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When Lawrence H. Summers left his job as President Obama's top economic policy adviser at the end of 2010 to return to Harvard University, one of his first steps was to set up a roster of part time positions that would touch on just about every corner of the financial world. But as he negotiated with a prominent venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Mr. Summers made one thing very clear: he needed an exit plan, in case he returned to public service. "That was generally the assumption," said Marc Andreessen, the co founder of the firm. "If he did, he needed a way to do a clean disengage." Today, the Obama administration is considering nominating Mr. Summers as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. If the White House does so, Mr. Summers's financial disclosure including his recent consulting jobs, paid speeches and service on company boards will be one of the hottest documents in Washington. Among the top contenders for the position, Mr. Summers has by far the most Wall Street experience and the most personal wealth. In addition to rejoining the Harvard faculty in 2011, he jumped into a moneymaking spree. His clock was ticking partly because he knew that the Fed chairmanship, to which he has long aspired, was likely to open up in early 2014, when Ben S. Bernanke's second term will come to an end. "With Larry, my wife always says that it's hard to be happy if you want to have the most money because you'll never have the most money," said Jeremy I. Bulow, an economics professor at Stanford University who is a friend and co author of academic papers with Mr. Summers. "He's kind of been going about his life just on the basis of 'who knows what's going to come next?' and just sort of maximizing his experiences, given the opportunities in front of him." The opportunities have been many over the last two years. Mr. Summers, 58, has been employed by the megabank Citigroup and the sprawling hedge fund D. E. Shaw. He works for a firm that advises small banks as well as the exchange company Nasdaq OMX. And he serves on the board of two Silicon Valley start ups: both financial firms that may pursue initial public offerings in the next year. One of them, Lending Club, offers loans to consumers and small businesses by making arrangements directly with online investors, a new business model that falls into a regulatory gap that consumer advocates say may lead to risky borrowing. Before his tenure in the Obama administration, Mr. Summers had accumulated personal wealth of at least 7 million; the last two years have most likely added considerably to that. But his money and Wall Street connections put him in an awkward position, partly because the next person to lead the Federal Reserve will oversee the writing of several key new regulations from the Dodd Frank financial reform bill. Still, some senators are speaking out against Mr. Summers. They are raising questions about potential conflicts of interest and noting his role in the repeal of the Glass Steagall law, which limited the sorts of activities banks could undertake, and his opposition to regulating derivatives in the 1990s decisions that many critics say contributed to the financial crisis. "I start from a position of being extraordinarily skeptical that Larry Summers is appropriate to chair the Fed," said Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. "I have serious doubts that Mr. Summers, who as a committed deregulator drove policies that set the stage for the Great Recession, is the right person for a key regulatory position." Mr. Summers declined to comment. But whatever his views on regulatory policy, those who know and admire Mr. Summers say he arrived at them honestly. "There has to be a distinction between talking to people, even for payment, and doing what they want you to do," said Robert Z. Lawrence, a professor who taught a course at Harvard with Mr. Summers this year. "When it comes to Larry Summers, for good or for bad, he's uncontrollable when it comes to the positions he takes. He doesn't take them for that reason." Mr. Summers's wealth comes mainly from two periods of private sector work between government postings. After a lengthy tenure at the Treasury Department in the 1990s, he became the president of Harvard a job that Robert E. Rubin, who preceded Mr. Summers as Treasury secretary, helped him obtain. But in 2006, Mr. Summers was forced out of the university presidency for a variety of reasons, including remarks he made questioning why few women engage in advanced scientific and mathematical work. Soon after, a young Harvard alum brought him into the hedge fund world with a part time posting at D. E. Shaw. That firm, one of the largest in the industry, paid Mr. Summers more than 5 million. Mr. Summers's wealth soared from around 400,000 in the mid 1990s to between 7 million and 31 million in 2009, when he joined the Obama administration, according to a financial disclosure he filed at the time. Before returning to government service, he earned 2.7 million from speeches in one year alone. As for his current work, representatives for Citigroup, Nasdaq and D. E. Shaw declined to disclose his pay. His speaking rates today run into the six figures, according to an associate who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Mr. Summers has spoken to Wall Street companies like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. The job that is likely to generate the most scrutiny for Mr. Summers is his work with Citigroup, which was rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by the federal government's bailout. Though he does not have an office there, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said he was a regular consultant. In a statement, Citigroup said he provided "insight on a broad range of topics including the global and domestic economy" to prestigious clients, and attended internal meetings. Citigroup hired Mr. Summers in part to advise Vikram S. Pandit, who resigned as chief executive last year. With his work there, Mr. Summers followed in the footsteps of his friend, Mr. Rubin, who joined Citigroup after he left the government and earned more than 100 million. "It will certainly give him a lot of windows into different parts of the financial system, different parts of the economy," Mr. Sachs said. Asked why Mr. Summers would not have simply opted out of financial work, given the questions it could raise if he were nominated to lead the Federal Reserve, Mr. Bulow, the Stanford economist, said he thought Mr. Summers's early experience with cancer (at the age of 28, he was treated for Hodgkin's disease) had been formative. It shaped him to make decisions based on present options, Mr. Bulow said, rather than worrying about future unknowns, like whether President Obama would choose him for the Fed. "He doesn't proceed that way," Mr. Bulow said. "I think basically, you know, it's a little bit like Sheryl Sandberg says, 'Don't leave before you're leaving.' " Mr. Summers's spokeswoman, Kelly Friendly, declined to provide details about his current pay, but said his "broad exposure to different parts of the economy gives him a unique perspective on what makes America work." In 2009, Mr. Summers said in an interview with The New York Times that he kept boundaries between his private and public work. "I wanted to be involved as an economist, not as a lobbyist," he said. "I never wanted to be in a position of taking public policy positions based on anything other than my convictions as an economist or a potential policy maker." Mr. Summers not only has a variety of professional contacts on Wall Street, he also has many friends there. At D. E. Shaw, for instance, Mr. Summers has worked with Darcy Bradbury, the firm's head of external affairs, who has known him for more than 30 years, ever since she was a student at Harvard. Ms. Bradbury, who also worked with Mr. Summers in the Clinton administration, was elected chairwoman of the hedge fund industry's association shortly after Mr. Summers began his work in the White House in 2009. That group, the Managed Funds Association, has been involved in discussions of industry trading rules as well as pushing for the preservation of a tax loopholes that benefit investment firms. Richard W. Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, predicted that Mr. Summers's work in finance would not derail his nomination or confirmation. "Remember, we had two secretaries of the Treasury, which is a regulatory position, who were chairmen of Goldman Sachs," said Mr. Painter, who is now a professor at the University of Minnesota. "We did it with Hank Paulson. Clinton did it with Bob Rubin." Mr. Painter noted that if Mr. Summers became Fed chairman, he would have to fully divest himself of all interests in the financial companies he works with. The divestitures, he said, would include even the start ups, companies that have the potential for Mr. Summers to make sizable future earnings, if they pursue public offerings. If Mr. Summers goes to the Fed, Mr. Andreessen said, "it would be a reasonable statement that he's leaving money on the table." Consumer advocates said Lending Club was so new that they had not yet seen many examples of its loans and collection practices in action. But Sarah Ludwig, the co director of the New Economy Project, a nonprofit in New York, expressed concern that the company did not verify all borrowers' income and employment. "This should be another red flag," Ms. Ludwig said of Mr. Summers's involvement. "What is he doing on the board of this company? What is a potential Fed chairman doing on the board of a company that doesn't check if people can afford loans?" Of the loans Lending Club has made in 2013, it did not verify income about half of the time, according to data available on its Web site. Mr. Laplanche said the company had models that dictated when it scrutinizes income and that the company was verifying income on more loans than it did in the past. He said that many other lenders also did not verify employment history and income. He added that Mr. Summers had pushed for strong consumer protection. "He was the most adamant about making sure we were tracing the loan in such a way that we were making sure the people getting the loan had the ability to repay," he said. And he said consumers would not be coming to Lending Club if they thought they could get better rates elsewhere. But some consumer credit experts said Lending Club's rates on many loans might be higher than what was available at a credit union or other lenders. Of the loans Lending Club has issued in 2013, 12.9 percent of the loans are charging annual percentage rates of 12.4 percent or lower, but 37 percent of the loans are charging annual percentage rates of 19 percent or more, with some as high as 29 percent. Mr. Summers has been encouraging Lending Club to spend time in Washington to share its story with regulators and policy makers, said John J. Mack, another company board member who was the chief executive of Morgan Stanley during the financial crisis. "The facts are all over the place, but to me, for it to be growing at the rate it is growing, it is serving a need for small consumers," Mr. Mack said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
When the opera "Blue" had its premiere last summer at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times that it featured "one of the most elegant librettos I've heard in a long time." Its author was the playwright and director Tazewell Thompson, who wrote the story about a black family the father a police officer that is torn apart when the son is killed at a protest by another officer. In March, before several stagings of the work were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Music Critics Association of North America decided to award "Blue" its prize for best new opera. Announced on Wednesday, the honor is sadly timely as the nation is roiled by unrest over police brutality and race relations. They were all names known to me, some quite famous. Some had written operas before. I have been writing something down each night, a diary of sorts, since I could hold a crayon and scribble. My parents' criminal behavior kept them in and out of prison throughout my childhood and most of my teenage years. They were deemed irresponsible, unsafe and unsuitable not fit to raise me. So I was taken from them at an early age and made a ward of the state. I spent seven years at the Convent of St. Dominic in Blauvelt, N.Y., where I was introduced to storytelling by Sister Martin DePorres, who read to us 30 boys at bedtime, everything from "The Hardy Boys" to Dickens. Sister Charles Williams encouraged me to take the next step and write for the school paper. At 9, I was editor, getting high on my power and the aroma of mimeograph fluid. But poetry was my real calling. I devoured Frost, Hughes, Millay, Dickinson, Whitman and Shakespeare. I walked around reciting aloud; I entered oratory contests. I was in love with the sound of my own voice, and the discovery that words were not democratic: Some were special and needed to be framed, stressed or served up more or less than others. "What about me?" I asked Francesca. She told me to send her a bit of material, something that would indicate that I understood the libretto form. So I sent Francesca two scenes set in Harlem, where I was born and now live: A young married black couple expecting their first child, a boy, and fearing the challenges and obstacles he will face; and a scene of the mother to be and her girlfriends. Francesca told me to send the samples to Jeanine Tesori, who would be the opera's composer. Jeanine and I met over avocado toast on Upper Broadway. It was a match. As I wrote, I looked to my favorite essayist and novelist, James Baldwin, and his "The Fire Next Time"; Ta Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me"; and, from my teenage years, Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land." I consulted with friends, black and white: How do you prepare a son for what awaits him? Do you have "the talk" with him, about how to survive and thrive from day to day? All the black parents said yes. The white ones said it had never even entered their thoughts. Six months later I had a first draft, in which a black family and their community are convulsed when an unarmed teenager is killed by a police officer. The principal characters were the father, a jazz saxophone player; the mother, a restaurant owner; and the son, a student activist interested in art and poetry. A chorus of 30 young black men represented other murdered boys, attempting through music and dance to make sense of the world they had left. As Jeanine and I met and she began to hear musical themes in my text, and with Francesca's tough notes, things evolved. I learned how to edit rambling sentences down to select bites that would allow the music to enter; how counterpoint is used, and the dramatic musical effect of repeating lines and using active verbs; how to write duets, trios, arias. At one meeting, Francesca and Jeanine suggested I get rid of the boys' chorus, and rethink the idea of the father as a struggling jazz musician. "What if he's a cop?" Jeanine said. Absolutely not, I answered. I did not want to write about a police officer. But despite myself, I soon recognized the irony, the tension, the glittering possibilities of personal conflict and heartache for a father whose son is murdered by a fellow officer. I set about interviewing black police officers. Francesca introduced me to one in Washington who was leaving the force to become an actor. I also consulted with a Harlem police officer whose relationship with his teenage son was a disaster, the son appalled that his dad worked for "the man" the enemy. That conflict is in the opera. For this officer, life insurance and dental coverage for his family were a major part of his decision to join the force. That's in the opera, too. It is hard to think about "Blue," or much of anything, in the midst of the continuing pandemic that has taken so much of my community in Harlem. Massive unemployment; lines snaking around several blocks for the food pantry on 116th Street. Small family businesses that have closed forever. The recent brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Rayshard Brooks and George Floyd: My people and I are left shocked and shivering, fending for ourselves. Moving targets. Who's next? How are we to catch our breath again? How are we to put our trust in the laws of the land? It is difficult for me not to feel utterly defeated. Not difficult at all for me to see my face superimposed over George Floyd's. I'm angry and frightened, living in an increasingly terrifying, divisive country where a white police officer, in broad daylight, in uniform, snuffs out the life of an unarmed, handcuffed black man. When I joined the Glimmerglass project in 2015, the opera was referred to in shorthand as "Race Opera." I began to attach new titles to each draft: "No Name Necessary," "Say My Name," "The Hunted," "Targets," "Black Boy." Both police officers I spoke to referred to their uniform as "blues": "When I'm in my blues." As the opera begins, the audience sees the central character, the father, changing from his civilian clothes into his police blues. I kept cycling through titles: "Black Blue," "Black In Blue," "Black Is Blue." But it seemed better to be more ambiguous, to refer equally to a mood, a uniform, a kind of day, a kind of music. I wrote to Jeanine and we decided we should call it "Blue." When the final curtain fell on opening night, there was a long silence, followed by gasps, audible weeping, and then, finally, applause. "Blue" has been referred to as a "protest opera" and "the opera about police violence." I suppose both are true. But I did not set out with that goal. I wrote it from an obsessive need and sense of responsibility to tell an intimate story behind the numbing numbers of boys and men who are killed. But here we are now: art imitating life, life imitating art. Unfortunately, the themes in "Blue" have no expiration date. I add my voice to those of the characters singing in the opera, and to those of the real families suffering great losses. Our eyes will never be free of tears.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, apologized under pressure on Thursday for taunting a survivor of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., as at least eight companies confirmed they would pull advertising from her show. The dispute began Wednesday when Ms. Ingraham shared an article about the student, David Hogg, 17, getting rejected from colleges and accused him of whining about it. As news of the boycotts began coming out on Thursday, Ms. Ingraham apologized. "On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland," she said, extending an invitation for Mr. Hogg to appear on the show. Mr. Hogg said he was unimpressed by the apology. "She only apologized after we went after her advertisers," he said. "It kind of speaks for itself." Mr. Hogg said he has grown accustomed to being criticized, often ruthlessly. But to hear a prominent television host mock his college rejections was "extremely frustrating," he said. "I'm not going to stoop to her level and go after her on a personal level," he said. "I'm going to go after her advertisers." Ms. Ingraham's remarks went too far for TripAdvisor, which said it planned to stop advertising on the show and that it did not "condone the inappropriate comments made by this broadcaster." "We also believe Americans can disagree while still being agreeable, and that the free exchange of ideas within a community, in a peaceful manner, is the cornerstone of our democracy," the company said through a spokesman. "In our view, these statements focused on a high school student cross the line of decency." Nutrish, a pet food brand owned by Rachael Ray, said it was "in the process of removing our ads from Laura Ingraham's program." 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 comments she has made are not consistent with how we feel people should be treated," the company said. Wayfair, an e commerce company, said in a statement that it supports "open dialogue and debate on issues," but that it would stop advertising on Ms. Ingraham's show. "The decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values," the company said. Nestle said it had "no plans to buy ads on the show in the future," while Stitch Fix, a clothing box subscription service, said it had pulled its advertisements. Johnson Johnson said it had done so as well, while Hulu said on Twitter, "We are no longer advertising on Laura Ingraham's show and are monitoring all of our ad placements carefully." Expedia said it had "recently pulled the advertising" from Ms. Ingraham's show, but it did not elaborate on timing or whether the decision was related to her comments. Consumers have increasingly used social media to demand that advertisers respond to a series of controversies, particularly those involving Fox News hosts. Last year, more than 50 brands pulled ads from "The O'Reilly Factor" after The New York Times reported on settlements that the show's host, Bill O'Reilly, had made with women who accused him of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior, which contributed to his ouster. Similar boycott calls around the host Sean Hannity did not gain as much traction. In November, several brands that initially said they would stop advertising on Mr. Hannity's show after comments he made about Roy S. Moore, the former Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, later walked back those statements. Keurig ignited a firestorm when it said that it planned to halt ads on the show, as Mr. Hannity's fans posted videos of themselves destroying its machines. The company's chief executive later apologized to employees for any negativity they had faced from the "appearance of 'taking sides.'" Mr. Hogg said he was glad that some companies had pulled their ads from Ms. Ingraham's program, but called it "just the beginning." If all of her advertisers pulled out, he said, "we can show that if you continue to bully the students that survived a mass murder, there's going to be consequences." "Deal with the issues, not the individuals," he said. In February, Ms. Ingraham drew rebukes from N.B.A. players after she said the basketball superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant should withhold their political opinions. Mr. James had spoken about his experience as an African American man and criticized President Trump. "Must they run their mouths like that?" she asked, adding, "Keep the political commentary to yourself, or as someone once said, shut up and dribble." Mr. Hogg plans to study either journalism or political science, he said. He confirmed that he had been rejected from four schools: University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, San Diego; University of California, Santa Barbara; and University of California, Irvine. He said he had been accepted by Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; California State University, San Marcos; and Florida Atlantic University, but has not decided which school he'll attend.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"I wonder if any of us have learned from the past," Ofra Bloch, the director of "Afterward," says upon hearing the agonizing story of Abir Aramin, a 10 year old Palestinian girl who was shot and killed by Israeli forces in 2007. Yet when watching Abir's father speak of forgiveness, and discovering that more than 100 former Israeli soldiers and officers later worked to plant a garden in the child's name, optimism flickers. Such moments keep this tough documentary from sinking into despair. Bloch was born in Jerusalem, served in the Israeli military and later moved to the United States. To explore her own history, and to better understand rising anti Semitism around the world, she travels to Germany, where she and other Jews are treated as victims. Elsewhere, she speaks with Palestinians, who curse Israelis as occupiers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Get set for spring or at least springlike temperatures with two made to measure suiting events. Bergdorf Goodman will waive all fees starting Thursday, so you can customize a cashmere Kiton jacket ( 7,595) choose from shawl, peak or notch collar, say, and add monogramming for its off the rack price. At Goodman's Men's Store, 754 Fifth Avenue. And Freemans Sporting Club is offering a 20 percent discount on all made to measure suits (starting at 1,084, originally 1,355) and sportcoats (starting at 800, originally 1,000). At 8 Rivington Street. Pick your queue at either the Adidas Originals or Alexander Wang stores, where the second delivery of Mr. Wang's capsule collection featuring a crop top ( 150) and track pants ( 220) with an inverted trefoil lands Saturday. At 115 Spring Street and 103 Grand Street. On Saturday, the minimalist accessories label WANT Les Essentiels will open a WANT Apothecary concept store where you'll find Byredo Mojave Ghost rollerball perfume ( 78) and Susanne Kaufmann essential bath oil ( 76) among a range of cult brands. At 1170 Broadway. Visit Angela Missoni's living room or, rather, the Missoni Surface Conversion and Kreemart present "Salotto Angela Missoni," an immersive installation filled with works by Tracey Emin and Mickalene Thomas, artists in the designer's personal collection, open Tuesdays and Thursdays. At 1009 Madison Avenue. R.S.V.P. to info kreemart.com. And Visionaire has joined with the artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari on Toiletpaper Paradise, featuring a fully furnished bedroom and kitchen reimagined through a psychedelic lens. At 330 Hudson Street. See Now, Buy Now On Thursday, shop the H M see now, buy now H M Studio collection, which includes a black nylon hoodie ( 59.99) the day after it appears on the runway in Paris. At 589 Fifth Avenue. The Jeremy Scott "Rat a Porter" capsule collection shown on the Moschino runway, including a trash can shoulder bag ( 850) and a paper bag dress ( 995), is available now. At 73 Wooster Street. "Make America New York" with Public School. All proceeds from the sale of the red baseball caps shown at New York Fashion Week ( 65) will benefit the American Civil Liberties Union. At 330 Hudson Street. In honor of International Women's Day, enter to win Sophia's Traveling Bag, a Sophia Webster signature Claudie bag, which has gone around the world with friends, including Misty Copeland, Leith Clark and Eva Chen, each of whom photographed it in their hometowns alongside personalized speech bubble charms with inspiring messages. All raffle tickets sold (PS5) will benefit Womankind Worldwide, a women's rights and development organization based in Britain. At givergy.com. All proceeds from the sale of Public School's "Make America New York" caps will benefit the American Civil Liberties Union. Fifteen percent of sales from a Maiyet x the Brave Collection tassel cuff ( 115) will go to Planned Parenthood. At 16 Crosby Street. And A.L.C. has created "The Woman" graphic tee ( 98) to also benefit Planned Parenthood. At alcltd.com on March 8. The Armarium twice yearly sale ends Thursday. There are discounts up to 70 percent on ready to wear and accessories like a Haider Ackermann cutout gown ( 1,000, originally 375 rental; 2,520 retail) and Jimmy Choo orange mink clutch ( 750, originally 250 rental; 2,895 retail). At 1 East 52nd Street, sixth floor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The Greek economy posted its 20th consecutive quarterly decline in the three months through June, government data showed on Monday, but a slower pace of contraction provided a glimmer of hope for beleaguered Greeks. Gross domestic product shrank by 4.6 percent in the second quarter compared with the same three months a year earlier, the official Hellenic Statistical Authority said. That was an improvement from the first quarter of 2013, when the economy contracted 5.6 percent compared with a year earlier. The economy has been shrinking since the third quarter of 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers rocked the global financial system, drying up credit to Greek businesses and consumers, exposing years of errors in government record keeping and driving the country to the brink of collapse. The troika of international bodies that have been shoring up Greece's finances and guiding its recovery the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission has approved more than 240 billion euros ( 319 billion) in bailout loans since 2010, a sum larger than the country's annual economic output. In July, Greece received a loan installment of 5.7 billion euros after Parliament agreed to further increases in taxes and cuts in the public payroll. Ben May, an economist in London with Capital Economics, said the latest number was "encouraging, as it looks like the quarterly pace of decline is slowing." An analysis of the second quarter figure suggested that G.D.P. might have ticked up by about one tenth of a percent from the first quarter, he said. "The troika's forecast for a 4.2 percent annual decline in 2013 looks achievable," Mr. May said. But it remains "plausible," he said, that the Greek economy will continue shrinking into 2015. He forecast a 2 percent decline in G.D.P. for next year, followed by a 0.5 percent contraction in 2015. Many economists argue that the austerity approach favored by the troika is itself part of the problem, pushing Greek unemployment to depression levels. The jobless rate reached a new peak of 27.6 percent in May, according to the statistical agency, with youth unemployment around 65 percent. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Austerity has in practice largely meant laying off civil servants and cutting social spending, because raising taxes generates little revenue in a collapsing economy. The policy is paying off in one respect: Christos Staikouras, the deputy finance minister, told reporters on Monday that the government had achieved a primary budget surplus of 2.6 billion euros, or 1.4 percent of G.D.P., in the first seven months of the year, significantly better than the expected primary deficit of 3.1 billion euros. A primary deficit or surplus excludes debt service and some other costs. The International Monetary Fund said last month that Greece had made "important progress in rectifying precrisis imbalances" and that the economy was "rebalancing." But the fund noted that the gains had come as a result of recession, which has suppressed imports, and not through "productivity enhancing structural reform." Mr. May said that it was almost certain that some kind of government debt restructuring would be needed to achieve what the troika calls a sustainability target: a debt to G.D.P. ratio of 120 percent by 2020. The Bundesbank, the German central bank, expects Greece to receive yet another bailout after German national elections on Sept. 22, according to a report Sunday in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which cited a central bank document. According to the document, which Spiegel said had been prepared by the Bundesbank for the I.M.F. and the German Finance Ministry, the Bundesbank says that it was only "political pressures" that enabled Greece to obtain last month's installment of financing, and that the bailout program remains "exceptionally" risky. The German Finance Ministry dismissed the Spiegel report, saying it had no knowledge of the document Spiegel cited, Reuters said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Hollywood Has Long Turned to Novelists for Help. But Poets? In her new film "The Kindergarten Teacher," Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a frustrated aspiring poet who discovers that a boy in her kindergarten class may be a budding literary genius, and begins co opting his verses as her own. When Gyllenhaal was preparing for the role, she thought a lot about what sort of poetry her character, a Staten Island teacher named Lisa Spinelli, would write. She figured Lisa's poetry would be somewhat labored and cliched maybe verses about flowers and butterflies. So she and the film's writer and director, Sara Colangelo, decided to ask a real poet to write some lines for the movie. The first verses they solicited, from the poet Dominique Townsend, an old friend of Gyllenhaal's, weren't quite plausible. They were too layered and complex too good. Townsend tried to revise the verses to make them worse an odd request that one could read as simultaneously flattering and mildly offensive. "As you might imagine, it was a strange process," said Townsend, who teaches at Bard College. "It was like, 'We love your work, and also can you write for this woman who is dying inside and feeling strangled and is a mediocre writer?' That was a strange prompt to receive, to write a bad haiku about flowers." Strange as it seemed, it was an intriguing challenge for a poet, and Townsend delivered. Early on in the movie, Lisa sheepishly shows her flower haiku to her husband after it gets panned by her poetry workshop. He picks up her notebook and reads aloud, "A dream garden blooms, rose, iris, phlox, but here? A white crocus pierces concrete," and assures her that he thinks it's good. "They didn't like it," Lisa tells him. "Someone said it was derivative." Townsend said that having her verses fall flat on screen didn't feel like a personal affront, since she was writing for a character, not as herself. "I don't take it personally, because it's not my voice," she said. "I typed those words and pressed send, but I wrote them with the sense of, this is a woman who's being strangled." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Still, the reaction to Lisa's poetry from audiences and critics made her "somewhat uncomfortable," she said. (A review in The Times referred to Lisa's writing as "mediocre.") "Part of the painfulness of the movie for me is reflected in those reviews," Townsend said. "The Kindergarten Teacher," which is adapted from an Israeli film, posed other unusual challenges. For one, Colangelo and Gyllenhaal wanted to dramatize the elusive and subjective feeling of poetic inspiration, not an easy thing to pull off cinematically. And in addition to Lisa's poems, they needed verses for the boy, Jimmy poems that had to be exceptional and memorable, but also plausibly written by a 5 year old. "The movie wouldn't really work unless what was coming out of him was really compelling," Gyllenhaal said. They zeroed in on work by two young contemporary poets, Ocean Vuong and Kaveh Akbar. After reading the script, Vuong sent around 10 short poems, some cannibalized from works he'd already written. He stripped down his verses to make them feel raw and spare, building them around a central image. "The trick was to have this prodigy have sufficient poetic depth, but also to be faithful to the mind of a 5 year old," he said. "I had to take out a lot of subordinate clauses out and write more independent statements, to build through parataxis. I had to shift the complexity from the syntax to images." One of Vuong's poems which he adapted from a longer poem about a bull is recited by Lisa in her poetry workshop, where she presents it as her writing. "The bull stood alone In the backyard. So dark. I opened the door and stepped out, Wind in the branches. He watched me, blue eyes. He kept breathing to stay alive. I didn't want him. I was just a boy. Say yes, Say yes, anyway." In another scene, Jimmy, who is played by Parker Sevak, paces around the classroom and begins reciting verses about a lion. Lisa rushes to him, only catching the final lines of the poem, which was written by Akbar: Townsend said she tried to incorporate that tension into later drafts of Lisa's poems, as she conjured the mind set of a woman whose literary aspirations are being stifled. "She does have a poetic sensibility and an alertness to the world and an attentiveness that I associate with poetry, so I was interested in what prevents her from finding her voice, and what prevents people from hearing it," Townsend said. "That was all in my mind, along with the sense that she's not very good."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A developer plans to create retail stores on this 18,000 square foot development site, formerly a Gulf gas station, next to a shopping center, on Long Island. 49 West 23rd Street (between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas) A developer of video games has signed a five year lease for the entire second floor with 5,594 square feet in this 12 story 1916 building. This two story 11,896 square foot building in Harlem, now occupied by a Rent A Center, is on a 30,000 square foot development site. The lease for the store, which offers rent to own items like furniture and appliances, runs until 2015.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Diabetes may be bad for the brain, especially if you are overweight. Researchers studied 50 overweight and 50 normal weight people in the early stages of Type 2 diabetes. All had been given a diagnosis within the previous five years. They compared both groups with 50 healthy control subjects. The scientists performed M.R.I. examinations of their brains and psychological tests of memory, reaction time and planning. Those with diabetes scored worse than the healthy controls on tests of memory and reaction times. M.R.I. scans revealed significant differences in brain areas related to memory, planning and the visual processing of information. Compared with the controls, those with Type 2 diabetes had more severe thinning of the cortex and more white matter abnormalities. Overweight people with diabetes had more brain deterioration than diabetic people of normal weight. Are these changes reversible? Probably not, according to a co author, Dr. Donald C. Simonson of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Every now and then, a movie succeeds as much because of its style the clothes, the cars, the hair as its story. When a guy's coolness leaps out from the screen, there is usually a sexy actor whose sense of style matches how dangerous his character is: Steve McQueen in his black turtleneck, holsters on display, in "Bullitt"; Ryan Gosling in a retro bomber jacket with a scorpion on the back in "Drive." Add to the list Ralph Fiennes for his role in the Italian thriller "A Bigger Splash." Mr. Fiennes plays Harry Hawkes, a shady music producer who goes on vacation with his rock star former girlfriend (Tilda Swinton) and her new boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts), packing his bag full of high priced designer clothes and bringing along with him heaps of trouble. To help set the mood of the film which owes a possible debt to "La Piscine," the 1969 Jacques Deray study of murder and mayhem starring Alain Delon and Jane Birkin there were 1940s inspired linen shirts made for Mr. Fiennes at Charvet, the famed Paris clothing shop; billowing trousers from M. Bardelli, the classic Milanese tailor; and one distinctive white, green and gray short sleeve shirt from Christophe Lemaire that the actor wears while dancing around the house to the Rolling Stones hit "Emotional Rescue."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The singer and actressJuliette Greco in 1965. Jean Paul Sartre once said, "Greco has a million poems in her voice." Juliette Greco, the singing muse of bohemian postwar Paris who became the grande dame of chanson francaise and an internationally known actress, died on Wednesday at her home near Saint Tropez. She was 93. Her family announced the death in a statement sent to the news agency Agence France Presse. For almost seven decades, Ms. Greco was a loyal practitioner of the musical tradition known as chanson francaise, a specific storytelling genre of popular music. The songs are "like little plays," she told The New York Times in 1999, adding: "They're typically French. We're a people who express our love in songs, our anger in songs, even our revolution in songs." She was the darling of critics, as well as of the intellectuals whose world she inhabited. Ms. Greco's ultimate rave review came from a friend, the Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who said simply, "Greco has a million poems in her voice." Her signature hits included "Sous le Ciel de Paris" ("Under Paris Skies"), "Les Feuilles Mortes" (which English speakers know as "Autumn Leaves"), "Deshabillez Moi" ("Undress Me"), "Jolie Mome" ("Pretty Kid") and "Je Suis Comme Je Suis" ("I Am What I Am"). Juliette Greco was born on Feb. 7, 1927, in Montpellier, France, near the Mediterranean coast. Her parents, Gerard Greco, a Corsican born police officer, and Juliette (Lafeychine) Greco, who was from Bordeaux, soon separated, and Juliette was brought up partly by her grandmother. She was 12 when World War II began in Europe and 13 when Hitler's troops marched down the Champs Elysees. Both her mother and her sister worked in the Resistance and were arrested and shipped off to Nazi camps (they survived); because of their association, Juliette spent a short time in a French prison. After the war, still in her teens, she lived alone in Paris. During this time her habit of wearing men's clothes, including rolled up pants, was necessitated by poverty and made possible by the hand me downs of male friends who lived in the same pension. The style caught on. Though she had yet to garner attention as an actress, her distinctive look she dressed all in black, wore her dark hair straight and long, had thick bangs and liberally applied black eyeliner got the attention of leading French photographers, who took and published pictures of her. "I was becoming famous without really having done anything," Ms. Greco told The Guardian in 2006, "which is a very uncomfortable position." As a fixture in the neighborhood, she became close friends with some of the most admired philosophers and authors of their time: Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian and Albert Camus. And, she said, she learned just by listening to them. "I was all curiosity, but I felt I didn't have anything to give in return," she said. "I was at that age where all one does is take." That was the beginning. The first song she recorded, "Je Suis Comme Je Suis," was released in 1951. Her first album, "Juliette Greco Chante Ses Derniers Succes," appeared the next year. But her star defining triumph was her 1954 concert at Olympia Hall in Paris, after a tour of the United States and South America. During the performance she introduced "Je Hais les Dimanches" ("I Hate Sundays"), a new number by a young songwriter, Charles Aznavour. Ms. Greco had made her film debut even before her singing career began as a nun in "Les Freres Bouquinquant," a 1948 drama. She went on to appear in almost 30 films, mostly in the 1950s and '60s. They included Jean Cocteau's "Orphee" (1950), as Aglaonice, an astronomer witch; "The Sun Also Rises" (1957), an American adaptation of Hemingway's novel, with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner; "The Roots of Heaven" (1958), a drama set in Africa, in which she starred opposite Errol Flynn; and "Crack in the Mirror" (1960), with Orson Welles. Ms. Greco sang the title song, on camera, in "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958). Her final acting role was in "Jedermanns Fest" (2002), a multinational drama with Klaus Maria Brandauer, and she appeared as herself in "Dans les Pas de Marie Curie" (2011), a French Polish documentary. She also made a lasting impression in a 1965 French mini series, "Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre." When it was made into a feature film in 2001, she was cast in a small role as a tribute to her influence. 1n 1953, Ms. Greco married the actor Philippe Lemaire; they divorced in 1956. Their daughter, Laurence Marie Lemaire, died in 2016. She was married to the French actor Michel Piccoli from 1966 until their divorce in 1977. She was with the pianist and composer Gerard Jouannest, her third husband, from 1988 until his death in 2018. Information on survivors was not immediately available. Her longest and best known romantic relationship may have been with Miles Davis, the celebrated jazz trumpeter, whom she met when he was appearing in Paris in 1949. Sartre reportedly once asked him why he and Ms. Greco were not married. According to Ms. Greco, Mr. Davis replied, "I love her too much to make her unhappy." In 2014, Ms. Greco told The Guardian, "We saw each other regularly until his death" in 1991.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, said at the Paris auto show last week that the automaker was considering changing the layout of the Jeep Wrangler from its traditional body on frame construction a configuration Jeeps have had since the compact four wheel drive truck was introduced during World War II to a unibody frame potentially made from aluminum. Although he pledged this year that F.C.A. would never build a Wrangler outside the plant in Toledo, Ohio, where they are now built, Mr. Marchionne said that if the new Wrangler ended up as an aluminum unibody, it might have to be produced in Belvidere, Ill., or Sterling Heights, Mich. (Automotive News, subscription required) Mr. Marchionne also said at the Paris auto show that a plug in hybrid version of the Chrysler Town Country minivan would be introduced in 2015, a year earlier than originally planned. Chrysler is also planning other hybrids, including a full size crossover. (Automotive News, subscription required) Karl Thomas Neumann, chief executive of Opel, General Motors' European brand, said last week that the next generation Opel Insignia which will be sold in the United States as the Buick Regal would be based on the sleek Opel Monza concept unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show last year. G.M. hasn't said when the new Insignia will hit the market, but according to a report from Automotive News, it is expected to precede the Regal's scheduled 2017 arrival in the United States. (GM Authority)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Clive James, a transplanted Australian whose wit and aphoristic style made him a fixture in Britain as a literary critic of unusually wide range, a longtime television writer for The Observer and a reliable comic presence on numerous television shows, notably "Clive James on Television," died on Sunday in Cambridge, England. He was 80 . His literary agents confirmed the death in a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday. In 2010, Mr. James learned he had leukemia, kidney failure and emphysema. Mr. James shared with his Australian compatriot Robert Hughes a pithy, muscular prose style and a zest for landing the knockout punch, the key to his success as The Observer's television critic from 1972 to 1982. He once dismissed a tedious public affairs program as "the mental equivalent of navel fluff." He described William Shatner's acting technique in "Star Trek" as "picked up from someone who once worked with somebody who knew Lee Strasberg's sister." Unlike his British counterparts, who tended to sneer at popular programming, Mr. James regarded the entirety of television as precious raw material waiting to be mined. He found the peculiar language of sports commentators and Barbara Woodhouse's dog training show just as fascinating as a plush historical drama from the BBC. The Observer column, Mr. James wrote in "The Blaze of Obscurity" (2009), the fifth installment of his memoirs, was "the real backbone of my career as a writer." "The Blaze of Obscurity," published in 2009, was Mr. James's fifth installment of his memoirs. That career was varied. He published several volumes of poetry, including a series of mock epics and, as a lyricist, collaborated with the singer songwriter Pete Atkin on six albums. He wrote a handful of novels, including "Brilliant Creatures" and "The Remake," sendups of the London literary world. Most of his non television writing, however, was devoted to literary criticism, some of which appeared in American publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books. His catholic tastes, and his enthusiasm for learning new languages, led him to take on figures as various as Edmund Wilson, Raymond Chandler and Primo Levi. His range was on full display in "Cultural Amnesia" (2007), in which he profiled more than a hundred representative 20th century figures, most of them literary, arranged alphabetically from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig. Among other things, the book was a conscious attempt by Mr. James to re stake his claim as a serious literary critic, which, in his own mind at least, had been damaged by his reputation as a television personality. His gift for the one liner and his lightning fast footwork turned him into a one man franchise. "Clive James on Television," a quirky review of strange foreign television shows and advertisements, made him a household name and led to several sequels, as well as the travel series "Clive James' Postcard" and a regular spot as a host of the weekly news review "The Late Show." American viewers saw him in 1993 when PBS picked up his eight part series "Fame in the 20th Century." Success came at a price. In "The Blaze of Obscurity," he wrote: "The effect on my literary reputation was immediate. It was thoroughly compromised, and even now, after a quarter of a century, it has only just begun to recover." Vivian Leopold James was born on Oct. 7, 1939, in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His father was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the beginning of World War II and died when the American transport plane carrying him back to Australia crashed into Manila Bay. After graduating from the University of Sydney and working briefly as an assistant editor on The Sydney Morning Herald, Mr. James set sail for London on New Year's Eve in 1961. The first volume of his autobiography, "Unreliable Memoirs," which was published in 1980 and rose to the top of the best seller list in Britain, described his childhood in Australia. Its sequel, "Falling Towards England," covered, in often painful detail, his mostly unsuccessful attempts to gain traction in London, where he shared a flat with the future filmmaker Bruce Beresford. Pembroke College, Cambridge, came to the rescue, offering him a place. Mr. James did manage to earn a degree and even embarked on a doctoral dissertation (never completed) on Shelley, but the real value of his second crack at higher education was the opportunity to do anything and everything. Cambridge was, he wrote in "May Week Was in June," his third volume of memoirs, "the one place where I could be everything I wanted to be all at once." Eric Idle, the future Monty Python star, welcomed him into Footlights, the student theatrical troupe; he became its president. He pressed his poems on every journal available and parlayed his enthusiasm for Hollywood potboilers and arcane Japanese directors into a position as the film critic for The Cambridge Review. Looking back in "May Week Was in June," he wrote: "I was tireless. I was tiresome. I was omniscient. I was a pain in the arse." A scrambling career in literary journalism followed, recounted in "North Face of Soho." He was perhaps the least recognized name in the constellation of young stars that included Martin Amis, James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens, although it was he, he wrote in "North Face of Soho," who created the weekly lunch that became the London equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table. His essays were first collected in "The Metropolitan Critic" (1974). Later collections included "At the Pillars of Hercules" (1977) and "From the Land of Shadows" (1982). His television criticism, issued in book form in "Visions Before Midnight" (1977), "The Crystal Bucket" (1981) and "Glued to the Box" (1983), was gathered in a single volume, "On Television," in 1991.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Airbnb, the peer to peer accommodations site where travelers book everything from single rooms to entire villas, has spent the last couple of years branching out. It has teamed up with airlines like Delta and Virgin America to give miles to travelers who book stays. And it has teamed up with travel management companies including American Express Global Business Travel on its Airbnb for Business program, which includes homes with business essentials such as Wi Fi and laptop friendly work spaces. Now, the company has unveiled its most ambitious endeavor yet Trips designed to help travelers not only book accommodations, but also book activities like cooking and painting lessons; take audio walking tours; and attend meetups. Soon users will be able to make restaurant reservations through the Airbnb app. And the company says car rentals, grocery deliveries and even flights are in the works, further propelling Airbnb toward being a full fledged travel company. "This is literally just the beginning," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, said in November at the Airbnb Open in Los Angeles, where the company's leaders discussed what's in the pipeline. So far, Trips has experiences available in a dozen cities worldwide: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Havana, London, Paris, Florence, Nairobi, Cape Town, Tokyo and Seoul. Mr. Chesky said that it would expand to more than 50 cities next year. "Trips is an immense program of both vertical and horizontal expansion of Airbnb's business model," said Bjorn Hanson, a clinical professor with the New York University School of Professional Studies at the Jonathan M. Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. Indeed, the revenue from the new Trips businesses could exceed Airbnb's core business revenue in just a few years, he said in an email. It ultimately could put Airbnb in the same class as major trip booking sites like Expedia. Yet Airbnb's expansion over the last eight years has not been without controversy. Travelers have experienced discrimination by Airbnb hosts, leading the company to create a new nondiscrimination policy. In New York, politicians and tenants' rights groups said that Airbnb worsened affordable housing problems. In San Francisco, Airbnb was fined for processing illegal listings. Even as Airbnb is working to fix these and other issues, it is pushing forward. Trips includes three categories (for now), which appear at the top of the Airbnb app: Experiences (activities such as following a member of the Tuscan Truffle Hunters Association through a forest in Italy, or motorcycling from Nairobi to Lake Naivasha with a biker); Places (online local guides for, say, finding authentic tacos and scenic trails; audio walking tours; and meetups); and Homes (Airbnb offers about three million rentals). In the future, it plans to add additional categories such as flights, though exactly what that might include remains to be seen. What awaits you in Trips? Let's take a look. EXPERIENCES While researching flights and hotels online has become second nature, few companies have managed to offer a worldwide variety of local experiences and make them easy and attractive to browse. Few sites offer consistency when it comes to particulars like photos, clutter free pages and reviews. And not all sites offer the chance to communicate with a guide in advance. Airbnb's "Experiences," which you can browse in thumbnails that call to mind old movie posters, are clear and fleshed out and allow travelers to post reviews and contact hosts in advance. Experiences vary in length and cost, such as "Biking Hidden Tokyo," a three day cycling tour (with stops for meals) for 301, or "Bubbly With a View," a four hour wine estate tour and tasting of Methode Cap Classique, a South African style of wine, in the Franschhoek wine valley for 73. Half the experiences offered on Airbnb are below 200, Mr. Chesky said. Airbnb divides experiences into multiday "immersions" or single experiences (just a few hours). You can filter by interest, such as "food drink," "history," "nature," "wellness," "fashion," "sports," "arts" and "social impact," which are experiences offered for the benefit of nonprofit organizations like the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Facing Change: Documenting Detroit. Beginning last month, would be hosts in the dozen cities mentioned above, as well as in nearly 40 more including Berlin, Cartagena, Chicago, Dubai, New Delhi, Reykjavik, Singapore, Tel Aviv and Toronto could begin asking to list their experiences with Airbnb. An experience purchased through the site can be canceled within 24 hours of booking for a full refund. If you cancel 30 days or more before the experience, you are also eligible for a full refund. If, however, you cancel less than 30 days before the start date, you won't receive a refund, unless the spot is booked and the experience completed by another guest. More details are at Airbnb.com/experiences/cancellation policy. Airbnb has also introduced a new identity authentication process for those offering and booking experiences. They have to scan an official government ID (like a passport) and then take a selfie in real time (which must match the ID photo). While meant to help protect users, these and other security measures raise privacy concerns. For instance, the site stores your government ID photo, and information you provide to Airbnb is shared with third party partners. To help make an informed decision about whether you want to participate, check out the site's "help" section for details. PLACES The "Places" category focuses on sightseeing. This includes free themed guides written by local influencers about their own cities. A pianist in Havana, for instance, writes about where to hear live music like salsa and jazz. A booking agent in California writes about the Los Angeles rock scene. So far, there are 100 such guides in six cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Havana, Nairobi, Detroit and Seoul. In addition to guides, Places also offers audio walking tours. Airbnb partnered with Detour, which creates GPS tours of cities. Right now the tours are available only in certain areas of downtown Los Angeles and can be downloaded free. In the spring of 2017, additional city tours will include San Francisco, Paris, London, Tokyo and Seoul. Under "Places," users may also find Meetups free get togethers for Airbnb users hosted by local businesses. A feature called Nearby Now offers tips and advice for places around you, like restaurants. For those on the go, a partnership with a restaurant booking platform called Resy will soon allow travelers to book tables at such restaurants through the Airbnb app. Resy said the feature will be available in early 2017. HOMES The "Homes" tab includes Airbnb's rentals. In the future, users will be able to use the "Homes" tab to have groceries delivered to their Airbnb. They will also be able to book rental cars.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, said on Tuesday that the United States economy remained on track despite a rough start to the year because the drag from weak growth in other countries was being offset by lower borrowing costs. Ms. Yellen told the Economic Club of New York that the economy "had proven remarkably resilient," and that the Fed expected better days ahead. She said the Fed still intended to pursue a careful, patient course toward higher interest rates as the economy improved. The cautious tone of her remarks, however, suggested no rate increase was likely at the Fed's next meeting, in April, shifting the eyes of Fed watchers to its subsequent meeting in June. "I consider it appropriate for the committee to proceed cautiously in adjusting policy," Ms. Yellen said. Stocks jumped and bond yields fell in the moments after the publication of Ms. Yellen's remarks, part of a now familiar pattern in which markets celebrate signs of economic softness and Fed restraint because that means interest rates will stay lower for longer. "The Fed chair is clearly in no hurry to undertake the next rate hike, in spite of the generally firmer tone of U.S. domestic data in recent weeks," Krishna Guha, head of the global policy and central bank strategy team at Evercore ISI, wrote in a note to clients. He said the remarks underscored that Ms. Yellen would rather move too slowly to raise interest rates and rein in the economy than too quickly. The Fed, which raised its benchmark rate in December for the first time since the financial crisis, continues to debate the timing of a second increase. That was half as much as the Fed had predicted at the beginning of the year. Ms. Yellen attributed the deceleration on Tuesday to a judgment by Fed officials that somewhat lower rates were necessary to maintain steady growth. "The committee in March did rethink to some extent the policy path that is appropriate to achieve an essentially unchanged outlook," Ms. Yellen said. She described a dynamic in which slower growth in other nations, which tends to drag on domestic growth, had been offset by a loosening of financial conditions. That is the way monetary policy is supposed to work markets anticipated the Fed's reaction to a weaker economic outlook, providing a jolt of stimulus before the Fed even had a chance to speak. The Fed then confirmed the market's expectations by announcing after its March policy meeting that it expected to raise its benchmark interest rate more slowly. Ms. Yellen said the reaction showed that markets have internalized the Fed's mantra that its management of interest rates is "data dependent," meaning the Fed's predictions about the likely path of interest rates are contingent on the economy's actual performance. "This mechanism serves as an important 'automatic stabilizer' for the economy," she said. While the Fed's assessment of the economy's anticipated performance remains unchanged, Ms. Yellen said officials now saw more risks to that outlook. The Fed's preferred measure of inflation rose by 1.7 percent through the 12 months that ended in January, a stronger pace than it managed the previous year. But Ms. Yellen said it was "too early to tell if this recent faster pace will prove durable." Indeed, Fed officials predicted in March that inflation would subside somewhat in the coming months, attributing the higher readings in the latest inflation survey to unusual jumps in the price of some kinds of goods, most notably clothing. The Fed regards the stability of inflation expectations as a mainstay of effective monetary policy. It wants inflation to be 2 percent a year and it wants people to believe inflation will be 2 percent a year, because expectations help to determine actual inflation. Market based measures of inflation expectations, however, are running well below 2 percent, while some survey based measures also have drifted lower. Ms. Yellen acknowledged these trends, a change from last year when Fed officials were largely dismissive. But she said the significance was "far from conclusive." Fed officials continue to regard the decline in market based measures as a result of pressures unrelated to expectations about inflation. And Ms. Yellen said that survey based measures historically had fallen hand in hand with oil prices.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
