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MILAN If you looked closely at the procession of tops, branded T shirts and parasols that came down the Gucci runway on Wednesday, many were emblazoned with scrawled handwritten slogans designed to stop and make one think. "What are we going to do with all this future?" "Common sense is not so common." "I want to go back to beliving in a story." The words, misspellings included, were the fruits of a working partnership between Alessandro Michele, Gucci's creative director, and the Spanish artist Coco Capitan. Born in Seville, she moved to London when she was 17 and attended Central St. Martins and then the Royal College of Art. After the show, Ms. Capitan shed more light on the project with Mr. Michele and what she plans to do next. How did you and Alessandro first start working together? I think that Alessando first saw my work two or three years ago when he arrived at Gucci. He showed his creative teams, and everyone liked what they saw. So then we did an initial collaboration for his New York show, which was a great experience. As time went on, the house kept seeing the work that I have been producing since and decided to include it in the AW/17 collection. Tell me a little bit about the collaborative process for the fall 2017 show. It was very easy and hassle free to be honest. I work so regularly with Gucci that anything we do just feels like part of an ongoing conversation between our studios. I know all of the creative team pretty well. I understand the way they think, and I think they would say the same about me. Why did you choose the slogans that you picked for the collection? Alessandro and I went through them together and then ultimately he had the final say. I guess we wanted to use text that felt very current to the state of the world today. For me, that main sentence "What are we going to do with all this future?" just feels so relevant to this moment we are all in right now, where no one knows what is going to happen and especially with these major shifts in political power. So the writing is about politics? I don't think the work is directly linked to politics, necessarily, but it is definitely about wondering about what will come next. What a future is even really about. Is it just a term we like to fantasize about? Fashion is always trying to be reflective of or a reaction to the world around us. But it doesn't have to be a specific event. It can be a broader feeling, too. Where do you live and work at the moment? I live in Haggerston and my studio is in Hackney Wick; both are in East London. But I travel a lot. Its really important for me to move around. It keeps my imagination fresh and gives me breathing space to do my writing and painting. At the moment I have a lot of projects in the pipeline: a new book, which is going to be launched very soon. And I am working on a major show in London that will open in early summer. But I can't tell you much about it it is all still very secret and under wraps.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It doesn't entirely work. The party scene is intended as a kind of gift, however poorly wrapped, but the acting often falters and the shots taken at the Brooklyn creative class are mostly cheap ones. "I'm gonna go in the bedroom and lead a meditation," one character says while they wait for eats. "And anyone who wants to come meditate with me should feel very free. Yes?" The play, directed by Jeremy Bloom with painted banners by Brian Rady, is probably a metaphor for theater or life or global warming. If you too are a young artist just trying to scrape together enough funding to keep going, it could feel violently necessary or just indulgent. The piece resembles early, less rigorous works by devised theater troupes like The Debate Society and The Mad Ones, who would eventually produce splendid stuff. In these early shows, the companies had created worlds, invented characters, written reams of dialogue. It seemed rude to ask for anything more. Like a story. Or a reason to care. In "Ding Dong," the most dramatic event happens offstage and it involves that lasagna. (Don't get too attached.) I'd lay good money that this lack of action is deliberate, prompted by Anton Chekhov's 1889 claim that "in real life people don't spend every minute shooting at each other, hanging themselves and making confessions of love." Instead, they eat, they drink, they make lame jokes and theater has a duty to show this. "I hear humans are 75 percent tidbit," one partygoer says. So stop whining about plot and pass the salsa. "Ding Dong" also suggests that in the face of world historical events, chiefly climate change, nothing that happens in one evening at one outer borough birthday party can possibly matter and it would be weird to pretend otherwise. "The age of stories with protagonists is over," says Sasha Masha (Robert Dowling), the company's resident playwright. "In the face of global warming, none of us are protagonists."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Clockwise from top left, Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; Joshua Lott/Agence France Presse Getty Images; Patrick Kovarik/Agence France Presse Getty Images; Firstview	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
P. K. Subban, a star defenseman for the Montreal Canadiens, is known as much for his flashy style of play as for his wicked slap shot. "I grew up in the inner city," said Mr. Subban, who is from Toronto. "I went to school with kids that didn't know anything about hockey. Most of the guys I played with went to private school or lived in predominantly white neighborhoods." He sloughs off the criticism he sometimes receives for his on ice vigor. "I really don't care what people think about my approach to the game," he said. During the January All Star break in Nashville, Mr. Subban gave us a glimpse of the routine that helps him endure the long season. The Gear It's bare bones: chin up bar, treadmill, free weights, mats. "Very rarely do I use a machine," Mr. Subban said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Peter Serkin had a lifelong fascination with the piano works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Perhaps he saw in him a kindred spirit. Like Mr. Serkin, whose father was the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, C.P.E. was the son of a famous musician: Johann Sebastian Bach. Mr. Serkin especially loved the six books of sonatas, rondos and fantasias 37 pieces in all that Emanuel Bach, as he was often known, collected and published for "Kenner und Liebhaber" ("Connoisseurs and Amateurs"), as the volumes were titled. That these pieces were so little known baffled Mr. Serkin. During the 18th century, if you mentioned Bach, most people assumed you were referring to Emanuel (1714 88), whose renown in that period eclipsed that of his father (1685 1750). The younger Bach was especially known for his elegant, inventive keyboard works, which include some 150 sonatas. But over eight days in March 2018, Mr. Serkin sat down and recorded the complete "Kenner und Liebhaber," nearly five hours of music. Newly released by Vivace Records, it was his final recording project before he died in February, at 72, of pancreatic cancer. The sessions came during a period when Mr. Serkin thought or dared to hope that his cancer was in remission. He had endured a grueling year of treatments and surgery, but had come through, felt better, and started performing again. Within a year, though, his cancer returned. In a recent interview, Marty Krystall, a friend of Mr. Serkin and Vivace's founder, said that even as Mr. Serkin's health deteriorated, he remained immersed in the intricate editing of these Bach discs, right into the final week of his life. "Peter was always a workaholic," Mr. Krystall said. "I never saw anybody with that kind of stamina." I should have known these remarkable pieces, but for the most part I didn't. It makes sense that this lesser known repertory appealed to Mr. Serkin. His exploratory streak which drew him to composers of our time, such as Wolpe, Messiaen, Takemitsu and Lieberson was also activated by the neglected Emanuel Bach, who was, like those contemporary masters, a searching composer who needed an advocate. Mr. Serkin's interest in this Bach began early in his career, when he read Emanuel's influential treatise "On the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments." Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms all "loved and had keen interest in C.P.E. Bach's music," Mr. Serkin adds in the recording's liner notes. These recordings have the potential to spread the word today. Bach was at the forefront of writing three movement sonatas, most of them following the fast slow fast format that took hold. If the renown he enjoyed during his lifetime did not carry over into the 20th century, that may have been because he was perceived as a transitional figure. He came of age at the end of the Baroque period and lived into the Classical age of Haydn and Mozart. When you bridge eras, it's easy to slip into the divide. But the "Kenner und Liebhaber" works demonstrate Bach embracing the stylistic flux of his time with authority and a touch of the maverick. I was hooked by the very first track of the first disc: the Prestissimo movement of Sonata I in C (Book One). Nodding to the keyboard toccatas of Bach's father, the piece is like a spiraling stream of notes, tossed between the hands. But it keeps veering off impulsively into new directions and shifting into unexpected harmonic patches. Mr. Serkin plays with pristine clarity, but not overly so. Some passages are rich with milky colorings. And there are hurtling, jagged moments when Mr. Serkin has the music sounding almost improvised. Day after day during the recording sessions, he did take after take, hour after hour. It was Mr. Krystall who finally starting insisting on regular breaks. Death hovered over the sessions in more ways than one. The day before Mr. Serkin began work, his good friend Buell Neidlinger, a bassist and cellist who played with both jazz giants and classical artists, died at 82 of a heart attack. A mentor to Mr. Serkin, he was to have taken part in the recording project, offering regular feedback. "Peter was in tears," Mr. Krystall said. "Just beside himself." The album is dedicated to Mr. Neidlinger. Four months before he died, Mr. Serkin wrote to me with regrets about putting off a meeting we had planned. Even on bad days, he added, "I am smiling more than usually, more genuinely, and more since being sick, I think." He was listening to music, Thomas Tallis and Stravinsky, and "looking at Bach." That, of course, included Emanuel. The day before he died, he sent his last editing requests to Mr. Krystall, along with a mailing list of friends he wanted the recording sent to. He asked for a note to be included in the packages: "In affectionate friendship and with love Peter."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
So after the agreement was struck between the N.B.A. and the players association to come back, the league assembled a 113 page PDF full of rules and restrictions that would govern bubble life. For example, if a socially distanced card game takes place for players on any team, they were required to dispose of that deck of cards when the card game was over. If players wanted to play , they could play singles but not doubles. But the two biggies in that 113 pages are the daily testing for everyone on campus. Because the league believes that with no vaccine, daily testing essentially operates as the closest thing it has to a vaccine but also no contact with the outside world. And for the N.B.A., that's an absolute. So Richaun Holmes of the Sacramento Kings, he was ordered to go back to quarantine for an extra 10 days. And the reason why, because he arranged a food delivery that was unauthorized and crossed a border to pick up that food delivery order, which he later revealed to be an order of chicken wings. And when the league found out, Holmes was subjected to an extra ten days of quarantine all by himself in his room. And that was kind of a message sent to everyone about how serious the league was taking the restrictions they had put in place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. Judging by the number of consignments and the turnout of buyers, the annual winter classic car auctions that began here on Tuesday with Barrett Jackson's sale seem to have been immunized against every strain of economic flu. It's almost as though the lean recession years of 2009 10 never happened. Here are some of the particularly interesting high end collectibles available this weekend: 1971 Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda (Barrett Jackson) One of 11 426 powered 'Cuda convertibles built that year, it was a tremendously expensive engine option for the day nearly 1,300 which explains its scarcity. Were this car to break 2 million here, it would be a sign that the market is close to being back to its peak of 2007. 1934 Cadillac V 16 Convertible Sedan (RM Auctions). In the 1930s, there was a race for engine size and number of cylinders. Only Marmon matched Cadillac in introducing an expensive V 16 in the depths of the Depression. This car is expected to bring up to 750,000.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Barnes Noble said Wednesday that it would cancel its plans to promote classic novels featuring covers with people of color, after criticism from writers and others in publishing that it was a misguided attempt at diversifying its shelves. For the project, called Diverse Editions and intended "to raise awareness and discussion during Black History Month," the bookseller worked with Penguin Random House and used artificial intelligence to look through 100 books including "The Secret Garden," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Moby Dick" that it said made no reference to the race of their characters. Artists then created limited edition covers for 12, reimagining the characters as people of color. Each book received five different covers depicting ethnically diverse characters. The covers for "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," for instance, included one featuring an Asian Dorothy with a pink dress, as well as black and Native American versions of the character. Barnes Noble planned to promote the redesigned books at one of its biggest stores, on New York City's Fifth Avenue, and at a panel session on diversity Wednesday evening.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
What do the satin leotard of the Playboy Bunny, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis's first wedding gown and a wool jacquard Savile Row suit from 2016 have in common? All were created by people of African descent, a new exhibition, called "Black Fashion Designers," at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology will gently remind or perhaps inform its visitors. But "a lot of contributions have been overlooked," Ariele Elia, the assistant curator of costume and textiles, who conceived the show, said during a tour on Tuesday, the day before it opened. "We wanted to bring attention to the history that people have forgotten and show some of the new faces that people might not be familiar with." And name the names, which include, corresponding to the garments above: Zelda Wynn Valdes, Ann Lowe and Ozwald Boateng. Making no claim to comprehensiveness, the show nonetheless packs a wide cultural range into a relatively small ground floor space. It is easily navigated, should Ms. Elia be unavailable, with an app introduced by the booming voice of the Vogue contributing editor Andre Leon Talley, who served on the advisory committee (along with the longtime Ebony commentator Audrey Smaltz, one of many African American muses featured). "The show is about black makers, models and designers, as opposed to 'black style,' " said Elizabeth Way, a curatorial assistant who worked with Ms. Elia, underscoring what might today be obvious but bears repeating: "There really isn't a black style." Some designers draw consistently from ancient African traditions, like the Nigerian born Duru Olowu, whose peacock like ensemble opens the exhibition, and Mimi Plange, from Ghana and then California, whose quilting on a pink dress mimics the body art of scarification and who has been championed (among many other independent designers) by the first lady, Michelle Obama. "This is, like, our last tribute to Michelle," Ms. Elia said with palpable wistfulness. There are items as casual as the red and white printed shift designed by Laura Smalls that Mrs. Obama wore in July to do a "Carpool Karaoke" segment with the late night talk show host James Corden. And looks as formal as an evening dress designed by Eric Gaskins inspired by the painter Franz Kline, a white column adorned with what looked like big black brush strokes. "Done with tiny microbugle beads!" Ms. Way said. "He crushed them down into almost nothing." (In recent years, Mr. Gaskins has been known for crushing the hot klieg lights of the fashion industry down to almost nothing on his addictively candid blog, the Emperor's Old Clothes.) Some pieces are familiar, thanks to show business celebrities, like a racy black lace gown by LaQuan Smith worn barely by Kim Kardashian to a yacht party in Cannes in 2015, and a white net and Swarovski crystal minidress by CD Greene that Tina Turner chose for her "Wildest Dream" tour in 1996. "She was having a problem showing up on stage, so she needed something that would really make her shine," Ms. Way said. Perhaps intuiting their own obsolescence, stars are now requesting something that actually makes them light up, and the young "creative technologist" Madison Maxey has been working on such innovations at her lab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But her contribution here is subtler: a computer code generated print on hemp whose belt incorporates recycled computer and headphone cords (radically revising the old phrase "waste not, no waist"). Ecological concern also crops up in a T shirt knit from yarn spun out of plastic ocean waste by G Star Raw, the label co owned by the musician Pharrell Williams. This is in a section devoted to protest through clothing that showcases Kerby Jean Raymond's "They Have Names," a homage to 13 unarmed black men who were killed by the police. "People are interested in this because it's so timely," Ms. Way said, "but we wanted to show that black designers have been working with activism for a very long time." Some of this activism centered around AIDS, which felled Karl Davis at 25 after only six collections, the last containing a sleek evening gown with Chanelesque back pockets that stands here as a sober monument to talent not fully realized. And in midcareer, Patrick Kelly, renowned not just for bright button embellishments but for his seizing back of racist figures like the pickaninny and golliwog, and Willi Smith, who found mass success designing for a new wave of working women, mixing patterns with joyful abandon. For a brief shining moment, after advancements in civil rights, there was also newfound freedom after hours at the disco, with its court costumers like Stephen Burrows, he of the lettuce edge (like the Toll House cookie, a happy accident), James Daugherty and Scott Barrie. "Designers were breaking away from structuralism of the '60s, and getting into something more body conscious," Ms. Way said, then made a sudden break from museum ese. "I think just really it was all about the music." But she acknowledged that in the current political climate the show's title is a provocation or, perhaps, an invitation. "You can say 'black designers' but that doesn't give you any other information," Ms. Way said. "Except how much they've been left out."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
But that's not what tends to be on view down here. At least once a week, the homeowners, the artist Tara Donovan and her husband, Robbie Crawford, an architect, settle in with their 8 year old twin sons for dinner while watching "something dumb and funny and appropriate," in Mr. Crawford's words. The couple send the boys downstairs to set things up the paneling on one wall opens to reveal a big flat screen TV while in the kitchen on the third floor, Ms. Donovan and Mr. Crawford load bowls of pasta into a dumbwaiter for retrieval as the credits begin to roll. Ms. Donovan, 48, a native New Yorker and onetime MacArthur fellow, is renowned for using mundane materials to make large scale sculptures that often evoke the natural world. In her hands, stickpins, drinking straws and plastic foam cups blossom into thrilling biomorphic forms. A midcareer retrospective of her work just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. As her career has been evolving, so has her home, with the ground level renovation among the latest projects that began soon after she and Mr. Crawford moved in. Mr. Crawford, who is nine years her junior, was then a designer at the firm. He wasn't on the design team for the Donovan project at first, but when Ms. Donovan asked for a study model of what would become her townhouse, the architects turned to Mr. Crawford, who is that rarity in the age of computer aided design someone still adept at making them. He happened to live in Bushwick, too, and when he and Ms. Donovan occasionally bumped into each other on the street, she would ask playfully, "Where's my model?" They began dating as second and third stories were added on top of the garage, both levels aligned with the front lot line and set back on the rear and providing outdoor space on the garage's roof, bordered by the playground's trees. In 2007, they married. "I'm interested in fugitive colors in materials," she said in a phone interview. Behind the carport was her studio with the garage's original concrete floor. An office for her and her studio manager occupied the front of the second floor, which, at the rear, opened onto the terrace. On the third floor, the living room flowed into the kitchen, with the bedroom off that. When the boys were born, their parents turned Ms. Donovan's second floor office into the twins' bedroom, and she and her studio manager squeezed into a smaller space at the rear of the floor. Because she and Mr. Crawford didn't like sleeping on the third floor with their babies below, they installed a Murphy bed in the area outside the boys' room. As the twins grew, their room was redone repeatedly (Mr. Crawford, who recently led a tour of the now 4,200 square foot home, ticked off three iterations). Currently, two beds line up under the long horizontal window. Bookshelves showcase large, complicated Lego models built by the boys, who apparently have inherited their parents' knack for construction. As they began to approach their preteen years, the family yearned for more space, and Ms. Donovan and Mr. Crawford switched things up again. She moved out of her studio, relocating to a warehouse in Long Island City, and the transformation of the ground floor began, once more with the help of Standard. Today, a new staircase descends from the second floor with a generous landing where Mr. Crawford, who now has his own architecture firm, Crawford Practice, works. At the bottom of the stairs, what Mr. Crawford and Ms. Donovan conceived as an entertaining zone begins. The renovation, which cost about 200 per square foot, has resulted in a setting where the twins can hang out with friends or their parents can have art world acquaintances over for drinks and dinner. Before one gets to the sunken lounge, there is a dining area with a table and chairs designed by Tom Dixon. A sink with a backsplash of Calacatta Gold marble is inset in green painted cabinetry. On one side of the sink, the cabinetry hides an oven and refrigerator; on the other there is a treadmill (not much used, Mr. Crawford admitted, though the couple does employ the yoga mats also stored there). In the middle of the ground level, a large platform topped by black marble patterned porcelain tile displays one of Ms. Donovan's sculptures of aggregated spheres made of silver Mylar. Also here is the Murphy bed, relocated from upstairs, for the benefit of overnight guests, and concealed by more walnut paneled storage when not in use. A row of cubbies tops that storage unit, and an experiment by Ms. Donovan composed of gold Mylar rolled in narrow tubes is tucked into one of them; backlit, it glows. A new large scale work made of the same material greets visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver show, titled "Tara Donovan: Fieldwork." All three levels of the museum's exhibition space, a total of 10,000 square feet, are devoted to her work. "Five semis worth of stuff," said Ms. Donovan, whose exhibition is on display in Denver through Jan. 27. Could a parallel be drawn between her transformation of ordinary materials into art and her conversion of a homely garage into a fabulous home? Certainly not, Ms. Donovan insisted, explaining how her work involves an exhaustive exploration of a material that can take months and even years, with the end result unknown at the start. Compared to the rigors of creating her art, working on the house with her husband is pure pleasure. "Renovating the ground floor that was so much fun for us," she said. "We both might have different ideas, and we hash it out. It's a part of our relationship we both really enjoy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
There is so much sex on the New York City subway now. Have you noticed? If you're here, you must have. It's inescapable. Sometimes, train stations are just coated in phallic cactuses. They jut out in every direction, advertising a company called Hims that sells not plants, but pills to help treat hair loss and erectile dysfunction. Within train cars, an ad for the linens company Brooklinen shows three pairs of feet tangled together under a sheet. Brooklinen originally wanted to tell riders that the sheets were meant for "threesomes" but was made to tweak it by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The advertisement now says that the sheet is for "throuples," those in a committed relationship of three. There are so many more. The Museum of Sex. Breast Augmentation. Lola prompts riders to talk about "condoms, lubricant and wipes," under an image of two women happily discussing "the weirdest thing I've ever felt." OkCupid uses a common acronym for being willing to have casual sex . Roman asks if you're subject to (again!) erectile dysfunction. When did this start? Where is it going? Do we really need this much sex on the subway? And what do we tell the kids? In the 1980s, the subways were perhaps the least sexy place in New York, unless you were turned on by dirty, broken things. In 1984, the M.T.A . hired a superstar of the transit world, David L. Gunn, from Philadelphia to improve the system. At first, Mr. Gunn focused on the most serious problems: derailments and dangerously hot cars. But eventually he got around to cleaning up the interiors. By 1989, the eyesores of the previous decade broken windows, trash all over the floor were all but gone. A graffiti artist told The New York Times then that he barely had time to take a picture of a finished tag, or signature, before a worker popped up to scrub it away. Three years later, the M.T.A. lost a major source of revenue when it banned tobacco advertising in subways and buses, which had made up about 16 percent of the 27 million the agency earned from advertising annually. The next year, Gay Men's Health Crisis, an AIDS nonprofit, began running subway ads that showed same sex couples canoodling, with the tag line "Young. Hot. Safe!" The organization received bomb threats that specifically cited the ads, said Krishna Stone, then a volunteer with G.M.H.C. Hot 97 ads used sex to sell an image of the radio station. Gay Men's Health Crisis was compelled to mention it by way of addressing a public health epidemic. In 2019, the companies that advertise on the subways frequently blur the distinction between these very different categories of ad. The M.T.A. has long used contractors, companies like New York Subways Advertising, TDI and (these days) Outfront Media, as its first line of defense when it comes to determining what is decent enough for the public eye. It's always been a balancing act. "We recognize that advertisers have a right to get their message across," Larry Levine, then a director of real estate operations for the M.T.A., told Newsday in 1993. "At the same time, we don't expect our contractors to put up things that are totally offensive." Four years ago, tired of losing in court, the agency again changed its advertising policy, most significantly banning all political advertising on the subways and buses. That helped convert the legal status of the transit system from a designated public forum into a limited public forum, with more ability to self regulate. These days, the process is supposed to work like this. When Outfront Media believes that an ad violates the M.T.A.'s advertising policy, it is supposed to forward the ad to the agency's advertising review committee of three : a director of external affairs, a compliance officer and a development officer (two women and a man). The committee, which sees a tiny percentage of all the ads submitted to the subway, is advised by a lawyer who specializes in free speech. If advertisers are rejected, they can appeal the committee's decision, asking the authority's chief development officer, Janno Lieber , for a formal written ruling. Not many companies get to that point. It is a classic, if risky marketing strategy to get attention through provocation. (See "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." and its variants.) If advertisers can get publicity by feuding with the subway, it may serve them better in the long run than the neutered ads that the authority would permit them to run. And yet, despite the M.T.A.'s increasing permissiveness, two companies that make sex toys have found a line that the agency, so far, has been unwilling to cross. The M.T.A. says in a posted list of questions and answers about its policy that advertisements for sex toys straightforwardly violate a rule against what it calls "sexually oriented businesses" introduced in 2015, at the same time as the rule prohibiting political advertising. In the spring of 2018, Polly Rodriguez, a founder of Unbound, a company t hat makes sex toys, thought the subways would be a good place to advertise. She submitted mock ups to Outfront, but was told that the ads would not be approved under M.T.A. guidelines. Ms. Rodriguez did not hear from the M.T.A. directly . She heard only from an employee of Outfront, David Luna, who said that "our committee" decided that the ads did not meet M.T.A. guidelines. The ads violated sections of M.T.A. rules that prohibit dissemination of indecent material to minors and the public display of "offensive sexual material," he said. Like Thinx before it, Ms. Rodriguez's company went to the press, accusing the M.T.A. of sexism. After several articles and lots of social media fervor, a spokesman for the agency told The Times that it would "work with the company toward a resolution that is agreeable to all parties and allows their ads on the system." Over the summer things with Outfront continued to drag along. For a time, Ms. Rodriguez gave up. "Everybody's allowed to use women's bodies and sexuality to sell since the dawn of time, except women themselves," she said. Encouraged by the agency's public diplomacy in the press, another female led company that makes sex toys, Dame Products, submitted an ad campaign to the M.T.A. in August, and went through several rounds of edits. In November 2018, the authority posted a "frequently asked questions" page that specified that advertisements for sex toys or devices were barred from the subways. A month after that, Dame's ads were rejected in a final determination by Mr. Lieber. Alexandra Fine, a founder of Dame and a friend of Ms. Rodriguez's, received an email from Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit (the branch of the M.T.A. responsible for day to day operations). He told her that he "cringed" when he read of her experience but that he did not have the authority to do anything himself. Ms. Fine did not give up. Earlier this summer, Dame sued the M.T.A.; its chairman, Pat Foye; and Mr. Lieber. In the suit, Dame asked that the court compel the M.T.A. to feature its ads. The litigation is continuing. Ms. Rodriguez and Ms. Fine have consistently contrasted the M.T.A.'s treatment of their companies with Hims and Roman, which also sells pills to combat erectile dysfunction. The subway justifies allowing those companies' advertisements by saying they offer medicinal products while Unbound and Dame offer products only for pleasure. "Fifty five year old men don't need erections," Ms. Fine said. "Those erections make them feel alive and that's beautiful, but same with my sex toys." Emma Freeman, a lawyer representing Dame in the suit, said that "the notion very broadly that advertisements like Roman and Hims serve a public health interest that Dame doesn't is nonsense," adding that the M.T.A.'s decisions represented a "pretty egregious double standard that stems from patriarchal and sexist cultural standards." Asked to comment on the Dame lawsuit, the M.T.A. said in a statement that its "advertising policy and its decision not to display the Dame Products ads is not gender based or viewpoint discriminatory," adding that its advertising policy clearly states "that advertisements for sex toys or devices for any gender are not permitted. Advertising for FDA approved medication including sexual dysfunction medication for any gender is permitted." More generally, the agency says that advertising "provides a critical revenue source" and that its advertising policy allows it to "maximize ridership and fare revenues and maintain a secure, orderly and welcoming system." In other words, it runs ads to make money, while also running a transportation network that serves a huge cross section of the public. Along with all the other trouble facing the M.T.A., like suspended service during a recent heat wave, total unpredictability from line to line and the saga of the L train, the agency says it hears frequently from organizations and individuals upset about sexual content in advertisements. Occasionally, passengers' interactions with them pop up on social media, too. In May, The Jewish Press lamented the Museum of Sex ads in an editorial: "Nearly every day, at least several hundred thousand people including tens of thousands of innocent teenagers and children see these ads," the editorial read. "Among them are many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of yeshiva boys and Bais Yaakov girls who ride on trains." (The phrase "Bais Yaakov" means school age.) Elana Taubman, who teaches middle schoolers in the city, said she was put in an uncomfortable situation by one of the companies that sells erectile dysfunction pills during the past school year. One of her students asked her what erectile dysfunction was. She told him to ask his science teacher. But the students continued to talk about the advertisement. "It made me realize that my students were pretty old compared to all the students who take the subway every single day," Ms. Taubman said. "A 13 year old, that's not even that crazy. To think that there are 9 , 10 , 11 year olds being exposed to this every day? I'd say it was a very explicit ad, and I thought it was a lot for them to see."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Ms. Copeland will play what a Disney spokeswoman called the lead ballerina role in the film, "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms." Lasse Hallstrom will direct; Ashleigh Powell wrote the script, adapted from the 1816 E. T. A. Hoffmann short story "Nussknacker und Mausekonig" ("Nutcracker and Mouse King"). When Ms. Copeland performed in Alexei Ratmansky's staging of the ballet in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brian Seibert wrote in his review for The Times, "Ms. Copeland, nearly flawless, brought out a womanly sensuality, her musicality suited to the crystalline exactitude of the solo to the celesta."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
MUNICH When it comes to misery, the families in Greek tragedies really take the cake. The unhappy offspring of the houses of Atreus and Thebes are some of the oldest protagonists of world drama: They have relived their traumas onstage continually since the fifth century B.C., both in the original plays and in adaptations that draw psychological insights and contemporary relevance from the ancient texts. Throughout Germany this season, ambitious modern reinventions of plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus argue for the universality and timelessness of these works. Now in his last year as artistic director of the Residenztheater in Munich, Martin Kusej has invited back Ulrich Rasche, the visionary director whose 2017 production of Schiller's "The Robbers" was one of the triumphs of Mr. Kusej's eight year tenure. And Mr. Rasche, 50, has once again brought his distinctive brand of "machine theater," which transforms the stage into an elaborate mechanical assemblage while treating the actors as cogs in an all consuming apparatus, this time for a production of "Elektra," adapted from Sophocles' tragedy in 1903 by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In "The Robbers," massive, continually rolling treadmills dominated the stage, in a production as dramatically gripping as it was technically ingenious. For this one act "Elektra," Mr. Rasche, who designs his own productions, has devised an even more sophisticated set. The action takes place on a raised disc that rotates on its axis and on which, safely harnessed, the actors march in a pack, fighting to stay in place as it is raised and lowered, often tilting at dangerous angles. Unfortunately, one walks away dazzled by the mechanics but underwhelmed by the drama. Much of the problem lies with how Mr. Rasche lets the rhythm of the production be dictated by Monika Roscher's throbbing score, performed live by six capable musicians. "The Robbers" benefited from a pulsating soundtrack by the American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers that sustained a mesmerizing intensity over four hours. Sadly, in "Elektra," a work half as long, both the individual performances and the production as a whole seem enslaved to the loud, droning music. This is especially true of Katja Burkle's raw portrayal of Elektra, the daughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon. Mr. Rasche's ritualistic staging is ill suited to a work of such emotional intensity. Amid the monotonous score and the chanting by the chorus (the director's invention), Ms. Burkle drools and howls while trudging along the spinning disc. Her performance is impressively feral, but not much more than that. The center of Hofmannsthal's version is the showdown between Elektra and her mother, Clytemnestra, who killed her husband when he returned triumphant from the Trojan War. It's a bloodcurdling scene, but here the plodding tempo set by the music makes it fall flat. Perhaps Mr. Rasche hoped to build Hitchcockian tension and suspense. In the absence of a ticking bomb under a table, however, the long scene just stagnates and dies. It is a directorial miscalculation that nearly sinks the whole production. One of the few bright spots is Lilith Hassle as Elektra's life affirming sister, Chrysothemis, a necessary foil to the vengeful title character. Only when Ms. Hassle tries to supplicate the imperious Ms. Burkle, honestly pouring out her maternal desires to Elektra's derision and scorn, does Mr. Rasche's industrially rigorous "machine theater" succeed on an emotional, human level. The vengeance of the children of Agamemnon is also the theme of "The Oresteia," the only tragic trilogy passed down to us from antiquity. In Burkhard C. Kosminski's first season leading the Schauspiel Stuttgart, in southern Germany, he has brought over the British director Robert Icke's acclaimed four hour version for its German language premiere. The handsome 2015 production, originally seen at the Almeida Theater in London, where Mr. Ickes is associate director, has arrived in Stuttgart with only minor changes to Hildegard Bechtler's minimalistic brick and glass set. Over the course of a long but gripping evening, the fall of the house of Atreus plays out on a sleekly modern set, which transforms from a suburban home to a courtroom in the cycle's final installment, "The Eumenides." As the matricidal Orestes reconstructs the bloody events leading to his trial, a clerk presents the evidence to the court, where it is dutifully relayed in print on an electronic console. Despite the contemporary relocation, Mr. Icke's version remains faithful to Aeschylus. To make the plays work in a modern context, the trilogy is mostly stripped of its religious trappings. Without the context of the Hellenic belief system, the faith that compels Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia comes across as superstition, although Mr. Icke clearly lays out the moral stakes in sacrificing a child to win a war. In this version, the character who comes most clearly into focus is Clytemnestra, the mourning queen, who will take revenge on Agamemnon only to be killed by her son. The German actress Sylvana Krappatsch ensures that the focus stays on her, thanks to a courageous performance that is ferocious, grief stricken and sexually charged. Matthias Leja is her worthy partner, and later opponent, as a severe yet uncommonly sympathetic Agamemnon. The others in the 12 member cast have less to do. As Orestes, Peer Oscar Musinowski looks panic stricken and flummoxed as he works through the traumatic memories and defends himself at his final trial, while Anne Marie Lux seems positively chipper as Elektra compared with Ms. Burkle in Munich. Mr. Icke's meticulous direction is full of disconcerting, often freaky, touches, including a spooked Iphigenia (Aniko Sophie Huber and Salome Sophie Roller alternate in the role) singing the most unsettling version of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" you'll ever hear while clutching a stuffed bunny. Mr. Icke is also fond of cinematic touches that recall David Lynch during climactic moments, such as the frosted glass dividers that turn transparent at the blink of an eye, accompanied by flashing light and a zapping noise. In what was his first postwar work for the stage, Brecht turned his attention to Sophocles' tragedy about filial duty, civil disobedience and the tyranny of the state. Based on an 1804 translation by the early German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin, Brecht's concentrated version was intended as an indictment of the German bourgeoisie who had embraced Hitler. Brecht scrubbed the play clean of references to Greek deities and shifted the emphasis away from one family's personal tragedy to the downfall of a society that embraces a totalitarian system. On the small stage of the Berliner Ensemble, the company in Berlin founded by Brecht in 1949, Veit Schubert directs a stripped down production of this "Antigone" starring students at the Ernst Busch University of Performing Arts. The nine actors clamber on and around a sloping stage that, over the course of the 90 minute performance, is progressively assembled from squares locking noisily into a large frame. (Wiebke Bachmann designed the striking modular set.) The cast all in their early to mid 20s perform with sweaty determination, if a touch too much studied intensity. A notable exception is Aniol Kirberg, who plays the blind seer Tiresias as a cheeky balladeer, plucking out bluesy tunes on a variety of instruments and annoying the tyrant Creon by parroting his pronouncements in song. The performances in the 200 seat theater are mostly sold out, which is a vote both for the next generation of Berlin thespians and for these foundational works of world literature. Surely directors and playwrights like Hofmannsthal, Brecht and Mr. Icke will not be the last to mine them for fresh insight into our values, our morals, our fears and our passions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
An infant in Cucuta, Colombia, with a Zika related rash. Typically, children in the study who were infected with Zika got only mildly ill; some had a rash, while half were feverish and a quarter had red eyes or joint pain. Children Who Get Zika After Birth Tend Not to Fall Seriously Ill, Study Finds Serious complications are rare among children infected with the Zika virus after birth, federal health researchers concluded in a study published on Friday a rare bright spot in the unfolding story of the epidemic. About 160 teenagers and toddlers infected with Zika virus have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 2015. The agency's new study marks the largest survey yet of laboratory confirmed cases in children. All of the infections were the result of travel, most commonly to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. About 100 of the cases occurred in June and July alone. The report represents just a fraction of the actual number of children in the continental United States infected with Zika. The children, aged 1 month to 17 years, were initially identified because they had symptoms of infection; only those who became ill were included in the research. Yet most people who are infected have no symptoms at all. The virus can profoundly injure developing fetuses, leading to a range of birth defects including irreparable brain damage, hearing loss and eye defects. But the C.D.C. researchers, reassuringly, found no serious injury among infected children. Typically, these children got only mildly ill: 129 had a rash, C.D.C. researchers found, while half were feverish and a quarter had red eyes or joint pain. One hundred and eleven had two or more of the four main symptoms. Five teenagers, ages 16 and 17, were pregnant when they developed symptoms, highlighting the need for sexually active teenagers to protect themselves from Zika, especially after travel to affected places. None of these children developed a kind of temporary paralysis called Guillain Barre syndrome, which may be triggered by Zika infection. Older adults are generally thought to be at higher risk for Guillain Barre. But at the height of the Zika epidemic in Brazil, officials reported that a few children had developed the paralysis, as well as meningoencephalitis, a dangerous inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. Still, the C.D.C. urged health care providers to test children with suspected Zika infection, to notify state health departments of all cases, and to remain vigilant for neurological complications even in the very young. No child died in the C.D.C. study, but two were hospitalized. A four year old with a fever, a cough, and trouble eating or drinking spent three days under observation. A one year old with a cough and rash spent a night in a hospital. Also on Friday, the C.D.C. announced that men who have visited areas in which the Zika is circulating should wait six months before having unprotected sex in order to avoid transmitting the virus, even if they have not had symptoms. The C.D.C. had recommended that men refrain for six months if they had experienced symptoms of Zika infection, but only eight weeks if they had not. The change brings the C.D.C.'s advice in line with guidelines from the World Health Organization. The new guidelines also suggest that both women and men in couples planning a pregnancy in the near future consider avoiding travel to areas where Zika is being transmitted, and that they use condoms or abstain from sex for at least six months after travel before trying to conceive. The Zika virus lingers in semen, the reproductive fluid that contains sperm. On Thursday, French researchers reported that the virus can penetrate individual spermatozoa. The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, found the virus in about 4 percent of the spermatozoa of a 32 year old man who had had Zika symptoms more than four months earlier.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"First, our investigation found that the Russian government interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Second, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities. We did not address collusion, which is not a legal term. Rather we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy and it was not. Based on Justice Department policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would not make a determination as to whether the president committed a crime. That was our decision then and it remains our decision today." "So the report did not conclude that he did not commit obstruction of justice. Is that correct?" "That is correct." "And what about total exoneration? Did you actually totally exonerate the president?" "No." "Now in fact, your report expressly states that it does not exonerate the present." "It does." "And your investigation actually found 'multiple acts by the president that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian interference and obstruction investigations.' Is that correct?" "Correct." "Now Director Mueller, can you explain in plain terms what that finding means so the American people can understand it?" "Well, the finding indicates that the president was not that the president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed." "This hearing is political theater. It's a Hail Mary attempt to convince the American people that collusion is real and that it's concealed in the report. Granted, that's a strange argument to make about a report that is public. It's almost like the Democrats prepared arguments accusing Mr. Barr of hiding the report and didn't bother to update their claims once he published the entire thing. "Well, your investigation is not a witch hunt, is it, Director Mueller?" "It is not a witch hunt." "When the president said the Russian interference was a hoax, that was false, wasn't it?" "True." "'This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove.' Donald Trump, Oct. 31, 2016. 'Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks.' Donald Trump, Nov. 4, 2016. Would any of those quotes disturb you, Mr. Director?" "I'm not sure I would say " "How do you react to them?" "Well, it's problematic is an understatement in terms of whether it displays, in terms of giving some, I don't know, hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity." "In your investigation, did you think that this was a single attempt by the Russians to get involved in our election, or did you find evidence to suggest they'll try to do this again?" "Oh, it wasn't a single attempt. They are doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign." "It's really the only subject I want to talk to you about, sir: Why didn't you subpoena the president?" "When we were almost towards the end of our investigation and we'd had little success in pushing to get the interview of the president, we decided that we did not want to exercise the subpoena powers because of the necessity of expediting the end of the investigation. "Was that, was that, excuse me. Did you want " "I was going to say, the expectation was, if we did subpoena the president, he would fight the subpoena and we would be in the midst of the investigation for a substantial period of time." "Director Mueller, isn't it fair to say that the president's written answers were not only inadequate and incomplete because he didn't answer many of your questions but where he did, his answers showed that he wasn't always being truthful?" "There I would say, generally." "Generally."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Louis Vuitton mohair sweater, about 690, at louisvuitton.com . Gosha Rubchinskiy pants, 310, at Dover Street Market New York. Converse sneakers, 50, at converse.com .Credit...Clement Pascal for The New York Times; Styled by Alex Tudela After 18 years of trying to get noticed, the rapper and teenage eccentric Lil Yachty has been forced recently to practice blending in. It's mostly the hair. On a recent Saturday, following a dayslong spate of promotional appearances and photo shoots, the 19 year old internet supernova, who found fame online and beyond this year with a series of catchy mixtapes and goofy viral moments, hoped to do a little shopping in the heart of Brooklyn. But before he could peacefully enter Kith, the streetwear store that specializes in sneakers and sugary cereal, Lil Yachty needed to hide his trademark accessory: his grenadine red skinny braids adorned with clear plastic beads. As his chauffeured S.U.V. approached the buzzing shop, the Atlanta rapper grabbed a knit cap from the head of a friend, who assented without a word, seemingly familiar with the routine. As with the mini shopping spree, there was still some thrill in needing to go undercover. "At the beginning of this year, I used to walk through the local mall and say, 'One day, I'm not going to be able to walk through this mall,'" Lil Yachty said later in the privacy of a Caribbean restaurant, his hair since released. "No way I could walk through the mall now. Unless I'm hiding." Last winter, the teenager born Miles McCollum, who had recently dropped out of college and had been arrested in a Florida mall for credit card fraud, was hoping to shake his anonymity. Rapping was a relatively new pastime (it still is), though striving for fame came naturally to a diligent student of social networks. "I always knew I was going to be something," he said. "I didn't know what." Now, at the end of a career making 2016, Lil Yachty seems more certain. "I'm not a rapper, I'm an artist," he said. "And I'm more than an artist. I'm a brand." The stats back him up. In addition to releasing the popular "Lil Boat" and "Summer Songs 2" mixtapes, filled with his taffylike digital wails and cartoon melodies, and reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 with his sweet and sour guest verse on D.R.A.M.'s "Broccoli," Lil Yachty has modeled Kanye West's Yeezy line at Madison Square Garden, starred in a Sprite commercial with LeBron James and teamed up with Nautica on a capsule collection for Urban Outfitters. An official debut album with Capitol Records is planned for early 2017. Yet even among the bevy of singular voices in the new Atlanta hip hop scene, where male rappers can wear dresses and carry designer bags, moan about their feelings and dance with their hips, Lil Yachty is demonstrably odd, flaunting his indifference to rap traditionalism and aiming to remain somewhat wholesome: more schoolyard than trap house. "Rappers don't have endorsements because of their images," he said. "Endorsement money is huge. And I care about my character." He added: "I don't rap about drinking or smoking, ever, because I don't do it. I don't rap about anything I don't do." Instead, Lil Yachty preaches an all purpose positivity fueled by timeless adolescent ambitions: chasing girls, looking cool and hanging out with friends. (Lil Yachty's crew is known as the Sailing Team: "If you're a fan of me, then you know my friends, because I push them just as hard.") His most menacing raps can feel playful, his sexuality disarmingly juvenile and his boasts betray his age: "Parents mad at my ass 'cause their kids sing my song in class," he taunts while proclaiming himself the King of the Teens. "We are the youth!" goes another battle cry. As with his breakout viral hits "1 Night" and "Minnesota," Lil Yachty's music relies less on technical rapping than on simple melodies that invoke warped nursery rhymes, with bright, bubbly production and an affecting falsetto smoothed with Auto Tune. Along with Kanye West and Kid Cudi, both of whom count as elder statesmen to someone born in 1997, his most direct influences include the cult favorite, outre internet rappers Lil B and Soulja Boy, along with pop acts like Coldplay, Daft Punk and Fall Out Boy. While modeling for Nautica last month to his own personal playlist, Lil Yachty mimed air guitar to "Paradise City" by Guns N' Roses and boogied to Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" when he wasn't belting Chris Martin ballads. Between looks, he dined on his preferred menu of Domino's pepperoni pizza, candy and cookies, head buried in his two Louis Vuitton cased iPhones. (One had a hand scrawled message: "LETS BE RICH FOREVER.") At the same time, Lil Yachty's stated indifference toward the catalogs of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. has made him a punching bag for rap purists, the poster child for a style over substance new school dismissively dubbed "mumble rap." He's leaned into that mantle, so online schadenfreude bubbles up every time Lil Yachty, say, bombs a freestyle over '90s beats or fails miserably at dunking a basketball. "I ask myself all the time, 'How do I always go viral?'" Lil Yachty said with a grin. "I'm the face of the youth, the new sound. Nobody likes my truth." Except the youth, that is. "They relate to me because I'm so like them," he said, "but on a global scale." Music, it turns out, was something of an afterthought, despite his deep roots in Southern rap. Though he was raised mostly by his mother in the Atlanta suburb Austell, his father, Shannon McCollum, lived in the city and worked as a photographer with local acts such as Outkast, Goodie Mob and Lil Jon. But hanging around stars as a child bolstered Lil Yachty's sense of style and business acumen more than his sense of hip hop history. An obsession with fashion followed. "Once, when he was about 7, we were picking up his friend, and Miles had on a pink polo shirt," his father recalled. "The little boy got in the back seat and started laughing uncontrollably at Miles, calling him a girl. Miles just said, 'You don't know nothing about this, man.'" In high school, influenced by the bright colors favored by Pharrell Williams and Tyler, the Creator, Lil Yachty would spend the money he earned working at McDonald's or as an assistant to his father at thrift stores. "Ninety nine cents, 50 cents, I just knew how to put it together," he said. His mother even taught him to sew. His confidence and originality helped to win over his eventual manager, Coach K, an Atlanta stalwart who has worked with Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane and Migos. "It was like your first meeting with Marilyn Manson," Coach K said of encountering Lil Yachty. "You've got this freakish look, but he's not scared of who he is. He's wearing it with pride. Instantly I said, 'This is it.'" Still, even he has been surprised by the speed of his ascent. "It just feels like a dream," he said, recalling that in January, he couldn't make it past the door of Kanye's studio. "I sat in the hallway for hours while ASAP Rocky was in there. They wouldn't let me in. By August, I was working with him." Nautica, too, came calling only after a year of Lil Yachty's attempting to get the maritime brand's attention via social media. It was backstage among the V.I.P.s at Jay Z's Made in America festival in September that Lil Yachty's new reality started to sink in. "Obama's daughters knew who I was," he said. "They were huge fans. Jay Z said my name to me before I introduced myself." And yet, persona aside, a teenager can only be a teenager. At an Urban Outfitters meet and greet in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, among decidedly less dazzling guests, the rapper hid once again behind his hair and phone as overeager young fans offered him anything they could find to autograph: 5 bills, laptops, water bottles, purses, coats and, yes, eventually breasts. Not yet immune to such attention at close range, Lil Yachty could only giggle to himself, shaking his head as he mouthed the words to his own music.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The hotel, in the Dublin 2 district, is about 300 yards from St. Stephen's Green. Many other attractions are a short stroll away, including the shops of Grafton Street (eight minutes) and Trinity College Dublin (13 minutes). Take note, however: The Dean is on Harcourt Street, home to popular nightclubs (a boon to some, an annoyance to others). Our fourth floor basic Mod Pod room gave off a cool, bachelor pad vibe with its wooden herringbone patterned floor, dark turquoise walls, wall mounted flat screen TV, Marshall speakers and a bright orange mini Smeg fridge that provided a pop of color as well as Irish liquors like Baileys, for a price. While there are considerably larger units, our small double, at 136 square feet, felt cramped, especially when it came time to sleep in the double bed, lined on three sides with tufted, cushioned board. All that plushness looked cozy but took up valuable real estate: When lying down, my husband, at just under six feet, could touch the footboard with his toes, while his hair practically scraped the headboard. Our night only got worse: A steady bass beat blasted from one of those nearby clubs into the early morning hours. Upon checkout, the concierge informed us that guests seeking a quieter stay who wouldn't? should ask for a south facing room.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Thomas P. Campbell, the former director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who resigned under pressure last year, has been hired to lead the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In a peculiar twist, he takes over the job vacated by Max Hollein, who left earlier this year to take over the leadership at none other than the Met and now fills the position from which Mr. Campbell announced in February 2017 that he would leave. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the institution that oversees the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, announced the decision Tuesday, bringing an unusual swap in leadership full circle between two major art museums at opposite ends of the country, and opening up the potential for future partnerships. "I can't think of anything like this in recent times, but it's kind of fun and serendipitous," Mr. Campbell, 56, said in a phone interview Tuesday. "I'm absolutely thrilled to have this opportunity. Just as he takes over an institution where I laid a certain groundwork, similarly he has laid groundwork here." In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Hollein, who was named director of the Met in April, supported the hire and said he looked forward to working with the San Francisco institution. "Tom has been a great and esteemed colleague over many years, and I am delighted for the Fine Arts Museums to have chosen him as its next director," he said. Mr. Campbell's hiring comes more than a year and a half after his hushed departure from the Met, where attendance had grown under his tenure but where he had also faced concerns over the museum's financial health and his ability to lead including a personal relationship with a female staff member that some alleged contributed to a yearslong erosion of respect for his authority. "It's clearly something we looked at," Carl Pascarella, a member of the board for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, said Tuesday. But he said that "the allegations that were brought forward weren't corroborated from our perspective." He added that the museum used a search firm before settling on Mr. Campbell. "We were very comfortable," he said. "We had a very good array of candidates and were unanimous in our selection." Tom Eccles, executive director for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, said that he could not recall a similar situation in which the directors of major museums had essentially switched roles. "What it signals is a complete lack of imagination," he said. Though he said Mr. Campbell had faced a steep challenge to expand the Met into the modern age without destroying its cultural history "he had the devil's job to square the circle of the Met" he criticized the choice of Mr. Campbell for the San Francisco position because it reinforced the insular nature of the art world. "These major metropolitan museums are facing a challenge today between the past and the future," he said. "They can't imagine the future and are fearful of it. So they yearn for a kind of civic past that no longer exists, and then they provide the representatives for that." After his resignation from the Met, Mr. Campbell received a Getty Rothschild Fellowship, which supports innovative scholarship in the history of art, collecting and conservation. Now, as the director and chief executive of the largest public arts institution in Northern California, he will oversee curatorial and education programs and manage a staff of more than 500 people. He was scheduled to begin the new job Thursday. Mr. Campbell praised San Francisco as one of the great cities in the world and "ground zero for the digital realm." He said he was interested in exploring how technology can take museums beyond their walls. He also said he appreciated San Francisco for its emphasis on inclusiveness, diversity and social consciousness. "I believe museums play an important role as safe places for discussion, not only of aesthetics and history but also contemporary issues," he said. "It's a great museum and a very interesting moment to be joining it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
