supported higher quality and lower cost child care and universal preschool. Even President Trump has talked about child care, proposing on the campaign trail to increase tax deductions to cover the cost and calling for a one time 1 billion investment in his White House budget. This is a vast, complicated crisis that is dampening our entire economy. It makes sense for presidential hopefuls to put forward ideas that are bold enough to match the stakes. But so far, although Mr. Biden has supported universal preschool in the past, he has been more or less silent on what parents of younger children should do. And while today he supports an increased child tax credit that can help families cover the cost, he wrote an op ed article in 1981 arguing that the credit subsidizes the "deterioration of the family" and "encourages a couple" to "evade full responsibility for their children" by helping them put those children in day care. The article argued against any universal government child care assistance because it would go to well to do families, but it also repeated language from Republicans who fearmongered about child care. The best way for Mr. Biden to disavow any antiquated positions and to assure voters that he is in tune with their most pressing needs would be to release his own universal child care plan. He doesn't have to reinvent the wheel; he can simply look back at our own history and take inspiration from what we would have had if things had gone slightly differently.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Before Emma Boettcher arrived at the "Jeopardy!" studio in California on a Tuesday in March, she hadn't heard of James Holzhauer. Boettcher, a 27 year old librarian at the University of Chicago , did not know that the contestant she would soon face had already won 32 games, amassed 2.46 million and established himself as one of the game show's greatest players of all time. Games are prerecorded, usually five in one day; Holzhauer's first win would not air until April 4. "It was weird to be a daily watcher of 'Jeopardy!' and somehow there's this phenomenon that I'd never heard of," Boettcher said in an interview last week. (The interview was conducted before the episode aired under the condition it not be published until Monday.) Holzhauer was working to beat one particular record: the highest all time winnings during regular season game play, a title held by Ken Jennings, who won 2.52 million during 74 games in 2004. At the rate Holzhauer was going, it seemed possible for him to surpass Jennings's mark during the first game recorded on March 12, when Boettcher arrived along with about a dozen other contestants who were prepared to play that day. As a book and theater lover growing up outside Philadelphia, Boettcher first tried out for "Jeopardy!" in high school. As she continued to chase her goal, her father, Kevin Boettcher, bought her books on topics that she needed to bone up on, such as sports. After finishing college at Princeton, she went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where she studied information science. While there, Boettcher decided to write her master's paper on her longtime obsession with a certain game show. In her 70 page final paper, Boettcher explored whether certain characteristics of a "Jeopardy!" clue could predict its difficulty level. She said she wanted to determine if a computer could predict whether a clue was easy or difficult based on the words it was using or the length of the clue. In essence, she was asking if there was a material difference between a 200 clue and a 1,000 clue. Boettcher included nearly 22,000 different "Jeopardy!" clues in the analysis. She concluded , among other things, that the number of component phrases in a clue could help a computer predict its difficulty level. She said the paper helped her understand what makes people perceive language as easy to read, a concept that applies to her current job, where she tries to ensure that the library's website and catalog are user friendly for university students and faculty. Meanwhile, she kept trying to get on "Jeopardy!" and after four in person auditions, Boettcher got the call asking her to appear. "When she wants something, she is very focused," her father said. Boettcher prepared for her appearance by simulating the experience of a "Jeopardy!" contestant. Each day, she would stand several feet from the television, pretending that she was standing behind the studio's podium . Boettcher would hold a pen in her hand, clicking it when she had the answer to one of Alex Trebek's clues. She soon realized that a pen was too skinny, and a toilet paper holder would work better as a stand in for the "Jeopardy!" buzzer. She wore different shoes to figure out which pair would be the most comfortable for standing. And she recorded her scores in a notebook, trying to figure out her weak spots on the board. "I was trying just not to dwell on it," Boettcher said of Holzhauer's dominance. "I had already steeled myself to expect the unexpected, just roll with whatever was happening, take one clue at a time." The game started as usual for Holzhauer: with him going straight for the high value clues, hunting for the Daily Doubles and betting everything he could when he found them. Boettcher had never seen his strategy in action, but she said she knew that players with his level of success typically deployed similar tactics. Holzhauer's ease making large bets was one reason for his success. His opponents did not always have the same affinity for risk taking. But Boettcher, who had calculated her rate of accuracy with Daily Doubles while watching at home, felt confident enough to go all in. When Boettcher hit on a Daily Double , she wagered everything she had, 7,600. Boettcher got the clue right, and she felt like she was back in the game. By Final Jeopardy, Boettcher was ahead of both her opponents. She felt confident that she had the answer right (it related to Shakespeare, and she had been an English major), and she knew she had wagered enough to come out on top. But it didn't quite feel real yet. "I don't think I felt like I won until Alex said so," she said. After her victory, Boettcher said she had to begin preparing for the next game and did not get to have much of a conversation with Holzhauer. (To calm herself, she sang out loud the music from "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" until the next game.)
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The director Gregory Mosher found an actor he thought was perfect to play George Deever, one of the main characters in "All My Sons," the Arthur Miller classic that is coming back to Broadway in the spring. Though the principal cast members in the original late 1940s production were white, this actor was black. Mr. Mosher went about trying to find a black actress to play his sister, Ann Deever. But Rebecca Miller, the film director and screenwriter who runs her father's estate, stepped in. She questioned the choice of making the Deever family black when the play's other central family, the Kellers, had already been cast as white. The two sides could not reconcile and this week, Mr. Mosher left the production, putting a cloud over a highly anticipated revival starring Annette Bening and Tracy Letts. It also rekindled a debate over access to important theater roles, though in this instance, the disagreement was not over whether to diversify the cast, but how. "All My Sons" tells the story of the Kellers and the Deevers, two families in 1947 Ohio whose relationships are upended by a scandal involving military parts for World War II, and a soldier gone missing. In other instances, Ms. Miller has supported casting people of color in roles traditionally filled by white actors. A 2019 production of "Death of a Salesman" in London, for example, will feature a black Loman family. But here, she said, she was not convinced. Gregory Mosher resigned as director of the revival, which is to open on Broadway next spring. There is a romantic connection between the two families, and if the Deevers were black, it could introduce the concept of an interracial relationship in a time and place where that was highly unusual. "My concern was that to cast the Deevers as black puts a burden on the play to justify the relationship in the historical context," Ms. Miller said. Since the script does not address race, she said, "I was worried that it would whitewash the racism that really was in existence in that period by creating this pretend Valhalla special family where no one would mention this." Mr. Mosher, a decorated director and producer and the chairman of the theater department at Hunter College, said that he believed Ms. Miller was making a sincere effort to protect the script, and that she offered to allow Mr. Mosher's choice for George Deever if Ann were played by an actress of a different race than her brother. It was unclear why that option was more acceptable, but in any case, Mr. Mosher said, the disagreement put him in an impossible bind, so he left. "I was auditioning black actresses, which means the black acting community in New York knew I was doing it," he said. "I didn't know what to say to these actors. I've decided to hire a white girl? I couldn't find somebody? What am I supposed to say?" "It was a kind of breaking faith with a community that I didn't want to break faith with," he continued. "I'm afraid it comes rather quickly to 'you just have the wrong skin color for this part.' " Mr. Mosher's departure was first reported on Tuesday in The Washington Post. He is being replaced by a Tony winning director, Jack O'Brien. A spokeswoman for the production company, the Roundabout Theater Company, said that the actor Mr. Mosher wanted for George is still being considered for that role. He has not been publicly identified. Playwrights have tremendous power in the theater, even in death. An estate can threaten to pull the rights to a show if it disagrees with certain choices, like casting, but Harvey Young, dean of the Boston University College of Fine Arts, said such disputes are rare and tend to be restricted to certain estates. But they happen. Last year, Edward Albee's estate refused to allow a theater producer in Oregon to cast a black actor in the role of Nick in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" In a statement at the time, a spokesman for the estate said, "Mr. Albee himself said on numerous occasions when approached with requests for nontraditional casting in productions of 'Virginia Woolf' that a mixed race marriage between a Caucasian and an African American would not have gone unacknowledged in conversations in that time and place and under the circumstances in which the play is expressly set by textual references in the 1960s." Dr. Young said that an example of the latter he likes to offer his students is "The Shawshank Redemption." In the original novella, written by Stephen King, the character named Red is Irish. But in the movie, that character is played by Morgan Freeman who even says, when asked how he got his name, "maybe it's because I'm Irish." Dr. Young said that color conscious casting allows the work to tackle contemporary issues and creates the opportunity to breathe in new life. "The very best theater allows you to engage with your present social and political moment," Dr. Young said. Ms. Miller said she was not advocating colorblind casting, but rather "being more conscious, not less." She said that she was in favor of casting more actors of color in the production and that she did not necessarily discount that the play could be performed with a black Deever family in the future. "I would love to see a reading of that to see what it would entail," she said. "But not in the kind of extreme pressure of 'we're about to start rehearsal.' It needs some time and thought." Mr. Mosher was dismayed by how it all turned out, though he did not appear embittered. "Man, I wanted to direct this play," he wrote on Facebook Tuesday night. "It's so good, and I've thought about it so intensely in the past half year." "But 'All My Sons' is not a documentary about life in rural Ohio in 1947, the year it opened. It's a play," he continued. "I think I made the right choice. We'll see what happens next. Maybe it will all be fine. I sincerely hope so."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Those clashing orders whisper side by side in your mind as you watch the meticulously acted revival of Kenneth Lonergan's "Lobby Hero," which opened on Monday night at the renovated Helen Hayes Theater, the new Broadway home for Second Stage Theater. That's because you will probably come to if not like then feel personally invested in the four self sabotaging New Yorkers so completely embodied here by Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley. And none of them can participate in the simplest exchanges of words without doing serious damage. Sure, the talk at first seems merely casual as these four characters pair off to shoot the breeze in and around an apartment building lobby where it always feels like 3 a.m. But lives as well as livelihoods are possibly at stake in what's being said, and everyday conversation becomes a minefield. Whenever someone starts talking again after a long silence, you feel an "Ouch!" coming on. At the same time, you can't wait to hear what's about to emerge from the mouths of Jeff (Mr. Cera), a newbie security guard (don't call him "doorman") and his exacting boss, William (Mr. Henry); and the Mutt and Jeff police partners who drop by. They are the swaggering Bill (Mr. Evans, in a terrific Broadway debut) and his rookie partner, Dawn (Ms. Powley). For one thing, much of what they have to say is both achingly funny and so pathetic it verges on tragic. For another, the combined wit and non wisdom of these fallible (i.e. human) beings offers a fascinating reflection on those shaky internal compasses we call moral instincts. As to the ethical quandaries and quagmires in which these people are mired, they feel even more pointedly and sadly relevant than they did when "Lobby Hero" was first performed at Playwrights Horizons 17 years ago. References to sexual harassment, abuses of power in the workplace and racial profiling scarcely seemed to raise an eyebrow when I first saw the show in 2001; they evoke audible, anxious murmurs in the audience of 2018. In the age of MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Americans may be newly receptive to "Lobby Hero." But don't imagine that this work, directed with savvy restraint by Trip Cullman, is an agenda driven debate. Mr. Lonergan, you see, doesn't work in bold blacks and whites, but in compelling shades of gray. He understands that purity of thought and deed is pretty much impossible in this muddy world. As a creator of plays ("This Is Our Youth," "Hold On to Me Darling") and films ("You Can Count on Me," "Manchester by the Sea"), he specializes in screw ups, compromised souls who would like to do the right thing, if only they had the backbone for it, or if they could figure out what it is. His dialogue is fueled by vacillation, equivocation and contradiction, with sentences that seem to eat their own words. Few actors are as qualified to deliver such precisely indefinite speech as Mr. Cera, a veteran of the ace 2014 Broadway revival of "This Is Our Youth." Mr. Cera's Jeff is a quintessential Lonergan loser, an uneasy 27 year old who was thrown out of the Navy for smoking pot and has vowed to become a real adult. So now he works the night shift in a residential lobby that reeks of urban loneliness. (David Rockwell is the set designer.) It's a job that's hard to take seriously. But Jeff's disciplined supervisor, played with bone tired alertness by Mr. Henry, has a strict list of rules and regulations. He, at least, seems to be someone who knows what's what. So, at first glance, does Mr. Evans's Bill. He's a cocky, friendly guy who oozes self assurance and is known around his precinct as Super Cop. (And, yes, this is the same Mr. Evans who played the superhero Captain America onscreen.) Bill is just the person for someone like the eager, dewy Dawn, fresh out of the Police Academy, to have as a protective mentor, right? And there you have the tidy setup for a play that operates on a system of moving parallels. Jeff's admiration for his boss is tested after William learns that his older brother has been arrested in connection with the murder of a nurse and William is asked to provide an alibi. William, who is African American, knows how easy it would be for his brother to get lost in the legal system. Dawn's hero worship of Bill is complicated by their having slept together. Disenchantment will set in fully when she learns why her partner is paying such regular visits to the building where Jeff works. The first time I saw "Lobby Hero," it felt a bit too openly schematic. It still does occasionally, especially during a protracted stretch of secret sharing in the second act. But the performances here are all so grounded that you never doubt their characters' authenticity or (pardon the word) sincerity. And because each portrait is so completely and ingeniously physicalized (watch how they each inhabit a uniform), we soon learn their "tells"; we know when they're deceiving themselves. Mr. Evans is a marvel of smooth calculation and bluster. His Bill is the most blatantly manipulative of the characters, which means the most likely to succeed. Ms. Powley's avid, impulsive and dangerously green Dawn is the perfect sidekick to this handsome sleaze. Mr. Henry (FX's "Atlanta") offers a deeply moving study of resignation and rebellion, courage and compromise in uneasy counterpoint. Mr. Cera's perfectly uneasy Jeff gives full weight to both the hopeful decency and bad faith that lurk in all Lonergan characters. It makes sense when others say they can't tell when Jeff is joking; he doesn't always know himself. There's a reason that Mr. Rockwell's set revolves between scenes, forcing us to adjust our angles of observation. Like morality, identity is relative in "Lobby Hero." Few playwrights match Mr. Lonergan in making confident art out of such constantly shifting uncertainty.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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When it comes to Oscar precursors, the SAG Awards, handed out by the Hollywood actors' guild SAG Aftra, always give us the most to chew over. This guild is comparable to the academy in terms of size and membership, and most of the five actors nominated in each individual category will go on to be nominated for Oscars, too. But where will the two groups differ? And are there contenders who missed with SAG but can still pull off an Oscar victory, as Regina King, from "If Beale Street Could Talk," did last year when she won the supporting actress Academy Award? Let's take a closer look at the nominations announced on Wednesday to see who's got the heat to go all the way. This nomination is a major coup for "Parasite," which will contend for SAG's top award despite the fact that none of its individual actors were nominated. This is not an awards body given to nominating foreign films "Parasite" is the first such movie since the 1998 film "Life Is Beautiful" to score a SAG cast nod and it's proof that "Parasite" will have the large academy contingent of actors on its side when mounting a best picture bid at the Oscars. "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" and "The Irishman" were expected picks in this category, but "Jojo Rabbit" was an on the bubble contender and "Bombshell" was a big surprise: Female ensemble casts can have trouble popping through at SAG, as Greta Gerwig found out when her take on "Little Women" was snubbed across the board.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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A proposed measure to restrict the use of pesticides that have been implicated in bee die offs around the world was left in limbo on Friday, after representatives from Britain and Germany, two of the largest members of the European Union, abstained from the voting in Brussels. The move left the committee without the needed qualified majority, which gives larger countries greater weight than smaller ones. The proposal was based on a recent report from the European Food Safety Authority recommending that no pesticide containing chemicals known as neonicotinoids be used on crops that are attractive to honeybees, because of the risk that the insects would be poisoned. Frederic Vincent, a spokesman for the European Commission, said that for the moment officials in Brussels, including the European health commissioner, Tonio Borg, would "reflect" on what steps to take next, adding: "This isn't the end of the story."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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Another awards show this year will go on without a host at the helm this time, on television's biggest night. No one will lead the Emmys at the presentation on Sept. 22, Charlie Collier, chief executive of Fox Entertainment, announced Wednesday. The Academy Awards also went hostless earlier this year after homophobic tweets surfaced from the ceremony's host of choice, the comedian Kevin Hart, and he stepped down. Rob Wade, Fox's president of alternative entertainment, said the reason for the Emmys change was twofold. For one, it will allow more time in the program to pay tribute to shows that ended this year. Several long running and heavily decorated series such as "Game of Thrones" and "Veep" recently concluded their final seasons.