We are the richest country in the history of the world, but at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that reality means little to half of our people who live paycheck to paycheck, the 40 million living in poverty, the 87 million who are uninsured or underinsured, and the half million who are homeless. In the midst of the twin crises that we face the coronavirus pandemic and the meltdown of our economy it's imperative that we re examine some of the foundations of American society, understand why they are failing us, and fight for a fairer and more just nation. The absurdity and cruelty of our employer based, private health insurance system should now be apparent to all. As tens of millions of Americans are losing their jobs and incomes as a result of the pandemic, many of them are also losing their health insurance. That is what happens when health care is seen as an employee benefit, not a guaranteed right. As we move forward beyond the pandemic, we need to pass legislation that finally guarantees health care to every man, woman and child available to people employed or unemployed, at every age. The pandemic has also made clear the irrationality of the current system. Unbelievably, in the midst of the worst health care crisis in modern history, thousands of medical workers are being laid off and many hospitals and clinics are on the verge of going bankrupt and shutting down. In truth, we don't have a health care "system." We have a byzantine network of medical institutions dominated by the profit making interests of insurance and drug companies. The goal of a new, long overdue health care system, Medicare for All, must be to provide health care to all, in every region of the country not billions in profits for Wall Street and the health care industry. It is true that the Covid 19 virus strikes anyone, anywhere, regardless of income or social status. Prince Charles of Britain has been diagnosed with Covid 19 and the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has just been released from a hospital. Rich people get the virus and rich people die. But it is also true that poor and working class people are suffering higher rates of sickness and are dying at much higher rates than wealthy people. This is especially true of the African American community. This disparity in outcomes from exposure to the virus is a direct reflection not only of a broken and unjust health care system but also an economy that punishes, in terrible ways, the poor and working class of this country. In addition to millions of lower income families not having any health insurance, Covid 19 virus is vicious and incredibly opportunistic in attacking people with pre existing conditions and weakened immune systems. For a wide variety of socio economic reasons, it is the poor and working class in this country who are exactly in that position as they suffer higher rates of diabetes, drug addiction, obesity, stress, high blood pressure, asthma and heart disease and are most vulnerable to the virus. Poor and working class people have lower life expectancies than rich people in general, and that tragic unfairness remains even truer with regard to this pandemic. Further, while doctors, governors and mayors tell us that we should isolate ourselves and stay at home, and rich people head off to their second homes in less populated areas, working class people don't have those options. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, and you lack paid medical and family leave, staying home is not an option. If you're going to feed your family and pay the rent, you have to go to work. And, for the working class, that means leaving your home and doing jobs that interact with other people, some of whom are spreading the virus. Should we really continue along the path of greed and unfettered capitalism, in which three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the nation, and tens of millions live in economic desperation struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing and education and put a few dollars aside for retirement? Or should we go forward in a very new direction? In the course of my presidential campaign, I sought to follow in the footsteps of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s and 40s, understood that in a truly free society, economic rights must be considered human rights. That was true 80 years ago and it remains true today. Now I will do everything in my power to bring this country together to help Joe Biden defeat the most dangerous president in modern American history. And I will continue to make the vigorous case that we must address the inequalities that contributed to the rise of Donald Trump, whose cruelty and incompetence have cost American lives during this pandemic. Simply opposing Mr. Trump will not be enough we will need to articulate a new direction for America. The new America that we fight for must end starvation wages in our country and guarantee a decent paying job to those who are able to work. We cannot be competitive in the global economy or be a strong democracy unless we guarantee quality education from child care through graduate school to all Americans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
On a sunny Saturday last summer, in a grassy park no bigger than a city block, the flags of the Confederate South and Nazi Germany flapped side by side, hoisted by the same young white men who, the night before, had carried torches instead. Some wielded shields, some sticks, some guns. And their wardrobes bore enough resemblance to paramilitary uniforms that, afterward, people scrolling through pictures of the ensuing violence online had difficulty discerning alt right marchers from the onlooking police. Kathleen Belew's gripping study of white power, "Bring the War Home," was written before the city of Charlottesville became a hashtag, and is largely concerned with activities from the 1970s and '80s. But it is impossible to read the book without recalling more recent events. Her activists for indeed, these were activists building a grass roots movement consolidated power in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is that starting point that hints at the book's explosive thesis: that the white power movement that reached a culmination with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing emerged as a radical reaction to the war. Sit with that for a moment, because it is a breathtaking argument, one that treats foreign policy as the impetus for a movement that most people view through the lens of domestic racism. But Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, perceives something more in the white power movement than metastasized racism. She sees the malignant consequence of the war, which, she argues, "comes home in ways bloody and unexpected."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Can a fish be depressed? This question has been floating around my head ever since I spent a night in a hotel across from an excruciatingly sad looking Siamese fighting fish. His name was Bruce Lee, according to a sign beneath his little bowl. There we were trying to enjoy a complimentary bloody mary on the last day of our honeymoon and there was Bruce Lee, totally still, his lower fin grazing the clear faux rocks on the bottom of his home. When he did finally move, just slightly, I got the sense that he would prefer to be dead. The pleasant woman at the front desk assured me that he was well taken care of. Was I simply anthropomorphizing Bruce Lee, incorrectly assuming his lethargy was a sign of mental distress? When I sought answers from scientists, I assumed that they would find the question preposterous. But they did not. Not at all. It turns out that not only can our gilled friends become depressed, but some scientists consider fish to be a promising animal model for developing anti depressants. New research, I would learn, has been radically shifting the way that scientists think about fish cognition, building a case that pet and owner are not nearly as different as many assume. "The neurochemistry is so similar that it's scary," said Julian Pittman, a professor at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences at Troy University in Alabama, where he is working to develop new medications to treat depression, with the help of tiny zebrafish. We tend to think of them as simple organisms, "but there is a lot we don't give fish credit for." Dr. Pittman likes working with fish, in part, because they are so obvious about their depression. He can reliably test the effectiveness of antidepressants with something called the "novel tank test." A zebrafish gets dropped in a new tank. If after five minutes it is hanging out in the lower half, it's depressed. If it's swimming up top its usual inclination when exploring a new environment then it's not. All of this, of course, may sound fishy to any of the one in six people who has experienced clinical depression. How could a striped minnow relate to what you've been through? Is "depression" the right word? While scientists have used animals, like mice, to study emotional problems for decades, the relevance of those models to human experience is sketchy at best. There's the obvious issue that "We cannot ask animals how they feel," says Dr. Diego A. Pizzagalli, the director of the Center For Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research at Harvard Medical School. Though researchers may find parallels in serotonin and dopamine fluctuations, neither fish nor rat can "capture the entire spectrum of depression as we know it," says Dr. Pizzagalli. There is a heated debate in the fish research community about whether anxious or depressed is a more appropriate term. But what has convinced Dr. Pittman, and others, over the past ten years is watching the way the zebrafish lose interest in just about everything: food, toys, exploration just like clinically depressed people. "You can tell," said Culum Brown, a behavioral biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney who has published more than 100 papers on fish cognition. "Depressed people are withdrawn. The same is true of fish." The trigger for most domestic fish depression is likely lack of stimulation, said Victoria Braithwaite, a professor of fisheries and biology at Penn State University, who studies fish intelligence and fish preferences. Study after study shows how fish are defying aquatic stereotypes: some fish use tools, others can recognize individual faces. "One of the things we're finding that fish are naturally curious and seek novel things out," said Dr. Braithwaite. In other words, your goldfish is probably bored. To help ward off depression, she urges introducing new objects to the tank or switching up the location of items. Dr. Brown agrees, pointing to an experiment he conducted, that showed that if you leave a fish in an enriched, physically complex environment meaning lot of plants to nibble on and cages to swim through it decreases stress and increases brain growth. The problem with small tanks is not just the lack of space for exploration, said Dr. Brown, but also the water quality tends to be unstable and there may not be sufficient oxygen. "A goldfish bowl for example is the worst possible situation," he said. If you own fish, you might want to consider where Dr. Brown keeps his: an extensively landscaped six foot tank. He recommends a "two foot tank with lots of plants and stuff" for your average betta. The last time a guest posted Bruce Lee to Instagram he was looking good and lively. Perhaps that new green leaf in his bowl had provided the enrichment he craved. But then, my heart sank. The internet produced photos of other Bruce Lees from the same hotel in several colors red, blue and purplish. I wondered whether the monotony would eventually drive this replacement Bruce, to hover, immobile, near his transparent rocks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In April, Jay Wright, the men's basketball coach at Villanova, worried the coronavirus pandemic would hurt his ability to recruit players from next year's high school class. Because coaches could not watch players in person or have them visit their campuses that month, Wright was not sure how he and his staff would be able to properly evaluate the athletes. "If it affects us and hurts us a little bit, so what?" Wright said in April. "Suck it up. There's a lot more important things going on in our world right now." Three months later, his fears seem almost quaint. After two recent verbal commitments, Wright and his staff now have four rising seniors committed and thus the No. 1 recruiting class for 2021, according to the recruiting website 247Sports.com. They include players who could start in the future: point guard Angelo Brizzi of Virginia, shooting guard Jordan Longino of Pennsylvania, small forward Trey Patterson of New Jersey and the big man Nnanna Njoku of Delaware. Under Wright, Villanova has won two of the last four N.C.A.A. championships, and these players are eager to be a part of the growing tradition. "We don't have A.A.U. this year, and normally we would be traveling and focusing on games," Patterson, out of Rutgers Preparatory School, said Tuesday in a phone interview. "But because of the pandemic, me and my family, we've had more time to talk to schools and evaluate programs, so I think that kind of expedited the process." In a normal summer, Patterson and many of the other top high school prospects would be out playing this month at the Nike Peach Jam in North Augusta, S.C., or at other events across the nation trying to impress coaches and attract scholarship offers. Now, with tournaments largely canceled because of the virus and the N.C.A.A. imposing a dead period for recruiting through at least August, Patterson verbally committed on June 18 and plans to sign his letter of intent in the fall. Several other schools are also benefiting. Baylor, Butler, Ohio State, Southern California, Louisville, Michigan and Florida State each had three players committed for 2021 as of Wednesday. "What's really pushed up the whole recruiting process is the pandemic because kids are uncertain as to whether they're ever going to be able to make paid visits to these schools, so they've had these virtual visits," Tom Konchalski, a longtime recruiting expert, said in a phone interview. "Obviously, that doesn't give them as much of a feel for the team, the campus, the coach, the players and the whole culture of the school as if they took a visit when school was actually in session. But it's better than nothing." Jeff Ngandu, a Canadian big man originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, pledged to Seton Hall in May for the 2020 21 season without ever having visited the New Jersey school. Saquan Singleton similarly committed in April for 2020 to New Mexico out of Hutchinson (Kan.) Community College. Both stayed in touch with their future coaching staffs through videoconferencing and phone calls. "Unfortunately, I couldn't get to see the visit but I just felt the love and the connection," Singleton said. Jordan Riley, a rising senior guard at Brentwood High School on Long Island, committed on Friday to Georgetown after only a one hour visit to the university this month with his father, Monty. They were not able to see any students or meet with the basketball team because the campus was closed. They did not even let Georgetown's coach, Patrick Ewing, and his staff know they were on campus. Yet the visit along with Ewing's recruiting message on a daily basis was enough to make the 6 foot 4, 185 pound guard pledge to the Hoyas over Kansas, Florida State, Connecticut and St. John's. He had visited St. John's and UConn, but was unable to visit the other campuses. "I saw the campus, I saw what I liked and I'm just ready to go there," Riley said of Georgetown. Monty Riley said he wanted to speed up the process because he was being overwhelmed with calls that he normally would not have received in a nonpandemic year. "It was just too many phone calls," Monty Riley said. "One day I got 30 phone calls. And I'm working. I made him shorten his list and made him go on from there." That could change if Bates reclassifies into the 2021 class. And if the N.B.A.'s one and done rule is collectively bargained away by 2022, Bates, who has been compared to a young Kevin Durant, could just enter the N.B.A. draft in 2022 and skip college altogether. He could also forgo college, and make money, by entering the G League's pro pathway program for elite prospects. For now, though, his college decision has been made. "The pandemic had no influence over the timing of our Michigan State decision," Elgin Bates, Emoni's father, said in a text message. "We just chose to let it be known what we've been thinking since seventh grade at this time. There was no point in waiting or wasting anyone's time recruiting." Michigan State landed a second pledge in the junior class this week when center Enoch Boakye verbally pledged to Coach Tom Izzo's team. Some college coaches and others in the game believe there could be another downside to these early commitments besides players changing their minds before officially signing. They're bracing for more transfers an interesting prospect considering there are already more than 1,000 players in the N.C.A.A. transfer portal. Patterson feels the early commitment will help Villanova and his future teammates in the long run, giving them more time to get to know one another and understand what they will expect from each other. "It's good that we're almost done with our class now and we have the opportunity to build relationships with each other over this next year before we come in and build a relationship with the coaches even more as well," he said. "So everybody's pretty much on the same page."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
High performance automobile manufactures seldom talk about comfort. It's all about scorching 0 60 times and lofty lateral g forces. But McLaren engineers want you to know that this, the 570 is tuned for civilian use. (SOUND UP) Now, starting at just over 200,000 215 as tested Malibu and Camry are in no danger of loosing market share to this. (ON CAMERA) No, it doesn't float like the Oldsmobile your parents drove. Compared to the 570 S, the GT relaxes the front spring rate by 15 percent in front, 10 percent in the rear. And then there are special tires. With a unique composition, tread pattern and a foam liner of sorts inside, road noise is cut by three decibels. Stuff more acoustical material into the cabin and the GT is better for road trip duty (SOUND UP) at warp speed if you're confident law enforcement isn't around. From rest, 60 miles an hour is just 3.3 seconds away. (ON CAMERA) I have been fortunate enough to drive some exotic high performance machines lately. Of the bunch, this and the Porsche 911 Turbo S get my vote for best everyday driver. It's not squirrelly at all. (SOUND UP) Whoosh! I'd be happy to tackle hundreds of miles from behind the flat bottom steering wheel. Top track speed is 204 miles per hour. I'm taking McLarens word to avoid the county jail. Those special rear tires are driven by a 3.8 liter twin turbo V8 that is tough to see... (SOUND UP) but lovely to hear there' d a whisper of turbo whistle. 562 horsepower and 443lb pound feet of torque are on tap. (ON CAMERA) Compared to the S model the exhaust is muted (SOUND UP)). I'm okay with that. A seven speed dual clutch automatic is smarter than most pilots but there's a manual mode. Driving dynamics can be tailored to your mood. Since the exhaust sound is neutered (SOUND UP) it helps to hush the cabin appropriately.... for a car of this ilk. (ON CAMERA) Okay, this isn't a really quiet car. You won't be thinking to yourself, it's just like an old Lexus. Pushing the 570 nears its lofty limits on public roads is a bad idea for so many reasons but I can tell you the rear drive dynamics are loads of fun when the pavement bends hard. (ON CAMERA) Obviously, few people buy cars this expensive. But vehicles like this are important because they pioneer high technology that then trickles down to everyday cars. Perhaps the 570s carbon fiber tub chassis structure will be common in the future. Shaving weight improves fuel economy, McLaren aren't saddled with a gas guzzler tax. Anti lock brakes showed up first on supercars. As you might imagine (SOUND UP) these are very good. (ON CAMERA) The auto start stop system can be turned off (SOUND UP) Buyers are free to choose from many different leathers and stitching to make the car their own. Built in the United Kingdom, 570 feels more hand crafted and small volume than cars from Mercedes AMG and Porsche. Some of the pieces border on art. Not much storage in here. Everything from the transmission operation to the unique touchscreen interface takes a while to get used to. The power seat operation by braille, is perhaps the worst I've used. Do I need mention there's no back seat? Visibility out the front is quite good, but glad this is standard. It's easy to scrape the chin on low slung cars. A front lift helps. (ON CAMERA) Considering this car's class it has some practicality... for those long road trips a standard sized suitcase and a purse will tuck into here. But wait there's more. A second piece of luggage is on display; make it the better looking bag. The swept silhouette in aluminum is especially impressive in person. McLaren might want to increase their marketing budget. Most eyeballs that lock on to the exotic shape have no idea (It's a Lamborghini, it's awesome) what this car is. The 570GT could be the most outrageous way imaginable to travel anonymously, comfortably, and rapidly.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Late on Nov. 3, election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, heard that they would be allowed to go home for the night. So they packed uncounted ballots into suitcases and prepared to lock up for the evening. When word came that they couldn't leave yet, they dragged the suitcases back out and began counting the ballots again. That singular scene of workers taking out suitcases of votes was then selectively edited and shared by allies of President Trump as a conspiracy theory that election workers had dragged out fraudulent ballots under the cover of night. According to the theory, those suitcases helped swing Georgia's Electoral College votes to President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. But on Monday, Georgia's secretary of state office dedicated part of a morning news conference to debunking that falsehood and many others, in what was called "Disinformation Monday." Gabriel Sterling, the voting implementation manager in Georgia and a Republican, said in the news conference that watching the entire surveillance footage of Election Day showed that workers had first packed the suitcases with valid, uncounted ballots and then later unpacked those same ballots. They had not taken out suitcases full of fake ballots, he said. "The reason they were packed away is because they were under the misbegotten impression that they were getting to go home, which, if you notice when you go back to see the videos on this, they were packing these things up 10, 10:30 at night," Mr. Sterling said. He ran through a list of other pieces of misinformation being spread about the Georgia elections and rebuked the baseless claims. Conspiracy theories have been running rampant in the state, which also will hold runoff elections for its two Senate seats on Jan. 5. About the rumor that a "water main break" had damaged ballots and the tally in Fulton County on Election Day, Mr. Sterling said, "There was no water main break." He cited surveillance footage that showed that there was simply a water leak and that it did not affect any ballots. "You'll see when they walk in, and they see the obvious water leak on the floor," he said. "You will see when they move all the stuff out of the way. You will see the Zamboni, little carpet dryer thingy driving around. I mean, you can see all the things happen, you can see the table get put in place." Mr. Sterling criticized Mr. Trump and his allies for sharing a clip of the water leak incident and making it appear to show something else that was false and deceptive. "What's really frustrating is the president's attorneys had this same videotape," he said. "They saw the exact same things the rest of us see, and they chose to mislead state senators and the public about what was on that video." On false claims that workers had fed the same ballot multiple times into voting machines on Election Day, Mr. Sterling also said that that could not happen because "it would have shown up in the hand count." Georgia election officials undertook a complete hand recount of the results after the election ended because of the closeness of the race. When the recount showed no change in results, the Trump campaign requested a machine based recount. That, too, showed no meaningful change. On false claims of hand count irregularities and how an algorithm was used in the voting machines to swing ballots against Mr. Trump, Mr. Sterling was unequivocal. "There is no algorithm proof," he said, adding it was "irresponsible" for people to spread the baseless rumors. Finally, Mr. Sterling addressed a claim that Georgia Democratic state senators went to Pennsylvania to count ballots as part of some conspiracy to help Mr. Biden in that state, saying it was not true. He made his exasperation clear. "It's ridiculous," he said. "I can't believe I'm standing here and saying these things."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Its premise is simple: Anthony (Jamie Dornan) loves girl on the farm next door Rosemary (Emily Blunt) but can't let her know. He's got some glitch that renders him, he believes, bad boyfriend material at least. As their respective parents (one is played by Christopher Walken, who's funny and has a lovely final scene) shuffle off this mortal coil, the two find themselves facing only each other. Oh, and also a rich American potential interloper, played by Jon Hamm. At the film's end, in a stormy scene with distant echoes of both "The Quiet Man" and "I Know Where I'm Going," Blunt and Dornan face off in passionate screwball mode, and sparks fly. But the viewer's patience may have been too harshly tested en route to this point to make much difference. Wild Mountain Thyme Rated PG 13, for a little accented barnyard language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. 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
SAN FRANCISCO A group of Silicon Valley technologists who were early employees at Facebook and Google, alarmed over the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, are banding together to challenge the companies they helped build. The cohort is creating a union of concerned experts called the Center for Humane Technology. Along with the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media, it also plans an anti tech addiction lobbying effort and an ad campaign at 55,000 public schools in the United States. The campaign, titled The Truth About Tech, will be funded with 7 million from Common Sense and capital raised by the Center for Humane Technology. Common Sense also has 50 million in donated media and airtime from partners including Comcast and DirecTV. It will be aimed at educating students, parents and teachers about the dangers of technology, including the depression that can come from heavy use of social media. "We were on the inside," said Tristan Harris, a former in house ethicist at Google who is heading the new group. "We know what the companies measure. We know how they talk, and we know how the engineering works." The effect of technology, especially on younger minds, has become hotly debated in recent months. In January, two big Wall Street investors asked Apple to study the health effects of its products and to make it easier to limit children's use of iPhones and iPads. Pediatric and mental health experts called on Facebook last week to abandon a messaging service the company had introduced for children as young as 6. Parenting groups have also sounded the alarm about YouTube Kids, a product aimed at children that sometimes features disturbing content. "The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies Google and Facebook and where are we pointing them?" Mr. Harris said. "We're pointing them at people's brains, at children." Silicon Valley executives for years positioned their companies as tight knit families and rarely spoke publicly against one another. That has changed. Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was "ripping apart the social fabric of how society works." The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today's biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook's Like button and is a co founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renee DiResta, a technologist who studies bots. The group expects its numbers to grow. Its first project to reform the industry will be to introduce a Ledger of Harms a website aimed at guiding rank and file engineers who are concerned about what they are being asked to build. The site will include data on the health effects of different technologies and ways to make products that are healthier. Jim Steyer, chief executive and founder of Common Sense, said the Truth About Tech campaign was modeled on antismoking drives and focused on children because of their vulnerability. That may sway tech chief executives to change, he said. Already, Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, told The Guardian last month that he would not let his nephew on social media, while the Facebook investor Sean Parker also recently said of the social network that "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." Mr. Steyer said, "You see a degree of hypocrisy with all these guys in Silicon Valley." The new group also plans to begin lobbying for laws to curtail the power of big tech companies. It will initially focus on two pieces of legislation: a bill being introduced by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, that would commission research on technology's impact on children's health, and a bill in California by State Senator Bob Hertzberg, a Democrat, which would prohibit the use of digital bots without identification. Mr. McNamee said he had joined the Center for Humane Technology because he was horrified by what he had helped enable as an early Facebook investor. "Facebook appeals to your lizard brain primarily fear and anger," he said. "And with smartphones, they've got you for every waking moment." He said the people who made these products could stop them before they did more harm. "This is an opportunity for me to correct a wrong," Mr. McNamee said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
NICK BLANCHARD tells the story of the Hollywood location scouts who came calling on his parents one day, in their clapboard house at 4144 Victory Boulevard in Travis, on the west shore of Staten Island. It was 1960, and the scouts were on the lookout for locations for the Warren Beatty/Natalie Wood film "Splendor in the Grass." They thought Travis, with its flat landscape and farms, would be a perfect stand in for Kansas, according to Mr. Blanchard. His parents, who owned the land, agreed, and the cameras started rolling, capturing green pastures stretching to the horizon. Contrasting the movie scenes with the view today might evoke a we're not in Kansas anymore feeling. Neat rows of houses have sprouted where cabbages once grew. Also, No. 4144, at the corner of Roswell Avenue, is now an empty lot for sale for 1 million. But the biggest difference is that the horizon has sprouted hills, looming brown and somewhat barren through the trees at the end of many of Travis's cul de sacs. The hills were formed by the garbage carted over the years to the Fresh Kills landfill, which at its busiest point in the 1980s accepted trash at a rate of 29,000 tons a day. Being the longtime receptacle for juice cartons, eggshells and coffee grounds from other New Yorkers' kitchens hasn't been appreciated in Travis, as might be expected. But it wasn't until 2001, after 53 years of complaints about nose wrinkling odors, brush fires and round the clock racket from trucks, that Fresh Kills finally shut down. Now, as if in reward for residents' suffering, a plan is afoot to turn those brown hills into a verdant 2,200 acre park. This part of Staten Island has heard the word "revitalization" before, so there is skepticism especially as the park's 30 year construction time line virtually assures that many residents won't be around to behold the final result. Still, any effort to create places to hike, kayak and kick a soccer ball represents an important step. "It was an environmental catastrophe, and soon it will soon be a green space," said Mr. Blanchard, a city police officer, who grew up at No. 4144 and now lives in a three bedroom 1950s ranch facing Schmul Park. "It will be nice to see a renaissance." And see it he probably will the first phase, at least. As part of a renovation that began in 2010 and is supposed to finish in May, parks officials are reconfiguring Schmul with meadows, a garden and a large sloping lawn. It will serve as an entrance to the 233 acre North Park, the first major section of Fresh Kills to be spruced up, according to a department spokeswoman. When North Park is complete, visitors will be able to stroll from Schmul down a trail to a boardwalk spanning a salt marsh, according to renderings. On top of which, a place that once smelled foul might soon help produce clearer skies. The city is seeking to erect seven 400 foot wind turbines in Fresh Kills, one of which would rise from North Park's crest, said Nick Dmytryszyn, an environmental engineer in the borough commissioner's office. He also pointed out that methane extracted from decaying trash there already powers thousands of local homes. Though turbines are sometimes considered noisy, Mr. Dmytryszyn doubts that would be a concern in Travis. "If you have bumper to bumper traffic on Victory Boulevard, or airplanes flying over from Newark," he said, "you're really going to hear the turbines?" The outside world has transformed it around the edges, but most of Travis six square miles and about 2,500 people has preserved its old time scale. Low slung houses on tiny lots still pack its core, which is about as walkable a place as you'll find on car dependent Staten Island. The walkability factor is most apparent on the Fourth of July, when a long running parade this summer will be its 102nd provides the impetus for come one, come all barbecues. "You just sort of wander into people's backyards, and they're like, 'Come in, have a burger, come in, have a hot dog, and hang out,' " said Billy Porter, a resident. Mr. Porter often dines at the West Shore Inn, a popular steakhouse near his attached two bedroom house, which he bought for 250,000 in a short sale in 2008. "It's great to have a meal, a few drinks and walk home," he said. When he wanted to move out of his mother's house in Heartland Village, a Staten Island community about three miles away, he considered Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, which he knew from doing curbside pickups for the Sanitation Department. But Staten Island provided similar space for less, he said. The fact that he hauls garbage for a living doesn't make him especially enamored of Fresh Kills, he pointed out; he is more than happy to see it reinvented. Yet it should be acknowledged that the landfill and other industrial tracts around Travis may have protected it from overdevelopment. As Mr. Porter, 33, observed, it often seems "this is still the same small town it was 20 years ago." The Quonset hut style greenhouses on Victory Boulevard belong to the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, which cultivates 100 species of local plants used for habitat restoration on city property, according to Richard Lynch, a botanist and one of its founders. In 1989, the city bought the land now occupied by the plant center from the Mohlenhoff family, which had farmed it since 1915, to halt the construction of a 450 unit development, Mr. Lynch said. But developers got their way with other open spaces, like McNamara's Picnic Grove. In the 1980s it became Country Villa Estates, a dense collection of town houses. Attached on at least one side, and often part of a homeowner association that charges for snow plowing, these types of town houses may resemble condos but are single family homes. In fact, condos are nonexistent in Travis. Newer town houses can be found on Burke Avenue, where a grouping has matte stone facades and gleaming metal stoop railings; on Alberta Avenue a town house mixes stucco and brick, and has a tiny basement level garage. Older wood frame houses, like those along Cannon Avenue, with their open front porches, are at times overshadowed by the town houses. Census records indicate that veterans make up about 11 percent of the population, versus 6 percent citywide. Similar data reveal that the area is largely white and of Italian, Irish or Polish ancestry, though Latinos, a growing force, represent 13 percent. In mid February there were 23 single family homes for sale, at an average price of 357,000, according to data from the Staten Island Multiple Listing Service prepared by United National Realty, a local brokerage. The most affordable was a two bedroom town house in Country Villa Estates, a short sale, at 190,000. The priciest was a three bedroom on Ridgeway Avenue whose windows overlook the plant center, listed at 479,999. Because many buyers in Travis are middle class, brokers say, prices ran up only so high during the boom, which means they haven't fallen far since. In 2011, 26 single families sold, at an average of 340,000, according to listing service data; in 2007, at the market's peak, 30 single families sold, at an average of 374,000. "Travis was never a hot neighborhood during the boom like Eltingville on the South Shore," said Michael Dukhovny, United National's owner. "They never had a huge influx from Brooklyn." Carteret School, or Public School 26, teaches kindergarten through Grade 5; it has 152 students. Last year 67 percent of tested students met standards in English, 86 percent in math. Citywide percentages were 51 and 62. There is no middle school within Travis's boundaries, but Rocco Laurie, off Richmond Avenue, runs through Grade 8. Similarly, many students leave Travis for Port Richmond High School, which enrolls more than 2,000. SAT averages last year were 423 in reading, 432 in math and 415 in writing, versus 436, 460 and 431 citywide. By the West Shore Expressway, which bisects Travis, is Showplace Entertainment Center. Billing itself online as Staten Island's "only xtreme party place," it is a sprawling complex with a 32 lane bowling alley, a comedy club and an arcade. A plaza in Chelsea, a mostly industrial microneighborhood, has stores like Modell's and Burlington Coat Factory. In the absence of subways, many commuters rely on buses. The S62 runs down Victory, arriving at the St. George ferry terminal in about 40 minutes on weekday mornings. The x11, an express bus, takes about 50 minutes to get to the financial district in lower Manhattan. In 1872, the American Linoleum Manufacturing Company opened at the end of Victory, where a Con Ed plant stands today. Filled with workers, the surrounding blocks became known as Linoleumville, but after the factory closed in the 1920s, that name was considered "too bothersome to write and lacking in dignity," according to a New York Times report. In 1930, residents voted to change the name to Travis, for Col. Jacob Travis, an early settler. His name won by 333 votes (over 3 for Victory Heights and one for Long Neck).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Allan H. Meltzer, an influential conservative economist who strongly opposed government bailouts and was credited with coining the anti bailout slogan, "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin," died on Monday in Pittsburgh. He was 89. Marvin Goodfriend, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a colleague of Dr. Meltzer's there, confirmed the death, at Shadyside Hospital. Dr. Meltzer taught at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon and, at his death, held a professorship there in political economy that was named for him. Throughout his career Dr. Meltzer was a consultant to congressional committees, the Federal Reserve System, the Treasury Department, foreign governments and central banks, advocating a hands off approach to economic affairs, even in the face of fiscal failures. "The reason he was one of the greatest economists in the 20th century is because he played a leading role in persuading the Federal Reserve to end the great inflation with disciplined monetary policy," Dr. Goodfriend said, referring to the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Under President Ronald Reagan, Dr. Meltzer was an acting member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. In its 1989 report to Congress, the council recommended that the government resist the impulse to respond to every "perceived social need" with financial intervention. In 1999 and 2000 he was chairman of a congressional commission informally called the Meltzer Commission that examined how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had responded to the 1997 98 financial crisis, in which a sharp devaluation of Southeast Asian currencies beginning in July 1997 rippled across the global economy, affecting markets in the United States, Europe and Latin America. In its report, the panel criticized both bodies as being bureaucratically bloated, doing more harm than good in the developing world and wasting billions of dollars making loans to middle income countries, which it said could rely on private capital. It recommended that the I.M.F. and the World Bank be radically reduced and overhauled. As recently as a few months ago, Dr. Meltzer opposed aiding governments and industries facing economic hardship. His economic philosophy has found renewed favor in the Trump administration. A protege, Adam Lerrick, who helped Dr. Meltzer with his I.M.F. and World Bank report, has been nominated as deputy under secretary for international finance in the Treasury Department. In books like "Why Capitalism?" (2012), Dr. Meltzer promoted the view that countries and investors should suffer the consequences of their mistakes, whether flawed fiscal measures or bad lending decisions. In coining the slogan "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin," he added another maxim: "Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior." Allan Harold Meltzer was born on Feb. 6, 1928, in Boston to George Meltzer and the former Minerva Simon. His mother died when he was 6, and his father later remarried. Allan attended the Boys' Latin School and Brookline High School in Massachusetts. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Duke University in 1948 and received master's and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1957 he became an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Graduate School of Industrial Administration, later named the Tepper School of Business. Dr. Meltzer's economic influence stretched decades. In 1973, he helped found the private Shadow Open Market Committee with Karl Brunner of the University of Rochester. The panel offered policy recommendations to the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee. He received many awards for his work, including the Harry Truman Medal for Public Policy and the Truman Medal for Economic Policy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Jessica Testa: We have to begin with the shoes, right? Elizabeth Paton: I mean, it was the strangest ever season for catwalk shows. Why are we even surprised that it was the strangest season of footwear, too. Your favorite, Jess? JT: I think the first weird shoes to catch my eye were in the Molly Goddard Ugg collaboration. Which you saw in person in London. EP: By catch your eye, you mean covet and want to buy? Don't be shy to say so. JT: Yes. Well. No. Mixed feelings about actually buying them. EP: Bad in rain was my view. Apparently it rained every day in Paris (where we weren't, because of the pandemic). Instead, we made up the digital front (second and third) row as most of the usual fashion week attendees tuned in from home. JT: Yes, and we're still working from home for the foreseeable future, which makes buying showy shoes feel a little pointless. At the same time, a weird shoe can spark joy in this joyless time! You're hunched over a computer 24/7, but then you look down and you're wearing mules that seem to be made from Elmo's skin. EP Do you think that the huge sales spike in Crocs is because they spark joy in people? (I understand why they exist in hospitals and kitchens, but aesthetically I continue to hate Crocs). I liked the Hermes status clogs. Delicious. I was pleasantly baffled by the horny reptilian shoes from Matthew Williams's Givenchy debut. Fully alarmed by the metal clamp ons at Paco Rabanne, making the wearer look imprisoned yet airborne at same time. JT: I think for the fashion crowd, Crocs are more of a novelty item so yes, joy sparking, or at least Instagram like sparking. But speaking of foot imprisonment: the three toe high heeled sandals at Givenchy! JT: I just appreciate the audacity. Even if I reflexively cringe when imagining putting them on. EP: Toe cleavage and ugly shoes have long been a favorite fashion fetish. A new trend this season, though, was beekeeper outfits. The whole hog at Kenzo. Vibes at Thom Browne and Marine Serre. It's a look that is really creating a buzz (sorry). EP: Yes. Perhaps on a bee farm, or for other bucolic countryside activities. But not at fashion week, or anywhere else. Certainly not in my living room, where I currently spend 92 percent of my time. Though the intended symbolism wasn't lost on me. JT: They do have a PPE vibe. (Minus the second P. I don't think they're particularly safe.) EP: Agree! Big, cocooning, protective sartorial spheres were available from the likes of Loewe and Simone Rocha, too. And a lot of baggy pants and balloon sleeves and cozy hoodies. Our colleague Guy Trebay has written beautifully on how lockdown life has hastened the gender blurring underway in fashion. Though for me there were lots of nods there, too, to the growing informality of our lifestyles and the fact that we have nothing to dress up for right now. Very little tailoring to speak of, besides a few big, bold shoulders that would take someone's eye out (I'm looking at you Olivier Rousteing! And at you Nicolas Ghesquiere!) JT: At the same time, there were a fair number of vests layered under blazers we're simply not giving up on suiting and harnesses layered over dresses. Thebe Magugu and Rokh used them to turn pretty dresses into something tougher and more postapocalyptic. (I loved them.) But obviously oversize and relaxed silhouettes resonate more in this particular moment. EP: Shall I tell you what was also apparently resonating but didn't really resonate with me. Crop tops. So many crop tops at Miu Miu, Versace, Dior and Chanel, to name but a few. Skin is in, apparently. JT: Yes, and I lean more toward the white Balenciaga "Paris Fashion Week" sweatsuit for spring. EP: On the subject of Balenciaga, I feel as if Demna Gvasalia, who gave us the most apocalyptic show experience last season, was a lot more optimistic in his offering this season. It was still a bit sinister, obviously, with models stomping around in the dark in the City of Light to a remix of Corey Hart's 1984 hit, "Sunglasses At Night." But there was an upbeat allure and couture tinged glamour to his pandemic proof loungewear. I loved it. I was distracted from my rainy new homebound status quo. But it didn't feel escapist either. Those gaiters will definitely sell. JT I would say much of this season's collections came across as light and bright, and not just because they're meant for next spring. If designers were feeling as gloomy and claustrophobic as the rest of us, they didn't tap into that depression. Maybe their tendency toward joy and fantasy was less about giving consumers an escape and more about giving themselves one. Also: Are gaiters going to be our winter face masks? I hadn't even thought about that. EP: Something we both noticed was a near universal absence of masks from collections. The fashion search engine Tagwalk reported that the keyword with the biggest percentage of search increases since the spring summer 2020 collections was masks up 17,004.5 percent. OK, the likes of Rick Owens and Marine Serre offered up masks and chiffon balaclavas, but dressing for a dystopian hellscape has been their schtick for a long time. Did you think there would be more of a direct response from designers to the times we are living in, Jess? Doesn't fashion need to opt into reality if it is to stay relevant? JT: I was hoping for more masks. Practically, they are the only accessory that matters right now. I get that some designers may have been wary of putting masks on the runway. A few luxury brands were criticized early in the pandemic for selling expensive masks. But since then, masks have been much more integrated into our lives and wardrobes. This is a chance to respond to the world we're living in, which is what fashion should do. EP: I guess the collections this season felt far more celebratory than I expected. Far more business as usual. JT: And should business be as usual? Some of the shows with audiences had their guests sitting pretty close to each other. Maybe not as close as usual that is, elbow to elbow but certainly not six feet apart. That seemed pretty tone deaf to me, particularly as Covid 19 infections are rising again in France. But I do understand the impulse to forge ahead with the shows. We know that they employ a lot of people. EP: There was a message to send about industry stability, for sure. And plenty of distracting sparkles and sequins, on shoes and sheath dresses and coat trimmings and even head to toe tuxedos. Ultimately, heady escapism is what fashion is particularly good for and heaven knows we need some right now. I had a particular soft spot for the Schiaparelli face jewelry. Who among us doesn't see the allure of 24 carat gold eye glasses with blocked in lenses and precious stones where your eyes should be? JT: Please don't forget the gilded coaster size earrings. See, those are very Zoom friendly. It's relevant escapism! This conversation has been edited for clarity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
ZHONGSHAN, China A strike at a Honda auto parts factory here in southeastern China collapsed on Monday morning, as Honda's hiring of hundreds of replacement workers on Sunday prompted most of the strikers to return to work. More than 100 strikers held a rally outside the factory on Monday morning, watching silently and despondently as replacement workers and former strikers filed through the factory gates. A factory manager with the voice of an auctioneer counted off the minutes until the morning shift started and exhorted the strikers to return to work, using lines like, "We won't give your job to the new workers if you come in now." In the last five minutes before the gates closed, all but half a dozen strikers went back into the factory, stricken looks on their faces. Some strikers had stayed home from the rally, and may have lost their jobs. The factory raised wages and benefits, although the increase fell far short of what the strikers had demanded. Some members of the factory's council of workers, chosen by the workers to represent them when the strike began on Wednesday, have gone into hiding, fearing retaliation, while others have returned to work in an effort to continue seeking a better deal. It was unclear on Monday how many longtime workers had lost their jobs to replacement workers. The factory was severely understaffed before the strike because it had not raised wages, workers said. By mid morning on Monday, Honda was dismantling the recruitment tent next to the broad avenue near the factory, after apparently concluding that it had a full complement of replacement workers and former strikers. But there were signs of further labor difficulties in the factory among strikers who had gone back inside. Two of these former strikers said in text messages and a phone call that employees in some factory departments were refusing to work while seeking further details from management on wage and benefit concessions. A Honda spokesman did not reply to numerous phone calls and text messages on Sunday and Monday. It is also too early to tell whether the apparent resolution of this strike somewhat higher wages but lost jobs for some strikers will set a pattern elsewhere as labor unrest spreads. Workers in the industrial southeast of China and elsewhere have been turning a labor shortage to their advantage by demanding better pay and working conditions. But the Honda Lock parts factory here can run on lower skilled, less educated workers than the Honda transmission factory in Foshan, a two hour drive to the northwest. A strike at the Foshan factory brought the company's auto assembly operations in China to a temporary standstill and the regular work force there was lured back to their jobs with reportedly much larger wage increases than Honda is offering here in Zhongshan. Replacement workers and returning employees here are receiving 11 percent higher pay and a 33 percent rise in allowance for food and housing. The combined increase in wages and benefits was considerably less than the near doubling of wages alone that the strikers had sought. Even so, the improved compensation wages of 152 a month and an allowance of 59 a month was enough to make the jobs attractive to replacement workers. City governments, which depend on taxes and other revenue from factories, play an important role in maintaining labor peace. Honda Lock, a subsidiary of Honda in Japan, owns 65 percent of the factory here. The other 35 percent is held by Xiang Suo, a business owned by the municipal government. Honda advertised on television for replacement workers and hired employment agencies to help find them, a factory recruiter said. Young men and women showing up at the factory gates looking for work said that they had heard about job opportunities through word of mouth or had met factory managers who walked through the nearby shopping mall seeking workers. Striking workers had held a rare protest march on Friday, chanting slogans as they walked down the main road of an industrial park, many of them smiling with an almost euphoric sense of unity. By midday on Sunday, four Chinese recruiters wearing white jump suits with bright red "Honda Lock" logos had set up a recruitment tent for replacement workers at the side of the avenue, about 10 yards from where the riot police had stood. The strike could help Honda end up with a younger work force with fewer family obligations to distract them. Most visitors to the tent were enthusiastically welcomed by the four recruiters. The strikers here had wanted to match the raises of up to 50 percent, to as much as 234 a month in addition free dormitory housing, reportedly obtained by workers at a transmission plant in nearby Foshan nearly two weeks ago. But they appear to have miscalculated on an important point. Transmission plants are highly automated operations that require skilled employees. The transmission factory workers in Foshan mostly have the Chinese equivalent of community college degrees in subjects like mechanical engineering. By contrast, the factory here assembles door locks, rear and side mirrors, and other low value products. One recruiter at the recruitment tent said that Honda only required a junior high school education for applicants. Honda is still trying to lure back strikers, however. A large sign at the factory gates said that last Wednesday through Saturday, the days when the factory was closed because of the strike, would be counted as paid work days. Management also offered double pay for hours worked on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, as the factory tries to catch up. Striking workers who do not return by the end of the day on Tuesday will be dealt with according to national labor laws, the factory notice said. The laws allow the dismissal of employees who do not show up for work. A young woman who came to the factory gates looking for work on Sunday said that she had traveled two hours by bus after hearing by phone from a friend that Honda was hiring and offered better working conditions than many factories. "I can't stand the 12 hour shifts at other factories," she said. "Here it's only eight hours." The crumbling of the strike shows that employers and the authorities retain powerful options in the face of rising labor unrest. Honda's ability to find replacement workers by offering only somewhat higher wages shows that many in China are still earning the minimum wage which is set locally and is around 130 to 150 a month in big coastal cities and are happy to change jobs for a little more money. Strong economic growth has fueled demand for factory workers. Yet the total population of young Chinese has leveled off because of tightening enforcement through the 1980s and 1990s of China's "one child policy." And even fewer young Chinese are available for factory work because more are going to university instead. But laws and social norms still favor employers. There is little stigma associated with strike breakers and scant sign of worker solidarity in what remains officially a communist country. Asked what would become of the strikers, several replacement workers shrugged and said they did not know. The strike activist at the mall said that he had nothing against the replacement workers, either. The new employees are trying to make a living, he said, adding that "they don't know me." The Chinese government's willingness to help a Japanese company replace Chinese workers with strike breakers could stir anger in China if it became widely known. Some hostility toward Japan still simmers in China as a result of atrocities during World War II. The strike here has particularly touchy historical overtones. Zhongshan is famous across China as the hometown of Sun Yat sen, who overthrew imperial rule in China in 1911 and had a socialist influenced vision of China's future in which workers would play a valued role. But the breaking of the strike may not become widely known in China. After allowing nationwide television and newspaper reporting of the early days of the transmission plant strike, Beijing authorities have imposed severe restrictions, without explanation, on the ability of the domestic media to report on labor unrest.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Legislation will be introduced in the California Senate on Wednesday that could reshape higher education by requiring the state's public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus. If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university. "We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn't get a seat in the course they needed," said Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, who will introduce the bill. "That's the motivation for this." Despite doubts about the measure from some faculty members, signs point to the proposal's passage after refinements to the legislative language, which is currently more outline than details. Democrats control the Legislature, and Gov. Jerry Brown has been a strong proponent of online education as a means to reduce college costs. In part because of budget cuts, hundreds of thousands of students in California's three public higher education systems are shut out of the gateway courses they must pass to fulfill their general education requirements or proceed with their major. Many are forced to spend extra semesters, or years, to get degrees. Under the legislation, some of the eligible courses would likely be free "massive open online courses," or MOOCs, like those offered by providers like Coursera, Udacity and edX; others might come from companies like Straighterline, which offers low price online courses, or Pearson, the educational publishing and testing company. "This would be a big change, acknowledging that colleges aren't the only ones who can offer college courses," said Burck Smith, the founder of Straighterline. "It means rethinking what a college is." According to Senator Steinberg, a Democrat from Sacramento, the state's 112 community colleges each had an average of 7,000 enrolled students who were on waiting lists, and at the 420,000 student, 23 campus California State University, only 16 percent of students graduate within four years, in part because of the difficulty in getting the courses they need. "It's almost unthinkable that so many students seeking to attend the public colleges and universities are shut out," said Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American Council on Education. "I definitely expect it to spawn serious deliberations within the faculty, but these would be the basic courses that perhaps faculty gets the least psychic reward from teaching." In a way, the legislation has a head start: Last year, in an effort to bring down textbook costs, Mr. Steinberg won passage of a law requiring free online textbooks for the 50 most popular introductory college courses, and in the process created a faculty panel three members each from the University of California, California State University and the community college system to choose materials. The new legislation would use that panel to determine which 50 introductory courses were most oversubscribed and which online versions of those courses should be eligible for credit. Those decisions would be based on factors like whether the courses included proctored tests, used open source texts those available free online and had been recommended by the American Council on Education. A student could get credit from a third party course only if the course was full at the student's home institution, and if that institution did not offer it online. Despite the element of faculty control that would be built into the process, it is not likely to sit well with faculty. "I think it's going to be very controversial," said Josh Jarrett, a higher education officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances research on online education. "The decision to award credit has been one of those solemn things that the faculty hold very dear. But it could be a catalyst for widespread change, driving community colleges where they turn away a lot of students to move quickly to put more of their own courses online, and charge tuition, to keep their students from taking the courses elsewhere." The trend to use educational resources available free online is moving at a gallop, nationwide. This week, the University of California, Irvine, announced that it was making its chemistry videos and lectures available free online albeit not for credit. And David Wiley, a pioneer of online education, started a new company, Lumen Learning, to work with colleges shifting toward open source textbooks and to create degree programs that would use only open source materials. In putting together the new legislative proposal, Mr. Steinberg worked with Dean Florez, a former California Senate majority leader who is the president of the 20 Million Minds Foundation, which works for open education resources. Mr. Florez said that the online courses would supplement but never supplant the classes taught at California's public colleges, so that students would not be delayed by bottlenecks. His own son had to wait three semesters at Santa Monica Community College to get into a math class he needed, he said. But Lillian Taiz, the president of the California Faculty Association, said that she thought it was too soon to conclude that online classes from third party providers were a good substitute for the classes at state institutions. "This whole online thing is not well vetted yet," she said. "There's a sort of mania for massive online courses right now, but there's no good evidence that they work for all students." "What's really going on is that after the budget cuts have sucked public higher education dry of resources," she continued, "the Legislature's saying we should give away the job of educating our students." Other higher education leaders were more open to the idea, including Mark Yudof, the president of the University of California. "I'm O.K. with credit for online, actually. I'm flat out optimistic about it, as long as our faculty has the chance to massage it appropriately," he said. "They might want to add recitation, or assessment or discussions groups, but assuming they accept it, I think it's fine. We're getting ready to put online 30 courses developed by our own faculty, mostly introductory general education courses, and it's possible that people at other institutions would use those." The chancellor of the California State University system, Timothy P. White, was also cautiously supportive. "Demand exceeds capacity on every one of our campuses," he said. "This is really about increasing our capacity with the existing resources. It isn't a challenge to professors' autonomy, or something that would mean cutting the work force. We have to find a way to do better at meeting the growing demand, and if there's a better way to do things, why not? We need innovation, but we also need quality, and the devil's in the details."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