As a mother of two young children who often accompany me on my travels, I can say that most of the hotel kids' clubs I've seen that is, if a property even has one tend to be single room spaces with little consideration to youthful interests. Most offer predictable activities like arts and crafts and board games. But increasingly I've begun to see clubs that have unique settings and entertainment offerings that aim to stimulate children and give them a sense of place. The best connect children to the culture of their destination while giving them space to play. It's not a surprising move, explained Amanda Norcross, features editor of Family Vacation Critic. "Parents want their children to be happy and engaged on their trips," she said. "Having an innovative kid's club is certainly a way to do that. It also gives a hotel a differentiating factor in an industry that's always competing for guests." The kids' club at the Marbella Club, a beachside resort in Spain, is a good example of a club that puts culture first. It's in a 55,000 square foot villa that was the original home of Prince Alfonso of Spain. It has its own shallow pool and plenty of outdoor space with extensive gardens.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Charles Wuorinen, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer and formidable advocate for modernist music, high culture and the composer's worth, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 81. His publicist, Aleba Gartner, said the cause was complications of a fall sustained in September. Mr. Wuorinen, who won the Pulitzer in music in 1970 at age 31, composed works for major orchestras, including the Boston and San Francisco Symphonies, while maintaining a prickly yet charming public persona. He received a surge of attention in 2004, when the New York City Opera premiered his opera "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," based on a novel by Salman Rushdie. That was followed by a commission to compose an opera based on Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," which was also the basis of the 2005 movie of the same name. Mr. Wuorinen was part of a generation of postwar modernists who found a new home in the academy, uncompromising avant gardists who saw themselves as inheritors of the European tradition. "If my friends and I decide today that there will be no orchestras, there won't be in 50 years," he said in 1973. "Our influence is long range. We are the future." In the opening to his 1979 guidebook for composers, "Simple Composition," Mr. Wuorinen wrote: "While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12 tone system." Despite such pronouncements, he strenuously denied that he was part of a domineering atonal vanguard, as some critics alleged. "It's not that a bunch of beady eyed theoreticians are forcing innocent students to do terrible, nameless things," he said in 1997. "The whole story is a big fake." Mr. Wuorinen was remarkably prolific, with a corpus of 279 pieces often suffused with brainy wit as well as influences from Renaissance and medieval music. Over time, his output became less forbidding than his reputation. "His music used to be chilly and desiccated, a hothouse product, wearing its dissonance as a spiky shield to dissuade all comers," the critic Tim Page wrote in 1986, describing a new orchestral work, "Movers and Shakers." "Mr. Wuorinen's harmonic language is still uncompromising," he added, "but 'Movers and Shakers' has passages of aching lyricism, and many moments of sheer, visceral excitement." Charles Peter Wuorinen was born on June 9, 1938, in Manhattan. His father, John, emigrated from Finland and worked in factories before earning a doctorate at Columbia University, where he was subsequently chairman of the history department. His mother, Alfhild (Kalijarvi) Wuorinen, earned a master's in biology from Smith College. Charles grew up in the elite intellectual environs of Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he developed a deep connection to the classical canon and began writing music at age 5. Though his parents discouraged a career in composition, he found support from the eminent historian Jacques Barzun, a family friend. From an early age he studied with Columbia composers, including Vladimir Ussachevsky and Jack Beeson. He won a Young Composers' Award from the New York Philharmonic at 16. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia in 1961 and a master's in music there in 1963 and soon became a major voice on the academic scene, with icy, dense pieces like his String Trio and Piano Variations. Mr. Wuorinen constructed a system of lucid, hyper intellectual 12 tone writing in which intervals between notes structured a piece's rhythm and form. His style elaborated the theories of his colleague Milton Babbitt; it also combined the rhythmic vitality of Igor Stravinsky with the atonal vocabulary of Arnold Schoenberg. In a larger sense, Mr. Wuorinen shared the midcentury modernist ethos of Mr. Babbitt, who articulated a new vision in an infamous 1958 article titled "Who Cares if You Listen?" His outlook was that American composers, like Cold War scientists and mathematicians, could find refuge for their avant garde experiments in the university. In 1962, with the flutist and composer Harvey Sollberger, Mr. Wuorinen founded the Group for Contemporary Music, a pioneering ensemble dedicated to the exacting realization of complex works. But his academic career remained at times uncertain. As a result of departmental politics, he was denied tenure at Columbia in 1971, only a year after he had earned the Pulitzer for his innovative electronic work "Time's Encomium." He went on to teach at many universities, including Princeton, Yale, and Rutgers, as well as at the Manhattan School of Music. He was both beloved and feared by his students. In the 1980s, Mr. Wuorinen held a major residency with the San Francisco Symphony and became a reliable interview subject for journalists seeking a contrarian and recondite perspective on the state of the arts. "We have reached the stage, under the impulse of cultural populism, where we are incapable of measuring or acknowledging artistic merit except in terms of commercial success," he told The New York Times in 1991. "We don't distinguish between the committed, passionate audience and the trend seeking yuppie audience. We just count bodies and measure sales." As minimalism and neo Romanticism began to find new audiences and institutional support, eclipsing his style of choice, Mr. Wuorinen was not quiet about his concerns. "What we have is the quick fix, the need for instant self gratification," he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. "And that accounts for this utterly unchallenging, unprovocative kind of music." He would deliver such remarks with a sly smile, knowing that they were bound to rankle. He clung steadfastly, if at times predictably, to his conservative beliefs; in 2018 he said that awarding the Pulitzer to the hip hop musician Kendrick Lamar marked "the final disappearance of any societal interest in high culture." If such harangues seemed to come from a singular aggrieved voice, they also carried a broader message: that classical composers deserved to be recognized for their contributions to American society. "Without the composer at the center of musical culture, there can be no musical culture," he wrote in 1967. (That his advocacy often involved demonizing popular culture was, for Mr. Wuorinen, a given.) He was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He wrote six scores for the New York City Ballet, and his vast catalog also includes notable works for voice as well as percussion. Under the direction of Gerard Mortier, City Opera commissioned Mr. Wuorinen to write "Brokeback Mountain." But the company folded before it could be presented. In his reimagining of Ms. Proulx's story, a tale of doomed love between two Wyoming cowboys, the character Ennis sings in Schoenberg's technique of sprechstimme, a cross between speaking and singing, but slowly opens up into lyrical lines as he falls in love with the bold Jack. "In older operas there would be an illegitimate child or difference of social classes," Mr. Wuorinen told The Guardian. "Same sex love, especially when it takes place in an environment where it's absolutely forbidden, is a contemporary version of the same eternal problem." "Brokeback Mountain" received mixed reviews upon its world premiere at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2014. It received its belated American debut at the revived City Opera in 2018, also to a mixed reception. (Anthony Tommasini of The Times wrote that "the score often seems relentlessly busy and ineffectively intricate.") In recent decades, the conductor James Levine became a champion of Mr. Wuorinen's music, commissioning major works, including a cogent Fourth Piano Concerto for the Boston Symphony and "Time Regained," a fantasia and homage to early music, for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Both works featured the pianist Peter Serkin, who died this year. When the Met fired Mr. Levine over allegations of sexual misconduct, Mr. Wuorinen publicly defended him. In 2018 he asked: "Can't you ever distinguish between the man and his work? Whatever happened about innocent until proven guilty?" Mr. Wuorinen is survived by his husband, Howard Stokar, with whom he lived for decades in a grand brownstone on the Upper West Side. His final completed work was his Second Percussion Symphony, which the New World Symphony premiered in Miami in September. In 1974, Vera Stravinsky gave Mr. Wuorinen permission to write a piece based on incomplete sketches by her husband, Igor; the result, "A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky," is a tautly compelling masterwork with an acerbic but moving lament at its center. That same year, Mr. Wuorinen wrote an article for High Fidelity, titled "We Spit on the Dead," noting the widespread disrespect that he said was accorded to his lodestars Stravinsky and Schoenberg. "It is enough to make anyone sick," he wrote, "and if you are a composer, nausea will be neither a stranger nor solace of recourse to you. But the prospect of enduring a lifetime of calumny, succeeded by posthumous defilement, urges on us the need for some form of adequate compensation in this life, now, for the work of art and art of composition."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Mr. Kakande is a journalist and author from Uganda currently working as a home health aide. His most recent book is "Why We Are Coming." BOXBOROUGH, Mass. Recently, as I drove home from a long day of work as a home health aide, a police cruiser appeared behind me with lights flashing. It was 10 p.m. and the roads were nearly empty. As I pulled to the side of the road, my heart was pounding. As a black man from Uganda, I was nervous. Charlie Baker, the governor of Massachusetts, had just issued a 9 p.m. curfew across the state. In the three excruciatingly long minutes it took for the officer to approach my car, I tried to sort out why I was being stopped and what would happen next. When the officer appeared at my window, he asked just one question: "Essential worker?" I quickly replied that I was. He waved me off without asking for my driver's license my skin color told him everything he needed to know. Many black people in America are on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, working as caregivers, health care professionals, grocery store workers, delivery people and other essential service providers. In rural areas around the country, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work as field hands and in factories and warehouses to ensure the nation's food chain continues to function. The work immigrants do has always been essential it's just not often recognized as such. After the public health crisis is over, will we find the political will to change things, or will populist politicians return to demonize immigrants as dangerous criminals, job stealers or parasites feeding on tax funded public assistance? For the moment, essential workers have mostly been spared unjustifiable scrutiny by law enforcement. And many are finally able to enjoy work related benefits that their employers have long resisted. In Massachusetts, employment agencies are advertising jobs for caregivers that pay between 25 and 30 an hour, well above the pre pandemic hourly rate of 12 to 15. There have also been plenty of overtime opportunities, with the hourly rate one and a half times the normal wage. Even as the benefits have doubled, the challenges of working on the front lines have multiplied. My younger brother, Wahab, works as a licensed practical nurse in a nursing home. He has seen an increasing number of patients testing positive for the coronavirus. Several have died. My brother mourns for these patients. He cared for some of them for over a year and had formed close bonds. My brother's background is in health care. He graduated as a radiologist in Uganda and practiced for a few years before migrating to the United States. Never before has he seen so many patients dying. During the pandemic, he has become withdrawn and talks less when he returns home. Relatives keep calling me to ask why he doesn't answer their calls or return their messages. I tell them not to worry, even as I see the pandemic taking a toll on him. I ask them to wait until things get better. One day Wahab returned to our one bedroom apartment with news that so many health care workers fear. He had tested positive for Covid 19 and was required to stay home for at least two weeks. I, too, had to quarantine for two weeks because, as his roommate, I had been exposed. During his quarantine, my brother's supervisor, who was working remotely at her home, called to see how he was doing. She asked Wahab if he had developed any symptoms and if there was anything he needed. Each call ended with her reminding him that he would be retested and if the results were negative, he would be able to return to work immediately, especially as the nursing home was short on staff. After every call, my brother said, in a half joking way, that he had never seen his boss act so caring. He returned to work after two weeks. The pandemic, as tragic as it has been, underscores the importance of the work contributions of immigrants. It is disheartening to see that there are still plenty of people who portray us as enemies or social parasites, especially when we are visible in every industry and workplace that has been designated as essential during our current crisis. We are caring for the sick, the elderly, the disabled, children and babies. We're delivering your food and packages, working on your farms, in your factories and warehouses. Pandemic or not, this work has always been essential. We need the political will to enact compassionate, realistic and decent reforms that mitigate, reduce and ultimately eliminate the barriers that prevent so many of us from making a living wage. We must think about those who are underpaid and exploited, including immigrants who flee terrible situations in their homelands, come here to make an honest living and are grateful to pay taxes. Migrants like me and my brother are here because we want to work and provide for our families, just like you. We are proud to be a part of the essential work force. We are even prouder to work on behalf of all American workers in the common effort to secure income equality and economic parity for everyone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Ms. Clifford went forward with the interview, which her lawyer first hinted about in a tweet featuring a photograph of him, Ms. Clifford and Mr. Cooper. It proceeded despite an arbitrator's ruling reaffirming an agreement that she reached with Mr. Trump in October 2016 to remain silent about their alleged relationship in exchange for 130,000. She has said she had a consensual relationship with Mr. Trump that started in 2006 and lasted several months. In recent weeks, Ms. Clifford's lawyer, Michael Avenatti, has led a publicity blitz, appearing frequently on cable news shows, since she filed a lawsuit on March 6 seeking to break her 2016 agreement. She asserts that the nondisclosure agreement was void because Mr. Trump did not personally sign it. That lawsuit came after Michael D. Cohen, the president's longtime personal lawyer who said he paid her 130,000 legally pressured her to stay silent. Days before Ms. Clifford sued, Mr. Cohen secretly obtained a temporary restraining through an arbitrator in California to prevent her from speaking about her alleged affair. Mr. Avenatti wrote in a letter to Mr. Cohen on Monday that Ms. Clifford would be willing to pay back the 130,000 to end the deal to stay quiet. The offer had a deadline of noon Tuesday for Mr. Cohen to answer, which came and went.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
ATHENS Anastasia Kastaniotou, a struggling mother of three, stood near the Greek Parliament building on Wednesday and threw up her hands as she contemplated an EUR11.5 billion austerity package that her country's government was trying to tie up this week to keep Greece in the euro. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has been scrambling to seal a deal with his coalition government for fresh cuts to pensions, salaries and other expenses before Greece's so called troika of international lenders returns to Athens on Friday to inspect his progress. The country's next installment of bailout money will depend on his getting a passing grade. But on the streets of Athens, there is a sense that this latest effort to placate Greece's lenders may be a last straw for the public. After two and a half years of wrenching austerity, "they will not be able to get more money from us than they already have," Mrs. Kastaniotou, 44, said as her three teenage daughters and husband nodded in agreement. "Mark my words," she added. "In the coming months, there will be a revolution, and this government will fall." Greece had all but slipped from the radar screen during August, after financial markets went onto late summer autopilot and troika inspectors from Brussels, Frankfurt and other North European cities headed off on their vacations. But as investors start speculating once again on the euro's future, this troubled country is returning to a central role in Europe's long running debt drama. And even as much of Europe awaits word Thursday on what steps the European Central Bank may take next to try to insure there are no more Greek style collapses, the Athens government is already in a critical care category beyond the help of any new E.C.B. remedies. Few people here expect or even want Greece to exit the euro. But the country is once again running out of cash. It continues to depend on loans from the troika: the International Monetary Fund, the E.C.B. and the European Commission. And despite Greece's teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the troika has been withholding EUR31.5 billion, or 39.7 billion, pending a review of Greece's efforts to make good on pledges to repay its loans. A preliminary review is expected to be conducted next week, with a final report card due in early October. Should that report be negative, a fresh wave of financial troubles would wash over this country. The broader concern is that the ripples would spread to other troubled euro zone countries, including Spain and Italy, which are struggling against a crisis of confidence by financial markets. (It is primarily those two big economies that any E.C.B. action on Thursday or in coming weeks would be intended to protect.) Mr. Samaras, citing his country's deep recession, is pleading with Greece's lenders to give the country a couple more years to implement the austerity measure that Athens had pledged as a condition of receiving its rescue, and to meet its promises to mend its tattered finances. Many German politicians and citizens in particular are loath to grant Greece any extensions if it means European taxpayers would have to lend Greece even more money to cover the interest payments that would be incurred. All of which is why Mr. Samaras wants to push through EUR11.5. billion in new budget cuts right now, as a way to persuade Greece's lenders to resume dispensing money to Athens from the EUR130 billion bailout that Europe and the I.M.F. agreed to. That money has been held largely in suspension since a caretaker government was installed in May following inconclusive elections, and a second round of elections held in June resulted in Mr. Samara's emergence as prime minister. A leaked draft of the budget cutting blueprint foresees fresh cuts to pensions and state spending in the health sector, defense and local government subsidies, as well as plans to push up to 40,000 civil servants out of the public sector by 2014, chiefly through forced retirement. Still, Mr. Samaras faces a stiff challenge in pushing those measures through his shaky coalition government. The two junior partners, the Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos and the moderate chief of the Democratic Left, Fotis Kouvelis, have misgivings about proposed additional cuts to pensions and civil servants' salaries fearing the social unrest it would cause. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Those concerns are probably not unfounded. Even if the government can hold itself together, such unrest seems increasingly inevitable. After two and a half years of cutbacks, a fifth straight year of grinding recession, and a jobless rate that is now above 23 percent, many Greeks are livid at the prospect of more cuts. The public refrained from holding protests during the elections. But now that Mr. Samaras is trying to impose more cuts on average workers but none on the oligarchs or on wealthy Greeks suspected of stashing their money in foreign accounts many people have been taking to the streets in recent days, ahead of the troika's visit. On Wednesday, judges, public prosecutors and court workers demonstrated in front of Greece's Supreme Court to protest a further round of pay cuts on top of 20 percent to 50 percent salary reductions already implemented over the last two years. Large swaths of the police force went on strike across the country last week, and firefighters and coast guard officials are to hold a march on Thursday. Perhaps more dire, in the last few weeks, numerous Greeks have been obliged to pay for the health services after doctors and pharmacists stopped providing them on credit to protest debts owed to them by the state. News reports that the troika may insist on further measures, like insisting that Greeks work a six day week, have not cooled passions here, even though Greek officials have denied rumors that the European lenders would insist on an extended workweek and other labor market reforms. As tension rises on the streets of Athens, Mr. Samaras and his energetic finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, have been conducting a charm offensive across Europe to persuade power brokers like the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the French president, Francois Hollande, and a phalanx of influential bureaucrats in Brussels that Greece means to stick to its pledges. Mr. Hollande has sounded an upbeat note, stating Tuesday that a Greek request for a two year extension to its fiscal adjustment period could be granted if the troika issues a positive report on the country's reform drive and as long as Greece does not ask its lenders for more money. Late last month, Ms. Merkel also repeated her desire to see Greece remain in the euro, and admonished German officials who have been calling for Greece's ouster to quiet down. On Wednesday, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, told German radio that speculation about a Greek exit from the euro was "not helpful." Still, he struck a stern tone with Mr. Stournaras, who visited him in Berlin on Tuesday, saying Greece must focus on implementing the agreed to reforms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
A neon sign at a former bank branch on 56th Street and Broadway in Manhattan beckons passers by to the "Bach Store," where the pianist Evan Shinners is playing five hours of Bach every day for more than a month. It looks like a typical pop up shop: the spare but cool neon signs, the bare whitewashed walls, the table up front for sales. But the offerings at this temporary storefront in the heart of Manhattan are musical: the music of J.S. Bach. Inside the shop, a Juilliard trained pianist, Evan Shinners, is playing five hours of Bach each and every day for more than 30 straight days, even on Thanksgiving and presenting evening concerts with guests. He calls it the Bach Store. The sight of Mr. Shinners at a Yamaha grand piano behind the plate glass windows of a former bank branch on 56th Street and Broadway, within view of the stage door of Carnegie Hall, is drawing a stream of listeners for short doses of Bach. Marica Coniglio, 33, a tourist from Sicily, stopped in after visiting the Museum of Modern Art ("It was very peaceful and unusual," she said). David Niles, 57, a New Yorker, was picking up a Citi Bike nearby when he ducked in. ("It was an unexpected surprise," he said.) The Bach Store is both an effort to make live Bach more accessible and available and something of an inward journey for Mr. Shinners, who is 32. It is also a marathon. "My arms are falling apart," he confessed on the 20th day as he took a break from playing preludes and fugues from "The Well Tempered Clavier" to a small crowd ranging in age from toddlers to older adults who had paid the suggested 10 admission charge. He practices in the shop daily from noon to 5:30 p.m., and evening concerts are at 6:15. There is merchandise, too: The shop sells T shirts emblazoned with the name of Mr. Shinners' alter ego, W.T.F. Bach; Bach cigarette lighters; stress balls shaped like brains that say "Yours Bach's," and condoms that note on their wrappers that Bach had fathered 20 children. Mr. Shinners said the marathon was partly inspired by an experience he had seeking the tutelage of the French harpsichordist and great Bach interpreter Pierre Hantai, who rebuffed him with a deep, two page letter that he wound up taking very much to heart. "He had Googled me and dismissed me as of the generation that tries to make high art accessible through YouTube gimmicks and things like that and I was certainly guilty of that," said Mr. Shinners, who has made videos playing Bach on two different pianos at once, and who, as W.T.F. Bach, performs electronic arrangements of Bach. In declining to meet him, Mr. Shinners said, Mr. Hantai wrote that his concern was not a matter of style, but of spiritual elevation. "I took it upon myself to face this quote for five hours a day and to try to elevate myself spiritually," he said. "And to put myself in a public setting where I could expose myself in a way that I was probably previously afraid to expose myself." The project was supported by a 20,000 grant from Music Academy of the West which Mr. Shinners attended in 2009 as one of its inaugural Alumni Enterprise Awards, given to music projects with community impact. Scott Reed, the academy's president, said in an interview that Mr. Shinner's project was "the ultimate accessibility of great music." As the end approached, Mr. Shinners, who had initially envisioned playing only during the month of November, decided to extend the run into the first week of December. And he is already thinking about a reprise. "So many people come in here and leave so exalted, and that's moving," he said. "So I think I will have to do it again."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Philadelphia Eagles were too cursed for too long to finally win a Super Bowl without a "Twilight Zone" worthy twist. Fate granted the Eagles a championship but denied them the franchise quarterback they thought they were getting with it. Carson Wentz's career has been clouded by skepticism since the moment Nick Foles hoisted the Lombardi Trophy at the end of the 2017 season. Three seasons later, Wentz's benching in favor of Jalen Hurts, a rookie, casts doubts on his future and threatens to plunge the Eagles into a long, bitter rebuilding cycle. Wentz is suffering through a catastrophic 2020 season. He leads the N.F.L. with 15 interceptions and has endured 50 sacks, 10 more than any other quarterback. While a revolving door cast of receivers and offensive linemen deserves a share of the blame, those players have nothing to do with the fact that Wentz's throwing mechanics, accuracy, timing and decision making have gone haywire. He is hesitant to throw to wide open receivers, blunders into sacks while stumbling around the pocket and appears almost morally opposed to checking down for a safe 4 yard toss when he can force a 40 yard interception instead. Worst of all, his 2020 performance looks less like an extended slump than the final stage of a three year decline. Wentz, the second overall selection in the 2016 draft, appeared destined for superstardom when he threw 33 touchdown passes and led the Eagles to an 11 2 record in 2017 before tearing his anterior cruciate ligament in December. Foles, a journeyman backup, relieved Wentz and led the Eagles through the playoffs and past the New England Patriots for the franchise's first Super Bowl victory. Foles, not Wentz, outdueled Tom Brady, caught the "Philly Special" and was honored with a statue outside Lincoln Financial Field. Anyone who studied ancient history knows that a general as triumphant as Foles either becomes emperor or is exiled to a barren Mediterranean island, and quarterback disputes are typically resolved similarly. Yet the Eagles retained both quarterbacks for the 2018 season. Wentz proved to be turnover and mistake prone when he returned to the lineup, and fracturing a vertebra in December of that year led to another late season hot streak by Foles that propelled the Eagles into the playoffs. The time had come for an exile, and for a confidence boosting coronation. Foles signed with the Jacksonville Jaguars in the 2019 off season. Wentz signed a four year, 128 million extension, then battled through another mixed bag of a season. He threw for 4,039 yards and 27 touchdowns to lead the injury ravaged Eagles to a playoff berth in 2019, but appeared to be malfunctioning for long stretches. His season ended with yet another injury in a playoff loss. Foles's ineffectiveness in Jacksonville in 2019 silenced any second guessers, but Wentz's time without a challenger would be brief. The Eagles ostensibly selected Hurts in the second round of this year's draft to provide an insurance policy against further Wentz injuries and to add an occasional wildcat wrinkle to their offense. It was like a couple thinking an amicable third partner would somehow spice up their romance, and had about as high a likelihood for success. Hurts's cameos on gadget plays took on increasing significance as Wentz flailed, but Coach Doug Pederson seemed reluctant to risk upstaging Wentz by giving Hurts more to do. Hurts finally replaced Wentz with the Eagles trailing, 20 3, in the third quarter against the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, and did a better job of moving the offense, though that may have been the case only because the Packers were unprepared for the switch. Pederson named Hurts the starter against the New Orleans Saints for Week 14; the battle for the future of the franchise has officially been joined. Moving on from Wentz, if the Eagles choose to do so, will not be as simple as reprinting the depth charts. Wentz's contract guarantees him huge sums in staggered stages, insulating him from any hasty organizational decisions. Wentz will cost the Eagles almost 35 million in cap space to keep in 2021, but over 59 million to cut. So even if Hurts assumes the job and plays like Patrick Mahomes for the next month, Wentz will almost certainly remain on the 2021 roster. Furthermore, the Eagles project to be 66 million over next year's salary cap because of the backloaded contracts of many veteran Super Bowl holdovers. Any attempt at a cap purge could leave the Eagles with Hurts leading a lineup of minimum wage earners while Wentz eats a prohibitive chunk of the payroll to clap politely from the bench. The Eagles are in no financial position to begin rebuilding around a rookie quarterback, which circles back to the question of why they drafted one. The Eagles' no win quarterback predicament reflects poorly upon Pederson, who supervised Wentz's backslide into ineptitude, and upon General Manager Howie Roseman, who negotiated Wentz's contract, drafted Hurts and strained the limits of team economics to keep much of the Super Bowl nucleus intact. Roseman has added almost no top tier offensive talent in the last three seasons, and Pederson's game plans have stagnated, making Wentz as much a symptom of the Eagles' deeper problems as the cause. However the Wentz Hurts dilemma plays out, it will look nothing like what the Eagles were hoping for when Wentz's ascendance led, indirectly, to a Super Bowl victory. Instead of enjoying the prosperity and stability that come with a young franchise quarterback, they're trapped in a "Groundhog Day" cycle of desperate reruns, where the same creaky cast enters September with championship aspirations but reaches December wondering whether a backup will be able to bail out an increasingly battered, bewildered starter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The actual news? The spacecraft remains the same, but it has a new name. The Solar Probe Plus spacecraft is now the Parker Solar Probe, named after Eugene N. Parker, the astrophysicist who predicted the supersonic solar wind a barrage of charged particles ejected by the sun at more than a million miles per hour. About 20 spacecraft have been named after prominent scientists, including Edwin Hubble, Lyman Spitzer Jr., Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Enrico Fermi, but this is the first time that a NASA mission carries the name of a living scientist. The spacecraft, now being built and tested, is to launch next year on an elliptical trajectory that will take it within the orbit of Mercury. Repeated flybys of Venus will act as a gravitational brake to bring it closer to the sun, and it will eventually dive within four million miles of the sun's surface, while accelerating to 430,000 miles per hour. That will make it, by far, the fastest human made object ever. "I'm greatly honored to be associated with this heroic scientific mission," Dr. Parker said. He predicted the existence of the solar wind in 1958. The idea was outlandish, and referees of the paper at The Astrophysical Journal initially rejected it. At the time, the region between planets was regarded as boring empty space. Dr. Parker instead described complex interactions between speeding charged particles and buffeted magnetic fields. "It was a fundamental insight that forever changed the way in which we understand the sun, the heliosphere and in general interplanetary space," said Eric D. Isaacs, the executive vice president for research at the University of Chicago. More than half a century of observations since then have filled in many details, but a core mystery remains: How does the sun generate the solar wind? That mystery hinges on the heating of the sun's atmosphere. The surface of a sun is a toasty 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. About 1,300 miles above the surface, temperatures in the sun's atmosphere the corona rise to an infernal 3.5 million degrees. Scientists still do not understand the heating process, although the sun's magnetic field appears to play a key role. The superhot corona powers the supersonic solar winds. "Until you actually go there and touch the sun, you really can't answer these questions," said Nicola J. Fox, the mission scientist. "Why is the corona hotter than the surface of the sun? That defies the laws of nature. It's like water flowing uphill. It shouldn't happen."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In Italy, soccer stopped as fans of Lazio, a club based in Rome, were dreaming that their two decade wait for a league title might be ending, buoyed by an unbeaten run that started in September. In England, Liverpool was on course to end its 30 year championship drought with an all but insurmountable 25 point lead. But these teams, along with many others across Europe, have had their narrative arcs frozen in time by concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. As the virus spread across Europe, the talk was about when soccer would be stopped games were first played behind closed doors, then postponed and then subjected to blanket bans as governments moved to contain the crisis. Now, the question is when players will be able to return to the field. With millions of people isolated in their houses either by government edict or voluntarily, Lars Christer Olsson, the Swedish head of a group representing Europe's top soccer leagues, said his organization was looking into ways soccer could return even while movement restrictions remained in place for large parts of the continent's population. Games might be able to be played behind closed doors, if safe, he suggested, and be broadcast into homes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
On the morning of Jan. 11, 2018, Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, received a phone call from the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, summoning him to the White House. Durbin had been working for months with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on a deal to grant legal status to the so called "Dreamers" children who had been brought illegally into the country by their parents when they were very young, had grown up here and knew only the United States as home. The news from Trump was encouraging. "Wow," Durbin told an aide. "I think we may actually have a deal." Durbin and Graham who received a similar call that morning expected a private meeting with the president, but as they waited in the West Wing lobby a phalanx of hard liners arrived, led by Stephen Miller, the young mastermind of Trump's draconian immigration policies. Were they being ambushed? Durbin wondered. Indeed, they were. The meeting lapsed into a notorious Trump rant about accepting immigrants from "shithole countries." The president seemed amazed by the Durbin Graham proposal: "Wait a minute why do we want people from Haiti here?" Why not more people from Norway? Graham was flabbergasted: What had happened between 10 a.m., when the president called offering the deal, and noon, when the historic Oval Office tirade had taken place? "I don't know where that guy" the more amenable Trump "went," Graham told the homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen days later. "I want him back." Trump's bigoted eruption was instant news. But the context provided by the New York Times journalists Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear in their exquisitely reported "Border Wars" reveals the shattering horror of the moment, the mercurial unreliability and instability of the president. Davis and Shear perform this contextual service time and again throughout their book, which is essential reading for those searching for the "beating heart" of the Trump administration. The authors argue it is immigration policy, and who can dispute that? From his very first news conference as a presidential candidate, when he denounced Mexican border crossers as rapists and criminals, a rancid nativism aimed at people who have darker skins than Norwegians has been Trump's tribalist weapon of choice, his scalpel prodding the worst impulses of the American spirit. Nativism isn't as American as apple pie indeed, it is the very opposite of our country's heterogeneous intention but it has been with us since the Irish began arriving in droves in the mid 19th century. It has almost always been a minor chord in American politics, but it has flared from time to time with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the harsh restrictions on southern and eastern Europeans in 1924, and again today, 50 years after Lyndon Johnson liberalized immigration policy in 1965.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Credit...Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times In a penthouse suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel on a cloudy fall day not long ago, the actress Gabrielle Union was stretching her body out on a chartreuse velvet couch: resting her long legs with ease, a red pillow propped up behind her, saying absolutely nothing. Though the tiny room was filled with half a dozen people Ms. Union's publicist, a photographer clicking away, the photographer's assistant, Ms. Union's stylist, her makeup artist, her hairdresser and this reporter, who slunk quietly into a corner the space was silent. The silence went on for a few minutes. It wasn't uncomfortable, but it wasn't the kind of atmosphere one might expect around someone like Ms. Union, who, at least on social media, appears to be a natural extrovert. And who, as an advocate of sexual assault victims for over 20 years, feels a deep need to be emotionally available, open and talking. After a few minutes, once she was comfortable, Ms. Union asked for some music. "Tina on shuffle?" her publicist said. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? Ms. Union's silence, it turned out, was recuperation from the intense emotional experience of a monthlong book tour spent listening to painful stories of hundreds of women (and some men). For many showing up to buy her recently published memoir, "We're Going to Need More Wine," the area around her served as a sort of pop up safe space to express their pain. Some of her readers, she said, have experienced the most horrific abuses imaginable. The kind of abuses, she said, if someone were to put it in a movie, it wouldn't seem realistic. Some would wait at the end of the line to meet her so they could get more time. End of the line people were especially raw, Ms. Union said, as if their traumatic event just happened. Their story would tumble out in the seconds it would take for her to sign their book. And then came the tears. Ms. Union would weep too, in her hotel room every night on the tour, thinking of what some of these women had suffered. "Crying like I'm at a funeral," she said. The actress has been in the public eye for over 20 of her 45 years, so it's fair to say that these people sharing sensitive material with her don't feel as if they're meeting her for the first time. On her Instagram account, 9.1 million followers are treated to outfit changes and frequent flashes of a dimpled, dazzled smile. The other day Ms. Union posted a video taken in June of herself in a velour tracksuit, shimmying for friends to Beyonce's "Love on Top." Her husband, Dwyane Wade, is the shooting guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the team won that night, so the caption read: "Me after that win and rolling into the weekend like." If this materializes, it promises to be harrowing. "We're Going to Need More Wine" contains Ms. Union's own heart wrenching, deeply personal stories: about her infertility struggles, her childhood during which she lived in the all white Pleasanton, Calif., for the school year and spent summers with her grandmother and cousins in a predominantly black neighborhood in North Omaha. About her first marriage, to the N.F.L. player Chris Howard, and subsequent divorce; her relationship with her father; and about the time she was raped at gunpoint when she was 19. Her assailant was caught, and he took a plea deal of 33 years in jail. She doesn't know if he's still there. She doesn't want to know. The book was the natural outgrowth, Ms. Union said, of years of therapy. "There's a valve at the bottom of my canister where I can let things out in a healthy productive way," Ms. Union said over lunch at Maialino, an Italian restaurant. "Like Skype sessions with my therapist, with friends, silence, sitting out in nature, time with the kids, with my dogs. Watching 'This Is Us' that has been quite therapeutic." Her house in Cleveland is so quiet that a buck often hops into her backyard. She likes having a cup of coffee when no one is around, and stares at that deer. But such solitude isn't always easy to find. Mr. Wade has sole custody of two sons (Zaire, 15, and Zion, 10) from his first marriage, to Siohvaughn Funches, as well as custody of his nephew (Dahveon, 16). Ms. Union said she will sometimes claim "gastrointestinal issues" in the bathroom just to get a few minutes alone. She has been talking about "me too" for many years even writing about it in her book long before it became MeToo. On Oct. 17, the day the book was released, about two weeks after the Harvey Weinstein story broke, Ms. Union told Robin Roberts during a segment on "Good Morning America" that she has been repeating her sexual assault story "with the goal of never having to hear 'me too' again." When she first saw MeToo trending, her arm went numb, she told Ms. Roberts. "Post traumatic stress syndrome from the rape," Ms. Union said on the air, visibly shaken, her mouth quivering. All of the hugging and the touching on the book tour, as rewarding as it's been, can be difficult for her as a trauma survivor, she said at lunch. In "We're Going to Need More Wine," she writes, "No one understands how much female celebrities are physically touched and grabbed and shoved and fondled." She needs to sit facing out in restaurants such as this one, for instance, because she cannot enjoy her meal with her back to the door. Robinne Lee, an actress and the author of "The Idea of You," who has been a friend since the early 2000s, said she understood Ms. Union's motivation for writing and that her candor is not new. "Black women are not a monolith, and we all have very different experiences," Ms. Lee said. "So I think it was important for her to show that she had all of these different facets of her life." According to HarperCollins, Ms. Union's publisher, her book is now in its fourth print run and has over 100,000 copies in print. It spent three weeks on The New York Times nonfiction best seller list. But she has felt that navigating the book world as a black woman is not a simple task. (One 2015 study of 40 publishers and review journals found that nearly 80 percent of those who worked in publishing were white.) Ms. Union said that in her tour, only certain airports displayed the book, and that she had heard from readers that they had asked for it in certain cities, only to find it was still in stacks on the floor or in carts in the back. "So I started asking people to tell me what stores this was happening in. You don't want to alienate booksellers," Ms. Union said, "but where's my book?" One store, she said, began promoting her book only after the store was deluged by a Facebook campaign. Kima Jones, the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, a publicity company, and who mostly represents black authors including the Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess and the PEN America prize winner Rion Amilcar Scott was not surprised that Ms. Union, who is not her client, felt "We're Going to Need More Wine" received inadequate support. "It doesn't make sense in a way," Ms. Jones said in a phone call, "but it does make sense to me because that's the way a lot of books by black people, celebrity or not, are treated." Ms. Jones wondered if the glamorous aspects of Ms. Union's life might lead sellers to underestimate the gravitas of "We're Going to Need More Wine." "That in and of itself is a tragedy considering that her book I hate to use the word 'timely,' because this is something that should have been part of the cultural conversation for a long time but it is very ripe and very timely," Ms. Jones said. "There's actually no reason we shouldn't be talking about Gabrielle Union's book beside Roxane Gay's work or Leslie Jamison or Maggie Nelson's work or any of the other women who are talking as critics of popular culture." Ms. Union thinks she didn't visit enough cities or enough stores. She'd like to do a second leg of the book tour. And maybe there will be one, especially given how invested she is in the public discussion around sexual assault. A lot of times her tour stops felt like a revival, she said. "If those people hadn't been Hollywood royalty," she asked, referring to some of the women who first spoke out about Harvey Weinstein. "If they hadn't been approachable. If they hadn't been people who have had access to parts and roles and true inclusion in Hollywood, would we have believed?" She knows that her own platform gave her a place that allowed her to speak for people who have gone through similar experiences. She calls herself a "perfect victim": not just because of her current celebrity status, but also because she was raped at work, because it was caught on surveillance and the police were called but also because the majority of sexual assaults aren't reported to the police, according the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. "When we have the microphone, how often do we pass it back to the people who are experiencing a different challenge, but who are equally worthy as having the microphone?" Ms. Union asked. And then she stopped herself. "I just did this," she said, and stretched her hand backward, over her head, as if she was symbolizing a passing of the microphone to someone behind her.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
