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"At that point, Trump squeezed his Diet Coke hand so hard it turned into a diamond." JIMMY FALLON "That was ice cold. And what made it even more devastating was that Michelle Obama wasn't angry, she wasn't yelling, she just stated Trump's complete failure as a president as an obvious fact. You know, it's the difference between your mom screaming at you and your mom just casually sipping a coffee and going, 'Well, not all kids can be winners.'" TREVOR NOAH "Former first lady Michelle Obama said President Trump is, quote, 'the wrong president for our country.' That's putting it mildly, like it's just a bad match or something. 'You're not a good president for us but there are plenty of countries out there for you. What about Mordor or Gilead?'" SETH MEYERS "That's right, everyone is saying the former first lady stole the night. I'm actually worried the speech might have backfired for Biden, because right after, everyone with a ballot wrote in Michelle Obama." JIMMY FALLON "It would suck to get dumped by Michelle Obama. Can you imagine? 'You were in over your head; you cannot deal with this. It is what it is.'" JAMES CORDEN
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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In mid October, researchers in California published a study of Civil War prisoners that came to a remarkable conclusion. Male children of abused war prisoners were about 10 percent more likely to die than their peers were in any given year after middle age, the study reported. The findings, the authors concluded, supported an "epigenetic explanation." The idea is that trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person's genes, which then is passed down to subsequent generations. The mark doesn't directly damage the gene; there's no mutation. Instead it alters the mechanism by which the gene is converted into functioning proteins, or expressed. The alteration isn't genetic. It's epigenetic. The field of epigenetics gained momentum about a decade ago , when scientists reported that children who were exposed in the womb to the Dutch Hunger Winter, a period of famine toward the end of World War II, carried a particular chemical mark, or epigenetic signature, on one of their genes . The researchers later linked that finding to differences in the children's health later in life, including higher than average body mass. The excitement since then has only intensified, generating more studies of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, of victims of poverty that hint at the heritability of trauma . If these studies hold up, they would suggest that we inherit some trace of our parents' and even grandparents' experience, particularly their suffering, which in turn modifies our own day to day health and perhaps our children's, too. But behind the scenes, the work has touched off a bitter dispute among researchers that could stunt the enterprise in its infancy. Critics contend that the biology implied by such studies simply is not plausible. Epigenetics researchers counter that their evidence is solid, even if the biology is not worked out. "These are, in fact, extraordinary claims, and they are being advanced on less than ordinary evidence," said Kevin Mitchell, an associate professor of genetics and neurology at Trinity College, Dublin. "This is a malady in modern science: the more extraordinary and sensational and apparently revolutionary the claim, the lower the bar for the evidence on which it is based, when the opposite should be true." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Investigators in the field say the critique is premature: the science is still young and feeling its way forward. Studies in mice, in particular, have been offered as evidence of such trauma transmission, and as a model for studying the mechanisms. "The effects we've found have been small but remarkably consistent, and significant," said Moshe Szyf, a professor of pharmacology at McGill University . "This is the way science works. It's imperfect at first and gets stronger the more research you do." The debate centers on genetics and biology. Direct effects are one thing: when a pregnant woman drinks heavily, it can cause fetal alcohol syndrome. This happens because stress on a pregnant mother's body is shared to some extent with the fetus, in this case interfering directly with the normal developmental program in utero. But no one can explain exactly how, say, changes in brain cells caused by abuse could be communicated to fully formed sperm or egg cells before conception. And that's just the first challenge. After conception, when sperm meets egg, a natural process of cleansing, or "rebooting," occurs, stripping away most chemical marks on the genes. Finally, as the fertilized egg grows and develops, a symphony of genetic reshuffling occurs, as cells specialize into brain cells, skin cells, and the rest. How does a signature of trauma survive all of that? One working theory is based on animal research. In a series of recent studies, scientists at the University of Maryland School of Medicine , led by Tracy Bale, have raised male mice in difficult environments, by periodically tilting their cages, or by leaving the lights on at night. This kind of upbringing, effectively a traumatic childhood, changes the subsequent behavior of those mice's genes in a way that alters how they manage surges of stress hormones. And that change, in turn, is strongly associated with alterations in how their offspring handle stress: namely, the young mice are numbed, or less reactive, to the hormones compared to control animals, said Dr. Bale, director of the university's Center for Epigenetic Research in Child Health and Brain Development. "These are clear, consistent findings," she said. "The field has advanced dramatically in just the past five years." Perhaps the best explanation for how such trauma marks could be attached to a father's sperm cells comes from Oliver Rando at the University of Massachusetts. His studies, also in mice, have zeroed in on the epididymis, a tube near the testicles where sperm cells load before ejaculation. There, they learn to swim over a period of days, and their genes can be marked, said Dr. Rando. The molecules that affect the changes appear to be "small RNAs," fragments of genetic material that scientists are still learning about, Dr. Rando said. "This tube produces small RNAs and ships them to the sperm as they develop, suggesting that there exists a place that senses the dad's environmental conditions and can change the package RNAs delivered through the sperm to the baby," Dr. Rando said. He makes no broad claims beyond that. Other researchers have attempted to fill out the picture. Once those RNA packages arrive at the epididymis, the hypothesis goes, they prompt a of cascade of changes at conception that evade the stripping, or rebooting, process and the subsequent reshuffling during early development. The critics are far from persuaded. "It's all very nice work , and yes, there are changes in the testicular cells," said John M. Greally, a professor of genetics, medicine, and pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "But as usual, the story that's often told is overblown relative to the results, and too much causality is claimed." And this debate concerns only the animal research. The human studies thus far are much less persuasive, most experts agree, and have identified no plausible mechanism for epigenetic transmission. Some of the studies have focused not on small RNAs but on an altogether different chemical signature, called cytosine methylation, that could very well be added after conception, not before, Dr. Rando said. The idea that we carry some biological trace of our ancestors' pain has a strong emotional appeal. It resonates with the feelings that arise when one views images of famine, war or slavery. And it seems to buttress psychodynamic narratives about trauma, and how its legacy can reverberate through families and down the ages. But for now, and for many scientists, the research in epigenetics falls well short of demonstrating that past human cruelties affect our physiology today, in any predictable or consistent way.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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There was a time in the early 20th century when Bayside rivaled nearby Long Island havens for the affluent and celebrated for instance Sands Point, a North Shore enclave often associated with Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby." Then came construction of the Cross Island Parkway in the late 1930s, effectively cutting Bayside off from the water. That set the area on a different course from North Shore communities like Douglaston and Little Neck, which still have grand waterfront estates. But Bayside bounced back. Today it is an upper middle class community where single family homes predominate; it has excellent schools and ample parks an archetype of suburbia, but within the boundaries of New York City. "People who want to live in Bayside really want to live in Bayside that's all there is to it," said Betsy Pilling, a lifelong resident and the broker/owner of Pilling Real Estate, which has been in business in Bayside for 40 years. Ms. Pilling described Bayside residents as homeowners with a strong civic interest who are "paying a lot of money, so they have to be motivated to want to live here." Detached three bedroom houses start at 600,000 or so; there are few, if any, affordable housing options, so buyers tend to be affluent, brokers said. The area was settled in the 1600s by English land grantees, evolving by the mid 1900s into a neighborhood that attracted prosperous Irish , Italian and German American families. In the last two decades, Korean and Chinese Americans have been its fastest growing ethnicities, many moving east from the Flushing area, said Daniel Algar, the broker/owner of East Coast Realtors in Bayside. It is a neighborhood of enclaves among them Bay Terrace, Bayside Gables, Weeks Woodlands and Bayside Hills strung together by the vibrant shopping strip along Bell Boulevard. Each enclave could be defined as a neighborhood in itself, but residents typically see themselves as Baysiders first. Each enclave developed in a different era, and in the early 2000s, all were in danger of becoming overrun by sprawling new single and multifamily homes until impassioned Baysiders came together and pushed through a rezoning proposal, said Jerry Iannece, the chairman of Community Board 11, which covers Bayside. Alison McKay, a resident of the Bellcourt enclave for eight years, owns one of the few remaining Victorians in the area. The director of the Bayside Historical Society, Ms. McKay says she treasures the four bedroom house. "It's really pretty," she said. "I'm the third owner, and the second owner did a lot of the renovation, so it's got central air." While Ms. McKay would not say how much she paid, Mr. Algar says homes like hers would sell in the low 800,000s, as attractive single family homes are always in demand. "If an owner is truly looking to sell, and the house is priced within the correct range," he added, "it will go almost overnight. If it's priced right on the money, you're going to get close to if not above asking price."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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"Father Soldier Son" is about a family shaped by war. But the film is quiet, captured in Davis's cleareyed, gray skied photography, softened by Nathan Halpern's plangent score and arranged in a clever chronology. Like life, it sometimes skips years, only to land on an evening that feels like an epoch. Isaac loses a little adolescent sweetness to teenage sullenness; Joey becomes a touch more wary around the camera. Brian has a loving new girlfriend, Maria, but his recuperation is met with setback after bitter setback. He starts calling himself a "used to could," his masculine identity knotted into what he sees as his diminishing physical prowess and military usefulness. Time passes. Triumphs unfold. Tragedy strikes. It's unlikely there's even a Mohs scale value for the hardness of heart it would take to remain unmoved by the film, but there is one disingenuous aspect. This Obama/Trump era straddling story, of a military family with a flag on the lawn and a semi serious joke about playing "The Star Spangled Banner" as a newborn's first song, feels implausibly apolitical, as though carefully crafted to omit the potentially divisive in favor of the universally humane. Still, the unquestionable admiration for the Eisches and all who serve does not sell short the complexity and contradictions of military service, an ambivalence most striking in the ending Einhorn and Davis choose. There's a new baby; a prom; even a bombastic ceremony with graduating cadets emerging through smoke clouds to booming rock lyrics: "This is a perfect day to die." But the story continues past any kind of circle of life climaxes, instead coming to rest on a note of conflicted pride and faltering certainty. Life, in "Father Soldier Son" does not move in a circle, but in an incrementally decaying orbit around the values that, in making us what we are, also keep us from being anything else.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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It's clear what someone high up at the Mariinsky Theater must have been thinking when that company's United States tour was being planned. The Mariinsky, repository of ballet classicism, was going to Washington to perform a full length work; why not send a few dancers, with a marquee name or two, to New York for a simultaneous season, and amortize the costs? Although the Mariinsky (formerly the Kirov) and the Bolshoi Ballet now tour the world fairly extensively, Russian ballet still has glamour and mystique. Ballet lovers long to see these storied dancers in the great classical works, and might have been grateful for this cost effective strategy if the content on offer had any substance. Instead, the Mariinsky presented four incoherent, slight dance programs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, billed as a tribute to the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who died in May. Though Plisetskaya danced with the Bolshoi, not the Mariinsky, a respectful homage to a great colleague is (just about) feasible. But before several dances on Friday night's program, a screen at the front of the stage showed black and white photographs of legendary Mariinsky names: Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Enrico Cecchetti and Tamara Karsavina. The program a hodgepodge of solos and pas de deux from various works associated with these figures had nothing to do with Plisetskaya's repertory, nor was her name or image ever invoked. Probably no one in the packed audience really cared. They were there to see Uliana Lopatkina, Vladimir Shklyarov and seven less famous Mariinsky dancers rotate through a jumbled sequence of dances that ranged from a pas de deux from Act II of "Giselle" (1841) to John Neumeier's mawkish and absurdly kitsch "Pavlova and Cecchetti" (1971).
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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COLUMBUS, Ohio The capital city of Ohio adopted a reconstruction plan for encouraging development 14 years ago that emphasized three unexpected ingredients: more grass, less water and targeted taxpayer spending. This year, those words on paper are fully coming to life in the southern blocks of the downtown area of Columbus, which is beckoning developers after decades of disinvestment. "What happened here is that people chose the future," Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said. "Our business leaders work closely with the public sector. We've taken some big steps that worked." In May, the Arshot Investment Corporation became the latest developer to embrace the formula. The company announced its plan for Millennial Tower, a 25 story, 90 million, 400,000 square foot mixed use development that includes 180,000 square feet of office space, 40,000 square feet of retail space and 100 apartments. Construction of the tower is scheduled to start early next year on the corner of Rich and Front Streets, a short walk from the nine acre Columbus Commons, which was completed in 2011. The tower will also be one block from the city's Scioto River shoreline promenade and park, which was completed last year. Within a few blocks of the coming tower are five other buildings that are under construction or just opened, totaling 241 million in private investment to construct 275,000 square feet of office space, about 800 residential units and 80,000 square feet of retail space. Preceding these changes was a challenging campaign for local lawmakers, who persuaded Columbus residents during the recession in 2009 to approve a city income tax increase to 2.5 percent, from 2 percent. The vote was close, but the measure passed. The added revenue helped prevent layoffs of city employees and enabled Columbus to begin investing in its reconstruction plan. The city spent 63 million from 2011 to 2015 to build three new parks. The total cost was 105 million, and the balance was raised from city businesses, most of them affiliated with the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 and directed by business and civic leaders. In 2011, the development group scraped away the last vestiges of the 1.2 million square foot City Center. The nearly empty shopping mall, which opened in 1989 but struggled as interest in downtown shopping declined, was replaced by Columbus Commons, a 25 million expanse of grass, gardens and a shaded food court inspired by Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan. The same year, the city rebuilt its eastern Scioto River shoreline, shrinking a five lane riverfront boulevard to three lanes, and adding a promenade and restaurants. The renamed Scioto Mile cost 44 million. Columbus then looked at the river itself, listless and muddy. In 2013, the city removed the Main Street Dam, which was completed in 1918 to control flooding but also doubled to 600 feet the distance between the river's banks. With the dam out of the way, and with the help of dredges to remove sediments, the river narrowed to 300 feet, and the city gained 33 acres of once submerged shoreline that opened as the 36 million Scioto Greenways park last year. The projects were principally financed by public funds. Columbus's strategy of seeding anticipated private real estate investment with taxpayer money defied the tactics of low taxes and public spending austerity that gripped Ohio's state lawmakers through and since the recession. But city officials say their decisions have paid off, attracting developers into privately financing the replacement of cracked asphalt of parking lots with nearly 350 million in new and renovated market rate buildings that house thousands of downtown residents, and helped generate 1,000 jobs. The newest completed project in the southern part of downtown is 250 High Street, a 55 million, 12 story building on the southwest corner of Columbus Commons. It is 320,000 square feet, and has about 120 rental units and retail and office space. Opened in November, it has 140,000 square feet of office space and 10,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. Over all, it is 99 percent leased. The market response has been so strong that the builders Robert White Jr., the president of the developer the Daimler Group, and Brett Kaufman, the chief executive of Kaufman Development are preparing to construct a 60 million, mixed use building of similar size on an empty parcel a block away. The new project from Mr. White and Mr. Kaufman on Rich Street, called Two25 Commons, will be the final piece in a three sided enclosure of buildings that surround the park. Other new structures are the Julian, a 21 million, seven story apartment building with about 90 residential units, which opened last year; and Highpoint at Columbus Commons, a 51 million, 300 unit rental apartment project with ground floor retail, which opened in 2013. Across High Street, a 30 million apartment project with about 250 units and 22,000 square feet of retail space is under construction. "We knew we needed to build the amenities to attract privately financed development," said Guy V. Worley, chief executive of the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation. "We had a lot of help from our major businesses here, which wrote seven and eight figure checks. At the same time, the public investment has been substantial." With 836,000 residents, Columbus is the largest city in Ohio and one of the largest in the Midwest by population. Unlike its two big sister cities, Cincinnati and Cleveland, which have lost residents, Columbus has grown over the last few decades. Business executives and government leaders cite Columbus's long history as the state capital, its central location and huge pool of graduating students from Ohio State University and other colleges as competitive advantages in sustaining the city's economy. Columbus also has an allegiance to big ideas without flamboyance. In 1991, for instance, city engineers discovered that cleaning up traces of chemicals in the dirt behind a maintenance facility would cost 2 million because of national hazardous waste rules. The city issued an influential report that asserted such urban cleanups caused enormous expense for little gain. The report started a national campaign to change standards and sharply reduce the cost of making urban industrial sites, called brownfields, safe for new construction. The new brownfield rules, enacted in the mid 1990s, adjusted national policy, and helped Columbus and other cities redevelop their waterfronts and business districts. Similarly, in the late 1990s, Columbus recognized that a 75 acre industrial area and abandoned rail yard along the Scioto River, about a mile north of Columbus Commons, was a prime site for a new multiuse district. The city collaborated with Nationwide Realty Investors, an affiliate of Nationwide Mutual Insurance, which is based in the city. Together, at a cost of 750 million, they turned the area into the Arena District, now one of the city's most active areas for work and residences. The Blue Jackets, the National Hockey League team, play there, as do the Clippers, an affiliate of the Cleveland Indians baseball team.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Prototype, the festival of new work whose ambitions are aptly conveyed by its subtitle, Opera/Theater/Now, has in its seven seasons gained a reputation as a star spotter. It has brought to New York two pieces that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Du Yun's "Angel's Bone" and, this year, Ellen Reid's "prism." (Both those works were produced by Beth Morrison Projects, which presents Prototype with HERE, the arts center in SoHo.) So audiences will be watching carefully to see if awards recognition might be in the future for the six works that will be shown in Prototype's eighth season, which will run Jan. 9 18 at theaters throughout Manhattan and was announced on Wednesday. The characteristic Prototype work is short in length and grim in subject matter. Last year's festival revolved around presentations "of almost cataclysmic suffering, the kind of pain that lingers without reason or resolution," I wrote in a New York Times review.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Other People's Money: Before she became a journalist, the New Yorker staff writer worked in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an analyst at a couple of small hedge funds specializing in risk arbitrage basically, she researched companies that planned to merge, and tried to predict how their stock prices would move. "I fell into hedge funds by accident," she told me in a recent phone call about her new book, "Black Edge," a look at the insider trading scandal that brought down the huge fund SAC Capital even as its founder escaped prosecution. (The book makes its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 12.) Kolhatkar got her start in finance as a temp, answering phones, shortly after she graduated from Stanford with a master's degree in media studies. "This was early in the evolution of hedge funds," she said, "and a lot of them were willing to take a chance hiring the kind of people you might not expect. There was a start up atmosphere, so everyone got to do a bit of everything. And the fund manager just sort of took a liking to me. She told me: 'Look, your boyfriend is a filmmaker. One of you should make some money. I'm giving you an opportunity to learn the business and make some dough to keep living in New York City.' So I took a crash course in financial analysis and investing. It was like learning a new language." As an analyst, Kolhatkar said, she already heard people talking about the trader Steven A. Cohen and the stellar returns at SAC Capital, which he began in 1992. And of course her colleagues were always looking for ways to increase their own profits. "They were often very smart and witty, and entertaining to be around," she said in a subsequent email. "But many of them were much more fixated on making money than I was." Still, there were limits. "My boss would say to me: 'I don't want to live in Costa Rica for the rest of my life. I'm not interested in insider trading,' " Kolhatkar said. After the dot com bubble burst in 2001, leading to a slowdown in mergers, Kolhatkar had a chance to catch her breath and evaluate her career. She realized it was time to move on. "I could not handle the stress of making imperfect decisions based on incomplete information with other people's money," she said. "I didn't have the personality for it. I was risk averse. I was a basket case." And getting rich had never been her main goal "foolishly, if you ask my parents," she said. "Which might help explain why I went into print journalism instead." Get Out of Town: John Darnielle's novel "Universal Harvester" is new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 10. According to The Harvard Crimson, Darnielle recently told an audience of Harvard students that the book "began to take shape after he thought through one simple question: When Iowans have family reunions, why do all the conversations focus on where people wound up, instead of how people are doing?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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Peter Abrahams, a South African writer whose journalism and novels explored, with sensitivity and passion, the injustices of apartheid and the complexities of racial politics, died on Wednesday at his home in Kingston, Jamaica. He was 97. The death was reported in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner. Mr. Abrahams spent most of his adult life in Britain, France and Jamaica, but his moral center of gravity was located in the country he left at the age of 20. "I am emotionally involved in South Africa," he told the trade magazine Wilson Library Bulletin in 1957. "Africa is my beat." He added: "If I am ever liberated from this bondage of racialism, there are some things much more exciting to me, objectively, to write about. But this world has such a social orientation, and I am involved in this world and I can't cut myself off." He first attracted notice in 1946 with "Mine Boy," a powerful, sparely written novel about the trials of a naive young black South African who leaves his home in the north to work in the gold mines near Johannesburg and falls in love with a mixed race woman. It is often cited as the first African novel in English to draw international attention. Two years later, Mr. Abrahams published "The Path of Thunder," about a black South African who returns to his native village to open a school. It established him as an important literary voice. "Beside Richard Wright's name as a Negro novelist, set that of Peter Abrahams," the critic Lewis Gannett wrote in a review of the book for The New York Herald Tribune. "Or beside that of Alan Paton as a South African novelist, set Peter Abrahams." Over the decades, in his reporting and in his fiction, Mr. Abrahams addressed the promises and the perils of black rule after colonialism, the possibilities of a postracial society and questions of personal identity. Those he felt acutely as a mixed race South African "colored," under the country's apartheid system married to a white woman, and as an exile for most of his life. Above all, the spectacle of racial injustice in his homeland spurred him to write. The novelist Nadine Gordimer, in an introduction to his memoir "The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation" (2001), wrote, "Abrahams is an African writer, a writer of the world, who opened up in his natal country, South Africa, a path of exploration for us, the writers who have followed the trail he bravely blazed." Peter Henry Abrahams Deras was born on March 3, 1919, in Vrededorp, a colored and Asian slum near Johannesburg. His father, James Henry Abrahams Deras (sometimes spelled De Ras), was an Ethiopian who settled in Johannesburg to work in the gold mines. His mother, the former Angelina DuPlessis, was colored, the daughter of a black father and a white French mother. His father died when Peter was quite young, and the family struggled. Before entering school at 11, he sold firewood and worked for a tinsmith. After a white woman in the tinsmith's office read the story of Othello to him from Charles Lamb's book "Tales From Shakespeare," he became determined to attend school. He completed a three year course at a colored school in Vrededorp in one year and won a scholarship to the Diocesan Training College in Grace Dieu, near Pietersburg, where he began contributing poems to the magazine Bantu World. While working at the Bantu Men's Social Center, he encountered the works of black American writers. "I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro literature," he wrote in "Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa" (1954). "I became a nationalist, a color nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. To them I owe a great debt for crystallizing my vague yearnings to write and for showing me the long dream was attainable." He later studied at St. Peter's, an elite school for blacks in Rosettenville, outside Johannesburg, and became a Marxist. In 1939, while working as an editor at a socialist magazine in Durban, he found work as a stoker aboard a freighter and made his way to London. There he was hired as a dispatch clerk at a socialist bookstore and did editing for The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the British Communist Party. He soon became involved in London's African political community, befriending the Trinidadian pan Africanist George Padmore and two future postcolonial leaders, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. This milieu provided the material for his 1956 novel, "A Wreath for Udomo," about an English educated African who returns to rule his native country with tragic results. The literary scholar Harvey Curtis Webster, in Saturday Review, called "A Wreath for Udomo" "the most perceptive novel that has been written about the complex interplay between British imperialism and African nationalism and tribalism." Several stories Mr. Abrahams wrote when he was still in South Africa were collected in "Dark Testament" (1942), and a small press run by Dorothy Crisp, a right wing political figure, brought out his first novel, "Song of the City," in 1945. A trip to South Africa and Kenya in 1952 generated a book of reporting, "Return to Goli" (1953). A few years later, the British colonial office commissioned him to write a popular history of Jamaica, published in 1957 as "Jamaica: An Island Mosaic." He liked what he saw. "In Jamaica, and in the stumbling and fumbling reaching forward of its people, is dramatized, almost at laboratory level, the most hopeful image I know of the newly emerging underdeveloped world," he wrote in Holiday magazine in 1963. That was several years after he had relocated to the island with his second wife, the former Daphne Miller, and their three children, Anne, Aron and Naomi. There was no immediate word on his survivors. For four decades, Mr. Abrahams broadcast political commentaries on Radio Jamaica. He wrote one novel with a non African setting: "This Island, Now" (1966), about a political radical who comes to power in an unnamed Caribbean country after the death of its first postcolonial leader. South Africa remained his subject. It was the setting of his political thriller "A Night of Their Own" (1965). He worked backward to it in the transgenerational novel "The View From Coyaba" (1985), a tale of black struggle in the Caribbean, the American South and Africa. He relived it in his second volume of memoirs. By then, history had brought relief. "I became a whole person when I finally put away the exile's little packed suitcase," Mr. Abrahams told Caribbean Beat in 2003. "When Mandela came out of jail and when apartheid ended, I ceased to have this burden of South Africa. I shed it."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"That's me with Larry Olivier," said Rex Reed, reaching for a black and white photo in a silver frame in his eighth floor apartment in the Dakota on a recent chilly Tuesday afternoon. The photo was taken on the set of "Inchon," a 1981 Korean War thriller. Looking dashing with his raven hair and Elvis cheekbones, Mr. Reed, then at the height of his fame as a journalist and television personality, played a music critic stuck in a war zone; Mr. Olivier Laurence to most of us played Gen. Douglas MacArthur. "My gofers on that picture were Audrey Hepburn's son, Sean Ferrer; and two of Marlon Brando's kids," Mr. Reed, 79, said with evident satisfaction. Old photos of Mr. Reed in his younger days with dear friends (Liza Minnelli, Angela Lansbury), some now departed (Natalie Wood, Liz Smith) line the antique tabletops and hunter green walls of his home of 48 years. The handsome two bedroom apartment functions as a shrine to a different New York, a different Hollywood: when movies were about silver screens, not touch screens; when those who peopled them were stars, not celebrities. When not everyone was a critic, posting their opinions for free on Twitter. On a red wingback chair sat a white needlepoint pillow. "It's not a pretty pillow," Mr. Reed said, "but it's a pillow that was done for me by Jean Simmons." The late actress, his "dearest, dearest friend," cheekily emblazoned it with the letters "FTA." The T stands for "them," the A for "all." It's a fitting motto for a man who became a star himself on the strength of his dandyish style, sharp wit and drive to enrage. To paraphrase "Sunset Boulevard," he used to be big, and maybe he is still big. It's the pictures that have gotten small. (Really small.) Always an Old Soul That dark hair is white now. The face it frames is less dashing than droll. And that trim physique shown off in houndstooth check jackets and ascots back in the 1960s has softened somewhat under a scarlet sweater vest. But Mr. Reed still has those eyebrows impish, irascible, just like in the framed Al Hirschfeld caricature of him in his den from 1970. They were arched in defiance as he sank into a beige suede sofa to talk about the state of film criticism today. Generation iPhone might not realize the power and prestige that Mr. Reed once enjoyed. For decades, he has reviewed for The New York Observer, a once influential peach colored broadsheet newspaper for Manhattan elites that, after shape shifting several times during a decade of ownership by Jared Kushner, is now a web only property, Observer.com. In the spring, headlines announced that Mr. Reed was included in a round of layoffs there. In fact, the there was no formal termination, since Mr. Reed is a freelancer, and when a new editor, Merin Curotto, took over shortly afterward, bringing him back was a top priority. "He isn't for everyone," Ms. Curotto said. "Great talents usually aren't." Indeed, Mr. Reed prides himself on bucking the tide of popularity, decreeing "The Shape of Water," which got a 93 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, "a loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel." (In the kind of error that used to be fish wrap but now lives forever on the internet, he also misidentified the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro as the Puerto Rican born actor Benicio Del Toro, misspelling his name "Benecio" as a bonus). A onetime host of "At the Movies," the popular 1980s movie review program, and a judge on, O.K., the "The Gong Show," Mr. Reed sees himself more as a guardian of Hollywood standards than as a hatchet man. "I like just as many films as I dislike," Mr. Reed said. "But I think we're drowning in mediocrity. I just try as hard as I can to raise the level of consciousness. It's so hard to get people to see good films." "When I was first admitted to the New York Film Critics Circle, you would go to a conference room and you would intelligently debate film with Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, Vincent Canby," he said. "You go now, and honestly, if you have white hair, you're over the hill. They don't believe that you can even understand the kind of movies that they like. It's very true. I don't understand. I mean, they're voting for James Franco. How more absurd can life get than that?" "Unfortunately, we have me, who lived through all that good stuff, and remembers it," he said. "So kill me already, you know?" From the South to the Steam Room Rex Taylor Reed was born in Fort Worth on Oct. 2, 1938, and spent his childhood bouncing around the South because his father, Jimmy Reed, worked as drilling supervisor on oil rigs in and around the Gulf of Mexico. "We lived in everything from a motel near a Tabasco sauce factory to a crumbling Southern mansion near Natchez anywhere there was an oil boom," he wrote in the introduction of "Do You Sleep in the Nude?," his 1968 collection of celebrity profiles. That crumbling mansion, he wrote, was "covered with bougainvillea vines, red as pomegranates," and had a cook with a glass eye "who used to make Creole gumbo in the kitchen while I sat around the table reading Nancy Drew mysteries." Mr. Reed's family tree, he said, is filled with notables. "My mother came from a family of 10 in Oklahoma, her second cousins were the Dalton Gang," he said. "And when my grandfather was a little boy, he was rocked by Jesse James on his knee." Mr. Reed chafed at his elementary school curriculum. "Don't even try asking me anything about 'if Farmer Brown has six acres of land, how much fencing does he need?'" he said. What he loved was words, and he learned their power early. "When I was in the eighth grade, my whole career as a controversial writer began, because I wrote the gossip column for the school paper," he said. "All anonymous: 'Who was Betsy Boudreaux seen passing a note to in study hall?' The school was up in arms." He was already plotting his escape. "I used to sit in the Greyhound bus terminal reading Town Country and think, 'Oh God, if only I could go somewhere where people know things.'" Movies provided a glimpse of a world beyond the oil patch. "I went every single solitary day after school to the movies," Mr. Reed said. "My father got very upset. 'What are you going to do when you grow up and have to get an honest job?' I told him, 'I'm never going to get an honest job. I'm going to be a movie critic.'" In college, he tried to sneak off in his father's car to New Orleans to see Bette Davis onstage, but the car got stuck in the mud during a storm. "Fade out, fade in: Years later, I'm sitting in Bette Davis's living room in Westport, Conn., interviewing her, and I told her the story," Mr. Reed said. "Her eyes got bigger and bigger, and she says, 'Hmm, if I had known who you would be, I would have sent a limo.'" The studio eventually laid him off after budget cutbacks, and in 1965 he fled the city to knock around Europe with friends in a rented red Volkswagen. He ended up at the Venice Film Festival just as his money was running out. "I didn't know how I was going to get home," he said. Mr. Reed decided to pose as a journalist and bluff his way into interviews with Jean Paul Belmondo and Buster Keaton, the aging silent film star who was promoting "Film," a 22 minute experimental silent movie written by Samuel Beckett. Mr. Reed sold both articles, making enough to buy a return ticket to the United States. The Keaton article, which appeared in The New York Times, was hammered out on film festival stationery. ("Buster Keaton was there, looking for all the world like the kind of man dogs kick. ...") Settling in New York, Mr. Reed soon became an in demand magazine writer, then a hot job: churning out swashbuckling profiles of Tennessee Williams, Warren Beatty and many others. His unflinching Ava Gardner profile for Esquire in 1966 portrayed an embittered former screen siren two fisting Dom Perignon and cognac, complaining about her tenure at MGM as "17 years of slavery" in which the studio "tried to sell me like a prize hog." The article wound up in Tom Wolfe's 1973 anthology, "The New Journalism." Mr. Reed was also becoming a regular on "The Dick Cavett Show" and "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson. "He developed his own fan club on the show," Mr. Cavett said in a phone interview. "I remember on one show, he said about Nancy Sinatra that she looked like a 'pizza waitress.' I actually began to worry. One of the musicians said to me, 'Don't worry, Frank doesn't have a temper, ha ha ha.' I think I went home and ordered a fallout shelter." Mr. Reed continues to consider physical appearance of public figures fair game. In 2013 he was denounced for calling the actress Melissa McCarthy "tractor sized" and a "female hippo" in his review of the comedy "Identity Thief." "I felt really bad for someone who is swimming in so much hate," she told The Times then. "She went nuts because all her fans came out of the woodwork and were mad at me," Mr. Reed said. "But what did she do? She lost 50 pounds. She started doing her own fashion designs. She looks terrific now, and is getting roles that don't require her to fall down in mud puddles." Mr. Reed knows firsthand the mercilessness of the camera, and the critics. In 1969 he edged out George Hamilton, he said, for a prominent role in "Myra Breckinridge," the big budget film adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel whose protagonist undergoes a sex change a scandalous notion then. In the film, the sex change was reduced to dream sequence. Mr. Reed played the pre transition Myron to Raquel Welch's Myra. At the outset, the film, which also starred Mae West and Farrah Fawcett, looked like a blockbuster. It quickly became a very different sort of disaster movie. The original director, the venerable George Cukor, fell out, along with Bette Davis and Burl Ives, Mr. Reed said. Ms. West, then in her late 70s, was entrusted to write key scenes, in which Mr. Reed and Ms. Welch refused to appear. "She didn't understand the movie at all," Mr. Reed said. Nothing made any sense. In one scene Mr. Reed sashayed through an orgy scene "with a bottle of champagne, and my jacket over my shoulder, like William Holden in 'Sabrina.'" But it was "a completely ridiculous orgy, everybody was fully clothed." Mr. Reed may not have made a fortune in the film business, but he is sitting on millions of dollars of real estate. "It's an awfully comfortable bachelor pad," he said of the book filled Dakota apartment he has lived in since 1969, which he bought for 30,000. He found the apartment through his friendship with Ruth Ford, the Broadway actress who lived there with her husband, the actor Zachary Scott, whose family "owned half of Texas," Mr. Reed said. The playwright William Inge, Judy Garland, Judy Holliday and the saxophone player Gerry Mulligan were all neighbors at various points. "I moved into this apartment with an A. P. shopping cart, some books and whatever I could drag over from my little walk up on 73rd Street," Mr. Reed said. His only furniture was a corduroy Queen Anne chair and a sleeping bag. The night he moved in, the film star Robert Ryan, who was president of the Dakota's board, rang the doorbell to welcome him, and the two shared instant coffee, Mr. Reed on the sleeping bag, Mr. Ryan in the chair. "Do you think that happens today?" he asked. Boris Karloff was another neighbor. Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein and Rosemary Clooney lived in the building. "Betty" Bacall, whose spacious three bedroom apartment sold for 21 million in 2015 after her death the previous year, and Mr. Reed used to eat together regularly, he said. He once signed a petition supporting John Lennon when the government was trying to deport Mr. Lennon because of his drug use and political activism. Mr. Lennon thanked him with a one year subscription to TV Guide, Mr. Reed said, adding, "That was his bible. All he did was lie around stoned watching television." If Mr. Lennon famously sang, "All You Need Is Love," Mr. Reed appears to disagree. "I don't have 'relationships,' except friends," he said. "I don't know, love is not something that I've been really good at. I think people are intimidated by people with opinions."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Tonight, a Japanese spacecraft completed a touchdown on the surface of an asteroid, where it fired a projectile at the rock's surface rock. A successful mission could help advance understanding of how our planet formed in the early solar system. Since last year, Hayabusa2, the Japanese probe, has been studying the asteroid called Ryugu. It surveyed the object's surface, and in the following months landed multiple robotic probes on its rocky terrain. All that work was done to support the aim of Thursday's operation (Friday in Japan) where it attempted to collect samples from Ryugu's surface and later bring them home to Earth. Other attempts could be made in the near future. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. What did Hayabusa2 do when it landed? Hayabusa2 tried to collect material from the rugged surface of the asteroid with a device called a sampler horn. To make small enough fragments, the spacecraft fired a projectile made of the metal tantalum basically a bullet at the asteroid's surface. Earlier this month, the mission's managers reported their simulation of this procedure on Earth to demonstrate that it would be able to succeed.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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In 1782, before the peace treaty that officially ended the Revolutionary War had been negotiated, Benjamin Franklin, fearing some form of reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, sought to inflame passions of the colonists and embarrass the British by concocting a report of packages including "8 large ones containing SCALPS of our unhappy Country folks, taken in the three last Years by the Senneka Indians from the Inhabitants of the Frontiers of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia," purportedly sent to the governor of Canada for him to transmit to England. Among the scalps were supposedly 88 women's scalps, 193 boys' scalps, 211 girls' scalps and "29 little infants' scalps of various sizes." None of this was true. Franklin may be a progenitor of fake news. White fear of rebellions by the enslaved marked American life before the Civil War and informed the legal code. As the National Park Service explained: "Slaveholding elites also regulated white behavior in attempts to increase security. One example among many occurred in 1739, when the South Carolina legislature passed the Security Act. A response to white fear of insurrection, the act required that all white men carry firearms to church on Sundays." This white fear also pervaded Reconstruction. As the Cornell University history professor Lawrence Glickman wrote in The Atlantic in May: "During Reconstruction, opponents of the black freedom struggle deployed pre emptive, apocalyptic, slippery slope arguments that have remained enduring features of backlash politics up to the present. They treated federal support for African American civil rights, economic and social equality however delayed, reluctant, underfunded, and incomplete it may have been as a cataclysmic overreaction and framed it as a far more dangerous threat to liberty than the injustice it was designed to address." This white fear of Black violence was part of what gave birth to the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and it pervaded pop culture. It was a central theme in "The Birth of a Nation," which helped revive the Ku Klux Klan and was the first movie ever screened at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, a racist who once wrote: "The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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As he prepares to launch a fact filled show into a fact challenged world, Bill Nye, a.k.a. the Science Guy, is looking on the bright side. "You have to be optimistic," the author, engineer and television personality said in a phone interview. "You're not going to solve global problems or address global issues without being optimistic. If you don't think you can do anything about it, you won't." His new program, "Bill Nye Saves the World," will premiere as a Netflix original series on April 21. In a statement, Netflix said, "Each episode will tackle a topic from a scientific point of view, dispelling myths, and refuting antiscientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders or titans of industry." Mr. Nye, 61, will be joined by celebrity guests like the model Karlie Kloss, the actor Rachel Bloom and the fashion consultant Tim Gunn. A Netflix representative said the 13 episodes, each 30 minutes long, will be released all at once. With President Trump's administration embroiled in debates over blatant falsehoods, "alternative facts," and "fake news," Mr. Nye's fans are saying the timing of this show couldn't be better. But the program is not a response to last year's election. Netflix announced that it was in the works in August, and filming ended in October. In any case, Mr. Nye said: "It's just a TV show. People don't have to watch it." Mr. Nye is famous for his Emmy Award winning series "Bill Nye the Science Guy." But fans of that kid friendly 1990s classic may be disappointed to learn that the upcoming series will have an entirely different format it's a talk show, not a children's' program. "We have guests, we have a panel of experts, we have what's essentially a monologue, and we have comedy video pieces that are inserted," he said. "The comedy bits," he added, "are brilliant!" Mr. Nye, who is known for wearing bow ties and has some background in stand up comedy, never fails to inject a dose of lighthearted humor into his talks and media appearances. Although it is clear he has fundamental disagreements with much of the Republican establishment, he seems to approach hot topics like climate change and the reproductive rights of women with a measure of restraint, deliberately showing respect for opposing viewpoints even when they frustrate him. And while he may get impatient with policy makers who reject scientific findings, he sees no point in getting testy. "As good as it might make us feel to call other people names, it's probably not in our medium or long term interest," he said. "Optimism may be counter to divisiveness." The new show will tackle a range of subjects including sex, climate change, technology and alternative medicine. It's not necessarily meant to be a political program, but Mr. Nye acknowledges that these days, issues like climate change are inherently hot button even when they shouldn't be. "We in the climate science community didn't politicize it. Other people did," he said. "People who want to preserve the fossil fuel industries, the extraction industries." Mr. Nye said he hoped that his show would be picked up for a second season, but there are no guarantees. In the meantime, his plate is full for the coming months. This year he will release a children's book series, "Jack and the Geniuses," and a general interest book for adults called "Everything All at Once: How Nerds Solve Problems." He's also thinking about attending the March for Science in Washington on April 22, even though he is not involved in organizing the event. And he'll keep doing whatever he can to make sure that science and critical thinking have a place in political dialogue. "We'll see what happens, but I'm very proud of the shows," he said of his Netflix series. "I hope they do influence some people."