It should have been bigger. More momentous. When you are holding something in your hands that is the last of its kind, you feel as if it ought to be more ... special. A collectible. Something worthy of a time capsule, or a memory box. But the last regular print issue of Glamour, which landed on newsstands on Tuesday, ahead of the magazine's complete pivot to digital (with, O.K., the occasional special physical product, exactly when to be determined), is an anemic little thing, not even 100 pages. On the cover there is a blond Amber Heard in a light blue shirtdress perched on the hood of a red convertible and a few halfhearted plugs for what's inside: "365 Days Worth of Ideas and Inspirations" "Meghan Markle's Major Fashion Impact" and so on. There's no drumroll for the "goodbye to paper," no editor's letter extolling the virtues of the more immediate future we're off the newsstand but on all your devices! There are no clues that this is a milestone moment in the struggle for survival of old media, and how women relate to the sisters in arms advice over wine voice of the magazine, one that is now moving from their mailboxes to their inboxes. It is, consequently, both an anthropologist's treasure, a perfect example of what exactly the problem is with legacy fashion magazines in the early 21st century stories that can't get published until well past their relevancy date (hasn't everyone done that Meghan Markle piece?), fashion we've all seen before (hello, Instagram!) and one that is entirely disposable, despite some smart articles. But thus does print go out: not with a bang, but a fizzle. That's evolution for ya. To be fair, Glamour's last regular issue is also a January issue, which is traditionally one of the thinnest of the year even in healthy magazine times. (Only July/August can rival it.) And chances are, when it was put together a few months ago, the decision had not yet been confirmed that it would be the end of the run, so perhaps it could not have been signposted in the pages themselves. And maybe Conde Nast, which owns Glamour, was leery of calling too much attention to the change, wanting it to seem like no big deal. (That seems likely given that it made the announcement about print two days before Thanksgiving, when attention was on meal plans, not on media.) Glamour is not by any means the first glossy to pivot to all digital. Teen Vogue, Self and Redbook all got there first; Seventeen practically at the same time. But Glamour was once the cash cow of Conde Nast, the 80 year old workaholic women's magazine that powered the shiny town cars at the curb. If the move to abandon print can happen there, it can happen to any denizen of the newsstand. And indeed, given the shake up announced at Conde Nast this week, with its American and international arms scheduled to merge under a single chief executive, who knows what the future may hold for the glossy stable. Rihanna was named one of Glamour's Women of the Year in the December 2009 issue. So isn't it about time we started thinking about planning the transitions better? Not just in terms of how they are spun in the media, or handled in house, but how they are marked for posterity. If we're going to say farewell to all that, why not say it with feeling? Pay homage to a past that meant something to the women who paid for it, while acknowledging it was time to move into the future? The two are not mutually exclusive, though we tend to treat them that way. It wasn't as if we (the we who follow such things, anyway) didn't know this was coming. It will come for us all, in the end. Those vaunted September issues have been shrinking for a while now. Millennial readers want what they want when they want it: witty commentary on Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin now, not three months after it happens. And when Glamour's longtime editor Cindi Leive resigned last year and was later replaced by Samantha Barry, a "digital native" from CNN, it seemed pretty clear the groundwork was being laid for the magazine to go into that good digital night. Whoops! Sorry, "future." After all, it's not as if there's no history to talk up. Glamour occupied a very specific place in the landscape of women's fashion magazines for a very long time. That's why many readers took to social media in the hours after the closure was announced to mourn its print demise. It "feels like my teenage self is getting a golf club to the back of the knees," went one post.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Patrick Bamford bounced around for a long time, the sodium glow of his youthful promise fading in the shadows of all those blind alleys. A few months at Crystal Palace, when he did not start a game, and a spell at Norwich City, where he failed to convince his manager he was worth keeping. Burnley was a dead end, too. It was not until he arrived at Middlesbrough that he finally managed to make a Premier League start and score a Premier League goal, but it was only one. And the season ended in relegation, anyway. This was not what had been expected of Bamford. It was not, most likely, what he would have expected of himself. He had joined Chelsea at 18, and was rich enough in potential then that one of the biggest clubs in the world had paid a couple of million dollars or so to sign him after only two senior appearances. Or, at least, that was the assumption. In 2012, when a club signed a teenage prospect, the natural conclusion was that it must have found a sensation, a next big thing waiting to take the game by storm. It would not have occurred to anyone, then, that a club might sign a young player so it could harvest loan fees for a few years and then sell him at a vast profit. Looking back, of course, that is precisely what happened to Bamford at Chelsea. It was not that he wasn't supposed to make it; it was that doing so would have been a bonus. The club was, effectively, running an industrial scale player trading operation, developing young players so they could be sold on, with the subsequent revenues reinvested into the first team. There is nothing wrong with that nothing, at least, in a legal sense; moral reactions may vary but it came at a cost to Bamford. He has always been judged by the standards of the player it was assumed he was meant to be. Every loan spell that did not quite work out provided a little more evidence that he had not lived up to his early talent. Two seasons later, Bamford is a Premier League player. More than that, he is a Premier League standard player. He scored one of Leeds United's three goals at Anfield on the opening weekend of the season. He scored another in a 4 3 win over Fulham a week later. Then he scored a decisive goal in an impressive victory at Sheffield United. Not long after, he scored all three in a 3 0 win against Aston Villa. He has played seven games and scored six times. Those goals have been of all shapes and sizes: pretty finishes and scruffy ones, artful ones and emphatic ones, from close range and from distance. A player written off as destined for life to be a second tier workhorse has arrived in what is regarded widely and occasionally even accurately as the best domestic league in the world and has been transformed into Ruud van Nistelrooy. The explanation for that is, in part, specific to Bamford. It is only now, as his father, Russell, recently told The Athletic, that he is working for a coach Marcelo Bielsa who "believes in him." It is only now that he is with a club invested in his success. For all the due diligence Chelsea and its peers among the superpowers do when finding client clubs to take their players on loan, the athletes are rarely anything more than borrowed assets. Players on loan are easily discarded. And Bamford, 27, is, perhaps, at an age when he is more centered, more comfortable, more at ease. Bamford, semifamously, had a privileged upbringing. He went to private school. He plays the violin. He speaks three languages "conversationally," which in his case is probably not a resume boosting euphemism for knowing how to ask where the swimming pool is. In his early years, that made Bamford an outlier in a sport where difference is too often seen as weakness. At times, he has admitted previously, it was a source of discomfort for him. Now he is old enough and wise enough to shrug it off. (He is also, as Phil Hay, a journalist who has covered Leeds for longer than is healthy, has pointed out, working for a manager who will not even be aware of his background, much less care about it.) Bamford is flourishing under Bielsa partly because of the connection between the two of them, but largely because he fits the coach's system perfectly. Bielsa does not need his striker just to score goals; that is not the sole metric by which he judges the effectiveness of his No. 9. Instead, the forward in Bielsa's vision of soccer is there to hold the ball up, to bring others into play, to create space, to destabilize the defense and, in particular, to lead the press. Goals are helpful, of course goals are the point of soccer but they are not the only metric. It is the same reason Jurgen Klopp finds it odd that Roberto Firmino attracts criticism for not being more prolific; it is why Rafael Benitez, a generation earlier, built a title winning team with Mista as its spearhead, a player who scored 48 goals in 218 games across a decade in La Liga. Bielsa sees Bamford in precisely the same light. Too often, as fans and as observers, we write off players when they fail to meet some indistinct performance standard. We determine that they are not good enough for this team or that level. We demand that they are dropped or sold or upgraded. We decide that they will never make it. England went back into lockdown on Thursday. This one is set to last a month, initially, but longer feels likely. In July, the government on suspiciously short notice canceled Eid for those living in some of Britain's largest Muslim communities, so there really shouldn't be any reason to place a firewall around Christmas. There are tighter pandemic restrictions in place across Europe now, too: nine cities subject to curfews in France; partial shutdowns in Germany and the Netherlands; limits on opening hours for restaurants and bars in Italy. The continent is in the grip of the second wave of the coronavirus, and most are warning that, without stringent measures, it may rise higher than the first. Elite soccer, you will have noticed, is carrying on regardless, even at a time when youth sports are being put on hold. The domestic leagues continue uninterrupted. The Champions League group stage has reached its halfway point. At a time when borders are closing and travel is being restricted, soccer has an international break planned. None of this has been met with any moral outcry. No anonymous executives have come forward, as they did in spring, to demand that the season be abandoned, to declare that it is abhorrent to play on while the death tolls mount. There have been no calls to nullify and void everything immediately. Nor should there have been, of course: Elite soccer has proved, over the last seven months, that it can play on in a time of pandemic. The number of positive tests among players remains low; the testing regimen is thorough and assiduous. Most important, the sport has not been linked to any major outbreaks, and it has not placed any excessive burden on health or emergency services. But it does raise two questions. One is why those who wanted to abandon soccer in spring on moral grounds are not calling for the same to happen now. The other is: Given that Europe is facing what may be a long winter of monthslong lockdowns, what would have happened if soccer had not proved that it could play on? What if we had set the precedent of abandoning last season? Without seven months of evidence that soccer, at least among the elite, can function in these conditions, presumably we would have to abandon this season now. That could mean almost an entire year without any revenue at all for clubs and associations. It would mean a return was effectively impossible until a vaccine had not only been found, but also been widely administered. Soccer did not handle that conversation at all well in spring. It was fraught and self interested and duplicitous and, at times, toxic. But, in hindsight, it may well have been the game's salvation. If it had not started then, it is not clear, now, whether the games really would have been able to start in any recognizable form at all. Jesse Marsch looked a little forlorn as he tramped across the field to congratulate his opponents and commiserate with his players on Tuesday night. It was not hard to see why: His Red Bull Salzburg team had been holding Bayern Munich with 12 minutes to play in their Champions League game. By the time Marsch stepped on the turf, head bowed, his team had lost, 6 2. Sympathizing with any of the Red Bull teams being, as they are, the sporting emissaries of a corporate empire is a complex thing. As we wrote of RB Leipzig in August, they make imperfect underdogs. All they have to compete with the game's elite, after all, is the backing of a 20 billion drinks empire, and some of the best facilities money can buy. Still, it is hard not to feel as if Salzburg has given more to the Champions League than it has, thus far, received. Marsch's team went toe to toe with Bayern Munich, the best side in Europe by some distance, for 80 minutes this week, and got nothing. It lost only at the last against Atletico Madrid the week before. There is an element of deja vu here: Last year, in its first Champions League group stage appearance, Salzburg lost narrowly to Napoli at home, took a point in Naples, and almost drew with Liverpool at Anfield. Only fine margins and an unkind draw separated Marsch and his team from a place in the last 16. The same fate, most likely, awaits Salzburg this season. That is a shame, because this is a team that would hardly wilt in that rarefied company: a collection of emerging stars with special mention for Dominik Szoboszlai and a coach who encourages them to play adventurous, intense soccer. Marsch was, clearly, disappointed his team could not quite get over the line this week. He can take great pride, though, in how far they have come. Thanks to Joe Klonowski, who saw in last week's retelling of the Colombian Pirate League an echo of baseball's Federal League. "The reserve clause was the maximum wage, holding wages down," he wrote. "Joe Tinker, Edd Roush and Mordecai 'Three Finger' Brown" were baseball's de Freitas, Rial and Di Stefano, famous players who jumped to the outlaw league for better pay. Christopher Orr, meanwhile, is not convinced that someone's having to become West Brom is quite the problem for a super league that I have suggested. "I'm wondering if we're missing the fact that most fans of English football would prefer to watch West Brom in the Premier League than Brentford, Luton or Bristol City in the Championship. In a super league, isn't it logical to assume fans of European football would also prefer watching the 'West Brom of Europe' to watching domestic league sides in regionalized European versions of the Championship?" That's all for this week. There's plenty to keep your eye on across Europe this weekend: Bayern visits Borussia Dortmund on Saturday in the Bundesliga, and Sunday is packed Lazio against Juventus, Atalanta against Inter Milan, Liverpool visiting Manchester City, and then Valencia hosting Real Madrid. This week's Set Piece Menu is a good one, on what role sport plays in broader culture. And, of course, please tell your family and friends that there is more to The Times than just working out which way Pennsylvania went.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Alzheimer's disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau. The surprising finding answers a longstanding question and has immediate implications for developing treatments, researchers said. And they suspect that other degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson's may spread in a similar way. Alzheimer's researchers have long known that dying, tau filled cells first emerge in a small area of the brain where memories are made and stored. The disease then slowly moves outward to larger areas that involve remembering and reasoning. But for more than a quarter century, researchers have been unable to decide between two explanations. One is that the spread may mean that the disease is transmitted from neuron to neuron, perhaps along the paths that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. Or it could simply mean that some brain areas are more resilient than others and resist the disease longer. The new studies provide an answer. And they indicate it may be possible to bring Alzheimer's disease to an abrupt halt early on by preventing cell to cell transmission, perhaps with an antibody that blocks tau. The studies, done independently by researchers at Columbia and Harvard, involved genetically engineered mice that could make abnormal human tau proteins, predominantly in the entorhinal (pronounced en toh RYE nal) cortex, a sliver of tissue behind the ears, toward the middle of the brain, where cells first start dying in Alzheimer's disease. As expected, tau showed up there. And, as also expected, entorhinal cortex cells in the mice started dying, filled with tangled, spaghettilike strands of tau. Over the next two years, the cell death and destruction spread outward to other cells along the same network. Since those other cells could not make human tau, the only way they could get the protein was by transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell. And that, said Dr. Samuel E. Gandy, associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, was "very unexpected, very intriguing." Although the studies were in mice, researchers say they expect that the same phenomenon occurs in humans because the mice had a human tau gene and the progressive wave of cell death matched what they see in people with Alzheimer's disease. One study, by Karen Duff and Dr. Scott A. Small and their colleagues at the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center, was published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. The other, by Dr. Bradley T. Hyman, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues, is to be published in the journal Neuron. Both groups of researchers were inspired by the many observations over the years that Alzheimer's starts in the entorhinal cortex and spreads. But, said Dr. Small, "what do we mean by 'spreads?' " Researchers knew that something set off Alzheimer's disease. The most likely candidate is a protein known as beta amyloid, which accumulates in the brain of Alzheimer's patients, forming hard, barnaclelike plaques. But beta amyloid is very different from tau. It is secreted and clumps outside cells. Although researchers have looked, they have never seen evidence that amyloid spreads from cell to cell in a network. Still, amyloid creates what amounts to a bad neighborhood in memory regions of the brain. Then tau comes in some researchers call it "the executioner" piling up inside cells and killing them. If some cells take longer than others to succumb to the bad neighborhood, that would explain the spread of the disease in the brain, and there would be no need to blame something odd, like the spread of tau from cell to cell. Studies in humans, though, could not determine whether that hypothesis was correct. They involved autopsy and brain imaging studies and were "indirect and inconclusive," Dr. Small said. Looking at the brains of people who have died of the disease, Dr. Duff said, is like looking at a wrecked car and trying to figure out the accident's cause. Faulty brakes? Broken struts? The question of which hypothesis was correct tau spreading cell to cell, or a bad neighborhood in the brain and cells with different vulnerabilities to it remained unanswerable. Dr. Hyman said he tried for 25 years to find a good way to address it. One of his ideas was to find a patient or two who had had a stroke or other injury that severed the entorhinal cortex from the rest of the brain. If the patient developed Alzheimer's in the entorhinal cortex and it remained contained there he would have evidence that the disease spread like an infection. But he never found such patients. The solution came when researchers were able to develop genetically engineered mice that expressed abnormal human tau, but only in their entorhinal cortexes. Those mice offered the cleanest way to get an answer, said John Hardy, an Alzheimer's researcher at University College London who was not involved in either of the new studies. There is another advantage, too, Dr. Hyman said. The mice give him a tool to test ways to block tau's spread and that, he added, "is one of the things we're excited about." But if tau spreads from neuron to neuron, Dr. Hardy said, it may be necessary to block both beta amyloid production, which seems to get the disease going, and the spread of tau, which continues it, to bring Alzheimer's to a halt. He and others are also asking if other degenerative diseases spread through the brain because proteins pass from nerve cell to nerve cell. Dr. Hardy thought he saw provocative human evidence that it might be happening in Parkinson's disease. Two Parkinson's patients being treated by a colleague had fetal brain cells implanted to replace dead and dying neurons. When the patients died, years later, autopsies showed they still had the fetal cells, but they had balls of a Parkinson's disease protein, synuclein, inside. The most obvious way that could happen, the researchers reasoned, was if the toxic protein had spread from the patient's diseased cells to the healthy fetal cells. But they could not rule out the bad neighborhood hypothesis. Now, Dr. Hardy said, with the mouse studies, the issue of a bad neighborhood is settled. The answer in Alzheimer's disease, he said, "is that isn't possible." "That is what is different between these papers and all the others," Dr. Hardy said. "It isn't a bad neighborhood. It is contagion from one neuron to another."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
You could get whiplash trying to follow the jumping timeline in "Don't Let Go." A likable, derivative genre mash up that mixes a police procedural with a supernatural thriller and a splash of family melodrama, the movie tracks a Los Angeles detective (David Oyelowo) who jumps on the case after receiving a call from his murdered niece. Is she dead or has he slid off the deep end? That's one question in this tricky mystery, in which the past isn't past and the present is sometimes a muddle. At some point you will likely get lost in "Don't Let Go," as people say of Venice, with its labyrinthine streets and canals. (The title evokes "Don't Look Now," another woo woo cinematic rebus , one that takes place in ta da Venice.) Knowing this may make it easier to watch "Don't Let Go," freeing you from pesky thoughts about time and space, narrative logic and quantum physics. There's pleasure in solving the mystery, piecing together the jigsaw. But it can be nice just going with the kind of choppy flow that soon envelops Oyelowo's Jack Radcliff once he begins investigating his own life. If that also suggests "Memento" it's because the director, Jacob Estes, has clearly taking some cues from Christopher Nolan's puzzle film. It does Estes no favors to push the comparison. "Don't Let Go" is less ambitious and less complex than "Memento," and you get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn't wholly figured out how to make toying with time work. But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied out spaces, and he makes his conspicuously low budget work for the near claustrophobic intimacy. More important, he has Oyelowo.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Clockwise from top left: Benny Olk and Erin Dowd in "Crises"; Misty Copeland and James Whiteside in "Swan Lake"; Andre M. Zachery and LaMont Hamilton's "Dapline!"; and Elina Miettinen and Gabe Stone Shayer in "Sleeping Beauty." Dance took off in a number of unexpected directions this year. The dance critics of The New York Times Alastair Macaulay, Gia Kourlas, Brian Seibert and Siobhan Burke look back at some of the biggest surprises. Bournonville Alive A single week in January brought the surprise that the choreography of August Bournonville (1805 79) was alive in the dancing of the Royal Danish Ballet at the Joyce, while the choreography of Marius Petipa (1818 1910) and Lev Ivanov (1834 1901) for the 1895 "Swan Lake" was dead in the dancing of the Mariinsky Ballet. (Another welcome Bournonville surprise was America's first ever production of the 1842 three act "Napoli" with Ballet Arizona: excellent.) Justin Peck's "Rodeo" The most marvelous new ballet of the year one of the best of the 21st century to date had its premiere on Feb. 4 at New York City Ballet. That work, Justin Peck's "Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes," was the first and finest of City Ballet's six 2015 premieres, by Mr. Peck and four other choreographers. One surprise, considerably against the law of averages, is that all six were worth watching. Another is that five showed same sex and opposite sex partnering coexisting naturally. The "Rodeo" adagio for five men is a quiet marvel; I hope it proves a classic. Small Screen Plisetskaya When the Bolshoi prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya died in May, the trove of YouTube films of her proved far more fun than all those innumerable Dying Swans led us to expect. Les Twins "The most famous dancers on the planet!" said the announcement whereupon it turned out that I had never heard of them. The place was the Apollo Theater in Harlem; the date was Oct. 16; the event was "Breakin' Convention," a festival of hip hop dance theater; and the dancers who arrived onstage were the knockout French fraternal duo Les Twins. Tango Teaming Two exemplars of Argentine tango, Gabriel Misse and Guillermina Quiroga, danced spectacularly together for the first time anywhere in New York on Nov. 21. The results live on YouTube. More, please. Dance on TV Thanks to Stephen Colbert, dance has a new spotlight. Since taking over "The Late Show," Mr. Colbert has hosted choreographers like Michelle Dorrance and Christopher Wheeldon. What's better is that he doesn't just show how they move, he lets them talk. Other stellar TV moments? Sia's duet with Mina Nishimura on "Saturday Night Live" and a zippy dance by Mikhail Baryshnikov, playing a version of himself on HBO's "Doll Em" as the director of a theater at which the main characters present a new work. Moving stiffly on a platform, Doll and Em are seized by nerves. The camera pans to the wings, where an encouraging Mr. Baryshnikov delightfully spry, hips shaking shows exactly how to get into the groove. The Misty Effect Misty Copeland is ballet's new Billy Elliot. (But she needs to fix those fouettes.) As American Ballet Theater's first African American female principal, she has transformed audiences. The Metropolitan Opera House looks a bit more like the rest of the world, a real breakthrough. Tearing Down Devotion In her latest dance, shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in September, the choreographer Sarah Michelson brutally bid farewell to her popular "Devotion" series by dropping a bomb otherwise known as "tournamento." Following the format of a sporting event, in which intermission felt more like halftime, "tournamento" has four dancers competing by performing austere, tough movement phrases as Ms. Michelson screeched, "Let's play!" The experiment to get to the essence of dance by extracting excessive emotion signals a new beginning. Elegance Revisited The thought of a contemporary ballet can cause trepidation, but Mark Morris's "After You" for American Ballet Theater honored both the art form and its dancers. Subtle and refined, "After You" is a modern ballet worth saving. Changing Times The diversity initiatives at the School of American Ballet, which are now expanding nationally, are starting to transform the makeup of the institution, evident at both its annual workshop shows and at New York City Ballet, its parent company. Most important, merit rules. 'La Bayadere' meets 'Aida' The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the city's most majestically imposing sites. By all rights, it should dwarf and overshadow two dancers. But in January, Surupa Sen and Bijayini Satpathy of India's Nrityagram Dance Ensemble more than held their own. Surrounded by the rigid lines of the temple, the sensuous curves of their Odissi dancing and their great artistry were even more ravishing than usual. Nice Curves With its small stage and odd shape, the Guggenheim Museum's theater isn't exactly dance friendly. But in February, Pam Tanowitz's "Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy)" wittily turned the place's every architectural idiosyncrasy into a compositional advantage. The dance was partly about brokenness fractured narrative, romantic fulfillment thwarted. The way Ms. Tanowitz channeled her eccentricity into the theater's circles turned smiles to tears. Big Subject Protests in Ferguson, Mo., inspired several dance works this year. The largest came in March with "FLEXN," in which Peter Sellars's poor direction allowed the artistry of street dancers to get lost in the vast Park Avenue Armory. A much more successful treatment could be found in the tiny theater of University Settlement by two artists I did not know: Andre M. Zachery and LaMont Hamilton. Their "Dapline!" had faults but also more disciplined power. Genius Hoofer A tap dancer won a MacArthur genius grant! The art form seldom gets the respect it deserves, so the September announcement came as a shock. Which tap dancer had won, though, was much less of one. Recently, Michelle Dorrance has emerged as a true original, deeply versed in tradition yet making it her own. Her appearance on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" showed TV viewers her effervescent talent and sincere humility. Her commissioned piece for the Fall for Dance Festival was a big thrill with one disappointment: not enough of her. Limon Lives The two week Jose Limon International Dance Festival at the Joyce Theater in October had several flaws, yet accomplished the essential thing: revealing the enduring power of mid 20th century work that would otherwise be easy to write off as hopelessly out of date. Dances With Gadgets The artist Michelle Ellsworth churns out surprises, from coin operated choreography to implausible science experiments. New York was treated to her smart, singular zaniness twice this year, at the American Realness festival in January and at the Chocolate Factory in November. If you missed those live shows, check out their online counterparts, created with just as much care. Learning Curve Though eager to present dance, museum curators haven't always been attuned to what dancers need, like floors conducive to jumping (unlike, say, concrete). So it was heartening to see sprung floors installed at spaces like the Museum of Modern Art for Yvonne Rainer's new work in July; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston for its current Black Mountain College exhibition; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in its new theater. Here's to healthy joints. The Art of Suspension Yasuko Yokoshi's "Zero One," at Danspace Project in September, offered many quiet revelations, including a film of the Japanese performance artist Hangman Takuzo, who hangs himself (safely) as a daily practice. What sounds morbid proved the opposite, an affirmation of life through his closeness with death. Ballet Breakaway While New York City Ballet remains retro in some regards see this year's roster of exclusively white male choreographers its dancers are taking on adventurous side projects. When Sara Mearns was given a residency at Jacob's Pillow this fall, she invited the choreographer Jodi Melnick who works outside the ballet world on a small, subtle scale to make something new for her and two City Ballet colleagues. So far it's just a sketch; let's hope it keeps growing. Coda of the Year Ralph Lemon's "Scaffold Room," at the Kitchen in November, was unparalleled, not least for its unexpected ending. Just as its reckoning with American pop culture seemed to wind down, the theater doors flung open for some seriously cathartic dancing in the lobby: Paul Hamilton, Malcolm Low and Omagbitse Omagbemi getting down to Kevin Beasley's D.J. set. Is there a Bessie for best outro? The Best in Culture 2015 More highlights from the year, as chosen by our critics:	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Martha Swope, via The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts When the curtain went up at the Palace Theater on Jan. 4, 1981, the expectations and the stakes were high. "Frankenstein," an adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel, had cost a reported 2 million, at the time a record for a Broadway play. The screen legend John Carradine and a young Dianne Wiest were in the cast, and the unprecedented stage effects came courtesy of Bran Ferren, the wunderkind behind the mind bending hallucinations in the film "Altered States," released two weeks earlier. Opening night had been pushed back three times, including to accommodate a last minute recasting of the lead, sending gossip swirling. Yet the bells and whistles like a massive Tesla coil that jolted Dr. Frankenstein's creation to life went off without a hitch. The scale of the flop may seem quaint compared with recent catastrophes like the 75 million musical "Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark." But it remained the talk of Broadway well past its untimely demise. "If my ghoulish friends are any indication," Rich wrote a month later, "theatergoers who didn't see 'Frankenstein' are envious of those who did." Forty years after opening night, we talked with some survivors, including Victor Gialanella, at the time a 31 year old first time playwright on the ride of his life. It may have ended in a crash, but like other partisans, he sees "Frankenstein" as a forerunner of the kind of spectacle common on Broadway today. "It was never a failure in our minds," Gialanella said. "The show did exactly what we intended and hoped: provided a spectacularly thrilling and immersive audience experience. If I had to do it over, I wouldn't change a thing." "Frankenstein" began life in 1979 at the Loretto Hilton Repertory Theater in St. Louis, where Gialanella worked as a production manager. It was his first play, written on spec to fill the fifth slot in their season. VICTOR GIALANELLA Horror was huge. "Dracula" with Frank Langella had just had two years in New York. The idea was to do "Frankenstein" as a kind of nonmusical musical, where the book drove to set pieces that were the equivalent of musical numbers. It got phenomenal response, great reviews. Two days later, I got a call from Joe Kipness. He said, "Hey kid, I'd like to buy your show." I thought, "Really? I mean really?" I didn't even have an agent. He'd heard about the play from Martin Gottfried, the critic for Saturday Review, who happened to have been in town and seen it. I don't think Joe had read it. In fact, I don't think he ever read it. Kipness, a flamboyant restaurateur who owned the Times Square Polynesian hangout Hawaii Kai, produced hits like "Applause" and non hits like "One Night Stand," which closed in previews. To retool "Frankenstein" for Broadway, he hired the director Tom Moore, of "Grease," then on its way to becoming the longest running musical in history at that point. Early on, Kipness envisioned effects of a sort never before seen onstage. But first, he arranged a trial production with a local director at a small outdoor theater in ... Fish Creek, Wis.? GIALANELLA It was really low end summer stock. There was a young director and the first thing he said was: "I have an idea. I want to have the hunchback, Igor, playing the organ, and he's going to narrate it like the common man from 'A Man for All Seasons.'" It was just an unmitigated disaster. I took a nap before opening night and didn't wake up. Joe came to see it a few days later. He said: "Well, that wasn't very good. But don't worry, kid. On to New York!" Casablanca Record and Film Works signed on as investors. After that relationship fell apart, Kipness joined forces with the theater owner James M. Nederlander, who oversaw the Palace, one of the biggest houses on Broadway. Terry Allen Kramer, coming off a Broadway smash with "Sugar Babies," became lead producer. STEWART LANE, producer These were terrible times for the theater industry. New York was in the toilet economically. I was making the transition from being an actor, and I was working with the Nederlanders. We could not find a show that would run a decent length of time at the Palace . We had to bring in temporary shows like the Toller Cranston "Ice Show." We were desperately looking for something. "Frankenstein" had a great team and a terrific cast. And it had Bran Ferren. At 25, Ferren had already staged rock spectacles for Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And in 1977, he had created an impressively realistic thunderstorm for the Sherlock Holmes adaptation "The Crucifer of Blood" on Broadway. MIKE MARTORELLA, production stage manager Marvin Krauss, our general manager, asked me to come to his office while he met with this special effects director. In walks this burly mountain man with reddish orange hair, a floor length fur coat. Bran said, "I think we'll do three kinds of fog, with different densities: ground fog, then another fog, then one at the top." Another idea was to send a shock wave through the audience. Marvin kept looking at me like, What's going on? The show's human stars included John Carradine, in what would be his last stage role, as the blind beggar. GIALANELLA Carradine had been doing such crap B movies, commercials. He was an old man, but he still had that deep, rich, whiskey voice. During previews, Joe rented a screening room and showed us "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein" from 1935, in which Carradine had an uncredited bit part . Someone turned to him and said: "That's such a great film. What's your memory of it?" He stood for a minute and said, "Two days' work." CARRIE ROBBINS, costume designer His hands were so riddled with arthritis he could not dress himself. I had a lovely small of stature dresser who was able to hide in the "fireplace" of the old man's hut and help him out. The role of Victor Frankenstein went to William Converse Roberts, a recent Yale Drama School graduate who would be making his Broadway debut. After extensive auditions of other actors, the part of the Creature went to Keith Jochim, who had originated the role in St. Louis. GIALANELLA Nobody was nailing it. I went to Joe and said, "You've got to bring in Keith." They didn't want to do it. They wanted someone with at least New York credibility. MARTORELLA Keith's audition was incredibly moving. We had 10 minutes, and he ended up reading for a half an hour. Then he came back in the afternoon in the makeup he had designed for St. Louis . I wrote in my diary, "He had totally transformed himself into a heap of horror." I can still see the faces of Tom, Joe and Victor. They were in awe. The show began loading in at the Palace on Oct. 23, 1980. The crew started with 15 stagehands, which quickly swelled to three dozen. The start of previews was delayed by the complexity of Douglas Schmidt's sets, which rotated on a giant turntable, and by issues with effects like the Tesla coil, whose full intensity was ratcheted up over the course of rehearsals. In an interview in the Times published two days before the opening, Dukes (who died in 2000) described getting a script that was so scribbled over it was "unreadable" and having just five days of rehearsals, some of which were held in the theater lobby because the set was being redone. GLOVER I remember cutting a lot from the script. Tom was tense. You could tell. There was a feeling we weren't giving them what they wanted. MOORE Once David came in, it started moving forward. All the effects were working. You may not have liked it, but there wasn't a dull moment. HOWARD SHERMAN, audience member at a preview performance I remember the set design and special effects vividly. The play? Not so much. The final moment, when the monster destroys the laboratory, was extraordinary. GLOVER In one scene, a curtain fell, revealing the monster. On one of the critics' nights, right before it fell someone shouted an obscenity . It really threw things off kilter. "Frankenstein" finally opened on Jan. 4, 1981. About an hour into the opening party (held at one of Kipness's restaurants), the reviews hit. MOORE A couple of people pulled me over and said, "It doesn't look good at The Times." Your heart just sinks. GIALANELLA I had gone upstairs to the room where my friends from out of town were staying. I wanted to see the first reviews on TV. They were not good. I went downstairs, and The Times had hit. Tom gave me a copy. I stood and read it. It was devastating. LANE We had a marketing meeting the day after, with Terry Allen Kramer and her father the Wall Street titan Charles Allen Jr. and Jimmy Nederlander . Jimmy said, "What are the advance sales?" I said there were no advance sales. "Is there a line at the box office?" I said, Jimmy, there's not even a line. "Did the critics like it?" No, they hated it. He said: "Let's close the show." For the next 36 hours, Kramer led an intense effort to bring the show back to life. MOORE Terry's father offered to pay the expenses of running another week. 20th Century Fox wanted to film it. But our lead Dukes had signed a TV deal for "The Winds of War" and wanted to leave the show. He's the one person in my life I never spoke to again. LANE Terry and Joe said, "How much would it cost to make an ad?" We figured it would take a half a million or more to start a television ad campaign. And add on top, to cover losses while the public gets to know it, another million. Jimmy shook his head and said: "Let's cut bait." MOORE I put the blame squarely on the Nederlanders. I don't think Jimmy Sr. had any fondness for the show. And "Woman of the Year" was waiting in the wings. GIALANELLA Lauren Bacall had done "Applause" at the Palace, and her dressing room still had the paint color she had wanted. "Woman of the Year" also with Bacall had a huge advance and no theater. We were an unknown entity with dreadful reviews and high running costs. MOORE The influx of the great gigantic English musicals was just about to happen, but it hadn't happened. The tragedy of "Frankenstein" is I know full well there was an audience for it. We saw them people kept showing up at the box office the next week. LANE Maybe five years later, with chandeliers falling and junkyards being recreated to accommodate "Cats." But as for plays, the public was looking for something else. MARTORELLA After we closed, Meat Loaf's agent or manager called me up and said he wanted to buy the set. But that never happened. The Museum of Modern Art did, however, acquire Gilbert Lesser's poster, which also went onto the so called flop wall at the theater district restaurant Joe Allen. GIALANELLA Every year since then, on Jan. 4, I have talked to or emailed Tom. Today, it's mostly positive memories. On the 30th anniversary, a number of us met at Joe Allen's. Tom called ahead and asked them to pull out the poster. They hung it with the hand pointing up instead of down . That cracked me up! MOORE It's like having a shared war together. Our lives were changed so greatly, both by the pleasure of doing it and the horror of its early demise. GIALANELLA After it closed, I was broke. A friend gave me three understudy roles, out of pity. I was in my own private hell. At one point, I sold shoes. I wrote "Ivory Pawns" two guys on a park bench, very soft and personal. The reported budget: 35. It won best new play at the Washington Theatre Festival in 1983. I wrote two or three other plays, but nobody was interested. Moore publicly vowed never to direct in New York again. Two years later, he was nominated for a Tony Award for "'night Mother." Kipness died in 1982, but Kramer went on to produce a string of Tony winning hits along with flops like "Escape to Margaritaville," her last show. She died in 2019. Gialanella began writing for soap operas, and won the first of several daytime Emmys in 1986. He walked away from "Frankenstein" (which still gets a handful of local and school productions a year) with a very different trophy the fake dog killed by the Creature. GIALANELLA It had glass eyes and hand implanted yak hair, cut and dyed to match the real dog in the play. I went and got it. That's the way I left Broadway on a bus to my parents' house in New Jersey carrying the dead dog.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Ms. Weiss is an Opinion staff writer and editor and the author of " How to Fight Anti Semitism." It was New Year's Eve, and I had decided to spend it with Andrew Yang. A self described "Asian man who's good at math," Mr. Yang had raised an impressive 16.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 for his presidential campaign. Despite being newly flush, the campaign didn't hold its shindig in a Napa Valley wine cave or at Gramercy Tavern, but in a fluorescent lit room above a bar in Nashua, N.H. The party looked like nothing so much as a high school dance if you had banned the bullies. There was a modest buffet of meatballs, spanakopita, Ritz crackers and Cheddar cheese. The D.J., a boomer with trousers that badly need hemming, could have been your chemistry teacher bouncing to Cardi B. Now, a few days away from the Iowa caucus, Mr. Yang has outlasted more than a dozen candidates, including three senators and two governors. He came in first among Democrats in the Iowa Youth Straw Poll on Tuesday. Next week, he'll be back on the debate stage. I went to New Hampshire because I wanted to understand how a political rookie with what seemed like little going for him beyond a signature proposal of free money and relentlessly upbeat online fans had gotten this far. What does the URL candidate's campaign look like IRL? That night, the Yang Gang, as the candidate's fans proudly call themselves, was a happy crowd of gamers, former goth girls, Burning Man enthusiasts, sci fi geeks, students, coders and stoners. When Mr. Yang dropped a "Lord of the Rings" joke "It's like the Eye of Sauron is closing in!" he said of his momentum in the race they erupted in laughter. Hardcore Yang voters are not cool. And that is exactly their, and his, appeal. Among the partygoers on New Year's Eve were Jackie and Dave Farrell, former Bernie Sanders supporters who own a deli in Caldwell, N.J. Mr. Farrell wore a handmade knitted beanie stitched with the words "Yang," "Math," "Vote" and "2020"; Ms. Farrell had a pink Yang Gang baseball hat over her blue hair and a copy of the candidate's best seller, "The War on Normal People," in her purse. They fell in love inside an online role playing game called HoboWars. It's hard to imagine anyone at a Joe Biden event with that kind of meet cute. "He actually sold me a guild," Ms. Farrell told me. "It's sort of like a gang. Like a Yang gang." Talk to anyone in the Yang Gang for a few minutes and they'll inevitably tell you how they got Yanged. The story almost always begins with a younger person telling an older person to Google Andrew Yang. Which is exactly what happened with the Farrells. In August, a 23 year old employee in the deli approached Ms. Farrell to ask whom she was supporting. "I was like: 'Bernie, I guess. I supported him in 2016,'" she recalled. "And he goes, 'Why haven't you Googled Andrew Yang yet?" So she did. "I literally stayed up till 4 a.m. that night watching videos." Have you ever been the target of a Twitter mob? It's about as pleasant as a Brazilian wax in slow motion. The one thing that brings a small measure of comfort when you are in the digital cross hairs is the following assertion: The internet is not real life. It is true, at least for the time being, that a horde of pixels cannot transform itself into a horde of people. But the lie that there is a bright line between the online world and the "real" one has been well and truly debunked. Just ask any middle school girl shamed for an Instagram post, or any adult fired because of a bad tweet, or any Democrat hoping to oust Donald Trump and become the 46th president of the United States. Bernie Sanders may be fueled by his zealous fans on social media, but of all the Democrats running for president, the web means the most to Andrew Yang. Without it, his candidacy simply wouldn't exist. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." It's a classic underdog story: a political unknown, ignored by the mainstream media, sidestepping the pundits who had considered him a punchline. "In the early days there weren't many people in cable news clamoring to have me on their shows," he told me over bubble tea on a recent afternoon in his Manhattan campaign headquarters. "And so you seek out people who can reach lots of Americans." Those people were the ones with podcasts. "What launched us was Sam Harris," said Mr. Yang of his June 2018 appearance on Mr. Harris's show "Making Sense." It put him on the map: "I was invited to speak at the Wing Ding in Iowa" a major Democratic fund raising event "because one of the people there was a Sam Harris fan." Mr. Harris introduced him to Joe Rogan, a mixed martial arts color commentator who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. (Disclosure: I've also appeared on his show.) "Joe Rogan was the game changer," Mr. Yang said. "We raised tens of thousands of dollars a day for awhile there and a million bucks in a week." But it isn't simply that Mr. Yang cleverly used new platforms to his advantage. Sure, the podcasts gave him a big boost, but lots of politicians have used new media to expand their reach: Franklin Roosevelt commandeered the radio; Team Obama mastered the email blast; President Trump tears up Twitter. Mr. Yang's outsize success shows that the people who insist that Rachel Maddow has more influence over the American electorate than Mr. Rogan are lying to themselves about where cultural power in America is actually located. What Mr. Yang understands is that the old rules no longer apply and that flouting those rules is an energizing strategy. But while Donald Trump burned the whole house down, Andrew Yang is dunking on the system with a big smile. The Yang campaign prides itself on the heterodoxy of its supporters. "I poll 18 percent among college Republicans," Mr. Yang told me. "I've got a higher appeal among independents, libertarians and even some disaffected Trump voters than Joe Biden by the numbers, than Bernie Sanders by the numbers." One of his campaign slogans is "Not Left. Not Right. Forward." The writer Wesley Yang has suggested that the in between nature of Asian Americans the way they are often regarded neither as white nor as people of color allows them "to say and do things that white liberals are now afraid to say and do, which is to stand up for certain fundamental values." When you consider Mr. Yang's positions on some of the touchiest aspects of the culture war and imagine his views coming out of the mouth of a Michael Bennet or a Pete Buttigieg, you can easily see the truth of this insight. For instance: He's glad that America has become "less of a monoculture." (When he was a kid, he says, his own "efforts to be American included things like joining the wrestling team"; he was terrible at the sport.) But, he added, "I think there's a middle ground where you can't just say America is nothing and everybody run off and do your own thing." It's important, he said, to have a "common cultural context and even and this will be very controversial a common language of expression." I spoke to some of his many Asian American supporters, and this resonated with them. Michael Chen, a 19 year old Drexel student at one of the New Hampshire town hall events, said he appreciated that Mr. Yang, whose immigrant father grew up in a house with a dirt floor on a peanut farm, is not running on his identity: "You can be Asian American, you can be black American, you can be Latino American, but the common denominator is American. That's who he is." Mr. Chen was there with his dad, Jack. The elder Mr. Chen calls himself a "Yang junkie" but insists being Asian has "little to do with it." What animates him is the practicality of Mr. Yang's solutions. Mr. Yang believes in talking to people he disagrees with. In April, he appeared on "The Ben Shapiro Show," a no go zone for those who buy into the new politics of contamination that to sit next to a conservative like Mr. Shapiro is to tacitly endorse his ideas. "Thinking that I'm going to catch ideas from someone seems ludicrous to me," he said. Soon after the comedian Shane Gillis was hired by "Saturday Night Live," it was revealed that he had used racial slurs on podcasts, including describing Mr. Yang with an anti Semitic and racist epithet. Mr. Yang tweeted that he didn't think Mr. Gillis should be fired, writing, "We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive." The show didn't follow Mr. Yang's advice. I asked Mr. Yang, who ran one of the top test prep programs in the country before it was bought by Kaplan, about his views on affirmative action. Is Harvard doing to Asians in the 21st century what it did to Jews in the 20th? He told me that he himself was rejected from the school he wound up at Brown though he was amply qualified. But "if you have any kind of perspective," he said, you realize that "my life and my humanity depends on more than whether some institution decides to stamp my hand." "Arguing for higher representation of an already overrepresented group at least according to population standards would not be my first bone to pick," he said. Instead, he asked why Harvard, a university with a 40 billion endowment, is "opening locations in Shanghai but not Ohio or Michigan." The real question, he said, is, "Are you trying to advance our society or are you trying to advance global moneyed interests?" On New Year's Eve it occurred to me that, despite living in New York, which prides itself on being the most cosmopolitan city in the world, I had not been in a room with such a politically diverse group of people since Donald Trump was elected president. If there is a typical Yang voter it is a former Bernie Sanders supporter who feels that Mr. Yang understands the challenges of the 21st century better than a 78 year old socialist without a single app on his phone. Mr. Yang supported Mr. Sanders in 2016, before voting for Hillary Clinton in the general election ("I'm pro civilization," he said). He understands why young voters are drawn to Mr. Sanders. "If you're a young person you look up and say, 'What have I experienced from this capitalist system?' Corporate abuse, crashes, bailouts, greed, record levels of college debt." But he insists the best actor to improve people's lives is "not our government, it's us." "Bernie's saying, 'Let's stick it to the billionaires and all will be well,'" he said. "I'm saying, 'We need to rewrite the code, we need to rewrite the software.'" At a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., I spoke with Sunny Payne, a 23 year old Yang supporter who'd come in from Bangor, Me., and uses the pronoun they. "While I think Bernie Sanders is an amazing person," they said, "he has had the exact same policy stances for literally decades." It made so much sense that they moved in with Ms. Peterson's sister in Vermont, 10 minutes from the New Hampshire border, so they could volunteer full time for the campaign and promote him on their YouTube channel. "Everybody in our family has been Yanged. And they were all Trumpers," Mr. Peterson said. At a town hall event attended by some 300 people on New Year's Day, the first question so on brand I almost assumed it was a plant was about the metric system: "So, Mr. Make Americans Think Harder, can we count on President Yang to support the blessings of the metric system?" The crowd laughed. Amazingly, Mr. Yang came back with a thoughtful answer about how the metric system is safer, not least because it is more accurate for micro dosing baby medicine. To hear Andrew Yang talk is to understand why it is possible for people like the Petersons to support him: Unlike the president, he never demonizes other Americans. "The differences between us are pretty trivial compared to the things we share in common. And that's a fundamental message of the campaign: Able bodied, special needs, white, black, old, young, rural, urban, we're all going to get run over by this automation freight train," he said. "We need to human up and stop focusing on relatively trivial distinctions." At each one of the four campaign stops I went to, he asked the crowd why President Trump won. The audience called out answers: The media. Russia. Racism. Hillary. Facebook. Twitter. James Comey. No, said Mr. Yang. It's because "we blasted away four million manufacturing jobs" through automation in states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Iowa. What happened to manufacturing is coming to retail, restaurants and even accounting and the law, Mr. Yang insists. While Mr. Sanders suggests a federal government job guarantee, and Joe Biden suggests turning coal miners into coders, Mr. Yang says that work as we have known it is over. If we don't change anything, I asked him, where will be 50 years from now? Best case scenario? "We will see inequality at a staggering scale that right now most Americans would find unthinkable." And in the worst case? "The collapse of the government in its current form, political break up, and societal dysfunction that results in mass riots and violence." It's impressive that, for the most part, his good humor softens the bleak message he is conveying. It's a vision of the future one disputed as hysterical by many observers that makes President Trump's "American carnage" address look almost rosy by comparison. I caught up with Sunny Payne this week. Hearing Mr. Yang in person "lit the fire under me," they said as they drove around Anderson, S.C., after a day spent door knocking for him. They'd just spent a week in Iowa before realizing that "I wanted to spread the message to black voters and communities of color and I realized the best place for me to do that was in South Carolina." I don't know if a universal basic income is the best solution to the problem of inequality. I'm not particularly passionate about lowering the voting age to 16 or requiring police officers to get purple belts in jujitsu. I worry about whether someone with zero foreign policy experience can be the commander in chief. But as Bernie Sanders sells class rage, Joe Biden promises normalcy and Elizabeth Warren pushes a social progressivism so perfectly doctrinaire it seems tailored for five kids at Oberlin, Andrew Yang's cheerful iconoclasm is refreshing. If getting Yanged means that I believe that this curious campaign is a cause for that rarest thing in current American politics hope and that Mr. Yang is modeling how to harness the populist energy that otherwise threatens to tear us apart, then count me YangGang. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992, was the unlikely star of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland. Her 1959 painting "Untitled" was sold by the New York and London dealership Levy Gorvy at Art Basel. It carried an asking price of 14 million. BASEL, Switzerland The Art Basel fair is widely regarded as the event that defines the current state of the art market from a dealer's point of view. The 290 galleries exhibiting at the 49th edition, which previewed on Tuesday, were hoping the fair would attract the sort of demand for modern and contemporary art that had recently raised 2 billion from a week of auctions in New York. Art fairs create a very different dynamic from auctions. But within the first hour of the opening, the ground floor booths of the world's top dealers were, as usual, crowded with wealthy collectors, eagerly browsing and sometimes buying freshly available works by established names. Upstairs on the second floor, where dealers presented more new works by established and emerging artists, the footfall was conspicuously lighter. "It's a very good snapshot of the international art scene today, but it does represent a narrow band of practices," said Melissa Chiu, the globally minded director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., which attracted 475,000 visitors during her "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors" show last year. "It's representative of what's salable and what collectors are interested in," added Ms. Chiu. Increasingly, in today's polarized and "financialized" art world, those collectors are more interested in safe investment than emerging talent. This explained, in part, why the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992, was the unlikely star of the fair, which last year drew an attendance of 95,000. Last month in New York, auction prices for the artist reached a new high of 16.6 million. In addition, the powerhouse gallery David Zwirner announced that it had taken over representation of her estate. Such developments give confidence to investment minded art buyers and sellers. There were at least half a dozen paintings by Ms. Mitchell available in the ground floor "Galleries" section of the fair. For many, the pick of these was a sumptuous abstract on the booth of the New York and London dealers Levy Gorvy. Painted in Paris in 1959, and notable for its thick impasto with vivid passages of red, this was on consignment from a private collection at an asking price of 14 million. It sold by the end of the first day. "We had three reserves on this from the beginning," said Brett Gorvy, co founder and partner at Levy Gorvy. "A lot of clients need the confidence of other people's interest." Hauser Wirth said it found a buyer for the 1969 painting "Composition," from the artist's "Sunflower" series, again priced at 14 million, and David Zwirner sold a 1958 abstract priced at 7.5 million. Top galleries' ability to enhance the value of artists' estates was also underlined at the fair by Hauser Wirth. The gallery has recently taken over representing the estate of the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow, a Holocaust survivor who made arresting polyester resin sculptures evoking fragments of the human body that she called "awkward objects." A lamp whose light took the form of a breast was sold by Hauser Wirth at the fair for 950,000, some 135,000 more than the current auction high for the artist. Ms. Szapocznikow has an uncompromising vision, and so too does the Brooklyn based artist Doreen Garner, who featured in the fair's "Statements" section devoted to 12 solo presentations of emerging artists. The New York gallery JTT presented a disturbing 2018 mixed media installation of simulated hanging meat by Ms. Garner inspired by the horrific experiments conducted by the 19th century gynecologist James Marion Sims on unanesthetized women. "Red Rack of those Ravaged and Unconsenting," priced at 40,000, was bought by a European collector on the second day, according to the gallery. "Everyone is doing the same thing, with more or less success," said Sebastien Montabonel, a London based art consultant who specializes in advising institutions, referring to the proliferation of Mitchells, Condos, Longos and Kapoors on offer downstairs. "They're showing what the bank manager wants to buy," he added. But curators, as well as bank managers, are shaping the art market. "We're looking at the idea of global modernism, at multiple art histories," said Ms. Chiu of the Hirshhorn, whose museum, in common with many others, is rehabilitating the contribution of overlooked or marginalized artists. Last month, the auction market caught up with the museum world when African American painters set several new auction highs. Among them was the 2.2 million given for a 1974 portrait by Barkley L. Hendricks, who featured in last year's influential "Soul of a Nation" show at Tate Modern in London.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