LOS ANGELES It seemed like a good deal. At first. Last April, Netflix offered Kay Reindl and her longtime writing partner a substantial sum in the mid six figures, Ms. Reindl said to oversee 10 episodes of a new sci fi series, "Sentient." It sounded like a lot of money for what they figured would be less than a year of work. Ms. Reindl and her writing partner, who have worked steadily as TV writers since the 1990s, would be executive producers, instead of staff writers on someone else's show. That would mean a lot more responsibility and much longer hours, but it seemed worth it. They found office space and hired a few writers. Then came a surprise: they learned that "Sentient" would actually take 18 months from start to finish. When Ms. Reindl did the math, she realized that, under the new timetable, she would be making roughly the same weekly pay as the writers she was overseeing. "It was a very bad day," Ms. Reindl said. The rise of streaming has been a blessing and a curse for working writers like Ms. Reindl, who said she and her partner had ultimately left "Sentient" because of creative differences unrelated to the length of the series. On demand digital video has ushered in the era of Peak TV, meaning there are more shows and more writing jobs than ever. But many of the jobs are not what they used to be in the days before streaming. When Ms. Reindl got her start, network series had 24 episodes or more a season. The typical TV writer's schedule looked something like this: Get hired by May or June, write furiously for most of the year, and then take a six week hiatus before the process started again. The seasonal rhythms that had been in place for TV writers since the days of "I Love Lucy" started to change more than two decades ago, when cable outlets put out 13 episode seasons of shows like HBO's "The Sopranos" and, later, AMC's "Mad Men." Streaming platforms have revised that model further: eight episode seasons of Netflix's "Stranger Things" and Disney Plus's "The Mandalorian"; six episode seasons of Amazon Prime Video's "Fleabag"; three and six episode batches of Netflix's "Black Mirror." Cable has replied in kind, offering fewer than 12 episode runs of shows like "Atlanta" on FX and "Silicon Valley" on HBO. "I think they're experimenting with the shortest product they can still call a TV series," said Steve Conrad, the president of Elephant Pictures, a production company in Chicago. "I couldn't keep this company together if it was fewer than eight, and it's coming." In addition to shortening season lengths, the streaming platforms have ignored the school year style calendar of television's network days, with its premieres in the weeks after Labor Day and finales late in the spring. Netflix has served up new seasons of its most watched program, "Stranger Things," in July. Apple TV Plus unveiled one of its most hyped shows, "Little America," in the middle of January. The rise of streaming has fattened the wallets of superstar writer producers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, while also giving chances to unproven writers. But the medium's shorter seasons and unpredictable cadences have made it harder for writers in Hollywood's middle class to plot out a year's work in a way that doesn't leave them nervous when mortgage payments are due. Complicating the issue is that streaming platforms have been known to take more time to make an episode than their network and cable counterparts. For many writers, that meant less money for more hours, and they complained to their union representatives. "Five years ago, it grew from an isolated problem to a dominant problem," said Chuck Slocum, the assistant executive director of the Writers Guild of America, West. "We had half of our members wake up and realize one day that they're making half the money that they were making." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The union worked out some protections for its members. Since 2018, studios are sometimes required to pay writers extra when filming runs longer than expected. That change kicked in too late to help Lila Byock, a writer whose credits include HBO's "The Leftovers" and Hulu's "Castle Rock." She said she was hired on a scripted series that she figured would last 10 months. Instead, it took nearly 18 months, which caused her to pass on other writing jobs. On the flip side, streaming seasons that require a short time commitment say, eight months can also wreak havoc on a writer's schedule. "You're not being paid by the studio for five months of the year, but that's not enough time to take on another show," said Mr. Conrad, of Elephant Pictures. The old TV calendar is not quite dead. Major producers of network shows, like Dick Wolf and Chuck Lorre, still must come up with at least 22 episodes per season of shows like NBC's "Chicago P.D." and CBS's "Young Sheldon." But with new streaming platforms like NBCUniversal's Peacock and HBO Max set to start in the spring, the lives of many TV writers are likely to get more chaotic. "I have friends working in network television and it's like they're on a different planet," said Harley Peyton, a writer and co executive producer of "Project Blue Book," a History Channel series with 10 episodes a season. He described staff positions on network shows as "the last full time jobs in this business," adding that "those jobs are extraordinarily difficult to get." The 10 established Hollywood writers who discussed the changes in the industry with The New York Times were careful to point out that they were still able to make good money, even amid the digital disruption of their industry. And yet, they said, it is common for veteran writers these days to be paid as if they were rookies. Jonathan Shikora, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents actors and writers, suggested that longtime TV writers were now underpaid. "Should I be getting the same as some new writer whose script I'm rewriting because their work is so green and new and I'm teaching that person?" he asked. Rob Long, once a writer and an executive producer of the long running NBC sitcom "Cheers," said he had tried to make allowances for the changes when he was in charge of "Sullivan Son," a TBS sitcom. That show had 10 episodes in its first two seasons and 13 in its third, a significant change from the 28 episode final season of "Cheers." That was fine with the financially secure Mr. Long, who said, "I got to be honest, I thought it was fantastic." The difficulty came when he was hiring staff writers. "I was making deals with younger writers just starting out," he said, "and I was doing the math." It took eight weeks to write the scripts and prepare for shooting. An additional 15 weeks brought the staff to the end of the production. The schedule meant that "Sullivan Son" would eat up nearly six months of staff writers' time. Under the terms of their contracts, they had to give priority to "Sullivan Son," meaning that, if the show got renewed, they were obligated to go back to it even if they were working on another project. "It was a de facto way of locking you up," Mr. Long said. So he came up with an informal solution that he has used on other shows since then.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
CAMBRIDGE, England On a recent evening, the 16 boys and 14 men of the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, stood in the gothic chapel where they perform, spread out in the flickering candlelight. A few of the choristers gazed at the vaulted ceiling about 80 feet above them. Then Daniel Hyde, the choir's music director, signaled that he was ready to begin, and all slipped off the masks they had been wearing to sing "I Saw Three Ships," a sprightly carol that will be heard by about 100 million people on Thursday. Each Christmas Eve, the choir's "Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols" is broadcast live on radio stations worldwide, including about 450 in the United States. (A separate service, "Carols from King's," recorded weeks in advance, is shown on BBC television in Britain.) The choir is one of the world's most famous, made up of boys age 9 to 13 who attend King's College school in the city, along with adult students from the University of Cambridge. In a typical year, the choir performs in religious services in the college chapel several times a week and tours worldwide. It has sung the Christmas Eve carol service every year since 1918, and the event has become a cherished holiday tradition. The choir continued singing "I Saw Three Ships" for about 15 minutes, pausing now and again so Mr. Hyde could give feedback and fine tune the sound. Although it seemed like an ordinary choir rehearsal, there was more at stake. Microphones in the chapel were ready to record everything in case a coronavirus outbreak or another government lockdown, as has since been introduced in London and most of England's southeast stopped them from singing live on Christmas Eve. Mr. Hyde reminded them of the evening's importance several times. "We want people at home to be on the edge of their seats," he said before one take. This year, because of the pandemic, the choir hasn't performed in public since March, when the coronavirus stopped group singing almost entirely in Europe. Scientists warned that choristers risked spreading the disease via airborne droplets, even in small groups. The safety of group singing has been in question ever since, especially after outbreaks were traced to choir practices worldwide. "There was one point this summer when I thought singing wouldn't be possible until there was a vaccine," Mr. Hyde said in an interview after the rehearsal. The picture improved this fall when scientists and governments issued guidelines advising how choirs could rehearse safely indoors. Most required singers to be spaced at least six feet apart, use large well ventilated spaces and limit rehearsal times. But such measures have not stopped coronavirus outbreaks. On Nov. 28, a member of the Danish National Concert Choir in Copenhagen tested positive for the coronavirus, and soon 44 other members followed. At the start of this month, 19 members of the Gothenburg Opera Chorus in Sweden tested positive after the ensemble met for two rehearsals. Unlike in Denmark and Sweden, scientists in the United States have also recommend that choristers wear masks. Mr. Hyde said the first step toward bringing the King's College choir back together had been to rehearse via Zoom. That was "tedious," he said: Time delays on the video platform meant being able to listen to only one singer at a time. In June, some of the choir's younger members returned to in person rehearsals when their school reopened, but they had to wear visors as a safety precaution. "It was so difficult," said one of them, Rufus Balch, 10. "The sound was just bouncing off the visor back into you," he added. "You thought you were really loud, but you weren't!" The singers arrive at rehearsals at different times to limit mixing, and the two groups stand at least six feet apart from each other when singing. The public has not been allowed into the chapel, so the choir has effectively stopped performing its religious role. Instead it has worked, then worked some more, toward the Christmas Eve service. In interviews, six choir members said the hardest thing about the new rules was the social distancing, which meant they heard one another a fraction of a second later than usual in the chapel's famously resonant acoustic. "It very much feels like you're singing a solo a lot of the time, which is slightly daunting," said Jacob Partington, 21. "You just have to keep telling yourself we are incredibly lucky to be doing this at all," added Owen Elsley, 27. Extra measures were taken to keep the adult members safe from the virus, Mr. Elsley added. They took weekly coronavirus tests, and nine of the 14 moved into a large house together to lessen contacts with others. "There is always that niggling little thought in the back of your mind that if one person goes down, then all of us go down," Mr. Elsley said. "But nothing's happened yet." Four days after the interview, though, on Dec. 8, two members of the house tested positive for coronavirus, and all of the men were pulled from a recording of the carol service for BBC television. The King's Singers, a vocal ensemble formed by former members of the choir, was called up as a replacement. He didn't get his wish. On Dec. 18, with coronavirus cases soaring in Britain and rumors circulating that a new lockdown was imminent, the choir canceled the live broadcast. It decided it just couldn't risk going ahead and contributing to the growth of the pandemic. This year, listeners around the world on Christmas Eve will hear the December recording instead. Mr. Hyde said in a telephone interview after the decision that he had heard the recording and he was sure it would keep listeners on the edge of their seats. "I feel lucky we had the foresight to make it," he said. "Given the year we've all had, I hope people will feel a special connection."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In what was more than just a whimsical romp through the South Caucasus, the reality television stars and other family members made several historically significant stops over the last week during their first visit to the ancestral homeland of Robert Kardashian, the patriarch of the family who died in 2003. The trip was chronicled on Kim Kardashian West's Instagram account, which has nearly 30 million followers, and her sister Khloe's, with 19 million. Armenia, by contrast, has no Instagram account for travelers. But the Kardashians more than made up for that. "Long hair don't care," Ms. West wrote in a post just before she and her sister headed to the Mother Armenia statue in the capital city, Yerevan, the many steps to which were no challenge for her strappy high heeled sandals. Joined by two cousins, the four women later sat down for a face to face with Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan to discuss the centennial commemoration of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the early 20th century that some, including Pope Francis, have labeled "genocide."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Netflix has done a fine job in recent years of stockpiling horror films from established classics to newer pictures discovered at international film festivals. But which are the scariest? It's a pleasure to watch a smart, artful and culturally relevant fright flick. But it's even better when it spooks you into leaving the lights on after bedtime. Looking to be thoroughly terrorized this Halloween season? Here are 13 devilish films that will have even the most stoic souls jumping at shadows. The writer director Osgood Perkins sets his atmospheric feature filmmaking debut, "The Blackcoat's Daughter," at a mostly empty private Catholic girls' academy, where a worldly senior played by Lucy Boynton reluctantly looks after a timid freshman played by Kiernan Shipka. While the two young ladies wait for their parents to pick them up, they investigate strange noises around the building. In a separate story line, a mysterious woman (Emma Roberts) races toward that same school. Perkins brings these pieces together for a gruesome final act, rooted in the idea that one bad choice in youth can haunt a person forever. (Read The New York Times review.) Madeline Brewer gives an outstanding performance in the sexually explicit and disturbing "Cam" a voyeuristic thriller for the internet age. Brewer plays Alice, an upbeat and unusually creative "cam girl," who strips online for money, performing shows that appeal to her fans' love of darkness and danger. When someone usurps Alice's persona and starts sapping her income, she tries to figure out who's been messing with her livelihood, and descends into paranoia as she realizes the people she's been working for may actually own her identity. (Read The New York Times review.) "Creep" the first found footage horror collaboration between the director Patrick Brice and his co writer and star, Mark Duplass is also available on Netflix, and is deeply unsettling. But it's OK to jump straight to the superior "Creep 2," in which Desiree Akhavan plays a YouTuber named Sara who agrees to spend a day shooting video of a man who claims to be a prolific serial killer. Duplass plays Sara's subject, who may be lying for the sake of soaking up this young woman's attention ... or who may be luring her to her doom. (Read The New York Times review.) Decades before Sam Raimi directed the first three "Spider Man" movies, he became a hero to horror fans with his imaginative low budget 1981 film "The Evil Dead." What starts as a typical "college kids partying in the woods" picture takes a turn when the youngsters accidentally open a portal to another dimension. Raimi works in elements of slapstick comedy, expertly performed by his leading man, Bruce Campbell. Gags aside, the first "Evil Dead" remains the scariest of the franchise, with a dynamic visual style that lets the audience see the action from the perspective of the demons, as they swoop rapidly in on their prey. (Read The New York Times review.) The shock rocker Rob Zombie made his feature directing debut with this grubby gore fest, pitched as a knowing throwback to the sleazy drive in fare of the 1970s. The premise is simple: A group of young friends get captured and tortured by a depraved family named Firefly and ... well, that's pretty much it. Zombie's obvious enthusiasm for atmospheric grotesquerie and true crime mythology later spun into two much more ambitious sequels gives this splatter flick real personality. "House of 1000 Corpses" is a movie made for horror connoisseurs, who don't mind being brutalized and disgusted. (Read The New York Times review.) Though it eventually builds to scenes of terrifying violence, for most of its running time "The Invitation" is just as much about the existential dread of awkward social interactions. Logan Marshall Green plays Will, a grieving father who reluctantly agrees to attend a dinner party hosted by his ex wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard). As the night wears on, Will becomes increasingly convinced that his hosts are part of a death cult. His attempts to warn his friends come off more like the erratic behavior of the emotionally wounded, playing out in scenes as riveting and nerve racking as any slasher film. (Read The New York Times review.) The producer and co writer Steven Spielberg often gets the bulk of the credit for the blockbuster hit "Poltergeist," a chilling ghost story set in the kind of cozy suburbia Spielberg has often featured in his movies. But the film is also clearly the work of its more acerbic director, Tobe Hooper. Though less gruesome and assaultive than Hooper's best known film "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," this tale of restless spirits plaguing a pleasant middle class family has a feeling of queasy anxiety, even before all hell breaks loose. The cast and crew make an ordinary American neighborhood feel like a village of the damned. (Read The New York Times review.) Shot on digital video at a time when cameras weren't as high tech as they are today, the supernatural thriller "Session 9" has a stark and hazy look, befitting its story of a down on their luck asbestos removal crew, who start disappearing under mysterious circumstances while working in an abandoned Massachusetts mental hospital. A terrific cast led by Peter Mullan and David Caruso captures the creeping anxiety that overwhelms these men as they work in the shadows, in a building that once housed some very troubled people. The director Brad Anderson and his team crank up the tension with a sound design that makes every creak and whisper sound ominous. (Read The New York Times review.) Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play a mad scientist couple who create life in a lab in "Splice," a well acted and energetic science fiction film that goes to dark places. The writer director Vincenzo Natali and his co writers Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor spend a lot of time developing the relationship between the two prickly geniuses before introducing the horror they make together: a spry humanoid beast they name Dren, who has a stinging tail, a croaking voice and the torso of a teenage girl. Though Dren is deadly, the horror in "Splice" derives more from the discomfort these "parents" feel about what they've spawned. (Read The New York Times review.) The writer director J.D. Dillard and his co writers Alex Hyner and Alex Theurer find a fresh angle on the giant monster movie in "Sweetheart," an intense and intimate thriller about a castaway stuck on a remote island patrolled by a human eating leviathan. Kiersey Clemons gives an excellent performance as the heroine, who has to think her way through the problems of how to keep herself fed and how to avoid becoming dinner. The filmmakers throw some surprises into this short, tightly plotted picture but never stray too far from the core appeal: the scenes of a clever young woman fighting to keep control of her situation. This innovative take on the found footage horror subgenre has been designed to look like a laptop screen, filled with face to face calls and text messages, playing out in real time. The director Leo Gabriadze, the screenwriter Nelson Greaves and a talented young cast use this gimmick to tell a good story, about high school friends who appear to be haunted by the ghost of a bullied classmate. "Unfriended" has a deftly constructed plot that reveals, gradually and chillingly, how social media makes it easier for kids to be cruel to each other. (Read The New York Times review.) A sick spin on a popular party game, "Would You Rather" carries an idle thought experiment to its most wonderfully appalling extreme. When a group of cash strapped folks accept a dinner invitation from an eccentric millionaire, they find themselves attempting gross, life threatening dares. Will they slice open their own eyeballs? Hold firecrackers in their hands? Murder their fellow guests? In this provocative and wince inducing shocker, the director David Guy Levy and the screenwriter Steffen Schlachtenhaufen expose the perversity of the American class system, which allows the decadent rich to buy the complicity of the needy. (Read The New York Times review.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Protesters outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, Conn., last year. The company, which introduced the prescription painkiller OxyContin in 1996, is blamed for much of the opioid epidemic. The Sackler family would give up ownership of Purdue Pharma, the company blamed for much of the opioid epidemic, and pay 3 billion of their own money under terms of a settlement proposal to resolve thousands of federal and state lawsuits, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. The discussions have been going on for months as Purdue and the Sacklers have sought to prevent any new lawsuits against individual members of the family as well as their company. If all the parties agree and the settlement is completed, Purdue would be the first among some two dozen manufacturers, distributors and retailers of prescription opioids facing lawsuits nationwide to settle all claims against it for its role in a public health crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the past two decades. A document outlining a tentative negotiated agreement, which was described to The New York Times, valued the family's and company's contributions at between 10 billion and 12 billion, including the 3 billion Sackler contribution. But it would not be a straightforward cash payout. The bulk of the funds would come from restructuring the company under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that would transform it from a private company into a "public beneficiary trust." That would allow the profits from all drug sales, including the opioid painkiller OxyContin, to go to the plaintiffs largely states, cities, towns and tribes. In addition, the company would give its addiction treatment drugs to the public without cost. Those drugs are currently under development and have received fast track review status by the Food and Drug Administration. They include tablets to blunt opioid cravings and an over the counter nasal spray to reverse overdoses. The value of the profits from the new trust and the drug donations is estimated to total between 7 billion and 8 billion. In addition to their 3 billion cash payout, the Sacklers would sell another drug company they own, Mundipharma, and contribute an additional 1.5 billion from the proceeds. "The Weekly," our new TV show, examines why a confidential government document containing evidence so critical it had the potential to change the course of the opioid crisis was kept in the dark for more than a decade. The settlement talks were first reported by NBC. Purdue emailed a statement in response to the reports: "While Purdue Pharma is prepared to defend itself vigorously in the opioid litigation, the company has made clear that it sees little good coming from years of wasteful litigation and appeals. The people and communities affected by the opioid crisis need help now. Purdue believes a constructive global resolution is the best path forward, and the company is actively working with the state attorneys general and other plaintiffs to achieve this outcome." Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, who filed the first state lawsuit against individual Sackler family members, declined to comment on the content of the settlement negotiations. The settlement talks have been underway for months, largely at the behest of Judge Dan Polster, the federal judge in Cleveland who is overseeing some 2,000 lawsuits by the local governments against companies in the opioids industry. Purdue wants to achieve what is called a global settlement an agreement by all parties that would end the lawsuits. To reach that goal, both the states, whose cases have been brought by their respective attorneys general, and the federal plaintiffs would have to make a unified agreement with Purdue. The framework for the agreement and which plaintiffs would sign on to it are still in flux. People familiar with the discussions expressed dismay that news was leaked at the 11th hour, just before the participants were to give a status report to Judge Polster on Friday. Some worried that the publicity could compromise the already delicate talks. Judge Polster had ordered all participants not to speak to anyone outside the negotiations about the content. The executive committee for the plaintiffs issued a terse statement to The New York Times: "Per Judge Polster's confidentiality order that we will respect, we cannot speak publicly to any speculation or media reports on settlement negotiations with the defendants we are preparing to litigate against in federal court this fall." Currently, about 10 states have been at the negotiation talks. What remains to be seen is whether the other 38 or so states that have filed lawsuits will agree. Also up in the air is whether a larger group of 34,000 cities and counties that have not yet filed lawsuits would agree to be bound by this framework. If the agreement can be completed, Purdue would immediately file for bankruptcy and be under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge. The judge would appoint three independent trustees, who would in turn name a board of directors for the new public beneficiary trust. The independent trustees and the board would make all decisions about how the revenues from continuing operation of Purdue's businesses should be handled. The Sacklers would no longer be involved in the companies founded by three Sackler brothers in the 1950s. Although Purdue has a relatively small share of the opioid market in the United States, its introduction of the prescription painkiller OxyContin in 1996 and no holds barred sales tactics are widely seen as initiating the two decade long slide into opioid addiction that gripped the country. Even as early as 2007, Purdue and three top executives pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug's risk of addiction and its potential to be abused. But despite paying a fine of 600 million, the company continued its aggressive promotion of the drug, playing down its risk and overselling its benefits.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
I knocked and knocked on the door to the artist's studio, beside the plastic logo of a painter's palette. It had been so hard to find the address of this musty commercial building on Hong Kong's Wyndham Street, I was beginning to think it was time to give up on finding my old friend Ng Tak Tung there. In 1997, just a few days after my college graduation, I moved alone to this island in the South China Sea to work at a business magazine. Much had been made of the British handing over control of their colony to the Chinese, which for many marked the symbolic end of an empire and an era. I wanted a little history, a little adventure and a little excitement, and ended up with more of all three than I was prepared to handle. From the deck of a rented junk bobbing off Stanley Beach, I watched teams of men and women furiously paddle their brightly painted dragon boats, the carved wooden heads, teeth bared, jutting from the prows. I reported from a demonstration for the first time, a candlelight vigil in Victoria Park with tens of thousands of participants to honor the democracy protesters slain at Tiananmen Square eight years before. A few weeks after that, I sat in a tiny storefront bar festooned with Christmas lights and watched a television news report showing that, just before dawn, armored personnel carriers brought Chinese troops over the border from Shenzhen. That same weekend, at the red and white brick Foreign Correspondents' Club, a giant of a man in muddy black tuxedo pants and an untucked pleated shirt head butted me because the bar was closed and he couldn't get a drink. And I had a darts partner from the Chinese island of Hainan, a painter who spoke as little English as I did Hainanese, which is to say none. But Tak Tung and I became unlikely friends at the dive bar across from my office on Hollywood Road, the Globe. He had a knack confounding the Britons we defeated for missing the easy throws and then hitting the bull's eye with improbable consistency. Since our words flew unintelligibly past each other, we communicated by drawing on napkins and beer coasters. We sketched the people we knew. We drew maps, of Hong Kong and China, of the world, of boats and airplanes and the dotted lines that described our respective journeys. The last time Tak Tung and I saw each other, he invited me back to his studio. He picked up the phone (a landline, of course) and dialed a number and handed the receiver to me. A woman was on the other end his wife. She said she was in the hospital and that her husband was having a difficult time because of her illness. He wanted me to know it meant a lot to him to have me as a friend. Soon after, I left that part of the world. It was long before Facebook. A lot of people didn't even have email addresses yet. And when you made a broke, disorderly retreat from a city as I did, you lost touch with most of your friends half a world away. Now two decades on, the only relic I had of Tak Tung was a small reproduction of a painting he had made of a bar scene in the Lan Kwai Fong night life district. As I prepared to return for the first time since the autumn of 1997, I searched online and found only a painting of wine bottles sold at Christie's a decade earlier and an ancient looking website for an art school with the purple palette logo I had come to stand beside now. No one answered my knocking. So much had happened in the 20 years of Chinese rule the SARS epidemic, creeping authoritarianism, the protest movement I did not expect to recognize Hong Kong. Looking on Wikipedia before my wife, Rachel, and I left for the trip, I saw that 18 of the 20 tallest buildings in the city had been built since I departed. I could picture the modern skyscrapers as they rose, cloaked in canvas and the city's traditional bamboo scaffolding. But as we scanned Google Maps for hotels, I pointed out my old apartment on Lyndhurst Terrace, traced my finger along the path I used to take down to the ferry pier. Rachel noted that I remembered the street names from 20 years ago better, in some cases, than those in Crown Heights, where we have lived for three years. Upon our plane's descent into Hong Kong, I looked out the window onto cargo ships slowly plying through gray green waters, the shipping containers like so many primary colored Legos stacked on their decks and could see the dark masses of the outlying islands jutting up from the water. I found it all instantly recognizable. Despite our extreme jet lag, I goaded us into a lengthy walking tour, each memory pushing me a few more steps, and the next sight leading to another memory. I showed Rachel the incense filled Man Mo Temple and the stone wall trees, banyans whose sprawling gray roots clung to the faces of old retaining walls like dense webs. The rank markets of raw flesh and living sea creatures still defied the advances of sterile supermarkets. And when there was no answer at Tak Tung's studio, I pushed us onward. The Star Ferry chugged us across the harbor, cheap as ever, offering amazing views of the bristling forest of high rises scaling Victoria Island. We disembarked and surged into the crowded insanity of Tsim Sha Tsui at the tip of Kowloon, on the mainland side, more densely packed than ever but the explosion of warm neon light largely extinguished in favor of cheaper LED. We plunged into the themed clusters of shops in nearby Mong Kok, touring the Goldfish Market, with thousands of colorful little fish swimming tiny circles in the rows and rows of plastic bags where they were displayed. We saw Flower Market Street's profusion of blossoms, including locally grown lilies and chrysanthemums. And we watched proud owners introduce their brightly plumed, squawking parrots at the Yuen Po Bird Garden. This was a far cry from my old routine in Hong Kong. When I first arrived in the city, I discovered that I was working semi legally at best, dispatched by hydrofoil to the Portuguese colony of Macau (now part of China) when my tourist visa was about to expire for a new stamp upon re entry. The only room I could afford was hardly bigger than the single wooden framed futon I slept on; once I put it down, the tiny bed filled the entire floor. My clothes hung on a pressure rod above my head so I could stand up only by pushing my shirts and slacks aside. Instead of a shower there was a hole in the bathroom floor and a spray nozzle attached to the sink. The kitchen consisted of a single burner attached to a propane tank. I did not spend a lot of time on Flower Market Street perusing fresh blossoms. I spent most of my time at the Globe. For anyone raised on back to back syndicated episodes of Cheers as I was, the Globe represented an ideal: not just an after work hangout, but a lifeline in a new city, with a built in group of friends. One night we decided we didn't know enough jokes so we required all customers to tell one before they could order a drink. We drew up lists of countries and cities each had visited for fun. Bets were settled with a paperback Guinness book, a dictionary and a complete works of Shakespeare. The darts matches went late into the night, and even when you had to wake him up for his turn, Tak Tung still hit the bull's eye. When the time came, we hiked the auxiliary staircase to the roof. But as the fireworks started, all we could see was a flickering halo around a dark rectangular silhouette. The hulking unlit mass of a skyscraper under construction, which had sprung up since the last fireworks display, eclipsed the light show for this political theater piece. The handover was planned and choreographed far in advance, but the Asian Financial Crisis was pure improvised catastrophe. The magazine where I worked was Thai owned and after the baht collapsed they stopped paying us. I was evicted. I had no recourse or safety net but the bartenders at the Globe, who adopted me. I found myself sleeping on the sofa of a kindly barmaid and her electrician boyfriend. As my financial position deteriorated, my beers were slipped surreptitiously on to the checks of rowdy bankers who were never the wiser. By the time I visited this year, the Globe had shut down on Hollywood Road, but avid patrons had chipped in to reopen it around the corner. The old metal sign from outside had been salvaged and now hung on a wall inside. The signature painting of a map of the world presided over a nook filled with games and books. At the old Globe, meals were made or should I say, cheese was melted in a toaster oven. The new iteration was a full on gastro pub with delicate fish and truffle polenta. Rachel and I ate in Hong Kong as I never could have back when cut rate scallion pancakes and cheap, filling McDonald's value meals were all I could afford. We had Sichuan fried chicken and pork belly buns at Little Bao; dim sum at the traditional Luk Yu Tea House, with its wooden booths and ceiling fans; and black truffle dumplings at the Sohofama restaurant in the converted police barracks, the PMQ, now a hip mix of art, retail and dining in Hong Kong's Soho neighborhood. Short for "South of Hollywood Road," I remembered Soho as a smattering of bars and mostly quiet restaurants near the giant series of escalators that eased the steep commute from the Mid Levels. Now throngs of young people spilled out of the many locales, a group of young women in colorful wigs even drinking as one sat on a yellow fire hydrant. We had a couple of quick Gweilo Pale Ales at the local craft beer bar 65 Peel before succumbing to jet lag. The next day, to escape the rain, we hopped one of the old trams and coasted along the busy waterfront all the way to North Point, where we watched thousands of maids from Indonesia and the Philippines picnic wherever there was shelter, under bridges and overpasses clogged with their day off celebrations. We had just finished eating egg tarts at Tai Cheong Bakery, as I puzzled over which fancy boutique had moved into the ground floor of my once grimy old apartment house, when I received a WhatsApp message. "Hi Nick, I'm Tak Tung! So excited to see your name card! Are you in HK now?" I arrived at his studio to find the door propped open. Wooden frames were stacked against the wall, along with a few brightly painted pink and blue canvases of flowers. Ng Tak Tung had round, black framed glasses I didn't remember and a white goatee now covered his chin. Despite the 20 years that had passed, he was instantly recognizable to me. The name on the cover of the books of his paintings, however, was not. According to them, he was now Ng Chung. Then I understood why it had been so hard to trace him. He brought out two Cohibas to celebrate. We puffed on the Cuban cigars as I admired the books. His assistant translated for us as we spoke and occasionally had questions of her own. "How did you talk to each other when you don't speak Chinese?" she asked. I explained that we would draw on whatever we could find. As she related what I had said, he flipped through the books excitedly and pointed to reproductions of his sketches on the backs of beer coasters and scraps of paper, two nude women, a fish biting a finger, a scrawny youth who looked a little familiar. I joked about how he was so good at hitting the bull's eye and he squeezed one eye shut and mimed holding a rifle. His aim was so good because he had been a crack shot in the People's Liberation Army, including during skirmishes on the border with Vietnam. His story began to pour forth, more complicated than I ever could have guessed. He came from a family of property owners and they had a difficult time during the Cultural Revolution. After military service he went to art school at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he met his wife, and followed her to Hong Kong. Was his wife sick in those days, I asked, testing my memories; in the hospital even? Yes, she was. Did she speak English? Yes, she did. As part of his artistic transformation, Ng Chung had abandoned his realist training and thrown himself into neo Expressionism, sinking into Lan Kwai Fong's dissolute bar scene like Toulouse Lautrec into Montmartre. "He started off from this foreign place, discerned the feeling of alienation everywhere he went, and comprehended what loneliness and helplessness meant," as one of the essays in the book put it. Like me, he had only just moved to the city at the time. More than I understood then, our friendship sprang from a shared loneliness that neither of us had been able to articulate. He changed his name, he told me, to change his luck, to start fresh. He had found success his paintings now belonged to the collections of major museums and he lived on the Peak, the aspirational address high above the city. In the years after I left, the stories I told about this place were always fun and lighthearted, the dragon boat races, Chinese dice games, Cantopop karaoke. Then I found an old leather bound journal I had kept and was dumbfounded at the misery. Down and out wasn't fun, getting rocked by a financial crisis didn't feel like a roller coaster, losing your first job out of school, getting evicted and spending all your savings just to survive was romantic only in retrospect. The city was too big, too expensive and too tough for me. What made it tolerable and, through the hazy tint of memory, a wonderful time, were the friends I made. Ng Chung led me down a back staircase, to a bar where they knew him as well as they used to know us at the Globe. His assistant left and we drank happily, as before, chattering away without comprehending the words but still understanding.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
MADURAI, India The Aravind Eye Hospital will treat anyone who comes through the door, with or without money. Each day, more than 2,000 people arrive from across India and sometimes other parts of the world, crowding into the hallways and waiting rooms of this 43 year old hospital at the southern end of the country. On a recent morning, Vt Muthusamy Ramalingamm, a local resident, walked into a room on the second floor, sat down and rested his chin on a small desktop device that pointed a camera into his eyes. A technician tapped on a screen at the back of an eye scanner, and within seconds a diagnosis appeared on a computer against the wall. Both eyes showed signs of diabetic retinopathy, a condition that can cause blindness if untreated. In most hospitals and clinics around the world, trained physicians make this diagnosis, examining a patient's eyes and identifying the tiny lesions, hemorrhages and discoloration that anticipate diabetic blindness. But Aravind is trying to automate the process. Working with a team of Google artificial intelligence researchers based in California, the hospital is testing a system that can recognize the condition on its own. Google and its sister company Verily targeted this type of blindness because of its prevalence and because it is the sort of illness that an A.I. system can detect early. Google is not charging the hospital while it tests the technology. Researchers hope this A.I. system will help doctors screen more patients in a country where diabetic retinopathy is increasingly prevalent. Nearly 70 million Indians are diabetic, according to the World Health Organization, and all are at risk of blindness. But the country does not train enough doctors to properly screen them all. For every one million people in India, there are only 11 eye doctors, according to the International Council of Ophthalmology. The project is part of a widespread effort to build and deploy systems that can automatically detect signs of illness and disease in medical scans. Hospitals in the United States, Britain and Singapore have also run clinical trials with systems that detect signs of diabetic blindness. Researchers across the globe are exploring technologies that detect cancer, stroke, heart disease and other conditions in X rays and in M.R.I. and CT scans. Last month, regulators certified the eye system for use in Europe under the Verily name. And the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a similar system in the United States. But hospitals are treading lightly as they consider deploying systems that are vastly different from technology traditionally used for health care. Aravind's founder, Govindappa Venkataswamy, an iconic figure in India who was known as "Dr. V" and died in 2006, envisioned a network of hospitals and vision centers that operate like McDonald's franchises, systematically reproducing inexpensive forms of eye care for people across the country. There are more than 40 of the vision centers around India. In addition to screening patients in Madurai one of the largest cities in southern India the hospital plans to install Google's technology in surrounding villages where few if any eye doctors are available. The new A.I. system could radically expand the number of people who can be screened. "Right now, there is a bottleneck when it comes to just screening patients, " said Dr. R. Kim, a nephew of Dr. V's who now serves as chief medical officer at Aravind. Behind the new screening methods are neural networks, complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. By analyzing millions of retinal scans showing signs of diabetic blindness, a neural network can learn to identify the condition on its own. At Aravind, computer screens mounted on the walls of the waiting rooms translate information into the myriad languages spoken in the hospital. During his exam, Mr. Ramalingamm, 60, spoke Tamil, the ancient language of southern India and Sri Lanka. He said he was comfortable with a machine diagnosing his eye condition, in part because it happened so quickly. After the initial screening by the A.I. system, doctors could treat the eyes, perhaps with laser surgery, to stave off blindness. The system performs on a par with trained ophthalmologists, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. But it is far from completely replacing a doctor. Earlier in the day, Pambaiyan Balusamy, 55, sat in the same room. The Google system diagnosed "proliferative" retinopathy in his left eye the most serious form of the condition but it could not read the scan of his right eye, most likely because the eye had developed a cataract. Doctors can sometimes make a diagnosis when faced with cataracts and blurry eye scans. The Google system still struggles to do this. It is trained largely on clear, unobstructed images of the retina, though Google is exploring the use of lower quality images. Even with this limitation, Dr. Kim said, the system can augment what doctors can do on their own. Aravind already operates small vision centers in many of the cities and villages surrounding Madurai. The hope is that the Google system can make eye screening easier in these facilities and perhaps other locations across southern India. Today, in these vision centers, technicians take eye scans and send them to doctors in Madurai for review. Automated diagnosis can streamline and expand the process, reaching more people in more places the kind of "McDonaldization" espoused by Dr. V. The technology still faces regulatory hurdles in India, in part because of the difficulty of navigating the country's bureaucracy. And though Google's eye system is now certified for use in Europe, it is still awaiting approval in the United States. Luke Oakden Rayner, the director of medical imaging research at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia, said these systems might even need new regulatory frameworks because existing rules weren't always sufficient. "I am not convinced that people care enough about the safety of these systems," he said. Though these deep learning systems are new, they are hardly the first effort to aid diagnosis through computer technology. As Dr. Oakden Rayner pointed out, software called breast CAD approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 has been widely adopted in the United States to help with the detection of breast cancer, in part because Medicaid provides a rebate when the technology is used. But studies have shown that patient outcomes did not improve and in some cases declined. "On paper, the Google system performs very well," Dr. Oakden Rayner said. "But when you roll it out to a huge population, there can be problems that do not show up for years."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A CP Industries plant in McKeesport, Pa. The company says tariffs on imported Chinese steel will increase its costs and make it less competitive in making cylinders for high pressure gas.Credit...Ross Mantle for The New York Times A Pennsylvania manufacturer that relies on Chinese steel pipe has few alternative sources and now its Chinese rival may gain an advantage. A CP Industries plant in McKeesport, Pa. The company says tariffs on imported Chinese steel will increase its costs and make it less competitive in making cylinders for high pressure gas. CP Industries just got an expensive lesson in the unintended consequences of protectionism. Based in McKeesport, Pa., the company makes seamless vessels to store gases at high pressure steel cylinders of up to six tons that it sells to the likes of the Navy, NASA and T. Boone Pickens's Clean Energy. It has received the first bill from the 25 percent tariff that President Trump placed on steel from China and a few other countries: 178,703.09 assessed on a steel pipe shipment scheduled to arrive at the Port of Philadelphia on Thursday. That's equivalent to about two weeks' payroll. Over all, tariffs on steel pipe that the company has ordered from China some already on its way across the Pacific will add more than half a million dollars to raw material costs over six months alone. "How long can we last?" mused Michael Larsen, the company's chief executive. "I don't know. We could go down relatively fast." What most sticks in the executive's craw is that he will probably end up losing business to the company's main rival in China, Enric Gas Equipment Company of Shijiazhuang, which also makes jumbo vessels. Noting that Enric's goods are imported under a classification not subject to the tariff, a CP Industries news release added, "It is impossible for CPI to compete with its Chinese competitor on this basis." This is what economists mean when they warn about the costs of protectionist policies. A tariff to protect one industry amounts to a tax on all of its customers. The steel tariffs tax the nation's more high tech manufacturing carmakers, aerospace companies, makers of vessels to store hydrogen for use in fuel cells to pay for a ring of protection around an aging industry that makes a raw material. President Ronald Reagan established a limited pool of imports that it apportioned among foreign producers. The first President George Bush renewed it. Mr. Clinton deployed diplomacy and antidumping measures to protect American steel makers. And in 2002 President George W. Bush put a new ring of "safeguards" around steel that lasted 20 months, until the World Trade Organization ruled them illegal. They mostly shrugged off the repercussions for the many manufacturing companies that relied on steel. But in 2003, the United States International Trade Commission surveyed manufacturers about the effects. Not only did the tariffs imposed by the Bush administration put many American companies at a competitive disadvantage, but companies also reacted in ways that did the American economy no good. Almost 500 steel consumers responded to at least some of the questions asked by the commission. About half of respondents reported paying higher prices. And roughly half reported problems procuring steel of the quality and quantity they needed. Over a third reported delayed deliveries; 132 reported steel shortages. About one in six said these problems had reduced sales, and one in three said they had cut into its profitability. A total of 82 companies including 11 makers of auto parts, nine welded pipe producers and five makers of fasteners said they had lost sales to foreign competitors because of the higher cost of steel. Some steel consumers shifted from importing steel to importing assembled steel parts that were not subject to the new tariffs. York International which makes air conditioning systems, furnaces and the like reported importing steel assemblies and complete products from overseas. The auto part maker Metaldyne simply moved some of its operations to South Korea, where it could obtain cheaper steel. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." Mr. Larsen is sympathetic to the plight of American steel companies. Though it is owned today by Everest Kanto Cylinder based in Mumbai, India, CP Industries emerged as an independent company in a 1989 spinoff from U.S. Steel. And still, whatever old loyalties persist, it makes little sense to force the company to obtain its steel domestically. For starters, no company in the United States produces pipes big enough to make its trademark six ton containers. The company estimated that it could get only a fifth of the steel pipe it needed domestically, from only one American firm. Domestic pipe is, moreover, delivered in random lengths and requires additional milling, cutting and testing, raising processing costs by about 16 percent. And Chinese pipes are much cheaper, the company added: Pipes from China delivered in Philadelphia cost 1,680 per metric ton, while U.S. Steel is charging 2,728 per metric ton at its works in Lorain, Ohio. A 25 percent tariff will not close the gap. CP Industries isn't simply going to let itself be pushed out of business. An option to consider is importing German steel which so far has been exempted from the protectionist fusillade. But it will take time to shift suppliers. And German steel will be more expensive. Of course, there is lobbying. CP Industries has requested a waiver from the tariffs, and it is working to get Pennsylvania's congressional delegation on its side. Something else it could do is move part or all of the manufacturing process overseas to avoid the steel tariffs. "We have a whole list of ideas that we could execute," Mr. Larsen told me. "But nothing we do will be more efficient than what we are doing now. And it will mean less value added in the United States." Mr. Larsen is not, by the way, an evangelist for free trade at all costs. Six years ago, when he was at Taylor Wharton International, a manufacturer of smaller vessels for high pressure gas, he teamed up with Norris Cylinder to bring an antidumping case against Chinese rivals and won. The government imposed an antidumping duty on Chinese imports to level the playing field. He would love to try that approach against his new Chinese competitors. But Mr. Trump nipped the strategy in the bud: Dumping selling below cost in order to drive rivals out of business and gain market share is not necessary when you are suddenly granted a 10 percent cost advantage. That's roughly the kind of edge that the steel tariffs gave the makers of high pressure gas vessels in China. "As it stands today," Mr. Larsen lamented, "they cannot be overcome."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