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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PHILADELPHIA The United States Department of Education is investigating complaints that plans to close or reorganize public schools in Philadelphia, Detroit and Newark discriminate against black and Hispanic students, as well as those with disabilities, a department official confirmed on Monday. Community activists from those cities and 15 others are scheduled to meet Tuesday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan to urge a moratorium on school closing plans until agreements can be reached on alternatives. Jitu Brown, a community organizer from the South Side of Chicago, said the community representatives would seek immediate action on the civil rights complaints, and would urge officials to halt school closings, stop plans to turn public schools over to private contractors, end "phaseouts" in which schools cease to accept new students so that numbers dwindle, and stop the practice of combining public schools with charter schools. "Racism is real in the U.S.," Mr. Brown said. "There are different rules for the students in our community." Daren Briscoe, an Education Department spokesman, said it has no power to put a moratorium on locally mandated school closings. The department's civil rights office has never substantiated a complaint based on such a program, he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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BERKELEY, Calif. Even before the coronavirus forced the world indoors and glued millions of people to their screens, 2020 was shaping up to be a huge year for gaming. Microsoft is set to release a new Xbox in November, and Sony is expected to introduce the next iteration of its PlayStation this holiday season. Both are big draws for video gamers eager to fire up the newest version of Halo or Spider Man as they wait out the pandemic. And as the ninth generation of consoles approaches, the cancellation of in person events has created a surge of interest in gaming and is likely to juice their sales even as their availability is expected to be limited by supply chain problems caused by the pandemic. Roughly every seven years, companies release a fresh series of consoles with technological improvements in this case, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X. Although they aren't expected to be drastic departures from previous versions, there's still plenty of hype for the holiday releases. Gaming has become one of the biggest global entertainment industries, with 2.7 billion people projected to play a game this year, according to the gaming market researcher Newzoo. Growth has accelerated during the pandemic, and gamers worldwide are expected to spend nearly 160 billion this year. "This launch is a massive moment," said David Gibson, the chief investment officer at Astris Advisory, a financial advisory firm in Tokyo. "It is the largest and most important next generation console launch ever." But Mr. Gibson said temporary factory shutdowns caused by the virus in several Asian countries, coupled with an increased worldwide demand for similar hardware components because of the rise in remote work, would most likely lead to a scarcity of Xboxes and PlayStations come November. "It's going to be really hard to find them," he said. Both consoles will have faster loading times for games and better graphics than their predecessors, though the Series X is anticipated to have slightly more powerful hardware. Even with the supply limitations, Mr. Gibson expects Sony to sell about five million PlayStations and Microsoft three million Xboxes in the first five months. Game developers do not have the same hardware limitations, though, and are likely to benefit from the high console demand, he said. Jacob Throop, a streamer for the professional e sports organization Team SoloMid, said he played on consoles from both companies, as well as on Nintendo's three year old Switch, and would buy both new devices. He said most of his fans seemed to favor the new Xbox. "I think the Xbox will be better," said Mr. Throop, better known to his one million Twitch followers as ChocoTaco. "On paper the specs are better, so it looks like it will be a more powerful machine." Many analysts, though, expect Sony to continue its historical sales advantage in large part because of the perception that the PlayStation offers superior games. And in August, the producers of Halo Infinite, the newest version of Xbox's flagship game series, announced that the pandemic had delayed its release until 2021, rather than a release with the Series X. Sony, which declined to comment on its coming release, has produced the three best selling individual home consoles the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 4 and original 1994 PlayStation and is focusing on the strength of its exclusive games and brand recognition while promoting the PlayStation 5. But Microsoft is signaling for the first time that it wants an end to the decades long console war, or at least a truce. Microsoft is putting a priority on flexibility and betting that the future of gaming will be mobile, with gamers spread across consoles, computers and even phones while on the go. The release of the Series X is still a big moment for the company, but Microsoft is also highlighting the success of Xbox Game Pass think a Netflix library for games and a new feature, xCloud, which will allow users to play Xbox games on Android phones for 15 per month, starting Tuesday. "Sony is focused on convincing gamers they need to get a PlayStation 5," said Matthew Ball, the managing partner at Epyllion Industries, which operates a venture capital fund. "Microsoft is telling customers they can get a Series X, or a lower cost Series S, or keep your old Xbox, or use your PC, mobile phone or tablet and we're still there for you." Rival companies are also sensing an opportunity to break into the growing market, and are experimenting with cloud gaming, a new technology that theoretically allows players to download and run games on any device using the strength of the internet or cloud. The nascent feature could devalue expensive consoles, especially at 5G internet speeds. Google Stadia, a 10 a month cloud service that lets subscribers play games across devices, arrived in November but has struggled with bugs and graphics problems. Amazon has been said to be working on its own cloud gaming service, Project Tempo. Microsoft's response to these incursions is xCloud. "We're committed to bringing more games to more gamers around the world, and cloud gaming is a long term investment for Microsoft and critical to making this commitment real," Ms. Walker said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Schools offering in person teaching are seeing a rise in applications even when tuition is 50,000 a year or more. Scott Anderson was living in Brooklyn with his wife and two children when the coronavirus hit, closing all of the city's schools and sending his children into the netherworld of online education. The family moved to its weekend house in Dutchess County, N.Y. The children, one a freshman and the other a sophomore at an independent school in Brooklyn where they had been since prekindergarten, were unhappy with their online classes. Their parents, meanwhile, were paying an annual tuition of over 50,000 for each. "This is the time for them to strike out and explore things," Mr. Anderson said. "Their school was completely unprepared for this style of teaching and for engaging a class." As the summer wore on, the Andersons decided to enroll their children in a boarding school, the Frederick Gunn School in Washington, Conn., 45 minutes from their weekend house. In making a change they had never contemplated before the pandemic, they joined a surge of affluent parents who have upended their plans in order to get their children into independent schools holding in person classes for the fall. It didn't come cheap the Frederick Gunn School costs 66,523 for boarding students but in person learning was not going to be possible at many public schools and even at well regarded day schools in big cities hit hard in the pandemic. "Applications are up, and enrollment is up," said Carole J. Everett, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools. "This is largely due to people fleeing the city and public school parents disappointed that their schools haven't opened in person. It really picked up over the summer and has continued into the fall." The National Association of Independent Schools said in August that 58 percent of its schools had reported an increase in interest from the previous summer. That uptick has helped the private day and boarding schools shore up their balance sheets, especially when some of their most lucrative students full pay international students, many from Asia, who are charged as much as 75,000 a year didn't return this year. "We have families who were six months ago enrolled in day schools, primarily in New York, and boarding school wasn't on their radar," said Peter Becker, head of the Frederick Gunn School. In the Northeast, it's boom time. Thirty six percent schools in New England reported a rise in enrollment from last year the largest increase in the nation as schools opened in September, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. But the New York metropolitan area reported a 56 percent drop in private school enrollment. Sacred Heart, in Greenwich, Conn., just 35 miles from New York City, accepted 22 students after the normal admissions cycle closed and would have accepted more if certain grades were not full, said Meg Frazier, the head of school. She said interest was driven by city families but also nearby families whose children were struggling with online public education. At Doane Academy, a day school for kindergarten through 12th grade in Burlington, N.J., 20 new students are entering, which is substantial given that the school now has just 253 students, said George Sanderson, head of school. The Southeast is a different story. Many schools in Florida had acceptance deadlines before stay at home orders began in mid March, largely filling their classrooms before the pandemic worsened. But other schools in the region struggled to hold on to students, with 59 percent reporting lower enrollment this year. Jay Lasley, director of admissions at Berkeley Prep in Tampa, Fla., said he had fielded a surge in calls from parents in Chicago and New York who wanted to move. He was able to accommodate a few families with students who were not in grades like fifth and ninth, when children typically shift to a new school and apply early, but not as many older children. Some boarding schools in the state, though, have managed to keep the virus at bay, and they have siphoned students from day and public schools. The Army and Navy Academy, a military boarding school for boys in Carlsbad, Calif., reopened with strict rules around staying on campus throughout the semester. Michelle and Michael Foster enrolled their son this fall at the Army and Navy Academy after seeing him struggle and become distracted in the online learning at his private day school in Los Angeles. "We'd looked at boarding school a couple of years ago, but that was prepandemic," Ms. Foster said. "This is his junior year, and we wanted to give him the best education he could get." But even some private schools in Los Angeles that are online until the county tells them otherwise have attracted new parents. George and Heather Ellis, who have three sons and live in the Sherman Oaks section, said they had watched their oldest boy, then in first grade, completely lose interest with remote learning in public school. They, like many others, rushed to apply to an independent school. They were put on the waiting listed at the Buckley School and began the school year at their public school. They said their two older sons, now in second grade and kindergarten, had little to do during the day as a single teacher struggled to manage a class on Zoom. When the Ellises were offered a place for their two sons at the Buckley School, they accepted at once. "Covid definitely propelled us to make the change," Mr. Ellis said. "I don't want to devalue what a hard job it is for one teacher to manage 26 kids online. At Buckley, it's not just homeroom teachers. It's specials teachers. It's P.E. It's a full day, from 8:30 to 3 p.m. every day." Still, these parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars for private Zoom school, and not everyone is happy with that arrangement. In New York, parents at one of the city's most elite private schools, the Dalton School, which remains remote even when competitors have in person learning, have begun to complain. Its reputation for excellent teaching and college placement keeps parents from leaving, said Emily Glickman, president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, which works with families to get their children into private schools in New York. Schools with less competitive reputations have struggled more. "It's interesting because parents are all looking left and right to see what their friends' kids are doing," Ms. Glickman said. "No one is sure what is better." Jennifer and Spiros Liras, who live in Brookline, Mass., and work in Boston, moved their family to their weekend home in Stonington, Conn, so their 14 year old twins could enroll at the Williams School, a day school in New London, Conn. "We were nervous in July when we hadn't heard about the school's plans for mitigating risks," Ms. Liras said. "They're very dated schools that are very crowded." Their children are thriving with in person learning, but she said she worried about what would happen when she and her husband could no longer work remotely and needed to return to their offices. Kim Leipham Freedman, head of New Garden Friends School in Greensboro, N.C., an area rich with colleges and universities, said she had several families who went through the admissions process over the summer but had to pull out at the end when they decided they couldn't afford the tuition, which is 22,000 a year for the upper grades and 17,000 for the lower grades. She said the school could have added more families if price weren't an object. "Many of them think they're going to get a ton of financial aid," Ms. Freedman said. "We do what we can, but we lost many families at the end." One thing many independent schools are doing is giving financial aid to existing students whose families have been affected by the pandemic. New families are generally out of luck: Most financial aid budgets are spent every year by summer. If independent schools are a barometer, the pandemic is continuing to affect families' education plans. Many private schools, like Berkeley Prep in Tampa, are reporting application requests for next year that are many times higher than in a normal year.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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ROBERT HEVEY was fascinated by gardening as a child, but then he grew up and took a 30 year career detour. Mr. Hevey earned a master's in business and became a certified public accountant, working for accounting firms and businesses ranging from manufacturing to enterprise software and corporate restructuring. "I went to college and made the mistake of getting an M.B.A. and a C.P.A.," he recalled with a laugh. Now 61, Mr. Hevey is making up for lost time. He's a second year Ph.D. student in a plant biology and conservation program offered jointly by Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Mr. Hevey, whose work focuses on invasive species, started on his master's at age 53, and he expects to finish his doctorate around five years from now, when he will be 66. "When I walk into a classroom of 20 year olds, I do raise the average age a bit," he says. While the overall age of Ph.D. candidates has dropped in the last decade, about 14 percent of all doctoral recipients are over age 40, according to the National Science Foundation. Relatively few students work on Ph.D.s at Mr. Hevey's age, but educators are seeing increasing enrollment in doctoral programs by students in their 40s and 50s. Many candidates hope doctorates will help them advance careers in business, government and nonprofit organizations; some, like Mr. Hevey, are headed for academic research or teaching positions. At Cornell University, the trend is driven by women. The number of new female doctoral students age 36 or older was 44 percent higher last year than in 2009, according to Barbara Knuth, senior vice provost and dean of the graduate school. "One of the shifts nationally is more emphasis on career paths that call for a Ph.D.," Dr. Knuth said. "Part of it is that we have much more fluidity in career paths. It's unusual for people to hold the same job for many years." "The people we see coming back have a variety of reasons," she added. "It could be a personal interest or for career advancement. But they are very pragmatic and resilient: strong thinkers, willing to ask questions and take a risk in their lives." Many older doctoral candidates are motivated by a search for meaning, said Katrina Rogers, president of Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif., which offers programs exclusively for adult learners in psychology, human and organizational development and education. "Students are asking what they can do with the rest of their lives, and how they can have an impact," she said. "They are approaching graduate school as a learning process for challenging themselves intellectually, but also along cognitive and emotional lines." Making a home for older students also makes business sense for universities and colleges, said Barbara Vacarr, director of the higher education initiative at Encore.org, a nonprofit organization focused on midlife career change. "The convergence of an aging population and an undersupply of qualified traditional college students are both a call to action and an opportunity for higher education." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Some schools are serving older students in midcareer with pragmatic doctoral programs that can be completed more quickly than the seven or eight years traditionally required to earn a Ph.D. Moreover, many of those do not require candidates to spend much time on campus or even leave their full time jobs. That flexibility can help with the cost of obtaining a doctorate. In traditional programs, costs can range from 20,000 a year to 50,000 or more although for some, tuition expenses are offset by fellowships. The shorter programs are less costly. The total cost at Fielding, for example, is 60,000. Susan Noyes, an occupational therapist in Portland, Me., with 20 years' experience under her belt, returned to school at age 40 for a master's degree in adult education at the University of Southern Maine, then pursued her Ph.D. at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. During that time, she continued to work full time and raise three children. She finished the master's at 44 a confidence builder that persuaded her to work toward a Ph.D. in adult learning, which she earned at age 49. Dr. Noyes, 53, made two visits annually to Lesley's campus during her doctoral studies, usually for a week to 10 days. She now works as an assistant professor of occupational therapy at the University of Southern Maine. At the outset of her graduate education, Dr. Noyes wasn't looking for a career change. Instead, she wanted to update her skills and knowledge in the occupational therapy field. But she soon found herself excited by the chance to broaden her intellectual horizons. "I've often said I accidentally got my Ph.D.," she said. Lisa Goff took the traditional Ph.D. path, spending eight years getting her doctorate in history. An accomplished business journalist, she decided to pursue a master's degree in history at the University of Virginia in 2001 while working on a book project. Later, she decided to keep going for her doctorate, which she earned in 2010, the year she turned 50. Her research is focused on cultural history, with a special interest in landscapes. Dr. Goff had planned to use the degree to land a job in a museum, but at the time, museum budgets were being cut in the struggling economy. Instead, a university mentor persuaded her to give teaching a try. She started as an adjunct professor in the American studies department at the University of Virginia, which quickly led to a full time nontenure track position. This year, her fourth full year teaching, her position was converted to a tenure track job. "I thought an academic job would be grueling not what I wanted at all," she recalls. "But I love being in the classroom, finding ways to get students to contribute and build rapport with them." As a graduate student, she never found the age gap to be a challenge. "Professors never treated me as anything but another student, and the other students were great to me," Dr. Goff said. The toughest part of the transition, she says, was the intellectual shock of returning to a rigorous academic environment. "I was surprised to see just how creaky my classroom muscles were," she recalled. "I really struggled in that first class just to keep up." Mr. Hevey agrees, saying he has experienced more stress in his academic life than in the business world. "I'm using my brain in such a different way now. I'm learning something new every day." His advice to anyone considering a similar move? "Really ask yourself if this is something you want to do. If you think it would just be nice to be a student again, that's wrong. It's not a life of ease: You'll be working all the time, perhaps for seven or eight years." Mr. Hevey does not expect to teach, but he does hope to work in a laboratory or do research. "I'm certainly not going to start a new career at 66 or 67," he said. "But I'm not going to go home and sit on the couch, either."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Your Money
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Rock Hudson did it with Mae West. Ray Charles did it with Betty Carter. Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon Levitt did it with a modern twist. And somewhere along the line, the 74 year old song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" became a holiday standard, in heavy radio rotation, playing overhead in department stores, and covered on Christmas albums. "I've got to get home," the woman sings in the duet. "But baby, it's cold outside," the man replies. "The answer is no," she protests later. By the end they're singing the chorus together. Now, a long simmering debate over the lyrics has reached a boil. The annual holiday culture wars and the reckoning over MeToo have swirled together into a potent mix. Say what's in this drink? Several radio stations have pulled "Baby" from the air. Arguments have erupted on social media, and multiple panels on Fox News and CNN have latched on to the debate. William Shatner has emerged as a vocal champion of the song. "You must clutch your pearls over rap music," he told one critic, urging him to listen to a 1949 classic version on YouTube. To some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape. The woman keeps protesting. "I ought to say no, no, no, sir," she sings, and he asks to move in closer. "My sister will be suspicious," she sings. "Gosh, your lips look delicious," he answers. She wonders aloud what is in her drink. "I think the song has always been creepy, but we didn't have the words to explain why," said Lydia Liza, 24, a singer songwriter. Sign up here for the Gender Letter, our newsletter that helps you keep up with the world, and the women shaping it. But some believe this to be a case of political correctness run amok. "Do we get to a point where human worth, warmth and romance are illegal?" the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson argued on Fox News. Faced with protests, radio stations are doing their best to walk the line. "I gotta be honest, I didn't understand why the lyrics were so bad," Glenn Anderson, a radio host for Star 102 in Cleveland, wrote in a blog post last month after the station pulled the song from rotation. "Until I read them." "Baby" is usually sung by a man insisting and a woman resisting, but not always. In "Neptune's Daughter," the romantic comedy that brought the song to the silver screen it won an Academy Award for best song in 1950 it was performed twice, and the gender roles were reversed the second time for comedic effect. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" had humble origins. The composer Frank Loesser, known for "Guys and Dolls" and other Broadway hits, wrote it in 1944 for himself and his wife Lynn Loesser to perform for friends in their living rooms. In an unfinished memoir, her mother recalled performing the song at one such party. "Well, the room just fell apart," Lynn wrote. "We had to do it over and over again and we became instant parlor room stars. We got invited to all the best parties for years on the basis of 'Baby.' It was our ticket to caviar and truffles." Frank later sold the song to the movies, against Lynn's wishes. (They divorced a few years later.) As decades passed, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," which makes no mention of any holiday, became a Christmas standard. There had been criticism over the years, too, but it seems to have reached a crescendo this year. "We're all kind of mystified," Susan Loesser said. "The MeToo movement, which I approve of, has really overstepped in this. You have to look at things in cultural and historical context." One of the earliest critiques came from Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer whose work influenced modern Sunni Islamism and who went on to become a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Upon visiting Greeley, Colo., in 1949, Mr. Qutb wrote angrily about a church dance where the minister dimmed the lights and went to the gramophone to put on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." "The 'Father' waited until he saw people getting into the rhythm of that erotic song," Mr. Qutb wrote in an article for an Egyptian magazine, according to a translation by John C. Calvert, a history professor at Creighton University in Omaha. Decades later, as discussions of date rape and consent became widespread, listeners began to notice just how often the woman says "no." There have been a few parody versions about date rape, including a 2015 video from Funny or Die, in which a man physically restrains a woman who is desperate to escape. She knocks him out with a fireplace shovel. But the song has been defended by some feminists who argue that it tells the story of a woman who wants to spend the night. They note that her stated reasons for leaving are not all her own she mentions a worried mother, talkative neighbors and one vicious aunt and that she's looking for excuses to stay. "It's alluding to both men's and women's sexual desire in a playful way, but it seems to me there isn't really any issue about consent," she said. But in the MeToo era, some say it makes sense to look at those old lyrics with fresh eyes. "I think a lot of men and women were blind to the power men had over women," said Ms. Liza, the singer songwriter. "And I think as we move forward, things totally transform, and we can put names to those feelings." She wrote her own version of the song, which she performed in 2016 with Josiah Lemanski, who sings that she can leave whenever she likes. "Baby, it's cold outside" becomes "Baby, I'm cool with that."