DORTMUND, Germany All told, Marcel Schmelzer must have spent hours scouring the video, searching for some sort of tell, some kind of clue. Schmelzer, Borussia Dortmund's long serving left back, has performed the ritual 16 times over the last decade, building up an unparalleled expertise in the field. He has pored over countless clips. He was hoping to find something, anything that would give him a little advance warning, a bit of a head start. "I tried to find a pattern," he said. Thus far, though, he has drawn a blank. Even after all these years, even after all those hours of study, even after all those games, the defender who knows Arjen Robben better than anyone else still cannot work out when, exactly, he is going to cut inside. From the outside, it can seem that there are few more predictable players in world soccer than Robben. He has performed his calling card so often since he first joined Bayern Munich 10 years ago that it now bears his name not just in Germany, but also in France, where the act of cutting in from the right wing to shoot with the left foot is known as Le Robben. The player acknowledged last month that he was proud to have his "own move." What is most remarkable, though, is that his go to maneuver has lost none of its power; the only surprise, now, is that he appears to retain his capacity to surprise. Robben is, after all, deep into what will be his final season in Munich. He may make his final appearance in the Champions League for the club this week, should Bayern prove unable to get past Liverpool in a delicately poised last 16 tie on Wednesday at Munich's Allianz Arena. His time in Germany has been impressively successful: He has won six straight Bundesliga titles and a slew of domestic cups, and he scored the winning goal in the 2013 Champions League final. But it has also been admirably long. Robben is 35. It is 15 years since Jose Mourinho first signed him for Chelsea; 12 since he joined Real Madrid. He remains, though, an integral part of one of soccer's great powers, a winger of genuine menace, silken touch and searing speed. If Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are this era's leading men, then Robben is among the most prominent members of the supporting cast: instantly recognizable, a fixture on the game's most exalted stage, his signature move a regular feature of the latter rounds of the Champions League. It is so familiar that it barely needs description. Robben sprints up the right wing, one arm outstretched for balance, head pulled back, legs whirring. Then, as he approaches the penalty area, he feints to his right and drops his shoulder, only to shift his weight and slip off to the left. The ball never leaves his control; his opponent is left grasping at shadows. Robben glances up, and curls a shot across the goalkeeper. It does not always go in, of course, but it does so frequently enough that Schmelzer is not the only one to have spent considerable time trying to work out how to stop it. Here, though, comes the puzzle. Robben has been cutting left for years. His intent is apparent to all. Defenders know exactly what is in his mind, precisely what is coming, and yet remain powerless to stop it. To Robben, two factors explain his continued success. Timing, he said in an interview with a handful of British newspapers last month, is one key: "If you do it at the right time, it still surprises them." Variation, he has previously suggested, is equally important. "Doing the same thing over and over again without variation will not work," he said. "If you never pass or dribble or go on the outside, cutting inside will stop working." To Schmelzer who has had to deal with Robben in direct, face to face competition more than any other opponent there is something else, however. He has noticed that Robben has leaned more heavily on his favored move in recent years, using the wing as a decoy to "open the path to the center." It still works, though, because he "recognizes it when you block his path, and then he reacts accordingly; that is what makes him special." It is that ability to improvise that Ricardo Rodriguez identified, too. Rodriguez, a Swiss defender now with A.C. Milan, knows Robben almost as well as Schmelzer. According to Gracenote Sports, he has faced him 11 times during his career, in his time with Wolfsburg and F.C. Zurich. "He is very fast, especially with the ball," Rodriguez said. "That makes it very difficult to stop him. He is terribly fast when he cuts inside. The only way to try to stop him is to stay very close to him. If you don't, he can hurt you any time." There is a reason for that. In 2010, a cognitive scientist named Shanti Ganesh, based at Radboud University in the Netherlands, conducted a study into Robben's movement. She determined that Robben moves "a little faster than conscious knowledge." A defender's brain, Ganesh said, unconsciously follows Robben's feints, even if it knows, deep down, that they are only feints. In the time it takes to rectify the error, Robben as he was always going to, as everyone involved knew he was going to has cut inside and taken a shot. "The player can still correct himself," Ganesh said. "But that will always be a fraction too late." It is a theory that chimes with the empirical study conducted by Wendell, a Brazilian left back at Bayer Leverkusen. He has faced Robben 10 times since moving to Germany, behind only Schmelzer and Rodriguez. "Normally, it is the same move, but it is also the move we are tired of seeing, running after, and not getting the ball," he said. "There must be something he does. Maybe he waits for the last moment, I don't know. Most of the time, I try to wait for his move, so I have a bigger chance of getting the ball back. If I don't take my time, I have no chance. He'll dribble past me." Like Schmelzer, Wendell has spent more time than he might like watching clips of Robben. Like Schmelzer, he remembers training sessions in the days leading up to games against Bayern in which the team worked on how to defend him: His danger is such that it can only be dealt with collectively. Dortmund always had the same approach. "You need your teammates to back you up," Schmelzer said. "We have to be honest: It is simply not possible to take him out of the match for the full 90 minutes. Jurgen Klopp always taught us that the problem is not losing a duel, but not covering it." When Schmelzer decided to go in for a tackle, he relied on his central defender, Mats Hummels, and his defensive midfielder, Sven Bender, to scurry across in support. It was not always enough: Robben, too, was not acting alone; he could always call on the threat of Philipp Lahm or, later, Joshua Kimmich streaking up the right wing to collect the ball on the overlap. Schmelzer had to be conscious of that, too. Working out when to use the cut inside, and when it was merely a decoy, was always the challenge. Even after all these years, his opponents cannot tell when the move is coming. They have seen it before, and yet somehow every time feels like the first time. They can study the tapes, they can stay close, they can call for backup. If none of that works, Wendell said, there is one last resort: "I try to get the ball back," he said. "If I don't, then I have to commit a foul." It is when that fails as it so often has when he skips away too quickly, when he disappears in a flash, that Arjen Robben does what he has been doing for 15 years, does what he always does, and cuts inside.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The crater lake from the summit rim at the center of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, which was formed by an underwater volcanic eruption in 2014. Scientists studying the new land mass hope it can serve as a template for better understanding ancient Mars. NEW ORLEANS How is a little Pacific island like the planet Mars? In December 2014, an underwater volcano amid the islands of Tonga in the South Pacific erupted. When the eruption ended and ashes settled a month later, a new island had emerged, rising 400 feet above the ocean's surface. Scientists unofficially named the island Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, a concatenation of two older, uninhabited islands it nestles between. Since then, scientists have been tracking how the new land mass has eroded and shifted. What they have found could make the island a Rosetta Stone to understanding volcanic features on Mars that also appear to have erupted underwater, providing clues about when the red planet was wet several billion years ago. He and colleagues presented the findings on Monday at a news conference at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here. Networks of river channels chiseled into Mars persuasively argue that liquid water once flowed across the red planet, but the current thinking of many planetary scientists is that Mars remained frozen through much of its history, punctuated with episodes of melting and flowing water. Some Martian volcanoes that look as if they erupted underwater could offer clues. By analyzing these leftover structures, scientists may be able to tease out information like how deep the water was when the volcanoes erupted and how long water persisted. While Tonga is in the middle of the ocean, Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai and its neighbors sit on the rim of a large volcano that rises about a mile above the deep ocean floor. Thus the water around the island is shallow, perhaps similar to what existed around the Martian volcanoes. Since the eruption, satellites have repeatedly viewed the new Tongan island, not much more than a square mile in size, allowing scientists to generate detailed maps of the shifting topography. Islands formed by explosive underwater eruptions are usually short lived, the ash washed away by crashing waves. In the initial months of its existence, Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai shifted in shape quickly. Initially oval, the island's southern shore eroded rapidly, allowing the Pacific Ocean to break through into the lake at the center of the island. Steep walls around the lake appeared in danger of collapse, and it looked as if the island might have been about to vanish. But then a sandbar formed, sealing off the lake again, and the landscape stabilized. When conditions are right, chemical reactions with warm water cement volcanic ash into resilient rock, and the scientists speculate that similar reactions may have occurred on Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai. It is only the third such island in the last 150 years to survive more than a few months. They estimate that the island could now last for decades. The evolving island can be compared with erosion patterns around Martian volcanoes. If some of the volcanic shapes on Mars matched an intermediate state of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai, that could suggest that the water disappeared and the erosion stopped. "That will give us a window into some of those murkier times of Mars, when we think there were standing bodies of water," Dr. Garvin said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Anyone analyzing the image of African Americans on the narrow range of TV stations available in the United States 50 years ago could expect to see one of just two stark portrayals. "We were either victims or villains," said Chester Higgins, a veteran photographer whose portraits of Black America helped widen that perspective. "The media focused on poverty, riots and crime. They chose not to give any presence to the full character of our people." That's the dehumanizing image the show emphatically titled "Soul!" aimed to obliterate. Debuting on New York City's Public Television station WNET (then WNDT) on Sept. 12, 1968, with Higgins as its chief photographer, "Soul!" presented "the vitality and creativity of Black America in a way no other program ever had," said Felipe Luciano, the poet, activist and broadcaster who worked on its production team. "'Soul!' gave viewers the first genuine sense of the expansiveness of Black culture." Nona Hendryx, who shared an ecstatic performance with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles on the show's inaugural episode, said, "For me, 'Soul!' was must see TV." She added: "Being on the show gave you credibility." "It was Ellis's revolutionary idea to combine politics, poetry, music and fiction into one forum," said Melissa Haizlip, the host's cousin, who directed the film, which arrives on Friday via movie theaters' video on demand services. "Soul!" wasn't the only attempt to more fairly represent the Black experience in 1968. Two other shows debuted that year, "Say Brother" and the local New York program "Like It Is." But neither so richly showcased the range of Black creativity: the author James Baldwin, the poet Sonia Sanchez, the dancer Judith Jamison, the activist Kwame Ture all appeared. The show gave particular exposure to musicians popular stars like Stevie Wonder, Wilson Pickett and Earth, Wind Fire and underground artists, including McCoy Tyner and the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, whose unhinged performance culminated with him smashing a chair to pieces. When Luciano asked Haizlip why he invited the famously unpredictable Kirk on the show, he recalled his deadpan response: "Because he's totally crazy." Haizlip, who died in 1991 at 61 from cancer, had a long history of involvement in the progressive arts. Growing up in a middle class household in segregated Washington, D.C., he began producing plays in college at Howard University. Upon graduating in 1954, he headed to New York, where he produced plays with Vinnette Carroll at the Harlem Y.M.C.A., including one starring Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones. He also produced concerts in Europe starring Marlene Dietrich and dramas overseas penned by Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Haizlip's father didn't approve of his homosexuality, though some family members accepted him, including his cousin, Dr. Harold Haizlip, the father of the film's director and an empathic speaker in the documentary. Though Haizlip guided the show from the start, he wasn't its first host. Initially, the scholar Dr. Alvin Poussaint and the actress and educator Loretta Long split that role, but by the fifth episode the role fell to a somewhat reluctant, and awkward, Haizlip. His first appearance displayed his daring as well as a nonjudgmental nature, a quality that allowed him to make the audience comfortable with even the more controversial guests. One episode featured the political, proto rap group the Last Poets who purposely used racial slurs in their lyrics to counter degrading images of Black people and scotch the scourge of internalized racism. Haizlip, whose tone never wavered from calm, introduced the piece by saying, "I hope you'll accept it in the spirit with which it is intended." The ease of his tone inspired Melissa Haizlip to label him a "subtle subversive." Haizlip didn't simply provide a platform for creative and confrontational stars. He also encouraged entirely new collaborations between them. He convinced Amiri Baraka to perform his poetry with the jazz musician Pharoah Sanders, and asked the dancer George Faison to choreograph a spontaneous piece while Stevie Wonder performed "You and I." Likewise, he convinced Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, then working as behind the scenes songwriters, to become an upfront performing duo beginning with their appearance on "Soul!" "He saw something in us that we didn't see in ourselves," Simpson said in a phone interview. From the start, Haizlip positioned "Soul!" as the premiere showcase for the emerging Black Arts Movement. "This movement was the return to the Harlem Renaissance from 40 years before," said Higgins, who, after leaving "Soul!" became a staff photographer for The New York Times. Though the show had many white viewers, it never catered to the white gaze. "Ellis used his platform specifically for creating a conversation within the Black community," Hendryx said. "He very much wanted that dialogue to take place." Perhaps the show's edgiest episode featured Louis Farrakhan. While the minister's condemnation of homosexuality was well known, the host dared to ask his guest about his feelings on the issue. Farrakhan, who knew about Haizlip's sexuality, answered with a long "love the sinner/hate the sinner" speech, throwing in a charge that Black gay people were made that way by whites, a view Haizlip did not challenge. While Melissa Haizlip feels that the minister's statements "are awful, we wanted to focus on Ellis' bravery in asking the question," she said. As holistic as the show's approach to Black politics and culture was, it played a particularly historic role in its presentation of music. "Soul!" helped pave the way for the pivotal Black music program "Soul Train," a far slicker production that made its national debut three years later, in 1971. It also served as a precursor to the many musical offshoots of the BET network, including BET Jazz, BET Hip Hop, and BET Gospel. "Soul!" still stood out, with its thoughtful camera angles, mindful close ups and entirely live performances, which, together, banished glitz to hold the focus on the performers' art. The film also deals with the quirkier elements of Haizlip's character. Associates said he was given to fabulist tales, like telling one friend that he had sex with Princess Margaret, Lyndon Johnson and the Dalai Lama. "He sometimes had a unique relationship with the truth," Melissa Haizlip said with a laugh. "Soul!" was canceled in 1973, despite a vigorous letter writing campaign from its viewers and strong ratings across PBS stations nationally. According to a 1969 Harris Poll, more than half the Black families who owned a television set in New York watched "Soul!" Still, pressure came from within PBS to "integrate" the show, which would have diluted its purpose. After the show's end, Haizlip went on to produce arts events and he remained on the NET staff until his death. In the final episode of "Soul!" its curator offered its ultimate legacy. "Although it's over, it's not the end," Haizlip said. "Black seeds keep on growing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WILL Americans buy a 50,000 BMW with 4 cylinders under its hood? We'll soon find out. Facing tougher fuel economy rules, the German automaker will bring powerful, fuel efficient 4 cylinder versions of its 5 Series sedan and Z4 roadster to American showrooms in October. At roughly the same time, Mercedes will offer a C250 sedan and coupe, followed by an SLK250 roadster next year, its first 4 cylinder models here since 2005. For BMW, the 2012 528i sedan and Z4 sDrive 28i will become its first 4 cylinder models in the United States since the 318ti hatchback of 1999. To keep Americans from feeling shortchanged, the new 2 liter turbocharged TwinPower engine puts up big numbers: 240 horsepower and 260 pound feet of torque, compared with a 255 and 220 respectively for the 3 liter in line 6 it replaces in the Z4 28i. (The 2011 528i makes 240 horses and 220 pound feet with the same engine). With that much power and smoothness assured by twin counterrotating balance shafts the engine is a natural for BMW's smaller, more affordable models, including a redesigned 3 Series sedan that goes on sale next year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Is there anything as maddeningly, inherently unfair to an actor as an audition? Anything besides a review, that is? Certainly the actor auditioning for an upcoming production of "Othello" in Keith Hamilton Cobb's "American Moor" has reasons to seethe. How do you show everything you can bring to a complicated role in five minutes from a cold start? But this actor played by Mr. Cobb and likewise called Keith, presumably in acknowledgment of the semi autobiographical nature of the play has other beefs beyond the usual absurdity of the situation. If he's brought some of those beefs into the audition room along with his well thumbed script, what follows confirms his expectations. The director, when he eventually shows up, offers no apology for being late. His first comments are about Keith's height: "Man! You're tall!" Worse, he immediately sets out to explain, to an actor with twice his experience, exactly who Othello is. "What Shakespeare was trying to say here," he starts, as if the playwright were a buddy of his who couldn't speak for himself. He wasn't a buddy, of course. But like the cocky director, Shakespeare was a white man presuming to get inside a black man's head. For the rest of Mr. Cobb's fascinating but uneven play, which opened on Sunday at the Cherry Lane Theater, the thick racial tension of that premise predominates. It's about performing "Othello" but also, in a way, about being Othello: a black man trying to find a path to excellence in a society anxious to keep him in his place. "Purely by virtue of being born black in America," Keith says, "I know more about who this dude is than any graduate program could ever teach you." If only he had said this trenchant line to the director, "American Moor" might be a more dramatic play. Instead because Keith wants the job he stifles the comment, uttering it to himself in one of a series of interior monologues that take up most of the 90 minute run time. Of course he is speaking to us as well, and much of what he says is eye opening even in the midst of the theater's current conversation about cultural appropriation and racial representation. Though "Othello" is now played almost exclusively by black actors except at the opera house its directors are more often white. (Kim Weild, the director of "American Moor," is white, too.) What white directors may miss, or may even actively prevent a black actor from expressing, is at the heart of Keith's complaint, which grows in fury as it develops. That can be hard to watch, but the play justifies both the character's and the author's fury convincingly. "You think any American black man," Keith says, "is gonna play Othello without being in touch with his anger at you?" He points to the director, but seems to encompass the (mostly white) audience as well. What's more, this take on Shakespeare makes sense. The speech Keith is reading for the audition is the one in which Othello, before the Venetian senate, answers the charge that he has seduced Desdemona by witchcraft; the director a straw man of a role deftly managed by Josh Tyson urges him to perform it with "obeisance" and yet "obsession," foreshadowing the tragic climax four acts later. Keith, contending that the war hero Othello wouldn't need to perform a "minstrel show" for these men, rejects that interpretation in favor of something cooler, but it's part of the cleverness of "American Moor" that Keith is now in exactly the position the director imagines for Othello. He must demonstrate obeisance and yet obsession. The difference is that though both the actor and the general are mercenaries, Keith does not have a hero's authority. "Put on your poker face, Brotha ," he mutters before trying the speech as the director asked; Mr. Cobb is quite expert at showing us how that approach must fail. "American Moor" is full of connections like that. Just as Othello adjusts his language in speaking to the senators, Keith code switches between proper round tones and the casual "ain't" when moving from his exterior to his interior voice. And when his annoyance at the director begins to edge into what seems like paranoia and grandiosity, you may find yourself thinking about the same transition in the Shakespeare. But as telling as these connections are, they eventually come to seem both calculated and rote. Cycling at predictable intervals between Keith's long, interior harangues and his brief, prickly interactions with the director, the play acquires a ticktock rhythm that prevents the buildup of momentum. And since there is very little action in either mode you will wait in vain for a breakdown or fistfight both, lacking clear contours, grow muddy. Ms. Weild seems stymied in her attempts to pace and differentiate the material. Her production, for Red Bull Theater, is handsome enough, but does more to create generic atmosphere with its backstage grit and Venetian flourishes (the set is by Wilson Chin) than to help us understand what's happening in real space and time. This problem perhaps the result of overworking the material, which has been in development around the country since 2013 emphasizes the script's essaylike qualities at the expense of its playlike ones. It's all argument, and to the extent that we need to be thinking through its knotty issues, that's not entirely a bad thing. But arguments alone, even big, important ones, might as well be TED Talks; they don't engage the full capability of theater. Nor of actors. Keith, no doubt echoing Mr. Cobb's own feelings, has a love hate relationship with "Othello": mostly love, for its insight and grandeur, but also hate because of the way the character is dangled before black actors, regardless of skill or aptness, as the one Shakespeare role not Romeo or Richard III they were born to play. Truth is, Mr. Cobb probably was. The way he delivers Othello's senate speech, even while hedging to accommodate the director, suggests he'd be pretty great if he got the part. Unlike in "American Moor," he could then have the argument and the action all at once.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Forensic scientists have long used dead pigs and other animals as stand ins for humans to better understand how the body decomposes after death. Their research on decomposing animals has informed the views of forensic experts in police investigations. Expert witnesses have cited studies in court testimony, and the research has enjoyed star turns on television shows like "C.S.I." But recent work by a team of scientists at the University of Tennessee suggests that for anyone trying to draw conclusions about a person's time of death or the way that decomposition progresses, pigs may be a poor substitute for humans. The study, conducted at the university's famed Forensic Anthropology Center, widely known as the Body Farm, compared the decomposition rates of pigs, rabbits and humans during different seasons. The speed at which the three species decomposed differed significantly, the researchers found, and the human bodies varied more in how rapidly they decomposed than the other animals. "What we're saying is that to estimate the time since death for human forensic cases, our results indicate that human subjects are best, because the pigs and the rabbits do not capture the variation we saw in the humans," said Dawnie Wolfe Steadman, director of the center, who led the research. She added that pigs or other mammals might be suitable for some types of forensic research, like determining the types of insects or scavengers in a particular region. The study, financed by the National Institute of Justice, a federal Justice Department agency, was presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences earlier this year. For forensic scientists, estimating the time of death from human remains has always been a somewhat iffy business. In 1981, William M. Bass, a forensic anthropologist, founded the Body Farm, the first outdoor research facility of its kind in the nation, because some of his estimates had been off by decades or even longer. In one case, Dr. Bass was called to look at well preserved remains that had been dug up during the renovation of a house in Nashville in 1976. He estimated that the man had been dead for a few months. But the remains turned out to be those of a Civil War colonel, killed in battle in 1864. Eric Bartelink, a professor of anthropology at California State University, Chico, and the president of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, said pigs were often chosen for decomposition studies because they had little body hair and their fat ratios were similar to those of humans. "The assumption was that it can't be that different," Dr. Bartelink said, referring to the decomposition rate of pigs. A 2007 study conducted at the Tennessee facility appeared to support that view, finding that a range of insects, choosing between dead pigs and dead humans, showed "negligible preference," suggesting that pigs were not much different from humans in the way they decomposed. The results "confirmed the claim that pig carcasses can substitute for human corpses in research and training programs," concluded the authors, led by an entomologist, Dr. Kenneth G. Schoenly, who is now at California State University, Stanislaus. But that study included only one human and two pigs a very limited sample, as Dr. Schoenly and his colleagues noted. In contrast, Dr. Steadman's research tested decomposition in 15 pigs, 15 rabbits and 15 human bodies that had been donated to science that were divided into three trials of five subjects of each species left to decompose in spring, summer or winter. The remains were placed outdoors on the ground at least 10 feet apart at the research facility. The researchers monitored temperature and humidity, and cameras documented scavenging by raccoons or other animals. Insect activity and the degree of decomposition were recorded twice a day. But Dr. Steadman and her colleagues found that estimates based on a formula often used to calculate time since death correlated weakly with the actual time that the pigs, rabbits and humans in the study had spent decomposing, and that decomposition rates differed sharply among the species and from season to season. In spring and summer, the peak seasons for insects like blowflies that are attracted to carrion, the pigs decomposed more rapidly than the human subjects. But in winter, humans decomposed faster, largely as a result of scavengers like raccoons, which seemed to prefer the human remains. "All of the areas of interest for the pigs are in the trunk," Dr. Steadman said, "where with humans it's all in the limbs, and that affects the scavenging." Dr. Steadman said one of the most striking findings was how much the decomposition patterns of one human body differed from another. "All of us have various diets, our body composition varies widely, and it's not just weight," she said. "Individuals who have a lot of fat decompose faster than lean individuals." She added that chemotherapy drugs and other medications could also affect how quickly a body decomposes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
AMSTERDAM With populist politicians across the Continent attacking the European Union and negotiations underway for Britain to leave the bloc, the very idea of a unified Europe seems to be under threat. Some artists feel the union needs to rethink its public image and refine its communications strategy to combat these attacks. In other words: to rebrand Europe. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has teamed up with a friend, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, to encourage artists and other creative people to brainstorm ways for Europe to better present itself to the public. They put out a call in March for rebranding proposals, asking: "How can the European Union be valued by its citizens and be recognized as a force for good, rather than as a faceless bureaucracy?" They requested ideas "for communicating the advantages of cooperation and friendship amongst people and nations." More than 400 proposals from 43 countries poured in. A German fashion designer had an idea for a unisex jacket that would serve as a ticket for public transportation in all 28 member states. A dance troupe with members from Albania, France and Italy proposed filming folk dances at European historical sites that could then be broadcast or viewed with virtual reality goggles. A musician from Hungary proposed a new anthem, and dozens of artists sent sketches for new European Union flags and designs for new euro bills and coins. Several proposals suggested the bloc needed to develop a new sense of humor. The ultimate goal of the session "is not about a happy, clappy symbol, song or gesture" to sum up the benefits of a united Europe, Mr. Tillmans said. "It is about coming to a deeper understanding of how this misinformation around the E.U. works and how can we counter nationalism." Mr. Tillmans considers himself to be a product of a "Pan European experience." He grew up in West Germany, moved to England as an exchange student in the 1980s, and has spent much of his adult life between London and Berlin; his burgundy European Union passport gives him the right to live and work in any member country. When he saw the "nationalist wave crashing," as he put it, with the campaign for the referendum in Britain on European Union membership, and subsequent attacks on the bloc by right leaning politicians in other nations, he said, "I realized that there is an urgency to defend what I have enjoyed and what other previous generations have fought for. I feel that's my duty as a citizen." Mr. Koolhaas said that, having lived through the formation of the European Union, he had "seen and felt the difference between being part of a single nation and being part of something bigger." "Anyone who hasn't experienced that transformation in an almost physical way has a hard time getting excited by it," he said in an interview in his Amsterdam office. "How do you get excited about a given?" Mr. Koolhaas said that he ultimately wanted "to find a crystal clear language to talk about Europe and to give it a more coherent narrative." "I think that inevitably we also need to look at what's causing this kind of persistent problem of the difficulty of communicating about Europe," he added. The European Union communication department is primarily tasked with informing member states and journalists about legislation and political initiatives. It has recently introduced a campaign called "E.U. and Me" to help younger Europeans learn how they benefit from the union. Carolien Peeters, a project adviser on that campaign, said that she and other officials planned to attend Eurolab, adding that she hoped to leave with new perspective and inspiration. Mr. Albrecht said that he had organized the conference to give cultural leaders a voice. "If Europe is a culture in which traditionally artists, philosophers and writers have pointed the way forward, how are these people going to be heard?" he said. "One of the problems with Europe today is that there's hardly any place where real artists are given a place to talk about the future of the Continent and its culture. It's a black hole in the heart of the European project." Mr. Tillmans said that he wanted the project to move beyond talk and result in concrete action after the end of the conference. He added that it would be finished only when people felt "a sense of ownership with the goals of the E.U." Mr. Koolhaas said that Eurolab would not end with a single winning proposal, but rather a range of ideas that could be put into play. He said he wanted to focus on refreshing "the raison d'etre of Europe, and describe it in new words that do not repeat the old cliches or used up rhetorics."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When Bill Irwin talks about how the language of Samuel Beckett "has gone viral," he becomes a walking, writhing index of a contagion's symptoms. This is a grave and incurable condition in which the human body is at war with itself, its mind and the inescapable forces of gravity. So on the stage of the Irish Repertory Theater, where Mr. Irwin's captivating "On Beckett" opened on Wednesday night, you will find a terminally possessed creature speaking in contradictory utterances as seemingly involuntary as hiccups. And shrinking and growing like Lewis Carroll's Alice after drinking a Wonderland elixir. And melting into asymmetry, like a waxwork in a fire. You can't help pitying that suffering soul and shame on you laughing at him. You may also recognize, whether you want to admit it or not, your own infinitely divided self. Whatever virus has taken over Mr. Irwin, you know on some level that you, too, carry it in your bloodstream and have since the day you were born. This skillful demonstration of the disease known as being alive, as diagnosed by a master playwright, is one I would recommend to any actor, student of literature or fan of tragedy and comedy. "On Beckett," which was conceived and staged by Mr. Irwin as an (almost) one man show, carefully peels back the skin on an actor's fascination with, and interpretation of, its title subject. In doing so, the show illuminates the notoriously opaque writings of Beckett without ever betraying their ineffable heart. In like manner, Mr. Irwin opens up his bag of performer's tricks and even spills them out for our inspection. But when these discrete elements coalesce into a moment of radiant, living theater, you still find yourself thinking: "How does he do that?" It's a reminder of a crucial paradox of great art, in which precise craft becomes a vehicle for profound mystery. Mr. Irwin is an unusually amphibious stage star, equally skilled as a professional classic clown and an intense dramatic actor. He has won Tony Awards for both the commedia dell'arte frolic "Fool Moon" (with David Shiner) and for playing the embittered George in a 2005 revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Such a dichotomous nature proves handy in the consideration of Beckett, whose creative lineage embraces not only the literary convolutions of his onetime employer James Joyce but also the pratfalls of vaudeville. Mr. Irwin, in earlier appearances in Beckett works including stage adaptations of the prose pieces "Texts for Nothing" and two high profile incarnations of the monumental "Waiting for Godot" has affirmed how closely linked these two sides are. Here, he returns to "Texts" dense, elliptical meditations in which raw, swirling consciousness is given argumentative voice performing excerpts from them and the Beckett novels "The Unnamable" and "Watt." He also takes on roles from "Godot" (assisted by the show's only other cast member, the open faced, 14 year old Finn O'Sullivan). And while the program promises a vignette from Beckett's "Endgame," Mr. Irwin says he has since decided not to tackle that Goliath. Even with that omission, this is a replete bill of fare, filled with perceptive and appealingly humble observations on bringing Beckett's language to life. Mr. Irwin speaks of subjects as diverse and interrelated as the pronunciation of "Godot," Beckett's Irishness, his "sensitivity to violence," and the "mobility" of the pronouns he uses, turning self into splinters. There are showbiz anecdotes as well, accounts of working with actors like Nathan Lane and Robin Williams (in two different versions of "Godot"), as well as the directors Joseph Chaikin and Mike Nichols, whose voices Mr. Irwin channels in quicksilver impressions. But the crux of the show designed by Charlie Corcoran (the spare, geometric set) and Michael Gottlieb (the mutable lighting) is Mr. Irwin becoming a receptacle for the holy, and unholy, spirit of Beckett. His delivery early in the show of a fragment from "Texts for Nothing, 1" is a taut internal dialogue, a tower of Babel within a single mind. What follows becomes increasingly physical, as Mr. Irwin introduces props including a cane, variations on the bowler hat, bow ties, an unruly microphone and a mortar board. These are the tools of the pantomime funny man. But Mr. Irwin has always been expert in reminding us that the abiding appeal of silent clowns like Chaplin and Keaton is rooted in existential exasperation. As he says, "The word existentialism tends to put us to sleep but questions of being of survival keep us awake." And what an obstacle course it is, Beckett's rutted path from womb to tomb. His physical world, with help from the unwieldy instrument known as the human body, trips up its inhabitant at every step. Small wonder that moving even an inch becomes a battle against inertia. Mr. Irwin traces this wrestling match with physical exactitude, pointing out that Beckett was "a writer acutely attuned to silhouette." In this sense, angles make the man watch Mr. Irwin instantly assume a burden worthy of Atlas with drooping shoulders and buckling knees but so do clothes. Putting on baggy pants, he says, "taps into some cultural memory in your eye, in my legs." He shows us what he means, by trying to ascend a simple, low platform, which suddenly seems determined to thwart him. At a certain point, you come to see Mr. Irwin's own shifting struggle with the elusiveness of Beckett's language as a noble subset of that writer's broader sense of the tragic human comedy, its Sisyphean "toil and play." Those are the words that conclude the first "Text," from a passage that Mr. Irwin savors. "Among other things," he says, "they seem like a perfect definition for working in the theater: so much talking, so much listening that's what we do here so much toil and play." The toil, according to Beckett, may be tedious and futile. But Mr. Irwin also gives us the pure, energizing joy in the playing of it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Out With the Old, and in With La Biennale Paris Global competition has brought some big changes to the latest edition of the venerable art fair La Biennale Paris. Think of it as an old school Citroen with a brand new engine. The modernization of the fair, which will take place Sept. 11 to 17 at the Grand Palais, starts with the very name. It was founded in 1959 by Andre Malraux, the famed novelist and France's minister of cultural affairs, and for most of those years it was known as the Biennale des Antiquaires. But the reference to antiques dealers has now been discarded, lest it sound musty and fusty. And despite the current and former monikers, it is not a biennial anymore. With this edition, it becomes a yearly event. Chalk this last shift up to an art marketplace that has more players, options and distractions than ever. "In order to compete as a major fair, you have to be part of the annual calendar or someone will take that slot," said Christopher Forbes, the fair's new president. Mr. Forbes, the vice chairman of Forbes Media and an art buyer who has frequented the Biennale in the past, is himself an example of the changes. He is the first American to be named president of the fair, and it is no accident that he is from a country full of deep pocketed collectors. "If I can get more Americans to come to the show, I dare say I will have done my job," said Mr. Forbes, who is known as Kip. Ninety four exhibitors will display their wares from antiques to jewelry, clocks to Pop Art at the Grand Palais. By art fair standards, that is still fairly intimate, since some events have more than 200 participants. The Biennale is aiming for a more international feel over all. Roughly a third of the exhibitors are from outside France. "Hopefully that trend will continue," Mr. Forbes said. "Being more international makes all the dealers up their game." Traditionally, the fair has had a strong French flavor. "We have the best galleries in Paris, but we also want important galleries from all over the world," said Mathias Ary Jan, the president of the National Federation of Antiques Dealers, known as the SNA, which organizes the fair. One of the most significant changes for the Biennale is something that happens behind the scenes, which collectors may not notice. The vetting, or examination and evaluation of the pieces offered for sale, has gotten much stricter. And it is no longer done by the SNA, as it was in years past. Now it is handled by an independent committee of experts, none of whom show at the fair, and whose decisions cannot be reversed by the SNA. "We can't do the vetting and do the Biennale, too," Mr. Ary Jan said. "We needed something independent. Collectors want transparency." An added attraction this year is a non selling exhibition called "The Barbier Mueller Collections: 110 Years of Passion." Assembled by four generations of the Barbier Mueller family, it features works by Georg Baselitz, Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun and Jeff Koons, along with Roman antiquities and tribal art from New Guinea. Alexis Lartigue of Paris, one of the youngest dealers at the event, is also a newcomer. "I go to the Biennale every year, and I always wished I would have a booth there one day," said Mr. Lartigue, who opened his modern and contemporary art gallery in 2006. "For me, it's good news." Mr. Lartigue said that, compared with other longstanding fairs, the Biennale was ahead on style points. "The booths are better decorated," he said. "Each is different, and you have a real atmosphere. People like that." No matter the surrounding decor, the works themselves have to galvanize the attendees, and Mr. Lartigue is offering about 15 pieces, a range of painting, sculptures and works on paper. The lineup includes what he called a "masterpiece" by the French painter Fernand Leger (1881 1955), "Yellow Cameo Composition" (1931). "It's never been at auction before, and that will interest collectors," he said. Plenty of veteran galleries remain year after year, providing continuity for the fair amid the recent changes. Brame Lorenceau still deals in the 19th century art that made its name, but often the choicest older pieces do not make it to the Biennale. "When we have the right level of Impressionist art, we sell it privately," Mr. Lorenceau said. "The fair works tend to be more modern. That's the taste of the day." "Sol LeWitt created his own language," Mr. Lorenceau said of the pioneering conceptual artist. "There's been increasing recognition of his art nowadays." That abstract work will be alongside a few older pieces, including a set of late 19th century translucent glass paste friezes by Henri Cros (1840 1907). Cros was looking back even further with his art, which often has mythological subjects. "He has a singular approach to history," Mr. Lorenceau said. "It's a return to ancient time." And despite the prevailing taste these days for newer works, he added, "There are still a lot of collectors who favor that." Jewelry is a small but sparkly category at the fair, with four dealers. The New York based jewelry designer Anna Hu, also a first time exhibitor, will show 20 of her creations at the Biennale, including a bracelet and two necklaces influenced by Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" that are made from sapphires, diamonds and other precious stones. "When I saw Monet's garden, it was an inspiration," Ms. Hu said of the artist's estate in Giverny. "I stayed there from 8 a.m. until 7 at night. I feel visually connected to it." Organizers hope for a similarly glamorous air during the Biennale's annual signature event for V.I.P.s, a dinner for 900 under the Grand Palais's barrel vaulted glass roof that will require about 200 people to make and serve it. It is an example of what the organizers see as a primary point of difference for the Biennale, especially compared with the art fairs in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Basel, Switzerland, two cities not known for romance. "For me, Tefaf and Art Basel are big and important, but just for business," Mr. Ary Jan said, referring to the European Fine Art Fair. "We have the Grand Palais dinner, the French touch. It's not just a show." Mr. Forbes, a francophile who owns a chateau in Normandy that houses some of his collection relating to what he called "France's least popular monarchs," had his own take on that idea. "One of the greatest draws is the city of Paris itself," he said. "It has that je ne sais quoi."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Many colleges and universities are struggling to reopen safely and offer in person classes during the pandemic. At risk is not just the health and safety of their students, faculty and staff, but in many cases the financial viability of the institutions themselves if they have to go to remote learning, which could prompt students and their families to demand reductions. Financial hardships are inevitable for all but the largest universities with multibillion dollar endowments, and a lack of paying students could force some closings. That raises questions for supporters who have made donations to these colleges using the most popular planned giving tool: a charitable gift annuity. These annuities are similar to commercial annuities, with one key difference. In a typical annuity, you would invest a sum and in return receive a regular payment until your death. After that, what's left goes to the insurance company as profit. With charitable gift annuities, donors still receive regular annuity payments, but whatever is left over goes to the nonprofit as a gift. They have been working this way since 1843, when the American Bible Society underwrote the first such charitable annuity. Michele Murphy, a retired lawyer in Palm Desert, Calif., who has set up charitable gift annuities at two of the University of California campuses Los Angeles and Riverside as well as Loyola Law School, said she was worried about their fate. "We felt comfortable with the risk at that time," she said. "We understood we were 'first in line' creditors if anything happened to these institutions, but felt that if the entire University of California system and/or Loyola Marymount University were in trouble, we would have a lot more to worry about." But with colleges and universities struggling during the pandemic, Ms. Murphy worries that her annuities may not provide guaranteed retirement income. "In my wildest dreams and speaking as an extremely risk averse person, I would never have expected that the future of these schools or our C.G.A.s could be in danger because of a pandemic," she said, using shorthand for charitable gift annuities. With all of the things to be concerned about right now, one bit of reassurance is that experts say these annuities should be relatively safe. Few nonprofits have defaulted on their annuity obligations. Experts say that donors should remain vigilant in how they select the nonprofits that will set up these annuities, but that the risk is still low. The total market for charitable gift annuities is about 4.3 billion, with about 1,600 charities issuing them, according to Dr. Clontz, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on charitable gift annuities. He said the number of these annuities was larger than any other so called split interest charitable vehicle, an investment that provides payments for the donor now and leaves what's left to the charity later. In fact, charitable remainder annuity trusts, which accomplish the same thing but are often larger and more complicated to set up and give the donor more control, have a total value of about 6.4 billion, but only about 14,000 exist, compared with over 117,000 charitable gift annuities. "The market is quite large relative to other lifetime income gifts," Dr. Clontz said. What ensures that the annuity payments will be made is the nonprofit itself, and more specifically the unrestricted cash and marketable investments that it has. Just as a commercial annuity is only as good as the solvency of the insurance company that created it, the same holds true with a charitable annuity and the nonprofit organization receiving the gift. Regulations of nonprofits that offer these annuities vary by state. California, New York and New Jersey are considered the most restrictive, with California requiring nonprofits to establish trusts to hold the annuity money, said Stephanie Buckley, senior regional fiduciary manager for philanthropic services at Wells Fargo Private Bank. That trust ensures that the annuity assets are kept separate from the general assets of the nonprofit. Most nonprofits are also guided by the American Council on Gift Annuities, which establishes ethical guidelines but also sets the rates that annuities pay. Those rates ensure that the donors will be paid an annuity stream based on actuarial calculations of their age. That rate presumes that about half of the donation will be left for the nonprofit when the donor dies. A recent survey from Crescendo Associates, which creates software for charities, found that over 80 percent of nonprofits followed the recommended rates. The other rate that matters is the investment return; the recession has driven those rates down. That could be bad for donors expecting a tax deduction on what is eventually left to the nonprofit because a lower assumed rate of return means more money that needs to be paid back as an annuity and less left over at the end, said Russell James, a professor of personal financial planning at Texas Tech University. In an examination of over 100 years of charitable gift annuities, Dr. Clontz said, only a handful of organizations defaulted on their obligations or had their annuity pools moved to different nonprofits when they ran afoul of the law. In all of these cases, the organizations were not operating as legitimate nonprofits. Instead they were selling gift annuities with false promises as a way to enrich themselves. Several were outright Ponzi schemes that offered unsupportable returns. "They were shell entities," Professor James said. "There was no hospital there. There was no university there. There was nothing other than these names selling annuity products as if they were nonprofit organizations. In those cases, we didn't have a normal operating charity." If anything, reputable nonprofits treat charitable gift annuities too cautiously. Joe Bull, the president elect of the American Council on Gift Annuities and previously a gift officer at Ohio State University, said nearly all institutions that adhered to the council's guidelines did not touch the annuity amount until the donor died. "The annuity is backed by all the assets of the organization, and the charities don't want to have to dip into other assets to make the payments," Mr. Bull said. For many organizations, the gift annuities are treated like bequests that are locked in. Consider George Washington University, which has an endowment of 1.7 billion. Charitable gift annuities constitute just 1 percent of its annual giving, and the university invests the entire amount of the annuity contract in its reserve fund, said Courtney L. Tsai, assistant vice president in the office of planned giving, development and alumni relations. One downside is that donors don't get to see what their gift does while they're alive, but a gift annuity is a start or part of a bigger giving strategy. "Many of our gift annuitants also make outright gifts during their lifetime and even create endowment funds during their lifetime," which the remainder of the annuity can go toward, Ms. Tsai said. Dr. Clontz put together a list of four questions to ask any nonprofit before setting up a charitable gift annuity. One, look at the institution's charitable filings and determine how much of its assets are unrestricted; this entails excluding all the restricted endowment funds but also the value of buildings and equipment. Two, check that the institution is part of the American Council on Gift Annuities none of the institutions that turned out to be scams were, he said. Three, make sure the institution is not engaged in any large scale, active litigation that could result in its assets being frozen to pay out a judgment. And last, do not create an annuity with an organization that offers commissions to other organizations that refer annuity business to it. "That's how the scammy ones built assets so quickly," he said. "Surprisingly, most told you they were doing that." For those still wary of colleges closing during the pandemic, Ms. Buckley of Wells Fargo said many of the smaller ones most at risk might not have charitable gift annuity programs, given the complexity of setting up and managing them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Bishnu Virachan was a bicycle deliveryman for a grocery store in Queens. With New York City locked down, he was busier than ever. But in early April, as he was watching television, he felt "a pain in my heart." It frightened him, but he did not go to the emergency room. Mr. Virachan, 43, was even more afraid of that. "What can I do? What can I do?" he asked. "Everywhere, the coronavirus." After a few days, pain overrode fear and he went to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Doctors discovered a nearly complete blockage of his left main coronary artery. A surgeon opened the artery, but Mr. Virachan was left with a weakened heart. Had he waited much longer, doctors said, he would have died. Fear of the coronavirus is leading people with life threatening emergencies, like a heart attack or stroke, to stay home when ordinarily they would have rushed to the emergency room, preliminary research suggests. Without prompt treatment, some patients, like Mr. Virachan, have suffered permanent damage or have died. Emergency rooms have about half the normal number of patients, and heart and stroke units are nearly empty, according to doctors at many urban medical centers. Some medical experts fear more people are dying from untreated emergencies than from the coronavirus. "Where are the patients?" asked Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist there. "That can't be normal." One of the few was a man who lives in Cleveland. According to Dr. Nissen, the man felt chest pain while doing push ups, but feared going to the hospital because there might be coronavirus patients there. He stayed home for a week, growing weaker out of breath with the slightest exertion, his legs swelling. Finally, on April 16, he went to the Cleveland Clinic. What should have been an easily treated heart attack had progressed to a life threatening disaster. He survived after a dicey operation and spent nearly a week in intensive care, including several days on a ventilator, Dr. Nissen said. The inpatient stroke unit at Stanford University Medical Center in California usually has 12 to 15 patients, said its director, Dr. Gregory Albers. On one recent day in April, there were none at all, something that had never happened. "It's frightening," Dr. Albers said. Yet few Covid 19 patients have been admitted to the hospital, and people needing emergency treatment have little to fear. "We prepared for an onslaught, but it has not arrived," Dr. Albers said. According to Dr. Samin Sharma, who heads the cardiac catheterization lab at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, the number of heart attack patients fell from seven in February to three in March. So far in April there have been only two. It's not just the United States. Dr. Valentin Fuster, editor of the Journal of American College of Cardiology, said he is getting so many papers from around the world on the steep decline in heart attack patients in hospitals that he simply cannot publish them all. A hospital in Jaipur, India, for example, that Dr. Sharma owns, treated 45 heart attack patients in January, he said. In February, there were 32, and in March, 12. In April, so far the number is just six. Researchers in Austria estimated that in March 110 citizens died from untreated heart attacks, compared with 86 who died of Covid 19. They based their calculations on a precipitous decline in patients going to hospitals, the expected number of heart attacks in Austria, and the mortality rates of untreated heart attacks. "I am very very worried that we are creating a problem that will have long term consequences for the health of the community," said Dr. Richard A. Chazal, medical director of the Heart and Vascular Institute at Lee Health in Fort Myers, Fla., and a past president of the American College of Cardiology. Could it be that there actually are fewer medical emergencies now? Dr. Fuster speculated that perhaps people are healthier because they are eating better, exercising more and under less stress now that so many are working from home. And, of course, the air is cleaner in urban areas. Other experts doubt that better health habits could have such dramatic and immediate effects. Far from eating better, Dr. Nissen said, many patients tell him they are overeating comfort food. There is no evidence that people are exercising more, and people are hardly under less stress. "They are scared to death," Dr. Nissen said. And, he said, even if some people changed their habits, studies have failed to find any immediate effects of short term lifestyle changes on heart attack rates. At the moment, it is nearly impossible to know who is not showing up in emergency rooms, and why, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University. "You can't find the dog that doesn't bark," he said. But you can get a sense from the patients who do show up, even belatedly. Kaplana Jain, 60, of Cresskill, N.J, was watching CNN late at night on April 18. She got up to go to the bathroom and collapsed on the floor. Her blood sugar was elevated, and her family called 911.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
