text
stringlengths 1
39.7k
| label
int64 0
0
| original_task
stringclasses 8
values | original_label
stringclasses 35
values |
|---|---|---|---|
Re "Who Would Get Vaccinated First? U.S. Considers Race in Its Plans" (news article, July 10): The debate in the article centers on who should get priority to receive the coronavirus vaccine when it first comes out. Another consideration is where it should first be deployed. Politics may dictate that it go to states that currently have the highest incidence, i.e., many red states. However, many places in those states are not prudently practicing quarantine, masking and social distancing. Would it be fair to those states with sensible policies that they have to wait for the vaccine? Joel Shalowitz Evanston, Ill. The writer is an adjunct professor of preventive medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. You report that policymakers are considering a "contentious option" whether to put Black and Latino people ahead of others. But does it have to be an all or nothing approach, as the article implies? Why not something more nuanced, where individuals in various categories can be scored according to relative risks? For instance, you are assigned a certain number of points if you are over 65, more points if you are Black or Latino, more if you live in a certain ZIP code, more if you have certain underlying conditions, more if you work in proximity to others, etc.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
I wish I could tell you that I'm sorry. I would start with an apology for that Saturday afternoon phone call, nearly a month ago. You answered on the first ring, anxious for news of your son. You had been there for every one of his hospital admissions for nearly four decades, since he was a child. Through the transplant, those long nights in the chair by his bedside, watching his chest rise and fall, his hand, puffy from fluids, in yours. But now you were at home, just a few miles that must have felt like worlds apart when I called and told you that his breathing was getting worse, and we might have to intubate. I tried to say it gently. I hope you could tell that I was trying. But I wanted to balance kindness with clarity, and I needed to make sure you understood how serious it all was without being able to see him but of course you understood. I could have worked harder to prepare you, but I didn't think of that until you started to cry. In the hospital on occasion, we've seen family members collapse under the news we deliver literally fall onto the floor and I imagined you doing that alone in your home. If you were with us in the family meeting room, I would have passed you a box of tissues. If it seemed right, I might have touched your shoulder or even offered you a hug. But the meeting room is eerily empty. And it has been months since I offered a patient's family member a hug. On the other end of the phone line, I waited silently. "Just promise you'll take good care of him," you said. "We're doing everything we can," I replied, though I was aware of how hollow these words must have sounded coming from a faceless stranger. How could I expect you to believe me? "I'm sorry you can't be with him," I continued. "I'm so sorry." I'm sorry to you, too, for the night I called at 2 a.m. to tell you that your father was dying. You were startled, your voice thick with sleep. I'm sorry that you could not come to see him, but you knew that our hospital rules at that time dictated that only one person could visit, and that one person would be your mother. Which meant that you would say goodbye on FaceTime. I wanted you to feel as though you were alone in that room, to forget for a moment that your surreal farewell was being facilitated by a doctor you had never met, who was also thinking of her own parents and hoping the seal on her N95 was tight enough. I should apologize to your elderly mother, too, left alone at the bedside in her grief as her husband died. In a different time, you would have been with her. You would have been together for that sad walk out of the unit when it was all over. The rules seemed to make sense at the start. In the initial days and even weeks of fear and unknown, the only rational response was to prioritize safety above all else. Hospital visitors, any of whom could be asymptomatic or pre symptomatic carriers, threatened to sicken their own loved ones and the hospital staff. Social distancing would be impossible with patients' visitors jammed into cramped elevators, sharing meals in the cafeteria, crowded into family waiting rooms. The safest way to minimize contact would be to keep all visitors out, with limited exceptions at the extremes during a birth or, even for those with coronavirus, a solitary loved one at the end of life. Now, it has been more than two months since my hospital banished most visitors. We are in a different place. And as the tide of coronavirus admissions recedes, we find ourselves wondering how these rules can safely begin to shift. At my hospital, our policies have recently changed to allow two visitors instead of just one at the end of a patient's life and over a longer time frame, three days instead of just in the moments before dying. Still, visitors have to check in at security in the lobby and answer questions before they can enter do they have a fever or a cough, or shortness of breath? A yes might mean that they could bring coronavirus into the hospital and so they can't proceed. If they are allowed in, they must go straight to their loved one's room. There, we outfit them with the appropriate personal protective equipment and make sure they stay in the room masked and gowned until they are ready to leave the hospital. It is a strange way to be with the person you love when that person is dying. But it is something a meaningful step as we move cautiously toward a new version of normality. But isolation continues for most of our patients. The restricted visitor policies apply not only to those who are diagnosed with coronavirus, but to everyone people with cancer and transplants and heart failure. I should say I'm sorry to them too, then. Scared and sick and alone in solitary rooms in the cancer wing of my hospital, bald and nauseated from chemotherapy, awaiting news of bone marrow transplants or another round of treatment, looking out the window waiting for someone they love to drive by so that maybe they can wave. Their hospital course will inevitably be harder without an advocate at the bedside. And it doesn't end when a patient leaves the hospital. So I should apologize to my patients at the long term rehab hospital where I sometimes work, to the woman who has not seen her family for six weeks, who woke up from her intubation alone, was transferred from room to room by a fleet of masked health care workers, phone briefly lost, glasses misplaced, vulnerable and increasingly delirious. To the man whose wife used to bring him a cup of ice every time he asked, who sat at his bedside and played board games with him late into the night, I know you are unimaginably lonely there in your room at the end of the hall. We have tried to balance your safety with your humanity, but that too has been a casualty of this pandemic. I wish I could tell you I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you would even recognize my name. Daniela Lamas is a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
Why Is the Eclipse Longer in Some Places Than in Others? The village of Makanda, Ill., is about to experience nearly three minutes of fame. That's roughly the amount of time the moon will completely block the sun on Aug. 21 in this small community in southern Illinois the longest duration of totality anywhere in the United States during the solar eclipse, according to NASA. The total solar eclipse is expected to start around 10:16 a.m. in Oregon and move diagonally across the country until it ends in South Carolina around 2:48 p.m. (The times are local.) The duration of totality, the period during which the moon completely covers the sun, varies by location. The difference has to do with the geometry of the Earth and its distance from the moon, said Ernie Wright, a data visualizer at NASA. Totality will be shorter in Oregon because that part of the Earth is tilted away from the moon and farther from it. The moon's shadow also will move more quickly across Oregon, compared with the middle of the country. "When it hits the edge of the Earth, it has to swoop around the whole curve, so it moves quite a bit faster," Mr. Wright said. Eclipse calculators predict the moon's shadow will move about 2,410 miles per hour in western Oregon, 1,462 m.p.h. in western Kentucky and 1,502 m.p.h. near Charleston, S.C. Totality will last longer in places where the shadow moves slower. Totality is longest where the Earth is farthest from the sun and closest to the moon. During this solar eclipse, that period will occur above Makanda, which will go dark for two minutes and 41 seconds. Normally, Makanda is a village of about 600 residents where, locals say, everyone knows their neighbors' names and dogs nap in the road for 10 minutes at a time without being roused. Next week, Makanda will be bursting at the seams with thousands of visitors who want to drink in the celestial phenomenon for as long as possible. The community has been preparing for the onslaught for three years now, arranging for basic necessities like portable toilets and ice water. Joe McFarland, head of the village's eclipse planning effort, compares it to planning the Olympic Games at least, it has felt like that. This is a town that's not used to more than a handful of visitors per day. The village can host 3,000 people and has only 75 parking spaces, Mr. McFarland said. He is encouraging people to try to watch the eclipse from nearby towns. "We can't possibly accommodate the thousands of people who'd like to stand here," he said. Mr. Wright said most places within an hour's drive of Makanda will experience similar durations of totality. "There's a whole swath that's within a tenth of a second of the longest duration," he said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
In "The Wrong Missy," the twerpy bank executive Tim (David Spade) has just met his dream girl and his nightmare. Trouble is, both women are named Melissa, and though he intended to text Melissa, the former Miss Maryland (Molly Sims), an invite to his company retreat in Hawaii (along with a selfie of his unmentionables), he's accidentally made Melissa the motormouth (Lauren Lapkus) his plus one, a feral lonely heart who forces a dog tranquilizer and a nonconsensual sex act on Tim before their plane has landed in paradise. If that "joke" feels like a relic, just wait until the New Kids on the Block dance number. Directed by Tyler Spindel, "The Wrong Missy" (streaming on Netflix) comes from Adam Sandler's Happy Madison productions, which guarantees four auteurist signatures: the smirking slapstick of early '90s "Saturday Night Live," a bizarrely accented Rob Schneider (here, as a shark trawler named Komante), a vacation resort setting where the producers can chillax with their cast member buddies between takes, and an unshakable belief that every schlub deserves a babe with a banging bikini bod. Despite having the personality of a cabbage, Tim is pursued by three. In a nod to the ludicrous setup, the maniacal Melissa (who goes by Missy) chirps, "The age thing doesn't concern me. What are you, 65?"
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands have no natural predators, but their shells represent a mortal danger of their own. When flipped over, the animals who regularly weigh in at more than 90 pounds often struggle to find their feet. If they fail, they eventually die. And for a giant tortoise with one shell type, the saddleback, big spills are a regular part of life. "The saddlebacks live in places where you have a lot of lava rocks, so they should fall more often," said Ylenia Chiari, a biologist at the University of South Alabama, comparing them with domed tortoises, another type that lives on flatter terrain. Dr. Chiari thought the shells on the saddlebacks, with their edges and corners, had evolved to make it easier for these tortoises to get back up, and set out to test her hypothesis in a study that was published Thursday in Scientific Reports. She was wrong, but her research offered additional insights into the anatomies of these endangered creatures and how they may have evolved to get back on their feet. To test her idea, Dr. Chiari and her team first made digital 3D models of both types of shells using 89 tortoises, some in the wild and some at the California Academy of Sciences. The researchers also determined centers of mass for the two different types of tortoises by placing them on an unstable platform and photographing them. The scientists were then able to calculate which shell would require a tortoise to expend more energy when rolling off its back. The results suggested that a tortoise with a saddleback shell would have to work harder to get back on its feet. In general, the study found, the rounder the shell, the easier it is for the animal to right itself seemingly an advantage for the domed tortoise. But there is another significant anatomical difference between the saddleback and domed tortoises: the larger size of the saddleback's neck opening. This allows the saddleback to extend its longer neck farther, which biologists long assumed was a trait that helped the tortoise reach food in a drier climate. The shell's larger front opening also allows the saddleback tortoises to use their long necks to help pick themselves up (they wiggle their feet to shift their balance, too). That hole and the longer necks "could have evolved to overcome the fact that self righting would have been more difficult in saddlebacks," Dr. Chiari said, although more research will be required to confirm that idea.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Each of the participants got a shot every two months, either cabotegravir or a placebo. Each participant also took either Truvada or a placebo pill every day. (A separate study of cisgender women in sub Saharan Africa was designed at the same time, but it has taken longer to enroll participants.) The trial was expected to continue well into 2022, but it was stopped in May after an interim analysis showed that cabotegravir was highly effective. In the final analysis, 13 participants who got the injections every eight weeks were infected with H.I.V., compared with 39 who were infected among those who took the daily pill. The shot was 66 percent more effective than Truvada. In a subset of 372 people receiving Truvada, blood tests showed that just 75 percent faithfully took the pills. The injection proved more effective than the pills for these participants, too. Even before the pandemic, some clinicians were concerned about how they could accommodate patients who might need shots every two months. Doctors at Dr. Gandhi's clinic in San Francisco have considered quick appointments just for the shot, perhaps delivered in a pharmacy, from a mobile van or in a parking lot. She and other experts praised ViiV Healthcare for testing the injectable in a diverse set of participants. Most H.I.V. trials have primarily enrolled older white gay men, who often join to gain access to new drugs. Gilead tested Descovy in more than 5,000 cisgender men and 74 transgender women, and the F.D.A. approved it only for those groups, not cisgender women or transgender men.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Anthony Fantano reviews albums and songs on his YouTube channel, The Needle Drop, bringing an old art to a new medium and perhaps ensuring it has a future. A few years ago, the Rhode Island noise rock band Daughters had an unlikely breakthrough, thanks in no small part to a goofy, baldheaded online enthusiast. The group had just released its first new album in eight years, and although the music's punishing heaviness wasn't exactly welcoming to a wide audience, Daughters' tour had sold out and its label noticed a sudden spike in sales and streams, the drummer Jon Syverson recalled. Syverson, who was approaching 40, even heard from a cousin half his age, who'd excitedly tried to explain the uptick in attention. "Oh my God," the teenager told him, "The Melon reviewed your album, he wore the yellow flannel and gave it a 10 out of 10!" Syverson had no idea what his cousin was talking about. But to a certain subset of young music fans, Daughters might as well have hit the Powerball jackpot. The influential evangelist in question is the YouTuber named Anthony Fantano, 34, who has been speaking album and song reviews directly into a camera for more than a decade on The Needle Drop, his channel with 2.26 million subscribers, making him probably the most popular music critic left standing. Across thousands of videos on multiple platforms, including a recent partnership with the Amazon owned livestreaming site Twitch, Fantano has built up a legion of followers and imitators who trade in nicknames ("Melon" is for the critic's pale dome), inside jokes and Easter eggs (wearing a yellow flannel shirt signals a rave, red flannel means a pan). Along the way, he has helped to push a notoriously insular and endangered art form the record review toward a new default medium and younger audience. "Obviously a lot of what is around now is heavily influenced by my aesthetic, my style, my delivery," Fantano, a vegan teetotaler, said recently over FaceTime, where he was as long winded as in his videos, which often top 10 minutes. He noted that while he was not the first to bring the early YouTuber, articulate rant treatment to music, he was meticulous about crafting his channel, studying competitors, including websites that still relied on the written word, and keeping his approach simple, intimate and communal. "I was eating, sleeping and bleeding YouTube for quite a long time," he said. "I had consciously chosen something that I found to be really uncomplicated, because I envisioned the delivery and the makeup as being something that was easy to copy, so other people could get in on the conversation." This month, Fantano posted a video on Twitter that seemed to prove his point, showing a child reviewing a new album by the rapper 6ix9ine with a preternatural bluster obviously modeled on his own. Lucas, 11, said he spent "hours a day, for years" watching Fantano and other YouTube music reviewers like Shawn Cee before building a bare bones basement setup during the pandemic and starting a channel of his own. With more than 900 million views across his YouTube accounts, Fantano, who functions as an entertainer as much as a critic, has become a touchstone among music focused, millennial and Gen Z content creators even as they refine and expand upon his format on platforms like TikTok. Dev Lemons, a musician and college student whose SongPsych account does bite size criticism by way of music theory and news, called Fantano "a celebrity and an authority" among her cohort. "I know so many people that just won't listen to something because Anthony Fantano was like, 'It's not worth your time,'" she said, noting that she has "looked into Pitchfork before," but mainly consumes video reviews. "There's so much more personality," she said. Another college student and musician, Ethan Fields, 20, has used his time at home during the pandemic to build a TikTok fan base, savvily interpreting popular songs in the style of other musicians. Fantano, Fields said, was an early influence on his knowing and silly insidery content. "I don't think there's anyone else like him, who's had that reach," Fields said. "If you told somebody on the street, 'Name a music critic right now,' if they're under the age of 25, they'll say, 'Anthony Fantano.'" (Asked if he could even name another music critic, Fields had to take a moment. "Ummmm, let's see ... honestly ... I'm trying to think. There's a guy from Rolling Stone who loves U2?" he said. "David Fricke?") The old guard has not exactly embraced Fantano. Robert Christgau, a rock critic for more than half a century, has called Fantano's career an "achievement," but sniffed, "I don't 'watch' reviews. I read writing." In an email, Christgau added, "I literally never think about Anthony Fantano and would probably have trouble recalling his name. This isn't a dis I don't know his work well enough to dis it." Over the years, Fantano has professionalized working with a managing editor, a video editor, a booking agent and an entertainment lawyer (whose son was a fan) but the look and feel of his videos has hardly changed since he started The Needle Drop in 2009, with a plain backdrop and a digital representation of the album cover in question over his right shoulder. Such consistency, a result of his type A workaholism, has been crucial to Fantano's success. His output is regular and optimized: a review almost every weekday, plus immediate reactions to new tracks, music news and other recurring features on his second channel, which he started in 2017 to circumvent the YouTube algorithm. ("The more content you're dropping on a single channel, the less likely it is that YouTube is going to appropriately promote all of it," he said.) His critical voice earnest, adjective heavy enthusiasm mixed with boyish, 4chan inflected internet humor and his taste, which can be eclectic but skews toward heavy rock, outre and experimental pop and rock influenced rap, are also reliable. The only five albums to earn a perfect 10 from him are by Kendrick Lamar, the noise rap trio Death Grips, the Kids See Ghosts duo of Kanye West and Kid Cudi, the aggressive rock band Swans, and Daughters, which he praised for its "nuclear bomb of cathartic hideousness" and "vile displays of auditory abuse." Predictably, The Needle Drop's most popular videos take on polarizing stars like West, Eminem and Chance the Rapper, but Fantano often avoids big ticket Top 40, which could bring him more views, in favor of proselytizing for something smaller or stranger. He referred to what he does as giving a "synopsis or CliffsNotes" for an artist or album, but also obviously values his role as a curator and tastemaker, too. "There's no number of negative reviews I can give to Nav that can end his career," Fantano said, referencing his takedowns of the slyly popular rapper. "But I feel like I can break an artist I do have the power to do that." At Southern Connecticut State University, Fantano threw himself into the college radio station, eventually becoming its general manager. Graduating into the dawn of a recession, he worked at a pizza place and interned at a local NPR station, where he briefly wrote about music and helmed a little heard podcast that anticipated The Needle Drop. But an editor's headline on a story he wrote, which inflamed Bob Dylan fans, convinced Fantano that he only wanted to work for himself. It was a golden age of music blogs, and Fantano was watching the landscape shift underneath the usual gatekeepers, he said. But he struggled to build an audience for his personal website until he hit on an idea to stand out: "Just get on camera." A bigger fan of Tim Eric and "South Park" than Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, Fantano felt no fealty toward the rock critical establishment, and said he was only ever an occasional reader of Pitchfork, the defining music publication of his generation. "Me and some of my friends thought it was funny when they did the Jet, monkey pee pee video, you know?" he said, referring to an album review that was simply a crass YouTube clip. Having spent a lot of time on the vulgar message board 4chan, Fantano infused his internet presence with winks, contrarian irreverence and attempts at humor, like a recurring "roommate" character that is just Fantano in a fake mustache. He became a favorite of the 4chan music forum known as /mu/, but Fantano's flirtation with that world also led to controversy when he was accused in a 2017 article in The Fader of courting the alt right with a spinoff channel that reviewed memes instead of music. The article was later deleted amid a settlement, and both sides are bound by a nondisclosure agreement. Fantano said he started that channel to make more money from YouTube, and acknowledged that there were some "grubby, close minded, young, aggressive male types hovering around the content." (The Needle Drop's audience on YouTube is only 6.5 percent female.) He said 4chan was "toxic and problematic," yet also "where most internet humor draws back to all of us are guilty of that original sin, in a way." In the years since, he has become more vocal on social justice issues, adding, "My politics have become, as a result of reading things online, more intersectional." He chalked up the backlash he has faced to jealousy. "There's an element of, 'I would like to be in that guy's shoes,'" he said. "Maybe people feel like I'm not entitled to my platform." Ultimately, it's Fantano's self image as an outsider that continues to animate much of his work, even as he has become hugely popular, a sort of gatekeeper of his own. Still, he maintains almost no relationship with record labels or the broader music industry, and said he has turned down numerous offers to be absorbed by a larger brand. "I don't want to have to sell my soul to basically make the same amount of money I'm making now," he said. As for the future of music criticism and his role in it, Fantano could only blow a raspberry. Does he even care? "In the traditional sense, probably not a lot," he said after a long pause. Whether it's Instagram posts, TikTok videos or Twitter threads, Fantano added, "What's most important to me is not the form that it takes, or the vehicle that it's being driven to me in, but really that it's observant, that it's passionate, and that the people who are doing it care."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Change the name and New York Fashion Week: Men's in its earlier iterations might as well have been Topeka Fashion Week: Men's, so little did it engage with the great metropolis. Shows held in generic repurposed industrial spaces could have taken place in any city, anywhere. Fashion, as Stefano Tonchi, the W editor and sometime curator, once said, "is not about clothes" so much as the expression of an overall cultural gestalt. Lacking the frame of a city and a world, catwalks quickly devolve into Habitrail wheels. The Belgian designer (and chief creative officer of Calvin Klein) Raf Simons upended all that on Tuesday with a moody nighttime show of clothes designed for his own label. He staged it in a Chinatown market with messy stalls clustered among the massive stone foundations of the Manhattan Bridge. Malodorous, clamorous, and with N and Q trains racketing overhead, the setting was Mr. Simons's homage to the animal market scene in Ridley Scott's dystopian classic "Blade Runner," with the addition of ripe fish market smells. Printed on pendant paper lanterns and glowing in neon signs was the word "Replicant," rendered in the graphic font Peter Saville once produced for New Order in case anyone needed a key to the familiar referents. That Mr. Simons's allusions led to no place in particular hardly seemed to matter to a mob that included Jake Gyllenhaal, Marc Jacobs, Julianne Moore, ASAP Rocky and hundreds of other New Yorkers, who are never happier than when being crowded, deafened and herded in the direction of something new. And Mr. Simons is that, a welcome, if exacting, novelty in a city and business lost in indecision. He is an almost dictatorial creator firmly in command of a vocabulary a formalist trained to design industrial products, who happened into fashion somewhat inadvertently. Sometimes the accidental path is the best one. New York has plenty of well schooled journeymen capable of producing designs whose general staleness no amount of clever styling can disguise. Ideas, on the other hand, can often seem scarce, and the concealing, genderless, uniform style clothes that Mr. Simons showed had plenty of those. Models carrying umbrellas, as if against toxic fallout that left some parasols in shreds, paraded past the standing crowd, all but concealed inside shiny conical raincoats with anatomically suggestive puckered armholes. Their faces, too, were mostly hidden by protective scarves and wide brimmed floral hats. Their limbs were lost inside clinging tunics, oversize collegiate sweaters and flowing trousers printed with blurred silk screen motifs. The roped gumboots on models were reminiscent of those worn by workers at Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market, and were among the many nods Mr. Simons made to a continuing fascination with the intersection of East and West. Moments before the show started, at roughly 10 p.m., production assistants arrived with big white plastic fish pails and sloshed water all over the pavement to ramp up the atmospherics. At this bit of added verisimilitude even some die hard Simons fans cried foul. "Do you know how much these shoes cost?" one fashion editor said, sidling away from the creeping tide. "Honey! Celine!" Unlikely as it is that their names might appear in the same sentence, Mr. Simons and Todd Snyder turned out this week to have in common an unexpected mutual interest in global urban realities. Mr. Snyder, an Iowa born designer, has built his career largely on gentling consumers toward a vision of reworked American classics, updated and smartened with a tailor's eye and vintage details. Though he is now a stalwart of New York fashion, it is worth remembering that before his particular vision could succeed here, he first had to become famous in Japan. Mr. Snyder changed all that for a spring 2018 collection that may be his best to date. (The Monday evening show was terrifically aided by a musical set played live by the two man Brooklyn indie band Lewis Del Mar.) It is fascinating to consider whether the designer's decision to embrace a mash up of influences from cities around the world was a result, as he said backstage, of a postelection recognition of New York's precious position as an immigrant place built on dispersion or whether internet trained consumers now expect of designers that they keep abreast of what's cool in Lagos or Mumbai. Whatever the reality, Mr. Snyder extended his range to include not only fabrics inspired by striped organic cottons spotted at a souk in Marrakesh, but also looks that combined elements of traditional dress in ways that, while unexpected, are geared to the new world of work. That is, a tidily tailored topcoat of refined burlap was worn with a pair of what Mr. Snyder called "active shorts," along with military dress shoes from Alden and black socks pulled high, just like his father used to wear them.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Steve Nash, the newly minted Nets coach, sounded all the right notes at his introductory news conference on Wednesday. He called the first coaching job of his career a "unique opportunity" and said the Nets had "an incredible roster" at an "incredible point in the history of the franchise." He also defended his hiring, which has reignited the long simmering debate over how much more often white people are chosen for N.B.A. head coaching jobs than Black people in a league where an estimated 80 percent of the players are Black. "Well, I did skip the line, frankly," said Nash, who is white and has no coaching experience. "But at the same time, I think leading an N.B.A. team for almost two decades is pretty unique." He added: "To be the head of the team on the floor. Think on the fly. To manage personalities, people and skill sets, and bring people together. Collaborating with a coaching staff for almost two decades. I mean, it's not like I was in a vacuum." Nash's hiring was a surprise to many basketball observers. He has never officially coached at any level. Jacque Vaughn, who had been the Nets' interim head coach since March, was passed over for the permanent role and asked to remain on as lead assistant. Nash's resume is almost entirely based off his N.B.A. playing days, which lasted from 1996 to 2014, during which he become one of the greatest point guards in N.B.A. history. He won two Most Valuable Player Awards and made eight All Star teams. He led the Phoenix Suns' so called "seven seconds or less" offense that focused on quick shots and 3 pointers, which contributed to a broad evolution in playing style across the league. These attributes, General Manager Sean Marks said, made Nash the ideal head coach. Marks, a former teammate of Nash's, joined Nash at the news conference. They wore matching black Nets polos and sat several feet apart, socially distanced. "As we spread the net in our search for the next leader, the next connector, a communicator and a cultural driver, we looked for these qualities, and all these qualities we found in Steve," Marks said. "His resume, his Hall of Fame resume, his experiences both on and off the court and his character are second to none." Nash told reporters that he reached out to Marks over the summer to express interest in the coaching job, but the conversation was a culmination of a two decade relationship with Marks. "I love to compete," Nash said. "I love to teach, lead and to be a part of the team. So to be in a position where I can do all those things on a day to day basis is a perfect fit. While I haven't necessarily publicly stated a desire to coach, privately it's always been in my mind." He added: "When you can't run up and down the court anymore, what can you do? What can you contribute?" Nash was close with Nets forward Kevin Durant before taking the coaching job. In 2015, Nash was hired by Golden State as a player development consultant and worked with Durant, who spent three seasons with the Warriors. Nash also said Wednesday that he has a relationship with Nets guard Kyrie Irving. They worked out together in New York after Nash retired. Durant and Irving are two of the best players in the league and together make the Nets a formidable championship contender. "Kyrie is one of my favorite players of all time," Nash said. "He's brilliant. His skill level is historically off the charts. Creative. Guts. Competitiveness. So for me to get to coach him is a pleasure." Asked what kind of coach he would be on the sideline, Nash said he wasn't sure yet. "I don't see myself as a yeller and screamer," Nash said. "But I haven't actually been over there yet so we'll see what transpires. But I think the reality is I'm going to be myself. If I'm anything other than myself, it's not going to work. I can't come in trying to conform to what I think a coach is supposed to be."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
"This is the CNN/New York Times Democratic presidential debate." "Sometimes there are issues that are bigger than politics. And I think that's the case with this impeachment inquiry." "In my judgment, Trump is the most corrupt president in the history of this country." "He has committed crimes in plain sight. And on this issue with Ukraine, he has been selling out our democracy." "I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth, because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires. Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires. We just have different approaches. Your idea is not the only idea." "You have not specified how you're going to pay for the most expensive plan, 'Medicare for all.' Will you raise taxes on the middle class?" "I have made clear what my principles are here. And that is: Costs will go up for the wealthy and for big corporations. And for hard working middle class families, costs will go down." "A yes or no question that didn't get a yes or no answer." "Senator Warren, I just want to say that I was surprised to hear that you did not agree with me that on this subject of what should be the rules around corporate responsibility for these big tech companies, when I called on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's account that you did not agree. And I would urge you to join me." "Sometimes I think that Senator Warren is more focused on being punitive or pitting some part of the country against the other." "I'm really shocked at the notion that anyone thinks I'm punitive. Look, I don't have a beef with billionaires. We need a wealth tax in order to make investments in the next generation." "If it's not O.K. for a president's family to be involved in foreign businesses, why was it O.K. for your son when you were vice president?" "Look, my son did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. Rudy Giuliani, the president and his thugs have already proven that they, in fact, are flat lying." "What has happened in Syria is yet again Donald Trump selling folks out. And that's why dude gotta go. And when I am commander in chief, we will stop this madness." "Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand. But so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime change war in Syria that started in 2011." "I think that is dead wrong. The slaughter going on in Syria is not a consequence of American presence. It's a consequence of a withdrawal and a betrayal. And when I was deployed, I knew one of the things keeping me safe was the fact that the flag on my shoulder represented a country known to keep its word." "Think about how absurd it is that this president is caging kids on the border and effectively letting ISIS prisoners run free." "We have ISIS it's going to come here. They are going to, in fact, damage the United States of America. That's why we got involved in the first place." "Protect small business and protect consumers." "They don't know how this is going to affect their jobs." "This is a disease of capitalism run amok." "Have a 15 member court." "Police violence is also gun violence." "Women are the majority of the population in this country. People need to keep their hands off of women's bodies and let women make the decisions about their own lives." "Thank you, senator." "I'm going to say something that is probably going to offend some people here, but I'm the only one on this stage who's gotten anything really big done." "But you know what you also got done? And I say this as a good friend. You got the disastrous war in Iraq done. You got a bankruptcy bill, which is hurting middle class families all over this country. You got trade agreements like Nafta, P.N.T.R. with China done, which have cost us 4 million jobs." "So you started this question with how you got something done. You know, following the financial crash of 2008, I had an idea for a consumer agency." "And I went on the floor and got you votes. I got votes for that bill. I convinced people to vote for it. So let's get those things straight, too." "Senator Warren, do you want to respond?" "I am deeply grateful to President Obama, who fought so hard to make sure that agency was passed into law." "You did a hell of a job in your job." "Thank you." "Now to the issue of candidates and their health." "I'm feeling great, but I would like to respond to that question." "Well, I want to I want to start by saying " "And Senator Sanders is in favor of medical marijuana. I want to make sure that's clear as well." "I do. I'm not on it tonight."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
SILVER SPRING, Md. A panel of experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration excoriated the manufacturer of a contraceptive device for not collecting data that they say could have helped predict risks for women. The device has received thousands of complaints from women who say they were harmed by it. The device, called Essure, is a small metal and polyester coil implanted into a woman's fallopian tubes to make her permanently sterile. The F.D.A. approved Essure 13 years ago after a fast track review process that prioritized the device because it offered the first alternative to surgical sterilization and promised a quick recovery. But since then, allegations that the device has caused severe pain, perforations of fallopian tubes and possibly even death, have accumulated, and the agency decided to hold a daylong public meeting on Thursday to talk about them. The F.D.A. does not have to take the advice of its expert panels, but it often does. The large auditorium at F.D.A. headquarters here was unusually full, and the ordinarily dry scientific discussion was punctuated with emotional testimony by female patients, and sharp questions from panel members, some of whom directly confronted the company, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, and the F.D.A., over the handling of the device. "How can Bayer and the F.D.A. have no knowledge of nickel allergies?" asked Dr. Peter Schalock, a dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, his voice incredulous. (The device is part nickel.) "Where did you test these people? How did you test these people? What did you test them with? Are we just making this up just for fun or is there data?" Bayer continued to stand by the device, saying its safety "is supported by more than a decade of science, with more than 10,000 women studied." The company said it included "information related to nickel," in the instructions for use since the device was approved in 2002. It estimates that a million Essure devices have been distributed around the world, about 60 percent of them in the United States. Some users of the Essure contraceptive device say health problems resulted from it. Uncredited/Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals, Inc., via Associated Press The problems seemed to be concentrated in the United States, too. A Bayer executive, Dr. Andrea Machlitt, said of the 17,000 so called "adverse event reports," which flag problems, 15,000 had been in the United States. Women told of autoimmune problems such as eczema, lupus, celiac disease, of cysts, abscesses and tumors, of severe fatigue and losing control of their bowels, and of odysseys through the health care system in search of diagnoses. Many women have sued the company. The company's supporters say it is not clear what share of those problems, if any, were caused by the device. Chandra Farmer, 33, said that after she had the device implanted several years ago, she had sudden bouts of muscle weakness so severe that she would collapse, leaving her helpless to care for her three children, one of whom was a toddler at the time. She could not stop falling asleep and had memory loss and hallucinations. She had a hysterectomy last year to get the device out of her body, and said she had not fallen down since. "My kids would have to tell people: 'Oh, it's O.K., she does that sometimes. She'll get up in a minute,' " she said, her voice breaking. Perhaps most troubling was an account by Gabriella Avina, who said she had taken part in the original clinical trials and had worked for the company, explaining the device to women when it first came on the market. "I am here today, almost 13 plus years later, to say I was wrong," Ms. Avina said. "Time has changed my thoughts, beliefs and, most importantly, my health." She said her health had deteriorated badly since she had Essure implanted. She was found to have celiac disease, a thyroid disorder and myasthenia gravis, illnesses that required multiple hospitalizations, chemotherapy and transfusions. "My health was in a tailspin, and I had failed to connect the dots," she said. "The only foreign object in my body was the coil." Some experts have called for more studies, saying the device had simply been poorly tracked after it came to market, with some women who had experienced problems left out of final results. But the women in the room rejected that recommendation, saying the device had harmed enough women they said 21,000 were now part of their Facebook network that it should be recalled. Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research, which has been tracking the device, said some women participating in the clinical trials had evidence that their answers were changed by clinical investigators to make their response seem rosier an accusation that Steven Immergut, a Bayer spokesman, denied. In a statement Thursday night, the company said it believed the panel's suggestions "support the continued safe and appropriate use of Essure." Several of the panelists questioned why it was so difficult for women to find a doctor who was trained in removing the device. Many of the women, in desperation, simply had a hysterectomy, which Dr. Charles Coddington, an obstetrician gynecologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, said was "like shooting flies with a cannon." The panel's patient representative, Cynthia Chauhan, said: "If you do not have access to someone who can remove it, you shouldn't be implanting it." Not all of the testimony was negative. Representatives from Planned Parenthood and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said they planned to continue using the device. They called for more information about the product and more studies. Dr. Raegan McDonald Mosley, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood, said the organization had conducted an internal analysis that found very few problems. "We continue to offer Essure as an important option," she said. Dr. Edio Zampaglione, a vice president at Bayer, said there had been many studies on the long term use of the device. He pointed to a current study in France of 2,600 women and said that, in all, thousands of women who have the device had been studied. "The body of knowledge about the safety and efficacy of Essure continues to grow," Dr. Zampaglione said at the meeting. He said none of the deaths in clinical trials had been related to the device one was from leukemia, and the other was from a heart attack after an operation. He said the fact that complaints about the product had increased was simply a reflection of the fact that more women were using it.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Ezra Chowaiki, a Manhattan art dealer who was accused of defrauding art collectors and dealers in December, has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in the case. Mr. Chowaiki acknowledged on Thursday that he had made fraudulent agreements to buy and sell artwork through his Manhattan art gallery, the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York said in a statement. Instead of honoring these agreements, he used the funds and artwork for unauthorized purposes. Prosecutors say he fraudulently transferred more than 16 million of artwork between 2015 and 2017. "As he admitted today in federal court, Ezra Chowaiki ran a multimillion dollar fraud on art dealers and collectors around the country," Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in the statement. "In some instances, Chowaiki sold artwork, purportedly on consignment, without the owners' authorization. In other instances, he took money from clients purportedly to purchase artwork, and kept the money but purchased no art." The victims of the fraud were not named, but court filings say they include art collectors in Toronto and Pennsylvania, and a company in the Cayman Islands managed by an art dealer who does business in Tokyo.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Only two of the past six presidents before Donald Trump lost their bids for re election. That's good news for him. But their stories are bad news for him, too. In their final years in office, both of those presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, experienced a noticeable slide in popularity right around the time early May through late June that Trump hit his current ugly patch. According to Gallup's ongoing tracking of the percentage of Americans who approve of a president's job performance, Carter's and Bush's numbers sank below 40 percent during this period and pretty much stayed there through Election Day. It's as if they both met their fates on the cusp of summer. And the cusp of summer has been a mean season for Trump, who has never flailed more pathetically or lashed out more desperately and who just experienced the Carter Bush dip. According to Gallup, his approval rating fell to 39 percent in early June from 49 a month earlier. So if Carter and Bush are harbingers, Trump is toast. He's toast by other measures as well. Two much discussed polls by The Times and Siena College that were published last week suggested that in key swing states, as well as nationally, he's the limping dead, trailing Joe Biden by double digits. That assessment is mostly consistent with other modeling and projections since the economy turned on Trump. According to some abstruse algorithm that The Economist regularly updates, he has only a one in 10 chance of winning the Electoral College and thus the presidency. According to a historical averaging of election year polls by the website FiveThirtyEight, Biden's lead over Trump right now is the biggest at this stage of the contest since Bill Clinton's over Bob Dole in 1996, when Clinton won his second term. Trump's response? To set himself on fire. His gratuitously touted instincts are nowhere to be found, supplanted by self defeating provocations, kamikaze tantrums and an itchy Twitter finger. There's a culture war for him to exploit, but instead of simply pillorying monument destroyers, he created his own living monuments: a white supremacist astride a golf cart in a Florida retirement community and a pistol toting Karen shouting at peaceful Black protesters from the stoop of her St. Louis manse. As a statement of values, it's grotesque. As a re election strategy, it's deranged. "Trump is in a deep hole and his reaction is to keep digging," David Axelrod told me. "What he's doing is shrinking his vote to excite his base." But that base is almost certainly not big enough to carry him to victory. Of course, November is still plenty distant. "Nobody could have predicted what these last four months would bring," Axelrod said. "We can't predict what the next four months will bring." And Trump has at times seemed to live beyond the laws of political gravity, untethered by precedents and unanswerable to pundits. For instance, his approval rating since his inauguration has been consistently and unusually low, lingering between 35 percent and 45 percent, according to Gallup. But his situation appears to be dire direr than Democrats allow themselves to admit. They remember how they counted their chickens last time around and got totally plucked. "Every Democrat rightly has 2016 PTSD," Lis Smith, a communications strategist who has advised Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Cuomo, told me. "But right now? You can't imagine normal suburban people voting for Trump anymore. He has really, really alienated everyone but the MAGA true believers." Additionally, 2016 is a possibly irrelevant point of reference, for reasons that become clearer all the time. I wouldn't be entirely shocked if Biden stages a rout in November or at least as much of a rout as this era of hyperpartisanship permits and the commentary afterward casts Trump's reign not as some profound wake up call but as a freak accident made possible by a perfect storm of circumstances. In fact that commentary has started. In The Washington Post last week, Matt Bai astutely observed that even as Trump won the presidency, most Americans rejected the core tenets of his campaign and viewed him darkly. His margin of victory "came from reluctant voters who almost certainly thought they were voting for the losing candidate, and who felt confident he'd make a terrible president," Bai wrote. "It was mostly about the intense emotions triggered by his opponent," he added, referring to Hillary Clinton. "In the only national referendum on Trumpism since 2016 the midterm cycle two years later the president's party was resoundingly rejected." There are many ways in which the last presidential election doesn't apply to this one, when Trump faces a much tougher challenge. In 2016, an unusually high percentage of voters, especially in such pivotal states as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, told pollsters that they'd decided whom to vote for in the final week. And these late deciders favored Trump. That could mean that many of them didn't have an entirely fixed opinion of him. But just about every American does now. He has dominated the media like none of his recent predecessors, with flamboyant behavior that repels ambivalence. His luck with late deciders in 2016 could also speak to Clinton aversion. But there's no comparable Biden aversion. If many voters can't bring themselves to adore him, they also can't bring themselves to abhor him. And Trump and his minions know it. That's why, instead of simply portraying Biden as some lefty nightmare, they're claiming that he's so mentally diminished that he'll be the puppet of progressive extremists. "Biden is just not scary enough for Trump," Axelrod said. "He's culturally inconvenient."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
The pattern with credit and debit card breaches tends to go something like this: A company like Target or Neiman Marcus announces that thieves may have stolen your card numbers or other information, then the company offers a year of credit monitoring. But the chastened keeper of your personal data rarely if ever offers to pay for the most potent protection of all: A security freeze on the files that the three big credit bureaus keep on you. Credit monitoring is often backward looking, informing you of new accounts that thieves may have already opened in your name. But a freeze prohibits the bureaus from releasing your credit reports to any company or other entity that doesn't already have a relationship with you. This prohibition is crucial, since credit card issuers, mobile phone providers, loan officers and others in similar roles almost never open a new account for people without seeing a credit report first. If they can't get access to the credit file, they probably won't open that new account. Given that this sort of new account fraud can be especially damaging, security freezes are one of the best tools consumers have to protect themselves from identity theft. After I mentioned credit freezes in passing in a column last weekend, many readers wrote or called wanting to know more about how to get one for themselves.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