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Because of environmental restrictions, all boats operating in the Galapagos are small, but the biggest of the small Celebrity Cruises plans to add two boutique ships to its fleet by acquiring Ocean Adventures and its two ships, the 16 passenger M/C Athala II and the 48 passenger M/V Eclipse. The vessels will join the 100 passenger Celebrity Xpedition, which runs year round trips in the Galapago (fares start around 3,500 a person for seven nights on the Xpedition). The new small ships will enable Celebrity to visit destinations new to the line, including Puerto Villamil, Darwin Bay, Black Turtle Cove and Chinese Hat Islet, and offer more land based hotel stays in the islands. Celebrity will begin operating the new ships late this spring, and will update both during a dry dock renovation in January 2017. Prices for cruises on the small ships have yet to be determined. Existing bookings with Ocean Adventures will be honored and unchanged. Spring train fare sales from Rail Europe aim to entice summer travelers to Switzerland, France and Germany and aboard the Chunnel transiting Eurostar. The largest distributor of European rail passes in North America, Rail Europe is offering the Swiss Travel Pass at 30 percent off for first class bookings, a saving of about 105 for a three day pass costing 246 after the discount, through March 29 for travel before July 1 (use coupon code ESwissSpring). The France Rail Pass in first or second class is selling for 20 percent off through March 31 for unlimited travel on all domestic trains; prices start at 165 in second class for three days with the sale. German Rail Pass deals sold by March 30 for travel before May 31 are 20 percent off, starting at 262 for second class after the discount for a seven day pass. The German pass covers travel to several destinations in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Italy. Children under 12 travel free on the Swiss, France and German passes. Rail Europe is also offering 20 percent off fares on first class seats aboard the Eurostar traveling between London, Paris and Brussels through Aug. 19 if booked before March 29. A similar discount will be applied to first class Eurostar seats on service between London and Avignon, Marseille and Lyon in France through Sept. 30. CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND THE DERBY BY RAIL Combining transportation and accommodation, Vacations by Rail plans to run train trips to two popular spring events, the Kentucky Derby in Louisville and the Washington, D.C., Cherry Blossom Festival. Using private rail cars, its Kentucky Derby trip departs Union Station in Chicago on May 4 and includes tickets to the Derby as well as to the day before Oaks races at Churchill Downs, as well as meals, beverages and accommodations in refurbished vintage rail cars with sleeper cabins and public lounges (prices from 5,199 a person). The six day Cherry Blossom Festival trip leaves Chicago April 12 and includes city sightseeing and the Cherry Blossom Parade (from 2,300 a person). Following the American Airlines code share expansion with Qantas, the competition for trans Pacific fliers intensifies with the announcement that United Airlines and Air New Zealand are forming a joint venture. Pending government approval, the two carriers, both members of the Star Alliance, will coordinate schedules and sales when United begins nonstop service between San Francisco and Auckland on July 1. United plans to operate the service three times a week using Boeing 787 8 Dreamliner planes and expand to daily service in November with larger Boeing 787 9 models.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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In the face of mass unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy, President Trump is desperate to end the pandemic lockdown and bring the country back on line. That's why he spent the past week asserting his "total" authority to reopen the economy ("The president of the United States calls the shots") and promising a rapid return to normal: "Our country has to get open, and it will get open, and it'll get open safely and hopefully quickly some areas quicker than others," he said on Tuesday. Republicans in Congress, likewise, are urging an end to the freeze. "It should have happened yesterday," Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, chairman of the hard line House Freedom Caucus, told Politico. Representative Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana acknowledged the chance of "loss of life" from an early end to social distancing but asserted, nonetheless, that it was better than the alternative. "It is policymakers' decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils," he said to a local radio station. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was even more blunt during an interview on Fox News on Wednesday. "We gotta reopen, and when we do, the coronavirus is going to spread faster, and we got to be ready for it." No doubt there is real concern for the economic and health consequences of an extended shutdown. But Republicans, and Trump in particular, are also thinking about November. If the president knows anything, it's that his fate rises and falls with the state of the economy. And if he loses his campaign for re election, then in this polarized environment of nationalized politics, he's likely to take congressional Republicans down with him. But I think there's another element underlying the push to reopen the economy despite the threat it poses to American lives, a dynamic beyond partisanship that explains why much of the conservative political ecosystem, from politicians and donors to activists and media personalities, has joined the fight to end the lockdown. 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." To even begin to tackle this crisis, Congress had to contemplate policies that would be criticized as unacceptably radical under any other circumstances. At 2.2 trillion, the initial relief package was a bill that was more than twice the size of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009. Further aid is almost certainly forthcoming, and Democrats, at least, are contemplating trillions more in additional stimulus, including universal basic income for the duration of the crisis, a COBRA expansion that would cover 100 percent of health care costs for laid off and furloughed workers and a proposal to cover payrolls for nearly every business in America. On top of all of this, the Federal Reserve is flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in rescue loans and bond purchases, to stabilize markets and keep interest rates low. In one short month, the United States has made a significant leap toward a kind of emergency social democracy, in recognition of the fact that no individual or community could possibly be prepared for the devastation wrought by the pandemic. Should the health and economic crisis extend through the year, there's a strong chance that Americans will move even further down that road, as businesses shutter, unemployment continues to mount and the federal government is the only entity that can keep the entire economy afloat. But this logic that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low. And in the wake of two political campaigns Bernie Sanders's and Elizabeth Warren's that pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics, voters might begin to see this essential truth. If the electoral danger for the Republican Party is that voters will blame the president for high unemployment and mass death a reasonable fear, given how Trump loudly denied the threat in the face of warnings from inside and outside his administration then the ideological danger is that it undermines the ideological project that captured the state with President Ronald Reagan and is on the path to victory under Donald Trump. Republicans haven't openly expressed this, but they seem aware of it, to the extent that on the eve of approval of the first coronavirus bill, they tried to kill the most generous provisions of relief an enormous expansion of unemployment insurance. The reason? "The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, 'I don't need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else,'" Senator Rick Scott of Florida explained on the Senate floor. In other words, we cannot help people so much that they can effectively bargain for better wages; crisis or not, we must discipline the working class. There's no guarantee that Americans will respond to the pandemic and economic collapse with support for more and greater assistance from the federal government. But the possibility is there and it will become more apparent the longer this continues. If the rolling depressions of the late 19th century disrupted the social order enough to open the space for political radicalism from the agrarian uprising of the Farmers' Alliance to the militant agitation of the industrial labor movement then the one two punch of the Great Recession and the Pandemic Depression might do the same for us. In which case, it makes all the sense in the world for Trump, the Republican Party and the conservative movement to push for the end of the lockdown, public health be damned. After years of single minded devotion, the conservative movement is achingly close to dismantling the New Deal political order and turning the clock back to when capital could act without limits or restraints. But in trying to destroy the administrative state in trying to make government small enough to "drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" conservatives left the country vulnerable to a deadly disease that has undermined that project and galvanized its opponents. And all of this is happening as one of the most progressive generations in history begins to take its place in our politics, its views informed by two decades of war and economic crisis. Yes, nothing is set in stone and, yes, events still have to unfold. But at this moment in American life, it feels as if one movement, a reactionary one, is beginning to unravel and another, very different in its outlook, is beginning to take shape.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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Lynn Cohen, the veteran actress best known for her role as Magda on the hit HBO series "Sex and the City," died on Feb. 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 86. Her death was confirmed by her son, Laurence Frazen. Ms. Cohen was seen in numerous movies and television shows, and in both Broadway and Off Broadway stage productions. But she didn't achieve her greatest fame until late in life, through her role as Magda, the stern Eastern European housekeeper employed by Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) on "Sex and the City." "I auditioned and they called me right away to do the episode, but my mother was turning 90 years old in Texas," Ms. Cohen said in a 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan. "I said, 'I would love to do this but I'm sorry, I have to be with my mother and she's turning 90 and she's sexier than anybody on the show.' And they moved the date for me." Magda first appeared in the show's third season, in 2000. Ms. Cohen was supposed to appear in only one episode, "Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman," in which Magda memorably replaces Miranda's vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary and later tells her that she'll need to learn to cook if she ever wants a boyfriend.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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THE BUYERS Briana and Matthew Tortoso, with their children, JohnCarlo and Mia, in their new home in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. With two small children crammed into a two bedroom co op in Yorkville, Briana Tortoso was ready to head for the suburbs. "The space was closing in on us," she said. "It felt like a toy box." For her, the decision to decamp was easy; for her husband, Matthew, less so. "Had my second child been a boy, we would still be there," Mr. Tortoso said. "We would have bunk beds, and we would have called it a day." (Their children, JohnCarlo and Mia, are now 5 and 3.) Mrs. Tortoso, 40, who works in advertising for the Game Show Network, and Mr. Tortoso, who is also 40 and works in finance, began their search two years ago, with a budget of 1 million or more. They were focusing on Westchester County, where they could find a house within an hour's train commute of Midtown, because both work near Grand Central Terminal. But nothing they found was quite right. Sometimes they disliked a layout, or a house was too big. Many of the houses they saw hadn't been updated in decades, and the need to spend 100,000 or 200,000 on renovations worried them. The home buying process, Mr. Tortoso said, felt like a game of musical chairs: You had to pick from whatever was available at any given moment. Buying there, Mr. Tortoso said, would have been "like moving into freshman class," and the children would have had built in friends. But the cul de sac where they found a 1.4 million house they liked was adjacent to high voltage electrical power lines, and the Tortosos were concerned about potential health risks; also, ConEd performs periodic inspections by helicopter and trims the trees, and they were worried about the noise. In nearby Briarcliff Manor, they loved a home on Butternut Road, another cul de sac. A 1.2 million house, it had been fully renovated by a contractor, but it wasn't configured to their liking. Then they heard something intriguing from their agent, Hillary Landau of Houlihan Lawrence, whom they found through Suburban Jungle, a service that helps match home buyers with the right suburbs. The advantages of buying a new, custom built house included the choice of "more efficient appliances, heating and cooling," said Jim Zappi, the owner of ZappiCo. "They are better insulated, so the cost of ownership is less." The Tortosos signed on for 1.12 million, for a two story, 3,000 square foot house with four bedrooms and four bathrooms. But the project was more complex than they had envisioned. The construction took a year, twice as long as scheduled. The family arrived last spring, after selling their Yorkville co op for about 1.43 million. Then Mr. and Mrs. Tortoso set to work on the landscaping, which was also more complicated than they expected. Now that they've settled in, though, they revel in the suburban supermarkets, with wide aisles and roomy shopping carts. Still, there are trade offs. "You can't swing by and have a slice of pizza," Mr. Tortoso said. "Whatever you have at home in the house is what you have for dinner." Mrs. Tortoso's main regret about their new home, she said, is not going with pocket doors in the bathroom that connects the children's bedrooms. The doors swing inward, and when both are open they nearly touch. As for Mr. Tortoso, he regrets that their new neighborhood is, in fact, "not a neighborhood there's not going to be a block party." But at night, they hear crickets rather than honking and sirens loud enough to wake the children. And the toys are largely confined to the basement playroom. "I am able to step into a private room to make a work call, and not have kids all over me," Mr. Tortoso said. "Before, I'd go to the hallway or the roof."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Reddick an artist turned art handler loathes the privileged white people moving into his beloved Bedford Stuyvesant; the problem is, he's one of them. At the start of 's noirish debut novel, "Restoration Heights," the author declares that we "know Reddick," because he's "that white guy on the subway," totally unremarkable because of his ubiquity. Reddick is surviving but not thriving in Bed Stuy. He's guilty about the part he's played in the neighborhood's gentrification, having moved there from the South a decade earlier. However, when Reddick is asked to look into the disappearance of a young woman, he banks on the privilege his appearance affords him to gain access and trust, to cross boundaries and invade the privacy of various suspects. In his day job, Reddick regularly enters the homes of elite New Yorkers to hang their extravagant art. The missing woman, Hannah, is engaged to the heir to the Seward fortune. Reddick happens to be the last person who saw Hannah in Bed Stuy in front of his building late one night, "tapping at her phone, coiled on the hood of a dark sedan," obviously drunk. The Sewards assure Reddick that Hannah would never be in a neighborhood like that, but he's certain that he saw her, and that she is in serious trouble. It's not clear why the Sewards won't call the police about Hannah's disappearance, nor why the matriarch of another obscenely wealthy family hires Reddick to find her. Reddick soon connects Hannah to Restoration Heights, the abandoned half built condominium towers near his apartment, as they would be the perfect place to hide a body. They're also the boldest example of the gentrification that Reddick despises, designed and constructed for "the white kids" who want "all the cachet of the neighborhood and none of the hassles. The guilty thrill of being surrounded by blackness without having to live like them. Not separate but unequal." As the mystery unfolds, Reddick must confront the nuances of gentrification as he considers the perspectives of the longtime residents, the developers and even the young newcomers.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The mother lives in the same East Village apartment where she raised her child (and a few blocks from this play's venue). He's still in the neighborhood so he visits regularly, and tells us what he sees: "Smoking. Reading. The weather channel is on, muted." And later: "She draws the smoke in deep, then releases. She draws in and closes her eyes." (The mother has a lifelong habit; we are told that even her books smell of smoke.) The son always well, almost always speaks in soft, neutral tones as he guides us through his mother's life. The pair chat, but not directly: It's as if we were hearing one end of a phone conversation. The woman gives off an impression of calm, elegant composure, with a hint of impish humor. We learn she was a theater buff and is still capable of strong opinions: "Neil LaBute? Oh, come on now," she says. "He is the worst." Knud Adams directs this production for the Play Company and Andy Bragen Theater Projects, which is presented by Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. The audience sits on both sides of the stage, adding intimacy to the already small venue. At the same time, the text's observational tone and Fliakos's dispassionate delivery maintain a sense of distance, which can feel overprotective of both characters. We are with them, but at a remove, as if they were in a documentary. Inevitably, the mother deteriorates. "Her mind is going," her son says, describing "some kind of softening, an inability to focus." It gets worse, and Bragen spares us few of the in dignities of old age. By the end, the son's emotions are harder to describe in tidy little sentences. The show comes alive just as death enters. Notes on My Mother's Decline Through Oct. 27 at Fourth Street Theater, Next Door at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212 460 5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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"Hangmen," Martin McDonagh's dark drama about a British executioner, will open on Broadway this winter after successful runs in London and Off Broadway. The show, first produced in 2015 by the Royal Court Theater, transferred to the West End and won the 2016 Olivier Award for best new play, and then was presented in New York last year by the Atlantic Theater Company. Set in Oldham, England, in 1965, when capital punishment for murder was being banned in Britain, the play takes place largely in a bar run by the executioner and disrupted by a mysterious visitor from London. McDonagh is an acclaimed playwright, nominated for Tony Awards for "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," "The Pillowman," "The Lonesome West" and "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," and a filmmaker (he wrote and directed the Oscar nominated "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri").
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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While your travel plans may be on hold, you can pretend you're somewhere new for the night. Around the World at Home invites you to channel the spirit of a new place each week with recommendations on how to explore the culture, all from the comfort of your home. "America is my country, and Paris is my hometown," wrote Gertrude Stein. Me too; or, well, almost. For the last few years I was shuttling between New York and the French capital, where my now husband worked, and in that time Paris came to feel like a city where I had history, whose streets I could navigate by muscle memory. Now that trans Atlantic travel is all but suspended, the closest I can get to Paris is onscreen but, luckily, the view is fantastic. Paris was the site of the first movie screening, back in 1895 (though the Lumiere Brothers shot those first pictures in Lyon). It remains the home of Europe's largest, most vibrant film industry France exports more movies than any country, bar the United States. Here I've picked 10 movies that transport me back to Paris, from the early days of sound cinema to the age of streaming. I've omitted many French movies made in English, some shot on soundstages ("An American in Paris," "Moulin Rouge!") and others on location ("Funny Face," "Midnight in Paris"). Instead I've selected films I rely on when I want to escape America for Paris ... which is quite often these days. Paris today is so much more than its touristic, tree lined core; it's continental Europe's most diverse city, where French mingles with Arabic and Wolof and you're more likely to hear Afro trap than Edith Piaf. This assured coming of age film by Celine Sciamma follows a young Black teenager as she shuttles across the racial, economic and cultural divides between Paris proper (or "Paname," in the girls' slang) and its suburban housing estates, whose architecture the director films with rare style and sympathy. Aubervilliers, Bondy, Mantes la Jolie, Aulnay sous Bois: these nodes of Greater Paris, birthplace of singers and stylists and the world's greatest soccer players, deserve the spotlight too. The most intimate and most Parisian film of Claire Denis, very probably France's greatest living director, follows a widowed father, who is a train driver, and his only daughter, a student, as they hesitantly step away from each other and into new lives. The cast (including Mati Diop, who's since become an acclaimed director herself) is almost entirely of African or Caribbean origin, yet this is the rare film that takes Paris's diversity as a given, and its portraits of Parisians in the working to middle class north of the capital have a fullness and benevolence that remain too rare in the French cinema. Just as beautiful as its scenes of family life are Ms. Denis's frequent, lingering shots of the RER, Paris's suburban commuter railway, which appears here as a bridge between worlds. The near entirety of this gray steeped musical directed by Christophe Honore and with a dozen tunes written by the singer songwriter Alex Beaupain takes place in the gentrifying but still scruffy 10th Arrondissement, where I put back a few too many drinks in my 20s. As its young lovers sing on some of Paris's least photogenic streets, on their Ikea couches or in their overlit offices, the capital turns into something even more alluring than the City of Light of foreign fantasies. This is the film to watch if you miss everyday life in contemporary Paris, where even the overcast days merit a song. Paris had a very good 80s: think Louvre Pyramid, think Concorde, think Christian Lacroix. Eric Rohmer's tale of an independent young woman, keen to hang onto both her boyfriend and her apartment, offers the most chic dissection of Parisian youth big haired models dancing in Second Empire ballrooms, and lovers philosophizing at cafe tables and one another's beds. There's a killer '80s score by the electropop duo Elli et Jacno, but what makes its beauty so bittersweet is its sublime star Pascale Ogier, who died shortly after the film's completion, age 25. It's just eight minutes long, it has no dialogue, but this is the wildest movie ever made in Paris; it's a miracle that no one died. Early one morning, the director Claude Lelouch got in his Mercedes, fastened a camera to the bumper, and just floored it: down the broad Avenue Foch (where he clocks 125 miles an hour), through the Louvre, past the Opera, through red lights and around blind corners and even onto the sidewalks, to the heights of Sacre Coeur. Every time I watch it I end up covering my eyes and then laughing at the insanity of it all: cinema verite at top speed. It's 5 p.m. on June 21, the longest day of the year, and the pop singer Cleo has gone to a fortune teller to find out: is she dying? And for the rest of Agnes Varda's incomparable slice of life we follow her in real time one minute onscreen equals one minute in the narrative across the capital's left bank. She walks past the cafes of Montparnasse, down the wide Haussmannian boulevards and into the Parc Montsouris, where she meets a soldier on leave from the front in Algeria: another young Parisian uncertain if he'll live another year. As Cleo puts her superstitions aside, the streets of Varda's Paris serve as the accelerant for a woman's self confidence. Jean Luc Godard's first feature is so celebrated for its innovative jump cuts and careering narrative that we forget: this is, hands down, the greatest film ever made about an American in Paris. As the exchange student hawking the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs Elysees, Jean Seberg invests the movie with a breezy expatriate glamour, feigning French insouciance but hanging onto American wonder. And if her language skills are iffy my French husband imitates Seberg's Franglais when he wants to mock my accent she embodies the dream of becoming someone new in Paris, even if you fall for the wrong guy. The suavest of all Paris gangster films and my go to movie for days sick in bed orbits around the handsome narrow streets of hillside Montmartre and, just south, the seedy nightclubs and gambling dens of Pigalle. Bob, the elegant, white haired "high roller" of the title, is a retired bank robber after one last big score, but Paris's old underground, and its old codes of loyalty, are fading away. The cast is undeniably B list, and genre conventions cling to their roles like barnacles: the world weary but wise cafe proprietress, the hooker with a heart of gold. But watch as Melville's hand held camera trails Bob in his trench coat and fedora, or follows a garbage truck around the Place Pigalle like a ball in a roulette wheel. Paris looks like a jackpot.