If you look at the delete Facebook hashtag, people are really angry. And I think they're sort of becoming aware of the extent to which they're being watched and tracked. This feels like it's a turning point for many of the people who use Facebook and aren't happy about how their data is being used. And the more they find out, the less happy they are. I think people underestimate how hard it is to untangle ourselves from a social network like Facebook. So before you delete your Facebook account, just remember that it's not just Facebook that you'll be losing access to. It's also all of the third party apps that you use Facebook to log in to or that are connected or plugged into your Facebook account. So it's important before you make this choice to go through those apps, see which ones you still need access to, and if there are any, to switch your login from Facebook to something else. So you can still access it even after you've deleted your Facebook account. And there are just some apps that you won't have access to if you delete your Facebook account. Facebook has a lot of ways to track your activity even if you're not logged in or if you delete your account entirely, and it uses what it calls the social graph to track the activity of people across the internet beyond just Facebook.com. This accounts for everyone who uses the internet, and you don't have to have a Facebook profile to be tracked by Facebook. For example, if your friends have Facebook accounts or Facebook Messenger accounts and if they've uploaded their contacts to Facebook and if you're one of their contacts, then Facebook knows your name and your phone number and can track you. When you deactivate or delete your Facebook profile, your profile disappears and people can't see what you posted or search for you. But all of the data that you gave over to third party app developers is still out there. And those developers are not required to delete it or do anything with it. They can use it however they want. For as long as they want. There's a whole list of ways that Facebook will track you outside of Facebook.com. To do the full cleanse, you would have to actually manually block a list of URLs that they use to track you. These are the lengths you'd have to go to if you truly wanted to get off of Facebook's grid.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In the heat of the civil rights struggle, the Ku Klux Klan tried to intimidate Shirley Ann Grau, a white Southerner who had written about interracial marriage, by burning a cross on her front lawn. But they forgot to bring a proper shovel. Unable to plant the cross upright in the hard ground, they laid it down instead, and the flames soon sputtered out. As it happened, Ms. Grau (rhymes with prow) wasn't even home. And on hearing of the incident, she was more amused than distraught. "It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbors," she told The Associated Press in 2003. "It all had kind of a Groucho Marx ending to it." Her response typified her unflappable nature. "She didn't hesitate to tackle controversial subjects, and she certainly wasn't going to be intimidated by the Klan," her daughter Katherine F. Miner said in an interview. Ms. Grau died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Kenner, La., a suburb of New Orleans. She was 91. Ms. Miner said the cause was complications of a stroke. The object of the Klan's ire back in 1965 was Ms. Grau's novel "The Keepers of the House," the story of a wealthy white widower and his 30 year relationship with his Black housekeeper, whom he secretly marries and with whom he has three children. Most of Ms. Grau's six novels and four story collections explored themes of race, power, class and love. They were deeply atmospheric, lyrical tales, most of them set in the Deep South, in worlds unto themselves. "Shirley Ann Grau writes of our most sublimated and shameful prejudices, about how miscegenation infiltrates every level of society, and about how racial harmony is a pretense that integration alone is unable to address," Alison Bertolini, the author of "Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction" (2011), told Deep South Magazine in 2013. "The sounds and smells and folkways of the Deep South are conjured up and the onerous burden of the South's heritage of violence and of racial neurosis is dramatized in the lives of a few unhappy people," Orville Prescott wrote in a review in The New York Times. "It is all an old and familiar story," he added, "but seldom has it been told so well." Many agreed. "The Keepers of the House" won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That was the last thing Ms. Grau expected. When the Pulitzer representative called to tell her she had won, she thought a friend was pulling a prank. "Yeah, and I'm the queen of England," she replied, and hung up. Ms. Grau was pleased, of course, but not overly impressed with herself. She hung the award inconspicuously over the closet in her study, where few would see it. Along with attacks from the Klan, her work drew threatening phone calls from white supremacists. She took those calls in stride, undaunted, partly because she knew she could defend herself she had spent time in her youth hunting rabbits and squirrels with a .22 caliber rifle in Alabama. "I remind the people," she told The A.P. of those callers, "that I'm probably a better shot than they are." Shirley Ann Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. Her father, Adolph Eugene Grau, was a dentist, and her mother, Katherine (Onions) Grau, was a homemaker. She grew up in New Orleans and spent part of her childhood in Montgomery, Ala. She attended Newcomb College, the women's affiliate of Tulane University, where she majored in English and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1950. She pursued graduate studies in literature at Tulane with the goal of teaching and writing. But, she told Deep South, when the English department chairman said he wouldn't hire women as teaching assistants, she dropped out before earning a higher degree. It was about that time that her short stories started to sell to The New Yorker, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Southern Review and Cosmopolitan, among other magazines. She married James Kern Feibleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane, in 1955. He died in 1987. In addition to Ms. Miner, Ms. Grau is survived by another daughter, Nora F. McAlister; two sons, Ian J. and William L. Feibleman; and six grandchildren. Her story collections the others were "The Wind Shifting West" (1973), "Nine Women" (1985) and "Selected Stories" (2003) generally received more favorable reviews than her novels, though Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post, among other critics, had a fondness for her novel "The House on Coliseum Street" (1961), about a young woman who has an abortion after an affair with a professor. If some faulted her novels for not presenting an overarching vision or unifying theme, others said that that was not her goal. "She had no agenda," her friend Maurice duQuesnay, an associate professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said in an email. Her interest, he said, was human nature and in creating a sense of place. She had told him, he recalled, that she viewed life as "a muddle" and that she wanted to show characters struggling to free themselves from the past and forging their own identities. Ms. Grau put it this way, when discussing "The Keepers of the House" with The New York Post in 1965: "Somewhere in the book I try to say that no person in the rural South is really an individual. He or she is a composite of himself and his past. The Southerner has been bred with so many memories that it's almost as if memory outreaches life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY The Extraordinary Adventure of "Les Miserables" By David Bellos 307 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. 27. A good book could be written about the bastardization of great novels, and Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" would make a fine Exhibit A. Rarely has any work of literature received such a pummeling at the hands of a succession of publishers, translators, filmmakers and musical impresarios, as David Bellos demonstrates in "The Novel of the Century," his intriguing new history of Hugo's 1,500 page masterpiece. "Les Miserables" was published in France in 1862. An English language version appeared in New York that same year, thanks to a justly hailed translation that the American Egyptologist Charles Wilbour completed in only six months. But right away there were signs the novel would take on a life of its own: A pirated version of Wilbour's translation was soon released in Richmond, Va., where the Union's copyright laws did not apply. All of Hugo's references to the evils of slavery were struck out. ("The absence of a few antislavery paragraphs will hardly be complained of by Southern readers," the preface proposed.) Hugo's doctored novel went on to become such an emphatic hit in the South that the downbeaten soldiers of Robert E. Lee took to calling themselves "Lee's miserables." There was distortion of another sort in the first British translation, by Sir Charles Lascelles Wraxall, also published in 1862. According to Bellos, Wraxall, a historian who fancied himself an expert on Waterloo, did not hesitate to alter the meaning of Hugo's novel whenever he disagreed with passages pertaining to Napoleon Bonaparte's downfall. Bellos also relates how filmmakers from around the world have betrayed the original by putting "back in what Hugo so pointedly omits" namely, organized religion. Though Hugo professed to believe in God, he did not subscribe to any one faith and was determined, Bellos says, not to let the Catholic Church "think it has a role in the 'indefinite but unshakable' religious slant of 'Les Miserables.' " Tom Hooper's unfortunate decision to shoot some scenes of his 2012 musical adaptation in Winchester Cathedral ran contrary to the novel, which never once enters a church. Perhaps the most damaging deformation belongs to the all conquering stage musical "Les Miz," which turns Monsieur and Madame Thenardier the novel's most egregious characters into bathetic comic relief. The lawless innkeeping couple who set out to blackmail the remorseful hero, Jean Valjean, are treated by Hugo with the utmost seriousness. "The figure of Thenardier is a warning that Satan may make his own use of the legitimate grievances of the poor," Bellos counsels. Impeccably researched and pithily written, Bellos's book provides an important corrective to these kinds of distortions. And it is easy to see why a writer as drunk on language as Bellos would grow so fond of "Les Miserables." For the English born translator of such knotty authors as Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare, whose previous books include a deep dive cultural history of translation ("Is That a Fish in Your Ear?"), "Les Miserables" represents the motherlode of French literature. "There are around 20,000 different words in the 630,000 words of the text," Bellos explains admiringly, "maybe as many as in all of Shakespeare, in fact, who was working in a language with a much larger vocabulary." Yet Bellos, who is 71, did not get around to reading "Les Miserables" until relatively recently, when he took a copy along on an aborted camping trip in the Alps. Confined to a hotel room by a cold, he "stayed ill rather longer than necessary," he writes in the introduction, "in order to follow this moving, challenging and immensely engaging tale to the end." It's a shame there are not more personal anecdotes of this nature. It could have been jolly, for instance, if Bellos had done a bit of shoe leather reporting and, say, infiltrated La Societe des Amis de Victor Hugo, France's leading association for all things pertaining to the author of "Les Miserables." What are the burning points of contention among Miserablists? Is there anyone out there who thinks Valjean's nemesis, the blinkered Javert, has been given a raw deal by literary historians? In fact there was rather more of this kind of anecdotal reportage in Mario Vargas Llosa's book "The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and 'Les Miserables' " (2007), which is notably name checked in Bellos's bibliography but not mentioned in his text. However, the notion posited by Bellos's title that "Les Miserables" is the novel of the (19th) century is given a thoroughly good airing. Not least because it proved to have such a considerable impact on French society: Bellos underscores four policy prescriptions the book proposes that have since been adopted by French governments of all political persuasions over the last 150 years. These include allowing convicts to re enter society without a perpetual black mark against their names (or in the case of Valjean, abolishing the "yellow passport" that makes it difficult for him to find food, lodging and work); amending the penal code to recognize crimes of necessity, so that (for instance) poor people who steal bread to feed their starving children won't be sentenced to hard labor; creating more employment for the uneducated; and building schools for the poor while making elementary education "universal and obligatory." Bellos's book also doubles as a fascinating partial biography of Hugo's life. Here we have a writer who had the courage of his convictions. He began writing "Les Miserables" in 1845 at the age of 43, the same year he was granted the ultimate honor of becoming a peer of the French realm by King Louis Philippe. After giving his book the provisional title "Les Miseres" and working on it sporadically between November 1845 and February 1848, he set it aside when street protests in Paris precipitated the chaos of a mini revolution. Indeed, it was miraculous that "Les Miserables" survived at all, as during that same month of February a rioting mob broke into Hugo's Parisian home while he was out. "Angry men were on the brink of ransacking it when one of them noticed a petition lying on top of a paper pile," Bellos writes. "It was a call for clemency for mutineers in the fleet at Le Havre. . . . The paper pile beneath the petition was the whole of 'Les Miseres.' " Hugo did not pick up "Les Miserables" again until some 13 years later, by which point he was living in Guernsey, a British crown dependency, after being banished from France by Napoleon III (whom he had accused of taking power illegitimately). His famous quip "Because we had Napoleon le Grand, do we have to have Napoleon le Petit?" became a rallying point for all those disenchanted by Napoleon III's autocratic regime. Hugo did not return to France until 1870, when Napoleon's reign came to an end. By then, his book was well on its way to outlasting them all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The push up bra may be finally going the way of the corset. The news this week that Jan Singer, the C.E.O. of Victoria's Secret Lingerie was stepping down this after a P.R. crisis over transphobic remarks made by another executive was just the latest hit to a brand that has been in steady decline for years. The marketing of Victoria's Secret has been nothing if not consistent. The company's fashion show this month, complete with skinny models, push up bras, thongs and strappy stilettos, was a near carbon copy of the one it first mounted in 1995, albeit with more feathers, sequins and wings. And its adherence to that vision of sexy will not be compromised. Not by those who criticize the whole affair as sexist, nor by the slew of new bra start ups that offer products meant for comfort and ease, nor even by the women abandoning Victoria's Secret to shop elsewhere. Victoria's Secret is still the leading U.S. lingerie brand, but its share of the market is falling rapidly. Sales are sagging and the company's stock is down 41 percent this year. In a September 2017 consumer study conducted by Wells Fargo, 68 percent of respondents said they liked Victoria's Secret less than they used to and 60 percent said they think the brand feels "forced" or "fake." The "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show" on television hasn't fared well either. It has shed nearly half of its total viewers in five years. Consider: In 2013, when the show was still something of an event, it drew an audience of 9.7 million viewers, bigger numbers that night than NBC's airing of "The Voice." Last year, the show drew an audience of only five million, about three million fewer viewers than tuned into CBS's broadcast of the holiday classic "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" two hours earlier. On Tuesday, Jan Singer, the chief executive of Victoria's Secret lingerie division, the company's flagship brand, resigned . Denise Landman, the chief executive officer of PINK, the company's athleisure division, will also step down at the end of 2018. (Both executives reported to Leslie Wexner, the chairman and chief executive of L Brands.) The response on social media was swift and furious. Mr. Razek walked his statement back the following day, saying that his comment "came across as insensitive" and that "we absolutely would cast a transgender model for the show." (He added that while transgender models had come to castings, none had yet made the cut for the show.) But the outrage continued. "My message to Victoria's Secret is: Challenge accepted," wrote Teddy Quinlivan, a trans model, on Instagram. The plus size model Tess Holliday tweeted: "Who needs VS anyway?!" Sara Lynn Michener, 39, stopped shopping at Victoria's Secret about 10 years ago. She said she was frustrated by the seemingly inexperienced sales people, the overwhelming "pinkness" of the brand and the inauthentic "glamazon images" in the store. She now mostly buys her bras online and at Nordstrom, environments that are mostly free of the sexed up imagery that makes Victoria's Secret the store it is. "Even if I walk into the Nordstrom section, I'm going to have a bad day, so you can imagine Victoria's Secret," Ms. Michener, a writer who lives in the Bay Area , said. Other women have decamped to new underwear start ups that offer comfort, relatability and pared down style. They include ThirdLove , which was started by a former product manager at Google in 2014; True and Co, which offers a quiz to help customers determine their bra size; Knix, a Canadian brand that employs patented bonded technology to keep sweat and leaks from seeping through undergarments; and Savage x Fenty, Rihanna's popular new brand. These companies were founded by women, and were born of a frustration with the industry at large. Victoria's Secret, on the other hand, was designed with the straight male consumer in mind. The company was started by the entrepreneurial couple Roy and Gaye Raymond in 1977 as an antidote to the confusion and shame Mr. Raymond felt in department store lingerie sections. He told Newsweek in 1981 that while shopping for his wife he "was faced with racks of terry cloth robes and ugly floral print nylon nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department store saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder." Heidi Zak, the chief executive of ThirdLove, said she used to dread having to drive to the mall to go to Victoria's Secret and buy a bra. "I came out and I took the pink striped bag and stuffed it in my bag because I was embarrassed I'd been shopping there," Ms. Zak said. "Nothing about the brand the aesthetic, the product nothing really resonated with me." The experience left her searching for a retailer with a greater variety of sizes Victoria's Secret offers bras sized from 30A to 40DDD, though the average bra size in the U.S. is 34DD and growing and for bras that didn't bind her up like torture devices. She couldn't find it, so she founded it instead. ThirdLove offers 74 sizes, including half sizes, as well as nursing bras for new mothers, and has raised about 30 million in funding in four years. Since 2016, it has grown by an average of 300 percent. The company's natural hued advertising campaigns featuring women of all ages, sizes and skin tones can be seen all over Instagram and plastered along the passageways of New York City's subway system. Blair Imani, 25, an activist and writer, is a recent devotee. "You feel confident when you are secure and I feel secure in ThirdLove," she said. "I love that they have nude for every skin color, not just beige. And they are functional and affordable, but I don't feel like I'm losing the feeling of being beautiful when I wear them." Ms. Imani said she used to shop at Victoria's Secret in high school but thought the bras were low quality, a point other women made. When she started buying ThirdLove bras, she realized she had "been measuring myself wrong. I'd thought for a long time I was a B, but I' m a C and a half." "It's hard to know your size, especially if you come from an economically challenged background," she said. "ThirdLove is leveling the playing field in that sense." Accounting for women's lived realities, like the wide variation in breast size, was also a part of Knix's business strategy. Since 2013, the company has gained a cult following in the intimate apparel space for its leakproof underwear and wireless bras. "I was thinking about what happens to women's bodies at different stages in their lives," said Joanna Griffiths, the founder and chief executive. "Women leak during normal activities." The company also uses advertising to confront cultural taboos and shine light on how women's bodies actually appear. Nikki Leigh McKean, a 38 year old photographer and restaurant owner who lives in Toronto, appears in several ads for the company, and said that she sometimes laughs so hard "she actually does pee her pants a little," so leakproof underwear has been ideal. Ms. McKean had a double mastectomy last year and no longer wears bras; the company used a topless image of Ms. McKean on social media and on public buses. "I want to shop from a brand that stands for body positivity," she said. "And getting to be part of it made me feel like I have a voice, like I could inspire just one person, and having that platform has been empowering, especially after many doctor's appointments when I'm asked if I've changed my mind about reconstruction." "When we launched we knew we wanted to use our customers as our models," Ms. Griffiths said. "Our campaigns are all real women. We have that built into our brand." The proliferation of online retailers still doesn't explain Victoria's Secret's slide. Customers may be gravitating to new offerings, but no single business has anything near the reach of L Brands, which is still the biggest lingerie company in the U.S. And it remains an affordable option out there, with bras that on average cost from 20 to 70, while ThirdLove's bras range from 48 to 84. Decreased foot traffic at shopping malls could be hurting Victoria's Secret, as could their elimination of a swimsuit line. (The company said that swimwear accounted for less than 5 percent of sales in 2016, the last year it was available.) Other retail trends, including the rise of athleisure and the embrace of less structured bras most notably, the bralette and "granny panties," suggest that consumers have come to reject the ideals that Victoria's Secret continues to manufacture. Then there are those who have decided to give up on bras entirely. The blogger Chidera Eggerue created an Instagram hashtag, saggyboobsmatter, which took off last year as a host of women shared pictures of themselves braless (but clothed) as a counterpoint to the age old image of the corseted woman. "It is absolutely not the case that people have just given up wearing bras," said Cora Harrington, author of "In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear and Love Lingerie." But larger trends "around being comfortable, athleisure and body positivity" are definitely ascendant, she said. "We are seeing a lot more of body positive campaigns, pushes for diversity," she said, and that is contributing to how "ideas of sexy have changed and are changing." Ms. Harrington called Victoria's Secret's marketing "tired and stale," but cautioned against writing the company off just yet. Other big brands, she said, including Chantelle, Natori and Wacoal, also seem behind the times, but are still doing well. And it's true that Victoria's Secret still draws big influencers and retains cultural cachet. The 2018 show, which will air on Dec. 2, featured a host of superstar "Angels" and lingerie clad models, including Adriana Lima, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Winnie Harlow. The Kardashian and Jenner sisters all dressed up as Victoria's Secret angels for Halloween. "Victoria's Secret's identity is sexiness, and that very identity is becoming a challenge for them," she said. "There is the question of whether their management team really connects to the customer. They would do well to have more women in leadership." Ms. McKean, who had the double mastectomy, said: "Victoria's Secret's angels are so stunning. But they are not real. I mean they are real people, but they are not a reflection of how we should look at our bodies and at women." Ms. Imani, who abandoned Victoria's Secret after high school, had much less reverence." I was always averse to the whole 'you have to worship white women's bodies' thing," she said. "You don't have to be a flat stomach to feel beautiful," Ms. Imani added. "I believe that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Debbie Eagan 's got nothing on Betty Gilpin . Debbie, Gilpin's character on the Netflix female wrestling comedy "GLOW," has only one alter ego: Liberty Belle, an All American blonde bombshell. But over the course of a recent hour plus conversation at a boutique cafe near her home in Brooklyn, Gilpin revealed that multiple personae are packed inside her shiny public exterior. Or, as she described that exterior, "the Barbie bus." "I sometimes feel like I'm a living, breathing production of 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' where I am Cyrano" Persona No. 1 alert! "driving the Barbie bus, fooling the Roxanne of show business, getting into rooms and getting jobs," said Gilpin, who has been open about her struggles with self esteem. (She wrote a 2017 article for Glamour headlined "What It's Like to Have Pea Sized Confidence with Watermelon Sized Boobs.") After toiling in semi obscurity for nearly a decade, Gilpin is the recipient of back to back Emmy nominations for best supporting actress in a comedy for her heartbreakingly funny and layered portrayal of Debbie on "GLOW." (The third season debuts Aug. 9.) If not quite a household name, she has nonetheless come a long way from the one dimensional babe of the week roles she felt obliged to take in the past . "When I was playing the hot chick, it was clear my job was to wear a very small costume and suck it in for the wide shot, and let the boys make the jokes," she said. "I'm never going to devalue myself again to keep a job. It makes me sad, thinking how many times I did that." Raised in New York City and Connecticut by parents who are both character actors, Jack Gilpin and Ann McDonough , she was Persona No. 2 alert! "a ham clown, with a spaghetti pot on my head, doing jazz hands at dinner parties, whether it was wanted or not," she said. "And I thought, 'Oh, this is what being an actor is!'" Gilpin's parents urged her to study more than just theater where she attended college, at Fordham University, in the name of financial security if nothing else. But she was determined to act. It gave her a chance to unleash her Persona No. 3 alert! "internal Joan of Arc Sylvia Plath Alanis Morissette Kraken monster." But after graduation, she struggled against typecasting. "We studied a lot of theater of the absurd at Fordham and 'building your inner ocean of weird' was the thesis statement," she said. "Then graduating and auditioning for things like 'Gossip Girl,' where the No. 1 priority is muffling your ocean of weird and curling your hair, I didn't work for a while because I was bad at both the muffling and the curling." Gilpin did the starving New York City actor thing for a while, appearing Off Broadway and in bit parts on "Law Order"(once), "Law Order: Special Victims Unit" (once) and "Law Order: Criminal Intent" (twice, as different characters). She was frustrated in her attempts to find depth in limited roles and by the internet's response to her. "Sometimes when I was playing a lawyer, I'd created all this identity for this person and done all this homework about what rage they were suppressing," she said. "And the first Twitter comment was 'Nice expletive .'" Things began to change when she was added to the cast of Showtime's dark comedy "Nurse Jackie" as Dr. Carrie Roman in 2013. The character was "basically supposed to be a bimbo who slept with everyone," Gilpin said, but two of the show's writers, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch , saw something in her. Something deeply odd. "Liz and Carly were like, 'Wait a minute, there's a weird Sylvia Plath ham clown in there; let's start peppering that into the writing,'" Gilpin said. Over the final three seasons of "Nurse Jackie," Flahive and Mensch helped to flesh out Dr. Roman into an idiosyncratic eccentric whose promiscuity was her least provocative personality trait. "On the outside, Betty is this 1940s blond bombshell, but the closer to you get to her, you realize she's so strange, theatrical and smart," Flahive said in a telephone interview. "You can't pin her down as a performer, and that's exciting." If Flahive and Mensch hadn't freed Gilpin's inner weirdo, "I really don't know what would've happened to me," Gilpin said. "The Roxanne of the business told me if you're in your 20s, you're supposed to be the naked girlfriend or the supportive young mother, and then you expire and we put you in a freezer for the rest of time." Finally, she was getting to play Cyrano instead of Barbie. "One of them is much more interesting and has way more stories to tell," she said. "The Barbie doll is fun, but ticktock! I have Irish genes. I'm supposed to write a poem in a field and die at 40. I'm not made for HD." "But that's for me to decide and not the business," she added. "I feel that intensely right now." When Flahive and Mensch went on to create "GLOW," which debuted on Netflix in 2017, they gave Gilpin the meaty role of Debbie, a 1980s soap actress whose husband ( Rich Sommer ) sleeps with her best friend (Alison Brie) in the pilot. By joining forces with her frenemy in a campy women's wrestling league, Debbie begins to declare her independence in spandex. "Liz and Carly are very meta in their writing," Gilpin said. "They see where I am in my fear and empowerment journey, and they write it into the script like evil genius demons. As Debbie finds her self worth, I'm doing that on our set, which is like a feminist Montessori bio dome experiment." The approach seems to be working. "Betty's body has been so objectified in the past," Mensch said. "To watch her step into a role where she gets to fully act with her body in a new way to tell stories about both her strength and her vulnerability is thrilling." While it's hard to gauge its true popularity (Netflix rarely releases viewing numbers), "GLOW" has become one of the service's most talked about series, earning sparkling reviews and awards and boosting the profiles of stars like Gilpin, Brie and Marc Maron, who plays a producer on the titular wrestling show. As Gilpin has dealt with newfound fame and acclaim, she has also developed Personae Nos. 4 and 5 alert! "an inner social worker and an inner stage mom," she said. "Sometimes I'm invited to a party, and I'm some cocktail of too afraid and too cool to go," she continued. "But sometimes I'll go and think, 'Thank God I listened to the stage mom side of me. I feel so good being here.' Self celebration is not vanity, up to a point." It doesn't always work out that way, though. "Sometimes I show up and I'm like, 'Why did you make me come here, stage mom?'" she said. "That's my social worker, who just wants me to go home and take care of myself." She plans to have the stage mom drive the Barbie bus to the Emmys on Sept. 20, and it will be fully tricked out. "You have award winning artists painting your face, shaping your hair and tailoring your clothes so suddenly you're like" Persona No. 6 alert! "a Versailles porn version of yourself," she said. "And you think, 'Wow, I look amazing! I don't look like myself, but after feeling invisible for so long, this feels really good.'" She knows that feeling won't last, and she's O.K. with that. "It's this happy balance of, 'Put on this really beautiful gown that someone's lending you that they may not lend you in five years, and have fun at this party,'" she said. "'But don't place too much value on it, because this is an ice sculpture of deceit.'" Besides, what Gilpin is most thankful for is living and working in an era when women are increasingly showing their complex, contradictory sides, both on and offscreen. "We owe it to generations of women sobbing into their hoop skirts and complicated bras of yore, who whispered and screamed, 'I'm not going to take it anymore!'" she said. "So much of what's happening in writing for women is you're used to seeing a certain side of the embroidery, and now we're writing for the flip side, with the knots and mistakes that we collectively made a pact years ago not to talk about." And if there's one thing Gilpin loves, it's the messiness of real life. "Someone defecated on my stoop yesterday, and that's one of the many reasons I love living in New York," she said, with all seriousness. "As actors, we're supposed to have one foot in the river of humanity and break out of that bubble. And that gentleman helped me do that yesterday. So I thank him, and I will use his work in mine." As for what comes after the life altering experience of "GLOW" what will define her next persona Gilpin doesn't know, but she has a hunch. "It feels like I'm in this room that I didn't know existed, and there are all these things I ever wanted," she said. "There's still one more little locked box that I'm not quite sure what's in there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LONDON The power of three is multiplied into infinity in "The Lehman Trilogy," the transfixing saga of family and finance that opened on Thursday night at the National Theater here. This sprawling yet devastatingly efficient production begins as the tale of three brothers, Lehman by name, Bavarian Jewish immigrants to the United States. The show is also divided into three parts, each of which (according to my watch) lasts a precise hour, with an additional 30 minutes of combined intermissions. It is set among the restlessly shifting American landscape of three different centuries, and its characters are shaken by three monumental wars. But what makes this work a ticket worth cashing in your gilt edged securities for are its three extraordinary actors, who are the sole occupants of the vast Lyttelton stage for nearly 180 minutes. They are Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. Behold them with wonder, humble theatergoer, for they are multitudes. Written by the Italian dramatist Stefano Massini, "The Lehman Trilogy" was staged in Paris (in 2013) and Milan (in 2015), where it clocked in at five hours. Ben Power has done the astute, hypnotically cadenced English adaptation, and it has been directed with luxuriant austerity by the celebrated stage and film director Sam Mendes. The story spun here is indeed that of the clan whose name became a byword for world shattering Wall Street hubris in 2008, when the mighty firm of Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Vertiginous falls from grace in the financial industry have been a favorite recent subject in books ("Too Big to Fail"), films ("Margin Call," "The Big Short") and jumbo size plays that include Lucy Prebble's "Enron" and Ayad Akhtar's "Junk." What sets "The Lehman Trilogy" apart is its exceptional concentration of narrative simplicity and depth, in which minimal resources seem to expand into unlimited riches. Unlike Mr. Massini's original version, the current "Trilogy" begins on the eve of Lehman Brothers' end, with a fleeting glimpse of a vast, desolate office that is clearly of the 21st century. Es Devlin's excellent contemporary set a rotating, glass walled cubicle furnished largely by packing crates will turn out to be both a time machine and a blank slate to be scrawled upon, filled in and erased by its inhabitants. Without a whit of cumbersome scenery or signaling, the play slips from the 21st century into 1844, when a young German Jew arrives in the harbor of New York City. His name is Henry Lehman, or it will be before he's through Customs, and he is embodied by Mr. Beale, arguably the greatest classical actor of the present day London stage, with a heart stirring air of contemplative awe. Here is Henry, speaking in the play's opening minutes: "He took a deep breath and walking quickly, despite not knowing where to go, like so many others he stepped into the magical music box called America." It's a sentence that gives you fair warning of the script's language. The performers describe their characters, their settings and their histories in the third person. Replete with the embroidery of epithets and metaphors, their accounts suggest the E.L. Doctorow of "Ragtime" channeling the incantatory verse of Homer. Enhanced by the varying tempo of a lone piano accompaniment, it is a style that might be called epic picturesque. By rights, it should pall quickly. Instead, you are pulled you into its unceasing tidal sweep, as tickled as a toddler with a bedtime story that promises endless permutations. That's partly because the play's performers, under Mr. Mendes's impeccably paced direction, are so inventively mutable. Though never stepping out of Katrina Lindsay's original costumes sharply tailored suits in shades of gray that bring to mind daguerreotype family portraits the brothers Lehman transform themselves into an innumerable host of others. These include their descendants, spouses, colleagues, rivals and employees during more than 160 years. Their metamorphoses are achieved with little excessive flourish. A cocked hip, a turned collar, a squint of the eyes, a stretched vowel: These transformations are in themselves pure pleasure, recalling pinnacle story theater productions like the Royal Shakespeare Company's fabled "Nicholas Nickleby." For instance, Mr. Beale, barrel shaped and bearded, is most seductive as both a demure 19th century Southern miss and a worldly 20th century divorcee. Mr. Godley, in turn, becomes every single one of the dozen matrimonial candidates auditioned by Philip Lehman (Mr. Beale), son of Emanuel. (And wait until you see Mr. Godley's Robert Lehman literally dance himself to death.) Mr. Miles (Cromwell in the stage version of "Wolf Hall") incarnates an entire melting pot of upwardly mobile Americans. What's most remarkable about the performances, though, is how the actors manage to suggest they are both inside and on top of their characters at all times. That dichotomy is essential to sustaining the mystical omniscience of a play that draws heavily from biblical scripture and Jewish ritual. The plagues of Egypt are invoked for the third act; so, for a boxes toppling climax, is the Tower of Babel. And, yes, "The Lehman Trilogy" could be described as a religious parable of reckoning. Past, present and future are coterminous here, a sense underscored by Jon Clark's lighting and Luke Halls's video projections, which summon an eternal Manhattan that is equal parts steel and shadow. The word "nothing" echoes throughout. Nothing is what the Lehman brothers say they come from; nothing is finally what's left of all they've achieved. That's what happens when money floats into the ether of latter day Wall Street, unmoored by connection to substance. But "The Lehman Trilogy" is unlikely to leave anyone who sees it in a nihilistic frame of mind. What you've witnessed, after all, is the creation of a whole, vastly populated, constantly changing world of infinitely renewable resources.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Let's not dismiss the Senate impeachment trial as a "kangaroo court." That's an insult to kangaroos, who lately have been suffering enough. President Trump and Senate Republican leaders seem to be planning a rushed, sham trial with no witnesses and limited evidence. This reminds me of a trial I once monitored of a Chinese journalist in Beijing: The proceedings were held in a majestic court building with high ceilings, plush courtrooms, crisp microphones and attentive security officers, all overseen by solemn judges everything a justice system might want, except justice. What's at stake in this trial is the basic idea that America's leader is accountable for misconduct. Without that concept, we may have a grand Senate chamber and eloquent speeches, but our democracy rings hollow. Without that principle of equality before the law, our grand Senate under Mitch McConnell simply becomes an American analogue of China's rubber stamp National People's Congress. McConnell's grim determination to see no evidence and hear no witnesses is particularly hypocritical because in 1999, during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, he did favor allowing witnesses. "It's certainly not unusual to have a witness in an impeachment trial," he said then. Lindsey Graham, a member of the House and an impeachment manager at the time, was even more blunt. "If there's any doubt, call witnesses," he urged. "In every trial that there has ever been in the Senate regarding impeachment, witnesses were called," Graham noted then. By the count of House Democrats, the average number of witnesses is now 33 for each of the past impeachment trials. Knowing that John Bolton as national security adviser referred to the Ukraine mess as a "drug deal," why would senators not want to clarify what he meant? Why risk covering up a cover up? There are less strained arguments that McConnell and others could make against removing Trump from office. They could say that the president's conduct, while improper, did not rise to the level requiring removal. Instead, Trump and his defenders are pursuing a line of defense that would create an imperial, unchecked presidency, because it's not clear what would ever merit impeachment and removal by their standards. Trump's team even suggests that "abuse of power" itself cannot be grounds for impeachment, calling it the "House Democrats' newly invented 'abuse of power' theory." Newly invented? Abuse of power was central to the discussions of impeachment at the Constitutional Convention. Alexander Hamilton said that impeachment was the remedy for "the abuse or violation of some public trust." It was also the basis for articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee against both Clinton and Richard Nixon (the full House rejected that article against Clinton, and Nixon resigned before a full House vote). Frank O. Bowman III, a constitutional law scholar who is cited in the president's legal brief, called that same brief "a well crafted piece of sophistry." Trump and his supporters simply make assertions without regard to reality. This is an echo in the impeachment domain of the 16,241 false or misleading statements Trump made in his first three years in office, by the count of The Washington Post. For example, Trump's backers insist that impeachment and conviction require a violation of a particular criminal statute, even though most scholars agree that that is not the case. Indeed, one early impeachment was of a judge who presided while drunk, which was not a violation of criminal law. Trump's lawyers argue that removal from office would amount to "nullifying an election and subverting the will of the American people." Under that reasoning, despite the Constitution, a president could never be removed and in that case, a president is untouchable. We all recognize that a president has the right to pardon criminals, but suppose he pardoned hackers in exchange for "investigating" the Bidens? Or what if Trump announced that he would pardon every Republican bank robber?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A judge in Chicago on Friday named a special prosecutor who will investigate how local officials handled the case against Jussie Smollett, who was accused of paying two acquaintances to attack him, making the assault look like a racist and homophobic hate crime. The new special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, is a former United States attorney and a high profile Chicago lawyer who worked as a special counsel in the Iran contra affair. The appointment came two months after Judge Michael P. Toomin of Cook County ordered that a lawyer be named to take another look at the case. The judge was charged with finding someone to assess whether there was any misconduct in the way the case was managed and whether there is justification for renewing the prosecution of Mr. Smollett, whose felony charges were dropped in March. Mr. Webb told reporters on Friday that his firm would work on the case pro bono, billing Cook County for out of pocket expenses but not legal fees. One of Mr. Webb's earliest tasks as special prosecutor, he said, would be filing a motion to request a special grand jury to assist him. As the United States attorney in Chicago, Mr. Webb was chief prosecutor in Operation Greylord, the undercover investigation of corrupt judges, police officers, lawyers and other public officials in Chicago. Mr. Webb gained international recognition for prosecuting Adm. John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, in the Iran contra affair. In his current role as an executive chairman of the international law firm Winston Strawn, he is known for defending prominent white collar clients, including George H. Ryan, the former Illinois governor. Judge Toomin chose Mr. Webb to serve as special prosecutor before, in a case in 2012 in which Mr. Webb was tasked with re examining the death of David Koschman. Mr. Koschman died after a fight outside a Chicago bar with the nephew of Richard M. Daley, the former mayor of Chicago. Despite being consistently associated with Republicans, Mr. Webb supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. Last year, Mr. Webb declined an offer to join President Trump's legal team, citing "business conflicts." With a case this polarizing, the special prosecutor position likely comes with several months of public scrutiny. Judge Toomin said in court that after reaching out to local state's attorneys from 101 counties in Illinois, the response was "less than enthusiastic." Judge Toomin then started interviewing private lawyers, which led him to Mr. Webb. At least two state's attorneys in Illinois have said publicly that they had turned down the position, explaining that they had no interest in draining their own county's coffers with what could turn into a lengthy and expensive investigation. Judge Toomin said he has known Mr. Webb for more than 50 years, often as an adversary in court when the judge was a public defender and Mr. Webb was a prosecutor. Mr. Webb has a "strong moral compass," Judge Toomin said. More about what's left to investigate in the Smollett case. In explaining his decision to appoint a special prosecutor, Judge Toomin said in June that the Cook County state's attorney, Kim Foxx, who was responsible for prosecuting Mr. Smollett, did not follow the proper procedure in recusing herself. Mr. Toomin said that Ms. Foxx should have asked for a special prosecutor when she separated herself from the case in February; instead, she asked her deputy to take over the prosecution. Ms. Foxx said she recused herself to avoid any perception that she had a conflict of interest after disclosing that she had communicated with representatives of Mr. Smollett's when he was still considered a victim in the case. When a retired judge from Illinois petitioned the court to assign a special prosecutor to get the "whole truth" of what happened in the case, Ms. Foxx and Mr. Smollett resisted such an appointment. Mr. Smollett's legal team attempted to get the case reassigned to another judge and asked that the court prohibit a special prosecutor from reopening prosecution of Mr. Smollett. Judge Toomin swiftly batted down Mr. Smollett's request to intervene. Ms. Foxx's office's abrupt decision to abandon all felony charges against Mr. Smollett angered some city officials, including Rahm Emanuel, the mayor at the time, and the police superintendent. The city sued Mr. Smollett, demanding that he reimburse them for more than 1,800 overtime hours spent investigating his hate crime report. Mr. Smollett asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, and a federal judge is scheduled consider his request in October. In response to the appointment of a special prosecutor in the Smollett case, the Cook County state's attorney's office released a statement saying, "We pledge our full cooperation to the special prosecutor appointed today to review this matter." Mr. Smollett's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As special prosecutor, Mr. Webb will have broad access to all records related to the Smollett case that are kept by the state's attorney's office, the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County Inspector General's office. Mr. Webb said he would be reaching out to Mr. Smollett's lawyers and would interview key witnesses. Mr. Smollett's legal team maintains that their client did not organize a hate crime in January and that two acquaintances, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, attacked him near his apartment building in downtown Chicago, shouted slurs at him and placed a noose around his neck. The brothers, claiming that Mr. Smollett paid them 3,500 to stage the attack, filed a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Smollett's lawyers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Before "Sideways: The Experience," Rex Pickett's stage adaptation of his novel, begins, guests who have plunked down an extra 100, can participate in the experiential portion, a preshow cocktail party at the Theater at St. Clement's. As waiters circulate with duck rillettes pot pie and tuna tartare tacos, two barmen pour wines meant to mimic those tasted by the play's characters, old friends on a California spree. There is also merlot, though fans of Alexander Payne's 2004 film version will remember a profane line arguing against that grape. The cocktail party less an immersive experience than a digestive one is a nifty idea. Enough passed hors d'oeuvres will improve almost anyone's mood. And booze goggles, I would imagine, would help to soften the show's unrepentantly male gaze. But since my head goes swimmy after the first drink, I spent the hour and a half nursing, neglectfully, a small rose, and approached the show sober, which I would not recommend. Creaky, queasily sexist and directed by Peccadillo Theater Company's Dan Wackerman with oblivious joie de vivre, the play, I'm afraid, is corked. Jack (Gil Brady), an actor turned director with a surfer dude drawl, and Miles (Brian Ray Norris), a pre success novelist and unacknowledged alcoholic, have fled Los Angeles for Jack's bachelor party a week in the Santa Ynez Valley, low key wine country. Miles envisions an orgy of rare vintages; Jack envisions an orgy. Inevitably, they meet Maya (Kimberly Doreen Burns), a waitress described in the script as "an earthy beauty" with her uniform shirt "provocatively unbuttoned," and Terra (Jenny Strassburg), a tasting room manager, "like a wine geek's most surreal fantasy." Before you can knock back a pinot noir, they have all decamped to what everyone insists on calling a "hot tub spa." Will Maya open up her best burgundy? Will Jack make it to the church on time? How much more should I have swilled to make this white male wish fulfillment even baseline palatable?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Wifredo Lam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; City and County of Denver, via Clyfford Still Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Julian Cassady for Sotheby's Wifredo Lam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; City and County of Denver, via Clyfford Still Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Julian Cassady for Sotheby's Credit... Wifredo Lam/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; City and County of Denver, via Clyfford Still Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Julian Cassady for Sotheby's LONDON "This is what we like: the ping pong between New York and Hong Kong. We see them on the split screens in perfect clarity," the auctioneer Oliver Barker said late Monday, sounding like a prime time TV game show host. He was taking seven figure bids at a Sotheby's sale of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art, presented as a "multicamera global livestream." The marathon 74 lot auction at Sotheby's, which replaced the postponed May evening sales in New York, used the latest technology to try breathing life back into the pandemic numbed top end of the international art market. The hybrid format featured the suavely suited Mr. Barker taking bids on a rostrum in an empty room in London, facing a bank of screens showing telephone wielding colleagues in an adjoining room, as well as in New York and Hong Kong. Mr. Barker deftly fielded online and on screen bidding from across the world for almost five hours, alone in his London control room. Led by a Francis Bacon triptych, five works sold for more than 10 million, and at least eight artist's records were set. "Sales are down across the board, but there's an incredible amount of wealth chasing the rarest of the rarest," said Wendy Cromwell, an art adviser based in New York. "There's a real disconnect between who's hurting and who isn't. There's so much pent up demand." And so it proved. Sotheby's was fortunate to have secured at least three major consignments before the lockdowns imposed to fight the coronavirus pandemic made owners reluctant to sell high value artworks via digital platforms. As lockdowns eased around the world, collectors and agents could view works by appointment in Hong Kong, London and New York. Several works had been widely published and exhibited, giving bidders further confidence. Francis Bacon's imposing 1981 work "Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus" had been exhibited since 1993 at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, a private museum in Oslo founded by the Norwegian collector Hans Rasmus Astrup. Dealers said the museum had been trying to sell the triptych privately for more than 100 million. But a more approachable valuation of 60 million at the Sotheby's auction encouraged a telephone bidder to give 84.6 million for the work, the third highest price achieved for the artist at auction. The 84.6 million Bacon was underbid online, and the 15.2 million achieved for a masterpiece quality 1982 Jean Michel Basquiat drawing of a head was not only a record for a work on paper by the artist, but was also claimed by Sotheby's to the highest price ever given by an online bidder at auction. "This is a departure," said Guy Jennings, managing director of the Fine Art Group, a London based advisory firm. "As a result of this sale we may see much more confident online bidding at a higher level than we've seen before. There used to be a ceiling of a few hundred thousand on internet bids." High quality Impressionist and modern pieces were fewer and further between, as has been the case for several years, but a private collection of Latin American Surrealist paintings did spark intense competition. The stand out lot was the haunting, highly detailed 1956 "Harmony (Suggestive Self Portrait)" by Remedios Varo. This set a new high of 6.2 million for the Spanish Mexican artist, underlining the revaluation of women's contributions to the Surrealist movement. Demand for works by long underappreciated female artists was a consistent theme of the evening. A group of 18 works from the estate of the pioneering Denver based dealer and collector Ginny Williams kick started the auction, grossing 65.5 million. All of them sold, with a new auction high for Helen Frankenthaler, whose "Royal Fireworks," a spectacularly vibrant 1975 abstract, sold to a telephone bidder for 7.9 million, more than double the high estimate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Every month, Amanda Danner and her husband make what feels like a mortgage payment. But they don't yet own a home. Instead, they collectively pay nearly 2,000 simply to service their student debts. Their next largest monthly expense is the rent on their apartment in Union City, N.J. "It's a rough reality," said Ms. Danner, a 26 year old analyst for Fidelity, who graduated from Montclair State University with 85,000 in loans, more than double the national average. "We definitely want to buy a house in the near future, and we certainly want to have kids in the next couple of years," she added. "But when you look at the initial monthly payments, it is staggering. It is hard to plan for the future." So she said she was thrilled to learn of a new perk that her employer made public last week: Fidelity will apply up to 2,000 annually to the principal of its employees' student debts. In Ms. Danner's case, that will shave four years off her repayment period, bringing it to roughly eight years from 12. Fidelity is one of the more prominent employers to announce the student loan repayment benefit in recent months, a policy that seems likely to gain traction. The benefit helps address what some employers describe as a challenge attracting and retaining younger workers, many of whom can't see beyond the burden of their student debt. Most employers that are offering the new perk also cap their costs at, say, 10,000 total per employee. Beyond Fidelity, a variety of organizations including PricewaterhouseCoopers, Natixis Global Asset Management and Nvidia have already either announced plans or started offering the payments. Several smaller companies LendEDU, CommonBond, SoFi, Chegg and ChowNow are also providing the benefit. The federal government, however, may be the pioneer here, having offered a repayment program to select employees for many years. And the list is growing. The handful of companies that administer the benefit behind the scenes Tuition.io, Gradifi and EdAssist among them said demand was rising. Tim DeMello, Gradifi's chief executive, said his firm was in talks to bring about 100 more employers aboard this year, and has signed 26 letters of intent. While this is all welcome news, the benefits are just another symptom of the underlying problem: Tuition has been rising faster than wages and inflation for decades, according to the College Board. But now that younger workers or those born from about 1981 to 1997 have surpassed Generation X as the largest share of the American work force, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data, it appears that employers are beginning to hear their concerns. Retirement benefits, even incredibly generous packages, did not resonate with younger workers at Fidelity. Nor did potential recruits find them tantalizing. Yet Fidelity happens to have a 401(k) match that made this Gen X er's mouth water: Workers who contribute 7 percent of salary receive a match of 7 percent, for a total of 14 percent. And if the company performs well, it will sweeten that with profit sharing of up to 10 percent more for a total of, yes, 24 percent of salary. That's retirement savings made easy. But for younger workers, the dead weight of their student debt eclipses all else. "We were surprised to hear, loud and clear from employees and their managers, that a key concern was student loans," said Jennifer Hanson, head of associate experience and benefits at Fidelity. "It was more acute than we realized, and we heard people were putting off real life transitions buying a home, getting married, having a baby. Given that we are all about planning, guidance and saving for the future, it was a real issue." So after speaking with employees, Fidelity decided it wanted to be seen as a trailblazer, largely to attract and retain talent. At the same time, the company more than doubled its paid parental leave policies (to 16 weeks for new mothers, and six weeks for all parents). Under the student loan repayment program, Fidelity will apply up to 2,000 a year or nearly 167 a month toward an employee's student loan principal, up to 10,000 total. More than 5,000 employees, or about 11 percent of its work force, have signed up since January. Tuition.io, a company based in Santa Monica, Calif., collects the payments and sends them directly to the loan servicers. It also gives workers guidance on which loans to pay off first. "I can't make predictions," said Betsy Dill, a partner and leader in the wellness advisory practice at the consulting firm Mercer. "But if I could, I would say based on the level of interest, I think we are going to see more" repayment programs. There are several pieces of federal legislation, in various stages, that could encourage more employers to help chip away at their employees' student debts. Right now, an employer's contribution to the student loan is taxed as income to the worker. That makes it less valuable to the employee (or the employer has to contribute more money to provide, say, an after tax benefit of 100 a month). Fidelity, for instance, wanted to provide at least 100 monthly on an after tax basis, so it contributes 166, which works out to 120 a month for workers who pay the most taxes. But several bills would make the perk tax free, up to certain limits. Other bills would go further, enabling employees to make their own payments on a pretax basis, up to a certain ceiling. One proposal, introduced by Representatives Rodney Davis, Republican of Illinois, and Gwen Graham, Democrat of Florida, would let workers receive up to 5,250 in tax free payments annually, which is on par with the existing benefit for employer tuition reimbursement. There's a companion bill in the Senate, introduced in January by Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. Elements of the benefit appeal to policy makers on both sides of the aisle, though it has not yet gained widespread support. "Republicans like employers and tax cuts and Democrats like education, and an exclusion from income for employer paid student loan repayment assistance lies at the intersection of the two," said Mark Kantrowitz, a student loan expert and publisher of Cappex.com, a college comparison site. The financial impact for workers can be substantial. Consider an employer that contributes 100 a month to an employee with a maximum benefit of 10,000 who is paying off a 35,000 debt with a 6 percent interest rate over 10 years. That would save the worker at least 2,213 in interest, and shave 2.5 years off the repayment period, according to calculations by Tuition.io. But that doesn't necessarily mean workers should focus solely on paying their loans at the expense of retirement savings. If an employer is offering a match on 401(k) contributions, the no brainer advice is to take it. "The match is free money," said Daniel Wrenne, a financial planner in Lexington, Ky., who specializes in helping physicians and other highly indebted graduates. The repayment programs themselves vary across employers. But Brendon McQueen, chief executive of Tuition.io, said that many employers were offering it to all employees. After all, there's a swath of workers who are entering retirement with student loans and plenty of working parents who have taken out loans for their children. There are restrictions, however. Natixis, for example, makes the perk up to 10,000 total available to all employees who have been with the company for at least five years, but only on their federal loans. PricewaterhouseCoopers offers the benefit up to 10,000 only to more junior employees. Nvidia, a computer graphics company, extends repayment to employees who graduated within the last three years, up to 30,000 total. But some employers may also begin to give workers a choice of how to deploy a benefit of, say, 100 a month. Maybe it's dedicated to a gym membership, a health savings account or to a student loan payment. "I think you will start to see more of that, where they are giving the option to pick one of three," said Mr. DeMello of Gradifi. If that's the case, here's a suggestion for the often forgotten middle child, the Gen X er who worries about paying a child's college tuition: A 100 to 200 monthly contribution to a 529 plan would be most appreciated, thank you very much.