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Apple has held talks with a number of leading television groups to offer an Internet based TV service for its iPhone, iPad and Apple TV set top box, according to people briefed on the company's plans. The service, which could be announced later this year, would offer a bundle of channels that is smaller and cheaper than the bloated catalog of offerings in a typical cable subscription, said these people, who discussed the incomplete plans on the condition of anonymity. The plan would potentially offer networks owned by the television groups Disney, Fox, CBS and Discovery, the people said Tuesday. That could include the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and Fox, along with a lineup of other cable networks, such as ESPN and Discovery Channel. The total number of networks to be offered is yet to be determined. Apple is not including all of the networks owned by each of the TV groups, signaling yet another fraying of the traditional cable bundle. No deal has been reached yet, the people said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Since 2007, Krip Hop Nation has been releasing mixtapes that showcase a worldwide network of hip hop artists with disabilities. Here are five songs by members of its extended family that have appeared on them over the years. Wheelchair Sports Camp, 'Hard Out Here for a Gimp' On "Hard Out Here for a Gimp," Denver's Kalyn Heffernan drops a deft, cocksure, assonant emo rap about perceptions and medical debt over a staccato art rap twinkle (courtesy of the keyboardist Ikey Owens of the rock band the Mars Volta). Forty two inches tall and born with brittle bone disease, Heffernan skewers otherizing media depictions that serve to make nondisabled people feel better about themselves. "Ah 'my cute wheelchair?'" she raps. "It costs as much your sports car." The rapper Prinz D, born Darius McCall and based in Washington, wraps a whirlwind of emotion into his lovelorn raps. "When I'm recording, I love to hear the bass and melodies a lot but I have to give that up because my hearing aids filter all the meaty portions of the beat out," he told the music blog D.C. Music Download. "The engineers can't turn up the beat because my aids will squeal." Over a metal guitar crunch, the Cleveland rapper and Nine Inch Nails fan Deacon Burns of "alternative punk hop" duo Kounterclockwise (which also features Kaya Rogue) confronts police brutality in rapid fire bursts: "Profiled by the beast, if your skin ain't bleached be discreet or get beat." The group stars in colorful animated music videos and released a short film in 2014, "Kounterclockwise in Forever Land." "Other then Joe Swanson on 'Family Guy' you rarely get to see a kick ass wheelchair character in a cartoon," Burns said in a 2014 interview, "so the fact that I go to another dimension and start a revolution and defeat a might y ruler all in a wheelchair is pretty dope." The musician, activist, consultant, public speaker and Krip Hop co founder Keith "Fezo da Mad One" Jones made deeply funky '90s flecked boom bap on a series of CDs. Born with cerebral palsy, Fezo uses his toes to make beats. On "Alter Ego" he raps that blessings "keep my feet on the right path and MP drum pads." King Caution, who is from Grand Rapids, Mich., "grinds hard from a wheelchair" after being paralyzed in a car crash in 2006. "How I Feel" mixes stories of his accident and recovery with hard braggadocio.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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How do you style a console or coffee table the way designers do so it looks effortless, not awkward? Here are some tricks of the trade. When a room is nearly finished and all the major pieces of furniture are in place, there's one thing you need to make the space feel complete: an artfully arranged tablescape, or grouping of objects on a console, coffee, side or center table. "The poetry of a room is often found in these more intimate details," said Dan Fink, an interior designer in New York. "Styling is about bringing a sense of personal beauty, and heart, to a room. The personality of the space, and the person who lives in it, can come through in personal objects." Empty tabletops, by comparison, often feel unfinished. "A room without accessories or styling is soulless," said Sarah Bartholomew, an interior designer in Nashville. "Styling a table makes a room feel finished and lived in. It's a way to personalize your home while adding depth and style." A tabletop is an ideal place to express your personality and showcase your collections with a little decorative flair. A tablescape, Mr. Fink said, should be "a combination of all of the things that reflect one's life and personal interests." In his case, that means tables scattered with nautical instruments; lion sculptures and prints (Leo is his astrological sign); objects that evoke his Austrian heritage; gifts from his husband, the interior designer Thomas O'Brien; and objects and books that recall Paris, a favorite city. Or look to the key colors and materials in a room to inform the pieces you select to display on tables, suggested Steven Gambrel, an interior designer in New York, who collects curiosities while traveling and uses them as accessories in his projects. "If you have a beautiful blue glazed wall, and there's a blue glazed vessel on the table, it brings the wall closer to you," he said. "It brings the big picture, which is the room, down to a smaller scale." Creating a tablescape is more art than science, and there are many ways to go about it. Few designers aim for complete symmetry, but most try to achieve a sense of balance or order across the composition. "Look at the paintings of Morandi or other artists who were good at composition," Mr. Gambrel said. "Sometimes the corner will be taller, and then it works its way down" to smaller objects toward the front and the other side of the table. "You want to ensure there's balance between the items," Ms. Bartholomew said. "Sometimes I divide a square coffee table into four quadrants. Two kitty corner quadrants might have stacks of books for balance, and then I'll put a large vessel or bowl on the third quadrant and an interesting object, like a bone inlay hurricane or something collected, in the fourth quadrant." "I usually start with something tall at the center of the table, or off to one side, and then work from there," said Meridith Baer, the founder of Meridith Baer Home, a home staging company with offices across the country. "For height, I like to bring in a statue, a nice floral or a lamp. The higher the ceiling, the more height you can bring in on a table." After situating the tallest object, she said, "I lay out the still life in relation to that piece." The best tablescapes become more interesting the closer you get to them. One of the ways to create that kind of appeal is to include objects made with varying materials, textures and finishes. "I like to combine things that are rough and fine, old and new, ancient and modern," Mr. Fink said. "It's about different juxtapositions. Perhaps it's glass and crystal with pottery and ceramics, or stone with wood and metals." Most designers also like to include something natural, like plants or flowers. "I always love having something alive," Ms. Bartholomew said. "Every vignette cannot always have flowers, but you can find ferns and plants that are low maintenance. When you're entertaining, it's a moment for cut flowers from your garden." Some designers use books in a way that shows off more than their spines and covers. Cheryl Eisen, the founder of the New York based design and home staging firm Interior Marketing Group, often places open books on tables to call attention to favorite pages. "I love an interesting art book like a giant book of Picasso photographs I have and I'll have it open on a bookstand," she said. "It's an interesting conversation piece, because it's open to a specific page and invites a conversation. And I change it to different pages all the time." Or she'll try to find a page that picks up on colors in the room: "We'll open the book to a page that matches the color story we want to tell." Small groupings of objects within a larger tablescape can add visual interest. "I like a small cluster of the same kind of object maybe three or five things, with different heights," Ms. Baer said. "A grouping of candlesticks, pieces of pottery from the same period or tiny carved statues from Indonesia. Right now, on my coffee table I have a few Chinese vases that are all in celadon colors, but in different shapes." To reinforce a grouping, the objects can be set on a tray, in a bowl or on top of a piece of stone. "I'm keen on trays that have an inch and a half or two inch edge to them," Mr. Gambrel said. "It cleans up the composition. It frames the objects in the same way that a frame works with a painting." And "if you do two trays" on a single tabletop, he added, "the space you've created between the trays is also a great place for an object." Look Beyond the Tabletop Once you have selected the accessories to display on a table, take a step back and consider the spaces around the table. The appearance of a console, in particular, will be affected by the objects mounted on the wall behind or placed underneath. "You need to think through the entire vignette," Ms. Bartholomew said. "Often I'll put a basket underneath, or a potted fern. It's something to finish it out, so there are no holes." Mr. Gambrel said he frequently hangs art above a console or corner table, with the specific objective of completing a tablescape. As a result, the art is not always centered over the table, and may be mounted lower on the wall than expected. "It's all put together like a collage," he said. "You just play around with the pieces until it looks good." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Three years ago, Christina D'Ambrosio went to her first spin class, pedaling fast on a stationary bike to the rhythms of popular music as an instructor shouted motivation. But Ms. D'Ambrosio, who exercises regularly, found the hourlong class was harder than she anticipated. By the end her legs were sore and wobbly. "I thought my body just wasn't used to that kind of muscle ache because it was my first class," said Ms. D'Ambrosio, a kindergarten teacher from Pleasantville, N.Y. Over the next two days, her legs throbbed with excruciating pain, her urine turned a dark shade of brown, and she felt nauseated. Eventually she went to a hospital, where she was told she had rhabdomyolysis, a rare but life threatening condition often caused by extreme exercise. It occurs when overworked muscles begin to die and leak their contents into the bloodstream, straining the kidneys and causing severe pain. After a two week hospital stay, Ms. D'Ambrosio was released and has since recovered. Her case was highlighted in April in The American Journal of Medicine along with two other cases of spinning induced rhabdomyolysis treated by the same doctors. The report noted that at least 46 other cases of people developing the condition after a spin class were documented in the medical literature, 42 of them in people taking their first class. The report cautioned that the condition was very rare, and not a reason to avoid high intensity exercise. But the authors said their goal was to raise public awareness so that people who begin a tough new workout program will ease into it to lower their risk of injury. "I would never discourage exercise, ever," said Alan Coffino, the chairman of medicine at Northern Westchester Hospital and a co author of the new study. "Spin class is a great exercise. But it's not an activity where you start off at full speed. And it's important for the public to realize this and for trainers to realize this." Rhabdo, as many experts call it, has long been documented among soldiers, firefighters and others whose professions can be physically demanding. An Army study in 2012 estimated that about 400 cases of the condition are diagnosed among active duty soldiers each year. On occasion there have also been large clusters of college athletes hospitalized with it after particularly grueling workouts. But doctors say they are now seeing more of it among weekend warriors driven in part by the popularity of high intensity workouts. Spinning in particular has gained a huge following; large chains like FlyWheel, SoulCycle and others report millions of rides and tens of millions in annual sales. Studies show that high intensity exercise offers myriad health benefits, but for a small subset of people, many of them beginners, rhabdo can crop up and quickly turn ugly. In 2014, doctors at NewYork Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center published a report on two patients who arrived at the emergency room with rhabdo shortly after their first spin class. One was a 24 year old woman hobbled by pain, her legs swollen and feeling "as tight as drums." She was rushed to surgery, where doctors sliced her thighs open to relieve a dangerous buildup of pressure. Another study found that between 2010 and 2014, there were 29 emergency room visits for exercise induced rhabdo at NewYork Presbyterian alone. Weight lifting, CrossFit, running and P90X were the reasons for some visits. But the most common one was spinning. Dr. Todd S. Cutler, an internist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork Presbyterian and lead author of the study, said the patients all fit a similar profile. "These are people who are not unfit," Dr. Cutler said. "They are being pushed too hard, and they're not trained to do this, and so they get really bad muscle trauma." There is some evidence that certain medications, including statins, stimulants and antipsychotic drugs, as well as genetic susceptibilities may contribute to the condition, said Patricia Deuster, a professor of military and emergency medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. But in general it occurs when people simply do not give their muscles time to adjust to an aggressive new exercise, experts say. A little damage to muscles is a good thing because that stimulates them to grow and adapt to stress. But when the stress is too great, fibers are destroyed. When that happens they break apart and release compounds that can be harmful to the liver, such as a protein called myoglobin, which causes brown or tea colored urine, a classic symptom of rhabdo. While almost any intense activity can cause rhabdo, it almost always strikes people who are doing something new. That is why people should always progress from light to moderate and then vigorous intensity when doing a new exercise, said Eric Rawson, chair of the department of health, nutrition and exercise science at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "You can be fit, and I can come up with a workout that you are unaccustomed to, and that could be what causes rhabdo," he said. Even elite athletes are not immune. Amy Purdy, a bronze medalist Paralympic snowboarder and "Dancing With the Stars" contestant, went to an exercise class last year after taking three weeks off from her training regimen. The class consisted of a circuit of challenging exercises, she said, including dozens of pull ups. "About halfway through I realized my arms were completely fatigued," she said. The next morning she could not straighten her left arm. Then it became sore, stiff and swollen, prompting her to go to a hospital. She remained there for eight days as doctors flushed her kidneys with water, she said. She was diagnosed with rhabdo, and when she wrote about the experience on social media she was inundated with responses. "Thousands of people have reached out to me on my Instagram page who have had it as well," she said. "Almost everyone was fit before, got it from pull ups and is trying to figure out the way to get back into fitness without risking a recurrence." Two things can help you avoid rhabdo, said Joe Cannon, an exercise physiologist. Before starting a new program, do a less intense version of it first. That means riding a stationary bike at a moderate pace before starting a spin class, or doing just one set of a weight lifting exercise rather than multiple sets and repetitions. But the most important advice is to know your limits: Don't be afraid to leave a class or to say no to a trainer if you are struggling. "One thing I've noticed when people tell me they've gotten rhabdo in the gym is that they gave up their personal power," said Mr. Cannon, author of "Rhabdo: The Scary Side Effect of Exercise You've Never Heard Of." "They kept doing what the instructor told them to do because they did not want to look weak." That was the case for Nancy Weindruch, a communications executive at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group in Washington. In 2015 Ms. Weindruch, who exercised regularly, attended a spin class with her sister, but was not prepared for the instructor's fast pace and directions to "push past your limits."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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As West Coast companies storm into New York, they are reshaping the city's neighborhoods and changing its identity from a hub of finance, fashion and media to one increasingly centered on technology. Google said on Monday that it planned to create a 1 billion campus just south of the West Village. The internet company's push into one of Manhattan's most famous neighborhoods positions it to become one of New York's biggest occupants of office space, allowing it to double its work force in the city to more than 14,000 over the next decade. Google follows Amazon, which said last month that it planned to open a new office in Queens that will house as many as 25,000 employees. Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and Uber have also embarked on recent New York expansions much of it driven by a hunt for talent. Each is creating hundreds or thousands of high paying jobs and leasing or building millions of square feet in commercial real estate. "Law, medicine and finance have been superseded by information technologies," said Mitchell Moss, an urban planning professor at New York University who studies the city's economy. Google's new campus selection of Hudson Square, once an industrial district just south of the West Village, strengthens its grip on Manhattan's West Side, likely accelerating the neighborhood's changes. That would mirror how Google transformed Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where it has had an office since 2006. The company bought Chelsea Market for 2.4 billion earlier this year and an adjacent building in 2010, and it leases other space in the area, about a 20 minute walk from its new offices. The centerpiece of the new 1.7 million square foot campus will be the St. John's Terminal building near the Holland Tunnel on Washington Street, with Google also set to occupy space at two buildings nearby on Hudson Street. Altogether, the company will expand its footprint in Manhattan by a third to about 6.75 million square feet. "New York City continues to be a great source of diverse, world class talent," Ruth Porat, Google's chief financial officer, said in a statement on Monday. "That's what brought Google to the city in 2000, and that's what keeps us here." Read our article chronicling Google's slow expansion in New York. New York's transformation into a tech center began after the 2008 financial crisis, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg focused on the industry as an engine of future growth. His administration sought to upgrade the tech skills of the local labor force, a campaign that led Cornell University and its partner, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, to open an applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. Tech initiatives new courses, buildings and research institutes are also underway at Columbia University, New York University and the City University of New York. Google arrived in New York when it opened an advertising sales office in 2000. It added an engineering team in the city in 2003 and has steadily expanded since. Other big tech companies quickly followed. Amazon and Facebook each now have more than 2,000 employees in New York, while Apple and Salesforce each employ more than 1,000. LinkedIn has a large office in the Empire State Building, and IBM chose New York as the base for its Watson artificial intelligence and cloud computing divisions. Since 2009, jobs in tech and advertising in New York have increased 31 percent to 360,600, while financial services jobs in the city increased about 12 percent to 475,500, according to an analysis of federal data by Ken McCarthy, principal economist at the real estate firm Cushman Wakefield. By contrast, the education and health sectors employ about one million people in New York, while the hospitality industry employs 465,800, according to his analysis. Mr. McCarthy said federal data categorized jobs based on the employer, meaning any bank employee is counted as finance. But New York's traditional industries banking, retailing and consulting have also added thousands of tech jobs. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup each employ thousands of tech workers, including many in new fields like data science, blockchain and machine learning. And New York's tech sector is accelerating. Over the past year, the share of New York postings on the job site Indeed increased nearly 13 percent for tech jobs and just 2 percent for finance and accounting jobs. About 5 percent of all New York jobs posted on Indeed are now tech related, the site said, compared with 3 percent for finance and accounting. That growth has made San Francisco, which is a gateway to Silicon Valley, a sort of sister city to New York. As a result, the air route between them is one of the nation's most competitive and heavily trafficked. "There is more economic connectivity between New York and San Francisco than between New York and any of the declining upstate cities," Mr. Moss said. Google's expansion in Manhattan contrasts with that of Amazon's in Long Island City, where a plan to enter the formerly industrial Queens neighborhood has been greeted with intense local debate. Amazon executives, who have promised little in the way of neighborhood benefits in exchange for as much as 3 billion in state and city incentives, faced protests and withering questioning at a New York City Council hearing last week. Google has expanded quietly and has not asked for public subsidies. "We've been growing steadily for the past 18 years without heralding trumpets, or asking for support from the government," William Floyd, Google's head of external affairs in New York said this month. "We've done it by the dint our own work." Still, Google has faced criticism in New York. The owners of some Chelsea restaurants said they are losing potential customers because of the company's free food at work policies. (San Francisco officials recently considered banning new employee cafeterias in the city for that reason.) And some in Manhattan are wary that Google and other businesses will begin to spread into historic neighborhoods. "My concern is that with Google's concentration in that area, it's going to pull in even more intense pressure for office development, particularly tech office development, in adjacent neighborhoods like the Village and East Village, where we are seeing it happen already," said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Mr. Berman said he did not oppose Google's expansion in Hudson Square, which in the past decade has transformed into a commercial district, with many of its lofts and factories converted to offices for more than 1,000 companies, many in technology, advertising and media. Today, more than 50,000 people work in the neighborhood, and thousands more have made their home there following a 2013 city rezoning that allowed residential development. But Mr. Berman said the growing demand for offices has led to the demolition of historic buildings, pushed out longtime businesses and residents, and resulted in modern office towers that are out of character with the rest of the neighborhood.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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One morning two years back, a heated argument broke out in my local Brooklyn moms Facebook group about something called "G and T." Certain parents were all for it, while others declared it elitist and problematic. My son was just a few weeks old at the time, so I had no clue what they were talking about. I identified most closely with the commenter who wrote, "I assume this is not about gin and tonic?" I know now that "G and T" stands for "gifted and talented," those public school programs reserved for children with superlative test scores, considered by some to be the pinnacle of educational achievement, greater even than admission to an elite private school. In neighborhoods like mine, where parenting can sometimes seem like a competitive sport, "gifted and talented" might be the ultimate "pressure cooker inside a pressure cooker," as Bruce Holsinger puts it in his wise and addictive new novel, "The Gifted School." The book centers on four friends who met when their children were babies, and remain close 11 years later. They live in Crystal, an affluent, fictional Colorado town that bears a strong resemblance to Boulder. Rose grew up working class. She's an overachieving doctor with a dissatisfying marriage and an only child, called Emma Q, because another member of the group, the wealthy and well connected Samantha, also has an Emma Emma Z. Azra and Beck are amicably divorced, co parenting twin boys and reckoning with Beck's dwindling trust fund and recent marriage to their former au pair. Lauren, a widow, is raising two challenging kids on her own. She is perhaps more obsessed than anyone else with her children's achievements: "Tessa had become a living, breathing benchmark, a proof of concept for the overinvested parenting they all practiced with varying degrees of obliviousness and guilt."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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At the entrance to the Armory Show, opening March 8 in New York at Piers 92 and 94, a line of silhouetted figures rising 25 feet on scaffolding will be visible from the West Side Highway. The piece, called "So Close," is the work of the French artist JR, known for siting monumental photographic portraits in public spaces around the world to humanize political problems, and it is based on an archival image of immigrants waiting at Ellis Island. Their faces have been superimposed with recent portraits of Syrians photographed by the artist at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. "This super scaled line of people is standing at a pier on the waterfront of New York City, a symbolic entry point into the country," said Jen Mergel, curator of "The Contingent," the art fair's second edition of its "Platform" section, with 15 site responsive works installed throughout the two piers. JR's marquee piece is intended to prompt "all who enter to think about issues of access, entry, ease or difficulty therein," she said, "even the inconvenience of having to wait, if you've ever been to the Armory." Inspired by the theme of collective assembly or force, "The Contingent" includes a new installation by Tara Donovan that groups tens of thousands of vertically stacked clear plastic tubes of different lengths in a luminous sea, rippling across the central gathering space in Pier 94. Other new works are by the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Sarah Cain, Beth Campbell, Leonardo Drew, Jeffrey Gibson, Amalia Pica, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, Berndnaut Smilde and Wilmer Wilson IV. Four projects by Elmgreen Dragset, Richard Long, Mary Sibande and Wang Xin will be exhibited for the first time in the United States. Ms. Sibande, an artist based in Johannesburg who has never shown in New York, will anchor Pier 92 with "Cry Havoc," a sculpture of a woman in a regal purple dress and waving a white flag, with a pack of red dogs jumping out from around her skirts.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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On a hot summer afternoon in the Uco Valley, south of Mendoza, Argentina, last December, six of us gathered for a wine blending of malbec, cabernet franc and syrah grapes that had been harvested nine months earlier. Our task: to decide what to do with the juice that had been aging in oak barrels for several months. As Mariana, our winemaker, guided us through the tastes and smells of the 2014 harvest, we stopped to take in the view of the majestic Andes Mountains in the distance. Agritourism may be big in these parts but we were taking it one step further than most: The wine we were blending was from our own vineyard. Enthralled by the region nine years ago, New York family members and friends with no experience in winemaking banded together to find an excuse to revisit it year after year. The price was 100,000, but not enough for the two other principal buyers and me to buy a house. This year, we will produce our fourth vintage, enabling us to share our wine and our tales of owning a vineyard in a faraway part of the world. How had we become accidental winemakers in the booming Argentine wine country? The first step was falling in love with Mendoza. It isn't hard to do. Mendoza is a leafy city founded in 1561 by Spanish settlers. The combination of lovely squares and wide boulevards adds to the colonial feel, as does an intricate web of canals running through the city. The place is alive with adventure travelers and oenophiles. I first visited the region in 2006 with two friends, Tom and Cap. During our stay at the Cavas Wine Lodge, a Relais Chateaux hotel 30 minutes from the city, we visited a dozen vineyards. We also fit in some hiking and horseback riding in the foothills of the Andes, then dined under the vines at Cavas. Our group went on to Santiago for a wedding, but my heart stayed in the Mendoza region. Anytime I heard that someone was heading there, I would ask them to come back with suggestions on how I might invest in the area. A friend, Martha, hit on the intriguing idea of opening our own winery. She had met Michael Evans, an American who traveled there for vacation in 2004, but decided to stay. He joined forces with a local Argentine, Pablo Gimenez Rilli, and the winemaker Santiago Achaval to establish a new business model for winemaking. Vines of Mendoza would be a 1,000 acre operation that would produce its own wine, and sell land to commercial producers, including restaurateurs who could create their own exclusive wines. And they would make three to 10 acre parcels available to private investors. The concept was that you could contract with the main company in a land purchase, select the grapes you wanted to plant and then piggyback onto all of the master vineyard's winemaking services for planting, harvesting and bottling your own wine. Today the "going in" cost ( 85,000 an acre) covers everything up to the first bottling of the first harvest. While there are other private ownership communities throughout the region, such as Casa de Uco and Dragonback Estate, creating an easy way for investors to become a part of the scene, Vines had a big vision for itself. A day with Mr. Evans exploring the property on horseback, followed by an authentic Argentine asado (barbecue), is all it took to convince me that I could create my own wine. While he explained how the private ownership terms worked, I thought of the line from the lyricist and novelist Paulo Coelho, "life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act!" Fortunately, I have a lot of friends who love wine, particularly Jack and Jay, each of whom has his own wine cellar. When I returned home, I lobbied hard, talking them into investing in a vineyard. "Let me get this right," Jack said. "You want me to make an investment thousands of miles away in a place that I've never been to with people who I have never met?" "But Jack, you love wine," I said. "Imagine your own wine label. What better time than now?" Ultimately, he and Jay agreed that the idea was irresistible. Martha wanted in on it, too, and within weeks, JMJ (Jack, Michael, Martha, Jay) Vines LLC was born. We bought three acres to plant right away and another 10 acres that would remain fallow until we got our winemaking feet wet. We didn't rush down and make our first pilgrimage to our vineyard together. But within the first year of our venture, all of the partners had taken trips to explore the land and mull over what we had done. I remember standing on the barren land wondering if we had done the right thing. When I looked at the stunning scenery, I knew that this would become an adventure of a lifetime. During this trip, it was my job to work with the winemakers to decide what type of grapes we'd plant, and to communicate the choices back home. Sitting with a glass of malbec to make the final decision was what I called "just another day at the vineyard." We settled on growing malbec, Argentina's signature grape. (Over 70 percent of the world's malbec is grown there.) The grape was introduced to Argentina in the 1860s and has blossomed thanks to the terroir there, a combination of sun, heat, soil, altitude and temperature that ensures ripeness and acidity, important to the rich, velvety full flavored wine that it is known for. Grown over a 2,000 mile stretch from Salta in the north to Patagonia in the south, the Argentine malbec has seduced the palate of wine drinkers everywhere. We would plant an acre each of malbec, cabernet franc and syrah, although in hindsight, we should have planted all malbec, since owners can buy other grapes grown at Vines for blending to produce other types of wines. In 2008, I went back to Mendoza with a few friends to lead the ceremonial planting of the baby vines. It would take three years before we could blend our first wine. We would be able to produce 80 cases an acre from that first harvest. Once the vines matured in Years 5 and 6, production would swell to several hundred cases an acre. Since then, we have gone to the area at least once a year. We plan our visits around the harvest or blending season. Or we pick a holiday that we celebrate there. The 11 hour overnight flight from New York to Santiago with the 30 minute hop to Mendoza has also allowed us to do an occasional five day weekend. Learning how to plant the vines, which could thrive for more than 75 years, we spent a few hours on our hands and knees, placing them in the earth, as farmers have done for centuries. At home, we tasted dozens of malbecs from the region, hoping that someday we would capture some of the great fruits of blackberry, plum and black cherry with a hint of floral notes that create the perfect wine. In spring of 2011, as our first harvest approached, eight of us assembled to attend winemaking camp and participate in the harvest. We clipped and piled our plump grapes into large plastic bins. Jack and his wife, Amy, joined in, as did Martha, the proud birth mother of the idea, along with Tom. While Jay couldn't join us, we sent him videos of our group at work. Our day of winemaking had bonded us in a way that none of us had anticipated, with shared moments that we talk about every time we see one another. Nine months later, most of our group headed back to Mendoza for the official blending of the grapes. Additional friends joined to partake in the winemaker's experience. Today, there are over 150 private vineyard owners at Vines, creating a global community, who communicate regularly. We've cheered one another on at marathons, celebrated weddings and births, and made toasts with our wines. We have learned that each year, the blending produces a different wine, as it depends on the weather conditions of the growing season. For 2014, Mariana predicted it would be a great year for malbec. We liked the taste of our grapes so much that we will produce four barrels (or 100 cases) of malbec, one barrel of syrah and our own blend of those two with cabernet franc that we named Founder's Reserve. To help finance the production, we sold 70 percent of our grapes on the Vines exchange. That helps us almost break even on our annual wine production. With the good luck from our Lechuza, our experience has been both fun and affordable. We expect that our wine will arrive in New York in September of this year, in time for family gatherings and the holidays. Lechuza is now my holiday gift to colleagues, clients and friends. We have all decided to keep our wine for our own use. A group of us will be in Argentina at least once a year for harvest or blending. Our investment has become a lot more than just owning a vineyard. It has enriched friendships, created new ones and established a place that we now call home.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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"The art world is still segregated," said Myrtis Bedolla, owner of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, shown with Delita Martin's "Star Children," which includes drawing, sewing, painting and collage.Credit...Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times "The art world is still segregated," said Myrtis Bedolla, owner of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, shown with Delita Martin's "Star Children," which includes drawing, sewing, painting and collage. Art Basel's online viewing rooms went live on Thursday, presenting 281 of the world's leading modern and contemporary art galleries. Not one of them is owned by an African American. Despite the increasing attention being paid to black artists many of whom have been snatched up by mega dealers and seen the prices for their work surge at auction the number of black owned galleries representing artists in the United States remains strikingly, stubbornly low. There is only one African American gallerist in the 176 member Art Dealers Association of America, a professional group. Now, as the country focuses on systemic racism amid the George Floyd protests, some black dealers say the mostly white art market is long overdue for a radical transformation. "Until we have a seat at the table, this is going to continue to be an exclusive club," said Karen Jenkins Johnson of Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco and Brooklyn. "We are not playing on a level playing field." To speak to more than a dozen black gallerists in this country including dealers who work at white owned galleries is to hear weariness at having to explain why there still aren't more of them. The answers remain the same, namely, less access to capital and exclusion from a rarefied network of connections that includes collectors, dealers, curators, critics and auction houses. "The art world is still very segregated," said Myrtis Bedolla, the founding director of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore. "Galleries are primarily owned by white men." It is expensive to run a gallery and to participate in the art fairs, which are where galleries did nearly half their sales in 2019. As with many black owned businesses in America, black dealers often struggle to get bank loans, and they lack patron support. "Let's not pretend lending is equal in this country," said Harry Jones, of Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, which was started by his parents, Stella and Harry, in 1996. In recent years, museums have focused more on developing and hiring curators of color, and New York City has tied its cultural funding to demands for diversity, equity and inclusion. But the current demonstrations nationwide have highlighted the need for equal opportunity in all fields, including the art market. This month, Artsy, an online forum for buying and selling art, posted a list of 26 black owned galleries to support," and some black art executives are seeking other concrete solutions. Ms. Vassell said she is assembling a task force including the artist Carrie Mae Weems and the curator Helen Molesworth to design tool kits to help museums and galleries "energize a discourse around race." "We want to approach it as equal parts education, policy engineering and communication," Ms. Vassell added. She is also organizing a pop up exhibition in Manhattan on the photographer Ming Smith, whose work would have been featured in the now postponed July show at the Whitney Museum of American Art about the Kamoinge Workshop, a 1963 collective of black photographers in New York. To be sure, there are networks of black art professionals that already exist, among them, Entre Nous, a dinner series started a few years ago by Courtney Willis Bair, a director of the Manhattan gallery Mitchell Innes Nash. She is part of the constellation of black dealers pioneers like June Kelly and Linda Goode Bryant in Manhattan, along with newer gallerists like Arnika Dawkins and September Gray in Atlanta who have informally supported one another. But black dealers also say the largely white art market could be doing more, namely helping them qualify for art fairs like Art Basel, where the cost of running a booth can run as high as 100,000. "We need to be at those fairs, we need to be reaching the upper echelons of the collector community," said Mr. Jones. "You have to say, 'We are going to have these allotments to make sure we have these black owned galleries,' he added, likening such an effort to affirmative action at colleges. Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, noted there are dealers of color in the fair from other countries but added he would look at how to better support black American gallerists. He suggested providing dealers "space in the fairs, putting them on our talks program to shine a light on them, to give them the visibility that they need," saying that these efforts would help owners "build the networks that they haven't inherited." He also maintained there are not a lot of black owned galleries seeking entry to the fairs in the first place. "This is not an Art Basel issue. This is an art world issue," he said. "There are very few black owned galleries in America." The marginalization is cyclical. Black galleries tend to be excluded from art fairs because they don't have the track record to be admitted, but they can only gain stronger track records if they can gain exposure at a fair. "If galleries such as mine are not allowed to participate, then it limits our access to major collectors, it limits our access to museum curators who may not find me in Baltimore," said Ms. Bedolla. Ms. Jenkins Johnson, who was repeatedly rejected by both Frieze and Art Basel, said she ultimately confronted fair executives directly, challenging them to appreciate the black artists she was showing. She was finally admitted to Art Basel Miami Beach in 2015 with the modern artist Roy DeCarava and then in 2017 to its Switzerland edition, where she exhibited the photographer Gordon Parks. "I've had to go in through the back door and fight and fight and fight to get in," Ms. Jenkins Johnson said. "It was very frustrating, but I'm stubborn. I know that what I have to offer is of the same substance and quality as those other galleries and artists being accepted." She suggests gallerists be more proactive in asking fair executives, "How can I grow so that I will be considered a gallery that will fit within the standards of your fair?" Ms. Jenkins Johnson said she has recently been advised by Noah Horowitz, Art Basel's director of the Americas, on how to better position herself for eligibility. Mariane Ibrahim, who runs a gallery in Chicago, said it is also important to have people of color on fair selection committees; she recently joined one for the Armory Show. "I'm in touch with galleries that are based in Zimbabwe, in Haiti," she said. "If you have a black dealer in those circles of decisions, you add another voice." Some dealers posit that white owned galleries could be doing more to help their black owned brethren, along the lines of what David Zwirner did in 2018 when he offered to pay more at art fairs if it would help smaller galleries participate. Recently, he invited smaller galleries onto his online platform during the pandemic (none, however, were black owned). "I would hope that some of the galleries that are doing really well would seek to substantively partner with someone like me," said Lewis Long, of the Long Gallery Harlem, "to either market the work or to do some kind of creative programming." While many galleries are putting out statements in support of Black Lives Matter, only a handful in Art Basel's viewing rooms, which run through June 26, seem to be featuring black artists. (Richard Gray, for example, shows McArthur Binion and Theaster Gates; Petzel offers Rodney McMillian and Derek Fordjour; and Yancey Richardson shows Zanele Muholi and Mickalene Thomas.) "There are larger questions that our society is facing right now about what we need to dismantle, and I think no one really has the answers," said Joeonna Bellorado Samuels, a black director of the white owned Jack Shainman Gallery. "The art world is going to have to sit with some really uncomfortable truths." Ebony L. Haynes, the black director of the white owned Martos Gallery, said galleries need to do more than show black artists. "Do you try to make sure your artists of color are collected by collectors of color? Do you try to reach out to curators?" she said. "If you have a gallery or museum that is full of white bodies, how can you fully speak to the practice and the intent of the work?" "Don't just put an artist name on your website and say you're doing your part to represent artists of color," she added. Black owned galleries also tend to be excluded from professional associations. "To be accepted, you have to be nominated," Ms. Bedolla said. "But no one has ever approached me to become a member of any of those organizations." (A spokeswoman for the Art Dealers Association said it is working "to expand and diversify the membership.") "Competition for the work now includes white galleries and the cost of entry has increased," said Sherman K. Edmiston Jr., of Essie Green Galleries in Harlem, which he started in 1979 with his late wife, Essie Green. "The black collector audience is not at that price point." Then there is the casual racism that every black dealer encounters day to day, such as when visiting a client's home. "You get a look from the doorman why aren't you going through the service door?" said Steve Henry, the black senior director of the white owned Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan. "I've actually had to say, 'I'm going for an appointment.' Or you talk to a collector for months or years on the phone, and then they meet you. They don't actually say, 'I didn't know you were black,' but you see it." Ms. Bellorado Samuels of Jack Shainman said these insults are "particularly heightened in art fairs, when someone approaches the table and asks every single other white person a question, and you're the only director." However exhaustingly familiar this moment in history feels, most of the black gallerists interviewed say they remain hopeful and determined to move forward. "The secret is in continuing," said Mr. Edmiston. "The secret is persevering."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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Walter J. Leonard, the chief architect of an admissions process at Harvard that has been emulated across the United States, opening colleges and universities to more women and minorities, died on Dec. 8 in Kensington, Md. He was 86. The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, his wife, Betty, said. The affirmative action formula that Dr. Leonard designed for Harvard allowed recruiters to take into account race and ethnicity, on a case by case basis, as one of many factors to consider as they sought to assemble a diverse student body. Martha L. Minow, the Harvard Law School dean, said the plan "had a ripple effect across the nation" as other institutions, facing demands for greater diversity, adopted similar ones of their own. The Harvard formula has passed four decades of constitutional muster, though the United States Supreme Court, in its current term, is revisiting rulings on similar policies in a case involving the University of Texas. Even before he designed the admissions policy, Dr. Leonard was aggressively recruiting more diverse applicants to Harvard Law School. Last week, the school's bulletin, Harvard Law Today, credited him with building "the foundation for the education of more minority and women lawyers than almost any other administrator in the United States." Later, as president of Fisk University in Nashville for seven years, Dr. Leonard raised 12 million to restore a measure of fiscal stability to that historically black institution and even offered his 1.5 million personal life insurance policy as collateral for a loan to keep Fisk from closing. Dr. Leonard became assistant dean and assistant director of admissions of Harvard Law School in 1969, when Derek C. Bok was dean. By 1971, when Dr. Bok became president of Harvard and enlisted Dr. Leonard as his special assistant, the number of black, female and Latino students in the law school had substantially risen. "The dramatic increase must be credited to Leonard's persistent recruiting efforts," The Harvard Crimson later wrote. The admissions policy Dr. Leonard devised for the wider university, in collaboration with other Harvard educators, came in response to complaints from Washington that the existing program at Harvard no longer met minimum federal standards. At the time, the university employed neither a black athletic trainer for its teams nor a black doctor in its clinic. The new formula included race or ethnicity as a plus, among other factors, on an individual application for admission. In 1978 the Supreme Court, upholding race as one factor that could be considered in college admissions in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, referred approvingly to what it called the Harvard plan, saying it weighed "all pertinent elements of diversity" in considering each applicant. "The Harvard model provides a standard," Prof. Ronald Dworkin of the New York University School of Law wrote in an essay for the book "The Affirmative Action Debate" (2002). "If the admissions officers of other universities are satisfied that their plan is like the Harvard plan in all pertinent respects, they can proceed in confidence." That view, however, has been challenged. The Supreme Court is hearing a suit filed by a white woman against the University of Texas. A separate federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of a Chinese American student who was denied admission and who maintains that the Harvard plan originally discriminated against Jewish applicants who had scored high on admissions tests, and that it now handicaps Asian Americans. Walter Jewell Leonard was born in Alma, Ga., the state's blueberry capital, on Oct. 3, 1929. His father, Francis, was a railroad worker. His mother, the former Rachel Kirkland, was a midwife. He enlisted in the Coast Guard during World War II at age 15 and went on to study at historically black institutions: Morehouse College, in Atlanta; what are now Savannah State University and Clark Atlanta University, where he attended the graduate school of business; and Howard University, in Washington, where he earned a degree from the law school in his mid 30s. He also received a certificate in executive management from the Harvard Business School and Harvard's Graduate School of Education. While working his way through night school in Washington as a waiter, Dr. Leonard recalled, he happened upon a white police officer beating a black man and reported the encounter to the authorities. "Any black person who witnessed such a scene in those days and failed to walk quietly away endangered himself," the civil rights lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree wrote in her memoir, "Justice Older Than the Law" (with Katie McCabe, 2009). "Yet Walter Leonard had chosen to come forward." She added: "He could not do otherwise, stunning us with his dignity and his command of the facts. A wrong had been done, he said, and without the testimony of an eyewitness, an innocent black man would be jailed, and undoubtedly convicted of a crime he'd never committed." The case against the man collapsed. Dr. Leonard is survived by his wife, the former Betty Singleton, and a daughter, Angela M. Leonard. Dr. Leonard was assistant dean of Howard University School of Law when he left for Harvard. At Harvard he was chairman of the committee that created the university's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Research. Harvard Law Today quoted Dr. Bok as saying that Dr. Leonard had helped the university achieve diversity not only in its student body but also on its faculty, and even in the construction crews that built Pound Hall at the law school all "without violating important academic principles or agreeing to steps that would ultimately work to the disadvantage of everyone, including the minority students themselves." Moving to Fisk University in 1976, Dr. Leonard inherited a nearly bankrupt institution; the gas company had even shut off the heat because of overdue bills. He found himself wrestling with the trustees over fund raising. In one instance he objected to selling off the university's art collection; in another he refused to rescind a speaking invitation to the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who some trustees feared would alienate white donors. After Dr. Leonard resigned, in 1983, he wrote prolifically, taught and served on numerous boards. Dr. Leonard's colleagues credited the endurance of Harvard's affirmative action plan to his ability to navigate the demands of student civil rights protesters for immediate action with the practicalities of running a university. "I'm not a preacher of patience," he once said. "I'm highly impatient myself. On the other hand, I'm also a realist."