HINDMAN, KY. The heritage of handcrafted stringed instruments runs deep in this tiny Appalachian village (pop. 770) stretched along the banks of Troublesome Creek. The community has been known as the homeplace of the mountain dulcimer ever since a revered maker, James Edward ("Uncle Ed") Thomas, pushed a cartload of angelic sounding dulcimers up and down the creek roads, keeping a chair handy to play tunes for passers by. Music is the region's lifeblood: Locals like to say that "you can toss a rock and hit a musician." But these strong cultural roots have been tested by the scourges that devastated Eastern Kentucky, an early epicenter of the opioid crisis. Hindman is the seat of Knott County, one of the poorest regions in the United States and one that continues to grapple with overdose death rates that are twice the national average. It is also in the top 5 percent of counties most vulnerable to the rapid spread of H.I.V. and hepatitis C, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The decline of the coal industry has brought even more economic hardship to these isolated hills and hollows providing fertile ground for Appalachia's signature epidemic. But last year, an unlikely group of renegades suspender wearing luthiers from the Appalachian Artisan Center here embarked on a novel approach to the hopelessness of addiction called Culture of Recovery, an apprentice program for young adults rebounding from the insidious treadmill of opioids and other substances. Participants, about 150 so far, learn traditional arts like luthiery the making and repairing of stringed instruments under the tutelage of skilled artisans. They come to the program through a partnership between the Artisan Center; a local residential rehab center for men, and the Knott County Drug Court, which is just down the block from the Appalachian School of Luthiery. The factors that have led to the crisis here have followed a circuitous route, like the hairpin turns on mountain roads. They include a sky high poverty rate, a legacy of accident prone industries, high incidences of childhood trauma, low educational attainment and a fatalism springing from a lack of opportunity and geographic isolation. These treacherous social determinants laid out a welcome mat for Big Pharma. "That Oxy is vicious," said Randy Campbell, the Artisan Center's executive director, referring to Oxycodone. He drove up a steep road to the family cemetery where his 64 year old brother, James Turner Campbell, was laid to rest from addictions to that drug and alcohol. "It grabs the educated as well as the noneducated." The art of crafting an instrument by hand requires keen focus, attention to detail and commitment to a goal qualities that can help during recovery, in concert with therapy, peer support groups and other rehabilitation work, experts say. The process is not linear: most people relapse at least once, said Kim Cornett Childers, a Circuit Court judge in Knott County who presides over the drug court. Some opt for other activities like yoga, adult education or prayer groups. The power of Culture of Recovery, Judge Childers said, is the reconnection with the region's resilient artistic heritage. "Many clients have never had anyone tell them they're proud of them, or done something they're proud of," she said. "Now they're creating something tangible and beautiful." One of the graduates is Nathan Smith, 39. Now a tenacious and promising luthier, Mr. Smith was swept up in a typical pattern in which the physical demands of his job shoveling coal and operating machinery led him beyond his doctor's initial prescription for pain pills. He began buying them off the street "It helped me work and not hurt as much," he explained and then started reselling the pills to support his habit. The result was a drug trafficking charge, a brief stint in jail and then entry into the Court's intensive, supervised outpatient treatment program, which lasts 18 months and often more. Mr. Smith gravitated to luthiery, making his first dulcimer, played on the lap, and apprenticing at the school for nearly a year. "I fell in love with it real quick," he said. "It is something I had a passion for that I didn't even realize." He has been off drugs for two years and four months and is employed full time with the Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company, a new nonprofit founded by Mr. Naselroad in partnership with the Artisan Center. Two of the company's six full time employees are former Culture of Recovery apprentices. All are in feverish deadline mode, honing the high end artisanal guitars and mandolins made from Appalachian hardwoods that they will be taking to the National Association of Music Merchants trade show in Anaheim, Calif., on Jan. 16. The main bridge is named for Jethro Amburgey (1895 1971), a dulcimer maker who taught generations of students at the historic Hindman Settlement School, which emphasizes Appalachian traditions, especially literature. In true mountain style, Mr. Amburgey was related to "Uncle Ed" Thomas (1850 1933), credited with pioneering the Appalachian, or mountain, dulcimer with its heart shaped sound holes and an hourglass form one maker described as "shaped like a lady with a quiet and lonely sound." Thomas was also a distant cousin of Jean Ritchie (1922 2015) in nearby Viper. During the folk revival from 1940s to mid 60s, she did more than anyone to popularize the dulcimer in Greenwich Village and beyond. "Hey, what do you call that contraption?" Woody Guthrie asked her at the 1948 "Spring Fever Hootenanny" in New York, according to her book "The Dulcimer People." "Why, you can get more music out of them three strings than I can get out of twelve!" Ritchie set the stage for the dulcimer's broader embrace by musicians including the Rolling Stones (in "Lady Jane") and Joni Mitchell's irresistible album "Blue." The company joins a movement across Kentucky to provide "recovery friendly" employment. "Our work force is dying," said Beth Davisson, the executive director of the Kentucky Chamber Workforce Center, referring to government data showing drug companies saturated the state with 1.9 billion pain pills roughly 63 pills per person per year between 2006 and 2012, which were then prescribed with wanton abandon. By 2018, statewide prescription drug monitoring programs were starting to have an effect, with overdose deaths beginning to decline slightly. But the abuse of prescription drugs, along with heroin and fentanyl, remains a critical public health issue. 'A Talent You Never Knew You Had' The idea for Culture of Recovery was inspired by Earl Moore, now 43, whose addiction began with buying OxyContin on the street, ultimately leading to several relapses, two suicide attempts and jail time for the illegal use of a credit card. His father left the family when Mr. Moore was young. "I took that personally," he said. "I found I could do substances and erase all that." But Mr. Moore had an affinity for woodworking inherited from his forebears. He found out the Appalachian School of Luthiery had opened in town and approached Mr. Naselroad. "Earl said, 'I know you have a felony background check, and I'm not going to pass it,'" Mr. Naselroad recalled. "But he told me he thought it would save his life." One goal of Culture of Recovery is to reduce the stigma around addiction. Mr. Moore apprenticed with Mr. Naselroad for six years, building some 70 instruments and forming a lasting bond. He went on to earn a master's degree in cybersecurity, his full time career. "Addicts are the best hustlers," he said. "I've spun it to the good." Kim Patton, 36, now the pottery instructor, went through the drug court after being indicted three times for trafficking. She was molested by a family member at age 14. "I never felt good about myself," she said. "Anything you asked the doctors for, they would give." Now she turns recovering addicts toward pottery making and sells her own work on Facebook and Instagram. Culture of Recovery led her to discover "a talent you never knew you had till you got clean and sober," she said. Her T shirt reads: "From Drug Addiction to Pottery Addiction." "Without art, God knows where I'd be at," she said. Culture of Recovery is at the forefront of nascent efforts by museums and other cultural institutions to address the addiction crisis. Doris Thurber, an artist in Frankfort, Ky., started a program for women now called "Yes Arts" four years ago after the overdose death of her 27 year old daughter, Maya Rose. In Manchester, N.H., The Currier Museum of Art has teamed up with the Partnership for Drug Free Kids on a program for parents and siblings dealing with a loved one's substance use. With an art educator, the families discuss a painting or sculpture with a salient theme, and the contemplative nature of the space is a balm. "We have a big social crisis in New Hampshire," said Alan Chong, the museum's director. "This is more important than a blockbuster show, to be blunt about it." In Hindman one evening, a harvest moon laying heavy in the clouds, Mr. Naselroad, the master artisan, donned a red cowboy shirt and a Stetson to host the "Knott Downtown Radio Hour," a monthly show on WMMT FM a "Hindman Home Companion" of sorts. One of the highlights is a "Songwriters Circle" of tunes written by those in recovery. Last month, the show was recorded at Hickory Hill, which was built on an old strip mine site. Amid living room beams inscribed with words like "self discipline and "perseverance," "the Hickory Hill boys," as Mr. Naselroad calls them on air, sang about regret, loss, longing and especially faith. One poignant anthem to the Lord was called "Calm a Storm in Me." Nevertheless, the storm of addiction is powerful. Dan Estep, who teaches blacksmithing for the program, lost a student to a fatal overdose recently. The man was in his mid 30s and the father of three. "This particular guy grew up with his whole family on drugs," Mr. Estep said. "It must be like quicksand." Mr. Estep, 62, who has been a blacksmith for 40 years, said that teaching his craft to people in recovery is the most important work he has ever done. "We can give it all we've got, but in the end it's up to the individual," he observed. "Humanity is the biggest project of all."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A STUDY prepared for the World Bank Transport Office in Beijing released today makes clear the urgency of China's transition to electric cars. According to "The China New Vehicles Program: Challenges and Opportunities," prepared by PRTM, a management consulting firm, China's soaring consumption of imported oil could stifle the country's economy, while emissions from petroleum powered vehicles could choke its cities with air pollution. Seventy percent of Beijing's carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions come from transportation sources. China's oil consumption is expected to rise to 11.6 million barrels per day by 2020, from 7.6 million in 2007. Half its oil currently is imported. "This was recognizance," said Shomik Mehndiratta, lead transport specialist at the World Bank. "Usually, we focus our urban transport work on walking, cycling, public transportation and land development to minimize auto travel, and we leave technology completely out of it. But all the analysis suggests that 50 percent of global carbon reductions in transportation will come from technology." Any financial support from the World Bank would be dwarfed by the Chinese government's commitment to spend 15 billion on building and selling electric cars in the next five years. "The money is not the key here," said Oliver Hazimeh, head of the global e mobility practice and a partner at PRTM. "The bigger notion of this report is helping China figuring out what else needs to be addressed in the overall ecosystem to make E.V.'s work. It is a technical, business modeling, policy setting support role more than a financial one." As dire as the need to go electric is for China, the challenges in making the transition to electric vehicles are even more monumental, according to the PRTM study, and similar to the situation in the United States. The first several hundred plug in cars started rolling on to American roadways earlier this year, but availability of vehicles is just the beginning. The long list of challenges in China (and the United States) includes uncertainty about how much car charging infrastructure is needed; lack of standards for how and where vehicles will be charged; and the need for industries that have traditionally not worked together utilities and auto companies, for example to forge partnerships. Then there's the elephant in the room: how to gain consumer acceptance for battery powered cars when their driving range is shorter than gas or diesel vehicles but their costs are significantly higher. Helping China to reach massive scale of electric car production is expected to bring down those costs in the next five to 10 years. According to Mr. Hazimeh, in both China and the United States different regions and constituents are each developing their own standards for vehicle and battery production, charging infrastructure and related business models. "In China, you can't just go in as we do in the U.S., and say here's the money for parts solutions without looking at connecting the elements," he said. The study recommends roughly 50 million in loans for pilot projects, from building charging infrastructure and related information networks to evaluating the commercial feasibility of re using E.V. batteries in secondary markets. The consequences extend beyond national borders, as China is now the world's largest auto market and is expected to become the world's largest producer of electric car batteries and drive systems. The Chinese automotive market is expected to grow to 30 million vehicles per year by 2030, from 12.9 million vehicles in 2009. "The next stage is to take the lessons learned, and put it into a more coordinated aligned roadmap," Mr. Hazimeh said. "Otherwise, you face a fragmentation of solutions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Now "Elliot wants to start a new chapter in his life," Ms. Chan said, adding that he would help look for his replacement and consult with Facebook's leadership on key projects. Mr. Schrage, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in a statement posted on Facebook that "leading policy and communications for hyper growth technology companies is a joy but it's also intense and leaves little room for much else." His departure was earlier reported by Recode. Several executives have recently left Facebook, or have said they plan to. In March, The New York Times reported that Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief information security officer, intended to leave after disagreeing over how to handle the threat of Russian agents' using the social network to influence American voters. And Jan Koum, who sold the messaging app WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014, said in April that he was leaving the company after becoming increasingly concerned about its position on user data. Facebook faced particular criticism early this year when it waited more than five days to issue a response after The Times and others reported that Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the data of millions of Facebook users. The company also was faulted for being too slow to reveal the extent of Russian manipulation of Facebook during the 2016 American presidential election. Mr. Schrage was known for often taking a wait and see approach on major issues, according to two people who have worked with him at Facebook. After the Russian manipulation, Mr. Schrage initially resisted the idea of an internal investigation, arguing that it could open Facebook up to further criticism, one of the people said. It was only when the evidence of meddling became overwhelming that Mr. Schrage agreed that the company had to issue a statement, the person said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The main premiere of the current City Center season of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater "Odetta," choreographed by Matthew Rushing feels less like a single dance composition than a succession of danced illustrations to a jukebox commemoration. The Odetta of the title is the great African American singer whose full name was Odetta Holmes; her voice alone, so gravely lustrous, gives the piece drama. In her singing, we hear beauty, eloquence, suspense. Her words help us recognize that Odetta was an inspiring pioneer and symbol for civil rights; her folk based music one of the songs is by Bob Dylan gives us the sense of a movement larger than any one person or even any one cause. The choreographer of this world premiere is a longtime Ailey dancer. Now the company's rehearsal director and guest artist, Mr. Rushing is so valued a part of the Ailey institution that the artistic director Robert Battle had only to mention his name in a curtain speech at the start of Wednesday evening to cause an ovation. "Odetta" is a pleasant, harmless piece. Mr. Rushing isn't, however, a choreographer of any individuality in terms of imagination or style. His "Odetta" dances merely visualize some of the situations in the songs without enriching them. When one song is about being on a train, the dancers all sit on benches and mime being on a bumpy train ride. When another song is Odetta's recording of "A Hole in the Bucket" with Harry Belafonte, we see a man and a woman (and a bucket) miming their discussion and making the song less, not more, funny. At several points, we hear Odetta speaking about her songs: This heightens the impression that we're witnessing some kind of danced biopic, but the action staged by Mr. Rushing to spoken words is the lamest part of his work. Some of the scenes turn into real dances, lively and with a good basic command of different stage geometrics. But they're all pendants to the music; their musical timing doesn't surprise, doesn't give the rhythmic piece a life of its own. Hope Boykin, with her marvelously alert eyes, head and presence, is the protagonist; we read her as Odetta, whether she's dancing center stage or watching from the side. The benches are the chief element of Travis George's decor; the dancers upend them to make pillars or, in one section, connect them to make the floorboards of a stage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Since New York theaters shut down in mid March, creators of live performance have been quick to adjust: improvising on Instagram, reimagining dances for Zoom, uploading their archives to Vimeo. The poet and performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko was well equipped to adapt when he learned that his latest work, "Chameleon: A Biomythography," would not go on as scheduled at New York Live Arts this month. As its title suggests, "Chameleon" is mutable, the result of Mr. Kosoko's exploration, over the past few years, of what he calls "adaptive strategies and ways of being in the world." On April 22, Earth Day, it will take a much different shape than originally planned, re envisioned as a daylong virtual experience, "Chameleon: The Living Installments." A meditation on black queer life in the United States, dealing with themes of healing and survival, the work evolved along with Mr. Kosoko's increasingly international career, which, from his home base in Brooklyn, has recently taken him to Germany, South Africa, Sweden and England for residencies and teaching engagements. Like many of his projects, this one channels the ideas of writers and artists he calls his queer ancestors, in particular the poet Audre Lorde. In the most consistent part of the live performance, a section called "The Hold," his figure slinks beneath an expanse of shimmering, stretchy brown fabric, searching for a way out: a metaphor, he said, "for certain psychic realities that many of us want or try to escape." Around that, everything shifts. Mr. Kosoko, 37, did not anticipate the moment we're now in, but he is acutely familiar with making art in times of tragedy and mourning. A Nigerian American artist whose work incorporates movement, song, poetry and film, he grew up in Detroit and Natchez, Miss., with his mother and grandmother. Both died before he turned 17. In his early 30s, he lost his father and his brother, who was just 22. "So much of my work already deals so deeply with grief and death and how to hold that alongside joy and pleasure," he said. "And so this really was no different than some of the things I've had to negotiate in the past." Still, Mr. Kosoko has been shaken by the pandemic and the threats it poses to his friends, some of whom are health care workers, and his artistic community. "Shortly after this thing unleashed itself and we were put on lockdown, something in me broke psychologically," he said. "It took me several days to work through the fact that friends of mine were on the front lines of this thing. It was so intense. It still is." Not one to give in to despair, Mr. Kosoko has reconfigured "Chameleon" in order to bring people together from around the world, "for idea sharing, for resource sharing, and hopefully for healing," he said. He calls it "a global gesture in listening." "We need possibility in this moment," he added, "and so that's really what I'm trying to propose: a space to dream, to imagine, and to do that in community." The day's offerings include the release of the digital zine "Chameleon: A Syllabus for Survival"; the streaming of a prerecorded conversation between Mr. Kosoko and the choreographer Bill T. Jones; the premiere of an excerpt from the coming film "Chameleon: A Visual Album"; and a performance of "Pidgin Chorus," a vocal section of "Chameleon," by the work's collaborators. Mr. Kosoko plans to host at least some of these events on Discord, a chat app used mostly by video game enthusiasts; anyone who prefers a less interactive experience can tune in on YouTube Live. In organizing the online gathering, Mr. Kosoko has worked with the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (better known as Empac) in Troy, N.Y., where he has had several creative residencies for "Chameleon." It was Empac's engineers who introduced him to Discord, a platform that allows users to hear but not see one another. Ashley Ferro Murray, Empac's curator of theater and dance, has been meeting with Mr. Kosoko on Discord to test it out. She said that at times, although she can't see him, she feels as if they are physically present together. Why did you choose to use Discord for this online convening? In my experiments on the platform, there's been a kind of intimacy. Not being as distracted or seduced by visual content, you're asked to meditate a little bit more on the beauty that comes from hearing someone's voice. This is a new platform for many of us, certainly for me. By no means can I pretend to become some tech guru in three weeks. Laughs. It will be a little clunky, especially if you've never experienced this thing before. Liveness is such an important part of your work, being in the room together. Are you trying to approximate that? There's nothing that really equates to the magic of being able to assemble in tactile, intimate space to share breath, to be forced to brush against your neighbor, to maybe meet somebody new that you didn't expect you would. What I am learning from this work is that I'm hearing the voice in a different way. I'm hearing the subtlety, the inflection, the vibrato, the cadence, just the rhythm of one's vocality. That's become for me the new elbow brush or shared breath. It's something that's really giving me hope, something to move toward. You've been traveling so much recently. Has it been challenging to stay in one place these past few weeks? Yeah, I was in the world. I was in the wind. My passport was my lifeline. Knowing that I could leave the U.S. at any time was what kept me sane in a lot of ways, being able to experience other cultures. It was very much a dream, and then suddenly I woke into a nightmare. We're all grappling with this. There's something soothing about that but also petrifying, like there is no place to run but to where you are. You've talked about the idea of changing the future, since we can't change the past. Do you see "Chameleon" as part of that effort? Yes, yes, yes. When I was going through my episode, we'll call it, I was in panic. I saw a future, and it was like watching this tornado in the distance, just watching it come and not being able to do anything about it. I think all artists have foresight. The work that we do is to create futures and invite people into them. And so that's what I'm trying to do: to put forward a proposal for the future and invite people into it. What kind of future do you propose? I think there's no way we can go back to business as usual. I think that would be a huge misfortune, to return to normality, whatever that could mean or whatever that meant. I think we have to be radical, we have to be strategic, we have to be strong and enduring, we have to be organized, and we have to support each other in the grass roots, because we see that our government does not have the capacity to do it and isn't interested in doing it. We are the ones we have been waiting for, in the great words of June Jordan. Does this new iteration still focus on black queer identity what this moment means for black queer people in particular? I'm not trying to speak for all of any one group; that's impossible. But I do think that I can speak to my specific lived experience and the communities I circulate inside of. I'm reaching back to these folks I call my queer ancestors: Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Sun Ra, Alain Locke. There are so many. I'm reaching toward them and asking them to help me through. I think that no matter our race, creed, color, nationality, whatever, there's something to be learned from those who exist in that space of black and queer. And both of those words are very unstable signifiers. What is black and what is queer, really? I think there's something in that illegible, unstable set of identities that everyone can learn from. Whether we're open to that, that's another question, but there's something to be learned, believe me. For updates on "Chameleon: The Living Installments," follow chameleon coalition on Instagram and visit empac.rpi.edu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
There are more than 9,000 editions of Funko Pops, those ubiquitous vinyl figurines with their black, saucerlike eyeballs and oblong heads. There are likenesses of Michael Jordan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sailor Moon and the Incredible Hulk, Hermione Granger and Ned Stark. Recent releases include a Filipino fast food mascot (Jollibee) and a TV egghead (Bill Nye); to date, there are 34 distinct figures of Conan O'Brien, in assorted costumes and looks. There is even a popular series based on film directors, which began in 2016 with a Paul Feig figurine, tied to the release of his "Ghostbusters" reboot. Since then, the line has expanded to include Alfred Hitchcock, Guillermo del Toro, J.J. Abrams, and four others (five if you count the producer Jason Blum, which some collectors do). But Funko has never released a Pop based on a female film director, living or dead until now. In March, the Everett, Wash. based toy company debuted a Pop based on the director Ava DuVernay ("When They See Us," "Selma"), complete with signature black glasses and a T shirt with the name of the director's indie film distribution company, Array, on the front. This month, Patty Jenkins will be similarly honored with her own Funko, which was initially timed to celebrate the June release, since postponed to August because of the pandemic, of her sequel "Wonder Woman 1984." With more than 600 active licensed properties, Funko has made much of its fortune ( 795 million in total sales in 2019 alone) on these pop culture creations, with many of the hottest sellers coming from superheroes (Marvel and DC), fantasy franchises (Harry Potter, "Game of Thrones"), and animation series ("The Simpsons," "Dragon Ball Z"). The directors series follows the same profitable format, focusing on popular filmmakers most likely to click with fans of, say, Funko Pops. A third of buyers are avid collectors, around half are women and nearly all are fans of pop culture, of one sort or another. So while there are no Pops based on Fellini or Kurosawa, the series does include James Gunn ("Guardians of the Galaxy"), whose limited edition figurine can be purchased online for around 1,000, and Taika Waititi ("Thor: Ragnarok"), resplendent in matching pineapple emblazoned shirt and shorts. How does a director become a Pop? The selection process can seem arbitrary, but there are back doors in. Quentin Tarantino isn't in the directors line, for example, but got a Pop for his role as Jimmie Dimmick, a minor figure in his own 1994 film "Pulp Fiction." The German director Werner Herzog didn't make the cut either, but was honored with a figure for his small role as the Client in the "Star Wars" spinoff "The Mandalorian." "Ava's really important now, because she's not only a woman of color who's breaking barriers as a director, she's also bringing in female filmmakers of all colors," she said. "And I picked Patty because she didn't just do 'Wonder Woman,' she stuck to what she wanted to do and say to make the second film." Making Pops of real people, female directors or otherwise, presents special challenges, said Lauren Winarski, Funko's senior manager of brand and licensing. Some people have never heard of Funko; others might not want to be depicted with a weirdly shaped, oversized head. And then there's the dangers of making Pops of people who end up being hated by a significant portion of the population. "A few years ago, we thought, we'll do Bernie and Hillary and Trump," said Ben Butcher, Funko's senior vice president of creative. "And people were like, why'd you do that person? Do you agree with them on this? So we learned our lesson." Plans for the DuVernay and Jenkins dolls received a push from another director and Funko Pop honoree. "J.J. Abrams was involved in me being chosen," DuVernay said. "He had said, as he does, great guy, do you have any women directors involved, and do you have any people of color involved? And that's how they started to include me in the thinking, which I thought was pretty fantastic." According to Abrams, Funko had called about making a figure of him, and "it occurred to me how much more people would enjoy having Ava and Patty on their shelves. I was essentially doing Funko a favor." When Funko got the go ahead from both directors, the work began in earnest. For DuVernay's Pop, the director pointed to a Barbie that Mattel had created of her in 2015, the year "Selma" was nominated for a best picture Oscar. "I told them you can just take the same Barbie outfit, which is basically what I wear on set: the tennis shoes, the glasses, my hoops and bracelets." "I wanted them to pay attention to the hair, because I have different hair than most directors," she added. "And so my hair has tripped up Barbie and Funko. But I think they did a really beautiful job to try to create texture and celebrate my locks." Jenkins also had hair issues with her Pop. "I think the only thing I might change is having it have my more usual dark hair. My hair has been a little lighter recently, just on a whim, but maybe I should have stuck to my more general look." The earliest director Pops were released as exclusives, some copies only available to attendees of the New York and San Diego comic cons. Many have since rocketed in price (for example, only 200 Paul Feig Pops were made and now run about 300 a piece). Today, fans and honorees alike regularly post photos on social media of their latest Pop purchases. "It's become sort of a badge of honor," Butcher said. "With 'Game of Thrones,' the talent started posting pictures as the first ones came out, and it turned into this thing where the others were like, hey, when's mine coming?" Who's next? Funko won't say, although Winarski admitted that there is one director they've been pursuing awhile. "I think we started the conversation three years ago," she said. Combemale is pushing hard for more female directors, with Catherine Hardwicke ("Twilight") and the French new wave filmmaker Agnes Varda topping her list. "It's especially important to have representation in vinyl figures, or in whatever is the most popular way that pop culture is articulated in our society," she said. "Part of the argument for female filmmakers not getting hired for big films is that they supposedly don't have name recognition, and so getting that recognition in pop culture, in toy stores, makes a huge difference." As for DuVernay, she gives out her Pop likenesses to students who visit her Array offices in Los Angeles (back before the headquarters were shuttered because of the coronavirus); she also has one in her home, sharing shelf space alongside Pops of Reese Witherspoon, Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling that were created to celebrate her 2018 adaptation of "A Wrinkle in Time." "I think the thing I love about the figure is the sweetness of it," she said. "It's like a little baby. There's an innocence. And especially in these moments, it makes you smile."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Keith Olbermann knows the question before it is asked: How, after a career spent anchoring news and sports shows on ESPN, MSNBC, NBC and Fox, has he come to be delivering anti Donald J. Trump commentaries on GQ magazine's website? He was a big, talented, peripatetic TV star, who, at times, was his own worst enemy, too often clashing with management. And now he's on a short term assignment for GQ.com that will end with the election, with no guarantees afterward. Still, he says he is happy, even liberated. He can say what he pleases and is performing in an evolving online environment that reminds him of being at CNN in its early days, and ESPN in its early middle period. So what if he has left behind the trappings, and production values, of prime time TV? "This is it," he said, with a triumphal tone in his baritone during a recent interview. "This is where it's going. There will be a garage band quality to news, particularly video news, in the years to come, and I think it'll be limitless. Maybe there will be a NewsFlix in the future, with 37 options with Olbermann's commentaries and a three minute Al Roker forecast." "If this looks like a downward spiral," he continued, "I would point out that I don't need the money. I'm doing this for charity for dogs groups and veterans groups. I'm doing this for the rides downtown." He was speaking in a spacious studio on the 24th floor of 1 World Trade Center, looking like a bank executive in his Brooks Brothers ensemble, with silver hair and black framed glasses. The scripts to the three essays he was going to record for his series, "The Closer" each a fiery burst of outrage about Mr. Trump's unfitness for the presidency lay on a table before him. "Were it the choice," he said near the end of one of them, "I would sooner and happily vote for a third term of George W. Bush than five minutes of President Donald Trump." At a certain point, a return to political commentary in any medium looked improbable for Mr. Olbermann. He hosted "Countdown" on MSNBC through the re election of George W. Bush in 2004 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. But he left unhappily in 2011. He hooked up with Current TV, Al Gore's short lived cable venture. That relationship ended in vitriol and lawsuits, but a legal settlement reportedly left Mr. Olbermann quite wealthy. He returned to sports and ESPN in 2013 with a studio show, "Olbermann," on ESPN2 that ultimately could not overcome various factors, including shifting time slots and modest viewership. But the political climate that fed Mr. Trump's rise riveted and dismayed Mr. Olbermann. His animus toward Mr. Trump since the beginning of his presidential run led Mr. Olbermann to sell his condominium apartment at the Trump Palace in Manhattan this summer. (Mr. Trump responded by releasing a statement that said in part, "Keith is a failed broadcaster and the people in the building couldn't stand him.") His interest piqued, Mr. Olbermann thought of a comeback, but talks that focused on returning to MSNBC and CNN (or its sibling network, HLN) ultimately went nowhere. Keith Olbermann in 2007, when he was with MSNBC, at an event at Soldier Field in Chicago. During the summer, a friend of Mr. Olbermann's who writes for GQ heard that the magazine wanted to talk to him about creating online commentaries for its website, whose most popular feature explores extremely expensive luxury goods with the rapper 2 Chainz. Mr. Olbermann and the magazine came to a quick agreement in August. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. "We wanted to add to our political and election coverage, and that dovetailed with Keith's desire to get back into the game," said Jim Nelson, editor in chief of GQ. "We felt that no one was meeting Trump at the temperature level that was needed. And I missed Keith's rage. We miss Jon Stewart. And we only get weekly doses of Samantha Bee and John Oliver. That's not enough." A decade ago, GQ lauded Mr. Olbermann in an article for producing "the most electric, intelligent and eviscerating news commentary on television," and posed him in a raincoat as Howard Beale, the unhinged, mad as hell newsman from "Network." So far, Mr. Nelson is pleased that the magazine is swimming in Mr. Olbermann's indignation. His more than 20 videos have attracted about 25 million views on GQ.com, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and sites like Yahoo and Huffington Post, according to internal measurements. Though measuring online views is an imprecise practice and the definition of what actually constitutes a view varies from platform to platform Mr. Olbermann sees those numbers as vindication of his new embrace of the online format. The first episode, called "176 Shocking Things Donald Trump Has Done This Election," has been viewed more than 800,000 times on YouTube. "That's from a dead stop," he said. "No promotion. Basically me tweeting every few hours and word of mouth." But not all responses have been positive. A recent article in Slate called the commentaries "a context less, free floating slice of sound and anguish" and "the most embarrassing thing humanity has ever produced." It said Mr. Olbermann had "the superior tone of some disappointed national dad." Jamie Horowitz, who produced Mr. Olbermann's show at ESPN2 and is now president of Fox Sports national networks, looks at the commentaries on GQ.com as less of a surprising career shift than a simple change in where content is available. "My belief is that content has to be platform agnostic," he said. "You can create quite compelling content on a variety of different platforms. That's where we're headed." Mr. Olbermann goes into GQ's offices at least twice a week to tape "The Closer." A small group of GQ staff members work on the series. A fashion editor, Jon Tietz, fusses over his tie and shirt collar. Geoffrey Gagnon, an articles editor, goes over the scripts. Instead of an elaborate anchor desk, Mr. Olbermann sits at a plain white table. A blue blanket is beneath his feet to muffle sound. A blue and red backdrop hangs behind him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
If the construction boom of a decade ago had a tint, it might have been green, as developers hustled to make their buildings as eco friendly as possible. Energy efficiency has not seemed as much of a priority during the current development wave, according to brokers, builders and designers, but there also may not be as much of an audience for it. At least, the marketing campaigns of recent condos rarely seem to tout environmental bona fides. Yet Alfa Development, a firm that jumped on the green bandwagon early, does not seem ready to jump off just yet. "Unfortunately, just a handful of us are doing it, and it's shameful," said Michael Namer, Alfa's chief executive officer. He added that the multiple hurricanes that have rocked the United States and the Caribbean this year should be a reminder that climate change is real, and dangerous. Alfa hopes to earn a gold award for this building under LEED certification, the country's most recognized seal of approval for green buildings, and to do so without sacrificing style. The East 21st Street building, which is scheduled to open at the end of 2018, has a facade that is made of gray, thinner than usual bricks, a material that has become increasingly trendy in residential buildings. Windows, meanwhile, are framed in bronze, and patterned black and white marble lines the lobby's floor. While green touches are prevalent throughout the condo, which has one to four bedrooms, they are not always obvious. For instance, instead of using granite slabs quarried from a mountain for counters, Mr. Namer went with Caesarstone, a stone and resin product that he said does not take as much of a chunk out of the earth. Similarly, the boards used for the floors came from oak trees that were selectively cut, and not clear cut in a way that might devastate a forest. Appliances at 200 East 21st are from Miele, which gets strong reviews from Energy Star, a product ratings system. In addition, the condo developer chose to get electricity not from coal or oil, but from wind power a more expensive but cleaner option, while hot water is mostly heated by dozens of solar panels on the roof. The condo's eco features did not significantly raise construction costs, Mr. Namer said. The developer hopes that besides reducing energy consumption, those features will also give a marketing edge to the building. "The competition is basically zero in this realm," said Justin Tuinstra, a salesman with Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, which is handling sales. Prices average 2,200 a square foot, or starting at 1.45 million for a one bedroom, while the penthouse, with four bedrooms and 1,800 square feet of outdoor space, is about 12 million, Mr. Tuinstra said. In the Gramercy Park neighborhood, the average price of co ops and condos for sale in mid October was 3.07 million, according to StreetEasy.com; among the 49 units in new developments, the average was 3.18 million. Most of those new apartments are clustered in just two projects. There is 121 East 22nd Street, a 133 unit condo with prices that average 2,200 a square foot, according to StreetEasy, and Gramercy Square, a 223 unit four building complex east of Third Avenue, where prices average between 2,100 and 2,400 a square foot. Alfa's green track record is long. The 36 unit Village Green, at 311 East 11th Street in the East Village, was followed by the 51 unit Chelsea Green, at 151 West 21st Street. After, came the 27 unit Village Green West, at 245 West 14th Street, and the 11 unit 199 Mott Street, in NoLIta. But the firm doesn't have a lot of company right now. Searching online listings for green buildings yields just a handful of apartments, and it is not always clear which eco friendly features are offered. Then again, this may reflect building codes. They have gotten so much more "aggressive," forcing landlords to make changes whether they wanted to or not, said John Haugen, a founder of Third Partners, a four year old consulting firm that has worked with landlords on green initiatives. (The firm is not affiliated with the East 21st Street project.) Buyers in some ways can take small carbon footprints for granted, he said. For instance, developers seem to have almost universally embraced light bulbs that last a long time, like LEDs, which offer obvious cost savings, he said. Indeed, at 200 East 21st Street, in addition to using them in common spaces, Alfa has offered a free lifetime supply of the bulbs to any buyer. "There's really no excuse to not have them now," Mr. Haugen said of the bulbs. "It's just a no brainer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
For years, hunting Margery Sharp novels has been my private sport; I always check under S in any used book store. And if I find a novel, I buy it, even if I already have a copy; I regard it as my obligation to give her books a home and pass them on. My Margery Sharp shelf is a collection of hard won unmatching volumes. Therefore, while I am delighted to see 10 of her 26 adult novels reissued this month, I am also slightly saddened by the end of my game, and perhaps even, the end of my secret. I first came to Margery Sharp, a British author who lived from 1905 to 1991, through her adventurous mice, Nils and Bernard and Miss Bianca, but for decades now, I have been browsing happily in her brilliantly acerbic adult fiction social comedies that track issues of romance, sex, marriage, family, class and artistic endeavor through most of the 20th century. But, as I say, I started with the children's books that began in 1959 with "The Rescuers," a novel about the adventures of the heroic mice of the Prisoners' Aid Society. When Sharp started writing her mouse adventure stories (beautifully illustrated by the incomparable Garth Williams, who also did the "Little House" books, and "Charlotte's Web," and gave us another famous mouse in his drawings of Stuart Little), she was already a successful author of adult novels, turning her hand to children's literature as a kind of sideline. She went on to write a series of nine books in the Rescuers series, and they eventually became successful Disney cartoon movies. "Cluny Brown," her sparkling 1944 upstairs downstairs social comedy of changing midcentury mores, set in the aristocratic Devon country house of Friars Carmel, became a classic Ernst Lubitsch comedy. In the film, Jennifer Jones played the heroine, in her maid's cap and apron, and French actor Charles Boyer was Adam Belinski, the refugee Czech intellectual roue, on the Hollywood assumption that one European accent is as good as another. It's a delightful movie, but it's an even better book, shifting deftly from the concerns of Squire and Lady Carmel and Andrew the young heir, to the real center of the novel, Cluny, the plumber's niece from London who is sent into "good service" as a parlormaid right before the World War II because she "don't seem to know her place," and who turns out to be able to navigate a wider and more rapidly evolving world than anyone around her anticipates. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Sharp had her devoted following; when "The Eye of Love" was published in 1957, she was a sufficiently established writer for Kirkus to comment, "Margery Sharp addicts may find this to their taste." Actually, this postwar novel is one of her best, a lapidary work about the shattered affair between Dolores Diver, who sees herself as a "Spanish type," (she changed her name from Dorothy Hogg) and her adoring lover Harry, who must marry another woman to save his business. Sharp, who as a narrator reliably has her Jane Austen moments, comments on the first page of "The Eye of Love": "Ladies of ambiguous status have by convention hearts of gold, and Miss Diver was nothing if not conventional; but a child in an irregular household is often an embarrassment." Sharp is interested in how her characters are shaped by their fantasies of themselves (Cluny Brown takes herself to tea at the Ritz, scandalizing her uncle; Dolores Diver treasures her carved tortoiseshell comb and her signature Spanish shawl), but also how they react when those fantasies bring them up against reality. And this combination of interior life and social reality makes for what may be her greatest portrait in "Britannia Mews," her novel of life on a disreputable London street from 1875 through to the Blitz; the book is a love letter to London and Londoners, and the central character, Adelaide, is an extraordinarily distinct creation, determined and definite in her passions, her actions and her ambitions. Writing in the Book of the Month Club News, the novelist John P. Marquand hailed the book as "a fine novel along traditional lines in a beautifully cultivated style that is both polite and biting, and yet its whole complexion is devastatingly clear and modern." As always, Sharp takes on potentially sentimental subjects with a tone which is almost shockingly unsentimental; never has the trope of a Victorian drawing master romancing his sheltered female pupil been rendered less romantic. Adelaide's life unfolds in the sordid surroundings of Britannia Mews as a consequence; she pursues the hapless drawing teacher, despite his attempts to warn her off. "I drink like a fish," he tells her, and she assures him that she will put a stop to all that: "You don't know what a very strong character I have." She's wrong about being able to stop his drinking, but she's certainly right about her own character. It's one of Sharp's great talents, creating female characters of toughness and complexity. She gave us profound and sympathetic portraits of mothers who feel notably unmoved by motherhood, for example, and realistic stories of women deeply motivated by money, by art, and yes, by sex, even as she created other gentler women in counterpoint, more daunted by convention, but sometimes tougher in the end. Margery Sharp is sometimes compared to Barbara Pym and to Elizabeth Taylor, and there are certainly overlaps (the retreat for Anglican gentlewomen in "Summer Visits," her last novel, published in 1977, seems like it could be peopled with Barbara Pym characters), but Sharp has a touch all her own when it comes to taking on social class, sex and its consequences, and the changes that the 20th century brought to both those arenas, most especially for women. She remained, always, both polite and biting, looking at the intoxications and delusions of life and love with wit and clear eyed sympathy. And if you try a novel and you like it, you can experience the delightful certainty that there are more than two dozen of them waiting, without even counting the mice. Cluny Brown (1944) The perfect country house comedy of love and manners among the masters and the servants and the wandering European intellectual who is taking refuge from the gathering storm of World War II, which will change everything. The Eye of Love (1957) A romantic comedy about the illusions of love, and how very real they can be; this also introduces the Martha series, which continues with "Martha in Paris" and "Martha, Eric and George." Britannia Mews (1946) Britain from Queen Victoria to the Blitz, as reflected in a decidedly seedy stretch of London and the remarkable Adelaide who makes it her home. The Nutmeg Tree (1937) This was made into a Hollywood movie, "Julia Misbehaves," with Elizabeth Taylor (the other Elizabeth Taylor) as the innocent daughter and Greer Garson as the all too experienced mother: "If she took lovers more freely than most women it was largely because she could not bear to see men sad when it was so easy to make them happy." The Stone of Chastity (1940) An academic bucolic comic masterpiece about a professor of folklore who goes to a small British agricultural village to research the Norse legend of the title, a steppingstone that is supposed to detect sexual misconduct in the local women by tripping the unchaste into the brook.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
GLEN OAKS, on the Queens border with Nassau County, is dominated by a series of co op apartment complexes, both garden and high rise. But it doesn't take a visitor much time to be able to reimagine this neighborhood of about 15,000 people as it must have been in previous lives as farmland, country estate and golf course. The most notable co ops are Glen Oaks Village, nearly 3,000 units spread among two sections of two and three story brick buildings that went up after World War II, and North Shore Towers, a gated trio of 34 story high rises dating to the early 1970s. Each sits on more than a hundred acres that once belonged to William K. Vanderbilt, and residents say the gardens and open space not to mention the nearby Queens County Farm Museum, a working farm give the area a quiet livability that is rare within the city limits. "I call it New York City's secret community," said Bob Friedrich, the president of the village's co op board, adding that from some parts of the complex, "you can literally look out your window and see all sorts of farm animals." Glen Oaks Village, which was built in 1947 and converted to co ops in 1981, is focused on keeping its roughly 10,000 residents in their units for the long term, said Mr. Friedrich, in explaining why the rules governing renovations and expansions are so flexible. Owners of second floor units are permitted to expand upward, turning attic space into a full scale upper floor, and ground floor owners are allowed to reclaim basement space for living quarters, he said. The board also encourages owners to build decks, terraces and separate rear entrances, partly as a way to improve property values. "The apartments are smaller, because they were built a long time ago," Mr. Friedrich said, "so by giving people the opportunity to enlarge their apartments, they stay rather than leave." Pets are allowed, he said, and services in the complex include trash pickup six days a week and snow shoveling in the winter. In warm weather, the board provides 24 vouchers that can be redeemed for flowers at local plant nurseries, including the farm museum. Christine and Harry Bergen, residents for 32 years, raised their son in the complex, and recently added a terrace off their kitchen. Ms. Bergen, who is on the co op board and heads its admissions committee, says a younger generation of residents have come to enjoy the development's charms. Ms. Bergen meets most of them when they arrive, and she added, "My committee, they always say, 'Oh, what nice people I just had.' " The other visually prominent complex, North Shore Towers, includes 1,844 units built starting in 1971 on the highest point in Queens, next to Grand Central Parkway. It is visible for miles. Originally rentals, the complex converted to co ops in 1987, though there are still a few sponsor owned rentals, and subletting is allowed. A building that connects all three towers, which residents call the "arcade," has food stores, a coffee shop, a bank, a dry cleaner and a movie theater. The stores are open to the public but used mostly by residents, said Annette Kroll, a resident who has been selling apartments in the towers since the co op conversion. The complex also has five tennis courts, indoor and outdoor pools, a health club and an 18 hole golf course. Views from high floors, Ms. Kroll said, stretch to the Manhattan skyline and the Atlantic. With all the services, she added, "it's like going to Canyon Ranch and not spending 500 a day." Long Island Jewish Medical Center lies at the eastern end of the 1.25 square mile neighborhood, near the city line, and residents of the local complexes include staff members and patients. Julia Shildkret, a local broker, said North Shore Towers had gained a reputation as an elder community, though Ms. Kroll said younger residents had been arriving in recent years as well. Brian Lynn, who bought a one bedroom last year in Parkwood Estates, a 400 unit complex next to the farm museum, said he was "very comfortable" in what he described as a "nice little enclave." With apartments making up so much of the housing, it is also relatively inexpensive. Mr. Lynn, who splits his time between Glen Oaks and his partner's place in Manhattan, said he paid 167,000 for his unit, along with 628 a month in maintenance, which covers many utilities and a parking space. Besides the self contained developments Glen Oaks Village with its red bricks and white trim, Parkwood Estates with similarly scaled buildings in yellow stucco there are pockets of one and two family detached houses, mostly along Union Turnpike. With this mix, the area provides starter homes for young families, said Ms. Shildkret, who sold a previous home for Mr. Lynn. Houses in another small subdivision Royal Ranch, an out of the way cluster near the parkway and North Shore Towers are among the more expensive, brokers say. That is partly because of their large, secluded lots. Residents' one big complaint, Mr. Friedrich said, is infrastructure upkeep; many curbs date to 1946. Their crumbling has caused flooding that local government has been slow to address. That said, however, Glen Oaks Village has benefited from the city's Million Trees campaign: about 300 have been planted in the complex, he said. Kathy Gibbons, the branch manager at the Bellerose office of Laffey Fine Homes, says co ops in Glen Oaks Village generally sell for 220,000 to 290,000 though prices vary according to condition and the number and type of improvements. For garden units generally, Ms. Shildkret said, one bedrooms have recently sold for 150,000 to 175,000, two bedrooms for 180,000 to 275,000. The one three bedroom co op to change hands recently, she said, citing data from the local multiple listing service, sold for 265,000. Mr. Friedrich says residents generally have a keen appreciation of the affordability of their property taxes, especially when compared with those in neighboring Nassau County. Semidetached houses near Union Turnpike, Ms. Shildkret said, generally sell in the 400,000 range, detached houses closer to 500,000. But some houses can be more expensive up to 700,000, Ms. Gibbons said, citing the Royal Ranch area, where properties come on the market infrequently. Prices in North Shore Towers vary, Ms. Kroll said. Studios and smaller one bedrooms sell in the 200,000 range, she said. Penthouses can exceed 1 million. (One bedrooms top out at 1,300 square feet, two bedrooms at 1,700 square feet and three bedrooms about 2,000.) The area lies within the prized School District 26, with most students zoned for Public School 186, on 72nd Avenue in Parkwood Estates. The school received an A on its most recent city progress report, with 79 percent of tested students showing mastery in English, 87.9 percent in math. No. 115, on 261st Street, serves the southern half of Glen Oaks Village; its grade was a C, with 68.4 percent proficient in English, 75.8 in math. Zoned middle schools include Junior High School 67, on Marathon Parkway, where 81.9 percent were proficient in English, 94.4 percent in math. It got an A on its most recent report card. SAT averages at the high school component of Q811 a kindergarten through Grade 12 facility on Marathon Parkway were 408 in reading, 428 in math and 407 in writing, versus 436, 460 and 431 citywide. Vanderbilt owned the land that is now Glen Oaks Village and North Shore Towers until his death in 1920, after which it was sold to the Glen Oaks golf club. Many early residents of Glen Oaks Village were returning veterans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
HONG KONG A billionaire Chinese petrochemical entrepreneur on Monday became the fifth senior industry figure in a week to become enmeshed in a corruption investigation that continues to reach higher into China's political and economic elite. The entrepreneur, Hua Bangsong, 47, is "now assisting the relevant authorities in the P.R.C. in their investigations," according to a filing made late Monday to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by Mr. Hua's company, Wison Engineering Services. A crackdown on corruption in China has intensified in recent weeks, focusing on the oil industry. Mr. Hua's company is one of the largest nonstate contractors to the oil and gas industry in China, and counts the China National Petroleum Corporation, or C.N.P.C., as one of its biggest customers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
By the numbers alone, New York City Ballet's Here/Now Festival is mind blowing. Over the course of four weeks, the company is dancing 43 ballets by 22 choreographers. Even if that accounts for less than a quarter of the 230 works that more than 60 choreographers have made for the troupe since the death of its godlike founding choreographer, George Balanchine, in 1983, it's still an epic size sample. No other ballet company in the world can approach these numbers. But it isn't just scale. The numbers tell a story. Only eight works from the 1980s and '90s are being revived, in effect conceding that that era was, as it is now generally remembered, a gloomy mourning period of anxiety, short on pathbreaking inspiration. Five of those eight are by Peter Martins, who has led City Ballet since Balanchine's death, and who, despite considerable skill, didn't turn out to be his equal as a genius choreographer. In the 35 works from the current century, there's another imbalance. Nineteen are by just three choreographers: Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck. Mr. Wheeldon's program immediately shows you why he was once the company's great young hope. Created in 2000, when the British born Mr. Wheeldon was 27, his "Mercurial Manoeuvres" is a young person's "look at everything I can do" dance. With meshing geometries of large and mobile groups, a firebrand soloist and a poignant duet all in a classical vocabulary that's been sped up and inventively extended without being slurred it is choreography that follows the house tradition of closely attending to music. The work checks all the right boxes and retains the excitement of discovery. After making it, Mr. Wheeldon, who had joined City Ballet in 1993, retired from dancing to focus on choreography. Mr. Martins shrewdly created for him the post of artist in residence. And "Polyphonia" (2001), the next work on the all Wheeldon program, demonstrates why that confidence was deserved. Set to piano pieces by Gyorgy Ligeti, it's obviously, allusively in the line of Balanchine's bracing modernist works "Agon" and "Episodes," yet it doesn't feel derivative. Alas, the rest of the Wheeldon program doesn't keep rising. Already in "Liturgy," from 2003, there are signs of a rut, of a narrowing into one avenue of success (the elastic, extremely acrobatic pas de deux), and the jump to "American Rhapsody," choreographed last year, is a large falling off. The ingenuity is still there, and the craft, but smothered in hokeyness, settling for something rote. Mr. Wheeldon did make work for City Ballet between 2003 and 2016. Two more pieces including his biggest hit, the 2005 "After the Rain Pas de Deux" are scattered among the highly uneven offerings of the seven remaining Here/Now programs. But the gap does imply a break, the moment in 2008 when Mr. Wheeldon resigned to concentrate on his own, ill fated company, Morphoses. By that time, there was competition, for in 2006, Alexei Ratmansky, then the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, had made "Russian Seasons." Here was a surprise: a work dense with classical steps, steeped in ballet history, as musically responsive as any lover of Balanchine could wish, but full of character and feeling and suggested stories about love and marriage and death. Its humor is distinctive, not always flattering to human nature. It feels wise. Joining it on the all Ratmansky bill is "Namouna" (2010), just as wonderful. Though it, too, is rooted in ballet history, it is not quite like anything else: a screwball comedy that's also a hallucinatory dream. Between the two Ratmansky works is a missed connection, a path not taken. After "Russian Seasons," it was widely assumed that Mr. Ratmansky would become resident choreographer for City Ballet. But in 2009, he shocked everyone by joining American Ballet Theater instead. He has since made two works for City Ballet both, strange and original and marvelous, are highlights of later Here/Now programs and he unveils a premiere at next week's gala, but his departure left an opening. Firmly based in classical technique and Balanchinian musicality, Mr. Peck's choreography seems of the moment, colored by contemporary manners. It's egalitarian, flattening ballet's traditional hierarchies, with principal dancers often costumed the same as everyone else. A relay chain of duets in the middle of "New Blood" (2015) treats men dancing with men and women dancing with women no differently from men and women dancing together. The pas de deux, as a vehicle of emotion, hasn't been Mr. Peck's strength, and yet "The Dreamers," a 2016 pas de deux on the program, is a fascinating examination of ballet conventions, a novel drama. I find the large scale "Everywhere We Go" (2014) impeded by its Sufjan Stevens score, but the invention doesn't cease. Mr. Peck is an astonishing talent, better represented later in Here/Now by "Year of the Rabbit" (2012) and "Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes" (2014). (There's also a Peck premiere buried in the otherwise dreary looking Program 8.) And that's where City Ballet is today. Except there's one more story remaining in the numbers: the high percentage of very recent works by many different choreographers. Logistics are surely behind this choice these pieces are fresh in the dancers' memories but it's also a display of fresh life, signs of a promising generation. Maybe there's a sense now that after Mr. Wheeldon and Mr. Ratmansky unquestionably enriched the repertory without ascending to divinity, that no one, not even the prolific Mr. Peck, needs to fill the Balanchine role alone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Otto F. Warmbier, the college student imprisoned in North Korea and returned to the United States in a vegetative state, suffered extensive brain damage following interrupted blood flow and a lack of oxygen, according to the coroner who examined his body. But an external examination and "virtual autopsy" conducted by the coroner's office in Hamilton County, Ohio, could not determine how his circulation had been cut off. "All we can do is theorize, and we hate to theorize without science backing us up," Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, the county coroner, said in an interview Thursday. Mr. Warmbier, 22, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was convicted in March 2016 of trying to steal a propaganda poster while on a trip to North Korea and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He was flown back to the United States in June in a vegetative state. North Korean officials said Mr. Warmbier's condition was caused by sleeping pills and botulism, a diagnosis that medical experts doubted. He died six days later at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. His parents requested that a full autopsy not be performed. On Tuesday, during an appearance on the television show "Fox Friends," Fred Warmbier said that his son had been "tortured" and described North Korean officials as "terrorists." After the interview, President Trump said in a tweet that Mr. Warmbier "was tortured beyond belief by North Korea." Dr. Sammarco's examination, which was concluded earlier this month, did not find signs of torture but could not rule out the possibility. "There are a lot of horrible things you can do to a human body that don't leave external signs behind," Dr. Sammarco said. "One of the frustrating things is the lack of information about what happened to him in North Korea," she added. In a virtual autopsy, pathologists rely on an examination of the body and on scans to determine what has happened to it. Mr. Warmbier was returned with brain scans done in North Korea in April 2016 and again in July 2016. M.R.I. scans were done at the medical center after he arrived, which also performed a whole body CT scan after Mr. Warmbier's death. The images clearly showed that his brain had been starved of oxygen and that large tracts of cells had died, Dr. Sammarco said. The medical diagnosis is anoxic ischemic encephalopathy. That condition differs from the damage that occurs during a stroke, when a single blood vessel is blocked, said Dr. Lee H. Schwamm, executive vice chairman of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. With an injury like Mr. Warmbier's, "blood flow is reduced everywhere the pump is turned off," said Dr. Schwamm, who reviewed the coroner's report at The Times's request. In the United States, the most common cause is a cardiac arrest, often precipitated by a heart attack. While cardiac arrests are unlikely in healthy young men, they can happen if the victim is malnourished and suffers an imbalance of blood electrolytes, such as potassium, calcium, or magnesium, Dr. Schwamm said. The damage is quick: It takes just four minutes without blood for brain cells to start to die. Blood flow to the brain can be interrupted for any number of reasons. The whole body CT scan did not find injuries associated with hanging, for example, but Dr. Schwamm said the evidence might not be visible if a bedsheet were used and the spine were not dislocated. Mr. Warmbier had a scar at the base of his neck that was probably caused by the insertion of a tube into his trachea as he was hooked up to a ventilator. This may indicate that he was not breathing on his own for a long period of time, Dr. Sammarco said. He was weaned from the ventilator in North Korea, though; he was not using it when he was returned. There were few other signs of injury on Mr. Warmbier's body. There were no bedsores, and his skin condition was excellent, Dr. Sammarco said. "His muscle volume was pretty good for someone who was bedridden for over a year," she said. In the United States, most families would opt for palliative care for a relative in a vegetative state resembling Mr. Warmbier's, she added. That would consist of providing pain medications and sedatives to soothe them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Michiko Kakutani, a Pulitzer Prize winning book critic for The New York Times who rigorously assessed the works of emerging and established authors including Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison and J. K. Rowling, has decided to step down as the publication's chief book critic, The Times announced on Thursday. Ms. Kakutani's departure quickly rippled through journalism and literary circles. Expressions of admiration and appreciation from writers and readers alike mingled with the occasional sigh of relief from those whose work she had not viewed favorably a verdict she never shied away from sharing with readers. "A rave review from Michiko Kakutani has been the equivalent of a badge of honor it's the ultimate endorsement for a serious writer," said Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon Schuster. "She has been greatly respected and greatly feared." Ms. Kakutani started her career covering cultural news at The Times in 1979 and became a book critic in 1983. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1998. "No one has played a larger role in guiding readers through the country's literary life over the past four decades than Michi," Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, wrote in a note to employees announcing her retirement on Thursday. "And no one, I would venture, knows more about the literature and writing that flowed out of Sept. 11." He added, "No one could be as well read as Michi." On Twitter, Ms. Kakutani expressed gratitude to The Times and said she intended to "focus on longer pieces about politics and culture." Over her 38 year career at The Times, she offered critical assessments of virtually every major author working during that time, but she also broke news. In 2015, her review of Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" was the first to tell readers that the beloved character Atticus Finch, the progressive hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird," harbored racist views. And in his waning days in the Oval Office, Barack Obama sat down with Ms. Kakutani to discuss the role books had played for him during his presidency and his life. Her career was not without controversy. In 2007, she wrote a review of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the last installment in Ms. Rowling's Harry Potter series, that The Times published before the book went on sale, earning criticism. Ms. Kakutani also used fiction and nonfiction as a lens to analyze politics and political figures. Her review in September of a biography of Adolf Hitler, Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889 1939," was widely read as a critique of Donald J. Trump. "What everyone loved was that she took it so seriously, so personally, that she would argue with writers and get mad at them when she felt they were not doing their best work," said Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette Book Group. "There aren't many critical voices like that, where you see someone, over a long period of time, responding to a writer book by book and to an entire body of work."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