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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This four bedroom townhouse is on a tree lined avenue in the upscale neighborhood of Markgrave, about two miles south of the historic center of Antwerp, Belgium. Built in 1912 and renovated in phases through 2017, the 4,300 square foot house has a mansard roof, terraces in the front and back, and a brick walled backyard adjacent to a public park. Though it is four stories tall, the house actually has seven split levels, with rooms in the front and back separated by half levels and a staircase in the center of the house running between them. "They don't build it like that anymore," said Henriette Siersema, the managing director of Sotheby's International Realty in Antwerp, which has the listing. Past the small front garden and a black front door is a long entrance hall with Belgian bluestone floors that stretches to the rear of the house. To the right are the living room, a sitting room with a chandelier and the dining room, all with oak parquet floors. The living room is entered through large, wood framed glass doors, with built in bookshelves on either side of a fireplace, the original ornamental plaster ceiling and a front facing bay window. The kitchen, behind the sitting room and dining room, has a La Cornue range, Belgian bluestone counters, a breakfast nook and floor to ceiling glass doors that open to a patio and the brick walled backyard. A half bathroom is under the stairs, as is a door leading to the basement, where there is storage and laundry. Between the ground floor and second story is a TV room with high ceilings and glass doors that open onto a large terrace, with stairs leading down to the kitchen patio. There are four bedrooms on the upper floors. Of these, two could serve as the master suite, Ms. Siersema said. The top floor has an office that shares a bathroom with the fourth bedroom. Ellen Claes for The New York Times A parking space in a nearby building, about two minutes away on foot, is available to rent. A small park is around the corner, and two public trams run on tracks in front of the house, with the nearest stop five minutes away and the city center about 15 minutes from there. Antwerp, a city of about 500,000 on the Scheldt river, is known for its Renaissance architecture, cobblestone streets and cultural treasures like the Rubens House, the 16th century former home and studio of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. Antwerp International Airport is about 10 minutes away by car. The Belgian capital of Brussels, and its international airport, are about 25 miles south. The area around Antwerp, the largest city in the Flemish Region of Belgium, had a very active residential real estate market in 2018 and the beginning of 2019, with transaction volume growing by 7 percent between the end of 2018 and the first quarter of this year, according to a report by Belgium's national notary organization. Antwerp's housing market is in the midst of several changes some possibly temporary, others systemic that are creating increased supply and demand, according to agents and market analysis. Low interest rates in Belgium (and Europe) have made borrowing more affordable, attracting investors. Those rates, which have discouraged saving money in the bank, have also generated increased interest in real estate investment. Migration to the region and low unemployment have created additional demand, and developers have rushed to meet it. In the past few years, there has been a housing construction boom across Belgium, and especially in Antwerp, where new apartment units have gone up throughout the city, agents said. These factors have combined to create a shift in who buys (and rents) homes, said Sam Bordon, a senior manager in Deloitte Belgium's real estate department. "Typically the market was very owner occupier oriented families buying houses for their own use," he said. "We see now, more and more, especially in inner city locations, a lot of the new build apartments are being sold to investors as well." With more investment sales, rentals are becoming a larger share of the housing market. "Antwerp was traditionally not a rental market, but that has been changing," Ms. Siersema said. Housing prices in Antwerp have increased unevenly in the last three years, with new apartments commanding higher prices, but older properties in unrenovated buildings remaining stable, although those properties often require upgrades, said Hilde Couturier, the managing director of Metropolitan Real Estate, in Antwerp. A small two bedroom apartment might sell for 250,000 to 270,000 euros ( 280,000 to 302,000) in an older, unrenovated building and require 50,000 euros ( 56,000) to bring it into compliance with Belgian and European energy efficiency regulations, while new energy efficient, two bedroom apartments might sell for 350,000 to 400,000 euros ( 392,000 to 448,000), Ms. Couturier said. Many of the new buildings are high rises, taller than the old standard of five or six floors, she added. Those who would once have held onto property outside the city center after retirement are now often choosing to sell and then buy smaller, easier to maintain homes in the center, Ms. Couturier and Ms. Siersema said. "Sometimes they move in, and other times they rent them out initially," Ms. Couturier said, noting that younger buyers, between 25 and 30, are being priced out of the market and increasingly need help from family to buy a first home. "The gap is getting really big between the rich and the poor," Ms. Couturier said. At the luxury end, prices vary widely based on size and location, Ms. Siersema said. A luxury renovated apartment in a prime location could go for 4,000 to 8,000 euros a square meter ( 415 to 830 a square foot). In new developments, prices are 6,000 to 12,000 euros a square meter (about 625 to 1,250 a square foot), although the higher figure would be for something "exceptional" on the harbor, she said. Most buyers of luxury properties in Antwerp are Belgian, Ms. Couturier said. Foreigners tend to have temporary work assignments, so they rent. Many buyers in Antwerp, and across Belgium, are from the Netherlands, as Dutch is the most commonly spoken language. Ms. Siersema said that about 25 to 30 percent of her agency's buyers in Antwerp are foreign, most of them from the Netherlands, Israel, Lebanon, India, Germany and the United States. Although some 40 percent of Belgians speak French, most French buyers prefer Brussels to Antwerp, she said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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WITH a torrent of money flowing into the United States from China, some savvy real estate brokers are trying to jump in farther upstream to better position themselves to win new clients. When the New York market dried up at the end of 2008, Sotheby's International Realty turned its focus to Asia. The company dispatched one of its prominent brokers, Nikki Field, to travel to Asia to develop relationships with potential clients. She and her real estate partner, Kevin Brown, began making about four trips a year there, with a growing focus on mainland China. "We wanted to get out ahead of the world's investment flow," Ms. Field said. And with good reason. The explosion of wealth in China has created myriad new billionaires eager to diversify their holdings with real estate investments in the United States. Often, they are looking to give their children a plush crash pad for boarding school or college, or a place to live in when they start careers and families. Many wealthy Chinese are also looking for places to invest where they can preserve their wealth and avoid the rising inflation in major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing. No city in the United States has been a bigger beneficiary of the Chinese buying wave than New York. So to some brokers, it has made sense to more aggressively seek out Chinese buyers on their own turf. Since 2008, Ms. Field said, she has been on an at times exasperating journey to understand China. She started taking Mandarin classes about two years ago. More recently she and Mr. Brown have been attending classes in Mandarin and business culture at the State University of New York's Confucius Institute for Business, a program that began in early 2011 and that is seeing a lot of interest from real estate brokers eager to sell to the Chinese. While other major foreign buying groups in New York the Brazilians, the Russians and other Europeans all require some cultural understanding for brokers to be successful, no group has posed more of a challenge than the Chinese, brokers say. The old way of doing business is no longer enough, Ms. Field said. "We as Americans always expected anyone to adapt to our business style, and they did," she said. "That is no longer true with the Chinese. There are too many of them, they have too much power. We truly must adapt to their style of business in order to do deals." Janet Wang, a broker at the Corcoran Group, who along with her colleague Carrie Chiang, make up one of the more successful real estate teams doing deals with the Chinese in New York, said that they have politely declined invitations by banks and organizations to travel to China to talk about American real estate. "I have yet to see how successful those cold approaches and road shows are," Ms. Wang said. "Chinese, especially on the high end, rely heavily on the circle of their trusted friends and family members and people they have done business with in the past." Dolly Lenz, the vice chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that classes in Mandarin and Chinese culture aren't necessarily the answer. "In my opinion, that won't be what will work in the end, but it can't hurt," Ms. Lenz said. "What matters to them is trust. And they expect you to be on the ball and know everything." Ms. Lenz hasn't made a trip to Asia in six years. She said she continues to rely on the web of contacts she made during an eight year span when she made some 25 trips to Asia. Still, she is benefiting from the Chinese buying wave. Half of her clients now come from Asia, many of them from China. That is twice as many as she had two years ago, she said. Chinese billionaires continue to buy high end properties in buildings like the Time Warner Center, 15 Central Park West and the newest, One57. But in May and June she saw something different: an "almost overwhelming volume" of calls and sales driven largely by interest in apartments ranging from 3 million to 6 million what Ms. Lenz calls the "middle market" in Manhattan. Chinese buyers are also no longer paying all cash as they were a few years ago. In recent months, several Chinese buyers have financed their purchases, some with United States based loans, Ms. Lenz said. They seem to be leveraging in New York so they can also buy properties in Los Angeles, London or other cities, she said. On her trips to China, Ms. Field has noticed a change in the conversation among potential clients. "When I first went over there five years ago, my presentations all had to be about return," she said. "Everyone was looking for returns. Two years ago, return questions almost dried up. Now it is all about wealth preservation. They are anticipating a bubble" in China, she added. For Ms. Field's team, that concern has translated into growing sales. Meetings with 37 potential Chinese clients this year resulted in nine signed contracts or closings on properties in Manhattan, at prices ranging from 3.5 million to 50 million. Most of those were at One57, she said. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Groups of Chinese are making their way to New York for house hunting tours. A Mandarin English luxury lifestyle magazine, YUE, is organizing a real estate conference in New York in October at which Ms. Field is scheduled to speak. More than 150 wealthy Chinese that Sotheby's has reached out to are expected to attend, she said. After five years of traveling to Asia, Ms. Field acknowledges that she is still not fluent in Mandarin and has "only scratched the surface on the choreography" required to be successful with the mainland Chinese. There is proper protocol with greetings to consider, welcome gifts, seating and who eats when at meals. There are nuances related to distinguishing business time and social time. Understanding Chinese negotiating styles has been a challenge, she said. But nothing is more puzzling to brokers and non Chinese sellers than feng shui, the Chinese belief system that often dictates a final purchase decision. Apartments need to be feng shui friendly. The layout of the apartment which direction it faces, where the kitchen and bathrooms are are all factors. Ms. Wang said some of her clients have a family feng shui counselor "on speed dial" and won't hesitate to fly him or her in from China with a compass to evaluate a potential purchase. Numbers are a particular focus. The number eight sounds like the word for "prosperity," and that is one reason some of the full floor apartments at One57 were sold early to Chinese buyers for about 50 million apiece. The Extell Development Company, which is building One57, specifically set aside apartment 88 for Chinese buyers, and it is under contract to a Chinese buyer, Ms. Field said. Developers like Extell and the Related Companies have tried to make buildings feng shui friendly. The designer Clodagh created peaceful, harmonious lobbies at the Caledonia in West Chelsea and at 225 Rector in Battery Park City that have helped make those buildings popular with Chinese buyers, said Sherry Tobak, a senior vice president of the Related Companies. But some buildings simply face an uphill battle. At 995 Fifth Avenue, the former Stanhope Hotel, Ms. Field said that Chinese buyers in Beijing and Shanghai initially were excited about an 8,000 square foot apartment she was selling for 30 million until they realized it was a restoration, not a new building. "They were very concerned about past lives that were inhabiting the building," Ms. Field said. A development at the former Drake Hotel site, 425 Park Avenue, which will be the city's tallest residential building (and some say the country's) when it opens, is not likely to have many Chinese residents. The number four sounds like the word for "death" in Chinese. Both Ms. Field and Ms. Lenz said they haven't received any calls from the Chinese, although wealthy Russians keep calling. But knowing that four is not a good number to have in an address is the easy part. "I have talked to my tutors about this, hoping to get a road map, so I would understand what would be approved as good feng shui versus bad, but there is no road map," Ms. Field said. Ms. Field is off to Asia again in two weeks, this time on a swing through Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, Sotheby's auction house will be selling art and wine. She is expecting the event to attract a lot of high net worth Asians from the region. "It is drawing bigger numbers than our auction houses have in the past for any sales," Ms. Field said. "They are buying art and also looking for the houses to put the art in."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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The uncertainty over the future of the wildly popular video app has brought chaos to its user community and to the entertainment and advertising industries as well. It was a weekend of chaos on TikTok unleashed on Friday night when President Trump said, while aboard Air Force One, that he might ban the video app. The surprise announcement sent influencers in droves onto livestreams to give possibly premature teary and heartfelt goodbyes to their fans, asking them to join them on apps like Instagram, YouTube and Triller. For agencies that manage talent on the platform, it was a long weekend of hand holding and downloading TikTok archives for posterity. Some users, in a last hurrah bid for virality, reposted TikToks they said had previously been removed by the service for violating nudity or profanity guidelines. Others tried to make light of the situation. Addison Easterling, 19, a TikTok star who dropped out of Louisiana State University to pursue a full time influencer career, posted a video of herself pretending to knock on the college's doors to let her back in. "Me at LSU tomorrow," she captioned it. TikTok is known mostly for dance videos and comedic skits, but that silliness can obscure two facts: TikTok has become a powerhouse in the entertainment industry and the primary platform that music executives and talent agents use to scout the next big act. And, at the same time, especially as the election nears, the app has become an information and organizing hub for Gen Z activists and politically minded young people. TikTok has had a fraught relationship with the United States government for some time. Several administration officials, including the president, fear the app is a security risk because its parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese, potentially giving the Chinese government access to American user data. TikTok and ByteDance have vehemently denied any relationship with the Chinese government. The president's comments suggesting he would shut down TikTok in the United States stalled ByteDance's negotiations to sell the app to Microsoft as a way to address the security concerns. On Sunday, Microsoft said that it had resumed talks after consulting with the president, giving some hope to users that the app would survive. Young users say TikTok is a crucial outlet for education about climate change, systemic racism and the Black Lives Matter movement. The talk of a ban only politicized them further, with many TikTokers believing Mr. Trump's threats were a direct response to their campaigns against him. "TikTok is to Black Lives Matter what Twitter was to the Arab Spring," said Kareem Rahma, 34, a TikTok creator with nearly 400,000 followers on the app. Mr. Rahma's TikToks from the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis garnered tens of millions of views. "I saw a lot of youth on the ground TikToking the protests as opposed to livestreaming, tweeting or Instagramming," he said. "The conversations these kids are having with each other are essential." In June, teenage TikTok users claimed responsibility for inflating attendance expectations, leading to rows upon rows of empty seats, for Mr. Trump's rally in Tulsa, Okla., after thousands of them registered for tickets to the event that they had no plans to redeem. TikTok users have also waged coordinated campaigns to rate Mr. Trump's businesses poorly on Google, to spam online surveys aimed at Trump supporters with useless information and to damage the Trump campaign's e commerce store by collecting in their shopping baskets items they never intend to buy. Ellie Zeiler, 16, who has 6.3 million followers on TikTok, said that Mr. Trump's threat to ban the app may even sway more young people to vote against him. "I think that a lot of people didn't like Trump before, and this has driven people to not like him even more," she said. "For many kids, politics feel very distant," said Eitan Bernath, 18, who has 1.2 million followers on TikTok. "This might be the first time it hits home for a lot of kids." On Sunday, nine TikTok creators with a collective 54 million followers, including Brittany Broski, Hope Schwing and Mitchell Crawford, published an open letter addressed to Mr. Trump on Medium. "TikTok has enabled the kinds of interactions that could never take place on the likes of Facebook and Instagram," they wrote. "Our generation has grown up on the internet, but our vision of the internet is going to require more than two gatekeepers. Why not use this as an opportunity to level the playing field?" they urged. Vanessa Pappas, the general manager of TikTok North America, attempted to quell concerns on Saturday. "We're not planning on going anywhere," she said in a statement released on the app. The TikTok creator Curtis Newbill, 24, is one of thousands of young creators who has found fame through the app. When he walked into a friend's house in Los Angeles on Friday night, his stomach sank. He was there for a gathering with fellow TikTok stars known as the Sway Boys. "They were like, 'Did you hear about TikTok? It's getting banned,'" Mr. Newbill said. Mr. Newbill's next few hours were a blur. He remained at the gathering and tried not to think about the situation, but a pit in his stomach grew throughout the night. He went live on the app, telling his 4.3 million followers to follow him on Instagram. All night, Mr. Newbill fielded a barrage of texts from concerned family and friends. He stayed up until 6:30 a.m., waiting for any information about his future. Like thousands of other entertainers who have made the pilgrimage to Los Angeles in the most recent West Coast entertainment gold rush, Mr. Newbill relies solely on income from TikTok to make a living. "I live song deal to song deal," he said. TikTok has rewritten the pop charts, becoming a new default for how labels and aspiring artists promote their songs. And TikTok is where major brands like American Eagle, Chipotle and others spend millions to reach the next generation of consumers. "I've lost brand deals in the past week," Ms. Zeiler said. "They're saying, 'We don't want to do this anymore.' They're worried if TikTok gets taken down, they're not going to get their full potential on the deal." Management teams worked all night on Friday to back up their clients' videos using FYP. RIP, a tool that downloads users' TikTok videos and emails them copies. Several managers held conference calls with skittish brands that were seeking to cancel deals. "We're preparing for the worst," said Mario Ayuso, an influencer manager. "A lot of the newer talent I work with began their career on TikTok and it has been the foundation for everything they know today," said Keith Dorsey, another talent manager. "They are concerned, worried and somewhat freaked out. One of them actually planned on quitting his job tomorrow to take his TikTok career to the next level. Our group chats are on fire right now." Last Wednesday, Triller, an app that functions similarly to TikTok, announced it had hired the 18 year old TikTok star Josh Richards as the platform's chief strategy officer, and successfully wooed Mr. Richards along with two other large TikTok stars, Griffin Johnson, 21, and Noah Beck, 19, to join the platform as investors. Instagram is also offering TikTok creators deals of hundreds of thousands of dollars to create content on Reels, its new product with similarities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Perez Hilton, a longtime celebrity news chronicler who has amassed 850,000 followers on TikTok, said he hoped that just the threat of a ban would serve as a note of caution for the young talent on the app. "These influencers on TikTok can't have all their eggs in one basket," he said. "You have to be everywhere," he said, if you want to stay famous. "You need to hustle," he said. "A lot of the TikTokers that are just pretty, those are the ones that are really going to struggle. Pretty doesn't age well and it doesn't translate. The ones that are willing to work on and off TikTok and other platforms, they're the ones that will be able to continue to thrive."