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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You might not know it by appearances, but Brothers Food Wine in Toronto is run by a couple of young iconoclasts: co owners Chris White, 30, and Jonathan Nicolaou, 33, who shares chef duties with Keenan McVey, 29. The two met in Toronto culinary circles, then rose up through boundary pushing London kitchens Dandelyan for Mr. White; St. John for Mr. Nicolaou. But talk to Mr. White and you get the sense that they have no interest in their restaurant being of the moment. "We don't use words like seasonal and local because they've been garbaged," he said. The menu, which changes daily, "is rooted in our personal history and heritage." Simplicity is the key: "The more we think about a dish, the less we like it." That's evident on the plate at Brothers, which opened last October in a slim, plain space just above the Bay Street subway station (you may occasionally feel the train rumbling under your feet). During a recent meal, dishes were indeed presented without much adornment. But their flavors drawing from (sorry, Mr. White) seasonal, local ingredients were complex and satisfying.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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THE BLACK CABINET The Untold Story of African Americans and Politics During the Age of Roosevelt By Jill Watts There's long been a standard story of the civil rights movement. It starts on a December evening in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. With that single act of defiance, the story says, Parks set off a movement that sped across the South of the 1950s and 1960s, through Little Rock and Greensboro, Anniston and Ole Miss, Birmingham and Selma, and brought Jim Crow tumbling down. Then, in the bitter spring of 1968, the movement went to Memphis. There it died, on a motel balcony awash in its martyr's blood. It's a profoundly powerful story, in large part because it's a sacred one, built on a fundamental faith in sacrifice and suffering as the route to redemption. And for years historians have been pushing against it. They've stretched the movement's chronology, extended its geography, recovered all but forgotten events and given its overlooked activists their due, all in an effort to make its history deeper, richer and more troubling than the standard story lets it be. "The Black Cabinet," by Jill Watts, the author of books on Hattie McDaniel and Father Divine, seems to take that revisionist project in a less than promising direction. In the early days of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt named a handful of African Americans to his administration, in recognition of the Democrats' expanding black vote. Some of the appointments went to party loyalists, some to superbly trained young professionals Harvard men mostly, as New Dealers tended to be and one to the longtime educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, whose friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt gave her connections the others didn't have. Here was "The Black Cabinet," the African American press announced, the New Deal's "leaders of the race."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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YOUNG AHMED (2020) Stream on Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. A bespectacled Belgian teenager gets swept up by radicalism in this most recent film from the brothers Jean Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne. The teenager, a 13 year old named Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi), falls under the influence of an extremist imam (Othmane Moumen). As Ahmed grows apart from his family, his attention falls on his math tutor, Ines (Myriem Akheddiou) a fixation that leads to catastrophe. "The plot may hinge on Ahmed's actions and motivations," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times, "but the film's real drama revolves around a central moral and political conflict, between religious extremism and a humanist ethos that is more behavioral than doctrinal." ANNEFRANK PARALLEL STORIES Stream on Netflix. This year is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Anne Frank was held before being transferred to Bergen Belsen, the camp where she died. Helen Mirren hosts this new educational documentary, which revisits Frank's diary alongside other stories of people who lived during the Holocaust. It includes interviews with Holocaust survivors and historians, who, among other things, discuss the ways the public's understanding of the Holocaust has evolved in the decades since.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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The cheetah, as swift as it is in the hunt, will not be able to outrun the threats to its survival without new conservation efforts, according to an international team of researchers who reported their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that the threat to cheetahs, which now number about 7,000 worldwide, had been underestimated because of a focus on groups of the cats living in protected areas like parks and refuges. The team called for the International Union for Conservation of Nature to change the cheetah's status from vulnerable to endangered, indicating the serious danger for the species. The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Zoological Society of London and Panthera led the study, and many other conservation groups participated. Sarah M. Durant, a conservation scientist affiliated with the wildlife and zoological societies, and the lead author of the report, says the heart of the problem is that three quarters of the territory where the cats live in Africa and Asia is unprotected. In those areas, the cheetahs suffer from loss of habitat, the animals they prey on are often hunted for bushmeat, and young cats are captured for sale as pets. The possibility of precipitous decline in those areas is clear, Dr. Durant said. The report cites the case of Zimbabwe, which lost 85 percent of its cheetahs from 1999 to 2015. The number of cats dropped to no more than 170 from about 1,200.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The moment she mentioned Lesbos, the room grew quiet. The group of a dozen people had splintered off about halfway through dinner to converse about life in Berlin and about the food we were grazing on. But now Hend, 37, wearing glasses and a gray hijab, had the stage. She was about to reveal what everyone at this dinner party was most curious about: What was it like for her to journey from Syria to Germany? This was no ordinary dinner party. Twice a month Anna Gyulai Gaal, a Hungarian born journalist, turns her apartment in the Neukolln district of Berlin into a supper club through the dining service WithLocals.com, and calls the get togethers Refugee Dinners. Her friends and strangers alike sign up and pay 35 euros or about 40 to partake in a multicourse feast that goes beyond the plate and the palate. The cooks are Syrian refugees, women who have just arrived in Berlin after making the arduous trek across the Mediterranean and through Europe. Because of their refugee status, the cooks are not allowed to work and earn money, so Ms. Gyulai Gaal gives them the money she earns from the dinners. Guests mingle with the cooks, hearing about the uprooted lives of people most have only read and heard about in the news: life in the refugee camps, what they left behind in Syria and, what the voyage was like to get to Germany. "We were walking on a road in Lesbos, a long line of refugees in front of us and behind us," said Hend, who requested on behalf of the group that only their first names be used for fear of possible repercussions to family members still in Syria. "We couldn't take it anymore, so my mother and I sat on the side of the road as cars sped past us. Suddenly a car stopped and they offered us food." Her mother, Ferial, sitting next to her, continued: "I said to the people in the car: 'We don't need food. We need a ride to the nearest police station so we can register as refugees.' They reminded us it was illegal to pick up refugees but they took us anyway." "And they were German," Hend said. "My mother later said, 'See, that's a good sign.'" Ms. Gyulai Gaal started the dinners with Boryana Ivanova, a Bulgarian born refugee activist. "I realized one day that the newcomers I don't like the word 'refugees' need to interact with locals. Integration can only begin by an initial meeting," said Ms. Gyulai Gaal, fanning her arm across the room where the dinner party was in full swing. For the diners, the appeal is to connect with people, going beyond the headlines. "I was looking forward to the dinner and had various questions," Samantha Tite Webber, an American student living in Berlin, said after the dinner. But, she realized, her hosts "are probably glad to have the chance to relax and share a bit of their homeland with us in the form of wonderfully prepared food." The five Syrian women (as well as a 12 year old girl) showed up to start cooking three hours before the guests arrived. By the time everyone was there a Hungarian, two Greeks, three Americans and a German they had laid out a feast of Syrian and Middle Eastern dishes, including tabbouleh salad, lamb and rice stuffed grape leaves and bazalya, a mixture of minced lamb, beef, peas, carrots and cashews. The star of the show, though, was rgaga, sometimes called borgaga, a chicken and caramelized onion pie from southern Syria. Ms. Gyulai Gaal's dinners aren't the only events in Berlin that celebrate collaboration with refugees. The nonprofit group Give Something Back to Berlin puts on the Refugee Cooking Group, weekly dinners where Berliners and the newly arrived cook together, chat and share stories. Uber den Tellerrand organizes cooking classes led by Syrian and Afghani refugees in the Schoneberg district. There are also guided walking tours of the Arabic and Turkish dominated Neukolln put on by the organization Querstadtein, led by refugees. "For us," Hend said, "we get the benefit of leaving the refugee camp." Wahida, 55, turned to Hend (who was translating) and said, "We can leave when we want, but coming to Anna's feels like a second home to us." Hugs and email addresses were exchanged. In two weeks they would be back here in their "second home," pleasing the palates of a new set of hungry people.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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U.S. Offers Huawei Reprieve on Monday, but May Crack Down on Friday WASHINGTON This week began with the Trump administration giving Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, a reprieve. It will most likely end with a different set of regulators voting to make it more difficult for the company to do business in America. The Commerce Department said Monday it would extend for 90 days the license that allows companies to export goods to Huawei, despite its placement on a government blacklist that bans it from doing business with American partners. On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission will vote on whether to ban wireless providers from buying Huawei equipment with federal subsidies meant to expand broadband access to underserved areas. The whiplash inducing week reflects Huawei's tenuous position in Washington as the Trump administration, along with lawmakers from both parties, tries to cut off the company's access to American technology and markets over national security concerns. In addition to the blacklist, which bans American companies from selling technology and other products to Huawei, policymakers have tried to stop federal agencies from doing business with the company. The fate of Huawei one of China's most visible tech companies has also become a bargaining chip in Mr. Trump's trade war with Beijing. The president has routinely linked the company's fate with trade talks, and his willingness to ease restrictions on Huawei in exchange for other concessions has worried China critics, who say it is unwise to mix national security and trade negotiations. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said Monday that if Mr. Trump and the Commerce Department "agree that Huawei is a national security threat, they should start acting like it." This is the second time the Trump administration has extended the license allowing American companies to continue exporting to Huawei. The previous extension was set to expire on Monday and this next reprieve will end on Feb. 16, 2020. The Commerce Department said a second extension was necessary to avoid service disruptions in rural areas, where some carriers use Huawei equipment. "The Temporary General License extension will allow carriers to continue to service customers in some of the most remote areas of the United States who would otherwise be left in the dark," Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, said in a statement. He said the agency would still "rigorously monitor sensitive technology exports" for national security risks. But the extension will also benefit some large American tech companies, like Google, that supply Huawei with certain components for its products. Those companies have also urged the administration to allow firms to continue doing business with Huawei. The temporary reprieve did little to satisfy Huawei, which has protested its inclusion on a United States "entity list" that the administration has increasingly used to block Chinese tech companies. "Extending the Temporary General License won't have a substantial impact on Huawei's business either way," a Huawei spokesman said in a statement. "This decision does not change the fact that Huawei continues to be treated unfairly." The Chinese company has also been pushing back on the F.C.C. measure, which would make it impossible for wireless carriers to buy equipment from Huawei or ZTE, another Chinese telecom company, using federal subsidies meant to expand broadband access. Huawei has criticized the F.C.C. over the proposal and called it "unlawful" in a filing at the agency this month. The F.C.C. rules could grow to cover other companies that are deemed national security threats, as well. Ajit Pai, the agency's chairman, has said the move is crucial as America and other countries build out the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The Trump administration has waged a global campaign to prevent Huawei from building that network, arguing that the company poses a national security risk because of its ties to China and new laws that will give Beijing the power to spy on networks that companies like Huawei have helped build and maintain. Huawei has disputed those allegations and said it did not and would not spy on behalf of the Chinese government. The F.C.C. measure has drawn support from Attorney General William Barr, who said in a Nov. 13 letter that the move could signal to other countries that they should not use gear from the companies. "At this critical moment, while the world decides where to place its trust, we should not signal that Huawei and ZTE are anything other than a threat to our collective security," Mr. Barr said. Rural carriers have also pushed back on the F.C.C.'s proposal, saying in addition to restricting future network development it could make it hard to maintain existing equipment. In some cases, rural providers have already bought Huawei gear because it is more affordable. Providers often also rely on federal subsidies to serve rural, isolated areas. The measure that the F.C.C.'s five commissioners will vote on Friday will address only future purchases of Huawei and ZTE equipment, but it also begins an examination of an even more loaded question: What to do with the equipment that has already been installed? Rural carriers say any requirement that they rip out existing Huawei gear could be very expensive and have called for financial support should they have to replace the equipment they've already purchased. A House committee will vote Tuesday on a bill that would allocate 1 billion to help carriers replace the equipment. "We have to ensure that these smaller and more rural providers have the support they need to stay away from this equipment," said Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey who is chairman of the House's Energy and Commerce Committee. "And I don't think that's going to happen unless we have a fund for replacement."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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WHAT WAS IT? 1971 73 Triumph Stag. WHAT WAS THE POINT? In the early 1970s, Triumph tried to go up market from its Spitfire and TR series and compete with Mercedes Benz. Like the Mercedes SL, the Stag was a convertible with a removable hardtop and V 8 engine, though the level of its engineering and the quality of its assembly were much inferior. LABOR PAINS At the time, the British sports car maker was in the grasp of British Leyland, a corporate combine better known for producing labor strife than automobiles. The Stag's problems included its 3 liter Triumph V 8, a virtual hand grenade that routinely overheated and suffered timing chain failures. Few Stags exist with the original engines. WHAT THE ADS SAID Triumph advertisements described the engine as "a big smooth V 8" whereas it was actually about half the size of a Detroit V 8 of the time. Nor was there much about it that was smooth. WHAT THE CRITICS SAID In a 1971 test, Road Track noted that the similarities between the Mercedes and the Triumph ended when one tried to use the car. "On the Stag, nothing quite works right," the magazine reported, noting that the test car had so many examples of poor assembly and shoddy design, "to enumerate them all would be to belabor the point that true quality of assembly was not one of the Stag's outstanding features."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Adrienne Asch, an internationally known bioethicist who opposed the use of prenatal testing and abortion to select children free of disabilities, a stance informed partly by her own experience of blindness, died on Nov. 19 at her home in Manhattan. She was 67. The cause was cancer, said Randi Stein, a longtime friend. At her death, Professor Asch was the director of the Center for Ethics and the Edward and Robin Milstein professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in Manhattan. She also held professorships in epidemiology and population health and in family and social medicine at Yeshiva's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "She certainly was one of the pioneers in disability studies," Eva Feder Kittay, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and a scholarly colleague of Professor Asch's, said in an interview. "She was a very strong voice, always bringing in the disability perspective, trying to change the view of disability as some tragedy that happens to someone, rather than just another feature and fact about human existence." Professor Asch, who was trained as a philosopher, social worker, social psychologist and clinical psychotherapist, produced scholarship that stood at the nexus of bioethics, disability studies, reproductive rights and feminist theory. She maintained that the lives of disabled women should be as much a feminist concern as those of able bodied ones. Disabled women, she argued, had long been doubly marginalized: first because of their sex, and again because they failed to conform to a collective physical ideal an ideal to which at least some able bodied feminists subscribed. Professor Asch's scholarship centered in particular on issues of reproduction and the family. In an age of fast moving reproductive technologies, she found that those concerns dovetailed increasingly with issues of disability rights. She became widely known for opposing prenatal testing as a means of detecting disabilities, and abortion as a means of selecting babies without them. Professor Asch supported a woman's right to abortion. (She was a past board member of the organization now known as Naral Pro Choice America.) But in her lectures, writings and television and radio appearances, she argued against its use to pre empt the birth of disabled children. She argued likewise for prenatal testing. For her, supporting abortion in general while opposing it in particular circumstances posed little ideological conflict. The crux of the matter, she argued, lay in the difference between a woman who seeks an abortion because she does not want to be pregnant and one who seeks an abortion because she does not want a disabled child. Adrienne Valerie Asch was born in New York City on Sept. 17, 1946. A premature baby, she lost her vision to retinopathy in her first weeks. When she was a girl, her family moved to New Jersey, then one of the few states that let blind children attend school with their sighted peers. She attended public schools in Ramsey, in Bergen County. On graduating from Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1969, she found employers unwilling to hire her an experience, her associates said, that made her keenly aware of disability as a civil rights issue. After receiving a master's degree in social work from Columbia in 1973, she spent much of the '70s and '80s working for the New York State Division of Human Rights, where she investigated employment discrimination cases, including those involving disability. Trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the 1980s, she maintained a private psychotherapy practice throughout that decade. In 1992, she received a Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia. Before joining the Yeshiva faculty, Professor Asch taught at the Boston University School of Social Work and at Wellesley College, where she was a professor of women's studies and the Henry R. Luce professor in biology, ethics and the politics of human reproduction. Her publications include two volumes of which she was a co editor: "Women With Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics" (1988, with Michelle Fine) and "Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights" (2000, with Erik Parens). A resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Professor Asch is survived by a brother, Carl, and a sister, Susan Campbell. In an article in The American Journal of Public Health in 1999, Professor Asch laid out her philosophy in no uncertain terms. "If public health espouses goals of social justice and equality for people with disabilities as it has worked to improve the status of women, gays and lesbians, and members of racial and ethnic minorities it should reconsider whether it wishes to continue the technology of prenatal diagnosis," she wrote. She added: "My moral opposition to prenatal testing and selective abortion flows from the conviction that life with disability is worthwhile and the belief that a just society must appreciate and nurture the lives of all people, whatever the endowments they receive in the natural lottery."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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No one would call it a huge leap on the evolutionary ladder, but the animated sequel "The Croods: A New Age" is slightly funnier than its serviceable 2013 predecessor. That movie followed a family of cave persons whose patriarch was the lunkheaded but big hearted Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage) as they left the safety of the rocky alcove they called home and, thanks to the creativity of an outsider, Guy (Ryan Reynolds), embraced more innovative ways of thinking. "The Croods: A New Age," directed by Joel Crawford, accelerates the Crood family's clash with modernity. The clan stumbles into a verdant utopia that's a cross between Shangri La and Gilligan's Island. This paradise is maintained by a family called the Bettermans, headed by Hope (Leslie Mann) and Phil (Peter Dinklage), who wear new age garb and snobbishly show off their advanced ideas, like private rooms, windows and fruit baskets.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Ms. McLean is the author of "Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World." Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the idea of energy independence, which in its grandest incarnation meant freedom from the world's oil rich trouble spots, has been a dream for Democrats and Republicans alike. It once seemed utterly unattainable until the advent of fracking, which unleashed a torrent of oil. By early 2019, America was the world's largest producer of crude oil, surpassing both Saudi Arabia and Russia. And President Trump reveled in the rhetoric: We hadn't merely achieved independence, his administration said, but rather "energy dominance." Then came Covid 19, and, on March 8, the sudden and vicious end to the truce between Saudi Arabia and Russia, under which both countries limited production to prop up prices. On March 9, the price of oil plunged by almost a third, its steepest one day drop in almost 30 years. As a result, the stocks that make up the S. P. 500 energy sector fell 20 percent, marking the sector's largest drop on record. There were rumblings that shale companies would seek a federal lifeline. Whiting Petroleum, whose stock once traded for 150 a share, filed for bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of Texans are being laid off in the Permian Basin and other parts of the state, and the whole industry is bracing for worse. On the surface, it appears that two unforeseeable and random shocks are threatening our dream. In reality, the dream was always an illusion, and its collapse was already underway. That's because oil fracking has never been financially viable. America's energy independence was built on an industry that is the very definition of dependent dependent on investors to keeping pouring billions upon billions in capital into money losing companies to fund their drilling. Investors were willing to do this only as long as oil prices, which are not under America's control, were high and when they believed that one day, profits would materialize. The industry's lack of profits wasn't exactly a secret. In early 2015, the hedge fund manager David Einhorn announced at an investment conference that he had looked at the financial statements of 16 publicly traded shale producers and found that from 2006 to 2014, they spent 80 billion more than they received from selling oil. The basic reason is that the amount of oil coming out of a fracked well declines steeply after the first year more than 50 percent in year two. To keep growing, companies have to keep plowing billions back into the ground. The industry's boosters argue that technological gains, such as drilling ever bigger wells, and clustering wells more tightly together to reduce the cost of moving equipment, eventually would lead to a gusher of profits. Fracking, they said, was just manufacturing, in which process and human intelligence could reduce costs and conquer geology. Actually, no. The key issue is the "parent child problem." When wells are clustered tightly together, with so called child wells drilled around the parent, the wells interfere with one another, resulting in less oil, not more. (This may not surprise anyone who is attempting to be productive while working in close quarters with their children.) The promised profits haven't materialized. In the first half of 2019, when oil was around 55 a barrel, only a few top tier companies were profitable. "By now, it should be abundantly clear that the current shale oil business model does not work even for the very best companies in the industry," the investment firm SailingStone Capital Partners explained in a recent note. Policymakers who wanted to tout energy independence disregarded all this, even as investors were starting to lose patience. As early as 2018, some investors had begun to tell companies that they wanted to see free cash flow, and that they were tired of compensation models that rewarded executives with rich paydays for increasing production, but failed to take profits into account. As a result, fracking stocks badly underperformed the market. But with super low interest rates, investors in search of yield were still willing to buy debt. Over the past 10 years, the entire energy industry has issued over 400 billion in high yield debt. "They subprimed the American energy ecosystem," says a longtime energy market observer. Even as the public equity and debt markets grew cautious, drilling continued. That's because one big source of funding didn't dry up: private equity. And why not? Private equity financiers typically get a 2 percent management fee on funds they can raise, so they are incentivized to take all the money that pension funds, desperate for returns to shore up their promises to retirees, have been willing to give them. In the Haynesville and the Utica Shales, two major natural gas plays, over half of the drilling is being done by private equity backed companies; in the oil rich Permian Basin, it's about a quarter of the drilling. From 2015 through 2019, private equity firms raised almost 80 billion in funds focused mostly on shale production, according to Barclays. Until the capital markets began to get suspicious, private equity investors could flip companies they had funded to larger, public companies, making a profitable exit regardless of whether or not the underlying business was making money. That, too, is ending, as investors in such funds have become disillusioned. You can see how all of this is playing out by looking at Occidental Petroleum. In 2019, Oxy, as it's known, topped a competing bid from Chevron and paid 38 billion to take over Anadarko Petroleum, which is one of the major shale companies. Since that time, Oxy's stock has plummeted almost 80 percent in part due to fears that the Anadarko acquisition is going to prove so wildly unprofitable that it sinks the company. On March 10, the company announced that it would slash its dividend for the first time since the early 1990s, when Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait sent oil prices plummeting. Occidental is just one piece of the puzzle. In April, the Energy Information Administration cut its forecast for U.S. oil production, estimating that it will fall both this year and next suggesting that the days of huge growth in production from shale are over. On March 10, Scott Sheffield, the chief executive of Pioneer Natural Resources, a major driller in the Permian Basin, told Bloomberg that U.S. oil output could fall by more than two million barrels per day by next year if prices remain where they are today. "This is late '80s bad," a close observer of the industry says. After the United States engaged in a high stakes negotiation with Russia and Saudi Arabia to curtail production, a tentative deal was struck on Thursday. Certainly, President Trump, who has staked so much on the American shale industry, wants to save it. "We really need Trump to do something or he's going to lose all the energy states in this election," Mr. Sheffield told CNBC in late March. A deal, and higher oil prices, might help the industry. But they won't fix its fundamental problem with profitability. Energy independence was a fever dream, fed by cheap debt and frothy capital markets. All that's left to tally is the environmental and financial damage. In the five years ending in April, there were 215 bankruptcies for oil and gas companies, involving 130 billion in debt, according to the law firm Haynes and Boone. Moody's, the rating agency, said that in the third quarter of 2019, 91 percent of defaulted U.S. corporate debt was due to oil and gas companies. And North American oil and gas drillers have almost 100 billion of debt that is set to mature in the next four years. It's still unclear where most of this debt is held. Some of it has been packaged into so called collateralized loan obligations, pieces of which are held by hedge funds. Some of it may be on bank balance sheets. Investors in the equity of these companies have already seen the value of their holdings decimated. Pension funds that have poured money into private equity firms may take a hit soon, too. All we know for sure is that fracking company executives and private equity financiers have made a fortune by touting the myth of energy independence and they won't be the ones who have to pick up the pieces.P Bethany McLean, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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AMC prides itself on the large number of young viewers who regularly watch its television shows. Now, the network is trying to take one of its shows to young viewers who may not already be watching. On Monday, the cable network will introduce an advertising campaign in which the first five minutes of "Preacher," the network's much hyped new series, will be able to be viewed from within Snapchat, the messaging smartphone app popular with millennials. Though many networks buy ads on Snapchat to promote their shows, this is the first time that an extended clip of a network television show will be available, according to both companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. AMC plans to make the clip exclusive to Snapchat for a period of 24 hours before broadcasting it more widely on other platforms. (The clip will be available on Snapchat for a week.) "Preacher" is set to make its network debut on Sunday. Snapchat users can find the five minute video clip inside of Snapchat "Discover," a section of the app where third party publishers like BuzzFeed, Daily Mail and National Geographic directly post content daily.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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After them, the ballerina's footwork gets faster and more intricate, with phrases of the most intoxicating brio. Balanchine later wrote, "The American style of classical dancing, its supple sharpness and richness of metrical invention, its superb preparation for risks, and its high spirits were some of the things I was trying to show in this ballet." He had spent years forging that very style. When "Square Dance" was new in November 1957, it was the first ballet that the usually prolific Balanchine had made in 18 months. He had been absent from New York City Ballet he, its co founder all that time. Everyone knew why he was away: His wife, the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, had contracted polio and collapsed in Copenhagen, and Balanchine remained by her side. When he returned from Europe, ballets flowed out of him in quick succession and they showed that he had much to say about America and history, combining the two subjects with astonishing imagination. After "Square Dance" (November) came "Agon" (December) and then "Stars and Stripes" (January). "Agon" is so modernist and American that it's hard at first to see the European traditions that underpin it; "Stars and Stripes" seems such a celebration of the brashest kind of patriotism that it's easy to overlook its phenomenal geometries. Balanchine was a great reviser, though. In 1976, he brought "Square Dance" back to City Ballet repertory, but now without a caller. The Americanness of his dance style and compositions was now widely felt; he no longer needed to spell it out. More radical yet, he added a new solo that transformed the work, danced by the lead man. In a ballet that is largely about speed, here's a slow, exploratory dance that seems like creativity at work. The man arches his back as if wracked by dark inspiration, makes his way around the stage like a visionary, suddenly pirouettes in ways you don't anticipate, and softly jumps, making a shape in the air as if testing an idea. The others have departed for this brief interlude: This poet is alone with his dance imaginings.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Most grad students in art history dream of discovering an unknown work by whatever great artist they are studying. Louis Shadwick has achieved just the opposite: In researching his doctorate on Edward Hopper, for the storied Courtauld Institute in London, Mr. Shadwick has discovered that three of the great American's earliest oil paintings, from the 1890s, can only barely count as his original images. Two are copies of paintings Mr. Shadwick found reproduced in a magazine for amateur artists published in the years before Hopper's paintings. The reproductions even came with detailed instructions for making the copies. Mr. Shadwick spells out his discovery in the October issue of The Burlington Magazine, a venerable art historical journal."It was real detective work," Mr. Shadwick explained, Zooming from his sunny apartment in London. At 30, he's older than most of his graduate school peers because of a longish spell fronting an alt rock trio (White Kite), a past not revealed in the blue button down he wore when we talked and his close cropped dark hair. Mr. Shadwick was working out the earliest influences on Hopper's art one aspect of his Ph.D., half finished so far when he figured out that an American Tonalist painter named Bruce Crane (1857 1937) might have played some kind of role. Scholars have talked about those early Hoppers as showing us his childhood home in Nyack, N.Y., and as examples of his preternatural talent as a self trained young painter, "and actually, both these things are not true none of the oils are of Nyack, and Hopper had a middling talent for oil painting, until he went to art school," said Mr. Shadwick, adding, "Even the handling of the paint is pretty far from the accomplished works he was making even five years after that." Those weak brush skills are now the only thing in those earliest oils that anyone can lay claim to as Hopper's. "It's always great to find out something new about a major artist," said Carter Foster, deputy director at the Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin, and a Hopper expert who organized the landmark show of his drawings at the Whitney Museum in 2013. He got to know Mr. Shadwick's work after meeting him at a Hopper symposium and admires the depth of the archival research involved. He also admitted that the discovery did not come to him as much of a surprise, given that, before the advent of modern art and its freedoms, artists almost always got their start by copying. For Kim Conaty, curator of drawings and prints at the Whitney Museum in New York, where she is at work on a big Hopper show, the copying that Mr. Shadwick revealed has more important repercussions: "It cuts straight through the widely held perception of Hopper as an American original," she said as an artist whose innate genius allowed him to emerge on the scene without a debt to others. "The only real influence I've ever had was myself," he once claimed. Ms. Conaty said that Mr. Shadwick's discovery promises to be "a pin in a much broader argument about how to look at Hopper." Mr. Shadwick is building precisely such an argument in his doctorate; the parts I've read look very promising. Mr. Shadwick submitted his discovery about Hopper's early oils to the Burlington Magazine for peer review, according to Michael Hall, its editor. It was part of a larger project meant to spell out the cultural context from which the painter evolved "the things he was seeing, the things he was reading, the newspapers his family received, the journals," Mr. Shadwick said. A Londoner, he especially wants to understand the notion of "Americanness" that Hopper grew up around, and that then grew up around Hopper as his reputation matured; it still rules much of the talk about him. But we're more likely to assume or assert that Hopper and his art are quintessentially American than to ask ourselves what that meant for him and his audience, or what it might mean for us today. In our new century, when the country's place in the world seems less sure by the day and when even Americans are split on the state of their nation does it need to be made great again or does it need to face up to past failures? a "national" treasure like Hopper seems to beg for a fresh approach. "What is this Americanness that people are identifying? Where does it come from, is it useful as a term?" Mr. Shadwick said those are the questions at the heart of his study of Hopper. Maybe it takes someone from elsewhere to recognize just how artificial and peculiar American identity has been, and how directly Hopper was involved in constructing it in his persona and his work. "Yes, there's a lot of talent and beauty and all that," said Mr. Shadwick, who remains a big Hopper fan, "but there's also a very conscious awareness of his place in history, and of the purported Americanness of the scenes he was painting." Moving on from copying, the young Hopper spent a long spell in art schools in New York and then flirted for a while with modern French styles and subjects. But when a 1915 show of his Frenchified paintings got panned, while a single New York cityscape earned praise, Hopper knew where to head next: "He refines and refines and refines these ideas of what it means to be an American painter," Mr. Shadwick said. As the United States withdrew into itself in the period between the world wars, an "Americanist" tendency took stronger hold than ever in the country's high culture, Mr. Shadwick explained, "and Hopper played along with it. Hopper knew exactly what he was doing for the market for his work." As Mr. Shadwick writes, in thesis ese, Hopper's "centring of the white male Anglo Saxon American experience, his regionalist sympathies for New England, and his eventual aversion to European style modernism," can all be connected to thoughts and feelings about the United States that were widely held in his day. One aspect of this "Americanness" involved the image of the lone male tall, taciturn, remote, just like Hopper bravely forging his own path. This was precisely the image of himself that Hopper helped to propagate; even after his death, it went on to shape the story, now revealed to be a myth, of the miraculous early oils that Hopper is supposed to have come up with on his own. Mr. Shadwick's discovery about those first paintings may also illuminate Hopper's much later, most iconic masterpieces. Critics and scholars have always been intrigued by an awkwardness that Hopper allowed himself in many of his classic paintings: seas that look more painted than liquid in his famous "Ground Swell"; the awkward anatomy of his female nude in "Morning in a City" or the stony faces of the diners in "Nighthawks." Now that we know that Hopper was never a painting prodigy, we can think of his later paintings as deliberately revisiting the limitations of his adolescence, and finding virtue and power there. That's a classic move in American culture: To see the unschooled and homespun as more authentic and especially as more authentically American than the sophistries of those decadent old Europeans.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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It will still be several months before the superheroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe return to theaters in new adventures, but Marvel Entertainment, the publishing home of Iron Man, Captain America and the Hulk, is preparing to bring its characters back to comic books. Though much of the comic book publishing industry has been on pause for the spring as it reckons with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Marvel said that it would release some new comics to stores on May 27, and has set a release schedule for the following weeks through July 8. In an approach similar to the one announced last month by DC, the publisher of Superman and Batman and its closest industry competitor, Marvel will release only a handful of new titles each week. The new books planned for May 27 include the latest issues of Avengers and The Amazing Spider Man, as well as the first issue of the "Star Wars" spinoff series Doctor Aphra. Titles planned for later weeks include new issues of Thor and Immortal Hulk, as well as some preliminary issues in Marvel's companywide Empyre crossover series. Diamond Comic Distributors, the industry's main artery, has said that it plans to resume shipments of new comics and other merchandise later this month.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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On the wall of Russell Howard's home studio in Marina del Rey, Calif., hangs a plaque from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers commending him for having altered the bedrock of the entertainment landscape by planting, through his company Signature Tracks, more music on American television than almost anybody else in 2016. Picture the earth in space: The blue is music provided by Signature Tracks. A lot of the green and brown parts are also music by Signature Tracks, as is the nearby envious moon. Signature Tracks's signature tracks have been heard alongside Kardashians and Bachelorettes; at the Jersey Shore and Siesta Key; in the Puppy Bowl and during Shark Week. ("We kind of pushed the boundaries" with Shark Week, said Mr. Howard's Signature Tracks co founder, Adam Malka. Mr. Howard elaborated: "We incorporated dubstep with heavy strings, like anticipation 'cause it's Shark Week, you know?") But most of all, they've been heard on Bravo, the Shangri La of reality TV. Since 2006, Bravo's "Real Housewives" franchise has spread across the United States with the efficiency of a bagged salad E. coli outbreak. Originally conceived to capitalize on the popularity of ABC's prime time soap opera "Desperate Housewives," the show has fortified itself into a pillar of American culture. (The connection between "Real Housewives" and "Desperate Housewives" is now as faint as the link between Bethesda, Md. and the biblical healing pool of beth hesda.) The basic premise: Wealthy women in the same vaguely defined social circle are followed by camera teams documenting the drama of their cosseted lives, which ranges from irritation at being served wine in a champagne coupe (Beverly Hills, Season 8) to allegations of conspiracy to commit rape (Atlanta, Season 9). Of the yearslong process of curating the Bravo sound, Mr. Baiardi said: "This is like, you know, on a much smaller scale what George Martin did with the Beatles." Much like the 8 bit calypso tune that is Mario and Luigi's constant companion as they dart through their vivid environs, the tinkling, sashaying instrumental leitmotif that accompanies "The Real Housewives" is their trademark. On the shows, the music functions as a kind of omniscient narrator, giving (or purporting to give) clues about characters' thoughts, and conjuring poignancy out of mundane interactions. Initially, it also helps differentiate characters. (In the first season of Beverly Hills, Mr. Baiardi said, "I had themes for all the girls.") And yet, there is no Bravo department tasked with inventing music for the network's programming. Each "Housewives" soundtrack is cobbled together using audio from multiple competing businesses; 15 or more companies might contribute, in some form, to a single episode. Mr. Howard is Signature Tracks's head composer. He entered the music business as an adolescent white rapper, eventually parlaying his interests into a career as a full fledged producer. Mr. Malka had backgrounds in sales and music production. The third founder, David Lasman, used to work as a reality TV producer; the company was his brainchild. When Mr. Lasman first approached his friends with the idea, Mr. Malka said, "Russ and I kinda thought it was a joke." To get music for many scenes, producers send these men general thematic requests (for "sentimental" cues, say). Other times, they ask them to "write to picture" that is, study specific scenes and soundtrack them directly. A huge volume of the work is for same day requests, and it adds up fast: A single season can require 2,500 pieces of music to fully score. The resulting harmonious amalgamation of sounds creates some murkiness. Mr. Baiardi estimated that his company Soundfile currently provides 70 percent of the music on Beverly Hills. Mr. Lasman estimated that Signature Tracks provides about 80 percent of the music for the same show. A representative for Bravo said it is nearly impossible to calculate what percentage of music a specific vendor provides to a show, given the network's labyrinthine filing system, contractual complexities between clips that are licensed and clips that are owned outright, and the ways in which the music cues themselves are edited for use. (Consider, too, that a single instance of music might last just one second.) Stuffing the Bravo Sausage Into Its Platinum Casing Every season of "The Real Housewives" is shaved down from hundreds of hours of footage into anywhere from 13 to 25 hourlong episodes. Much of the series is stakes setting establishing the precarious perfection of the housewives' lives so each cast member need be truly interesting (i.e. lose her temper, faculties or inhibitions) just once or twice in a period of several months to ensure an entertaining season. Incessant quick cuts from a woman, criticizing; to a woman on the other side of the room, being criticized; to a third woman summarizing those criticisms directly into the camera; to a close up of decimated party hors d'oeuvres are one reason reality shows feel jumpier and more chaotic than multicamera sitcoms like "The Big Bang Theory." Wall to wall music corrals the visually disconnected footage into a cohesive narrative in a manner unique to Bravo: In contrast to other TV shows even other reality TV shows nearly 100 percent of its screen time is underlaid with music. For scenes of discord, Mr. Howard said, "It's all minor key. Usually D and C minor are like, drama." Bombshell revelations are followed by a second of abrupt silence that leaves the words that precede it ringing in the air. Lighter footage what Mr. Baiardi calls "tasking" scenes is scored with less bass, sparser, high pitched instrumentation, and physically smaller drums. This music often accompanies scenes of soothing upper class chores: a woman wiping a clean cloth over a countertop the size of a sparkling glacier; a woman instructing her maid on how to pack her designer luggage; a woman in a maelstrom of dinner party preparations discovering her mother's urn tucked beside the silver condiment bowls. The Signature Tracks guys showed off their process from Mr. Howard's home studio, which is crammed with equipment but neat, like NASA's Mission Control Center if just one person worked there and had a taste for purple. The room is blessed by a small plaque recognizing Mr. Howard's work on Jay Z's album "Vol. 3 ... Life and Times of S. Carter." A tense instrumental boomed from his speakers, but Mr. Howard decreased the volume until it was almost inaudible. "Now you can hear them talking," he said. It was true; the music sounded more familiar more Bravo like at a muted level. Every few seconds, three quick string notes in a minor key abruptly cut in VHHVHHVHH and fell silent. "There are these little string fills that give it that tension," he said. "They're dropping in and out, which is creating room for dialogue," Mr. Lasman added. "The dropouts are a really big part of actually telling the story." They provide opportunities for close up reaction shots. They suspend time to amplify uncomfortable moments. It's important to differentiate the network's shows by sound, but not stray too far afield from the hypnotic Bravo theme. Signature Tracks is currently working on an untitled Bravo docu series Mr. Lasman describes as "kind of like the Housewives of San Antonio," starring affluent women of Mexican descent living in Texas. "We're incorporating some light Latin sounds to it," said Mr. Howard. "Just light. But enough." "We literally had to hide the fact that we were putting hip hop in," Mr. Lasman said of another Bravo show in the Signature Tracks repertoire "Vanderpump Rules," a "Real Housewives" spinoff that chronicles the lives of the staff at restaurants owned by the "Beverly Hills" Housewife Lisa Vanderpump. The cast skews a decade or two younger than most Housewives, with a raindrop of their liquid assets. The characters' age difference is reflected in Signature Tracks's "Vanderpump" brief: to create songs that could be Top 40 hits, minus the star performers. (Music by known artists is prohibitively expensive for regular TV use so much so that parties thrown on camera are generally conducted in eerie silence, with the soundtrack added later.) Mr. Lasman describes "Vanderpump" music as "more aggressive" than a typical "Housewives" score; the sounds of an 808 drum machine are louder, the cymbals are deeper and there is more overt hip hop influence. The majority of the cash comes from royalties received any time a cue is played on television, calculated based on factors like a song's duration, the time of day it aired and the show's ratings. The rate decreases with each subsequent airing of an episode, but a cable network that fills midday hours with reruns can remain lucrative for years. TV placement can also be a profitable landing spot for composers' extant, languishing musical creations. Unused songs Mr. Howard had written for the singer Seal formed the basis of Signature Tracks's initial library. Occasionally, the men behind the sound of "Housewives" tune in as viewers. More often, said Mr. Baiardi, after a day of scoring swimsuit shopping scenes, "It's like, I just wanna watch 'Game of Thrones.'" A few months back, he bumped into a Housewife walking her dog near his home. They'd met a few times, at wrap parties, mostly. He asked what she was doing there. The quotidian activities of her daily life, it turns out her performing them, him creating ambient music about them had allowed them both to purchase homes in the same lovely neighborhood. She had moved in down the street. Be the "Housewives" You Wish to See in the World Suffuse your own life with glamour and drama by using this micro playlist as background accompaniment.