This season Stella McCartney eschewed her normal slot during Paris Fashion Week for a slightly later reveal with a twist. She's not coming out just with a collection; she's coming out with a whole lexicon of values, with each letter illustrated by a different artist. Below, in an interview that has been edited, she explains why, and what it means. There's been a lot of talk about the pandemic changing the fashion value system, but you seem to have taken that literally. I think, like all of us, I asked myself a lot of questions during lockdown. "Why do I do what I do? Why do people work at Stella McCartney? And why on earth would you be in fashion?" I had all these sleepless nights, and then I woke up at like 4 o'clock in the morning and wrote down everything that really makes what I do important to me and meaningful. I wrote a manifesto without knowing it. Then we turned that into an A to Z. I wrote down words that basically correspond to the meaning of the brand. A is to be accountable, C is to be conscious, S is for sustainable, L is for love, H is humor, O is for organics, Z is for zero waste, R is for recycle. Every letter has a word that I think is a great kind of focus for us now and for the future, because when you're working this way, you can always be better. And it's been great fun to design around that, too. D is for desire. It doesn't mean we have to punish ourselves. It doesn't mean we have to compromise. We can still have fun. What are you going to do with it? It's basically a set of guidelines and principles for the brand, and it's lovely because it gives clarity. I think words are really important, especially when people are talking all the time about sustainability and fashion. But a lot of it is greenwashing, and a lot of it doesn't really have any substance. So for us, it's like put your money where your mouth is. Just setting the record straight and just be like, "You know what, this is what we do at Stella McCartney; we intend to do this forever." So how is it being realized in your collection? For the summer show, it's working with recycled industrial waste. I find it so sexy and cool and exciting. We have some lace pieces, and all of the lace is completely upcycled from what we have left over from maybe four or five fashion shows. All of our cotton and all of our denim is a hundred percent organic now, which is amazing. Of course, tomorrow my organic crop might fail or I might not be able to source it. There's a fragility in working this way, and you have to kind of hold your hands up and say, "You know what, we're trying really hard, but we are not perfect and you can only control so much." We have a room that's all one off pieces that were basically pieces that we made but that weren't put into production. They were just sitting around. I thought: "Why are these going into a sample sale and being chucked out? These are precious pieces." So instead we've taken them and embellished them more and put little handwritten notes in them. And so they became hugely rare and precious and emotional. You are now in a partnership with LVMH, so are these ideas and the manifesto going to trickle upward? Should we expect Fendi to go fur free? You'd have to ask the Fendi gang. I hope so. The biggest impact we have in a positive way on sustainability at Stella McCartney is not using animal products. One of the many reasons that I wanted to join LVMH is to really infiltrate from within, and I think it's a brave statement from them to invest in me. I'm a vegan fashion house that's not in line with a lot of what they're doing, and the fact that they are betting on someone like me that was a bold move. That's a conversation starter. It says we're looking at this and we're taking this seriously. You know, it's a big ship. I'm like this little pirate ship. I'm like the Sea Shepherd on the side.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
Richard Meier has been an architect for half a century, and yet, the Pritzker Prize winner has never bought an apartment of his own design. Until now. Mr. Meier, who is based in New York City, was one of the first to buy a condominium at the Surf Club Four Seasons, his latest project in Miami. "I thought, well, you know, everyone is going to Miami. This place is jumping," said the 80 year old architect. "I probably should have done this before. But I designed the building and it is great, and I figured I might as well enjoy it myself." Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of the New York City based brokerage the Corcoran Group, which is marketing the project, also purchased a unit there. In fact, two thirds of the buyers are New Yorkers, said Nadim Ashi, the managing partner at Fort Capital, the developer. Over the past 18 months, prices have risen by 11.5 percent along the beachfront in Miami, with new condominiums averaging 1,011 a square foot, up from 907 a square foot, according to a December market report by the Miami brokerage firm ISG. At the same time, the number of units for sale has dropped by nearly 64 percent, to 623 units from 1,717 units, over the same period. There are also a number of high priced penthouses for sale, including several that surpass 3,000 a square foot. The priciest is a 60 million home for sale at Faena, the development where the Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and the Apollo Global Management co founder Leon Black, both New Yorkers, have reportedly bought residences. "For us, 3,000 to 4,000 a square foot is crazy, but it is considered a bargain in some better Manhattan neighborhoods," said Daniel de la Vega, the president of One Sotheby's International Realty in Miami. "New Yorkers typically went to Palm Beach for their vacation homes, but now they see Miami as a value so are coming here, driving up prices and creating a frenzy." This year, Miami was ranked the seventh most important city to high net worth individuals with more than 30 million in assets; in 2009, the city was ranked 29th, according to the annual global Wealth Report, a study published by the real estate brokerage firm Knight Frank. "Miami is no longer the place where my grandma went to retire," said the developer Richard LeFrak, whose family built LeFrak City in Queens. He owns two development sites in Miami, and is building 1 Hotel Homes South Beach, a new condominium, with Starwood Capital Group. The project launched sales of its 29 penthouses during the recent Art Basel Miami Beach Fair, and New Yorkers bought three of the four penthouses that were sold. "New Yorkers love the convenience it is just a two and a half hour flight and of course, the warm weather," he said. Miami has also become a mecca for foodies and a darling of the art crowd. "It is very different than what my prior perception of it was going back 10 or 15 years." Evan Speiser, a 30 year old vice president at the Speiser Organization, agreed. Mr. Speiser, whose firm is a family run business that specializes in real estate development, acquisition and management, currently rents a loft on the Lower East Side. Rather than buy in New York, he decided to purchase a four bedroom apartment at the Ritz Carlton Residences, Miami Beach. "I thought there was a lot more upside in Miami than New York," he said. "The Miami market is in the middle of popping, rather than New York, where it has popped already. It was just too good an opportunity to pass up." Prices at the Ritz Carlton range from 2 million to 40 million, or roughly 1,300 to 1,400 a square foot on average, said Ophir Sternberg, a founding partner of Lionheart Capital, the property's developer. Like many companies, Mr. Sternberg's firm was based in New York City for 16 years before he moved its operations to Miami some four years ago. "I moved down to Miami fairly early, but more developers are now making the move to South Florida because of the amount of opportunities available there." Property Markets Group, a developer with JDS Development Group of the Walker Tower, which broke a record for downtown Manhattan when it sold a penthouse this year for more than 50 million, was also an early champion of Miami real estate. It has several projects underway, including Echo Brickell, also with JDS Development, and Muse Sunny Isles. The company has been aggressively pricing its Miami projects and is offering a free Tesla Model S to its penthouse buyers. Its latest listing is a 10,500 foot penthouse at Echo Brickell for 37 million. If sold at that price, it would be a record for the downtown Miami neighborhood, which is on Biscayne Bay and not on the ocean. Despite the price tag and its location, the penthouse already has a full price offer from a South American buyer, although no contract has been signed. "About 20 percent of our buyers are domestic, and of those, at least 90 percent are from New York," said Kevin Maloney, the company's chief executive. "They say, 'Let's move to Miami because it is less expensive,' but as New Yorkers come down and buy, the prices have been going up." "In Miami, especially in new construction, the majority of buyers are nonresidents buying vacation homes, or investors," said Don Peebles, the chairman of the Peebles Corporation, which is building the Bath Club Estates along the ocean in Miami Beach, where a penthouse is for sale for 50 million. "In a recessionary environment, if there is a glut of product, you will see these investors getting skittish." This is especially true in emerging neighborhoods like Brickell, Wynwood or the Design District, he said. "Buyers are looking at these neighborhoods like they are SoHo or TriBeCa, but they are not. Those neighborhoods are driven by people who live there full time, but not so in Miami." These newer areas "will be the first to fall," he said. "It is a real danger." Still, others say safeguards are in place this time that were lacking during the previous downturn. Developers now require buyers to put 50 percent to 60 percent deposits down on a unit, rather than 10 percent to 20 percent. "We incorporated this model from Latin America, where buyers are accustomed to putting up 100 percent of the purchase price before they close. So this will make it much harder for people to just walk away," Mr. de la Vega said. "There is very little speculative building, in fact I would say there are no speculative buildings going up, because basically, with some exceptions, 40 to 60 percent of the units are sold with high deposits before any construction starts," said Mr. LeFrak, who sold 100 of his project's 156 units in the pre construction phase. Still, he owns a development site in the Design District and another in North Miami, but has decided to wait to see how the market shakes out before building there. "Look, I was the first guy saying that Miami won't come back for decades after the last downturn, but it came back in three years and prices are 50 percent higher than they were at the very peak of that last cycle," Mr. Maloney said. "Unlike New York, Miami is fed by South America, and there, to a great extent, is a flight of capital and people. Nothing will change until you restabilize South America, which is years away." In the meantime, New Yorkers looking to flee a freezing winter and ever rising prices might benefit.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Water towers are beloved fixtures of the New York skyline, inspiring urban myths and song lyrics (see: Beastie Boys and Bruce Springsteen). Five years ago, an artist even built a clandestine bar inside a water tower in Chelsea. Now, a tourist friendly and Instagram ready version has been erected in Brooklyn, on the rooftop of the new Williamsburg Hotel. The Water Tower, which opened in November, is built of steel and glass, rising some 175 feet. While the structure never held water, patrons don't seem to mind as they take selfies next to the D.J. booth or on the wraparound balcony, with its panoramic views of actual water towers. The bar is in a hotel packed corner of Williamsburg (the Hoxton, the William Vale and the Wythe are nearby). The circular space is roughly 800 square feet and is decked out with plush sofas, a mural of graphic posters, and floor to ceiling windows, the better to take advantage of the views.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook announced on Friday that it had discovered a bug that allowed outsiders access to private photos, potentially affecting some 6.8 million people who use the service. "We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual," Tomer Bar, an engineering director at the company, said in a blog post. In March, The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a third party firm, harvested the data of Facebook users without their express knowledge or consent. And in September, a separate, more serious breach gave hackers full access to the Facebook accounts of tens of millions of users. This most recent incident is somewhat less severe than previous ones. Around 1,500 third party apps had access to users' uploaded photos even if they had not posted them publicly to Facebook from Sept. 13 to Sept. 25. Facebook said the number of people affected was probably smaller than 6.8 million, because it doubted that all 1,500 apps gained access to the social network during those 12 days. The company said it was contacting the 876 developers who had built the apps and asking them to check and delete any photos they may have retrieved improperly. Facebook has repeatedly pledged to better protect user information. "If we can't, then we don't deserve to serve you," Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, said in a note to users this year. But the bug reported on Friday prompted more scrutiny in the United States and Europe of whether it was following through on those promises. The announcement is likely to raise questions among federal regulators about whether Facebook violated a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011. Under the agreement, Facebook is prohibited from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices. It also requires the company to obtain users' consent before overriding their privacy choices, and to institute a comprehensive program to protect the privacy and security of users' data. In March, in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica, the commission said it was investigating Facebook's data handling practices. David C. Vladeck, a former director of the commission's bureau of consumer protection, said it was possible that Facebook's failure to anticipate and address the latest data privacy problem violated the agreement. Mr. Vladeck oversaw the investigation that led to the consent decree. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. "If Facebook can't control access by third party apps, they are going to be in constant trouble with the Federal Trade Commission and the public at some point is just going to revolt," Mr. Vladeck said. "This is just not acceptable." But Chris Hoofnagle, an adjunct professor of law who is the faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley, said it wasn't clear the incident violated the consent decree. "We don't know yet whether this security hole was a product of negligence or an accident that could happen even if you have good security," Professor Hoofnagle said. European regulators have signaled a strong displeasure with Facebook's privacy policies. The company's main data protection regulator in the European Union, the Irish Data Protection Commission, said on Friday that the mounting number of problems required a deeper investigation. Ireland is Facebook's lead privacy watchdog in the European Union because the company's European headquarters are in Dublin. The company found the bug on Sept. 25, the same day Facebook discovered a data breach that affected 30 million users. But executives did not notify government officials in Europe until November. Under the new European privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R., companies have 72 hours "without undue delay" to disclose an incident to authorities. Companies taking longer must include reasons for the delay. Facebook said it did not alert officials earlier because it needed time to "create a notification page" and to translate the message to consumers into multiple languages.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
A full floor apartment on the 84th floor of the glass sheathed One57 tower, with panoramic water, park and city vistas, sold for 52,952,500 and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. Monthly carrying costs for the residence, No. 84, which has 6,240 square feet of space that includes four bedrooms, a sitting room and five and a half baths, are 12,375. The original asking price was 45.5 million. Jeannie Woodbrey, a senior sales executive for One57 who represented the sponsor, the Extell Development Company, said the buyer, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company Tower 84, was local. "It's a New York buyer," she said, "and interestingly enough, he came to us through word of mouth, so there is not a broker that brought him in." The apartment, like many others in the 90 story skyscraper, at 157 West 57th Street, has unparalleled views of Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers and an assortment of city landmarks, along with top of the line finishes that include a Smallbone of Devizes kitchen and custom interior flourishes by Thomas Juul Hansen. Residents also have access to the many amenities provided by the new Park Hyatt New York at the base of the tower.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
Businesses along King Street in Charleston, S.C., were damaged during a Black Lives Matter protest, but the local visitors' bureau told members to post only "uplifting and positive content." The week that George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, the Charleston, S.C., Convention Visitors Bureau introduced a campaign to assure tourists that despite the coronavirus pandemic, Charleston a city that has topped must go travel lists for years was ready to welcome them back. The program asked hotels and restaurants to take a "White Glove Pledge," which would assure guests a high level of commitment to hygiene. The campaign's logo was a white gloved hand holding a tray. The unwitting reference to the servitude of plantation life came at a moment when Black Lives Matter protests were beginning to fill streets in cities across the nation. "The white glove pledge could not have been any less well conceived," said Steve Palmer, the managing partner of the Charleston based Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which employs about 1,000 people in 20 restaurants and bars in four Southern states and Washington, D.C. Days later, the Black Lives Matter protests reached Charleston and turned violent. Nearly 125 buildings in the core of the city were damaged. The next morning, Helen Hill, the chief executive of the Charleston Area Convention Visitors Bureau, who has been marketing the city for more than 30 years, sent an email to the bureau's members, praising people who emerged the next morning to clean up. "They are sweeping and not weeping!" she wrote, without acknowledging the pain that had spurred the protests. "Please remind your staff who handles social media to post only uplifting and positive content. Remember our audience is bigger than local!" To many who make their living from the 7.4 million people who visit the Charleston region every year, Ms. Hill's response seemed tone deaf at best and, at worst, laid bare what has for years been simmering just below the surface of the city's genteel antebellum image: the delicate balance between the narrative promoted by the powerful visitors' bureau and the city's history as the capital of the North American slave trade. That balance could no longer hold. The tension between the two story lines is not new. In recent years, the mostly white leadership of the city and the tourism industry have worked to highlight the region's African American heritage. The visitors' bureau added a deeply reported section on Charleston's African American history to its website. And after more than two decades of planning and fund raising, the city in 2022 will open the International African American Museum on Gadsden's Wharf, which had been the first stop for as many as 100,000 Africans an estimated 40 percent of the people captured and brought to America to be sold into slavery. But as cultural institutions across the country take a more cleareyed look at interpreting history in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the push to change how Charleston tells its own story has taken on a new urgency. The bureau, with an annual budget of 18 million and the ability to help direct 8 billion in tourism dollars to specific businesses, is being asked to do more to tell a more realistic tale and to support Black owned business, many of which have been priced out of the city as its tourism industry has grown. "There has been a deliberate effort by very powerful industries and organizations to sanitize and whitewash Charleston and show a 'safe' and white and palatable Charleston," said Mika Gadsden, founder of the Charleston Activist Network, a media platform that focuses on Black and Gullah experiences. She has become one of the most vocal critics of the C.V.B., as the visitors' bureau is known, saying that its attempt to soften the city's history of enslavement with a big serving of genteel Southern charm has worn thin, particularly during a painful moment for many of the people who keep the tourism industry moving in Charleston. The agency worked to promote and educate tourists about the city's history of slavery, so much so that it has been criticized for capitalizing on Black people's pain, she said. Finding the right balance is challenging, with criticism coming from people who think it isn't focusing enough on the Black experience and those who think it's overcorrecting, she said. Still, she said, the C.V.B. can do more. "We've learned through this period of time that we have to do a better job of getting the story out to the people that are in Charleston about what we are doing," Ms. Hill said. "We realize we've got to let our locals know what we're doing, especially, especially around this issue." The C.V.B. has previously been called out for having few Black members, a criticism Ms. Hill has responded to by saying that the agency has 31 Black owned businesses as members out of more than 800. The agency's budget comes from three sources: Charleston's share of a state accommodations tax, a state grant that matches industry contributions and contributions from businesses, which pay 700 a year to be part of the C.V.B. For the past two years, Black business owners have been allowed to join for 300. Kwadjo Campbell, president of JC Associates, a firm that works on development for African Americans in Charleston, and K.J. Kearney, the founder of Black Food Fridays, an online campaign that encourages people to patronize Black owned restaurants on Fridays, said that the C.V.B. hasn't done enough to connect with Black Charlestonians. "We haven't seen a change in dollars going to Black businesses," Mr. Campbell said. "We haven't seen dollars come through from the C.V.B. The way this will work is if there are real partnerships and conversations. Helen's got to listen to Black people in this sector. She has got to share the wealth." Being part of the C.V.B. helps businesses connect more with large tour groups. Members are promoted on the Explore Charleston website and in social media channels. When tourists inquire about things to do in the city or where to eat, they are directed to C.V.B. members. The C.V.B. spends a third of its budget advertising in magazines like Conde Nast Traveler, which has named Charleston as its No. 1 destination in the United States for nine consecutive years. "The C.V.B. has such power and influence and not just locally," said Allyson Sutton, a co owner of Sightsee Shop, a store and coffee bar in the Elliotborough neighborhood in downtown Charleston. She and her husband, who are both white, recently resigned from the C.V.B. in protest. "For this organization to have a 20 million operating budget, a huge social media following and a website they invest a lot of money into, and for the bulk of that content to whitewash history, not promote the incredible Black culture we have now and to not at the very least use its platforms to say 'Black Lives Matter' is incredibly disappointing," Ms. Sutton said. "I'm able to make connections between the history of these women and treatment of Black women and how that treatment hasn't changed, especially in the wake of Breonna Taylor and the treatment of Black trans women that we hear about," she said. She said both the C.V.B. and other historic sites could take a cue from McLeod and tell the stories of the enslaved more accurately, making Black experiences more central. "The narrative many plantations have been telling, that the city has been telling, is a simple one," she said. "It's not easy transitioning from this one narrative that seems to have worked in bringing people here to a difficult one, but it has to happen." McLeod stopped allowing people to book weddings on its property in 2019 (weddings that were already scheduled for future dates will still take place). In December, the Knot Worldwide, one of the biggest online wedding planning platforms in the United States, and Pinterest, the image sharing site, said they would no longer promote images that romanticize plantations. Ms. Hill said that many plantations tell the story of slavery well and shouldn't be excluded from the C.V.B. site. "There's this whole thought that somehow you shouldn't have celebratory things happening at this beautiful outdoor venue," she said. "We just feel really strongly that we want to support our attractions because they have worked so hard, and if they decide that they want to use their special facility for weddings, we're going to support them." Stephanie Burt, a travel writer and host of The Southern Fork podcast, has been one of a growing chorus of people lobbying for changes at the visitors' bureau. In its drive to market Charleston, the agency has smothered the city's history, she said. Indeed, the influx of expensive hotels and tourist shops has driven up the cost of living in Charleston and sent the working class many of whom are African American to less expensive parts of the region. Since the 1980s, the racial makeup of Charleston has flipped. Once, two out of every three residents was Black. Now, the city is about 72 percent white. "Charleston's viability has come at the expense of Black folks," Ms. Gadsden said. In recent years, the C.V.B. has been unpopular among locals who believe that it is pushing for tourism at any cost. There have been yearslong battles over allowing large cruise ships to dock in the city, complaints about constant bachelorette and bachelor parties and pushback against the opening of new hotels in residential areas. Restaurants have played a major part in making Charleston a destination city. The modern Southern food movement, which blew up the cornpone national perception of Southern eating popularized by cooks like Paula Deen, and made stars out of the region's restaurants, was built in large part in the kitchens of Charleston restaurants like Husk, FIG and Rodney Scott's BBQ. While some in the city's food community worked to better tell the narrative of the region's Gullah Geechee food traditions and support Black chefs, many restaurant owners paid their dues to the visitors' bureau and didn't question how the city was being promoted, Mr. Palmer, of Indigo Road Hospitality, and others in the industry said. Festival organizers took criticism from people who thought politics were outside the event's purview, and others who called the move performative and argued that the organizers should do a better job in the way they treat people of color they ask to participate, both as volunteers at the festival and as guest cooks and winemakers. Gillian Zettler, the executive director of the festival, said the nonprofit organization had since last fall been examining issues of diversity and inclusion, including diving deeper into the history of venues it selects for the festival, creating a more diverse board and developing deeper relationships with South Carolina's Black hospitality professionals who have been historically underrepresented at the event. The organization also has pledged to make the festival more accessible to African Americans and other people of color. B.J. Dennis, a chef whose ancestors come from a Gullah Geechee community in Wando, outside Charleston, has worked with the festival to curate events that more accurately explore the Gullah Geechee food traditions developed by West Africans who were enslaved along the southeastern Atlantic coast. He has long been an advocate for telling a more complete story about Charleston, and says he has watched with a heavy heart as many Black owned restaurants have been priced out of the core of the city. But he remains skeptical that Charleston is really ready to tell its truth. "I think people are more aware and have been put on notice with the movement," he said, "but as far as change, people got to want to change." "To get the plantation narrative to move from the 'Gone With the Wind' narrative to telling the true story of plantations, which is really the story of concentration camps, is not going to come easy," he said. "But for every two of your blue blooded faithful customers you may lose by telling the truth, you may gain 10 to 20 followers who will want to hear the real story." Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
LONDON On Saturday night, news broke in Britain that Caroline Flack the former host of "Love Island," a wildly popular reality TV show had killed herself. Within hours, British social media was flooded with tributes to the star, who died while awaiting trial for assaulting her boyfriend. But those tributes were soon overtaken by something else: demands for a new law in Flack's name, to stop Britain's tabloid newspapers from publishing stories that relentlessly dive into celebrities' private lives. Flack had been a tabloid fixture, having had romances with Prince Harry and Harry Styles, among others, and social media users accused the newspapers of harming her mental health. "The British media is the cesspit of our society," wrote one Twitter user, adding the carolineslaw hashtag. On Monday, an online petition calling for a law that would prevent newspapers from "sharing private information that is detrimental to a celebrity, their mental health and those around them," quickly gained over 400,000 signatures. Politicians also lined up to criticize the tabloids, as well as hate fueled social media commenters. The press "have to take responsibility as well," Keir Starmer, the front runner to become the next leader of Britain's Labour Party, told reporters, accusing newspapers of amplifying negative social media chatter. None of that debate was noticeable to readers of Britain's tabloids on Monday. The Sun the newspaper subject to the most criticism, with some social media users calling for a boycott devoted seven pages to Flack's death. Its front page led with criticism of the British Crown Prosecution Service for "its pursuit of fragile Caroline Flack" in forcing her to trial. The authorities had decided to pursue the assault charge despite knowing Flack had self harmed during the alleged assault, The Sun said. Last year, The Sun featured blanket coverage of the assault allegations against Flack, even calling her "Caroline Whack." The rancor around Flack's suicide is only the latest time British tabloids have come under scrutiny. It comes just weeks after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have complained repeatedly about press intrusion into their lives, again threatened legal action against several British tabloids over invasive photos. But media commentators said they did not think calls for carolineslaw would be any more successful than past campaigns to strengthen privacy laws in Britain. Nor did they expect the campaign to dent the British public's interest in such stories, which tend to be popular on social media. "This is one of those great hypocrisies of the British public, that they indulge in reading, and often writing, about these celebrities and then when things go wrong, they turn on the media and say it's all the media's fault," Roy Greenslade, a media columnist for The Guardian, said in a telephone interview. Greenslade once worked at The Sun and was also editor of The Daily Mirror, another tabloid. Greenslade said he lived half of every year in Ireland and there seemed "less of an appetite" there to read about celebrity gossip. That was also the case in other European countries like France and Norway, he said. Gossip rags do exist elsewhere, he said he cited the National Enquirer as one example but they are not seen as also being serious newspapers like Britain's tabloids. Adrian Bingham, a historian who has written a history of Britain's tabloid press, said in a telephone interview that British newspapers' focus on people's private lives first boomed in the 1930s as the publications competed for scoops. "People would have done anything then," he said. "If they could have hacked phones in the 1930s, they would have." He didn't expect anything to come from the calls for a carolineslaw. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, while pursued by journalists "didn't lead to anything meaningful" around press regulation, he said. Flack was not as big a celebrity and the newspapers were already using their platforms to divert blame onto other people, such as the Crown Prosecution Service or the producers of "Love Island," he added. On Monday, the Daily Mail's front page said Flack feared a "a show trial." Inside, an opinion piece said Flack had been "tried and convicted by the merciless court of social media." The Daily Star, another tabloid, focused much of its coverage of Flack's death on a backlash against ITV, the TV company that broadcasts "Love Island," with fans asking if it gave her sufficient support after she left the show because of the assault case. "Did the tabloids kill her?" asked David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun and deputy editor of The New York Post, in an email. "I think the reality is that popular newspapers are now just one part of the toxic ecology the very famous have to cope with." Social media and the tabloids "feed off each other in a way which creates a living hell for celebrities in the wrong place at the wrong time" he added. "It seems to be getting worse and there are no easy answers." Flack had a typical rise to fame in Britain, first making her name on children's television before being involved in popular reality TV shows such as "I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here." In 2014, she won "Strictly Come Dancing" one of the most popular shows on British TV and the following she year became the host of "Love Island," a show in which contestants live in couples in a luxury villa. That show has stirred debate in Britain around the ethics of reality television shows, following the suicides of several former contestants. Its latest season didn't air episodes on Saturday and Sunday nights following Flack's death, although it was due to return on Monday night. Throughout her career, Flack was a tabloid fixture. On Monday, The Sun carried a two page article focusing on how her career highs "coincided with crushing personal lows." It then listed her failed romances, bouts of depression and use of anti depressants. "In a pattern often repeated, her career took off while her personal life was in tatters," it said, after discussing her first public romance. Last October, around World Mental Health Day, Flack posted on Instagram about her recent struggles. "The last few weeks I've been in a really weird place," she wrote. "I guess it's anxiety and pressure of life and when I actually reached out to someone they said I was draining," she added. "Be nice to people," she added. "You never know what's going on. Ever." Greenslade said he had read about the message and thought it was "a lovely plea" that he supported. But, he added, "if you're a celebrity and you have depended on your media profile to make your fame and therefore create your income, it's very difficult then to turn off the tap."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
After the success of Ocean Vuong's book of poetry, "Night Sky With Exit Wounds," people asked him when he would write his next collection. "For what?" he would say. "There's nothing left." Before he sold his first novel, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," for a hefty advance, Ocean Vuong was writing poetry. Which means he was broke. Which means he was making 8 an hour cleaning toilets at a Panera Bread. If you worked your way to regional manager, you could make 60 grand a year. "That would be considered fancy where I'm from," Vuong says. It's not clear what he means by where he's from. There's Ho Chi Minh City, where he was born and lived until he immigrated to the United States at age 2. Or Hartford, Conn., where he was raised by his mother and grandmother. Or he could simply mean people who didn't grow up with much. At Brooklyn College, where he studied American literature after dropping out of business school, he bopped around cheap sublets and couches of newfound friends in the poetry community. One of his teachers was the poet and author Ben Lerner. "It was unclear if Ocean was aware of the immensity of his talent," Lerner says, "but everybody around him was." As an undergraduate, Vuong worked on what would eventually be collected in "Night Sky With Exit Wounds," published through an open submission competition by Copper Canyon Press. The poems are intensely personal, wrestling with Vuong's understanding of his own race, queerness and memory. For that vulnerability, he won the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whiting Award. After the accolades, people asked Vuong when he would write his next collection. "For what?" Vuong would say. "There's nothing left." The novel that would become "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" started as an experiment, one Vuong never set out to finish. (It shares a title with one of the poems in "Night Sky.") When he shopped the new book around to publishers, it surprised some editors, including one who admitted to never thinking about Vietnamese nail salon workers also dining at their workplaces. In "On Earth," there's a scene where Vuong's point of view stand in, Little Dog, is served jasmine tea over rice. "True peasant food," his grandmother says. "This is our fast food, Little Dog. This is our McDonald's!" In the novel, being poor is portrayed not by its tragedy but by its rare moments of delight. Whereas poverty is often used in fiction as a plot mechanism, Vuong writes it as a texture, a fact of life. 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. Vuong, 30, lives in a handsome single story home in Northampton, Mass., where he teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. When I visit, I am first greeted by his dog, a Shih Tzu poodle mix named Tofu. We sit at a reclaimed wood dining table, where Vuong has laid out "Beloved," "Gilead," "Moby Dick" and other books that have inspired him. On the wall, there is an LP of Frank Ocean's "Blonde." Vuong likes the quiet, domestic rhythms of living in Northampton. Before, he was living on Long Island, commuting two and a half hours each way to teach poetry at New York University. He lived among roommates with kids. It was a noisy home, so Vuong would write in his bedroom closet. (As a queer author, he says, "The irony is not lost on me.") It was a refuge: a laptop, lamp and Vuong with his headphones on, likely listening to Frank Ocean. Throughout the many revisions, the conceit was always clear: the novel would be a letter addressed to Vuong's mother, who is illiterate. It uses a narrative structure called kishotenketsu, commonly seen in the work of filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, a form that refuses to deploy conflict as a means of progressing the story. "It insists that a narrative structure can survive and thrive on proximity alone," Vuong says. "Proximity builds tension." There are no villains, no victims, and no clear arcs. His goal: to create "a new gaze, a new attribution to American identity," he says. I ask if he's writing for Vietnamese Americans, and Vuong clarifies it's for young Vietnamese Americans, first and foremost. But what about older Vietnamese, like my parents and grandparents, the ones who have suppressed their firsthand experiences of the war? Vuong says it's hard for him to imagine, since his family can't read he could barely read until the age of 16. But he understands. For many Vietnamese refugees, the war is too painful. Memory is a theme that shows up consistently in the works of recently decorated Vietnamese American authors: Diana Khoi Nguyen's poetry book "Ghost Of" (a National Book Award finalist), Thi Bui's graphic novel "The Best We Could Do" (an American Book Award winner) and Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer winning novel "The Sympathizer," which challenged Americans' reflection of the Vietnam War. "We have an obligation to remember, especially tragic, complicated pasts," Viet Thanh Nguyen says. "And yet at the same time, we need to move on. We need to forget in order to move on. How do you balance these two things?" 'I don't have to care about my book anymore' Vuong says his mother doesn't care about the book. I find that hard to believe. "She's very proud," he says. "She goes to my readings, and because she doesn't understand, she'll face the audience, because she wants to see the audience react. She wants to see older white folks." There is always the white reader. "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" may not have been written toward that sensibility, but Vuong knows most of his readers will arrive from there. "In order to read the book, people have to eavesdrop as a secondary audience upon a conversation between two Vietnamese people," he says. Vuong lives across from a cemetery, where he goes in the morning to perform a Zen Buddhist practice called "death meditation" that he's been practicing since he was 15. Among tombstones, he summons the saddest, grimmest thoughts he can deaths of family members, of friends, of Tofu as a means of cleansing his thoughts. Recently, he's not had to extend his imagination much. Five weeks before our meeting in Northampton, Vuong's mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. It had spread to the spine. The doctor explained it to Vuong, who sobbed in the ER. His mother asked him what was going on. She couldn't understand the doctor's English, so Vuong told her in Vietnamese. "The only silver lining in her diagnosis is that I don't have to care about my book anymore," Vuong says. "My mother has cancer. She's going to die. The novel, publicity, it's all just so small." He would be content if his entire career is just one collection of poetry and one novel, and he is glad his mother got to see him succeed this much already. After the news of her health, Vuong considered canceling his book tour. He still might. But he is excited to perform his work. To him, the book is fossilized, but aloud, it can have another life. Vuong says: "To read from the book is a second chance." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter ( nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
When it came to dating, Tanya Pushkine and Paul Luykx each had a strategy. For Ms. Pushkine, a philanthropy consultant, it was dating sites. She joined 11 of them. "Whatever I found out about, I'd put myself on," she said. "I didn't take them all seriously." She was highly selective, though, about who she would meet. "I had been stalked before and came across some scammers," she said. "I had a lot of disappointments but wouldn't give up. I knew I wanted to get married again. It became a calling to find someone." Mr. Luykx, a real estate investor, joined just four dating sites, but his goal was to make many connections. So, he created a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. "I didn't want to make mistakes and say to someone, 'How's your brother?' and have them say, 'What brother?'" he said. His one year goal: to "meet five new women every week, which meant I needed to email 20 and speak to 10 and dwindle it down to five." Both had similar backgrounds. They had been married before Ms. Pushkine once, and Mr. Luykx twice and each have two children from previous relationships. Ms. Pushkine was married for 14 years to a restaurant manager whom she had known for six months before separating in 2003. Her divorce was finalized five years later. Mr. Luykx was 20 when he married his high school sweetheart. "We were good friends, but we hadn't grown up yet," he said. The marriage lasted 19 years. "I was married to my second wife for 14 years," he added. They divorced in 2016. Like Ms. Pushkine, Mr. Luykx craved being in a relationship. "At 60, I never expected to be in this situation again," he said. Along with a dating spreadsheet, Mr. Luykx had developed a routine. The line he used with Ms. Pushkine was standard. He met first dates at Center Bar in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan for drinks, which were sipped at the same reserved table. On his way to the bar, he would stop and buy a small box of gummy candy from Sugarfina on the first floor of the building. "This might sound like a high volume set up, but it wasn't that way at all," Mr. Luykx said. "I was so impressed with the women I met. I felt privileged to meet them." On July 17, however, Mr. Luykx was running 20 minutes late to meet Ms. Pushkine, and so he arrived with apologies rather than candy. "He walked in wearing bright reddish pants and Converse sneakers, which I loved," said Ms. Pushkine, who described herself as Bohemian and eclectic with an edge. "We share a cultural bond. He's from Amsterdam, I'm from Brussels. A few minutes after meeting him I knew he was different. Usually I have one of my kids do a rescue call, but I didn't need it. I remember thinking, 'I don't want to be anywhere else but here.'" Mr. Luykx felt the same way. "We are both European; we are both French speakers. We had so many things in common," he said. "She was beautiful. She showed up in silky pajama bottoms. We couldn't stop talking." Four hours passed quickly. Then they took a walk in Central Park. More talking, and some kissing, followed. Before they knew it, three hours had slid by. Neither wanted to leave, but Mr. Luykx got into an Uber and went to his home in Jersey City. Ms. Pushkine, who lived nearby, walked to hers. "In the car I was thinking, 'Oh my God, this is the girl. I'm done. Resistance is futile,'" he said. Texts, calls, emojis of blowing kisses, and an additional date followed. Then it was a weekend stay at his apartment where the spreadsheet was revealed. "I thought it was a joke until I asked to see it," said Ms. Pushkine, who saw she was rated No. 1 out of 80 plus women. Under the notes section, he wrote, 'She floats my boat more than anyone.' Then I was really curious about these other women." "I wanted the apartment to be ours," she said. "In the past, boyfriends moved in with me and the apartment was my personality. I didn't want it to be that way. I wanted it to be ours. We sold all of our furniture and started from scratch." In May 2018, Mr. Luykx took Ms. Pushkine out to dinner, but on route, steered her to a park bench near the Museum of Natural History, got down on one knee and pulled out a box. "Inside was this big, gaudy diamond ring that looked real, but I knew was fake," she said. "He has a wonderful sense of humor. He's very efficient, but he's jewelry incompetent." "Tonight is about two people working hard and developing a relationship that is so strong because they're so committed," Ms. Rojas said. "I've seen my mom go through several men over 16 years and knew that Paul was her match. They both have a goofiness where they can be themselves. I've watched them form a deep, kind, loving relationship." Mr. Rojas, who flew in for the wedding from Los Angeles, echoed those sentiments: "I have tremendous happiness for her. I was front row for the divorce and saw the hardships of dating. I've learned to cherish the people who bring her happiness and Paul does that. He has a great spirit and personality." During their vows, Mr. Luykx promised to always ask her: What will make you happy? Ms. Pushkine promised to be the most dependable person in his life and to love him no matter what. The couple exchanged rings under the huppah, then stepped on a glass to end the ceremony and signify their unity. Dinner was served family style at elongated, wooden tables; guests sat in metal chairs. Industrial wine vats were the backdrop, while branches of pink cherry blossoms added a soft, special feel. Wine poured endlessly. At 10 p.m., guests moved into the bar area for the newlyweds' first dance. Mr. Luykx was surprised when his daughter, Sandra Mae Luykx, a jazz singer and musician living in London, serenaded the pair with "At Last," made popular by Etta James, a favorite of the bride. (His son was unable to attend.) The song's sentiments were not lost on anyone. It was very clear this couple had found each other, and love, at last. "She's the most precious thing that has ever happened to me in my life," said the groom. "The way we love each other is deeper than anything I've experienced." The bride spoke similarly. "I wanted someone faithful, loyal, honest, and kind all things that Paul is," Ms. Pushkine said. "He has the most generous heart of anyone. It took me a really long time to find my other half. But I did."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
The Swiss aren't known for dancing all night to ABBA, but in the town of Vevey, the 52 Places Traveler found, every 20 years or so they let loose. Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before Vevey, he was one of only four tourists in the Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas. I arrived in Vevey, a small town that hugs the northeastern coast of Lake Geneva, so jet lagged that I thought I might be hallucinating. I saw a human sized starling posted up on a bar stool drinking a beer. A cow wearing a crown of flowers that would rival Carmen Miranda's most flamboyant headpiece lumbered in my direction. Screaming at the top of their lungs, a gaggle of children dressed in the overalls of 18th century farmhands, ran in circles. Vevey's Fete des Vignerons, or winegrowers' festival, is a big deal, though most of the people under 30 that I spoke to in the days leading up to my arrival including those from the German speaking region on the other side of Switzerland had no idea it existed. That could be because the last time it happened, we were 10 years old. This year, organizers built a 20,000 capacity stadium, enough to fit the entire population of Vevey, smack dab in the center of town for the sole purpose of the daily show that is the festival's main draw. The bottom of the arena is covered with the largest LED floor ever made, and the "stage" extends up and around the audience so that during the show, no matter where you're looking, you're seeing something. After August 11, the last day of the festival, the city will begin the three month process of tearing down the stadium. Though I speak no French, I was able to glean the basic narrative of the three hour proceedings. A grandfather sits with his daughter, explaining the life cycle of vineyards and what it takes to make wine. Along the way and this is where I got a little lost there are dance routines put on by playing cards and bugs; people dressed as starlings, foxes and rabbits; Swiss mercenaries in their medieval best; and one number that involved giant fish and an airborne fairy swooping across the arena. The 5,500 performers are mostly volunteers from the region and are joined by brass bands, an orchestra and a 950 strong choir. It's like the Olympic ceremony of wine except it happens daily for almost a month. And it's no coincidence that it brings that other spectacle to mind: The show's director, Daniele Finzi Pasca, was responsible for the closing ceremonies at the Sochi and Turin Olympic Games. But the mind warping spectacle is really only a part of the festival, as I discovered over the course of four days (my planned schedule was truncated by a delayed departure from the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas). Most of the fun and the same heavy dose of psychedelic weirdness happens outside the confines of the arena. Things tended to get going around noon the thousands of revelers united in slow mornings after late nights and by midafternoon parades filled the street running along the lakeshore, blocked to traffic, with marching, halberd carrying soldiers in full plate armor looking like they had just fallen out of some wormhole from the 14th century. Vendors sold food from across the world and I dug into more than one decadent baguette, hollowed out and filled with molten hot fondue. Every day of the festival, a different canton of Switzerland is represented a crowd of wizard looking men in cork top hats from Geneva one day, steampunk marching bands from Fribourg the next. One evening, I followed a fife and drum group from Basel as they barhopped across town, breaking into a full on musical march between each stop. None There's plenty to do in Vevey even when the party of a generation isn't happening. For starters, this area was home to Charlie Chaplin from 1953 until his death in 1977. Reminders are everywhere: on postcards and T shirts, and in the form of a statue right on the shore of the lake. To get fully immersed though, you'll have to head to Chaplin's World, a multimedia museum on the site of his former manor, a 30 minute walk from the center of town. None There are plenty of places to stay, from hostels to Airbnbs (my choice) to luxury hotels. If the city's two five star hotels are out of your budget like everything in Switzerland, they go for a pretty penny they are at least worth a visit. Start with the stunning Grand Hotel du Lac, which manages to channel throwback grandeur without the tackiness that sometimes comes with it. The summer Buddha Bar pop up on the hotel's front patio, overlooking Lake Geneva, is a good spot for a midafternoon break from the wine to have a cocktail, instead. None You'll have to wait quite a bit if you're planning to get to the next Fete it won't be for at least 20 years, the exact date chosen within the next five. But it's not too late to get to this one. The festival runs until August 11. Even if you can't score tickets to the show, the free events spread across the old town and the general sense of celebration are draw enough. Everything is transformed for the duration of the festival. You can grab a beer to go at the local bike shop, or mill around what is usually a furniture store sipping on white wine. Elsewhere, caveaux, underground wine cellars, have been converted into night clubs where after dark, the performers, still in costume, pump their fists to cheesy electro music. It wasn't long before I realized that the Fete is about far more than wine. In fact, the wine itself is an afterthought: most bars only served two white varietals, either from Lavaux, the Unesco inscribed region that includes Vevey, or the adjacent La Cote. It's a winegrowers' festival not a wine festival, with vintners recognized for how they maintain their vines, fight diseases and pests, keep up with pruning. And it isn't even about tradition either, though the throwback costumes seen on every corner are pivotal to the celebrations. As Blaise Duboux, a member of the Brotherhood of Winemakers, and a 17th generation winemaker, put it, it's as much about keeping with the times as keeping the old ways alive. "The Fete des Vignerons is on the Unesco list of intangible cultural heritage," Mr. Duboux said. "To be intangible it can't be stuck in history it has to be alive, constantly changing. You can't just think about the old ways. You have to be thinking of what maintaining the vines will look like in 20 years." And the Fete is changing with the times despite some resistance from some of the more traditionally minded members of the Brotherhood. This year, in the award ceremony, a woman won a gold medal and an organic wine producer won a silver medal, both firsts in the Brotherhood's history. The Swiss are known for many things, but letting loose and singing along to ABBA until dawn is not one of them. I experienced plenty of stereotypical Swiss efficiency during my brief stint there: My trains in and out of Geneva ran on time to the second. I had an incredibly frustrating conversation with a shopkeeper who wouldn't sell me stamps for some postcards I had bought the day before because it was "against the rules" he had set for one stamp per card at the time of purchase (I didn't get it either).