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Soldiers in El Salvador in 1985, during the country's civil war. Roberto Lovato's task in "Unforgetting" is to piece together not only his fragmented identity, but the mosaic of testimony from the host of characters he assembles, all the while standing in the rubble of war's aftermath. UNFORGETTING A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas By Roberto Lovato "The machete of memory cuts swiftly or slowly," Roberto Lovato writes at the beginning of his groundbreaking memoir, "Unforgetting." It "makes us hack at ourselves," it "chops up our families" and it "severs any understanding that epic history is a stitching together of intimate histories." Fittingly, at the tender heart of this book is a treadle sewing machine used by his grandmother, Mama Tey, to support the family in El Salvador and, later, San Francisco. At the dark heart of this book is a family secret fiercely kept by his father, having to do with the genocidal aftermath of an uprising in El Salvador in 1932. This massacre, called La Matanza (the slaughter), so traumatized the "tiny country of titanic sorrows" that today, according to Lovato, it is unknown to most Salvadorans, repressed during five decades of military dictatorship. A second uprising, beginning in 1980, led to 12 years of civil war between the Salvadoran military, supported by the United States, and the armed forces of the opposition. The war displaced more than one million Salvadorans, with half taking refuge in the United States. After the war, social and economic reforms promised during peace negotiations were abandoned, and until 2016 amnesty laws protected the perpetrators of war crimes, the majority committed by the military. Civilians, and combatants from both sides of the conflict, struggled to survive in a deteriorating postwar environment. In the United States, young Salvadoran war refugees defended themselves from urban street gangs by forming gangs themselves, and when the government expeditiously deported them, gang life became a U.S. export, seeding criminal enterprises such as narco trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and money laundering. In the absence of serious economic development and domestic security, Salvadoran parents despaired of keeping their children fed and safe, and sent them north, until whole families were fleeing on foot to the U.S. border. These families are often referred to as "migrants," but in truth, they are the most recent refugees of the war and its aftermath, victims of a conflict that could not have been prosecuted without the support of the United States, the country that is now refusing to grant the vast majority of them asylum. "Unforgetting" is a story of two countries, inextricably bound, and Lovato is uniquely positioned to tell it. As a U.S. born son of immigrants, he grew up knowing the culture of gang life in the streets of San Francisco, spent his holidays visiting family in El Salvador, was briefly a born again Christian, worked for nongovernmental organizations in both countries, joined the opposition as an urban commando late in the civil war and later witnessed, as a journalist working for The Boston Globe, the exhumation of mass graves. In one of his memoir's most chilling chapters, he takes us into a forensics lab in San Salvador where "all the country's documented and undocumented dead come to be analyzed and counted before being returned to their loved ones or buried in anonymous graves." We meet Saul Quijada, a forensic anthropologist skilled in "making the bones speak" "from rural and urban areas where killings in El Salvador force migration," he says, "to the deaths that take place during the migration through Mexico to the United States." He shows Lovato one of the older skeletons from the massacre at El Mozote, early in the war: "We're rebuilding the cranium piece by piece because it was in pieces, chopped up with a machete. The pieces were like a jigsaw puzzle." The jigsaw puzzle is one of the governing tropes of Lovato's episodic narrative; his task is to piece together not only his fragmented identity, but the mosaic of testimony from the host of characters he assembles, all the while standing in the rubble of war's aftermath. His grandmother tells him: "We're all pieces of broken glass, stained with blood and struggling to put ourselves back together." Lovato's quest is "to do the personal forensic work of recovering the fragments of my childhood and adolescent memories, especially the ones that are often more painful to conjure." These have largely to do with his violent, charismatic father, whose smuggling business, alcoholism, womanizing and secrecy bequeathed to the author a measure of "nihilistic rage" that animates his search to uncover his father's secret regarding the massacre in 1932. The revelation of this secret guides Lovato in contemplating deeper questions about the personal and political silences that perpetuate violence; about prolonged mourning and the enduring effects of intergenerational trauma; about the collective inability to look down into the abyss of our history; and about "what turns salvageable kids ... into stone cold killers." In a particularly timely passage, he ties the militarization of policing in the United States to counterinsurgency tactics deployed, thanks to U.S. aid and training, by El Salvador during the civil war. The American military strategists who advised the Salvadoran government during that war later recommended using the same tactics in the "war on gangs" in Los Angeles, with "cops wearing puffed up, RoboCop gear now worn by police everywhere." Today, Lovato writes, "while the media popularizes the terrors of gang war, it ignores the fact that counterinsurgency policing is a multibillion dollar industry for the arms dealers and military contractors that provide the tanks, semiautomatic weapons, and other equipment now supplied to local police forces throughout the United States." It is a complex puzzle indeed, and Lovato is among the first Salvadoran American writers to assemble it, shuttling back and forth in time, between countries and languages, to retrieve the pieces for a kaleidoscopic montage that is at once a family saga, a coming of age story and a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all for him, identity. If there is a defining moment in the narrative, it might be his visit to Corral de Piedra in 1990, just after a rocket attack by the Salvadoran military in which a number of children had been killed. "Looking at the crosses placed near the bombed out adobe wall, thinking about the children living as well as dead," Lovato recognizes that his fight is not just against the government of El Salvador. "My new fight was also against the government that ... put El Salvador on the path to becoming one of the longest standing military dictatorships in the Americas," he writes, "my own government, the one that had issued my passport." Years later, one of his university students in California will say: "I remember the war and, yeah, I remember seeing dead bodies and things that cause terror, Lovato, but I also remember eating jocotes, always having lots of family around and playing escondelero in the cool shade at the foot of the volcan 'til late. I remember a lot more than 'terror.' And who paid for that terror? This country. That's who." In a time of national reckoning, such truths must be faced if we are to be serious about who we are and what we have done. Lovato's memoir confronts historical amnesia and "the myth of American innocence shared by conservatives and liberals alike." The picture he assembles is a mural of our complicity in systemic violence and inhumanity, and the resilience of the people who endured it.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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When Penguin Random House announced last week that it had acquired world publication rights to two books by the former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama, the news led to intense speculation within the publishing world. Which of the company's many imprints would release the books, and who would edit them? Are the Obamas both writing memoirs? And did the company really pay, as The Financial Times reported, some 65 million for the books? Now at least a few of those details have emerged (though the company has not commented on the 65 million question). On Tuesday, Crown, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that it will publish the Obamas' books in the United States and Canada. No additional news about the books' titles, publication dates and scope were released, and the terms of the deal, which was negotiated by Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell of Williams Connolly, were not disclosed. "Crown is honored to continue its publishing relationship with President Obama and Mrs. Obama, both of whom are transformative figures in today's world," Maya Mavjee, the president and publisher of Crown Publishing Group, said in a statement. "They will write deeply inspiring and illuminating books that draw upon their rich personal experience and dedicated public service." Crown is in many ways a natural publisher for the Obamas. The imprint published Mr. Obama's best sellers "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," as well as "American Grown," Mrs. Obama's best selling 2012 book about the White House kitchen garden.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"The story of Theodore Roosevelt is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them." In her new book, "Leadership: In Turbulent Times," the acclaimed presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes this line from "The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt," a 1918 volume by Hermann Hagedorn, one of Roosevelt's earliest (and most sycophantic) biographers. By regaling young readers with stirring tales of the beloved president's exploits, Hagedorn aimed not simply to burnish his hero's reputation but also to forge the next generation of virtuous leaders, who might draw inspiration, as Roosevelt had, from the lives they encountered in books. In a sense, this is also Goodwin's aim: to purvey moral instruction and even practical guidance to aspiring leaders through the stories of four exceptional American presidents. Written in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin's books surefire best sellers, "Leadership: In Turbulent Times" recounts the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The prolific Goodwin has already produced full length studies of each of these men, starting with "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream" (1976) and continuing through "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II" (1994), "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" (2005) and "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism" (2013). But in her new book she forsakes the strict confines of biography for the brave new world of leadership studies. A booming field of scholarship or, traditionalists would say, pseudoscholarship leadership studies is usually taught in schools of business or public administration, geared toward would be or midcareer executives and often focused on imparting useful lessons to apply in the workplace. Accordingly, much more than in her narrative histories, Goodwin here explicitly takes up the formation of her subjects' characters and how their most notable qualities equipped them to lead the country during trying times. Structurally, the book follows a formula. The first section features four chapters, one on each man's boyhood and early influences; the second part, also comprising four chapters, dwells on early adulthood traumas that tempered their flaws and bred resilience; the third part spotlights the chastened leaders in their crucibles of crisis; and an epilogue lightly glosses their legacies. In each man's case, the setback is a prelude, a learning opportunity, a character building experience: Abraham Lincoln as a young man withstood a depression so severe that friends removed all the sharp objects from his room; Theodore Roosevelt saw both his mother and his beloved wife die within a day; Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio; and Lyndon Johnson lost his first race for the Senate, throwing him into a depression of his own. Readers of presidential biography will know these stories, but newcomers may not and in any case Goodwin is telling them not for their own sake but to establish certain key ingredients of skillful democratic leadership. Other popular presidential historians have also produced books of this sort, including Michael Beschloss's "Presidential Courage" (2007) and Robert Dallek's "Hail to the Chief" (1996). Typically those volumes haven't endured as long as more meaty biographies and histories by the same writers. One reason may be that the leadership genre harbors a built in bias toward producing user friendly general rules or in the glib jargon of the trade "takeaways," which not only tend toward superficiality but also obscure the rich particularity that historians (and readers of history) prize. The very genre in some ways works at cross purposes with the historian's goal of shedding light on a given individual's, or period's, uniqueness. It is therefore to Goodwin's credit that she teases out the variety and peculiarities among the four presidents. Despite the overarching steeled by adversity template into which she wedges these stories, each retains its own intrinsic drama. "There was no single path," Goodwin writes, "that four young men of different background, ability and temperament followed to the leadership of the country." This is a historian talking. "Leadership: In Turbulent Times" is most absorbing when Goodwin resists the urge to glean pat lessons or rules from the past and allows herself to savor the stubborn singularity of each moment or personality. While she highlights her subjects' common traits preternatural persistence, a surpassing intelligence, a gift for storytelling it is the differences among them that are most interesting. For example, where Abraham Lincoln grew up under the discipline of an austere father, who would destroy the books that his son loved to read, Franklin Roosevelt thrived under the trusting indulgence of a loving mother. In contrast to Theodore Roosevelt, whose curiosity led him to immerse himself in pastimes like studying birds and other animals, Lyndon Johnson "could never unwind," channeling his manic energy into his ambitions. The only safe generalization is that you can't really generalize. Goodwin's special strength as a historian has always been her ability to present subtle, complex studies of her subjects' personalities and to show how they interact with their times. Decades ago, as a graduate student in political science, she took an interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory to biography, as pioneered by Erik Erikson, among others. Although only her Johnson book trafficked explicitly in psychoanalytic methods and concepts, this education quietly informed her later work, which benefited from her focus on her protagonists' upbringing, personality and human relationships. In "Leadership," too, she renders her characters with a depth and intricacy that not all academic historians seek to attain. Her Lincoln, for example, suffered from debilitating depression, as we know; but she also reminds us that he developed a mordant wit that reflected a deep stoicism and goes far in explaining why the weight of his melancholy didn't derail his career. Goodwin sees complexity, too, in the beguiling Franklin Roosevelt, who, for all his cheerfulness, possessed a fierce, even ruthless ambition. Her account of his drive to conquer his polio so that he could traverse the Madison Square Garden stage at the 1924 Democratic convention exemplifies her talent at bringing personality to life not through didactic exposition but through well wrought narrative. She describes Roosevelt preparing for his convention walk by measuring off the distance in his library in the family's East 65th Street house, then digging into his teenage son James's arm with a grip "like pincers," as he practiced hoisting his inert, braced legs across the room. At the convention itself, Goodwin recounts the tension in the arena as Roosevelt triumphantly hauled himself across the stage, on just his crutches, to seize "the lectern edges with his powerful, viselike grip" and flash his beaming smile to the cheering throng. In contrast, when Goodwin gets to her section on the four presidents' emergency leadership, which should be the book's piece de resistance, she succumbs to the leadership genre's vocabulary of self help bromides and bullet point banalities. Otherwise bracing accounts of Lincoln guiding the nation through the Civil War and Johnson shepherding the 1964 civil rights bill into law are punctuated by boldfaced, italicized subheads dispensing wisdom like "Anticipate contending viewpoints," "Shield colleagues from blame," "Rally support around a strategic target" and "Give stakeholders a chance to shape measures from the start." These conference room poster slogans protrude in the text like hurdles obstructing a runner's path. They interrupt the flow of the stories while unfurling what are fairly self evident, common sensical streamers of advice. Still, it would be unfair to deny the value in thinking collectively about these four presidents, especially in these dark times. Because so much recent commentary on our presidents has been negative remembering Lyndon Johnson only for Vietnam, Franklin Roosevelt for barring the gates to Jews fleeing Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt for his imperialist swagger and even Abraham Lincoln for the limits of his racial egalitarianism we can benefit from reminders that even flawed mortals can, in times of national emergency, achieve great things. We can only hope that a few of Goodwin's many readers will find in her subjects' examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Palantir Technologies, a company that helps government agencies analyze vast amounts of digital data, saw its shares jump in its Wall Street debut on Wednesday in a sign of continued investor excitement for money losing software companies. The company's shares began trading at 10 on the New York Stock Exchange, a 38 percent increase from a "reference price" of 7.25 set Tuesday evening, and closed the day at 9.50. Palantir is one of many companies rushing to go public before the election on Nov. 3. It hit the market the morning after a presidential debate seemed to foreshadow political turmoil that could rattle investors in the coming months. Still, as the rest of the American economy has struggled with mass unemployment and the closing of businesses big and small, Wall Street has been welcoming to new public offerings. The three months that ended with September were the busiest quarter for initial public offerings in 20 years, with 81 offerings set to raise 28.5 billion, according to Renaissance Capital, which tracks I.P.O.s. Shares of Asana, a collaboration software provider, and Velodyne, which makes sensors for self driving cars, also began trading on Wednesday. Asana's stock rose, valuing the company at 4.4 billion, up from its last private valuation of 1.5 billion, while Velodyne's stock fell 24 percent to 18.69. Recent successful debuts have included the gaming company Unity Software, the software provider JFrog, and Snowflake, a business technology company whose value increased more than fivefold in its initial public offering this month. Airbnb, DoorDash and several other tech companies are also expected to go public in the coming months. Investors embraced Palantir despite its inability to turn a profit and the many controversies swirling around it. Among them is the highly unusual way Palantir has kept most of its corporate voting power in the hands of three founders, including Peter Thiel, a venture capital investor and member of Facebook's board. Wall Street valued the company at 21.4 billion, a slight increase from a private valuation of 20 billion. Mr. Thiel is the company's largest individual stockholder, owning just over 15 percent, followed by Mr. Karp's 5 percent and Mr. Cohen's 2 percent. The company's structure places an enormous amount of voting power in their hands. Holding special Class F founder shares, the three will retain nearly 50 percent of the voting power in perpetuity, even after selling most of these shares. "We have seen something similar with companies like Google and Facebook, but this is a far more extreme way of consolidating control in the hands of the founders," said Anita Dorett, associate program director with the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, an organization that also alerts financial investors to other business risks, not just threats to human rights. Palantir and Asana went public through a "direct listing," another unusual approach that has become more common among tech companies in recent years. In a direct listing, a company does not issue new shares to raise capital but merely floats existing shares and lets the market determine their price. "Palantir makes clear that the 'cookie cutter' approach to new listings is over and done," said Lise Buyer, founder and managing partner of the Class V Group, a firm that advises companies on initial public offerings. Because of problems with the Morgan Stanley software that Palantir used to trade shares, trades were delayed for many employees until about an hour before the close of the market. Palantir has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2003, losing about 580 million in each of the last two years. But its revenues grew 25 percent last year, rising to 742.5 million, and the company said last week that it expected they will increase about 41 percent this year to 1.05 billion. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Karp said he believed that going public would help Palantir reassure its customers that they were working with a financially stable company. "Transparency around our financials is really going to help us" add to contracts, he said. Funded in part by In Q Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, the company created technology to help the C.I.A. and other government agencies gain new insights from vast amounts of digital data, like internet traffic and cellphone records. The company has become a significant government contractor. Last year, Palantir was awarded a contract that could be worth over 1.7 billion to create an intelligence analysis system for the Army. This spring, it began working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of the coronavirus.