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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Early to bed and early to rise is a maxim that's easy to follow for some people, and devilishly hard for others. Now, in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers curious about the genetic underpinnings of chronotype whether you are a morning person, a night owl or somewhere in between looked at about 700,000 people's genomes. They identified 351 variations that may be connected to when people go to bed. While these variants are just the beginning of exploring the differences in chronotypes, the study goes on to suggest tantalizing links between chronotype and mental health. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The researchers drew on data from 23andMe, the genetic testing company, and the UK Biobank, which tracks hundreds of thousands of volunteer subjects in Britain, about 85,000 of whom wear activity monitors that record their movements. Those data were key, said Michael Weedon, a bioinformaticist at University of Exeter in England and an author of the new paper; earlier studies had relied only on people's subjective opinions of whether they were morning people. Using the activity monitors, however, the team was able to confirm that self reported morning people did go to sleep earlier and people with the most morning linked gene variants went to bed 25 minutes earlier than people with the fewest. Morning people did not sleep longer or better than night people; all that differed was the time that they went to sleep.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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STRATFORD UPON AVON, England "Macbeth" is Shakespeare's shortest and most concentrated tragedy, shot through with well known phrases and images. Why, then, is it so rarely satisfying when performed? You almost feel as if its infamous witches were having their wicked way with this vexed play, four centuries on. That question is worth returning to in the wake of fresh sightings of "Macbeth" at two of England's most established theatrical institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or R.S.C., here and the National Theater in London. Both have opened hot on each other's heels. (Enthusiasts of "the Scottish play" can also catch Verdi's opera based on it at the Royal Opera House from March 25; the choreographer Mark Bruce's dance theater version, meanwhile, is touring England through May.) The R.S.C. and the National's productions have their virtues. But after seeing them in quick succession, I found myself pondering the curse that apparently haunts this play: It fails more consistently than it succeeds. While many actors find lasting acclaim playing Hamlet or, in later life, King Lear, celebrated Macbeths are comparatively rare, and not a few productions of "Macbeth" have become legendary failures Peter O'Toole at the Old Vic in London in 1980, to name but one. Neither the R.S.C. nor the National production is a car crash. But both illustrate the difficulty in finding an appropriate physical landscape for a play whose real terrain is Macbeth's diseased mind. What the play needs is some way to make sense of its unyielding savagery and darkness. Who are these jabbering women at the beginning, for instance, and how literally are we meant to take them? At Stratford upon Avon, the director Polly Findlay has cast three doll clutching girls to play the witches. From the opening scene, they locate "Macbeth" in a forbidding supernatural realm that is unique in Shakespeare. The conceit suits this veritable abattoir of a play in which children exist to be done away with: Why shouldn't these "weird sisters" function as an eerie reminder of that fact? Except, alas, that even amplified the child actors aren't easy to hear. Later they are pressed into service to move the set around. Have the stagehands gone on strike? Nor is there much luxuriance in the language as spoken by Christopher Eccleston in the title role. He is a comparative newbie to Shakespeare and charges through Macbeth's various set pieces with a flat and unvarying vocal attack. The actor comes naturally by the "rugged looks" spoken of by his wife (a jittery Niamh Cusack, who overplays Lady Macbeth's spousal agitation). But rather than any sense of a murderous king spiritually hollowed out by his own ascent, we get Macbeth as a blunt, bluff pugilist who looks as if he would be happier taking on Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull" than ruminating over matters of conscience. Ms. Findlay, the director, worked wonders with a wacky "As You Like It" several years ago at the National. But her modernist approach this time includes a faceless, multilevel set, drained of color but containing a water cooler next to which sits the Porter (an ever deadpan Michael Hodgson), who now and then pushes a carpet sweeper around. Both her stars wander into the audience, to little purpose, and Ms. Cusack shows her bloodied palms to unsuspecting spectators in the front row. Anyone craving a fuller sense of the psychic legacy of a warrior at odds with himself is better off with the National's production, with the ravishingly spoken Rory Kinnear in the title role. His climactic "I have lived long enough" finds more power in a single line than the entirety of the R.S.C.'s brisk reckoning. Mr. Kinnear has won awards for playing Hamlet and Iago on the stage now hosting his Macbeth, and he knows his way through the sinuous, ever shifting mind sets of Shakespeare's tragic leading men. (By contrast, Rufus Norris, this production's director, last turned his hand to Shakespeare more than a quarter century ago.) The production that surrounds Mr. Kinnear is guaranteed to enrage purists wanting Scottish accents and some explanation for the enormous trash bags hanging from Rae Smith's cavernously gloomy set. A note in the program locates the action happening "now, after a civil war," amid a grubby, grimy community concerned less with kingship than the mere rudiments of survival. The "royal preparation" for battle referenced in the text here consists of Mr. Kinnear affixing knives to his torso; beheadings, appropriately enough, frame the action. The soundscape couples ominous rumblings with high pitched bleats, to evoke a post apocalyptic ruin of a world in which Mr. Norris's witches adults, this time shimmy up poles to survey the desolation below. If all this sounds like sound and fury signifying you know what, the result is at the very least an improvement on the shouty Lincoln Center "Macbeth" in New York in 2013 in which Anne Marie Duff first played Lady Macbeth. She returns to that role (and to a happier onstage partnership) this time round. It's worth remembering, too, that the same play brought to grief at least two of Mr. Norris's predecessors as artistic director of the National, Peter Hall and Richard Eyre, whose stagings were met with lukewarm reviews, albeit 15 years apart. "Macbeth" demands a claustrophobia and intensity and a forensic fury that seems frustratingly tricky to capture, though not for wont of trying. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised to find a third "Macbeth" opening somewhere nearby next week.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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FOR 40 years BMW's M division has been the substance behind the company's claim of having created the Ultimate Driving Machine. BMW's image was not always so well defined. The company scraped through the postwar era building a tadpole shaped microcar called the Isetta along with some ponderous models and the occasional great beast like the 507 roadster. But everything changed with the introduction of the Neue Klasse compact series of sedans in 1962. Starring the brilliant 2002 model, the Neue Klasse machines soon established BMW as the maker of an altogether new vehicle type: the sport sedan. By the early 1970s, BMW's image was solidly linked to high performance, and the board of directors decided the company should control its motor sports destiny. On May 1, 1972, the tiny Sports department was replaced by BMW Motorsport the first in a wave of factory "tuner" divisions bursting with 35 employees under the supervision of Jochen Neerspach. Mr. Neerspach, 33 at the time, had been a driver for the Porsche factory racing team and manager of Ford's European racing efforts. He immediately set his crew to building a version of the 2002, powered by a 16 valve 4 cylinder engine, for rallying. For touring car racing, the 3.0 CSL was created. Based on the 3.0 CS luxury coupe, the CSL carried aluminum body panels and a 3.3 liter twin cam version of BMW's in line 6. The car won the European Touring Car Championship six times in 1973 79 and was the first car to wear the blue, violet and red stripes that, alongside a stylized M, became Motorsport's logo. Emboldened by the 3.0 CSL's success, Motorsport took on the construction of a car built specifically for competition. What emerged was the midengine M1, a sleek supercar with a fiberglass body from Italy. Powered by a 3.5 liter version of the 6 used in the 3.0 CSL, it reached production in 1978, but by then its racing series had been canceled. The roadgoing M1 models built to qualify the model for racing fewer than 500 were made were a critical success. When M1 production stopped in 1981, however, the car's 6 cylinder engine was orphaned, so the Motorsport division tucked a 282 horsepower version of it into the E24 6 Series coupe to create the M635CSi. That car was known as the M6 when it went on sale in the United States in 1987. That first M6 defined the BMW roadgoing M car formula: a production BMW optimized for handling and braking, powered by a special high revving engine backed by a manual transmission. The M5 followed the M6 in 1985, and the first M3 appeared in 1988 powered by a high strung 192 horsepower 4 cylinder. Though the M cars were aimed at enthusiasts, the cachet of the M brand logo grew quickly and soon was showing up not only on cars, but merchandise and accessories. Recognizing this, in 1993 BMW split the brand into two divisions. Motorsport would continue running BMW competition efforts while the new M division took charge of road cars and the M brand. Though the M car formula held pure through the 1990s even as it was applied to almost every BMW vehicle line (the 7 Series sedans being the notable exception), the pull of the mass market was overwhelming. Four cylinder M3 engines gave way to an in line 6 and then a V 8. Automated manual transmissions began displacing pure manuals. In 2010 the M badge finally found its way onto vehicles ill suited to any sort of motor sport, the X5 M and X6 M crossovers powered by a twin turbocharged V 8. "It's become more of a marketing tool than the real specialized vehicles it used to be," said Rennie Bryant of Redline Performance, a BMW tuning shop in Pompano Beach, Fla. "The brand is pretty strong. But it's not a purist thing any more."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Automobiles
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Halloween and haunted houses go together like costumed children and epic sugar highs. This year, perhaps you would like to spend Oct. 31 with an overnight stay at a house or hotel frequented by the dearly departed. In the United States, there's no shortage of rumored haunted accommodations, and the five options here celebrate their haunted histories with Halloween festivities, ghost encounter filled guest books and more. Built in 1909 and revamped in 2014, this 110 year hotel boasts a rumored ghost who was a scion in the arts scene of the early 20th century: Alice B. Toklas. All encounters, many of which are said to occur in and around room 408, Toklas's regular accommodation are friendly ones, says Tiffiny Costello, Hotel Sorrento's marketing manager. "We like to use the word spirited!" The hotel is celebrating the legacy of their lingering guest with events throughout October, including a Tuesday tarot reading, a Witch's Tea, aura photography and the annual Alice B. Toklas dinner and ghost tour celebrating Toklas's cookbook. Rooms from 199 for two adults in October. This sunny beach resort near San Diego opened in 1888 and acquired a ghost just three years later. Kate Morgan was 24 when she checked into a third floor guest room on Nov. 24, 1892. After five days she took her own life estranged from her husband, the story goes that she was to meet with a lover who failed to show. Since then, guests and employees have noted phenomena, including flickering lights, doors that open and close, unexplained footsteps and voices on the hotel's third floor and in the guest shop. Kate sightings in hallways and on the beach have also been reported. Get in the Halloween spirit at "The Del's" adults only Hallo wine and Spirits party, or follow in Ms. Morgan's footsteps on an hourlong Haunted Happenings Tour. Rooms from 299 for two adults in October.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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This 1983 book about Mexican Americans in Los Angeles was judged by the Times Book Review to be an "honest, steady novel that presents some hard cultural realities." The name on the book jacket, Danny Santiago, lent it authenticity, even though there was no accompanying author photo. It turns out there was a reason for this: The author was actually Daniel Lewis James, the son of a wealthy Kansas businessman who attended Andover and Yale, where he majored in classical Greek. He based the novel on his experiences as a volunteer working in poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The revelation of his pseudonym after the book was published caused a backlash, to his bewilderment. Friends had warned him about using a Latino name. "But I said the pen name is pretty well established, with Mark Twain, Rabelais and so many others," Lewis said. "I said nobody's going to be hurt if the book's any good.'' In the late 1960s, with books by Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann topping the best seller list, the Newsday columnist Mike McGrady decided that any novel with enough explicit sex in it could sell. He rallied two dozen of his fellow male journalists at the paper to write a hoax novel satirizing the genre. The group used the made up name "Penelope Ashe" (McGrady's sister played the role of Ashe for meetings with publishers). McGrady was right: The book sold 20,000 copies when it was first published in early 1969. Then McGrady and his crew went on the David Frost Show to reveal themselves. After being introduced as "Penelope Ashe," they walked into the stage one by one as the house band played the song "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." This one was bad. "Love and Consequences" was rapturously received as the memoir of a half white, half Native American girl growing up in Los Angeles as a foster child among gangbangers. Much of the book was about running drugs for the Bloods. But the author of the memoir, Margaret B. Jones, did not exist. She was the invention of Margaret Seltzer, who is white and from the San Fernando Valley, a private school graduate who had never lived with a foster family. When confronted about her lies, Seltzer said she had based the book on friends she had met while working on the problem of gang violence. Her publisher recalled all copies of the book. "Maybe it's an ego thing," Seltzer said about her decision to invent a story and claim it as truth. "I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it." Cleone Knox, 'The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764 1765' "A little Irish girl, the 19 year old daughter of a British naval officer, has accomplished the greatest literary hoax of the century," The Times exclaimed in a front page story on June 4, 1926. Magdalen King Hall, wielding what the paper called "a saucily descriptive pen," dashed out the fake (and racy!) diary of a late 18th century woman in a few weeks. Published in 1925, it was a best seller in Britain and the United States. It's unclear how King Hall was unmasked, although she admitted to factual errors in The Times's report: "I made Cleone read in October Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto.' It was not until my book had been issued that I discovered that that particular work had not been published until December of that year."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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When Sara Mearns wavered for a millisecond during a supported pirouette in George Balanchine's "Diamonds," my breath caught in my throat. I forgot where I was: in the kitchen drinking coffee on a rainy Saturday morning. I cherish performances by Ms. Mearns and Russell Janzen, her partner, but I didn't think "Diamonds," which New York City Ballet streamed in May, would be the ballet to sweep me into the sensation of liveness losing track of time, the chills, the whole nine yards. Up to that point, little that I had seen online affected me so palpably. And while I admire "Diamonds," it can feel distant, with a thin performative line between poise and anguish. That it felt authentic was a relief because, like it or not, video is our reality now. As spring seasons are lost and debuts and premieres erased, ballet companies have been releasing digital content at breakneck speed. The two major companies usually at Lincoln Center at this time of year, American Ballet Theater, which would now be celebrating its 80th anniversary at the Metropolitan Opera House, and New York City Ballet, which would just have finished its season, have reimagined programming for your screens. Quality varies. But digital programming doesn't just mean a straightforward performance. Before the coronavirus pandemic, ancillary experiences like discussions, open rehearsals and lecture demonstrations tended to fall under the category of donor friendly fare. They scratched the surface or seemed overly staged. That has changed. Now when extra content with substance and depth is added to the mix, it helps to bring a dance to life through accumulation, immersion especially with artists guiding the way. A podcast places a dance in broader context; a tutorial shows a ballerina dancing her heart out and faltering, too in her apartment. Taken together, this braiding of forms may not create the feeling of a live performance, but it generates an authentic excitement: It paves the way for remembering that spirit of aliveness. When watching a dance, you're faced with two choices: to daydream or to pay attention. In recent weeks, more than the companies it has been the dancers their resiliency is astounding who have given me reason to pay attention, from their online classes to their interview segments. Dancers are opening up their world and their art to you. Isabella Boylston, the Ballet Theater principal, is teaching variations. In her apartment. For you. "Variations with Bella," which like Ms. Fairchild's interviews, is on YouTube and separate from her company's digital season, is another lively program to come out of the quarantine. In life and in her dancing, Ms. Boylston is full of casual joie de vivre; where classical interpretations in story ballets can lean toward melodrama, she lends them a fresh, carefree modernity. In an Instagram post featuring "La Esmeralda," she substituted a frozen pizza (wrapped in plastic) for a tambourine. You're not in a lecture hall; you're in her kitchen. But she's not joking around as she demonstrates her variations and shares slightly out of breath details from coaches, as well as her own opinions. For "Giselle," she stressed that it should look natural. "You're a peasant girl," she said. "You haven't gone to dance school. You just taught yourself, basically." Arts organizations are hurting, and no one can blame Ballet Theater for going ahead with its gala: Money is needed. But its hourlong presentation last month felt more like a branch of its marketing arm than a company taking a stab at making art online. There was more talking than dancing and too many awkward toasts from well wishers like Al Roker, Katie Couric and Jennifer Garner. I wasn't expecting much under sheltering at home conditions, but the gala was trivial and sad. Throughout the program an unspoken question persisted: Is Ballet Theater essential in the age of a pandemic? Is ballet? Clearly, of the two big New York companies City Ballet has an advantage: It has been able to stream works in their entirety this season because it already had a process in place. About 10 years ago, the company negotiated with its unions to have broader promotional capabilities, including filming some performances for its social media channels. Ballet Theater is not in the same position. Union issues and licensing rights prevent it from broadcasting performances that were recorded for programs like Live From Lincoln Center and Dance in America, though negotiations to secure rights for some of those are in progress. The company's archival recordings, shot from the back of the house, are regarded as records of performances and the quality is not ideal. But that isn't the only reason Ballet Theater isn't getting the job done right. What sets the company apart its arsenal of story ballets, its emphasis on acting is also what can make it seem stuck in another time: the dusty glamour of the 1980s. A digital discussion about the female roles in "La Bayadere" with Ms. Boylston and the former principal, Cynthia Harvey, was telling. Ms. Harvey, who played the original Gamzatti, spoke about being inspired by Alexis on "Dynasty. Now it's basing much of its digital output on reliving memories. In a recurring video feature, dancers and staff look back at performances at the Met. In one, Susan Jones, the principal ballet mistress, explains the plot of "La Bayadere" while pictures pop up, decorated with cartoon emojis of hearts and tears. It undermines the seriousness of the art form. But City Ballet has created a universe for its ballets. In addition to showing complete works, there is its weekly podcast, often hosted by the dancer Silas Farley, which started before the pandemic and improves each week; and City Ballet Essentials, a series of movement workshops that focus on specific works. For one about George Balanchine's "The Four Temperaments," the principal dancer Adrian Danchig Waring spoke about the ballet including how Balanchine was influenced by African American vernacular dance, which is not the sort of thing you see in program notes, but should. Mr. Danchig Waring led a barre warm up to get participants, he said, "settled in their bodies." Then he taught choreography, one phrase at a time. It was not only detailed and serious, it was somehow holistic. Mr. Danchig Waring, with his stellar direction, was not facile; the workshop was predicated on the mind body connection and it had a clear result: To get inside of the dance. My "Diamonds" experience was enhanced by a pair of podcasts in which Mr. Farley interviewed the former principal Merrill Ashley and Ms. Mearns. Each was strangely thrilling. Ms. Ashley cried out as she described the dynamism and speed of the finale: "You can't believe he could have built it any more," she said, referring to Balanchine, "and he does!" The ballet's overwhelming mix of beauty, complexity and power, she continued, "just hits you in your soul somewhere." Were those changes part of the reason their "Diamonds" was so breathtaking? To a certain degree. Beyond that, though, I know that the ballet will mean something more to me after the pandemic; more than its outward beauty, I'll feel its essence, and that's because of digital programming. But it was also about Ms. Mearns and Mr. Janzen's approach: calm and internal. We had to lean into them; they were more in the moment in their moment then they were performing for us. During Ms. Fairchild's YouTube interview with Ms. Mearns, she spoke of how present her friend's dancing is. "I don't know if you know what you do, but it's like everything has such a care to it," Ms. Fairchild said. "And it's almost like you don't just step. It's with such care. It's almost like you're dancing on glass." Is it that authentic care and purpose transcend a screen? In the end, it's not just the ballets we're missing, it's the dancers that make them come to life. Mr. Janzen and Ms. Mearns, Ms. Fairchild and Ms. Boylston don't just bring their bodies to the stage. They bring their being, their light, their minds the way they move through the world when they aren't dancing. And they have never been more essential than now.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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Ken Kurson, a friend of President Trump's son in law and adviser Jared Kushner, and a former editor of The New York Observer, the newspaper owned by Mr. Kushner's family, confirmed on Friday that he is under consideration for an unpaid position with the Trump administration. As part of a background check, the F.B.I. recently visited The Observer's offices and has conducted interviews with journalists who have worked with Mr. Kurson, according to two people familiar with the matter. Such checks are standard for anyone who is up for a post in a presidential administration. In an interview, Mr. Kurson described his possible appointment as an "honorary type position." He added that it would be "like one of those boards, where there are several members." The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. Before he joined The Observer in 2013, Mr. Kurson was a speechwriter for Rudolph W. Giuliani. He was also the co author of Mr. Giuliani's 2002 book, "Leadership." Last May, he left The Observer for a job as a senior managing director at Teneo, an international consulting firm whose founders include two longtime advisers to former President Bill Clinton.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. In March, Mark Zuckerberg visited the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the site of a mass murder by a white supremacist. Last month, he went to Dayton, Ohio, to sit down with recovering opioid addicts at a rehabilitation center. And he spent an afternoon in Blanchardville, Wis., with Jed Gant, whose family has owned a dairy and beef cattle farm for six generations. On Thursday, in a commencement speech at Harvard, from which he dropped out in 2005, Mr. Zuckerberg discussed how his views on how people live and work with one another had broadened, partly as a result of what he has seen on the tour. He said he had come to realize that churches, civic centers and other organized meeting places are integral to building and maintaining a strong sense of community. "As I've traveled around, I've sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go," said Mr. Zuckerberg, who also received an honorary doctoral degree at the ceremony. "I've met factory workers who know their old jobs aren't coming back and are trying to find their place." To his critics, Mr. Zuckerberg's road trip is a stunt and has taken on the trappings of a political campaign. His every pit stop eating with a farming family in Ohio; feeding a baby calf at a farm in Wisconsin has been artfully photographed and managed, and then posted to Mr. Zuckerberg's Facebook page. "He has all of the mechanics needed for a massive, well staged media operation," said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog group. "Photographers, handlers, its size, scope and scale all the ingredients are there. And he's appearing in an environment where there's no sole Democratic leader or counterbalance to Trump, who's consuming all the oxygen in media." Mr. Zuckerberg has publicly denied that he is using the visits as a platform to run for public office. He has said they are a way to "get a broader perspective" to inform how he runs Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company through which he plans to give away the majority of his wealth over the course of his life. So far, Mr. Zuckerberg has made it to roughly half the states, including ones he has previously spent time in. The visits have plunged him into self reflection, according to four current and former colleagues and people close to the chief executive who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. The self reflection is especially the case as Facebook has wrestled with more questions about its responsibilities and its role in the lives of its users, many of whom rely on the network for news and information. The trips are part of a real world education for Mr. Zuckerberg, who grew up comfortably upper middle class in the suburbs of New York, walked the elite halls of Harvard and then moved to Silicon Valley, where he became a paper multibillionaire by the time he was 23. (He is now 33.) Recent events have forced Mr. Zuckerberg to step out of that Silicon Valley bubble. Last year, after the presidential election, Facebook was assailed as a repository of fake news that influenced the way the American electorate voted. People have also posted videos of killings on Facebook, raising questions about what responsibility the social network bears in distributing such content. The American road trip follows many international travels for Mr. Zuckerberg in 2015 and 2016. In January, he said on Facebook that he wanted to talk to more people about how they're "living, working and thinking about the future." Friends said Mr. Zuckerberg was catching up on many things that he missed out on by spending the last 10 years in Silicon Valley building a 438 billion company. "I think he's just really curious and wants to visit all the places that he's never been," said Ashley Gant, 27, who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg when he visited her family's Wisconsin dairy farm in April. Over a midday meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and her grandmother's applesauce Jell O, Ms. Gant said, she answered the chief executive's questions about daily life on a farm. "It felt like an everyday conversation with someone who isn't from around here," Ms. Gant said. "It just so happens that he also invented Facebook." The road trip began in January with a tour of Texas, where Mr. Zuckerberg divided his time between business testifying in a lawsuit against his company in downtown Dallas and events like attending his first rodeo in Fort Worth. He flew in and out of cities in between his day job in Menlo Park, Calif., where Facebook is headquartered. Mr. Zuckerberg travels on a chartered private plane and has a small staff at both Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative coordinating his trips, though some occur by happenstance. Ms. Gant's family, for instance, was contacted after Mr. Zuckerberg saw a photo of their dairy farm that a friend of a friend had shared on Facebook. In February, he stopped in to view his Oculus virtual reality team in Washington. A week later, he hit the road with his wife, Priscilla Chan, driving through Southern states. In Alabama, he visited a shrimp boat; in Mississippi, he went to a blues club. For security reasons, hosts at each place were sometimes told only hours before that the couple was coming. At the Charleston church, also known as Mother Emanuel, which was attacked by a white supremacist in 2015, Mr. Zuckerberg spoke of the church's sense of community and how important that had been in bringing the congregation together after the shootings. In March, he also spoke about diversity and the arts with a dozen students at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, where he listened to concerns from minority students who had grown up in predominantly white communities. "It was nice to meet a white male who came from privilege and seemed to understand that, and can have an open dialogue, with others who do not," said Cam'Ron Stewart, 18, an acting student who spoke with Mr. Zuckerberg at the meeting. The trip to Dayton, where he met with a group of opioid addicts, stood out. In an airy, well lit room where people sat in a circle of chairs, those in recovery explained how their drug use had ravaged their lives and left them without feelings of purpose. Mr. Zuckerberg seems to have carried that lesson with him. "Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for," Mr. Zuckerberg said in his commencement address at Harvard, where he wore a suit and light blue tie instead of his usual gray T shirt and jeans. "To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Can a New Owner Take 'Balmainia' to the Next Level? So, Mayhoola for Investments the Qatari sovereign wealth fund that owns Valentino, Anya Hindmarch and Pal Zileri, and that is backed by Qatar's royal family has bought Balmain, the Paris fashion house backed by the Kardashians (well, not exactly backed, but they are its biggest cheerleaders). This could have big repercussions on what we all wear. Since 2005, when the designer Christophe Decarnin transformed the couture house to haute rock 'n' roll hotness, Balmain has been a brand whose buzz with its own name, "Balmainia" is significantly bigger than its bite of the market. Mr. Decarnin left in 2011 (reportedly because of stress), after convincing numerous women that they really, really desired a pair of wildly expensive crystal bedecked ripped jeans. Olivier Rousteing, then 24, took the reins, altering the balance between glitz and grunge in favor of the former. Mr. Rousteing's Instagram account has 3.4 million followers, Balmain has 4.7 million (both of which pale in comparison to Gucci's 9.1 million, though no one really seems to care). You'd think, by all the hoo ha around his account, that Balmain would be a megamaison. But if reports of its sales (around 130 million euros, or about 135 million, in 2015) are correct, it's more in the lower middling range, and very reliant on the marketability and profile of its young designer. Mayhoola is betting that it can get larger. Part of Mayhoola's assumption is probably that Balmain's growth has been held back by the death in 2014 of Alain Hivelin, the owner and the greatest booster of its reinvention, and by the fact the house has been owned since then by a family owned holding company that did not seem particularly impassioned about fashion. That may be true. But the gap between image and sales may also be a result of the fact that Balmain is somewhat of a niche taste, marked primarily by an unabashed 1980s "ynasty" meets Vegas high roller aesthetic. Elaborately and expertly made though it may be, it still has very specific appeal. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West love it. So do many models: It was one of the most worn brands at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala this year. But a giant social media/reality TV following does not necessarily a giant consumer base make (it's unclear how many of those vicariously living Mr. Rousteing's life are actually able to buy his clothes). To become a major player, Mr. Rousteing has to extend his aesthetic. His collaboration with H M in the fall suggests he understands this, though the pieces were essentially just less expensive versions of his greater hits; they let wannabes into his world, but they didn't expand it. More interesting, really, were a few garments hidden among the otherwise over the top hourglass excess and boudoir trousers in his last collection: a peach colored cashmere wrap coat, a dove gray suede dress with a bit of safari lacing. They suggest formerly hidden depths of subtlety in Mr. Rousteing's creative arsenal, and the possibility that more refined layers could, indeed, be built into the collection that would appeal to a wider group of women, much in the way Dolce Gabbana may promote an image of lusty Italian corseted mamas, but sell a whole lot of terrifically cut pinstriped suits.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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It's not difficult to create a room where you can get a good night's sleep if you follow a few simple steps. How to Get the Bedroom of Your Dreams One of the best moments of a long, hectic day often comes at the very end, when you fall into bed, pull up the covers and drop off to sleep. Unless, of course, your bedroom is an uninviting mess. A poorly chosen paint color you would rather forget, an uncomfortable rug underfoot and the glare of streetlights outside are just some of the problems that can conspire to create a room you would rather avoid the opposite of an ideal environment for deep sleep. "Our bedroom environment is probably the most modifiable factor that can influence our sleep health," said Natalie Dautovich, an assistant professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the environmental fellow for the National Sleep Foundation, which has declared March 8 the beginning of Sleep Awareness Week. "There are things we can do to improve the bedroom that will help us to fall asleep more easily, return to sleep when we wake up during the night and stay asleep until our desired wake time." But by adding comfort and a feeling of security, we can do much better than a cave. For tips on how to design a restful bedroom, we consulted designers and scientists. When your objective is to create a comforting environment, the bedroom is not the place to experiment with dazzling patterns or bold colors like lime green or fiery orange. "I like to make bedrooms super calm," said Timothy Godbold, an interior designer in Southampton, N.Y., who favors a crisp palette of whites and light grays with few, if any, pops of bright color. "My clients tend to be super busy people who work a lot, so when they go to bed, they want to clear their minds." Mark Cunningham, an interior designer in New York, also prefers a tightly controlled color palette. "A lot of times they're kind of monochromatic," he said of the bedrooms he designs. "I think it's a nice relief and retreat to go into a serene bedroom." That doesn't mean light colors are the only option. Dark colors can be equally inviting, so long as you choose neutrals and stick with them. In one Manhattan apartment, for instance, Mr. Cunningham used a palette of dark grays, resulting in a deeply cozy, cocoon like bedroom. The easiest way to surround yourself in a calming color is with a fresh coat of paint. But in a bedroom, many designers instead opt for a soft wallcovering. For one San Francisco home, Alison Pickart, a Bay Area designer, created a bedroom with walls upholstered in gray silk velvet. "For me, bedrooms always need to feel super cozy, and I always love to layer textures," she said. But the look and feeling of velvet isn't its only asset it also helps keep the room quiet. "It's dead silent," she said, "because of the acoustical quality of the velvet on top of the cotton batting." An economical way of achieving a similar effect is to use wallpaper with the look of fabric. In some of her projects, Ms. Pickart has used Suede Lounge wallpaper from Phillip Jeffries, which looks and feels like natural suede once it has been installed. An easy way to make a room with wood floors quieter and more inviting is to add carpet. "We always love a carpet in a bedroom," said Lee Cavanaugh, a design partner at Cullman Kravis. "It's nice to be able to step out of bed and not just feel a cold wood floor." The softer the carpet the better, since it's a place where you'll often be barefoot. When the budget allows, "we like to use a carpet with silk in it, because that's really soft," Ms. Cullman said. But there are a number of pleasing options that are less expensive, including rugs made from wool, cotton and other natural fibers. Usually, designers install a wall to wall carpet or a large area rug that extends under the bed and other furniture, leaving a border of exposed wood around the edges of the room. The choice comes down to the desired look, as well as the layout of the room, Mr. Cunningham said. Often, he said, if there is a walk in closet or dressing room adjacent to the bedroom, "we'll do wall to wall, just so it can run into the closet." "Light is the most dominant cue for our circadian sleep wake system," Dr. Dautovich said, so controlling the illumination from windows is important. The easiest way to reduce the light from outside whether it's from the moon, an early sunrise, streetlights or the headlights of passing cars is with blackout shades or curtains that have a blackout lining. "The way the sun rises at dawn is particularly powerful. The gradual onset of light cues the body to suppress melatonin and start feeling alert," Dr. Dautovich said. "If your desired wake time is after dawn, then blackout curtains can help with that." Of course, bedrooms aren't used solely at night. Most people also want privacy and some light control during the day, without having to make the room completely dark. Many designers use multiple layers of window coverings that might include blackout shades inside the window and sheer curtains over top. Cullman Kravis frequently goes one step further and installs blackout and solar shades inside the top of each window, and then a decorative treatment, like embroidered curtain panels, over the window casing, for a softer appearance. In bedrooms with many windows, Mr. Godbold recommended installing motorized shades that can be raised and lowered with the push of a button (or smartphone tap), from a company like the Shade Store or Hunter Douglas. "You don't necessarily have to have electrical wires in your walls" near the window casings, he said. "There are a lot of battery operated ones that are really good." In the same way that layers of window coverings provide better control of natural light, layers of light fixtures can help create the right atmosphere at various times of day. "We are firm believers in lots of layers of light," said Ms. Cavanaugh, of Cullman Kravis. "We like an overhead light fixture, art lights, sconces and lamps." Installing numerous fixtures and lamps may also make it easier to support the body's natural circadian rhythms. "Don't try to get everything out of one fixture in the middle of the room, because you're probably not going to be able to do it," said Mariana G. Figueiro, the director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "You really need bright light during the day and then dimmer, warmer colors in the evening, because that's what gives you that robust light dark pattern that helps maintain entrainment for the circadian system." Bedroom light fixtures and lamps should be on dimmers, she said, and bulbs should have a warm color temperature of about 2,700 kelvin. That way, all the fixtures can be switched on at full wattage to brightly illuminate the room in the morning, but then the ceiling fixture can be switched off and bedside lamps can be dimmed in the evening. Also consider having a storage place for electronics like smartphones inside the drawer of a nightstand, for example where they won't disrupt sleep with late night notifications. To finish it off, Mr. Godbold usually keeps the bedding simple, topping mattresses with white sheets, a blanket or duvet and a minimum of pillows. "For me, it's about having one or two pillows per person, and that's it," he said, noting the current trend away from the sumptuously overblown beds of decades past. "It's not that grandma vibe of having way too many pillows on your bed." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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So much happens in the first 40 pages of the artist 's memoir of adolescence, "The Light Years," that I doubted the pace could be maintained for the ensuing 300 pages and worried that it would be. Before it's done, the book crosses the continent from wealthy, suburban New Jersey to the countercultures and wildernesses of Arizona and California no fewer than four times and folds in at least three dozen significant characters. But, happily, this busy, headlong narrative is not forced by its author; the propulsion driving it is one into which he seems pulled, drawn by whatever it was that engineered the collective crest then crash course of idealistic seekers and misfits between 1967 and 1976. Drugs, for one thing. "Please don't call them drugs. Call them what they are sacraments." Young Chris, whose church building, alcoholic father has begun actively and coarsely abhorring his middle child's loquacious effeminacy and artistic flair, is only 11 when his sister Donna's friend Valentine explains LSD as a gateway to God. Slender, shirtless and glamorous on a blanket in the county park, Valentine, whose "features fell exactly between male and female, his long hair a perfect shade of platinum," is the custom designed demagogue to whom Chris and his shaken sense of the future are receptive, an antidote to the clampdown on his self expression. The book has barely begun when he doses for the first time, feels divine vibrations, asks to buy five tabs and is given instead 1,000 to sell at the Catholic boarding school to which his parents have banished him their precocious boy, "different" enough perhaps to be a priest. And because St. John's won't be the only school from which Chris is dishonorably discharged, his natural move is to follow Donna west, where she has become a nudist, vegetarian, believer and drug runner in Saint Valentine's Great Experiment. When in a later reckoning Chris presents as a sort of prodigal, a near daily hash user, rail thin, longhaired, skittish and visibly scarred from violence on the road, Valentine by then on his way to becoming a multimillionaire winks and disagrees with a concerned onlooker in his entourage: "I think he looks beautiful. Holy men are always skinny." Chris's repeated returns east result in increasingly dramatic expulsions from his family's house, compounded by his father's brutality and younger brothers' abuse. Remarkably, his beatific innocence remains intact, as does the lightheartedness of the narration. If "The Light Years" can seem haphazard or uncurated, scribbling hitchhiking routes back and forth across the map, what it sacrifices in reflection on Chris's experience it makes up for in reflection of the culture. The Rush household is a paradigm of the era's blithe suburban torpor: Perry Como is on the hi fi, prescription pills conceal hurt and betrayal, a worried child eavesdrops from his "listening step" and the maid may be summoned by intercom. For accelerant, Mr. Rush squirts napalm into the grill, while, because of a chemical pollutant upstream, the nearby river runs red, cheered on by the local high schoolers, whose team color it is. Chris's other home, out west, a commune and stash house run by a pair of kind criminals, likewise produces its archetypal hallmarks: peasant dresses "from which milk laden breasts kept flopping out. Babies in all directions." When, during a giant drug deal, Donna herself goes into labor, all hands, buyers and sellers, assist. Chris, just waking, is told to take his sacrament because a miracle is about to happen. "I took five tabs, then ate a bowl of Grape Nuts."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Books