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Greg Glassman, the embattled owner of CrossFit who was the subject of a recent article in The New York Times detailing routine sexual harassment of female employees, intends to sell the fitness brand to Eric Roza, according to a message sent to affiliate gym owners by the company's chief executive, Dave Castro. Mr. Roza is the former senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Data Cloud and is an owner of a CrossFit gym in Boulder, Colo. He was previously the chief executive of Datalogix, a data company that was acquired by Oracle in 2015, and is also chairman of TrueCoach, a software company for personal trainers. Mr. Roza began training in the CrossFit method in 2008, after he was sidelined by a running injury and discovered he has high cholesterol. Mr. Castro introduced Mr. Roza in his message to gym owners as "one of us" and someone who "also knows how to build great, inclusive workplaces." Mr. Castro had taken over as chief executive earlier this month after Mr. Glassman was excoriated for tweets and comments made in early June on a Zoom call about the death of George Floyd. Mr. Glassman stepped down at that point, but remained the sole owner. Several parties had been interested in purchasing the fitness company in turmoil, including Mr. Glassman's ex wife, Lauren Jenai, who founded CrossFit with him. Ms. Jenai received 20 million from Mr. Glassman as part of their divorce settlement, in exchange for her ownership of the company. "I was approached by an investment company who wants to back me in buying CrossFit," Ms. Jenai said in an interview last week. "In people's minds, including mine, it would be a very elegant solution. I don't want to see this thing go down the drain." But CrossFit representatives had accused Ms. Jenai and those who spoke about the company's toxic culture of attempting to lessen the value of the brand. "There is a collective effort to devalue the company and buy it for scraps," a spokeswoman said this weekend. The spokeswoman said that she believed Ms. Jenai was working in cahoots with Andy Stumpf, a former Navy Seal with five Bronze Star medals and a Purple Heart who previously oversaw CrossFit, Inc.'s partnership with Reebok. He also served as Mr. Glassman's pilot. Both Ms. Jenai and Mr. Stumpf denied this. "I want nothing to do with CrossFit for the rest of my life," Mr. Stumpf said, "and no amount of money and no position offered to me would change my position." Public scrutiny of the company's culture intensified on June 12, when Mr. Stumpf, now a speaker on leadership, devoted an entire episode of his podcast, "Cleared Hot," to what he saw while working for CrossFit, Inc. from 2010 to 2014. "I cannot count the number of times that derogatory and specifically sexual comments were made about female staff members directly in my presence," Mr. Stumpf said, urging Mr. Glassman and the company to release former employees from nondisclosure agreements Now headquartered in Scotts Valley, Calif., CrossFit was created in 2000. It is privately held and currently employs 72 people full time, down from 137 two years ago. The company made its name with a rigorous exercise method, now taught in thousands of mom and pop gyms around the country that have licensed the CrossFit trademark. For some of its devotees, CrossFit is a near religion. "There is so much positive in the CrossFit community," said one female former employee who, like many others interviewed, was granted anonymity because she fears legal retribution from Mr. Glassman. "CrossFit is not just about fitness. It becomes your friends, your family, your community. People create their entire lives around it." But interviews with eight former employees, and four CrossFit athletes with strong ties to the company, revealed a management culture rife with overt and vulgar talk about women: their bodies, how much male employees, primarily Mr. Glassman, would like to have sex with them and how lucky the women should feel to have his rabid interest. According to the dozen interviewed, Mr. Glassman, 63, has verbally demeaned women, pulled at their clothes to try to peek at their cleavage and aimed his phone's camera to snap photos of their breasts while they traveled with him for work (sometimes pressuring them to consider sharing hotel rooms or borrowed houses with him). Through a company spokesman and spokeswoman, Mr. Glassman denied such conduct. The spokeswoman said Mr. Glassman has treated her only respectfully. The former employees say reporting the harassment was not an option. Mr. Glassman was the sole owner of CrossFit, Inc. Perhaps the most powerful female executive there, Kathy Glassman, the affiliate director, is Mr. Glassman's sister, and they were reluctant to complain to her. There was no human resources manager until 2013. That manager left the company in January and has not been replaced. "There was a constant narrative about women," the former corporate employee said. She described Mr. Glassman using vulgarities frequently to refer to women, enumerating which he wanted to have sex with and which he wouldn't. He "was always descriptive in nature about it," she said, "bragging about sexual escapades." This attitude was so entwined with operations that the Wi Fi password at a company office in San Diego used to be a sexist obscenity, according to three former employees.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
Sony, the company that owns and operates PlayStation, announced late Thursday that it would offer refunds to people who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 and remove what had been one of the year's most highly anticipated video games from its online store, after a week of negative reviews and criticism from users over its poor performance. In a statement on PlayStation's website, Sony said it would offer full refunds to users who purchased the game through the PlayStation Store. Cyberpunk 2077, the company said, would also be removed from the store until further notice. Microsoft, the company that owns Xbox, announced on Friday that it would also be offering refunds to people who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 through the Microsoft store. The game retails for 59.99, and its developer, CD Projekt Red, had touted receiving eight million pre orders of the game. CD Projekt Red said Friday that Sony's decision to "temporarily suspend" sales of the game came after a discussion with the company, which is based in Warsaw.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
WASHINGTON At a private event last week, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, stated a reality that economists treat as conventional wisdom but that the Trump administration routinely ignores: The United States needs immigration to fuel future economic growth. "We are desperate, desperate for more people," Mr. Mulvaney told a crowd in England. "We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth." He said the country needed "more immigrants" but wanted them in a "legal" fashion. Mr. Mulvaney's sentiments are at odds with President Trump's crackdown on undocumented entries and family based immigration into the United States. But they reflect the viewpoint of economists and many in the business community, who say that immigrants are needed to power the U.S. labor market as growth in the native born work force rapidly slows as the population ages and people have fewer children. Immigrants have already been a crucial source of new workers, accounting for about half of the labor force's expansion over the past two decades. But the foreign born population has been expanding only tepidly during Mr. Trump's tenure. That slowdown could have long lasting and profound repercussions, economists warn. "Immigration, while a sensitive topic, has been a key part of work force growth in the United States," Robert S. Kaplan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in an interview. Immigrants "have been additive to the U.S. economy" and "they've helped us to grow faster." Gross domestic product growth comes from two basic ingredients: population and productivity gains. To produce more goods and services, businesses need either more workers or better efficiency. Productivity improvement has been weak in America over the past decade. While some economists hope that will change as companies embrace nascent technologies in robotics and machine learning, others believe that most economy altering innovations may be behind us think cars, washing machines and refrigerators. Future gains could be consistently mediocre. If that's the case, the United States' economic fate will hinge on population growth. Work force expansion will almost certainly not come naturally. Fertility has dropped since the baby boom of the late 1940s to mid 1960s, and has plunged recently. The expected number of births per woman in America has dropped to just 1.73, based on data from the National Vital Statistics System. That is nowhere near the rate the population would need to replace itself a little more than two births per woman. Proponents of restraining immigration, particularly among low skill workers, often argue that newcomers can supplant American workers or depress their wages, even if they help the economy as a whole. Companies have to compete less to hire when there are more workers around. But the evidence supporting that argument is limited. In one study, the Harvard economist George Borjas examined how a group of Cubans who went to Miami in 1980 affected the local labor market. He found that native born workers who had dropped out of high school took a wage hit when the newcomers arrived. But that research has been the subject of a fierce debate over data choices several different economists have argued that with a different design, the pay effects disappear. Other research, by Giovanni Peri at the University of California, Davis, suggests that lower skill immigrants complement their American counterparts, actually lifting wages. Immigrants are more entrepreneurial, other studies have found, and at higher education levels, they contribute a big share of the United States' science, technology and math work force. Whatever competition immigrants do pose is probably even more limited now, when the unemployment rate is at its lowest in half a century and businesses have about 1.1 job openings for every available worker. "It's very hard to think that in this situation you would displace anyone," Mr. Peri said. "A little bit more immigration would alleviate and help this problem, allowing the economy to grow a little faster and generating more consumption." "As an industry, they are not able to produce at the levels they would like, and at the demand that's being requested," said Guy Ciarrocchi, the head of the Chester County Chamber of Business and Industry. The local unemployment rate comes in under 3 percent, so other opportunities are plentiful. "You can make a very nice living in mushrooms, but it's hard work," said Lori Harrison, the communications director at the American Mushroom Institute, an industry group. Farms have avoided building new houses to expand amid labor shortages, she said. "If you put the capital into it, but don't have anyone to harvest the mushrooms, then you're out." Mr. Ciarrocchi and his chamber colleagues regularly talk to their legislators about the shortage in the local work force, which extends to other industries. They see immigration as one part of the answer. "Build the wall, that's fine," he said. "But at the same time, we should be able to talk to whether it's mushroom farmers or engineers or doctors whatever the economic needs may be." Near term labor shortages like Chester County's offer a hint of problems that could arise if the work force expands more slowly amid muted immigration. As the population ages, more people will depend on Social Security, Medicare and other public programs while a shrinking share of the population punches the clock and pays the taxes needed to fund them. "The U.S. economy, I think, will undergo a transition in which growth will slow down, society will age, and the economic dynamism will slow," Mr. Peri said, adding that the nation's debt burden would increase. "That's the direction that the U.S. is going to be headed toward if fertility doesn't change and immigration is still constrained."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Economy
|
At one point in his career, the 25 year old Atlanta rapper Lil Baby earned cachet as a reluctant hip hop star he avoided the limelight even while churning out mountains of content, and was known to swing by the local Chick fil A unaccompanied. But since the release of his latest album, "My Turn," in March, Lil Baby has been unavoidable, holding strong streaming numbers week after week and releasing a candid protest anthem, "The Bigger Picture," this month. "My Turn," which opened at No. 1, returned to the top spot last week, helped in part by a lack of competition from new releases as the music industry went on a self imposed pause to focus on racism in the wake of George Floyd's death. This week, "My Turn" has held No. 1 again, notching its third week at the top only the third title to reach that milestone this year. "My Turn" had the equivalent of 72,000 sales in the United States last week, according to Nielsen Music, with 110 million streams, many of them coming through Apple Music. "The Bigger Picture" which has aching lines like "It's too many mothers who's grieving, they killing us for no reason, it been going on for too long to get even" was not included on "My Turn," but as Billboard noted, it surely drew attention to the album.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
A changing of the guard is underway at People magazine under its new ownership. Jess Cagle is stepping down after a five year run as editor in chief. Taking his place at the publication known for its mix of celebrity news, royal gossip and heartwarming or salacious stories about ordinary Americans will be Dan Wakeford, a 44 year old from Britain who has been deputy editor since 2015. Meredith Corporation, which acquired People's former parent company, Time Inc., more than a year ago, announced the promotion of Mr. Wakeford on Thursday, a day after Mr. Cagle informed his staff about his departure. "I've decided it's time to do some other things while I'm still young or at least alive," Mr. Cagle, 53, wrote in a staff memo on Wednesday. "It's also time for me to live in Los Angeles full time under the same roof as my husband and dog." In addition to his role at People, which is based in New York, Mr. Cagle has served as the editorial director of Meredith's entertainment group, a job that gave him oversight of Entertainment Weekly and People en Espanol. He will leave that post, too, when his contract is up on March 31.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
David Rockefeller, who died last week at 101, was a giant among American philanthropists. He continued the tradition of giving that ran from his grandfather, John D., the founder of Standard Oil; through his father, John Jr.; and his oldest brother, John III. In his lifetime, Mr. Rockefeller gave away an estimated 2 billion to organizations, from Harvard and Rockefeller Universities to a "Living Pyramid" made of wild grass and flowers in Queens. "No individual has contributed more to the commercial and civic life of New York City over a longer period of time than David Rockefeller," Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, said in a statement. But along with the immensity of his largess, Mr. Rockefeller used his charitable gifts to instill in his children and grandchildren a sense of the family's philosophy of giving. In doing so, he also transmitted family values including humility, responsibility and engagement to a group that now numbers 40, including spouses. "What I'm standing here in appreciation of, with my grandfather having just passed, is the gift of inheriting a philanthropic tradition while being empowered to make it my own," said Michael Quattrone, Mr. Rockefeller's grandson and chairman of the David Rockefeller Fund, one of four family philanthropic vehicles that Mr. Rockefeller was involved with. Few families, of course, are as wealthy as the Rockefellers. But their example offers lessons for families without famous last names, philanthropic resources and numerous plaques in their honor. One of the top lessons is a sense of gratitude. "Among the values David passed down to his children was his profound gratitude," said Lukas Haynes, executive director of the David Rockefeller Fund. "He expressed gratitude for what he inherited from his father and grandfather and his opportunity to carry it forward." In an interview, Mr. Quattrone spoke of the gratitude he had for his family's legacy. "I feel proud and grateful to have witnessed and to have been touched by my grandfather's extraordinary life," he said. "He never lost touch with the simplest joys of the moment tasting his food, connecting with the people he loved, and recognizing the common humanity in everyone," Mr. Growald wrote. "I am grateful to him for all of his living lessons." But the flip side of being grateful or, really, being expected to be grateful could be the feeling of being burdened. Family members are not required to participate in philanthropy in rigid ways, however. "You can rotate onto the board or you can skip a rotation if you're getting married or having a baby," Mr. Quattrone said. "You can get on a committee. You can represent the fund at another organization's event. There's a broad range of participation." The family bonded through traveling. Mr. Rockefeller's oldest son, David Rockefeller Jr., said that on trips to France his father would talk about the importance of preserving cultural icons like Versailles, which the family helped to restore. And in the Tetons in Wyoming, "We were riding on horseback and he told the story of his father, my grandfather, buying up the land and helping to create Grand Teton National Park," David Rockefeller Jr. said. "We learned by example." David Rockefeller Jr. has, in turn, done the same with his children. "My two daughters, who have traveled with me a lot, have taken in some of my interests, particularly in the environment when we've been on sailing expeditions," he said in an interview. "My passion for protecting the environment has gotten through to them." Mr. Quattrone said he learned from the philanthropy of his mother, Peggy Dulany, Mr. Rockefeller's fourth child. She started the Synergos Institute to help address poverty in the developing world. "She took to heart my grandfather's emphasis on broad relationships and bringing stakeholders to the table," he said. Four philanthropic vehicles are linked to Mr. Rockefeller through his lineage. The Rockefeller Foundation was endowed by John D. Rockefeller Sr. and run at one point by David Rockefeller's father, John Jr. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was set up in 1940 by the five sons of John Jr. The Rockefeller Family Fund was set up in 1967 to give the brothers' children known collectively as the cousins a chance to learn the art of philanthropy. Mr. Rockefeller started the David Rockefeller Fund in 1989 with the more modest goal of being a vehicle to give to local charities where the family had homes: in New York City, Westchester County and coastal Maine. Just as Mr. Rockefeller's own siblings and extended family had varying degrees of involvement with philanthropy, he allowed his own children and grandchildren the same freedom of choice. With the David Rockefeller Fund, which allows spouses to be involved as full board members just like blood relatives, money is set aside for so called discretionary grants. Family members can give fund money to a charity of their choice even if it is outside normal giving areas. "There's been a great respect for not imposing your own fund raising on the others," said Marnie Pillsbury, Mr. Rockefeller's philanthropic adviser. "They meet and learn that Michael is interested in theater for the disabled or David Kaiser is interested in physical abuse in the prison system." Letting children follow their own passions has been a key to keeping the family philanthropically engaged. It would seem an obvious thing to do, but many family foundations, and more broadly families, try to steer children in a particular direction. Last year, the David Rockefeller Fund divested itself of investments in fossil fuels, which some other family giving vehicles have also done. Its endowment is now being invested with environmental, social and governance guidelines. This change was pushed by two of the younger trustees, who made their case to the larger board. "We took our time to do the due diligence on the financial practicality and wisdom of doing this," Mr. Haynes said. "It was a unanimous decision after six months of due diligence." The lesson here was for an older generation to listen to its younger members but also for the younger generation to come prepared to make its case in economic as well as moral terms. "There were older people who talked about the fiduciary responsibility and maintaining a balance," Ms. Pillsbury said. "It took some dialogue. It was a learning process for everyone. But it came out of the family and not out of some consultant." After all, the Rockefeller fortune was built on those very fossil fuels. Yet overseeing this transition of thought was something Mr. Rockefeller relished. He "attended all of our board meetings right through December at 101," Mr. Haynes said. "He took enormous pleasure in attending under the board leadership of his grandson."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
KAFKAESQUE By Peter Kuper and Franz Kafka. (Norton, 19.95.) Kuper has been adapting Kafka's stories in graphic novel form since 1988. This book gathers 14 of them, including "In the Penal Colony" and "A Hunger Artist," placing the work in a contemporary setting so that Kafka, that master critic of the modern world, can comment on issues like civil rights and homelessness. STAN SMITH By Stan Smith, foreword by Pharrell Williams. (Rizzoli, 55.) The Stan Smith tennis sneaker, named after the former world No. 1 tennis player Stan Smith, has maintained cult status since it was first introduced over four decades ago. This book celebrates the sneaker's reach, from mentions in rap lyrics to its appearance in Bollywood movies. THE WHITE HORSE By Mary McCartney. (Rizzoli, 55.) McCartney, a photographer who grew up in the Sussex countryside, focuses here on one white stallion, Alejandro, and the intimate relationship between horse and rider. WRITERS UNDER SURVEILLANCE Edited by JPat Brown, B. C. D. Lipton and Michael Morisy. (MIT Press, paper, 24.95.) Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the F.B.I. files in this collection monitor writers considered by the government to have been subversives. Many of the intellectual heavyweights are here, from Hannah Arendt to Susan Sontag to James Baldwin. AMY WINEHOUSE Photographs by Blake Wood, text by Nancy Jo Sales. (Taschen, 40.) Wood's images of the singer, especially of her relaxing on the beach at St. Lucia, show a human, private side to contrast the self destructive public persona. In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they're reading now. "Alice Schertle and Jill McElmurry's LITTLE BLUE TRUCK begins, as so many of the great thrillers do, on a quiet country road, far from any sign of danger or menace. It is fall. The truck is stopped at a stop sign, but no one is behind the wheel. And the truck has eyes. Suddenly there are toads. So many toads. One is winking at you. Or is it winking at the truck, which is moving now? It doesn't matter. There's no turning back now. Ominous signs abound. The wind picks up. A cow appears, and a pig and sheep. Is that a raccoon in the tree? Now it's starting to rain. The stage is set for a villain unlike any other in the canon of epic poems for children: a surly dump truck. Things get messy. There's comeuppance for the evil dump truck. An important lesson is learned. The 3 year old, for whom the book was intended, demands to know, for the 700th time, the difference between a toad and a frog. And he wants you to read it again, for the 701st time."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
The enduring fascination with the life of Alexander McQueen shows no signs of slowing, more than six years after his death and five years after "Savage Beauty," the blockbuster retrospective exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute. Last month, the announcement of an as yet untitled movie on Mr. McQueen, the British designer who committed suicide in 2010, and his penultimate catwalk collection generated great fanfare, in part because the rising star, Jack O'Connell, will be taking the title role. And this past summer, news that a Central St. Martins student was working on a project that could use Mr. McQueen's DNA to grow skin for an artificial leather goods range, again stoked interest in a man who loved to shock, one of the most feted and contentious designers of his generation. "People remain completely intrigued about Lee, partly because of the drama, excitement and tragedy that whirled around him in both life and death, but also because he was a rare genius one of a handful of designers, alongside Martin Margiela and Rei Kawakubo, whose first collection set the mood of the wider industry for years afterwards," Tony Glenville, creative director at London College of Fashion, said, referring to the designer by his first name. "People recognize that he had a creative flair that changed the fashion industry forever. It's not surprising so many people want to find ways to keep experiencing that force in some way."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
IRRESISTIBLE (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. Five years after leaving "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart makes a return to political satire with this comedy, which he wrote and directed. "Irresistible" stars Stewart's old "Daily Show" pal Steve Carell as Gary Zimmer, a decorated Democratic strategist who helicopters into a Wisconsin town to help a retired Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) win a mayoral race, which Gary believes carries deep symbolic value. (The helicoptering is metaphorical; Gary travels by fancy jet and a Ford S.U.V. selected to telegraph American authenticity.) A Republican strategist (Rose Byrne) shows up to counter Gary. The movie is making its debut in virtual cinemas because of the pandemic. In a recent interview with The Times, Stewart spoke of releasing a movie at this moment. "There's tragedy everywhere," he said, "and you're like, 'Uh, does anybody want chocolate?' It feels ridiculous. But what doesn't feel ridiculous is to continue to fight for nuance and precision and solutions." 47TH ANNUAL DAYTIME EMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. The Daytime Emmy Awards have been around since 1974, but the ceremony is going virtual this year. Hosts of "The Talk," including Sharon Osbourne and Marie Osmond, will run the show, with remote appearances from Gayle King, Kelsey Grammer and many others.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
TOKYO Major League Baseball began its 2019 season on Wednesday in Japan with the first of two games between the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners at the Tokyo Dome. But don't say they are playing on foreign soil. That's because 12 tons of clay, silt and sand mixtures were shipped by boat from the United States to make the batter's box, pitcher's mound, base pits and bullpens feel like home. The dirt swap was news to the veteran Seattle pitcher Mike Leake, who nonetheless gave his stamp of approval after starting the first of two exhibition games each club played against teams from Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball as a tuneup. "Oh, you mean we weren't pitching on the same mound the Japanese teams use during their season?" Leake said Sunday. "It felt like the same mound that we pitch on in the States. The only thing I would say is that maybe they put a little too much water at first, so some of the clay stuck to my spikes in the first inning, but that happens at home, too. After that, it was perfect." For Murray Cook and his traveling crew of three, that is the highest praise. Cook has been a consultant for M.L.B. on field construction and maintenance for nearly three decades, and he serves as the unofficial head groundskeeper for any league sanctioned event played on a diamond not ordinarily manicured by one of its 30 teams. "The commissioner's office and players' association have a big plan to develop the game worldwide and with that they need fields," said Cook, who is also the president of the commercial landscaper BrightView's sports turf division in Pennsylvania. "So I get tasked with these fun projects from them to create these canvases for the players to go out and perform." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. He was quite familiar with the stadium for Wednesday's game, the fifth time M.L.B. had opened a season at the Tokyo Dome the most of any ballpark outside its 30 member stadiums in North America. A packed crowd of 45,787 came out to see what is likely to be Ichiro Suzuki's final pro appearances in Japan. The fans were treated to an offensive showcase won by the Mariners, 9 7. Players described it as similar to the loose soil used with potted plants, and it caused more headaches when an all star team came over for a postseason tour in 2004. Roger Clemens's foot was sore and Dontrelle Willis developed pain in his back, Cook said, because they were sliding more than usual on the pitchers' mound. Cook was camping with his family in the Blue Ridge Mountains when the league summoned him to Japan in an emergency. "They were all complaining about how soft the mounds were," Cook recalled. "I said, 'Well, we can fix that.' I came over and whipped up a concoction that got them through the rest of that tournament." Since then, the league has taken greater steps to ensure that Leake's experience is the norm. Cook estimated he had been to Tokyo four times since the games were announced last spring. In between, he spent time in London, Mexico, New Zealand, the Dominican Republic and Peru among other places to work on fields for games, clinics and other events over the past year. His challenge is to ensure that wherever the game is taking place, the field is always up to M.L.B.'s competitive and safety standards. There are plenty of other issues to address besides the dirt. For this series, Cook's work began on March 4 and included helping lay a new, previously planned artificial turf surface at the arena. The bases used in Japan are also fluffier and rise to a crown, while American bases are harder and flatter. They also anchor into the base pits differently, so Cook not only has to bring bases from home but also has to change the holes into which they are fitted. Japan also uses 12 permanent nylon markers four around each batter's box and four around the catcher's box as guides for laying chalk lines around those spaces; in the United States, a metal template is brought out before each game for the markings. In past events here, M.L.B. catchers complained that the half inch high tufts were distracting, and they would pull them out of the ground and toss them away. Cook now stores one of his metal templates at the Tokyo Dome, along with an array of other handy supplies. Cook's job may be easier in Japan than it is almost anywhere else because of baseball's deep history here. The 12 tons of dirt for this series is a smaller shipment than previous ones because he has been able to find suitable domestic materials to complement his imported soil. But when the Yankees and the Red Sox play a series at London Stadium in June M.L.B.'s first regular season games in Europe Cook will need to export 300 tons of dirt to England to build a field entirely from scratch. With his vast experience, Cook will be up to the task, but he noted that there was one item in his field conversion process that still bedevils him. While he has become an expert in the nuances of importing American soil products through customs in many countries, he estimated that Japanese security agents had confiscated seven metal tape measures from him over the years. This week, he vowed, he would remember to tuck it into his checked luggage after the Mariners and the A's are finished.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
The installation of steak grown from human cells at the Design Museum in London was intended to criticize the meat industry's rising use of living cells from animals. It ended up triggering a roiling debate about bioethics and the pitfalls of artistic critique. Orkan Telhan, an artist and associate professor of fine arts at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, spent the last year imagining how climate change might impact the future of food consumption. He collaborated with scientists to create a project that included 3 D printed pancakes, bioengineered bread and genetically modified salmon. But it was their provocative, and less appetizing, development of what they call "Ouroboros Steak," meat cultivated from human cells and expired blood, that challenged the sustainability practices of the nascent cellular agriculture industry, which develops lab grown products from existing cell cultures. After the Ouroboros Steak traveled to the Design Museum in October, an intense online debate grew over the project's motivations, and the artist received dozens of threatening emails and social media posts calling him "wicked" and "pure evil." Some messages have demanded the destruction of the artwork. According to Mr. Telhan, who provided the emails and tweets to a reporter, "the focus quickly became centered on accusations that we were promoting cannibalism." Named after the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, "Ouroboros Steak" examines, but does not promote, auto cannibalism as a satirical take on the increasing demand for meat products around the world, which scientists have warned will likely contribute to carbon emissions and reduced biodiversity. The designers hoped that shocking audiences with the suggestion would trigger an examination of environmental responsibility and the clean meat industry, which has promoted itself as producing "kill free" food, although most companies heavily rely on fetal bovine serum harvested during the slaughter of pregnant cows for cell cultivation. "Our project provides an absurd solution to a serious problem," said Andrew Pelling, a biophysicist who partnered with Mr. Telhan and the industrial designer Grace Knight to create the steaks. "But in our scenario, you are at least giving consent by taking your own cells. In the world of lab grown meats, you are taking cells from animals without their consent." As controversial as the project has become, the bite size chunks of meat toured museums around the United States last year without a problem even when cheekily displayed on a dish with silverware. "I called it a sleeper hit," said Michelle Millar Fisher, the curator who commissioned the steaks for the exhibition, "Designs for Different Futures," which began at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "The provocation at the heart of this project is really fair. It's important to ask ourselves where we get our proteins." There are no plans to remove the installation from the Design Museum before the exhibition ends in March 2021, although Ms. Fisher and Mr. Telhan will address the criticism of "Ouroboros Steak" in an upcoming online conversation. Priya Khanchandani, head of curatorial at the Design Museum, has also defended the project, calling it "the equivalent of a design dystopia." "It is asking a controversial question that in an epoch of severely depleted resources badly needs to be articulated," she added. Investment in cellular agriculture has increased at a remarkable pace over the last few years, even as serious discussions around the bioethics of lab grown meat have taken a back seat. Market researchers estimate that the cultured meat business could reach 214 million by 2025, and more than double to 593 million by 2032. Earlier this year, the National Science Foundation Growing Convergence program awarded the University of California, Davis, a 3.5 million grant for cell based, lab grown meat research. And on Dec. 2, Singapore became the first government to approve the consumption of chicken cells grown in bioreactors, telling the San Francisco based company Eat Just that it could sell its bioengineered chicken nuggets. "We need productive critique if we are ushering in a new technology," said Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, a nonprofit research institute focused on accelerating breakthroughs in cellular agriculture. "This technology holds the promise to create a more sustainable means of meat production, but how do we hold ourselves accountable to ensuring that happens?" In recent decades, several artists have questioned the ethics of biotechnology by adopting the field's methods and machinery. The Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac worked with a team of geneticists in 2002 to splice an albino rabbit's DNA with that of a luminescent jellyfish to call attention to what the transgenic crossing of species' characteristics might imply for the human genome. In 2019, the artist Jordan Eagles projected magnified images of blood onto the gallery walls of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh as commentary on the stigma associated with L.G.B.T.Q. blood donations and those living with H.I.V./AIDS.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
New fathers in the United States are getting older. Researchers at Stanford University reviewed data on 168,867,480 live births from 1972 to 2015, making statistical adjustments for missing paternal records. The average age of the father of a newborn in the United States, the investigators found, has risen to 30.9 from 27.4 in 1972. Paternal age increased across the country: the oldest fathers lived in the Northeast, and the youngest in the South. There were average age increases across all educational levels, races and ethnicities. The report appears in the journal Human Reproduction. In 2015, fathers with college degrees were 33.3 years old on average, compared with 29.2 for those with only a high school diploma. Asian fathers were the oldest on average by ethnicity, and blacks and Hispanics the youngest. Japanese fathers saw the largest increase in average age during the study period, from 30.7 in 1972 to 36.3 in 2015. White fathers were on average 27.6 years old in 1972 and 31.1 in 2015, while the average age of black fathers increased to 30.4 from 27.2.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
As New Year's Eve Ball Drops, the Free Press Gets a Moment in the Spotlight Television viewers on New Year's Eve tune in for performances by the latest hitmakers and nostalgia acts. This time around, 11 journalists ranging from familiar faces like Martha Raddatz of ABC to behind the scenes editors like Karen Toulon of Bloomberg News shared the Times Square limelight, part of an effort by organizers to recognize the erosion of press freedoms at home and abroad. The journalists were tasked Monday with pressing the crystal button that initiates the minute long descent of the New Year's Eve Ball, a prime moment on a night that attracts tens of millions of viewers. Just before they pressed it, the journalists gathered around the button, cheering and waving to the crowd before bringing the ball down. Among those invited was Karen Attiah, who edited the Washington Post columns of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and American resident who was murdered in Turkey this year by Saudi agents; Mr. Holt of NBC; Alisyn Camerota of CNN; Vladimir Duthiers of CBS; and Jon Scott, a weekend anchor on Fox News. Editors from Time, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were also on the bill, along with Maria Ressa, a journalist in the Philippines whose news site, Rappler, has been threatened by the country's authoritarian president, Rodrigo Duterte. Ms. Ressa, along with Mr. Khashoggi, was featured on the cover of Time this month for its annual person of the year honor. The reporters and editors were part of broadcasts featuring stars like John Legend, Shawn Mendes, Jennifer Lopez, Bebe Rexha, Sting and a reunited New Kids on the Block. Journalists do not carry quite the same star power as past honorees, like Muhammad Ali or Lady Gaga, who memorably kissed the mayor at the time, Michael R. Bloomberg, in the first moments of 2012. But even a brief recognition from viewers will go a long way, said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group that promotes press rights and helped coordinate the event. "People who are watching across the country will see the media together, standing on the stage, visually united behind this principle," Mr. Simon said in an interview. "That's a positive message at a time when journalists around the world are threatened as never before." Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, has sought in recent years to leverage the ball drop's worldwide audience to promote civic causes. Tarana Burke, the founder of the MeToo movement, appeared onstage last year. David Miliband, who runs the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group for refugees, was a guest on Dec. 31, 2014. 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. This year's idea came about after a conversation between Mr. Tompkins and an acquaintance from his college days, Jacob Weisberg, a former editor in chief of Slate and a Committee to Protect Journalists board member. "The two pictures that are sent around the world generally are people kissing each other with confetti falling and the people who appear on the stage," Mr. Tompkins said. "We wanted to use that in a deliberate way." "It's fitting to celebrate the free press as we reflect on where we've been during the past year and what we value most as a society," he added. Given the attention span of viewers on a night dedicated more to carousing than to the Constitution, Mr. Simon said the televised image of journalists, representing a range of news organizations, would be a potent symbol. "You have to send a simple and essentially visual message," he said. "The basic principles of press freedom are unifying, and it's something that people can celebrate even if they have divergent views."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
UNEASY PEACE The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence By 244 pp. W.W. Norton Company. 26.95. The United States is nearly the safest that it has been in 50 years. You would not realize this if you watch local news programs which still lead with sensational violent offenses conducted by young black men or believe President Trump, who has made the false claim that the murder rate is the highest it has been in 47 years. In 2017, New York City achieved a record low number of homicides, 290, compared with more than 2,000 in 1990. While violence in places like Chicago and Baltimore has not fallen on a pace with most other cities, they are safer than they were a few years ago. The "great crime decline" referenced in 's new book, "Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence," is in fact "great," both qualitatively and normatively. It is especially great for the young black men who are the most likely victims of violent crime another fact you wouldn't realize from local news. Many books about the woes of the United States criminal justice system from Michelle Alexander's influential "The New Jim Crow" to James Forman's Pulitzer Prize winning "Locking Up Our Own" use data to argue for change. Sharkey, the chairman of the sociology department at New York University, supports evidence based reform but also provides statistics that give the reader a reason to cheer. Here's one of the most encouraging: The reduction in homicide has added three quarters of a year to the life expectancy of African American boys. Sharkey draws on facts like that to support his main argument: The benefits of lower crime rates extend beyond the halls of justice to public health, education and even democracy, in the form of more civic engagement and better race relations. Sharkey finds "strong evidence" that safer cities make teenagers more likely to graduate from high school and increase upward mobility for children from formerly high crime neighborhoods. This kind of analysis makes "Uneasy Peace" provocative. Sharkey offers fresh takes on issues like gentrification and the achievement gap that will trouble both liberal and conservative orthodoxies. What's not to like about a reduction in crime? The way that it was accomplished, which, according to Sharkey, included brutal policing and record levels of incarceration. "The Warriors," a cult film made in 1979, depicts New York City as an urban jungle; the film's title comes from a violent street gang that some critics thought the movie glorified. The new warriors, Sharkey worries, are the men and women in blue. They too are glorified, by politicians like President Trump and the former New York City mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, for restoring order to American cities. In Sharkey's view, police officers deserve the credit but not the glory. In high poverty communities from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, everyone used to be scared of the stickup boys. Now the residents of those neighborhoods especially the young men are mainly afraid of the police. And with good reason, as demonstrated by tragedies like the death of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York police officer who claimed he was resisting arrest. The officer was taking Garner in for selling loose tobacco cigarettes, the kind of "order maintenance" policing that makes many of its main subjects young African American and Latino men hate the police. Given Sharkey's justified concerns, he might have been more cautious about attributing so much responsibility to law enforcement for the decline in crime. Other researchers have advanced theories about demographics, environmental factors like lead poisoning, even the availability of legal abortion. One weird fact makes it easy to dispute any grand theory of causality: Crime is decreasing all over the Western world especially in richer countries. These places have different demographics, laws and police strategies, and still, like the United States, are safer now than they have been for decades. The accurate, though unsatisfying, answer to the question of why crime rates rise and fall is "nobody knows." Sharkey's suggestions about where we should go from here are not as intriguing as his story about how we got here. He's a fan of the former New York Police Department commissioner William J. Bratton, who "used his final tour of duty to change the culture of the N.Y.P.D." I would not give a shout out to the former chief as much as activists in the movement for black lives, and Shira A. Scheindlin, the federal judge who ordered the police to end their unconstitutional and racist practice of "stop and frisk" a strategy that Bratton helped implement. Sharkey endorses Bratton's "new version of broken windows policing that limits the need for aggressive enforcement." Good luck with that. The N.Y.P.D. has never demonstrated an ability to provide "equal justice under law" to black and brown citizens, and a kinder, gentler version of broken windows is apt to continue that tragic history. More inspiring are the stories in "Uneasy Peace" about the crucial role that community members play in creating healthy and safer cities. Neighborhood activists and nonprofit organizations refused to cede the streets to criminals, and they fought their battles without the cops' guns or powers to arrest people. They were successful in part because they did not see the young men who were causing the harm as enemies, but rather as people in need of help. Building after school centers for kids and cooperative gardens does not resolve every issue in the neighborhood, but neither does building prisons. It's unusual and lovely to see an academic of Sharkey's credentials giving proper respect to the ordinary women and men who sustain a sense of community against all odds. "Uneasy Peace" admirably connects two stories about the criminal legal system that are usually told separately. One is that the country that Americans live in is safer than it has been for a long time. The other story is that for some citizens, especially African American men, the country that they live in is not free.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
They call it the poor man's methadone. The epidemic of opioid addiction sweeping the country has led to another form of drug abuse that few experts saw coming: Addicts who cannot lay hands on painkillers are instead turning to Imodium and other anti diarrhea medications. The active ingredient, loperamide, offers a cheap high if it is consumed in extraordinary amounts. But in addition to being uncomfortably constipating, it can be toxic, even deadly, to the heart. A report published online in Annals of Emergency Medicine recently described two deaths in New York after loperamide abuse. And overdoses have been linked to deaths or life threatening irregular heartbeats in at least a dozen other cases in five states in the last 18 months. Most physicians just recently realized loperamide could be abused, and few look for it. There is little if any national data on the problem, but many toxicologists and emergency department doctors suspect that it is more widespread than scattered reports suggest. As efforts to limit prescription opioids intensify, a handful of experts are concerned that more addicts might turn to loperamide much as an alcoholic might resort to mouthwash when the Jim Beam runs dry. "We've seen patients who have been on loperamide for months at a time," said William Eggleston, the lead author of the recent report and a clinical toxicologist at SUNY Upstate Medical Center. He added, "A subset of patients take it to get high, and other patients use it as a bridge" meaning that if they cannot obtain heroin or morphine, they take loperamide to ease withdrawal symptoms like muscle pains, vomiting, diarrhea and nausea. Sarah Peddicord, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said, "The F.D.A. is aware of recent reports of adverse events related to the intentional misuse and/or abuse of the anti diarrhea product loperamide to treat symptoms of opioid withdrawal or produce euphoric effects." After a review, she said, the agency "will take appropriate steps as soon as possible." The recommended dose of loperamide is safe. The standard daily dose of Imodium A D is no more than four caplets, or eight milligrams. But lobe abusers as they sometimes call themselves have reported ingesting 100 two milligram tablets daily for weeks. In a case reported by Dr. Eggleston and his colleagues, a 24 year old man experiencing opiate withdrawal took so much loperamide that he died. Toxicology analysis found more than 25 times the regular dose in his blood. In another case, a 39 year old man collapsed at home and was pronounced dead at a hospital. His family said he had once managed his opioid addiction with prescription buprenorphine, but had taken to medicating with anti diarrhea drugs. Anti diarrhea medications are cheap, legal and can be bought easily in large quantities without raising suspicion. Costco sells 400 loperamide caplets for just 7.59. Yet loperamide used to be a prescription drug and a controlled substance, in the same class as cocaine or methadone. The F.D.A. approved it in 1976, and it became an over the counter drug in 1988. Typically, loperamide acts on opioid receptors in the gastrointestinal tract and does not enter the central nervous system. At recommended doses, there is no high, and low potential for abuse. But large doses can produce a high, doctors say. Some toxicologists argue that the sales of loperamide should be limited, much as the nonprescription drug pseudoephedrine was restricted a decade ago to help prevent the manufacturing of crystal meth. "The average person doesn't need 400 tablets of loperamide weekly," he said. "I've used a handful in my whole life." In the journal HeartRhythm Case Reports, he described a 28 year old woman who said she had taken 400 to 600 milligrams of loperamide daily for months. An electrocardiogram showed dangerously irregular heartbeats and abnormal electrical conduction through her heart. After repeated blackouts, she sought medical attention at a hospital. While there, unknown to doctors, she was still taking 100 tablets of loperamide a day from a private stockpile. After she transferred to U.C.S.D. and confessed her habit, Dr. O'Connell asked her to stop. In a few days, an electrocardiogram showed her heart normalizing, and the fainting subsided. "If you take enough, it rushes the gate, and some penetrates the blood brain barrier," Dr. O'Connell said. "Once it crosses the barrier, it can act on the central nervous system and you get euphoric effects." Some users complain the high does not compare to that produced by opioids. "You can definitely get high from it, and even kill yourself with it," a commenter wrote in 2013 on Bluelight, a website where people discuss drug use. The high was "not worth the health risks, whatever they are," the commenter wrote. Another commenter cataloged loperamide's downsides the need to continually take stool softeners, for one but wrote that the medication took away the misery of opioid withdrawal: "Don't wish to be dead ... so that's a plus." Loperamide abuse may go undetected in emergency departments, experts warn, because routine drug screens cannot detect it. "The urine toxicology we do in our hospital doesn't look for loperamide, so it's possible we missed cases," said Amitava Dasgupta, a toxicologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Some loperamide abusers arrive at hospitals lethargic or not breathing, as if they had overdosed on heroin. Naloxone, an anti opioid drug, may be given. "When a drug screen comes back negative, emergency room staff may assume the test was faulty, or by that time, if the patient is responsive, they may write it off as nothing," said Dr. Jennifer Dierksen, a pathologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. In one case at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, opioid abuse was suspected after a 19 year old Texan was found dead at home with a distended bladder full of urine. But a drug screen was clean. So Jeffrey Walterscheid, then a toxicologist at the institute, used a test known as liquid chromatography mass spectrometry to pinpoint loperamide as the culprit. All cases of cardiac problems associated with the misuse or abuse of loperamide should be reported to the F.D.A.'s Medwatch online registry. But not all physicians do so. "The more people sounding the alarm, the more likely the F.D.A. will take the problem seriously and take action," Dr. Eggleston said. "A first step would be legislation or regulation that places the items behind the counter." Johnson Johnson, Imodium's manufacturer, did not respond to requests for comment.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
LONDON An autonomous missile under development by the Pentagon uses software to choose between targets. An artificially intelligent drone from the British military identifies firing points on its own. Russia showcases tanks that don't need soldiers inside for combat. A.I. technology has for years led military leaders to ponder a future of warfare that needs little human involvement. But as capabilities have advanced, the idea of autonomous weapons reaching the battlefield is becoming less hypothetical. The possibility of software and algorithms making life or death decisions has added new urgency to efforts by a group called the Campaign To Stop Killer Robots that has pulled together arms control advocates, humans rights groups and technologists to urge the United Nations to craft a global treaty that bans weapons without people at the controls. Like cyberspace, where there aren't clear rules of engagement for online attacks, no red lines have been defined over the use of automated weaponry. Without a nonproliferation agreement, some diplomats fear the world will plunge into an algorithm driven arms race. In a speech at the start of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 25, Secretary General Antonio Guterres listed the technology as a global risk alongside climate change and growing income inequality. "Let's call it as it is: The prospect of machines with the discretion and power to take human life is morally repugnant," Mr. Guterres said. Two weeks earlier, Federica Mogherini, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, said the weapons "impact our collective security," and that decisions of life and death must remain in human hands. Twenty six countries have called for an explicit ban that requires some form of human control in the use of force. But the prospects for an A.I. weapons ban are low. Several influential countries including the United States are unwilling to place limits while the technology is still in development. Diplomats have been unable to reach a consensus about how a global policy can be implemented or enforced. Some have called for a voluntary agreement, others want rules that are legally binding. A meeting of more than 70 countries organized by the United Nations in Geneva in August made little headway, as the United States and others said a better understanding of the technology was needed before sweeping restrictions can be made. Another round of talks are expected to be held later this year. Some have raised concerns that a ban will affect civilian research. Much of the most cutting edge work in artificial intelligence and machine learning is from universities and companies such as Google and Facebook. But much of that technology can be adapted to military use. "A lot of A.I. technologies are being developed outside of government and released to the public," said Jack Clark, a spokesman for OpenAI, a Silicon Valley group that advocates for more measured adoption of artificial intelligence. "These technologies have generic capabilities that can be applied in many different domains, including in weaponization." Major technical challenges remain before any robot weaponry reaches the battlefield. Maaike Verbruggen, a researcher at the Institute for European Studies who specializes in emerging military and security technology, said communication is still limited, making it hard for humans to understand why artificially intelligent machines make decisions. Better safeguards also are needed to ensure robots act as predicted, she said. But significant advancements will come in the next two decades, said Derrick Maple, an analyst who studies military spending for the market research firm Jane's by IHS Markit in London. As the technology changes, he said, any international agreement could be futile; countries will tear it apart in the event of war. "You cannot dictate the rules of engagement," Mr. Maple said. "If the enemy is going to do something, then you have to do something as well. No matter what rules you put in place, in a conflict situation the rules will go out the window." Defense contractors, identifying a new source of revenue, are eager to build the next generation machinery. Last year, Boeing reorganized its defense business to include a division focused on drones and other unmanned weaponry. The company also bought Aurora Flight Sciences, a maker of autonomous aircrafts. Other defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and Raytheon are making similar shifts. Mr. Maple, who has worked in the field for over four decades, estimates military spending on unmanned military vehicles such as drones and ships will top 120 billion over the next decade. No completely autonomous weapons are known to be currently deployed on the battlefield, but militaries have been using technology to automate for years. Israel's Iron Dome air defense system automatically detects and destroys incoming rockets. South Korea uses autonomous equipment to detect movements along the North Korean border. Mr. Maple expects more collaboration between humans and machines before there is an outright transfer of responsibility to robots. Researchers, for example, are studying how aircrafts and tanks can be backed by artificially intelligent fleets of drones. In 2016, the Pentagon highlighted its capabilities during a test in the Mojave Desert. More than 100 drones were dropped from a fighter jet in a disorganized heap, before quickly coming together to race toward and encircle a target. From a radar video shared by the Pentagon, the drones look like a flock of migrating starlings. There were no humans at the controls of the drones as they flew overhead, and the machines didn't look much different from those any person can buy from a consumer electronics store. The drones were programmed to communicate with each other independently to collectively organize and reach the target.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
The 24 year old Bulgarian actress won the role after an open call and three days of screen tests in London. "But the project was so confidential, I was like, is this actually a project? I was sure it was going to be a human trafficking situation."Credit...Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times The 24 year old Bulgarian actress won the role after an open call and three days of screen tests in London. "But the project was so confidential, I was like, is this actually a project? I was sure it was going to be a human trafficking situation." Sacha Baron Cohen may be the star of "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," but it is Maria Bakalova who has emerged its hero. In this raucous prank comedy, now streaming on Amazon, Bakalova plays Tutar Sagdiyev, the downtrodden 15 year old daughter of the titular Kazakh journalist portrayed by Baron Cohen. Raised in a barn and miseducated by her oblivious father, Tutar contrives a way to accompany Borat on his latest journey to the United States, becoming both the bait and the co conspirator in her father's schemes to deliver her to Vice President Mike Pence. Through numerous awkward encounters with unsuspecting marks including a now infamous interview with Rudolph W. Giuliani Tutar discovers her self worth while calling attention to the quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) misogyny around her. As Bakalova explained in a Zoom conversation on Tuesday, she sees the "Borat" sequel as being fundamentally the story of Tutar's education and liberation. "It's a movie of how a girl can grow up and should grow up," she said, speaking from Los Angeles, where she currently lives. "How people can treat you as not equal because you're a woman and what kind of options you have." For Bakalova, a prominent role in a major American film is also a satisfying opportunity to honor her home country. "Things like that are not happening to people like us, Bulgarians," she said. "Most of the time, there is eventually a small, small extra part in a movie, two or three lines as like a prostitute or a Mafia guy. I will be really grateful to Sacha for giving this platform to an Eastern European, to play a strong and complicated character who's not just one thing." Bakalova spoke further about the making of "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," her work with Baron Cohen and her highly scrutinized scene with Giuliani. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. Were you ever a prankster or practical joker? Actually, no. I was a super disciplined child. I was reading too many books. I was obsessed with Dostoyevsky, at like 15, 16. When the first "Borat" movie was released in 2006 , I was 10, so I never even watched it before they gave me the part. But even if I had, I for sure wouldn't have understood it. How did you come to be cast in the sequel? I heard from a friend there was an open call for the lead role in a Hollywood movie. And I was like, that's not possible. We are Bulgarians. Nobody can actually see us in lead roles. I sent out self tapes, then they called me for a screen test in London. But the project was so confidential, I was like, is this actually a project? I was sure it was going to be a human trafficking situation. I had no idea I was going to meet Sacha it was a surprise. How did you prepare with him in London? There were three days of screen tests. The first one, we had a small rehearsal; the second one, we started working with real people. They had to believe that we're real people, that we are not actors, for this to work for the movie. We had to stay undercover. So it's you and Sacha playing Tutar and Borat together. Who were you acting opposite and how did you pick them? As you started making the film, how did Sacha describe the character of Tutar to you? Sacha explained that Tutar should be as crazy as Borat, maybe even crazier. She should be completely disoriented what is right, what is wrong and through this journey, she should learn how to be a normal human. It's a satirical movie, it's over the top, but he got me thinking about me what it would be like, living this life, even if it's fake. He'd be like, would you be happy if people treated you this way if the whole purpose of your life was to get married and live in a cage? And how her perspective would be warped by a sexist manual that misinforms her about her own body? The manual is a metaphor for how society and the patriarchy are asking us to behave and what people are expecting. Should I be ashamed that I menstruate? Should I be ashamed that I have body hair? Should I be ashamed that I'm a woman? That's what Tutar has believed from the beginning, and Sacha wanted to show that in 2020, this is a moment when people should start treating each other equally. When we first meet Tutar, she is in an extremely degraded state. How did you approach those scenes? It's something like hypnosis. You're just going for it. We actually decided that I would grow out my real body hair. L.A.'s hot almost all the time. Every time I'm supposed to wear a dress or a top, you were able to see my armpit hair and leg hair. It was kind of gross. My facial hair never grows. I tried my best. But my eyebrows are never growing out. The facial part is because of my makeup artist, Katy Fray, but everything else is completely natural. It was so interesting when I finally shaved I was able to feel the wind on my arms and my legs. Were there ever times when it was hard for you to stay in character? When Sacha starts doing his thing, and you're right next to him, he has this super serious face. I have to act like it's the most normal thing ever. But he's so funny. There were moments when the scene was extremely funny and you just can't stop laughing. It's bad, because people were able to realize that it's a joke. He taught me a trick to cross my fingers, to put pressure on my fingers, to stop laughing. Were there any marks that you sympathized with? Jeanise Jones, the woman hired as Tutar's babysitter, was extremely kind to you did you feel you were deceiving her? We spent maybe five, six hours with Jeanise and she is the person you see onscreen. She is just incredible. She's not an actress she just wanted to help Tutar and for Tutar to appreciate herself, to follow her dreams and educate herself. We need people like Jeanise. She is an angel. Were there ever times when you felt that you were in physical danger? Sacha, he's my nonbiological father and he will be like that forever. So I trusted him from the beginning and I knew he would never put me in a dangerous situation. At the same time, we had a security team that was able to save us in a moment. Maybe the scene when we were at the hotel and Rudy Giuliani called the police, I was kind of scared that something would happen. But fortunately, we escaped. Did you know who Giuliani was before you recorded your interview with him? I knew who he was, because 9/11 is something everybody should know. It's one of the hardest moments in recent history. But I'm not American, I don't get into American politics. I don't think I'm that informed with the situation in America and its political system. Sacha has been living here for a long time. I trust him. How did you and Sacha prepare to shoot that scene? We'd been talking a lot about different scenarios. How should I act, this way or this way? What should I do? What is smarter? But in all of the scenarios, I was confident that Sacha will save me and he will save the scene, so it's not going to be a disaster. He's my guardian angel. Were you still nervous about filming it? Yeah. I was nervous. My heart was racing. But Sacha was like, you should be nervous in this situation. So use your nerves. Convert them and accept them and they're going to help you through everything. Giuliani has said that he was never inappropriate to you and that he was tucking in his shirt, but other viewers believe he was doing something illicit. What happened in that scene? Laughs I saw everything that you saw. If you saw the movie, that's our message. We want everybody to see the movie and judge for themselves. But did you come to a conclusion yourself as to what he was doing? I believe it's my back to the camera there, we can see what he's doing in the mirror. What do you think was taking place? You're the only other person who was in the room. Did you have any other indication as to what he was doing? Long pause What do you think he was doing? I can see how either interpretation could be correct. But I wasn't there, and you were. Do you have an opinion either way? Sacha jumped into the room quickly, because he's been worried about me. So, if he were late, I don't know how things were going to go. But he came just in time. Did Giuliani think that Tutar was 15 years old when he agreed to do the interview? I'm not the person who is actually booking these people, so when we get to the scene, I'm just doing the scene, without introducing myself. I'm not sure what he knows or does not know. Giuliani has been widely mocked and criticized for being duped by you and the "Borat" filmmakers. Do you feel bad at all for that? Movies like this are showing people's true colors. It's going to show Jeanise's true colors. It's going to show the real character of Judith Dim Evans , the lady in the synagogue. It's going to show Rudy's real character. You're responsible for your own decisions. So, no, I don't feel bad. What have you since learned about Americans, living among them after the film's release? I was extremely happy to see how happy people were over the weekend following the presidential election . Because in my country, there has been years and years, through different systems, when people haven't had the right to vote. Now seeing that people are actually voting, and all over the streets people were celebrating and crying and dancing and singing. It was probably one of the most beautiful things I've seen in my life. It was really inspiring, seeing that there is, for the first time in history, a woman as vice president. Like in the movie, women can do anything. And sometimes we can do it better.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