IF all goes according to plan, the 2013 Quadski will be the first amphibious vehicle from the Gibbs companies to make it into the sales distribution chain. But it won't be the first introduced as ready for market. In 2003 Gibbs launched the Aquada, an amphibious three seat sports car. Aside from placing the driver in the center position, the Aquada looked like a normal roadgoing automobile and was said to be capable of speeds faster than 100 m.p.h. on pavement and 30 m.p.h. in the water. Although it didn't meet United States environmental and safety standards, the Aquada did meet European requirements, according to Neil G. Jenkins, chairman of Gibbs. The Aquada was, for the most part, well received. In Britain, the magazine Auto Express said it was "more fun to drive than a lot of saloons," using the British term for sedans. Time Magazine named it to a list of the best inventions of 2003. In 2004, Richard Branson crossed the English Channel in an Aquada, setting a record and generating media attention.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Kim Myers used to compete in rodeo style barrel horse races, but after being sterilized with an implantable device called Essure, the pain was so intense that she had to stop. The device's small metal and polyester coils had pierced her fallopian tubes, her doctor found, so the two implants were removed. But the sharp, laborlike pains didn't really subside until three years later, when Ms. Myers had a hysterectomy. Then her surgeon discovered the cause: A piece of metal coil was still embedded in her uterus. "Doctors kept saying there was nothing wrong with me," said Ms. Myers, 53, of Wesson, Miss. "I knew, with every fiber of my being, there was still something there." Ms. Myers was among a parade of women who testified before the Food and Drug Administration 14 months ago, saying they'd been injured by Essure and urging officials to pull the device from the market. Essure comprises two small coils, made of a nickel alloy and a polyesterlike fiber, placed in the fallopian tubes through the vagina. The coils are designed to provoke an inflammatory response that causes scar tissue to form and block the tubes, a process that can take three months. F.D.A. officials declined to withdraw the device, saying that Essure was safe and effective for many women although some experienced "very serious and sometimes debilitating problems." But last week the agency ordered that a so called black box warning be placed on the device's packaging saying it could cause the kinds of injuries Ms. Myers sustained. The implant may puncture the fallopian tubes and uterus, and travel into the abdomen and pelvic cavity, the warning notes, causing persistent pain and requiring surgical removal. Officials at Bayer, which makes and sells Essure, say poor surgical skills are to blame for complications like Ms. Myers's and insist there is no proof the device causes other reported side effects like chronic pain and autoimmune disorders. "These are so common to women," said Dr. Edio Zampaglione, Bayer's vice president for United States medical affairs. The F.D.A. also took the unorthodox step of guiding Bayer in the development of a new checklist of risks for doctors to review with patients before implanting the device. The three page checklist is broken into five sections, each followed by a spot for the patient's initials, and is to be signed by both doctor and patient. The checklist is not mandatory, and critics say it does not mention many common side effects linked to Essure, like heavy, painful menstrual bleeding. Some doctors complain that the checklist is intrusive and burdensome, may dissuade physicians from using the implants, and is based on anecdotes rather than scientific clinical trial data. Some providers, including Planned Parenthood, have said they will inform patients of the risks and benefits, but not ask them to sign the document. "There's no question there are complications, but there are risks and benefits to everything we do in medicine, and we don't have good data to establish the magnitude of the problem," said Dr. Christopher M. Zahn, the vice president of practice for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. "Decisions like these should be made based on data that's appropriately vetted, not a series of anecdotal reports," Dr. Zahn said, referring to the black box warning and the checklist. Dr. Zampaglione of Bayer noted that some studies had shown that other methods of permanent sterilization, not just Essure, have caused serious long term adverse events as well. The F.D.A. approved the implant in 2002 after a fast track review process that prioritized the device because it was the first sterilization procedure for women that could be done in a doctor's office, without an incision and without general anesthesia. It offered an option to tubal ligation, commonly known as having one's "tubes tied." Pain and other serious side effects emerged in the clinical trials of Essure. The device could not always be implanted, and failed to block the tubes in a significant percentage of patients. According to the new checklist, nearly one in 10 women who try Essure cannot rely on it to prevent pregnancy. The F.D.A. approved Essure after trials lasting a year or two, even though the implant was meant to last for life. By the end of last year, the agency had received nearly 10,000 reports of injuries and pregnancies related to the device, as well as reports of a very small number of fatalities. Many doctors who insert the implant do not know how to remove it, the new warnings say. Nor is the best method of removal entirely clear. The true complication rate also remains uncertain; Bayer would not provide United States sales numbers, which also would not reflect the actual number of women who have received implants, because no one knows how many of the devices have been implanted in the United States. The original clinical trials did not include control groups for comparison, so it has never been clear whether complications like back pain or heavy bleeding are higher in Essure users compared with women sterilized surgically or who relied on other birth control methods. By contrast, drug trials are required to have a comparison group of participants who are given a placebo.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
His Eye Makeup Is Way Better Than Yours Would you be inclined to buy makeup because a 10 year old boy is showing you how to create a look on Instagram? If we're talking about Jack Bennett of makeuupbyjack, then the answer could well be a resounding yes. Since convincing his mother to start his account in May, young Mr. Bennett, who lives in Berkshire, England, has amassed 331,000 followers and attracted the attention of brands like MAC and NYX, which have offered products to create looks. Refinery29 has celebrated him as the next big thing in makeup. He is the latest evidence of a seismic power shift in the beauty industry, which has thrust social media influencers to the top of the pecking order. Refreshingly, they come in all shapes, sizes, ages and, more recently, genders. Hailed by Marie Claire as the "beauty boys of Instagram," the early male pioneers, like Patrick Simondac ( PatrickStarrr), Jeffree Star ( jeffreestar) and Manny Gutierrez, ( MannyMua733), have transcended niche to become juggernauts with millions of followers. And their aesthetic is decidedly new: neither old school rocker makeup nor drag queen. Not that it was easy. Mr. Starrr, now 27, lived in Orlando, Fla., at the time and worked at a MAC store in his local mall. He recalled getting stares from families at the food court. "I was wearing a scarf on my head and wearing makeup," he said. "I'm a Filipino plus size brown man. I felt like a clown. But I was comfortable at my work. That was a very, very safe place for me." So was the social media world, where he connected with other young men who loved makeup. As his profile and career grew (he has 3.6 million followers), Mr. Starrr also realized the power he had to influence a larger movement. Men like Mr. Starrr have since influenced a new generation of young men who are wearing makeup and posting about it. According to the Instagram data team, there has been a 20 percent increase since the start of the year in mentions of "makeup" by male accounts on the platform. In only a couple of years, these young men have gained sway in the industry. Cosmetics brands like Milk Makeup have built their offerings on genderless beauty; the skin care company Glow Recipe hosts sold out boy beauty mask classes; and in the fragrance aisle, unisex scent houses continue to grow. In Mr. Starrr's case, the employee is now the collaborator: In December he is releasing a special collection of products with MAC, which will kick off a yearlong commitment for five collections. The collaboration is second in size only to Rihanna's collections for the company. And the men who are paying attention appear to be getting younger and younger. Jack Bennett is one of the youngest and sees his account as a way to "enjoy the artistic side of makeup." Jake Warden, from Longmont, Colo., is 15 and has 2.1 million Instagram followers. MAC Cosmetics has paid him to feature its Studio Fix foundation. Alan Macias (473,000 followers) is 19. His favorite look is what he calls "boy glam, which is a boy, but a pretty boy." "That's foundation, concealer, mascara, gloss and done," he said. And it's likely they would all like to achieve the success of James Charles, now 18 with 2.5 million Instagram followers, who landed a CoverGirl contract as its first male ambassador. Certainly their ages have raised eyebrows and drawn eyeballs. Some have mainstream celebrity followers, like Shay Mitchell, Ansel Elgort and Meghan Trainor. But Carly Cardellino, beauty director of Cosmopolitan.com, argues that their skill is the draw. "If you're amazing at applying makeup, it doesn't matter how old you are or what gender you identify with," she said. "If you're young, already embracing who you are and are insanely talented, those factors will make you stand out even more." Though the younger generation of influencers are of diverse molds, they are similar in that they take men wearing makeup as a given. "I didn't think about gender identity, what you do with your life, things you associate yourself with," Mr. Warden said, referring to the time he started his Instagram posts. "I think no matter what gender, you are free to do what you want." And the way men are dispensing with male beauty stereotypes is trickling down. Cozy Friedman, a founder of the Cozy's Cuts for Kids hair salon in Manhattan, has seen a shift in attitudes. "What you have now are millennial moms who have grown up in an era where gender is more fluid," Ms. Friedman said. "Millennials are very in tune with empowering their children." For example, she sees a wide range of hair lengths on boys. "It's not unusual for boys to sit in the chair, take out an iPhone and show a picture of what they want their hair to look like," she said, adding that they start around age 6. "There are many role models for them to look to now." Matthew Taylor, 16, with 180,000 Instagram followers, is optimistic that male beauty norms will continue to loosen, regardless of sexual orientation. "I do think that one day boys will be able to do whatever they want and not be judged," he said. Yet for a male influencer like Kevin Ninh, 21, known as Flawless Kevin on Instagram and YouTube, simply putting on makeup and taking photos should be only part of the message. Mr. Ninh is now at the University of Washington Bothell, where he is double majoring in media communications and gender, women and sexuality studies. Though he started wearing makeup as a teenager and posting about it on YouTube five years ago, he has learned, he said, how portrayals in media can affect perception of gender and identity. "Yes, it's important to entertain," he said. "But while you're doing it, why not teach them something at the same time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"Premature" isn't original, but it feels that way. A tender, naturalistic romance set in Harlem, this sophomore feature from Rashaad Ernesto Green takes a slight story and packs it with attitude and feeling. Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created. Unwaveringly focused on Ayanna (a captivating Zora Howard), 17, during the summer before she leaves for college, the movie deftly alternates between two distinct tones. One is sassy and jocular, as Ayanna, a coolly confident would be writer, hangs out with her boisterous group of girlfriends. The other is slow and sexy, a cocoon of infatuation that envelops her when she meets the sweetly chivalrous Isaiah (Joshua Boone). A fledgling music producer, Isaiah is a little older, but as we shall soon learn not much wiser.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
With its rhythmic onomatopoeia, cacophony of fonts and screeching palette, everything about "Noisy Night," by Mac Barnett, illustrated by Brian Biggs, is gleefully loud. A child is woken by sounds coming from upstairs. "What is going LA LA LA above my head?" We see a cross section slice of the floor above: a glimpse of dapper shoes and coattails. A page turn shows an opera singer belting out an aria. But wait, what's going MA MA MA above his head? Each entertaining spread reveals a different noisy tenant and a new mystery to be solved. Who or what is going HAW HAW HAW, CAW CAW CAW or RAH RAH RAH? Page by page, floor by floor we discover a diverse bunch of residents in a city apartment building, laughing, cheering, dancing, or in the case of a sheep, talking to themselves, until we reach the BLAH BLAH BLAH coming from the top floor. An old man is hollering for everyone to go to sleep. And they do. Presumably. (We never see the child again. Possibly he's lying awake fuming.) There's a lot to enjoy in Biggs's illustrations. I appreciate the impeccable continuity in the details, the infectious joy of the cowboys, the mixed genders of the cheerleaders. I can't help wishing, though, that the form of the book was more playful. I'm thinking of Peter Newell's "The Rocket Book" from 1912, which is also a journey from a basement to the top floor of a building, connected by a die cut hole that disrupts each page and its inhabitants. I wanted to turn "Noisy Night" 90 degrees counterclockwise in the beginning so we might rise vertically through the apartment. But small children probably won't be so demanding. Instead they'll enjoy returning to the cover to pick out each character in the building, no doubt noisily resisting their own bedtimes. Considerably quieter, Akiko Miyakoshi's "The Way Home in the Night" begins with a sleepy rabbit child being carried through empty city streets in its mother's arms. There is something immensely comforting in viewing the world over a parent's shoulder. When I was 7, I feigned sleep in the car so that my father might lift me out and carry me inside, knowing deep in my bones that this ritual would soon end. (Partly because I was getting too big, partly because my parents were getting divorced.) In Miyakoshi's subdued text, originally written in Japanese, we encounter the sounds, smells and sights of an urban neighborhood at day's end, observed by a family on their way home. In her tender illustrations we see a grainy, charcoal night, punctured with windows of soft light, populated by figures with human forms and gentle animal heads. Somehow her characters, which defy racial and gender stereotypes, are poignantly, heartbreakingly human. They are preparing dinner, watching TV, answering the phone. Staring wistfully at photographs as they brush their teeth. Hugging their favorite one goodbye.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The courtyard of Campus Hybernska, one of several new cultural venues that have opened in abandoned buildings in Prague. Don't be put off by the looming doorway, with its spray painted graffiti tags and crumbling posters, just off hectic Namesti Republiky, one of the busiest squares in Prague. Beyond it, a quieter world unfolds, with courtyards, galleries, a cozy cafe and bar. Campus Hybernska, as this sprawling complex is known, is one of several new cultural venues that are springing up in Prague's many long abandoned buildings. "The front building was built between the 18th and the 19th centuries, and the whole thing was once some sort of downtown seat of a Czech noble family," said Jan Bicovsky, a professor at Prague's Charles University and a director of Campus Hybernska. "A 'palace' is probably the right expression." Abandoned factories and palatial structures, former military barracks and old electrical substations: Unlike Berlin's art collectives and Budapest's party friendly "ruin bars," the city's post 1989 cultural life rarely included the use of these kinds of buildings, which have mostly remained empty, often for decades, because of local ownership laws and usage regulations. But in recent years, they have become home to grass roots arts and entertainment spaces, whether they are in the city center or up and coming neighborhoods. You won't find them in mainstream travel guides; they are decidedly off the radar venues, providing insider access to alternative cultural activities and a chance to see interesting, historic spaces. And for those who have an aversion to Prague's famous tourist crowds, you won't find them in these places. Instead, you'll find a quieter, more local side of Prague's vibrant cultural life . Art in an old Praga factory Other projects have taken longer to develop. A few miles east of the city center, the old Pragovka automobile factory in the outlying Vysocany district has stood more or less empty for decades. Starting in 1907, the stylish Praga automobiles built here turned heads until just before the Communist takeover in 1948. After that the factory built trucks, military vehicles and automobile parts until 1989, when it was privatized and eventually shuttered. Although the first artists started moving in about seven years ago, it is only recently that its two main art galleries, featuring both local and emerging European artists, have opened, along with a new cafe. "It's got a melancholy air, to be sure," said Lawrence Wells, an expat American artist who was among the first to start renting a studio here in 2011. A five minute walk from the Kolbenova metro station, the main, E shaped building now hosts more than 120 artists, designers, filmmakers and other creative types. Studios still bear signs identifying chemical laboratories and warnings about the dangers of smoking around flammable gasses. Above a run down loading dock, a bone white sculpture of an immense male nude reclines. In warmer months and at special events during the winter, an outdoor beer garden serves Czech craft brews. Old Pragovka trucks, painted white, ghost the parking lot, while billboards on the eastern edge of the property feature work from resident artists, including the former street and graffiti artist known as Pasta Oner. "Working here is fantastic," said Ladislav Vlna, a Czech artist who made headlines for his use of a blowtorch and power tools to "paint" large scale portraits on metal sheets. "It's warm, there's plenty of room, and we have a lovely cafe. And if you use a very noisy tool to make art, there's no problem, because no one actually lives here." Halfway across town, another creative space has opened in an old military barracks near the western edge of the trendy Karlin district. "This used to be a changing room," said Matej Velek, the director of the project, gesturing around a stylish cafe near the empty pool, which now serves as a performing arts space. Original changing room tiles don't look out of place in the minimalist cafe, which serves, among other things, Czech lager, French wine and coffee drinks. The cafe is part of Kasarna Karlin, a new project that is making temporary use of the barracks. In this case, "temporary" probably means between five and 10 years, while the building's owner decides what to do with it. Originally built in 1848, the block length barracks was floated for possible privatization in 2013, while it was still the property of the Czech government, a fate that has befallen many Prague buildings that were once considered public property. Instead, it was transferred from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Justice, who then worked with the local city government to find a suitable tenant. The old barracks are massive; Mr. Velek and his partners only have the use of one wing of the D shaped building, as well as the large courtyard that it surrounds. Events take place inside and out, year round. In winter, the beach volleyball court turns into a public ice skating rink. The movie theater upstairs is also home to break dancing classes. The complex includes a contemporary art gallery, a bar and a music venue, called Garaze. "We have an indoor cinema, and we have an outdoor cinema in the summer," Mr. Velek said. "The old swimming pool is an experimental place that works for author readings and some performances." He is most proud, he said, of the five large scale sculptures displayed in the courtyard three by the artist Frantisek Skala and two from the sculptor and filmmaker Cestmir Suska as well as the amount of open space Kasarna Karlin contains: about 2.47 acres. It would be difficult to find quite so much room in the crowded maze of Old Town. But even there, a new creative development is shaping up inside the building known as the House at the Golden Horn, just off Old Town Square. On the same block as the recently restored astronomical clock, a formerly vacant five story building, mostly dating from the Renaissance era, now houses nonprofits and start ups. The charitable organizations inside the House at the Golden Horn might not hold too much interest for tourists. But the Scout Institute here hosts poetry readings, concerts and other cultural events every week, including some in English, and the cafe on the second floor is one of the least commercial places to stop for a cup of coffee in the heart of Prague's hyper commercialized tourist zone. Just by sticking your head in you'll get a glimpse of a Prague Renaissance building. With dozens of vacant buildings across the Czech capital, the trend is set to continue in coming years, with activist groups like Prazdne Domy regularly promoting available spaces. More are already on the way. Near the Florenc metro station, not far from Kasarna Karlin, locals started renovating a vacant building called Bar/ak this past summer, recently installing a pottery studio, bar, cafe and community grilling area. And just a short walk downhill from Prague Castle toward the Vltava River, a local charitable foundation has announced plans to transform a former electrical substation from 1932 into a new art gallery called Kunsthalle. Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The American Academy of Pediatrics posted updated guidance Friday on young people and sports in the pandemic, making a strong recommendation that participants should wear face masks for all indoor sports. It made exceptions only while swimming and diving, since it's harder to breathe through wet masks; during gymnastics and cheerleading, where masks could get caught or obstruct vision; and during wrestling contact, where they could be a choking hazard. Cloth face masks are also encouraged for outdoor sports, when athletes are competing, in group training sessions and on the sidelines. The new recommendations are a response to rising numbers of Covid 19 cases in children and are meant to protect the athletes themselves, their family members and their communities. The academy had issued previous guidance on children and sports in the pandemic, but this revision notably strengthens the face mask recommendations for those actually engaged in vigorous exercise, and offers clarifications on cardiac risks for young athletes who have had Covid 19. "We know kids are getting infected at a significant rate, we know kids live with adults and there's a significant rate of transmission if they bring it home," said Dr. Susannah Briskin, an associate professor of pediatric sports medicine at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, who is on the executive committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics' council on sports medicine and fitness, and was co author on the new guidance. Dr. Briskin said that in states that have mandated masks for all sports, "athletes tolerated the change very well most people take a couple of practices to find a mask they can work out in." When she was working on the guidance, Dr. Briskin started exercising in a mask herself, and tried several kinds to find the right one. It may take more than one session to get used to wearing the face mask during exercise, she said. "The first time, people may find it to be an annoyance; by the second or third, they don't notice," she said. Heart problems after Covid 19 have been a concern in athletes, both children and adults, since early in the pandemic, when it became clear that the novel coronavirus could cause myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle. So the advice has been adjusted for young athletes who have had Covid 19 and want to return to play. 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. The new A.A.P. guidance specifies that children and adolescents who have had asymptomatic disease or mild disease need to be screened by their primary care providers before returning to sports. Those who have not been sick, or who have had less than four days of fever and other mild symptoms, should see their regular doctors, who are expected to carry out a cardiovascular history and physical (the American Heart Association recommends a 14 point screening checklist). All those who have had Covid 19, even without symptoms, should thus be asked about symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations or fainting. A positive screen or an abnormal physical exam should lead to an EKG and a referral to a pediatric cardiologist. And a child or adolescent who had a more significant bout with Covid 19 including fever for four days or more; more severe and prolonged symptoms of muscle aches, chills or lethargy; or a hospitalization should see a cardiologist after symptoms resolve and before starting to exercise. Even those who were completely asymptomatic should increase activity gradually, and only after being screened, Dr. Briskin said, suggesting five stages of incremental progress toward full activity; the A.A.P. recommends a schedule for graduated return to play that was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine earlier this year. Dr. Aaron Baggish, the director of the cardiovascular performance program at Massachusetts General Hospital Heart Center, said that early in the pandemic, when it became clear that many of those who were sick enough to be admitted to the hospital with Covid had evidence of injury to the heart, those who worked with athletes began worrying about what they might see in young people. Early guidelines were very conservative, he said, and recommended extensive testing, but more recently, with better information, it has become clear that it is more important to focus on those who were more significantly ill. Dr. Baggish was the senior author of an article, "Coronavirus Disease 2019 and the Athletic Heart," published in October in the journal JAMA Cardiology, which put forth guidance for cardiac testing in adult athletes before they can return to play. The article also argued that while there are still many unknowns about the possible effects of Covid 19 on the heart, the single most important consideration about organized sports should be preventing transmission and viral spread. Dr. Briskin agreed that the initial approach pediatricians took, when not much was known about the effects of Covid 19 infection, to "make sure we were doing everything we could to protect our athletes," advice was generally to be very conservative. "We're just starting to hit the point where we're getting some data about cardiac effects of Covid 19 on a younger population," she said; "that's going to help us give more accurate guidance for return to play." Dr. Peter Dean, a pediatric cardiologist who is the team cardiologist for University of Virginia athletes, and who sits on the American College of Cardiology sports and exercise leadership committee, said that as far back as June, athletes who had had Covid were starting to ask if they could go back to playing. The recommendations for adults at the time suggested fairly extensive cardiac testing for everyone, including EKGs, echocardiograms and blood tests for troponins (proteins that increase when there is injury to heart muscle). "At that point we really weren't seeing pediatric cases," Dr. Dean said, and it seemed that children were less severely affected by the infection in general. Covid 19 infection can definitely affect the heart in a child or adolescent, Dr. Dean said, and some children, such as those with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, do need extensive cardiac work ups. But rather than testing all children, it makes sense to focus on those who had moderate or severe disease, or who have persistent symptoms. "Myocarditis is a big deal, but it's incredibly rare," he said. "I think we are less worried as a community now about subclinical myocarditis than we were before," Dr. Dean said. There was a fear, perhaps, that children who had been mildly ill might have sudden cardiac arrests, either at home or when exercising, but "we just haven't seen it." Dr. Alex Diamond, the director of the program for injury prevention in youth sports at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said that the conversation about returning to play after even asymptomatic Covid infection should be "another opportunity for pediatricians to have a touchpoint with their patients." Because of the pandemic, he said, "we're seeing people delaying care for other issues," and missing well child checks and vaccinations. The sports physical allows the pediatrician to do all the other important checks to make sure that a child or adolescent is doing well and can safely participate in sports. And anyone who continues to have symptoms after Covid, especially shortness of breath, palpitations or chest pain, should be seen promptly by a doctor. "Watch out for any exertional type symptoms," Dr. Diamond said. Sports have great value in the lives of children and adolescents, and people who practice sports medicine tend to believe strongly in the benefits of athletic participation. "Our kids need some outlets, their lives have been turned completely upside down, like the rest of us," Dr. Diamond said. "For some, their only outlet is sports." But the benefits of exercise make it even more urgent to make things as safe as possible. "When we talk about the risk of playing sports, we have to look at the risk of not playing sports," Dr. Dean said. Contact sports bring people close together, Dr. Briskin said, and as sports move indoors for the winter, the risk of transmission increases. "If people want to give sports a chance to continue in a safe manner, they need to give thought how to do it safely and curtail spread before we see lots of teams isolated or people infected," Dr. Briskin said. In addition, the athletes need to restrict their activity away from sports, she said, again minimizing their own risks and reducing community spread.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
"Cubby" is clearly an effort to make an offbeat, personal film; an opening title card says that it's "based on a lie," and details throughout are so strange they must be drawn from life. But whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe worthy minutes. Mark Blane (who wrote the script and directed, although Ben Mankoff has an obscure "co directed" credit) casts himself as Mark Nabel, a wide eyed aspiring artist who arrives in New York from Indiana. He tells his mother he has a gallery job. But he does not, and he soon takes work as a babysitter. The job barely pays his share of the rent in the communal living arrangement he enters with unusual ease. (In what year is "Cubby" set? How cutthroat has real estate gotten in Bed Stuy? The film's relationship with such lived realities is tenuous at best.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For a living room to feel pulled together , most designers will tell you, it needs a rug. But rugs can be expensive. And because a large scale item like that is going to have a big effect on the way a room looks and feels, choosing one can be intimidating. The right rug may live in your home for decades. The wrong rug will serve as a daily reminder of the money you wasted and the money you'll have to spend if you want to replace it. And getting it wrong is all too easy, given the range of materials, colors, patterns and sizes available. Finding the ideal rug, observed the New York based interior designer Celerie Kemble, is a "complicated puzzle." To help you solve that puzzle, we asked Ms. Kemble and other designers and rug manufacturers for advice. Smaller spaces, and living rooms enclosed by walls and doorways, usually benefit from a single large rug. "I'm often dealing with apartments where the goal is to expand the sense of usable space in a living room," Ms. Kemble said. In those cases, "I usually want to use one rug, and make it as big as I possibly can." Sprawling, open concept spaces, like lofts, are more likely to benefit from multiple rugs, which help ground disparate groupings of furniture and can be used to separate a living area from a dining or media area, in the absence of walls. Another option is to layer rugs on top of each other, with a single large, plain rug on the bottom to cover most of the floor, and smaller decorative rugs on top to anchor different seating areas. It is important to work around a room's obstructions when planning a rug purchase. "We always start with the practical and then get to the decorative, while considering the architecture and mechanics" of a home, said Jesse Carrier, a principal of Carrier and Company, a New York interior design firm. "Are there doorways and door swings to consider? Is there any floor grille for HVAC that you don't want to cover? Is there a fireplace where you have to deal with a hearth?" After taking these details into account, consider circulation around the seating areas. "There's nothing worse than being forced to walk on the perimeter of a rug," Ms. Kemble said, with one foot on and one foot off. Choose a size that either completely covers the walkway or leaves the floor exposed where people need to pass by. Then decide how far beyond the furniture the rug should extend. A common way to size a rug is to ensure that it reaches underneath all four feet of all the furniture. Or you could use a smaller rug that runs under the front feet of the sofas and chairs, and stops there. Just make sure that smaller objects at the rug's edges, like end tables and floor lamps, are completely on or off the rug, Mr. Carrier said: "You don't want unbalanced, rocking end tables every time you put something down." What about small rugs that float in the center of a room, untethered by sofa and chair legs? Many experts advise against them. A boldly patterned rug can serve as the defining feature of a living area, but because it has so much impact, it's a choice that requires courage. Deciding whether to go with a graphic statement rug or something more understated comes down to personal preference, as well as your overall design vision and where your home is. "In the city, oftentimes clients will want to invest in an antique carpet from an auction or one of the great rug vendors as a showpiece," Mr. Carrier said. But in country homes and beach houses, "we'll often do some sort of sisal, sea grass or coir carpet, because it's a little more informal and rustic." If you decide to shop for a patterned rug, there are endless choices available, from free form contemporary designs to more traditional ones. But if you'd rather keep it simple, there are plenty of opportunities to introduce pattern at a smaller scale. Rugs come in many materials, including plant based fibers like cotton, linen, sisal, jute and allo; downy, natural fibers like wool, silk and mohair; and synthetic materials like nylon and solution dyed acrylic. There are also nonwoven rugs made from stitched together materials like cowhide. Each offers a different look and feel, with varying characteristics related to how well the materials wear and how easy they are to clean. They also range widely in price. Rugs made from plant based materials are often among the most affordable and offer an easy, casual look. But different fibers have different durability: Cotton and linen, for instance, age fairly quickly, while sisal and allo can take more abuse. "We've had some disasters with linen," Mr. Carrier said, "which is very, very beautiful" at least when it's new. But because it is easily damaged by wear and spills, he added, "we've had to replace a lot of linen rugs in our time, and now avoid them like the plague." Allo, on the other hand, is "very cleanable and doesn't retain stains," he said. One of the most popular materials is wool, which can offer a range of looks depending on how it's handled, from thin, flat weaves to hairy, hand knotted shags. Wool tends to be more expensive than most plant based materials, but it is stain resistant, softer underfoot and durable enough to last for centuries. "Wool has lanolin in it, which makes it a very cleanable, stain resistant fiber," said Bethany Hopf, a sales manager at the House of Tai Ping carpet company, in New York. "When you spill, it sits on top for a little while before it will actually absorb," which gives you time for cleanup. It's tempting to bring a rug home and put it down immediately, but there's a step you shouldn't skip: putting a nonslip rug pad underneath. Cut the pad to a size slightly smaller than the carpet. A general rule is that it should be trimmed about an inch shorter than the rug on all sides, to provide maximum grip while preventing a visible change in level where the rug transitions from pad to floor. Rug pads offer a touch of additional cushioning, Ms. Hopf said. But their real utility is more "about keeping it in place and preserving the life of the carpet," she said. In other words, it ensures that your new rug won't slide like a banana peel. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
BERLIN The same weekend that Italy locked down much of the country's north, fears over the coronavirus didn't stop the sold out premiere of Kirill S. Serebrennikov's "Decameron" from going ahead to a full house in Berlin. It seemed somewhat ironic, given that Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of ribald tales is set against the background of a plague outbreak in 14th century Florence. In this staging at the Deutsches Theater, Serebrennikov swaps out the Tuscan estate of Boccaccio for a contemporary aerobics studio, and the 10 tales that unfold over the course of the production are partly updated. There's a Wall Street tycoon, but also a king and a queen. Some of Serebrennikov's retellings bear little resemblance to their source material. Like so much of the director's work, the production is never less than grippingly contemporary. Beyond the gym setting, the only other main staging elements are large video panels that display German subtitles when the dialogue is in Russian, plus the contents of online chats, stock tickers, '80 style video games and trippy projections (by Ilya Shagalov) for several freaky sex scenes. Serebrennikov is perhaps the most prominent Russian theater and opera director working today, a distinction that owes as much, if not more, to politics as it does to art. A fraud trial that he currently faces has widely been interpreted as an ultimatum on artistic freedom in today's Russia. The director spent 20 months under house arrest before being released in April, but he remains barred from leaving Moscow, which is where he developed "Decameron" with actors from the Gogol Center, the avant garde theater he has run there since 2012, and the Deutsches Theater. (A Moscow premiere is set for June.) The Deutsches Theater has been a staunch ally during the director's lengthy battle with Russia's justice system. "Decameron" was originally planned to play there in 2018, but because Serebrennikov was still under house arrest, the Gogol Center presented other works. A year later, that company returned to the Deutsches Theater with Serebrennikov's provocative "Who Is Happy in Russia." (Berlin will see more Serebrennikov soon, when "Outside," which premiered at last summer's Avignon Festival, is performed at the Schaubuhne theater's FIND festival this week.) On the Russian side, Aleksandra Revenko is the most striking performer as she uses her hard stare to play a pitiless lover or comically snap to life as a personified bot advertising a beauty product to a gullible woman. Among the men, Marcel Kohler makes the best impression as a succession of cuckolded husbands. Many of the other male performers spend the evening in various states of undress, moving to Evgeny Kulagin's erotic, aerobics inspired choreography and live music that runs that gamut from Bach cello suites to Nina Simone (the latter, sung by the drag performer Georgette Dee, an alluring, if unexpected, presence here). The movement and music add definition to what would otherwise be a disjointed production, but the long evening ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts. There is greater sense of arc to the two hour long first act, but after intermission "Decameron" starts to fizzle out, with some poignant vignettes a group of older women sharing their love stories with the audience seeming out of place. Serebrennikov's point of departure seems to be that human nature is essentially unchanged from Boccaccio's age to our own. Like those Renaissance nobles and the tales they concoct, we are still bound and chained by the same drives and obsessions. Yet while the tales themselves are full of love and sex, this adaptation puts the focus elsewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director's recent Kafkaesque experiences, "Decameron" is most interested in exploring existential states of confinement. We are all imprisoned and quarantined by our passions and foibles. Is there a way out? This German Russian co production seems to suggest that artistic collaboration and exchange is our best hope.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
January is often reserved for kicking bad habits and beginning work on New Year's resolutions. But some parts of the internet especially news articles from the last few years and even some law groups have cast a dark cloud on the month, suggesting it is a popular time for couples to divorce. They've even unofficially nicknamed January "divorce month." Bleak, for sure. But is there any truth behind it? The answer, of course, is complicated. "Divorce is seasonal," Vicky Townsend, co founder and chief executive of the National Association of Divorce Professionals, said last month. Her network consists of specialists like lawyers, therapists and tax advisers who may be used in divorce proceedings. From Thanksgiving until New Year's, lawyers' offices are slow because people have put off divorcing until after the holidays, Ms. Townsend said. And people who may have been considering a divorce in the final months of the year often put off the decision until the holidays have finished, she noted. The idea may be, "New Year's resolutions it's a new year, new you, new start," she said. "The holidays are over, and I'm not going into this year as miserable as I was last year." A Google Trends search for "divorce" last year returned that it was, ever so slightly, most popular from Jan. 6 through Jan. 12. The term also appeared to be trending upward from the last week of December through this week. But over the past five years, the search term peaked at various times including March 2018, January 2017 and September 2016.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Brian Kilmeade, right, co hosts "Fox Friends," one of President Trump's go to programs, with Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt. Mr. Kilmeade was baldly critical of Mr. Trump on the Friday morning broadcast. Whenever President Trump is in a tight spot, things get tricky for Fox News. The cable network's most popular hosts have largely supported Mr. Trump and his agenda. The network's highest rated host, Sean Hannity, took the stage with him at a rally in Missouri last month. Mr. Trump even hired the former Fox News co president, Bill Shine, as the head of his communications team, and he has made no secret of the fact that he likes to start the day with the show "Fox Friends." On Thursday night and Friday morning, they faced the challenge of filling airtime with talk about the president just as he found himself in the middle of a crisis. And while the nighttime commentators tiptoed around a president in trouble, the morning host Brian Kilmeade was bluntly critical. In not toeing the White House line, he was following the lead of the firebrand writer Ann Coulter and the radio host Rush Limbaugh. The conservative media stars had a lot to work with. On Thursday Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, resigned in protest over the president's decision to pull American forces out of Syria a move followed by news of a troop drawdown in Afghanistan. The governmental drama also included Mr. Trump's blowing up a deal that would have allowed the government to avoid a shutdown over his demand of 5 billion for a border wall. "Killing the wall would be a big political win for the left," Mr. Carlson said on Thursday, "but there are other considerations, too, like, what about America?" At the bottom of the screen flashed a chyron: "Dems Walk Away From Sensible Wall Debate." With the sudden departure of the nation's military chief having alarmed leaders of both parties Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said the loss of Mr. Mattis meant the country was "headed toward a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation" Fox News devoted much of its coverage in prime time to what it called, in large onscreen type, the "Wall Fight." As the House of Representatives voted in favor of legislation that added 5.7 billion for a border wall a bill unlikely to pass the Senate Mr. Carlson parried with the Democratic strategist Julian Epstein about immigration. That was followed by a segment on a murder in California committed by an immigrant. After that, the host got around to addressing Syria and Mr. Mattis. And when he did, he echoed Mr. Trump's spin. "It may seem surprising that the president is breaking with one of his top advisers, but there's another way to look at it," Mr. Carlson said. "President Trump was told the U.S. could defeat ISIS and then leave Syria once it did. The U.S. did that. Now everyone in Washington is demanding he stay in Syria to counterbalance Russia and Iran." Critics, Republicans among them, have strongly disputed the claim that ISIS has been contained or that the United States should leave the region. "I disagree w removing US troops from Syria," Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, said on Twitter. But the wall was the main story of the night at Fox News. Substituting for a vacationing Sean Hannity was Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who was until recently a host on the National Rifle Association's media outlet, NRATV, a streaming service available through Apple, Amazon and Roku. On Fox News, Mr. Bongino, who has been praised by Mr. Trump, spent most of the hour talking through the legislative hurdles for potential wall funding. Guests on Mr. Bongino's edition of "Hannity" included Representative Jody Hice, Republican of Georgia, who labeled the potential government shutdown a "Schumer shutdown" in reference to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. Representative Tom Garrett, a Republican from Virginia, offered this: "If the clowns on the other side of the building want to fail, let them." 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. "Thanks for fighting the good fight, guys," Mr. Bongino said. Conservative media had lasered in on the wall in the days leading up to the Congressional vote on the spending bill, and it seemed to have had a potent effect. Earlier in the week, Mr. Trump appeared willing to sign a continuing resolution that would have kept the government operating through late February, even without money for the wall. But by the middle of the week, the president had to confront a backlash from a few of his most influential supporters. Ms. Coulter published a blistering column on her website with the headline "Gutless President in a Wall Less Country." In it, she called Mr. Trump a "gigantic douchebag." The president appeared to have taken notice. He unfollowed Ms. Coulter on Twitter, according to TrumpsAlert, a Twitter account that tracks the activity of the Trump family. Mr. Trump follows 45 people on the social network. On his radio show Thursday afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh who also appeared at the Missouri rally with Mr. Trump pressured the president to veto any bill that did not include wall funding. But he was more politic in his language than Ms. Coulter. "Veto this thing and then head down to Mar a Lago," Mr. Limbaugh said, referring to the president's club in Palm Beach, Fla. After advising Mr. Trump from behind the microphone, the host let his listeners know he had just received word from the White House that the president would indeed stick to his guns. At around that time, Mr. Trump told a gathering of House Republicans that he would not sign a spending measure that did not include the funding. On Friday morning, there was more tough talk from one of Mr. Trump's media allies. After noting the fall in the stock market and the threat of a government shutdown, Mr. Kilmeade said, "It was as crazy as any day and when James Mattis walks in with that three page resignation letter with subtle shots at the president, you got to wonder where we go on day two."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday and Friday, Margaret offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... 90 minutes, and I'm on my own 'Great Performances: Lea Salonga in Concert' When to watch: Friday at 9 p.m., on PBS. (Check local listings.) This concert, filmed last November at the Sydney Opera House, is a ton of fun a terrific set list, the correct amount of banter and just enough shots of musicians thoughtfully tooting away. The Broadway and Disney star Lea Salonga sings some of what you would expect from her oeuvre, including a "A Whole New World," which she performs as a duet with an audience member, along with a few surprises like "Meadowlark" from "The Baker's Wife." Three contestants show off their decorated lockers on an episode of "Craftopia." 'Craftopia' When to watch: Now, on HBO Max. If you are managing some of your cabin fever by bedazzling things and watching instructional D.I.Y. videos, or if your household is still into slime, try this good natured kid geared craft competition series like "Making It" for the locker decorating set. Three creative tweens go head to head on each episode, and the judges' feedback is sweet and supportive. Depending on your tolerance for glitter use, plenty of the challenges could be adapted for the home audience. There are eight regular episodes, two Halloween specials and two new Christmas specials. A scene from the new version of "Saved by the Bell." 'Saved by the Bell' When to watch: Now, on Peacock. This revival of the beloved teen sitcom sounded like a terrible idea but it's actually bright and charming. In this iteration, the children of the original characters are now students at Bayside, which, thanks to Governor Zack Morris's fumbling, is welcoming the student body from an underfunded, now shuttered high school. If you're into zingy teen shows like "Never Have I Ever," or the self aware earnestness of "Cobra Kai," or if you enjoy the contemporary recapitulation of "The Babysitters Club," watch this. If you care only about seeing Zack, Kelly, Slater, Jessie, one minute of Lisa and a glancing reference to Screech, skip ahead to Episode 8.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
One recent morning Erik Harrison, a vice president of the Patrinely Group, stopped by 535W43, a rental complex nearing completion that his company is developing with the USAA Real Estate Company between 10th and 11th Avenues in Manhattan. But it wasn't the 280 units in the two 14 story brick towers designed by CetraRuddy that were on his mind. It was the bike rooms, one in each of the towers, located not in a shadowy basement but right on the ground level, with big windows letting in abundant light. "We're going to have a table where people can fix their bikes, and maybe we'll hold workshops," Mr. Harrison said, surveying the south tower's 850 square foot bike space as cyclists seen through the windows zipped by toward the Hudson River Greenway. "We'll fit as many bike racks as we can." Driven by demand as well as a city mandate, developers and building owners are carving out bike rooms for residents to store what for some has become their transportation mode of choice. The state of the art spaces often have their own entrances, saving wear and tear on the lobby and passenger elevators. They also offer their own gear by way of pumps and repair stands, and, sometimes, homey touches like hooks for hanging helmets. In the fancier buildings, porters and door attendants act as bike valets. "People come to an open house and ask, 'Do you have a gym, a roof deck, a doorman?,' " said David Maundrell III, the executive vice president for Brooklyn and Queens new development of Citi Habitats. "Now they also ask, 'Do you have a bike room?' " Ridership has been growing steadily, according to the New York City Department of Transportation. A 2014 survey by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene indicated that in vast swaths of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, up to 20 percent of the population cycled several times a month. While the Citi Bike program can lay claim to some of the increase in cycling, people who own their own wheels still make up the majority of riders, according to Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. Of course, riders can store their bikes in their apartments, if there's room. But "now when you're spending a million dollars for a one bedroom," said Roberta Axelrod, the director of residential sales and marketing at Time Equities, "no one wants a bike in there" propped against the wall. "If you have a building with two and three bedroom apartments, 100 units doesn't mean 100 bikes," said Matthew Baron, the president of Simon Baron Development. "It could be 300 or 400." Consequently, there are waiting lists for many of the city's bike rooms. As for new buildings, a zoning amendment passed in 2009 requires the provision of one bike space for every two units in structures of 10 apartments or more. The law also applies to substantially enlarged buildings and to those being converted to residential use. "It used to be you'd build a building and then say, where should we put the bikes?" Ms. Axelrod said. "Now it's included in the program from the beginning." In Downtown Brooklyn, 388 Bridge, a new 378 unit rental/condo building, created 190 bike spaces in three separate rooms in the basement, one space above its mandated quota. Many buildings near parks or bike lanes, or ones geared to a demographic group that favors cycling, exceed the minimum number of spots. Forty2East, a new 53 unit condo building in East Williamsburg, has 36 bike spots, nine more than its quota. In some cases, bike rooms are muscling out other types of storage. The Richard Meier designed condominium One Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights neighborhood, originally was going to have 75 bike slots, but even before the building opened in 2008, that number was deemed inadequate especially considering the location, opposite Prospect Park, and the number of family size apartments it contained. After space from the garage was folded into the bike room, it accommodated 90 bikes, and, more recently, with the addition of double decker racks and wall hooks, it now has 117 spots. These days, however, it seems the mere provision of space isn't enough. Bike rooms in buildings coming to market now are being tricked out with compression air pumps, of the sort found in bike shops and gas stations, and work stands to which one can clamp a bike while oiling a chain or fixing a flat. Tools are often on hand, and sometimes there's a hose for washing bikes down after a muddy ride. At 252 East 57th Street, a condominium under construction near Second Avenue, one of the door attendants stationed at the porte cochere will be able to whisk away a bike after a ride and have it readied for the next outing. At the Residences at Prince, a condominium project in an 1826 landmark designated building in NoLIta that previously housed a Catholic school, the bike room will have hooks where residents can hang their helmets between rides. Many buildings are providing the bicycles themselves, acquiring their own fleets emblazoned with the buildings' names for residents' use. At least one building is even giving bicycles away. Nine52, a luxury condo soon to open on West 52nd Street in Hell's Kitchen, will have 20 black single speed Joulvert bikes, according to Maria Theresa Ienna of Park River Properties, the director of sales. It is also offering a bike, valued at around 450, as a closing gift to the first 25 buyers. "Customers come in and listen to the sales presentation and say, 'That's a beautiful bike,'" Ms. Ienna said. "We say, 'If you buy an apartment, the bike is yours.' " The least expensive unit in the building (already in contract) is a studio for 597,000. There is usually a price for parking in a bike room, according to owners and developers. The charges, which can come in the form of a monthly or annual fee, vary widely, from a token 10 per year to 10 to 100 per month. "It's a decent revenue stream," said Marc Kotler, a senior vice president for the new development group of FirstService Residential. "It can be 10,000 or 20,000 a year in income" for a building. For some New Yorkers, even a bike room won't do. The finicky can stow their top of the line bikes in the private storage lockers that some buildings have, safe from jostling and scratching. Or come up with other solutions. Susi Wunsch, the founder of Velojoy, a cycling lifestyle website, keeps her everyday bike, an all black aluminum Kona Dew with disc brakes, in the bike room of her Greenwich Village building, though she isn't a fan of wrestling it on and off overhead hooks. She balances her Serotta Ottrott road bike which she called her "pride and joy" atop a bookcase in her home office. With a frame that's clear carbon and titanium, it weighs only 16 pounds.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When I stepped off the S Bahn at the Neckarpark station in Stuttgart on my way to the Mercedes Benz Museum, I ran into a gaggle of Idaho high school students who nicely summed up the two automotive museums they had just visited. "Mercedes has more details and has more history," one of them told me. Porsche, he said, was more about Porsche and its racing heritage. There you have it. My work is done. Stuttgart is home to these two luxury brands, and as a car guy and automotive journalist, I have always wanted to make the pilgrimage there. Germany does not have the sort of geographic center for its auto industry that the United States has in Detroit. But since the companies' founders got their 19th century starts in Stuttgart, it comes closest. My first stop was Mercedes, which presents a captivating walk through the birth of the automobile with the kind of historical sheet metal eye candy that will wow an automotive fanatic. It's a tale the company is allowed to own because a founder, Karl Benz, is credited with making the first car, and its other founder, Gottlieb Daimler, was not far behind. But before I even entered the museum, I was stunned by the building. It's a double helix design by the Dutch architects UNStudio and sits like a round jewel on Mercedes Street. It opened in 2006. Though Henry Ford made the expensive automobile popular with his affordable Model T in the early 20th century, it was Mr. Benz, an engineer and inventor, who got things started in 1885, when he installed the almost one horsepower internal combustion engine he invented into a three wheel buggy. The building provides a floor by floor circular walk through Mercedes history over its nine floors and 177,000 square feet of exhibition space, with the timeline starting on the top floor. There I found a reproduction of that first car, with the real Daimler car next to it. Actually, a horse, thankfully another reproduction, greeted me as I began my tour at the start of the automobile age, when one horsepower meant what it advertised. Within a few years cars started to look like cars instead of horse drawn carriages for example the museum's 1902 40 HP, the oldest existing Mercedes branded car. Still, the industry used carriage types to describe its models, like phaeton (a light, open carriage), shooting brake (a carriage meant for gamekeepers and sportsmen) and cabriolet (a light carriage with a foldable hood drawn by one horse). Even dashboard is a leftover carriage term it was the board that insulated the driver from rocks and dirt from the road. The walls of the ramps that connect the floors are also part of the show. As I made my way down to the fourth floor, which highlighted safety, I learned that the ramp walls were made of polyamide, an airbag material. Clever. "It is the only museum in the world that can document over 130 years of automobile history complete from the very first day," Miriam Weiss, a Mercedes spokeswoman, wrote in an email. Frankly, the museum can seem overwhelming because there is so much of that history to take in and so many beautiful cars to sigh over, like the 1955 300SL Coupe, known as the Gullwing. You will learn that Mercedes was the name of an important customer's daughter, Mercedes Jellinek (interesting that her father, Emil, eventually changed his last name to Jellinek Mercedes), and that the company's logo, the three pointed star, symbolizes earth, water and air. I traveled to the museum by train, but left with a strong urge to drive, something from the AMG performance division preferably, but alas, there was no opportunity. I went to the dealership on the bottom floor, but was told test drives must be scheduled about a week in advance. There is no such problem at the Porsche Museum, about seven miles away from Mercedes. The Porsche building, which sits on three V shape columns, is striking and seems to float above the ground. It was designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects of Vienna and opened in 2009. Representatives in the lobby will let you drive, say, a 911 for about 165 an hour and up to about 60 miles, but be aware you have to leave a 3,000 deposit. No matter see the museum first. It's more straightforward than Mercedes's, with everything on one floor and a loft. It contains more than 60,000 square feet of exhibition space, and the displays are spread out. You can follow the development of Porsche's models, from the design ultimately used for the Volkswagen Beetle, first created by Ferdinand Porsche, the company founder, to the car that defines the company, the 911. You can see how the sleek Type 64 racecar from the late 1930s led to the beloved Porsche 356 and then to the 911. And for fun, there's an area where you can press buttons to hear the engines of several cars, like the Panamera GTS and 911 GT3. Also impressive is the case that displays dozens of trophies from the company's 30,000 motorsport wins. If you love the brand, especially its racing history, you'll love this museum. "Racecars have real road grime, dirt and dents," Achim Stejskal, director of the Porsche Museum and Historical Communications, wrote in an email about some of the museum's exhibits. "And all the cars actually run and participate in hundreds of events worldwide every year." Both museums touch on World War II and the roles that Mercedes and Ferdinand Porsche played, with Mercedes devoting part of a ramp wall explaining its use of forced labor and the allied bombing of its plants. Porsche has a brief mention of Mr. Porsche's work as an engineer during the war, when he assisted Germany with tank design. But do not, under any circumstance, miss the two hour factory tour across the street from the Porsche Museum. (You need to book about a month in advance.) I was able to watch workers hand make these precision sports cars, with 911s, 718 Caymans and 718 Boxsters teasing me as they crawled by on the assembly line. My tour group was full of Porsche owners who were being schooled on why their cars cost so much. Fun factory facts: It makes about 240 cars a day; 15 percent of the work force is women; it takes 4.5 hours to make the famed boxer engine; and, the tour guide said, most of the leather comes from Austria. Many of the cars being built that day were headed to China and the United States. I watched as a powertrain arrived on an orange cart under a 718 Boxster for what my tour guide called its marriage into the chassis. A worker hit a button, and the powertrain rose precisely into the chassis. It was a beautiful thing to see. I would have liked to have followed that car to its new owners, telling them I saw their baby being born. And if their baby grows up and also moves to Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, after all, isn't too far away.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