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"Where there are two Jews, there are three opinions," Manfred Kirchheimer says in his little gem of a documentary, "My Coffee With Jewish Friends." In the film he speaks with more than 20 people and comes away with countless viewpoints, as well as some smiles and bittersweet tales. Mr. Kirchheimer is himself something of a gem. After escaping Nazi Germany with his family, he came to the United States in 1936. Since the 1950s he has worked as a cameraman and editor, and has directed his own independent films, among them "Canners" and "Stations of the Elevated." His skills are keen here, particularly in editing and intercutting conversations that range from wistful to indignant to delighted. He's just as nimble in front of the camera, usually sitting one on one with others to consider topics including Israel, marriage and orthodox religion. Touchy subjects are approached in easygoing tones; Mr. Kirchheimer is too gentlemanly to badger his guests, yet he's not shy about questioning an opinion or seeking clarification. The most thoughtful discussions are with those who have lost faith in a god, or those whose beliefs have altered over time. One friend wonders how any creator could allow the Holocaust, and another explains why he holds tight to his Jewishness: "I cannot betray my grandparents. I cannot betray the millions who came before and who were murdered."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Michael Wolff Says Trump Has Less Credibility Than 'Anyone Who Has Ever Walked on Earth' The author of a scathing new book about President Trump said on Friday that the president's attempt to block its publication would not only help with sales but would also confirm the book's key finding: Mr. Trump is unfit for office. Speaking on the "Today" show, Michael Wolff, the author of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," called the administration's attempt to block the book "extraordinary" and dismissed the president's criticisms of him out of hand. "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point," Mr. Wolff said. Mr. Wolff countered by saying that he had absolutely spoken to the president and had done so after the inauguration. "Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don't know, but it certainly was not off the record," he said. He said that, cumulatively, he had spent about three hours with the president during the campaign and in the White House. "What was I doing there if he didn't want me to be there?" he said. Excerpts from "Fire and Fury" began to appear online earlier this week, leading to a break between Mr. Trump and his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who is quoted in the book calling Donald Trump Jr.'s actions during the campaign "treasonous" and "unpatriotic" and insulting Ivanka Trump. Mr. Wolff characterized the book as an investigation of what it was like to work with Mr. Trump. He wrote that the president's associates called him a "moron" and an "idiot," and almost unanimously described him as being "like a child." 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. "What they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification," Mr. Wolff said. "It's all about him." On Thursday, a lawyer for the president sent an 11 page letter to the book's publisher, Henry Holt and Co., saying that it included false statements about the president that "give rise to claims of libel." In reaction, the publisher moved up the release date. Originally scheduled for a Tuesday debut, "Fire and Fury" was made available early Friday morning. "We see 'Fire and Fury' as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book," the publisher said in a statement. The White House has characterized the book as a "complete fantasy" full of "tabloid gossip," but it is not only the administration that has questioned Mr. Wolff's reporting. Some journalists have also expressed skepticism and pointed to past criticism of Mr. Wolff's work. In 2004, The New Republic said the scenes in his columns "aren't recreated so much as created springing from Wolff's imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events." Others have said that the book, while filled with new and lurid details, corroborates previous reporting about the Trump White House. Writing in The Atlantic on Thursday, James Fallows, a former Carter administration official and prominent critic of Mr. Trump, called the book's details "unforgettable and potentially historic." "We'll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it's a remarkable tale," he said. Mr. Wolff chose to sidestep broader questions about his credibility on "Today," claiming that he had written "millions" of words in his career and had never received a correction. Instead, he kept his attention fixed on a president whose opposition to his book has only heightened its profile. Asked how he felt about the president's attempt to keep the book off shelves, Mr. Wolff quipped, "Where do I send the box of chocolates?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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Outside the U.S., It's All About WhatsApp How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Adam Satariano, a technology correspondent based in London, discussed the tech he's using. You reported from the United States before moving to London. How has your tech setup changed? I moved to London three years ago, and the biggest change has been how to communicate with colleagues, family and friends. It's hard for many Americans to grasp how pervasive WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook, is outside the United States. I'm in family groups on WhatsApp for sharing photos of my kids, another with friends called "Steve Kerr 2020" to banter about Bay Area sports, and others for news about my sons' elementary school classes. One group, called "Anybody Fancy a Pint," is just for friends in my neighborhood in London to use if one of us is going to a local pub and seeking company. This isn't unique to living in Europe, but I'm laughably reliant on Google Maps. I invariably end up being that annoying person on the street staring down at my phone doing circles to figure out which direction to go. Sure, I worry about privacy and the ungodly amount of data that Google collects, but it feels like a fair trade when I'm lost or navigating a new place. I bookmark restaurants, bookstores and cafes that I want to visit or remember for a future trip. (Product suggestion: Google, please add a way to write notes for saved locations in Maps.) On the road, I also use a debit card from Revolut that you can top up with money through an app and doesn't have foreign transaction fees. With the G.D.P.R. and other regulations, Europe has been tough on tech companies when it comes to digital privacy. How is that affecting the internet and apps in Europe? The biggest difference for the average person is the comical number of notifications you receive when visiting a website or signing up for a new online service. A key part of the General Data Protection Regulation is that people must be given detailed information about the data being collected about them. But it's overload. I feel ground into submission. Most people I know express annoyance more than gratitude about the law. That said, there are changes below the surface that people are benefiting from. One aspect of the law I'd love to see made easier to use is letting people ask a company to turn over all the data it has on them. It's currently not an easy or inviting process. When I asked a few companies for information, the data that came back wasn't complete or comprehensive. Why do Europeans seem to care about digital privacy so much more than Americans? There isn't a unified view on privacy across Europe. Citizens of a country like Germany put a priority on privacy for unique historical reasons. Yet in Britain, where there is more surveillance than in probably any other Western country, people don't seem to be overly concerned. In general, people view privacy the way they do in the United States: The amount of data collected by the likes of Facebook and Google makes them somewhat uncomfortable, but not enough to stop using Google or Instagram. I hear much more concern about the amount of time we're spending staring at screens. 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. What technology do you use that helps you do your job as a tech reporter? My setup needs an upgrade. I was in Paris recently for a news conference, and a reporter at a different news publication pulled out a keyboard that wirelessly connected to an iPhone that he placed in an impressive looking stand. He also had an audio recording app called AudioNote that synced with the notes he was typing. By clicking on a word within his notes, he could jump to that part of the audio recording to check the exact wording of a comment. As I was rummaging through my notes, I was seething with envy picturing him efficiently writing a finely crafted story. This is a safe space, so I'll admit that I have organizing issues. I have notes scattered in paper notebooks, email draft folders, Google Docs, Evernote, Word and the Notes program on my MacBook. I have at least three different "story ideas" files. There is a method to the madness, I swear, but I am constantly panicking that I lost a quote, an anecdote or a phone number. It's an affliction. The Times needs somebody on staff who can Marie Kondo my digital work life. Outside of work, what tech product are you personally obsessed with, and what do you do with it? This isn't really tech, but I'm a devotee of Parker pens. They write smoothly and fit easily in my pocket, but aren't so expensive that I feel bad losing one. I'm also always looking for a better backpack. I have one made by a company called Knomo in London that has a good mix of space for a laptop and other stuff, but could use extra compartments and more comfortable shoulder pads. Instagram serves me a constant stream of backpack ads, and I don't even mind. There are a few apps that I can't live without. One is The Athletic. In Europe, it's hard to keep up with American sports, but The Athletic hired some of the best sportswriters in the Bay Area to cover my favorite teams. The subscription isn't cheap, but it's the best digital twist on a newspaper sports page that I've seen. I use Twitter an unhealthy amount, but I've started deleting it on weekends. My favorite app is Spotify. I'm listening constantly. I have a playlist called "Sunday Morning" that I've been curating for years and love even if my wife jokingly calls it "music that makes you want to kill yourself."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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Last fall, Questlove, of the Roots, visited Pandora Media's headquarters in Oakland, Calif., for what he assumed would be a perfunctory outreach meeting. Pandora, the internet radio giant, was one of several digital music outlets then trying to curry favor with him, Questlove said. But the meeting turned surprisingly productive once Tim Westergren, Pandora's co founder, showed him the company's Music Genome Project, its system for categorizing songs by hundreds of precise musical attributes. Intrigued by a technology company that was as obsessive about the fundamentals of music as he was, Questlove immediately began discussing new projects with Mr. Westergren, who later brought him on as a strategic adviser and Pandora's first artist ambassador. "I went in there to talk about playlists, and I ended up with a job as an equity partner," Questlove, whose real name is Ahmir Thompson, said in an interview. The first fruit of the partnership is "Questlove Supreme," a weekly radio show that will debut on Sept. 7. A three hour program with wide ranging playlists and guests including the actress Maya Rudolph and the singer Kimbra, "Questlove Supreme" shows off its host's eclectic tastes; he describes the show as an extension of the music courses he teaches at New York University and "the black nerd version of NPR." For Pandora, which has clashed with the music industry in the past, the involvement of an authority like Questlove whose group is the house band on NBC's "The Tonight Show" is an important endorsement as the company embarks on its biggest challenge yet: expanding its service beyond radio to compete directly with Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal. "We are entering into a new phase for the company," Mr. Westergren said. "We are working more directly with labels and artists. We really want to invest a lot in that nexus, and having someone like him bridge that and speak on our behalf is really powerful." Pandora, which began in 2005 and went public in 2011, has long been the most popular internet radio service, and it is one of a handful of digital music brands that have become household names. But its growth has slowed as it has faced more pressure from streaming competitors. Pandora's number of average monthly listeners reached its peak at the end of 2014, at 81.5 million. To turn itself around, Pandora made a string of acquisitions last year, including the data analytics firm Next Big Sound, the ticketing company Ticketfly, and the assets of Rdio, a bankrupt on demand streaming service. With its stock price slumping, in March the company replaced its chief executive, Brian P. McAndrews, with Mr. Westergren, and for much of the year the company faced steady pressure from investors to sell. "Pandora is in a difficult chapter," said Mark Mulligan, a digital media analyst with Midia Research. "Wall Street doesn't like mature growth stories in young tech companies. It expects to see a dynamic growth and expansion story." Pandora plans to introduce a multitiered new service that, in addition to its basic radio version, will add levels of on demand access the ability for customers to listen to any song they want for prices of up to 10 a month. The company is expected to introduce these levels in the fall, when it may also face new competition from Amazon. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. To stand out, services like Apple and Tidal are competing for exclusive content from stars like Beyonce and Frank Ocean, and Apple has also set up an internet radio station, Beats 1. On Pandora, Questlove will play the part of the expert curator, selecting songs for his show and expounding on them at length in the casually professorial style that fans have come to expect from his social media posts and appearances in music documentaries. For his first show, with Ms. Rudolph the former "Saturday Night Live" cast member whose mother was the singer Minnie Riperton ("Lovin' You") Questlove led a brief but enlightening conversation on the perhaps overlooked history of children in inspirational 1970s soul songs. To prepare for each show, Questlove said, he goes through about 200 songs. "This is a commitment deeper than any girlfriend I've ever had," he said, "or any diet I've tried to stick to." The other side of Questlove's involvement with Pandora is his role as ambassador, which will include evangelizing for the service among fellow artists. In its earlier days, Pandora stayed largely independent of the music industry, relying on statutory licensing processes rather than dealing with record labels, which has sometimes resulted in ill will over royalties. Last year, Pandora reported that it paid 610 million, or about 52 percent of its revenue, in royalties and related costs. These days, Pandora is eager to promote the marketing platforms it makes available to artists, such as audio messages that can be delivered to fans and detailed data about the popularity of particular songs. When asked, Questlove said he initially had some hesitation about working with Pandora given its past conflicts with music world, but said he was confident that the company paid its royalty obligations properly and that part of his job would be to speak up for musicians in the company. Mr. Westergren said he was "very open to a candid assessment of how artists think about it." Questlove said he was most excited about the possibilities of producing a radio show that would open listeners' eyes to more than just the biggest and most heavily promoted pop. That plan, he said, was clear from when Pandora first asked what his dream radio show would be. "I want a world in which Drake's 'One Dance' can also live with Frank Zappa's 'Uncle Meat' can live with James Brown's 'Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing,'" Questlove said, "and all stops in between."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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SHANGHAI The teenage girl, pink eyelash curler in hand, begins her video innocently: "Hi, guys. I'm going to teach you guys how to get long lashes." After a few seconds, she asks viewers to put down their curlers. "Use your phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there," she says. The sly bait and switch puts a serious topic the mass detentions of minority Muslims in northwest China in front of an audience that might not have known about it before. The 40 second clip has amassed more than 498,000 likes on TikTok, a social platform where the users skew young and the videos skew silly. But the video's creator, Feroza Aziz, said this week that TikTok had suspended her account after she posted the clip. That added to a widespread fear about the platform: that its owner, the Chinese social media giant ByteDance, censors or punishes videos that China's government might not like. A ByteDance spokesman, Josh Gartner, said Ms. Aziz had been blocked from her TikTok account because she used a previous account to post a video that contained an image of Osama bin Laden. This violated TikTok's policies against terrorist content, Mr. Gartner said, which is why the platform banned both her account and the devices from which she was posting. "If she tries to use the device that she used last time, she will probably have a problem," Mr. Gartner said. Ms. Aziz, a 17 year old Muslim high school student in New Jersey, said in an email on Tuesday that her TikTok videos tried to make light of the racism and discrimination she experienced growing up in the United States. In one video, she addressed a slur that she said she and other Muslims heard regularly: that they would marry Bin Laden. "I think that TikTok should not ban content that doesn't harm anyone or shows anyone being harmed," Ms. Aziz said. In recent months, United States lawmakers have expressed concerns that TikTok censors video content at Beijing's behest and shares user data with the Chinese authorities. The head of TikTok, Alex Zhu, denied those accusations in an interview with The Times this month. Mr. Zhu said that Chinese regulators did not influence TikTok in any way, and that even ByteDance could not control TikTok's policies for managing video content in the United States. But episodes such as Ms. Aziz's show how difficult it might be for TikTok to escape the fog of suspicion that surrounds it and other Chinese tech companies. China's government rigidly controls the internet within the nation's borders. It exerts influence, sometimes subtly, over the activities of private businesses. The concern is that, when companies like ByteDance and the telecom equipment maker Huawei expand overseas, Beijing's long arm follows them. China would certainly prefer that the world did not talk about its clampdown on Muslims. Over the past few years, the government has corralled as many as one million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons. Chinese leaders have presented their efforts as a mild and benevolent campaign to fight Islamic extremism. But internal Communist Party documents reported by The Times this month provided an inside glimpse at the crackdown and confirmed its coercive nature. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a news conference in Washington that the documents showed "brutal detention and systematic repression" of Uighurs and called on China to immediately release those who were detained. President Trump, however, has refused to impose sanctions on Chinese officials deemed responsible, despite recommendations from some American officials to do so. Davey Alba contributed reporting from New York, and Edward Wong from Austin, Texas.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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NEW DELHI Climate change and rising sea levels eventually may wipe out one of the world's last and largest tiger strongholds, scientists warned in a new study. The cats are among nearly 500,000 land species whose survival is now in question because of threats to their natural habitats, according to a report on Monday by the United Nations. The Sundarbans, 4,000 square miles of marshy land in Bangladesh and India, hosts the world's largest mangrove forest and a rich ecosystem supporting several hundred animal species, including the endangered Bengal tiger. But 70 percent of the land is just a few feet above sea level, and grave changes are in store for the region, Australian and Bangladeshi researchers reported in the journal Science of The Total Environment. Changes wrought by a warming planet will be "enough to decimate" the few hundred or so Bengal tigers remaining there. "By 2070, there will be no suitable tiger habitats remaining in the Bangladesh Sundarbans," concluded the study by 10 researchers. The paper, which relies on climate scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its simulation models, adds to existing studies that offered similarly grim predictions for wildlife in the Sundarbans. In 2010, a study led by the World Wide Fund for Nature projected that a sea level rise of 11 inches could reduce the number of tigers in the Sundarbans by 96 percent within a few decades. Climate change has already harmed almost half of the world's endangered mammals, far more than previously thought, a recent study found. Sharif A. Mukul, lead author of the new report on the Sundarbans, and his colleagues looked for risks to the tiger beyond sea level rise, which accounted for 5.4 percent to 11.3 percent of the projected habitat loss in 2050 and 2070. Other factors related to climate change were more damaging to the Sundarbans' tigers, one of the largest remaining populations of wild tigers in the world, the researchers found. Since the early 1900s, habitat loss, hunting and the illegal trade of animal parts have decimated the global population of tigers from around 100,000 to fewer than 4,000. In the Bangladesh Sundarbans, a spike in extreme weather events and changing vegetation will further reduce the population, the study found. And as the Sundarbans flood, confrontations may grow between humans and tigers as the animals stray outside their habitat in search of new land. "A lot of things might happen," said Dr. Mukul, an assistant professor of environmental management at Independent University, Bangladesh in Dhaka. "The situation could be even worse if there is a cyclone or if there is some disease outbreak in that area, or if there is a food shortage." In October, a landmark report by the United Nations's scientific panel on climate change found that if greenhouse gas emissions continued at the current rate, the atmosphere would warm as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels by 2040.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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For much of the city's Asian community, the center of New York City is not in Manhattan, but in downtown Flushing, Queens, the bustling shopping district at the end of the No. 7 subway line. Soon this crowded commercial hub will grow even busier as sales start early next month at Flushing Commons, a mixed use development that has been in the works for a decade. The first phase of the 1.8 million square foot project will be finished in 2017, delivering 148 residential condos as well as office condos and retail. Eventually, the complex of more than five acres will house a total of 600 residential condos, an outdoor plaza and a new Y.M.C.A. facility. Completion is scheduled for mid 2021. Construction began last year on the site of a municipal parking deck between Union and 138th Streets and 37th and 39th Avenues, snarling traffic and isolating small businesses. Although the previously existing parking was consolidated at an undeveloped portion of the site, prices have jumped to 3 an hour from 1, vexing drivers and merchants. But supporters of the development see the arrival of the glassy contemporary complex as a welcome addition to a rapidly changing neighborhood, one that will deliver much needed open space and ultimately increase parking spots to 1,600 from 1,100. "Flushing is coming of age," said Michael Meyer, the president of F T Group, which is developing the 1 billion project with the Rockefeller Group and Aecom Capital. Flushing Commons will certainly alter the character of an area full of mom and pop shops selling pork buns, noodle soups and herbal remedies. Prices start at 650,000 for a one bedroom with Swedish oak floors, quartz countertops and Italian porcelain tiles. Among the amenities for condo residents: a dog park, a reading room and Zen walking gardens. Two bedrooms start at 850,000, three bedrooms at 1.2 million and four bedrooms at 2.5 million. The project is being marketed to Chinese buyers, particularly new arrivals. The glossy residential brochure, translated into Chinese, highlights the area's rich Asian culture, describing a place "where deep rooted traditions and the authentic foods and flavors of your homeland blend seamlessly with a multigenerational community." "Somebody that's moving from China, they're not going to want to live in the West Village and eat at the Spotted Pig," said Helen Lee, an executive vice president of F T Group, referring to the popular Manhattan restaurant. "It makes no sense. They don't speak English." But the merchants toiling in the mostly Korean owned shops along Union Street see Flushing Commons as a threat to their livelihoods. Foot traffic has dwindled since construction began, according to Ikhwan Rim, the president of the Union Street Small Business Association, which represents about 150 businesses. Shopkeepers also worry that once the project is complete, customers will favor the upscale Flushing Commons shops and restaurants over the older businesses nearby. Turnover has spiked since construction began, with about a third of the 150 businesses along Union Street replaced by new ones, said Mr. Rim, who owns Rim's Fine Jewelry on Union Street. "We're sitting ducks just waiting for businesses to close down," he said. "Your neighbors are one by one leaving and it's not a good sight." Merchants also worry that the higher parking fees have cost them the customers who plan to buy only inexpensive items like pastries or dumplings. But the lot is now privately owned and rates were set according to an agreement between the developer and the city. According to Mr. Meyer of the F T Group, they are below current market rate. To alleviate the strain of years of construction, the city provided local businesses with 2.25 million for marketing and other support. And the Department of Transportation has taken steps to ease traffic congestion in a transit hub that includes a subway station, a Long Island Rail Road station and 22 bus routes. "The impact is there, so then the question becomes: How do we try to minimize that or bring the community together to take on the challenge?" said Christopher Kui, the executive director of Asian Americans for Equality, which is managing the city funds for the businesses and has also provided about 1.5 million in microloans to 32 local businesses. The temporary inconvenience, said Peter Koo, who represents Flushing on the New York City Council, is a worthwhile price to pay for the addition of more housing, a new Y.M.C.A. and a 1.5 acre plaza to the neighborhood. "This is an exciting development in our area," he said. "It will create a lot of jobs and a lot of tax revenue for the city."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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And I listened. Those in the audience who supported Mr. Trump came up to me and assured me they weren't racist. They often said they'd enjoyed the talk, if not my politics. Still, not one told me they'd wavered in their support for him. Instead, they repeated conspiracy theories and Fox News talking points about "crooked Hillary." Others made comments like: "You're a good, moderate Muslim. How come others aren't like you?" In Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter. We were cordial to each other, we made jokes and we shared stories about our families. But neither of us changed our outlook. "They'll never take my guns. Ever," he told me, explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Mrs. Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns. Although he didn't like some of Mr. Trump's "tone" and comments, he didn't believe he was a racist "in his heart." I'm not a cardiologist, so I wasn't qualified to challenge that. In 2017, I was invited by the Aspen Institute which hosts a festival known for attracting the wealthy and powerful to discuss racism in America. At a private dinner after the event, I was introduced to a donor who I learned was a Trump supporter. As soon as I said "white privilege," she began shooting me passive aggressive quips about the virtues of meritocracy and hard work. She recommended I read "Hillbilly Elegy" the best selling book that has been criticized by those living in Appalachia as glorified poverty porn promoting simplistic stereotypes about a diverse region. I've even tried and failed to have productive conversations with Muslims who voted for Mr. Trump. Some love him for the tax cuts. Others listen only to Fox News, say "both sides" are the same, or believe he hasn't bombed Muslim countries. (They're wrong.) Many believe they are the "good immigrants," as they chase whiteness and run away from Blackness, all the way to the suburbs. I can't make people realize they have Black and brown skin and will never be accepted as white. I did my part. What was my reward? Listening to Mr. Trump's base chant, "Send her back!" in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a Black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee. I saw the Republican Party transform the McCloskeys into victims, even though the wealthy St. Louis couple illegally brandished firearms against peaceful B.L.M. protesters. Their bellicosity was rewarded with a prime time slot at the Republican National Convention, where they warned about "chaos" in the suburbs being invaded by people of color. Their speech would have fit well in "The Birth of a Nation." We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves. Mr. Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed. He is their defender and savior. He is their blunt instrument. He is their destructive drug of choice. Don't waste your time reaching out to Trump voters as I did. Instead, invest your time organizing your community, registering new voters and supporting candidates who reflect progressive values that uplift everyone, not just those who wear MAGA hats, in local and state elections. Work also to protect Americans against lies and conspiracy theories churned out by the right wing media and political ecosystem. One step would be to continue pressuring social media giants like Twitter and Facebook to deplatform hatemongers, such as Steve Bannon, and censor disinformation. It's not enough, but it's a start.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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On Twitter, President Trump deployed the phrase "fake news" 273 times this year 50 percent more often than he did in 2018. He demanded "retribution" over a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, declared that Washington Post reporters "shouldn't even be allowed on the grounds of the White House," and accused The New York Times of "Treason." Four American journalists were barred from covering the president's dinner with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong un. The administration argued in court that it had the right to ban a reporter from the White House. The daily White House briefing ceased to exist. And a new press secretary rarely spoke in public outside Fox News. Mr. Trump's vilification of the news media is a hallmark of his tenure and a jagged break from the norms of his predecessors: Once a global champion of the free press, the presidency has become an inspiration to autocrats and dictators who ape Mr. Trump's cry of "fake news." For those who wondered if Mr. Trump might heed the concerns of historians and First Amendment advocates who say his actions have eroded public trust in journalism, and perhaps the very concept of empirical facts 2019 provided a grim answer. Few presidents have affected the perception of journalism like this one. A Pew survey this month found that Americans' confidence in news coverage is closely correlated to their opinion of Mr. Trump. Forty percent of Republicans who strongly approve of the president's job performance said that journalists have "very low" ethical standards, versus only 5 percent of Democrats. Mr. Trump has long oscillated between taunting, cajoling, criticizing, and manipulating the journalists who cover him. Asked by The Times in January about his views of the free press, Mr. Trump replied in contradictory ways, deeming the news media "important," "beautiful," "so bad," and "unfair." And when he was confronted by the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, about a rise in threats against reporters since he took office, Mr. Trump declared, "I don't like that," before quickly returning to his grievances. "When you get really bad stories, where it's not true, then you sort of say, 'That's unfair.'" By year's end, Mr. Trump had referred to the press on Twitter as "the enemy of the people" in 21 tweets, up from 16 tweets in 2018. To Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, these rhetorical attacks have rippled outward. Globally, Mr. Simon said in an interview, at least 30 journalists were jailed in 2019 under charges of reporting false news in 2019. "We view that as governments around the world taking advantage of the Trump 'fake news' framing and using that as a pretext of imprisoning journalists," Mr. Simon said. "The dissemination of that rhetoric has only increased in the last 12 months. It's having a very negative effect." Domestically, journalists in Washington say Mr. Trump's behavior this year has only deepened their unease. 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. Jonathan Karl, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association, cited the attempt by the administration to ban a journalist Brian Karem of Playboy magazine from the White House grounds. The episode mirrored an incident in 2018 where Trump aides revoked the credentials of a CNN correspondent, Jim Acosta, and falsely accused him of "placing his hands" on an intern. (Both journalists' passes were restored by the courts.) The violent video, concocted by right wing provocateurs, was later disavowed by the White House. But the administration has presided over more subtle rebukes of the press. The daily White House press briefing was once a ritual of Washington life and, viewed abroad, a potent symbol of accountability in government. In 2017, the Trump administration held about 100 formal briefings; in 2018, that number dropped by roughly half. Two briefings took place in 2019. The first, on Jan. 28, began with a barbed greeting from the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders "Missed you guys," she said dryly and the second, on March 11, ended with shouted questions about Mr. Trump's involvement with payoffs to a pornographic film star who had alleged an extramarital affair. Ms. Sanders referred to outside counsel and cut the queries short. "Thanks so much, guys," she said. No more questions. In reality, Mr. Trump remained more directly accessible to journalists than several of his recent predecessors. He routinely fields questions during photo ops and has made a habit of jousting with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House while the presidential helicopter whirs in the background. But the arrangement is stacked in Mr. Trump's favor. The noise lets him ignore questions he dislikes. And the events are entirely at Mr. Trump's discretion, as opposed to a regular briefing where officials must answer for the news of the day. Ms. Sanders departed the White House in June, signing on as a commentator at Fox News. Her successor, Stephanie Grisham, has yet to hold a White House briefing. For the first five and a half months of her tenure, she granted interviews only to Fox News, Fox Business and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a regional network that had required its affiliates to broadcast pro Trump editorials. Ms. Grisham appeared on ABC and CBS for the first time in December, after Mr. Trump was impeached. Fox News remained Mr. Trump's news venue of choice, despite the president's occasional carping about the channel's insufficient loyalty. Of Mr. Trump's roughly 70 interviews in 2019, 23 took place on Fox News, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS News reporter and the unofficial statistician of the White House press corps. (Fox Business interviewed Mr. Trump an additional four times.) Sean Hannity, the Fox News star, interviewed the president on seven occasions. ABC, CBS, and NBC each had one interview; CNN was shut out. The Times had one formal interview with Mr. Trump, and he spoke with The Post twice. Mr. Trump's bookings ranged widely, from C Span to Telemundo to right wing stalwarts like Breitbart News and The Daily Caller. He also spoke with Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News host who was fired after numerous revelations of workplace harassment. In the ratings, Fox News ended 2019 far ahead of its competition. Not only did the channel beat its cable rivals, MSNBC and CNN it was also the highest rated network on television outside of the traditional Big 4 broadcasters (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox). Mr. Hannity's show drew an average of 3.3 million viewers a night, making it the No. 1 program in cable news. Mr. Smith's abrupt exit in October shocked his colleagues and offered a glimpse at strains inside the network, where pro Trump morning and evening programming often clashed with the sometimes critical reporting included as part of its daytime news coverage. The impeachment hearings underscored the divide, with anchors like Chris Wallace acknowledging the damaging testimony against Mr. Trump, even as Mr. Hannity dismissed the process as a "revolting charade." Impeachment offered some answers to a question media executives are asking themselves as a new year begins: Will a news saturated public continue to tune into the Trump Show? There are early signs of news fatigue. Ratings for the televised impeachment hearings were solid, but they fell short of political spectacles like James B. Comey's testimony in 2017. Television audiences for the Democratic primary debates dwindled over the course of the year. Over all, cable news viewership was down slightly in 2019, despite all the political drama. At one point in 2019, even Mr. Trump suggested that he might tune out the news, too. After yet another perceived slight, he conspicuously canceled the White House subscriptions to The Post and The Times. Like many Americans, though, the president could not bear to look away. Days later, he was back to complaining about the coverage in the papers that he had claimed he would not read.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Media
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In "Quiz," a sprightly three part British drama coming to AMC on Sunday, form closely follows content. The series is based on a quiz show scandal that mesmerized Britain in the early 2000s, and it takes the form of a question: Do you think they did it? Directed by Stephen Frears and written by James Graham, based on his play of the same name, "Quiz" dramatizes the events surrounding the September 2001 appearance of an army officer named Charles Ingram on the original, British "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," a national sensation then beginning its fourth year. Ingram went all the way, becoming for a brief moment the third person to win the show's million pound top prize. But he and his wife, Diana, were accused, along with another contestant, of having cheated through the deployment of strategically timed coughs and were convicted of "deception" and given suspended sentences. The first episode is devoted to the creation of "Millionaire," and it's a stimulating dose of inside baseball. David Liddiment (Risteard Cooper), the new programming director at the ITV network, bemoans the BBC's superior ability to create "event television." (His example, the funeral of Princess Diana, establishes the series's fondly mocking view of its own medium.) A pair of producers, David Briggs (Elliot Levey) and Paul Smith (Mark Bonnar), pitch a show called "Cash Mountain" with an unprecedented payout and a format that produces excruciating pressure; after some tweaks and a name change, ITV has a monster hit. In a series of quick, deft scenes, we see Diana and Adrian's instant obsession with "Millionaire" and the lengths to which they will go to make it on the show, including reaching out to a shadowy underground of gamers who, for a cut, provide assistance that's legal but not exactly sporting. When Charles eventually gains a slot, it's because Diana, ineligible to appear a second time, has put his name in without telling him. This is all preparation for the main acts. "Quiz" is framed throughout by the Ingrams' trial, and the second and third episodes subtly take on the shape of that proceeding. Episode 2, which re enacts Charles's victorious appearance and the growing suspicions of the "Millionaire" staff, is the prosecution's case: We the jury are shown his dodgy behavior a repeated pattern of announcing his first guess, then reciting all four choices before settling on his final answer and we hear the coughs from the studio audience that would be at the heart of the case against him. Episode 3, recounting the trial and its dreary aftermath, is the defense, as the Ingrams' lawyer (Helen McCrory) casts doubt on each aspect of the state's entirely circumstantial case. All of this is handled, by the estimable Frears ("A Very English Scandal"), with a sure hand and a light wit; it's consistently entertaining. The really distinctive feature of the show, though, is the sleight of hand he and Graham employ to keep open the question of the Ingrams' guilt. Conversations cut off at ambiguous places; significant glances might signal complicity or shared bewilderment. The couple's lawyer argues that the "Millionaire" producers are able to build an unassailable narrative because they control the evidence; "Quiz" uses similar techniques to opposite effect, arguing that it's impossible to be sure of what happened. At times the show plays with our desire for an answer. A flashback that seems to offer us proof that Charles is lying is revealed to be part of his own testimony in court, in which he then offers an explanation for the apparent contradiction. Guilt and innocence slide around each other from one moment to the next. Charles, a major in the Royal Engineers, is both puffed up and eager to please, and Macfadyen uses his jutting jaw and a lurking terror in his eyes to convey Charles's ambient passive aggression, the elaborate way in which he has accommodated himself to being dominated by his bulldog wife. It's a quieter, more pleasant variation on the sycophant he plays in "Succession." In a similar vein, Clifford's Diana has a toned down version of the neurotic intensity of her character in "Fleabag." Both are good, as is McCrory as the tenacious lawyer. But the show's most memorable performance is given by Michael Sheen as the "Millionaire" host, Chris Tarrant. Without a trace of condescension, Sheen nails a certain kind of utilitarian charisma; his jaunty reading of the witness instructions when Tarrant is called to testify is a throwaway tour de force. If these performances are more diverting than memorable, it's probably because "Quiz" itself isn't as substantial as you might hope, given the big themes it dabbles in. It skates along nimbly on the surface of its mystery and its light social satire Charles and Diana may have royal sounding names, but they are, a prosecutor points out, "middle class, middle aged, middle England" and is content to stay there. In contrast to much of the current TV and streaming landscape, it makes you wish there were more of it its three 45 minute episodes (not including commercials) feel too slight. That "Quiz" avoids going too deep may make sense, though, if you consider that its real theme is the TV business's ability to profit from pain. The Ingrams' lives were ruined, but they brought a landslide of publicity to "Millionaire" and ITV, and the network exploited the scandal further in two highly rated documentaries. And last month, "Quiz" was a big hit in Britain on ITV. If the question is who was always going to make the real money, you don't need to phone a friend for the answer.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Judd Apatow has collected autographs since he was a boy. He began when he was about 9, and would write to celebrities Jackie Gleason, Gilda Radner, Andy Kaufman begging them to send signed photos. In high school, he cased autograph conventions. "I bought Harry Truman's," Mr. Apatow said. "I was very impressed with myself." He has never stopped, although he knows it is "a very obscure dad hobby." "But if you're not into clothes and you're not into cars, there's nothing for men to buy," he said. Mr. Apatow, 51, was walking into the Argosy Book Store in Midtown Manhattan, the sanctum sanctorum for autograph hounds, gulping down a brownie and an alkalized water. In New York to promote the third season of "Crashing," which he produces, his schedule hadn't allowed for lunch. He brushed down his sharp checked blazer and entered, greeting Naomi Hample, an Argosy owner and autograph cicerone. "He horrifies me sometimes," Ms. Hample said of her loyal and occasionally relentless customer. "He combs through my desk." Still, she presented Mr. Apatow with a complimentary Argosy T shirt and led him toward the rickety elevator that would hoist him to the sixth floor, where the autographs are kept. (The elevator then promptly broke.) Mr. Apatow scanned the framed autographs behind Ms. Hample's desk. "Here's a Maurice Sendak," he said. "That's pretty good." He moved on to a Frank Sinatra and a Mark Twain. "Would I want Brigham Young's autograph?" he asked himself. "I performed at Brigham Young University when I was 19 years old. And the audience was very polite." Handling the framed autograph, he nearly dropped it. "Oh, geez. Can I break things?" he asked Ms. Hample. He already had a Queen Elizabeth. "Isn't that weird? I'm trying to think if I bought it from you." He considered an Andy Warhol and a signed Peanuts cartoon. Ms. Hample tried to interest him in a letter from Sigmund Freud, which included a reference to a "15 year old hysterical child." Mr. Apatow thought about hanging it in his younger daughter's room. But his daughters don't share his hobby. "It would be their worst nightmare," he said. "I've never found anyone who was interested in looking at any of it." He said he probably showed them to his wife, the actress Leslie Mann, when they first met. "She was horrified, but polite," he said. He noticed a framed letter from Phil Silvers, a comedian of the 1950s. "Now you've got me!" he said. "I like weird letters from comedians." Mr. Apatow recently returned to standup comedy, which he had abandoned not long after that Brigham Young gig. He includes a penmanship joke in his new set ("Anything my daughter writes looks like a letter from the Zodiac killer to the police") and complains about how schools don't teach cursive writing anymore. "I get very mad at friends who have no autograph," he said. "Lena Dunham, her autograph is like one twisty line. Amy Schumer, too." Is Mr. Apatow's signature legible? "I do make an effort," he said. But no one wants it. He receives maybe three autograph requests a year. "I'll go on eBay to see what they sell for, and no one is making any money on my autograph," he said. (He may have a point.) His proteges' autographs probably sell better. Mr. Apatow is known as an ace talent spotter: Ms. Dunham, Ms. Schumer, Seth Rogen, the "Crashing" star Pete Holmes and others. "I think it's the same as being an autograph collector," he said. "It's just the part of me that hunts down interesting, funny people. Except now, I try to get them to make something with me." Unfortunately, most of the interesting, funny people on Argosy's sixth floor are dead. After looking at a signed book by Mel Brooks and then one by Steve Allen ("the first person I ever interviewed"), he started pawing at the unsorted autographs on Ms. Hample's desk: Cole Porter, Leo Tolstoy. Did she have any Johnny Carson? Not this time. A stack of Adolf Hitler's official stationery stopped him cold, but he was warmed by a photo of Annie Oakley, a fabled sharpshooter. Mr. Apatow thumbed through signed Playbills. "It's all Rex Harrison. Rex Harrison and Angela Lansbury," he said. But he found a few treasures, including a "Dracula" Playbill signed by Frank Langella. When Mr. Apatow's parents divorced when he was 12, his maternal grandparents took him to the "Dracula" revival to cheer him up. A little while later, his father showed up with more "Dracula" tickets, so he saw it again. "That's like a very strong divorce memory," he said. He began to browse more quickly, moving from display wall to display wall, past letters by Richard Pryor, Milton Berle and Kurt Vonnegut. "Yeats. Maybe I need a Yeats," he said. He considered a John Ritter photo a possible present for Mr. Holmes and a photo signed by the Platters, a group his grandfather had briefly produced, made out to Roy Cohn. He piled up his maybes (mostly comedians including Phil Silvers, George Jessel, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, along with Ray Liotta, Bing Crosby and assorted Playbills) and left the pile with Ms. Hample, who would sort through it, email him the prices and then mail him his selections. "I need a little distance," he said as he marched down the five flights. "I need to get away from my instinct to get too much. I go home and I think, 'Would I really hang up an autograph of the Platters to Roy Cohn?' Sometimes I go, 'You know what? I would.'"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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PARIS Last week, at the opening of the haute couture season, in the gardens of Les Invalides, the gold domed monument to France's military history where Napoleon is buried, Christian Dior created the world yet to be explored: Wooden crocodiles roamed over arid earth; giraffes through stands of bamboo; and eagles soared overhead beneath the canopy of a suspended map by the artist Pietro Ruffo. The next day, in the Grand Palais, Chanel rebuilt the Eiffel Tower, its girders plunging upward toward the glass ceiling, while in the shade of the structure's enormous metal limbs were assorted potted trees and green folding chairs meant to mimic Paris's most famous parks. And the day after that Jean Paul Gaultier ended his show with a model riding a bicycle chariot festooned with lace and feathers down the runway as snow fell behind and on either side the video lights of hundreds of iPhones illuminated her way. Yet by definition couture clothes that take a seamstress hundreds and even thousands of hours to make by hand, which are meant to last over decades and made for a single individual, to her body and her specifications derives its worth from the experience of intimacy. The tension between value systems was the subtext of the week. This particular discipline may be the most inaccessible of the whole clothing world, but it's a microcosm for a debate over an issue to which we can all, on some level, relate. Whether we can wear the stuff or not. There were other concerns, of course, running through the collections: the pulling down of borders and the lowering of barriers to entry, as the couture welcomed the American ready to wear labels Proenza Schouler and Rodarte, who merged their signature conceptual urbanity and twisted prettiness with the discipline of craft and classicism, and were the better for it. Not to mention the emergence of Wonder Woman as something of a muse of the season, complete with gold sequined catsuits and leather molded minidresses at Versace, and a tweedy Diana Prince influence almost across the board. (The 1940s and '50s are back, silhouettewise, as are suits.) But as Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative director of Valentino, said before a breakthrough couture show, "We are in a moment where everything is visible, where everything is said, so what becomes special is what you don't see." That was his theory anyway. He was not alone. Indeed, Giorgio Armani's entire collection was practically a metaphor for the idea. Entitled "Mystery," it featured layers of veiling over embroidery, shadowing painterly prints and creating a scrim of evening promise. Though the rationale behind some looks, especially the hobble skirts, was too much of a mystery to understand. What you don't see is, after all, what the couture is really good at: the painstaking stitches required to encrust every inch of an otherwise simple little Giambattista Valli 1960s minidress with paillettes of flowers (better than his overblown ball gown finales, which resemble the Titanic made tulle); the wearable sound waves of Iris Van Herpen's marriage of technology and craft. Even the inside of the Maison Margiela atelier, which guests were invited to enter after the label lost its previous site to a memorial for the French politician and feminist champion Simone Veil. It turned out to be a lucky accident, as the inside out nature of the designer John Galliano's clothes, which focused on the basic building blocks of glamour the corset, the nylon stocking, the trench coat and then combined them with the everyday (Fair Isle knits, tweeds) to elevate their essence, demanded attention. The better to realize that a belted corset composed of stalagmitelike shades of corrugated cardboard was actually organza, for example. Increasingly, however, the pleasure of connoisseurship seems to be forgotten in the drive to attract more and more eyeballs. But the choice does not come without a cost, and the trade off was clear on the catwalk. After all, the prize for Instagram interaction was won by according to analytics from the platform Dior, Chanel and Elie Saab, the latter known for a royal court's worth of warrior queen confections that wear all the workmanship on the sleeve (and skirt and train). They could blind you with embroidery. And yet the lingering memory of Dior and Chanel was the scale of the sets, which dwarfed the comparatively low key clothes on the runway. At Dior, in a show inspired in equal parts by the daywear in the archives of M. Dior and female explorers like Amelia Earhart, Freya Stark and Louise Boyd, the palette was earthy and angsty, the silhouette curved in at the waist from a small, soft shoulder and belled out to the calf, and the decoration was minimal: Embroidery on jackets and coats mapped, literally, the world; far flung continents were picked out in flowers made of feathers; and tiny tulle ruffles and feathers fogged in the body. Though they looked loyal to their antecedents almost to a fault (both house and historical time period), the heaviness had been leeched out of the garments by the skills of the atelier. But such technique the way fabric was seamed on the diagonal on the pelvis and then released at the thigh to create a waterfall of extravagant pleats is too subtle to carry the small screen. Just as the oversize curves of shoulders at Chanel, where full coverage clothes seemed the order of the day, from skirts tentlike and midcalf or skinny and spilling long under tunics to thigh high leather boots and detachable gauntlet sleeves, couldn't compete with the ersatz monument around them. Even the rosettes of flowers made from multicolored feathers on necklines and pockets and party dresses in glinting steel or full skirted satin, layered like doublets, didn't make an indelible impression. Mr. Lagerfeld took a different approach at Fendi. His third haute fourrure show might have been held in the Art Deco environs of the Theatre des Champs Elysees, but the stage was merely a backdrop to a collection that was a master class in transforming the tenets of impressionism into clothing. A pointillist landscape on an egg shape cape turned out to be made from thousands of tiny fur paillettes. The daisies and poppies and pastel blooms on an evening capelet were carved from fur. Ditto the jacket and pencil skirt of a suit, shaved thin as wool and traced by inky blooms, though the only way, really, to tell was to get up close and see it with your own eyes. Even then it would be hard to know for sure. Coats were sculpted just so with two pristine folds at the scapulars to create a hint of a cocoon at the back; princess collars raised just enough to transform the neck into an object of veneration; knits and dresses and boots and leggings an explosion of color embedded in the fabric itself and entirely controlled by the purity of the line. Dresses were made of strips of velvet, leather and chiffon covered by thousands of minute silver studs that had been pieced together, shaped to the torso and then released, and they spoke to both past and future but were unrestricted by any moment in time, just as the body beneath was unrestricted by any corsetry or binding. These clothes don't advertise their power; they project it inward, so the aura of confidence attaches to the person, not the outfit. It's a gossamer distinction, but an important one. And it was also present at Valentino, where Mr. Piccioli not only largely eschewed the obvious, but also many of the conventional rules of couture itself, treating daywear in a rainbow of colors with the throwaway mix and match ease of sportswear: pairing a long tuxedo shirt in blush chiffon with slouchy trousers and a capelike tabard; another louche pair of black pants with an oversize white shirt and an elaborately pieced cape flowing from a cropped vest tossed on top oh, this old thing? and a leaf green pleated skirt with a bronze chiffon sweatshirt banded in burgundy and a bubble gum pink cashmere coat tied together by a yellow ribbon. Closer inspection, however, revealed that the fluid effect of the skirt was achieved through the application of thousands of minute feathers to one side of each pleat, letting the other remain sheer; a tank dress wafted silver caviar beaded cilia but was as light as tissue paper; and a sleeveless lace gown was given depth by darker chiaroscuro sections collaged from three different kinds of mink.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Fashion & Style