The country faces a choice about what the future of policing looks like and whether it exists at all. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays. It has been exactly one month since George Floyd was killed by the police, and still, the protests and their reason for being continue. In the streets, in the press, in academe and in Congress, Americans are insisting on radically divergent futures for policing. Which path should the country take? Here's what people are saying. The idea of eliminating policing as we know it is foreign to most Americans, but it is not new. A concept with roots in the midcentury civil rights and prison abolition movements, it has certainly become more mainstream in recent years: In 2017, Tracey L. Meares, a professor at Yale Law School who served on the Obama administration's President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, wrote that "policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed." The rationale for abolition traces back to the genesis of American policing. As Mariame Kaba, an activist and organizer, explains in a Times Op Ed, policing evolved in the South in the 1700s and 1800s from slave patrols, white vigilantes who enforced slavery laws by capturing and "returning" black people who had escaped enslavement. In the North, policing emerged as a way to control an unruly "underclass," which included African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and the poor, in service of the rich. "Everywhere," she writes, "they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo." Listen: "The History of Police in Creating Social Order in the U.S." Commissions to examine police brutality have been convened since 1894, but none of them has solved the problem Ms. Kaba views as inherent to the institution's design. The only way to do so, she argues, "is to reduce contact between the public and the police." What about crime? In his book "The End of Policing," Alex S. Vitale writes, "It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys." Most officers make no more than one felony arrest per year, he says; they spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic tickets, and making arrests for petty misdemeanors. Most violent and property crimes go unsolved. And despite what pop culture teaches, the idea that putting more officers on the street reduces crime is hotly contested. (And what constitutes a crime is itself a political question.) Ms. Kaba argues that the goal of a safer, less cruel society would be better served by redirecting the 115 billion allocated to police departments every year toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs for everyone. Fellow thinkers in this vein include Angela Davis, the scholar and activist, who recently told the newscast "Democracy Now!": "Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It's not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of. It's about re envisioning, building anew." Related: The "abolish the police" movement, explained by seven scholars and activists Abolition is closely related to the demand to defund the police. If abolition is the goal, defunding is a method but a method that people who oppose getting rid of all policing can also get behind. As a more technocratic call, it doesn't necessarily entail eliminating budgets for public safety, as Christy E. Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law School, explains in The Washington Post. Rather, it means "shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need." Proponents argue that defunding must be paired with investment in alternative emergency response programs. For example, Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris suggest in The Times: "If someone calls 911 to report a drug overdose, health care teams rush to the scene; the police wouldn't get involved. If a person calls 911 to complain about people who are homeless, rapid response social workers would provide them with housing support and other resources." And if more money were devoted to addiction programs, mental health care and housing in the first place, such interventions would be less frequently required. "This conversation is long overdue," the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. "One of my (white) high school classmates in Oregon lost a son to a police shooting two years ago; Kelly desperately needed drug treatment, not six bullets." Related: "What NYC could do with its 6 billion police budget" Again, what about violent crime? In The Washington Post, Patrick Sharkey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, argues that cops do prevent violence but that they are not the only people or groups who can. "Decades of criminological theory and growing evidence demonstrate that residents and local organizations can indeed 'police' their own neighborhoods and control violence in a way that builds stronger communities," he writes. "We have models available, but we've made commitments only to the police and the prison system." Most Americans oppose calls to defund the police. In a letter to The Times, Stephen Crawford, a research professor at George Washington University, points out that when the Baltimore police stepped back after the uproar over Freddie Gray's death in 2015, crime rose and Baltimore's homicide rate became the highest in the nation. "It is naive to think that abolishing the police will radically reduce robbery, rape and murder, even if all the saved money is reallocated to better housing, schools, jobs and social services," Mr. Crawford writes. "Fixing these broader problems will take far more resources." But he also calls it equally naive to think that the problem with policing is just a few bad apples. "Real reforms are possible, and it's important to seize this rare opportunity to achieve them." But which reforms? Many of the most common proposals like body cameras and implicit bias training haven't been shown to work. But there are others that people hope might: Restrictions on use of force. Activists have long pushed for tighter rules on when and how police officers can use force putting someone in a chokehold, for example, or shooting at a moving vehicle which appear to have the potential to substantially reduce killings. Retraining. According to J. Scott Thomson, the former police chief of Camden, N.J., simply changing policies isn't enough. "Within a Police Department, culture eats policy for breakfast," he told The New York Times Magazine. "You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it's meaningless if it just exists on paper." Eric Garner, for instance, was killed in 2014 by an officer who used a chokehold that had been banned more than 20 years earlier. To change the culture around the use of force, Mr. Thomson said, you need not only continuous training but also rigorous systems of accountability. Related: "As Camden's police chief, I scrapped the force and started over. It worked." Increased accountability. "There's a deep sense in the black community that when the police commit harms, they're not held accountable," Alicia Garza, the principal of Black Futures Lab and a co founder of Black Lives Matter, told The Times Magazine. "The continual push to shield the police from responsibility helps explain why a lot of people feel now that the police can't be reformed." None Civilian review boards are one way to address that, she said but they often lack teeth. To give them real power, they need to be able to hire and fire officers. None Another proposal with bipartisan support is eliminating qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has become "an absolute shield for law enforcement officers" that protects them from lawsuits. None Increasing accountability would also require curbing the power of police unions, the Times columnist Ross Douthat writes, which makes it "too hard to fire bad cops, too easy to rehire them, too difficult to sue them, too challenging to win a guilty verdict when they're charged with an offense." None There also needs to be federal regulation and oversight, according to Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in this country, and I don't think we've seen major federal legislation for police reform pass since the 1990s," she told The Times. Demilitarization. Criminal justice activists and scholars have called for an end to the Pentagon's practice of donating military equipment including tanks, grenade launchers and weaponized aircraft to the police, which research suggests leads to more violence against officers and higher numbers of fatal shootings by the police. But Alec Ward argues in Reason that demilitarizing the police is also a matter of changing attitudes: A 2019 study, for instance, found that community relations improve when the police think of themselves as guardians rather than warriors. More but better policing. As The Times's Jenee Desmond Harris wrote at Vox in 2015, many African Americans report being both over and underpoliced. Matthew Yglesias argues that addressing the issue would require providing money to put more cops on the beat, "a proven and cost effective means of bringing crime down that offers a humane alternative to harsh prison sentences as a deterrent and at least offers some prospect of cutting down on disproportionate use of force as well." "The Rebellion Against Racial Capitalism": An interview with historian Robin D.G. Kelley. The Intercept "Black ex cop: I understand the anger but don't defund police. It could make things worse." USA Today "Accept Nothing Less Than Police Abolition" The Boston Review "In the fight for police reform and abolition, design plays a key role" Fast Company Here's what readers had to say about the last debate: Are Black Lives What Really Matter to Companies? Anahita, 14, from California: "Companies posting empty reassurances of solidarity draws a lot of parallels with their actions concerning the L.G.B.T.Q. community, especially during Pride Month. It feels like they all have rainbow branding and celebrations of being queer during June, but as soon as July 1 rolls around, it's back to forgetting about the L.G.B.T.Q. community and in some cases discriminating against them. I feel like the same thing will happen with BLM.: Once the media moves on, so will companies. They just want to improve their optics." Sean, 53, from Montana: "The fact that these brands are using this moment to make a statement means people can hold them accountable and it means that the message gets spread far wider and in a greater variety of voices than it might have otherwise. "All of that is essential to change. So, while genuineness may be debatable, the fact that companies that influence millions of lives are going on record is not. Now consumers and employees need to hold them accountable and put that increased awareness to work to help spark systemic change in their communities. The privilege of ignorance is no longer an excuse."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Opinion
|
Just hours before what would have been his 70th birthday, David Bowie resurfaced. A new video for one of Mr. Bowie's final songs and a brief EP of previously released tracks were made available late on Saturday, almost exactly a year since the release of the musician's final album, "Blackstar," and days before the first anniversary of his death on Jan. 10. The video, for the song "No Plan," was directed by Tom Hingston, who also worked with Mr. Bowie on videos for the songs "I'd Rather Be High (Venetian Mix)" and "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
Once projected as a top pick in the N.F.L. draft, Tua Tagovailoa ultimately became one of its biggest mysteries. A dynamic left hander who won two national championships as Alabama's quarterback, Tagovailoa has been recovering from a hip dislocation sustained in a November game. He was cleared to begin football activities in March, but teams were unable to scout him in person because of travel restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. Although this has affected all potential draft picks, it may be especially detrimental to Tagovailoa, because scouts have been unable to assess his progress in person. During his time at Alabama, he also fractured his left index finger, sprained his right knee and hurt both ankles, and his draft hopes may have been undermined by perceptions that he will always be at risk of injury.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Megan Rapinoe, the biggest star in women's soccer, will not be on the field when the National Women's Soccer League becomes one of the first American sports leagues to resume competition later this month, her coach said. Rapinoe's apparent decision to sit out a monthlong tournament in Utah neither Rapinoe, her agent or her team, OL Reign, would confirm she had made a binding decision not to play was revealed by her new coach, Farid Benstiti, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Progres. "I understand her motivations, but I am disappointed and frustrated that she will not be with us to compete in this tournament," Benstiti told Le Progres. "Megan is important to the group, and we could have achieved something big if she had joined the rest of the group. She will be missed by the team and also by women's football." The Utah tournament, the N.W.S.L. Challenge Cup, is a new competition arranged by the league as a way to ensure it will play something resembling a season this year amid the coronavirus pandemic. To pull off the event, the league will gather its nine teams and place them in semi quarantine in Utah while they play a series of matches and then a brief knockout tournament. For the duration of the competition, the N.W.S.L. will house the players and staff members and subject them to repeated testing for the virus, which has infected more than 1.8 million Americans and killed more than 107,000 of them. Before announcing the event, the league held discussions with its players to try to assuage concerns about everything from health and testing protocols to isolation from their families and partners to the risks of injury from a compressed schedule in which most games will be played on artificial turf. In unveiling plans for the competition after weeks of quiet negotiations, the league and the players' union went out of their way to say that every player had the right to choose whether to take part and that there would be no consequences if they decided not to do so. Either way, the league said, all players' salaries and benefits would be guaranteed through 2020. Rapinoe's agent, Dan Levy, did not respond to messages seeking comment on her status. Neither did a spokeswoman for her team, OL Reign. The N.W.S.L. declined to comment on the French news report or Benstiti's comments about Rapinoe's decision. That Rapinoe, 34, might elect to sit out the tournament would not necessarily come as a surprise. The teams will play on artificial turf until the semifinal and final rounds of the N.W.S.L. tournament. The prevalence of artificial playing surfaces has been a sore issue in women's soccer for years, to the point that dozens of the world's top players sued FIFA, the sport's governing body, in an effort to have it removed before the 2015 Women's World Cup in Canada. Months after the United States won that tournament, Rapinoe tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee while training on a turf field before one of the national team's victory tour games. She also tore the meniscus in her left knee in 2017. Concerns about injuries this summer have been on many athletes' minds ahead of the Utah event because there will be an abbreviated training period for the players, many of whom have not been able to work out normally while adhering to stay at home orders. And while some players might feel pressured to participate to remain in the good graces of their teams, Rapinoe, as one of the most popular and most marketable stars in the game, is presumably not at risk of losing her place in the pecking order at OL Reign. Still, the N.W.S.L. would no doubt miss the presence of Rapinoe and any of the other top American women who are considering sitting out. Rapinoe was named the tournament's top player after leading the United States to the title at the 2019 Women's World Cup, where she elevated her profile as a candid, eloquent and often very humorous speaker on a range of social issues. Rapinoe will not be completely out of the spotlight this summer, though. On June 21, she will host ESPN's annual ESPY Awards which will be held virtually with her girlfriend, the W.N.B.A. star Sue Bird, and N.F.L. quarterback Russell Wilson.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
It's not unusual for meteors to illuminate night skies over southwestern Australia's desolate landscapes. But the fireball of July 7, 2017, was different. For a full minute and a half, it just kept burning and burning and burning. The object carved a trace of light as wide across as Texas, then faded. Many meteors disintegrate in our atmosphere, or slow down and crash into the soil. But after its light show, this one kept going, departing our planet with a celestial "thanks, but no thanks." Next stop: Jupiter, at the beginning of 2025. And after tangling with that giant planet's gravity, it will most likely be ejected into interstellar space, said Patrick Shober, a graduate student at Curtin University in Western Australia who led a team that studied the event. The July 2017 event is known as a grazing fireball, a rare type of meteoroid that hits Earth's atmosphere at a low angle, then skims like a skipping stone on a lake. Some are legendary, like 1783's Great Meteor, which streaked past England and over continental Europe, or the incorrectly named Great Comet of 1860, which was painted by the Hudson River School artist Frederic Church and inspired a poem by Walt Whitman. The first grazing fireball to be studied by modern science zipped over North America for 101 seconds in 1972. But few spend this long dipping into the atmosphere. And not one has ever been as well studied. It might have gone unseen if not for the Desert Fireball Network, a set of observatories that span a vast, sparsely populated swath of Australia. The network's goal is to fetch meteorites that land in the desert. "We see a lot of things that people don't see because we put the cameras in places where we can find the rock," Mr. Shober said. But in this case, there was nothing to retrieve. His team estimates the rock responsible for the event entered the atmosphere weighing 130 pounds and measuring only about a foot across. But it blazed so brightly for so long because it traveled on a shallow path and moved at a blistering pace of about 10 miles per second. Near its lowest point, still about 36 miles above the surface of the Earth, a chunk broke off and burned up. By triangulating its trajectory from multiple positions, Mr. Shober traced the fireball back to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, his team reports in a paper that will be published by The Astronomical Journal. As it reached Earth, the planet gave it an extra kick. "It gained orbital energy from the close encounter the same way a space mission might use a slingshot maneuver," he said, referring to the orbital navigations NASA and other space agencies use to speed robotic probes toward their destinations. That sent it careening toward Jupiter, giving it an elongated, outbound orbit more like a comet's than an asteroid's. Its path interests astronomers, who can't study anything this small through a telescope. The interplanetary rock passing routes that astronomers usually study "are like American football: Neptune to Uranus, Uranus to Saturn, and then to Jupiter, and they're sort of passing things forward," said Erin Ryan, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in California who was not involved in the study. "But in this case, it's kind of more like rugby, where everything is getting passed backwards." Mr. Shober, who is now working to understand just how often our planet might assist in these passes, said the same interplanetary rerouting might also occur around Mars, Venus and Mercury. As for the Australian meteoroid, his simulations suggest that repeated encounters with Jupiter will most likely have kicked it out of the solar system within half a million years. That leaves astronomers waiting for the next grazing fireball. They're adding more eyes to the hunt with a newly formed Global Fireball Observatory that knits together the effort in Australia with projects elsewhere. Cameras will soon be scanning the skies over 2 percent of the world's surface. "It will be interesting to see how many more of these they get," Dr. Ryan said.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Soon after Charles Manson was indicted on murder charges in 1969, his dream of celebrity became a reality. Life magazine put him on a cover with a headline "The Love and Terror Cult" that read like a trashy film poster. Inside, there was more horror, more titillation: "Flattery, fear and sex lured his girls into a sisterhood of exploitation." Manson was the star the mythic monster, the devil among us, the dark side of the American id but just as fascinating were the pretty young women with the flowing hair and big, blank smiles who formed the eerie nucleus of what was called the family. In her powerful and deeply affecting "Charlie Says," Mary Harron revisits the Manson cult in a dramatization largely told from the perspective of his female followers. It's a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner's script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license. She revisits some of the familiar locations, including the dusty California ranch where the Manson family set up house, and she carefully restages some of the murders. For those familiar with the horrific details of those crimes, the movie may seem wholly uninviting, but bear with Harron she has something to say. One of the smartest things about "Charlie Says" is that, as the name telegraphs, it isn't really about its title character, who can feel like a blank even when onscreen. (He's played by the British actor Matt Smith, from the television shows "Doctor Who" and "The Crown.") The movie instead narrows in on three female followers who, under his sway, compulsively repeat what he says, invoking him like a deity. Their idolatry begins shifting in prison when they meet Karlene Faith (the empathetic Merritt Wever), a graduate student who cracks open the door to their consciousness and, by extension, their autonomous selves by asking something that hasn't been asked in a while: What do you think? Karlene is teaching in a California women's prison where, after their conviction, the women have been isolated from the main population. Answering the invitation of the enlightened warden (Annabeth Gish), she starts engaging with the women, just by talking. It's a modest first step in what becomes a complex attempt to rehumanize and reindividualize them. To themselves and the outside world in real life, they were often referred to as the Manson girls or Charlie's girls, and seen as part of his so called harem these women remain under his shadow, an extension of him, his property. This then is about a struggle for freedom, a liberation of the mind and the spirit that is fought for in prison visits and through consciousness raising and mind expanding reading. Karlene gives the women copies of Robin Morgan's feminist landmark "Sisterhood Is Powerful." Over the course of the story, she also peels away their defenses and smiles, digging into their past with Charlie, which is glimpsed in elliptical flashbacks. As the three begin responding, they become recognizably human, at times uneasily likable, which only deepens the horror of their crimes. It is, the movie argues, easier to label someone a monster than to acknowledge that ordinary people can be monstrous. Leslie, a.k.a. Lulu (a quietly affecting Hannah Murray, from "Game of Thrones"), becomes the main portal to the family's past. (The character is based on Leslie Van Houten, who, with Manson, was found guilty of murders, along with the other two featured women: Susan Atkins, a.k.a. Sadie, played by Marianne Rendon; and Patricia Krenwinkel, a.k.a. Katie, played by Sosie Bacon.) Leslie first meets Charlie when she's brought by a friend to the Spahn Movie Ranch, the rundown location and tourist attraction where the family has set up ramshackle house. There, amid the dust and scrub and sagging old timey wooden buildings, Charlie lords over a gaggle of hangers on, mostly women. The flashbacks are smoothly integrated with the prison sequences, which visually underscores that these spaces have more in common than it might seem. Harron often uses dissolves to further blur past and present; as things fall apart on the ranch and Charlie's eccentricities grow progressively more frenzied, the interiors grow dimmer and seemingly smaller, more claustrophobic. There are different ways to imprison someone, including with love and instilled dependence. Leslie (Lulu at the ranch) loves Charlie and has surrendered to him. Part of what is so tragic and ghastly about the Manson family is that sometimes this surrender looks like liberation. There's a feminist argument to be made about the dangers of an all consuming dependence that feels inescapable, even desirable. But Harron and Turner aren't engaging in polemics; they're telling a complex, nuanced story about power and how it is both taken and surrendered. And while Leslie, Susan and Patricia are victims, they are also victimizers, which the movie reminds you as it creeps toward the murders and toward a harrowing, mercifully brief scene with the family's most famous victim, Sharon Tate (Grace Van Dien), then married to Roman Polanski. Harron, best known for "American Psycho," handles the violence here brilliantly, rightly keeping the focus on Tate. At first, Smith, who's fuzzed and scuzzed for the role, seems miscast. His Charlie isn't especially attractive and doesn't read as remotely charismatic. The further the story develops, the more this lack of conspicuous magnetism reads like a deliberate choice, a strategic way of taking away some of the odious star power and fame burnishing mystery that Manson accrued over the years. It's hard to imagine this cult leader inspiring the interest, even adulation (ironic or not), that the real figure did. Manson was an aspiring musician and former convict; in this telling, he is also a two bit lunatic con man, the kind who recurrently pops up in American history selling a dream that becomes a nightmare.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Mike Porco owned the restaurant turned music venue Gerde's Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village, and one October night, a few friends showed up to celebrate Mr. Porco's birthday. Allen Ginsberg was there, as were the familiar folkies Phil Ochs and Bob Neuwirth. None were better known than Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, who first met at the original Gerde's and performed that night as well. But this wasn't the early 1960s folk scene. The year was 1975, and Mr. Dylan, not yet a Nobel Prize winner but long since a songwriting legend, was in the middle of his third stint living in the Village. That night, he and his artist friends weren't just celebrating Mr. Porco's birthday, a man who Mr. Dylan said "became like father to me." They were also rehearsing for his coming Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Mr. Dylan would soon move on from the Village scene for good, as the neighborhood was far from what it had been during those first years of artistic discovery. "America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes," he wrote of his early days in New York in his memoir "Chronicles." "New York was as good a place to be as any." Greenwich Village is drastically different now from the place Mr. Dylan left behind, but there are still remnants from his days of leading a generation defining music scene, and landmarks worth exploring for aspiring Dylanologists. Robert Zimmerman arrived in January 1961, and would soon find Mr. Guthrie at the Greystone Hospital near Morristown, N.J. (where he was being treated for Huntington's disease), but not before persuading Fred Neil, who ran the daytime show at Manny Roth's Cafe Wha?, to let him perform at the Village coffeehouse on his first day in the city. He described the cafe as "a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables," but "that's where I started playing regular in New York." Cafe Wha? is still a fixture of Macdougal Street, and one of the few Dylan haunts still operating under the same name in the same location. But not much else is like it was in the early 1960s. The club closed in 1968, had a long run as a Middle Eastern restaurant, and opened again as Cafe Wha?, under new management, in 1987. Music is still the main draw, with the talented Cafe Wha? Band headlining most nights. They'll play at your wedding, too. Caffe Reggio, which claims to have served the first cappuccino in the United States, remains open and is much as it was, minus the music, on Macdougal Street, as is Caffe Dante (now Dante NYC), where small plates have replaced protest songs. The Commons, also on Macdougal, near Minetta Lane, was where Mr. Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind," and was later renamed Fat Black Pussycat. It has since become Panchito's Mexican Restaurant and Cantina, which in 2011 erased the last tie to its musical past when it painted over the faded lettering reading "Fat Black Pussycat Theatre" above its entrance. In Mr. Dylan's mind, none of these smaller coffeehouses compared with the Gaslight Cafe (116 Macdougal), a "cryptic club" that "an unknown couldn't break into," he wrote, though he managed to eventually. The Gaslight "had a dominant presence on the street, more prestige than anyplace else," he wrote. While the Gaslight closed in 1971, the Kettle of Fish bar, which Mr. Dylan and his contemporaries would frequent next door, is still in business, though it is now at its third location, at 59 Christopher Street, and attracts far more Packers fans than folkies these days. As for the Fat Black Pussycat, it's now a night spot featuring a lounge, pub and downstairs dance club at 130 West Third Street. Its front room was once Kettle of Fish's second home, and photographs and paintings still pay tribute to that bar's history. Next door at 169 West Fourth Street remains the Music Inn, where he would sometimes borrow instruments to play. Ms. Rotolo described it in her memoir as "an impossibly cluttered store that sold every kind of instrument ever made in the entire world." It's still cluttered, and still sells all kinds of instruments and has an open mike night on Thursdays. A short walk from the West Fourth Street apartment is the site of what Anthony DeCurtis in The Times called "one of the most evocative images of Greenwich Village in the 1960s." The cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" captures the couple strolling down a snow covered Jones Street in February 1963. "It was freezing out," Ms. Rotolo told Mr. DeCurtis. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all." The album, which featured some of Mr. Dylan's best known songs, including "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" and "Girl From the North Country," propelled him to larger New York venues like Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, now called David Geffen Hall. But the immense fame that followed would chase Mr. Dylan and his eventual wife, Sara, from the Village to upstate New York. They returned to the Village in 1969. Despite Mr. Dylan's notoriety, he remembered, he was relatively unbothered by those in the neighborhood, and purchased a 19th century townhouse at 94 Macdougal Street. But there was no respite from the obsessive fans who tracked him down and "paraded up and down in front of it chanting and shouting, demanding for me to come out and lead them somewhere," he wrote in "Chronicles." His family was forced to seek peace elsewhere when they could. In addition, "the stimulation had vanished. Everybody was in a pretty down mood. It was over," he told Playboy in 1978. He would later call his return to the Village "a stupid thing to do." Still, years later, after his first major tour since the mid '60s and enduring a bitter divorce from Sara, he found himself back in the Village, this time living alone. He started hanging out at some of his old favorite spots, like Gerde's, which had moved from its original location at 11 West Fourth Street to 130 West Third Street, and the Kettle of Fish, and found some peace at the Bitter End (147 Bleecker Street), where he played pool, watched bands and sometimes went onstage to perform. "I made sure no one bothered him," the owner Paul Colby said in "The Greenwich Village Reader." Kris Kristofferson told The Times that the Bitter End was the place "people like me and Bob Dylan didn't just perform, we came to hang out."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Ars Nova, the daring Off Broadway company that has nurtured the career of Lin Manuel Miranda and shows including "Natasha, Pierre the Great Comet of 1812," will move its home base from Hell's Kitchen to Greenwich Village beginning in early 2019. The company plans to keep its current home on 54th Street in Manhattan, but will use the Greenwich House Theater as its primary venue for performances. That space is currently the home of Barrow Street Theater, which was notified on Thursday that its lease would not be renewed. "I'm not pleased," Scott Morfee, Barrow Street's founding producer, said in an interview. "I suppose over time that there will be more to say, but for now I wouldn't have a way of being able to say what comes next." Last year, Greenwich House put out a formal request for proposals for companies to occupy its historic 199 seat theater, which has housed Barrow Street productions including Tracy Letts's "Bug," Nina Raine's "Tribes" and Lucy Prebble's "The Effect" since 2003. Tooting Arts Club's much extended revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" is currently at the theater, with plans to run at least through May 27.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
It could have been any day on the internet: A critical comment, not naming President Trump or his Republican allies but clearly aimed at them, circulated on social media. But the passage shared over the past few days by educators, writers and veterans of past presidential administrations came from an unlikely source: "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel about greed and aspiration published nearly a century ago. "They were careless people," Nick Carraway, the narrator, concludes about Tom and Daisy Buchanan, characters whose excesses ultimately destroy the lives of those around them. "They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." For those who shared the passage online, Fitzgerald's indictment of the rich, blase Buchanans in the novel's final pages seemed to fit an administration that has attempted to downplay the pandemic, even after Trump and other top Republicans tested positive for Covid 19. "The juxtaposition between their privilege and their seeming indifference to the possibility of spreading the coronavirus is what was striking to me," said Natalie J. Ring, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas whose Friday tweet sharing the Fitzgerald passage has racked up thousands of likes and retweets. "I was just stunned by, as Fitzgerald says, the carelessness of these people." That recurrence is a testament to the novel's enduring resonance. Despite selling poorly and earning mixed reviews during Fitzgerald's lifetime, "Gatsby" became a perennial American classic after his death in 1940. A staple of high school curriculums nationwide, it reliably sells half a million copies in the United States each year. "I love what an old, old student of mine said once: It's the Sistine Chapel of American literature in 185 pages," said Maureen Corrigan, a Georgetown University English professor and the author of "So We Read On," a 2014 book about the novel's origins and cultural endurance. "It does that magical thing of saying something big about America, and saying it in gorgeous, unforgettable language. That's why we're all quoting 'careless people' right now." For some readers, the lessons of "Gatsby" have been colored by the Trump presidency and by a pandemic that has claimed more than 210,000 American lives and roiled the economy. "The problem with 'The Great Gatsby,' which was written in 1925, is that you get the stock market crash in 1929," said Ring, who teaches a course on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, periods of material excess and reform that preceded the Great Depression. "We're already there." But if anything, the novel's purchase on American society seems likely to increase in the coming years. The rights to "Gatsby," which have remained with Fitzgerald's descendants for decades, are set to become public domain in January. That could prompt renewed attention on the book, said Blake Hazard, Fitzgerald's great granddaughter and a trustee of his literary estate. "We have to assume that there's going to be adaptations, sequels, prequels and whatever people dream up," said Hazard, a Los Angeles singer songwriter whose Instagram account is studded with references to her literary forebear. And as an election that will decide Trump's political fate approaches, the question of whether his presidency will inflect future readings and adaptations may hinge on another: What would Fitzgerald have made of the president?
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
The new coronavirus is not the only illness that teachers, students, parents and staff will have to worry about as some schools attempt to reopen this fall. Legionella could lurk in the water supplies of school buildings, and some measures to keep people in schools safe from coronavirus may even increase risks from deadly illnesses caused by the bacteria. Last week in Ohio, officials found Legionella at five schools in an assortment of towns. On Friday, a district in Pennsylvania also announced it had found Legionella at four of its schools. "It is unusual to hear about nine schools in a one week period having a detection of Legionella," said Andrew Whelton, an associate professor of civil, environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University in Indiana who has been studying the effects of lockdown on water systems. He said that more schools may be testing for the bacteria than in a typical year. Legionella, usually Legionella pneumophila, is the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease, a respiratory condition. It can form in stagnant water and then disperse through the air and be inhaled when, for example, a shower or tap is turned on. It can be fatal in one in 10 cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although young children are less at risk of Legionnaires', older students, adults and people with compromised immune systems are vulnerable. To protect against the spread of coronavirus, many school buildings have been unoccupied since March. Their bathrooms, cafeterias and sports facilities have gone unused. While low occupancy in schools is typical during summer breaks, many are open for summer school and other activities. Experts worry that water was left to stagnate in plumbing during lockdown, and that schools don't have plans or effective guidance from health authorities for dealing with the effects of prolonged shutdowns. "Schools generally do not have a water management plan," Dr. Whelton said. "There's a myth that most do. They don't in my experience." Precautions that schools may take to limit coronavirus infection risk could also add to Legionella concerns. For instance, some schools are turning off drinking fountains to prevent oral spread of the virus, or closing off every other sink to ensure social distancing. Some sports facilities also remain closed because of the risk to student athletes and coaches. But stagnant water in unused drinking fountains or sink plumbing could be a good reservoir in which the bacteria could grow. And shower heads like those found in locker rooms are common places for Legionella to proliferate. Facilities managers will need to be on guard for the bacteria in school athletics complexes if sports start again next spring. And Dr. Whelton said that many people responsible for managing buildings' water systems "had no idea you can acquire Legionella from showers and toilets." The C.D.C. has issued guidelines for business and building reopenings after coronavirus lockdowns. A spokeswoman from the agency said that its guidelines are "applicable to all types of buildings," including schools. But the vagueness of many of the guidelines, according to Dr. Whelton, means that schools can do as much or as little of general preventive steps and claim to be compliant. The usual way to guard against Legionella growth is a process known as flushing. Bringing fresh water into the system keeps a small dose of chlorine in the system, which limits the bacteria's ability to propagate. But flushing has to be done regularly and for all outlets. That means running every tap, shower and toilet. One of the schools in Ohio that found the bacteria, Englewood Elementary in the Northmont City Schools district outside of Dayton, began flushing its system in July. When a water management company discovered Legionella last week, they shut down all the water in the building and sent a high level of chlorine through the system. A spokeswoman from the district said that they are continuing to test the water to ensure its safety. The only way to tell if the flushing is effective is to test the water. Flushing once does not get rid of Legionella if it is present. Milton Union High School in Ohio began testing their water in late July. They found that after 72 hours the chlorine level had dropped to zero. They flushed again and when they tested 24 hours later it was back again to zero. They tested the water and found Legionella. The Landscape of the Post Pandemic Return to Office None Delta variant delays. A wave of the contagious Delta variant is causing companies to reconsider when they will require employees to return, and what health requirements should be in place when they do. A generation gap. While workers of all ages have become accustomed to dialing in and skipping the wearying commute, younger ones have grown especially attached to the new way of doing business. This is causing some difficult conversations between managers and newer hires. How to keep offices safe. Handwashing is a simple way to reduce the spread of disease, but employers should be thinking about improved ventilation systems, creative scheduling and making sure their building is ready after months of low use. Return to work anxiety. Remote work brought many challenges, particularly for women of color. But going back will also mean a return to microaggressions, pressure to conform to white standards of professionalism, and high rates of stress and burnout. Caitlin Proctor, a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue who has been studying Legionella during lockdown, said that despite the use of chlorine, the bacteria's biofilms can protect some of them from disappearing completely. "They can proliferate again once that disinfectant dissipates." Officials of the Fox Chapel Area School District in a Pittsburgh suburb, which also detected the bacteria in multiple schools, said in an email to parents that they were sending high temperature water through the system. This process, known as thermal shock, was proposed by county health authorities as another means of killing off the bacteria. However, some industry groups question the effectiveness of thermal shock for stopping Legionella. Some schools do not have the budget to test for Legionella and other waterborne risks. But even those schools that do are encountering a lack of authoritative advice. Many, for example, test their water directly after flushing. Because the water is fresh, the Legionella will not show up, rendering the test ineffective. "You're not supposed to measure immediately after you flush, but that's not so clear in the guidance," said Michele Prevost, a civil engineering professor at Polytechnique Montreal, who has worked on studies on Legionella and drinking water in the United States. Knowingly or unknowingly these schools are essentially cheating the test. And there is no requirement that schools test for Legionella. Nor is there a mandate that they report it if they do find it. Health authorities are required to report to the C.D.C. cases of illness caused by Legionella, but not the presence of the bacteria. Some of the schools in both Ohio and Pennsylvania opened their doors to students this week despite being unable to confirm the elimination of Legionella, which can take weeks. Dr. Whelton said that if more schools tested for the bacteria, more would likely detect the problem. But it remains to be seen how many will choose to do so. "If parents haven't heard from their schools about whether or not testing is being conducted, then they should start asking questions."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
Credit...Jake Naughton for The New York Times The New Museum isn't new any more. It hit 40 this year, by some reckonings early middle age, though it's still thinking young, or youngish, and living in the now. One thing that made it feel fresh early on was that it did shows on themes no other museums were tackling, like the 1982 "Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art," the first major American institutional survey of work by gay and lesbian artists. Now comes another such venture, "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon," a look at concepts of "trans" and "queer" as embodied in new art. The difficulty is that queer, and to some extent trans, are hard to capture, institutionally. Slipperiness is built into them; they don't sit still. Trans by definition is the act of changing, going beyond the boundaries of gender (and race, and class). Those boundaries are porous, and crossings in any direction are negotiable. Queer is even more category aversive. It's not so much a personal identity as a political impulse, a strategy for thwarting assimilation and sowing constructive chaos at a time when culture wars are again escalating. The question is whether a cohesive exhibition can be forged from such chaos. The answer in the case of "Trigger" which includes more than 40 artists and collectives and fills three floors of the museum as well as its lobby is just barely, to which an important coda must be added: Asking for cohesion in a survey of trans and queer art is probably asking for the wrong thing. This is not to say there are no through lines. Grounding the show are historical references that keep the gay trans queer links always in sight. We get an encyclopedic dose of that history in a newsprint photo collage posted in the museum's main elevator. Produced by the artist Chris E. Vargas, and attributed to the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art that he founded as an archive in 2013, the picture is a group shot of L.G.B.T.Q.I. (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex) celebrity spanning the centuries. Johnson was a "drag mother" to young trans women living in the New York City streets, and the tendency to replace hostile birth families with families of choice has long been a hallmark of gay, trans and queer life. The artist and performer Justin Vivian Bond made the switch as a teenager, nominating, from afar, the Estee Lauder model Karen Graham, seen in magazine ads, as a surrogate mother. The artist, who identifies as "trans genre," uses "Mx." as an honorific, and prefers to be referred to as "they," tells this adoption by proxy story in an installation called "My Model Myself," which sets drawings of Ms. Graham by a teenage Bond beside recent, superglam Bond self portraits to illustrate how trans self fashioning works. Tschabalala Self, who stitches racially and sexually ambiguous figures from patches of fabric on canvas, is one of several artists working with traditionally female associated media. (Feminism is, of course, deeply folded into the show.) Diamond Stingily, who as a child hung out in her mother's Chicago hair salon, is another: her sculpture, a single long braid of artificial hair, trails through all three floors of the show and into the lobby. Vaginal Davis, originally from Los Angeles, now in Berlin, adds social class to the mix in small wall reliefs made from Dollar Store beauty supplies: Wet n Wild nail polish, Aqua Net hair spray and perfume by Jean Nate. Ms. Davis's sculptures are only subtly figurative. And the show's organizers Johanna Burton, director and curator of education and public engagement at the New Museum, working with Natalie Bell and Sara O'Keeffe, assistant curators have included a substantial amount of entirely abstract work of a kind 1982 audiences perceived as apolitical, though here it is not. Although you wouldn't know this without reading a wall label, the fine netlike patterns in Ellen Lesperance's gouache paintings are inspired by photographic close ups of clothing worn by female activists, past and present. Surely the residents of the women only retirement park that Connie Samaras has been photographing over the past six years 15 prints from the series are on view would qualify as Lesperance subjects. At the same time, it's hard to figure out why certain art is here: the many wonky little sculptures (a few would do), the big, boxy "stage" that technically goes with a Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz film, but mostly just takes up space. In the exhibition catalog, Mr. Moten speaks of "Trigger" as an example of "a poetics of the mess," a fair description, in good ways and not. The show avoids the standard institutional tactics of curating your thinking, mapping your path, telling you what you basically already know. It hands you a slew of ideas and leaves you to sort through them, which means it leaves you confused. You're not alone: the catalog includes three round table discussions among "exhibition advisers," and they sound confused too but thinking hard, which is the point of an experiment like this. Confusion may be the only reasonable response to the world at present. And creating confusion may be queer's most useful weapon. Queer has no fixed fan base. Genders, races, classes: bring them on. But it has one broad political mandate: to foster instability as resistance to any status quo. Resistance is good exercise. It helps keep you young. And it can keep you alert. Even when you lose track of what "normal" is, you know you don't want to be that.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
It's a rare and refreshing moment for the queer coffee table book collector (your reporter included): As New York City prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion by hosting World Pride this June, an array of titles celebrating the L.G.B.T.Q. community's history, art and culture are suddenly on offer. The lineup is impressive, both in its scale there are more books than the 10 fit to print here and in its sweep, comprising histories of rights, artworks and lovers gained and lost to time. Read Holland Cotter's review of Stonewall exhibitions, and our guide to Pride events. "We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation" (Ten Speed Press, 40), the tallest of the titles, ironically began as a pocket sized project: the Instagram account lgbt history. Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown, the creators of the 400,000 strong account and the book's co authors, were compelled to immerse themselves and their readership in a legacy that eludes many of today's Millennials and Generation Z ers. In print, this translates to an impassioned photographic tour of an ever changing, increasingly vocal and insistently resilient L.G.B.T.Q. community and culture, from 19th century ideology to contemporary conversations around intersectionality. Those still grappling with terminology (including the L.G.B.T.Q. community's reclaiming of the former slur "queer" itself) would benefit from flipping through the diminutive "The Queeriodic Table: A Celebration of LGBTQ Culture" (Summersdale, 13.99). The author Harriet Dyer goes far beyond the abbreviation to explore key vocabulary, figures, historical markers and artistic works, all packaged in cheery graphics and clear, conversational language. "Oh, labels. We humans use them to make things easier and they just don't always work that well," Dyer writes in the book's introduction, a fitting invitation to unpack and question them. "Pride: Fifty Years of Parades and Protests From the Photo Archives of The New York Times" (Abrams Image, 24.99) offers a self reflexive review of the ways in which this newspaper has reported on the L.G.B.T.Q. community over the past half century. In his introduction, The Times's Los Angeles bureau chief, Adam Nagourney, takes the paper to task for its shortcomings in regards to its coverage of Stonewall and AIDS, among other subjects. The book reproduces a February 28, 1971 article, "More Homosexuals Aided to Become Heterosexual," published two years before the American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was not, in fact, a mental illness. The chronological interplay of published stories and more than 350 photographs presents a timeline of the relentless march and marches of recent history, as filtered through the media's perspectives and prejudices. "Pride: Photographs After Stonewall" (OR Books, paper, 30) offers a more intimate account of the events of June 28, 1969, and the decades hence, via the lens of The Village Voice's first picture editor and staff photographer, Fred W. McDarrah. The book is a reissue of a 1994 publication, now out of print, initially published in time for Stonewall's 25th anniversary, but the black and white images somehow feel more resonant today than ever before. Despite the visual ephemera on display in recent retrospectives and publications, McDarrah was one of the only photographers to capture the immediate aftermath of that now legendary weekend, from the smashed jukeboxes and graffiti scrawled windows to the slightly stunned and celebratory crowd outside of Greenwich Village's 53 Christopher Street. McDarrah continued to document New York's often overlooked L.G.B.T.Q. community until the 1990s, and his full body of work is interspersed throughout the book with poignant quotes from the subjects pictured. Similarly, "Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet Into the Stonewall Era" (W. W. Norton Company, 24.95) frames the turbulent and triumphant 1960s and '70s from the distinctive vantage points of the photographers Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies. The album is a distillation of an exhibition at the New York Public Library, running through July 13, here culled into four themes by the editor and curator Jason Baumann. One of them, "Visibility," comprises a collection of quiet portraits of Lahusen and Davies's community of activists, such as the tireless, seemingly ubiquitous Marsha P. Johnson. First published in 2013, "Art Queer Culture," by the professors Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer (Phaidon, paper, 39.95), aimed to codify, dissect and celebrate an L.G.B.T.Q. fine art canon. There's much to absorb in this expanded reissue over 130 years' worth and much of it benefits from a close read of the (very) fine print, owing to its furtive, discrete or symbolic nature. Thus does the sexually ambiguous Thomas Eakins's 1883 85 scandal steeped "Swimming" open the first portion, its sensuous portrayal of nude male bodies a prelude to the increasingly bold, complex and diverse queer work that follows. Per its title, the scope of "Art After Stonewall, 1969 1989" (Rizzoli Electa, 60) is relegated to the two seismic decades following the uprising. This particular catalog coincides with an exhibit organized by Ohio's Columbus Museum of Art, split into two segments for its opening at New York's Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and New York University's Grey Art Gallery (through July). Helmed by the artist and curator Jonathan Weinberg, the book and exhibition situate the work within seven themes. Among them: "Coming Out" (Peter Hujar's triumphant photograph for a Gay Liberation Front poster in 1970) and "AIDS and Activism" (Lola Flash's haunting image "AIDS Quilt," 1987). Weinberg has also authored another title, the result of 16 years of research: "Pier Groups: Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront" (Penn State University Press, 34.95). This far more personal and academic tome focuses on the 1970s, when Weinberg himself used to trawl Manhattan's West Side piers for both sexual and artistic gratification. The rambling, blighted structures that once represented the city's reputation as a booming seaport were newly rife for site specific artwork and documentation by the likes of Gordon Matta Clark, whose 1975 "Days End" five gaping incisions into the now destroyed Pier 52 presided over the comings and goings of gay men looking for connection and satisfaction. It's an alluring homage to a time, a community and a landscape that have long since vanished.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
This contemporary waterfront house is in a wooded enclave of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, on the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island, off the Pacific Coast of Canada. It is on 1.3 landscaped acres facing Haro Strait, between the United States and Canada, near Cadboro Bay. Built in 1983, it is in the Ten Mile Point neighborhood, where there are many estates of an acre or more, and is close to parks, beaches and the University of Victoria. The two level structure is around 5,120 square feet, with five bedrooms and four and a half baths. The foyer, on the main level, has exposed wood beams and nearly 14 foot vaulted ceilings. "It's quite a dramatic feel when you come in you can see through to the ocean," said Lisa Williams, an agent with Sotheby's International Realty Canada, the listing broker. "There's a lot of natural light in the house, with many oversize windows." The owners, who are from China, bought the house about two years ago, she said, and have made extensive renovations. Off the foyer are the dining and living rooms, both of which have walls of windows and are anchored by a fireplace. There is also an open area with a skylight that includes a family room and kitchen; two rambling decks 1,959 square feet in all flank this space, with one deck facing the strait. The kitchen has stainless steel appliances, black granite counters, wood cabinetry and a separate breakfast nook. Nearby are a double pantry, laundry and powder rooms, and a mudroom that connects to a three car garage. The master suite is on the main level, with two walk in closets, a spacious bathroom with a soaking tub, and an office or den area currently used as a yoga studio. The other bedrooms and baths are on the lower level, along with a large exercise room; all are connected to a sprawling covered patio. A kidney shaped pool with a slide faces the strait. Nearby is a small structure with a changing room, shower and storage area. Ten Mile Point is in the city's Saanich district, which has a population around 114,000. It is about seven miles from downtown Victoria, around three miles from the University of Victoria and less than a mile from the Ten Mile Point Ecological Reserve. The housing market in Victoria, which consists of 13 municipalities, was weakened after the 2008 global financial crisis. But prices and sales quickly recovered, and the market remained stable before taking off in the last two years, said Ara Balabanian, the managing broker of Macdonald Realty Victoria. Last year "was just off the charts," said Mr. Balabanian, who is also president of the Victoria Real Estate Board. He attributed that to a combination of low interest rates, a healthy economy and pent up demand. Sales volume is moderately lower so far this year, he said, though prices are up. "It's still a good, brisk market." Most buyers can expect to pay between around 500,000 and 1 million Canadian dollars (or around 400,000 to 800,000) for a single family home, Mr. Balabanian said, with prices starting in the mid to high 200,000s (or around 200,000 and up) for a small condominium inland, and as much as 12 million (or 9.6 million) for a waterfront estate. Most buyers in Victoria and elsewhere on Vancouver Island are Canadian. "Foreigners are not a driving force in the market," Mr. Balabanian said. "They make up only about 5 percent." Those who do buy real estate in Victoria are usually from the United States or Asia, with a smaller number from Europe, and they are often buying retirement or second homes, he said, though "many Chinese buyers are purchasing condos for their children to go to school; it is a bit of a mix." Buyers are drawn to Vancouver Island's year round temperate climate, beaches, mountains and terrain, all of which make it a popular tourist destination. And fees are few: A 15 percent property tax on foreign buyers, instituted by British Columbia about a year ago, does not apply to the island (though it does apply to the greater Vancouver area). There are no restrictions on foreign buyers, although local financing can be difficult to obtain. "If Americans want to finance a purchase in Canada, they should probably do so through an American lender," said Michael J. Velletta, the founding partner of Velletta Company, a law firm in Victoria. "It's not so easy to establish credit in a foreign country." Agents recommend hiring a qualified local lawyer early on in the process to assist in reviewing the contract and to help with due diligence, which includes investigating the title and inspecting the property. "The land title system in B.C." or British Columbia "is a leading edge, world class system: It's very fast, efficient and accurate," Mr. Velletta said, adding that real estate transactions are often completed quickly. The seller typically pays the sales commission, which on this house is 6 percent of the first 100,000 Canadian dollars of the sale and 3 percent of the balance. Transaction costs for buyers include the home inspection, lawyer fees and other closing expenses.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
The Wall Street Journal named a new editor in chief on Tuesday, elevating Matthew J. Murray to the top spot at one of the country's pre eminent newspapers and bringing an end to the tenure of Gerard Baker, whose stewardship gave rise to unrest in the newsroom. The British born, Oxford educated Mr. Baker, who led the broadsheet for five and a half years, will remain at The Journal as a weekend columnist. He will also host live events and a Journal themed show on the Fox Business Network, which, like the newspaper, is an arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. At The Journal, Mr. Baker oversaw a sharp rise in readership and an award winning investigation that exposed fraudulent claims by the health care tech company Theranos. But he also faced apprehension among his staff. Last year, at an all hands meeting called to address concerns about coverage, Mr. Baker defended himself against accusations from reporters that the paper had gone easy on President Trump, and suggested that other news organizations had become overly negative in their coverage. He also encouraged unhappy newsroom employees to seek jobs elsewhere an offer that many reporters and editors took him up on. During his tenure at The Journal, more than a dozen left for new jobs at The Washington Post and The New York Times. News of Mr. Baker's exit on Tuesday caught the newsroom by surprise: No announcement was made to the staff besides a formal news release issued by the Murdoch owned News Corporation, which purchased Dow Jones, the paper's parent company, in 2007. News Corp. declined to make Mr. Baker or Mr. Murray available for comment. Some of the complaints about Mr. Baker emanated from The Journal's Washington bureau, which had bristled at his leadership role, given his past as an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama. Mr. Baker seemed friendlier toward Mr. Trump; during an Oval Office interview last year, the editor made small talk with the president about golf and greeted Ivanka Trump with a reminder that the two had socialized in the Hamptons a few weeks prior. 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. That Mr. Baker's comments became public was itself a sign of internal discord: A transcript of the Oval Office interview, which Mr. Baker had conducted along with other Journal reporters, was leaked to a rival news outlet. Later, a leak of late night emails from Mr. Baker in which he admonished Journal reporters and editors for their coverage of a Trump rally triggered a fresh round of newsroom consternation. Mr. Baker, 56, who had worked at The Financial Times and The Times of London before joining The Journal, appeared unmoved by the complaints. He defended his newspaper's political coverage as objective, rigorous and fairer to the new administration than that of its rivals. And it cannot be said that The Journal, during his watch, has not made Mr. Trump squirm: The paper has been at the forefront of reporting on payments involving the president and women who have said that they once had sexual relationships with him. Four days before the 2016 presidential election, The Journal broke the news of a 150,000 payoff made by the company that owns The National Enquirer to the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had a relationship with Mr. Trump. More recently, the paper has been aggressive in its coverage of Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, and his payment of 130,000 to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels, who has said that she had a sexual relationship with Mr. Trump in 2006. Mr. Baker's replacement, Mr. Murray, is a 24 year veteran of Dow Jones and The Journal's current executive editor. He will begin his new job on Monday. His first task is likely to be improving staff morale. The departures of top talent have been significant: Last month, three former Journal reporters received Pulitzer Prizes for their work at The Washington Post. (Mr. Baker's reporting crew received one Pulitzer during his tenure, for an investigation into health care data.) A Washington native who was educated at Northwestern University, Mr. Murray, 52, will take charge of a newsroom during one of the most intense, and intensely scrutinized, news environments in recent history. He started at the company in 1994 and became The Journal's banking reporter in 1997 before rising through the editing ranks. In 2013, he became a deputy to Mr. Baker. He is the author of "The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey Into the Monastic Life," which tells the story of his father, a former civil servant who entered a monastery. He is also a co author, with the former New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen, of "Strong of Heart." "I have no doubt that Matt is a worthy successor as editor in chief and will be a leader of the highest commitment and integrity," Robert Thomson, the chief executive of News Corp., said in a statement. "His strong reporting and editing background and his passion for The Journal are obvious to all who have the privilege of working with him." On Tuesday evening, Mr. Murray wrote on Twitter that he was "humbled and excited" about his new role. He added: "We've made great strides and are doing so much great work and there is much more to come!"