"I was curious." That's how James M. Duggan, an Oxford University medical student, explains why he agreed to swallow a big dose of live typhoid bacteria. "This may sound odd," he continued, "but as a medical student, it's quite interesting to go through the process of being very ill. It does help to create empathy for your patients." Mr. Duggan, 33, was not on a self destructive sympathy bender. Like more than 100 other residents of Oxford, England, he was taking part in a trial of a new typhoid vaccine. Typhoid fever, caused by the bacteria Salmonella typhi and spread in food and water, kills almost 200,000 victims a year many of them young children in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Survivors may suffer perforated intestines, heart problems and other complications. The experimental vaccine was a big success. The trial's results were published in The Lancet on Thursday: the vaccine turned out to be 87 percent effective. It is the only effective vaccine that is also safe for infants, and already it is made cheaply and used widely in India. The Oxford Vaccine Group, which ran the trial, and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, which paid for it, hope the World Health Organization will endorse the vaccine soon. "These are great results," said Dr. Anita Zaidi, the foundation's director of diarrheal diseases. "And challenge tests are a great way to short circuit the process of proving it works. "If we'd done this in the field, we would have had to follow children for three or four years." So called challenge tests involve giving subjects an experimental vaccine and then deliberately infecting them with the disease to see if it protects them. Still, there was a good chance that the participants in Oxford would be unpleasantly sick with typhoid fever for several days until their antibiotics kicked in. So what would motivate dozens of well educated Britons to swallow a vial full of the germs that made Typhoid Mary famous? In interviews, they gave various reasons. Some, like Mr. Duggan, were curious. Some wanted to help poor people. And some mostly wanted the cash. Participants who followed all the steps, which included recording their temperatures online, making daily clinic visits and providing regular blood and stool samples, received about 4,000. They all said they understood the risks. Typhoid got its fearsome reputation in the pre antibiotic age, but these days it normally can be driven out of the body with common antibiotics, like ciprofloxacin or azithromycin. All participants had to be healthy adults, ages 18 to 60, with ultrasound scans proving their gallbladders were stone free. Different participants had very different experiences. Mr. Duggan was sick for three days with flulike symptoms: "proper flu, where you don't want to get out of bed," he said. His temperature rose to 102 degrees, and he had joint pains and a bad headache. Once a blood culture proved he had typhoid, he got antibiotics right away; he was not released from treatment until three typhoid free blood and stool samples proved he was out of danger. He later was told that he had been in the trial's placebo arm and had received a meningitis vaccine instead. (Modern ethics boards frown on useless "sugar pill" placebos.) Nick J. Crang, 24, a graduate student in proteomics, also got the placebo. But somehow he never got sick, even after two typhoid challenges a year apart. "It turns out I've got innate immunity to typhoid," he said. So does he feel superhuman? "No, I'm the lab rat who's screwing with the figures." He did give extra blood samples to researchers curious about his immune system. The bacterial doses were offered by nurses wearing plastic aprons, gloves and face shields to prevent splashing. Participants also donned aprons and goggles, and were asked to first drink bicarbonate of soda to neutralize their stomach acid. But there were no steaming beakers out of Vincent Price movies. "It was all quite underwhelming," said Daina Sadurska, 26, a grad student in biology. "It was served in a typical laboratory tube. I expected it to taste more 'typhoidy.' Not like poop, that is the things that make poop smell like poop are absolutely different bacterially." "But I expected something. A lot of cultures have a typical smell. It was clear, I think, and it tasted like nothing particular." Ms. Sadurska never fell ill and later learned that she had gotten the vaccine. She had a unique reason for joining: her great great grandmother and one of her aunts died during a typhoid epidemic in Latvia during World War I. "When I told my mother I was doing this, she reminded me of that episode," she said. "When I signed up, I thought, 'Why on Earth am I doing this?' But I'm a biologist. All sorts of boogeymen become a lot less scary when you know more about them." She and Mr. Crang, her boyfriend, used the money to visit Croatia, Israel and her family in Latvia. They have both signed up for a second vaccine trial that will pay for his laser eye surgery and then a trip together to Australia. Faye Francis, a 42 year old psychiatric nurse, said she felt "happy to be doing something that could help millions of poor people who haven't got antibiotics." "But I won't lie," she added. "The money was a big part of it." She used it to take her husband and three children on a vacation in Cornwall "and buy a few bits for the car and the house." Her mother was not happy. "She said, 'That's ridiculous don't think about the money, think about your health!' " Mrs. Francis said. "And people were telling me horror stories about things they'd seen on TV. So I didn't go on about it to my parents after that." She got sick and "felt rotten for about a week" with a 101 degree fever, headache and nausea. "But I still went to work," she said. "I felt a bit guilty about not going when I had an illness I'd given myself." Because her job is to distribute medicine on home visits, no patients were endangered, she said. (Mr. Duggan, the medical student, was also quick to say that he took part during a period when he was not assigned to hospital rounds.) "They don't let you do it if you've got preschoolers or children in nappies," Mrs. Francis said. "And you're not allowed to handle food, so my husband did all the cooking." During the worst week, "you feel sorry for yourself and you say 'I'm never doing that again,' " she said. "And then it's like childbirth you get amnesia, and you do it again. I've just signed up for a second trial."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
SAN FRANCISCO Most big banks have tried to stay far away from the scandal tainted virtual currency Bitcoin. But Goldman Sachs, perhaps the most storied name in finance, is bucking the risks and moving ahead with plans to set up what appears to be the first Bitcoin trading operation at a Wall Street bank. In a step that is likely to lend legitimacy to virtual currencies and create new concerns for Goldman the bank is about to begin using its own money to trade with clients in a variety of contracts linked to the price of Bitcoin. While Goldman will not initially be buying and selling actual Bitcoins, a team at the bank is looking at going in that direction if it can get regulatory approval and figure out how to deal with the additional risks associated with holding the virtual currency. Rana Yared, one of the Goldman executives overseeing the creation of the trading operation, said the bank was cleareyed about what it was getting itself into. "I would not describe myself as a true believer who wakes up thinking Bitcoin will take over the world," Ms. Yared said. "For almost every person involved, there has been personal skepticism brought to the table." Still, the suggestion that Goldman Sachs, among the most vaunted banks on Wall Street and a frequent target for criticism, would even consider trading Bitcoin would have been viewed as preposterous a few years ago, when Bitcoin was primarily known as a way to buy drugs online. Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an anonymous figure going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, who talked about replacing Wall Street banks not giving them a new revenue line. Over the last two years, however, a growing number of hedge funds and other large investors around the world have expressed an interest in virtual currencies. Tech companies like Square have begun offering Bitcoin services to their customers, and the commodity exchanges in Chicago started allowing customers to trade Bitcoin futures contracts in December. But until now, regulated financial institutions have steered clear of Bitcoin, with some going so far as to shut down the accounts of customers who traded Bitcoin. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, famously called it a fraud, and many other bank chief executives have said Bitcoin is nothing more than a speculative bubble. Ms. Yared said Goldman had concluded that Bitcoin is not a fraud and does not have the characteristics of a currency. But a number of clients wanted to hold it as a valuable commodity, similar to gold, given the limited quantity of Bitcoin that can ever be "mined" in a complex, virtual system. "It resonates with us when a client says, 'I want to hold Bitcoin or Bitcoin futures because I think it is an alternate store of value,'" she said. Ms. Yared said the bank had received inquiries from hedge funds, as well as endowments and foundations that received virtual currency donations from newly minted Bitcoin millionaires and didn't know how to handle them. The ultimate decision to begin trading Bitcoin contracts went through Goldman's board of directors. The step comes with plenty of uncertainties. Bitcoin prices are primarily set on unregulated exchanges in other countries where there are few measures in place to prevent market manipulation. Since the beginning of the year, the price of Bitcoin has plunged and recovered significantly as traders have faced uncertainty about how regulators will deal with virtual currencies. "It is not a new risk that we don't understand," Ms. Yared said. "It is just a heightened risk that we need to be extra aware of here." Goldman has already been doing more than most banks in the area, clearing trades for customers who want to buy and sell Bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Exchange. In the next few weeks the exact start date has not been set Goldman will begin using its own money to trade Bitcoin futures contracts on behalf of clients. It will also create its own, more flexible version of a future, known as a non deliverable forward, which it will offer to clients. Mr. Schmidt is looking at trading actual Bitcoin or physical Bitcoin, as it is somewhat ironically called if the bank can secure regulatory approval from the Federal Reserve and New York authorities. The firm also has to find a way to confidently hold Bitcoin for customers without its being stolen by hackers, as has happened to many Bitcoin exchanges. Mr. Schmidt and Ms. Yared said the current options for holding Bitcoin for clients did not yet meet Wall Street standards. Goldman is known for pushing the envelope in the trading of complicated products. The firm faced significant criticism after the financial crisis for its profitable trading of so called synthetic derivatives tied to the subprime mortgage markets. Since the crisis, Goldman has made a big push to position itself as the most technologically sophisticated firm on Wall Street. Among other things, it has started an online lending service, known as Marcus, that has brought the firm into contact with retail customers for the first time. The virtual currency trading, though, will be available only to big institutional investors. Mr. Schmidt said Goldman's sophistication was a big part of the reason he was open to the job, despite many other opportunities in the virtual currency world. "In terms of having a trusted institutional player, it has been something I have been looking for in my own crypto trading but it didn't exist," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Barnes Noble has been acquired by the hedge fund Elliott Advisors for 638 million, a move that has momentarily calmed fears among publishers and agents that the largest bookstore chain in the United States might collapse after one of the most tumultuous periods in its history. The sale was announced Friday morning after months of speculation over the future of Barnes Noble. The acquisition follows Elliott's purchase of the British bookstore chain Waterstones in June 2018. James Daunt, the chief executive of Waterstones, will also act as Barnes Noble's C.E.O. and will be based in New York. It marks a surprising new chapter in the 40 plus year history of Barnes Noble, which evolved from a single Manhattan bookstore in 1971 and grew into a national fleet of superstores. In the 1990s, Barnes Noble was often vilified as a greedy corporate giant that slashed book prices to lows that its competitors could not match and helped put struggling independent booksellers out of business across the United States. But in recent years, Barnes Noble has been decimated by the strength of online booksellers like Amazon and struggled to make a profit. The company has closed more than 150 stores in the last decade or so, leaving it with 627. "The loss of Barnes Noble would have been catastrophic for the industry," said Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon Schuster. Mike Shatzkin, the chief of the Idea Logical Company, a book industry consulting firm, said a sale was probably the best outcome for the company's future. "Somebody else had to save Barnes Noble the present ownership succeeded in a completely different environment and was not ready to jump into the 21st century," he said. "The fact that they own Waterstones certainly puts them in the right direction. Their ability to influence the publishing industry is going to be stronger being in both markets." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. The all cash transaction valued Barnes Noble stock at 6.50 a share, a premium of nearly 42 percent over the retailer's stock price on Wednesday, before a report by The Wall Street Journal about an impending deal drove up the price on Thursday. The stock rose 11 percent on Friday, closing at 6.62 a share. The sale was approved unanimously by Barnes Noble's board. Leonard Riggio, the company's founder and chairman, said in a news release: "In view of the success they have had in the bookselling marketplace, I believe they are uniquely suited to improve and grow our company for many years ahead." Mr. Daunt is well regarded in the publishing industry for rescuing Waterstones from near bankruptcy. "James Daunt is a terrific bookseller, and his focus in the U.K. has been bringing customers in and making book retail exciting," Ms. Reidy said. "It bodes well for not just having a solid Barnes Noble, but for having a growing Barnes Noble." Waterstones has pursued a strategy that some analysts say is the only way to compete in a marketplace dominated by online sales, by allowing individual Waterstones booksellers to tailor each store to the needs and interests of its community. Mr. Daunt, who took over in 2011, has said Waterstones operates more like a constellation of independent stores than a homogeneous chain. Mr. Daunt, who ran his own bookstore chain, Daunt Books, before taking charge of Waterstones, said he planned to apply a similar approach with Barnes Noble. "The main thing is that there isn't a template; there's not some magic ingredient," he said in an interview on Friday. "The Birmingham, Ala., bookshop, I imagine, will be very different from the one in downtown Boston. They don't need to be told how to sell the exact same things in the exact same way." While Barnes Noble and Waterstones will operate independently, they will "benefit from the sharing of best practices between the companies," the news release said. Barnes Noble's new owner, Elliott Advisors, is an affiliate of Elliott Management, an activist fund founded by Paul Singer. Elliott spent more than a decade in a vicious fight over bond payments with Argentina, whose former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner called Mr. Singer a "vulture lord" and his firm a "financial terrorist." In 2016, the country paid Elliott 2.4 billion, a 392 percent return on the original value of the bonds. Mr. Singer has given money to campaigns supporting same sex marriage and is an influential Republican donor. He was a major critic of President Trump until after the election, when he donated 1 million to Mr. Trump's inaugural fund. Before Elliott bought Waterstones, which operates more than 280 stores, the chain was struggling, posting a loss in 2012. It now has a double digit margin. For its 2018 fiscal year, it had sales of more than 385 million pounds, or about 490 million. Mr. Daunt acknowledged that Barnes Noble faced significant challenges as it sought to reverse years of decline and Amazon continued to gobble up market share, but he expressed confidence that investing in stores would pay off in the end. "That tide has been only going in one direction for a while, and we have to reverse that," he said. "And you do that by running really nice bookshops." In recent years, the future of Barnes Noble has looked grim. Its longtime strategy of beating competitors through the sheer volume of its offerings no longer provided an advantage in an era of online retail. Many in the book business have been bracing themselves for the chain's possible demise, which would be a devastating blow to the publishing industry. The turmoil was compounded by a series of management crises. Last summer, Barnes Noble fired its chief executive, Demos Parneros, who was the fourth chief executive to depart in five years. He had been in his role for just over a year when he was ousted, in part because of claims of sexual harassment by an employee.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Hard to imagine she once worked in shadow; when she had her first New York exhibition, in 1938, Vogue preferred to name her "Madame Diego Rivera." For there may be no artist today as famous as Frida Kahlo, now recognizable from Oaxaca to Ouagadougou with those big brown eyes framed by her notched unibrow, those pursed lips topped by a whisper of a mustache. Certainly no woman in art history commands her popular acclaim. There is a Frida Barbie. A Frida Snapchat filter (with a suspicious skin lightening effect). Frida tchotchkes on Etsy and eBay number in the tens of thousands. Beyonce herself dressed as Kahlo a few years back, trailed by the usual "FLAWLESS" and "SLAY" headlines, and so did more than 1,000 fans who gathered at the Dallas Museum of Art in Frida drag. Even Theresa May, the British prime minister not overly accustomed to celebrating Communists, sported a Frida Kahlo charm bracelet during a major address. The V A's most visible recent shows have been lightweight spectacles of celebrity culture. There was every chance, I feared, that this exhibition would follow in the vein of the museum's showcases of pop stars like Kylie Minogue, Pink Floyd and David Bowie, the last of which also toured to Brooklyn. It turns out to be a more rigorous enterprise than those, thanks in part to its organizers, Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, curators at the Brooklyn Museum, who worked with Ms. Henestrosa. The Brooklyn exhibition deepens and broadens the V A's version with new loans and dozens of pre Columbian antiquities from the museum's own collection. (Another good addition: The Brooklyn Museum has provided all the wall text and labels in Spanish, as well as English.) The clothes, lent from Mexico City, are fantastically elegant, above all the rich skirts and blouses from the Oaxacan city of Tehuantepec. As for paintings, there are only 11 here, in a show of more than 350 objects. Never miss an event again. Subscribe to The New York Times Culture Calendar. More than celebrity relics, the show argues, the clothes are key to Kahlo's achievement. So are her jewelry and her spine straightening corsets Kahlo was in a traffic accident as a teenager, and this show puts a particular focus on her disability. Do her outfits have the weight of art, or are they just so much biographical flimflam? My mileage varied from gallery to gallery, but it's worth considering, given her admirers' intense love for her persona, how much can be displaced onto skirts and shawls. Love for her style has inflated the standing of her art all out of proportion, and in recent decades it's become an article of faith that Kahlo was a more important painter than her acclaimed husband, indeed one of the indisputable greats. This is well, not true, sorry! In Brooklyn you'll find some engrossing self portraits, including MoMA's severe "Self Portrait With Cropped Hair," but Kahlo also painted half competent still lifes, gross Stalinist agitprop, and ghastly New Age kitsch including this show's "The Love Embrace of the Universe ...," a world spiritualist tableau featuring a lactating Mother Earth that would make Deepak Chopra blanch. I'd name many other Mexicans, men and women, who drew more productively on surrealist, folk and indigenous vocabularies to force a new art after the revolution, including Rivera, the wily modernist Dr. Atl, the Mexico based Englishwoman Leonora Carrington and the ripe for rediscovery Alice Rahon. Yet Kahlo was a pioneer in self disclosure, a national advocate and an essential social connector, brokering introductions between Americans and Europeans and the local avant garde. She posed constantly for the best photographers, including Tina Modotti, Carl Van Vechten, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. Her real accomplishment, this show proposes, was a Duchampian extension of her art far beyond the easel, into her home, her fashion and her public relationships. Which makes her, for good and ill, a figure right for our time and also complicates the easy opposition between her Communist convictions and today's global Frida industry. Read more about how Frida Kahlo meticulously built her own image. Kahlo was born in 1907 in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City, in a newly built house called the Casa Azul. At 6, she contracted polio. At 18, a trolley car rammed into the bus she was riding; the accident shattered her spine and reduced her right leg to bits. Her father, Guillermo, a photographer who specialized in architectural documentation, took a formal, Europeanized portrait of her a few months after the accident, which appears in the first gallery here. She wears a long, dark silk dress and clasps a book in her hands; her hair is pulled back, her mien is stern. Her right leg, agonizing her, lies half hidden. "Appearances Can Be Deceiving" is more interesting as a photography exhibition, whose more than 150 images divulge her meticulous craftsmanship of a stern, self possessed record for the lens. In studio pictures she appears in full Tehuana dress; no paint splattered overalls. For Imogen Cunningham she wore a dark cloak and a necklace of chunky pre Columbian jade. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, perhaps the greatest of Latin American photographers, made a formal seated portrait in 1938; Kahlo wears her hair in the thick braid favored by Zapotec women, and drapes her shoulders and lap with an intricate rebozo, or woven shawl. Kahlo, like so many metropolitan leftists of Mexico's post revolutionary period, romanticized the country's indigenous population, though she did not see Tehuana clothing as retrograde. A valuable fringed rebozo with interlocking zigzags like the one in the Alvarez Bravo photo was woven from newfangled rayon. In 1929 she married Rivera, 20 years her senior and one of the most acclaimed modernist painters on the planet, who would receive the second ever solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931 (right after Matisse). In the painting "Self Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)," from 1943, her passion for her husband and for her country's indigenous south fuse into a tacky but strangely compelling icon, which riffs on the 18th century style of monjas coronadas, or nuns painted as brides of Christ. Diego's image is tattooed in the chevron of Frida's unibrow, and framing her face is a stiff lace headdress called a resplandor. It's paired here with a photo of Kahlo painting it while Rivera watches, a mannequin wearing her white and pink resplandor, and a wonderful sequence shot from "!Que Viva Mexico!", by the couple's friend Sergei Eisenstein, in which young, beaming women in Tehuantepec fit themselves with the same starched lace ruffs. Rivera, the bard of lefty Mexicanidad, loved when his young wife dressed in Tehuana clothing; it was a rebuke of the capital's Paris envying bourgeoisie. Yet the Brooklyn Museum show proves that Kahlo favored the beautiful ensembles here striped shawls over white lace blouses, coveralls festooned with woven silk flowers, skirts of canary yellow and rich indigo for profounder reasons. The long skirts covered her wasted right leg, which was eventually amputated, while the loose blouses also gave breathing room to the corsets and braces she wore to sustain her spine after nearly two dozen operations. A steel brace here, equipped with leather clad paddles to push back her shoulders, also appears beneath a see through Tehuana gown in the drawing that gives this show its title: "Appearances Can Be Deceiving." Orthopedic corsets became canvases in their own right, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. Even when confined to bed Kahlo dressed to the nines. The clothes, as well as the corsets and jewelry, were discovered in 2003 in a bathroom at the Casa Azul, where she was born, worked, suffered and died in 1954, age 47. The couple undertook an expansion of the French style house in the 1940s, ordering an Aztec inspired extension from Juan O'Gorman (better known for his astounding mosaics at Mexico City's main university) and decorating it with indigenous stone statuary, papier mache figurines, painted gourds and a healthy mix of pets. A rare film here shows the lush gardens that would inspire the dense, Rousseauesque vegetation in this show's most trademark Kahlo: "Self Portrait With Monkeys" (1943), featuring a quartet of primates who join the artist in a staring contest. Countless visitors, perhaps already following her on an Instagram account with nearly a million subscribers, will come to this show because of self portraits like this one. I hope they also spend time with the even more powerful artworks in the same room: a dozen retablos, or votive paintings on metal by anonymous Mexicans, similar to hundreds of paintings Kahlo lived with in the Casa Azul. These little devotional works depict sudden violence and racking illness, but also divine intercession; one gives thanks to the Virgin of Talpa for freeing a child from prison, another praises the Holy Trinity for sparing the life of a man crushed by a car. Each is a little masterpiece of suffering and redemption, made with a wrenching, openhearted economy. These artists knew, and Kahlo and Rivera knew when they collected them, that art has a much higher vocation than myth or merchandise. Through May 12 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718 638 5000, brooklynmuseum.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
She met Ms. Paltrow and Ms. Alba through her firm's involvement with "Planet of the Apps," the reality series produced by Apple that featured celebrity entrepreneurs as judges. She bonded with Ms. Paltrow, she said, in part because she is a quintessential Goop consumer. "I'm British, so I'm very self deprecating and I think that helps, too," Ms. Quinn said. Latest Project: Lightspeed funded Lady Gaga's new makeup line, Haus Laboratories, a glam, midpriced collection that began selling on Amazon in September. "When I first met Gaga, she just showed up at this meeting at a cafe in Malibu in shorts and a tank top and sneakers and yelled, 'Surprise!'" Ms. Quinn said. Next Thing: After building lifestyle brands around female celebrities, she is looking to branch out into famous couples. She has been in talks with Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen, though she would not reveal any details. "With a high profile husband and wife duo, essentially one plus one equals three," she said. It's a Thin Line: When Ms. Quinn is studying a celebrity's potential as a lifestyle brand, she is more interested in how deeply the fans are connected, rather than the likability or even popularity. Before working with Lady Gaga, for instance, she pored over the comments on Gaga's Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts. "I look for a really engaged followship," Ms. Quinn said. "Not everybody loves Gwyneth Paltrow, but the people that love her really love her. And when there's any negative publicity, that makes her lovers love her even more."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
WHEN Jack Resnick thinks of summer, he thinks of Brighton Beach, the broad expanse of Brooklyn waterfront just south of Sheepshead Bay. Dr. Resnick was born in 1946 in a displaced persons' camp in Germany. His parents, Eastern European Jews, had survived the war in hiding. The Resnicks came to the United States when he was 3, and except for a few years in Baltimore, lived in various neighborhoods in Brooklyn. On weekends, the family used to take the subway to Brighton Beach, where Dr. Resnick remembers his father swimming rhythmic laps along the shore, enjoying respites from long days working in the garment industry. "We'd go right to the beach, which would be so covered with blankets, you couldn't see the sand," said Dr. Resnick, an internist with a solo practice on Roosevelt Island. "It was a real boy meets girl place in those years, with the boardwalk and all." He remembers the knish stands and the kosher pizza, though not the seafood at the fabled Lundy's because his family was Orthodox. He also remembers water so murky with pollution that he couldn't see his body below the surface. When he looked down, all was blackness. "But I remember being very happy," he said. "I loved the freedom." Dr. Resnick's father died more than two decades ago. He himself is a grandparent. The waters of Brighton Beach have been cleaned to a crystalline shimmer. And two years ago, with his wife, Barbara Fisher, he returned, in a sense, to the summers of his youth. Unlike friends from the Upper West Side, who typically vacation in places like the Hamptons, Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, Dr. Resnick and Ms. Fisher have started spending long weekends on a beach just 17 miles from their apartment on West End Avenue. Dr. Resnick, an avid cyclist, sometimes makes the trip by bike. The journey is 23 miles and takes an hour and 45 minutes if he follows the scenic route along the water. If he and his wife travel by subway, their blue eyed Tonkinese, Sparky, makes the trip in a small black cat carrier. Both had been married previously, and between them they have six grown sons. Dr. Resnick had summer houses in Sag Harbor and in Truro on Cape Cod. Ms. Fisher, a writer who for many years taught English at the New School for Social Research, remembers childhood vacations by the water. "My father was a psychiatrist," she said, "so we used to go to places where psychiatrists went, like Wellfleet and Provincetown." Ms. Fisher and Dr. Resnick, who were married in 2001, live in a three bedroom apartment on West End Avenue. During their years together, they have traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Latin America. But shuttling to and from summer houses proved both expensive and time consuming. At the same time, Dr. Resnick felt a tug that pulled him back to South Brooklyn. Sometimes the couple took the subway to Brighton Beach and just strolled along the boardwalk. "For me, it was sort of weird," Ms. Fisher said. "I was born and raised in Manhattan, and in my whole life, I'd never even been to Brooklyn." Yet the idea of a summer place on the Brooklyn waterfront proved increasingly intriguing, and in fall 2010 they bought a two bedroom, fifth floor apartment on Corbin Place, for which they paid 485,000. Their building, erected in 1941, is at the water's edge. The beach is just steps from their back door. For Dr. Resnick, the experience is pleasantly deja vu. Ms. Fisher Barbsie to her friends is still marveling at their decision. "I would never have thought to do this myself," she said. "But Jackie is a man of no social pretensions. He doesn't realize the extent to which something like this goes against the grain. And he doesn't care." Although the two have been spending weekends at the apartment since last summer, only this spring did they embark on a renovation. They removed old linoleum and fake veneers, opened up the kitchen and outfitted it with granite countertops and stone floor tile. The decor is very different from that of their Upper West Side apartment, with its rich color scheme and country French furnishings, and the place is still awaiting such final touches as art and bookshelves. But with its pristine white walls, neutral color palette and minimal furnishings, the Brooklyn apartment has the spare, stripped down look of a cottage by the shore. This apartment couldn't be more different from their neighbors' homes. The community has in recent decades become a magnet for new Russian immigrants, who have erected mansions with columned entranceways and gilded spiral staircases. Here in the place some call Little Odessa, Russian is the language heard on the street, and even pizzerias have signs in Cyrillic lettering. Dr. Resnick and Ms. Fisher are savoring such local institutions as the Russian greengrocers and bakery and the array of ethnic restaurants. Last year they celebrated their 65th birthdays with a party for 60 friends at Tatiana, a popular Russian restaurant on the boardwalk, complete with a stage show that featured outfits adorned with feathers and sequins. "It was like Las Vegas manque," Ms. Fisher said. "Really, it was a little nutty." But most of their time is spent quietly, just swimming or sitting on the beach. In the evening, they watch as elaborately dressed Russians, many with little dogs at the ends of leashes, stroll along the boardwalk, giving it the look and feel of a promenade in a European or Latin American city. And they're becoming accustomed to the polite but sometimes dubious reactions of many friends. "The first reaction is disbelief," Ms. Fisher said. "They won't say, 'Are you nuts?' They'll say: 'You really got a place in Brighton Beach? How interesting. Maybe we should sell our place and move there.' But we know they won't."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Facebook said its advertisers must submit the additional documentation by mid October or it would pause noncompliant ad campaigns. "We truly understand the importance of protecting elections and have been working for quite some time to bring greater transparency and authenticity to ads about social issues, elections or politics," said Katie Harbath, Facebook's public policy director for global elections. Over the past few years, Facebook has struggled with questions about election interference and disinformation on its platform. The social network has worked to secure its site during elections, setting up so called war rooms to handle false content and bad ads during the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, as well as the national election in India this year and the European Union's parliamentary elections. It also rolled out the transparency policy on political advertising. Yet Facebook has applied its political advertising policy inconsistently. NBC News recently found that one political advertiser had sidestepped Facebook's rules and was running ads under decoy company names. Last month, academics also called the social network's ad archive a tool Facebook introduced in late 2018 to allow the public to analyze political ads and ferret out disinformation campaigns "broken," describing it as riddled with bugs and technical issues. Ms. Harbath said that Facebook's tools were not perfect and that it would "continue to learn from elections in the U.S. and around the world." Facebook alone cannot tackle political disinformation in ads, she said, adding that advertisers, governments, regulators, journalists and researchers will need to participate in addressing the global disinformation problem.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Christo's temporary floating sculpture "The London Mastaba," made from thousands of stacked oil barrels, on the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park, London, on June 15. LONDON Wearing a hard hat and a cargo jacket, the artist Christo stood on a platform looking over the Serpentine lake one April morning and watched his latest creation come to life. As ducks glided across the water, men in orange jumpsuits began assembling the installation, a crane hovering above their heads. "The London Mastaba," Christo's first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (through Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it's 66 feet tall as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt and weighs roughly 650 tons. Named after a flat roofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word "mastaba" means "bench" in Arabic), it's a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi. Installing the London sculpture has not been plain sailing, however. Christo had to fund the project himself, at a cost of 3 million pounds, or around 4 million. (Christo does this for all his projects, through artwork sales.) He then spent a year securing permits from local authorities and from the body that manages Hyde Park, and had two and a half months to get everything done. "Each work of ours is like an expedition, something incredibly invigorating," said the artist in an interview. "I love to be here with the workers. I like that process. That journey is so incredible, unforgettable." The materials for the sculpture had to be transported into the park by more than 70 trucks, which were ordered to drive at about a mile an hour because the park is full of pedestrians. Christo's nephew Vladimir Yavachev, who oversees all of the artist's outdoor public projects and was also on site, appeared less worried. "Christo has a lot of engineering sense," he said. "There is a way to do it, and it's not impossible." He said the important thing was to "do it simply" and to "do it quickly, too: It needs to go in, be there, and then go out." "The London Mastaba" rests on a floating platform that's anchored to the lake bed. This is topped with a steel scaffolding frame that the barrels are attached to. In late April, the floating cubes were only just being laid out over the lake. Two weeks later, the scaffolding frame was partially in place, and a single row of painted barrels had gone up. By early June, the installation looked nearly complete; a green crane lowered rows of barrels onto what was already a hulking mass. The Mastaba is part of the summer program of the Serpentine Galleries, and it's paired with an exhibition of sculptures, drawings and collages focusing on Christo's work with barrels and with the mastaba shape. The Serpentine's artistic director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, said he had approached Christo after seeing his 2016 "Floating Piers" installation on Lake Iseo, Italy, for which walkways made of fabric were laid out on the surface of the lake. "There's always been this thought that, somehow, Christo is missing in London," Mr. Obrist said. Discussions started, and Christo came to London. On a walk through Hyde Park, he "pointed at the very site where the sculpture is going to be," Mr. Obrist said, recalling the artist's determination to put up a floating mastaba, "a form that has obsessed him for a long time." The wrapping of the Pont Neuf nearly fell through when the mayor of Paris tried to revoke a permit he had granted for it. The Reichstag project involved prior testing at a castle and an airplane hangar, bodyguards for Christo because of the death threats against him, and a parliamentary vote introduced by the project's chief adversary: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "The London Mastaba" faced no such obstacles, and Christo's team said the installation went through smoothly. Now the next big thing for Christo is the desert "Mastaba." He has no idea whether it will materialize, he said, "But we are advancing." "I am like a chess player," he added. "I hope to live to when the project has happened," Christo said. "This is the most important thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
On the day Chelsea Moore got married, it had been six months since she last saw her fiance, Christopher Blackwell. But now Ms. Moore, wearing a mask assigned to her, stood on a designated spot six feet from her soon to be husband. The room was empty save for a few chairs and tables and other seemingly storage bound items haphazardly strewn about and a backdrop depicting a walking bridge in the woods in the early fall. On Sept. 18, Ms. Moore and Mr. Blackwell were married in the visitors' room at the Washington State Reformatory in the Monroe Correctional Complex, where he is a prisoner. Mr. Blackwell, 39, is serving two sentences. The first is for a robbery, for which he was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to eight years. The second is for the murder of 17 year old Joshua May during a home invasion in 2003. Mr. Blackwell was convicted of first degree murder and received a 38 year prison sentence in 2007. There is no parole in Washington State. He will be released in 2045. He grew up in the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, Wash., which was known for its gang violence in the late 1980s and is now being gentrified. He was incarcerated for the first time when he was 12 for stealing a car and would spend the next six years of his life in and out of jail. While incarcerated, Mr. Blackwell has received a general associate degree from Seattle Central College and is several classes away from a bachelor's degree in political science from Adams State University, which is in Alamosa, Colo. He writes about his experiences in prison and his work has appeared in BuzzFeed, the Marshall Project and Jewish Currents. Ms. Moore, 32, who grew up in the wealthy community of Ojai, Calif., which she describes as "hippie town nestled in the mountains and known for being a geomagnetic vortex that attracts eccentrics and mystics," is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Washington. She expects to complete her degree in the next couple of months. Ms. Moore also just started law school at the University of Washington where she is also an instructor and teaching assistant. It is her aim, she said, to use her education to "do post conviction review work for people with long sentences." The pair first crossed paths when Ms. Moore volunteered to teach a constitutional law civil liberties class at the prison in the summer of 2017. Mr. Blackwell was in the class. Ms. Moore was still finishing her dissertation and interested in criminal justice work when she met his mother, Connie Palmersheim, in February 2019 at a community meeting in Seattle for those interested in sentence reform and parole legislation. The random connection seemed like kismet to Ms. Moore. "She told me a bit about what Chris was up to and encouraged me to reach out to see if I could help at all," Ms. Moore said in reference to his writing. Their friendship grew through prison email, but, "really it was snail mail where we first started to fall in love," she said. "We have binders and binders full of letters we've written to one another." Their connection grew over music, movies and books. "We'd send each other songs to listen to that remind us of each other. We sometimes do a book club. We can watch movies together over cable and will write back and forth about them." After they had begun corresponding, the pair were disheartened to learn there was a Washington Department of Corrections policy that did not allow former volunteers to be on a prisoner's visitation list for three years after the date they stopped volunteering. They set out to change the policy. "Through a lot of advocacy and persistence we were able to change the wait to a year instead of three years," Ms. Moore said. The new policy went into effect in November 2019, though it has not been posted on the D.O.C. website. Although neither can remember the precise moment they knew they were in love, both were sure that's precisely what it was. Mr. Blackwell says knowing that Ms. Moore had read through his 360 plus page juvenile record, and still wanted to be with him, made him sure she was the one. There was no formal proposal, although she said he did "kind of" propose after writing a list of the 50 things he loved about her. They decided in January 2020 that they wanted to get married. Megan Rose Donovan has been a close friend of Ms. Moore since 2008, when both were at Occidental College. She said what Ms. Moore needs now "is a friend to confide in and someone who won't pass immediate judgment." "I also understood that Chelsea's decision to marry Chris would likely create tension in some of her other relationships with friends and family," she added. "So when she told me that they would be getting married I thought, "OK, pretty much everyone in this woman's life is going to have a negative reaction to their relationship." That very same month, the couple began the long process of applying with the corrections department to get married. But then the coronavirus pandemic struck and a difficult process became a near impossible one. No prison visitation was allowed just three months after she had begun regularly visiting him and virtual marriages were not legal in the State of Washington at the time. In May, they received and signed a marriage packet (which was separate from a marriage license) from the Department of Corrections. "The D.O.C. application requires me to say whether or not I've ever been abused and also that I restate all of Chris's criminal history," Ms. Moore said. Because of the coronavirus, she felt it was urgent to speed the process. Should they fall ill, they would have no rights in regard to the other without being married. "Incarcerated people are 550 percent more likely to get Covid 19 and 300 percent more likely to die of it," she said. On May 18, Ms. Moore reached out to the D.O.C., including Robert Herzog, the assistant secretary of the Washington State Department of Corrections Prisons Division, and the associate superintendent of the Monroe complex, John Padilla, to inquire about getting married. They were denied at every turn. Emails were exchanged until mid June. Her knowledge of the law and the system was invaluable during what she called a stressful process. Ms. Moore soon learned that the Washington Supreme Court had already proclaimed video marriages were legal on May 29 but had not issued a public statement about it. Finally, on Aug. 18, after more calls and emails, Mr. Herzog, who had been contacted by State Senator Joe Nguyen at Ms. Moore's request, responded to Ms. Moore. He told her that the prison would allow a virtual ceremony. The next day, much to her surprise, she was notified that the ceremony could be done in person after all. The couple received a document that laid out the rules for the in person ceremony including, "There will be no physical contact at any time between any parties, to include the bride and groom. Failure to follow this expectation will result in immediate termination of the marriage ceremony, an infraction for the incarcerated individual, and suspension/termination of the visitor's visiting privileges." On the day of their wedding, Mr. Blackwell was taken to the visitation room, wearing his assigned prison uniform and a mask that he had beaded himself with the letters BLM. (Mr. Blackwell is a bead artist, and sold some of the works he has made while in prison to buy Ms. Moore's engagement ring. "Chris worked hard to sell his beadwork and make enough money to buy me a ring, a yellow diamond ring that has two crescent moons and one full moon in it," she said.) Ms. Moore's arrival to her wedding was delayed 40 minutes because of the prison's entry process, which she described as humiliating. Ms. Moore wore a long, sheer, white dress that had a knee length slip beneath it. After prison officials measured the hem length, and then the height of her heels, she was then told the dress showed too much cleavage. "So I had to zip up my jacket," she said. "These are just some of the small indignities that someone who visits an incarcerated person has to suffer." When she did finally walk in the room, the bride and groom had tears in their eyes. "We were in constant fear of retribution," Mr. Blackwell said, "of me being put in the hole, of the ceremony being stopped, of Chelsea losing her visitation rights." Ms. Donovan, who served as the one witness Ms. Moore was allowed to have in attendance, said the ceremony "was surreal." She stood more than six feet away from the couple as the bride read her vows. "I know our life together will not be easy, but loving you is," Ms. Moore said through her mask. "And I promise to love you without regards to convenience or circumstance. This marriage is not the first mountain we have had to move to be together and it will not be the last." Both said the ceremony, led by a prison chaplain, Brian Henry, passed in what felt like an instant. "We signed the papers, took a few photos, and then we were told the ceremony was over," Mr. Blackwell said. "It makes me tear up now because I have no idea when we'll see each other again." Mr. Blackwell's mother said the years her son has spent behind bars have changed him. Mr. Herzog of the D.O.C. said he was appreciative of the couple for working within the system. "We are grateful to Ms. Moore and Mr. Blackwell for helping us work through the challenges to find a safe way to facilitate their marriage and we thank them for helping us define clear protocols to ensure all involved would be safe and secure," he said via email. "We wish them a long and happy marriage." The couple are in the early stages of forming a nonprofit group, Look2Justice, which will work for comprehensive sentencing reform in Washington, especially for people who committed crimes as young adults. "We have a clear passion for the same things," Mr. Blackwell said by phone. "We care about people. We care about equality." In an email, Ms. Moore cites current brain science, which, she said, "tells us that an individual's brain is not fully developed until around their 25th birthday. In Washington, people can't even buy tobacco until they're 21, yet in sentencing we treat anyone above the age of 18 the same. This legislation would provide people who received long sentences before the age of 25 to eventually be considered for parole." Mr. Blackwell has said that he believes his juvenile convictions prejudiced his sentencing. Ms. Moore spoke to her family after the ceremony. "They're not excited, but they're supportive, which is what I expected," she said. "I'm so happy. I love him so immensely. I can't picture a life without him and I don't want to. Any life can turn difficult at any moment. I just followed my heart on this one."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Are you better off than your parents? Research suggests that many Americans born in 1980 have had a harder time jumping up the economic ladder than the generation before. The year 1980 also marked a rough turning point in the United States, where income, wealth, job security and economic opportunity began to diverge sharply for the most and least affluent Americans. That means that this current public health and economic crisis is catching them with varied levels of resources to draw on. We're working on an article about the financial situations of people born in 1980 as we enter a recession. If you're turning 40 this year, please tell us what effect the economy has had on you.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Before it had even been released, Woody Allen's new autobiography, "Apropos of Nothing," ignited a ferocious backlash. Employees of Hachette Book Group, the publishing company that originally acquired the book, staged a walkout in protest. With remarkable speed, Hachette, which had planned to release the book through its Grand Central imprint, canceled the publication and returned the rights to Mr. Allen. While some applauded Hachette's decision, others argued it amounted to censorship. Now, another company, Arcade Publishing, has snapped up the book and is releasing it on Monday, with a first print run of 75,000 copies. The publication of Mr. Allen's memoir, which was reported earlier by The Associated Press, comes at a challenging moment for the industry, which is struggling with the economic toll of the coronavirus outbreak, as bookstores across the country close. While it seemed inevitable that another publisher would eventually take on the project, it was surprising that Mr. Allen resold it so quickly, in such a dismal retail environment. In his autobiography, Mr. Allen addresses some of the controversies surrounding his private life and behavior toward women, including his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow's abuse allegations against him. He also includes a postscript about the book's troubled path to publication, slamming Hachette for dropping him. "Hachette read the book and loved it and despite me being a toxic pariah and menace to society, they vowed to stand firm should things hit the fan," he writes. "When actual flak did arrive they thoughtfully reassessed their position, concluding that perhaps courage was not the virtue it was cracked up to be and there was a lot to be said for cowering." He added that he was confident his book "would land somewhere because you can't keep the truth bottled up forever." In a statement announcing the publication, Arcade called the book "a candid and comprehensive personal account by Woody Allen of his life, ranging from his childhood in Brooklyn through his acclaimed career in film, theater, television, print and standup comedy, as well as exploring his relationships with family and friends." Jeannette Seaver, an editor who acquired the book, said that Arcade decided to publish the book not only on the merits of the material, but also on principle, to take a stand against Mr. Allen's critics. "In this strange time, when truth is too often dismissed as 'fake news,' we as publishers prefer to give voice to a respected artist, rather than bow to those determined to silence him," she said in a statement. "We firmly believe in upholding the right to freedom of speech in the world of publishing and, as a result, we're pleased to support not only this terrific book but also and even more importantly this democratic principle." Arcade is an imprint of the independent publisher Skyhorse, a company that has been willing to court controversy in the past, with provocative authors like the attorney and commentator Alan Dershowitz, a frequent defender of Donald J. Trump, and the conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison. At a moment when publishers are increasingly wary of sparking controversy and driving a social media backlash, Arcade's decision to publish Mr. Allen caught some in the industry by surprise, particularly after Hachette's rapid about face. Grand Central had acquired the rights to Mr. Allen's autobiography in March 2019, but had only announced that fact earlier this month. The journalist Ronan Farrow, whose best selling book "Catch and Kill" had been released by Little, Brown, another Hachette imprint, last year, quickly lashed out at the company, saying it had secretly planned to publish Mr. Allen's book behind his back, and that he would no longer work with the publisher. Mr. Farrow, whose reporting on accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men helped touch off the MeToo movement, is Mr. Allen's son with the actress Mia Farrow. Mr. Farrow and his adopted sister, Dylan Farrow, have long accused Mr. Allen of molesting her when she was a child, allegations he has denied. Mr. Allen was not charged after two investigations. "Your policy of editorial independence among your imprints does not relieve you of your moral and professional obligations as the publisher of 'Catch and Kill,' and as the leader of a company being asked to assist in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes," Mr. Farrow wrote to Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of Hachette. Mr. Pietsch had defended the decision to publish Mr. Allen's book, but a staged walkout of more than 100 employees was part of the pressure that led to the reversal of the plan. "The decision to cancel Mr. Allen's book was a difficult one," a spokeswoman for Hachette said in a statement at the time. "We take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books. As publishers, we make sure every day in our work that different voices and conflicting points of views can be heard." Mr. Allen, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, has seen his legacy tarnished by the allegations about his daughter. An agent representing him had approached several publishers since late 2018 but was "met with indifference or hard passes," The New York Times reported last year. In November, Mr. Allen and Amazon settled a breach of contract lawsuit after the company backed out of a multi movie deal with Mr. Allen after MeToo allegations from the 1990s resurfaced against him. Mr. Allen filed the suit against Amazon earlier last year. Following Hachette's announcement of the book's cancellation, Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free speech nonprofit PEN America, had called the situation "something of a perfect storm." This incident, she said in a statement, "involved not just a controversial book, but a publisher that was working with individuals on both sides of a longstanding and traumatic familial rupture. This presented unique circumstances that clearly colored the positions staked out and decisions taken. If the end result here is that this book, regardless of its merits, disappears without a trace, readers will be denied the opportunity to read it and render their own judgments."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk's dream of sending people to Mars. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. From the same pad where NASA launched rockets that carried astronauts to the moon, a big, new American rocket arced into space on Tuesday. But this time, NASA was not involved. The rocket, the Falcon Heavy, was built by SpaceX, the company founded and run by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. "It seems surreal to me," Mr. Musk said during a news conference after the launch. The launch of this turbocharged version of the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which has been carrying cargo to space for years, marks an important milestone in spaceflight, the first time a rocket this powerful has been sent into space by a private company rather than a government space agency. The rocket carried a playful payload: Mr. Musk's red Roadster, an electric sports car built by his other company, Tesla. Strapped inside the car is a mannequin wearing one of SpaceX's spacesuits. They are expected to orbit the sun for hundreds of millions of years. The success gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Mr. Musk's dream of sending people to Mars. To do that, he has described a new generation rocket called B.F.R. (the B stands for big; the R for rocket) that might be ready to launch in the mid 2020s. The near flawless performance of the Heavy on Tuesday "gives me a lot of confidence we can make the B.F.R. design work," Mr. Musk said. He added that he hoped the launch would encourage other companies and other countries to aim for more ambitious goals in space. "We want a new space race," he said. "Races are exciting." For now, the Heavy will enable SpaceX to compete for contracts to launch larger spy satellites, and some experts in spaceflight are encouraging NASA to use private rockets like the Heavy instead of the gigantic and more expensive rocket, the Space Launch System, that is currently being developed in part to take astronauts back to the moon. "It basically gives them another tool in their toolbox for accomplishing the space community's goals," said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school who previously worked as a senior manager of communications and corporate projects at SpaceX. Although delayed by high altitude winds, the countdown proceeded smoothly, without any of the glitches that have bedeviled other maiden launches of new rockets. The Heavy roared to life, a plume of smoke and steam shooting sideways from the launchpad. It rose from the pad, with an impossibly bright glare of 27 engines beneath it. About 15 seconds later, a thunderous roar, traveling at the speed of sound, rolled over the spectators. Just over three minutes after it blasted off, the most suspenseful part of the flight was over, as the boosters dropped off and the second stage continued into Earth orbit. Some eight minutes after launch, a pair of sonic booms rocked the area as the two side boosters set down in near synchrony on two landing pads at Cape Canaveral. In the past few years, SpaceX has figured out how to routinely bring a booster stage back in one piece to fly again on future flights. The one blemish on the mission was that the center booster, which was to set down on a floating platform in the Atlantic, slammed into the water instead, because some of the engines failed to ignite for the final landing burn. Once in orbit, the rocket sent back video of the spacesuit wearing mannequin in the car, with a hand on the steering wheel. On the dashboard were the words "Don't Panic," a nod to Douglas Adams's book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The spacecraft journeyed through Earth's Van Allen radiation belt. About seven hours after the rocket took off, Mr. Musk announced that a third and final burn had put his sports car on an elliptical orbit away from Earth and around the sun that extends beyond Mars's orbit. The Falcon Heavy is capable of lifting 140,000 pounds to low Earth orbit, more than any other rocket today. Because all three boosters are to be recovered to fly again, a Falcon Heavy launch costs not much more than one by the company's existing rocket, Mr. Musk said. SpaceX lists a price of 90 million for a Falcon Heavy flight, compared with 62 million for one by Falcon 9, a bargain in the context of spaceflight. Mr. Musk estimated that his company had spent more than half a billion dollars on Falcon Heavy and said that the program was almost canceled three times. SpaceX has booked coming Heavy flights for Arabsat, a Saudi Arabian communications company, and the United States Air Force. However, the market for the Heavy is smaller than what Mr. Musk envisioned when he announced development of the rocket in 2011. Back then, he expected that SpaceX's launches would be evenly split between Falcon 9s and Heavies. But the development of the Heavy took years longer than anticipated the central booster had to be redesigned to withstand the stresses of the powerful side boosters and with advances in miniaturization, the trend is toward smaller satellites. SpaceX also boosted the capability of the Falcon 9, which now can launch many of the payloads that would have originally required a Heavy. In addition to its central booster, the Falcon Heavy was equipped with two additional side boosters that essentially tripled its power at liftoff. While the Heavy uses many of the same components as the Falcon 9, Mr. Musk had cautioned that failures during a test flight would not be surprising. In particular, he worried about complex buffeting of air flowing past the boosters, which is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer simulations. In the past year, SpaceX has tabled many of the plans for future development of the Heavy. The company had intended to use the rocket to launch one of SpaceX's capsules, known as the Dragon, without people, on a mission to land on Mars. That was scrapped last summer. Last year, Mr. Musk also said two space tourists would be launched by a Falcon Heavy on an around the moon trip this year. On Monday, he said that for now the company had no immediate plans to make the improvements needed before putting people aboard. Instead, SpaceX is focusing its efforts on the B.F.R. It would be a two stage rocket: a powerful booster to provide lift out of Earth's gravity and then a spaceship on top for interplanetary missions. The full vehicle would not be ready until the 2020s, but Mr. Musk said he had "aspirational" hopes to begin short hopper tests of the spaceship portion next year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