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at AT T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid 1980s. It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive. "It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early '80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Photo Illustration by Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times When Brennan McDermott was an underclassman at Simsbury High in Connecticut, he found himself in a timeless situation, familiar to watchers of horny 1980s comedies and after school specials alike. "A couple of my buddies were like, 'Hey, let's go to the bathroom,'" said Mr. McDermott, now Simsbury's senior class president. "I was like, 'Whoa, what's going on here?!' I got kind of uncomfortable with it. They were all passing it around. I didn't take it." In a modern twist from coming of age canon, though, "it" wasn't a cigarette it was a small, rectangular vape product known as the Juul. In the public imagination, vaping with its oversize, multipart manipulatable products has become associated with a techier, dweebier slice of the population. But as early as 2015, e cigarette use by high school and middle school students had eclipsed cigarette use. And by late 2017, an informal consensus had burbled up from students, teachers, parents and the internet: All across the country teenagers who in generations past would have become cigarette smokers or, perhaps, would have never taken up smoking were falling in love with the Juul. "Cigarettes, they're not even a factor anymore," Mr. McDermott said. "Nobody smokes cigarettes. You go to the bathroom, there's a zero percent chance that anyone's smoking a cigarette and there's a 50 50 chance that there's five guys Juuling. And it's like, how Band Aid has become synonymous with 'bandage'? Juul has become synonymous with 'vape.'" Created by two former Stanford University design students, the Juul attempts to mimic the nicotine hit of a real cigarette, and sells for 49.99. Over Christmas, Nielsen reported Juul had achieved a 46.8 percent market share exceeding the top market share achieved by Marlboro cigarettes at the peak of that product's measured success. Then, last month, Nielsen said Juul had 54 percent of the market. I, an adult, first noticed the Juul on the various Instagram feeds of the unapologetically dumb Barstool Sports. In recent months, they've been flooded with college kids finding creative ways to display their prowess with, or devotion to, their Juuls: kids hitting their Juuls at their parents' dining room table over fall break; kids hitting their Juuls in the hospital after a bloody drunken escapade. It was all a bit bewildering. It took oodles of efficient pop culture manipulation for America to accept cigarettes as the ultimate symbol of rebellious cool. But now, all of a sudden, a vape is cool? Sebastian and Gio, students at a continuation high school in Northern California, both Juul. "I'm on probation so I can't smoke marijuana," Gio said, by way of explanation. (The students asked that their last names not be used, for fear of disciplinary infractions.) "And I don't want to smoke cigarettes. Cigarettes taste nasty." Sebastian said: "I like the feeling of it. The lightheadedness. It makes me feel sober and high at the same time. Plus it looks sleek you smoke it, you look kind of bougie." Both are also fans of Juul's flavored tobacco pods. In particular, Gio said: "Mango! That Mango go hard." (Other flavor options include Cool Mint, Fruit Medley and Creme Brulee.) As for discretion, Gio said, "It looks like a USB drive. It doesn't look suspicious." Chidum Okeke, 18, of Louisville, Ky., said, "In my opinion it looks like the coolest thing ever. Almost futuristic." Mr. Okeke doesn't Juul, but he has gone a bit viral tweeting about it. He traces the inflection point to early 2017. That is when the "Juul wave," as some have called it, started to go from the popular kid set in his grade to entire neighboring schools. "It's so small, so easy to hide in the palm of your hand," he said. "And they're rechargeable! I've lost track of the number of people I have found charging their Juuls in class through their laptops. It's almost comical." Mr. Okeke said he also knows kids who have named their Juuls; names he has heard include "Juulia" and "Richard." In February, Greta Frontero, an 18 year old senior at Westfield High in New Jersey, wrote an article for her school paper about the Juul. It is a true gem of reportage: "A senior male was caught Juuling during class when his chemistry teacher's back was turned. 'I took a hit of it and blew it in my sweatshirt, but the smoke came out the back of my jacket,' he said. 'When my teacher asked why there was smoke coming out of my jacket and I opened my mouth to respond, more smoke came out of my mouth.'" "It's almost like a game," Ms. Frontero said. "Like if the teachers would catch you doing it or not." But it's not just school, she said: At house parties, Juuls are so rampant that theft has become an issue. That's where customization has come in. "I've seen nail paint polish, initials carved in, smiley face stickers," Ms. Frontero said. "It's really just to make sure that if someone steals yours you know it's yours. And they're everywhere. You're in someone's basement and the host doesn't even know you're doing it 'cause they don't smell." For the record: At least in Westfield, kids use a different product, wax pen vaporizers, for smoking weed. The Juul is strictly for tobacco. After her article came out, Ms. Frontero said, "the teachers had to catch up." Now kids at Westfield are getting handed three day suspensions for Juuling. Gio, from Northern California, agreed that "teachers are starting to see what they really are." So have kids started carrying actual USB drives, just to throw teachers off the scent? Gio laughed. "Not yet!" And getting a Juul is as easy as ever. "My friend has a middle school brother and they walk into Krauszer's" a local New Jersey grocery store "and buy it without any question," Ms. Frontero said. "It's ironic. This product was made to wean addicts off cigarettes, and in reality it's attracting teenagers who would never smoke." The glamorization of the cigarette took place over decades and throughout countless Hollywood movies and glossy ads. The Juul iconicity was birthed much faster: through social media. That includes personal accounts, kids eager to fuel the Juul wave with winkingly knowing tweets about the hype cycle. "One of the things I'm super interested in is meme culture," said Mr. McDermott, the Simsbury High class president. "What resonates with our generation is the memes. I haven't seen the Juul on TV. But you'll see a bunch of memes about Juuling. It's just, like, making it more socially acceptable it's perpetuating the thing that vaping is cool." Ashley Gould, the chief administrative officer of Juul Labs, is careful to walk a line between pride and responsibility. "We're the No. 1 e cigarette in the United States," Ms. Gould said. "And we're not a big tobacco company. We're an independent company." Pointing out she is not a smoker, Ms. Gould ticked off some of the properties of the Juul that the company believes have made it big: the way the "formation of the e liquid mimics the way the nicotine is delivered in a cigarette"; the fact that Juul was the first to "design an e cigarette that was not cylindrical." But, she added, "what we've seen happening with youth we did not want to be happening." "We're taking it extremely seriously," Ms. Gould said. "We do not want underage kids using our products. Our marketing is directed toward adults, tested with adults. And I do think it's worth noting: All of the things you see on social media, we have absolutely nothing to do with. We actively try to take these things down. But unless there's an infringement of our intellectual property it's quite difficult." So the teen love caught the Juul team off guard? "Yeah," Ms. Gould said. "I think that's a fair statement. We're actively trying to understand it so that we can combat it but I can't tell you that we currently understand it today." "A few weeks ago there was a whole thing going around that it caused lung cancer. And for probably, like, a day people were like, 'I'm going to stop doing it!'" Ms. Frontero said, and laughed. "And then that quickly faded. I don't think anyone's all that concerned." So can anything stop this youthful fandom? Perhaps the only hope to end the teenagers' winking love of the Juul is to expand the demographic out of its hipness. To that end, I'm doing my part. On a recent winter evening, a buddy and I walked out of a show and into a surprisingly pleasant Thursday evening in Manhattan. We'd just seen Yung Lean and Thaiboy Digital, two delightfully strange international musicians, and we were buzzing. It was one of those latish, drunkish weekday nights that had the potential to become a properly late, properly drunk weekday night. In fact, in a few minutes, we'd find an Irish bar and drink more, fast. But first my buddy wanted to smoke. In the past, in times like these, I might bum a cigarette or two or seven. Instead, he took out a small, square vape. Here we were. A couple of grown men. Hitting the Juul.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Randy Quaid, far right, during a 2007 open dress rehearsal in New York for the Broadway bound musical "Lone Star Love." He was accompanied by the musicians (from left) Chris Frank, Jack Herrick and Emily Mikesell. Among the casualties of the current Broadway shutdown are shows in previews that will never officially open, as well as those whose futures are still in limbo. This series is looking at the curious history of five other shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night. Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time. Then there's "Lone Star Love," which after nearly two decades as a regional theater staple, finally crashed thanks to the mercurial behavior of its star, which resulted in his lifetime banishment from Actors' Equity. The actor: Randy Quaid, who with his wife/manager, Evi Quaid, has since been in the news largely for brushes with the law. Today, almost 13 years after its aborted Broadway opening, the creators of the show are reluctant to speak the names of the couple at the center of the cancellation. He is "the actor who caused an unbelievable fracas," or simply "that actor"; she is known as "her." Flash back, though, to happier times, when "Lone Star Love" was simply a bouncy Texas set updating of Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor," complete with bluegrass music. Its origin story begins in 1973 with John Haber, a young graduate of the University of North Carolina who returned home to Chapel Hill with an M.F.A. in directing from New York University's Tisch School. The local troupe Everyman Company asked him to direct "Henry IV, Part I" at the outdoor Forest Theater on the Chapel Hill campus. They wanted to cast the banjoist Tommy Thompson, a member of the local bluegrass band Red Clay Ramblers, as Falstaff, the portly friend of Prince Hal in the drama. Falstaff, as you may remember, was a vain rogue said to be Shakespeare's own favorite character. Haber thought that the comic Falstaff from "The Merry Wives of Windsor" was better suited for the company's mostly amateur cast. So he modernized and set the production in Windsor, Texas, post Civil War. The band played incidental music from the side of the stage, and at the curtain call performed "Happy Trails." As a noble, Falstaff is an outlier, but "'The Merry Wives of Windsor' is Shakespeare's only play about common people," Haber explained recently. "After the Civil War, Texans started making money as cattle ranchers, just the way wealth was being accumulated in England in the 15th century. And I could picture John Falstaff as a southern colonel." When Haber moved back to New York, he joined the Dodgers, a producing entity, and worked on other shows. The Red Clay Ramblers came to have a higher profile as well, releasing several albums and touring internationally. The play's journey restarted in 1987, when the renowned Alley Theater of Houston asked the Ramblers if they had any ideas for a show they might bring to the venue. The band had just performed there (and in New York) in Sam Shepard's "A Lie of the Mind." Thompson remembered the Texas set "Merry Wives" he had once done, and called his old friend Haber. The Ramblers wrote a full score of music and lyrics, and Haber made changes in the script that combined Elizabethan language with cowpoke action. The musicians played Col. John Falstaff's wingmen, held up props, and generally added to the merriment of the enterprise. The Repertory Theater of St. Louis put it on the following year. From there the show meandered the Players Theater in Columbus, Ohio; Duke University; the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. It was a bona fide regional theater crowd pleaser. Next stop? New York. Workshops were organized in 1996, and in 1999, with Jim Belushi as Falstaff. "We loved him he was great," said the composer, Jack Herrick of the Red Clay Ramblers. Unfortunately, Belushi had commitments to his ABC TV series and couldn't stay with the musical, which was now called "Lone Star Love; or, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas." It took five more years, but "Lone Star Love" finally opened at the John Houseman Theater Off Broadway, under the auspices of AMAS Musical Theater. The production was immersive before that became so trendy; audience members were ushered to the stage where the cast served up a barbecue meal. (Some thought that was too country, but when the 2019 Broadway revival of "Oklahoma!" did something similar it was considered brilliant.) Still, "Lone Star Love" had a lot going for it: words by Shakespeare, a familiar plot, charming music and, most important, investors who were willing to put money into it. They included the seasoned Broadway producer Bob Boyett, as well as Ed Burke, a newly retired businessman from Chapel Hill. He had just sold his company and wanted to get into the producing game. He flew to New York to take a three day seminar to learn how. Given his North Carolina provenance, the instructor introduced him to "Lone Star Love." That the creators were fellow Tar Heels felt promising. "Living in North Carolina," Burke told me over the phone recently, "I was country come to town. But I got hooked. "I went to opening night, I wrote a check, and I met Bob Boyett, the lead producer," he added. Before long, he and his wife, Eleanor, were writing checks frequently. A cast album was recorded and the show was nominated for best musical by both the Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel awards. Though it didn't win, it had momentum, and after closing Off Broadway in 2005 the producers had Broadway in mind as the next logical step. Boyett suggested that John Rando ("Urinetown") come aboard to direct. (His eventual credit was creative supervisor; Randy Skinner was the director/choreographer). He also called in Robert Horn (who later won the Tony for "Tootsie") to co write the book. The gang realized they needed a higher profile star for Broadway. In 2007 Rando and Horn met with Randy Quaid at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. In 2005 the actor, a native Texan, had been Emmy nominated for playing Col. Tom Parker in a mini series about Elvis Presley. The same year he had a choice movie role in "Brokeback Mountain." That August, after some New York rehearsals, the production moved to Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theater for a pre Broadway tryout, with the New York opening scheduled for December. ("Hairspray" had gone to Broadway from the same theater.) In order to procure Quaid for the gig, he was given an unusual amount of creative approval. Problem No. 1: the fat suit. According to Burke, Quaid, on the advice of his wife, refused to wear it for the role. "Not only did our script contain references to Falstaff as a fat man I counted eight at the time," Burke recalled, "Jack had even written a production number called 'Fat Man Jump.' " Instead the couple suggested, over many objections, that Falstaff should wear a "gigantic codpiece," as it was described to me. An actor from the Seattle company remembers a crack that was shared among the performers: "It looks like he's wearing his understudy in his underpants." Participants in the Seattle production were generally loath to be quoted on the tryout, but did provide glimpses of the turmoil as captured in emails from the Quaids to the creative team. "With all the deceit going on and lack of paying key creative elements for the production Randy's contract being unethicly sic passed around, he has no trust in the working process he does not agree to any changes," read one note from Evi Quaid. "He no longer trusts the creative teams sic agenda or to Honor his contractual rights in this production. He is not willing to make changes in the script." As friction grew between the Quaids and everyone else, life in Windsor, Texas, became far from merry. One day Horn said he went to the Quaids' hotel room to talk over line changes. "Mr. Quaid was agreeing with me and showing me respect," he recalled, "but Mrs. Quaid didn't like the fact that he was trying to find a middle ground. "The nice conversation descended into chaos," he added. "I got out of that room. It was the last time I ever spoke to them." Stories of misbehavior flew out of Seattle and into the New York tabloids. "Jack Herrick and John Haber suffer from the fact that I was not a New York producer," Burke recalled. "If you write enough checks you can call yourself a producer. But we had an unmanageable situation. Our contract wouldn't allow us to hire another actor. It guaranteed that Randy Quaid would take the role on Broadway."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Facial recognition may soon be coming to an airport security line near you. Earlier this week , the Transportation Security Administration released a 23 page report outlining changes it is proposing on how passengers are screened before boarding their flights. Key among those changes is the proposal that passports and other forms of identification will eventually be replaced by biometric technology. "With the threat to aviation evolving every day, developing the next generation of security technology with our industry partners is critically important," David Pekoske, the T.S.A. administrator, said in a statement. "By expanding our use of biometrics, TSA secures its position as a global leader in aviation security and advances global transportation security standards." Early this year, the agency began testing facial recognition technology for international travelers at Los Angeles International Airport. The biometric technology matches facial images to photos in government databases, such as photos obtained from passports or visa applications. And in 2017, the T.S.A. tested fingerprint technology at the T.S.A. PreCheck lanes at the Atlanta and Denver airports. The technology matches passenger fingerprints provided at the checkpoint to those provided to the T.S.A. by travelers who have enrolled in the PreCheck program.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
At a time when classical bronze statues of men are falling out of favor across the country, some artists see the scrapped Angelou monument, which was intended for a spot outside the city's central library, as an example of politicians' thwarting visions of a more diverse future. Supporters of Ms. Thomas are demanding that the city's arts commission enact reforms to prevent another controversy. "Lava's monument is a challenge to conventional representations of Black women, " said Angela Hennessy, an artist who, along with Dana King and T Rasheed, founded the collective See Black Womxn, which has been an advocate of Ms. Thomas over the last year. "It's quite subversive in a poetic way. That monument would be in production right now in the context of all these other colonial monuments being reconsidered and removed." Acknowledging the problem, the commission president, Roberto Ordenana, apologized to Ms. Thomas on Monday. "I want to remind us all that when there are systems failures, the individuals and communities that end up experiencing the most harm as a result of said failures are those of us who experience oppression and marginalization," he said during a public meeting. "Due to our failures, we have caused significant harm to an incredibly talented Black woman artist, and we have caused deep pain to members of the Black artist community." For Ms. Thomas and her supporters, it was a step in the right direction. But the group is demanding additional measures, including the resignations of the art commission's visual arts committee chair, Dorka Keehn, and Supervisor Stefani; a meeting with Mayor London Breed; and the suspension of the reissued call for proposals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Keys's performance was a play on the song of the year nominee "Someone You Loved," by the 23 year old Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi. The theme of her speech continued with her lyric: "It's when people do nothing that the bad guys win." Dua Lipa, presenting the award for best new artist with Keys, also took a moment to acknowledge gender equality in the music industry. "There are so many stellar female producers, artists, songwriters, engineers," she said. "And if you're in the business, and you're hiring, raise your sights to the amazing, talented women out there, because we all deserve a seat at every table." O.K. We're back. And here I am in my favorite place, at the piano, where I always go when I need a little energy. You know what I mean? When I need a little, when I need some good vibes, I come here. So let me give us some background music while I'm talking. Because let me be honest with y'all: It's been a hell of a week. Damn. This is a really, it's a serious one. Real talk, there's a lot going on. And can I also have a little more piano in my ears please so I can properly serenade the people? You know, I need to serenade y'all for a minute. But you know what? I'm proud to be standing here, you know? I am. I am. And I'm proud to be here as an artist, for the artists, with the people. And I feel the energy of all the beautiful artists in this room. It's going to be an amazing night, amazing night. Because it's a new decade. It's a new decade. It's time for newness. And we refuse the negative energy. We refuse the old systems. You feel me on that? We want to be respected and safe in our diversity. We want to be shifting to realness and inclusivity. So tonight, we want to celebrate the people, the artists that put themselves on the line and share their truth with us. And I mean, we got the incredible Billie Eilish right here in this building. That's great. That's my little sister right there. We got Lizzo, who just owned the stage. Eight nominations and already a winner tonight. We have the magnificent Ariana right here in the building tonight. You see us? You see us? We're unstoppable. We get to be who we want to be. We get to be different. We get to be unique. We get to be everything, right now. So I'm looking forward to being here together with all of us, again, celebrating this music. Because I know how much Kobe loved music. I know how much he loved music. So we've got to make this a celebration in his honor, you know? He would want us to keep the vibrations high. You know music is that one language we can all speak. It don't matter where we're from. We all understand it. So I want to show some love to some of the artists who spoke this language so beautifully with us this year. So I've got something for you.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
CATSKILL, N.Y. Marveling at oak galls, the glossy little tree growths that have been used since antiquity to produce a rich red ink, the artist Kiki Smith observed recently: "There's a tremendous generosity in nature. There are so many gifts there, for free." She added that it was "like SoHo in the '70s, when there was all this industrial stuff lying around on Canal Street." For the last eight years, Ms. Smith, who has a gift for spotting expressive wealth in overlooked resources, whether they're urban or rural, material or psychological, has been living nearly full time in Catskill, a couple of hours' drive north of New York City. She is not alone. Many artists, squeezed by relentless increases in real estate prices, are heading to these hills. So are exhibition venues. Since the Dia Art Foundation opened its Beacon branch in an old factory in 2003, both nonprofit and commercial art spaces have proliferated in the Hudson Valley. This summer has summoned a bounty of artwork to Catskill, Hudson, Cold Spring and beyond. Here is what I sampled recently. I started at the 1815 residence of the Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole, in Catskill (it sits just across the river from Olana, a popular Moorish Victorian house built by his successor Frederic Church). Ms. Smith's home, part of which dates to 1690, is a short walk from Cole's, and a few of his landscapes reproductions are now on view feature small renderings of it. So it made perfect sense that the Cole curator, Kate Menconeri, invited Ms. Smith to place work in and around the historic site for its second annual open house exhibition. Most of the work was made since her move upstate; none has been shown to better advantage. Ms. Smith's sympathies have long traveled in the border zones between the applied and the fine arts she has twice previously integrated her work with historic homes and their furnishings, once in Venice and once in Krefeld, Germany. Glimpsed on entry at the Cole house is "Congregation," a tapestry in a stairwell picturing a nude girl sitting demurely on a downed tree. A rain of twigs and branches streams from her eyes and fractures the surface, which is dotted with woodland creatures. (Like the other tapestries here, it was woven, with stunning subtlety, by the studio Magnolia Editions.) Ms. Smith lost 150 trees in Hurricane Irene. She says her backyard looked like a giant had been playing pickup sticks. Here, the debris creates a forbidding kind of radiance. "Singer," a cast aluminum sculpture shown in a spare room on the ground floor, portrays a girl standing at attention and proffering a bouquet of silk flowers. The bouquet is wired to one hand; the other hand is rigidly raised. Ms. Smith said she was thinking of the little girl in Picasso's bullfight images who holds out an appeasing bunch of flowers, and of Elie Nadelman's folk art inspired sculptures. But the most evocative connection Ms. Smith named was to the early 19th century liturgical tradition of shape note singing, in which congregants chant, forcefully it is more shout than song hymns notated with simple geometric shapes. The raised arm of Ms. Smith's singer echoes the tradition's stern gesture for marking a beat. The girl's expression, too, is stern: hers is a chastening innocence. One feels a connection to Cole's vision of the American landscape, a Romantic construction to be sure, but less keyed to operatic drama than that of the Hudson River School's next generation. On a landing are several etchings, one of a handsome turkey and the others of crystals. Cole, like Ms. Smith, was a rock collector, and his collection is on view in an adjacent room. In Cole's bedroom is a digital print, from an iPhone photo of Ms. Smith hanging her head upside down over a sofa; her flowing hair is overdrawn in white ink to suggest the nearby Kaaterskill Falls. Two aluminum chairs leaning into each other echo the lone outdoor sculpture: two upturned aluminum chairs, a pair of birds perched on one, suspended from a walnut tree. In the sitting room are "Tiller," a bronze sculpture of a maple sapling springing from a tree stump, and another bronze, "Phantom," of a single stem issuing from a downed limb: death generating life. Nearby is Ms. Smith's crystal sculpture of dandelions under a bell jar. If things get a little precious here, and again in the nursery, where Ms. Smith has fashioned covers for a crib and a bed and stocked them with cloth dolls, such moments are few. Ms. Smith is still best known for her early, harrowing portrayals of human bodies, but she has long favored nature's bounty. Skeptics have dismissed this turn as sentimental, a term that has become a dirty word for tenderness. In any case her fairy tale characters wolves and girls, bats and fawns are wired in all of us, deep and dark, and Ms. Smith does their complexity full justice. Now 63, she began her career in the late 1970s as a member of Colab, a lively collaborative group that contested the premium on individual mastery, and she remains fundamentally committed to its ethic. Nothing in this installation was achieved in one go, by one hand. Working by choice with skilled artisans, Ms. Smith looks outward to nature, to history, to a community of makers with illuminating acuity. In nearby Kinderhook, Jack Shainman, who maintains two galleries in Chelsea, has turned a 1929 Federal style brick schoolhouse into a clean white 30,000 square foot art venue. The current show at the School is a tribute to Claude Simard titled "The Coffins of Paa Joe and the Pursuit of Happiness." Simard, who died in 2014, was a partner in the gallery and an avid collector of African art. The billing is a little misleading. Of the nearly 200 artworks on view, only three are by Paa Joe, a Ghanaian craftsman of vernacular coffins; none of his sculptures at the School would accommodate a corpse. But they punch way above their weight. Painted with devastating brio, they are wood models of African Gold Coast "castles" that served as holding pens for Africans sold into slavery. (A fourth, in a related show at Mr. Shainman's 24th Street gallery, grimly bears the name "Fort Good Hope." All four were commissioned by Mr. Simard, whose collection is the subject of an exhibition now at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College.) For the rest, the show is a wildly heterogeneous assembly of East and West, old and new. As promised, happiness even ecstasy is hotly pursued, though despair, exalting or otherwise, is not infrequently the result. Mr. Shainman's collection of the Spanish Baroque is represented, as are African tribal figures, Indian paintings and the gallery's artists El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom Boakye and Richard Mosse, the last with an eerie, nocturnal photomural made with a heat sensitive camera of a Greek storage yard for shipping containers, some of them sheltering asylum seekers. A wall of niches holds anonymous non Western objects, and also unsigned busts of Gandhi and of Joseph Hirshhorn, and small paintings by Philip Taaffe and Linda Stark. Particularly engrossing are the handful of commissioned responses to Mr. Shainman's collection. One is Titus Kaphar's answer to a 17th century portrait of Marie Therese, wife of Louis XIV and supposed lover of an African dwarf in the royal household. It is said that the illicit couple's brown skinned daughter became a nun; Mr. Kaphar's "Menina," a moonlit painting, presents a determined little girl in court dress, with a deeply shadowed, faceless figure looming behind her. Farther south an hour from Manhattan by Metro North is the newly opened Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring. A horseshoe of elegant galleries surrounding a ghostly piazza, Magazzino was designed by Miguel Quismondo, who incorporated a pre existing industrial building (the name means warehouse). It provides an almost comically sleek home for the Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu collection of postwar and recent Italian art. Their concentration is Arte Povera, a term coined by Germano Celant in 1967 that means, roughly, impoverished art. But as Magazzino confirms, by its design aesthetic as much as by its inaugural show it honors Margherita Stein, a patron of the movement an irrepressible sense of good taste prevailed from the start. In fact, so did fairly expensive materials, including an abundance of marble and steel. Magazzino Italian Art, a warehouse art space, is a new stop on the Hudson Valley tour of contemporary art. Represented in depth in "Margherita Stein: Rebel With a Cause" are Michelangelo Pistoletto (he is also at the School), whose medium is mirror finished polished steel, often with applied photo silkscreens; Alighiero Boetti (embroidered textiles); Luciano Fabro (mainly stone, sometimes balanced in unexpected ways); and Jannis Kounellis (assemblages of hardware and miscellany). A little clay bust and two mixed media works on paper by Marisa Merz, the only woman here and one of the few Povera artists who did rely on inexpensive materials and offhand techniques are among the more unruly contributions. Others include two works by Giuseppe Penone, one an elaborately transferred image, mediated by photography, of his charcoal sprinkled body. The result, a charcoal drawing, maps a territory of indeterminate scale and terrain, lively and unstable. Mr. Penone again registered his touch literally, and wittily, in a paper relief featuring dozens of 3 D fingerprints, each marking a tear made by that finger. Bringing warmth to the exhibition is, paradoxically, a refrigerated sculpture by Pier Paolo Calzolari, its metal parts flocked with ice that is lent a pink cast by neon tubing. It emits a faint sizzle, promisingly. The Olnick Spanu collection is active, and examples of work by younger Italian artists can be seen in the final gallery, whose exhibitions will rotate twice a year. (The current selection of earlier work remains on view until late 2018.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
THE AVETT BROTHERS If your appetite for sentimentality hasn't been sated by holiday films, this may be the livestream for you. In their strummy folk rock vernacular and tidy close harmonies, the brothers Scott and Seth Avett sing earnest songs about love and family. A slew of special guests including Willie Nelson, Brandi Carlile, Norah Jones and Loudon Wainwright III will bolster the star power of this New Year's Eve performance (the 17th edition of an annual Avett tradition). At 8 p.m. Eastern, nugs.tv. Tickets start at 40. (Olivia Horn) THE BEST OF RADIO FREE BIRDLAND The pay per view virtual concert series has brought live to tape performances to pandemic weary cabaret fans since April. To finally welcome a new year, it will present a compilation of them all captured on the Birdland Theater stage with three cameras and no audience members featuring Broadway and cabaret favorites such as Sierra Boggess, Reeve Carney, Nikki Renee Daniels, Darius de Haas, Telly Leung, Eva Noblezada, Laura Osnes, Christopher Sieber and Billy Stritch. Streaming on demand from Dec. 31 to Jan. 3; tickets are 10 at events.BroadwayWorld.com. (Elysa Gardner) BIG HIT LABELS' 2021 NEW YEAR'S EVE LIVE Owing to the success of their crown jewel, BTS, Big Hit has contributed substantially to K pop's growing global footprint. Their artist roster, which includes lesser known (in the U.S., anyway) groups like Gfriend and Nu'est, will join forces for this concert, live from Korea. BTS's past collaborators Halsey, Lauv and Steve Aoki have been tapped to expand the program's international reach with a collaboration on the so called "Global Connect Stage." At 7:30 a.m. Eastern, on the Weverse shop app. The basic ticket option is sold out, but multiview packages are available for about 48. (Horn) BUD LIGHT SELTZER SESSIONS PRESENTS NEW YEAR'S EVE 2021 Post Malone's ubiquitous, post genre pop songs can be bacchanalian (for the New Year's that we want) or brooding (for the New Year's that we're getting). At this virtual shindig, streaming live from Las Vegas, he'll perform a selection with support from Saweetie, the cheeky rapper whose popularity has surged on the back of consecutive TikTok hits. The comedian Lilly Singh will host, with additional performances from Jack Harlow and Steve Aoki. At 10:30 p.m. Eastern, budlight.com/nye and on Bud Light's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. (Horn) 'DICK CLARK'S NEW YEAR'S ROCKIN' EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2021' If the ball drops in Times Square and no one is around to see it, does 2020 actually end? Despite the absence of the usual crowds, Ryan Seacrest and his fellow hosts, the actors Lucy Hale and Billy Porter, will be on hand to capture the ball's descent from One Times Square, with Ciara hosting a sister celebration in Los Angeles. Machine Gun Kelly, Miley Cyrus, Megan Thee Stallion, Cyndi Lauper and more will perform; Jennifer Lopez is the evening's headliner. At 8 p.m. Eastern, on ABC. (Horn) 'CNN'S NEW YEAR'S EVE' Andy Cohen, who co hosts this broadcast with Anderson Cooper, described it as "an authentic experience" (a year ago, that authenticity manifested with a peer pressured Cooper struggling through tequila shots on air). This holiday, the pair will be freewheeling masters of ceremony for a lineup of performers and special guests that includes John Mayer, Patti LaBelle, Kylie Minogue, the Goo Goo Dolls, Jon Bon Jovi and Carole Baskin, of "Tiger King" fame. At 8 p.m. Eastern, on CNN. (Horn) DANCEAWAY2020 Clear some floor space and consider carb loading before tuning into this marathon livestream, a 20 plus hour dance party bringing together an intercontinental lineup of electronic D.J.s. From Melbourne, the longtime techno kingpin Carl Cox will book end the show with sets at 7 a.m. Eastern on Thursday and 3 a.m. on Friday. Other notables on the bill include Honey Dijon (live in Berlin), Tokimonsta (in Los Angeles) and Nicole Moudaber (in Barbados). At 7 a.m. Eastern, on Beatport's Twitch, YouTube and Facebook. (Horn) NATALIE DOUGLAS The 12 time Manhattan Association of Cabarets Award winner will once again use her supple wit and soulful warmth to kiss today goodbye, this time with an assist from technology. For "A Virtually Natalie New Year 2020," kicking off at 9 p.m., Douglas and her longtime music director Brian Nash will offer songs old and new, and take requests via Facebook and YouTube. In lieu of a cover charge, viewers are asked to simply pay what they can, at Venmo or PayPal. Streaming live at facebook.com/natalie.douglas.nyc and youtube.com/nataliedouglasmusic. (Gardner) ESCHATON NYE: THE DISSOLUTION The vibe of this interactive theater piece should hover somewhere between spooky cabaret and escape room. Originally conceived as an in person experience, the Eschaton project nimbly pivoted to digital in the spring, maximizing Zoom rooms' functionality by presenting a suite of interconnected virtual performance spaces, through which guests can meander. The organizers encourage festive attire. At 11 p.m. Eastern, tickettailor.com. Tickets start at 25. (Horn) HIROMI Among jazz musicians, pianists were among the best equipped to handle the doldrums of isolation this year there's a lot you can do with 88 keys, and the piano is the rare instrument that's often performed solo in a jazz context. Over the past two decades, Hiromi has honed her own relationship to the instrument's vast possibilities. Last year she released a redoubtable solo album, "Spectrum," and she had just finished a tour promoting it when the coronavirus struck. She's likely to draw from that material this week, as she does a run of solo shows at the Blue Note Tokyo; on New Year's Eve, in a nod to her North American audiences, she will perform a livestream from there at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Passes are 20 at bluenotelive.com. (Giovanni Russonello) JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT Widely regarded as one of Music City's great storytellers, Jason Isbell writes deftly about world weary, embattled characters; his songs strike a tone befitting a year that has left many worse for wear. In May, Isbell celebrated the release of his new album with a livestreamed show at an empty Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville, with accompaniment from his wife, the singer violinist Amanda Shires. For the holiday, the pair will return, this time with the full band in tow. At 9 p.m. Eastern, fans.live. Ticket packages start at 25; day of, they jump to 30. (Horn) THE JUNGLE SHOW This blues supergroup, anchored by ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, convenes annually for a New Year's show at Antone's Nightclub in Austin, Tex. Gibbons and his compatriots including the singer guitarists Jimmie Vaughan and Sue Foley will forgo an in person audience to keep the tradition alive this year, delivering rollicking guitar riffs from the empty club via livestream. At 8 p.m. Eastern, jungleshow.tv. Ticket packages start at 25. (Horn) KISS Never ones to skimp on the theatrics, the glam rock titans are plotting to break world records with the pyrotechnics display that will accompany their show at the Atlantis in Dubai. Tune in for hedonistic guitar anthems and, inevitably, a glimpse of Gene Simmons's tongue. At 12 p.m. Eastern, kiss2020goodbye.com. Ticket packages start at 40. (Horn) 'NBC'S NEW YEAR'S EVE 2020' Carson Daly hosts NBC's addition to the crowded New Year's prime time market, welcoming musical guests including Chloe x Halle, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton, Sting, Bebe Rexha and Doja Cat. At 10 p.m. Eastern, on NBC. (Horn) NEW YEAR'S QUEENS: GOODBYE 2020! Sixteen alumnae of "RuPaul's Drag Race" comprise the lineup for this New Year's glitterfest, with hosting duties split between Alaska, Bob the Drag Queen, Katya, Miz Cracker, Peppermint and Trixie Mattel. Can't get enough? Season 13 of "Drag Race" premiers on New Year's Day. At 6 p.m. Eastern, sessionslive.com/NewYearsQueens. Ticket packages start at 49. (Horn) PINK MARTINI'S 'GOOD RIDDANCE 2020' For most people not named Kardashian, long distance trips became an untenable risk this year; lucky for Pink Martini, globe trotting through music and traveling back to supposedly simpler times has always been its stock in trade. A little big band that achieved worldwide renown in the late 1990s, its wide repertoire consists of old show tunes, cabaret fare, romantic songs from around the world and original compositions that sound like all of the above. On New Year's Eve, Pink Martini will present a streaming holiday concert, filmed in its hometown Portland, Ore., that will be broadcast twice: once at 9 p.m. Paris time, and again at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Streaming passes can be purchased for 15 at ourconcerts.live, and can be used to watch the show at any point for the next 48 hours. (Russonello) CHRIS POTTER Since the 1990s, Chris Potter has been among jazz's most casually fearsome saxophonists, and left entirely to his own devices during quarantine, he has proved just how deep his virtuosity goes: This month he released "There Is a Tide," a slinky, coolly funky album for which he recorded every instrument overdubbing saxophones, clarinets, flutes, bass, drums, guitars and keyboards. Potter has played New Year's Eve at the Village Vanguard for the past two years, and this week he'll return to the club for livestream performances on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, at 8 p.m. each time. There will be no live audience, but he'll be accompanied by a stellar quartet of longtime associates: David Virelles on piano, Joe Martin on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. Tickets cost 10 at villagevanguard.com. (Russonello) KT SULLIVAN AND RUSS WOOLLEY KT Sullivan, the ebullient cabaret veteran and champion, and the producer Russ Woolley will present "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?," a benefit for the Mabel Mercer Foundation, featuring the jazz pianist Jon Weber and the singer and pianists Eric Yves Garcia and Larry Woodard. The virtual festivities, taped live and streaming at 10 p.m., will include a countdown to midnight with champagne, noisemakers and masks. The stream is free of charge, though donations for the fund raiser are appreciated. At mabelmercer.org. (Gardner) YANDEL GOODBYE 2020 This O.G. reggaetonero helped forge a path that artists like J Balvin have followed to mammoth crossover success. With his performing partner Wisin, Yandel came up with the first wave of international reggaeton stars in the early 2000s; two decades after their debut, the pair remain prominent voices in the genre, both together and individually. Their plans for a Vegas style residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico this month were, of course, scrapped. Instead, Yandel will offer fans this free virtual concert, broadcast live from Miami. At 8 p.m. Eastern, on Yandel's YouTube channel and the app LaMusica. (Horn) YOUTUBE'S HELLO 2021 Lest any one New Year's special feel too boilerplate, YouTube's in house content studio is producing five different, regionally specific variations, each carried by (mostly) local talent. The "Americas" version will offer urbano courtesy of J Balvin and Karol G, modern country from Kane Brown and disco pop from Dua Lipa. On triple duty, Lipa also features in the U.K. special alongside the pop singer Anne Marie and the shapeshifting rapper AJ Tracey, and in the Indian edition, alongside the comedian Zakir Khan and the rapper Badshah. At 10:30 p.m. Eastern, on YouTube Originals' channel. (Horn) JOHN LLOYD YOUNG The Tony Award winning star of "Jersey Boys" both the original Broadway production and Clint Eastwood's 2014 screen adaptation has in recent years parlayed his affinity for pop and R B classics into a busy cabaret career. To ring in 2021, John Lloyd Young will lend his robust, rangy voice to such material along with originals and perhaps a show tune or two. Young's live streamed, hourlong set, beginning at 11 p.m. Eastern, will be followed at 12:15 a.m. Eastern with a V.I.P. after party and interview, with the singer answering audience questions submitted in advance. From Feinstein's at Vitello's, Los Angeles (and available On Demand for a limited time after the event); 818 769 0905, feinsteinsatvitellos.com, 30 plus 5 for the V.I.P. experience. (Gardner)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
It was the biggest political clash in American history by one measure, at least. The first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump was watched by 84 million television viewers, Nielsen said on Tuesday, the largest audience since televised debates began in 1960. In an era when mass events are increasingly rare, Monday's meeting of the candidates was seen in nearly half of American households with television sets. The viewership toppled the previous debate record of 80.6 million, set during the sole 1980 debate between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in the days before social media and cable TV. The tally did not include Americans who watched Monday's debate on the internet or on mobile devices. It also did not include viewers of C Span, which is not rated by Nielsen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