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
CHICAGO Of the issues that remain to be settled in the contract dispute here between the teachers' union and the city, expanding charter schools is not officially on the table. But the specter of those plans an oft cited goal of Mayor Rahm Emanuel hangs heavily over the teachers' strike. "Even if it's not explicitly something that we're bargaining over," said Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union, "everyone knows it's the elephant in the room." While 350,000 students here remained out of school for the third day of the citywide teachers' strike, about 50,000 who attend the city's 96 charter schools went to class as usual. The charters, which are publicly financed but privately operated, are not required to hire unionized workers, and a majority of them do not. Experienced teachers at charter schools make about 15,000 to 30,000 less than their counterparts at traditional district schools, where the average salary is 75,000. Union members see the mayor's vocal support for charters as of a piece with other initiatives that he has introduced, and that have led to the strike. Charters play a prominent role in a national education agenda for change that includes more rigorous teacher evaluations and challenges to union seniority, issues that have proved nettlesome in these negotiations. But here as in other cities across the nation, the role of charters ignites passions on both sides. Teachers regard them as a way for districts to undermine union protections, and say that underperforming schools are often closed before they have a chance to improve, and then are replaced with charters. "This is an effort to pull out the rug from under neighborhood schools and the union members who work in them," Mr. Potter said. Critics also argue that charter schools, which have open enrollment policies but often draw pupils from across a city, siphon away public financing and the most motivated students from neighborhood schools, leaving teachers in traditional public schools to work with the most needy students. Proponents, meanwhile, say that the charter schools offer parents much needed alternatives to failing public schools. Sharonya Simon was looking for a better fit for her son when she pulled him out of a gifted program in a traditional district school five years ago and enrolled him and later her daughter in Chicago International Charter School Bucktown, on the Northwest Side. At the neighborhood school, "I did not feel like he was being challenged," she said during a parents' meeting at the school on Wednesday. Ms. Simon also said that teachers spent too much time disciplining troubled students, and that many of her son's classmates came from families with uninterested parents. At the charter school, she said, "you have a different group because of what we have to go through to get our kids into a charter school. You have more involved parents here." Ms. Simon said she was also happy with the quality of instruction there. Unlike district schools that work under more centralized leadership, charter schools govern their own curriculum and finances. Although Mayor Emanuel frequently holds up specific charter schools as exemplary performers, and has cited the fact that 19,000 families are on waiting lists for the city's charter schools, their performance has been mixed, here as in the rest of the country. As originally conceived, charters were designed to be laboratories for new ideas in education that could then be transferred to traditional public schools. In fact, some of the issues that have been most contentious in the Chicago contract negotiations test score driven teacher evaluations, more freedom for principals to make hiring decisions separate from seniority rules, and longer school days originated in charter schools. "We want charters to be not only helpful to the kids in them, but we want them to be helpful for the broader set of kids in public education," said Todd Ziebarth, vice president for state advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But charters often have more freedom to develop curriculum and other policies than traditional schools do. On Wednesday morning, second graders at Bucktown sat on the carpet in front of their teacher, Blair Burson, as she guided them through a lesson in distinguishing realism from fantasy in "Julius," a book about a girl and her pet pig that the class had read that morning. Christy Krier, the director of the Bucktown school, said that students took numerous tests throughout the year to gauge their learning and to help teachers adjust their lesson plans. Although students' progress on these tests figure into teacher evaluations, Ms. Krier said that she did not set classwide targets for teachers to meet in order to qualify for a particular rating. "Teachers are so focused on students that it is really not brought up," she said. The public school teachers' union has balked at the city's plan to base 25 percent of a teacher's rating on student achievement, going to 40 percent in five years. Those rules will not apply to the city's charter schools. The mayor has not set specific goals for the number of charter schools he is planning, but has openly praised the 12 high schools in the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Michael Milkie, co founder and chief executive of the Noble Network, said he hoped it could grow to 20 schools in five years, and serve up to 15,000 students.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Education
|
Many people visiting Brazil make a beeline for the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. In doing so, they fly over Brazil's fourth largest city, and one of the most culturally fascinating regions in the country. Recife and the northeastern corner of Brazil are a world apart from Rio, Sao Paulo and the rest of southern Brazil. The climate is hotter, and much of the food and music can only be authentically consumed in the region itself. It is also a hub of Brazilian political agitation (the northeast, of which Recife is a de facto capital, was the only region to vote against the right wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, in the last election). Visitors today will find a city that seems at first glance unlovable: One of the most famous songs about the city and an example of a Recife music genre called manguebeat, or mangrove beat is called "Rivers, Bridges and Overpasses" ("Rios, Pontes e Overdrives"), and that's what Recife's center looks like, to a large extent. But farther south are the teal waters of Boa Viagem beach, and north is the charmingly colorful pocket community of Olinda. Just a few days in the area will have visitors appreciating a different kind of Brazil. Skip Friday rush hour and taxi over to the dock for a one and a half hour sunset cruise of historic downtown Recife and its many bridges from the vantage point of the Capibaribe (Capivara) River. From the open air catamaran, look for the ceramic statues of the Sculpture Park of Francisco Brennand, with works by one of the most famous artists from Recife lining the jetty across from Marco Zero. Catamaran Tours operates a 4 p.m. departure that catches the sunset on the way back. Check the schedule ahead of time. Cost: 60 reais per adult. The best way to embrace the scope of northeastern cuisine is at Parraxaxa, in the Boa Viagem neighborhood, where a traditional Brazilian per kilo buffet turns into a cornucopia of otherwise difficult to find local foods worth trying, such as stewed goat with dried coconut and pumpkin, carne de sol steak (a kind of brisket) covered in queijo coalho (a local cheese), and fruit juices made from gritty caja and milky cashew fruit. It's also the perfect place to load up on the leafy greens you might crave post travel. Dinner for two, 80 reais. What Recife lacks in aesthetic character is more than made up for by its suburb Olinda, whose historic center, a UNESCO site and one of the best preserved colonial centers in Brazil, is 20 minutes north of Recife. Colorful, winding stone streets, terra cotta rooftops and swaying palms make Olinda a photographer's dream; feel free to get lost. A good starting point is the first church of Brazil, the Se Cathedral, at the top of a hill called Alto da Se; besides being the center of Olinda, it offers a glorious view across the expanse of the Olinda Recife area. Around February, Olinda transforms into a feverishly packed Carnaval party town; it is one of the top destinations for Carnaval celebrations in the world. To get an off season taste, pop into the Casa dos Bonecos Gigantes (House of the Giant Puppets), where some of the traditional papier mache puppets that stiffly swing through the crowds during Carnaval are stored (entry 15 reais). Shoppers will devour tropical sundresses and other handmade finds at the female owned atelier Periodo Fertil, and canvases by local artists at Sobrado 7. Keep a pep in your step with a coffee at Estacao Cafe, a fresh coconut water from one of the vendors at Alto da Se, or something a bit stronger (like local cachaca) at the funky Bodega de Veio. Join the crowds enjoying their Sunday morning in the sunshine of Boa Viagem beach. Between the waves and the occasional sharks (really), many locals just enjoy the turquoise horizon from their beach chairs. Pick up basketball, bike rentals, beach volleyball and tennis are all options for those wanting to burn off the weekend. At Entre Amigos Praia, you can enjoy chic, oceanfront Miami vibes and fresh oysters from the region, scooped from a tank and served raw along with ice cold beer. You might also want to convince your group to go in on a whole fish stuffed with plantains and shrimp dotted farofa Brazilian bread crumbs made from yucca. Lunch for two, 160 reais. That rhythm you've been hearing all across Recife is called maracatu, a traditional Afro Brazilian musical form from northeastern Brazil, developed by slaves working the region's sugar cane fields as a way of retaining their connection to Africa. The sound is intense and disarming, and during Carnaval it is one of the key rhythms heard across Recife. The best way to feel its thunder is to catch an open rehearsal of one of the many maracatu groups, such as the Sunday afternoon rehearsal of Maracatu Ogun Onile in old Recife. It's a good idea to read up on the origins and meaning of maracatu before visiting to better appreciate the distinct costumes and instruments, such as the alfaia drum, the agbe beaded gourd, and the gongue cowbell. The rhythms can be considered sacred, so be discreet and mindful. It is a good idea to ask permission before taking photos or video of any maracatu group. Boa Viagem, right next to Pina, is the best neighborhood to find safe independent lodging options similar to high rise hotels, but without breakfast. Apartments with a beach view range from 25 to 70 on Airbnb. If you are committed to the Brazilian pousada, or bed and breakfast, concept, your best bet is to stay not in Recife but in Olinda, about 20 minutes by car to the north, where colonial homes have been fixed up and splashed with bright colors, making for uniquely memorable ambiences. The Pousada dos Quatro Cantos, with its lush gardens, canopy beds and distinctive decorations, is a fail safe choice in the heart of Olinda. (Rua Prudente de Moraes 441; pousada4cantos.com.br/en gb; from about 250 reais). 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
Emmett Murphy arrived in New York nearly 30 years ago, and spent much of that time living with roommates. Six years ago, he rented a two bedroom in a modern Harlem building with his partner, Robert Balaguer. "I had never lived that far north, and I loved the Harlem vibe," Mr. Murphy said. "As we saw the economy return, the neighborhood really bloomed." And over time, their rent did too, rising from 2,300 to 3,500 a month. Mr. Murphy, 48, is a theater director and producer who owns a company called ShowHive that develops theatrical productions, including shows for cruise lines. As his business grew, he saved money to buy a home, but worried that he had already missed his opportunity. He and Mr. Balaguer, 37, an opera composer, were nevertheless reluctant to renew their expensive lease, so last year Mr. Murphy contacted a friend, Whitney Osentoski, a retired performer who is a licensed salesman at Halstead Property. "Real estate is a fantasy, and your mind fills in a lot of blanks," Mr. Murphy said. "But when you walk in, you have a visceral reaction, like the ceiling is too low or something smells funky. I was looking at the lower end of the market and trying to find the best version of that." Many of the buildings he visited, charming though they were, needed structural work. Some that were just a few dozen years old didn't appear to be holding up well, making brand new buildings more enticing. The Style, a condominium that opened last year in East Harlem, had two buildings connected by a landscaped courtyard. Last fall, there was only one one bedroom available, for 611,000, with monthly charges of around 1,100. The apartment was on a low floor, with plenty of activity outside, including a parking lot and a playground across busy East 132nd Street. "You can hear children screaming with joy through a plate glass window," Mr. Murphy said. Both men work from home, making the noise a problem. "I am there during the day when all that is happening," he said. The apartment later sold for 622,000. Elsewhere in Harlem, a two bedroom in a small, renovated condo was listed at the temptingly low price of 550,000, with monthly charges in the mid 400s. "When I got up there, I kind of loved it," Mr. Murphy said. The unit had a long, skinny layout with an extra nook for working or dining. But there were several drawbacks, including its location on the top floor of a five story walk up. "I have lived in those buildings in the past, but I was younger at the time," he said. It also had a monthly assessment of more than 860. "When you climb up and have the sweat running down your neck, they hand you a paper with the financials, and that's when they tell you about the assessment," he said. "It was kind of a jaw dropper." The apartment later sold for 530,000. A two bedroom in a small, renovated central Harlem condominium had a long, skinny layout with an extra nook for working or dining. But it was on the top floor of a five story walk up and came with a monthly assessment. Mr. Balaguer was out of town for most of the hunt, so Mr. Murphy sent him photos as he went. "I could tell he wasn't really sold on anything and was going to keep looking," Mr. Balaguer said. To avoid getting locked into another one year lease, the couple temporarily moved into the apartment of Mr. Murphy's cousin, whose travels often left her two bedroom rental in Flatbush, Brooklyn, near Prospect Lefferts Gardens, vacant. "We moved in on top of her stuff," Mr. Murphy said. "I had been to the neighborhood only once." His familiarity with the borough was limited mostly to events at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "It felt like New York felt 20 years ago," he said. "Seeing how Harlem changed in six years, I could see the potential." The couple embraced the neighborhood, which they found charming, diverse and convenient. From the corner of Flatbush and Church Avenues, the 2, 5 and Q trains were within walking distance, as was Prospect Park. In Harlem, "nothing really jumped off the page," Mr. Osentoski said. But "I was working with another buyer at a new build, 2100 Bedford" an eight story condo in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, just a few blocks away from where the men were staying so he sent them to see it. "I turned the corner, and it felt like a completely different neighborhood," Mr. Murphy said. "You could hear the volume of the whole neighborhood drop."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
The film "2001: A Space Odyssey," which is being rereleased this year for its 50th anniversary, baffled film critics when it first came out but now tops their lists of the most important movies of all time.Credit...Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images The film "2001: A Space Odyssey," which is being rereleased this year for its 50th anniversary, baffled film critics when it first came out but now tops their lists of the most important movies of all time. In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars. At the time he was deep in development of a blockbuster film about the discovery of alien intelligence. Word was that MGM had bet their studio on the film. What if Mariner discovered life on Mars and scooped them? Kubrick looked into whether he could buy insurance against that event. He could, but the price was astronomical. Kubrick decided to take his chances, according to a new book about the making of the movie, "Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece," by Michael Benson. (Simon Schuster 2018) That was 54 years ago. We still haven't discovered intelligence or even believable evidence of pond scum anywhere else in the universe not for lack of effort. A new spacecraft, TESS, designed to look for habitable nearby planets just vaulted into space, and an interstellar asteroid recently spotted streaking through the solar system was inspected for radio signals. Another robot is on its way to listen in on the heart of Mars. We still don't know if we are alone. Mr. Kubrick's movie, "2001, A Space Odyssey," finally debuted, late and over budget in April 1968, to baffled film critics and long lines of young people. John Lennon said he went to see it every week. It was the top grossing movie of the year and is now a perennial on critics' lists of the most important movies of all time, often the first movie scientists mention if you ask them about sci fi they have enjoyed. In honor of its 50th anniversary it is being rereleased at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday and then in various cities around the world in a shiny new version overseen by Christopher Nolan, the director of "Dunkirk" and "Inception," among other films. He told The Los Angeles Times the original film had been a "touchstone" from his childhood. The movie, written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (whose books and stories the movie was based on), and directed by Kubrick, is a multisensory ode to cosmic mystery, fate and the future. Long stretches happen with no explication or action except the zero gravity ballets of spaceships immaculately imagined. The story begins four million years ago in Africa, where a bunch of bedraggled primates are losing the battle of the survival of the fittest until a strange black monolith appears. To the thunder of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," one of those apemen is inspired to pick up a bone and use it as a club to kill the animals that have been pushing him around. Suddenly, the apemen are eating meat and chasing their rivals away from the water hole. In a moment of exultation the ape throws the bone into the sky where, in what has been called the longest fast forward in film history, it turns into a spaceship. Around that toss Kubrick pivots his movie and all of human evolution. Another monolith appears on the moon, and yet another in orbit around Jupiter, where an astronaut named Dave Bowman connects with it after subduing a neurotic computer, the HAL 9000, which has murdered his shipmates. In the finale, Bowman is sent through a "star gate" on a trip through space and time, death and rebirth, returning as a glowing Star Child to float like a fetus over the Earth. I first saw "2001" in the spring of 1968 in the same pharmaceutically compromised condition that all my friends did. I didn't need that kind of help, anyway, having grown up reading Clarke's stories, in particular the novel "Childhood's End" and the short story, "The Sentinel." The last time I watched the movie (on VHS of all things on my tiny home television), was in 2000, on the eve of its eponymous year. I never realized how much I had missed until I read Mr. Benson's book, a deep, informative and entertaining dive into the making of the movie. This is not a review of the book; Mr. Benson is a friend of mine, and I'm unabashedly ignorant of the history of cinema anyway. But it is a review of my own shifting attitudes and encounters with the movie itself over the years. One mark of the movie's status as a masterpiece is that it has something different to say to us every time we encounter it anew. Like the monolith it appears to give us what we need. Fifty years ago it was a harbinger of the future. We were about to win the race with the Russians to the moon. A whole generation was pumped and primed to tune in, turn on and transcend the whole dreary space time continuum as we knew it. Thoroughly researched by Kubrick and Clarke, large swaths of the film were like a documentary of the future: the space station, the moon base, the grand stepping outward just as Clarke and people like Wernher von Braun had prophesied. "2001" comes back at another poignant time in history, especially as it relates to space and the cosmos. Once we got to the moon, the script of future history was abandoned by the Nixon White House. It's now been 46 years since there was anyone on the moon. It's possible to imagine a time in which there will be no humans alive who have been there. But now the traditional sci fi script has flipped. A generation of swashbuckling billionaires has taken center stage in the space business, as well as a new class of wealthy customers who can afford to indulge their services. Instead of Star Child these days we have the "Star Man," launched into orbit past Mars in a Tesla convertible by Elon Musk. I once wrote that I no longer expected bootprints on Mars in my lifetime. Now I'm not so sure. It's not crazy to think that private outfits like SpaceX, which seem to be running rings around NASA and Congress, could beat NASA into deeper space. I'd happily come out of retirement sometime in the 2030s to write the words that humans have landed and walked on Mars. Not that NASA has credible plans or the prospect of enough money to go anywhere exciting anytime soon. Under its new administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former congressman, NASA is taking steps to move forward on a long range program of exploration and survey of resources that would lead to the establishment of a permanent base there. But Mars is having a moment in the popular imagination from the Matt Damon film "The Martian," which got high marks for scientific realism a couple years ago, to an upcoming television series "The First," about settlers on Mars being planned by Beau Willimon, the producer and showrunner of the Netflix series "House of Cards." This week space leaders and enthusiasts gathered in Washington, D.C. for The Humans to Mars Summit, sponsored by the aerospace industry. The meeting featured the release of a report outlining how humans could be on Mars as early as 2033. Where the script has really flipped is in the future history of evolution. Robots have taken over the sacred task of exploring for us. Increasingly sophisticated and smaller machines have spread out to every world of the solar system, buzzing the rings of Saturn, daring the dark voids beyond Pluto and landing on comets, scanning the heavens for new planets, new places to dream about. There have been enough robots, landers and orbiters violating the skies and surface of Mars to spark legends and myths and paranoia among whatever life forms might be there. The next generation extending our telepresence across the universe will be even smaller and cleverer. Plans are afoot to send fleets of spaceships the size of iPhone chips toward Alpha Centauri, like clouds of butterflies across interstellar space. Even if our bodies don't ever cross the voids between the stars, our DNA surely will, in a microscopic cascade of space invaders that could still colonize the galaxy. We all carry HAL in our pockets now, and in a few years he, it, will be in our bloodstreams. The future, to the extent that humans are part of it, is bionic. Computers, to the delight of surveillance states and the despair of civil libertarians, can now recognize faces. For all we know neural networks like Deep Mind can dream. Worse, we may all be part of the dream. The news from some physicists like the late Stephen Hawking is that the universe might be a hologram, an illusion like the three dimensional images on a bank card. Some cosmologists have argued that it is not inconsistent at least mathematically to imagine that the entire universe as we know it could just be a computer simulation, as in "The Matrix" another movie with long shadows. In effect, we are all made of bits, so the argument goes, removable, deformable at the click of an interstellar mouse. In that case, I have a bone or two to pick with the director.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
After another playoff appearance that did not end with a World Series title, the Yankees pinpointed their pitching staff as an area for improvement. They threw money at relief pitchers Adam Ottavino and Zack Britton, and at C.C. Sabathia and J.A. Happ, two veteran starting pitchers. Their biggest pitching addition, however, was James Paxton, a talented but oft injured left hander whom the Yankees acquired from the Seattle Mariners in November in exchange for a package that included their top prospect, Justus Sheffield. Paxton's pinstripes debut ended with a 5 3 loss to the lowly Baltimore Orioles on Saturday afternoon, the second game of the season, because of a few mistakes, including by catcher Gary Sanchez, and an offense that was dormant until late in the game. "He went out there and dominated, but we just weren't able to come up in the big situation with those runs he needed," Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge said. "We got that one for him, but against any major league team, one isn't enough. Plus, a couple costly errors. You make errors in the major leagues, they come back to bite you."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Sports
|
Among some astronomers, there is a growing suspicion that our solar system's distant reaches conceal a large, ninth planet that we have not yet seen. New findings about a small ice world far beyond Pluto buttress this idea. On Monday, astronomers led by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington revealed the orbital details of the world, which they have nicknamed the Goblin. Dr. Sheppard and his colleagues first spotted the world, which for now carries the official designation of 2015 TG387 as part of a systematic search three years ago for new worlds in the outer system, including the hypothesized Planet Nine. But only with additional observations did they realize how far out TG387 really is. "It took us three years to figure out that it has an interesting orbit," Dr. Sheppard said. The astronomers have submitted a paper describing the discovery to The Astronomical Journal. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The world, estimated to have a width of a couple of hundred miles, is currently about 7.4 billion miles from the sun, or about 2.5 times farther away than Pluto. But that is near to the closest it ever gets to the sun.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
After months of uncertainty, which saw organizers battling a former investor in court, losing two potential venues in upstate New York, and attempting a last ditch move to an amphitheater in Maryland, the planned 50th anniversary concert was finally called off on Wednesday. "We just ran out of time," Michael Lang, one of the partners behind Woodstock 50, as well as the promoter of the original festival in 1969, said in an interview. The event was to have been held Aug. 16 18, almost exactly 50 years after the original. Once planned as a world class outdoor concert for up to 150,000 people, featuring Jay Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Dead and Company, Santana, John Fogerty and dozens of others, the festival met an ignominious end after the majority of its artists abandoned the event once Lang and his partners tried in recent days to move it to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md. Merriweather, which could hold about 30,000 people for a festival, would have represented a drastically lower profile for the event, which had been planned for the grounds around a racetrack in Watkins Glen, N.Y. In addition, the new location may have had practical complications for many artists, through so called radius clauses a requirement in many touring contracts that restrict artists from appearing too close to other stops on their tour.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
"It's an abrupt transfer of power," said Bonnie Snyder. She and her husband, Mark, teach at Millersville University in Lancaster, Pa., and are aware of the perils as parents and college instructors. A COLLEGE freshman walked to a hospital emergency room at midnight and said she feared that she was going to harm herself. Twelve hours later, after it was determined that she was no longer in danger, she decided to call her parents but only after a long conversation with a nurse at the hospital about whether she wanted to talk with family members about her experience. "It was initially a shock to realize that if this had happened the day before, we would have been called immediately," said her mother, who asked to be identified only by her middle name, Jo, to protect her daughter's privacy. Why the difference? The daughter turned 18 at midnight that night and by law had the right to keep the episode private even from her own parents and even though they would ultimately pick up the bill. Most parents know in theory, at least that their children are no longer children when they turn 18. But the full significance may not be apparent until something happens that drives that reality home. "It's an abrupt transfer of power," said Bonnie Snyder, author of "The Unemployed College Graduate's Survival Guide" and "The New College Reality." The change in legal status may be especially surprising nowadays for parents who try to control so many aspects of their children's lives. So when their offspring turn 18 and gain the ability to vote, serve on a jury, sign a contract and marry without parental consent, it may be the first time they have ever had any real autonomy. "Gone is the homework hotline and every other check and balance," said Nancy Berk, author of "College Bound and Gagged." "It's time to separate, but not every kid hits the ground running." Having a conversation about their rights and responsibilities when they turn 18 is a good first step, Ms. Snyder said. The "enormous gaps in the knowledge" of her two daughters one now a college graduate and one a college freshman surprised her, she said, on things like understanding health insurance and balancing checkbooks. Many boys don't realize, for example, that when they turn 18 they must register for the military draft, or are in violation of the law. All newly minted adults should also know that not only do they have responsibility for their health and education records including grades, schedules and financial accounts but also that their parents cannot get access to them without the student's permission. That means even tuition bills go directly to the student, not the parent, no matter who is paying. That is because of a 1974 federal law, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa, that all institutions of higher education receiving federal money must follow. Colleges tell parents this at orientations and have the information about the law on their websites, but it can easily get lost in the masses of information. All students have the right to sign a waiver and in most colleges it is as easy as clicking on a page on the school website permitting parents access to their school records. "I see nothing wrong with saying, 'If I'm writing the check, your part of the contract is that you share your grades with us,' " Ms. Berk said. "It's just like a boss would want to see what is produced before you get the paycheck." Mark Snyder, Ms. Snyder's husband and an academic adviser at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, says he gets calls about once a week from parents asking for or more typically, hinting that they want to know more about their child's schedule or grades. "We have to say, 'No, we can't talk to you about that,' and they don't like that," said Mr. Snyder, who is also a professor of applied engineering. "I've sometimes been on the phone for an hour explaining it." The issue can become even touchier when talking about health matters, particularly mental health. Once Jo got the phone call, she raced to be with her daughter, who has since seen a counselor and is doing fine. And, Jo said, ultimately she was not sorry her daughter had been left to handle things on her own. "This legal technicality has helped me keep it her business which keeps me from picking it up and making it my own," she said. "She is 18. She got herself the help she needed when she felt she could not go another minute without it. Which is all you want to achieve as a parent, right?" As so many parents are discovering, Jo added, "so much of her life is private now, after 18 years of so little being private." Of course, there are far too many stories that do not turn out well, where young adults harm themselves or others. One of the most dire was the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007, when a student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before committing suicide. After that tragedy, the requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act were clarified to let school officials know they have more discretion in sharing information with parents when students' health and safety are believed to be at risk. While the most extreme cases stir up parental terror what is going on with my child (or that matter someone else's child) that I don't know about most of the time the system works pretty well, said Josh E. Gunn, past president of the American College Counseling Association and a counselor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Here is what parents too often don't know they have a right to know, said Dr. Victor Schwartz, medical director for the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps colleges and universities address mental health issues: School officials can contact parents if they feel that a student is homicidal or suicidal. Schools can let parents of students under the age of 21 know of any violations involving drugs or alcohol. In addition, if a student is considered a tax dependent, the schools can release any information to parents. Nevertheless, most universities will still be cautious about contacting parents, Dr. Schwartz said. Parents and friends should realize that while they may not be able to get information about their child, they can give information, by notifying a dean of students or counselor if they are worried about someone. Most times, college counselors do not want to call the parents "because it's bad policy, not because they're afraid of the Ferpa police," Dr. Schwartz said. "If the schools are too quick to bring in families, there's a fear that the students won't come in for help." Outside college, federal privacy laws bar parents from getting information about their over 18 year old without permission. That is why Laurie Ohall, a Florida lawyer specializing in estate law, suggests that it is a good idea to get your adult child to sign a health care designation or health proxy in case you are faced with an acute situation. While in some states parents will be allowed to make decisions without official forms if they are the closest living relatives, that is not always the case, and they might have to go to court to seek guardianship. The same is true with financial power of attorney. "If a 19 year old gets into a car accident and has brain damage, without a power of attorney, you have no right to sign up for benefits for him," Ms. Ohall said. These are not decisions that should be taken lightly. Having the ability to act in extreme circumstances seems prudent, but both sides need to discuss how much access that means. Should parents oversee their grown children's banking? Doctor's appointments? Medication? All these things are a matter of balance, said Ms. Berk. It is time to let go, but perhaps not all at once. You don't want to remind your child she has an exam, but maybe to get that meningitis or flu shot. As she said, "You might need to stay on the nagging train just a little while longer."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Your Money
|
Brittney Middleton was not looking for love when she met Ikenna Ogike, who is known as Ike, at the Couture nightclub in Los Angeles in October 2014. She had recently ended a six year relationship with a man she had dated since attending the University of South Carolina. And she had more than enough to keep her occupied managing the business and personal affairs of her brother, Khris Middleton, who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association. "I was too busy to date," said Ms. Middleton, 29, who was born in Shreveport, La., and raised in Charleston, S.C. She had moved to Los Angeles in 2012 to pursue a career in sports and entertainment management when the job with her brother opened up. "I was traveling a great deal with Khris for the N.B.A.," she said, "and not thinking about romance." When Mr. Ogike spotted Ms. Middleton, he felt she looked out of place. "I liked that she was wearing a ruffled and pleated outfit instead of the usual short and tight attire worn by many L.A. girls," said Mr. Ogike, 39, who was born in Nigeria and operates a State Farm insurance agency in North Hollywood. "I bought her a drink, and we talked for a while. She was reserved yet attractive and interesting." Ms. Middleton said she "liked his accent and thought he was cool, established and mature. He reminded me of a well mannered guy from the South." They exchanged phone numbers, and two days later, Mr. Ogike, who was ready for a relationship after years of bachelorhood, texted her. Their first date was on the rooftop at Wokcano, a restaurant in Santa Monica. Although Ms. Middleton was sick with tonsillitis, they shared Asian fusion food, listened to music and chatted about work, family and dating in Los Angeles. "I didn't feel butterflies that night, but I was intrigued," Ms. Middleton said. "Ike's mature viewpoints on life were refreshing, but I wondered why he never married." "Even though Brittney wasn't Nigerian, which I originally wanted in a partner because it's easier, she spoke well, and I liked talking to her," he said. "But she acted nonchalant and didn't show much emotion. I felt she wasn't into me." So nothing happened for three weeks. When Mr. Ogike eventually texted her, she responded by expressing her displeasure for not being contacted sooner. "I thought: 'Wow! She must like me,'" said Mr. Ogike, and he quickly asked her to go bowling. They met in Studio City and had fun just being themselves. "We talked trash, were casual and let our hair down," she said. "When he kissed me good night by my car, I started to fall." The couple began dating at least twice a week. He sent her flowers and cupcakes, and they talked constantly when not at the beach, movies or dinner, where they bonded over food. Mr. Ogike liked Ms. Middleton's independent streak and feisty manner. "Her hopes and dreams aligned with mine," he said. "We both loved family, wanted children and experiences like travel, sports and dining in restaurants." In December, when Mr. Ogike flew to Nigeria for his sister's wedding, they sent pictures and talked daily via FaceTime. "His commitment to me while he was in his home country made me realize that I was in love with him," said Ms. Middleton, who sent him a video professing it. But when he returned to Los Angeles in January 2015, the mood changed. Mr. Ogike had contracted malaria. He was also still struggling with the death of his mother a few years earlier. "Ike was awful and nasty, wanting his mother because he was sick," Ms. Middleton said, adding that while she sympathized with his feelings, she thought he should have dealt with his illness better. "I grabbed my bag and left his apartment." He entered the hospital, complaining that Ms. Middleton was insensitive. "I was ill and didn't think she cared enough," he said. "After texting each other, she came back sobbing, telling me that she was a great girl, and that I won't ever meet anyone like her again. "That defining moment," he continued, "was the first time I knew I would someday make her my wife." But there were challenges to overcome. Mr. Ogike still embraced certain aspects of his Nigerian culture, like not wrapping Christmas gifts and playing down birthdays. (Ms. Middleton loves birthdays.) He also speaks in the native Igbo language to his father, a retired college professor, and other family members who live in California. ("I felt left out," she said.) And he favors traditional Nigerian foods like goat meat, chewy chicken, rice and soups. (Ms. Middleton wasn't a fan.) Ms. Middleton also noted that the Nigerian culture favored traditional roles for men and women. "Nigerian men expect to lead, with the woman being a caretaker," she said. "My mom and dad both worked, and my dad did child rearing, too. Ike's family was not like that." But they learned to understand each other, often resolving any conflicts the same day. "Ike is an uneasy guy who feels at home with Brittney because she is down to earth and humble," said Obi Dukes, a groomsman. "He was never that close to any girl before. It's a beautiful thing to watch them together." In August 2015, Ms. Middleton complained of "feeling funny" and soon learned that she was pregnant. "This was a total shock to me because it was so soon, and I thought Brittney was on birth control," Mr. Ogike said. "While we had talked about having three children after we married, I never wanted a child out of wedlock." Still, telling her family was daunting. Her brother employer thought the baby would make their lives more hectic. But because they had "such a great comfort level, that would make it work," Khris Middleton said. Her mother, Nichelle Middleton, took the news well. "Brittney was educated and could take care of herself and the baby," she said. "I was O.K. with it. One just came before the other." Two months later, the couple moved in together. While they split the household chores, cooking, another traditional aspect of the Nigerian household, presented problems. Each took turns preparing meals, though it didn't come naturally for Ms. Middleton. But Mr. Ogike got over it. "When I like a nice meal at home," he said, "I just cook it myself." By working through their cultural differences, the couple had begun to forge a modern relationship using their own rules. Mr. Ogike grabbed the ring, got down on his knee, and proposed: "You are carrying my child and making me the happiest person." Before Chizarankem Emory Ogike, named for Mr. Ogike's mother, was born on April 19, 2016, Ms. Middleton had converted from her Southern Baptist religious upbringing to his Roman Catholicism. "I did it for him and for me," she said. "I am more spiritually in tune now than I was as a Baptist." On June 17, the couple were married before 275 guests, including the flower girl, Zara, which is how their daughter is known, in a traditional religious ceremony at Holy Spirit Catholic Church on Johns Island, S.C. Under oak beamed ceilings, the Rev. Fidelis Omeaku, the associate pastor at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church in Camarillo, Calif., officiated. The Nigerian born Father Omeaku, a longtime family friend, explained to the guests how the wedding merged two cultures. And he stressed the importance of communicating and listening to the other's point of view. "Marriage is about sacrifice as you join as one," he said. Ms. Middleton's cousin Kandis Thomas, a bridesmaid, observed that "as they embraced the other's culture, both have mellowed. This day begins their new life where each is excited about taking care of the other."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Fashion & Style
|
Before Tiffany Shu, 23, left New York in late March, she spent two days in her East Village apartment frantically boxing up clothing, accessories and kitchen items, and preparing her mattress and a mirror for storage. With growing concern about the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Shu's parents, Patty Shu, 56, and Jesse Shu, 62, of Anaheim Hills, Calif., urged their daughter to come home. "Everything was so uncertain. I kept feeling this pressure," said Ms. Shu, who is a graphic designer for the beauty brand Amorepacific. On top of that, Ms. Shu's lease expired on May 1 and her roommates would not renew. "The best option for me was to pack up my life, and find movers to help me move everything into a storage unit," she said. Since returning to New York on June 1, Ms. Shu has been renting a furnished apartment month to month on the Lower East Side. To this day, her belongings remain at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea. The move last March cost 280 (plus a 60 tip). Her 5 foot by 6 foot by 8 foot unit costs 124 a month. She got a third month free after signing up for two months of storage. Across the country, as people were deciding last spring whether they wanted to shelter with family or friends in other towns and states, they often were also having to grapple with what to do with their apartments and all of their possessions. With an end date on the crisis completely uncertain, and for some, with a lease renewal looming, renting a storage unit has become a welcome option. With five facilities in New York and New Jersey, Dumbo Moving Storage serviced 2,650 new storage customers in May, up 35 percent compared to May 2019. "Some customers were in a state of panic because they needed to move out," said Lior Rachmany, owner and chief executive of Dumbo Moving Storage. "Many customers moved out of state'" and left their belongings behind. Because of the uptick in storage requests this spring, the company's buildings in Brooklyn, Newark and East Rutherford, N.J., reached capacity by late June. The Dumbo facility in Maspeth, N.Y., still has availability, as does the 220,000 square foot facility in East Orange, N.J., which the company bought in response to high demand caused by the pandemic. MakeSpace sends professional movers to pick up, transport and store items in the company's warehouses. Before pickup, MakeSpace can provide free packing kits or clients can use their own boxes to store property. Customers digitally track pickups, access photo inventories of their items and retrieve stored belongings on demand without ever visiting the storage warehouses in person. Previously, MakeSpace would pick up items from inside the home or apartment, but now they offer curbside pickup at the residence to eliminate face to face interaction. (In a few instances where curbside pickup is not possible, MakeSpace will enter the home while all parties wear masks and maintain six feet of social distancing.) The reasons for obtaining storage space may differ from person to person, but recent health concerns are the same for consumers, storage companies and their employees. Precautions directly influence the way brands conduct business. Within its storage warehouses, MakeSpace frequently sanitizes shared surfaces to ensure cleanliness. Oscar Madriles, 25, a driver for MakeSpace in Los Angeles, wears a mask and gloves on the job and carries wipes and hand sanitizer. His truck is also sanitized on a weekly basis. These days, it is not unusual for storage arrangements to be made not just in a hurry but over the phone. Sonya Matejko, 29, paid 500 (and a 130 tip), when she remotely hired two Simply Moving movers to pack up everything in her Upper East Side apartment and deliver her belongings to CubeSmart Self Storage in North Bergen, N.J. Ms. Matejko, who is a communications consultant, left New York on March 13 to quarantine with her parents in Tampa, Fla. Her lease expired on April 30 and she was unsure if she would be able to return to New York before then. "I just had to do everything remotely and trust that everything was going to work out OK by providing approvals via phone," said Ms. Matejko, who has paid about 75 month to month for a climate controlled 5 foot by 12 foot by 8 foot unit since April. Many storage companies provide units on a month to month basis, with prices ranging from 77 to 561 in New York (or 50 to 233 across the U.S.), depending on details like size and geographic location, said Chris Nebenzahl, a Denver based research director at Yardi Matrix, which tracks storage unit rates for U.S. based facilities of at least 25,000 square feet. Pricing also depends on services provided such as climate control, hours of access, proximity to the facility's doors and elevators, and the level of security provided. Mr. Nebenzahl said customers might get a free month for longer leases (rather than a lower price, because many operators increase the rent every six months). However, the national average price of self storage units was down by 4 percent in June, compared to the same month last year, Mr. Nebenzahl said. "Rates dropped quickly after Covid hit, as many operators wanted to fill up their vacant units. The economy was on shaky ground and demand for storage was unknown, so to attract tenants, owners wanted to offer the best rates possible." That price drop isn't necessarily a comfort for people who never thought they were going to have to pay for a storage unit in the first place especially since it is an expense that likely doesn't have a specific end date. For students attending Connecticut College in New London, Conn., spring break began on March 6, the same time on campus housing closed for the break. Gabriel Josephs, 20, a sophomore psychology major, spent the time off at his childhood home in Manhattan rather than flying to Puerto Rico for a tennis tournament, which was canceled because of the pandemic. Campus housing was previously scheduled to reopen after the break on March 23. Instead, an email from the school instructed Mr. Josephs to collect his belongings from his on campus residence at Harkness House by that date. While some colleges provide free storage on campus, Mr. Josephs had to scramble for a place to store a rug, refrigerator, microwave and clothes. Ever since, Mr. Josephs has been renting a 5 foot by 5 foot by 8 foot CubeSmart Self Storage unit near school in Gales Ferry, Conn., month to month. "I was hoping a friend would split it with me because 51 felt pretty steep," he said. For three months, Mr. Josephs was unsure if campus would reopen in the fall. He described his vulnerability to indefinite storage fees as "a nerve racking experience." On June 22, Mr. Josephs received communication from Connecticut College, which is scheduled to start in person classes on Sept. 1. "I'm still not completely convinced the plan will follow through," said Mr. Josephs, who relocated to East Hampton, N.Y., in late June. But despite his skepticism, Mr. Josephs feels excited and hopeful. If all goes well, he'll move his belongings out of storage in August. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
"Lucky Penny" is an autobiographical show, written by and starring the actor David Deblinger, but while Mr. Deblinger unfolds the story of his life, he disappears so often into the other colorful characters in the tale that he himself almost seems to be a supporting player. The spine of the show, presented by the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater, is Mr. Deblinger's relationship with his father, whom we first meet when he is all but incommunicative, hospitalized and suffering from dementia. Later we learn that while Mr. Deblinger was performing in San Francisco, he had gotten a call from his sister saying that their father had suffered a stroke. When his sister holds the phone up to their father's ear, so that Mr. Deblinger can speak encouraging words of love even though his father had by this point been rendered mostly speechless his dad suddenly perks up: "San Francisco? That's exciting." But their relationship was not always a simply loving one. Although his father would sentimentally tell his young son how much he loved his mother, his parents were often engaged in simmering fights that Mr. Deblinger was naturally pulled into once to the extent of drawing a knife on his father, who dared him to use it. He didn't, of course, but it's clear where he got his flair for drama. Also his seemingly effortless ability to slip into the voices of other people: His father had an affection for mimicry, and would stage scenes with his son with their new video camera including one about a German child molester in which the young Mr. Deblinger was cast as the child. Ahem. Clearly not your average upbringing, but perhaps good early training for Mr. Deblinger's career.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
Samsung Electronics may be having the same problem Apple has: nearly everyone in the world who can afford an expensive smartphone has one already. Samsung, the largest maker of consumer electronics, said on Friday that it expected weaker profit and revenue, which analysts attributed to slowing sales of high end smartphones. This is a trend that also bedevils Apple, its main rival. Samsung, the No. 1 maker of mobile phones, aims its Galaxy models at the top end of the market. Apple sells its iPhone to these customers, too. And while sales of smartphones continue to grow over all, the rate of increase for the more expensive devices has been easing in recent months. In recent days, BlackBerry and HTC, the Taiwanese phone maker, have also reported difficulties selling advanced smartphones. In the United States, more than 58 percent of adult consumers who own cellphones own a smartphone, according to comScore, a market research firm. Only three years ago, it was 20 percent. Rival smartphone makers like Sony and HTC have mounted a renewed challenge with their latest handsets. But for Samsung, the real problem may be that much of the growth in smartphone sales in coming years will be at the lower end of the market, where Chinese manufacturers are gaining share. Samsung simply does not have the most appealing models for those consumers. As smartphones become increasingly commoditized, prices will fall and profit margins will shrink. "The concern is the future of the smartphone market, which is already saturated at the high end," said C. W. Chung, an analyst at Nomura Securities. "The smartphone industry may be becoming more like the PC industry," in which consumers make their buying decisions mostly on price, despite attempts by manufacturers to differentiate their products. Samsung said it expected to post an operating profit of 9.5 trillion won, or 8.3 billion, for the second quarter, a 47 percent increase from a year earlier. While many companies would envy such a growth rate, the forecast disappointed financial analysts, who had, on average, expected Samsung to post operating profit of more than 10 trillion won in the quarter. Even before the news on Friday, some analysts downgraded their forecasts for Samsung. Investors have taken heed, and Samsung Electronics shares are down about 17 percent since the start of the year. (Apple shares are down about 21 percent in the same period.) Samsung shares dropped 3.8 percent on Friday in trading in Seoul. Open or closed on Thanksgiving? Here are stores' plans for Thursday and Friday. The high cost of gas is forcing families to cut back on activities and essentials. Clearview AI does well in another round of facial recognition accuracy tests. In April, Apple reported its first year over year decline in quarterly earnings in a decade, as iPhones sales showed signs of slowing. The company sold 37.4 million iPhones in its fiscal second quarter or about 2.88 million phones a week. Samsung's Galaxy S4 got off to a quicker start than its predecessor model, the S3. It took only 60 days to sell 20 million S4 handsets, a slower pace than the older iPhone, but still far faster than the 100 days it took Samsung to sell that many Galaxy S3 phones. While Samsung is also the world's largest television maker, profit margins in that business have been squeezed by competition. So Samsung remains highly dependent on its mobile division, which delivered three quarters of the company's operating profit in the first quarter. Samsung's overall estimated revenue grew strongly in the second quarter, rising 20 percent, to 57 trillion won. But that, too, was slightly below expectations. "With Samsung, the market had gotten used to upside surprises," Mr. Chung of Nomura said. "But the previous quarters were abnormal. People need to adjust their focus." In March, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S4 amid considerable fanfare at an event at Radio City Music Hall in New York. While the new model has sold well in the United States, now at a carrier subsidized price of 200, it has not performed as strongly as some analysts expected. It sells in China for about 850. The cost of Samsung's heavy marketing it is a bigger worldwide advertiser than Coca Cola has eaten into profit margins. It also has the expense of opening Samsung shops inside more than a thousand Best Buy stores in the United States. The high end phone makers faced another profit margin problem. As lower price smartphones get more sophisticated and the advantage of higher price smartphones is reduced, more people may shift to those lower price phones, putting increased price pressure on companies like Samsung or Apple. Mark Newman, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong, says he thinks investors became too pessimistic about Samsung. Profit margins will rebound in the second half of the year, he said. "At current valuations, the market is assuming the mobile business will destroy value," he wrote in a note to clients. "We believe Samsung is cheaper than ever." Some analysts noted that even if smartphone profit margins fell and Samsung faced greater pressure from rivals, it could benefit because it is the biggest producer of the semiconductors used in smartphones and other computing devices. Prices of memory chips have also been rising in recent months after a long slump. Samsung plans to post its official report of second quarter earnings on July 26.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Oct. 4, 7:30 p.m.; through Oct. 6). The third program of Jaap van Zweden's subscription season includes a third major premiere, Louis Andriessen's "Agamemnon," as well as Debussy's "La Mer," Stravinsky's "Symphonies of Wind Instruments" and his Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org THE ORCHESTRA NOW at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Sept. 30, 2 p.m.). This is the first of three Sight and Sound events led by Leon Botstein this season, all of which involve discussion of the relationship between particular pieces of music and works of visual art. Here, the young players of this orchestra and the baritone Michael Anthony McGee help put Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder" in the context of Klimt, Schiele and Picasso. Children can attend for 1. 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY at Carnegie Hall (Oct. 3, 7 p.m.; Oct. 4, 8 p.m.). Michael Tilson Thomas kicks off his Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall this year with this season opening visit from the Californian orchestra he has led for over two decades. Following a recent trend, the programs are not as innovative as they once were. Wednesday's gala includes Gershwin, Liszt and a selection of vocal numbers sung by Renee Fleming and Audra McDonald. Thursday's affair is all Stravinsky, with "Petrouchka," "The Rite of Spring" and at nearly the same time as you can hear it a few blocks north at the Philharmonic the Violin Concerto. Leonidas Kavakos is the soloist. 212 247 7800, carnegiehall.org