A duet from "Suite for Five" (1956) begins with a woman perched on a man's shoulder. Her legs are stretched back into the air behind her. Her torso arches up to present her face and shoulders to the front. This is a heroic lift you can see in several ballets but the resemblance stops beneath the waist. The difference here is that the man is kneeling. The effect is weird, truncating, fascinating. As that number develops, you can't miss its complete independence from music or the exploratory drama it creates by setting its dancers forth on separate routes. A trio from "Suite" keeps changing in structure. Now it's a duet and a solo; now a tight woven trio; now three separate solos in different paths and meters that nonetheless connect in overlapping orbits. The special element of these performances is a rarity, a duet from "Springweather and People" (1954), originally danced (like the "Suite" duet) by Cunningham and Carolyn Brown. This duet was lost for decades until, two years ago, the researcher and filmmaker Alla Kovgan found a 1958 film of it. Part of it was danced again, beautifully, by Boston Conservatory students in the October January edition of this "Leap Before You Look" exhibition at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Arts. But it's only now, with these Los Angeles performers, that the whole duet has returned to the stage. And now we can feel the complex structure of it, with its couplings and solos, its intimacies and its distances. Though some still use the word "abstract" to describe plotless choreography, Cunningham, like the choreographer George Balanchine before him and Mark Morris today, observed that humans dancing cannot be abstract. Cunningham, more than any other dance maker, created works that operated on multiple levels. Sometimes there's nothing but this movement; but the sheer physics of it make for drama. With the "Suite" excerpts, that's continually true. This remains extraordinarily fresh: Dancers switch angles and routes, and present jumps and floor work, as if we were in the laboratory with them. Sometimes, as often in the "Springweather" duet, we can't help seeing imagery, character and narrative. Is this movement for its own sake or is it a window to meaning? The ambiguity is essential to Cunningham dance theater. I love a moment in this dance where the woman, in profile to us, holds a formally pure arabesque. The man, approaching her from behind, places a protective hand around her torso to support her hip. She stretches her neck tenderly back toward him; we're close here to the narrative of "Swan Lake." But then, still holding that arabesque, she hops softly away. The story changes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
WASHINGTON Robyn J. Skrebes of Minneapolis said she was able to sign up for health insurance in about two hours on Monday using the Web site of the state run insurance exchange in Minnesota, known as MNsure. Ms. Skrebes, who is 32 and uninsured, said she had selected a policy costing 179 a month, before tax credit subsidies, and also had obtained Medicaid coverage for her 2 year old daughter, Emma. "I am thrilled," Ms. Skrebes said, referring to her policy. "It's affordable, good coverage. And the Web site of the Minnesota exchange was pretty simple to use, pretty straightforward. The language was really clear." The experience described by Ms. Skrebes is in stark contrast to reports of widespread technical problems that have hampered enrollment in the online health insurance marketplace run by the federal government since it opened on Oct. 1. While many people have been frustrated in their efforts to obtain coverage through the federal exchange, which is used by more than 30 states, consumers have had more success signing up for health insurance through many of the state run exchanges, federal and state officials and outside experts say. Alan R. Weil, the executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, an independent nonpartisan group, credited the relative early success of some state exchanges to the fact that they could leap on problems more quickly than the sprawling, complex federal marketplace. "Individual state operations are more adaptable," Mr. Weil said. "That does not mean that states get everything right. But they can respond more quickly to solve problems as they arise." In addition, some states allow consumers to shop for insurance, comparing costs and benefits of different policies, without first creating an online account a barrier for many people trying to use the federal exchange. The state run exchange in New York announced Tuesday that it had signed up more than 40,000 people who applied for insurance and were found eligible. "This fast pace of sign ups shows that New York State's exchange is working smoothly with an overwhelming response from New Yorkers eager to get access to low cost health insurance," said Donna Frescatore, the executive director of the state exchange. In Washington State, the state run exchange had a rocky start on Oct. 1, but managed to turn things around quickly by adjusting certain parameters on its Web site to alleviate bottlenecks. By Monday, more than 9,400 people had signed up for coverage. The Washington Health Benefit Exchange does not require users to create an account before browsing plans. "The site is up and running smoothly," said Michael Marchand, a spokesman for the Washington exchange. "We're seeing a lot of use, a lot of people coming to the Web site. If anything, I think it's increasing." Other states reporting a steady stream of enrollments in recent days include California, Connecticut, Kentucky and Rhode Island. In Connecticut, a spokesman for the state run exchange, Access Health CT, said users have generally had a smooth experience with the Web site other than "a couple of bumps and hiccups on the first day." By Monday afternoon, the Connecticut exchange had processed 1,175 applications, said the spokesman, Jason Madrak. Daniel N. Mendelson, the chief executive of Avalere Health, a research and consulting company, said: "On balance, the state exchanges are doing better than the federal exchange. The federal exchange has, for all practical purposes, been impenetrable. Systems problems are preventing any sort of meaningful engagement." "By contrast," said Mr. Mendelson, who was a White House budget official under President Bill Clinton, "in most states, we can get information about what is being offered and the prices, and some states are allowing full enrollment. All the state exchanges that we have visited are doing better than the federal exchange at this point." In California, Peter V. Lee, the executive director of the state run exchange, said that more than 16,000 applications had been completed in the first five days of open enrollment. Mr. Lee said that while the consumer experience "hasn't been perfect," it has been "pretty darn good." Some state run exchanges have run into difficulties because they rely on the federal marketplace for parts of the application process, like verifying an applicant's identity. Minnesota, Nevada and Rhode Island are among the states that have reported problems with the "identity proofing" process, which requires state run exchanges to communicate with the federal data hub. Brandon Hardy, 31, of Louisville, Ky., was one of the first to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky's state run exchange, working with an application counselor who guided him through the process last Wednesday. Mr. Hardy, who is uninsured and has epileptic seizures that land him in the hospital every few months, spent about 45 minutes filling out the online application, and learned that he would be eligible for Medicaid under the health care law. "It was pretty easy," Mr. Hardy said of the process. "What I really need is a neurologist, and now hopefully that will happen. This is like a huge relief." Attempts to sign up for coverage through the federal marketplace have often proved more frustrating. Bruce A. Charette, 60, of Tulsa, Okla., said he had been trying to log onto the Web site for the federal exchange since last Wednesday, but had not been able to see the available plans or their rates. Mr. Charette said he was asked verification questions that did not appear to match his identity. One question, he said, asked about the name of a pet for which he had purchased health insurance two years ago. "I don't have any pets," he said. "It's obvious that the site is overloaded," said Mr. Charette, an electrician who works in the aviation industry and said he did not have health insurance. "I am not going to stare at a computer screen for 45 minutes, waiting for a response. It looks as if the Web site is freezing up."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
WASHINGTON President Trump on Tuesday unexpectedly put off new tariffs on many Chinese goods, including cellphones, laptop computers and toys, until after the start of the Christmas shopping season, acknowledging the effect that his protracted trade war with Beijing could have on Americans. Mr. Trump pushed a 10 percent tariff on some imports to Dec. 15, and excluded others from it entirely, while facing mounting pressure from businesses and consumer groups over the harm they say the trade conflict is doing. The stock market soared after the announcement, following weeks of volatility driven by fears that the standoff between the world's two largest economies could hamper global economic growth. The decision was the latest twist in a dispute during which China and the United States have alternately escalated tensions with tit for tat tariffs and softened their positions as they sought a deal. Mr. Trump continued to insist on Tuesday that the trade war was hurting only China. But he also admitted that there was potential for the new tariffs to inflict economic pain closer to home. "Just in case they might have an impact on people," the president told reporters, "what we've done is we've delayed it so that they won't be relevant for the Christmas shopping season." Mr. Trump, frustrated that negotiations had failed to yield an agreement, said on Aug. 1 that the United States would impose the 10 percent tariff on 300 billion worth of Chinese imports on Sept. 1. That would be in addition to a 25 percent tariff already imposed on 250 billion of Chinese goods. But on Tuesday, the United States trade representative's office said that while a substantial amount of Chinese imports would be subject to the Sept. 1 levy as planned, various consumer electronics, shoes and other items would be spared until mid December. The office also said it was dropping 25 types of products from the tariff list altogether "based on health, safety, national security and other factors." The items include car seats, shipping containers, cranes, certain fish, and Bibles and other religious literature, a spokesman said. Stocks rallied immediately on the news, with the S P 500 climbing nearly 2 percent in morning trading before ending the day up 1.5 percent. The benchmark index was lifted partly by shares in retailers and computer chip producers that have been especially sensitive to the trade tensions. Best Buy, which gets many of the products it sells from China, was among the best performing stocks in the S P 500, rising more than 6.5 percent. Apple, whose iPhones and computers would have been subject to the tariffs, climbed more than 4 percent. The technology heavy Nasdaq composite index ended the day up more than 2 percent. The tariff announcement followed what Mr. Trump described as a "very productive" call involving Liu He, China's vice premier and its lead trade negotiator; Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. The three agreed to speak again in two weeks, China's state run Xinhua News Agency reported. Negotiators had planned to meet again early next month in Washington. Now, about 112 billion of Chinese goods will be hit with the 10 percent levy on Sept. 1, according to Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Another 160 billion in goods will be subject to the tariff as of Dec 15, he estimated. Whether the president's move on Tuesday will ease tensions enough to make a deal with Beijing more likely was unclear. But negotiators have made little progress since May. The stumbling blocks included whether the White House would roll back the tariffs already in place and whether Beijing would enshrine in law the changes it pledged to make. 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. As his re election campaign gears up, Mr. Trump is increasingly focused on ending the conflict in order to maintain his support among farmers, who have lost some of their main export opportunities as China ordered state owned companies to stop buying American soybeans. But he has also expressed an unwillingness to accept a deal with China that falls short of his goals. Mr. Trump said his tariffs and tax cuts would set off a wave of investment, but data show they have not caused a significant return of factory activity from overseas. The president has tried to persuade China to buy large amounts of American farm goods before an agreement is reached, but that hasn't happened. He continued to berate China on Tuesday for not making such purchases and suggested that the tariffs might force it to do so. "As usual, China said they were going to be buying 'big' from our great American Farmers," he wrote on Twitter. "So far they have not done what they said. Maybe this will be different!" Chinese officials and state media outlets have responded to Mr. Trump's prodding by taking an increasingly strident tone and threatening to punish American firms. China has also allowed the value of its currency to fluctuate in recent weeks, raising the specter that it would use it as a weapon. That prompted the White House to label China a currency manipulator, the first time the United States had done that since 1994. The tariff delay could create an opening for Chinese officials to soften their statements. There is also the question of whether the Trump administration will allow American companies to continue supplying certain goods to the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei despite a ban on such trade because of national security concerns. A so called temporary general license that allows American companies to supply Huawei despite the ban is set to expire on Monday, but the Trump administration could renew it. Trade groups said they welcomed the reprieve on tariffs for the holiday season, but added that the changes would not reduce the uncertainty they faced. "The hope is that this creates an opportunity for the two sides to get back to the table, resume the broad based trade talks and look at some confidence building measures that would boost the prospects of a big deal down the road," said Myron Brilliant, the executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Matt Priest, the president of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, said the delay was also an acknowledgment by the Trump administration that Americans were bearing the cost of the trade war. "It is no coincidence that the administration is allowing certain shoes to come in without raising taxes in hopes that prices do not rise at retail during the holidays," Mr. Priest said. "While we are pleased with the decision to delay new tariffs on certain shoes, we are not satisfied."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
We stepped out into a drizzly London evening on St. Martin's Lane in the heart of the city's West End. I had decided to treat my mom, an obsessive "Game of Thrones" watcher, to an afternoon performance of "Doctor Faustus" at the Duke of York's Theater, starring the inveterate heartthrob Kit Harington. Mr. Harington, who plays the sullen Jon Snow on the HBO series, spends much of "Doctor Faustus" running around in his underwear. Legions of fans wait for him at the side door entrance, and they had actually started lining up before the performance even began. My mom looked at them, then me, and slapped me on the shoulder. "Well," she said, "Thanks for the man candy." That about summed it up. We agreed that this production of "Faustus" was more flash than substance, but that Mr. Harington was good and that the experience was worth the PS28.50 (about 37) per ticket. Near nudity aside, the electricity and sense of excitement that comes from seeing a celebrity in a live performance was palpable in the crowded theater. It was one of seven performances I crammed into a long weekend in London a reminder that one of the city's best features is its incredible theater scene. Even better: It is cheaper than you may think and comes with plenty of opportunities to see a recognizable face or two. You can, of course, spend as much as you'd like on London theater, but there are also bargains. The most reliable theater deal in town is Shakespeare's Globe on the south side of the Thames, near the Tate Modern. There are seated gallery tickets that run as high as PS45, but the frugal among us know where the real deal is: standing in the yard, with the rest of the groundlings. There are 700 standing tickets available for PS5 each at every performance, and you can maneuver your way right up to the lip of the stage if you'd like. Fair warning: Wear comfortable shoes. Shakespeare wasn't known for his brevity, and even his shortest play, "Macbeth" (the play I saw), runs well over the two hour mark. The bard is ubiquitous in London, and every season presents new takes. I caught a few Shakespeare performances during my theater crawl, including a sleek new "Romeo and Juliet" at the Garrick Theater, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James, who played Lady Rose on "Downton Abbey." Ms. James's understudy was onstage the night I was there, but fortunately that absence was more than compensated for by the presence of one of my favorite stage actors, Derek Jacobi. In a testament to the versatility of Mr. Jacobi, who played King Lear in a 2011 BAM production, he wonderfully portrayed Romeo's hotheaded sidekick, Mercutio. How many actors are good enough to play those two roles in reverse chronological order? "Romeo and Juliet" wasn't an easy ticket to get. The show was sold out on the theater's website, and calls to the box office proved unhelpful. I used the help of StubHub instead, landing a pair of very acceptable last minute tickets in the front row of the grand circle (balcony) for PS30, a good savings on the PS47.50 face value. Third party sites can be useful when you try to attend sold out performances. I used three different ones and found them all reliable: StubHub, Lovetheatre and TodayTix. They are all good sites (with accompanying apps) that I used to land discounted or hard to get tickets. But be aware if you're making last minute purchases: You may have to print your own tickets ahead of showtime, or travel to a separate location to pick up hard copies, as was the case with StubHub. Sometimes, though, you just have to get tickets the old fashioned way. "Richard III" was the play I really had my eye on. It starred the Oscar winner Ralph Fiennes, and I was determined to get into the show. It was, of course, sold out. Undeterred, I went to the Almeida Theater early almost three hours before showtime to wait for returns. As I was waiting in the attached cafe for my name to be called, who happened to walk in? None other than Mr. Fiennes. I couldn't help but surreptitiously snap a photo. Mysore masala dosa a thin pancake made from fermented batter, wrapped around a mash of potatoes, chili, turmeric and other spices at Sagar, near Covent Garden in London. David Azia for The New York Times Minutes later, I heard my name being called from the box office. I purchased a ticket for a mere PS10 in the main orchestra section with a slightly obstructed view (I had to occasionally lean to one side during some of the action). Mr. Fiennes was, as expected, excellent in his portrayal of the demonic duke of Gloucester. When considering accommodations for a potential London theater crawl, a good location is essential. If you want to be in the center of the action, stay near Covent Garden. I landed a stunningly cheap 83 per night room through Hotels.com UK at the Strand Palace Hotel, a venerable 1909 institution that is surprisingly modern. The room was small but clean, and the price was a steal. Nearby food options are easy, and the proximity to the West End means pretheater menus galore. Cote Bistro offers a three or two course prix fixe option for PS13.95 and PS12.50, respectively, but I went with the slightly more frugal option and headed around the corner to Sagar Indian. I enjoyed a Mysore masala dosa a thin pancake made from fermented batter, wrapped around a mash of potatoes, chili, turmeric and other spices. It cost only PS7.95, and was more than enough for my dinner. My room at the Strand Palace was a quick walk across Waterloo Bridge from one of my favorite London theaters, the National Theater a state sponsored complex overlooking the Thames. During the 50 plus years that it's been around, everyone from Peter O'Toole to Helen Mirren to Daniel Day Lewis has graced the stage. I stumbled upon a dark comedy called "The Suicide," a modern, urban retelling of a banned 1928 Stalin era drama. My PS15 ticket put me squarely in the front row. The National Theater in London, a state sponsored complex overlooking the Thames. David Azia for The New York Times Then there's the Barbican Center, an enormous performing arts complex that is roughly a 30 minute bus ride from where I was staying. It is one of the largest performing arts centers in Europe and showcases performances from around the world. I love the architecture of the place, with its concrete heavy Brutalist style that gives it a somewhat dystopian and foreboding feel. It can be tough to find your destination within the main building. I handed the usher my PS12 ticket to "The Shadow King" just as the lights were dimming. A fascinating retelling of "King Lear," the Australia based Malthouse Theater sets the family tragedy within a dysfunctional Aboriginal clan. Weaving native music and Kriol dialect through the original English gave the play a depth I had never appreciated. Theater in London is not merely confined to the indoors it truly pervades the city. I stepped out one afternoon to see a workshop sponsored by Simon McBurney's well regarded company, Complicite. At the end of a street in Notting Hill were roughly a dozen performers in elaborate masks. They proceeded to give a free show in the broad, commedia dell'arte style. Lone pedestrians stopped, as did a young family. A group of young children stared, slack jawed, at this group of adults in sequined and feathered masks shouting in the street and undulating in exaggerated movements. In my few days crammed with London theater, I thought I'd truly seen it all. That is, until I saw that Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land," with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, would be running this fall at Wyndham's Theater. I may have to make a return trip.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Ford Motor announced Tuesday that J Mays, who has directed the automaker's designs for 16 years and is group vice president and chief creative officer, would retire in January. Succeeding Mr. Mays, 59, will be Moray Callum, 54, who has been responsible for the design of Ford's cars in the Americas since 2006 and will assume the title of vice president of design. When Mr. Mays arrived at Ford in 1997, after stints at Audi and Volkswagen, he was already famous for the Concept One design study, which became the VW New Beetle. He took charge of the eight brands that Ford Motor controlled at the time: Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar and Aston Martin. He immediately ordered designers at all the marques to create car keys that reflected the "emotional qualities" of each brand. Mr. Mays's tenure as design chief was long. He recently noted that he served under five chief executives and oversaw many styles. But he may be remembered most for raising the public profile of the automobile designer. And he challenged the wall that traditionally kept the designers of automobiles separate from those who shaped buildings, furniture and consumer products. Mr. Mays's work was the subject of a major museum show, curated by Brooke Hodge, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2002, he was celebrated on television by the BBC and profiled by the architecture critic Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker. And when John Lasseter of Pixar wanted to visit a design studio while preparing to make the film "Cars," he consulted with Mr. Mays. In 1999, Mr. Mays commissioned a concept car from Marc Newson, a noted designer of furniture and products. The result, shown at the Milan furniture fair, was named the 021C after the Pantone color code for its original orange paint. The boxy, friendly looking car captured worldwide attention; repainted green, it continues to be shown in museums. Ms. Hodge, the director of exhibitions and publications at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, described Mr. Mays's work as "retrofuturist," a term that referred to a return to the optimistic, forward looking imagery of the 1950s and 1960s. But many styles flourished under his direction. At the same time he was directing one look for the United States market, he was presiding over the emergence of a different style, called kinetic, in Europe. Eventually, versions of kinetic theme cars came to America as Ford began to standardize its product lines around the world. The latest Fiesta and Focus models, along with the well received Fusion midsize car, completed the process. His design record includes hits and misses. Though it was a public sensation at its debut, the retro new Thunderbird was something of a dud in the market, and the large Five Hundred sedan came across as a bloated Passat. The Freestyle crossover was derided by critics as the Style free. But the level of his work is generally regarded as high, even though his design team sometimes had to scramble to bring new life to aging vehicle platforms. "J Mays made car design accessible to a broader public because he himself has such an expansive view of design," Ms. Hodge said in an email. "He looks at everything from fashion to furniture to inform the cars he designs." She continued, "His belief that innovations of the past should be used to inform future solutions led him to design cars that inspired emotional connections." Mr. Mays hired and supported top designers, including Martin Smith at Ford of Europe and Peter Horbury at Volvo. Mr. Callum, the brother of Ian Callum, the head designer for Jaguar, is one of them. He came from Mazda in 2006 to perform often thankless work like a reskinning of the staid Taurus. Mr. Mays's concept cars tended to come at design from surprising angles. The Forty Nine of 2001, which paid homage to the simple, honest 1949 Ford, and the 2007 Interceptor, a sort of latter day Galaxie 500, were the sorts of sedans that designers wished they could build. The 24 7 of 2000 was ahead of its time in focusing on the integration of electronics and communications in the car. In the years when Ford was emphasizing environmentalism, his Model U responded to the anniversary of the Model T: it was made of mostly recyclable parts. Mr. Mays is known for striking auto show stands, sometimes of legendary expense. In one, he sampled architecture from Mies van der Rohe and Zaha Hadid to highlight brand attributes for Lincoln and Mercury. But industry downturns limited his reach and curbed his ambitions. He made his design headquarters in London for seven years and in 2002 established an ambitious studio there to open up the imaginations of his designers: They would also work on other products, like mobile phones or shoes. Ingeni, as it was called, was closed two years later. Mr. Mays was born in rural Oklahoma, where, he has said, his unusual single letter first name was simply country practice. After a brief stint in a college journalism program, he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. But his hometown, Maysville, Okla., provided the right background for evolving the look of the best selling Ford vehicle throughout his tenure, the F 150 pickup truck. He appeared recently in New York boasting of that truck's popularity: bumper to bumper, a year's sales would stretch from Los Angeles to Memphis. In a news release announcing the retirement, Ford's chief operating officer, Mark Fields, said: "The bold and sophisticated design language that J Mays pioneered will be visible for years to come in Ford vehicles and the auto industry over all. In addition to his talent as a world class designer, J has brought together one of the most talented design teams in the business." Ford also announced Tuesday that Jim Tetreault, vice president of North America manufacturing, would retire after a 25 year career at the automaker. He will be succeeded by Bruce Hettle, currently the executive director for global vehicle manufacturing and engineering. Marty Mulloy, vice president of labor affairs, will also retire after 34 years at Ford.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
A Home in Riverdale With Room to Work and Play Nearly a dozen years ago, Jo Blackwell Preston and Kamau Preston rented a two bedroom in the Sugar Hill area of Harlem, switching to a three bedroom in their building as their family grew. A few years later with a son, daughter, dog and large turtle they moved to yet another three bedroom in the building, spending 15,000 on renovations there. Shortly thereafter, the building was sold. The new owner raised the monthly rent around 500, to 2,900. The couple already resented paying so much more than their many rent regulated neighbors. Dayne, now 11, and Ava, 9, shared a bedroom; Mr. Preston, a D.J., used the third bedroom as a music studio. "I own a company but I don't own anything else," said Ms. Blackwell Preston, 49, who attended beauty school as a teenager in Ohio and now owns Dop Dop Salon in SoHo and commutes to work by car. She and Mr. Preston, 38, met in his native Jamaica. He is Dop Dop's operations manager. "My salon is my living room," Ms. Blackwell Preston said. "It is 4,000 square feet of love." Mr. Preston visited endless open houses, often taking videos. "You have to have a list of things that you can live with and things you can't live without," he said. They enlisted the help of Ariela Heilman, a licensed associate broker at Halstead Property and a longtime salon client. In large buildings, they sought a corner or top floor location, with few neighbors. An apartment number did not always reveal a unit's location within the building, or whether it was surrounded by neighbors. "We didn't want anybody walking on our heads anymore," Ms. Blackwell Preston said. Nor did they want to disturb their neighbors with their own noise. "If the door was in the middle of the hallway, forget it," she said. In their immediate neighborhood, a sunny four bedroom co op was listed at 975,250, with monthly maintenance of 900. It felt pricey for a building with no parking and a tiny elevator. To move in, "we would have to walk all of our furniture up six flights of stairs," Ms. Blackwell Preston said. In Spuyten Duyvil, the Bronx, a duplex co op in a 1964 building was 445,000, with maintenance of around 1,800. It had a waiting list for parking, and they were sick of hunting for street parking. "The renovations that were going to have to happen weren't worth it," Ms. Blackwell Preston said. "In the hairdressing world, we say, 'You cannot tone your way out of a bad color.'" Some listings took them to houses farther north in the Bronx, in north Riverdale, beyond the terminus of the No. 1 train at 242nd Street. "They were looking at price points," Ms. Heilman said. The couple wondered what it would be like to have a house. "My husband was like, 'More space, more headaches,'" Ms. Blackwell Preston said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Katherine M. Bonniwell, a former publisher of Life magazine who was widely considered a role model for female magazine managers, died on Aug. 31 at her home in Manhattan. She was 70. The cause was lung cancer, her husband, William Leibovitz, said. Ms. Bonniwell was an "early glass ceiling breaker" who led a "groundswell of very talented women" into top positions at Time Inc., Life's parent company, said Chris Meigher, who was president of the organization during her time there. "She was strong and stalwart and could stand toe to toe with anybody," Mr. Meigher said. Life, best known for its photo essays, was published weekly until 1972 and then monthly from 1978 until 2000. It now exists as a depository of 20 million photos and images on the Time website. Ms. Bonniwell was publisher from 1988 to 1991, a period marked by high magazine readership but also by advertising downturns and shifts in consumer interest. During her tenure, the magazine increased its circulation to 1.4 million from 1.2 million and won two National Magazine Awards.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
BELTED tightly within the slender carbon fiber sheath of a black missile known as the DeltaWing, I hurtled over a brow on the Road Atlanta racecourse and knifed down to a 90 degree left hander at nearly 170 miles an hour. Despite plenty of racetrack experience, I had my doubts about what would happen next. Critics say that this radical racecar a bizarre looking creation that resembles the Batmobile is more likely to fly than to turn. Five days earlier, in fact, it had done just that, flipping into a guardrail after being hit by another car during a prerace test session. I hammered the brake pedal and clicked the left shift paddle three times to select second gear as my body strained against already taut shoulder harnesses. The carbon carbon brakes bled off speed at an astonishing rate, and by the time I had to turn left, I was able to glide through the corner with no more drama than easing into a shopping mall parking space. This is not to suggest that I'm a hero racecar driver; quite the contrary, to be honest. Instead, my point is that while the DeltaWing looks more like a futuristic mobility pod than a contemporary racecar, it drives like, well, a regular automobile. "If I were blindfolded, I wouldn't know the difference between the DeltaWing and a normal car," said Gunnar Jeannette, who had driven the hastily repaired machine to a respectable finish here a few days earlier in the 1,000 mile Petit Le Mans sports car race. Curiously, the inside of the cockpit is just about the only vantage point from which the DeltaWing doesn't seem freakishly different. But its strange appearance from the outside, unlike any other car built for road racing, is an honest indicator of the unique technology it embodies. The DeltaWing is arguably the most innovative and probably the most polarizing racecar to appear at least since rear engine cars replaced traditional roadsters for Indianapolis 500 type events. By virtue of a design that minimizes aerodynamic drag and cuts weight to less than 1,300 pounds, it is able to go roughly as fast as cars that have twice as much horsepower and use twice as much fuel. "The DeltaWing is all about making history," said Dan Gurney, the legendary Southern California driver who has won in many forms of motor sport. "It's going to have an enormous impact from the standpoint of efficiency, fuel economy, brake wear, tire wear, aerodynamics and power to weight ratio." The avant garde shape of the car widely panned by both racing fans and participants as being hideous and the threat it represents to existing designs has created a legion of detractors. But it has also generated an avid core of supporters who say they believe it holds the key to making motor sports relevant in a world increasingly aware of environmental matters, though that was not the main inspiration for the project. In 2008, he had an epiphany: the two big front tires on Indy and Formula One cars produced loads of aerodynamic drag that slowed them down. What if he replaced them with two small front tires placed very close together? This would allow him to fashion needle nose bodywork that minimized drag. Low drag meant that less power would be needed to reach the same speeds. In 2010, Bowlby's concept was entered in a competition to select a new chassis for the IndyCar series for 2012. The DeltaWing design was rejected because of concerns that the small front tires wouldn't allow the car to turn properly, while the wingless body might be prone to flying uncontrollably. But officials of the Le Mans endurance race were seduced by Bowlby's mantra: half the power, half the weight, half the fuel and all the speed. So they invited the car to enter a demonstration class showcasing green technology. With the imprimatur of Le Mans, Bowlby was able to secure backing to build the car. Because the design was so radical, virtually every component had to be custom built. Michelin agreed to create the special tires. (The front tires, a mere four inches wide, look as if they belong on a vintage VW Beetle). Nissan signed on as the lead sponsor and provided a 1.6 liter 4 cylinder engine, which produces a paltry (by racing standards) 300 horsepower. In seven months, the DeltaWing went from the drawing board to completion in the shop of Dan Gurney's All American Racers. Three months later, it was racing at Le Mans, where it ran creditably before being knocked into a concrete barrier by another car. It then appeared last month at the Petit Le Mans race, finishing a remarkable 5th over all (running in an exhibition class), silencing cynics who said the car wouldn't perform as advertised. The DeltaWing is eligible to compete next year in American Le Mans Series sports car races. The A.L.M.S. founder, Don Panoz, who is now the owner of the DeltaWing project, told me at Road Atlanta that he was developing closed cockpit and road versions of the car. In some ways, a road car would bring motor sports full circle. Racing began at the turn of the 20th century as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of early automobiles. But it didn't take long for cars to be developed specifically for competition. In Europe, open wheel thoroughbreds raced on road courses a model that matured into the modern Formula One format while in the United States they tended to compete on purpose built tracks like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Sports cars based on road going automobiles raced in their own events, most notably the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. For much of the 20th century, racing was the crucible in which new automobile technology was perfected before trickling down into the world of everyday road cars. Disc brakes, turbocharging, all wheel drive and twin cam engine architecture are just a few of the innovations pioneered by racecars that we now take for granted in our minivans and family sedans. But by the 1980s and '90s, advances in aerodynamics and electronics had made racecars so fast and so potentially dangerous that the rules became ever more constraining in an effort to slow the cars. As a result, although hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually developing cars in Formula One, the technical apogee of the sport, racing no longer generates technology that translates into more sophisticated road cars. "Formula One is wretched excess," said Ricardo Divila, a former designer of Formula One cars and Le Mans prototypes who serves as an engineering consultant to Nissan. "Formula One has been gelded. You can't do anything interesting anymore but make minute, incremental improvements."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Spoilers ahead for the first season of "Russian Doll." In the summer of 1988, a violent clash occurred in the East Village between New York City police officers and counterculture protesters fighting a proposed curfew for the neighborhood's Tompkins Square Park. After three years of off and on conflict, the city temporarily shut down the park in 1991. In the new Netflix series "Russian Doll," a violent clash occurs between Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), an East Village woman who keeps reliving the night of her 36th birthday, and her own lingering traumas stemming from an unstable childhood. In one episode she wanders through Tompkins Square Park at night, looking for her lost cat. For the New York Times critic Jason Zinoman, the connection between the Tompkins Square Park riots of three decades ago and "Russian Doll" is clear. As he wrote in a Twitter thread on Monday, he views the show as "an against the grain meditation on the cultural guilt" around the disturbances that exacerbated tensions between community residents and law enforcement: So what really happened in Tompkins Square Park? In 1988, it was still a place that never slept. About 150 homeless people lived in the park, which had also become a busy spot for drug dealers, young people and what The Times described as "drunken rock fans." Surrounding the area were "graffiti scarred tenements, nightclubs and a smattering of newly renovated dwellings where apartments sell for as much as 450,000." As a community board moved toward approving a curfew for the park that summer, relatively peaceful protests escalated into something more violent. On the night of Aug. 6, reporters from The Times who were on the scene described "sporadic confrontations" lasting more than four hours. Around 150 to 200 protesters, many "drinking beer and taunting officers," marched on the park and waved signs, including one that read "Gentrification Is Class War." Protesters threw objects; officers were seen clubbing and injuring civilians, including bystanders. Around 100 complaints of police brutality were reported following the incident, much of which was caught on videotape by Clayton Patterson, an artist. Soon after, the city's police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, stated that "poor planning and tactical errors led the police to lose control of the situation." By spring of 1991, the park still did not have an official curfew, and along with children playing on the fenced off jungle gym, the park's patrons included more than 100 homeless people and a "ragtag army of radical East Village residents known locally as the 'anarchists,'" The Times wrote. The local assemblyman, Steven Sanders, called for a curfew to evict the homeless, and more unrest erupted over Memorial Day weekend. Later that week, Mayor David Dinkins said, "It is the only city park that cannot be used by the public as a park the atmosphere is disturbing, disruptive and dangerous." Police officers removed Tompkins Square Park's homeless residents and announced that the park would be closed for renovations for "at least a year." (Some sections, including the playground, would remain open during the day, but close at 9 p.m.) A year later, Dinkins dedicated a renovated park and vowed to enforce a midnight curfew. Read about how a Harry Nilsson song came to be featured prominently in "Russian Doll." In 2008, on the 20th anniversary of the original riots, The Times observed that class tensions in the area had now "faded": Studio apartments were renting for 2,000; the park's midnight curfew was "rarely a source of controversy." (The curfew remains the same today.) In his tweets, Zinoman noted details both subtle and on the nose that signal how "Russian Doll" was influenced by memory of the riots: the ostensibly timeless aesthetic, which jumps between references to the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and the present; Nadia's guilt over leaving her troubled, "downtown NY cool" mother to live with a more stable "yuppie family friend" in 1991, when Nadia was still a child; the street parade featuring Bread and Puppet figures derived from the radical political theater of the 1960s; the heavy presence of Tompkins Square Park itself, which serves as a backdrop for much of the season. Nadia's guilt is a stand in for the city's collective guilt for "losing the real authentic downtown represented by the 'cleaning up' of the park," Zinoman continued, "a fight the city won. If the riots were the last stand of NY bohemia, then it lost." Horse (Brendan Sexton III), a homeless character who lives in the park and is sometimes seen standing next to a curfew sign, also plays a significant role in the show: Nadia and Alan (Charlie Barnett), the other character stuck in a time loop, "find salvation (and a way out of their 'Groundhog Day')" in part by "making peace with the homeless guy," Zinoman wrote. He posited that his theory could sound "pretentious," or like "nonsense." But both Lyonne and Leslye Headland, who created the show along with Amy Poehler, confirmed his analysis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Consumer confidence and falling interest rates are helping the capital city of Bogota compete for international home buyers. A Circular House in the Hills Outside Bogota This three story, circular house is built into the hills outside La Calera, a small town in the eastern ranges of the Andes Mountains overlooking Bogota, Colombia. Completed in 2012, the three bedroom, five bathroom house offers panoramic views of the San Rafael Reservoir, with a round bamboo roof designed by Simon Velez, a renowned local architect who specializes in tropical architecture. With 8,600 square feet of living space, the home sits on a third of an acre in a subdivision of about 15 homes. Floors throughout are marble, ceramic and wood, and the furnishings, including the handwoven Colombian rugs, are included in the asking price, said Rosita Guzman, the Colombia director of Latin Exclusive, which has the listing. The circular house is built into the hills outside La Calera, a small town in the eastern ranges of the Andes Mountains, overlooking Bogota. Veronica Angulo for The New York Times "The owner is from Iran, so they have a mix between Middle East and Colombian style," Ms. Guzman said. "It's in an area that's hot in the day, but at night it gets a little bit cold, so it's nice to use the fireplace and have some wine that kind of atmosphere." The main living area, on the top floor, is anchored by a cavernous living room with an ornate, illuminated ceiling canopy and a large gas fireplace. The room is surrounded by floor to ceiling windows and opens to a curved deck with reservoir and mountain views, and a protruding bamboo roof that serves as a sunshade. On one side of the living room is a seating area with a wood beamed ceiling; on the other is an open kitchen with an island and breakfast bar, cream granite countertops, wood cabinetry and a six burner countertop range. There are two bedrooms on the second floor, including the master suite, which has a walk in cedar closet, a private balcony and a bathroom with a sauna and a double vanity. The guest bedroom has a vaulted, beamed ceiling and decorative windows. A third room on this level currently serves as a home gym. The dining room, on the first floor, has built in wine storage, hardwood floors and water views. Glass doors lead out to a wood deck with a vertical garden and steps down to a glass conservatory with a furnished seating area and a gas fireplace. There is also a third bedroom with an en suite bathroom on the first level. The property includes a four car garage, a security kiosk and a separate two bedroom dwelling for employees. The house has armored doors and windows, a panic room and other high tech security features, Ms. Guzman said. La Calera, which has about 27,500 residents, is separated from metropolitan Bogota by a stretch of mountains descending into the city. The town has plenty of restaurants and recreational activities, and La Cima Golf Club is within walking distance of the property. Visitors to the area enjoy hiking, biking, horseback riding, parapenting and fishing in the reservoir. Supermarkets and shopping malls are about 10 minutes away by car, Ms. Guzman said. Bogota, the capital and largest city in Colombia, with a population of about 8 million, is 25 minutes away. The political and economic center of the country, it has multiple historic and cultural attractions, including the Gold Museum. El Dorado International Airport, in the northwest part of the city, is about an hour's drive from the house. The housing market in Colombia has traditionally been stable, and it continues to see growth despite some economic uncertainty due to the 2018 presidential election and the low international oil and commodities prices, said Santiago Rico Calderon, the managing director of the Bogota office of Engel Volkers. "An increase of consumer confidence along with relatively low interest rates have allowed for some very positive results at the end of 2018," he said. Bogota, which has the highest housing prices in Colombia and an increasingly modern and attractive city center, is planning to unveil rapid transit projects in the near future, he said, and that should foster good conditions for housing investment. The devaluation of the Colombian peso against the American dollar by roughly 40 percent since 2015 has also made the Bogota market appealing to international investors, Mr. Rico Calderon said. "For the dollar paying buyer, Bogota represents an excellent opportunity to invest in a property at a much lower price compared to previous years," he said. Adrian Beales, the director of sales for the Colombian brokerage Lifeafar, said home prices in Bogota's upper middle class neighborhoods tend to average about 4 million to 6 million Colombian pesos a square meter (or 118 to 178 a square foot). Home prices in the trendy Parque 93 area of the Chapinero neighborhood are higher, with resale properties selling for up to 8 million pesos a square meter ( 237 a square foot) and new construction fetching 12 million pesos a square meter ( 355 a square foot), Mr. Beales said. While many foreign buyers tend to focus on Medellin and Cartagena, Colombia's second and third largest cities, Bogota does draw international investors, most of them from Spain, the United States, Canada and Latin American countries like Venezuela, brokers said. "The expat community has been growing steadily in Colombia for the past few years, and a number of them choose to buy local properties, as they see this as a strong investment option," Mr. Rico Calderon said. Among the most popular Bogota neighborhoods with international buyers are Chapinero, an economic and cultural hub, and Santa Barbara, with its casino and public park, brokers said. Foreigners also buy homes outside Bogota, in quieter areas like Chia, a suburb about 15 miles north of the city center, Mr. Beales said. La Calera and the areas just outside it are especially appealing to those who don't have to commute into Bogota for work, Ms. Guzman said. "It's big houses, a lot of families and a lot of foreigners from the States, most of them that are getting married to Colombians," she said. "They want to be outside the city, because they're people who can work anywhere." There are no restrictions on foreigners buying property in Colombia. While real estate transactions are handled by a notary, most buyers from abroad typically hire their own legal representation, Mr. Beales said. The attorney's fee is usually around 3,000, although it can range from 2,000 to 5,000 per transaction, Mr. Rico Calderon said. The buyer typically pays around 1.94 percent of the sale price in taxes, he said. The real estate commission is usually around 3 percent, plus tax, and is paid by the seller, Mr. Beales said. Most foreign buyers pay in cash, as Colombian banks don't typically provide mortgages to foreigners without proof of collateral in the country, brokers said. The annual taxes on this property are about 4,000, although that may change after it is sold, Ms. Guzman said. Property taxes are levied on the cadastral value of properties as assessed by Colombian municipalities. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Three original members of the Smashing Pumpkins will mark the band's 30th anniversary with a tour: from left, James Iha, Billy Corgan, Jeff Schroeder (who joined about a decade ago) and Jimmy Chamberlin.Credit...Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times Smashing Pumpkins Say They're Happy Now. Can They Keep It Together? Three original members of the Smashing Pumpkins will mark the band's 30th anniversary with a tour: from left, James Iha, Billy Corgan, Jeff Schroeder (who joined about a decade ago) and Jimmy Chamberlin. LOS ANGELES In the nearly two decades since the original lineup of the Smashing Pumpkins succumbed to rock star cliches, crumbling under the weight of drugs, expectations and egos, the band's lead singer, songwriter and guitarist Billy Corgan has kept himself plenty busy. A confident mastermind with omnivorous ambitions, Mr. Corgan, 51, became a published poet; a professional wrestling executive and owner; a prolific Myspace and LiveJournal user; a curator of vintage photographs; an amateur talking head and recurring guest on Alex Jones's Infowars programming; the proprietor of a Chicago area tea shop; and a cat magazine cover star, among other side hustles. There was no shortage of music either, including two solo albums and one with Zwan, as well as various iterations of the Smashing Pumpkins that Mr. Corgan has kept afloat since declaring in a 2005 full page newspaper ad: "I want my band back, and my songs, and my dreams." Looking back at the aftermath of those accomplishments, Mr. Corgan can admit now that he was a bit like Don Quixote, "wrestling with the ghost of the thing" and carrying on "a war that was very much my own war," he said this month. "I was in denial about what I'd given up." So it was with some hard won humility that Mr. Corgan allowed himself to realize a few years back that the Pumpkins were just not the same without the original guitarist James Iha, who helped found the group as a Chicago teenager in 1988; Jimmy Chamberlin, the drummer who has been Mr. Corgan's most frequent on and off collaborator; and the bassist D'Arcy Wretzky. After some tentative emails initiated by Mr. Iha their first real contact since 2001 and then a few air clearing dinners, Mr. Corgan began the process of slowly piecing back together his core creative unit. With enough time past, and having each toiled with enough subpar substitutes, they made it work this time and Mr. Corgan finally got his band back. Almost. Because what would a Smashing Pumpkins reunion be without some drama? Beginning in July, the original group minus a discontented Ms. Wretzky will set out on a 38 date (and growing) summer tour titled "Shiny and Oh So Bright." And though the shows will coincide with the Pumpkins' 30th anniversary and exclusively feature songs from their first five essential albums, it's not all a nostalgia trip. Trying to make this more of a reboot than a reunion, the band has been in the studio with the guru producer Rick Rubin at work on new songs, which likely will be released as two EPs before year's end. "I would say this is the happiest time of the band," Mr. Corgan said, flanked by Mr. Chamberlin, who was relentlessly positive, and Mr. Iha, who seemed content to go with the flow. The question now is whether fans who have weathered years of diminishing returns from Mr. Corgan's mercurial antics, broken promises and odd decisions will allow themselves to trust the band enough to care. And assuming they do, how long can this infamously dysfunctional musical family hold it together? Kevin Weatherly, the program director of the alternative station KROQ in Los Angeles, said that although a reunion may feel less impactful for a band that "never really completely went away," the Pumpkins' biggest hits have remained a constant presence, and a set list full of them could likely fill seats with old fans. "You can count the bands on one hand that really defined the '90s alternative scene," he said, "and I would put the Pumpkins up there with the biggest from that era." At the Four Seasons outside of Malibu, near where the band was finishing recording this month, the three original members were convincingly in sync and professional, if not affectionate. All three are fathers now and in interviews, separately and together, they expressed gratitude for the opportunity to demonstrate newfound maturity and once again tour arenas with their greatest hits. But with the exception of Mr. Chamberlin, 53, who seems to have fully evolved from a drug addicted caricature of a rock drummer into a sober Midwestern dad who plays jazz, serves on school boards and does tech consultant work on the side, the Pumpkins remained very much in their classic roles. (In 1996, Mr. Chamberlin was booted from the group for three years after a touring keyboardist died from a heroin overdose after using with him in a hotel room.) "It's a bit akin to trying to rekindle a romance almost two decades later," Mr. Corgan said, away from his bandmates. "The love is there, but, you know, is the language? Is the magic there?" In the studio, they decided, it most certainly was. The band put out a demo of 15 songs with hopes of perfecting one single with Mr. Rubin to publicize the tour; the producer ended up picking eight songs he wanted to record. "The energy of the performances are fiery and vibrant," Mr. Rubin wrote in an email, noting that the music "fits well with classic Pumpkin catalog." He added: "It's not unusual for there to exist volatility with passionate, creative people. It seems like they've known each other long enough for many of the old wounds to have healed and they all seem like they are in a good place, so they came in with a healthy mind set." Mr. Chamberlin said that the group's disagreements had never been musical, so upon reuniting, the new songs "just poured out." Mr. Corgan concurred: "It picks up where this unit left off," he said, adding that the fresh material saw him return to "the Zero character" that he had used to write some of the Smashing Pumpkins' most wrenching lyrics. Mr. Corgan said that, for a time, "the controversy worked to our favor" and noted that the Pumpkins pulled off five world tours and produced some 200 recorded songs. "So how dysfunctional were we, really?" But as the others fell away, first Ms. Wretzky in 1999 and the rest of the band soon after, Mr. Corgan's shtick soured. "To my discredit, I didn't realize that that formula only works if you're winning commercially," he said. And when the audience dwindled? "Well, then you're just a jerk with a bad message." At the same time, Mr. Corgan maintained that he was largely in control of his meta narrative. "I would say 80 percent of the things that I get held up and mocked for, I'm doing intentionally," he said. "It's sort of funny to me that they actually think I'm that stupid. It's, like, yeah, I work in wrestling I'm running you." (In fact, he promised another cat magazine cover is coming soon.) So it could be forgiven if some cynical observers saw the band's recent online spectacles as all part of a WWE like plan. Though the Pumpkins had been teasing some sort of a reunion for months, the official announcement was pre empted and undermined by the news from Ms. Wretzky that she would not be participating. First in pseudonymous comments on a rock blog and then in leaked text messages and an interview, the bassist detailed a long making up and negotiation process that was ultimately derailed by miscommunication, worries from Mr. Corgan about her ability to perform and, of course, money. Ms. Wretzky said by phone that she had been discussing a potential Pumpkins comeback with Mr. Corgan for nearly two years, but felt in retrospect that he had never truly considered her to be the band's full time bass player. "He was stringing me along and using me to be able to say that it was, in fact, a reunion of all the members," she said. "Billy can be incredibly charming and funny and fun, but when it comes to money and giving credit where credit is due and any kind of work situation, it's not pretty." She added that while she was initially told she would make "millions of dollars," there were disagreements about how the members would split the payday, with Mr. Corgan making twice as much as the others. "I really wanted to do this tour for the right reasons," Ms. Wretzky said. "If everybody was doing it for free, I would have done it for free." "I can sit here and tell you all day, 'I wrote the songs' and 'I was alone in the studio at 12:00 at night, while you were drinking wine on the Riviera,' you know?" Mr. Corgan said. "It seems really irrelevant." (He did, however, mention one grudge that lingered: After the band played its final shows together in 2000, Mr. Corgan proposed renting out the venue Metro in Chicago, "our sort of home temple," and record a "Let It Be" style farewell album; Mr. Iha refused.) Now, though, Mr. Iha implied that Mr. Corgan was less of a taskmaster the guitarist was delighted that, recently, he could miss some band responsibilities to drop off his kids at school without any pushback. Mr. Iha added that he had tried not to pay much attention to Mr. Corgan or the Pumpkins in the intervening years. "I didn't allow myself to think about it that much," he said. "But there would be reminders a song on the radio or in the grocery store." After he and Mr. Corgan had reconnected as friends, the guitarist made a cameo with the Pumpkins live for the first time last spring. But to Mr. Corgan's disappointment, "It's not like the minute he got up onstage with us the phones started ringing off the hook in fact, it was the opposite," he said. "So that silence was humbling." But the lack of industry clamor allowed the band to take its time in deciding exactly what a reunion would look like. It came to resemble an apology as much as a fresh start. Although the group was most energized when discussing its new work "He still has angst," Mr. Iha said proudly of Mr. Corgan, who began reciting new, still dour lyrics the Pumpkins also realized that by playing only their most loved songs on this tour, they could be, for once, crowd pleasers. "It's a concession to a bigger goal," Mr. Corgan said, promising to play the music, for the first time, as faithfully as possible to its recorded version. "We collectively need to rebuild the public trust in our brand." Already, there had been some schadenfreude around reports of sluggish ticket sales in certain cities, but Mr. Corgan was defiant. "Are they all selling as well as I would like them to sell? No," he said, but he added, with eyes toward the international market, that the band was still ahead of estimates and selling more tickets overall than it did in 1997. Mr. Corgan insisted the tour would be a corrective after decades of hardheadedness. "We're going to say, 'Look, yes, we're brats. Yes, we've tested your patience. But this is our absolute best effort,' " he explained. "We charted a very, very, very difficult path, and have rarely received the credit. This is our time to have a party we deserve a party." That said, Mr. Corgan slipped in, it's probably a one time thing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Two fault zones that were thought to be separate actually make up one continuous fault system running through San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties, according to new research. If all the offshore and onshore segments of the so called Newport Inglewood/Rose Canyon fault system were to rupture at once, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake could seize the region. "The size of an earthquake is directly related to the length of the fault that's rupturing the longer the fault, the larger the earthquake," said Valerie Sahakian, a researcher at the United States Geological Survey, who led the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. While previous research had suggested that breaks in the Newport Inglewood and Rose Canyon faults were as wide as three miles, Dr. Sahakian's team found that these gaps were no more than 1.25 miles wide.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science

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