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The new papal encyclical on the environment is a ringing call to action, a critique of consumerism and a prophetic warning about the dangers of ignoring what Pope Francis calls "the ecological crisis." But amid all his soaring rhetoric, did the pope get the science right? The short answer from climate and environmental scientists is that he did, at least to the degree possible in a religious document meant for a broad audience. If anything, they say, he may have bent over backward to offer a cautious interpretation of the scientific facts. For example, a substantial body of published science says human emissions have caused all the global warming that has occurred over the past century. Yet in his letter, Francis does not go quite that far, citing volcanoes, the sun and other factors that can influence the climate before he concludes that "most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases" released mainly by human activity. Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, pointed out that the bulk of the evidence suggests that solar changes and volcanoes have slightly counteracted the warming effect of greenhouse gases.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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NASA officials on Monday evening unveiled an updated budget request to Congress, seeking more than 1 billion in additional funding in what they called a down payment to accelerate the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024. Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator, also said that the mission back to the moon would be called Artemis. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, whose name was used by NASA for the series of spacecraft that first landed Americans on the moon in 1969. But the revision is just a request, and Congress must decide whether to back the Trump administration's plan to race back to the lunar surface. NASA had been aiming for a moon return in 2028 until Vice President Mike Pence announced in March that the administration wanted to push that ahead to 2024, during what could be a second term for President Trump. NASA's budget for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, is 21.5 billion. In March, the president's original budget request for the 2020 fiscal year sought to cut spending by 500 million. It now is seeking to add 1.1 billion, a swing of 1.6 billion. Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. The added money would include 651 million for the Space Launch System, the new large rocket NASA is developing, and the Orion capsule that would take astronauts to the moon and other deep space destinations. NASA is also seeking 1 billion to begin development of a commercial landing system to take astronauts to the moon's surface. NASA is also seeking 132 million for developing technologies like converting ice within craters at the moon's poles to water and 90 million for robotic exploration of the moon. Mr. Bridenstine said that even higher increases would be needed in future years and that NASA was still figuring how much that would be. He described the current request as a "down payment." No cuts would be made to other NASA programs, said Mr. Bridenstine, who emphasized that the agency's financing for the International Space Station and science programs would be secure. He added that he did not know what cuts might be made to other parts of the federal budget to pay for the moon program. The proposed NASA increase is part of a larger budget amendment sent by the White House to Congress on Monday night. The extra money for NASA and other items would be financed from surplus Pell Grant money, an administration official said, but no students would lose aid as a result. The budget amendment would take away another 1.9 billion from the Pell Grant program, the official said. Enrollment in the program has declined since 2011, leading to a surplus of 9 billion, the official said. Even with the proposed reduction, the program would have sufficient money to cover all costs through 2023, the official added. Under the NASA plan, a mission to land on the moon would take place during the third launch of the Space Launch System. Astronauts, including the first woman to walk on the moon, Mr. Bridenstine said, would first stop at the orbiting lunar outpost. They would then take a lander to the surface near its south pole, where frozen water exists within the craters. NASA is looking to commercial companies to develop the lander rather than doing that work itself. One possible option was revealed last week by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the owner of the rocket company Blue Origin. Even before the revised budget numbers were announced, some members of Congress appeared to be skeptical of the Trump administration's proposal. At a hearing this month, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said she wanted to better understand the reasoning behind the push. She noted that the Trump administration was seeking steep cuts in science research at other agencies, including 1 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 4.5 billion from the Department of Energy and 300 million from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "Based on the limited information provided to Congress, it is impossible to judge the merits of the president's budget amendment," Ms. Johnson said on Monday in a statement. "We don't how much money will be required in total to meet the arbitrary 2024 Moon landing deadline or how that money will be spent." Jack O. Burns, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado who in March spoke in favor of an early return to the moon before Mr. Pence and the National Space Council, said he was surprised the request was not higher. "I had expected at least 2 billion supplemental, maybe more," he said in an email. Dr. Burns said he thought NASA needs a budget of about 25 billion a year to achieve its lunar goal. Phil Larson, a former White House space adviser during the Obama administration, was skeptical that Congress would go along with any increase. "It is tough to see any kind of new spending being welcomed with open arms on both sides of the aisle," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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LONDON Not long after I arrived in Britain, I got lost in Athens. Or rather, I was wandering through a surreal suburb of the city a very green place, filled with beds and half dressed people who seemed as confused as I was. None of them, it appeared, were quite sure whether they were awake or asleep. There was a distinct feeling of danger in the air, as there usually is when order melts into chaos. At the same time, there was no denying that this was exactly the place that most of them wanted and perhaps needed to be. Such is the disorienting, delighting landscape that has been conjured for the Bridge Theater's hit production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." As directed by Nicholas Hytner, this immersive interpretation of one of Shakespeare's most performed plays is allowing theatergoers to escape the harsh British midsummer of 2019, with its floods and heat waves and sense of a nation unmoored by Brexit. In a moment when nothing seems fixed in a country that has always prided itself on its anchoring traditions, this "Midsummer" lets Londoners feel in control by losing control. If they choose (and they should, if they have a decent sense of balance and sturdy legs), audience members may stand and walk and occasionally gambol on the stage for the nearly three hours of the production. They are joined by a group of hymn singing Athenians who don't at first look like a whole lot of fun. These are stern folk, wearing drab attire that brings to mind the repressive culture of "The Handmaid's Tale." Moving in procession, the men lead, the women follow and nobody smiles. Not to worry. This rigid scheme of existence including its sexual power structure will soon be turned upside down and inside out. The floor of Bunny Christie's ostensibly naked green set cracks open to produce a crop of four posters with plump pillows, mattresses and sheets that turn into trapezes. And we can all dream a little dream together, forgetting and reconstituting who and what we are. This "Dream" was the second show I saw in London. The night before I had been at the London Palladium for a widely acclaimed revival of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," a musical I thought I never needed to see again. For that matter, I'd been wondering if I wanted to take in yet another "Midsummer Night's Dream." But these productions turned out to be ideal fare for a battered soul in an advanced state of jet lag. And it occurred to me that, even before I set foot on a plane, I'd been feeling jet lagged all summer discombobulated, bleary, apprehensive. Though I'm not about to equate Rice and Lloyd Webber with Shakespeare (I'm not that jet lagged), I found myself unexpectedly misty eyed at both shows, as if some inner pressure valve had been opened. And I was reminded that sometimes a few hours at the theater, whether silly or profound (or both, as in the case of "Dream"), can do as much good as a week's vacation. "Joseph," based on the Old Testament tale of the boy in rainbow hued outerwear who was nearly done in by his rivalrous brothers, was created more than 50 years ago. It's a slight, bouncy little piece of story theater (its first professional incarnation was just half an hour long) that has expanded over the years into a bloated, family friendly spectacle that often has urbane grown ups bolting for the bar. This latest version, directed by Laurence Connor, is big, all right, but in a gleeful, giddy way that matches its environs. The Palladium has been the setting for deluxe variety shows since the 1920s, with diverse headliners who have included the Three Stooges and Kathy Griffin, Frank Sinatra and Elton John, Judy Garland and Rufus Wainwright doing Judy Garland. Mr. Connor, who did a fine job directing Mr. Lloyd Webber's "School of Rock," has appropriately conceived his "Joseph" in that music hall tradition. It's a warm weather equivalent of a Christmas pantomime, with performers (including a multicast chorus of children) dressing up in deliberately hokey costumes, cutting vaudevillian capers and warbling insidiously tuneful, pastiche ditties that stick to the memory liked chewed bubble gum. Its ensemble strategically mixes elements that would have been familiar to Palladium audiences of yore. There is the fresh faced, stardom bound ingenue (the appealing newcomer Jac Yarrow, who sings with the whispery sincerity expected of Lloyd Webber heroes); the sentimental old favorite (the pop star Jason Donovan, who played Joseph on the same stage in 1991, here as a scene stealing Pharaoh) and the knock 'em dead marquee star. She sometimes pushes the limits of crowd courting charm. But she is expert at enlisting the audience in the complicity of spirited make believe. "It's still me!," she says exultantly, every time she shows up in a new disguise, a fake beard or an eye patch. Heaven help me, but I fell for it all and am even willing to forgive having Mr. Rice's singsong lyrics lodged in my head for the rest of the year. ("I look handsome, I look smart / I'm a walking work of art.") At the Bridge Theater, the role playing is conducted on a deeper level. This is a fluid "Dream" in which the lines of sexual attraction and control melt and morph. As is often the case, the same performers who portray Theseus, duke of Athens, and his betrothed, Hippolyta, also play the fairy king and queen, Oberon and Titania. In this instance, though, Mr. Hytner has reassigned crucial parts of the text, so that it's Titania (the formidable Gwendoline Christie, of "Game of Thrones") who transforms the would be thespian Bottom the Weaver (the deeply likable Hammed Animashaun) into an ass, with the assistance of her fairy minion, Puck (David Moorst, terrific). And it's a bewitched Oberon (a very dashing, very funny Oliver Chris) who falls head over heels for said ass. Since we have previously encountered Ms. Christie as Hippolyta, an unhappy captive bride to be, her dominance as Titania takes on that aspect of sweet revenge that dreams can sometimes provide. And the play's runaway mortal lovers (Isis Hainsworth, Tessa Bonham Jones, Paul Adeyefa and Kit Young) pair off in dreamily disconcerting combinations that in this version include same sex foreplay. An entourage of androgynous fairies (costumed in sequins and leotards by Christina Cunningham) floats above the audience, performing sinuous acrobatics (a homage to Peter Brook's fabled 1970 production), compounding the sense of a world in which even the rules of gravity have been suspended. For the show's finale, two full moons descend from above, bouncing balls to be batted about by the audience. And for a few ecstatic moments, theatergoers can pretend that this crazy, out of joint universe is their palpable, personal plaything.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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Until recently, if you were looking to buy a condominium with high ceilings, your choice was limited to prewar apartments, lofts or penthouse units. Now several developers are offering new condo projects that have soaring ceilings in more than half the building, giving buyers the option of taking a unit on a lower floor with ceilings 11 feet or higher. "Today, 11 foot ceilings are the new eight foot ceilings," said Izak Senbahar, the president of the Alexico Group, a developer behind the TriBeCa condo tower 56 Leonard. Unlike a kitchen that you can renovate to your liking, a ceiling can't be pushed higher once the building is constructed, he said. The 60 story condominium at 56 Leonard incorporates ceiling heights of 11 to 19 feet in each of its 145 units. "You can't fake the sense of space, air and light without high ceilings," Mr. Senbahar said. Higher ceilings generally translate into higher construction costs, but some developers feel the money is well spent, since high ceilings can help create grander spaces. The extra height can set a development apart from the pack and be a helpful marketing tool as the city's high end real estate market begins to soften. On a national level, most buyers of a standard home prefer nine foot ceilings on the first floor, according to a 2015 survey conducted by the National Association of Home Builders. In New York City, while prewar buildings tended toward nine foot ceilings, most postwar buildings were built with eight foot ceilings because it was more affordable to do so, according to Richard Lambeck, clinical associate professor and chairman of the construction management graduate program at the New York University School of Professional Studies Schack Institute of Real Estate. Apartments were compact, which also coincided with the availability of portable air conditioning units, he said. "With high ceilings, developers can lose an entire floor and, at the same time, add another 15 percent to their construction costs," Mr. Lambeck said. The need to use multiple sheetrock panels for the walls, add more bolts, and order customized doors and windows all add to the cost of the final product. Increasing the ceiling height from eight to nine feet adds an extra 4,000 to the cost of an average home, according to the home builders' survey. Arthur W. Zeckendorf, a principal of Zeckendorf Development, estimated that placing 11 foot ceilings in the 33 units at 520 Park Avenue was adding an extra 10 percent to his building costs, and adding 10 percent more time to the construction schedule for the 54 story structure. Nicholas Werner, a founder of Largo Investments, one of the developers of the Fitzroy in Chelsea, where all the rooms will have 11 foot ceilings, said, "There's no need to build a room that's an echo chamber, but we wanted to build a home that seemed gracious and proportionate." Technological advancement in building materials has also made it easier for developers to expand in volume, Mr. Werner said. For example, residences at the Fitzroy will have hydronic radiant floor heating, and not just in the bathroom, where it is customarily found, to better heat the entire home, since warm air rises. Larger windows that were selected in proportion to the higher ceilings add more natural light, which cuts electricity costs, he said. Vickey Barron, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, said she started to notice clients' asking about ceiling heights about five years ago. "I now have clients who will give up having a pool or other amenities in a building, but will not budge on ceiling height," she said. "Buying a home is an emotional thing, and that 'wow' factor a high ceiling provides is something you can't replace." Lori Goldstein, a fashion stylist and creator of the LOGO clothing line, is one such buyer. After living in a Chelsea loft for almost 15 years, she is set to close on an apartment at 10 Sullivan Street, a new condo complex on the southwestern edge of SoHo that has ceiling heights of 11 feet in all 22 units in the tower. In addition, four townhouses in the complex have 11.7 foot ceilings. "I can't stand being claustrophobic," Ms. Goldstein said. "There's something about a room that's taller than it is wider." To show potential buyers how one feels in an expansive room, some developers have taken the extra step of finding a showroom large enough to build an exact replica of a room with such height no small task in itself. "It's impossible to explain" the impact of ceiling height, he said. "You have to experience it." It took the developers behind 20 East End Avenue, where units will have 11 foot ceilings, about a year to find a commercial space for their showroom, according to Nicole Siciliano Trazzera, the sales director at the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, who is marketing the new building. "It's been the best sales tool," she said. "The reaction is utter amazement." None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Homes with large rooms and high ceilings are often sought by buyers with art collections. Every livable room at 180 East 88th Street will come with art rails that hang a few feet below the ceiling. Not only are the rails convenient for hanging art, but they also help bring one's sight line just a bit lower, making you feel more grounded in a room that is extra tall, Mr. McMillan said. And sometimes it's all about the view. When designing the Gibraltar, a new six story condo building going up at 160 West Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the architect Joseph Eisner said he wanted future residents to enjoy the views of Manhattan and the East River from the living room, which will have 11.3 foot ceilings. "I didn't consider lower ceiling heights, because I wanted the cleanest, freest feel," so common areas feel larger than they are, Mr. Eisner said. How to incorporate a sense of space in home design has always been part of the discussion for architecture students, said James Garrison, an architect and adjunct associate professor at the Pratt Institute's School of Architecture. "Sure, you can have bragging rights when you have high ceilings, but people can really feel space," he said. "And the way you design a room with height can bring a hierarchy to how certain rooms are utilized." Ashwin Y. Verma, a founder of Siras Development, which is building the Soori High Line on West 29th Street, where about 80 percent of the 31 condos will have 13 to 18 foot ceilings, says new condo construction will incorporate higher ceilings from here on. "I think the market is moving toward" measuring rooms in cubic feet, he said. "As a developer, the New York market is one of the few places where you can change the story on architecture like this and still get rewarded."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Unfrozen, confined and isolated on their little platforms, the workers move frequently in unison, a joyless expending of energy that would be more interesting to watch if it were more varied. Even their individual freak outs are much the same: Restless, they scratch and slap at their skin, swipe at their hair, seem to choke. Later in the piece, when they all come down off their platforms, able to make contact with one another, hostility and indifference are their primary modes. There's almost no counterpoint though maybe that's what the band was meant to provide. Strangely, the dancers and musicians didn't really meld except in a couple of pulse quickening, drum driven moments created for "monumental." The rest of the score comes from the band's pre existing music. Ms. Holzer's texts, from her 1980s series "The Living Series," mostly fit in well, as do William Morrison's projected films, particularly the images of traffic choked highways at dusk. Directed by Ms. Gingras, with chilly lighting by Marc Parent, it's a good looking production. Yet "monumental" was first staged, without the live music, in 2005 when BlackBerry was king, the iPhone was still a rumor, and the economic crash was three years off. The way we work, and worry about work, has changed since then; if anything, we're more disconnected now, more aware of the ephemerality of employment. But with its army of miserable white collar drones, "monumental" feels stuck in that past.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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As a grave, it was way too small for a body, not that there was a body, or ever would be. But it was as close to a burial as the deceased would ever have. Under a leaden Berlin sky on a blustery November afternoon, a small group of mourners gathered outside the creamy, red roofed Wilmersdorf apartment complex that the couple had fled on the eve of World War II in 1939. At the threshold, two cobblestones were dug out, and replaced by two new stones topped with shiny brass plaques about four inches square and embossed "HIER WOHNTE ..." With its ancient birdcage elevator, austere furnishings and moderate prices ( 85 with shared bath), it exuded a, well, funky prewar aura I remembered fondly from a previous visit. Mostly, I loved that from 1931 to 1937 it had been the apartment of the 1910s Danish silent film legend Asta Nielsen, whose movie posters adorned the halls. We'd made dinner reservations at the popular former brewery, Katz Orange, or Orange Cat, that did wondrous things with cruciferous vegetables. With little time, we crisscrossed the city to absorb the grim lessons of history that Berlin teaches in spades, along with an almost fetishistic devotion to contrition and atonement: the bombed ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Checkpoint Charlie and remnants of the despised wall, the Brandenburg Gate and the labyrinthine Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe with its 2,711 suffocating stelae. But we were there for our own memorial. In what has been called the world's largest monument, more than 53,000 Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks (although they lie flush with the sidewalk), have so far been installed at victims' last chosen residence throughout Germany and 20 other European countries, including Hitler's birthplace in Austria, Braunau am Inn. The nonprofit initiative, documenting the fate of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and all minorities persecuted by the Nazis including some who survived was begun in 1993 by a non Jewish Cologne sculptor, Gunter Demnig, who takes pride in hand crafting and installing the stones himself, charging 120 euros each, or about 135. Some have called underfoot monuments disrespectful, with the Munich city government, at the behest of the Jewish community, barring them altogether. But I found them deeply touching. As Mr. Demnig told The New York Times in 2003, "if you read the name of one person, calculate his age, look at his old home and wonder behind which window he used to live, then the horror has a face to it." Gunter Demnig, a German artist, creates and installs Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks, at the entrances to buildings where Jews and other victims of the Nazis lived. Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times With the internet feeding a growing interest in tracing lost ancestors, the Stolperstein phenomenon shows no sign of fading. Indeed, the waiting list is long, with no new installation appointments available now until February 2017. So I was astonished on Oct. 13 less than nine months after applying and six months after being warned of "a long delay" to open my email to a curt message, "Bitte beachten Sie den Anhang." Clicking open the attachment, I found an announcement that just a month away, on Nov. 14, from precisely 14:05 to 14:20 wedged between four other ceremonies nearby two stones would be laid for the Diamants. Would I travel to Berlin to participate? None of this would have come to pass had I not found a cache of letters and documents among my mother's belongings after she died in New York in 1984. In German, typed and inked on flaking sheets, they looked intriguing if not ominous. I leafed through them quickly and unaccountably put them away, carrying them from move to move across the country, until one day about five years ago when I came across them again and started reading. I knew I owed Szilard my existence his teenage friend, Hans Blumenthal, and Szilard's sister Rose had fallen in love, married and emigrated to America in 1929. They became my parents. By 1937, when the letters in the file begin, Szilard and Hella Better, who wed in 1932, are living in an attractive circa 1910 garden apartment complex at Guntzelstrasse 49 in Wilmersdorf, a chic district of western Berlin that since Weimar years had been drawing professionals, including many Jews, intellectuals and artists. From photos, they appear to have always just stepped out of a fashion shoot; Hella coifed and soignee, Szilard in jacket and cravat, often smoking a pipe. Throughout the tightening Nazi dragnet, they are active dues paying members of the Jewish community, and Hella is working in the youth office. By 1938, with Szilard forced out of his metals business, they are citing these connections in desperate financial appeals to the Jewish aid association Hilfsverein fur Juden in Deutschland as they dangle on a waiting list for visas to America where their in laws, my parents, are vouching for them. On Feb. 16, 1939, Szilard's residence permit as a Czech national expires, and they make plans to decamp for his homeland and await visas there. Meanwhile he applies for a transit camp in England en route to America, noting his high school training in economics and metals and fluency in German, English, French, Polish, Hungarian and Hebrew. But nothing is happening. Amid frantic efforts for a hearing, they unleash a final burst of letters to the Hilfsverein until the answer comes on April 3, 1939: "We are fundamentally not in a position to provide subsidies for passage to the U.S.A. ..." Whereupon the file ends. (I recently donated the originals to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.) But little of the story came together until much, much later, although I had, over the years, made repeated trips to Berlin. In 2011, I returned to show our two daughters our ancestral city and track down, at long last, a special address. Guntzelstrasse is a long street, and it seemed as if we walked for miles before finding No. 49 in a pleasant residential neighborhood of shade trees and small shops. We paused outside the entrance to an inner garden court, green and peaceful. So this is where they lived ... I found a custodian sweeping up and asked if by any chance anyone was still there from before the war. He doubted it. But I left him my card. We were back in New York when I heard from a tenant, Ingrid Broesicke. As the building's longest occupant (since 1948 when she was 8, as I later learned), she emailed to say my family story would be of great interest, as she was a nurse who did "remembrance work." Was I looking into Stolpersteine? But days later she had bad news. "Unfortunately, it has not been possible to clarify the fate of your uncle." German federal archives had no record that my uncle had ever lived there. That was crazy. All the letters I had were return addressed to him there. Now, finally, I began a more systematic inquiry. The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, a project of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, had two testimonials, filed decades apart by Hella's two sisters in Israel. Unfortunately their accounts conflicted, putting Szilard's death in Bergen Belsen in Germany in 1943 or in Majdanek in Poland in April 1942. The sisters had died. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's collection of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, yielded a startling twist. After nearly half a century had passed, someone had asked the Red Cross for further information on Szilard. The inquiry had turned up a list of Jews aboard Transport II from Nitra, Slovakia, toward Lublin, Poland, on April 15, 1942. Szilard and Hella appeared as numbers 729 and 730. According to an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Buechler, writing in "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" in 1991, Slovakia was one of the first of Nazi Germany's satellite states to deport Jews to death camps. From March 26 to Oct. 20, 1942, almost 58,000 Jews were put aboard 57 trains, 19 sent north to Auschwitz and the rest beyond to the Lublin district, including Majdanek. Few survived. Astonishingly, the Red Cross file revealed, the person requesting the information in 1991 was none other than Hella now Helena Tirkel of Armadale, Victoria, Australia. Four days after she and Szilard had been put aboard the deportation train, they were separated in Lublin. I had known she survived, but no details. Searching her listed address on the internet turned up a phone number. Which is how I found relatives I never knew I had a grandniece of Hella's in Baltimore, other relatives in Israel, and a stepcousin, my aunt's adopted son, Andrew Tirkel, who was able to provide a striking new dimension. Andrew turned out to be a 66 year old scientist/engineer in East Brighton, Victoria, a beachy suburb of Melbourne, with affiliations at Monash University in Melbourne and the University of Adelaide. By Skype and email, he told me that his parents, Alfred and Sonia, had survived the Holocaust by fleeing east to Kazakhstan; after the war, they returned to Poland, where Andrew was born in 1949. Three weeks later his mother died in botched surgery. When Andrew was 3, friends introduced his widowed father to Hella, who had turned up alive in Warsaw. She moved in with them in 1952; the couple married in 1955 and in 1960 won permission to emigrate, reaching Australia via Switzerland. Alfred died eight years later, widowing Hella once again. I felt sick. I knew that my parents and grandmother had been in touch with her but I had stupidly never sought details. I'd had Szilard's letters since 1984. In all that time, I could have reached out to her, or even met her. She had never confided much, Andrew said. What he knew he had gleaned from records and her occasional stories. Once in 1992, he accompanied her on a return visit to Katowice, Poland. They were caught in a traffic jam, and Hella freaked out, flashing back to the railway station and a train to Auschwitz. Then a Polish researcher I had found through the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw located Hella's passport file under the Communist regime. Appealing yet another refusal of her application, in 1957, to emigrate with her new family, Hella said she had been put aboard a boxcar to Auschwitz. They waited 48 hours for a transfer to Sobibor where, of some 5,000 Jews, a hundred were selected for work. She was one of the lucky ones. Her husband and "son," she told the authorities, were sent to their deaths in Majdanek. But Hella had no son anyone knew of, although she told Andrew she had once undergone an abortion, forced or otherwise. Hella went on to say she was transported to Krychow (variously Kirschhof or Griechhof), a labor camp associated with Sobibor, under the command of the notorious Franz Stangl, who later died in prison while serving life for mass murder. Even as a child, she said, she reacted angrily when her mother and others claimed ignorance of the atrocities. "At least admit," she now said, "you stood behind the door and made in your pants when they dragged the Jews out." So years later, herself a mother of a grown son in the restaurant business in United States, she busied herself in "remembrance work," spending time in Auschwitz working with the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and now volunteering at a Berlin welcome center for Syrian migrants flooding into Germany. A devout Christian, she said she was shocked to discover in 2000 that 42 area churches, according to their own archives, had run a wartime forced labor camp using Ukrainian prisoners to tend cemeteries. She and fellow congregants tracked down 10 survivors and raised several million dollars for their support. She told me she had spent the last few years arguing for Stolpersteine for Szilard and Hella. I had had no idea. Then it was time. From a shelf in her pantry, Ingrid retrieved a bouquet of white roses and an armful of tea lights. We walked out to find a dozen neighbors gathered at the building entrance. A few minutes before 2, a van pulled up with Gunter Demnig, a stocky figure in a blue work shirt, vest and safari hat. Carrying tools in a bucket and two shiny new Stolpersteine, he stepped across the sidewalk and with a small electric concrete saw sliced out two cobblestones, smashing them apart with a mallet. He scooped out loose gravel and was about to insert the new stones when I stopped him. I placed two small black and white photos of Szilard and Hella in the excavation. Ingrid and the other neighbors scattered the white roses and lit the candles. A duo of husband and wife violinists, Daniela Jung of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Reinhold Wolf of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, set their baby carriage aside and played Mozart. I came prepared to say a few words about Szilard and Hella but at the last minute revised my remarks to begin with the victims in Paris, massacred the day before. "It didn't end with the Third Reich," I managed, quaveringly (This would become even more horrifyingly true after Orlando.) Ingrid called my attention to an array of other brass topped stones sunk into the pavement at Guntzelstrasse 49, which she said she went out to polish from time to time. "Twenty one," she said. "Your uncle and aunt make 23."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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The National Institutes of Health announced on Thursday that it was planning to lift its ban on funding some research that injects human stem cells into animal embryos. The N.I.H. announced its proposal in a blog post by Carrie Wolinetz, the associate director for science policy, and in the Federal Register. The purpose is to try to grow human tissues or organs in animals to better understand human diseases and develop therapies to treat them. Researchers have long been putting human cells into animals like pieces of human tumors in mice to test drugs that might destroy the tumors but stem cell research is fundamentally different. The stem cells are put into developing embryos where they can become any cells, like those in organs, blood and bone. If the funding ban is lifted, it could help patients by, for example, encouraging research in which a pig grows a human kidney for a transplant. But the very idea of a human animal mix can be chilling, and will not meet with universal acceptance. In particular, when human cells injected into an animal embryo develop in part of that animal's brain, difficult questions arise, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, Davis. "There's no clear dividing line because we lack an understanding of at what point humanization of an animal brain could lead to more humanlike thought or consciousness," he said. The N.I.H.'s plan will most likely go into effect in the fall perhaps with some modifications after a 30 day comment period that is now open to the public and researchers. The N.I.H., which would be a major source of federal funds for this type of work, imposed the moratorium in September to consider concerns about the research. The studies were just beginning, and the N.I.H. did not have any projects underway involving human animal chimeras, a term derived from mythological creatures that were part goat, lion and snake. But Renate Myles, a spokeswoman, said, "We watch the state of the science and knew that this was where the science was heading." For scientists, the moratorium was "a little jarring," said Dr. George Q. Daley, a Harvard professor and the director of the stem cell transplantation program at Boston Children's Hospital. Two months later, the N.I.H. convened a workshop to hear from researchers and experts in animal welfare. Two types of experiments that are being considered for funding would still have to undergo a review by an N.I.H. advisory committee. The first involves the addition of human stem cells to the embryos of animals before the embryos reach a stage when organs are starting to develop. Because nonhuman primates like monkeys and chimpanzees are so genetically close to people, researchers working with such primates would have to wait until an embryo was further developed before adding human stem cells, according to the proposal. The second type of study introduces stem cells into embryos of animals other than rodents where the cells could get into and modify the animals' brains. Of particular concern is creating chimeras with human cells in the brain. The N.I.H. would continue its ban on funding any research that could result in an animal with human sperm or eggs that would then be bred. All of the N.I.H.'s proposals, though, apply only to the work that is financed with taxpayer money. Research supported by private donors or companies would not be affected. Dr. Daley described some of the work researchers had been doing in this area. First, they wanted to know if they had isolated new types of stem cells ones that could turn into any type of tissue or organ. Accomplishing that involves putting the new cells into an embryo and seeing if they turn into the placenta, as well as every cell type in the adult animal. In other experiments, they wanted to look at human stem cells that developed into very specific tissues. For example, one team of researchers found that if they put rat stem cells into the embryo of a mouse that was missing genes needed to make a pancreas, they ended up with a mouse that had a rat pancreas. Now, Dr. Daley said, the hope is to do the same sort of experiments with pigs missing genes for organs like a kidney or a liver and see if human stem cells can be used to grow human organs in the animals for transplants. "It's science fiction today, but there has been enough progress in rat to mouse and even in pigs that it is at least theoretically possible," Dr. Daley said. Another team studied the use of human stem cells in mice embryos in the hope of eventually understanding human psychiatric disorders. Dr. Wolinetz of the N.I.H. said during a teleconference that she expected "some on the job learning" about what would happen with chimeras that had human cells in their brains. "There is a lot we don't understand about the brain," she said, "which is one reason the possibility of these animal models is really exciting." The work is disturbing to many. But does the unease reflect the novelty of the ideas, like concerns that surfaced with the advent of heart transplants, which were first met with revulsion and then embraced by the public? Or is this work of a different ilk?
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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A beast calls in the distance. Hearing a low rumble, you might imagine the source will be an unholy cross between a wild boar and a chain saw. The message is unmistakable: I'm here, I'm huge and you can either come mate with me or stay out of my way. Like online dating, the soundscape of the animal world is rife with exaggerations about size, which animals use to scare off rivals and attract mates. Gazelles, howler monkeys, bats and many more creatures have evolved to create calls with deep sonic frequencies that sound as if they come from a much larger animal. Now scientists have proposed this same underlying pressure to exaggerate size might be linked to an even deeper mystery. It could have spurred mammals toward developing the ability to make a wider array of possible calls, to mimic sounds after hearing them and maybe even speech, what scientists call vocal learning. "We are offering one possible way for vocal learning to have evolved," says Maxime Garcia, a biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who suggested the relationship with his colleague, Andrea Ravignani, in the journal Biology Letters this month. Their idea builds off previous studies on vocal learning in humans. Beyond just opera singers, beatboxers and Michael Winslow from the "Police Academy" movies, we all have some level of control over the frequencies of our voices. "I can tell you to lower your pitch or try to sound big, and you can soound like thissss," said Katarzyna Pisanski at the University of Lyon in France, affecting a deep voice. But this power to voluntarily deceive seems to make us unique among our closest relatives. Even captive apes seem to have only very limited control over their voices. "You can't tell another primate to do this," she says. Traditionally, scientists have reasoned that the vocal control of Homo sapiens was a rung on the ladder of our evolution of speech. But in 2016, biologist David Reby and others, including Dr. Pisanski, argued that, instead, humans became acoustic "cheaters" because of evolutionary pressures to sound bigger and more masculine. Now Dr. Garcia and Dr. Ravignani have applied the same idea to the animal world. Among many species that cheat by willfully modulating their voices, previous experiments show a correlation: Many can also imitate sounds. Elephants, for example, can make sounds through their mouths or their long, stretchy trunks. "Going through one way or the other, the characteristics will change drastically, and change the impression of body size," Dr. Garcia says. "And it happens they are vocal learners, too." One of the best examples may be Hoover, a harbor seal who spent much of his life heckling visitors at the New England Aquarium in a thick, impossibly human Maine accent. Hoover died in 1985. But scientists confirmed last year that seals even much less talented ones really could learn to change the same sonic frequencies that also hint at their size. At least 164 non primate mammal species are either confirmed vocal learners or related to one and can produce frequencies far from what you might expect based on their body size, Dr. Garcia and Dr. Ravignani found. Now they hope to see if screening for animals that exaggerate size in their calls might be a good way to pick which animals to test next for vocal learning abilities. The idea of a deeper connection will be hard to prove or disprove, says Dr. Pisanski, who didn't participate in the current study. "The biggest impact this article will have is by looking at the role of vocal control outside of primates, and comparing a large number of mammals," she said. "This is something we really need to do."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Novak Djokovic, the world's top ranked male tennis player, apologized on Tuesday as he announced that he and his wife, Jelena, had tested positive for the coronavirus. His mea culpa came after days of growing criticism over a tournament he organized, after which other players and coaches were also found to be infected. "I am so deeply sorry our tournament has caused harm," Djokovic said on social media. The exhibition event, called the Adria Tour, was supposed to bring some of the world's best players to Balkan nations, including Serbia, where Djokovic is from, and provide some income for the participants and some welcome entertainment to tennis fans who haven't seen professional games since March. Social distancing was not enforced in the stands during the series, and face masks were a rare sight. Players mingled freely, exchanging hugs and handshakes, playing pickup soccer and basketball, and even dancing the limbo one night in Belgrade, Serbia. At the tournament, players posed for photographs with workers, tournament officials and spectators. No systematic coronavirus testing was required of the participants before the event began, according to the organizers. Some Croatian tennis officials are calling for the resignation of Nikolina Babic, president of the Croatian Tennis Federation. Besides the Djokovics, two coaches and at least three prominent players tested positive for the virus: Grigor Dimitrov, Borna Coric and Viktor Troicki, a Serb whose wife, Aleksandra, also tested positive. That prompted fears among the authorities in Croatia and Serbia that the athletes might have started a cluster of infections. In Zadar, a small coastal town in Croatia that had no confirmed infections until it hosted a leg of the competition, the authorities were left scrambling to trace and test people who might have come in contact with Dimitrov, a Bulgarian who said on Sunday after returning to his home base in Monaco that he had tested positive. "When we saw the crowds, everyone was surprised to see an event of that size come back so soon," said Bob Bryan, the veteran American doubles champion who watched the action from his home in Florida. "I guess the cases were low in Croatia, and they thought they could. It's a harsh reminder that there is still a pandemic going on and everyone has to behave responsibly." Goran Ivanisevic, a former Wimbledon champion from Croatia who now coaches Djokovic, was the director of the event in Zadar. Ivanisevic, who said he had tested negative for the coronavirus, said it was unclear where and when Dimitrov contracted it. Ivanisevic said Dimitrov traveled to Serbia from Los Angeles and then traveled to Bulgaria before arriving in Croatia. Ivanisevic said local health officials informed the tour organizers that there was no requirement to test players or other attendees upon arrival if they were asymptomatic. "He came here on Wednesday and was complaining about his elbow," Ivanisevic said by telephone, referring to Dimitrov. "The first time Grigor said he was not feeling great in general was on Friday, and on Saturday he played his first match against Coric. He didn't look very good." Dimitrov withdrew from his second match on Saturday, then decided to leave the event and return to Monaco. Ivanisevic said the coronavirus was almost impossible to understand. "I was two weeks with Marco Panichi, who is Novak's fitness coach," Ivanisevic said. "I was with him night and day, and he is positive, and I am negative, so how to explain that?" Djokovic returned to Belgrade with his family after the tournament's final on Sunday was called off. "Everything we did in the past month, we did with a pure heart and sincere intentions," Djokovic said in a statement announcing his positive test. "Our tournament meant to unite and share a message of solidarity and compassion throughout the region." He said before the event began in Belgrade this month that the tour was following guidelines from local authorities by not imposing strict restrictions on player contact and by allowing spectators to attend matches. "We believed the tournament met all health protocols and the health of our region seemed in good condition to finally unite people for philanthropic reasons," Djokovic said Tuesday. "We were wrong, and it was too soon. I cannot express enough how sorry I am for this and every case of infection." Djokovic caused a stir in April after he suggested that he would rather not be vaccinated against the coronavirus. He has said he wants to know what is best for his body, while keeping an open mind. He has spoken frequently about his belief in natural healing and ventured far outside the mainstream in a podcast last month by maintaining that "molecules in the water react to our emotions." But he sounded ready to embrace more conventional medical methods on Tuesday, urging all those who attended the Adria Tour or who were in contact with any attendees to be tested and to practice social distancing. Djokovic, whose primary organizational role in the tour was to recruit the players, said that his two young children Stefan, 5, and Tara, 2 had tested negative for the virus and that he would remain in isolation in Belgrade for the next 14 days and be retested later this week. The remainder of the tour, scheduled for Banja Luka and Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been canceled. "It's easy to be a general after a fight," Ivanisevic said. "Everybody is smart now, and they are attacking Novak. He tried to do a great thing, a humanitarian thing. We were locked down for three months. He organized this tour. The players came in Belgrade and we had good tennis and a good atmosphere. Everything in Serbia and everything in Croatia was done with the recommendations by the government." Three other leading players who took part in the tour Marin Cilic, Alexander Zverev and Andrey Rublev announced on Monday that they had tested negative for the virus but would also self isolate for two weeks. Dominic Thiem, the Austrian ranked No. 3, who won the Belgrade leg of the tour, has since played in another exhibition event in France. He has tested negative three times for the virus. It is unclear whether he, too, will be required to self isolate. Djokovic, 33, is not only the top player in the world, he is also president of the ATP Player Council, which has been actively involved in planning for the return of the regular men's tour. The tour has been shut down since March because of the pandemic and is now scheduled to resume in mid August at the earliest. The plan is to do so without spectators and with strict testing and health protocols in place. Several players have criticized Djokovic's decision to organize the Adria Tour without any such measures, arguing that it not only risked public health, but sent the wrong message to the wider world. "Apparently there's a pandemic," Andy Roddick, a former No. 1 from the United States, wrote on Twitter. "A horror show," Bruno Soares, a Brazilian doubles star who is also a member of the player council, said in an interview with GloboEsporte. "With the situation in the world, even if you are at the North Pole, you don't go out and party and post the photos on Instagram." Even Ivanisevic conceded that the limbo dance, in which he took part, might have been over the top. "OK, maybe you didn't need this," he said. "But they are all individuals. Nobody forced anybody to come into that club. Nobody forced anybody to dance. Nobody can tell you go on the stage, take your shirt off and dance. And how do you know anyone even got infected at that party?"