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Music
|
SAN FRANCISCO Uber said on Tuesday that it was eliminating forced arbitration agreements for employees, riders and drivers who make sexual assault or harassment claims against the company. Before they could use Uber's ride hailing app, customers have had to consent to a terms of service agreement that required them to resolve any legal claims with the company in an arbitration hearing, rather than in open court. Now, customers can take those claims to court, the company said. The decision to yield to pressure from critics who had pushed Uber to forgo the controversial legal practice is the company's latest move to improve its badly tarnished image since Dara Khosrowshahi took over as chief executive last August. With hopes for an initial public offering sometime in 2019, Uber is eager to move past a series of scandals that rocked the company over the past year and is trying to distance itself from behavior that prompted a grass roots campaign urging riders to DeleteUber. On Monday, Uber started an advertising campaign featuring Mr. Khosrowshahi and a message that the company was "moving forward" in a new direction. That new direction includes ending the use of forced arbitration agreements. The practice common to many industries has been denounced for allowing companies to keep sexual misconduct claims out of the court system and away from public view. Because the claims are kept under wraps in confidential hearings, critics say bad behavior is allowed to perpetuate without warning to future victims. Uber already allows drivers and employees to get out of arbitration agreements, as long as they opt out within the first 30 days of signing a contract with the company. The changes detailed on Tuesday will also eliminate that 30 day requirement. In a blog post, Uber said anyone bringing a sexual assault or harassment claim against the company would not be forced into arbitration and could pursue the matter in court. Uber also did away with a clause requiring people who settle such claims with Uber to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would forbid them from speaking about their experience. "It's important to give sexual assault, and harassment survivors control of how they pursue their claims. So moving forward, survivors will be free to choose to resolve their individual claims in the venue they prefer," wrote Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer. "They will be free to tell their story wherever and however they see fit." Uber also said it planned to publish a safety transparency report that would provide data on sexual assaults and other episodes that take place on the "Uber platform." That would include rides and deliveries, as well such incidents that happen before pick up or after drop off. The company said it planned to publish the review after it completed a system for reporting incidents. Uber said it hoped to have the system, which it is working on with 80 women's groups, in place by the end of the year. In April, 14 women who have accused Uber drivers of sexually assaulting them wrote a letter to the company's board, urging it to waive the arbitration agreement and allow them to proceed with a lawsuit in open court. Despite the change in policy, Uber is still not permitting people with individual claims of sexual assault or harassment to take collective action in open court. Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer whose account of harassment and sexism at the company prompted a wide ranging investigation into the company's workplace culture, has also thrown her weight behind legislation in California that would prohibit companies from making arbitration agreements a condition of employment. Ms. Fowler publicly challenged Mr. Khosrowshahi to scrap the forced arbitration agreements on Twitter. "These kind of clauses are pretty common, but to have a company come out in front of it and say 'it's not the right thing to do' is significant," said Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer for Raliance, an advocacy group working with Uber. In December, Microsoft announced it was eliminating forced arbitration agreements with employees who made sexual assault or harassment claims. In an interview, Mr. West, a former Justice Department official who joined Uber in November, said its new policy applied to people currently in arbitration with Uber over sexual assault of harassment claims. He said waiving of arbitration only applied to those claims and not for other legal claims, like discrimination. Also, Uber will not lift the nondisclosure agreements on people who agreed to remain quiet in past settlements with the company. Mr. West said the company struggled with the decision to commit to a safety transparency report for its rides, because he knows that it will be "disturbing" when the actual number of assaults that happen on Uber is announced in part because of the company's size and the ease with which customers can report an incident. Also, there is no common terminology in law enforcement for reporting sexual assaults and sometimes the definitions of "sexual assault" differ from organization to organization, he said. Mr. West said he expected the number of reported assaults to increase in the first six to nine months after reporting the initial figures because "people will see that we are paying attention, that we are counting, that we looking to act on this data and that will encourage more reporting."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Technology
|
AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013) 7:35 p.m. on FXM. David O. Russell took the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s and early '80s, covered it in hair and soaked it in whiskey with this screwball comedy. The film stars Christian Bale as Irving Rosenfeld, a con man with a comb over; Amy Adams as Sydney Prosser, a con woman and Rosenfeld's mistress; and Bradley Cooper as an F.B.I. agent out to con the con artists. It also features Jeremy Renner as a shady New Jersey mayor and Jennifer Lawrence as Rosenfeld's wife. "'American Hustle' giddily embraces the excesses of its era, from spandex to 'staches," Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times, "though it's a farce that speaks as well to this tarnished age." BULLETPROOF 8 p.m. on the CW. This British import gives an English spin to the buddy cop genre, with the actors Noel Clarke and Ashley Walters playing a pair of London law enforcement officers who were also childhood friends. The first episode involves the pair on the tail of a gang who deal in the theft of expensive cars.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
It's how Morris grilled two former secretaries of defense (Robert McNamara in "The Fog of War," Donald Rumsfeld in "The Unknown Known"), not to mention Holocaust deniers, a professional lion tamer and Steve Bannon. Morris scans the room with a quizzical expression. And with that, one of the biggest true crime rabbit holes of the past 50 years enters the hall of mirrors, if such a thing is spatially possible. On one level, Smerling's series, a five part true crime documentary debuting Friday, is an adaptation of the 2012 book by Morris about the Jeffrey MacDonald case, which involves a Manson family type massacre for which MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor, was convicted in 1979. But it also gives Morris the Morris treatment a re investigation by Smerling, who himself is known for producing bombshell documentaries like "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Jinx." So now there are two versions of "Wilderness": One is a book that questions MacDonald's conviction for having killed his pregnant wife and two young daughters. The other is a docu series that doesn't seem to arrive at the same place. "I believe Marc thinks Jeffrey is guilty," Morris told me in a phone interview earlier this month. "Is that incorrect?" "We're not fully aligned," Smerling had said in an interview two days earlier. "We are aligned on certain things, and we're not aligned on other things." "Care to detail what some of those things are?" I asked. "I think if I did that, Scott, I would give a lot away," Smerling said. "I would be depriving the viewer of the experience of watching it, too." If Smerling and Morris have interpreted the same evidence somewhat differently, they aren't the first. From the beginning, the MacDonald case has been a jumble of subplots, twists and meta narratives. It has been the subject of countless media treatments, including other major books by high profile journalists and a hit mini series starring a young Gary Cole each of which has helped shape the public's understanding of a conviction that MacDonald, 76, continues to appeal from prison. Certain facts are agreed upon. On Feb. 17, 1970, military police officers at Fort Bragg, N.C. were summoned to a grisly scene at the MacDonald residence at 544 Castle Drive. MacDonald's pregnant wife, Colette, and their daughters, 5 year old Kimberly and 2 year old Kristen, were found brutally murdered in their respective bedrooms. MacDonald was discovered alive next to his wife with non life threatening wounds on his face and torso, a collapsed lung and a mild concussion. The word "PIG" was written in blood on the headboard of the couple's bed. MacDonald told investigators that four drug crazed hippies had attacked his family three men and a woman in a blonde wig and a floppy hat who carried a candle and chanted, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs." Charges against MacDonald were dismissed in an Army hearing. Nine years later, after Colette's parents, Freddy and Mildred Kassab, grew convinced of his guilt and pushed for a criminal trial, he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. "It's monstrous on either side," said Bob Keeler, a reporter who worked the MacDonald beat at Newsday from 1973 to 1985, in a phone interview. He also appears in the documentary. "If he did it, he committed a terrible crime, and who could possibly explain it? And if he didn't do it, the government railroaded a man who was totally innocent and lost his wife and children." In 1983, the writer Joe McGinniss ("The Selling of the President 1968"), who had befriended MacDonald and partnered with him on a book deal, famously turned against him in his true crime best seller "Fatal Vision." The next year, two of the three leads from "On the Waterfront," Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint, played MacDonald's in laws in an NBC mini series adaptation, dramatizing the Kassabs' conversion from MacDonald's staunchest allies to the most fervent believers in his guilt. Writing "A Wilderness of Error" was Morris's quixotic attempt to dislodge the case from public perception. Morris was friends with one of MacDonald's attorneys, Harvey Silverglate, and Morris's dissatisfaction with McGinniss's and Malcolm's books led him to 544 Castle Drive on Christmas morning, 1991. In poking through the evidence, Morris, a former private investigator, decided that the crime scene had been horribly managed and the criminal trial "rigged," as he put it, courtesy of a "good ol' boy network determined to secure a conviction no matter what." Morris shopped it as a film but couldn't find a buyer, opting ultimately to write a book instead. Smerling was introduced to the book by Jason Blum, of the Blumhouse production company, who had worked with Smerling on the 2015 HBO true crime series "The Jinx." Known mostly for horror films, like "Insidious" and "Get Out," Blum signed on as an executive producer with Smerling, who also directed. Over five episodes, Smerling surveys an array of colorful characters, and he does it in the style of a Morris documentary: impeccable lighting, a lively score and extensive use of re enactments to stage conflicting interpretations, as used in Morris's landmark 1988 film, "The Thin Blue Line." Many of the major players are not present the Kassabs and others are dead, including potentially exculpating witnesses but Smerling pores over the living witnesses and the evidence, as Morris did with his book. In the constant rehashing of these events, it's easy to forget that real people were and still are affected by the case. MacDonald is still serving time. Colette's brother, Bob Stevenson, agreed reluctantly to appear in the series, but the experience was visibly painful, his face often streaked with tears. It would be fair to expect the FX series to make a strong argument regarding MacDonald's conviction, much as Morris did with "The Thin Blue Line," which helped exonerate a man sentenced to death for the killing of a Dallas police officer. After all, "The Jinx" ended with an apparent live mic murder confession from the real estate heir Robert Durst. (Durst was arrested and is still awaiting trial.) "Wilderness" is not that kind of show. "Everything I've done has been an homage to Errol Morris," Smerling said, but he sees it more like Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon," drawing from a chorus of viewpoints on the same events. "You're telling these stories from different perspectives, and then these stories start to intercept with each other," said Smerling. "And when they overlap, there are obvious inconsistencies and consistencies. Then you start to see, very clearly, where the line through the story is." In a sense, Morris sees the MacDonald case the same way, only he believes that those different perspectives are all unreliable narrators himself included. Years after his book was published, he acknowledges in the series that he still believes MacDonald is innocent but knows he can't absolutely prove it.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
That cynicism was unnecessary. Anyone directing the two act "Giselle" has several hundred small options. There are matters of cuts, dramatic sequencing and musical text. (Adolphe Adam's 1841 score has had many later additions and rearrangements.) Meanwhile, larger issues loom about period (Just when in European history is "Giselle" set?), designs (How much realism, how much fantasy?) and overall style (How much should the ballet's Romanticism be shaped by late 19th century classicism?). A vast majority of Ms. Kent's decisions were canny, and so seemingly definitive that you have to be a "Giselle" connoisseur to realize that any choices were involved. Ms. Kent also welcomed back the Washington Ballet Orchestra, which, for financial reasons, has sometimes been replaced by taped music in recent years. Lars Payne's attractive edition of Adam's music has been subtly adapted by the experienced Charles Barker (principal conductor at Ballet Theater). Ms. Kent's staging draws intelligently from tradition. Orthodox ballet mime is used: Although Giselle's mother, Berthe (Elaine Kudo, the company ballet master), does not gesticulate the full story of the wilis, her sustained narration is authoritative and lucid. I question just a few points. When the aristocratic hunting party arrives in Act I, most of its members discreetly take up neat positions behind Giselle's village friends. This makes a nonsense of the class situation that this ballet depicts. (To win the love of the peasant Giselle, Count Albrecht has disguised himself as a villager. His blue blooded fiancee, Bathilde, treats Giselle with kind condescension. When the scandal of his behavior suddenly emerges, it makes a lot less impact if the classy hunters have been standing politely behind Giselle's rural friends.) And why is emphasis paid to the spectral wilis and their queen, Myrta, removing their veils when Giselle, the wili novice, then enters with no veil? Thursday's performance was efficient, often impressive as dance, seldom moving as drama. (This is often the case with first nights of big classics. Things relax in later performances.) The corps de ballet moved not just in unison but with a shared sense of line, gesture and dramatic engagement. Giselle was Maki Onuki, who has danced the role in the company's previous staging; Albrecht was Rolando Sarabia, one of the dancers Ms. Kent immediately imported into its ranks. Everything went smoothly (well, almost everything Mr. Sarabia and a corps dancer deftly dealt with a flower that attached itself to Ms. Onuki's dress in Act II), but without any of the dramatic chemistry that turns a strong "Giselle" into a touching one. The best moments came in their solos. In the quick jumps of Act II, Ms. Onuki's rapid takeoff into the air, remarkable by any standard, won waves of applause. As Myrta, Kateryna Derechyna was another prodigious jumper and forceful presence. (A pity that her point shoes have loud, clippety clop blocks.)
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
In the current revival of "Angels in America" on Broadway, the Angel takes flight with the help of Angel Shadows one of the most remarkable elements about this Tony Award winning production.Credit...Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times Using intricate choreography and cues, the Angel Shadows dancers and puppeteers propel the Angel into the air and operate her heavy wings. In the current revival of "Angels in America" on Broadway, the Angel takes flight with the help of Angel Shadows one of the most remarkable elements about this Tony Award winning production. When the dancer Ron Todorowski, who has performed with Twyla Tharp's company and in numerous Broadway shows, was asked if he wanted to audition for the part of an Angel Shadow in "Angels in America," he recalled, he told his agent "probably not." "I was like: How will I fit into this?" Mr. Todorowski said. "I'm a dancer. I'm used to dancing and acting through movement." The Angel is a messenger from heaven who visits Prior Walter, a gay man with AIDS, to tell him that he is a prophet. In the production of Tony Kushner's two part play currently on Broadway through July 15, the Angel is not an ethereal creature who flies gracefully through the air with the help of a complicated rigging system, as she has done before. Now, when she flies she has five bodies, or Angel Shadows, to support her. This Angel is broken down and dusty, wearing a tattered, disintegrating costume. Her movements are jerky and frazzled. She twitches. She can fall into a rage in a split second. "I had an idea of this clean angel coming from the ceiling," said Amanda Lawrence, who originated the part in London and performed for weeks in New York. "But she is like a cockroach, she's an insect, she's damaged she's like his disease." In order to manifest that quality, an Angel needs her Shadows. In this version, the original movement was created by Robby Graham, who worked in close collaboration with Finn Caldwell, the puppetry director. For the New York production, Steven Hoggett was the play's movement consultant. (He's also the movement director for "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.") Early on, Mr. Graham said, he thought of the Shadows as a hive or a colony. "From the very first meeting with Marianne, she had a very clear idea that she didn't want to do the conventional staging of the Angel," he said. "I work primarily with dancers in a partnering and lifting context, so as soon as she started to talk about the concept, visually, I could imagine what that would look like." And from the beginning, he said, "the idea that the wings would be puppeteered was set in stone." For the auditions, Mr. Todorowski said, dancers had a week of performing exercises while moving together. "It was as simple as walking in patterns in a unit," he said. "One person would be the Angel, and we would have to stay connected following this one person. A lot of it was getting used to moving slightly if she moved, but not taking focus away." Mr. Hoggett set up improvisations in which dancers were told to imagine that they were blind creatures and that their only way to find a chair was to taste the room. "Chins and jawlines and fingertips start to do very strange things," he said. "You see, oh, that looks very rich over there. Let's hold onto that." And how to make the Angel fly? Mr. Graham and Mr. Caldwell studied the mechanics of bird wings, and how birds take off and land. "We tried to incorporate those principles of biomechanics into the choreography," Mr. Graham said. "We really wanted to create that suspension of disbelief where you feel she could just fly off into the distance." But the Angel doesn't soar smoothly. "Marianne always wanted her to be really rough around the edges," Mr. Graham continued. "It was important that the coughs and those jittery moments were a part of her language." And that filters back into the way she moves or the way the Shadows move her through the air: At times, there is a jerkiness that meshes with her character. The Shadows have two big movement scenes, both in the second play, "Perestroika." One is a long dialogue scene between the Angel and Prior in which the tension of the words comes alive through movement; the other is a wrestling match between the two in which Prior wants to fight his disease. Mr. Hoggett reworked the wrestling scene to make it more manic. A fight or a wrestle, he said, "a genuine one, is really haphazard and messy." It doesn't operate on logic, so Mr. Hoggett purposely made it out of order. The scene is now clunky and disjointed, never fluid and that's what makes it scary. "Every night, it has a certain manic energy and a slight desperation to it," Mr. Hoggett said. "It doesn't become slick." For one rehearsal exercise, pencils were placed on three chairs, and Ms. Malone's job was to fly with her Shadows from chair to chair to chair while collecting each pencil with a different frame of mind: curiosity, despair, rage. The order was up to her. On top of that, each lift needed a different height low, medium, high. "At the end of it, you have a scene, and it's repeatable," she said. "All of a sudden, a narrative emerged from this little exercise." In the show, she cues the Shadows with her breath, which becomes, in a sense, part of the text. "You take in a breath, and everybody goes down with you," she said. "And then you're in the air. It's incredibly human." Ms. Malone, who skis and rides mountain bikes, has always been active and in good shape. But performing the Angel has transformed her relationship with her body. "Certain beliefs about my limitations have evaporated," she said. "I could be in a movement piece now, and before I would always think, no I can't do that. That's for those people. But now I think it's for me, too."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Dance
|
A Dutch boy named Merlijn, left, and young Afghan refugees use a cellphone translation app to communicate in "Hello Salaam." The film is part of the New York International Children's Film Festival, opening on Friday. When Merlijn and Sils, Dutch boys who are 11 and 10, meet Afghan and Syrian youths while visiting a refugee camp in Greece, the children seem to have nothing in common. But using cellphone translation apps and a knowledge of English words, they begin to connect over childhood games, a snowball fight, their mutual curiosity. By the time the Dutch leave the boys' mothers are camp volunteers the two groups have forged a surprisingly trusting and tender bond. Sound more like a movie than real life? This story is both, unfolding in Kim Brand's "Hello Salaam," a Dutch documentary short in the New York International Children's Film Festival, which arrives on Friday with Masaaki Yuasa's exuberant anime feature "Lu Over the Wall" and continues through March 18 in six venues, with more than 100 works from over 30 countries. A festival for ages 3 through 18 that isn't afraid to challenge its audience, it offers 15 features, nine shorts programs and its first virtual reality mini fest. "The core nature of the festival is about this kind of wonderful chaos," Maria Christina Villasenor, its programming director, explained in an interview. "There's definitely very calculated curating and programming, but it's also bringing so many different kinds of storytelling and image making together." The aim is diversity, not only in films but also among their makers: About half this year are female. But the festival has always celebrated girls. Long before MeToo, it began offering "Girls' POV," a shorts program exploring the female preteen and teenage perspectives. This year, it's added "Boys Beyond Boundaries," whose short films feature not only the children of "Hello Salaam," but also a boy who furtively cross dresses and one who's the only male entrant in a baton twirling contest. "We encourage girls to break boundaries," Nina Guralnick, the festival's executive director, said. The next step, she added, was "to take that same concept and apply it to boys." The 21 year old festival has also expanded with "Friends Neighbors," a shorts program initiated in 2017, with films this year from the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia, in Mexico. "We thought it would be interesting to work with a festival that doesn't focus on kids' programming," Ms. Villasenor said, but that yielded distinctive animation. The program is likely to attract a reliable festival demographic: grown ups, particularly animation fans, who attend without children. Adults also help select the festival's winners. While audience voting determines a majority of the awards, a jury of professionals this year it includes the directors Sofia Coppola and Gus Van Sant decides on the best animated short and best live action short, which then become eligible for Academy Award consideration. (This is one of the rare children's festivals that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has approved as an Oscar qualifier.) This thread surfaces strikingly in "Liyana," an uplifting but sometimes unsettling blend of live action documentary and animated fiction from the married American directors Aaron and Amanda Kopp. Set in Swaziland, where Mr. Kopp grew up, "Liyana" features five children inventing a story. It intersperses scenes from their lives at an orphanage with Shofela Coker's lush animation illustrating the adventures of their made up heroine, Liyana, who triumphs over traumas the children have faced as well: physical abuse, robbery, the deaths of parents from AIDS. Having aimed for a traditional documentary, "we decided to just embrace fiction," Mr. Kopp said in a telephone interview, "and we trusted fiction to bring us a truth in a way that a conventional documentary wouldn't." The Dutch director Mischa Kamp's buoyant musical "Sing Song" also uses imaginary characters to illuminate a complicated reality. It focuses on Jasmine, a 16 year old Dutch girl born in Suriname. She earns a spot in a singing competition there, but her greater objective is to locate her mother, whom her father will not discuss. Ms. Kamp said by phone that she wanted to portray the immigrant experience, but also to show "this connection between who you are and where you are from." Such works illustrate a paradox at the heart of this enterprise: Sometimes you need to go to a children's film festival to see something truly grown up.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Colombia Is Hit Hard by Zika, but Not by Microcephaly BARRANQUILLA, Colombia This tropical city on the Caribbean coast may hold the answer to one of the deeper mysteries of the Zika epidemic: Why has the world's second largest outbreak, after Brazil's, produced so few birth defects? In Brazil, more than 2,000 babies have been born with microcephaly, abnormally small heads and brain damage caused by the Zika virus. In Colombia, officials had predicted there might be as many as 700 such babies by the end of this year. There have been merely 47. The gap has been seen all over the Americas. According to the World Health Organization, the United States has 28 cases almost all linked to women infected elsewhere. Guatemala has 15, and Martinique has 12. Had the rest of the Americas been as affected as northeastern Brazil, a tidal wave of microcephaly would be washing over the region. Most experts say that will not happen, but they are at a loss as to why. Pregnant women here, alerted to the tragedy unfolding in Brazil, may have sought abortions in greater numbers, officials say. Others seem to have heeded the government's controversial advice to delay pregnancy altogether. Dr. Miguel Parra Saavedra, the director of maternal fetal medicine at the Cedifetal Clinic in Barranquilla and one of the country's leading high risk pregnancy specialists, is among the experts who suspect many pregnant women in Colombia, alarmed by news reports, sought ultrasounds and aborted deformed fetuses. Some of his own patients have done so. Dr. Parra Saavedra heads a study of Zika related birth defects in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the course of the research thus far, he has diagnosed 13 cases of fetal microcephaly. Four of the mothers terminated their pregnancies immediately, he said. Another four, and possibly a fifth, sought abortions but were turned down by their health insurance companies. Abortion is legal in Colombia to protect a mother's health, and the health ministry considers a severely deformed baby a threat to maternal mental well being. But Zuleima who asked that the couple's surnames not be used because some relatives opposed abortion was already 31 weeks pregnant. While the abortion law does not specify which week is too late, her insurer balked, she said, saying it needed time to decide whether to pay for the procedure. "There were papers and papers to fill out, and the company didn't say no and didn't say yes," she recalled. "They said, 'We'll call you later.'" Dr. Fernando Ruiz, Colombia's vice minister for public health, also says that it is "very possible" that abortions lowered the microcephaly rate here. "Colombia has some of the most progressive laws and regulations in South America," he said in an interview. With gynecologists alert to the threat, he said, many women had ultrasounds early enough to made decisions. Even a very small increase in the abortion rate could account for a sharp reduction in microcephaly. Just 320 legal abortions were officially reported in Colombia in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York based research organization supporting abortion rights. Yet the institute estimates that there actually were 400,400 abortions each year in Colombia. In this country, most abortions are not performed in clinics by vacuum aspiration, but are induced by misoprostol, a drug that causes strong contractions, said Dr. Guido Parra Anaya, the director of the Procrear assisted fertility clinic in Barranquilla. Any doctor can prescribe the drug, and none are legally obligated to report it. Misoprostol also is commonly given out by illegal providers here, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Frequently, women are told to take the pills and go to a hospital when heavy bleeding starts, as if they had had a miscarriage. Colombian hospitals treat an estimated 93,000 women a year for postabortion complications. In July, Dr. Martha Lucia Ospina, the director of Colombia's National Institutes of Health, reported that fetal deaths reported as miscarriages on death certificates had increased by 8 percent. The numbers have begun returning to normal only recently. In Brazil, by contrast, abortion is permitted only in cases of rape or incest or to save the mother's life, and illegal abortions are hard to get because the police, under pressure from evangelical Christians in Brazil's Congress, began cracking down on clandestine clinics a decade ago. Also, because the microcephaly surge in Brazil appeared with no warning, even women who might have risked illegal abortions had no time to receive ultrasounds. In Colombia, women now normally have three ultrasounds during a pregnancy. The increased screening has made for hard choices. But they will still be far fewer than originally predicted. Dr. Ruiz said that based on Brazil's experience, he had expected to see 700 cases of Zika related microcephaly this year. Now, he expects 100 to 250 at most. In December, Dr. Ruiz asked women in Colombia to delay pregnancies, and he says he believes many did so, although he cannot prove it yet. A drop in the birthrate would indicate that many women heeded the advice, but the national health statistics office takes 18 months to tally up each year's birthrate. In some Latin American countries, suggestions from health ministers that women delay pregnancy met harsh resistance both from the Roman Catholic Church and from women's groups complaining that there was too little access to contraception. El Salvador faced a backlash when it asked women to stop having children for two years. But Colombia's health ministry asked women to delay for only six to eight months while officials watched how the epidemic unfolded. Some women found that sensible. As her husband, Gustavo, a police officer, and her young son Sebastian watched, Madis Dominquez, 27, explained how she happened to be getting a four month ultrasound in September. She originally planned to become pregnant last December, she said, "but they said, 'Please wait six months.' So I waited till May, when they said it looked safe again." How many women followed her example will not be known for some time. The epidemic appears to be winding down in much of Latin America as the hottest, rainiest months end and as more people, having been bitten, develop immunity. Some experts thought it might have been premature to declare the epidemic over in Colombia, because the virus had infected less than 1 percent of the population. In French Polynesia, it infected more than 60 percent before cases disappeared. A study done by scientists at London's Imperial College estimated that across Latin America, where the geography is far more diverse than on Pacific islands, it may be two to three years before widespread immunity stops the epidemic. In places like Puerto Rico, where the virus arrived relatively late, microcephaly cases are expected to keep increasing. The first live birth of a child with Zika related microcephaly was reported last month.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
As a student at Parsons the New School for Design, Miisha Jones started off in a dorm, later sharing a one bedroom in the theater district with a roommate. When her roommate graduated, Ms. Jones was happy to leave their high rise building on West 50th Street, where she paid 1,875 for her half of a flex, or a one bedroom turned two bedroom by means of a temporary wall. She mulled a move to a waterfront high rise in Long Island City, Queens, partly at the urging of her mother. But she preferred surroundings on a smaller scale, and decided to hunt in Brooklyn. "I was looking for a cozier neighborhood and something not so busy as the theater district with all the tourists," said Ms. Jones, who is 22. Living near the popular musical "Wicked," she often felt overwhelmed by the crowds. One summer day, as Ms. Jones was riding a bus to visit relatives in New Jersey, she couldn't help but notice the couple seated in front of her. They were apartment hunting themselves, using the app for Urban Compass, a real estate company. Ms. Jones downloaded it, inquired about a few listings and heard from Chaka Smith, a salesman there. She told him she wanted a relatively small building in a residential Brooklyn neighborhood. For a one bedroom, her monthly budget was in the mid 2,000s. She and her mother were also pondering a two bedroom that could function as an alternative to a hotel for her mother, a Seattle based tech executive whose work often takes her to New York. Their budget for this was the mid 3,000s. "At the beginning, Miisha was pretty vague about what she wanted," Mr. Smith said. "The biggest thing for her was proximity to a train so she could get to school. She told me up front if there was a newly renovated brownstone unit, she would probably like it." He showed her a sunny one bedroom for 2,600 a month in a three story building in Cobble Hill. The apartment, with a pretty oriel window and exposed brick, had new appliances and even a washer dryer. Ms. Jones liked the idea of not having to schedule her laundry around classes or haul it to a basement room. She loved the neighborhood, which was both quaint and convenient. But she decided to keep looking. "I was very indecisive," she said, "so I wanted to see more places just in case there was something better." A two bedroom duplex for 3,500 a month in Boerum Hill wasn't better. Ms. Jones liked the neighborhood but was put off by the railroad layout, the dark ground floor bedrooms and the even darker room for laundry and storage on the lower level. She quickly dismissed another Boerum Hill entry, a 2,600 a month one bedroom in a five year old building. It was on Fourth Avenue, a busy thoroughfare with an industrial ambience. The Cobble Hill one bedroom had become her reference point. "My mom said, 'Let's continue to see some more, just in case,' " Ms. Jones said. The living room was being used as a bedroom by the departing roommates. "I wanted something that had legitimate rooms," Ms. Jones said. "If my mom was going to be here, I don't think there is any privacy as far as a door. Everything was open." The place was also several long blocks from the nearest train. "I was stuck on the whole tight knit quaint neighborhood thing," Ms. Jones said. In Williamsburg, "things seemed farther apart." She remained uncertain. She sent many photos to her mother "because I didn't want to make the decision on my own," she said. "My mother is big on sunlight. I am the type to be a hermit inside. She said, 'Make sure there is enough sunlight so you can feel lively and awake or it will be depressing.' "
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
The classic folk song "This Land Is Your Land" may literally belong to you and me. That's the case being pressed by the same law firm that persuaded a federal judge last year that "Happy Birthday to You" belongs in the public domain. The New York firm, Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman Herz, also hopes to do the same for the Civil Rights era protest song "We Shall Overcome." But the suit filed Tuesday over Woody Guthrie's classic "This Land Is Your Land" is aimed at liberating a song known to generations of schoolchildren who have raised their voices to sing about a free country belonging to one and all, sprawling "from California to New York Island, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters." The suit was filed on behalf of the Brooklyn band Satorii, which recorded two versions of the song. It argues that the music belongs to the public and not to the Richmond Organization and its subsidiary, Ludlow Music, the publishing company that collects licensing fees to use the composition. Ludlow did not return phone calls or answer an email message seeking comment on Thursday.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
Hugh Downs, seen here on the set of NBC's "Today" show in 1966, had a mellow voice and the manner of an intelligent listener in a long career on television. Hugh Downs, whose honeyed delivery and low key but erudite manner helped make him a familiar face and voice on television for half a century, and whose career included long stints as host of both "Today" on NBC and "20/20" on ABC, died on Wednesday at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 99. His family announced the death in a statement. Mr. Downs was a man of many parts, with numerous interests unrelated to broadcasting in his own self effacing words, he was "a champion dilettante" who dabbled in music, art and science. But he was best known as a perennial television fixture, beloved for what The New York Times's John J. O'Connor called his "reassuring, warmly upbeat presence" and renowned for his longevity. Mr. Downs's 1986 memoir was called "On Camera: My 10,000 Hours on Television," and that number was no idle boast: For years he held the Guinness certified record for most total hours on commercial network television. (Regis Philbin eventually passed him.) His television career began in the medium's earliest days, when he was already a radio veteran. His smooth baritone was heard on shows like "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," "Caesar's Hour" and, most notably, "The Tonight Show," where he was cast as Jack Paar's foil (Mr. Paar referred to him as "my Sancho Panza") and where he briefly found himself, much to his surprise, thrust into the spotlight. In February 1960, Mr. Paar, no stranger to volatility, became furious after NBC removed a joke from the show for reasons of taste. (The joke, tame by today's standards, involved the use of the term "water closet," meaning bathroom.) He decided that the best way to teach NBC a lesson was to walk off the next night's show as it was being taped, leaving Mr. Downs in charge. Mr. Downs assumed the host's chair immediately, if not confidently: at one point he looked into the camera and plaintively said, "Jack, come back." The show aired as scheduled, walk off and all. Mr. Paar did come back, to the surprise of nobody, but not until 25 days later. In his absence Mr. Downs who years later would diplomatically remember his former boss as "quite a bundle" ably assumed his duties as "Tonight Show" host. The Times critic Jack Gould saluted Mr. Downs for having "in most trying circumstances carried off the situation with dignity." It was Mr. Downs's first taste of center stage. It would not be his last. Hugh Malcolm Downs was born in Akron, Ohio, on Feb. 14, 1921, the son of Milton and Edith (Hick) Downs. His father was a machinist and battery salesman, and the family moved to Lima, Ohio, when he was 2, and 10 years later to a farm outside Lima, where Milton Downs worked part time to supplement his Depression era wages. Milton's circumstances were dire when his son graduated from Shawnee High School in Lima and accepted a scholarship to attend Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio. After a year, Hugh had to drop out to help support his family. He was hired as an announcer at WLOK, a radio station located not far from the farm, for 12.50 a week. Within a year he was promoted to program director at twice the salary. He moved to WWJ in Detroit in 1940 and, after serving briefly in the Army and receiving a medical discharge, joined the staff of WMAQ, the NBC station in Chicago. Later in the decade he made the transition to television, working on "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," a popular puppet show that began in Chicago and soon went national. While in Chicago he met Dave Garroway, whose easygoing manner as the first host of NBC's "Today" show would make him one of television's earliest stars. He later recalled that he "learned from Dave how to ad lib in a very casual way." In those days being on the air was rewarding but frightening for Mr. Downs. Although he projected the image of a quietly confident performer in the manner of Mr. Garroway, he suffered from a bad case of mic fright. Mr. Downs recalled those days in "On Camera," his memoir: "At the end of a piece of music, when I was supposed to say something, my knees would shake uncontrollably. My pulse and respiration went up. Fortunately, the fear never showed in my delivery, but it did in my hands. If I had to hold copy, the paper would rattle. As a defense, I learned to lay copy out flat on the desk, or, if standing, to grab my lapels along with the copy, so the paper didn't move with my hands." His fright did not diminish until after he had been in the business a good 10 years. Despite his fears, he came to New York in 1954 and was soon working as an announcer for Arlene Francis on "Home" and Sid Caesar on "Caesar's Hour." He joined "The Tonight Show" when Mr. Paar did, in 1957, and remained until Mr. Paar left in 1962. Mr. Downs in 1960. He was host of the morning question and answer show "Concentration" on NBC from 1958 to 1969. During those years he was also host of the popular daytime game show "Concentration," a job he held from 1958 until 1969. And in 1962 he began his most high profile and prestigious assignment to date, the one that would establish him as not just an announcer but also a respected television journalist: Mr. Garroway's old job as host of "Today." He remained there for a decade. In June 1978, after seven years of freelancing, Mr. Downs received a call from Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, asking him to take over the newsmagazine "20/20." Its debut just a week earlier had been a disaster, with critics deriding its haphazard format and theatrical flourishes and Mr. Arledge himself acknowledging that "a lot of it made no sense." "Hugh Downs knows how to lead into a news piece and put it into perspective," Mr. Arledge said. "I think it will all start to settle down now." It did, and it has been a staple of the ABC prime time lineup ever since. Mr. Downs was the sole host until 1984, when his former "Today" colleague Barbara Walters, who had been contributing to "20/20" for a few years, became his co host. He remained with the program until retiring in 1999. Mr. Downs married Ruth Shaheen in 1944; she died in 2017. He is survived by their children, Hugh Raymond and Deirdre Lynn Downs; a brother, Wallace; two grandchildren; and four great grandchildren. In addition to his television work, Mr. Downs was a composer (he wrote a prelude that was performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra); an amateur guitarist (he played for Andres Segovia and said he was pleased that Segovia did not leave the room) and painter (when he had the time); the author of numerous books; an advocate for the elderly (he wrote books and articles about the aging process and was the host of a PBS series on aging called "Over Easy") and for family planning (including abortion rights); a science buff (he was once NBC's resident expert on science programming); an audiophile (he built his own stereo equipment from scratch); an environmentalist; and an unabashed adventurer who piloted a 65 foot ketch across the Pacific, went to the South Pole and rode a killer whale at Sea World.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Television
|
PHILADELPHIA A colonial era punch bowl that has been called the "Holy Grail" of American ceramics is to go on public display for the first time in New York this month after its discovery during excavation on the site of the new Museum of the American Revolution here. The ceramic bowl, dating from about 1770, is the earliest known example of American hard paste porcelain, a technique that was perfected by the Chinese hundreds of years earlier but which eluded European china makers. Although scholars have found documents indicating that the porcelain was made in America during the Revolutionary period, no such objects had previously been discovered. "It's the first physical evidence of what we call hard paste porcelain being produced in America," said Robert Hunter, an archaeologist and the editor of the journal Ceramics in America. "I've used the term 'Holy Grail of American ceramics.'" The bowl was found in 2014 among some 85,000 other items on the museum site. It was initially thought to be stoneware but later determined to be porcelain that was probably made in Philadelphia.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Second U.S. Baby to Be Born From a Dead Donor's Uterus Is Delivered None Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, which is conducting a trial with five patients, announced on Thursday that Jennifer Gobrecht, 33, had delivered a healthy son, Benjamin, through uterine transplantation. When Jennifer Gobrecht was 17, doctors told her that she would never carry her own child. But on Thursday, researchers at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia announced that Ms. Gobrecht had delivered a son by cesarean section in November, the second baby in the United States to be born using a transplanted uterus from a deceased donor. "We were beyond lucky," Ms. Gobrecht said. Ms. Gobrecht, now 33, was born with a congenital condition called Mayer Rokitansky Kuster Hauser syndrome, meaning she was born with ovaries, but without a uterus. In 2017, she and her husband were exploring the possibility of implanting frozen embryos into a surrogate when Ms. Gobrecht was selected to be the first patient in a trial at Penn Medicine that hopes to help five women who otherwise couldn't carry their own children. Uterine transplantation, as the process is known, is a relatively new frontier in reproductive medicine. Doctors say it could help women who have a condition called uterine factor infertility, which means they were either born without a uterus, had it removed or had uterine damage. About 5 percent of reproductive age women worldwide are affected, according to Penn Medicine. "For women with uterine factor infertility, uterus transplantation is potentially a new path to parenthood outside of adoption and use of a gestational carrier and it's the only option which allows these women to carry and deliver their babies," said Dr. Kathleen O'Neill, who is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and who helps run the trial. There have been about 70 such transplants around the world. But most programs have focused on living donors, Penn researchers said. (In some cases the donor was the recipient's mother.) In the United States, there have been six live donor cases. In 2017, the world's first known woman to receive a uterus from a deceased donor gave birth to a six pound girl in Brazil. Last summer, the Cleveland Clinic announced that a girl had been born after a uterus transplant from a deceased donor, the first such birth in the United States. Dr. Paige Porrett, an assistant professor of transplant surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study's co leaders, says the major advantage of using a deceased donor is that doctors are able to harvest more of the blood vessels attached to the organ. This gives surgeons larger vessels to use during the procedure, in which vessels from the donor organ are sewn together with the patients'. Using deceased donors also eliminates the unnecessary surgical risks that otherwise healthy living patients would undergo to donate, Dr. Porrett said. Despite these risks, more than 80 women offered to donate a uterus for the trial. Dr. Porrett said there wasn't enough data yet to determine whether there was a difference between transplanting an organ from a living or deceased donor. The total cost of the procedure is unknown, said Dr. O'Neill, who added that the hospital was paying for the five cases in the trial. She estimated that similar procedures cost 60,000 in the United Kingdom and upward of 200,000 at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, which also performs the procedure. Dr. O'Neill, who has struggled with her own infertility issues, said the team had successfully transplanted a uterus into a second patient, but declined to provide further details. In 2018, Ms. Gobrecht underwent a 10 hour surgery to transfer the donor uterus. About six months later, doctors implanted the first embryo, which was ultimately successful. "I felt the actual glow," she said about being pregnant with her son, Benjamin. "Feeling Benjamin's little kicks, and seeing all the ultrasounds are priceless to me," she said. But there were difficult parts. Ms. Gobrecht had to take immunosuppressant medicine and follow a strict regimen to prevent her body from rejecting the organ. "It can be a lot," she said. She said she was inspired and supported by other women who had undergone the procedure and wanted to help advance the science for others. "I hope that this process can be another mainstream option for couples hoping to have children that don't necessarily have the option to do it the standard, natural way," she said. After Ms. Gobrecht gave birth to her son, doctors removed the uterus. On Thursday, her husband, Drew Gobrecht, said the couple were relishing changing diapers and feeding their son at their home outside Philadelphia. "It's been an abnormal journey so far," he said. "We're excited about the normal stuff."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
SPOKANE, Wash. Shanna Torp has never been uneasy around guns. Her father, a retired trucker, kept a gun in the cab when he was on the road. When Ms. Torp, a debt collector from Post Falls, Idaho, goes camping, she takes a rifle to ward off cougars and bears. But after her mother died following heart surgery, her 80 year old father became despondent, Ms. Torp told suicide prevention workers at a gun show here last autumn. There had been several suicides in Post Falls, she said. She added pointedly: "And he's got quite a few guns." Ms. Torp has reason to worry. Gun violence kills about 40,000 Americans each year, but while public attention has focused on mass shootings, murders and accidental gun deaths, these account for little more than one third of the nation's firearms fatalities. The majority of gun deaths are suicides and just over half of suicides involve guns. According to national health statistics, 24,432 Americans used guns to kill themselves in 2018, up from 19,392 in 2010. People who kill themselves in this way are usually those with ready access to firearms: gun owners and their family members. Gun owners are not more suicidal than people who don't own guns, but attempts with guns are more likely to be fatal. Now, nearly a year after the coronavirus pandemic began, unleashing a tide of economic dislocation and despair, experts are bracing for a rise in suicides. Gun sales have risen steadily since March, and as shutdowns aimed at containing the virus have disrupted lives and led to social isolation, studies have shown an increase in anxiety and suicidal ideation. "So many people are struggling right now," said Jennifer Stuber, an associate professor of social work who helped found the University of Washington's Forefront Suicide Prevention center. "The indicators are that a perfect storm is about to hit." She noted that people who purchase guns to protect themselves from civil unrest and a possible rise in crime "may actually be incurring more potential risk in terms of harm that can come to their family." The concern about suicides has led to an unusual alliance between suicide prevention advocates and gun rights proponents; together they are devising new strategies to prevent suicide in a population committed to the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. Retailers and gun range operators are learning to ask questions of the new customer who doesn't seem to know much about, or to be interested in, the gun he wants to buy. (Most suicides, especially gun suicides, are carried out by men.) Many gun shops have stopped providing loaner firearms to new customers to try out, as people have used these to kill themselves at ranges. Jacquelyn Clark, owner of Bristlecone Shooting outside Denver, has changed her loaner policies, but said she still worried that customers could develop depression or dementia and do something rash. "That's what keeps me up at night," she said. Many gun owners are unaware that gun suicides outnumber all other gun deaths. Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: "How did we not know?" Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders. Some suicide prevention experts wonder if there isn't a contradiction in working with groups like the National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation and Second Amendment Foundation. These groups do not support many measures that public health officials have called for, including universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods and so called red flag laws. Brett Bass also served in the Marines, where he became a rifle sharpshooter and pistol expert. A certified marksmanship instructor, he owns six handguns and four rifles. But Mr. Bass, who is 37, has also known several men, including a fellow Marine with whom he served in Afghanistan, who killed themselves, and he has stored guns for close friends when they were severely depressed. Mr. Bass works full time for Safer Homes, Suicide Aware, a state funded suicide prevention program in Washington State led by the Forefront Suicide Prevention center. Since the pandemic started, the organization has rolled back in person outreach at events like the Wes Knodel Gun Knife Show at the fairgrounds in Spokane, where Mr. Bass had a table in the corner late last year. He was surrounded by displays of firearms: antique bayonets and rifles laid out on zebra skin, historical pistols that look like props from old Westerns, and rows and rows of boxed ammunition. At Mr. Bass's booth, a poster implored visitors: "Stop by and have a conversation that may save a life." The incentives were free merchandise: lockboxes for medication, high end safes for handguns and expensive gun locks that could disable a shotgun or rifle. (All of the gear was donated by Boeing.) If they say they are troubled, offer to take possession of their guns until the crisis passes. It's not true that someone contemplating suicide will simply choose another method. "People think, 'There nothing I can do about it. If someone wants to commit suicide, I can't stop them,'" said Ms. Votava, who lost two brothers to suicide. "But there's a part of us that is wired for life, and if the attempt is aborted, the natural wiring kicks in." Public health experts liken the approach to taking the keys away from a friend who might otherwise drive home drunk. "If you're on a diet, do you want to have ice cream in your freezer?" Dr. Stuber said. "Clinicians will tell you, what's most important is to remove the firearm from the individual. That person is in terrible pain, and they fixate on getting out of that pain. We've got to disrupt that." Most gun suicides are carried out by people who are longtime gun owners; less than 10 percent are carried out by someone who recently purchased the gun. In either case, Dr. Stuber says, firearm retailers are important allies in suicide prevention efforts. A study she co authored found that once gun retailers learned about the risks to their community, they were more willing to get involved and integrate information about suicide prevention into firearm safety training. Mr. Aposhian, of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, is a prime example. When his own research confirmed what a local legislator, Steve Eliason, had told him that 85 percent of gun deaths in Utah were suicides he had "an epiphany of sorts," he said. "That was our family, our friends, our neighbors, our co workers," Mr. Aposhian said. "Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn't realize was we have a huge suicide rate." Since then he has played a leading role in state efforts to curb suicide. These include adding a suicide prevention module to the training that is required for a permit to carry a concealed gun, a permit that is recognized by dozens of states outside Utah. Whenever a friend or acquaintance is going through a difficult time, Mr. Aposhian said, "I ask that awkward question, 'Are you thinking of harming yourself?' The second question is, 'Hey, why don't I babysit your guns for a week?'" Mr. Aposhian said he had stored guns for friends on numerous occasions, most recently for a family that owned many firearms. "There was a traumatic experience in the family, and they are big time gun owners," he said. He changed the combination on their electronic gun safe, and stashed other guns the family owned in his own safe. "Friends don't let friends in crisis have access to lethal means of harm," Mr. Aposhian said. "It's not a great bumper sticker, but it's easy for people to accept." Years earlier, when Mr. Demicco was just an employee at the store, he had reluctantly sold a gun to a woman who radiated unhappiness. But the store owner's wife knew her and vouched for her. "Would you believe," Mr. Demicco said, "the next morning, that same lady, to whom I sold a gun, took her 7 year old daughter, drove to a remote location, and killed her daughter and herself." In the years that followed, Mr. Demicco said, he took action that he believed prevented suicides on dozens of occasions. In one case, he said, a well dressed woman came in, walked straight to the counter, pointed to a handgun and said she wanted to buy it, without ever making eye contact with him. "I said to her, 'Should you be buying a gun?'" Mr. Demicco recalled. The woman started crying, he said, and confided that she had just been discharged from the hospital. He encouraged her to go home, and called her doctor on her behalf. 'How are you going to save lives?' The discussions that brought public health experts and gun owners together in New Hampshire gave rise to the Gun Shop Project, a coalition of public health and mental health practitioners, firearm retailers and gun rights advocates, under the aegis of the New Hampshire Firearm Safety Coalition. The project created suicide prevention posters and fliers to distribute in gun stores that could be reproduced for free, on one condition, Mr. Demicco said: "You stick to the spirit and intent of our materials, which is not anti gun but anti suicide." The poster reads, "Concerned about a family member or friend? Hold on to their guns." It lists warning signs that a person might be suicidal, such as depression, anger, reckless behavior, a recent breakup or other setback, substance abuse and talk of "being better off dead." Whether such educational efforts will be successful in reducing gun suicides is still an open question. The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention has estimated that 3,600 to 3,900 gun suicides a year could be prevented if even a small proportion of gun owning families locked up their guns, and the risk of a suicide in a household with a gun was lowered to that in a gun free home. In Washington State, Dr. Stuber's research has found that the brief suicide awareness interventions at community events led gun owners to be more diligent about locking up their firearms. In New Hampshire, the percentage of suicides occurring after recent gun purchases has declined slightly in recent years, although researchers say the drop cannot be clearly attributed to Gun Shop Project initiatives. Research on legal restrictions on firearms is more plentiful. A new handgun law in Connecticut that requires a permit before a firearm purchase has been associated with a 15 percent reduction of gun suicides in that state, while the repeal of permit to purchase laws in Missouri has been associated with a similar increase in firearm suicides, a study found. State laws prohibiting the sale of firearms to youth were associated with a modest decrease in suicides among those aged 14 to 20, one study found. A study of handgun laws in all 50 states indicated laws restricting the purchase of handguns could have an even bigger impact on lowering suicide rates. "When people say, 'Why are you working with gun shops? They sell a terrible product' I get it," said Catherine Barber, a senior researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Research Center and one of the founders of the Gun Shop Project. "But how are you going to save lives?" And barriers remain, including the deeply ingrained message that gun owners have internalized, that they need quick access to firearms to protect themselves. Ms. Torp, concerned about her father, picked up a pill lockbox for his insulin from the Safer Homes booth, as well as a handgun safe and a locking device for his Winchester Defender.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Health