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. The monthlong crackdown on peaceful protests over a blatantly fixed election in Belarus is an affront to everyone who cherishes democracy and elemental fairness. The question is how to respond. The Belarusian strongman, Aleksandr Lukashenko, tried at first to quell the protests with a dictator's basic tool, violence, unleashing his police and secret services to beat and round up thousands of marchers. But, as he should have known, that only fanned the flames, bringing up to 200,000 people into the streets. Now, aided and abetted by his Russian mentors, Mr. Lukashenko has begun forcibly expelling leaders of the protests to neighboring countries. The tactic is a familiar hand me down from Soviet repression. Back then, dissidents who were too well known to be beaten or arrested were frequently exiled to the West, where they could be portrayed as agents of the enemy. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, an alumnus of the K.G.B. political police, has demonstrated a particularly cruel variant of that gambit with his political archenemy Aleksei Navalny, who was poisoned and sent for treatment abroad only to have Kremlin stooges suggest that the poison was administered in Germany. One of the brave women at the forefront of the Belarusian protests, Maria Kolesnikova, founder of a prominent cultural center in Belarus and a former flutist with the state philharmonic orchestra, is said by her allies to have avoided being exiled by ripping up her passport and jumping out of a car en route to the Ukrainian border. True to form, Mr. Lukashenko claimed that Ms. Kolesnikova was arrested for "violating the rules on crossing the state border," suggesting she had been trying to flee to Ukraine. Ms. Kolesnikova is one of three women who assumed leadership of the protests when the men they supported were barred from running in the presidential election. Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of a prominent blogger who was jailed after announcing his candidacy, entered the race and drew huge crowds of supporters. When official results of the Aug. 8 vote were announced, she was assigned only about 10 percent of the vote, to Mr. Lukashenko's 80 plus, though unofficial exit polls indicated that she garnered far more and may have won. Threatened with prison and separation from her children, Ms. Tikhanovskaya was forced to leave Belarus for Lithuania. The third of the women, Veronika Tsepkalo, wife of a former ambassador to the United States, is in Poland. Whether the protesters can persevere when their leaders are systematically forced out remains to be seen. A small country of about 9.5 million people, Belarus has not known the nationalist or geopolitical passions of its far larger southern neighbor, Ukraine, and Mr. Lukashenko's 25 year reign has not been seriously challenged until now. Though called "Europe's last dictator" in the West and periodically slapped with sanctions by the European Union, he has been adept at maneuvering between the European Union and Russia. It is precisely the simplicity of the protests that make them so compelling and so worthy of support. After a quarter century of having no say in how they are ruled, the Belarusians declared that they'd had enough of Mr. Lukashenko and his lies and fake elections. The protesters have not reached out to the European Union, NATO or the United States for support. The men who tried to run against Mr. Lukashenko, and the women who tried to take their place, were not activists or dissidents like Mr. Navalny in neighboring Russia they were a popular blogger, a former ambassador to the United States, an oligarch, an English teacher and a musician. Yet to Mr. Lukashenko, and more so to Mr. Putin, the notion of allowing people to choose their government is anathema. In Mr. Putin's vision, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were the core of the Soviet empire, and already one republic has slipped the coop. A free and democratic election in Belarus would not only risk a government with different ideas, but could serve as an inspiration to Russians to follow suit. One possible reason for poisoning Mr. Navalny was his public sympathy for the Belarusian demonstrators. Mr. Lukashenko is scheduled to visit Mr. Putin soon in Moscow, and he may find that the Kremlin is prepared to dump him in an attempt to calm the waters in Belarus. Moscow may also try to draw the European Union into some form of dialogue that would give a patina of legitimacy to Russia's search for a way to resolve the crisis to its advantage. That must not be the European Union's role, or America's. Any Western participation in a Russian controlled transition would support Mr. Lukashenko's and Mr. Putin's claim that the street protests are the work of "foreign enemies." That would amount to a betrayal of what the Belarusians seek and hope for. If there is to be any dialogue, it must be with the opposition as a full participant. The West's role that of governments, human rights organizations and the social media wielding public is to demonstrate to the many courageous people who cast their ballots for Ms. Tikhonovskaya, and who have braved beatings and arrest simply to demand that these be counted, that free people everywhere are on their side and support their demand for new elections, the release of all detainees and the return of opposition leaders who have been driven into exile. The message ought to be underscored by serious personal sanctions frozen foreign bank accounts, travel bans and the like against Mr. Lukashenko's cronies and those who falsified the election results and then cruelly abused those who dared to protest.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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"Over the past few days, there have been other allegations which have appeared as posts on social media," the theater added. "To date, Signature has received no formal complaints, but would handle them according to the theater's comprehensive policies which could include an independent investigation." Keegan said on Twitter Wednesday that he welcomed Schaeffer's resignation, and called for the removal of the theater's board, which he accused of complicity. Sarah Valente, a member of Signature's board of directors, defended the board's handling of the initial accusation, saying, "I do not believe that we ignored anything. A thorough investigation was done, we trusted the investigator who came highly recommended, we accepted her findings and moved on." Valente said that Schaeffer had decided to leave of his own volition, and that the board had accepted his decision. Schaeffer did not respond to a request for comment about the allegations, and in a statement issued by the theater, he did not refer to the circumstances of his departure. "After thirty years, with the world feeling upside down, I am retiring as Co Founder/Artistic Director," he said. "I hope that the next generation of leaders can weather the many storms our profession faces," he added. "To do so, it needs to pull together, dedicate itself to the work, and avoid the toxic polarization that damages not just the institutions, but the work itself, the art." Founded in 1989 by Schaeffer and Donna Migliaccio, Signature initially staged its work in a middle school auditorium. It then spent years in a former auto garage before finishing construction on a 16 million, two theater facility in 2007.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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TOKYO As Sotheby's contemporary art auction heated up in New York last week, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa sat on the floor of his living room here, streaming the auction live on his laptop and relaying bids for Jean Michel Basquiat's 1982 skull painting on his iPhone to a Sotheby's specialist. After the price sailed past the 60 million guaranteed minimum, Mr. Maezawa who hadn't gone into the sale with his own limit in mind felt that the competitive bidding reinforced the work's enormous value. "I decided to go for it," Mr. Maezawa said in an interview at his home on Friday. As Mr. Maezawa was bidding, Basquiat's sister Jeanine Basquiat was about 7,000 miles away in New Jersey, hoping the auction would turn out well. When she heard that Mr. Maezawa had paid 110.5 million the record price for an American artist at auction she called her older sister, Lisane Basquiat, in California. "There wasn't a lot to say," Lisane said in a rare telephone interview. "We were speechless." If members of the Basquiat family are keepers of the Basquiat flame, Mr. Maezawa has now ensured it will continue burning, at least in the near future in no small part because he posted about his purchase on Instagram and Twitter right after the auction. "Vast numbers of people are aware of Jean Michel Basquiat all over the world," said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime Basquiat expert, "and that is really only because of the immense price." Whether or not this month's sale recalibrates the market for this Brooklyn born artist, who died of a heroin overdose at 27, remains to be seen. While collectors are likely to consign their works by him in an effort to ride this wave, few top paintings are expected to come up for sale anytime soon. And auction prices don't necessarily translate into intrinsic value. Still, most agree that the Basquiat sale has cemented his place in the revenue pantheon with Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon; confirming that he is not some passing trend; and forcing major museums to acknowledge that, by not having the artist in their collections, they passed over a crucial figure in art history. "It's an artist who we missed," said Ann Temkin, the chief curator of paintings and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, which does not own a single Basquiat work. "We didn't bring his paintings into the collection during his life or thereafter." Technically, however, his Basquiats are in private hands rather than public institutions, as are the other examples widely considered the artist's best work generally paintings made from 1981 to 1983. Given Basquiat's short career (1980 87), there are simply not a lot of great Basquiats out there. (Peter Brant, Eli Broad and Philip Niarchos are among the collectors who have them.) "You're talking about a handful of masterpieces, which are distributed among a few collectors who are not sellers," said the art dealer Brett Gorvy, a former Christie's chairman. "You're going to have to wait a long time if you are a major collector to see another extraordinary painting like this." Even the Basquiat estate does not have many leading pieces left, art experts say; the two it sold at Phillips this season, for example, each went for under 4 million. The Basquiat sisters, in a joint telephone interview, said they didn't need the price to tell them their brother's work belonged in the history books. But it was still nice to have Jean Michel's auction value enter the stratosphere. "It's humbling and satisfying to see this happen 30 years after he passed away," Lisane said. "We have been walking on Cloud 9." The sisters had never seen this particular painting before it had not been on the market since 1984, when it sold for 19,000 to Jerry and Emily Spiegel so Sotheby's invited them to New York to view it in advance. Lisane called it "breathtaking." While he "didn't expect the price to go that high," Mr. Maezawa said his love for Basquiat runs deep he paid the previous high price for the artist last year ( 57.3 million). And he saw that others felt the same, including one other buyer willing to go the distance (later revealed to be the casino magnate Frank J. Fertitta III), since the two wound up in a bidding war. "I learned that so many people wanted to have this piece of art so much," Mr. Maezawa said. "I was sure that my eye was certain." Mr. Maezawa, who is 41, said he started collecting about 10 years ago, and the apartment he rents in Tokyo is testament to his passions for art Richard Prince's "Runaway Nurse" ( 9.6 million at Christie's last year) in the stairwell; a Roy Lichtenstein in the dining room; a large Christopher Wool ( 13.9 million) in the living room, along with two Calder mobiles. Mr. Maezawa is also seen as ushering in a new chapter of collecting in Japan, a country previously known for the Impressionist art bubble of the '80s. He is a collector "who became a businessman, and not a businessman who became an art collector," said Aki Ishizaka, the former head of Sotheby's in Japan and now an art adviser. Curled up in a scarlet red armchair designed by the French designer Jean Royere, Mr. Maezawa who does not work with an art adviser said he was driven entirely by his love of art and not financial investment. "I just follow my instinct," he said. "When I think it's good, I buy it." "Jeanine and I have been Basquiats since the day we were born," Lisane said. Although they take pride in their brother, she added, "we also have our own lives." The sisters said Jean Michel's "genius" was evident early on. "He was creative, and that's what fed him he absorbed everything," Jeanine said. "He saw himself as someone who was going to be big." Lisane added: "He always had a pen in hand and something to draw on or write on. He got into the zone, and it was a beautiful thing to watch." When the hammer came down on the Basquiat this month, Mr. Maezawa said he felt overwhelmed and relieved, "like an athlete who wins a gold medal and cries." Asked whether he aimed to buy another major Basquiat in the future, Mr. Maezawa said with a puckish smile, "Don't you think two is enough?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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President Trump's trade policies enjoy the strong backing of his supporters but are less popular among independents, moderate Republicans and others whose votes could decide control of Congress in the midterm election this fall. That could complicate Republicans' plans to make their economic record a central argument in their case for re election. Over all, Americans are about evenly split on the steel and aluminum tariffs that Mr. Trump announced early last month, according to a survey conducted in early April for The New York Times by the online polling firm SurveyMonkey. Support split mostly along predictable partisan lines, with 78 percent of Republicans supporting Mr. Trump's tariffs and 74 percent of Democrats opposing them. Only 68 percent of self described moderate Republicans said they supported the tariffs, however, and only 42 percent of independents did so. Support for the measure was also softer among better educated and wealthier Americans of both political parties, echoing other evidence that backing for Mr. Trump's agenda is weaker in the affluent suburbs that were once a Republican stronghold. "A few people benefit from the protection," Mr. Campbell said. "But when prices rise as a result, the net effect, I think, is harmful to the economy." Minnesota is a key political battleground this year, with several competitive House seats and two Senate elections because of the resignation of Al Franken after a sexual misconduct scandal last year. Mr. Campbell said that he was still likely to support Republican candidates, but that he was frustrated by the party's shift toward protectionism and support for increased government spending. "I blame Republicans for that," Mr. Campbell said. "A very significant portion of Republicans in Congress are not really conservative when it comes to spending." The re emergence of trade as a central political issue has scrambled traditional partisan alignments in ways that carry risks for both parties. Mr. Trump won the presidency partly by tapping into voters' concerns about the impact of globalization on jobs and wages, particularly in the industrial Midwest. But free trade still receives strong support among business groups, which have historically backed Republican candidates, and among big dollar conservative political donors such as the Koch network. As recently as 2015, three quarters of House Republicans voted for a measure meant to open trade even further so called "fast track" negotiating authority for President Barack Obama. 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. Reflecting those tensions, congressional Republican leaders have criticized Mr. Trump's tariffs as potentially harmful to businesses and consumers while also praising the president's broader goals on trade. Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, opened a hearing on the effects of tariffs on the economy last week by saying the measures "curtail economic growth, discourage new investment, delay new hiring, and put American workers at a huge disadvantage to foreign competitors." But he added, "I remain committed to working with President Trump and the White House on strong, enforceable trade policies that will target bad actors and encourage economic growth here at home." Democrats face their own challenges on the issue. As Republicans have shifted away from supporting free trade agreements, Democrats have embraced them: In the Times poll, 73 percent of Democrats said they thought free trade agreements helped the United States, compared with 51 percent of Republicans. But union members, long a key source of mobilization and support for Democrats, retain the party's longtime skepticism of free trade. "It's not an ideal issue for either party," said Robert J. Blendon, who directs the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It makes the issue slightly more complex because their voters' views don't correspond to their interest groups." For Republicans, Mr. Trump's trade battles pose an additional risk of undermining the party's core economic message. Republicans have tried to emphasize the tax law they passed in December, which cut taxes on businesses and most households. But trade has largely pushed the tax law from the headlines, and support for the law, which rose early in the year, now seems to be ebbing. "You're starting to certainly complicate the message," said Jon Cohen, chief research officer for SurveyMonkey. The trade fight has also roiled financial markets, which had risen steadily during Mr. Trump's first year in office. If that volatility continues, it could erode consumers' confidence in the economic recovery. There are hints that could already be happening: The University of Michigan's measure of consumer sentiment dipped slightly in April, with many respondents citing trade as a source of concern. SurveyMonkey's consumer confidence index also ticked down in April, with the largest declines coming among higher earning households, which are much more likely to own stocks. "It's possible the war of words over trade, tariffs and sanctions, and the financial market turmoil we had has led to some setback in consumer confidence," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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Middle grade author isn't a genealogy buff, but his aunt is, and a few decades ago she traced the Gratz family line back to one Louis Alexander Gratz. "He was a penniless Prussian orphan who came to the United States in the 1860s, joined the Union Army and fought his way south with Sherman's troops," Gratz explains. "But the most surprising thing she discovered about old L.A. Gratz was that he had a secret: He was Jewish, but had abandoned his religion and heritage when he made his new start in America. Family lore has it that learning our ancestors were Jewish is what gave my anti Semitic grandfather a fatal heart attack." So perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Gratz has written a number of children's books about immigrants and asylum seekers and Jews. His most recent, "Refugee," braids together stories from three different time periods: Nazi Germany, 1990s Cuba and modern day Syria. Published on July 25, 2017, it has spent 23 weeks on the list; it's currently at No. 3. Gratz says at first he planned to write only about World War II era refugees, but "while I was mulling over that story, my family and I happened to be on vacation in Florida, where we came across an abandoned refugee raft on a beach. That raft brought home for me the immediacy of refugee stories in the here and now. Why was I writing a book about refugees 75 years ago, when we had refugees struggling for freedom 100 yards away from where I had slept last night? That was when I got the idea to write about three at once." Finding common experiences to link the different eras wasn't hard. "Every generation experienced dangerous water crossings," he says. "Nativistic prejudice. The kindness of strangers. The loss of family members along the way. I wanted the parallels to make the book feel more cohesive while reinforcing its major theme that refugees continue to suffer because we make the same mistakes again and again."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Auto China, held every two years in Beijing to showcase new models directed at the growing Chinese market, opened Sunday in Beijing with a media preview that featured a surprisingly robust display of debutantes from Chinese, European and American automakers. With major international auto shows in New York and Beijing underway almost simultaneously, there were concerns that international automakers might not be able to supply enough products to support both shows adequately. But those concerns faded as a cornucopia of new models was unveiled. Of note were the many models that have been specifically designed, or redesigned, for the needs and tastes of the market in China, where emissions, reliability, limousine like back seat capaciousness and luxury are at the forefront of many consumers' minds. Chinese made models often have been found wanting in these areas, causing buyers to swarm instead to foreign made offerings. Mercedes Benz, BMW, Nissan, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford and General Motors led the new model offensive for the Chinese market. Interestingly, many of the cars introduced in Beijing were not shown in New York, and will not be sold in North America or anywhere outside China, in some cases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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A MELTING POT When Netflix cast him as "Queer Eye"'s "food and wine expert" in 2017, Antoni Porowski came down with a case of impostor syndrome. "I questioned whether I was gay enough to be on a show called 'Queer Eye,'" he writes in his first cookbook, "Antoni in the Kitchen," which entered the Advice How To list last week at No. 2. "And, really, was I enough of a food guy?" As the recipes reveal, Porowski cooks not to impress, but to connect. There's the souvlaki his mother craved while pregnant with him, and the peanut butter and Nutella balls he keeps on hand for when the munchies hit ("I'm not gonna dance around this," he writes. "Most of my late teens and 20s were spent high"). He says now, "I approached the book ... by making it deeply personal, and looking at it as a memoir." If the cuisines in the book sound geographically scattered "Jonny's Queso Blanco," "Frenchified Latkes," "Easy Bastardized Ramen," "Chickpea Masala" that's because they are. The son of Polish Canadian parents in Montreal, Porowski "was lucky to be raised in a very diverse community" where he attended a French international school that hosted an annual event at which families exchanged their native dishes. "The Buffet of Nations shaped me as an individual," he says. But don't be intimidated: "Antoni in the Kitchen" is as much for inexperienced chefs (he's already met several young fans for whom "this is the first cookbook they've ever purchased") as it is for practiced ones (the "Polish hangover soup" involves fermenting a rye mixture for five days).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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The clip reinforces the idea that this is the end of the Skywalker portion of the story, but as we all know, "Star Wars" will live on in future films, streaming TV series and other forms. Directed by J.J. Abrams, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" lands in theaters on Dec. 20.