With the No. 1 ranking, two Grand Slam tennis tournament titles and an Olympic gold medal, Victoria Azarenka is one of the most famous Belarusian athletes of the past decade. But despite reaching her first Grand Slam quarterfinal in more than four years at the United States Open this week, Azarenka is an afterthought at home, in a country normally enamored with sports but currently rapt by mass protests against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the autocratic president known often as "Europe's last dictator." Lukashenko, in office since 1994, has been clinging to power and brutally suppressing demonstrations in the weeks since he claimed a landslide victory in the Aug. 9 election. Lukashenko said he earned 80 percent of the vote, but many Western governments have called the election a farce. With some exceptions, the players have largely resisted the substance of what is happening in Belarus, with many refusing to say directly whether they support Lukashenko or his opposition. But they have said they think their run at the first major tennis tournament since the coronavirus pandemic has been a footnote at home, despite state media normally closely following the performances of Belarusian athletes and Lukashenko often an active promoter of athletics and fitness. (As he downplayed the threat of the coronavirus earlier this year, Lukashenko promoted hockey, vodka, saunas and farm work as potential cures.) Belarus has long had a connection to tennis, with a handful of consistently competitive players since the 1990s as part of an influx of Eastern Europeans into the sport, especially on the women's side of the game. Yet Olga Govortsova, who reached the second round, said, "Sport is not important right now." Govortsova primarily lives and trains in Sunrise, Fla., but she has stayed in close touch with family in Belarus and said they are staying out of the current unrest. "But they see a lot of people going to protest, and sometimes it's scary to walk outside," Govortsova said. "It's crazy for Belarus." Aryna Sabalenka, who was seeded fifth in singles but lost in the second round to Azarenka, said she was preoccupied by her family's safety after arriving in the United States to play in several tournaments. During her first tournament here, in Lexington, Ky., a restless Sabalenka "couldn't sleep," growing increasingly frantic as she waited for her mother to answer her message. "I was really worried about her and she didn't respond to me," Sabalenka said. "I forgot the internet there wasn't working and I just called her and as soon as I heard her voice I felt a little bit better and I could sleep." She added that it was difficult for several weeks, but that "hopefully everything will be calm." Both Govortsova and Sabalenka posted a meme titled "Belarusians Lives Matter" on Instagram last month. Sabalenka included a caption that said: "I can't look at cruelty to people who are defenseless; please stop the violence." The most politically outspoken Belarusian player has been the youngest: Vera Lapko, 21, attended a protest in Minsk, the Belarus capital, before reaching the second round of the U.S. Open. "There were a lot of people," Lapko said. "They all were peaceful. They all were happy that they can show their opinions, show their emotions, about all that is happening right now. It was really nice to be there next to them." Had she won one more round in New York, Lapko would have faced another Belarusian, Aliaksandra Sasnovich, in the third round. After her first round match, Sasnovich immediately said "no comments" when the subject of Belarus was broached. Sasnovich, who along with Sabalenka led Belarus to the 2017 Fed Cup final against the United States, has spoken of the pep talks she and her teammates had received from Lukashenko before the matches, which were held in Minsk. "He said 'Come on girls, you can do it, Belarus is better than America,'" Sasnovich said in a 2018 interview. Belarus narrowly lost that final and Lukashenko expressed his disappointment while praising the team's "spirit." "We men are nothing at all: we play very badly in tennis, football and hockey. Therefore, all hope fell on these delicate girls' shoulders," Lukashenko said. "We can just say that they played very well but they could have won." In 2010, Lukashenko attended an exhibition in Minsk between Azarenka and Caroline Wozniacki, and enthusiastically accepted Azarenka's invitation to come down on the court and play. In an interview with The New York Times in 2017, Azarenka, who won a gold medal in mixed doubles at the 2012 London Olympics, said she was once invited to meet Lukashenko and wound up talking about tennis with him for "seven hours straight." "My mom thought I was, I don't know, kidnapped," Azarenka joked then. Azarenka's tone about Belarus and Lukashenko has been considerably more serious and hesitant this year, calling it a "very difficult topic to speak on." "That's breaking my heart to see what's happening, because not being able to be there and understand the whole situation, it's really sad," Azarenka said last month. "It's really sad, and it's really difficult to speak on that. But I just hope that all the violence stops immediately, really does, because it's really heartbreaking. I can't even speak without tears in my eyes when I think about it." After beating Sabalenka last week, Azarenka said she hoped people in Belarus were watching. "Obviously what's happening in Belarus is very dear to my heart," she said. "At this point, what is it going to do? I feel like sport has always been a celebration in our country." "There was no sport for a really long time," she added. "Having two Belarusian women playing on the biggest stages, I think it's really important. I hope people have enjoyed our matches and will continue to watch."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. And the Category Is ... President Trump remarked during a FEMA briefing Sunday that he had never heard of a Category 5 hurricane before, despite Dorian being the fourth he has dealt with and publicly discussed during his presidency. "How have you never heard of a Category 5 hurricane when there have been three Category 5 hurricanes while you've been president? And you know how I know that? From listening to you not know what they are." STEPHEN COLBERT "He'd never heard of it then, and he said he never heard of a Category 5 about 10 different times when Maria hit Puerto Rico. This is the fourth Category 5 since he's been president. He has the memory and skin tone of a goldfish, this man." JIMMY KIMMEL "Said Trump, 'Well, I've also never heard of Puerto Rico, so.'" SETH MEYERS "That's not what anyone wants to hear from the president when a hurricane is bearing down on them. It's like if you called 911 and the operator said, ' Expletive ! One hundred and four degree fever? I didn't know they went that high! Gary! Gary, did you know it went to 104? Gary knew.'" SETH MEYERS " Imitating Trump I've never heard of a Category 5. Up until I took office, four was the largest number. Now they invented five. And wait hold on. I have an idea. Are you ready for this? Six." STEPHEN COLBERT Trump spent most of the weekend golfing and tweeting, though he was said to be receiving regular updates on Dorian. Some hosts wondered if that was the safest place for him to be. "President Trump faced international criticism this weekend after he was seen playing golf instead of staying in the office to monitor the progress of Hurricane Dorian, though, honestly, would that be better? Making Trump monitor the hurricane would be like making your 4 year old do the dishes. After about five minutes, you'd be like, 'You know what, Tyler? Just go out and play.'" SETH MEYERS "So I know people get mad when they see Trump playing golf when a hurricane is closing in, but after what we've heard, I think the less Trump is involved with this hurricane, the better it is. He doesn't know how big it is, doesn't know where it's going and has bat expletive ideas about how to stop it, so let him play his golf because if we don't there's a good chance Trump ends up nuking Alabama." TREVOR NOAH Trump erroneously tweeted on Sunday that Alabama would be among the states affected by Hurricane Dorian, followed by the National Weather Service's reassurance that the state would not be in the storm's projected path. "Trump had to be corrected by the National Weather Service! And I know we're used to it by now, but it still amazes me how often the government has to tell you not to pay attention to the president." TREVOR NOAH "I can't wait for the day when the U.S. Postal Service has to tweet, 'It is our duty to report that the president was incorrect when he said that packages are mommies and letters are their babies.'" STEPHEN COLBERT " As Trump O.K., I'm not wrong. Because at one point, I was right. Under certain scenarios, it could have hit Alabama. I know this because I write weather fan fiction." STEPHEN COLBERT "We're like a week away from the Justice Department tweeting, 'Contrary to the president's tweet, the Joker is not a threat. He's a character in a movie played by Joaquin Phoenix. There is no evacuation of Gotham underway, nor is Gotham a real place.'" SETH MEYERS Bill Hader, Jimmy Fallon and Cara Delevingne traded some real life scary stories on "The Tonight Show."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The bulletin sent to dealers is reminiscent of two other actions in which G.M. told dealers or owners about a safety problem, but did not, at the time, recall millions of vehicles. The highest profile example involves the ignition problem on 1.6 million small cars that were recalled in February. In 2005, G.M. told dealers that a heavy key ring or a severe bump to the ignition could turn off the engine on the 2005 Cobalt. However, for about a decade the automaker did not recall the vehicles, according to documents the automaker provided to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. G.M. also said this month that it was recalling 1.3 million crossover vehicles, including the 2009 13 Chevrolet Traverse, because there was a possibility that the air bags might not deploy because of a wiring problem. The company sent those owners a notice in 2011 telling them about the problem, but said there was no need to repair it unless an air bag warning light was illuminated. Under the current recall, G.M. is now required to repair all of those vehicles. Under federal safety regulations, once a manufacturer is aware of a safety problem it must within five business days inform the safety agency of its plan for a recall or face a civil fine. The maximum fine, however, is 35 million, an amount some consumer advocates routinely describe as a "rounding error" to a huge corporation. The difference between a recall and the "customer satisfaction program" G.M. offered to owners is huge, said Clarence Ditlow, the executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. Under federal law, the recall letter to owners must state that there is a safety problem. The automaker must also report to the N.H.T.S.A. on its progress in conducting the recall. If the agency finds that not enough vehicles have been repaired, it can require an automaker to send a second or third recall notice. But for customer satisfaction programs, Mr. Ditlow said, there is no such federal oversight. The air bag system on the 2005 Cobalt was a dual stage system designed to deploy the frontal air bags at a lower or higher pressure, depending on the severity of the crash. The idea behind such systems, which at the time were being adopted by all automakers, was to keep air bags from causing injuries, which the N.H.T.S.A. had confirmed was a possibility by the late 1990s. There is some variance among models and automakers, but for less severe crashes the air bag would deploy at about 60 percent of its power, Mr. Caruso said. For more severe crashes, it would inflate at full force. The problem with the driver's side air bag on the Cobalt was that the wiring "may be reversed," the automaker told dealers and owners in the letter from 2005. Consequently, the air bag would deploy at full power "instead of at the reduced level described in your owner's manual," the bulletin said. There was no mention that such a deployment could cause a serious injury, nor was there a sense that it was important to get the repairs done quickly. Instead, the letter assured owners that the Cobalt still met "the occupant protection requirements" of the federal government.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Three European born scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a new way to assemble precise three dimensional images of biological molecules like proteins, DNA and RNA. Their work has helped scientists decipher processes within cells that were previously invisible, and has led to better understanding of viruses like Zika. In the future, their techniques could offer road maps in the development of drugs to treat diseases. The Nobel committee said the technique, cryo electron microscopy, produces "detailed images of life's complex machineries in atomic resolution." "Soon there are no more secrets," said Sara Snogerup Linse, a professor of physical chemistry at Lund University in Sweden who chaired the committee for the chemistry prize. "Now we can see the intricate details of the biomolecules in every corner of our cells, in every drop of our body fluids." Dr. Henderson said during a news briefing in Cambridge that he was delighted to share the prize. He was at a conference listening to a talk when he was called by the Swedish Academy of Science, which administers the prizes. "I rejected the phone call," he said. "Then it rang again." He also recognized others who had contributed to the technique's development. "I think the feeling is that the three of us who have been awarded the prize are sort of acting on behalf of the whole field," Dr. Henderson said. "It's kind of a worldwide effort that's just now come to fruition." Dr. Frank received his phone call at 5:18 a.m. New York time. He said recently his dog has been barking earlier and earlier in the morning, waking up him and his wife. "This time it was not the dog," he said. Why did they win? Figuring out the shape of proteins and other biological molecules is crucial to understanding their functions. The structure of a virus, for instance, gives essential clues to how it invades a cell. For decades, the main method for studying protein structure was stacking many copies of a protein into a crystal, bouncing X rays off the crystal and then deducing the protein shape using the patterns of X ray reflections. But many proteins, especially those embedded in the outer membranes of cells, are too floppy or disordered to crystallize. The particular protein that Dr. Henderson and his colleagues wanted to study was embedded in the cell membranes of a photosynthesizing organism, and they used a coating of glucose solution to prevent it from drying out. They also turned down the intensity of the electron beam and took advantage of the regular arrangement of the proteins in the membrane. That allowed Dr. Henderson, in 1975, to reconstruct the shape of the protein from the scattering of the electrons, almost the same mathematical analysis he had used for X ray crystallography. For most proteins, scientists could not rely on a protein being embedded in a regular pattern, all oriented in the same direction. In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Frank came up with the next advance honored by the Nobel committee. He recorded images of thousands or millions of copies of a protein at one time, scattered in random orientations. "Then you have a chance of capturing all the projections that you need," Dr. Frank said in an interview. "The only problem is to find out the orientation of the molecules. That's the hard part." A computer grouped together similar images the proteins that were in similar orientations figured out how they were arranged and combined them to produce a sharper result. The many orientations essentially offered views of the same molecule from different angles. He was also able to put together three dimensional shapes. Dr. Dubochet, of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, invented the "cryo" part of cryo electron microscopy. "He's the real father of the field," Dr. Henderson said. Embedding the molecules in ice would also protect them from drying out. But in ice, water molecules usually stack into a crystal shape, and the bouncing of electrons off the ice crystals in a frozen sample yielded useless images. To overcome this problem, Dr. Dubochet dipped the samples in liquid nitrogen cooled ethane. At minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), an ultrathin layer of water molecules froze so quickly that they had no time to line up in crystals, and they solidified into a glass like structure. That enabled the electron microscope technique to view the embedded molecules instead of the ice. Advances in the detectors of electron microscopes now provide enough clarity to pinpoint each and every atom in the molecules. The blobby protein that Dr. Henderson originally imaged in 1975 can now be studied precisely. Why is the work important? The same technique was used to figure out the structure of proteins involved with circadian rhythms, advances that were recognized with this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine. Only a small number of institutions can perform cryo electron microscopy. The microscope apparatus costs millions of dollars. Dr. Henderson likened the technique to DNA sequencing once laborious and costly, now commonplace and affordable. He imagined that the same will happen for biologists wanting to know the structure of a protein. "You send it off, teatime, and the next morning, you get the structure back by email," he said. Dr. Frank said he had yet to decide what to do with his one third share of the 1.1 million prize money. "I haven't discussed this with my wife," he said. "One thing I told her is we don't have to worry about dogsitting anymore." Who are the winners? Dr. Dubochet, 75, is a Swiss citizen. He retired from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2007. His web page at the university humorously notes that in October 1941, he was "conceived by optimistic parents" and in 1946 he was "no longer scared of the dark, because the sun comes back." He noted of his dyslexia: "This permitted being bad at everything ... and to understand those with difficulties." Dr. Frank, 77, was born in Germany and is now a citizen of the United States. He is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics Columbia University in New York. He was also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2014, he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Science from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Netflix, the streaming juggernaut that has upended the entertainment industry, showed signs of vulnerability Wednesday when it reported that it had lost 126,000 paid subscribers in the United States during the second quarter. It was the first time the company had shed domestic streaming customers since it started its digital service 12 years ago and its shares fell sharply. The number of those subscribers dropped during a time when the price for Netflix went up. In January, the company announced that it was raising its rates by anywhere from 13 to 18 percent, depending on the subscription plan, with the increases hitting existing subscribers in March. The second quarter is typically Netflix's weakest time of year, but its performance this time was unusually poor. In its letter to shareholders on Wednesday, the company acknowledged that the higher subscription cost had something to do with its failure to meet second quarter expectations. Netflix also noted that its second quarter slate of programming, lacking fresh episodes of two of its original hits, "The Crown" and "Stranger Things," was not as robust as it had been the previous quarter, which most likely figured in the disappointing results. In addition to losing domestic subscribers, Netflix significantly undershot the number of customers it had expected to sign up worldwide for the period. The company reported that it had added a total of 2.7 million subscribers for the three months ending in June, well short of the five million expected by investors and down from the 5.5. million it had brought aboard in the first quarter. Netflix stock fell more than 9 percent in early trading Thursday. Reed Hastings, the chief executive, brushed off the weak second quarter performance. "Our position is excellent," he said on a call with analysts after the release of the earnings report. Netflix forecast that it would add more than seven million subscribers in the current quarter, when the new season of "Stranger Things" was made available. The company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., tends to raise its prices around every 18 months. It decided on the latest increase at least partly because it burns a lot of cash, much of it borrowed, spending wildly on Hollywood talent and lavish promotional events. Netflix remains the nation's largest internet television network, with over 60 million paying subscribers in the United States. The company has said it could ultimately bring in as many as 90 million total domestic customers. Globally, Netflix is most likely the largest streaming business, with more than 151 million subscribers. Its future growth will largely come outside the United States, with India representing its best opportunity. Netflix has given up on entering the Chinese market after difficulties with regulators there. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The company's dominance has prompted more established media giants to embark on streaming services of their own. AT T, which acquired HBO and Turner Broadcasting as part of its 85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner last year, announced plans this month for a streaming service HBO Max that will start next year. The Walt Disney Company will also go big on streaming, with plans to fill an expansive new streaming product, Disney Plus, with franchises like "The Avengers" and "Star Wars." It will also offer the many television shows and films it picked up when it bought the bulk of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox entertainment empire for 71.3 billion in a deal that closed in March. Adding to the competition, Apple is shifting away from its focus on hardware to spend more than 1 billion on Hollywood talent as it enters into the entertainment business with Apple TV Plus. That streaming service, with new content from a roster of talent that includes Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon, is scheduled for a fall debut. "It's not a zero sum competition," Mr. Hastings said on Wednesday. "People will subscribe to multiple shows. I'd wager that most Netflix employees are HBO subscribers." As part of its effort to ramp up its original offerings, Netflix signed Shonda Rhimes, the creator of ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," to a nine figure deal in 2017. The company subsequently wooed Ryan Murphy, the prolific producer behind "Glee" and the anthology series "American Crime Story," away from 21st Century Fox with a five year deal said to be worth nearly 300 million. Netflix released its second quarter report a little more than a week after the news that it would lose the North American rights to "Friends," the NBC sitcom that has had a highly remunerative afterlife in syndication and online.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Sasheer Zamata met with civil liberties lawyers at the A.C.L.U.'s offices in Lower Manhattan. Sasheer Zamata, the actress, stand up comedian and former "Saturday Night Live" player, doesn't think of herself as a political comedian. "I talk about my life, and being a woman, and being a black woman in America," she said. But on a bright morning in early fall, she tucked her leopard print high heels under the table at the no frills offices of the American Civil Liberties Union in Lower Manhattan. As an artist ambassador for the A.C.L.U.'s Women's Rights Project, she had come to talk politics. "I love you because you're our pre Trump ambassador," said Jessica Weitz , the A.C.L.U.'s director of artistic engagement, who also works with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Alyssa Milano and others. "Before it was cool," Ms. Zamata added. The plain conference room, decorated with a few wilting plants and a "Women's Rights Are Civil Rights" poster, overlooks New York Harbor and the helipad where the president sometimes lands. Ms. Zamata was in town to promote "The Weekend," a new movie about a comedian, Zadie, who plans a weekend getaway with her ex and his glamorous new girlfriend. Zadie thrives on chaos. Ms. Zamata, who joined AmeriCorps right out of college, prefers getting organized. The A.C.L.U. recruited her in 2015. She meets with its civil liberties attorneys every year or so. They update her on current cases, supply statistics that she thinks she might use in her act, and brainstorm ways that she can amplify the project's work. Because social justice needs jokes, too. "I feel like that's a really healthy and constructive way for me to channel some of this energy," she said. Does her work feel more urgent since Trump got elected? "It was all urgent then, it's all urgent now," she said. Ms. Weitz handed Ms. Zamata a folder of newspaper clippings and a blue A.C.L.U. ribbon. Seated around the table were five female attorneys and one male intern who were dressed in varying shades of black, blue and gray. Ms. Zamata, progressive even in her fashion, wore an apple green dress with an asymmetrical skirt and earrings that looked like straightened paper clips . Louise Melling, the A.C.L.U.'s deputy legal director, began with an overview. "The A.C.L.U. had been busy working toward racial, justice, criminal justice, women's rights," she said. "So we have our hands full, but they're super good hands." Sandra Park, a senior staff attorney in a no nonsense blazer, explained the first order of business. The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to make housing discrimination harder to prove. The A.C.L.U. was drafting a letter to oppose the change. Would Ms. Zamata be the lead signatory? "Yes," she said. "This is how we get stuff done," Ms. Weitz said enthusiastically. She used a stronger word than stuff. Stuff also needed to get done about the targets of sexist school dress codes, like the 17 year old girl in Florida who was reprimanded for not wearing a bra to school (she had a severe sunburn) and the teenager in Alaska who was disqualified from a swim meet when her suit was deemed too revealing, even though it was the team uniform. "And as unfunny as all of that is, part of me just feels like this could live in your act," Ms. Weitz said. She suggested they work on a video. Ms. Zamata was intrigued. "I don't think there's enough things from the students' perspective," she said. She also thought she could pitch Samantha Bee's show a segment on Facebook's discriminatory algorithms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Philadelphia Republican Party began posting complaints on Twitter about voter fraud in the city shortly after 6 a.m., saying Republican poll watchers had been barred from polling sites the complaint was picked up by the conservative website The Daily Caller, gained steam on Reddit and proliferated across Twitter and Facebook. Separate reports that electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania were switching votes meant for Mr. Trump to Hillary Clinton reached Infowars a site, long focused on conspiracies, that has recently gained prominence as a pro Trump outlet only to be further fueled by a viral video, described as from a Pennsylvania voter, showing difficulty voting for Trump on a touch screen machine. Soon, The Drudge Report posted a link on Facebook to an article on a conservative website featuring the video with the (uppercase) caption: "Voters report seeing Trump votes switch to Clinton before their eyes ..." By the time a Nevada judge denied a request from Mr. Trump's campaign to have votes impounded on the ground that poll workers had illegally extended early voting hours, and Mr. Trump himself suggested in radio and television interviews on Tuesday that he might not accept the result of the election, the floodgates had been opened. Mr. Trump has frequently expressed doubt about the integrity of the voting process, at campaign events as well as on the night of the 2012 presidential election. "This election is a total sham and a travesty," he said on Twitter after President Obama's re election. "We are not a democracy!" So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Trump's most reliably supportive voices on the internet were ready to back up that narrative. Project Veritas, which films undercover videos and orchestrates political stunts, and then shares them through social media and other websites, released a video purporting to show a woman wearing a head scarf and claiming the ballot of Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin in New York City. In another video, James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was in a car trailing what he called "a pastor's bus" that was transporting people to the polls in Philadelphia. Mr. O'Keefe promised evidence of people doing "improper things, busing people around." By early evening, before the polls had closed, the same alternative media ecosystem that had fostered a sense of confidence and calm in the morning had made allowances for either outcome. "Only Correct Public Brexit Poll Predicts Trump Victory," said the top headline on Breitbart, all in capital letters. However, right next to an image of Mr. Trump in a smaller typeface (though still all in capitals) was a hedge, courtesy of a series of updating headlines. "Reports of Voter Fraud Hit Social Media," one stated. Another provided a hint of what might be in store for the night to come, and the days after: "TROUBLE AT POLLS."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Competition for Broadway's biggest prize will now be a hard fought race between four artistically ambitious musicals, as the nominators snubbed several popular commercial ventures and instead showered affection on productions nurtured by nonprofit organizations in the United States and Britain. The leading candidates for best new musical the most coveted prize with the biggest box office impact remain two emotional musicals: "Dear Evan Hansen," about an anxiety ridden adolescent who insinuates himself into the life of a grieving family, and "Come From Away," about a Canadian town that sheltered stranded travelers after the terrorist attacks of 2001. But "The Great Comet," a raucous and eye popping production that marries an avant garde creative team with a top selling pop star, dominated the day Tuesday, winning nominations not only for Mr. Groban, who taught himself to play accordion for the role, but also for two other members of its cast, Denee Benton and Lucas Steele, and much of its creative team. "Groundhog Day," which overcame a last minute anterior cruciate ligament tear by its star, Andy Karl, just three nights before opening, also had a good day, and will now hope that the nominations provide some help at the box office, where this musical has been lagging behind the other nominated contenders. The nominators gave no nods to one of the season's costliest new musicals, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and only two to "Anastasia." Both are adapted from popular sources "Charlie" from the Roald Dahl novel as well as the Gene Wilder film, and "Anastasia" from an animated film and both are selling well at the box office. All four nominated shows had long developmental journeys to Broadway. "The Great Comet" began at Ars Nova, was then staged in two tents in Manhattan and at the American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts before heading to Broadway; "Come From Away" had pre Broadway productions in La Jolla, Calif.; Seattle; Washington; and Toronto; "Dear Evan Hansen" started at Arena Stage in Washington and then moved to Second Stage in New York; and "Groundhog Day" was started at the Old Vic Theater in London. Can Bette or Ben be beat? There were 37 Tony eligible plays and musicals on Broadway this season, but two performances have been indisputable must sees: 23 year old Ben Platt in a devastating star is born turn as a decompensating adolescent in "Dear Evan Hansen," and 71 year old Ms. Midler in a delirious career capping turn as a meddlesome matchmaker in "Hello, Dolly!" They were each nominated for awards on Tuesday, he as best leading actor in a musical, she as best leading actress in a musical. Can either of them be beat? Ms. Midler seems like a lock. The reviews were nearly unanimous in their praise, despite some concerns about the quality of her singing voice; audiences have been worshipful and are paying top dollar to see her (premium seats are being sold for 748). Her competitors include two much honored Broadway mainstays, Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, facing off in the awards derby for playing the rival cosmetics executives Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden in "War Paint." Also nominated were two actresses making their Broadway debuts Ms. Benton in "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812" and Eva Noblezada in "Miss Saigon." Mr. Platt has been universally acclaimed, and has accomplished the rare feat of creating an original role that speaks to young people. His main challenger is Mr. Karl, who stars as the caddish weatherman Phil Connors in "Groundhog Day." Mr. Karl's magnetic performance has come to seem almost heroic, given that he tore his anterior cruciate ligament three days before the show opened and is performing in a knee brace. Other men nominated in lead roles: Mr. Groban, wowing critics and fans with his Broadway debut in "Great Comet," Mr. Hyde Pierce, daffy and winning as the feed store owner in "Hello, Dolly!," and Christian Borle as the gay man trying to juggle his relationships with his ex wife, his son and his lover in a moving revival of "Falsettos." In general, it was a good day for many of the best known performers. In addition to Ms. Midler, Mr. Groban and Mr. Hyde Pierce, Tony nominations were given to Kevin Kline ("Present Laughter") and Laurie Metcalf ("A Doll's House, Part 2") for two of the best reviewed performances of the season, as well as to Cate Blanchett ("The Present"), Sally Field ("The Glass Menagerie"), Danny DeVito ("The Price"), Nathan Lane ("The Front Page"), and Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon ("The Little Foxes") Playwrights make their first marks on Broadway Each of the contenders for the best new play Tony marks the writer's Broadway debut and each of the playwrights is American. Brits will not dominate this prestigious category this year. The front runners are "Oslo," by Mr. Rogers, an unexpectedly crackling drama about a Norwegian couple who helped broker the 1993 Middle East peace accords, and "Sweat," by Ms. Nottage, which depicts the impact of a declining manufacturing plant on friends and family in Reading, Pa. Not to be counted out: "A Doll's House, Part 2," by Mr. Hnath, which was the last show of the season to open, and did so to uniformly positive reviews, and "Indecent," by the Pulitzer winning playwright Ms. Vogel, which reconstructs the controversy over "The God of Vengeance," which opened on Broadway in 1922. In an era of OscarsSoWhite, how are the Tonys doing? The last Broadway season the one with "Hamilton," "The Color Purple," "On Your Feet!" and "Allegiance" was widely celebrated for its diversity, and all four acting awards for musicals went to black actors. This season, the successes were less flashy, but still noteworthy. "Jitney," the only one of August Wilson's 10 play Century Cycle never before staged on Broadway, was given a sterling production by the Manhattan Theater Club, and was nominated for six Tony Awards on Tuesday, including for best play revival. The playwright, the director and the entire cast were African American. Ms. Nottage, an African American playwright who was unable to reach Broadway with "Ruined," her Pulitzer Prize winning play about rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, got there this spring with "Sweat." The play's critical reception was mixed, but it won Ms. Nottage a second Pulitzer Prize, and on Tuesday it garnered three Tony nominations, including for best new play. And a revival of "Miss Saigon," with a predominantly Asian American cast, served as a reminder of how much attitudes toward casting have changed: The leading role of the Engineer, controversially originated by a white British actor, Jonathan Pryce, in 1991, has since been played by actors of Asian heritage, and the revival stars a Filipino American, Jon Jon Briones, who was in the original British ensemble. The current production was nominated for best musical revival. Of the 40 performers nominated for acting awards this year, 34 are white. This was an unusually crowded and competitive theater season, leaving many shows disappointed at awards time. Of the 37 Tony eligible shows, 12 received no nominations on Tuesday. In addition to "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," the shows snubbed by nominators included "Paramour," Cirque du Soleil's costly effort to combine acrobatics with musical theater to fashion a Broadway show; "Amelie," an adaptation of the film starring the "Hamilton" alumna Phillipa Soo, which is now in serious danger of closing because of weak ticket sales; and "A Bronx Tale," another adaptation from a movie, which has been doing better at the box office but heads into summer facing stiff competition. The nominators seemed to concentrate their affection on a handful of shows. All four members of the cast of "A Doll's House, Part 2" were nominated, as were all four actors at the heart of "Falsettos," and four actors in the cast of "Hello, Dolly!" And there were three acting nods each for "Oslo," "The Little Foxes," "Dear Evan Hansen" and "The Great Comet." There is campaigning, of a sort. Producers send glossy souvenir books, and often compendiums of positive reviews, to remind voters of what they've seen, and some send gag gifts as well. Shows that opened in the fall "The Great Comet" and "Dear Evan Hansen," for example invite voters who attended months ago to see them again. Nominees, meanwhile, show up or perform at gala fund raisers for nonprofit organizations that have Tony voters in the crowd. And there is an invariable battle for media coverage as well. A few folks can start making room on their shelves now. The Tony Awards administration committee announced Thursday that James Earl Jones, a two time Tony winner (for "The Great White Hope" and "Fences") will be given a special Tony for lifetime achievement in the theater. Baayork Lee, an actress, choreographer and director best known as a member of the original cast of "A Chorus Line," will receive the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award, which honors volunteerism, in recognition of her work with the with the National Asian Artists Project, which she founded. Dallas Theater Center will receive the regional theater Tony Award. Two longtime general managers, Nina Lannan and Alan Wasser, will receive Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theater. And a special Tony for sound design will be presented to Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin for their work on Simon McBurney's one man show, "The Encounter."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Skiing in Europe can cost a pretty penny, especially if you stay at marquee resorts. Happily, the Alps are home to hundreds of ski centric accommodations, many with budget friendly price tags. Here, experts offer up lesser known but equally charming destinations in Italy, France, Switzerland and Austria, with lodging suggestions and approximate nightly rates. Many are family run hotels, offering "half board" pricing that includes both breakfast and dinner. And remember, traveling midweek and during off peak times is always the way to nab the most affordable lodging. In Zermatt, at the foot of the spectacular Matterhorn Mountain, you'll find an idyllic village, fine dining options and some of the longest runs in the Alps. You'll also find sky high prices. A rental chalet or a five star hotel, like Cervo Zermatt, could easily run you 1,212 a night. For a less pricey way to access Zermatt, Dan Sherman, chief marketing officer of ski.com, suggests staying on the Italian side of the Matterhorn in the Breuil Cervinia ski area. "Since Cervinia is lift linked to Zermatt, skiers can simply travel to the top of the Plateau Rosa via the Plan Maison gondola and then transfer to the Plateau Rosa cable car and ski down to Zermatt on the same ski pass," he said. Chris Epskamp, European director of the ski focused website Powderhounds, agrees that Cervinia is a cost effective way to ski Zermatt. He added that some of Europe's best off piste, free ride ski terrain is also in this region. In town, you'll find hotels like Hotel Edelweiss ( 222) and the just renovated Hotel Europa ( 238). A few miles away, Les Neiges D'Antan ( 199) is a stylish destination tucked into the pastoral forest of Valtournenche. The land of World Cup descents and alpine eateries, Cortina d'Ampezzo is considered by many to be the jewel in the Dolomites' crown. But you don't need to stay in this tony enclave to tap into splendid alpine culture. Pete Kovacevic, international director for the tour operator Alpine Adventures, favors Trentino's Val di Fassa region, specifically the town of Canazei. "Canazei is a great base to tackle the Sellaronda circuit, the iconic 40 kilometer circular ski route around the Sella mountain range," he said, adding that quality lodging can be found at Hotel La Perla ( 155) or Hotel Astoria ( 286). Mr. Epskamp also likes Val di Fassa, particularly for the groomed runs of the Catinaccio and Ciampac Buffaure ski areas, and the access to off piste ski routes that run down the side of the Sella massif into Passo Pordoi and the village of Colfosco in Alta Badia. His lodging of choice? A farm stay. "Agriturismo is a superb way to have a cultural experience whilst skiing in Europe," he said. For 75 a night plus breakfast, he said, "the cozy Agritur Majon Da Mont near Pozza di Fassa is a perfect example." Skiing France's 3 Vallees means tapping into 372 miles of interconnected ski runs that weave through eight resorts from the glaciers in Val Thorens, through the frosted pine forests of Meribel and over to Orelle with a single lift pass. Courchevel is where the posh perch think 1,878 for a night at L'Apogee or 2,044 at Cheval Blanc. Our three expects concur that Brides les Bains, the region's lowest altitude resort, is a less pricey way to access this scenic terrain. Mercure Brides Les Bains Grand Hotel des Thermes ( 122) and cheap and cheery Savoy Hotel ( 99) are walking distance to local restaurants and Le Grand Spa Thermal, a wellness center with pool and massage treatments. In the morning, board the Olympe gondola (Brides les Bains housed the Olympic Village in 1992), which will deposit you in Meribel, a gateway to the larger 3 Valles area. St. Anton or Zurs, instead of Lech A favorite of the international glitterati and royalty (Princess Diana famously taught her sons to ski here), Lech am Arlberg wears its ritziness like a glittering tiara. Properties like Hotel Almhof Schneider ( 1,1240) and Severins ( 1,094) dazzle with five star amenities. Mr. Sherman likes St. Anton, which is also connected to Lech on the same ski pass. The largest mountain in the Arlberg region, St. Anton combines big mountain terrain with one of Europe's rowdiest apres ski scenes, he said. "The party at Mooserwirt and Krazy Kanguruh can go well into the evening." Best lodging bets: The centrally located Hotel Ehrenreich ( 125), the modern Hotel Anton ( 175) or Hotel Post ( 220), in the heart of the pedestrian zone To Mr. Epskamp, old fashioned ski in, ski out inns like Hotel Edelweiss ( 299) in Zurs only 300 meters, or about 985 feet, above Lech deliver excellent value. "From Zurs, you can tackle the famous White Ring circuit a 22 kilometer route moving from the picturesque peaks of Zug and Oberlech and avoid the crowds that congregate in Lech."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Contact tracers won't be able to find cases (and contacts) quickly enough. Contact tracing won't stop all spread of the coronavirus. But just because you can't fix an entire problem doesn't mean you shouldn't fix some of it. Every time contact tracing results in an infected person's being isolated or a contact's being quarantined when that person develops infection, a web of transmission is broken. The best evidence is that most people with the coronavirus don't spread the infection at all, but a few spread it widely in superspreading events. These events are most devastating when they occur in congregate facilities that house medically vulnerable people in particular, nursing homes, homeless shelters and correctional facilities. Contact tracing can quickly sound the alarm so that outbreaks can be either prevented or stopped early, limiting disease spread both within and outside these places. With asymptomatic spread, it will be impossible to contain the coronavirus by contact tracing. Spread by people without symptoms is a wild card that makes contact tracing harder because we have to identify and isolate infected people regardless of whether or not they have symptoms but it doesn't make it impossible. Many infected people eventually develop symptoms. Use of masks by all can reduce spread from people who are asymptomatic. Additional testing (for example, during an outbreak at a nursing home or a homeless shelter) can identify people with asymptomatic infection. Asymptomatic infection and transmission means that we may need to test every contact of every case for infection when first identified and also before the end of quarantine. This is the kind of operational detail that can be optimized as we conduct contact tracing more extensively. Public health departments are too under resourced to do this. Contact tracing is intense work, and we have underinvested in public health at the national, state and local levels for decades. So yes, this is going to be hard. But our safety and our economy depend on getting it right so we're optimistic that we will. Contact tracing isn't easy. It requires effective communication to build trust, good people skills, access to resources for patient and contacts, sophisticated knowledge of health (including mental health), sensitivity to social and confidentiality concerns, and resourcefulness. Effective programs treat patients and contacts as the V.I.P.s of the program and provide extensive support services carrots and sometimes sticks to encourage people to stay separated and stop the spread of infection. As highlighted in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, contact tracing will not be successful unless we support patients with a modernized version of historical quarantine so that they can remain separate successfully. Some people will be unable to maintain physical distancing, including nursing home residents and those living in crowded households with medically vulnerable people; we must provide these individuals with alternative housing, such as hotel rooms, for the duration of their isolation. A promising approach is the use of call centers with specially trained and supervised staff, augmented by in person public health specialists to visit as needed, with handoff to skilled disease detectives in the case of possible outbreaks in congregate facilities. Contact tracing will require active engagement and participation by patients and their contacts. This can be increased if people throughout society understand that this is a service to patients and their contacts to support them and reduce the chance that they spread the infection to their families and others. The more readily people participate, the faster and more effective contact tracing will be.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
LAUSANNE, Switzerland The International Olympic Committee is taking no chances. Amid an increase in athlete activism and rising political tensions worldwide, the organization has settled on strict and specific guidelines for the types of actions, gestures and statements competitors at this summer's Tokyo Olympics will be permitted to make. No kneeling. No politically motivated hand gestures. No political messages on signs or armbands. And absolutely no disruptions of medals ceremonies. The I.O.C. announced the guidelines Thursday after a meeting of its athlete commission, where the organization's challenge was to balance growing demands from athletes to be able to speak out on issues with ensuring the Games pass without sparking diplomatic incidents. Many of the guidelines announced Thursday merely codify existing rules. Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter already bars athletes from staging political protests on the field of play or at medal ceremonies. But until now, the guidelines were ambiguous about what constituted a political display. "We needed clarity and they wanted clarity on the rules," said Kirsty Coventry, the chairwoman of the I.O.C. Athletes' Commission, which oversaw the creation of the three page document explaining what is not permitted. "The majority of athletes feel it is very important that we respect each other as athletes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland of Canada. The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin of the United States, Gerard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada for harnessing one of the most ineffable aspects of nature, pure light, into a mighty microscopic force. Dr. Strickland, a self described "laser jock," is only the third woman to win the physics prize, for work she did as a graduate student with Dr. Mourou. Dr. Ashkin will receive half of the monetary prize, worth about 1 million; Dr. Mourou and Dr. Strickland will split the remainder. The Nobel committee recognized the scientists for their work in transforming laser light into miniature tools. Dr. Ashkin invented "optical tweezers," which use the pressure from a highly focused laser beam to manipulate microscopic objects, including living organisms such as viruses and bacteria. Dr. Strickland and Dr. Mourou developed a method of generating high intensity, ultrashort laser pulses, known as chirped pulse amplification. The work has had a wide range of real world applications, enabling manufacturers to drill tiny, precise holes and allowing for the invention of Lasik eye surgery. Some physicists think that chirped pulse amplification eventually will be employed to accelerate subatomic particles, replacing giant contraptions such as the Large Hadron Collider with tabletop experiments. In the physics of tomorrow, "bigger is not necessarily better," said Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. In a telephone news conference, Dr. Strickland expressed hope that chirped pulse amplification might one day be used to cure cancer. Dr. Ashkin's optical tweezers have been especially important in biological research on viruses and other microbes. Read more about Dr. Strickland's work in physics. Dr. Ashkin was born in 1922 in New York City. He earned an undergraduate degree in physics from Columbia in 1947. He received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Cornell in 1952 and joined Bell Labs, the longtime hotbed of innovation and Nobel Prizes, in Murray Hill, N.J., where he worked until 1991. Dr. Ashkin began experimenting with lasers beams of coherent monochromatic light waves marching in unison like toy soldiers in the 1960s, shortly after they were invented. The same light pressure that sweeps from a comet's tail, he figured, could be used in the lab to push a microscopic ball around. To his amazement, the play of forces within the laser beam actually drew the ball into the center of the beam and trapped it there a first step toward optical tweezers. "Optical tweezers were not an invention, they were a surprise," said David G. Grier, a physicist at New York University and a former colleague of Dr. Ashkin at Bell Labs. "That was a new thought for science, that light can pull. It is revolutionary." In 1997 Steven Chu, who had worked with Dr. Ashkin at Bell Labs and is now at Stanford University, won the physics prize for using optical tweezers to investigate the quantum mechanical properties of atoms. Dr. Ashkin later said he was disappointed that he hadn't been included in the award. With his own tweezers, Dr. Ashkin went on to investigate the inner workings of cells and the molecular motors that power tiny organisms. He is still at it. After Tuesday's announcement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that Dr. Ashkin, who turned 96 last month, would not be available for comment because he was busy with his next scientific paper. Dr. Mourou was born in Albertville, France, in 1944 and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Grenoble in 1973. Currently he is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique in France and director of the International Center for Zetta Exawatt Science and Technology, which is devoted to the study of high intensity, ultrafast laser pulses. Experimenters were at a loss for how to amplify high energy laser pulses without wrecking their amplifiers. Dr. Strickland suggested stretching out the pulses in time, amplifying them and then compressing them again. The process generates intense laser pulses that last only a femtosecond one millionth of a billionth of a second, the amount of time it takes a light wave to traverse the width of a human hair. Dr. Strickland, who was born in Guelph, Canada, in 1959, is only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. She is now is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The Nobel prizes have come under criticism in recent years for the lack of female laureates. Among the overlooked candidates often mentioned is Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars as a graduate student at Cambridge University in 1968 but was not included in a Nobel Prize that was subsequently awarded to her adviser, the astronomer Antony Hewish. Dr. Strickland sounded surprised when she was asked how it felt to be only the third female Nobel winner for physics. "I thought it might have been more than that," she said. "I don't know what to say." The Royal Academy announced last week that it was changing its nominating guidelines to try to ensure greater diversity of winners in the future, but said these measures had not affected Tuesday's award. "Yes, it's great," Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, said in an email of Dr. Strickland's prize. "My guess is they were listening."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When hockey's postseason starts this weekend, finalists for the league's top awards like Edmonton's Leon Draisaitl will get a long delayed chance to shine. The N.H.L. announced finalists for its major awards last week, and it was both a reminder of how long ago those performances were and how compelling the postseason tournament will be if players can get back to that level of play quickly. The awards will be based on play before the league was shut down in March because of the coronavirus pandemic. Edmonton, Alberta, will host the Western Conference playoffs, both conference finals and the Stanley Cup finals. The city earned its designation as one of the N.H.L.'s hub cities because of how well it has handled the coronavirus outbreak. The Eastern Conference playoffs will unfold in Toronto before the conference finals. The Edmonton Oilers have racked up 10 Hart Trophies since joining the N.H.L. in 1979. Wayne Gretzky won the award eight times, Mark Messier once with Edmonton and Connor McDavid won it in 2017. Goalie Grant Fuhr was once a finalist. "Amazing players, legends of the game no question about it," Edmonton forward Leon Draisaitl said. "It's a big honor to be part of that group for sure." No one exemplified that connection more this season than Draisaitl, who is a finalist for both the Hart Trophy, for most valuable player, and the player voted award for most outstanding player, alongside Rangers wing Artemi Panarin and Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon. Draisaitl was productive with and without his teammate McDavid, leading the league in total points and points per game, points percentage and time on ice for a forward. Matchup to Watch: No. 5 Edmonton Oilers vs. No. 12 Chicago Blackhawks (best of five series starts on Saturday) The Oilers (37 25 9) tightened defensively under Coach Dave Tippett, but also have plenty of firepower to trade goals with the run and gun Blackhawks (32 30 8), who are led by the three time Stanley Cup champions Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. The Boston Bruins (44 14 12) already had the Presidents' Trophy, given to the team with the most points, and right wing David Pastrnak won the Maurice Richard Trophy as the league's top goal scorer. But the Bruins racked up more recognition for the league's subjective honors, too: Coach Bruce Cassidy joined Alain Vigneault of the Philadelphia Flyers and John Tortorella of the Columbus Blue Jackets as Jack Adams Award finalists for coach of the year. Goalie Tuukka Rask is a Vezina Trophy finalist, awarded to the league's top netminder. Rask won the award in 2014. Center Patrice Bergeron became a Selke Trophy finalist for a record ninth time and could win his record fifth trophy, given to the league's top defensive forward. But after pushing the St. Louis Blues to a Game 7 in last year's Stanley Cup finals, it's probably safe to say there is only one trophy the Bruins are focused on lifting. Matchups to watch: Boston thought it had locked up home ice through the playoffs, winning 16 of its previous 20 games, before the pandemic pause and the reformatting of the postseason. No team will be playing for its life when the Eastern Conference round robin tournament begins on Sunday, but Boston will face Philadelphia (Sunday), Tampa Bay (Aug. 5) and Washington Aug. 9) to determine seeding in the first round. Against those teams this season, the Bruins won just three of 10 games, losing four in shootouts. In the West, St. Louis (42 19 10) will compete against Colorado (Sunday), Las Vegas (Aug. 6) and Dallas (Aug. 9) in Edmonton. Artemi Panarin Wants His Just Due Rangers winger Artemi Panarin's late push helped make him a first time finalist for the Hart and Lindsay hardware while helping the team (37 28 5) come to within one game of a wild card spot before play was halted. After signing the most lucrative contract of any free agent since 2013 last summer, he accumulated 61 points in his final 41 games. That was even more remarkable for a player whom N.H.L. teams passed over multiple times before he signed with the Blackhawks in 2015 at age 23. "I would like to thank all the G.M.s for not choosing me in the draft because it allowed me to choose the team where I wanted to play that played my style of hockey," Panarin, a Russian, said through an interpreter last week. Matchup to watch: No. 6 Carolina Hurricanes vs. No. 11 Rangers (starts Saturday) The Rangers should have a healthy Igor Shesterkin between the pipes for the postseason, though the team declined to officially name him the starter over Henrik Lundqvist. Carolina (38 25 5) has its own talented Russian wing, Andrei Svechnikov, and the star defenseman Dougie Hamilton back healthy for the last hurrah of their veteran leader, right wing Justin Williams. Josi's blend of smooth skating, positioning and deceptiveness helped him to a career high 65 points this season. Still, Carlson may remain the favorite, as he led the league's defensemen in points (75) and assists (60). The Calder Trophy, awarded to the league's top rookie, is also likely to be awarded to a defenseman. In his first full season, Colorado defenseman Cale Makar challenged the rookie points record for defensemen before play stoppage, ultimately finishing with 50, second among rookies only to Vancouver defenseman Quinn Hughes (53), his competition for the award. Matchup to watch: No. 7 Vancouver Canucks vs. No. 10 Minnesota Wild (starts Sunday) Vancouver boasts not only a Calder favorite but also last year's winner, center Elias Pettersson, nicknamed the Alien for his otherworldly playmaking ability. The young Canucks will face the Minnesota Wild, who had turned their season around sharply near the time of stoppage. Can Hellebuyck Get Past the Vezina Veterans? The Vezina Trophy for the league's top goalie includes another relative unknown turned bright star, Connor Hellebuyck, the Winnipeg Jets goalie and former fifth round pick. The Winnipeg defense saw massive turnover as four regulars departed from the roster last summer, but Hellebuyck thrived anyway. The other finalists are last season's winner, Tampa Bay's Andrei Vasilevskiy, and Boston's Rask. Hellebuyck and Vasilevskiy were ranked first and third in games played and shots against. Rask played fewer games, but led all starters in save percentage and all goalies in goals against average. The Jets pulled out a 2 1 overtime win in the outdoor Heritage Classic over the Flames in October, their only meeting this season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The United States Golf Association postponed the 75th United States Women's Open from early June to mid December on Friday, a notable sign that golf's governing bodies are seriously weighing dates late this year as they scramble to reschedule an ever expanding list of postponed women's and men's events. The women's Open will now be contested Dec. 10 13 at the Champions Golf Club in Houston, which had been set to host the event June 4 7. It would be the first women's major held in December. "The U.S.G.A. remains committed to hosting the U.S. Women's Open in 2020," Mike Davis, the U.S.G.A. chief executive, said. "Our priority remains ensuring the safety of all involved with the U.S. Women's Open, while still providing the world's best players the opportunity to compete this year." It is the third women's major to be postponed in recent weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic, behind the ANA Inspiration and the Evian Championship. The ANA Inspiration, originally scheduled for this month has been moved to Sept. 10 13. The Evian Championship was moved back two weeks to Aug. 6 9. The LPGA Tour on Friday also postponed several events that were rescheduled later in the year. The next L.P.G.A. event for now would begin June 19. "We believe mid June is doable," Michael Whan, the LPGA Tour commissioner, said in a conference call with reporters Friday. "If it's not doable, as I've said many times, we have a mid July plan if we need another 30 days." Playing the U.S. Women's Open in December was proposed by the U.S.G.A. and Whan admitted he would have normally been highly skeptical but in recent weeks he has grown accustomed to entertaining the atypical suggestion. "Almost every conversation starts with, 'I've got an idea; it might be a crazy one,'" Whan said. He added: "I mean, I know the U.S.G.A. didn't say, 'Dec. 7, man, that would be a killer good date for us.' And so everybody is essentially sort of taking one for the team." Whan also acknowledged that some of the events intended to make up the 2020 golf season could end up being contested in 2021. The women's Open postponement is another disruption to the golf calendar, joining the delayed men's majors the Masters, usually played every April in Augusta, Ga. and the P.G.A. Championship, which was set for mid May in San Francisco. No rescheduled dates have been announced. Another men's major, the British Open, is leaning toward a postponement, perhaps until 2021. A decision on postponing the men's U.S. Open, scheduled to begin June 11 at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., is expected next week from the U.S.G.A., hosts of the tournament. While the U.S.G.A. would like to keep the event at Winged Foot, its decision to move the women's Open to December rather than scheduling it in an earlier month signals an understanding that it may be more prudent to target late 2020 as potential landing spot for large scale sporting events. But holding a U.S. Open in December would mean moving the event out of the northeastern United States due to shortened daylight hours and weather concerns. Even in Houston, the temperate location of the women's Open, the U.S.G.A. has had to make concessions to accommodate a winter start. It announced Friday it would use two golf courses simultaneously for the first two rounds of the women's Open. Additionally, both the men's and women's Opens will be broadcast on Fox, which in December expects to be broadcasting a full slate of pivotal, late season N.F.L. games. The L.P.G.A. events postponed Friday were the Pelican Women's Championship in Tampa Bay, which moves from mid May to Nov. 12 15; the ShopRite L.P.G.A. Classic in Atlantic City, which was slated to begin on May 29 but now will be contested from July 31 to Aug. 2; and the Meijer L.P.G.A. Classic in Michigan, a mid June event that has yet to be rescheduled. The Pure Silk Championship in Virginia was canceled and will return in 2021. The Kia Classic in Carlsbad, Calif., postponed last month, was rescheduled to begin Sept. 24. Given the international makeup of a usual L.P.G.A. field, Whan said one factor in suspending the schedule into June was to give players and their caddies the time and the freedom go home if they wanted. He said there was mounting anxiety about travel bans. "Rather than saying let's check back in every two weeks, it just was becoming uncomfortable," Whan said. "We were actually adding to anxiety, not relieving it, for a lot of our athletes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"They're a glamorous, kind of Hollywood accouterment," said Ken Fulk, an interior designer and event planner with offices in San Francisco and New York. "Rather than a big tray, you have this cart that might be wheeled around by a tuxedo clad gentleman." That's one of the reasons Mr. Fulk keeps fully stocked vintage bar carts by Aldo Tura at both of his offices. And his fascination may also help explain why a cart of his own design is the bestselling item in the collection of home goods he created for Pottery Barn. But bar carts aren't merely about seasonal showmanship; they're practical year round. "A lot of people don't have the space for a full bar," Mr. Fulk said. "Rather than having glassware, liquors, decanters and tools closed away, a bar cart is a great way to store and display them." Does it matter what it's made of? If you plan to serve from the cart, it does: Consider choosing something made of impervious materials like glass and metal, Mr. Fulk said, because they are easily wiped down.