|
We had made it to Tete, Mozambique. The sun was sinking behind the Zambezi River like a scoop of orange sherbet as we sat on the motel's deck taking in the quiet close of another long day on the road. But we avoided one another's eyes. The table in front of us was cluttered with maps, notebooks, competing spreadsheets and empty beer bottles. "I don't know, man," Robert said. "Mozambique's interesting, but it kind of reminds me of Spain in the '80s. Maybe we should go our separate ways." For days, tensions had been building. It was hard traveling with another family, facing the endless decision making of a road trip, especially this one. Robert and his wife, two Dutch friends whose children are about the same age as ours, were hankering to go west to see Botswana's Kalahari Desert and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. I had promised our two boys, Apollo, 6, and Asa, 4, that we would hit the beach in Mozambique, fabled for its pristine coastline. But this wasn't just a quibble over the route, which, in the spirit of this trip, we had always intended to be flexible. We were getting on one another's nerves. No. That's too soft. We were annoying the bejesus out of one another. The next morning my wife, Courtenay, and our sons jumped into our truck. "Roll 'em up, lock 'em up," I said as we swung out of the parking lot. We headed down a long, bright highway by ourselves. I'd told Robert that we would meet him in Cape Town, though who knew if either of us would actually make it. Cape Town was still nearly 2,000 miles away. This odyssey driving across the bottom half of Africa, without any firm plans started out as a lark. We were at a birthday party at Robert's house; at the time, (which was late last year), we all lived in Nairobi, Kenya. During the festivities, Robert abruptly turned down the music and called everyone outside. He has worked all over the world for the United Nations and other international organizations and speaks about 38 languages. You know what military officers call "command presence"? Well, Robert has it in spades: tall, handsome, confident, topped by a wicked crest of pure white hair. He also has an awesome smile. The instant he told everyone to go outside, I knew what he was up to. He was going to give his wife a car, and I could tell from the glint in his eye that this was as much a selfie gift as anything. Stepping into the driveway, everyone gasped and started laughing: He had bought her an old green Land Rover Defender, the ultimate safari vehicle, and wrapped it in Christmas lights adorned with Chinese lanterns. It was the most ambitious road trip any of us had ever planned: 4,250 miles one way, 16 days, six countries, five young children, four hardheaded adults and two questionable trucks. "Sounds like a bad Christmas carol," Courtenay muttered. To be honest, she was never into it. Most areas we intended to pass through in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa were relatively safe for drivers, northern Mozambique being the one question mark. But it wasn't as though we had AAA for back up. You break down in rural Malawi or back roads Tanzania, where there aren't any spare parts or much transport, and you might as well get comfortable for a week. And our truck was no spring chicken. It was a Nissan Patrol, sturdy as heck but 11 years old and with more than 100,000 miles and a few rattles. This all might sound risky, maybe even reckless, but I've lived in East Africa for more than a decade and felt comfortable traveling here, knowing the region was more accessible than most people appreciate. As the push off date approached, our mountain of gear stupidly grew. (When you take a road trip, you're the worst packer. You think: "Oh, yeah. We'll have all the room in the world.) Soon we were running out of space in our operational staging area. Our guest room was heaped with mosquito nets, tarps, sleeping bags, bed rolls, tin dishes, flats of water, a monstrous medical kit containing everything from malaria prophylaxis to Tums, copies of our passports, visas and this thing called a "Carnet de Passages," a very official looking customs document that allows you to cross borders in your own vehicle. We'd also packed too many clothes, a satellite transmitter, spark plugs, granola, nuts, fuses, boxed milk, an air pump, a tow rope and seven packages of Huggies, for the long rides. We spent the next hour and a half waiting in lines, to get our passports stamped, to get our yellow fever cards checked, to show our Carnet de Passages. Then we were free, out on the road again chugging past trucks with inspirational messages emblazoned on their backsides such as "Love Your Enemies." We crossed into Tanzania that same day, and the landscape immediately opened up: lush, green savanna unrolling from the sides of the highway. We passed through a string of villages, each specializing in a particular commodity. In the first, everyone along the road sold chickens. In the next, eggs. The village after that, oranges. We motored through spiky sisal fields that ran for miles and miles and ended in a town where dozens of people were selling wooden hand carved stools they were actually carving them along the road, flakes of wood shavings littering the highway's shoulders being gently stirred by the wind of our passing wheels. In rural Africa the economy isn't hidden, as it is in the United States. You drive right through it. Robert was right behind me as I took a curve, perhaps a little fast. Ahead, I saw a man in a white uniform step out from under a mango tree into the road. Shoot. A police officer. He had his arm up, which meant stop. Road trips are as much about what is happening inside the car as out. Our collective brood, all boys between ages 4 and 7, did surprisingly well, napping, looking out the windows and pulling each other's hair only occasionally. The roads were tarmac all through Malawi and Tanzania. The only problem was gas. Malawi has few fuel stations, and I ran out twice, rescued by Robert. I think our best day of the entire trip was shortly before we split up. We had treated ourselves to a classy old whitewashed hotel, the Sunbird Livingstonia Beach Hotel, on Salima Bay. It wasn't even that expensive, around 90,000 Kwacha a night, or about 125, and we took the day off from driving to swim in the body temperature lake and get tossed around by the waves. I didn't want to leave. But Robert and his team hadn't signed up for a beach holiday, and driving all the way to Cape Town had been my great idea, after all. When we told the room steward that we had to go, he shook his head wistfully. "It'd be great to see other countries, see how other people live," he said, folding a sheet. "In Malawi, everyone's born in Malawi. They live in Malawi. They die in Malawi. They don't see anything else." After getting the keys to a rundown rondoval at a seaside hotel, we scampered to the beach, to sand that sparkled but not in the way you might imagine. It was the day after New Year's. Thousands of beer bottles lay at the water's edge, as though they had been vomited up by the sea. The place was a pigsty, but our boys loved it, collecting dozens of dirty bottles and making giant bottle castles. In Kenya, you'd never see that. Poor people would have been all over that beach, scooping up the empties to make money from recycling. Courtenay and I found the whole scene depressing and consoled ourselves with heaping plates of rice, paozinho (Portuguese rolls) and shrimp so succulent and tasty that even the boys who usually flee at the sight of anything unusual on their plates, especially if that unusual thing has eyes gobbled it up. But our clock was ticking. Robert was somewhere out there, chugging his way south. Though we'd had our disagreements, I missed seeing that dark green Land Rover behind me. As we hustled toward the Swaziland border, a wall of brown, stubbly mountains rising before us, I guess I started to zone out. I didn't see her until it was too late. A corpulent police officer stepped out from under a tree. That was always their strategy: Hang out in the shade and wait for a victim. It was the equivalent of the American patrol officer on a motorcycle hiding behind a billboard. She walked into the road, arm up. When I pulled over, she fanned her face. Her eyes darted around. "Baby no have seatbelt." "What? He just took it off. We've been stopped for three minutes." "Baby no seatbelt. We go police station Matola." "Matola?" I said incredulously. "Isn't that an hour away?" "Then pay fine here," she said, staring into my face. "Three hundred meticals." After I handed it over, she waved happily goodbye. The Kingdom of Swaziland is a strange little place: population 1.4 million; per capita income 8,500, not bad by sub Saharan standards; and one of the world's lowest life expectancies, at 52 years. AIDS destroyed this place, possibly because it is a country in between. In Africa, transit points have become H.I.V. hot zones; long haul truckers are some of the worst culprits for spreading the virus. Swaziland's roads were good, its landscape barren and windswept. We drove end to end in 2 hours 48 minutes 7 seconds. By the time we reached South Africa, we had six days of vacation left and more than 1,000 miles to go. I had visited South Africa nearly a dozen times, but I had never driven the country. The landscape was dreamy: rippling green hills, tall trees and miles and miles of farms and vineyards stocked with grapes so plump and juicy, you just wanted to pull over and pluck them. I found myself asking: "How did this happen? How did South Africa get all the good land?" We caught one of the most beautiful sunsets I'd ever seen. Over the west side of the N2 highway, fingers of light reached into a cool, dark forest. We made three stops on the way to Cape Town, our favorite being St. Lucia, a well kempt town sporting carpets of crab grass for front lawns. It felt like Boca Raton, Fla., except for the 3,000 pound hippos lumbering through the neat little streets at night. Set in a large estuary filled with life, St. Lucia is a great place for a boat tour to see hippos and crocodiles, which we enjoyed, booking through Hornbill House, the bed and breakfast where we stayed. We were all eager to get to Cape Town, arguably one of the world's most stunning cities. Our boys were excited to see the penguins at the Simon's Town penguin colony. I was ready to stop driving. Courtenay just wanted the trip to end. As we curved around a mountain near the penguins, bubbling with the sense of triumph at having made it, a familiar green Land Rover hurtled toward us. I tooted madly. We pulled over and hugged, a lot, in a parking lot. It was great to see Robert, his wife and their children, and we were sorry that we hadn't been able to stay together the whole time. But we had adventures to share and the children were talking fast: "We saw crocodiles!" "Well, we saw a castle!"
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
A confession: Until recently, the only time I spent a night on water was at age 8, when my parents booked our family of three on a cruise to Finland. I remember gaping at the ice cream selection and gazing into brightly lit boutique windows, and not much else. So when I boarded the Regent Seven Seas Explorer, the luxury cruise line's newest ship, on its recent voyage to Mexico, it was with limited expectations: copious food and stuff to buy. Regent is targeting travelers like me, millennials green to cruising, with promises to go above and beyond their assumptions (or vague recollections of childhood voyages). But it's a delicate balance, appealing to a generation of thrill seekers a 2014 Harris survey found that 72 percent of millennials prefer to spend money on experiences rather than material things while appeasing the cruise line's most loyal demographic (ages 60 and up). There are other big ships wooing millennials: In 2015, Carnival Cruise Line started Fathom, which has programs designed for 20 and 30 somethings' hunger for purpose, like onboard self improvement seminars and on the ground activities, like making water filters in the Dominican Republic. Then there are fist pumping bacchanals like Groove Cruise, a four day party that bills itself as the "world's largest floating dance music festival." Regent's hook: unabashed opulence, like a floating Las Vegas. On the day I set sail, a banner at the Explorer's embarkation dock proclaimed, "the most luxurious ship ever built"; completed in 2016, the ship cost 450 million. The first thing that greets guests: a piano size chandelier dripping with crystals. With only 375 guest rooms, small compared to megaliners that can accommodate more than 3,000 passengers, Regent rolled out the red carpet for everyone: Champagne sat cooling in an ice bucket in my suite, which was spacious enough not to feel claustrophobic. The pool deck echoed the over the top sensibility, with furnishings that are reminiscent of Miami or Mykonos (neon lights; white upholstered chairs; gauzy, curtained cabanas). By the bar, women in leather moto jackets sipped white wine, and a D.J. spun Fleetwood Mac (a win on both demographic fronts). One restaurant, Pacific Rim, seemed attuned to adventurous palates, with melt in your mouth prawn crackers and Korean barbecue style lamb. With its sunken floor, Claes Oldenburg esque light fixtures and Tibetan prayer wheel, the place felt more like a scene y Manhattan restaurant Tao, Hakkasan than a cruise dining hall.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Travel
|
She shows up on his doorstep in the middle of the day, while his wife and toddler son are out. It's been four years since Tom and Sophie were together, and as he lets her into his home you can feel his wariness. He's moved away from their old town in the north of Wales, started a new life, tried to disappear. What does she want with him now? What he wants is clear enough: to get her gone as fast as possible. But the reason for her coming, and the reason they broke up, emerge only gradually in Brad Birch's psychological thriller "Tremor," at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. Directed by David Mercatali for the Cardiff, Wales based Sherman Theater, this hourlong drama unfolds at first like a simple meeting of exes him rigid and defensive, her nervous and on unfamiliar turf. Their catch up conversation is littered with casual daggers to the heart, like her surprise that he's a father when she didn't think he was the type. "We just never spoke about it," he says, correcting the assumption. "It's not a conversation we had."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
BERKELEY, Calif. As a child in Hilo, one of the less touristy parts of Hawaii, Jennifer A. Doudna felt out of place. She had blond hair and blue eyes, and she was taller than the other kids, who were mostly of Polynesian and Asian descent. "I think to them I looked like a freak," she recently recalled. "And I felt like a freak." Her isolation contributed to a kind of bookishness that propelled her toward science. Her upbringing "toughened her up," said her husband, Jamie Cate. "She can handle a lot of pressure." These days, that talent is being put to the test. Three years ago, Dr. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a relatively easy way to alter any organism's DNA, just as a computer user can edit a word in a document. The discovery has turned Dr. Doudna (the first syllable rhymes with loud) into a celebrity of sorts, the recipient of numerous accolades and prizes. The so called Crispr Cas9 genome editing technique is already widely used in laboratory studies, and scientists hope it may one day help rewrite flawed genes in people, opening tremendous new possibilities for treating, even curing, diseases. But now Dr. Doudna, 51, is battling on two fronts to control what she helped create. While everyone welcomes Crispr Cas9 as a strategy to treat disease, many scientists are worried that it could also be used to alter genes in human embryos, sperm or eggs in ways that can be passed from generation to generation. The prospect raises fears of a dystopian future in which scientists create an elite population of designer babies with enhanced intelligence, beauty or other traits. Scientists in China reported last month that they had already used the technique in an attempt to change genes in human embryos, though on defective embryos and without real success. Dr. Doudna has been organizing the scientific community to prevent this ethical line from being crossed. "The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing," she said. She is also fighting for control of what could be hugely lucrative intellectual property rights to the genome editing technique. To the surprise of many, the first sweeping patents for the technology were granted not to her, but to Feng Zhang, a scientist at the Broad Institute and M.I.T. "I really want to see this technology used to help people," Dr. Doudna said. "It would be a shame if the I.P. situation would block that." The development of the Crispr Cas9 technique is a story in which obscure basic biological research turned out to have huge practical implications. For Dr. Doudna, though, it is only one accomplishment in a stellar career. "She's been a high impact scientist from the time she was a graduate student," said Thomas Cech, a Nobel laureate and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado, for whom Dr. Doudna was a postdoctoral researcher. "New topics, new fields of science, but she just has a knack for discovery." Dr. Doudna was 7 when she moved to Hilo, where her father taught literature at the University of Hawaii campus there, and her mother lectured on history at a community college. Their daughter loved exploring the rain forests and was fascinated by how things worked. She found her calling in high school after hearing a lecture by a scientist about her research into how normal cells became cancerous. "I was just dumbstruck," Dr. Doudna recalled. "I wanted to be her." After studying biochemistry at Pomona College in California, she went to Harvard for graduate school. There her adviser, the future Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, was doing research on RNA. Some scientists believe that RNA, not DNA, was the basis of early life, since the molecule can both store genetic information and catalyze chemical reactions. Dr. Doudna earned her doctoral degree by engineering a catalytic RNA that could self replicate, adding evidence to that theory. But her inability to visualize this catalytic RNA hindered her work. In 2005, Dr. Doudna was approached by Jillian Banfield, an environmental researcher at Berkeley who had been sequencing the DNA of unusual microbes that lived in a highly acidic abandoned mine. In the genomes of many of these microbes were unusual repeating sequences called "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," or Crispr. No one was quite sure what they did, though over the next few years scientists elsewhere established that these sequences were part of a bacterial immune system. Between the repeated sequences were stretches of DNA taken from viruses that had previously infected the bacteria genetic most wanted posters, so to speak. If the same virus invaded again, these stretches of DNA would permit the bacteria to recognize it and destroy it by slicing up its genetic material. Dr. Doudna was trying to figure out exactly how this happened. "I remember thinking this is probably the most obscure thing I ever worked on," she said. It would prove to have wide use. At a conference in early 2011, she met Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist at Umea University in Sweden, who had already made some fundamental discoveries about the relatively simple Crispr system in one bacterial species. The bacterial expert and the structural biologist decided to work together. "It was very enjoyable, because we were complementary," said Dr. Charpentier, who recalled sitting in her office near the North Pole while Dr. Doudna regaled her with stories about Hawaii. Along with postdoctoral researchers Martin Jinek and Krzysztof Chylinski, the two scientists eventually figured out how two pieces of RNA join up with a protein made by the bacteria called Cas9 to cut DNA at a specific spot. The researchers also found that the two RNA pieces could be combined into one and still function. In a eureka moment, the scientists realized that this cellular defense system might be used to edit genomes, not just kill viruses. A specific sequence of guide RNA could be made to attach to a spot virtually anywhere on the genome, and the Cas9 protein would cleave the DNA at that spot. Then pieces of the DNA could be deleted or added, just as a film editor might cut a film and splice in new frames. The researchers demonstrated this using DNA in a test tube. While there were other genome editing techniques, they found that Crispr Cas9 was much simpler. Dr. Doudna, whose expertise was in working with molecules, not cells, reported such a demonstration in human cells in January 2013. But her report came four weeks after two papers were published simultaneously, one by George Church at Harvard and the other by the Broad Institute's Dr. Zhang. Now the University of California and the Broad Institute are arguing before the federal patent office over whether Dr. Doudna or Dr. Zhang, who last year received the Waterman Award for young scientists that Dr. Doudna had won years earlier, was the first to invent the genome editing technique. So far, the patents have gone to Dr. Zhang. The Broad Institute claims that the paper by Dr. Doudna and Dr. Charpentier in 2012 did not demonstrate how to alter DNA in cells with nuclei, including human cells, something requiring the inventive steps that Dr. Zhang took. His patent application included pages from a lab notebook he said demonstrated that he was doing Crispr genome editing even before the 2012 paper was published. The University of California says it filed for a patent months before Dr. Zhang did, though the Broad Institute says that initial application lacked necessary details. The university's request to the patent office says that once the 2012 paper laid out the recipe, it was obvious how to use it in cells. The university also says Dr. Zhang's notebook does not prove he could edit genomes before the 2012 paper. Patent disputes are often settled in time. In any event, Dr. Church of Harvard said, before Crispr Cas9 could be used to treat disease, it would need important refinements from many other researchers. "It's going to be hard to use Feng's without Jennifer's, and it would be hard to use either of them without further improvements," he said. The scientists have formed competing companies with rights to their patents and pending patents. Dr. Doudna co founded Caribou Biosciences to work on research uses of Crispr Cas9, and more recently, Intellia Therapeutics to work on disease treatments. Even before the dust settles, researchers are moving ahead. While contending with the patents, Dr. Doudna began hearing reports that researchers were trying to use Crispr Cas9 to make inheritable DNA changes in embryos. Genetically altered monkeys had already been created in China using the technique. "It's very far afield from the kind of chemistry I think about and know about," she said. Still, she felt it would be irresponsible to ignore the rumors. She organized a meeting of leading biologists in Napa, Calif., in January. In a subsequent commentary published in Science, the group called for a moratorium on attempts to create altered babies, though they said basic research on inheritable changes should still be done. Dr. Doudna said it was not practical to prohibit basic research. "You can't really put a lid on it, even if you wanted to," she said. She and others are trying to organize a bigger international meeting with participants from companies and governments as well as universities, possibly to set new guidelines. She is also trying to cope with her newfound quasi celebrity status. She has been invited to hobnob with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, to speak to science fiction writers, to advise Hollywood on science themed movies. The garden, her hobby, has had to wait. In November, Dr. Doudna and Dr. Charpentier were each awarded 3 million Breakthrough Prizes, endowed by leading Internet entrepreneurs. They accepted their awards at an Oscars like black tie affair attended by movie stars like Cameron Diaz and Benedict Cumberbatch. Recently Time magazine listed the two scientists among the 100 most influential people in the world. Dr. Doudna, who has a 12 year old son, Andrew, also finds herself a role model for women in science. Her secret: "I have a great partner," with whom she shares the chores. Her husband, Dr. Cate, is also a professor at Cal Berkeley. The couple have adjacent offices, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Dr. Cate also studies RNA; there is some overlap, but mostly they do their own research. Andrew walks to their office from his middle school each afternoon and hangs out until his parents are ready to go home. "I don't think of myself as a role model, but I can see that I am," Dr. Doudna said. "I still think of myself as that person back in Hawaii."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
One midnight near semester's end on the skirts of Harvard Yard, music thumped and laughs rang out from a colonnaded, Greek revival mansion, the sort usually seen in Hollywood fantasies about fraternal campus life. But it was the scene outside that suggested something other than a frat party. This was the headquarters of the Fly, an exclusive men's fellowship known here as a final club. At its side door stood a silver haired man in tuxedo, checking names against a list of the lucky invited. Eager young women in micro minis queued up. Except one. A lone girl sat on the front steps, bathed by yellow light spilling from windows in which the silhouettes of revelers held pool cues and beer bottles. She was hunched over, legs flopped on either side, face in hands. She had managed to get in but was "kicked out," she wailed into a phone pressed against her ear. Her cheeks were reddened, streaked with mascara. Now, she sobbed, "they won't let me in!" A group of young men stood in the doorway, hands shoved in pockets, chatting. Every so often they cast an awkward glance at the young woman. The Fly is one of six remaining all male final clubs. They are, if not the hub, the apex of social life at Harvard upscale surrogates for those classic centers of college merriment, sororities and fraternities. On any given weekend, a string of young women spools out onto Mount Auburn Street in front of one or another of the club porticos. And while there might be legitimate reasons to exclude them, from intoxication to overcrowding, the crying woman on the stairs underscored the power the final clubs have over the student psyche. Entree can feel like belonging, rejection like a scarlet F. Some students describe final clubs as nothing more than fun outlets on a campus with few options for unsupervised play. To those who join they offer a close knit group of friends and a refuge from the high pressure of the Harvard course load. After graduation, members enjoy access to an extensive alumni network. But to many students on the outside, the clubs are laden with a legacy of upper crust snobbishness. As the writer Kenneth Auchincloss referred to them in a 1958 dispatch in The Harvard Crimson: Final clubs are gathering places of the "St. Grottlesex crop," an amalgamation of the names of several elite East Coast boarding schools, who "look to the Clubs as centers for privacy and 'good fellowship,' cut off from the hectic University by their locked front doors, their aura of secrecy, and a generally shared feeling of superiority." Today, that description is perpetuated by unwritten codes on who may pass through their doors and who may join. The elaborate courtship of the desirable can begin with an engraved invitation slipped under a dorm room door to "punch" a selection process that continues with a series of outings and culminates in a black tie dinner feting the few who make it through. These clashing perceptions have roiled the community over the past year, with the administration falling squarely into the camp that final clubs and all they represent, wittingly or not, do not belong at Harvard. It is a long held stance that has resulted in periodic action by the university and counterpunches by the clubs. But this year's iteration of the battle, led by Rakesh Khurana, dean of the college, carries a particularly big stick: Starting with the class of 2021, members will be barred from leadership roles in Harvard sanctioned clubs and athletics and from receiving recommendations from the dean for top scholarships like the Rhodes and Fulbright. And the conversation has been expanded to include all single gender clubs unaffiliated with the university, including five all women final clubs, four sororities and five fraternities. The decision stands to have ramifications beyond Cambridge, Mass., by ratifying a movement that is taking hold across the country: to make student social life more inclusive. "The discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances," Dr. Khurana wrote in a letter to Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, in May. "The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men. In their recruitment practices and through their extensive resources and access to networks of power, these organizations propagate exclusionary values that undermine those of the larger Harvard College community." In an interview a few days after graduation, Dr. Khurana softened his rhetoric. "It's not our intention to make the students feel persecuted," he said. "I want to just say to our students: The issue is not our students. I think they are people of immense character and integrity. We are trying to create the conditions to allow our students to become the kind of people they say they want to become in their admissions essays." The push to end, or at least reform, final clubs is also informed by the urgent discussion nationwide of sexual assault on campus. A 2015 survey of several universities by the Association of American Universities found that by the time they were seniors, 47 percent of Harvard women who had participated in final club activities had experienced unwanted sexual touch, compared with 31 percent schoolwide. Richard T. Porteus, class of '78 and president of the Fly's graduate body, is one of the few final club members to publicly challenge the college. "If Harvard really were to become serious about preventing sexual assault rather than using it as a way to push an ideological stance," he told me, "they'd drill down to find out exactly what is occurring rather than trying to throw a moral pall over any man or women who belongs to these clubs." To charges that the men cast themselves in the role of patriarchal gatekeeper, Mr. Porteus made a pragmatic argument: The clubhouses have limited capacity, and invitation only protects members and guests, particularly women. And the doorkeeper, a part time staff member and parent of a college student, can assess the sobriety of guests, entering and departing. In a stab at the dean, he concluded: "What is more patriarchal than an older male authority figure deciding for young women where and how they should spend their personal time when off campus?" The clubs have adamantly defied demands to become coeducational not for exclusivity's sake, Mr. Porteus said, but out of a belief that what a single gender space offers is of deep value. "Whether you're a man or a woman or you identify in any other way, you're curious to learn from others of the gender you identify with," he said. "That is why single gender entities exist, from Wellesley College to the Boy Scouts of America." "It is not," he said, "a rejection of anyone." Walking into the Fly, it's easy to sense the power and lineage of the men who came before: the lingering aroma of smoke that must have taken decades to accumulate, the large wooden table in the members only library, where students have studied for at least a hundred years in this, their final social club before graduation (having already passed through a freshman club and a waiting club). History is venerated, and he was eager to tell how it is passed down through the many artworks and objets d'art housed in its clubhouse, including thousands of renderings of boars, its emblem. Alexander Calder, a rare exception to the nonvisitor policy, was so taken with the place, the story goes, that he gifted a sculpture depicting two mating boars; it was once lent to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a retrospective. Far from fraternity hazing, Porc initiation rites include memorizing and reciting each item's provenance and meaning in pop quizzes. The Porcellian is considering becoming coed, the member said. "Even though it's the oldest club, it's not blindly and foolishly wedded to a certain way of being," he said. "The club, in order to stay relevant for its members, needs to continue to evolve." What it is rejecting is being forced by outside parties to do so and instantly. And it has pushed back. Last spring, the Porcellian commissioned a report of its own contesting the sexual assault statistics produced by the Association of American Universities. If the administration continues with its sanctions, he said, the club will pursue a lawsuit, citing rights to freedom of assembly. The Fly is also considering litigation. If the groups were to bend and turn coed, whatever it is they do behind their stately doors and Corinthian columns could continue. Last year, a few relented: The Spee and Fox admitted women, though in response to alumni backlash the Fox's were provisional members. Contrary to the patrician conception of the club, the graduate member said, the current new class, though under a dozen, as is typical, is diverse, including several students of color as well as foreign students. Yet the clubs are stymied by both their image problem and closelipped policies. He understood that conundrum: "We recognize that as an all male club, and particularly as the oldest all male club, even if you take the time to learn about our traditions, our quirky weird traditions, we are just not a sympathetic figure and never will be in the public eye." But instead of breaking down barriers, more single gender organizations emerged. In the early '90s, the first female only final clubs and sororities arose. "We had often found ourselves on the steps of a final club trying to get into a party and being chosen or not chosen by these men, who own this real estate," Eugenia B. Schraa Huh, a founder of the women only Sabliere Society, told me. "There was this feeling of us being powerless on the social scene. We absolutely founded the club to help correct a power imbalance at Harvard." But parity has remained elusive. The women's clubs have their own level of exclusivity, and their social role is limited because many of them do not have dedicated spaces (some partner with men's clubs for parties, or co host dinners at the Fly, for example, with wine served from its cellar). The rub with the new rules is that they apply to all single gender clubs. Shortly after the announcement of sanctions, a protest called Hear Her Harvard coalesced about eliminating the women's "safe spaces." An estimated 250 participants marched from Massachusetts Hall, past the bronze statue of John Harvard, and through Harvard Yard to decry the inclusion of all female groups in the new rules, but the conversation swelled to encompass the everyday experience of being a woman at Harvard. Caroline Tervo, a member of the Pleiades Society (a women's club named for the "seven sisters" star cluster), addressed the crowd before the march: "Gender discrimination happens every day. It happens in the classroom, when men are called on more often; in the workplace, when men are paid more; and on the weekend, when women are targeted and shamed for their sexuality. On a campus and in a society that is still so male dominated, female spaces are necessary sources of empowerment." On the day sanctions were announced, women in Greek lettered T shirts huddled in urgent discussion around campus. On Facebook, fraternity and sorority members changed their profile pictures to their organization's insignia in solidarity. Many want final clubs to change but believe that by including other groups the university painted with too broad a brush. "There is a lot of value in targeting some of the exclusionary aspects of the final clubs, and making sure we are working toward the same goals collectively," said Rebecca Ramos, a rising senior and president of the Delta Gamma chapter, one of the Greek organizations that took root here in the early '90s. But, she told me, "The administration has tried to target the entire single sex social organization scene in one fell swoop, as opposed to targeting certain organizations that don't align with the values expressed by the mission of Harvard College." She said that sisters of her sorority, which is open to all women, including transgender women, act as guardians of one another's mental health, watching for signs of emotional distress and coming to their aid to share coping mechanisms or just hugs. "We've been emotional support throughout many difficult times for our sisters," she said. "People are really concerned about losing that on campus. Harvard can be a really difficult place to be." It is a place where social pressure is palpable. Several dozen students refused to discuss final clubs on the record. One, rushing across campus in a seersucker suit on his way to a Kentucky Derby watching party, summed up the sentiment of many when he said that if you have an opinion that might offend someone, keep it to yourself. Even detractors feared being dropped from a final club's party rolls. Some worried they would be blacklisted from certain professions after graduation if a powerful club alumnus got wind of any criticism. Several students were afraid they would not be able to get a job in academia, or of getting bad grades, if they criticized Harvard. Ana Andrade, a freshman folded into a chair in the center of Harvard Yard between final exams, felt emboldened enough to comment on the clubs' social impact. Particularly galling for her are the mechanics of a final club party, where women, dressed to impress, show up hoping to be picked from the crowd and invited in. "It's all about the patriarchy," she said. "It's perpetuated right there." The process, she noted, has an Ivy League twist: Women are not measured merely by the velvet rope yardstick of physical beauty. A "Harvard 10," she explained, is a mix of intellect, social status and academic je ne sais quoi. Yet the idea that men determine women's worth, she said, made her too uncomfortable to participate. Amir Khan, a 23 year old student at a local community college, has borne uneasy witness to young men as the gatekeepers of Harvard social life. He drives a cab at night, and regularly picks up profoundly inebriated women from outside final clubs. "You give them power and they think that everyone has to kneel down to them," Mr. Khan said of the club members. "Even with girls, that's how they look at it. They get to pick; it's their choice. You let these kids grow up like this and they'll have this mentality for the rest of their lives." In an annual survey of seniors conducted by the university, a majority continually say they view the clubs unfavorably, even though just a small fraction of the student body belongs to one. A similar, less comprehensive survey by The Harvard Crimson reflects that breakdown. The name drew curses from the dance floor. Harvard is but the most prestigious wave in an ocean of unrest on college campuses regarding single gender extracurricular groups. With fraternities caught up in allegations of sexual misconduct across the country, the movement to abolish them has gained momentum. In 2014, Wesleyan University ruled that its small group of residential fraternities must integrate women. Greek organizations have been banned altogether from Amherst College. Middlebury College has replaced them with mixed gender "social houses." Studies underscore the connection between binge drinking, assault and Greek life. A 2007 study by John D. Foubert, a professor of higher education at Oklahoma State University, found that members of frats have three times the likelihood of committing rape as nonmembers. But whether abolishing male organizations improves the environment for women remains to be seen. "There are lots of questions we don't have research about," Dr. Foubert said. Good metrics are hard to come by: A rise in sexual assault complaints can be a good sign "the women trust the institution more," he said and "kids can drink alcohol in any setting undetected." Some experts worry that bad behavior would just move underground. At Trinity College, a push to force single gender organizations to go coed was abandoned last year, after the president, Joanne Berger Sweeney, announced that the move appeared unlikely to foster the inclusion and equality that was hoped for. "In fact, communitywide dialogue concerning this issue has been divisive and counterproductive," she wrote in a statement. A spokeswoman confirmed that the houses failed to attract the opposite sex, and alumni donors with Greek life ties had pulled back. Despite the turmoil, nothing seismic happened when the Fox went coed, according to one member interviewed outside the clubhouse. (He would not give his full name because the club forbids members to speak to the news media.) "People were worried that, 'Oh, we can't act the same way, we can't act up,' " he said. "But I don't see it changing. I think it's a cool experience with having a different perspective in the club." Some fear what their commitment to such clubs will mean for their future. Mitchell York briefly questioned his hope to punch this year when, as a sophomore, he'll be eligible. But the promise of lifelong friends outweighed any hesitation. It even trumped the specter of reprisal, and any anxiety of being associated with a club at the cross hairs of a conversation about sexual assault. That's because the solution, Mr. York believes, lies in the club members themselves. "I know that I would never have an issue with what the final clubs are accused of," he said. "People who are joining, and people who are in them currently, have to take on the responsibility to make sure that these things don't happen."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Education
|
PepsiCo is using its expertise to help make medication more palatable for children. The giant food and beverage company, whose original soda was concocted by a pharmacist using sugar, lemon oil and nutmeg, is returning to its roots by deploying its vast research and development operation to improve the taste of tuberculosis drugs. Tuberculosis medications are produced in pills meant for adults, and are often difficult for children to swallow. "The drugs are not formulated for them, and they're unpleasant," said Dr. Richard Chaisson, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and international health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Parents are advised to crush the pills and mix them into foods like applesauce, peanut butter or ice cream to mask the vile taste, but that often simply turns children off applesauce, peanut butter and ice cream, he said. "Getting kids through treatment for TB is a nightmare," Dr. Chaisson said. "Not only are we hoping this will improve the drugs we already have, the other thing is what it will do to set the tone for newer drugs that are coming online," said Dr. Mel Spigelman, chief executive of the TB Alliance, the nonprofit group with which Pepsi is working. About 10.4 million people each year contract tuberculosis, and 1.8 million of them die, or roughly 5,000 each day, making it one of the world's 10 deadliest diseases. But only recently have public health officials woken up to the prevalence of tuberculosis among children, and even now, they say their figures on youngsters with the disease are more guesstimate than estimate. "Over the last 60 years, the timeline of when TB cases were counted, the number of cases in children has been vastly underrepresented," Dr. Chaisson said. "In the last several years, we've begun to recognize that there are at least twice as many cases of TB in kids as was previously reported." Dr. Chaisson said that because young children don't always have the characteristic cough that spreads the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, the medical community had assumed the disease wasn't as widespread among them as it now believes it is. In its most recent report on tuberculosis, the World Health Organization estimated that roughly one million children each year come down with the disease, most in Africa and India but also in parts of what was the Soviet Union and Latin America. About 200,000 of them will die, Dr. Spigelman said. In the United States, a total of 9,582 cases were reported in 2013, of which 485 were among children under 15, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year, the alliance, together with Unitaid, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, introduced a fruit flavored dissolvable tablet containing three of the drugs used to fight simple tuberculosis. It took six years and 16 million to bring those medications to market, said Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the global tuberculosis program at the World Health Organization. "The adherence issue in TB is a major one even among adults because the treatment is long, anywhere from six months to 18 or 24 months, and the drugs have some bad side effects, so anything that means people stay on the treatment longer is a good thing," Dr. Raviglione said. Pepsi has one of the more unusual research and development operations in the food and beverage business. Its leader, Mehmood Khan, is a physician and scientist who previously worked at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and he has brought that expertise to bear in reducing sugar, enhancing flavor and generally improving the nutritional quality of the company's products. One of the first innovations to come out of Dr. Khan's lab was Trop50, an orange juice product with half the calories of orange juice. More recently, the lab's work was responsible for one of the company's most successful products in the last decade, Mountain Dew Kickstart, a 60 calorie version of the soda with flavors like Pineapple Orange Mango and Fruit Punch. Trop50 and Kickstart are sweetened with stevia, a natural sweetener that has been difficult to use because the initial sweetness it delivers tends to quickly turn bitter. Kickstart, which was introduced in 2013, is on track to generate 400 million in sales this year, Dr. Khan said. "Nobody has copied that product or Trop50 because they can't," said Dr. Khan, vice chairman and chief scientific officer at PepsiCo. "We have know how in our lab that no one else has, and we can leverage that to make these drugs taste better." The idea of tapping into PepsiCo's expertise came from Rajneesh Taneja, senior director of pharmaceutical product development at the alliance and himself a survivor of drug resistant TB and a veteran of Pepsi's R D lab. Dr. Khan said it took almost no time to get Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo's chief executive, to sign off on a partnership. "This is a no brainer," he said. PepsiCo will be working to improve the flavor and sensory perception of 17 drugs used in treating tuberculosis. The company is donating to the alliance its time, expertise and any intellectual property associated with the flavors and sensory innovations it comes up with to make the drugs more palatable. Ties between soda and food companies and medical organizations have been under scrutiny of late, but Dr. Spigelman said he was not concerned that the alliance's organization with Pepsi would corrupt its mission. "I have to admit that when we went more public about this internally, some of our people raised the issue of this being a company that's selling sugar to kids and making people fat and did we really want to be associated with that," Dr. Spigelman said. "But as I weighed the option of being politically correct versus really doing something that will help save lives, to me the decision was really simple."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Well
|
If you lived in New York in the years after "Evita" arrived on Broadway in 1979, or for that matter in Argentina at any time since 1949, you know the dress: a white strapless ball gown, fairy dusted with spangles, fitted like a bandage at the bodice and billowing into a parade float below. The Dior original that Eva Peron wore to the theater and the version of it that Patti LuPone wore to sing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" in the show have each, in their way, come to signify brutal glamour, in governance as in musicals. That dress reinterpreted by the Argentine designer Alejo Vietti has been lifted out of its various contexts to become the central image of the director Sammi Cannold's smart yet unpersuasive production of "Evita," which opened on Wednesday as the annual gala production for New York City Center. When you enter the theater, it is hanging from the flies, glittering but baleful, like a carapace or an iron maiden. If that seems about right as a concept, it's a touch academic as entertainment, a pattern that Cannold's staging maintains throughout. "Evita" is already a "concept" musical, derived from a 1976 concept album by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice and originally realized on Broadway by a director, Harold Prince, whose take was deliberately chilly. Luckily, the performances of his stars LuPone and, as a narrator figure called Che, Mandy Patinkin were instinctively emotional, and the clash of temperatures was thrilling. But Cannold's interpretation, based in part on work she did for her undergraduate thesis at Stanford, is even more analytical than Prince's. Aside from separating the dress from the woman, she has separated the woman from herself: Eva is played from age 15 through 20 by Maia Reficco and as an adult by Solea Pfeiffe r. Even after the girl turns into the woman, in the middle of the song "Buenos Aires," she hovers over the rest of the action as a caution. The result, as it must be for 2019, is a more ambivalent, feminist reading of Argentina's first lady, lay saint and lightning rod. But it's also, for much of its two hours, more muddled and less engaging. When we see, for instance, how middle aged men use an obviously teenage Eva sexually as she sleeps her way from poverty in the sticks to glory in the capital, we are properly repulsed and yet confused about the message. If she's the men's victim how is she also, in deliberately bedding them with no long term interest, their victimizer? Though it's sensible to posit that Eva could be both, the libretto which is unchanged except for the interpolation of the song "You Must Love Me" from the 1996 movie doesn't give Cannold enough to support and develop the idea. It also leaves her with a problem that comes to feel like a hangover, as young Eva has little to do for most of the show but wander around with her valise like a refugee from "Les Miz." "Evita" is already overloaded with symbols. Most of its characters are abstractions, and so are most of its conflicts. Eva's chief antagonist isn't her husband, the quasi fascist Juan Peron (Enrique Acevedo), but Che (Jason Gotay), a generalized man of the people and freelance cynic. The plot unrolls like a military campaign seen from above on a strategy map, with the ensemble divided into armies representing the haughty rich, the cutthroat military and the impoverished descamisados. Cannold's production, with its additional symbolic superstructure and shaky use of the stage, is often too fragmented to produce the effects the show's creators intended. I am not really endorsing those effects; deliberately or not, they give moral status to characters who don't deserve it, just by letting them sing. Cannold undercuts that, forcing us to confront our complicity in enjoying them as entertainment. But of course, in the process they become less entertaining. As Eva, Pfeiffer an Eliza in "Hamilton" who also made a splash in the Encores! Off Center production of "Songs for a New World" bears the brunt of this problem. She looks and sounds smashing throughout, but fully comes into her own only in the second half, when a concrete if interior conflict Eva's health emerges. Acevedo is vocally lustrous but dramatically inert as the underwritten Peron. It's left to Gotay to hold things together, which he does with a beautifully sung, consistently wry performance . But Cannold deploys him haphazardly onstage, like a mouse in a maze; whenever he builds up a righteous rage, he's forced to scuttle away. In its historical hugeness and skimpy script, "Evita" will always require such trade offs. Lloyd Webber gives you his most inventive, supple music, unsingable though much of it may be, then cleverly reprises it before finally ramming it into your ear. Rice occasionally interrupts his mis accented, mixed metaphor lyrics with hooks so pointed they rip your skin. The overall idea of beatifying while beating up on Evita is likewise fatally compromised. So it's encouraging that Cannold's approach, however equivocal, works even as well as it does. Part of that is its physical and sonic beauty: not just Vietti's costumes but also Jason Sherwood's white flower bier of a set, Bradley King's ardent lighting and the orchestra, under the direction of Kristen Blodgette, playing Lloyd Webber's revised orchestration for the 2012 Broadway revival. Hiring a predominantly Latin o cast is another decision that pays off. Whether we need an "Evita" that helps to humanize a woman who enabled a dictator is a matter of taste. For me, I'll just say that the gorgeous dress is now more impressive on a hanger than it ever was when worn. Tickets Through Nov. 24 at New York City Center, Manhattan; 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours .