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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They are some of the most hallowed names in baseball history, 10 of the most dominant offensive forces of the fully integrated major leagues, inner circle Hall of Famers who slugged their way through an era better known for pitching: From 1964 through 1974, those were 10 of the top 11 hitters in the major leagues in on base plus slugging percentage, with a minimum of 1,000 games. The unlisted name is Dick Allen. He ranked second in O.P.S. for that era at .940, just one percentage point behind Aaron. Allen died on Monday, at 78 years old, in his hometown, Wampum, Pa. With better health and no coronavirus pandemic, he might have instead spent the day at baseball's winter meetings, reveling in his status as a newly elected member of the Hall of Fame. The Golden Days committee would have considered his candidacy on Sunday, but the vote was canceled, as were the meetings, because the group could not gather in person. It was overdue recognition for the first Black star from the last National League franchise to integrate, but Allen had long since made peace with Philadelphia. In his first tenure with the Phillies, from 1963 through 1969, he grew so weary of the fans that he scratched "BOO" in the dirt at Connie Mack Stadium and wore a helmet in the field. When he returned in the mid 70s, at Veterans Stadium, he became an elder statesman on the first Phillies playoff team in a generation, a mentor for younger stars like Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski and Larry Bowa. "We had read all the stuff about how he wasn't a good guy, but we never saw any of that," Bowa said Monday in a statement released by the team. "Dick was a great teammate and a great tutor for us. He couldn't have been more open with us as young players and was actually the complete opposite of everything we had read." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Here's what they might have read, from a Sporting News editorial following Allen's trade to Philadelphia from Atlanta in May 1975 which came after he refused to play for the Braves: "In 12 years in the major leagues, Dick Allen never played with a pennant winning club, which may be a measure of the man's contribution to team success in face of his own personal achievements. There is no question about Allen's talents as a hitter, but he is first and foremost an individualist who willfully refuses to go along with the rules that govern the rest of his teammates. Spring training? Allen scarcely needs it. Batting practice? It's a useless waste of time for Allen. If the rest of the players are required to show up two hours before game time, 10 minutes is enough for Allen." And so on. You get the idea. Allen had a brutal image in the news media, and baseball writers would reject him 14 times on their ballot, never giving Allen even 20 percent of their support. Surely some of their opinions were colored by bias but maybe not as much as it seems. Hall of Fame voters often struggle to evaluate players like Allen who did not compile gaudy counting statistics. Consider those 10 Hall of Famers listed above. All but Stargell and Williams have at least 3,000 hits or 500 homers. Stargell was a one team guy, a beloved leader who won two World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Williams played 16 of his 18 years for one team, the Chicago Cubs, and came close to the benchmarks, with 2,711 hits and 426 homers. Williams needed six tries for election. Allen had 351 homers and 1,848 hits. He never played in the World Series and was traded five times in a six year stretch. He won Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards with a .292 career batting average. But other rate statistics, like on base and slugging percentage, were not especially valued in Allen's era. Totals mattered most. There are exceptions, like Ralph Kiner, who had 369 homers, never played in the World Series and did make the Hall of Fame. But it took 15 tries, an obvious and compelling accomplishment Kiner led the N.L. in homers in each of his first seven seasons and a postcareer spotlight in the Mets broadcast booth to get him in. Allen has vocal advocates like Schmidt, the greatest third baseman in history, and a former Phillies groundskeeper, Mark (Frog) Carfagno, who has passionately promoted Allen's cause for years. The controversies of his past have faded, and ultimately, it seems, Allen's absence from Cooperstown has mostly to do with an inconsistent application of greatness. If a pitcher dominates for a 10 year stretch, like Roy Halladay or Pedro Martinez, he usually gets in easily. But if a pitcher is a tick below that level over 10 years, like Ron Guidry, or has a comparable peak that lasted only seven years, like Johan Santana, he's an afterthought on the ballot. How long must a hitter excel? Apparently, longer than 10 or 11 years. More recent sluggers like Albert Belle and Lance Berkman had comparable stat lines to Allen's: fewer than 2,000 hits, between 350 and 399 homers, and a career average in the .290s. Neither lasted even three years on the ballot.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Finding the tomb of an ancient king full of golden artifacts, weapons and elaborate clothing seems like any archaeologist's fantasy. But searching for them, Gino Caspari can tell you, is incredibly tedious. Dr. Caspari, a research archaeologist with the Swiss National Science Foundation, studies the ancient Scythians, a nomadic culture whose horse riding warriors terrorized the plains of Asia 3,000 years ago. The tombs of Scythian royalty contained much of the fabulous wealth they had looted from their neighbors. From the moment the bodies were interred, these tombs were popular targets for robbers; Dr. Caspari estimates that more than 90 percent of them have been destroyed. He suspects that thousands of tombs are spread across the Eurasian steppes, which extend for millions of square miles. He had spent hours mapping burials using Google Earth images of territory in what is now Russia, Mongolia and Western China's Xinjiang province. "It's essentially a stupid task," Dr. Caspari said. "And that's not what a well educated scholar should be doing." As it turned out, a neighbor of Dr. Caspari's in the International House, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, had a solution. The neighbor, Pablo Crespo, at the time a graduate student in economics at City University of New York who was working with artificial intelligence to estimate volatility in commodity prices, told Dr. Caspari that what he needed was a convolutional neural network to search his satellite images for him. The two bonded over a shared academic philosophy, of making their work openly available for the benefit of the greater scholarly community, and a love of heavy metal music. Over beers in the International House bar, they began a collaboration that put them at the forefront of a new type of archaeological analysis. A convolutional neural network, or C.N.N., is a type of artificial intelligence that is designed to analyze information that can be processed as a grid; it is especially well suited to analyzing photographs and other images. The network sees an image as a grid of pixels. The C.N.N. that Dr. Crespo designed starts by giving each pixel a rating based on how red it is, then another for green and for blue. After rating each pixel according to a variety of additional parameters, the network begins to analyze small groups of pixels, then successively larger ones, looking for matches or near matches to the data it has been trained to spot. Working in their spare time, the two researchers ran 1,212 satellite images through the network for months, asking it to look for circular stone tombs and to overlook other circular, tomblike things such as piles of construction debris and irrigation ponds. At first they worked with images that spanned roughly 2,000 square miles. They used three quarters of the imagery to train the network to understand what a Scythian tomb looks like, correcting the system when it missed a known tomb or highlighted a nonexistent one. They used the rest of the imagery to test the system. The network correctly identified known tombs 98 percent of the time. Creating the network was simple, Dr. Crespo said. He wrote it in less than a month using the programming language Python and at no cost, not including the price of the beers. Dr. Caspari hopes that their creation will give archaeologists a way to find new tombs and to identify important sites so that they can be protected from looters. Other convolutional neural networks are beginning to automate a variety of repetitive tasks that are usually foisted on to graduate students. And they are opening new windows on to the past. Some of the jobs that these networks are inheriting include classifying pottery fragments, locating shipwrecks in sonar images and finding human bones that are for sale, illegally, on the internet. "Netflix is using this kind of technique to show you recommendations," Dr. Crespo, now a senior data scientist for Etsy, said. "Why shouldn't we use it for something like saving human history?" Gabriele Gattiglia and Francesca Anichini, both archaeologists at the University of Pisa in Italy, excavate Roman Empire era sites, which entails analyzing thousands of broken bits of pottery. In Roman culture nearly every type of container, including cooking vessels and the amphoras used for shipping goods around the Mediterranean, was made of clay, so pottery analysis is essential for understanding Roman life. That dream became the ArchAIDE project, a digital tool that will allow archaeologists to photograph a piece of pottery in the field and have it identified by convolutional neural networks. The project, which received financing from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, now involves researchers from across Europe, as well as a team of computer scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel who designed the C.N.N.s. The project involved digitizing many of the paper catalogs and using them to train a neural network to recognize different types of pottery vessels. A second network was trained to recognize the profiles of pottery sherds. So far, ArchAIDE can identify only a few specific pottery types, but as more researchers add their collections to the database the number of types is expected to grow. "I dream of a catalog of all types of ceramics," Dr. Anichini said. "I don't know if it is possible to complete in this lifetime." Saving time is one of the biggest advantages of using convolutional neural networks. In marine archaeology, ship time is expensive, and divers cannot spend too much time underwater without risking serious pressure related injuries. Chris Clark, an engineer at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif., is addressing both problems by using an underwater robot to make sonar scans of the seafloor, then using a convolutional neural network to search the images for shipwrecks and other sites. In recent years he has been working with Timmy Gambin, an archaeologist at the University of Malta, to search the floor of the Mediterranean Sea around the island of Malta. Their system got off to a rough start: On one of its first voyages, they ran their robot into a shipwreck and had to send a diver down to retrieve it. Things improved from there. In 2017, the network identified what turned out to be the wreck of a World War II era dive bomber off the coast of Malta. Dr. Clark and Dr. Gambin are now working on another site that was identified by the network, but did not want to discuss the details until the research has gone through peer review. Shawn Graham, a professor of digital humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, uses a convolutional neural network called Inception 3.0, designed by Google, to search the internet for images related to the buying and selling of human bones. The United States and many other countries have laws requiring that human bones held in museum collections be returned to their descendants. But there are also bones being held by people who have skirted these laws. Dr. Graham said he had even seen online videos of people digging up graves to feed this market. "These folks who are being bought and sold never consented to this," Dr. Graham said. "This does continued violence to the communities from which these ancestors have been removed. As archaeologists, we should be trying to stop this." He made some alterations to Inception 3.0 so that it could recognize photographs of human bones. The system had already been trained to recognize objects in millions of photographs, but none of those objects were bones; he has since trained his version on more than 80,000 images of human bones. He is now working with a group called Countering Crime Online, which is using neural networks to track down images related to the illegal ivory trade and sex trafficking. Dr. Crespo and Dr. Caspari said that the social sciences and humanities could benefit by incorporating the tools of information technology into their work. Their convolutional neural network was easy to use and freely available for anyone to modify to suit their own research needs. In the end, they said, scientific advances come down to two things. "Innovation really happens at the intersections of established fields," Dr. Caspari said. Dr. Crespo added: "Have a beer with your neighbor every once in a while." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Nastasya Tsultsumova arrived in the United States as an exchange student at age 15, spending a high school year in Tulsa, Okla. Ms. Tsultsumova is from the Republic of Kalmykia in southwest Russia. She had never been abroad. "I never met an American person before I came here, and I didn't know what the Midwest is or what New York is," she said. "Now I know they are totally different planets." She returned to Russia for a year and then, preferring to live in a more cosmopolitan part of the United States, returned for four years at the College of St. Elizabeth in Morris Township, N.J. She lived in a single room in a dorm. As graduation approached last spring, Ms. Tsultsumova, who has a bachelor's degree in business administration, started looking for a job in the New York area. She did not know how long it would take, and she didn't want to crash with friends. "I could stay with someone for one or two weeks, but not six months," she said. "I don't like to be a burden." Staying briefly in Richmond, Va., where she has an uncle, she soon landed a position as an executive assistant at a bank. The office was on the Jersey City waterfront. She had thought of living in the Russian speaking neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, but that was no longer feasible. She wanted to be within easy walking distance of work, or at least of a station for a PATH train or light rail, with plenty of stores and services nearby. "I really appreciate when there's infrastructure and transport," said Ms. Tsultsumova, who is now 22. "These are my top priorities." Her budget was around 1,000 a month. For that amount, or a bit more, she would have to live with roommates. "As long as I have my own room, I'm fine," she said. "People say there's a lot of scams on Craigslist, but I personally always have had good experiences," she said. "If you have good judgment, you can see who is a scammer and who is not, so it's up to you." One possibility, for just 750 a month, was a room in a three bedroom house with two other roommates on Seventh Street in Union City, north of Jersey City. "The room was small and the distance to the light rail was far," Ms. Tsultsumova said. She preferred to pay a few hundred dollars more to secure what she really wanted, which was an amenity filled high rise. "Everybody told me you will never be able to afford a high rise," she said. But, she thought, "If one miracle happened to me" landing a job "maybe another miracle will happen, too." She visited the Atlantic, a high rise in Jersey City's Newport section, where the bedroom in a one bedroom apartment was available for 1,050 a month. Two sisters shared the large living room, which was divided with a shoji screen. The sisters paid the balance of the 2,535 a month rent. Ms. Tsultsumova liked it a lot, and the roommates seemed nice. "We had a great conversation," she said. "We tried to understand each other's requirements. I am a pretty quiet person. I don't have parties. It is very important to have a conversation, so you can see if the person is your kind of person." The roommates required two months' notice of departure. The flexibility suited Ms. Tsultsumova, since she might at some point leave for business school. Other places required a 12 month commitment. She was pretty sure she would find nothing better, but wanted to check out the next day's lineup, just in case. In a two bedroom in the Gotham, a high rise on Warren Street in downtown Jersey City, a monthly rent of 1,050 would get her a "converted living room." That turned out to mean part of the room was curtained off. "It kind of bothered me there was a curtain," she said. "I appreciate having a door," which at least meant privacy on the phone. Through Craigslist, she had arranged to team up with a man who was looking for an apartment to share. "It was a stranger, but he turned out to be a very nice person," she said. Together they saw a two bedroom at the Lincoln on 10th Street, a mid rise building in the Hamilton Park neighborhood of Jersey City for 3,200 a month.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Website Revs Up, With New York Magazine's Help, to Cover More Local News With the once robust metropolitan news coverage in New York dwindling, a new nonprofit website called The City is teaming up with New York magazine in hopes of replacing some of that lost local accountability and investigative journalism. The City will be led by Jere Hester, a lifelong Brooklynite and former city editor at The Daily News, where he spent almost 15 years. Mr. Hester expects to hire 15 journalists to focus on beats like transportation, politics, affordable housing, health care, education and climate change. He plans to start publishing articles in January. "We're really hoping to not only do some good here, but also to kind of reconnect people to civil activity," said Mr. Hester, 52, who since 2006 has been the director of the NYCity News Service at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. "To me, the best stories are the ones that bubble up from communities." The partnership will allow The City to immediately reach New York magazine's large audience, an unusual starting point for a news operation, said Kai Falkenberg, the executive director of The City and a former first deputy commissioner of the New York mayor's office of media and entertainment. The City will be accessible through the magazine's website, and some of its articles will be posted there. The magazine will also provide technological infrastructure and office space, at least for the time being. But there will be no financial connection between the two organizations. "It was hard to see a downside," Adam Moss, the editor of New York, said. "Our name is New York," he added. "We can't possibly do enough local coverage, and so this will offer us an opportunity to bring local coverage to our readers." Local news in New York has been battered recently. In July, The Daily News cut half of its already reduced staff. The Village Voice shut down for good last month. The news sites Gothamist and DNAInfo were shut down by their owner last year. (Gothamist was revived this year by a new owner, New York's public radio station, WNYC.) It's this coverage void that The City is hoping to fill. The site has raised nearly 8.5 million in funding including 2.5 million each from the Leon Levy Foundation, the Charles H. Revson Foundation and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. "I love the idea of trustworthy journalism coming from the neighborhood level," said Mr. Newmark, who has made several sizable donations to journalistic institutions recently, including 20 million to the investigative start up The Markup this week.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. This editorial has been updated. President Trump must doubt his administration's own claims that it has deterred Iranian threats. "Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets," Mr. Trump tweeted on Saturday, "we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level important to Iran the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!" The threat came after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, vowed "forceful revenge" for an American drone strike early Friday that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, after, the White House claims, the general prepared attacks on American interests. Why was Mr. Trump's threat on Twitter even necessary? Wasn't the death of General Suleimani supposed to have stopped the threats the president now claims America still faces? Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, defended the attack on Friday by saying, "It was time to take this action so that we could disrupt this plot, deter further aggression from Qassim Suleimani and the Iranian regime, as well as to attempt to de escalate the situation." "One hundred percent certainty that America is safer today," he said Sunday on "Meet the Press," even if, "it may be that there's a little noise here in the interim." Would Mr. Pompeo consider a vote by the Parliament in Baghdad noise? On Sunday it called for the end of American military presence in Iraq. For various reasons, such a withdrawal may not be imminent, or even certain. But coming, as it did, along with the news that America was suspending action against ISIS because of retaliatory threats, it made clear how difficult it will be for the United States to fight that continuing threat, and how Iranian power in Iraq may only have grown. Later in the day, the Iranian government announced it would end its commitment to limit enrichment of uranium under the 2015 nuclear deal that Mr. Trump abrogated in 2018. Killing General Suleimani seems to have deterred and de escalated nothing. Otherwise, why would the State Department have needed to advise all Americans to leave Iraq? Since the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran (and the seizing of the aforementioned 52 hostages) in 1979, the two countries have been in a low grade or proxy conflict. Since then, General Suleimani spent 22 years at the helm of Iran's own Quds Force as Tehran's liaison to countless militias, factions and terrorist groups across the Middle East, except for brief moments of calm, such as when General Suleimani offered to help American troops attack his enemy, the Taliban, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, only to rebuff cooperation after President George W. Bush lumped his nation in with Iraq and North Korea as part of an axis of evil. Yet there was a reason that past American presidents refrained from assassinating one of the region's most powerful and, yes, blood soaked military commanders: Iran's ability to respond with asymmetric violence. The regime has turned that stratagem into an art form since the catastrophic war with Iraq during the 1980s, which at times resembled the slaughter at the Somme. General Suleimani saw combat then and learned some of the lessons that guided his doctrine of proxy fighting from Yemen to Lebanon. By declaring that the United States will respond with airstrikes to any attacks on American targets or assets, Mr. Trump is drawing a bright red line that Iran cannot cross. And yet, Iran relies on a network of proxy actors from Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Must they all respect Mr. Trump's red line? There are plenty of hotheads in those proxy forces that will be incensed by the assassination, the same way young men with weapons and minimal discipline often are. Even during the Iraq war, which saw the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers from Iranian munitions, keeping proxy militias under control was difficult. Mr. Trump can't keep an entire region from crossing his red line, making violent conflict all the more likely if the president holds to it. And Iran itself can respond less directly, but no less effectively, with cyberwarfare, attacking American allies in the region, disrupting trade and undermining the United States in Iraq and elsewhere. A senior national security official told The Atlantic in 2018 that the administration believes that "permanent destabilization creates American advantage." Mr. Trump may well be creating permanent destabilization, but that is to no one's advantage and such loose talk may just be rationalizing a lack of planning and reason. Mr. Trump's national security staff has thinned out drastically in the past year or so. Seasoned counsel may be either in short supply or given little credence. What's even more troubling is that the administration is not seeking sensible advice elsewhere. It didn't notify leaders from either party in Congress before the drone strike, although on Saturday the White House did notify at least some senior leaders, as required by the War Powers Act. Lawmakers had expected a public document that would clearly explain to them and the American public the reasons for the attack but received a classified one instead. "The highly unusual decision to classify this document in its entirety compounds our many concerns, and suggests that the Congress and the American people are being left in the dark about our national security," said Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives. Several lawmakers are working on a resolution barring the White House from escalating the conflict without congressional blessing. While appropriate, such efforts to rein in executive war making powers have proved insufficient since the 9/11 attacks. That's why it is crucial that influential Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell remind Mr. Trump of his promise to keep America out of foreign quagmires and keep Mr. Trump from stumbling further into war with Iran. The President has listened to them in the past, and has reason with his impeachment trial nearing in the Senate to fear them as well. The crisis between the United States and Iran has not yet reached a point of no return. Voices of reason can keep it from doing so.