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Pressure mounted on Tuesday for Fox News to take action against its top rated host, Bill O'Reilly, as a series of prominent companies pulled advertising from his show and a leading women's rights group called for his ouster. Following an investigation by The New York Times over the weekend that revealed multiple settlements over allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by Mr. O'Reilly, the network faced a major advertising revolt as more than a dozen marketers said that they were withdrawing their ads from "The O'Reilly Factor." Escalating the tension, the National Organization for Women called for Mr. O'Reilly to be fired and said an independent investigation should be conducted into the culture at Fox News. "Fox News is too big and too influential to simply let this go," Terry O'Neill, the president of NOW, said in a statement. And inside Fox News, three women who work in the newsroom said that the continued support of Mr. O'Reilly by Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, led them to question whether the company was committed to maintaining a work environment "based on trust and respect," as executives had promised last summer after the network's founding chairman, Roger E. Ailes, was ousted. The employees requested anonymity because they feared retaliation for speaking publicly. The erosion of advertising support, along with pressure from advocacy groups, heightened the sense of uncertainty at Fox News, which for months has been trying to move beyond the sexual harassment scandal that led to the dismissal of Mr. Ailes. It also raised questions about how long 21st Century Fox will stand behind Mr. O'Reilly. Fox News signaled that it was trying to contain the controversy and working to restore relations with the network's advertisers, noting that companies had reallocated their spending from Mr. O'Reilly's program to other network shows. "We value our partners and are working with them to address their current concerns about 'The O'Reilly Factor,'" Paul Rittenberg, the executive vice president for advertising sales at Fox News, said in a statement. "At this time, the ad buys of those clients have been re expressed into other FNC programs." If more advertisers leave the program, Fox News and 21st Century Fox may have to respond. Mr. O'Reilly, 67, is the network's most visible star, leading a prime time programming slate that draws industry leading ratings with its conservative commentary. "The O'Reilly Factor," which draws almost 4 million viewers a night, generated more than 446 million in advertising revenue from 2014 through 2016, according to the research firm Kantar Media. A spokesman for Mr. O'Reilly, Mark Fabiani, declined to comment on Tuesday. Mr. O'Reilly has said that the accusations against him are without merit and that his fame has made him a target "for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel." He did not address the issue on either his Monday night or Tuesday night broadcasts. Mr. O'Reilly's contract, which was set to expire this year, has been extended by 21st Century Fox, people familiar with the deal said. When the company agreed to the extension, it was aware of multiple settlements that had been reached with women who had complained about his behavior, and it structured the deal to include more leverage over his behavior, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. O'Reilly earns about 18 million a year. The advertising boycott and the public outcry echo what happened to the radio host Don Imus a decade ago over racially and sexually charged statements he made about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. After a series of advertisers suspended their ads from his radio and television program, and NOW called for his ouster, NBCUniversal canceled the simulcast of his show on MSNBC. And at Fox News, the former host Glenn Beck left the network in 2011 after hundreds of advertisers refused to allow their ads on his program. On Tuesday, multiple advocacy groups started campaigns targeting advertisers of "The O'Reilly Factor." The Women's March group posted a message on Twitter, encouraging people to use the term " DropOReilly" to tell advertisers to pull their ads from the program and also encouraged people to share their own experiences with sexual harassment. The advocacy group Color of Change also started a campaign focusing on the advertisers of the show. "Their money and support is keeping him on the air," said Rashad Robinson, executive director of the organization. "It is rewarding his actions. It is rewarding the damage he has done to people in their lives and their careers." "In essence, these corporations are the ones whose money is paying the settlements," Mr. Robinson added. Among the companies pulling their ads from Mr. O'Reilly's show are the car companies Mercedes Benz, Hyundai, BMW of North America, Mitsubishi and Lexus; the pharmaceutical and health care companies Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Consumer HealthCare; and Allstate, the insurance company. The decisions came after The Times investigation found that five women who had accused Mr. O'Reilly of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior received settlements totaling about 13 million. "Mitsubishi Motors takes these allegations very seriously, and we have decided that we will pull our advertising at the present time," Alex Fedorak, a company spokesman, said in a statement. Mitsubishi spent about 2.1 million for ads on the "The O'Reilly Factor" in 2016, making it the show's fifth largest advertiser, according to iSpot.tv, the TV ad analytics firm. Some advertisers have said they will continue to run ads on his show. Cheryl Reed, a spokeswoman for Angie's List, said, "Just as we trust members to make their own hiring decisions, we trust them to make their own media consumption decisions." The weight loss company Jenny Craig was noncommittal, saying: "As an organization, Jenny Craig condemns any and all forms of sexual harassment. As a matter of corporate policy, we do not publicly comment on our advertising strategy." An ad for Jenny Craig appeared during Mr. O'Reilly's show on Monday night. The broader legal troubles for Fox News continued on Tuesday. Monica Douglas, a black Fox News employee, joined a lawsuit that was filed last week against Fox News by two other women, asserting that they were subjected to racial harassment at the network. The suit was filed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. Fox News dismissed the executive named in the suit, Judith Slater, the longtime controller, on Feb. 28. It said in a statement "there is no place for conduct like this at Fox News, which is why Ms. Slater was fired." On Monday, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, one of the network's co presidents, asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Mr. Ailes's sexual advances. Mr. Ailes has denied all the sexual harassment accusations against him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In "The Prodigy," a ho hum horror movie given a mild boost by its credible performances, a small boy named Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) begins to exhibit disturbingly supernormal intelligence. Further red flags include sleep chatting in Hungarian, abusing his babysitter and battering a classmate with a wrench. If this isn't evidence enough of Miles' bad seed credentials, he also has one brown eye and one blue weird eyes being a dead giveaway in the evil spawn genre. Miles might be a little devil, but it's not the Prince of Darkness who's messing with his head. Enter a lanky psychologist with a very particular set of skills (Colm Feore), none of which prepare him for those of his pint size patient. Yet the movie's occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that's left aggravatingly vague. Jeff Buhler's script reveals too much too soon in a moodily photographed prologue showing a crazed killer mowed down by police while his latest victim escapes with one hand fewer than when she was snatched.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
PARIS Hermes has turned window shopping for handbags and saddles and suitcases into high art. On Nov. 8, the luxury design house opened a free exhibition at the Grand Palais museum to celebrate the pastime of looking at but not buying goods in store windows. The exhibition consists of eight fantasy shop window displays created by Leila Menchari, the Tunisian born queen of design who reigned over the picture windows at the Hermes flagship on Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore from 1978 to 2013. "Hermes wouldn't be Hermes without Leila," Axel Dumas, the C.E.O. of the luxury house, said at the opening. "Hermes a Tire d'Aile: Les Mondes de Leila Menchari" (Hermes Takes Flight: The Worlds of Leila Menchari) was sponsored by the brand, and it comes at the same time as the unveiling of the annual Christmas window displays at the grand department stores: Galeries Lafayette, Le Bon Marche, Printemps. It also echoes a similar exhibition of Ms. Menchari's window displays at L'Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2010.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
SEATTLE Technology executives have for days assailed President Trump's executive order suspending immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries, framing their arguments largely in moral terms. On Monday, two tech companies Amazon and Expedia stepped up their opposition to the order with filings that were part of a lawsuit in federal court against the Trump administration, arguing that the order will hurt their businesses. The filings represent an escalation of the technology industry's efforts to push back on the order signed by Mr. Trump on Friday night. There was little sign of the outcry over the order diminishing throughout the industry, as employees at Google staged demonstrations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Amazon and Expedia made declarations supporting a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration in federal court Monday night in Seattle by Washington State's attorney general. The lawsuit, part of a growing wave of legal challenges to the immigration ban across the country, asked the court to declare key parts of the executive order unconstitutional. Expedia argued that the executive order hurt its ability to recruit employees from overseas, and it also could undermine the core of the company's business as an internet travel company. "Expedia believes that the executive order jeopardizes its corporate mission and could have a detrimental impact on its business and employees, as well as the broader U.S. and global travel and tourism industry," Robert Dzielak, the company's general counsel, wrote in the filing. Sergey Brin, a co founder of Google, came to the United States as a 6 year old refugee from the Soviet Union. As of Sunday, at least a thousand Expedia customers with passports from one of the seven countries, which includes Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, have made travel plans that involve flights to, from or through the United States. Dara Khosrowshahi, Expedia's chief executive, was born in Iran and fled the country with his parents in 1978 shortly before Iran became an Islamic republic during the revolution. "The president's order represents the worst of his proclivity toward rash action versus thoughtfulness," Mr. Khosrowshahi said in a statement. "Ours is a nation of immigrants. These are our roots, this is our soul. All erased with the stroke of a pen." Amazon said it was aware of 49 employees out of its United States work force of 180,000 who are from one of the countries identified in the executive order, nearly all of whom hold citizenship in another country. Seven job candidates, all of them originally from Iran but citizens of other countries, have received employment offers from Amazon. The company is considering jobs for the candidates in other countries. In an email to Amazon employees, the chief executive, Jeff Bezos, said the company had expressed its opposition to the order to senior administration officials and congressional leaders. He said the company was exploring "other legal options as well." "For tech leaders, it's a work force issue," said Michael Schutzler, the chief executive of the Washington Technology Industry Association, a trade group representing the state's technology companies. "We have a huge shortage of talent. We create jobs 10 times faster than the state can produce talent. Reducing our ability to recruit talent to the state essentially concedes the field to our international competitors." Technology companies are bracing for another executive order, expected to be signed by Mr. Trump soon, that could affect them further with changes to the system for issuing visas to foreign workers. Technology companies are big users of H 1Bs and other forms of visas for hiring engineers from overseas. It was a scene more fitting for a college campus than a gathering of employees at one of America's most valuable companies. Google offices in other cities like Seattle, San Francisco and New York held similar rallies. Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, told employees at the rally that immigration was "core to the founding of this company." When the Google co founder Sergey Brin, who attended the protests at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, was introduced, the crowd broke into chants of "Sergey, Sergey, Sergey." Mr. Brin noted that he came to the United States as a 6 year old refugee from the Soviet Union when nuclear tensions between the two countries were at their peak.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Dr. David Ho, center, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University, conducted a study on an injection protocol for AIDS drugs. BOSTON Researchers are reporting that injections of long lasting AIDS drugs protected monkeys for weeks against infection, a finding that could lead to a major breakthrough in preventing the disease in humans. Two studies by different laboratory groups each found 100 percent protection in monkeys that got monthly injections of antiretroviral drugs, and there was evidence that a single shot every three months might work just as well. If the findings can be replicated in humans, they have the potential to overcome a major problem in AIDS prevention: that many people fail to take their antiretroviral pills regularly. A preliminary human trial is to start late this year, said Dr. Wafaa El Sadr, an AIDS expert at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, but a larger trial that could lead to a treatment in humans may still be some years away. It has been known since 2010 that healthy people taking a small daily dose of antiretroviral drugs a procedure known as pre exposure prophylaxis, or PreP (pronounced prep) can achieve better than 90 percent protection against infection. But in several clinical trials since then in gay men, in intravenous drug users and in couples where one partner is infected, it has been shown that the only participants fully protected were those who took their pills every day without fail. Many did not. The failure rate was particularly acute among women in Africa. Although some participants in one PreP study told researchers that they were scared by rumors about side effects, many also said they were afraid to keep the pills in their home because their sexual partner or a neighbor might see them and mistakenly assume they already had the disease. An intramuscular injection that a woman could get every three months could change all that, several AIDS experts said. In Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, many women already receive shots of long lasting birth control hormones like Depo Provera, preferring them to daily pills, which might anger spouses or boyfriends who find them. About the injection protocol tested in monkeys, Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University and an author of one of the studies, said the popularity of Depo Provera was "a good analogy for how it might work in developing countries." In the other study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, six female monkeys were given monthly injections of GSK744, an experimental drug that is a long lasting form of an antiretroviral drug already approved for H.I.V. treatment by the Food and Drug Administration. Six other monkeys got a placebo. Twice a week, liquid containing human simian immunodeficiency virus, a hybrid human monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS, was pumped into their vaginas, simulating sex with an infected monkey. None of the monkeys protected by GSK744 became infected. All six who got the placebo were infected quickly. The Rockefeller researchers did a similar experiment with 16 monkeys using the same drug. They got rectal washes of the virus, imitating anal sex. The results were the same: All the monkeys that got the drug were protected, compared with none of the monkeys that did not get it. Dr. Ho's team also tested to see how much of the drug had to be in a monkey's blood and tissue to be protective. They found that an amount large enough to protect was "eminently achievable in humans with a quarterly injection," Dr. Ho said. The studies were presented here on Tuesday at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the results "very impressive for something in the animal model." Mitchell J. Warren, executive director of AVAC, an organization lobbying for AIDS prevention and treatment, said a long acting injectable drug "is clearly the place to go because adherence has been the Achilles' heel of PreP." But he argued that people at risk of H.I.V. infection would eventually need several options, just as women seeking birth control want to be able to choose among pills and other options. A similar experimental drug known as TMC278 was tested in monkeys several years ago and also protected them, although the study was not identical to the two released Tuesday. But little attention was paid then "because people were focused on other things," Mr. Warren said. The human trial expected to start later this year will be small, enrolling only 175 people in the United States, South Africa, Malawi and Brazil. Dr. El Sadr, of Columbia, said the study should take up to three years before a larger trial to see if the injection method works in people as effectively as it does in monkeys.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Now lives: In a two bedroom apartment in Marina del Rey, Calif., that he shares with a roommate. Claim to fame: Mr. Smit McPhee, who is in the next "X Men" movie, and has appeared in a short film for the fashion label Kenzo, is a rising star who has drawn strength from physical pain. At 16, he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a medical condition that causes vertebrae to fuse. "Dealing with such an obstacle taught me a lot," he said. "It showed me the darker sides to people's selfishness in the industry, but on the other hand, it has showed me the beauty of how much people will give themselves to help get someone in need back on their feet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The advertising company Rubicon Project said on Tuesday that it had agreed to buy the Canadian start up Chango for about 122 million, in the latest sign that the advertising technology industry is consolidating. Rubicon Project, which went public last April and had about 125 million in revenue last year, aims to become a centralized, automated exchange for buying and selling ads. With the acquisition, Rubicon, which is based in Los Angeles, is looking to build its premium ad marketplace through Chango's so called intent marketing technology, which delivers ads based on a consumer's intent implicit or explicit to buy a particular product or service. "Taking Chango's strong technology and data platform, plus their people platform, and pushing this out through Rubicon Project's massive marketplace is great for the market and great for our customers," said Frank Addante, the chief executive of Rubicon Project. It estimates that the intent marketing category will exceed 35 billion globally in 2015. For Chango, which has about 140 employees, compared with 470 at Rubicon Project, the deal is a way to gain scale quickly and connect with Rubicon's customers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
It was the biggest known breach of a company's computer network. And now, it is even bigger. Verizon Communications, which acquired Yahoo this year, said on Tuesday that a previously disclosed attack that had occurred in 2013 affected all three billion of Yahoo's user accounts. Last year, Yahoo said the 2013 attack on its network had affected one billion accounts. Three months before that, the company also disclosed a separate attack, which had occurred in 2014, that had affected 500 million accounts. Digital thieves made off with names, birth dates, phone numbers and passwords of users that were encrypted with security that was easy to crack. The intruders also obtained the security questions and backup email addresses used to reset lost passwords valuable information for someone trying to break into other accounts owned by the same user, and particularly useful to a hacker seeking to break into government computers around the world. Yahoo sold itself to Verizon for 4.48 billion in June. But the deal was nearly derailed by the disclosure of the breaches and 350 million was cut from Verizon's original offer. Yahoo was combined with AOL, another faded web pioneer that Verizon bought in 2015, into a new division of the telecommunications company called Oath. That investigators did not discover the full extent of the 2013 incident before Verizon closed the deal to acquire Yahoo in June was surprising to outside cybersecurity analysts. "Frankly, I don't know how Yahoo got away with this," said Jay Kaplan, a former Defense Department cybersecurity expert and senior analyst at the National Security Agency who is now the chief executive of the cybersecurity company Synack. After Yahoo discovered that one billion accounts were affected, it should not have been a stretch to consider that all of the company's user accounts had been compromised, he said. "My guess is that Yahoo was completely 'owned' across the board," Mr. Kaplan said. "Our investment in Yahoo is allowing that team to continue to take significant steps to enhance their security, as well as benefit from Verizon's experience and resources," Chandra B. McMahon, Verizon's chief information security officer, said in the statement. The company said it did not have more to add beyond an additional fact sheet for users. Yahoo was hit with several shareholder lawsuits after the breaches became public, and the disclosure that data on all of its accounts was compromised could increase financial liabilities for Verizon. No one knows exactly what happened to the data after it was stolen in 2013. But last August, a hacking collective based in Eastern Europe quietly began offering Yahoo's information for sale, according to intelligence gathered by InfoArmor, an Arizona cybersecurity company that monitors the darker corners of the web. Since then, at least three buyers two known "spammers" and an entity that appeared more interested in using the stolen Yahoo data for espionage paid about 300,000 each for a complete copy of Yahoo's stolen database, InfoArmor said after Yahoo first disclosed the breach. Cybersecurity professionals warned that because many of the three billion Yahoo accounts belong to people who use the same passwords for different sites and services, there is likely to be an escalation of email fraud and account takeovers. They added that anyone who had used Yahoo should be diligent about monitoring their personal accounts. With the stolen data, fraudsters have a higher chance of gaining access to the victims' bank accounts, said Frances Zelazny, the vice president of marketing at BioCatch, a security start up. "Most people reuse passwords or make multiple versions of the same passwords that are easy to hack," she said. Yahoo maintains that the breaches in 2014 and 2013 are not related. But investigators believe the attackers behind the 2013 breach were Russian and possibly linked to the Russian government. In March, the Department of Justice charged four men, including two Russian intelligence officers, with the 2014 breach. Investigators said the Russian government used stolen Yahoo data to spy on a range of targets in the United States, including White House and military officials, bank executives and even a gambling regulator in Nevada, according to an indictment. The stolen data was also used to spy on Russian government officials and business executives, federal prosecutors said. What made that theft particularly egregious, Justice Department officials said, was that the two intelligence officers who were indicted had worked for an arm of Russia's Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., that is charged with helping foreign intelligence agencies track cybercriminals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A suspect in the shooting, who had a history of conflict with the newspaper, has been charged with five counts of first degree murder. "This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette." "I'm going to share the names of our five victims with you now. First victim's name is Wendi Winters. Second victim is Rebecca Smith. Third victim is Robert Hiaasen. Fourth victim is Gerald Fischman. And the fifth victim is John McNamara." Mr. McKerrow was looking intently at his laptop in the garage, waiting for his photographs to transmit. It was not how he had planned his day. After an assignment in the morning, Mr. McKerrow was on his way to pick up his daughter for her birthday when he heard about the shooting and raced to the newsroom. Talking about the newspaper's long history, Mr. McKerrow began to cry. "It's a real newspaper and like every newspaper, it is a family," he said. "We will be here tomorrow. We are not going anywhere." Mr. Cook usually wrote about state politics and had worked 16 hours the previous day covering elections, The Baltimore Sun reported. Because of the long day on Wednesday, he was at home at the time of the shooting. But he drove immediately to the newsroom when he heard about it and then worked out of the garage. He darted between the garage and the newsroom's building, where the police held several news conferences throughout the afternoon and night. At a packed 8 p.m. news conference, Mr. Cook managed to get called on. He asked what was on his colleagues' minds. "Can you just tell us a little bit about the people who were not injured?" Mr. Cook asked, according to The Sun. "What their status is? How they're doing?" Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The Capital newspaper published a 40 page edition on Friday. The headline across the front page, "5 shot dead at The Capital," was just below photographs of the five people killed Gerald Fischman, 61, the editorial page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, an editor and features columnist; John McNamara, 56, a sports reporter and editor for the local weekly papers; Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant; and Wendi Winters, 65, a local news reporter and community columnist. In a newsroom of about 20 people, the work required to publish the paper was a team effort. The lead article about the shooting listed 10 staff members in the byline. Inside the newspaper, the pages were filled with details about the suspected gunman, the news organization's origins in the 1720s and profiles on the five people who died. On Page 8, there were two stories that, on any other day, might have filled the front page. Mr. Davis wrote about a former Army medic who was a double amputee who had died in a paddling accident in the Chesapeake Bay. Another reporter, Rachel Pacella, wrote about a ceremony she attended on Thursday morning for new midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. It included a photograph by Mr. McKerrow. Over the past 26 years, the following page in Friday's edition usually included an editorial by Mr. Fischman, known for his sharp but fair opinions as the voice of the editorial page. But Mr. Fischman was among the dead, and the page was largely left blank except for a small block of text in the middle. "Today, we are speechless," it said, listing the names of the five people who had died. "Tomorrow this page will return to its steady purpose of offering our readers informed opinion about the world around them, that they might be better citizens."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. If a country music fan watches Maren Morris's entire video for her new song, "Better Than We Found It," here is what that person would absorb: None The story of two young Mexican boys, beneficiaries of the Dream Act, soon to return to Mexico None The uncle of Daniel Hambrick, shot and killed by Nashville police in 2018, striking a shooting stance and painfully re enacting the moment: "Pow, pow, pow pow" Morris doesn't push as directly in the song itself listen casually and it could be the kind of paean to faith and neighborliness and good acts that might, in simpler times, come out of the mouth of any of Morris's Nashville peers. But her references to xenophobes, to being told to stay silent about politics, and to blue clad wolves knocking at doors are crisp and striking, and her willingness to state the obvious is, in this spoiled moment, a form of bravery: America, America, divided we fall America, America, God save us all From ourselves and the hell that we built for our kids America, America, we're better than this After the breakup cools, clarity arrives. Halsey captures this vividly and sneeringly on "I'm Not Mad," from the deluxe edition of her recent album "Manic." The chorus is optimistic it focuses on how she's moved on. But in the verses, she's still looking in the rearview, her eyes narrowed into a seething glare: "I hope your little brother turns out/To be nothing like you." CARAMANICA "I don't know if you want me to come over," the British R B singer Jorja Smith ponders in this exploration of a relationship's communications gap. "I wish I could read your mind." Meanwhile, the Jamaican singer rapper Popcaan complains, "I call for you girl, but you don't answer me." The beat is a semi submerged variant of dancehall; the situation is all too common. JON PARELES Priya Ragu is Swiss; her parents are Tamils from Sri Lanka. The first half of "Good Love 2.0," like most of her recordings, is steeped in the cushy keyboard chords and short phrases of 1990s R B as she switches between singing and rapping. But two minutes in, everything changes and convention disappears. South Asian drumming pushing threes against twos, and swirling electronic loops and male and female voices, in different modes, summon the East West hybrid she promises at her best. PARELES Few could have predicted this collaboration: Jonsi, who led the sweepingly cinematic band Sigur Ros, working with the dance crying auteur Robyn and the brittle, glitch loving, meta pop producer A.G. Cook. It's legato vs. staccato, contemplation vs. dance, physicality and breath vs. programming. Upbeat and second by second changeable, the track feels like a collision of sensibilities and time frames: "You're a heartbreaker, ole!'" But it also strikes sparks. PARELES From the moody, sinister collaborative album "Savage Mode II" a sequel to the original "Savage Mode," from 2016 comes "No Opp Left Behind," a prime example of 21 Savage's plain spoken grimness and Metro Boomin's theatrical bounce. CARAMANICA Try not to be overwhelmed by the low key exchange that opens "Tarifa," from the saxophonist Dayna Stephens's new album, "Right Now! Live at the Village Vanguard." Until a few months ago, it was commonplace: Ben Street opens with a few notes of the tune's syncopated bass line, and Stephens utters an affirmation, as if saying, "My heart heard that!" Feeling invited, the crowd calls back with a ripple of laughter. Street's kick stepping line locks in with the restrained piano accompaniment of Aaron Parks and the drummer Greg Hutchinson's Mediterranean accented pattern. Stephens's soprano saxophone carries the incantatory, airborne melody, which he wrote in a fit of inspiration after traveling to a Spanish town that overlooks Morocco. The performance never tips into melodrama or open display, but you can feel the band becoming a collective engine, at once clearing and cluttering Stephens's path, drawing the listeners into the equation. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Area code 219 covers northwestern Indiana, where Omar Apollo was born and grew up. He has built his audience with long breathed R B songs. He is also Mexican American, and he often slips some Spanish lyrics into his R B. In "Dos Uno Nueve (219)" he switches to the traditional Mexican music he grew up hearing: a corrido, a lilting waltz backed by bass and filigreed, improvisational guitars. He sings about being a self made success against the odds, and about earning his expensive wardrobe; a few spoken words provide hip hop swagger and profanity. But it's a surprisingly old school corrido no electronics, no drums. PARELES Burnt Sugar isn't the best known band to emerge from the Black Rock Coalition a group of (mostly) musicians that came together in the 1980s to blast back against the whitewashing of rock, punk, Sun Ra's legacy, and anything related to free jazz or guitars or the New York underground but it has become the collective's flagship. Loosely led by the game changing critic and musician Greg Tate, Burnt Sugar's snaky, acid blasted sound collages have the multidimensional abundance of an assemblage, and the tangled narrative of a surrealist text. It makes a nice kind of sense that this track its title refers to the reclamation of Oakland as a historical site of Black resistance would be prominently featured on the first release from Burning Ambulance, a new record label created by the artist I.A. Freeman and the writer Phil Freeman, who as a critic seeks to uncover the missed connections and social imperatives running through the vast territory of improvised music today. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Siegfried, the prince in "Swan Lake," spends a lot of time surrounded by women who don't seem to interest him. In American Ballet Theater's production, he invariably appears more excited by the arrival of a maypole at his birthday party (Act I) than by the young ladies lining up to dance with him. In Act III, when princesses of the world parade through his court, enticing him with their national dances Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Polish he wants none of them for his bride. "No," he mimes to the Queen Mother, who has urged him to choose one, causing a flurry of disbelief among his courtiers. What is it, then, that distinguishes his dual love interests the Swan Queen Odette and her deceitful doppelganger, Odile, played by the same dancer from the earthly maidens who drift inconsequentially through his world? In three casts seen at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, it wasn't always easy to tell. While Paloma Herrera (Tuesday) and Hee Seo (Friday) each had virtues that set her apart, by far the most otherworldly, multidimensional Odette Odile came from Polina Semionova on Saturday afternoon. From the ballet's first moments, when the sorcerer von Rothbart captures Odette and entraps her in the body of a swan a hokey stuffed animal that could really use a replacement Ms. Herrera had a wafting, understated softness that conveyed an unsuspecting innocence. But there is a fine line between that cool, placid quality and a less character driven detachment from the role. The downy grace worked for Ms. Herrera as Odette, but as Odile she seemed too much like the same woman, Odette with a costume change and the slightest bit more sass. A series of off center pirouettes made her look no more authoritative. And where there should have been sparks between her and Siegfried a gallant but stilted James Whiteside there was instead a sense of dancers just doing their jobs, or occasionally, struggling to do them. You shouldn't have to worry, as I did during what is supposed to be a climactic lift in Act IV, that a guy is going to drop his partner.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt unions a setback in their legal fight against executive orders President Trump had signed targeting federal government workers and their unions. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a lower court ruling from last summer that struck down the main provisions of the executive orders, which Mr. Trump issued in May 2018. Mr. Trump's orders had sought to reduce the amount of time that underperforming workers were given to improve, limit their options for appealing evaluations and reduce the amount of paid work time that they can use to attend to union business. The administration said the orders would make government more efficient. Many experts agreed that changes like making it easier to remove poor performing civil servants were necessary. But they argued that the executive orders went well beyond what was required to achieve that objective.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The commissioners of five college athletic conferences have asked the N.C.A.A. to relax some of its requirements because of financial problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In a joint letter to the president of the N.C.A.A., Mark Emmert, the commissioners of the American Athletic, Mountain West, Mid American and Sun Belt conferences and Conference USA asked for temporary relief for up to four years, calling this the "direst financial crisis for higher education since at least the Great Depression." "We felt that there were some common sense things we would take up with the N.C.A.A," said Mike Aresco, the commissioner of the American Athletic Conference, adding later, "We are looking at worst case scenarios." Among their requests was for the N.C.A.A. to ease the requirement that they sponsor a minimum of 16 sports to be in the Football Bowl Subdivision. They also asked to waive the football attendance requirement, which requires colleges to average at least 15,000 people at all home football games, and to change scheduling requirements.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Can the immigrant writer, having taken as his or her subject the expatriate experience and all its attendant dislocations, ever really relinquish that subject? Bharati Mukherjee, Henry Roth and Amy Tan might say no; Vladimir Nabokov and V. S. Naipaul, yes. is still thinking about it. Shteyngart's fourth and latest novel, "Lake Success," veers from its forebears by placing a Long Island born financier at its center, rather than Russian emigres or their children, and for the most part shuns themes of transnational displacement and the hyphenated existence. Yet the fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation are nevertheless what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel. Shteyngart's subject may be America, but it's Trump's America: seething, atomizing, foreign and hostile even to itself. "Can it be that we're all exiles?" Roberto Bolano once asked, a question that goes echoing through this novel. "Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?" The chief wanderer in "Lake Success" is Barry Cohen. In casting his lead, Shteyngart doesn't pander to contemporary sympathies: Barry is a white, middle aged hedge fund manager "with 2.4 billion of assets under management." He has Goldman Sachs on his resume and lives in the same Manhattan apartment building as Rupert Murdoch. He has a congenital inability to remember the names of women, though not those of men, and unironically idolizes Hemingway. Until college (Princeton) he'd never so much as spoken to a black person, and after college well, "his industry did not employ many African Americans." The closest gesture he's made toward social welfare, aside from social and tax minded philanthropy, is a "plan to launch a collection of billionaire trading cards for poor kids, with all the billionaires' financial stats, such as net worth, Forbes list ranking and liquid and paper assets on the back ... so that the 'black kids could get inspired to do better at school.'" When we meet him, he's staggeringly drunk from Japanese whiskey that retails for 33,000 a bottle and bleeding from wounds bestowed upon him by his wife and his child's nanny. He's the anti mensch. (Readers allergic to unlikable protagonists should approach this book armed with an EpiPen.) The writer Larry Brown employed a storytelling tactic he called "sandbagging," loading his characters with immense heaps of trouble to see if and how they might wriggle free. This is Shteyngart's tack with Barry. Barry's marriage has imploded, due partly to his inability to reckon with his 3 year old son's autism diagnosis. The Securities and Exchange Commission is after him for dirty trading. And like many middle aged men, rich and poor, "he didn't really know who he was." So, on a boozy whim, Barry undertakes that most iconic of American responses: He lights out for the territories, in this case boarding a Greyhound bus with a rollerboard suitcase containing six precious wristwatches, "the implements of his true desire." He ditches his phone, then later his credit cards. By the time he hits Baltimore, he's already shivering with Kerouacian ecstasy: "Barry had broken free of the surly bonds of his own life. He had been granted refuge in America."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"Ungeheuer in Bereitschaft (Monsters in Readiness)," a drawing by Paul Klee from 1939, the year before he died. In 1937 , Paul Klee's paintings were included in what might have been the best attended art show of the 20th century: the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich. The Bauhaus, his old school, was long shut; "Angelus Novus," his early masterpiece of a gasping seraph, languished in the luggage of the exiled philosopher Walter Benjamin ; and Klee, who'd left Germany for his native Switzerland , turned his ironic eye to a continent losing its mind for the second time . Thirty six subsequent drawings and paintings on paper he made two years later most from 1939, the last year of his life are up now at Zwirner, where Klee's wily, woozy art looms with a bleak new urgency. These late works depict people confused, annoyed, disoriented; Klee's lines wobble and shimmy, and his figures struggle to balance. In "Sieht Zuruck (Looks Back)," a single line zigzags against a background slicked with a grease crayon until it forms a disjointed human body, hopelessly lost, ready to topple. A photomontage here by Josef Albers shows the Swiss artist at the Bauhaus, gazing at Albers's lens with smoldering concentration. But Klee's final drawings exhibit instead a bewildered detachment, each asserting the need for irony in a world governed by madmen. In the drawing "Ungeheuer in Bereitschaft (Monsters in Readiness)," a cavalcade of ghoulish stick figures, with lumpish heads and stigmata like eyes, stumbles forward like a pathetically untrained army. Klee pictured the Europeans of 1939 in a manner not unlike the Americans of 2019: petulant, belligerent, strung out, sleepwalking. JASON FARAGO Alongside this essential Klee exhibition, Zwirner is presenting a second helping of Bauhaus on its ground floor, now filled with the jazzily geometric textiles, diagrams and etchings of his student Anni Albers (1899 1994) . (It's her first substantial show in New York in two decades, and follows a well received retrospective at Tate Modern in London.) Where the late Klees bristle with anxiety, the Albers textiles are cool, rhythmic, and almost indecently gorgeous. Klee's famous lesson to his students to "take a line for a walk" found its shrewdest interpreter in Albers, who let her thread slide and skitter across the grid of the loom, and then went in by hand to add supplementary wefts that dance over the warp. In wall hangings like "Haiku" (1961), a chunky thread of black wool gambols down an earth toned weaving of cotton, hemp, and glinting metallic thread descending like a fabric line on a tipsy promenade. The highlight is Albers's recently rediscovered tapestry "Camino Real": a major work never before seen outside Mexico City, where it was commissioned for a hotel built for the 1968 Olympics. Ten feet square, it agglutinates irregularly alternating triangles of pink, scarlet and wine into a syncopated pattern that seems to shift and fizzle. Here you might also see the legacy of Klee and his sportive, irregular grids though "Camino Real" and Albers's later works also reflect her lengthy travels in Latin America, where she fused Bauhaus principles and pre Columbian artistry into a language all her own. JASON FARAGO Loneliness and sorrow lurk behind the picturesque facades of a mountain hamlet in the 8 1/2 minute 35 millimeter film that constitutes the centerpiece of Sean Donnola's wryly titled solo show, "Don't Ever Leave," his first in New York. As in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, those who don't leave a small town can find themselves enmeshed in a web of regrets. It is never clear what is troubling the middle aged protagonist of the film, or what he is burning in the fire pit by his rustic home. But to judge from the photograph on a table and the images that flicker in the pixilated pointillist dream sequence, shot on Super 8 film, his desolate state involves a woman who has, indeed, left. Seven photographs included in the exhibition, also shot on film, share the contemplative mood. A picture of a discarded beer bottle lying in an amber hayfield evokes Dora Maar's classic Surrealist photograph of a miniature junk sailing ship in a sea of rippled hair. A photo of a man at a diner is a carefully structured melange of color and pattern, with a townscape refracted through a window and sprinkled, redemptively, with a confetti of light. "Artists are gamblers," the artist Chris Martin writes in a news release for Marcus Jahmal's new show, "Double Down" at Almine Rech, because every time an artist paints over something he can't get it back. "Each adjustment," Mr. Martin explains, "is a possible disaster or perhaps a chance for glory." Making a career of art is a gamble, too, since it's impossible to predict what will resonate with audiences. Mr. Jahmal, a Brooklyn based artist, is on a winning streak. Rough and vibrant, his paintings, like "High Roller," "Thief in the Night" or "Lovers" (all from 2019) depict people who are gambling with money or the law or romance. Dice and cards float through the compositions and one room here is wallpapered with reproductions of illegal lottery cards sold in New York bodegas, and which include advertisements for the products and services of folk healers. Glimmers of Jean Michel Basquiat, Henry Taylor and the tradition of Haitian painting can be detected in Mr. Jahmal's work. He is slowly creating his own idiom, though, somewhere between abstract and figurative painting, sculpture and installation. For Mr. Jahmal, the worlds (and underworld) of symbolic images and objects are vitally important; every painting feels like an emergency response. A painting must have magical qualities, after all, since winning or losing, in life and death and in art, depends upon them. Stephen Prina's "English for Foreigners (abridged)" at Petzel Gallery, a partial reprise of a 2017 museum show in Naples, has a lot of separate parts. It's got about four dozen illustrations from Frederick Houghton's 1917 "Second Book in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools," which his Italian born father studied in America. These range from a finely detailed portrait of George Washington to a simple diagram of an American place setting, and they're all excerpted from the book's text and reproduced as lithographs in Pantone's 2017 color of the year, "greenery." (Mr. Prina uses Pantone's annual choices as a way of dating his work.) It's got orange and yellow frames embroidered with "Pete's Meat Can't Be Beat," the motto of the elder Prina's grocery store in Galesburg, Ill. There's also a "listening station" with speakers that play the artist's own covers of several apropos songs, including one associated with the Italian Resistance as well as the Fascist anthem that spurred his father to emigrate. Pietro Prina, or so the story goes, used to play clarinet in Piedmont until one night a gang of Blackshirts made a request that he couldn't safely decline, and it seemed like time to go.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
BAYREUTH, Germany I received more than a few suspicious looks on a recent Friday morning as I waited in line for a performance of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" here. Maybe it's because I was the only adult. The only adult, at least, who wasn't a chaperone for one of the large group of children eager for the doors to open at a rehearsal stage tucked behind the Bayreuth Festival Theater. One parent, holding the hand of a girl in lederhosen, squinted at my notebook, as if confused not only by my presence but also by why I was taking a show designed for kids so seriously. But the colorful 75 minute adaptation of "Meistersinger" presented by the Bayreuth Festival as this year's edition of Wagner fur Kinder, an ongoing series of productions of the composer's operas made for children was well worth taking seriously . Ostensibly designed for audiences between the ages of 8 and 12, this would have been an ideal entry point for a newcomer or a fresh perspective for a seasoned fan. (Alas, adults aren't allowed unless they're chaperones or journalists.) Die hard Wagnerians may bristle at the thought of the master's notoriously sprawling operas reduced to roughly an hour in the case of the mighty "Ring" cycle, 15 hours of the original are delivered in a tight two. But the productions I saw, in Bayreuth and on DVD, were lucid and loyal, taking liberties yet revealing the kinds of universal truths you can only find in fairy tales and fables. Walking into "Meistersinger," I was as skeptical of Wagner fur Kinder as the parents were of me. After all, how could a children's version reckon, as all directors today must, with the final scene's disturbingly nationalistic turn, in which Hans Sachs instructs the company to "honor your German masters" so that, even if the country were to decay under "false, foreign rule," holy German art would remain? For that matter, how could the intricacies and ambiguities of Wagner's other works be translated to a young audience: the Schopenhauerian fever dreams of "Tristan und Isolde"; the tension of the sacred and profane in "Tannhauser"; the sheer scale of the "Ring," whose themes are as dense and extensive as its World Ash Tree? Wagner fur Kinder productions tend to concede complexity in favor of a single, central meaning and plotline. So, where Barrie Kosky's "Meistersinger" at the Festival Theater interrogates Wagner's life in Bayreuth and how his art became ensnared in the rhetoric of Nazi Germany, ending with Hans Sachs presented as a Wagner double giving testimony at the Nuremberg trials, the children's version retains only a portion of that problematic finale, focusing on the opera's love story. That the children's "Meistersinger" will be a lighthearted romance is clear from the start: Ivan Ivanov's storybook sets have the look of a high school musical, and the costumes, based on the winning drawings from a contest among students at a local school, are fit for a Renaissance fair. Mr. Girschik and Marko Zdralek, who adapted Wagner's score, began their work on the production with a rough cut made by Katharina Wagner, the composer's great granddaughter and the director of the Bayreuth Festival, who founded Wagner fur Kinder a decade ago. But it was two and a half hours long, so they trimmed it further based on what, they said, was essential: In addition to Walther and Eva's romance, that included Wagner's moral about the need for art to evolve. While editing the plot, and occasionally speeding up scenes with spoken dialogue, Mr. Girschik added interactive touches for the children, such as having the apprentice David the charismatic and soothing tenor Stefan Heibach, a Wagner fur Kinder regular teach the audience to harmonize on the line "Wacht auf" ("Wake up"). And, in the final scene, the children are asked who could sing better than Beckmesser. (The answer, of course, is Walther, though at one performance, a boy shouted, "Me!") Even with a smaller ensemble, Mr. Zdralek's arrangement manages to make the fanfare like overture no less grand than in its original form. It helps that the production takes place in what amounts to a black box theater, with musicians and singers sharing the stage. (That didn't stop anyone from holding back; Wagner from a short distance should come with ear plugs.) But even in quieter moments, the score didn't seem compromised by, for example, a group of woodwinds persuasively standing in for an organ. What I didn't realize until later is that this "Meistersinger" is tame even a little conservative compared with other Wagner fur Kinder productions. When the doors do open, the three Rhinemaidens let out a billowing sheet that, with the help of children in the front row, ripples to conjure the churning Rhine, which Alberich crosses to steal their gold and forge the ring. The audience later participates again by being asked whether Wotan should give that ring to the giants Fasolt and Fafner. (Imagine what would happen if they said no!) With a running time of two hours, this "Ring" has little room to breathe, yet it's efficient in both conveying the essentials of the story and offering an education in Wagner's leitmotifs. Even when characters sprint through spoken dialogue, they leap back into the score whenever an important musical theme is introduced, or revisited with new meaning. A breakneck pace, however, is only possible by sacrificing characters like Donner and Froh, Gunther and Gutrune. Gone, too, are about four hours of "Gotterdammerung." Siegmund and Sieglinde, the incestuous lovers of "Die Walkure," are never described as brother and sister; here, Brunnhilde wants to save Siegmund because, she says, he is her brother (which is technically true). At the end of this "Gotterdammerung," Brunnhilde doesn't destroy the ring; she simply takes it from a sleeping Hagen (who killed Siegfried for it) and returns it to the Rhinemaidens. This is a gentle ending for a "Ring" with barely a body count but then, as the cabinet doors close on the Rhinemaidens waving their treasure, Alberich, too, steps inside. In a bleak send off for the children, Mr. Merz's production suggests that the greed at the heart of the "Ring" is a cycle, indeed. I suspect, though, that children have connected most with the Wagner fur Kinder "Tannhauser" of 2017. It's not an opera that would seem to lend itself to young audiences, with its story of a medieval troubadour who, having had a taste of a lustful life in the realm of Venus, is banished by his fellow knights and sent to seek forgiveness from the pope in Rome. But, if the Bayreuth Festival's new production by Tobias Kratzer an inventively updated telling presented as a virtually new story about the nature of art is any indication, "Tannhauser" is more malleable than it's sometimes been treated. Zsofia Gereb's Wagner fur Kinder staging with an impressively versatile set, wrapped around the orchestra, by Jule Saworski rivals Mr. Kratzer's in its ingenuity. Tannhauser, in her revelatory read of the opera, is torn between dangerous new adventures with Venus and the more conventionally boyish playtime he has always known with his group of friends. He thinks there may be room for both; peer pressure would say otherwise. What child hasn't experienced this? The singing contest of Act II, in which Tannhauser's profane desires are revealed and his beloved Elisabeth shields him from retribution and sets him on his way to Rome, is presented here as a flippant game of make believe among friends: a singing contest in which the prize, little Elisabeth says, is her hand in marriage. Tannhauser, nicknamed Tanni, sings about Venus and is immediately ostracized by the other boys; his confession even gets him punished by adults. But Elisabeth saves him by pleading for their forgiveness in the form of her Act III prayer, which survives in Mr. Zdralek's musical adaptation, while nearly the entire overture, Pilgrim's Chorus and "Song to the Evening Star" do not. The tragedy of "Tannhauser," traditionally, is that his redemption comes at the cost of Elisabeth's life, as well as his own. Ms. Gereb, however, offers us a world in which forgiveness can come with a happy ending, at last.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The luxury travel company Black Tomato has introduced a service called "Drone the World," which sends a professional drone photographer to capture their clients' adventures. The service is included in trips from 5,500 a person for a three night itinerary, including flights, accommodations and excursions. Once home, travelers receive a three minute edited video that features sweeping aerial footage of their trip. According to a co founder, Tom Marchant, "It gives our guests a chance to see where they traveled from a brand new perspective." The InterContinental David Tel Aviv just started a five night honeymoon package (from 3,277) that counts a drone photo shoot among its array of offerings. And Shangri La's Hambantota Resort Spa in Sri Lanka (rooms from 250) provides guests with the opportunity to fly a drone themselves or be filmed by one while engaging in a wide range of on site activities, including golfing and trapeze flying. Footage is available on CD or via email for a 20 fee. Back on the ground, travelers can forgo the ubiquitous selfie by booking through companies supplying high quality shoots by professional photographers. Katalina Mayorga, the founder of El Camino Travel, said she understood that we live in an image driven world, but felt that travelers (herself included) too often sacrificed the present moment to capture the perfect Instagram worthy photo. This led Ms. Mayorga to start a travel company for millennials that specializes in group itineraries to Latin America (from 2,050 a person). On each trip, she sends a professional photographer who shoots upward of 500 photos a day and delivers approximately 30 edited images each morning to the group, which they can immediately share on social media. "It's a much different vibe when people are not always on their phones," she said. "The experience becomes much more authentic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