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Anhelina Kalinina thought she had hit the jackpot just by playing in the United States Open. When tennis officials first announced the initial field of 128 total players in the men's and women's singles draws, Kalinina did not make the cut. But then, players kept dropping out, mostly because they did not want to deal with the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic and the hassles of traveling, including being confined to a Long Island hotel for several weeks. Players in the U.S. Open had to agree to a lengthy set of restrictions as the tournament's organizers attempted to create a so called bubble, an environment that would be mostly self contained to help prevent the spread of the virus. Kalinina, who lives in Kyiv, Ukraine, kept climbing up the list of alternates. Then, a little more than a week before the tournament, she got in. She flew 5,000 miles, landed in New York last Monday and began practicing the next day. By Thursday, her luck had turned. She drew the No. 1 seed, Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic, as her first round opponent. Their match lasted 62 minutes, with Pliskova winning 6 4, 6 0. "A little tough to go out and play the top seed in my first match," said Kalinina, who struggled to find hitting partners over the past five months in Ukraine. Damir Dzumhur's luck was nearly as bad. After more than two weeks in New York, the Bosnian's stay was cut short after the world No. 1 Novak Djokovic sent him out in straight sets in the first round on Monday. "My friends were telling me how lucky I was to be in New York," Dzumhur said after his loss. "I keep telling them, 'Don't be jealous.'" The health crisis has wreaked havoc on sports and life in countless ways. At the U.S. Open, it is making tough first round matchups and quick exits feel especially cruel. In normal years, a tournament entry, even for those who do not last very long, comes with a free room at a Midtown Manhattan hotel and a chance to enjoy the city's nightlife and shopping during any downtime. But this year, for most participants, an entry has meant at least two weeks at a hotel in the middle of parking lot in Uniondale on Long Island and few extracurricular options other than arcades and cafe areas at the hotel or the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Dzumhur traveled from Belgrade and spent 16 days in the bubble. He lost in the second round in the Western Southern Open, which preceded the U.S. Open and was held on the same site. His U.S. Open run ended in one hour, 58 minutes. For three total matches in New York, Dzumhur will have ultimately spent two plus weeks in relative seclusion and traveled 9,000 miles in the air. That sort of Grand Slam experience is getting old for Dzumhur, ranked 109th in the world. His last three Grand Slam tournaments he drew Roger Federer, then Stan Wawrinka and Djokovic in the first round. Three champions right off the bat the tennis equivalent of being dealt a 16 at the blackjack table. Dzumhur said he has no regrets about this trip, though. During his time in the bubble he burned through nearly all five seasons of "Breaking Bad," which he enjoyed, and got to be back at work, an opportunity not lost on many tennis players who have been without their primary source of income since March. He had his chances, too, against Djokovic, missing a handful of break points in the second set before Djokovic pulled away to win 6 1, 6 4, 6 1. "I don't mind playing Nole," Dzumhur said, using the nickname of his good friend, Djokovic, "but maybe next time I can get him in a third or a fourth round." Ironically, Dzumhur probably came into this tournament as well prepared as any other journeyman following the long layoff. Belgrade, where he lives, is a hotbed of tennis talent. He hit often with the gaggle of pros who live or spend time in and around the city Viktor Troicki, Filip Krajinovic, and occasionally Djokovic at a club owned by a friend. Even though the club was closed to the public, the friend opened it for the local professionals so they could stay in shape.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Dr. Giorgio Franyuti is usually in the remote jungles of Mexico diagnosing T.B. But since the pandemic, he has worked at a makeshift hospital treating coronavirus patients in Mexico City.Credit...Meghan Dhaliwal for The New York Times Dr. Giorgio Franyuti is usually in the remote jungles of Mexico diagnosing T.B. But since the pandemic, he has worked at a makeshift hospital treating coronavirus patients in Mexico City. It begins with a mild fever and malaise, followed by a painful cough and shortness of breath. The infection prospers in crowds, spreading to people in close reach. Containing an outbreak requires contact tracing, as well as isolation and treatment of the sick for weeks or months. This insidious disease has touched every part of the globe. It is tuberculosis, the biggest infectious disease killer worldwide, claiming 1.5 million lives each year. Until this year, TB and its deadly allies, H.I.V. and malaria, were on the run. The toll from each disease over the previous decade was at its nadir in 2018, the last year for which data are available. Yet now, as the coronavirus pandemic spreads around the world, consuming global health resources, these perennially neglected adversaries are making a comeback. "Covid 19 risks derailing all our efforts and taking us back to where we were 20 years ago," said Dr. Pedro L. Alonso, the director of the World Health Organization's global malaria program. It's not just that the coronavirus has diverted scientific attention from TB, H.I.V. and malaria. The lockdowns, particularly across parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, have raised insurmountable barriers to patients who must travel to obtain diagnoses or drugs, according to interviews with more than two dozen public health officials, doctors and patients worldwide. Fear of the coronavirus and the shuttering of clinics have kept away many patients struggling with H.I.V., TB and malaria, while restrictions on air and sea travel have severely limited delivery of medications to the hardest hit regions. About 80 percent of tuberculosis, H.I.V. and malaria programs worldwide have reported disruptions in services, and one in four people living with H.I.V. have reported problems with gaining access to medications, according to U.N. AIDS. Interruptions or delays in treatment may lead to drug resistance, already a formidable problem in many countries. Malaria season has begun in Africa, which has 90 percent of malaria deaths in the world, but the normal strategies for prevention distribution of insecticide treated bed nets and spraying with pesticides have been curtailed because of lockdowns. According to one estimate, a three month lockdown across different parts of the world and a gradual return to normal over 10 months could result in an additional 6.3 million cases of tuberculosis and 1.4 million deaths from it. A six month disruption of antiretroviral therapy may lead to more than 500,000 additional deaths from illnesses related to H.I.V., according to the W.H.O. Another model by the W.H.O. predicted that in the worst case scenario, deaths from malaria could double to 770,000 per year. Several public health experts, some close to tears, warned that if the current trends continue, the coronavirus is likely to set back years, perhaps decades, of painstaking progress against TB, H.I.V. and malaria. The Global Fund, a public private partnership to fight these diseases, estimates that mitigating this damage will require at least 28.5 billion, a sum that is unlikely to materialize. If history is any guide, the coronavirus's impact on the poor will be felt long after the pandemic is over. The socioeconomic crisis in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, for example, led to the highest rates in the world of a kind of TB that was resistant to multiple drugs, a dubious distinction the region holds even today. The starting point in this ruinous chain of events is a failure to diagnose: The longer a person goes undiagnosed, and the later treatment begins, the more likely an infectious disease is to spread, sicken and kill. For malaria, a short delay in diagnosis can swiftly turn fatal, sometimes within just 36 hours of a spiking fever. "It's one of those diseases where we cannot afford to wait," Dr. Alonso said. Apprehensive about malaria's rise in West Africa, the W.H.O. is now considering giving entire populations antimalarial drugs a strategy of last resort used during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the Boko Haram insurgency. Across sub Saharan Africa, fewer women are coming to clinics for H.I.V. diagnosis. A six month disruption in access to drugs that prevent H.I.V. positive pregnant women from passing the infection to their babies in utero could increase H.I.V. infections in children by as much as 139 percent in Uganda and 162 percent in Malawi, according to U.N. AIDS. Diminishing diagnostic capacity may have the greatest effect on TB, leading to dire consequences for households because, like the coronavirus, the bacterium spreads most efficiently in indoor air and among people in close contact. Each person with TB can spread the disease to another 15 individuals over a year, sharply raising the possibility of people infected while indoors spreading it among their communities once lockdowns end. The prospect is especially worrisome in densely populated places with high rates of TB, such as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the townships of South Africa. There, he has seen nine patients with a sputum filled cough characteristic of TB that began months earlier but who were presumed to have Covid 19. The patients later contracted the coronavirus in the hospital and became seriously ill. At least four have died. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. "Nobody is testing for TB at any facility," he said. "The mind of clinicians in Mexico, as well as decision makers, is stuck with Covid 19." "TB is the biggest monster of them all. If we're talking about deaths and pandemics, 10 million cases a year," he said, Covid doesn't compare yet to that toll. India went into lockdown on March 24, and the government directed public hospitals to focus on Covid 19. Many hospitals shuttered outpatient services for other diseases. The impact on TB diagnoses was immediate: The number of new cases recorded by the Indian government between March 25 and June 19 was 60,486, compared with 179,792 during the same period in 2019. The pandemic is also shrinking the supply of diagnostic tests for these killers as companies turn to making more expensive tests to detect the coronavirus. Cepheid, the California based manufacturer of TB diagnostic tests, has pivoted to making tests for the coronavirus. Companies that make diagnostic tests for malaria are doing the same, according to Dr. Catharina Boehme, the chief executive of the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics. Coronavirus tests are much more lucrative, at about 10, compared with 18 cents for a rapid malaria test. The pandemic has hindered the availability of drugs for H.I.V., TB and malaria worldwide by interrupting supply chains, diverting manufacturing capacity and imposing physical barriers for patients who must travel to distant clinics to pick up the medications. And these shortages are forcing some patients to ration their medications, endangering their health. In Indonesia, the official policy is to provide a month's supply of drugs at a time to H.I.V. patients, but antiretroviral therapy has lately been hard to come by outside of Jakarta. Even in the city, some people are stretching a month's supply to two, said "Davi" Sepi Maulana Ardiansyah, an activist with the group Inti Muda. Mr. Ardiansyah has done so himself, although he knows it has jeopardized his well being. "This pandemic and this unavailability of the medicines is really impacting our mental health and also our health," he said. During the lockdown in Nairobi, Thomas Wuoto, who has H.I.V., borrowed antiretroviral pills from his wife, who also is infected. As a volunteer educator for H.I.V., Mr. Wuoto knew only too well that he was risking drug resistance by mixing or skipping medications. When he finally made it to the Mbagathi County Hospital, he had gone 10 days without his H.I.V. medicines, the first time since 2002 that he had missed his therapy. People with H.I.V. and TB who skip medication are likely to get sicker in the short term. In the long term, there's an even more worrisome consequence: a rise in drug resistant forms of these diseases. Already drug resistant TB is such a threat that patients are closely monitored during treatment a practice that has mostly been suspended during the pandemic. According to the W.H.O., at least 121 countries have reported a drop in TB patients visiting clinics since the pandemic began, threatening hard fought gains. "This is really difficult to digest," Dr. Ditiu said. "It took a lot of work to arrive where we are. We were not at the peak of the mountain, but we were away from the base. But then an avalanche came and pushed us back to the bottom." The lockdowns in many places were imposed so swiftly that drug stocks were rapidly depleted. Mexico already had expired drugs in its supply, but that problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic, according to Dr. Franyuti. In Brazil, H.I.V. and TB drugs are purchased and distributed by the ministry of health. But the coronavirus is racing through the country, and distribution of these treatments has become increasingly difficult as health care workers try to cope with the pandemic's toll. "It's a big logistical challenge to have municipalities have higher stock so they can supply," said Dr. Betina Durovni, a senior scientist at the Fiocruz Foundation, a research institute in Brazil. Even if governments are prepared, with some help from big aid agencies, to buy drugs months in advance, the global supply may soon run out. The pandemic has severely restricted international transport, hindering the availability not just of chemical ingredients and raw materials, but also of packaging supplies. "The disruption of supply chains is really something that worries me for H.I.V., for TB, for malaria," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, chair of the scientific advisory board of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The hype over chloroquine as a potential treatment for the coronavirus has led to hoarding of the drug in some countries like Myanmar, depleting its global stocks. More than 80 percent of the global supply of antiretroviral drugs comes from just eight Indian companies. The cost of these alone could rise by 225 million per year because of shortfalls in supplies and work force, transport disruptions and currency fluctuations, according to U.N. AIDS. There is also a real risk that Indian companies will turn to more profitable medicines, or will not be able to meet the global demand because migrant workers have deserted cities as the coronavirus spreads. The Indian government may even decide not to export TB medicines, saving its supply for its own citizens. "Hospitals are functioning in an emergency mode," said Dr. Tapiwa Mungofa, a physician at the Sally Mugabe Hospital. The situation is no better in KwaZulu Natal, which has the highest prevalence of H.I.V. in South Africa. Dr. Zolelwa Sifumba was a teenager when she saw images of skeletal patients dying of AIDS. Over the past few years in KwaZulu Natal, she is again seeing patients with full blown AIDS. "We're seeing people come in at the stage where they're kind of on death's door," she said. "What are we not doing right?" Some remote parts of the world are being decimated by the coronavirus but their very remoteness makes the pandemic's impact on these other big infectious killers impossible to measure. The town of Tabatinga in Amazonas, the biggest state in Brazil, is more than 1,000 miles from the closest city with an I.C.U., Manaus. The government has been using airplanes to transport coronavirus patients to Manaus, but many cases are being missed, said Dr. Marcelo Cordeiro Santos, a researcher at the Tropical Medicine Foundation in Manaus. Hospitals are giving chloroquine to people with Covid 19, at the recommendation of the Brazilian ministry of health, even though evidence now suggests it does not help and may even be harmful. Chloroquine is also a crucial malaria medicine, and its indiscriminate use now may lead to resistance to the drug, Dr. Cordeiro Santos warned with possibly dire consequences for those infected in the future. But he also said it's possible that widespread distribution of chloroquine may help protect residents of Amazonas from malaria.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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It isn't going too far out on a limb to predict that "Ready Player One" will turn out to be one of Steven Spielberg's more controversial projects. Even before its release, this adaptation of Ernest Cline's 2011 best seller what one writer called a "nerdgasm" of a novel was subjected to an unusual degree of internet pre hate. That was only to be expected. Mr. Spielberg has tackled contentious topics before terrorism, slavery, the Pentagon Papers, sharks but nothing as likely to stir up a hornet's nest of defensiveness, disdain and indignant "actually" ing as the subject of this movie, which is video games. And not only video games. "Ready Player One," written by Mr. Cline and Zak Penn, dives into the magma of fan zeal, male self pity and techno mythology in which those once innocent pastimes are now embedded. Mr. Spielberg, a digital enthusiast and an old school cineaste, goes further than most filmmakers in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a form that is frequently dismissed and misunderstood. Aided by his usual cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, and by the production designer Adam Stockhausen, he turns a vast virtual landscape of battling avatars into a bustling pop cultural theme park, an interactive museum of late 20th and early 21st century entertainment, a maze of niche tastes, cultish preoccupations and blockbuster callbacks. Mr. Spielberg navigates this warehouse with his usual dexterity, loading every frame with information without losing the clarity and momentum of the story. Nonetheless, the toy guns of social media and pop up kulturkritik are locked and loaded. Mr. Spielberg will be accused of taking games and their players too seriously and not seriously enough, of pandering and mocking, of just not getting it and not being able to see beyond it "it" being the voracious protoplasm that has, over the past three or four decades, swallowed up most of our cultural discourse. Whatever you call it the revenge of the nerds, the franchising of the universe, the collapse of civilization it's a force that is at once emancipatory and authoritarian, innocent and pathological, delightful and corrosive. Mr. Spielberg and some of his friends helped to create this monster, which grants him a measure of credibility and also opens him up to a degree of suspicion. He is the only person who could have made this movie and the last person who should have been allowed near the material. That material has issues of its own. Mr. Cline's book readable and amusing without being exactly good is a hodgepodge of cleverness and cliche. Less than a decade after publication, it already feels a bit dated, partly because its dystopian vision seems unduly optimistic and partly because its vision of male geek rebellion has turned stale and sour. In the film, set in 2045, Wade Watts (a young man played by the agreeably bland, blandly agreeable Tye Sheridan) lives in "the stacks," a vertical pile of trailers where the poorer residents of Columbus, Ohio (Oklahoma City in the book), cling to hope, dignity and their VR gloves. Humanity has been ravaged by the usual political and ecological disasters (among them "bandwidth riots" referred to in Wade's introductory voice over), and most people seek refuge in a digital paradise called the Oasis. That world less a game than a Jorge Luis Borges cosmos populated by wizards, robots and racecar drivers is the creation of James Halliday (Mark Rylance). After Halliday's death, his avatar revealed the existence of a series of Easter eggs, or secret digital treasures, the discovery of which would win a lucky player control of the Oasis. Wade is a "gunter" short for "egg hunter" determined to pursue this quest even after most of the other gamers have tired of it. Among his rivals are a few fellow believers and Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the head of a company called IOI that wants to bring Halliday's paradise under corporate control. In the real world, IOI encourages Oasis fans to run up debts that it collects by forcing them into indentured servitude. Sorrento's villainy sets up a battle on two fronts clashes in the Oasis mirroring chases through the streets of Columbus that inspires Mr. Spielberg to feats of crosscutting virtuosity. The action is so swift and engaging that some possibly literal minded questions may be brushed aside. I, for one, didn't quite understand why, given the global reach of the Oasis, all the relevant players were so conveniently clustered in Ohio. (If anyone wants to explain, please find me on Twitter so I can mute you.) But, of course, Columbus and the Oasis do not represent actual or virtual realities, but rather two different modalities of fantasy. Wade's avatar, Parzival, collects a posse of fighters: Sho, Daito, Aech and Art3mis, who is also his love interest. When the people attached to these identities meet up in Columbus, they are not exactly as they are in the game. Aech, large and male in the Oasis, is played by Lena Waithe. But the fluidity of online identity remains an underexploited possibility. In and out of the Oasis, Art3mis (also known as Samantha, and portrayed by Olivia Cooke) is a male fantasy of female badassery. Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki) are relegated to sidekick duty. The multiplayer, self inventing ethos of gaming might have offered a chance for a less conventional division of heroic labor, but the writers and filmmakers lacked the imagination to take advantage of it. The most fun part of "Ready Player One" is its exuberant and generous handing out of pop cultural goodies. Tribute is paid to Mr. Spielberg's departed colleagues John Hughes and Stanley Kubrick. The visual and musical allusions are eclectic enough that nobody is likely to feel left out, and everybody is likely to feel a little lost from time to time. Nostalgia? Sure, but what really animates the movie is a sense of history. The Easter egg hunt takes Parzival and his crew back into Halliday's biography his ill starred partnership with Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg), his thwarted attempts at romance and also through the evolution of video games and related pursuits. The history is instructive and also sentimental in familiar ways, positing a struggle for control between idealistic, artistic entrepreneurs (and their legions of fans) and soulless corporate greedheads. Halliday is a sweet, shaggy nerd with a guileless Northern California drawl and a deeply awkward manner, especially around women. Sorrento is an autocratic bean counter, a would be master of the universe who doesn't even like video games. These characters are cliches, but they are also allegorical figures. In the movie, they represent opposing principles, but in our world, they are pretty much the same guy. A lot of the starry eyed do it yourselfers tinkering in their garages and giving life to their boyish dreams back in the '70s and '80s turned out to be harboring superman fantasies of global domination all along. They shared their wondrous creations and played the rest of us for suckers, collecting our admiration, our attention and our data as profit and feudal tribute. Mr. Spielberg incarnates this duality as perfectly as any man alive. He is the peer of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and a Gandalf for the elves and hobbits who made Google, Facebook and the other components of our present day Oasis. He has been man child and mogul, wide eyed artist and cold eyed businessman, praised for making so many wonderful things and blamed for ruining everything. His career has been a splendid enactment of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, and at the same time a series of deeply personal meditations on love, loss and imagination. All of that is also true of Halliday's Oasis. "Ready Player One" is far from a masterpiece, but as the fanboys say, it's canon.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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Brian Tarantina, a character actor known for playing a comedy club M.C. on the Emmy Award winning series "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," was found dead on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. His publicist, Laurie Smith, said Mr. Tarantina died of "complications from a severe health crisis he experienced a few months ago." About 12:40 a.m., police officers responded to a call reporting an unconscious male inside an apartment in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Officers said they found Mr. Tarantina unresponsive on his couch and pronounced him dead at the scene. The medical examiner's office was to perform an autopsy. Update: In December, the medical examiner reported that Mr. Tarantina died of an overdose. Mr. Tarantina was best known recently for his work on "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which last year won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series. In the show, he played Jackie, the M.C. at the Gaslight comedy club, where Midge Maisel, the housewife turned comic played by Rachel Brosnahan, got her unwitting start.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Television
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Partisanship is the starkest divide, but not the only one. Women are generally more concerned about the virus than men, and Black, Hispanic and Asian survey respondents are substantially more worried than whites not surprising, given that those groups have also been hit harder by the pandemic. Perhaps more unexpectedly, older Americans don't report being significantly more concerned about the virus, despite being at substantially higher risk of death or severe illness. There is a split in actions, not just words. Given high levels of partisanship in American society, researchers sometimes worry that surveys won't capture whether people's actions conform to their stated views. For example, a staunch Republican, in order to signal support for President Trump, might report feeling comfortable going to an indoor restaurant while staying away in practice. But partisan differences show up in real world data, not just in surveys. Cellphone mobility data analyzed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that people in Republican dominated parts of the country are leaving home more often and traveling around more than those in predominantly Democratic areas. The partisan pattern holds up even controlling for the fact that Covid 19 cases were initially more prevalent in Democratic strongholds like New York and Seattle. The mobility data shows that people are being more cautious in areas that were harder hit by the virus or that have had recent flare ups. But even in such cases, Republican leaning areas show more activity, on average, than Democratic leaning ones. The divide is just as wide on the economy. Confidence in the economy has dropped sharply among all groups during the pandemic, but the partisan gap is as wide as ever. In the latest survey, 60 percent of Republicans said they expected "continuous good times economically" over the next five years. That wasn't just far higher than the 15 percent of Democrats who said the same in July; it was also twice as high as the 31 percent of Democrats who gave that answer in February, before the coronavirus began to inflict significant damage on the American economy. In other words, Republicans are more optimistic about the economy now than Democrats were before the pandemic began. "It just seems like there are two separate economies or two separate pandemics," Ms. Wronski said. "There's no way to reconcile these different experiences when you think about how there's record unemployment or you hear about businesses that are closing."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Economy
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It seems fair to say, 11 years after James Brown's death, that his estate planning has failed in its major mission: to distribute his wealth efficiently. Not a penny has gone to any of the beneficiaries of his will, who include underprivileged children in Georgia and South Carolina, to whom Mr. Brown sought to donate millions, perhaps tens of millions, of dollars. But as a petri dish for cultivating legal disputes, Mr. Brown's will may have few rivals. More than a dozen lawsuits related to the estate have been filed since Mr. Brown died on Christmas Day in 2006, including one filed last month in federal court in California. Another lawsuit now in the appellate stage challenges whether Ms. Hynie actually ever was his wife. (A lower court ruled she was.) There have also been several suits by people who contest the will; another by a person who thought she should have been appointed a trustee of the estate; still another by people who were trustees of the estate but then were removed; and still another filed by James Brown II, 16, to assert his right to be viewed as a son and heir. The court records themselves are largely dry recitations of estate and copyright law, but the larger debate over Mr. Brown's financial legacy has been a louder affair, one chock full of accusations of bigamy and corruption, racism and the fraternity of the South Carolina legal and political establishment. "This is a mini series," said Jay Cooper, a lawyer who handles estates and has represented Katy Perry, Jerry Seinfeld and Etta James. "You really need a map to go through this whole thing." Of course, Mr. Brown's life as the Godfather of Soul was a bit messy too, marked by divorce; estrangement from some of his children; and arrests on drug, weapons and domestic violence charges. That kind of instability fed, in part, the first effort to overturn the will, in which several of his children and grandchildren said his drug problems had prevented him from making sound decisions about his estate. The will had set aside 2 million to underwrite scholarships for the grandchildren, and it gave his costumes and other household effects to the six children he recognized, a bequest thought to be worth perhaps another 2 million. But the bulk of the estate was to be given over to the I Feel Good Trust, which he set up to distribute scholarships for children from South Carolina, where he was born, and Georgia, where he lived for much of his life. After the will was challenged, the South Carolina attorney general, Henry McMaster, who is now the governor, proposed a settlement: Mr. Brown's children and grandchildren would receive a quarter of the estate and Ms. Hynie would receive another quarter. But the state's Supreme Court overturned the settlement, arguing in court papers that the reformulated asset distribution amounted to a "total dismemberment of Brown's carefully crafted estate plan." At that point, Ms. Hynie and several of the Brown children were near allies in their efforts to overturn the will. Now they are opposing one another, not only in the latest suit but in the ongoing effort to determine whether she was, in fact, legally married to Mr. Brown. Ms. Hynie, a singer who worked in Mr. Brown's band, was apparently married to another man in 2001 when she wed Mr. Brown, a circumstance that led to the legal challenge of her status. Mr. Brown had filed for an annulment at one point, but a South Carolina judge ruled in 2015 that she had been the wife and was a legal heir, and that her child, James Brown II, was Mr. Brown's son. (The paternity decision has not been appealed.) The value of the estate itself also remains very much a matter of debate. The administrators of the estate have suggested in court papers that it could be worth less than 5 million but others have given estimates as high as 100 million. There is little argument that the bulk of the value comes from the song copyrights that Mr. Brown retained as the songwriter. In addition, the portion of any copyrights that were sold to a music publisher revert to the writer, or his or her heirs, either 35 or 56 years after a song is published, depending on when it first came out. The heirs regain these so called "termination rights" and can strike deals to license the use of the songs or to sell the copyrights. The results can be incredibly lucrative. Mr. Brown's songs are routinely used in commercials, including recent ads by L. L. Bean and Walmart. In the new federal lawsuit, Mr. Brown's children and grandchildren assert that Ms. Hynie sold her share of the termination rights to just five of Mr. Brown's 900 some compositions to Warner/Chappell, a large song publisher, for nearly 1.9 million, a payday that would speak to the collection's potential worth. Typically copyright termination rights, which are not bound by the terms of a will, are split between the spouse and the children, with each receiving half. "In order to do anything, it has to be a majority it's got to be 51 percent to make a decision," Mr. Cooper, the estate lawyer, said. "You can't convey it to anybody." The federal suit charges that Ms. Hynie and James Brown II made deals regarding these rights without fully informing Mr. Brown's other children and grandchildren, and thus "conspired to unlawfully deprive plaintiffs of their valuable termination interests." It says Ms. Hynie agreed to give back 65 percent of her share of the termination rights to the estate in exchange for its dropping the challenge to her spousal status, and it questions why she would agree to turn over such a potentially large benefit. "The Estate of James Brown has long been marred by dubious back room dealings between the Estate and James Brown's putative wife, Tommie Rae Hynie, as described in our lawsuit," a lawyer for the children and grandchildren, Marc Toberoff, said in a statement. Robert Rosen, a lawyer for Ms. Hynie, said that he had not reviewed the California lawsuit as yet. He noted that the lower court had already ruled that Ms. Hynie was Mr. Brown's wife and said he and his client have "full confidence in the appellate courts of South Carolina to decide this issue." The estate's administrator, Russell Bauknight, did not respond to a request for comment. Daryl Brown, a son of James Brown who is not a party to the recent suit and never challenged his father's will, said that he has lost faith in the South Carolina justice system. "This stuff wouldn't happen to Elvis Presley," he said. Alan Leeds, who once managed tours for Mr. Brown and was a consultant to the 2014 HBO documentary "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown," which was made with the support of the estate, said, "I just feel sorry for everybody." "Whatever good was going to come out of it that would benefit the community that James had originally intended and whatever good would benefit his family, for that matter, was all jeopardized," he continued. "There are no winners in this."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Music
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Sofia Martin, 18, a senior at Puget Sound Community School in Seattle, identifies as nonbinary neither a boy or a girl and uses the pronouns they or them. At the age of 15, after rehearsing in the shower, Sofia Martin made an announcement to the students at Puget Sound Community School. "I've been thinking a lot about who I am," Sofia recalled saying at the morning meeting, a daily assembly of the school's 52 students and staff members. "I've come to the decision that I'm nonbinary, which means that I'm not a boy or a girl." Sofia asked the teachers and the students, who are in grades six through 12, to use the pronouns they or them, which they promised to do. Over the course of the next year, Sofia, who is now 18, pushed for a gender neutral bathroom and encouraged fellow students to name their pronouns when they introduced themselves. Today Puget Sound, a small, unconventional private school in Seattle, has converted a former men's room into an all gender restroom and four more students have made similar announcements in front of the whole school. "I don't want to suggest that we got this perfectly right, although I will say that doing something was right," Andy Smallman, the founder and director of the school, wrote in an email about the restroom. At some schools, teaching for and about transgender people is a battle, epitomized by nationwide debates over "bathroom bills." But at others, educators aren't battling against trans students or their needs. Instead, schools like Puget Sound are altering their policies to include transgender kids and, more broadly, to make gender a deliberate part of the curriculum. Students are leading the way, driving schools to adopt more inclusive teaching methods. "Ten years ago, I wasn't really talking at all about transgender in my classes," said Emily Umberger, who teaches health at two private schools in Charlottesville, Va. Now, "the kids are very comfortable asking questions about gender identity, transgender stuff. It's amazing how much that has changed in a few years." As alternative private schools test these ideas classroom by classroom, some larger school districts are enacting them more widely. The California Healthy Youth Act, which went into effect in 2016, requires all California public schools to teach students about gender expression and gender stereotypes. (Outside of the classroom, California just passed a law allowing a third gender option on state drivers' licenses and birth certificates, for people who identify as nonbinary.) In Florida, Broward County requires middle school students to learn about gender identity. Of course, not all schools or parents accept these changes. Glsen, a national nonprofit focused on L.G.B.T. issues in K 12 education, notes that in some parts of the country there are laws that forbid teachers to talk about gay and transgender people in a positive way in the classroom. Alabama, for example, requires teachers to emphasize "that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state." Parents, too, can weigh in. Recently Chloe Bressack, a fifth grade teacher in Florida, sent a letter to parents asking to be referred to with gender neutral pronouns like "they, them, theirs." After some parents complained, the teacher was transferred to a different school in the district. But at some schools many of them rooted in progressive pedagogy, with an emphasis on hands on learning and social responsibility teachers and administrators are listening when students demand they catch up on gender. Educators then have to figure out the quotidian details: Can boys wear skirts and still follow the dress code? How should teachers explain that most people with uteruses will get their periods, but not all people with their periods have to be girls? And what to do about those bathrooms, anyway? Many educators and students noted that the goal is not just teaching kids to be accepting of trans or gender nonconforming people. Instead, it's about loosening up the whole idea of gender, for every kid. "This is not about those kids," said Deborah Roffman, a teacher at the Park School in Baltimore who has been teaching human sexuality for 40 years. "Everybody in this building has a gender identity, which exists along a continuum." Unlike the stark sex ed films of the past (with messages that amounted to "Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant, and die"), today teachers read aloud from books about transgender kids (or books about gender bending crayons or same sex penguin dads) to start conversations. Rossana Zapf, a learning and curriculum support coordinator at the Miquon School in Philadelphia, read the elementary students Jazz Jennings's picture book "I am Jazz," and Michael Hall's "Red: A Crayon's Story," about a blue crayon who is mistakenly labeled red. "That reminds me of my friend," a kindergartner said after the reading. Ms. Umberger in Charlottesville said she uses a little game to explain the gender binary, the idea that boys and girls are opposites and that people must be one or the other. "I'll say, what's your favorite color? Is it lime green or crimson? And they'll say, actually it's royal blue," she said. By showing that sometimes two rigid options aren't enough, she teaches them what it means to be nonbinary. At the Green Acres School in Bethesda, Md., students are asking administrators to rethink the dress code for eighth grade graduation, says Ann Kappell Danner, the middle school counselor. Typically, the girls wear dresses and the boys wear suits and ties. Now the students are proposing that the dress code be gender neutral: a list of acceptable clothing with no determination of which gender should wear what. "The students are so hungry for this," said Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education and training at Advocates for Youth, a Washington based nonprofit that provides a free sex ed curriculum for K 12 students which includes lessons about the range of gender identities. "When I'm in a school, the students are leading the way, and adults are desperately trying to catch up." As kids push forward, it can be difficult for even the most supportive parents and schools to know what the best course of action looks like. A 36 year old mother at a progressive school in Seattle, who asked not to be named because she was sharing intimate details about her young child, informed the school last year that her 6 year old identified as a girl. The daughter, assigned male at birth, had been trying on dresses and playing around with girls' names for about three years and she wanted to be recognized as a girl. The teachers were 100 percent supportive, the mother says. They just wanted to know what to do. But that was exactly the problem. "Just because I have a kid who's going through this doesn't make me at all an expert," the woman said. "I kind of felt like I was drowning in information, but at the same time, very alone." She explained her daughter's transition to the parents and other teachers at the school, and helped her daughter tell her class. But a year later, she still feels uncertain. "It's tough when people say follow your kid's lead," the woman said. "We're talking about a 7 year old who has no concept of what this looks like in the future." At the moment, though, even little kids are grasping the big ideas. At the Advent School in Boston, Erina Spiegelman, who is an instructional coordinator, recalled that a teacher last year asked a group of students the big question: "What is gender?" The first answer came from a second grader: "It's a thing people invented to put you in a category."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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J. Press, the men's wear clothier founded on the Yale campus in 1902, has signed a seven year lease for a 3,425 square foot space with floor to ceiling windows for its offices and showroom on the second floor of this 12 story building in the garment district facing Lord Taylor. J. Press will move from SoHo by the end of the year. The building, which has three elevators and a freight elevator, has two other prebuilt units for lease on the second floor. A five to 10 year lease is available in NoMad for the entire 17th floor of this 1929 Art Deco 23 story office building with a lobby attendant. The 4,660 square foot space has new windows, polished concrete floors, an exposed ceiling and tenant controlled air conditioning.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Real Estate
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Vampires get all the attention at this time of year, but bloodthirsty leeches, insects and birds are just as compelling and they're real. It has been a big year for leeches. A new species was discovered near Washington and announced in August by Anna Phillips, who may have the world's best job title: curator of parasitic worms at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The new leech, Macrobdella mimicus, has three jaws and 59 teeth, and is quite literally a creature of the Washington swamp: It drinks your blood and drops off when it's full. This particular parasite is not registered as a foreign lobbyist. And there's more leech news: In May, a man was charged in what may be the first case of leech smuggling in Canadian history. He had flown into Toronto with almost 5,000 leeches in a grocery bag for personal use. At least, that's what he said. What kind of personal use could that be? Well, leeches are good for bait, although fake ones are cheaper. There's D.I.Y. bloodletting. And you can keep them as pets. (They're not cheap, though: If you buy them online, you could pay 18 for a jumbo leech.) Still, 5,000 is a lot of personal leeches. Suspicious officials called in Sebastian Kvist, curator of invertebrates at the Royal Ontario Museum, to identify the smuggled contraband. He said that dried leeches can be ground into a powder that is reputed in Chinese traditional medicine to have a variety of benefits. It's a leech intensive process. Dr. Kvist, who also helped identify Macrobdella mimicus, is co designer of a new museum exhibit called "Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches," a celebration of the sucking, sipping, drinking and lapping of the blood of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians in real life as well as the imagination. The exhibit opens Nov. 16 at the Royal Ontario Museum, in case Halloween is just too short for you. Dr. Kvist said that although the smuggling incident did not prompt the exhibit, some of the leeches seized at the airport will be on display live. He and Doug Currie, senior curator of entomology at the museum, have been plotting such an exhibit for some years, because they both do research on blood feeders and wanted to open up the world of hematophagy to the public. To those who love them, leeches are just incredibly cool. Mark Siddall, a curator and professor at New York's American Museum of Natural History known far and wide as "the leech guy," bows to no one in his admiration. Hirudin, an anticoagulant derived from leeches, was essential in early human dialysis, he pointed out. Leeches are now used in certain kinds of surgery, such as the reattachment of a body part, to drain excess blood. They have even been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a medical device. "They're beautiful," Dr. Siddall noted. If you can bear to look at the next one that gets attached to you in a pond or stream, you will see "it's got orange polka dots running down its back." "A lot of the marine leeches are fantastically beautiful," he added. Dr. Currie, on the other hand, specializes in bloodsucking black flies. Although smaller than leeches and perhaps not as feared, they are vastly more numerous and arguably more hated. Both scientists hope that the upcoming exhibit might leave visitors, if not more inclined to love blood feeders, perhaps more able to tolerate sharing the planet with them. Dracula is included in the exhibit, by the way, along with fantasies of vampires from many cultures. The Royal Ontario is a science and culture museum, and imaginary creatures are welcome. There are a lot of them to keep Dracula company, like the ancient utukku of Mesopotamia, the Icelandic draugr and the very recent (1995) chupacabra, first sighted in Puerto Rico. What are they like? Awful, all of them, and bloodthirsty, of course. The Penanggal of Malaysian folklore is at the top of the list of the most disgusting. It's a floating head with dangling entrails. Happy Halloween. The bloodsuckers of reality may be less horrific, or not. But they are certainly far more numerous. There are 30,000 animal species that feed on blood. You may ask: Why so many? Dr. Kvist's question is: Why so few? If blood is so plentiful and energy rich, and it is, why didn't more of the 1.3 million known species get in on this diet choice during the course of evolution? The answer is that drinking the blood of other creatures while they are alive, and might possibly swat you, is not as easy at it looks. Some difficulties are obvious (see: swatting). And although blood often flows close to the surface of the body, you have to get through the skin to draw it out. Thus, the many drills, biting parts and teeth of blood feeders. But like bank robbers, blood feeders need to be stealthy. And there's the clotting problem: you've got to keep the blood flowing if you want to suck it. Then there are nutritional obstacles. Blood lacks enough B vitamins, and even insects need them. Although blood transports B vitamins, it's always dropping the nutrients off where they are needed. Dr. Siddall said red meat has roughly 1,000 times as much B 12 as blood, ounce for ounce. That's not all: Iron can be toxic, and blood has so much that, as a plasma diner, it's dangerous to have a lot of somebody else's in your digestive system. Leeches have solutions for all of these problems. Their saliva is a complex mixture of many, many compounds, including anticoagulants and anesthetics, which has left them in great demand among medical researchers. Leeches solve the vitamin problem by playing host to bacteria in their stomachs that create B vitamins. (So do ticks and lice and other blood loving creatures). And leeches have several adaptations to protect themselves from iron, including a type of tissue that binds iron to proteins to make it less toxic. "If you think of evolution as beautiful, this is one of the more beautiful systems," Dr. Kvist said. He also has advice for when you get bitten. Do not pull the leech off, or shake salt or lemon juice on it, or burn it with a cigarette. All of these things are profoundly disturbing to the leech, which may then vomit up the contents of its stomach while still plugged into your bloodstream. That could cause an infection. Dr. Kvist suggests letting the leech fill up and fall off on its own, but even he doesn't believe anyone will follow this advice. A less disturbing alternative is to slowly and methodically pry off the leech's mouth with something like a credit card, sort of the way you try to get an old registration sticker off a windshield. Dr. Kvist is a treasury of information on leeches. They are descended from earthworms, and the ancestral wormy parasite from which they all came, 250 300 million years ago, was a blood feeder. There are now 700 species of leeches, and 200 of them no longer feed on blood. They eat insects and other little creatures. What about the other 29,500 species of blood feeders? There's the famous vampire bat, which nicks the ankles of cattle and other animals and laps the trickling blood. Its anticoagulant is called draculin. But how about vampire finches, one of the many finches in the Galapagos? They peck the tails of boobies until they bleed. This may not sound like the best way to make a living, but one report said there are more vampire finches than any other kind of finch in the Galapagos, and they sometimes swarm their food sources. There are also blood loving snails, fish and moths. But insects and ticks are by far the most numerous blood feeders. They make up 25,000 of those 30,000 species, including bedbugs, fleas, lice, tse tse and other flies, and the ubiquitous mosquito. Looking at the toll insects take when they drink blood kind of makes leeches look like humanity's friend. True, some land varieties will drop down on you from trees as you are walking through a rain forest. But they don't spread human diseases. And if you keep them as pets and you forget to buy leech food Dr. Kvist buys cattle blood and sausage casing from the butcher, and makes tasty little blood balloons you can always feed them your own blood. Dr. Kvist does so, on occasion, as do other leechologists. One of the current uses of leeches is to assist in wildlife surveys. Scientists can recover the DNA of the last four animals a leech has fed on from its stomach. This provides a nice snapshot of what's running around the environs, and scientists don't have to tramp through the jungle chasing animals or setting up camera traps or worse, real traps. He and Dr. Kvist are off to Madagascar in November to collect leeches in an area that is being eyed for its conservation potential. Knowing what inhabits the potential park is essential. Fortunately, "there is a horde of leeches in this park," Dr. Siddall said, so the researchers won't need to track down actual animals that live there, just the leeches. And that is easy: "They find us."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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The social media influencer Jake Paul has been charged with criminal trespassing and unlawful assembly after videos appeared to show him participating in a looting at a mall in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Saturday. Videos of Mr. Paul, a YouTube star with more than 20 million subscribers, at the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall with friends circulated online throughout the weekend after his videographer, Andrew Blue, shared footage of Mr. Paul inside at the time of the looting. In videos posted to Instagram, Mr. Paul can be seen walking through the mall as looters smash the glass of a Sephora and Swarovski store and bash in car windows around him. One clip appears to show Mr. Paul handling a stolen bottle of vodka. "Our investigation has revealed that Paul was present after the protest was declared an unlawful assembly and the rioters were ordered to leave the area by the police," the Scottsdale Police Department said in a statement on Thursday. "Paul also unlawfully entered and remained inside of the mall when it was closed. As a result, Paul has been charged with criminal trespass and unlawful assembly." Both charges are misdemeanors. Mr. Paul, 23, is best known for his brash personality and using controversy and internet feuds to court views. He regularly documents his life on social media and travels with a team including a videographer, who captures his escapades for his YouTube channel. In the days after, he has remained adamant that he was present at the mall simply to capture what was going on and potentially use it as content for his YouTube channel. "To be absolutely clear, neither I nor anyone in our group was engaged in any looting or vandalism," he said in a statement on Twitter, adding that he and his crew were "strictly documenting, not engaging." According to Ishan Goel, 21, who was with Mr. Paul on Saturday night, Mr. Paul got wind of the events at the mall and the group decided to walk from the nearby restaurant where they were having dinner to check it out. "There were police helicopters circling with lights and sirens, and Jake wanted to figure out what was going on inside the mall," Mr. Goel, an entrepreneur, said in an interview on Thursday. "He was trying to figure out why people were there and what they were doing." Shortly after they arrived on the scene, Mr. Paul began interviewing people and was getting recognized by groups. He continued to film as the police moved in. As he approached a group of officers, they began using what Mr. Paul described as tear gas. "I walked right up to there," he said in a video posted to Instagram, gesturing at a line of police officers, who he said "tear gassed" him.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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In 2017, Robbie Myers, the editor of Elle magazine, stepped down after 17 years and was replaced by Nina Garcia, then the creative director of Marie Claire and a "Project Runway" judge. Under Mr. Young, editors with a knack for digital and social media have taken over key brands. Jessica Pels, 33, was named the editor of Cosmopolitan in 2018, after making her name as the digital editor of Marie Claire and then Cosmo. Mr. Fielden was replaced by Michael Sebastian, the digital director of Esquire. (Hearst is also embroiled in increasing tension with many of its employees, after they announced, in November, their intention to unionize.) Ms. Bailey will continue to work with Harper's Bazaar as a global consultant, Hearst said in a statement. "I've wanted Bazaar to be a party that everyone is invited to, and I thank my incredibly talented team for helping me do just that," Ms. Bailey said in a statement. Cultivating an image of herself as warm, nurturing and proudly anti elitist, Ms. Bailey ran the magazine in the old fashioned way, relying on relationships with designers like Karl Lagerfeld and championing new names including Derek Lam and Victoria Beckham. "She is much deeper than fashion," Donna Karan said of Ms. Bailey in 2013. "She gets into the soul." But Ms. Bailey was also criticized for some of those relationships. For example, Harper's Bazaar continued to hire the photographer Terry Richardson after multiple accusations of sexual harassment had led other publications including Vogue and W to stop working with him.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Style
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He informed us that when he came to work in the morning, he'd been told by his boss that a business partner who'd visited the company the week before, coming from China, had just phoned. And she'd said that on the weekend back home in China, she'd been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus infection. And he'd actually been ill over the weekend himself. And he'd asked us whether he could be checked for this new virus at our institution. And this was January 27, so had the coronavirus been detected in Germany? So what were you thinking when this man came into your office? Well, it was January. It was a time of year when there are lots of respiratory infections circulating. In fact, it's the peak of the influenza season. And he'd been very unspectacularly ill over the weekend, so it could have been anything. In contrast, the pictures that we received from China by then were pictures of a very serious disease people being on ventilators, et cetera. So I thought, well, I mean, interesting story, but this could be anything. And we took a swab from his nasal pharynx and sent it to the lab. And a few hours later, I was phoned by the lab and informed that, in fact, the test tested positive for the novel virus. Huh. So at this point, you have just been told that you have the first confirmed case of the coronavirus in Germany. And based on what you knew about the contact that had brought him to you in the first place, what were you thinking about that? That was quite a puzzle, because I'd obviously grilled him on the fact whether the Chinese business colleague appeared in any way ill. Had she coughed, or did she have a runny nose, or did she look ill in any way? And actually, he said she had held quite intense business workshops and meetings without showing any obvious signs of illness. And then on day two, which was the Tuesday, more employees of the company came to our clinic. And another three, all of them with very minor mild symptoms, were tested positive. That was the point when I thought, we need to spread the news to get this out to the world. And we contacted The New England Journal of Medicine, and they were interested. And it was very rapidly accepted and put online for people to read it. I think there's a couple ways to look at it. And one is that if you are the World Health Organization, and you jump in with two feet into this idea that this disease can spread without symptoms, it is a seismic change in the way we think about Covid 19, and has massive ramifications for public health policy in every country in the world. So of course, they need to be cautious. They can't just go, oh my god, here's an observation by one doctor with one patient, and we're going to change the world's policies based on that. That's unrealistic. But what's really confusing about all this is it didn't take very long until it wasn't just Dr. Rothe in Munich. Because the Bavarian health authorities get genetic information back, and they find genetic proof that it did spread before symptom onset in two other patients. And so now it's not just Dr. Rothe saying, hey, I saw something weird. Now we have mounting evidence from this cluster saying, it's pretty darn clear this is happening. And so now you really do wonder, why was the response from the World Health Organization, we don't think this is a big deal? And not, boy, the evidence is growing, we're not there yet, but we're taking this really seriously. And we should maybe be start thinking about how we would adapt our policies if this really catches on. So the W.H.O. says they definitely did not do that. That is not what happened. But this issue of should the World Health Organization or other public health officials be scaring the crap out of people, I mean, I get that. But I think most people would tell you no. Because there's a huge danger in telling people, this is the big one, this is it. Because the vast majority of alerts aren't the big one. You need people to take their advice seriously and rationally and not feel like, oh, here comes another alert. And so it's like they got to constantly straddle this line between, I need you to hear me and take this seriously, but I can't also get crazy and say, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, this is the one, tbjs is the one. Because if it's not the one and most aren't then the next time, you're just not going to listen. Doctor, if German authorities and European health officials and the W.H.O. had taken your findings seriously back in January, despite the fact that it was a single patient, despite the fact that there was a semantic debate around the title of the paper, how do you think it would have made a difference in the state of the pandemic today? Ha. That is very difficult to tell. It would be too easy, even though I would like to say that that could have saved hundred thousands of lives. Had authorities been stricter at an earlier point in time, well, would have people accepted it? This may sound strange, but maybe we needed the drastic pictures that we saw in Italy, when the military had to basically bury the coffins because nobody else could, or the dramatic pictures from New York City. Maybe that we needed, all of us needed that shock to take it seriously and really to pull up our socks to fight the virus. So it's very difficult to tell what would have happened had we taken this onboard early on. Has this experience changed how you see the global health community, your colleagues essentially? Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely. It was a very sobering experience. I still don't know what to make of it. What I really hope is that someone is going to somehow work this up in a, again, in a scientific way to say, what happened? What happened in the heads of people? Why was this unwelcome news? Why was this dismissed? Can we learn from this? Is this, if you like, a cognitive error on the side of decision makers? And what can we do to prevent this from happening again? And I was, to be honest, deeply disappointed by it. But more so, I really wish to understand what was behind it. I'm really hoping that one day someone will come and explain to me what the issue really was.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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The seaside town of "Feral," a production by Tortoise in a Nutshell that opened at 59E59 Theaters on Wednesday, is easily recognizable. With its quaint streets, attractive shops and effortless charm, it might as well be called Idyllville. It's the place most of us wish we remembered from childhood. You get to see this town being erected in front of you, sprung from childlike wonder through puppetry and live video projection Tortoise in a Nutshell's specialty since its founding in 2010. With "Feral," expertly directed by Ross MacKay, the troupe chronicles the decline of Scottish seaside towns while capturing the feeling of growing old and realizing that we can't always recognize ourselves in the memories we hold dearest. As the lights go on, they reveal an elaborate drawing desk crowned by seven work lamps. One of the performers, Matthew Leonard, sits with his back to the audience and begins to draw on a blank sheet of paper; the images are projected onto a screen. He draws four stick figures that he then names. There's Joe, our protagonist, and his family: Mum, his sister, Dawn , and their cat. He draws square buildings with square windows, and as he finishes, more cast members, Alex Bird and Arran Howie, begin turning the two dimensional world into a tangible reality. They attach miniature cardboard structures to the drawing desk. What just seconds before was a metallic slope suddenly becomes a hill with ocean views .