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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LOS ANGELES Next month is the official kickoff of Pacific Standard Time:LA/LA, a festival of exhibitions and events throughout Southern California that, even in this era of biennials duplicated across borders and fairs franchised across continents, takes the prize for sprawl. PST, as it's called, meanders into more than 60 museums, from Santa Barbara to San Diego, each of which presents an exhibition or more of art from Latin America or America's Latino communities. Another 65 commercial galleries here are also getting in on the act: proof, if wearied New Yorkers like me needed it, that Los Angeles's art scene is now second to none. A few shows affiliated with PST have opened early, and one exhibition downtown by the Italian born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino, who is at last receiving her first American retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art should be urgent viewing for both local audiences and for the crowds arriving this September from this country's east and from this hemisphere's south. As a young artist, living under Brazil's military government, she used painting, photography, video and paper collage to express her anxieties under the regime and her displacement in the New World, as well as her identity as a mother and daughter. Later, in a democratic Brazil, she made equally poignant drawings and works in clay and plaster, which explore more elemental themes of hunger and nourishment, ritual and obsession. Ms. Maiolino was born in 1942 in Calabria, the less developed south of Italy, and early memories of wartime privation, as well as the burdens of immigration and leaving one's native tongue, suffuse her later art. Her family moved first to Venezuela, then to Brazil before she was out of her teens. The Brazil that she discovered was undergoing a wholesale transformation under the decisive civilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, with a brand new capital, Brasilia, rising like magic in the country's interior. She attended art school in Rio de Janeiro, where she studied alongside the painters Antonio Dias and her future husband, Rubens Gerchman. They, and Ms. Maiolino too, would develop a hot colored style known as Nova Figuracao ("new figuration"), which rhymed in places with American pop or French narrative figuration. (You may have seen their work in "International Pop," a major exhibition at the Walker Art Center and other museums last year.) A few of Ms. Maiolino's early works reflect the pugnacious orientation of Nova Figuracao, and directly contest the junta that took power in Brazil in 1964. For "O Heroi" ("The Hero"), from 1966, multiple panels of brightly painted wood conjoin into a portrait of an army general, his lapel affixed with gaudy military decorations, his face nothing but a ghoulish skull. Nevertheless, her art always took a more poetic, expansive approach to questions of politics and society, and made heavy use of metaphor above all, metaphors of eating and speaking, language and food. "Glu Glu Glu...," made in 1967, features a fabric bust painted with a wide open mouth, perhaps eating, perhaps screaming. The head sits above a model of the digestive system whose principal components (a yellow stomach, a green pancreas, a bluish large intestine) are the colors of the Brazilian flag. Rough edged prints, whose hashed lines recall the illustrations in pamphlets from Brazil's poorer northeast, also depict despairing or gluttonous figures with open mouths. And when she turned to film and photography in the early 1970s, after two years in New York, Ms. Maiolino continued to employ alimentary and linguistic metaphors to reckon with a country where opening your mouth could get you sent to the torture chamber. In the short film "In Out (Antropofagia)" ("In Out (Cannibalism)"), from 1973, we see close up shots of different mouths, men's and women's, as they babble and swallow and regurgitate eggs or multicolored strings. Another film, "Y" (1974), features the artist blindfolded, her mouth wide open and screaming without end. The mouth, in these works and in similarly intense photographic series, expresses the political limitations of the era, and perhaps too her constraints as an immigrant and a woman. It also serves to recall Oswald de Andrade's "Cannibal Manifesto" of 1928, the most enduring text in modern Brazilian art history, which advocated for an art that absorbed European, African and indigenous Brazilian influences, without regard to their relative status in western capitals. Those paper works offer some essential preparation for Ms. Maiolino's recent art, including her cunning late drawings and wall mounted works of gouged plaster, which play similar tricks with inside and outside. Above all, they set the stage for a dramatic new installation making use of one of her favorite mediums, unfired clay. For "Estao na Mesa" ("They Are on the Table"), created especially for this exhibition, hundreds of clay cylinders, crescents and braids lie on a simple wood table, as if waiting for the kiln. Piles of vermiform clay are heaped on the floor. The brown clay objects recall ancient weights and measures, extruded taffy, piles of pasta, or the knot shaped classic Italian cookies known as tarralucci; excrement, too, unavoidably. Again, the metaphor of alimentation exceeds easy decoding yet these late clay and plaster works are engaged with the discrepancies between individual and social life. They are personal and yet systematic, fragile and yet nourishing. And they are masterworks. This retrospective has been organized by Helen Molesworth, who joined MOCA as chief curator in 2014, and Bryan Barcena, a research assistant for Latin American art at the museum. I hope it gets the attention it deserves, not only within the giant PST, but within a downtown Los Angeles art scene where MOCA, one of the country's most important museums, has lately been in the shadow of some ostentatious new arrivals. The galleries were quiet when I visited this vital retrospective, while hundreds of chancers baked on Grand Avenue hoping to get into the Broad, MOCA's new neighbor across the street. Hauser Wirth, the mega gallery down the road (which represents Ms. Maiolino), had numerous visitors in its art spaces, and far more in its in house restaurant. They would do well to pop into MOCA too. Ms. Maiolino knows there are other, more lasting kinds of nourishment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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This information exchange has left me both enormously grateful and utterly panicked. I feel as though I'm back in school, cramming for a final only to learn that the one chapter I haven't studied is the focus of the test. In all of this, I've learned only one thing to be universally true: For all the Google docs you share, baby books you buy and delivery plans you make, childbirth is an experience for which you will never be truly prepared. 's "And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready" makes this abundantly clear and, as a result, is the only baby themed book that has yet offered me actual solace. This is due in large part to the fact that O'Connell offers no advice. She doesn't recommend certain carriers or protein rich diets, nor does she feel compelled to tell you how pregnancy and motherhood ought to be. Rather, hers is a completely honest, often neurotic and searingly funny memoir of her pregnancy and childbirth. When O'Connell, a writer living in Brooklyn, learns she is pregnant, she instinctively wants a child but, given the circumstances of her life and work, feels unready. After a long discussion with her boyfriend, Dustin, that begins as they're picking up their weekly farm share and continues into the night, the couple finally, definitively decides to keep the baby. She shares the news with friends, casually posts about it on Instagram, navigates the steady stream of doctor's appointments all while a petrified, what on earth am I doing feeling simmers under the surface. Everything feels life or death as she's living it, unable to foresee that it's all going to turn out fine. There is a car trip with Dustin in which she doesn't feel the baby kick. Her mind leaps to the worst possible place: "'The baby is dead!' I scream the scream of a woman who is not being taken seriously, who is not being fed enough, coddled enough, who is not being ultrasounded every hour so that she can be reassured that the possible is not probable, is not inevitable." She worries about losing the baby, about not savoring pregnancy enough about not being a good mother.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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In 1962, as a child from Phoenix vacationing in Manhattan, Keith Peterson knew that someday he wanted to live in the city. It just took a lot longer than he expected. After Amherst College brought him to the East Coast, Columbia Law School brought him to New York City for a time. But after living in the dorms, Mr. Peterson moved to a large one bedroom in Brooklyn. When he married, his wife, who was from Warsaw, joined him there. By 1992, they had a baby girl, and they moved into "the nicest place I could afford," said Mr. Peterson, who is now 61 and works as a trusts and estates lawyer in the financial district. The three story rowhouse in the historic Hamilton Park neighborhood of Jersey City was 155,000. A few years later, his wife received a diagnosis of late stage cancer. Although they tried an experimental stem cell treatment, she died 18 months later. And because the treatment wasn't covered by insurance, it took years for Mr. Peterson to dig himself out of the ensuing debt. "There were certain differences we didn't take into account," Mr. Peterson said, including "our understanding of household finances." About two years ago, concerned about retirement, Mr. Peterson reviewed their finances. That was when he confirmed that, despite good salaries, "we still managed to spend it all," he said. Not long after, Mr. Peterson began caring for an elderly friend in Chelsea who was terminally ill. "I was one of a team of people who looked after him," he said. He visited daily, and in the process got to know and like the neighborhood. Within a year, Mr. Peterson's wife had moved out, and he was making plans to sell the Jersey City house to fund a divorce. He sought help from a neighbor, an agent at Keller Williams Realty, who listed the house for 1.05 million. After one open house, he received several offers. Mr. Peterson realized that he could finally do what he had been wanting to do for as long as he could remember: move to Manhattan. He wasn't quite sure what he could afford, but was hoping for a one bedroom apartment in Chelsea, preferably in a small, spartan co op with few amenities no elevator, no doorman, no dishwasher. "I've always preferred washing my own dishes; it's therapeutic for me," said Mr. Peterson, who enjoys writing his own lyrics to popular tunes. "I write my song lyrics while I am washing dishes. I think them through and sing them to myself." Think: "Pretty sane am I, according to my therapist; And, after all, I think a doctor should know," sung to the tune of the Beatles' "Penny Lane." His Jersey City agent referred him to a colleague, Dawn McCloud, an agent at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, and she provided a list of open houses in Chelsea, taking Mr. Peterson to two he was interested in. On West 22nd Street, they climbed five flights of stairs all the way to the top floor to see a one bedroom for 595,000, with a maintenance of just over 800. The space was charming, Mr. Peterson said, but "once I got to be 90, I wouldn't be able to climb those stairs, so I would be housebound and that really was impractical." The apartment sold for 575,000. On West 20th Street, in another beautiful six story co op building, there was a one bedroom available on the second floor. It was 615,000, with maintenance of a little more than 1,000. The layout was narrow, but it had "a clever design," Ms. McCloud recalled. "The seller did some smart things with custom cabinets." The price, however, was too high, so Mr. Peterson passed on that one as well. It sold for 585,000. "I reassured him that we could look in a lower price range," Ms. McCloud said. "All you ever read about in the news is 20 million apartments. But there is real estate here that is reasonable" or, at least, reasonable by New York standards. Next up were several apartments in the East Village. Mr. Peterson picked an appealing ground floor one bedroom to visit, because he liked the idea of "the street noise and the passing traffic," he said. "I want life around me." The apartment had plenty of wall space for his many bookcases, and no dishwasher. It was listed at 525,000, with a maintenance of 570. "I liked everything about it," Mr. Peterson said. But he couldn't make an offer until his Jersey City house closed. He was pleased when it sold for 1.125 million to "a nice young couple with a 2 year old girl, cute as a bug's ear," he said. "I thought they would be good neighbors to my neighbors, who were always good neighbors to me." He calculated "a gross appreciation of 9 percent a year over the lifetime of my ownership." Returning to the East Village, Mr. Peterson found himself charmed by "all the strange shops selling strange things." Not far from the apartment he liked was a hair salon called Twigs, "with a jackalope in the window," he said. "I've never seen a jackalope east of the Mississippi." That clinched the deal, particularly as he had no interest in looking further. He offered 490,000, settling at 510,000. And last winter, he moved in, thrilled to be living in the city at last. In his new bohemian neighborhood, Mr. Peterson said, "I feel ancient." Even so, he added: "I don't mind if they don't mind. I've been walking around Manhattan all my adult life, but always as a commuter. I was never a resident."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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A scene from a new production of "Don Giovanni" directed by Ivo van Hove for the Paris Opera and, later, the Metropolitan Opera. When I think of aging Metropolitan Opera productions that I'll miss when they're inevitably replaced, I think of Otto Schenk's grand "Tannhauser," and Anthony Minghella's elegantly lacquered "Madama Butterfly." What I won't miss are "Don Giovanni" and "Rigoletto." Michael Grandage's "Giovanni," around since 2011, is awash in sleepy earth tones, with barely anything to say about the work's tonal swerves and thorny gender politics. Beyond the neon lights and showgirls of "Rigoletto," transported to Rat Pack Las Vegas by Michael Mayer in 2013, are plot holes, including a murky conception of the title role. But change is on the way. New stagings of "Don Giovanni," by Ivo van Hove for the Paris Opera, and "Rigoletto," by Bartlett Sher for the Berlin State Opera, recently premiered in Europe; they are co productions with the Met that will travel there in future seasons. And while neither is radically innovative, both are improvements over what's currently on offer in New York. There has always been a touch of the operatic in the theater work of Mr. van Hove, whose style thrives on maximalism even when his settings are austere. And you can expect opera to occupy more of his time in New York: In addition to "Don Giovanni," the Met has ordered productions of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's "Dead Man Walking" and Weill and Brecht's "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," which premieres at the Aix en Provence Festival in July. In Paris, Mr. van Hove hasn't fundamentally rethought how we hear Mozart or the "Giovanni" libretto, the way he has with the plays of Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner. With few interventions, his production capably conducted by Philippe Jordan and wonderfully sung, particularly by the soprano Nicole Car as Donna Elvira even comes off as a little safe, until its arresting ending. Like many of Mr. van Hove's productions, this "Don Giovanni" is populated by beautiful people prone to desperation and violence. It's also strikingly photogenic. (Jan Versweyveld, Mr. van Hove's longtime collaborator, did the scenic and lighting designs). The set is a deceptively simple trio of unfinished concrete buildings with labyrinthine colonnades and staircases out of Piranesi, but also the disorienting forced perspective of Borromini and de Chirico. Behind them, mirrors create the illusion of a dense cityscape. These structures rotate slowly, almost imperceptibly, not unlike the shifting desires and balances of power among the characters. There's no color, really, not even in the costumes for the most part black, white and shades of gray. The styles are vaguely mid 20th century Italian, but with the sleekly modern sexiness that runs through Mr. van Hove's work. (Don Giovanni's little black book the subject of Leporello's famous "Catalog" aria, sung with chilling matter of factness by the bass Philippe Sly is a Moleskine.) Mr. van Hove's Don Giovanni (the baritone Etienne Dupuis, not always convincing as a villain) wears a trim suit and tie, and a gun at his waist. He's a local crime boss or something like it, flashing his firearm and bullying others to get what he wants. You get the impression Leporello isn't so much his playful servant as a man both afraid and trapped, destined to be a disposable fall guy when the moment comes. When we first see Don Giovanni, the pathological womanizer is mid conquest, attempting to force himself on Donna Anna. In the libretto, her father, the Commendatore, challenges him to a duel and is killed. Here, the Commendatore doesn't even have a weapon: Don Giovanni simply pulls out a gun and casually shoots him. Soon after, in mourning, Donna Anna lays a single rose at the foot of the stage; it remains there the rest of the performance, the only dash of color and a constant reminder of the crime at the heart of this three hour tale. But as the set pieces turn and the conquests continue, it's clear Mr. van Hove is also interested in something else. The other men are worth as much scrutiny as Don Giovanni, the production argues, teasing out the pushy paternalism of Don Ottavio, the class anxiety machismo of Masetto and the guilt by association of Leporello, endearing though he may be. By drawing stark opposition between the men and women, Mr. van Hove sets up a more moving, empowering ending for the female characters one fitting for the MeToo moment than you typically get in the opera's jarringly upbeat coda. (Particularly in the case of Donna Anna, who insists on not marrying Don Ottavio for another year, if at all.) Not before Don Giovanni is dragged to hell, of course. That climactic scene is rendered here marvelously. After Giovanni and Leporello messy the stage by eating like pigs flinging pasta and chicken, pouring an entire bottle of wine into a single, overflowing glass the set's three buildings snap into a position that shows only their bare, flat sides, which become canvases for increasingly zoomed in, eventually suffocating video projections of swirling, naked bodies in hell. By contrast, the Berlin "Rigoletto" of Mr. Sher a Met regular who, like Mr. van Hove, brings Tony Award winning cachet is never wanting for color. Indeed, the production is saturated from the moment the audience enters the State Opera's theater and sees the curtain: vast swaths of red, a vivid detail from a painting by George Grosz, one of the artists who defined 1920s German art. That's not the last Grosz onstage: The walls of the shape shifting set, designed by Michael Yeargan as a capacious Art Deco club from the late Weimar Republic (think "Babylon Berlin"), are covered in his paintings. He saw his work as documentary caricature, with a critical eye to interwar life and those who stood idly by as Hitler rose. What does this have to do with hapless Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester in the Duke of Mantua's court, and the tragic events that lead to the death of his daughter? Not much. In this production, Weimar decadence is more of a context than a concept. To be clear, Mr. Sher's staging is a step up for the Met: ultimately traditional but thoughtfully coherent and at times unexpectedly affecting. If this production is a little boring, it's because, like many of Mr. Sher's shows on Broadway and in opera, it's handsome and smooth, with a seamlessness that's easy to take for granted. Mr. Sher, like Mr. Mayer, has framed his "Rigoletto" around a locale where men can behave badly, and get away with it. But neither engages the opera deeply enough to reckon, for example, with just how complicated Gilda's tragedy is. Think of what a psychologically acute director like Dmitri Tcherniakov whose intensely intimate "Tristan und Isolde" is also running now at the State Opera would do with her: sheltered, naive and suicidally in love with the Duke. Gilda is sung by Nadine Sierra, a rising Met soprano who sounded more controlled and sensitive than ever, offering a delicately spun "Caro nome" and passionate duets with the baritone Christopher Maltman a Rigoletto costumed like someone in a painting by Otto Dix or Max Beckmann, Grosz's peers in Act II. (Andres Orozco Estrada conducted.) That "Caro nome" comes right before what may be the finest touch in Mr. Sher's production, and the clearest nod to the societal complicity Grosz observed in his most alarming paintings. When the Duke's men come to kidnap Gilda thinking she is Rigoletto's secret lover and wanting to play a trick on him her nurse, Giovanna, doesn't remain frightened inside the house. Instead, she just stands there, eyes scared but body language calm, as the uniformed men take Gilda away. Then Giovanna quietly leaves the house and goes about her night. In that one moment, Mr. Sher has already done more for "Rigoletto" than Mr. Mayer ever did with his showgirl spectacle. Through July 13 at the Palais Garnier, Paris; operadeparis.fr. Through June 29 at the Berlin State Opera, Berlin; staatsoper berlin.de.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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A range of renovations and adjustments can be made to our apartments or houses to help us stay in our homes for as long as possible. Add grab bars. There are many stylish models for the bathroom that look like a towel or shampoo rack but are sturdy enough to support 500 pounds of weight if properly installed, says Chrysanne Eichner, a senior occupational therapist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. You can also add grab bars by the top or foot of the stairs. Replace doorknobs with lever handles that are easier to open. Increase lighting and replace toggle switches with either a dimmer or a rocker switch. Think about color contrast. If you have stairs, place reflective tape at the edge of steps so you can see where each one ends. Use a brightly colored bath mat so you can see where you'll be stepping down after bathing.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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