ARDE MADRID: BURN MADRID BURN Stream on MHz Choice. Talk about an escape. This black and white limited series transports us to 1960s Madrid. Under the orders of Spain's dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, Ana Mari (Inma Cuesta), a strait laced spinster, poses as a maid to spy on the actress Ava Gardner (Debi Mazar of "Goodfellas" and "Entourage"), who spent time in Spain after divorcing Frank Sinatra. To get the job done, Ana pretends to marry Ava's driver, Manolo (Paco Leon, who also directed the series), a cocky opportunist whose freewheeling lifestyle goes against everything Ana stands for. The mission forces the fake couple to step outside their comfort zone. Manolo gets in touch with his emotions, while Ana, influenced by Ava's lavish parties and hedonistic lifestyle, slowly starts to let loose and fall for Manolo. GOLD DIGGER Stream on Acorn TV. This six part romantic thriller questions whether older women have the same sexual freedom as men, particularly onscreen. Sixty year old Julia (Julia Ormond) has always placed her family first. But after her husband leaves her for her best friend and her adult children prove to be selfish snobs, she finds happiness in Benjamin (Ben Barnes), an attractive copywriter who is nearly half her age. Their relationship blossoms quickly, but doesn't sit well with Julia's children, who criticize the age gap and worry that Benjamin is after Julia's wealth. The series hints that Benjamin is hiding something throughout, but the truth doesn't come to the fore until the final episode.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
There are many types of roster rebuilding projects in the N.F.L., from a perennial contender's on the fly soft reboot to a new regime's all out salary cap purge. And then there is what the Jacksonville Jaguars did this off season, which was akin to desperate settlers eating their breeding stock and draft animals because they failed to prepare for a harsh winter. The Jaguars released two time 1,000 yard rusher Leonard Fournette on August 31 and traded Pro Bowl defender Yannick Ngakoue to the Minnesota Vikings for a pair of draft picks the day before. Both players are just 25 years old. Their departures were part of an off season long clearance sale in which the Jaguars traded quarterback Nick Foles to the Chicago Bears just one season after signing him to a four year contract worth up to 88 million, sent five time Pro Bowl selection Calais Campbell to the Baltimore Ravens for a pair of mid round draft picks and traded former Pro Bowl cornerback A.J. Bouye to the Denver Broncos for a fourth round pick. Who does that leave in Jacksonville? There's quarterback Gardner Minshew, who looks like a bootleg T shirt seller outside a 1974 Black Oak Arkansas concert but who plays like your typical mid tier prospect. There is a smattering of talent that might be almost good enough to crack one of the league's better rosters. Finally, there are head coach Doug Marrone and general manager Dave Caldwell, the proud engineers of both the current demolition project and the condemned structure which needed to be torn down in the first place. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. After nine years without a winning record, the Jaguars finished the 2017 season at 10 6 and reached the A.F.C. championship game. That team surprised opponents with a brash, turnover happy defense led by Bouye, Campbell, Fowler, Ngakoue, Ramsey and others. All bumbling quarterback Blake Bortles had to do most Sundays was hand off to Fournette and stay out of victory's way. He usually succeeded. When the Jaguars fell to 5 11 in 2018, Bortles was (rightfully) singled out as a primary culprit. So the Jaguars splurged for former Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl hero Foles, believing their defense could return to the playoffs with some competent leadership on offense. That belief was unfounded. Foles suffered a collarbone injury but was ineffective when healthy, the defense took a step back, Ramsey was traded after a sideline scuffle with Marrone, and the Jaguars finished 6 10. A December report that the Jaguars accounted for 25 percent of N.F.L. Players Association grievances Fowler, most notably was inappropriately fined 700,000 for failing to attend injury rehabilitation sessions revealed one probable reason morale was low and the team's brightest young stars were leaving town. Former Giants coach Tom Coughlin, hired as the Jaguars vice president of football operations before their sudden 2017 rise, was fired soon after the grievance reports went public. Coughlin has a reputation as the N.F.L.'s grouchiest father in law, so it's tempting to blame all of the poor decisions of the last two years on him. But Ngakoue, who did not sign his franchise tender this July, had feuded on Twitter with a member of the Jaguars ownership family in April, well after Coughlin's departure, while Ramsey's primary beef was with the hot tempered Marrone. Caldwell, meanwhile, was overpaying for veterans like Foles long before Coughlin bumped him down the org chart. It's also tempting to label all the departing Jaguars as malcontents and/or disappointments, though the coaching staff and front office has remained the same throughout. So too has the team's conflict resolution strategy: get rid of the players and eat their remaining salaries. The Jaguars will absorb 44.8 million in dead cap space this year as a result of the leftover money guaranteed to discarded players. That's not necessarily a bad thing: With little hope of reaching the playoffs, they are at least repairing their credit a bit. They have also stockpiled two picks in each of the first, second and fourth rounds next year, giving them plenty of chances to pluck prospects who emerge from the largely theoretical 2020 college football season. The Jaguars roster is now so thin that Marrone fielded questions after Fournette's release about tanking losing on purpose this year so the team can splurge in the draft and free agency in future years. Tanking is a popular internet theory because it allows fans of bad teams to frame losses as secret successes ("we'll have the last laugh when we draft six Hall of Famers next year"), but it's a suspect roster building strategy, especially when a team parts ways with rising stars and worthy building blocks like Ngakoue and Ramsey. At any rate, the Jaguars have been so inept in so many ways for so long that if they set out to purposely lose games they would probably finish the season 13 3.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The housemate dysfunction might be sad if it wasn't played for laughs. Mara is frozen in her starry past, and Norberto and Martin treat her and Pedro with self aggrandizing nostalgia or contempt. But Campanella, who directed the Oscar winning 2010 thriller "The Secret in Their Eyes," sets up a routine of look at them go one upmanship. Would be villains Barbara and Francisco look plain by comparison. (The older actors are fixtures of Argentine cinema, and the movie remakes a 1976 premise; Mundstock, who died in April, was a well liked humorist.) Norberto and Martin, professional cynics, spin their own plots to stymie the young swindlers, and the movie leans on our delectation in this. The Grand Guignol conclusion does fulfill the flair promised by the film's tuned up colors and by Mara's vintage posters for her movies, which have glorious titles like "The Other Woman Forever." There's an attempt to reinvigorate the romance between Mara and Pedro, but that pales next to the bad behavior of their less savory companions. You can't keep a good weasel down. The Weasels' Tale Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Full reviews of recent dance performances: nytimes.com/dance. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. American Ballet Theater (through July 4) The company's 75th anniversary is in full swing, with eight performances of "Giselle" up next. Three principal dancers are retiring this season, and two of them, Paloma Herrera and Xiomara Reyes, bid farewell on Wednesday, Ms. Herrera in the afternoon and Ms. Reyes at night. (The third, Julie Kent, gives her last performance on June 20.) The role of Giselle, a peasant girl who dies of heartbreak and, resurrected, saves her lover from a tribe of ghost women, should lend itself to dramatic and bittersweet goodbyes. Mondays through Fridays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays at 8 p.m.; matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 2 p.m.; Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, 212 362 6000. Complete schedule: abt.org. (Siobhan Burke) Kimberly Bartosik and Dylan Crossman (through Saturday) In 2008, Kimberly Bartosik introduced the first and second chapters of her "Ecsteriority" project, a meditation on decay. "Ecsteriority3" appeared in 2011 a six hour marathon and now she completes the cycle with "Ecsteriority4 (Part 2)," for an all star trio of Dylan Crossman, Marc Mann and Melissa Toogood. Mr. Crossman contributes a solo to the second part of the evening, part of the Abrons Arts Center's Travelogues series. His work, "Bound," considers that emotional seesaw of freedom and constraint. At 8 p.m., 466 Grand Street, at Pitt Street, Lower East Side, 866 811 4111, abronsartscenter.org. (Brian Schaefer) Bodystories: Teresa Fellion Dance (through Saturday) In the title of Teresa Fellion's new work, "The Mantises Are Flipping W.3," the "W" stands for "world," and this is the third one she's created in her Mantises series. The project started as a solo, but this world is populated by seven dancers who are charged with expressing a variety of unrelated but interconnected themes: the nature of opposites, sanity and insanity, how sound moves through and around the body, and the mental effects of isolation. At 8 p.m., Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street, East Village, 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org. (Schaefer) DanceAfrica (Friday through Monday) The founder of this festival, Chuck Davis, will soon be stepping down, after almost four decades of inspired leadership. He and the incoming artistic director, Abdel R. Salaam, have organized this year's edition with a focus on Afro Brazilian traditions. Featured groups include Bale Folclorico da Bahia, from Brazil; Bambara Drum and Dance Ensemble, from the Bronx; and, well known to DanceAfrica regulars, Brooklyn's own BAM/Restoration DanceAfrica Ensemble. A street fair outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music accompanies the action onstage. Friday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday and Monday at 3 p.m.; Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Burke) Eifman Ballet (Friday through Sunday) This company from St. Petersburg, Russia, visits City Center every few years with a juggernaut of a story ballet. This time, it's Boris Eifman's "Up and Down," a tumultuous love story set in the 1920s and inspired by Freud. Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.; 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan, 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. (Burke) Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana (through Sunday) This New York based company, which has been championing flamenco for more than 30 years, presents three new works by Spanish choreographers. Angel Munoz's "Angeles," with a cast of 10 dancers and musicians, finds angels in myths and music; Enrique Vicent and Antonio Lopez unleash the beautiful agony of flamenco's dark side in "Martinete Seguiriya"; and Guadalupe Torres offers a moving solo called "Ausencia." Additional company repertory rounds out two separate programs. Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.; Fishman Space, Fisher Building, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 321 Ashland Place, near Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, 718 636 4100, bam.org. (Schaefer) Fridays at Noon (Friday) In a program for this eclectic, low tech series, the choreographer and costume designer Walter Dundervill uses chaos as an organizing principle. "Construction and Action," as the afternoon is titled, includes his own new work and that of two colleagues, Stacy Grossfield and Rebecca Davis, who create and disrupt order in very different ways. At noon, 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 212 415 5500, 92y.org (Burke) Graham 2 (Thursday through May 31) The junior ranks of the Martha Graham Dance Company operate much like their parent troupe, preserving Graham's classics while bringing in contemporary works that challenge the dancers in new ways. In a program at the company's West Village studio, they offer a premiere by the Spanish choreographer Blanca Li, alongside well known Graham repertory like the jubilant "Diversion of Angels" and the defiant "Steps in the Street." Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; next Friday, May 30 and 31 at 8 p.m.; Martha Graham Studio Theater, 55 Bethune Street, at Washington Street, 212 229 9200, Ext. 30, marthagraham.org. (Burke) Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (through Sunday) If the Midwest has a hub for European choreographers, Hubbard Street is it. This troupe of exceptional dancers, who thrive in many modes of contemporary ballet, travels east with two programs of works created at home and abroad. These include Jiri Kylian's stark and percussive "Falling Angels," Nacho Duato's Mediterranean tinged "Gnawa," a Crystal Pite solo and a tribute to George Balanchine by the Spanish choreographer Gustavo Ramirez Sansano. The resident artist Alejandro Cerrudo contributes two pieces, one on each program. Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.; Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival (Through June 21) This East Village festival is entering its 10th year of supporting adventurous dance, with a busy lineup of local and international artists. The opening weekend includes an American premiere by Junk Ensemble, from Ireland; a shared evening of choreography by Gwen Welliver, Brandon Collwes and Eric Geiger and Anya Cloud; and Stanley Love's joyful, unapologetically jazzy "Persephone Pomegranate seeds, huny." Beginning on Thursday, John Scott's Irish Modern Dance Theater presents "Hyperactive," which has been described as a "high energy human dance installation," and Jane Comfort offers the premiere of "Altiplano," departing from her generally text based work with a movement driven exploration of social behavior. At various times, La MaMa, 74A East Fourth Street, 212 475 7710. The full schedule is at lamama.org. (Burke) Paloma McGregor (Friday through Sunday) In "Building a Better Fish Trap/Part 1," Ms. McGregor, a Caribbean born choreographer, explores the nature of leaving a cultural home: "What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?" she asks. Inspired by the fishing tradition of her octogenarian father and other memories, the work has grown out of intergenerational collaboration all over New York City, leading up to this iteration at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m., 2474 Westchester Avenue, at St. Peters Avenue, 718 918 2110, baadbronx.org. (Burke) New York City Ballet (through June 7) There are three more chances this season to see City Ballet's new "La Sylphide," choreographed in 1836 by August Bournonville and recently restaged by Peter Martins. It shares a program with "Bournonville Divertissements" on Saturday and Sunday; Lauren Lovette makes her debut as the title fairy of "La Sylphide" on Saturday afternoon. This is also a good week for fans of Jerome Robbins, whose "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz" appears on a "Classic NYCB" bill, alongside Mr. Martins's "Morgen" and George Balanchine's "Raymonda Variations" (Friday, Wednesday and Thursday). Tuesday's "All Robbins" evening includes "The Goldberg Variations" and "West Side Story Suite." Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays at 3 p.m.; Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com. (Burke) Rebecca Patek (through Saturday) The full title of Rebecca Patek's new work is "The Future Was Looking Better in the Past: My Family Herstory: Or from religious persecution to American greed to murderous infamy to denial, repression and the slow dissolution into moral confusion, financial ruin and karmic retribution," which tells you plenty. Expect to be uncomfortable: Ms. Patek's gripping and disturbing brand of dance theater doesn't hold back. At 8 p.m., Chocolate Factory, 5 49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org. (Schaefer) Purchase Dance Company (through Saturday) Purchase College, part of the State University of New York and about 35 miles north of the city, is home to one of the best higher education dance conservatories in the country. The Purchase Dance Company, made of its most promising students, presents two programs combining classical and contemporary styles, including works by the popular modern dance choreographers Doug Varone and Aszure Barton and the former New York City Ballet dancer Bettijane Sills. At 7:30 p.m., New York Live Arts, 219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org. (Schaefer) Wendy Whelan: 'Restless Creature' (Tuesday through May 31) Toward the end of her 30 year tenure at New York City Ballet, the eminent ballerina Wendy Whelan branched out on her own, commissioning four contemporary choreographers to create new works for her. The resulting suite of duets by Kyle Abraham, Joshua Beamish, Brian Brooks and Alejandro Cerrudo, who double as her dance partners has been touring the country and, at long last, makes its New York City debut. In "Restless Creature," Ms. Whelan appears at once transformed and like the avidly curious artist her admirers know and love. Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday and next Friday at 8 p.m.; May 30 at 2 and 8 p.m.; May 31 at 2 p.m.; Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In a surprise move, Fox will turn to AMC's president, Charlie Collier, to take over its broadcast network in several months, the company announced Friday. It had been widely assumed in Hollywood that Gary Newman, a co chief executive of the Fox Television Group, would continue in the job. But Mr. Newman indicated to Fox that he would stay only through this television season, which ends in May. Lachlan Murdoch, who will be chief executive at the new Fox, did not want to wait that long to find a replacement. Mr. Collier, a career cable man, has been president of AMC for a decade, and helped shepherd hits like "The Walking Dead," "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." His new title will be chief executive of entertainment at Fox. It's the latest change at a time of sweeping executive turnover for the broadcast networks. Leslie Moonves, the longtime head of CBS, was forced out last month after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct against him. On Thursday, Showtime's chief executive, David Nevins, was named chief content officer of CBS, where he will oversee the network's executives.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
KUSNACHT, Switzerland There is a metal plaque on the gate to Tina Turner's estate that says "Vor 12.00 Uhr nicht lauten, keine Lieferungen ," which I believe is German for "Do not even think about bothering Tina Turner before noon." She was the symbol of rock 'n' roll stamina for 50 years. Her "Proud Mary" was 175 percent longer than the original, and John Fogerty didn't even dance. S he became a star with Ike Turner in her 20s, escaped his abuse in her 30s, fought her way up the pop charts in her 40s, toured the world through her 60s, and now she would like to sleep in. So I arrived at 2. Erwin Bach, Turner's lovely German husband, fetched me in his SUV and delivered me to the house, which is named did you think Tina Turner's house would not have a name? the Chateau Algonquin. It has cartoon palace energy: ivy snaking up the walls, gardeners manicuring the shrubs, a life size two legged horse sculpture suspended from a domed ceiling, a framed rendering of Turner as an Egyptian queen, a room stuffed with gilded Louis XIV style sofas and, sprawled on one of them, Tina Turner herself. She does not miss performing. Oh, no. Even in 2009, as she romped around the world on the final dates of the "Tina! 50th Anniversary" tour, she was fantasizing, to be honest, about redecorating her house. She lived that life with Ike, and then she conquered that life with a life of her own, and now it was time to take in her unobstructed view of Lake Zurich. "I was just tired of singing and making everybody happy," she said. "That's all I'd ever done in my life." Once in a while, though, she will be in the car. The radio will come on, and with Bach humming respectfully beside her, she will give the song the full Tina Turner treatment, bouncing in her seat and purring for an audience of one . There is a song that she can't resist. "Oh, what's his name?" she called to her husband, who was puttering around in the next room. "Darling? What's his name?" And then she did sing: "I want something just liiiike this!" "Coldplay," Turner repeated. "You know what I like?" She began to rhapsodize on the counterintuitive appeal of Chris Martin's voice. "He doesn't have that really good black voice, like Motown " Turner may not be singing much these days, but there's a squad of Tinas performing around the world on her behalf. "Tina: The Tina Turner Musical," based on her life and scored with her hits, has brought a Tina to London and a Tina to Hamburg. Soon it will bring a Tina to Broadway, when the 16.5 million production begins performances at the Lunt Fontanne Theater next month, with Adrienne Warren in the wig. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd ( "Mamma Mia !"), the show covers four decades of Turner's life, beginning when she was little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, and hopscotching through the '80s, when she grew into the fiercest pop star on the planet. ( Katori Hall, whose Martin Luther King play "The Mountaintop" reached Broadway in 2011, is the lead book writer, along with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins. ) Turner consulted closely on the musical, showing the choreographer her moves and sharing her recollections with the writers. When she met Warren in London, she administered a little quiz. Lounging on a couch, the actress standing expectantly before her, Turner asked, "Can you do the Pony? Do it a little bit." Warren bounced enthusiastically up and down. "That?" she asked, to which Turner replied: "No." And so Turner rose, paused her retirement just long enough to correctly execute her signature move, and then collapsed laughing onto the couch, gleefully kicking her Louboutin flats into the air. I asked her if it's strange to watch these other women pretend to be her, and she said that she has spent her whole career watching other women pretend to be her. She used to audition promising background singers for the Ike Tina Turner Revue and say: "She'll make a good Tina." Later, when she started to see young pop starlets arise in her mold, she would look them over and say: "She'll make a good Tina." And when her record company told her that Beyonce had released a song that referenced her "Drunk in Love," on which Jay Z crudely boasts of his resemblance to Ike Turner's response was, "Yeah, I'm not surprised." It's revisiting her life itself that is hard. The musical traces her triumphant rise as a solo artist and her budding romance with Bach, but first it tears through the 16 years she spent with Ike. She met him when he was a swaggering St. Louis bandleader and she was 17 year old Anna Mae. He gave her a break as a performer, but by the end, he had almost made her hate music. He changed her name, and then he trademarked it, and then he owned her. He stole her earnings. He threw hot coffee in her face. He broke her jaw. Through it all he made her sing, even if blood was running down her throat. It is difficult to neatly fictionalize that kind of physical and psychological violence. When Disney mounted "What's Love Got to Do With It," the 1993 biopic based on Turner's life, Laurence Fishburne would not agree to play Ike until his "cardboard cutout" villain character was deepened. The climax of the stage musical shows Tina Turner triumphantly hitting Ike back before running to freedom; in real life, she did hit him back, but then she rubbed his temples until he fell asleep; only then did she feel safe enough to sneak away. To this day, Turner has never revealed the full extent of his abuse. "I think I'm ashamed," she said. "I feel I told enough." She first documented the violence in her 1986 book "I, Tina," and it was then that her public persona began to evolve from popular singer to living legend. Suddenly, "You're not just a star onstage with the hair and the legs," she said. "You had a life. You had a tough life." But once she had said it, she was forced to retell the story again and again. It felt like every time her friend Oprah interviewed her, she would ask, "Do you remember the first time Ike hit you?" When "What's Love Got to Do With It" came out, Turner didn't watch it. She didn't need to relive that nightmare. But last year, when "Tina" the musical debuted in London, there she was, sitting in the best seat in the house. And as she watched her story unfold once more, she found herself laughing. At the curtain call, she walked onstage and assured the actor who played Ike: "I forgive you." Some took that to mean that she had forgiven Ike Turner himself, which she had not. "I don't know if I could ever forgive all that Ike ever did to me," she said, but "Ike's dead." Turner laughed. "So we don't have to worry about him." When Turner finally escaped Ike in 1976, she left with just 36 cents in her pocket. Her head was so swollen from the beatings, she had to leave even her wig behind. And she was in debt. All the venues for all the canceled Ike Tina Turner Revue shows were calling, and they weren't interested in launching the solo career of a 37 year old single black woman. She went on "Hollywood Squares," and the host, Peter Marshall, introduced her by saying, "Tina, where's Ike?" By the time she was fully and properly respected in America as a solo artist, Turner was already gone. She wanted to put an ocean between herself and Ike. Besides, she was done with American guys. In those years, she skipped across Europe, sampling a continental buffet: She enjoyed flirtations with a Dutchman, an Italian, a Greek. She loved the way Europeans said her name. Ike always said it like "Tee nuh," but here it was "Tee nah." She recorded her 1984 comeback album, "Private Dancer," in London, and she shot the cover for her 1990 single, "Foreign Affair," literally hanging off the Eiffel Tower, Paris at her feet. She began to believe that she might have been French in another life. Nobody there ever asked her where Ike was. She had just flown into Cologne when she saw him. An A R man for her record company, EMI, emerged from behind a column in a jaunty windbreaker, like some kind of German boyfriend ex machina. She loved his eyes. She loved his nose. "Didn't like his hairstyle," she told me, but she figured she could redecorate that, too. The instant attraction was not mutual. Bach told me that, as a music industry professional, he would never even have considered fraternizing with an artist. "But also I was bushed," Turner added. "I didn't look too good." So later that night, at a business dinner where she had made sure to look extra fine, she mischievously requested every last record company executive's date of birth and then researched Bach's full astrological profile. (He's an Aquarius, thank God. Ike, obviously, was a Scorpio). Then, when the Cristal was flowing, she turned to him and said, "I want you to make love to me." She was 46 and he was 30. The press called him her "boy toy." But here they are, more than 30 years later, and his silver hair is slicked back in a Tina Turner pleasing formation. He calls her "Barli" (German for little bear) and "Schatzi" (sweetheart) and will under no circumstances reveal what her nickname is for him. Whenever he talks too much, Turner raises a hand in the air and cinches her fingers together in the style of Dr. Evil, and he quiets. He knows that his wife is a star and he is not, and he feels that it is very important to honor that distinction. The Erwin character in the show woos Tina, and while the real Erwin doesn't recognize himself in the role, he says matter of factly: "The musical is done by professionals under the guidance of Tina, and they decide how the characters look." Several years ago, when Turner was on dialysis and close to death, her husband gave her a kidney. "And I would do it again," he said, to which she replied: "Well, I might need another one on the other side." Turner may have laughed through the musical, but Bach cried. The couple moved to Switzerland in 1995. After a chaotic life, Turner likes the Swiss zeal for order. Everything here runs according to the rules. She does not speak German, which, actually, she prefers; it means she's not expected to say much. If someone says something amusing, she can just ask her husband what it was. On a typical day, she gets up. Her major domo, Didier, an enormously tall Swiss man with a bright polo shirt buttoned all the way to his shy face, makes her some oatmeal. She shops. The Algonquin is overflowing with beautiful things: a pair of novelty castle keys ("I really wanted a castle until I saw how big castles were," she said); pieces of an enormous shattered amethyst arranged by the in ground swimming pool ("It was a gift"); framed photographs of the sarcophagi of old Egyptian royalty (she senses she was one of them in a past life; Didier was there too); a sword wielding pre Columbian idol she picked up just as she was leaving America for good ("I liked him, at the time"). Nothing is in storage: Now that she can afford it, "I want to see it," she said. When Turner was with Ike, she had no space of her own. She changed the towels in the bathroom once, and he screamed at her. She hid her Buddhist prayer cabinet in a spare room, and when he discovered it, he ordered it out of the house. One day she returned home from a hospital stay to find that he had totally remodeled the place in his vulgar style. Thirty years later, Mike Wallace visited Anna Fleur, Turner's villa in the south of France, and he asked her: "Do you feel like you deserve all this?" To which she replied: "I deserve more." Now she has the Chateau Algonquin, where she is in total control of her physical surroundings, and she revels in them. The only hitch is that she does not actually own the chateau. Her landlord, Kaspar, lives in her attic and controls the boathouse, which stands un Tina fied at the shore of the lake. She led me on a tour of the grounds, holding my arm in hers, and as we paused beneath her covered patio, she gazed wistfully at the boathouse. "I'm looking forward to decorating that," she said. Tina Turner has become a symbol of so many things sex appeal, resilience, empowerment that she cannot quite relate to. She was never trying to be sexy onstage; she was sweating through her clothes to sell her songs. And the idea of connecting her life to the feminist movement or recasting it through MeToo feels alien to her. "I identify only with my life," she said. While everyone was making her into a symbol, "I was busy doing it. Doing the work." The strength of her voice, and the power of her story, have seemed to build an almost invincible persona, but it's just a persona. "I don't necessarily want to be a 'strong' person," she said. "I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come." She gestured around her. "This came." When Turner got tired of talking about herself, I left her. I returned the following afternoon to find her transformed: wig styled, lips painted red, eyes sparkling. "That was Anna Mae yesterday," she told me. "Here's Tina." Turner was having her photo taken that day. A makeshift studio had been erected on her lawn. She had draped herself in luxury accessories, which she listed aloud: Cartier. Bulgari. And "who's the one with the red bottoms, darling?" Louboutin.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The dollar lost a bit of its exalted status last week and the Chinese renminbi gained some luster. That was the straightforward meaning of an announcement in Washington by the International Monetary Fund, which decided to admit the renminbi to an exclusive group of elite currencies. But global markets told quite a different story: The renminbi remained no more than a promising but relatively inconsequential currency, while the euro weakened and the dollar remained at the center of world events, with effects that rippled through the world economy. To make sense of these apparently conflicting pictures, first examine the I.M.F. decision on the renminbi. It was long awaited and, in some ways, portentous, signaling China's growing political clout, if not the ascendance of its currency. The international organization decided that for the first time, the Chinese currency would join the dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound in a prestigious, if obscure, club: The big four currencies together form a global reserve asset known as the I.M.F.'s Special Drawing Rights (S.D.R.) basket. Next October, the renminbi will become the fifth member. S.D.R.s aren't a currency, but they can be used as a claim on currencies in the basket, indirectly bolstering the role of the renminbi as a potential reserve currency. While this doesn't have much day to day significance right now, it certifies that China's currency, which could barely be traded on world markets only a few decades ago, has already come a long way. In order to qualify for inclusion, an S.D.R. member needs to be the currency of a major exporter, and the renminbi certainly is that. The other main qualification is ticklish: A currency needs to be "freely usable." Using a strictly technical definition, the I.M.F. declared that the renminbi meets that test, even though its price doesn't move freely in currency markets and it isn't traded or held nearly as much as the other major currencies. The I.M.F. acknowledged that "challenges" remained for the renminbi and stressed "the importance of continuing and deepening" the financial and economic reforms that have taken place in China. These reservations are substantial. Nonetheless, Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said quite correctly that the I.M.F. decision amounted to "landmark recognition" of China's growing economic power. In order to make room for the renminbi in its S.D.R. basket, the I.M.F. shrank the other four currencies, especially the euro. The dollar lost a little of its stature. But if the renminbi's rise in status signaled the incipient decline of the dollar, you wouldn't have known it from the action in the foreign currency markets, or from any other major markets last week. The dollar did fall against the euro on Thursday, after the European Central Bank issued policy guidance that surprised some traders. But if anything, the almighty dollar, as Washington Irving once called the greenback, retained every bit of its global importance. It was bolstered by comments from Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, suggesting that the Fed would soon raise short term interest rates after holding them close to zero for nearly seven years. Ms. Yellen's testimony before Congress on Thursday added to that general conviction in the markets, though the dollar briefly gave up ground against the euro after the European Central Bank in Frankfurt loosened monetary policy less than had been expected. Still, the market consensus remains that diverging policies in Europe and the United States will solidify a trend that has been underway for many months: The euro will weaken further and the dollar will grow ever stronger. What's more, the rising dollar over the last year has already had profound effects. It has helped account for the drop in commodity values, which are commonly priced in dollars. The soaring greenback has also pummeled producers of coffee, cotton, copper, zinc, oil and gold, and it has punished many commodity producing nations, like Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Canada. At the same time, the dollar has helped put a lid on inflation in the United States, the Federal Reserve said last week in the periodic survey of American economic conditions known as the beige book. "The strong dollar put downward pressure on prices," the Fed said. It also concluded that the dollar had hurt the competitiveness of American exporters and contributed to weakening global economic demand. And in earnings calls with financial analysts, a range of American companies reported that the dollar had created significant headwinds for their businesses, and was likely to do so in 2016. As Goldman Sachs reported in its most recent beige book a survey of corporate America that it periodically performs: "A strong U.S. dollar continued to weigh on earnings, particularly for companies with significant international exposure." Those effects are widely expected to strengthen, not weaken, in the months ahead. The dollar remains the main currency in which the world does business. It accounted for more than 43 percent of foreign currency turnover in 2013, the most recent I.M.F. figure, compared with less than 17 percent for the euro, the second most widely used currency. At 1.1 percent, the renminbi barely showed up on the radar. Still, the renminbi is being traded frequently in Asia, the I.M.F. found, if not much in Europe or North America. And because China is already among the world's biggest exporters it is the biggest, by some measures it has leverage to shift commerce toward the renminbi rather than the dollar. China has already demonstrated that a small shift in the value of the renminbi can have major effects on global markets. In August, it announced that it would allow the renminbi to float in a broader range a shift that helped China receive the benediction of the I.M.F. last week but when the currency briefly lurched downward, world currency, stock and commodities markets fell sharply. In Beijing last week, Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, said the bank intended to "keep the renminbi's exchange rate stable at a reasonable level," yet would also gradually allow the currency to move more freely. Those goals may prove to be difficult to achieve simultaneously. Having disrupted the markets only recently, China could do so again. But China's rising status at the I.M.F. could have a calming effect. It will lead to a small rebalancing of global reserves at central banks, which are likely to begin to modestly increase their renminbi holdings. Eventually, the renminbi could become a haven in times of trouble, a place where investors seek security, not a currency from which people flee, as has recently been the case. In order to achieve that transformation, the renminbi will have to become much more freely and dependably usable than it already is. It is becoming more important and will undoubtedly grow in stature. But the dollar remains at the fulcrum of world trade and global economics.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Archaeopteryx was described in the 1860s by Thomas Henry Huxley from its fossil specimen as having feathers but many reptilian features. At a preview of the new American Museum of Natural History exhibition "Dinosaurs Among Us," scientists gave a tip of the hat to Thomas Henry Huxley, the man who proposed in the 1860s that dinosaurs never really vanished from Earth. Most did go extinct, but their evolutionary legacy lives all around us. They are birds, all 18,000 species of them. While Charles Darwin's book of books, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," was still in print in 1859, Huxley, a lecturer in paleontology and natural history in London, wrote a favorable review and became a convert to Darwin's theory. In a debate the next year, Huxley got the better of the bishop of Oxford, and became known thereafter as Darwin's bulldog. He was also the first in a long line of Huxleys who distinguished themselves in science and the arts. A few years later, Huxley enlisted Archaeopteryx, a fossil specimen found in a Bavarian limestone quarry, in his defense of Darwin. He was struck by the specimen's many reptilian features; but for a feather in the fossil, it would probably have been misidentified as a reptile. In a report in 1867, Huxley established the evolutionary relationship of birds and reptiles, citing 14 anatomical features that occur in birds and reptiles alike, but not in mammals. Archaeopteryx was one of those "missing links" in the fossil record that Darwin worried was a weakness in this theory of evolution. Huxley called attention to the feathers and wishbone of this early bird and the long bony tail of a reptile. This was a species in transition. Mark A. Norell, the chairman of the division of paleontology at A.M.N.H. and curator of the exhibition, had long been a staunch proponent of a dinosaur bird link. A lot of evidence amassed over the last two decades, especially the numbers of feathered dinosaurs found in China, moved paleontologists to organize the exhibition as a kind of victory lap. "I think this is really going to shake up the way people think of dinosaurs," Dr. Norell said. Most ornithologists, though not completely won over, had already ceased raising blanket objections to the dinosaur bird link. They seemed at a loss to conceive of alternative explanations for the gathering evidence, paleontologists say. The slow evolution of the practice of paleontology itself was another reason for the delay in recognizing Huxley's insight. For the rest of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the big game of fossil hunting was the bigger and more bizarre dinosaurs that drew people to museums. Expeditions to remote lands widened the search to nearly all continents, piling up skeletons faster than could be analyzed in depth. Roy Chapman Andrews became the real life Indiana Jones in the 1920s, bringing back from the Gobi Desert of Mongolia a variety of new dinosaur species and the first dinosaur eggs. If only he had found feathered dinosaurs then and there, paleontologists say, the dinosaur bird link might have been recognized much sooner. That was not to happen until the end of the century. By that time, the field work of fossil hunters remained important, but only as the first step in discovery. For example, in 1964, John H. Ostrom of Yale University saw a birdlike claw sticking out of the ground in Montana. He named the dinosaur Deinonychus, or "terrible claw." But it reminded him of Huxley's evolutionary insight, leading Dr. Ostrom to link birds to new generations of dinosaur research. In the last two or three decades, biological disciplines have joined dinosaur studies, applying tools capable of transcending the terrible claw limitations of fossilized skulls and bones. Geologists once dominated the field, Dr. Norell said, but "now so many of us could be called paleobiologists." Also, thousands of fossils with feather imprints have been discovered in Liaoning Province in northeastern China in the last 15 years, Dr. Norell said. Birds are the only feathered creatures alive today, but 150 million years ago, early birds and dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes came with feathers, not necessarily for flight. Feathers, museum researchers said, are one of the most useful skin coverings that ever evolved for insulation or mating display as well as gliding or powered flight. Paul C. Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist, has analyzed many recent Chinese fossils of animals that had lived more than 100 million years ago that were found in lake bed sediments. "Huxley was a brilliant anatomist," Dr. Sereno said. "Some of the first birds from the Chinese site look just like Archaeopteryx. This time, the dinosaur bird transition has become ascendant." So what is there not to like about evolution if it indeed accounts for the few surviving dinosaurs transformed into flocks of birds? Monstrous dinosaurs may captivate first graders, who thrill at being scared at a safe distance in time. They may also draw comfort from knowing the eating habits (carnivore or herbivore) of dinosaurs their know it all grown ups can't even pronounce their names. Need there be more reason for a fascination with strange and mighty dinosaurs when you are little in a big world? From my back porch in the country, I hear crows squawking high in the trees. Crows are smart, clever enough to pry open garbage cans down the road, if raccoons had not gotten there first which might account for their squawking. Some birds, like blue jays at the feeder, seem to enjoy chasing off chickadees and sparrows. Better to be hearing the bullying jays or cardinals singing their vespers, however, than to have a fearsome T rex peering in at you through your upstairs windows at daybreak, ready for breakfast.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
new video loaded: Puzzle in Poland: Who Bent the Trees?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LOS ANGELES When a group of workers at the video game maker Riot Games staged a three hour walkout in May over the company's handling of sex discrimination accusations, they had help from a labor organizer named Emma Kinema. Ms. Kinema doesn't work for a union, but she is part of a grass roots wave of labor activism, filling voids where traditional unions lack a presence. She volunteers for a group called Game Workers Unite while holding down a full time job, subsidizing her endeavors by soliciting online donations. Workers in industries like education, hospitality and technology are growing more assertive, engaging in strikes and informal walkouts at levels unseen in decades and taking part in new organizing efforts. And that should give unions, hobbled by years of legal setbacks and contending with unfriendly policies in Washington, reason for optimism. "I'm exhausted," Ms. Kinema said. "We could have 10 times the organizing capacity, 10 times the organizers, 10 times the experienced people, and there would still be an infinite amount of work to be done." The question is whether traditional unions can harness this energy and reverse their long term membership decline, from about one third of the work force in the 1950s to about one tenth today. In some cases, unions have kept their distance unless workers first commit to becoming members. In other cases, workers say unions have taken action without giving them a sufficient voice. The biggest labor federation, the A.F.L. C.I.O., says it is committed to strengthening and broadening its ranks. "Every person who works at the A.F.L. C.I.O. and every dollar we spend is dedicated to building the labor movement and giving a voice to working people," said John Weber, its press secretary. But most unions are reluctant to invest heavily in activities like Ms. Kinema's efforts at Riot Games, which can invigorate labor activism even if they don't directly produce new members. "It's an opportunity being squandered," said Stewart Acuff, a former organizing director of the A.F.L. C.I.O. "We're also squandering our responsibility." "It's in the air," said Peter Dreier, an expert on urban policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "It's infected other people." Yet even the triumphs have left some workers cold. The teachers' strike had been gestating since 2014, when a slate of teachers known as Union Power seized on frustration with ballooning class sizes and lagging pay and swept out the union's leadership. The new leaders meticulously prepared to strike with escalating protests and rallies, according to a forthcoming book by the organizer Jane McAlevey. But after the district agreed to many of the strike demands among them raising wages and adding support personnel like nurses and counselors many teachers grumbled that union officials gave them only hours to review the proposed contract. "They wanted you to accept the agreement without any kind of debate," said David Feldman, a high school history teacher who is part of a fledgling campaign to challenge the current leadership. "That's kind of a pattern of things." Gloria Martinez, one of the union's vice presidents, said the limited time for discussion was a valid concern. "There were a lot of pressures of wanting to get our students back into the school," she said. "We should have paused for a bit." It is not the only union campaign that has left rank and file workers seeking more of a say. One of the country's biggest groups of Uber drivers, the Los Angeles based Rideshare Drivers United, has clashed of late with the two million member Service Employees International Union over talks that the S.E.I.U. and other unions have held with Uber and its ride hailing rival Lyft. The talks explored a way to exempt the companies from having to classify drivers as employees covered by minimum wage laws and workers' compensation, which a bill in the State Legislature known as A.B. 5 would require. In exchange, a deal could have made it easier for a union to represent the drivers. The S.E.I.U. said it had never sought a deal that would trade away drivers' rights and that driver input was critical. Linda Valdivia, an Uber driver who is a member of an S.E.I.U. funded driver group, said, "Everything is under our authority they ask us and we approve it." 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. In other cases, unions have held back until workers indicate that they want to become members. Matthew D. Loeb, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said his union was willing to send in a full time professional organizer to help workers at a game studio once they decide to affiliate with his union. "We're prepared to provide all sorts of resources legal, communications, corporate pressure," Mr. Loeb said. The union has held occasional discussions with workers, but has largely deferred to Ms. Kinema and her colleagues at Game Workers Unite. Ms. Kinema, who trained with the Industrial Workers of the World, a traditionally radical labor group, said that the support from unions like Mr. Loeb's was real but that the undertaking "needs capital." She makes 13 an hour as a quality assurance tester for a game developer in Orange County and lives in a two bedroom apartment with three other people. She estimates that she typically spends 60 hours a week attending conferences and training and advising workers, efforts she underwrites with an online fund raising account that yields nearly 1,000 a month. After workers at Riot Games attended a Game Workers Unite meeting in Los Angeles last year, she helped them set up a small organizing committee. Several weeks later, Kotaku, a website that covers the industry, published an account of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company, and the article's impact added momentum to the organizing push. Ms. Kinema's work is beginning to pay off. As recently as early August, the walkout leaders had not focused on building a formal entity like a union. But Ms. Kinema made the case that just getting workers together to vent without any power to resolve their frustrations "can feel really defeating," Ms. Monahan said. She and her colleagues want to create a worker led organization to help solve problems like overwork and burnout, though it will not necessarily be a union. In principle, an umbrella group like the A.F.L. C.I.O. might be better positioned than individual unions to fund what Ms. Kinema refers to as the foundational work of training and educating workers. But the federation has substantially cut its organizing budget in recent years, according to documents obtained by the website Splinter. Ana Avendano, a former A.F.L. C.I.O. official, said a partnership that she helped start in 2006 between the federation and so called worker centers, which assist employees in organizing but aren't unions, had been de emphasized. "The idea of growing the labor movement just to build worker power," said Ms. Avendano, who left the federation in 2014, "is not something that is in the DNA of the leadership." Mr. Weber of the A.F.L. C.I.O. said that years of declining resources amid attacks on labor had made it harder for the federation to award grants, but that its organizing budget did not reflect all its spending on organizing. He said a fund through which the federation invested in certain partnerships, including some that Ms. Avendano worked on, had actually increased over the past decade, though the increase comes from outside sources. Even as overall union membership has declined, some unions have experienced gains, such as those representing teachers. Unite Here, which represents hotel workers among others, has added tens of thousands of members since 2014. Another union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, has organized thousands of cannabis industry workers. The need to make larger investments in organizing could be a central theme of the campaign to succeed Richard Trumka, the A.F.L. C.I.O. president, when his term ends in 2021. Sara Nelson, the head of the Association of Flight Attendants, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate, said the labor movement should shift some of the tens of millions of dollars it spends on political campaigns toward helping workers build unions, even if those investments take years to pay off. "Polls continue to show increased interest in being in a union," Ms. Nelson said. "If you were a business that saw those numbers of people who wanted to have access to what you have, and you were only operating at about 10 to 15 percent of the interest, you would do everything you can to get your product or service in the hands of people who want it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
It's clear almost from the get go what ails Lizzie ( Noomi Rapace ) in Kim Farrant's "Angel of Mine," a chilly stalker mystery with a single, trembly mood. "You haven't been doing so great" is the glaring understatement offered by her ex husband ( Luke Evans ), by way of explaining why he's seeking full custody of their young son. Popping pills and flinching at every shadow, Lizzie appears perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown a ledge, we learn, she's been dancing on for the past seven years. That was when her baby daughter perished in a fire and Lizzie appeared to lose her grip on reality. Now, she's become fixated on Lola ( Annika Whiteley ), a doll faced neighborhood seven year old, following her to the ice rink and peeping in the windows of her family's luxury home. And that's just for starters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies

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