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
Some lives seem predestined to be shaped into stories, and Berlin's contained infinite chapters. She spent her childhood in small mining towns across the Northwest, where her father worked as an engineer. Then, while he served in World War II, she and her mother went down to Texas. When she was 13, her father moved the family to Santiago, Chile. She attended the University of New Mexico, then zigzagged from New York to California, through alcoholism and detox centers, through odd jobs (substitute teacher, hospital ward clerk, phone operator, cleaning woman), through three husbands and four sons and many other men, for whom she had a weakness nearly as great as that for drinking. Though her first collection didn't appear until she was 45, she began to write in earnest in her early 20s. Homesick for Chile, she wrote to remember, until each flower appeared in front of her. Toward the end of her life, as a writing instructor in Colorado, she was interviewed by two students for a school assignment. They asked her if she wrote for joy. She told them, "I just wrote to to go home." The vast majority of Berlin's stories include a description of a house, as rich and textured as if it were a character. It's no surprise, then, that when she sat down to write her memoir, she organized her material by place (and no surprise, either, that she omitted the less sensual truth of dates and years). The memoir ends midsentence, unfinished at the time of her death. The rest of the book consists of letters, most to her friend and mentor the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, and a list titled "The Trouble With All the Houses I've Lived In." Written in the late 1980s, in terse staccato prose, that list is the skeleton key to the rest of her work. It begins: "Juneau, Alaska Avalanche the day I was born, wiped out a third of town. / Deerlodge, Montana No heat, just the oven. Earthquake." The list picks up speed and pathos as it goes on: "Paper thin walls. Mama crying crying"; "Dust storms. Old man died in the apple orchard"; "Pump broke, well went dry, wiring blew, chickens died, rabbits died, termites, goat broke leg. Shot her"; "I burned it down"; "Eight people, two bedrooms. Toilet overflowed. Sewer line broke. Evicted"; "Police. Fire next door. Evicted"; It ends in Oakland, with these words: "No catastrophe. So far." The list of houses is the bare knuckled spine holding together a body of work in which each story shows you a single detail, in high definition. In Berlin's stories, her alter ego changes names Maya, Laura, Maggie but the scattershot particulars of her life hold constant. In "La Barca de la Ilusion," Maya attempts to keep Buzz (an analogue for Buddy Berlin, her third husband and great love) away from the vicious heroin dealers who trail him through Mexico. When one shows up in their secluded paradise, Maya "didn't speak or think. She stabbed him in the stomach with the paring knife. Blood gushed down his white sharkskin pants. He laughed at her, grabbed a rag." The image slips a knife into the reader: Maya's determination and helplessness laid bare. As the two men shoot up by the fire, Maya watches from the bed. The dealer pitches forward into the flames, overdosed, dead. Buzz dozes. Maya hauls the corpse into a canoe and pushes it out into the bay. In "The Wives," the character Laura says, in passing: "I once stabbed a connection, in Yelapa. I didn't even hurt him, really. But I felt the blade go in, saw him bleed." The woman she is speaking to puts on a Charlie Parker record and changes the subject. In her memoir, the section on Yelapa ends: "All young, handsome ex beach boys, smart and mean. Whispers in our garden, laughter in the dark by the datura tree." In the list of houses, Yelapa becomes simply: "Sharks, scorpions, coconut grove THUD THUD three kids. Hurricane." The knife, the inevitable tragedy of addiction, the dealer's corpse: THUD THUD.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
After her husband dies in a bathtub at home, Jia Jia finds a sketch of a half man, half fish sitting atop a stack of towels. "Braised Pork," by An Yu, opens with the mystery of this man's death was it a suicide? did he drown? but, much like the women in Haruki Murakami's stories, the husband is less a character than a plot device. His presence in the novel serves only to propel Jia Jia into a journey of self discovery, her quest to understand the meaning of the drawing leading her down a winding path into her past. The book's semi surreal "world of water" with its lonely late night bars, its anthropomorphic creatures rarely deviates from the tropes of magical realism, but the first time novelist, who is Chinese but writes in English, puts her own touches on the genre with quiet observations about contemporary Beijing. It's the city Yu was born and raised in, and you can tell; the pages throb with the isolation of life in a metropolis. Jia Jia takes an antipollution mask with her before heading outside. Bags pass through security checkpoints before passengers board the subway. Nietzsche sits on a bookshelf alongside titles on the Liao dynasty. A subplot involving Jia Jia's family serves as a commentary on the faint line between corruption and guanxi, the Mandarin term for corporate networking, set against a backdrop of a nouveau riche home aquarium filled with "disconcerted" fish. Yu's prose is crisp and never tedious, with bursts of startling imagery amid the otherwise restrained style: At one point, Jia Jia recalls her mother lying in a hospital bed "like a white flower petal that had been tweezed off its stem." The book is most enthralling when it juxtaposes the ancient and the aggressively modern (there are bronze dragons and Buddha wall paintings alongside Burberry hair clips, slick shopping malls), carefully weaving the disjointed, contradictory parts of Chinese society, like how sacred deities can be reduced to serving a New Age notion of karma. Unfortunately, Yu introduces several topics only to abandon them before they reach the level of real insight: for example, the role of marriage today, the generational differences in Chinese attitudes toward widowhood and the financial realities Jia Jia faces as a painter struggling to make ends meet. Yu takes her protagonist to Tibet in search of spiritual answers, without a single mention of the region's real world political complexities.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Books
|
When Kristin Hart bought a house five years ago in Van Cortlandt Village, a Bronx neighborhood that has a long history of community activism, she was soon drawn into local politics. Having paid about 400,000 for their house, an attached four bedroom colonial built in 1912, Ms. Hart and her family gut renovated it. "Then I found a note in my mailbox saying come to a hearing because someone wanted to build a 120 unit housing facility across the street," she recalled. Ms. Hart not only attended the meeting and fought to have the development project killed but soon ended up as the president of the Fort Independence Park Neighborhood Association. The area, etched into a hill descending from the Jerome Park Reservoir, has nearly 16,000 residents, according to census data; it is a terraced niche of narrow, winding streets originally laid out by the landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect, along with Calvert Vaux, of Central and Prospect Parks. Now a tranquil enclave of leafy streets, steep stairways and picturesque single family homes including ornate neo Tudors and Georgian style "garden houses" the neighborhood also has a collection of brick apartment buildings. It is on the wedge of land framed by the 1,146 acre Van Cortlandt Park, Interstate 87, and the open land surrounding the Jerome Park Reservoir, which totals about 125 acres, according to the Jerome Park Conservancy. The reservoir, which has been empty and under repair for the larger part of a decade, is fenced off from the public for safety reasons, but the adjacent area has become a magnet for joggers, said Robert Fanuzzi, the chairman of Bronx Community Board 8. The city has agreed to create a jogging path that will run about halfway around the reservoir along Sedgwick Avenue, he said, adding that the reservoir would most likely be full again come fall. "This is a jewel of a neighborhood," Mr. Fanuzzi said. "To have a neighborhood built around a park like this Van Cortlandt Village is a little gem." The activism of Ms. Hart and others underscores the level of local agreement with Mr. Fanuzzi's assessment. A 2004 rezoning sought to protect the community's low lying charm but, Ms. Hart said, didn't go far enough. In her view, the area continues to see developers proposing high rise apartment buildings on lots unsuitable for development including the one across the street. "This is a very stable neighborhood, where people stay for a long time," Ms. Hart said. But "it's also a very fragile neighborhood," when it comes to fending off developers. Neil Fitzgerald, a teacher on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, bought his 750 square foot one bedroom here three years ago, after he discovered it during a run. "Van Cortlandt Park is famous for its cross country course," he said, "so there are races just about every weekend during the fall, and I came up this way and thought this was kind of a nice area." Mr. Fitzgerald wouldn't disclose what he had paid, but comparable apartments now on the market nearby are listed for 125,000 to 135,000. Neighborhood boundaries can be a subject of disagreement, but Van Cortlandt Village is generally seen as defined by Van Cortlandt Park to the north; Dickinson and Sedgwick Avenues on the east; Perot Street and Albany Crescent to the south; and Bailey Avenue to the west. At the northern end is the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, founded in 1927 by members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, who were mostly European Jewish immigrants. With about 1,500 units in 11 buildings, the Amalgamated, as it is known, has a much more diverse roster of tenants nowadays, but continues in its role as a community anchor, with a nursery school, playgroups, crafts workshops, art exhibits and social gatherings, among other offerings. Standing out among the well maintained brick and frame homes farther south is a similar place, a cooperative called the Sholem Aleichem houses, with about 230 units. With about 15 Tudor buildings set amid well tended lawns and gardens, it is the focus of a local effort for landmark designation, Ms. Hart said. Only a handful of single and multifamily houses are on the market at any one time. They start around 200 a square foot, said Peter Segalla, an associate broker with Houlihan Lawrence. Most date to the 1920s, '30s and '40s. "If these properties were in Brooklyn, in Park Slope," Mr. Segalla said, "they would be 1 million and over. This is a huge opportunity for young families to still live in New York City at a price range that's half a million dollars or less." Also, he pointed out, the area has many of the assets of Westchester County without its heavy tax burden. Prices did not significantly increase before the housing crash of 2008, said Joan Kuzniar, an associate broker with Robert E. Hill, so prices have fallen only about 10 percent. "Houses may sit on the market longer," Ms. Kuzniar said, "but I wouldn't say there have been a lot of foreclosures or distressed sales." There are no subway stops in Van Cortlandt Village, but the No. 1 subway train has stops a short walk away in Kingsbridge, at 231st and 238th Streets. The trip to Midtown usually takes about 40 minutes, residents said. On the east side of the reservoir, the No. 4 subway has stops at Bedford Park Boulevard and Mosholu Parkway. Van Cortlandt Village is served by bus lines including the Bx1, the Bx2, the Bx3, the Bx10, and the BxM3 Manhattan express. Lehman College, on the southeastern side of the Jerome Park Reservoir, serves as a cultural force in the area, with institutions like the Lovinger Theater offering high caliber performances, Ms. Kuzniar said. "They have, for example, Tito Puente's band, and the Russian ballet," she said. "Just a lot of great programs that are affordable and accessible." Sedgwick Avenue has a few shops and a library, but most residents shop along Broadway in Kingsbridge. By the end of the year a new center, Riverdale Crossing, is to open on Broadway near 236th Street, anchored by a BJ's Wholesale Club. In 2006, the AmPark Neighborhood School 344 opened in a building owned by the Amalgamated. With about 300 students through Grade 5, it is serving as a welcome alternative, some parents say, to Public School 95 Sheila Mencher, the area's longstanding elementary and middle school. AmPark got a C on its latest progress report; 68 percent showed mastery in English, 75 percent in math, versus 47 and 60 citywide. P. S. 95 got a B, with 43 percent showing mastery in English, 56 percent in math. (Progress reports are based on the relative improvement in performance.) A top public high school, the Bronx High School of Science SAT averages last year were 632 in reading, 688 in math and 649 in writing, versus 434, 461 and 430 citywide is across Jerome Park. Also nearby, DeWitt Clinton High School averaged 419 in reading, 426 in math and 410 in writing.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Real Estate
|
The cast of the original "Star Trek" television series is the classic example of science fiction's myopia. A mostly male, mostly white crew on an interstellar exploration vessel seems to assume that American society as it was in the 1960s could go on forever. But as an insight into the time that produced it, the vision was pretty sharp and the same is true of the Queens Museum's sprawling, consistently mind bending "Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas." A somewhat remixed version of an exhibition originally presented as part of the transcultural initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the show is an impressively broad sample of styles and sensibilities from every corner of the United States and Latin America. And its focus on science fiction amplifies and exemplifies the way art can illuminate reality by imagining the unreal. Space travel is especially incisive for Adal ( Adal Maldonado), one of the standout artists. In his black and white video "La Coconauts Interrogation," the artist's native Puerto Rico has literally sunk and disappeared under the weight of the mainland's domination. It's a heavy handed metaphor, but that's what makes it so effective: On the one hand, it's an expressionist cri de coeur about what really has happened, and continues to happen, to the island under United States control . On the other hand, because it's obviously a fantasy calling for suspension of disbelief, its subtler points catch you unaware and cut more deeply. An actor playing a survivor of the disappearance stares into the camera, his thoughts subtitled but his mouth unmoving: In the United States, his voice just doesn't register.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Art & Design
|
Credit...Album/British Library, via Alamy A lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you're one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing. It is hard to think of another moment in history when so many scientists turned their attention to one subject with such speed. In mid January, scientific papers began trickling out with the first details about the new coronavirus. By the end of the month, the journal Nature marveled that over 50 papers had been published. That number has swelled over the past few months at an exponential rate, fitting for a pandemic. The National Library of Medicine's database at the start of June contains over 17,000 published papers about the new coronavirus. A website called bioRxiv, which hosts studies that have yet to go through peer review, contains over 4,000 papers. In earlier times, few people aside from scientists would have laid eyes on these papers. Months or years after they were written, they'd wind up in printed journals tucked away on a library shelf. But now the world can surf the rising tide of research on the new coronavirus. The vast majority of papers about it can be read for free online. But just because scientific papers are easier to get hold of doesn't mean that they are easy to make sense of. Reading them can be a challenge for the layperson, even one with some science education. It's not just the jargon that scientists use to compress a lot of results into a small space. Just like sonnets, sagas and short stories, scientific papers are a genre with its own unwritten rules, rules that have developed over generations. The first scientific papers read more like letters among friends, recounting hobbies and oddities. The first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published on May 30, 1667, included brief dispatches with titles such as "An account of the improvement of optick glasses," and "An account of a very odd monstrous calf." When natural philosophers sent their letters to 17th century journals, the editors decided whether they were worth publishing or not. But after 200 years of scientific advances, Victorian scientists could no longer be experts on everything. Journal editors sent papers to outside specialists who understood the details of a particular branch of research better than most scientists. By the mid 1900s, this practice evolved into a practice known as peer review. A journal would publish a paper only after a panel of outside experts decided it was acceptable. Sometimes the reviewers rejected the paper outright; other times they required the fixing of weak points either by revising the paper or doing additional research. Along the way, scientific papers also developed a distinctive narrative arc. A paper published in Philosophical Transactions today is no longer a gossipy letter, but a four part story. Papers typically open with some history, giving a justification for the new research they contain. The authors then lay out the methods they used to carry out that research how they eavesdropped on lions, how they measured chemicals in Martian dust. Then the papers present results, followed by a discussion of what those results mean. Scientists will typically point out the shortcomings in their own research and offer ideas for new studies to see if their interpretations hold water. As a science writer, I've been reading scientific papers for 30 years. I'd guess that I've read tens of thousands of them, in search of new advances to write about, or to do background research for stories. While I'm not a scientist myself, I've gotten pretty comfortable navigating around them. One lesson I've learned is that it can take work to piece together the story underlying a paper. If I call scientists and simply ask them to tell me about what they've done, they can offer me a riveting narrative of intellectual exploration. But on the page, we readers have to assemble the story for ourselves. Part of the problem may be that many scientists don't get much training in writing. As a result, it can be hard to figure out precisely what question a paper is tackling, how the results answer it and why any of it really matters. The demands of peer review satisfying the demands of several different experts can also make papers even more of a chore to read. Journals can make matters worse by requiring scientists to chop up their papers in chunks, some of which are exiled into a supplementary file. Reading a paper can be like reading a novel and realizing only at the end that Chapters 14, 30, and 41 were published separately. The coronavirus pandemic now presents an extra challenge: There are far more papers than anyone could ever read. If you use a tool like Google Scholar, you may be able to zero in on some of the papers that are already getting cited by other scientists. They can provide the outlines of the past few months of scientific history the isolation of the coronavirus, for example, the sequencing of its genome, the discovery that it spreads quickly from person to person even before symptoms emerge. Papers like these will be cited by generations of scientists yet to be born. Most won't, though. When you read through a scientific paper, it's important to maintain a healthy skepticism. The ongoing flood of papers that have yet to be peer reviewed known as preprints includes a lot of weak research and misleading claims. Some are withdrawn by the authors. Many will never make it into a journal. But some of them are earning sensational headlines before burning out in obscurity. In April, for example, a team of Stanford researchers published a preprint in which they asserted that the fatality rate of Covid 19 was far lower than other experts estimated. When Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University statistician, read their preprint, he was so angry he publicly demanded an apology. "We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error," he wrote on his blog. But just because a paper passes peer review doesn't mean it's above scrutiny. In April, when French researchers published a study suggesting that hydroxychloroquine might be effective against Covid 19, other scientists pointed out that it was small and not rigorously designed. In May, a much bigger paper was published in the Lancet suggesting that the drug could increase the risk of death. A hundred leading scientists published an open letter questioning the authenticity of the database on which the study relied. When you read a scientific paper, try to think about it the way other scientists do. Ask some basic questions to judge its merit. Is it based on a few patients or thousands? Is it mixing up correlation and causation? Do the authors actually present the evidence required to come to their conclusions? One shortcut that can sometimes help you learn how to read a paper like a scientist is by making judicious use of social media. Leading epidemiologists and virologists have been posting thoughtful threads on Twitter, for example, laying out why they think new papers are good or bad. But always make sure you're following people with deep expertise, and not bots or agents of disinformation peddling conspiracy nonsense. Science has always traveled down a bumpy road. Now it is in an extraordinary rush, with the world looking for every new preprint and peer reviewed paper in the hope that some clue will emerge that helps save millions of lives. Yet our current plight does not change the nature of the scientific paper. It's never a revelation of absolute truth. At best, it's a status report on our best understanding of nature's mysteries.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
The heart of Pluto is forever facing away from its largest moon, Charon. To explain why is not a story of spurned love, although it does involve a heavy heart. Two studies published on Wednesday by the journal Nature show how the surface of Pluto might have been scarred long ago when a smaller body slammed into it. The resulting crater then partially filled with denser nitrogen ice and possibly a bulge of liquid water from an underground ocean, and the additional mass caused Pluto to roll over, perhaps as much as 60 degrees, to its present configuration, the scientists conclude. "These are interesting and plausible papers," said David J. Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved with either paper. "If you take Pluto and you put an extra weight on the surface of Pluto, then Pluto will roll over so that weight moves toward the equator and toward either the point directly underneath Charon or the point opposite that," said Francis Nimmo, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of one of the Nature papers. Dr. Nimmo argues that the rolling over of Pluto is additional evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath the icy crust. The other researchers, led by James T. Keane, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, mapped networks of cracks on the surface that they say are the places where Pluto ruptured as a result of tectonic forces as it rolled over. "Imagine you have an egg, and you want to move that bulge to another part of the egg," Mr. Keane said. "You have to squish it, and that's going to cause it to break." As Pluto reoriented, its spin axis largely remained pointing in the same direction. From the perspective of someone on the surface, it would have seemed that the location of the north pole was changing, in what astronomers call "true polar wander." The starting point of the research for both teams was the revelation of a bright splotch on the surface of Pluto just north of the equator in the shape of a Valentine heart, in images captured during the flyby of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft last year. Mission scientists named the splotch Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto. ("Regio" is the Latin word for "region.") Pluto and Charon today are in what astronomers call a mutually tidally locked orbit of 6.4 days, the same side of Charon always facing Pluto, and the same side of Pluto facing Charon. Astronomers including Dr. Nimmo and Mr. Keane noticed that the left side of the bright heart, named Sputnik Planitia, is almost exactly on the side opposite from Charon, and it did not seem likely that it ended up there by chance. "Sputnik Planitia is located very close to that special point," Dr. Nimmo said, "and so that makes you suspect Sputnik Planitia represents an extra weight." For this idea to work, the scientists had to explain how to make a hole in the ground be heavier, not lighter. If Sputnik Planitia had less mass, it should have rotated toward one of the poles instead. Dr. Nimmo and his colleagues argue that water from an underground ocean welled upward, adding mass, because liquid water is denser than frozen water. (With Pluto's frigid temperatures, the water would have to be loaded with antifreeze most likely ammonia for it not to freeze.) New Horizons detected a glacier of nitrogen ice, which is also denser than water ice, covering Sputnik Planitia. Mr. Keane does not argue against an ocean, but he said a thick layer of nitrogen ice might be sufficient explanation. Douglas P. Hamilton, an astronomy professor at the University of Maryland, agrees that Sputnik Planitia is a heavy spot that caused Pluto to roll over, but he disagrees with the premise that it started as an impact crater. Dr. Hamilton said he has a paper scheduled to run in the same print issue of Nature as the other two that explains how the basin could have formed simply from the weight of nitrogen ices pushing down on the crust. Because the paper has not yet been published online, he said he was prohibited by Nature's embargo policy from discussing details of his research.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Science
|
Man free zones, a leather weekend, a trans pageant, a bunch of witches meeting in the woods and a Two Spirit gathering here's everywhere cool to be in America and around the world this summer. Distinct person, female hunter, instructed by the moon: These are terms used by people from Utah to Alaska to describe Two Spirits, a term that refers to gender non conforming Native Americans. Steven Barrios, a.k.a Auntie Steven to younger members of the Blackfeet nation, is an organizer of what he says is the oldest consecutive Two Spirit Gathering in North America, held for 22 years. The year's gathering on the banks of Flathead Lake will feature ceremonies for healing and cleansing. During one, smoke from a circulating pipe is believed to carry prayers up to a creator; during another, a rite holder surrounded by a circle of participants pours water on hot rocks. The gathering is also is home to a more contemporary ritual: the drag show. In 2015 Rocky Peterson, now 31, known as Akasha Makai in drag, snagged the gathering's Miss Two Spirit Montana title with a rendition of "Diamonds" by Rihanna. For Mr. Peterson, the best way to pass on history to younger generations is by modernizing it. Recently, Akasha performed a Blackfeet dance at the Haskell Indian Nations University Two Spirit powwow. "She's classy, native and fabulous," Mr. Peterson said of Akasha. "We're showing people it's O.K. to be fabulous." Ms. Knyckare, along with the dozens of would be volunteers who, to her shock, emailed her in the wake of the tweet, soon specified that the festival would exclude only cisgender men, whereas everyone else would be welcome. The inaugural Statement Festival will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, over the last weekend of August. Performers will include the rappers Joy M'Batha and Cleo, the singer songwriter Frida Hyvonen and the electronic producer Tami T. It has taken plenty of planning, as is typical for a music festival of 7,000, and much philosophical deliberation over the boundaries of manhood, as is less so. The debate around the festival's admission policy mirrors on a festival size scale other discussions happening across the world in feminist and queer communities around "no cis men" spaces. "What about transgender people who love and embrace their masculinity?" wrote one commentator about similarly delineated parties in Copenhagen. "We preach that your assigned gender doesn't determine who one is and then use it as grounds to include people in a separatist space." For Ms. Knyckare, the designation is a practical one. "Transgender men also need a safe space from rape culture and sexual assault," she said, noting that in future years, men will be welcome, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. "The idea is, for now, that you can't know who is a rapist and who isn't. And we won't be looking over our shoulders." In a video released by the official Church of Latter Day Saints YouTube channel in 2016, a graphic designer named Ricardo talks about reconciling his homosexuality with his faith. "I don't have to be perfect," the father of six says, embracing his wife. "I can acknowledge these feelings and move on with my life." The Mormon Church prohibits homosexual acts. ("Experimentation with sexual expression outside marriage" defined as between a man and a woman "is a serious sin," an official website says.) But in recent years the church has adjusted its rhetoric on the subject, encouraging members who believe they may be gay to be open about their sexuality. Which makes the second inaugural LoveLoud, an L.G.B.T. music festival held in the Mormon spiritual center of Salt Lake City and endorsed by the church last year particularly intriguing. The festival, founded by Dan Reynolds, the frontman of the band Imagine Dragons, aims to build bridges and foster dialogue between the Mormon and gay communities in Utah, according to Jacob Dunford, the festival's C.O.O. More than 30,000 people are expected at the event this year, where Mr. Reynolds, a practicing Mormon, as well as Zedd, Mike Shinoda and Grace VanderWaal, will play. "This was up until recently so taboo," said Mr. Dunford, 23, who is gay and who left the church in 2015 because of its policies. Soon after, he helped found Utah County's first L.G.B.T. resource center, with the aim of preventing youth suicide and homelessness. "I want that kid hiding under his bedsheets to be live streaming this on his iPhone," Mr. Dunford said of the festival. "This is nonstop affirmation. We're not invisible." Bubble T, held monthly, was founded in 2017 by five friends: Stevie Huynh, Karlo Bueno Bello, Nicholas Valite Andersen, Pedro Balneg Vidallon Jr. and Paul Tran. "We'd been going out in New York for years," said Mr. Huynh, 34, a makeup artist. "But this was something we'd never seen." As its Instagram bio specifies, Bubble T is where "Asianz rule but everybody's welcome." Mr. Chan, a printmaker, said, "I didn't have that many queer Asian friends before this. You're always tokenized or fetishized." The community he found at Bubble T, and at other queer Asian parties that have sprung up in its wake, like Onegaishimasu, motivated him to come out to his mother in the spring, when he went home to Singapore for the first time in years. "That's something I never would have done, but I had the backing and support of these beautiful people, my chosen family," he said. Though the movement focuses on goddess worship, Reclaiming in recent years has moved away from binaries. "Masculinity and femininity don't make sense in a compost heap," one witch wrote in 2010. Reclaiming witches gather in camps around the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia each summer. Their rituals draw primarily from pre Christian Europe but often are aimed at supporting the activism of indigenous landholders. The camps range in vibe: One in Vermont offers a "pixie track" for children, another in British Columbia describes itself as sex positive and provides a temple space where attendees can find privacy. "I think there's a big yearning for spirituality among radical communities on the West Coast," said Briar Sparkle, 36, who works for an organic farm and had been involved with anarchist and environmental activists in Southern California for years. They first attended Witch Camp while dealing with the trauma of being arrested at a protest. "It's great to have fun at festivals it's why any kid loves summer camp but where are the levels of political awareness?" Last year, on the eve of the conference he has organized for eight years, Ian Coleman messaged a few of his Facebook friends with an odd request. "I need you to out me as trans," he told them. "My event is suffering because people don't think they can go to the bathroom. They don't trust me when I tell them it's safe." Despite Texas's 2017 proposed bathroom bill, the hotel in Dallas was ready to accommodate the crowd of masters, slaves, sirs, bois, daddys and puppies in whatever bathroom they would like, according to Mr. Coleman. (It was, after all, also hosting their workshops and oral history discussions.) With such a diverse crowd, why focus specifically on women's history? "Because you can go out and find the men's history," Mr. Coleman, 52, said. "You can't find the women's." The leather subculture originated among gay men in the mid 20th century. Early on, women who wanted to participate were often ostracized; today, images of Tom of Finland hunks remain its calling card. At its core, though, leather is about power exchange. Roles like dominant and submissive are not aligned with any particular gender or orientation; they are identities that determine sense of self and interpersonal relationships, says Mr. Coleman. (Inhabiting these identities full time is also what distinguishes leather from, for instance, B.D.S.M.) S and M may be "written on the genetic code of all (some?) of us," reads a 1979 booklet distributed by Samois, the first lesbian sadomasochist organization. Samois, a San Francisco group that is far less known today than, say, the Village People, helped give birth to the now ubiquitous idea of sex positive feminism in the 1980s, as it defended itself against critics who argued that leather, along with pornography, perpetuated patriarchal power structures. Dance music has roots in queer Midwestern spaces. Today, a crop of underground house and techno parties in the Rust Belt region is adding a new chapter to that genre's history. "It's amazing that you can pull something off with this level of diversity in the middle of nowhere," said Shane Christian, a 22 year old D.J. from Cleveland, of Honcho Campout, a weekend long party in the woods of southern Pennsylvania. "Everyone's there for a reason, and the energy is so palpable." Now in its fourth year, Honcho Campout has become a cult destination for those who prefer weird and intimate dance spaces, much like the regular parties at Hot Mass, a gay bathhouse turned after hours club in Pittsburgh, out of which the event was born. Think of it as an antidote to the selfies in the V.I.P. section festival: cameras on the dance floor are discouraged, booze sales are cut off at midnight while subwoofers go till sunrise, and tickets are kept affordable. Lineup wise, this year brings D.J.s from Los Angeles's Spotlight Party and San Francisco's Honey Soundsystem, as well as from Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. "It's kind of a D.I.Y. annual report of the queer dance scene," said the organizer Aaron Clark. Early Honcho parties were populated largely by men; for its first two years, the party was held at Roseland, a clothing optional gay resort in West Virginia. The current location, the Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary, was chosen with expanded queer inclusivity in mind. You can still get naked. "I'm not usually at ease with that at queer parties because I'm so self conscious. I've had dysphoria since I was a kid," said Eris Drew, 42, a house D.J. from Chicago whose music includes references to shamanistic techniques as well as to 1990s rave culture, and who played Campout last year. "But I felt free dancing with my partner. My body wasn't ridiculed or even overly focused on. It was the lunar equinox, and you could hear the drone of the insects melding with the kick drums. It was magical and healing."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Style
|
Ronald DeLuca, who orchestrated the advertising campaign that spared the Chrysler Corporation from insolvency in the 1980s and transformed Lee Iacocca, the ailing automaker's voluble chief executive, into a national brand himself, died on Tuesday in Oneonta, N.Y. He was 91. The cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, his grandson Mark Lotto said. Mr. DeLuca and Mr. Iacocca forged a bond in 1967, when Mr. Iacocca was in the last phase of his 32 year career with the Ford Motor Company and Mr. DeLuca was a creative director at Kenyon Eckhardt. Almost exactly the same age Mr. DeLuca was 13 days younger both men were born in Pennsylvania, sons of Italian immigrants. In 1978, when Mr. Iacocca joined Chrysler at a salary of 1 a year to salvage the company, which was nearly bankrupt, he wooed Kenyon Eckhardt away from its 75 million account with Ford. "There was a certain amount of risk involved," Mr. DeLuca told The New York Times in 1992. "The risk was that our company would go down the drain."
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Media
|
HONG KONG For the past few weeks, Santa Claus, looking cheerful and surrounded by twinkling stars and ornaments, has been dancing on the sides of skyscrapers. The images, rendered in tens of thousands of lights across Hong Kong, are varied: in one part of town, Santa is riding a dolphin; not far away, giant beribboned parcels decorate the exterior of another building, blinking gently many floors above ground. Chinese culture adores lights, and the Hong Kong skyline has some of the biggest, brashest and most colorful in the world, year round. Shop fronts, signposts, entire buildings are lit up some with undulating and flickering effects as the sun sets each evening, enveloping the entire city in an orange glow. But this time of year, the spectacle ratchets up several notches. Out come vast, multicolored, complex designs that span many floors and make the Rockefeller Center in New York and Oxford Street in London pale by comparison. Frolicking reindeer, bobble hatted snowmen, enormous Christmas trees adorn dozens of buildings, sometimes to startling effect. The man behind many of these images is Terence Wong, who trained as an electrician and once did stage lighting work for theaters. Thirty years ago, Mr. Wong was asked by a Hong Kong property developer to add a bit of seasonal pizazz to a new complex of office buildings in Tsim Sha Tui East, an area that was then off the beaten track. He has not looked back. "It is my passion," Mr. Wong, 54, said in an interview in his office, which is filled with files and lighting accessories. "I never want to stop." The first job involved simple stars suspended from the tops of buildings. Over the years, Mr. Wong has made the displays ever more complex, as he and his workers have learned how to affix strings of light bulbs to the glass facades of buildings using window cleaning platforms. The displays, Mr. Wong said, typically cost anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 Hong Kong dollars, or about 2,600 to 13,000, depending on the size and intricacy of the image. But for many building owners, sprucing up exteriors is as much a part of the holiday season as tree lights are for operators of shopping centers or private citizens in Western cultures. Likewise, spending this year has not changed, even though the Hong Kong economy, hit by the global downturn and slower growth in China, is expected to have grown just 1.2 percent in 2012. That is down from 4.9 percent last year and 6.8 percent the year before that. The displays are typical of the resilience in consumer spending in Hong Kong, where unemployment remains low 3.4 percent, according to the latest government figures. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Light displays are deeply ingrained in Chinese folk culture. Lanterns have been objects of artistic expression and status symbols for centuries, as have the elaborate fireworks displays that feature in major celebrations to this day. In the same vein, prominent buildings are brightly lit all over China at night, often changing colors every few seconds, while light shows are a popular form of public entertainment. In Hong Kong, various factors have given the phenomenon an extra intensity. Unlike cities on the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong has sizable Christian and Western communities, so Christmas and Jan. 1 join the Lunar New Year as important festivals. Then there is the sheer commercialism of Hong Kong, which derives a large part of its wealth from millions of Chinese tourists. "For every mainland Chinese who visits Singapore or New York today, there are 20 or more who go to Hong Kong," Donna Kwok, an economist at HSBC, said in a research report this month. By 2015, these visitors are expected to spend 55 billion dollars, equivalent to one third of Hong Kong's gross domestic product, she added. Attractions like the city's nightly light and laser show, which involves more than 40 buildings and is organized by the Hong Kong tourism board, are an important draw, and visitors flock in their thousands to see it each evening. The holiday bonanza of decorative lights on buildings lasts about three months. Once Christmas and the Western calendar New Year are over, the displays are changed to focus on the Lunar New Year celebrations, which mark the high point of the Chinese calendar and fall in January or February. "Merry X mas" wishes are replaced with Chinese characters wishing good luck and wealth for the coming year. Santa Clauses morph into Chinese money gods. Symbols of fortune and happiness replace stars and snowflakes. Mr. Wong's illuminations started going up in late November and will stay up until a week or two after the start of the Year of the Snake, on Feb. 10. Mr. Wong, however, stays busy year round, looking after the manufacture of the strings of light bulbs and other equipment he needs and preparing the designs for the next season. He never recycles old images, he said, but designs three new proposals for each decoration job that Shun Sze Lighting, the company he founded in 1976, bids for. Given that Shun Sze does about two dozen buildings per year, that is a lot of drawings but Mr. Wong does not seem to mind. "Every day, I think about Christmas all year," he beamed. "Santa Claus is coming every day!"
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Global Business
|
Ron and Staci Schnell have seen "They're Playing Our Song" a lot. The chance to share their story replete with photos of the programs they've collected along the way prompted us to put the question to other readers: What show have you seen again and again, and why? Some very passionate and necessarily edited responses follow. 'How could we not go back for the O.G.???' My husband and I got tickets to "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" with Neil Patrick Harris on a whim. (We lived in Pittsburgh at the time and had tickets to see "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill" at 8 and realized that we could fit in a 10 p.m. show of "Hedwig" right after it.) We loved the production so much, and were absolutely blown away by Lena Hall's much deserved Tony winning turn as Yitzhak. As soon as we left the theater we scooped up tickets to see it again before NPH left the show. We happened to be planning a trip to New York that Christmas season with my sister and her husband, and Michael C. Hall had taken over the role. Still wonderful and worth every penny, especially with Ms. Hall still inhabiting Yitzhak. Later it was announced that John Cameron Mitchell was taking over the part. How could we not go back for the O. G.??? GENA JOHNSON, Pittsfield, Mass. 'Little did I know I would be seeing the show over 25 times' After traveling to London in 1987 to see "Phantom of the Opera" and after four hours in line for a cancellation I got a front stalls seat. I almost fell asleep during the first act, due to the long wait for a ticket. Sarah Brightman was out, but Michael Crawford was magnificent. I bought a ticket to the New York production for February 1988 and for July the same year. Little did I know I would be seeing the show over 25 times from repeat visits with friends and family to working at the theater. I got to know a person who saw the show over 200 times. Crazy, huh? DAVID PANDOZZI 'I still cry whenever I see the show' My repeat attendance reached its peak with "Rent," which I have probably seen more than 150 times. I was one of those people who slept on the sidewalk outside the Nederlander Theater to get a front row seat when any one of the original cast was having their final performance. I went to London and slept, again on the sidewalk, to get a front row ticket to the opening night performance at the Shaftesbury Theater. I still cry whenever I see the show, because of the humanity of the characters, and because through life and death they are there for each other, the way I wish my friends are, and will be, there for me. JOHN JOHN MANLUTAC, New York 'I hope you will publish this as I went to the trouble of searching Google for the correct spelling of chaperone' The first time was to see Ben Vereen again in "Pippin" two times. The next was to see Jim Dale in "Barnum" also two times. "The Drowsy Chaperone" was wildly clever, plus it starred Sutton Foster (three times). Finally, "Farinelli and the King," because of the fabulous production but mostly because of Mark Rylance. I hope you will publish this as I went to the trouble of searching Google for the correct spelling of chaperone, and then I went to the drink cup I bought at the theater for the correct spelling of Farinelli. BARBARA MATTER, New York 'Not only did I save my tickets, I xeroxed them and made them into place mats' I'm a folk singer/songwriter who has the great good fortune of having one of my songs, "Air Conditioner," sung by Sutton Foster in concert. Not long after, in 2006, I learned that a show called "The Drowsy Chaperone," starring the very same Sutton Foster, just had its first preview. Garth Kravits, an actor singer I knew, was in it. I asked how it went? He gave me a slow, sly smile and said, "Better than any of us could have hoped." I decided right then and there to get a ticket for the next night's performance. I remember sitting down in the fifth row of the orchestra section, with a very bitchy, very SELFISH thought: I hope for Sutton's sake it will be a hit, but if it flops, she'll be doing a lot more concerts and will be singing my song all over the country. I can't lose! When that preview performance was over, I slowly got up from my seat with a whole different thought: I must see this show again. And again. And again. And I did. All told, I saw the Broadway production of "The Drowsy Chaperone" 68 times. How do I know? Not only did I save my tickets, I xeroxed them and made them into place mats. CHRISTINE LAVIN, New York It was the summer of 1993. I was on the verge of turning 40 and looking forward to a new job. To celebrate I joined an older friend for a N.Y.C. trip one of those six shows in four days trips. I don't recall all those shows right now, but "Kiss of the Spider Woman" left an indelible impression. I had never seen Chita Rivera on stage but the moment she entered I realized that she was indeed a star. I felt I was witnessing a historical performance. I flew back to New York a few months later and saw her two more times, and then later flew up and saw her again. As a native New Yorker who joined me in one of these viewings exclaimed in her delicious New York cadence, "Dahling, Chita is a stah!" Absolutely. BILLY PULLEN, Memphis "Hello, Dolly!" Many, many times. The first was with Ginger Rogers, took the whole family for Christmas, 12 second row orchestra seats for 10 apiece. Do you believe that? Then came Martha Raye. She was fantastic. Then Phyllis Diller what a surprise, she was really good. Then Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, twice. Finally got to see Carol Channing, again twice. Closing night of the original Broadway run with Ethel Merman. Sorry, missed Betty Grable. Almost went to Chicago to see Eve Arden. Missed out on Bette and Bernadette because I would not pay 500 for front orchestra. DAVID VELEZ, New York 'The (disastrous) movie I could only sit through once' I saw the original production of "A Chorus Line" three times, leaning on the Shubert Theater red velvet back railing opening week in 1975. If I recall, standing room tickets at the time were 5 and the ticket line formed between 4:30 and 5 the morning of the performance. During the 15 year run I saw the show at least once during each visit (usually three or four a year) to N.Y.C. from my home in Ohio. I totally missed the 2006 production at the Schoenfeld Theater due to caregiving responsibilities that kept me away from N.Y.C. However, I was able to get to one performance of the wonderful 2018 New York City Center production. Between the two productions I have seen "A Chorus Line" more than 50 times in N.Y.C. This does not take into account touring productions and the (disastrous) movie which I could only sit through once. MICHAEL CORDRAY, Fairborn, Ohio I saw the original "Chorus Line" 17 times! Every young actor in New York was mesmerized by "their stories" presented live onstage. Plus standing room was just three bucks, a lot cheaper than therapy. GERRY CORNEZ, New York I flew to New York to see Neil Patrick Harris in "Hedwig" on Broadway; I attended a production translated into Swedish in Stockholm; I saw Lena Hall step into the starring role on the show's national tour; and in a tiny San Francisco theater, I even saw a production in which numerous actors shared the lead role. No matter how many times I've seen it, I still cry every time Hedwig hands Yitzhak the wig during "Midnight Radio" my all time favorite theatrical moment. SUE TROWBRIDGE, Alameda, Calif.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Theater
|
I AM old and comfortably set in my ways, so the 2010 Land Rover LR4 presents a dilemma. I like vehicles that are small, cheap, practical and interesting to drive. Think Honda Fit. So I find it puzzling to the point of distress that I genuinely like the new LR4. It is big, heavy and fast. And it is capable of the kind of amazing off road feats that I would rarely engage in. Its fuel economy is so bad it could qualify for the Oil Company Association's "Guzzler Truck of the Year," if there were such an association or award. But, hey, I like it. The LR4 is a heavily reworked version of the LR3, changed so much that Land Rover officials didn't just want to call it the 2010 LR3, or the LR3 2.0. They point to the many awards the LR3 had received, but the S.U.V. was also criticized for problems ranging from a cheap looking interior to clumsy on road handling. The LR4 is quite different. Not only does it have significantly more power and a first class passenger compartment, but its on road handling is greatly improved and its off road ability remains impressive. The LR4 also has slightly revised exterior styling, aimed at addressing a design that some consumers considered somewhat brutal, said David Saddington, the director of the Land Rover Design Studio. "It is more approachable some might say a little more friendly," Mr. Saddington said. If you ask me (actually, nobody has) I think it looks as if someone pasted a chain mail doily onto the grille. Mr. Saddington says these changes are part of Land Rover's design philosophy, which he described with the mystifying phrase "bold evolution." The interior is new. Mr. Saddington said that while company officials saw the interior of the LR3 as being "Land Rover tough," consumers thought it looked "low rent." The LR4 has an interior that is both practical and luxurious, and more in keeping with its cousins from Jaguar. Both Jaguar and Land Rover are marketed and sold through the same organization, a subsidiary of Tata Motors of India. The standard features include a sunroof with three glass panels. There are two fixed panels over the rear seats, and the section over the front seats retracts open. The expanses of glass make the interior feel particularly airy. The downside is that the front part of the roof opens only about 10 inches. All the important safety equipment is standard. However, the LR4 has yet to be crash tested by either the federal government or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. With the third row folded, there is 42 cubic feet of cargo space, according to Land Rover. That's a little less than the Mercedes Benz GL, a chief competitor. The driver and passengers ride rather high in the LR4, which makes it feel, upon acceleration, as if one is in a small plane zooming close to the ground. One half expects to hear, "Announcing the arrival of flight 2010 LR4." The credit for such speedy travel goes to a new 375 horsepower, 5 liter V 8 with direct injection, an engine shared with Jaguar. It has 75 horsepower more than the LR3's 4.4 liter V 8. The engine is paired with a superb 6 speed ZF automatic transmission. Like other Land Rovers, the LR4 has a sophisticated full time four wheel drive system. Although it weighs almost three tons, the LR4 can reach 60 miles per hour in 7.5 seconds, about a second quicker than the LR3, the automaker says. Despite the extra horsepower, the economy rating is unchanged because the engine is more sophisticated and efficient: 12 m.p.g. in town and 17 m.p.g. on the highway. That's exactly the same as the Mercedes GL550 4Matic. To upgrade the on pavement handling, the suspension and steering were reworked. Nick Rogers, Land Rover's chief engineer for new vehicles, says the result is "a significant improvement in terms of poise and control" with steering that has "more feedback and greater sense of control." Indeed. On a mountain road the LR4's handling was a huge surprise. The vehicle changes direction quickly, and somehow the suspension manages to control all that height and weight with aplomb. There is a sense of disbelief, like discovering that a two story apartment building can race around corners and down straights. All the while, the ride remains comfortable and the cabin stays quiet. There are plenty of other vehicles that work equally well on pavement. What makes the LR4 stand out is its ability to also handle awful terrain that would make a crossover vehicle faint. Such tasks (rare as they may be) are made easier with Land Rover's Terrain Response system. Turning a knob in front of the gearshift lever allows the driver to prepare the vehicle for conditions like snow, sand, mud or rocks. The computer then adjusts the suspension, brakes and powertrain to the optimal settings for each situation. Prices begin at 48,100 for a five passenger version; adding a third row seat costs 1,150. One could easily stop there and have a pleasingly equipped vehicle. An LR4 with every option runs just over 64,000. What is missing is the stamp of societal approval that big, thirsty S.U.V.'s have lost. But a week or so driving the LR4 erodes any tendency toward disdain and makes one vulnerable to the vehicle's power, comfort, exclusivity and omnipotent ability to easily handle anything from a quick trip along a twisty road to traveling on no road at all. INSIDE TRACK: Cheerio to the LR4 and ta ta to the LR3.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Automobiles
|
"Denise Ho: Becoming the Song" is an inspiring documentary driven by an unwavering belief in the ability of people particularly young people to create the world they want to live in. The film, directed by Sue Williams and available through virtual cinemas, maps the life and career of the Cantopop singer Denise Ho, who has used her platform to become one of the more influential pro democracy activists in Hong Kong. Her story may be of particular note at this moment, as China's new security law imposes more restrictions on the region. Ho's parents left Hong Kong for Montreal in 1988, four years after Britain and China settled on a joint agreement that would hand the territory over to China in 1997, but allow it to retain autonomy. They feared Beijing's encroachment and wanted to raise Ho and her older brother in a different environment. In Montreal, Ho became inspired by Anita Mui, an early Cantopop star (often referred to as the Madonna of the East) who was also a pro democracy activist and nurtured the values Ho says made her the person she is today.
| 0
|
N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
|
Movies
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.