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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More than half a dozen airports in and around Houston, including one of the nation's busiest aviation hubs, remained closed Monday amid catastrophic flooding and unprecedented rainfall associated with Tropical Storm Harvey. Houston's major airports George Bush Intercontinental, the city's largest, and William P. Hobby Airport are expected to remain closed until Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration said Monday morning in an air traffic report. Later on Monday, United Airlines said George Bush Intercontinental would be closed until at least Thursday. Roads are flooded throughout Houston, and thousands of flights have been canceled. Airlines are offering travel waivers to ticketed passengers, allowing them to reschedule their flights into September. More than 54 million passengers made their way through the Houston Airport System last year. Most of them came through George Bush Intercontinental, which has flights to more than 70 international destinations and to more destinations in Mexico than any other airport in the United States. The airport had just over 16 inches of rain on Sunday, doubling the previous record of more than 8 inches set in 1945, according to the National Weather Service forecast office in Houston/Galveston. William P. Hobby Airport serves far fewer people (about 13 million last year), but offers nonstop flights to dozens of destinations in the United States, Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, and is one of Southwest Airlines's most active hubs. The carrier issued a travel advisory asking people not to attempt to reach Hobby Airport.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Travel
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LOS ANGELES It's hard to know what to make of the bright gold stripes running down the dark travertine lobby walls of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple here. From a distance, they look like long strands of jewelry. Up close, they resemble chains of hieroglyphics. But how to crack this code, nobody knows. The pattern, made of gold glazed ceramic tiles, is just one of the beautiful and inscrutable details of the 1961 building, newly visible as the permanent showplace of the contemporary art collection owned by the brothers Maurice and Paul Marciano, co founders of the Guess empire. After much anticipation, the Marciano Art Foundation opens to the public on Thursday, May 25, with free admission, though reservations are required. The California artist architect Millard Sheets designed the imposing edifice on Wilshire Boulevard for the Masonic brotherhood (a fraternal society with roots in medieval builders' guilds), planting his own symbolic murals and mosaics throughout. The Marciano Art Foundation bought it in 2013 for 8 million. "It's been interesting for us to turn something very secretive and formidable into something friendly and curiosity driven," added Kulapat Yantrasast, the project architect. "It's especially interesting for L.A., because we tend to love what's new and shiny instead of investigating history in this way." The Marciano Art Foundation is not alone in going the historical route. Several new arts institutions in development that will expand the city's museum landscape have opted to reimagine existing buildings rather than build sleek new ones, as the Broad museum did in 2015 with its Diller Scofidio Renfro design. Mr. Yantrasast's firm, WHY, is also adapting a 1950s warehouse downtown for the Institute of Contemporary Art L.A., a reincarnation of the Santa Monica Museum of Art set to open in September. Also downtown, the real estate developer Tom Gilmore and the arts leader Allison Agsten have teamed up to open the Main Museum in a 1905 Classical Revival bank building, with an adjacent storefront space already in use for exhibitions, and plans to open the bank vaults for performances and projects in 2018. And on the Hollywood front, the architect Renzo Piano is transforming the 1939 May Company Building department store on Wilshire a leading example of Streamline Moderne into a museum for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, designed to showcase film posters, photographs, drawings and other memorabilia, from Dorothy's red slippers to a spacecraft model from "2001: A Space Odyssey." As contemporary art has grown in its scale and ambitions, the trend of converting industrial spaces to provide cheap and flexible space has also taken off. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where Mr. Marciano is co chair of the board, helped lead the way in the early 1980s by turning a warehouse, now known as the Geffen, into a still raw seeming exhibition hall. Mass MoCA, in former textile mills of North Adams, Mass., and Dia:Beacon, in a defunct Nabisco box factory in Beacon, N.Y., followed. And European cities where space is scarce have long proven resourceful, transforming train stations (Musee D'Orsay in Paris and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin) and power plants (the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon) into visual arts centers. In 2015, after years of trying out different spaces, the Prada Foundation established a permanent home in Milan in a former gin distillery. So far, the cultural citadels of Los Angeles, a city still in its infancy by comparison, have mainly taken the form of gleaming new edifices like the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Broad, with Peter Zumthor's proposed addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in development. But other museum leaders here call adaptive reuse inspiring and practical. "With so many wonderful vacant buildings downtown, there is no need for a museum like ours to begin building from scratch," said Elsa Longhauser, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art L.A. The obvious incentive is financial. While structural changes to meet earthquake codes can throw an expensive wrench into the works, museums can get a better price per square foot by adapting an existing building if its bones are good. "In a perfect world, you would save a little money this way," said Mr. Gilmore, the developer behind the Main Museum. "But the case I make is that even if it costs the same, you're coming out ahead on the sustainability end for recycling materials and not tearing down a building." Mr. Gilmore credits the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles in large part to a 1999 city ordinance facilitating the conversion of office buildings into apartments. Then there are the branding possibilities. If the convention for world class museums is to have a custom built home, preferably by a Pritzker winning "starchitect" ("museum buildings as logos" as Mr. Yantrasast sees it), some smaller institutions prefer to use existing spaces the funkier, the better to convey their own sense of adventurousness. As Ms. Agsten of the Main Museum, a noncollecting institution, pointed out: "This is definitely not the kind of place you would want to hang your Rothkos. A space like ours sets the visitor up for a different kind of experience for a sense of experimentation." She noted that artists had already expressed interest in using the Main's bank vaults, hinting at another motivation behind the trend: a growing weariness among artists over showing work in predictable, and interchangeable, art fair booths and even pristine gallery rooms. "Most artists would rather see work installed in a rough space than in gleaming new exhibition halls because it's what their studios look like a continuity between place of production and place of presentation," Mr. Yantrasast said. Jim Shaw, a Los Angeles artist, is creating a special exhibition for the opening of the Marciano Art Foundation in a vast, raw ground floor space that used to hold a 2,400 seat theater. A conspiracy driven, apocalyptic sounding excavation of power structures called "The Wig Museum," his dense installation includes wigs and enormous theatrical backdrops left over from this the Masons, who staged their own plays as initiation and education rites. Having worked in museum conversions before he recalled a former slaughterhouse, Les Abbatoirs, in Toulouse, France Mr. Shaw said these adapted spaces have a big advantage: "When you're an artist, it's terrible to have a blank page. It's better to have something to work off of, riff off of, a starting point." The disadvantages, he said, are mainly practical: "I could use more electrical outlets now." Throughout the Masonic Temple, which is not a landmark building, Mr. Yantrasast worked to preserve some original elements while also creating clean, light filled spaces to show off the ultracontemporary art that the Marcianos have acquired, often together, over the last two decades: an on trend collection that is rich with Los Angeles artists such as Mark Grotjahn, Jonas Wood, Analia Saban and Oscar Tuazon. (The inaugural selection was organized by a guest curator, Philipp Kaiser.) But there are moments when the new art and historical building have competing agendas. Walk east on the third floor, and you find a panoramic Sheets mosaic mural from 1961 with a nature theme, complete with stylized roosters and glittering trees. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a full view of the mural: A new wall has been built parallel to it, just six feet in front. Mr. Marciano called the Sheets mural "beautiful and powerful," a personal favorite. But he explained that he had the wall erected to keep the building's history at a remove. He didn't want the mural to eclipse his contemporary art: "The mosaic is too commanding," he said. "It would have completely overtaken the view."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Art & Design
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TOKYO Panasonic makes the world's biggest 3 D television, a 152 inch, high definition plasma screen that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and is big enough to project life size people. The company also sells no frills refrigerators for poorer countries that come with extra space for pumped water and are priced at 170. And between those extremes Panasonic has a vast catalog of other consumer electronics products in various price ranges, including four types of nose hair trimmers and a separate device for ear fuzz. But how long can Panasonic keep trying to be all things to all consumers? Analysts complain that Panasonic suffers from a case of the attention deficit disorder that they say plagues many Japanese consumer electronics giants. The affliction, critics say, has distracted management and ceded markets to more focused, agile players like the American company Apple and Samsung of South Korea. After the empire building glory years for Japanese manufacturers in the 1980s, as markets began to clog with cheap products and competition grew more intense, it became clear that the Japanese needed to concentrate on fewer products instead of trying to compete across hundreds of unrelated ones. And yet, despite repeated company promises to "sentaku to shuchu," or "choose and focus" an oft heard corporate refrain in Japan in recent years many Japanese manufacturers have struggled to pare their operations and curtail overlapping product universes. But Panasonic, shrugging off criticism that it is spread too thin, seems intent on even further product expansion despite having lost 103 billion yen ( 1.2 billion) on revenue of 7.4 trillion yen (about 83 billion) in the fiscal year that ended in March. An investment bank, Macquarie, predicts that Panasonic's net profit will rebound to 91 billion yen for the fiscal year ending in March 2011, as the global economy recovers. "It's true our business spans a wide area," Fumio Ohtsubo, the president, said in a recent interview at the Tokyo offices of Panasonic, which is based in Osaka. "But it's not as difficult as you might think." In fact, the new drive by Panasonic to sell its wares in poorer countries like India and Indonesia has yielded early successes. So has its push into 3 D technology, billed as the next revolution in home entertainment in rich countries like the United States and Japan. Plasma televisions at the Panasonic Center in Tokyo. Panasonic is making a push into emerging markets like India and China. But those efforts also increase entropy in an already far flung product universe, each category with its own broad spectrum Blu ray disc recorders to mobile phones, microwaves to massage chairs, rechargeable camera batteries to automotive fuel cells. At the same time, Panasonic is also shouldering the costs of its 400 billion yen ( 4.5 billion) acquisition last year of Sanyo Electric, the world's largest maker of rechargeable batteries and a major manufacturer of solar panels. The purchase was meant to raise Panasonic's standing in the promising renewable energy field, but it also expanded its product line even further. "We probably sell tens of thousands of products; we've never counted," said Akira Kadota, a Panasonic spokesman in Tokyo. "Perhaps even a million?" Sprawl is by no means unique to Panasonic. Until recently Sharp, Fujitsu, Toshiba, NEC, Casio, Hitachi, Kyocera and Sony all made cellphones, while in some cases also building nuclear reactors and advanced business network server computers. Sony, the electronics and entertainment giant, perhaps best known for its televisions and the PlayStation game consoles, is also busy making car navigation systems and rechargeable batteries for laptops and other gadgets, while also running a movie studio and a financial services firm. That breadth, some analysts argue, is distracting Sony from major battles like the one against Nintendo and Microsoft in the lucrative gaming market. "A large majority of tech companies in Japan have way too many businesses," said Atul Goyal, a consumer electronics analyst at the brokerage firm CLSA. "These companies need to think: what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, and focus on their core strengths." Generally bucking the trend is Nintendo, one of Japan's most consistently profitable tech companies, which sells just two hardware products: the Wii home video game console and the DS hand held. (Staying true to its game roots, Nintendo also makes traditional Hanafuda playing cards and Go board games.) An obvious move that many Japanese manufacturers could consider, favored by American conglomerates like General Electric, would be to sell off money losing or marginally profitable businesses and cut excess workers. But large layoffs, considered a lapse of social responsibility, especially at larger companies, are still frowned upon in corporate Japan. There have been some steps toward consolidation. Last month, Fujitsu and Toshiba said they would combine their cellphone operations to better compete domestically against companies like Apple and its iPhone. Separately, NEC, Casio and Hitachi merged their handset operations. "In terms of technological potential and breadth, we're on top," said Fumio Ohtsubo, the president of Panasonic. But Panasonic, with 385,000 employees worldwide, continues to push forward on all fronts. Its revamped business strategy, presented to analysts in May, charts a three year course. Panasonic is aiming for a 330 billion yen expansion of sales in emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India and China, and plans to reach 1 trillion yen ( 11 billion) from those markets in 2013. And over all, Panasonic means to increase annual sales to 10 trillion yen ( 112 billion) in 2013, which would be up 35 percent from its most recent fiscal year. "We have high expectations for emerging markets," said Mr. Ohtsubo, the president. "Our focus will be on increasing overseas sales." To tailor products to local needs, Panasonic says it has conducted "lifestyle research" in various emerging markets. After visiting Indonesian households, for example, the company designed a refrigerator with extra space for the pumped water that families often store in bottles, as well as a dedicated shelf for medicines and cosmetics that are often stored chilled alongside fruits and vegetables.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Global Business
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Moon was having eating issues, familiar ones to many cat owners: He batted food out of his bowl before he would eat it. Some days he seemed terrified even to approach his feeding dish. Moon's owner, Cheryl Anne Gardner, did some internet research and found the likely cause: whisker fatigue. As soon as she replaced Moon's dish with a wide, shallow one that did not have rims or sides that brushed against his sensitive whiskers, both Moon and her other cat, Rupert, were much happier at mealtimes. Their chin acne, another common problem in cats, also cleared up. Whisker fatigue is a fairly new diagnosis, one that many (but not all) veterinarians take seriously. When cats have to stick their faces into deep bowls and their whiskers rub up against the sides, the experience can be stressful, prompting them to paw the food onto the floor, fight with other cats or grow apprehensive at mealtimes. Some companies have begun to advertise their food bowls as "whisker friendly." One of them is Hepper, which makes whisker conscious Nom Nom bowls ( 39.99, or 71.99 for two), which are one inch deep and four inches by five inches wide. They are made of stainless steel, which unlike plastic will not harbor the bacteria that can lead to chin acne (known colloquially as "catne"). "Whiskers are like little antennas for kitties," said Jed Crystal, an industrial designer and the founder of Hepper. "They collect lots and lots of data all day long, as subtle as wind movement or as big as being brushed by a wall or another animal." Whiskers help cats protect themselves, find food and detect predators, Mr. Crystal said, and when they hit the sides of a bowl during a meal, "that repeated stress isn't giving the cat any additional information." He added, "We don't want them to have associations of stress while eating." Hepper's Nom Nom bowls have rounded corners, so that food doesn't get trapped in a tight place, Mr. Crystal said. Whisker fatigue is a real thing, said Andrew Roost, a general partner at Pet Fusion, a family run pet products company that sells feeding dishes for cats and dogs. Dogs, Mr. Roost said, do not have the same issues with whisker sensitivity that cats do. But, he said, both dogs and cats may benefit from dishes that are raised to various heights, a feature the company says is best for an animal's digestive health. Mr. Roost said that his company's four inch high raised pet feeder, which costs 59.95, would be perfect (and whisker friendly) for a cat or a small dog. There are rubber dots on the feet of the dish, making it difficult for the animal to push around, and it can be bought with a mat that goes underneath, for those inevitable kibble accidents. "You want the food to go down a certain way," said Mr. Roost, who has four cats. "Both dogs and cats can have arthritis, they can have trouble bending down to get food that's on the floor. Imagine you bending down to eat. You want it to be more like a straight line." Often, a regular plate will work just fine as an antidote to whisker fatigue, according to many cat owners. But for ergonomic excellence and what cat doesn't deserve it? there are a growing number of dishes on the market that were made by people who have studied the whisker issue intensively. Take, for example, Dr. Catsby's Bowl for Whisker Relief ( 19.99), the product of an industrial design firm that conducted extensive testing on a cat named Sputnik owned by one of the business partners.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Well
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If there is one thing to know about Farhad Manjoo, the technology columnist for The New York Times, it is that he uses Twitter. A lot. So if anyone would know a thing or two about what appears on Twitter, it would be Farhad. Now Farhad has come to a conclusion: Twitter is making the news dumber. "The service is insidery and clubby," he writes. "It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by 'covfefe,' which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo." What's more, Twitter has been used to push conspiracy theories, misinformation and half truths. And it is full of fake accounts. Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not require people to use their real names, so one person interested in spreading something can create lots of accounts to help make that happen. And bots automated programs meant to behave like real people on social media can make a bogus story look as if it is gaining more traction than it really is.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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How to get students thinking about their environmental footprints? Jeff G. Wilson and his students at Huston Tillotson University in Austin, Tex., retrofitted a garbage container into a cozy pad that he lived in for an entire year. It was, he says, "a radical experiment in what it would mean to live on, and in, less" specifically, 33 square feet. He moved out last February but the experiment continues. Nine educators have since taken up residency for up to a week to see what it's like to live without running water. Cooking is on a camping stove. But there is electricity. To battle interior heat that rises to over 130 degrees in Texas's sweltering summers, the bin had to be connecting to the grid so air conditioning could be installed. There's now a TV and an overhead light. But it's still tight quarters. "There were a few who grabbed the spirit early on, like they were camping," says Amanda M. Masino, a biology professor and co director of the Dumpster Project. "And then there were some that brought two pieces of luggage and realized they didn't have room to open it in here."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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While public health campaigns in China promote exercise, they omit the value of cutting calories or reducing intake of processed foods and sugar sweetened beverages. Happy 10 Minutes, a Chinese government campaign that encouraged schoolchildren to exercise for 10 minutes a day, would seem a laudable step toward improving public health in a nation struggling with alarming rates of childhood obesity. But the initiative and other official Chinese efforts that emphasized exercise as the best way to lose weight were notable for what they didn't mention: the importance of cutting back on the calorie laden junk foods and sugary beverages that have become ubiquitous in the world's second largest economy. China's fitness is best message, as it happens, has largely been the handiwork of Coca Cola and other Western food and beverage giants, according to a pair of new studies that document how those companies have helped shape decades of Chinese science and public policy on obesity and diet related illnesses like Type 2 diabetes and hypertension. The findings, published Wednesday in The BMJ and The Journal of Public Health Policy, show how Coca Cola and other multinational food companies, operating through a group called the International Life Sciences Institute, cultivated key Chinese officials in an effort to stave off the growing movement for food regulation and soda taxes that has been sweeping the west. The group, known as ILSI, is a worldwide organization with a Washington headquarters, funded by many of the biggest names in snack foods, including Nestle, McDonald's, Pepsi Co. and Yum! Brands as well as Coca Cola. It has 17 branches, most of them in emerging economies like Mexico, India, South Africa and Brazil, and promotes itself as a bridge between scientists, government officials and multinational food companies. But in China, ILSI is so well placed that it runs its operations from inside the government's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. In fact, when asked to comment on the studies, the ministry emailed a statement not from a government official but from ILSI's China director. The director, Chen Junshi, said that the group had always emphasized the importance of both exercise and a well balanced diet, and that its activities "are based on science and are not affected by any business." The close relationship with the highest government health policymakers goes significantly beyond what the companies have been able to achieve in the West. Coca Cola tried similar tactics in the United States by partnering with influential scientists and creating a nonprofit called the Global Energy Balance Network to promote a message that exercise, not dieting, was the solution to the nation's obesity crisis. But in 2015, after an article in The New York Times on the efforts and subsequent outcry from public health advocates, the company disbanded the organization. Read our article that revealed Coke was behind the group. In China, beginning in the late 1990s, ILSI organized obesity conferences, paid the way of Chinese scientists who attended the events and helped create national health campaigns aimed at tackling the country's obesity epidemic, according to Susan Greenhalgh, a social scientist and China expert at Harvard who is the author of both studies. China's public health initiatives almost always promote exercise, and they seldom mention the value of cutting calories or reducing the consumption of processed food and sugar sweetened beverages, which many experts say is essential for losing weight, keeping it off, and improving health. "You can't use physical activity alone to get rid of obesity, hypertension or diabetes," said Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Popkin was not involved in the study, but he has spent decades working in China to help the country develop nutrition guidelines and food policy efforts he said were often thwarted by well placed officials aligned with ILSI. Given his experience, he said Professor Greenhalgh's findings were not surprising. "Over the course of several decades, Coke and ILSI have worked to prevent any kind of food policy that would benefit public health," he said. "What they've been doing in China is insidious." "ILSI does not profess to have been perfect in our 40 year history," the statement said. "Not surprisingly, there have been bumps along the way. This is why ILSI has analyzed best practices and has committed to ensuring scientific integrity in nutrition and food sector research." Coca Cola said in a statement that it had also been changing the way it funded scientific research through greater transparency and by ending its practice of providing the lion's share of money for studies. In recent years, it added, Coca Cola has sought to address mounting obesity in China by offering an array of new sugar free beverages and through improved nutrition labeling on products. "We recognize that too much sugar isn't good for anyone," it said. Professor Greenhalgh's findings were based on interviews with Chinese officials and scientists, and a review of public documents produced by Coca Cola and ILSI. She said the industry efforts have been wildly successful, in part because China lacks a free media or watchdog organizations that might have been critical of the relationship. In just a few decades, China has gone from a nation plagued by food shortages to one buffeted by soaring obesity and chronic diseases tied to poor diet. More than 42 percent of adults in China are overweight or obese, according to Chinese researchers, more than double the rate in 1991. In Chinese cities, nearly a fifth of all children are obese, according to government surveys. The increases closely follow growing prosperity in China that began in the 1980s as Beijing embraced market economics after decades of isolation. In 1978, Coca Cola was among the first companies allowed into the country, and ILSI arrived soon afterward. Seeking to identify influential scientists it could work with, the group found a partner in Chen Chunming, a leading nutritionist who was the founding president of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, the forerunner of China's C.D.C. In 1993, Ms. Chen became the head of ILSA China and she remained a senior adviser to the organization until her death last year. Professors Greenhalgh and Popkin said that Ms. Chen was instrumental in stymying attempts to address soaring obesity by stressing the harmful impact of consuming highly processed food and sugary soft drinks.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Health
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If May was the amuse bouche of the sports menu, June looks set to provide an honest to goodness appetizer. And while the main courses may be some way off, there should be plenty for hungry fans to take in. All right, it's time to quickly drop that metaphor and get to the sports. The first jewel of the Triple Crown will be run on June 20, but it won't be the Kentucky Derby. Instead the Belmont Stakes, normally run third in the sequence, will kick things off. But the race won't look the same as in years past. No fans will pack Belmont's sweeping grandstands. And with 3 year old horses having had limited options to race, organizers have decided that asking them to go the Belmont's famed grueling 1 1/2 miles was too much this year. Instead they will race at a mere 1 1/8 miles, making the Belmont the shortest, instead of the longest, Triple Crown race. Whoever wins the Belmont will have to wait some time to complete the Triple Crown. The Kentucky Derby is set for September and the Preakness for October.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Sports
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Eric J. Barron, the president of Florida State University and a nationally known climatologist, was named on Monday as the president of Penn State University, which has spent the past year trying to find a new leader as it continues to wrestle with the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal. In selecting Mr. Barron, a former professor and dean at Penn State, the school will get an administrator praised for his efforts to boost Florida State's academic and research standing and to raise capital. At the same time, he also demonstrated he was at ease running a school where football is a defining force. Mr. Barron, 62, who is scheduled to take over at Penn State by May, will receive salary and compensation that could total 6 million over the five years of his contract. He replaces Rodney A. Erickson, who had been Penn State's provost and executive vice president before he was appointed president after the Sandusky scandal led to the November 2011 resignations of Graham B. Spanier, the former president, and Joe Paterno, the football coach for 46 seasons. The specter of the Sandusky scandal was the main topic at a news conference on Monday, but Mr. Barron deflected a question about the role Mr. Paterno's legacy should have. "The wisest answer is to tell you to give me time, O.K.?" he said. "I watched all of his great strengths as a faculty member and as a dean and as someone who loves this institution, but in my view whatever we do, we have to make sure that we do it with a high sense of dignity and honor. And sometimes that takes time." Asked how the university handled the scandal, he said, "What I see is an institution that has really taken control of compliance and is no doubt now a model university." Mr. Paterno died in 2012, and Mr. Spanier and two other former Penn State officials are facing trial on charges that they were part of a cover up related to the scandal. Mr. Sandusky, a longtime top assistant to Mr. Paterno, was convicted of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison. The university has agreed to pay about 60 million to settle claims made by dozens of victims of Mr. Sandusky, who used his Penn State connections and his charity for disadvantaged youths to befriend them. Karen B. Peetz, a Penn State trustee and president of the Bank of New York Mellon, said that at Florida State, Mr. Barron "helped enhance the institution's academic stature, financial stability, research reputation and service to the state and to the nation." Some members of the university community who criticized trustees for what they believe was a rush to judgment in firing Mr. Paterno and Mr. Spanier also praised Mr. Barron. "It's encouraging to know that we have someone who has an open mind," said Maribeth Schmidt, spokeswoman for Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship, a group of alumni critical of how the university handled the crisis. Ms. Schmidt said she also was encouraged by Mr. Barron's response after prosecutors in Tallahassee announced in December that Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston would not be charged after an accusation of sexual assault. On Monday, asked what he learned from that experience, Mr. Barron echoed what he said in December, that "it's incredibly important that an institution follow due process." That view, Ms. Schmidt said, "is encouraging for a Penn State community that has lived through the exact opposite of that the last couple years." Another critic of how the school handled the scandal, Spencer Niles, who left a professorship at Penn State last year to become dean of the school of education at the College of William and Mary, said he hoped Mr. Barron's handling of the aftermath of the messy departure of Florida State's football coach, Bobby Bowden, suggests he may be open to restoring the Paterno legacy. In Tallahassee, Mr. Barron's devotion to varsity programs was clear. (He told USA Today last year: "I really want successful athletic programs because it's the front door. It's absolutely the front door to your university.") That commitment was also plain in his cultivation of his relationship with Mr. Bowden, who was forced out after 34 years in December 2009, the same month Mr. Barron was hired, thrusting him into a firestorm that divided the school. Mr. Bowden was angry, but under Mr. Barron his relationship with the school improved, culminating in "Bobby Bowden Day" last year. "He showed a real sensitivity in that instance for the importance of mending a situation," Mr. Niles said. "I hope that is a good indication that he'll choose to pay tribute to the many contributions and achievements of Joe Paterno."
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Education
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Animals around the world are on the move. So are their parasites. Recently, scientists carried out the first large scale study of what climate change may do to the world's much loathed parasites. The team came to a startling conclusion: as many as one in three parasite species may face extinction in the next century. As global warming raises the planet's temperature, the researchers found, many species will lose territory in which to survive. Some of their hosts will be lost, too. "It still absolutely blows me away," said Colin J. Carlson, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He knows many people may react to the news with a round of applause. "Parasites are obviously a hard sell," Mr. Carlson said. But as much as a tapeworm or a blood fluke may disgust us, parasites are crucial to the world's ecosystems. Their extinction may effect entire food webs, perhaps even harming human health. Parasites deserve some of the respect that top predators have earned in recent decades. Wolves were once considered vermin, for example but as they disappeared, ecosystems changed. Scientists realized that as top predators, wolves kept populations of prey in check, which allowed plants to thrive. When wolves were restored to places like Yellowstone, local ecosystems revived, as well. Researchers have begun carefully studying the roles that parasites play. They make up the majority of the biomass in some ecosystems, outweighing predators sharing their environments by a factor of 20 to 1. For decades, scientists who studied food webs drew lines between species between wildebeest and the grass they grazed on, for example, and between the wildebeest and the lions that ate them. In a major oversight, they didn't factor in the extent to which parasites feed on hosts. As it turns out, as much as 80 percent of the lines in a given food web are links to parasites. They are big players in the food supply. Parasites can control populations of their hosts. Some are killed outright; other hosts, once infected, cannot reproduce, which would divert resources that the parasite craves to eggs or sperm. Some parasites move from host to host by making prey species easier for predators to kill. So if these horrendous pests are major players in ecosystems that we want to save what then? "This view requires that parasites be protected alongside their hosts," said Kevin D. Lafferty, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new study. A warming climate complicates the picture. Some researchers had already investigated the fate of a few parasite species, but Mr. Carlson and his colleagues wanted to get a global view of the impact of climate change. They began their work with the National Parasite Collection, founded in 1892 and now maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. One of the world's biggest, it includes 20 million specimens, some preserved in jars of alcohol and some mounted on slides. By determining the present range of each parasite species, Mr. Carlson and his colleagues were able to estimate the kind of climate in which it can survive and how it might fare in a hotter world. Building this global geographic database took five years. The researchers often relied on the old tags and cards stored with the specimens to figure out where they lived often a difficult task. "Sometimes you'd just get, 'Island, Ocean,'" Mr. Carlson said. "You can imagine the stress that caused." After he and his colleagues were done sifting through the collection, they ended up with 53,133 parasites they felt confident enough to use in their study. The records come from 457 species of tapeworms, ticks, fleas and other animals. Parasites typically live in or on their hosts, but that does not protect them from climate change. Rising air temperatures can harm them. Ticks, for instance, risk baking in the heat as they wait in the grass for their next victim. Hookworm larvae require damp soil to survive before slipping into someone's foot. And parasites need their hosts if they go extinct, their parasites probably will, too. So Mr. Carlson and his colleagues also evaluated how hosts are expected to fare in response to climate change. The researchers combined all these factors to estimate the risk that each kind of parasite faced. Some kinds won't lose much in a warming world, the study found. For instance, thorny headed worms are likely to be protected because their hosts, fish and birds, are common and widespread. But other types, such as fleas and tapeworms, may not be able to tolerate much change in temperature; many others infect only hosts that are facing extinction, as well.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Science
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Depiction doesn't always indicate endorsement , but that doesn't mean it's necessarily enlightening. "Wallflower" dramatizes the circumstances of a March 2006 mass shooting in Seattle that left seven dead, counting the gunman, who committed suicide. The movie puts the massacre in its second scene, then flashes back to reveal what happened the night before, when the victims and the killer had attended a rave. At the rave, Link (Conner Marx) invites the man we know will be the killer (never named, he is credited only as "murderer" and played by David Call) to an after party at a house. We've already seen that Call's character will return the next morning and open fire.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Movies
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This election is in danger of being stolen. By Donald Trump. Trump is a win at all costs kind of operator. For him, the rules are like rubber, not fixed but bendable. All structures laws, conventions, norms exist for others, those not slick and sly enough to evade them, those not craven enough to break them. Trump is showing anyone who is willing to see it, in every way possible, that he is willing to do anything to win re election, and will cry foul if he doesn't, a scenario that could cause an unprecedented national crisis. Trump has been on a rampage over voting by mail. Last week he tweeted: "With Universal Mail In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???" Setting aside the fact that Trump has no power to delay the election, he is clearly seeking to undermine the legitimacy of the outcome should he lose. If he wins, he'll say he did so in spite of fraud, and if he loses, he'll claim he did so because of it. In Trump's world, he is never to blame for failure. He is the best, the greatest ever, like no one has ever seen before. He doesn't fail. In reality, his life is chock full of failure. At the same time Trump is attacking voting by mail, he is undermining the mechanism by which it would be done: the United States Postal Service. This is fueling concerns by many that the Postal Service is being damaged precisely because of Trump opposition to mail in voting. As Barack Obama said in his eulogy for John Lewis: "But even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive I.D. laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the Postal Service in the run up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed in ballots so people don't get sick." Trump is afraid of what the data say: according to a May Gallup poll, 83 percent of Democrats would favor their state allowing all voters to vote by mail or absentee ballot in this year's presidential election, while only 40 percent of Republicans would. Trump wants to suppress the votes of those opposed to him because he fears there won't be enough votes in support of him. Polls now consistently show him losing to Joe Biden, not only nationally but also in battleground states. These polls aren't enough to lock in a victory for Biden, but they have been enough to rattle Trump. A couple of weeks ago, Trump even suggested in an interview with Fox News's Chris Wallace that he may not accept the election results in November, saying, "I think mail in voting is going to rig the election, I really do." When Wallace pressed and asked specifically if Trump was suggesting that he might not accept the election results, Trump said, "I have to see." For months now people have been gaming out what will happen if Trump lost the election, doesn't concede and refuses to leave the White House. One concern is that he might view the results as invalid and challenge the election in court, which could lead to protracted litigation. Trump hinted at the prospect of litigation last week, when he said he wanted to know the winner of the election on election night, adding, "I don't want to see that take place in a week after Nov. 3, or a month or, frankly, with litigation and everything else that can happen, years." This could happen. We should put nothing past this man. The words "far fetched" and "outlandish" don't exist in the Trump universe. This is a man who, during the last election, invited assistance from Russia. Since taking office, he has repeatedly doubted or refused to accept his own intelligence services' conclusion about Russian interference in that election. He has met privately with Putin without the world knowing fully what was discussed. He has instituted policies favorable to Russia. He was even impeached over issues surrounding the assistance from Russia. And yet, he has said that he would accept assistance from foreign governments again. And yet, when it was reported that there was some intelligence that Russia may have placed a bounty on our troops, Trump refused to condemn that and said that he didn't even raise the topic in a discussion with Putin. All of this was unfathomable just a few years ago, and now it's the reality we are all living. There are no norms under Trump but the consistently abhorrent. Put nothing past Trump, not even the destruction of the American electoral process. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter ( NYTopinion), and Instagram.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Opinion
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The choreographer Camille A. Brown may be tiny, but her latest dance isn't the least bit diminutive. In "Black Girl: Linguistic Play," which opened the Joyce Theater's fall season on a high note Tuesday, Ms. Brown explores black female identity by transporting her dancers and audience to the playground. On a multilevel stage of platforms and mirrors, she uses the games of childhood as a source of empowerment. In a section inspired by the cheer known as "Jig a low," described by Kyra D. Gaunt in her book, "The Games Black Girls Play," as a "call and response between two or more girls," Ms. Brown says, with pluck: "My name is Cami. And I am small. But when you see me. You think I'm tall." There's great spirit in this evening length work, influenced by Ms. Gaunt's book, especially in the opening dance for Ms. Brown and Catherine Foster in which the pair sync up for sneaker stomping duets that are so elastic, so intricate that the sense of cadence and rhythm is as visual an experience as it is an aural one. Featuring the pianist Scott Patterson and the electric bassist Tracy Wormworth, who both contributed original music, "Black Girl" is, by turns, clever and tender. Two more duets follow this playful tour de force, but the tone shifts each time: Fana Fraser and Beatrice Capote show both the rivalry and pathos of the playground as they feud and forgive; while Yusha Marie Sorzano and Mora Amina Parker, ending this dance on a quiet note, reveal a more nurturing side of friendship.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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OAKLAND, Calif. Would you like that Whopper with or without beef? This week, Burger King is introducing a version of its iconic Whopper sandwich filled with a vegetarian patty from the start up Impossible Foods. The Impossible Whopper, as it will be known, is the biggest validation and expansion opportunity for a young industry that is looking to mimic and replace meat with plant based alternatives. Impossible Foods and its competitors in Silicon Valley have already had some mainstream success. The vegetarian burger made by Beyond Meat has been available at over a thousand Carl's Jr. restaurants since January and the company is now moving toward an initial public offering. White Castle has sold a slider version of the Impossible burger in its 380 or so stores since late last year. Burger King's chief marketing officer, Fernando Machado, said that in the company's testing so far, customers and even employees had not been able to tell the difference between the old meaty Whopper and the new one. "People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which," Mr. Machado said. Burger King is initially making the Impossible Whopper available at 59 restaurants in the St. Louis area. Mr. Machado said the company had plans to quickly expand it to every branch in the country if everything in St. Louis goes smoothly. Impossible Foods was founded in 2011 by Pat Brown, a former Stanford University professor, who became a vegan soon after college and founded his company with the explicit goal of decreasing the world's reliance on animal agriculture. Mr. Brown, who is 64, was motivated by his discomfort with the ethical, health and environmental costs of meat. But he said he came to believe that consumers would make a change only if they had a product that satisfied their cravings for beef. "Our whole focus is on making products that deliver everything that meat lovers care about," Mr. Brown said in an interview at Impossible's production facility in Oakland, where he was wearing jeans and a T shirt with a picture of a cow floating in space as an astronaut. The company's success has not been without controversy. A small but vocal group of environmentalists has said Impossible rushed its novel ingredients to market without adequate testing. At the same time, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals slammed Impossible for testing its product on rats. Cattle ranchers have also criticized Impossible for calling its product meat and have promoted state level legislation that would limit how Impossible and other alternative meat companies can market themselves. But Impossible has broadly delivered on Mr. Brown's desire to create an environmentally conscious alternative to meat. Meat production is one of the biggest single contributors to climate change and Impossible's process creates just a fraction of the greenhouse gases that traditional beef burgers leave behind, according to an analysis commissioned by the company. The more important results for Impossible have come from early interactions with consumers. After White Castle added Impossible's food on a test basis in September, sales were strong enough that the chain announced in December that it would permanently add the Impossible slider to its menu. "We beat our goals for this product," said Kim Bartley, the chief marketing officer at the chain, which is based in Columbus, Ohio. "It was a nice surprise how many different kinds of customers wanted to try it." Now Impossible will face the challenge of scaling up its production to feed the new demand. On the same day that Burger King introduces the Whopper in St. Louis, a burger made with the Impossible patty will be introduced at all 570 locations of the West Coast based fast food chain Red Robin. As if it to emphasize that the product is for meat eaters rather than committed vegans, Burger King is sticking with the mayonnaise that comes on top of all Whoppers. That will put it out of bounds for vegans . The introduction of the Impossible Whopper does not mean that Burger King is relaxing its commitment to producing meat, as its recent marketing for Chicken Fries and the Bacon King sandwich make clear. But Mr. Machado said the company had seen the rising numbers of consumers looking to cut back on meat, especially beef. In Impossible, he said, Burger King found a way to satisfy that demand without the trade offs that have traditionally come with vegetarian alternatives. "We see there is no compromise on taste, and lots of upside on things that people seem to be looking for," he said.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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"Letter to My Nephew" is what James Baldwin called the first part of his enduringly urgent essay "The Fire Next Time." A newish work by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company carries the similar title "A Letter to My Nephew." In a program note for the piece, which had its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday, Mr. Jones calls it "a kind of postcard from uncle to nephew," and that description seems more accurate. Despite its aspiration to topical relevance and the trendy allusion to Baldwin, this collage of dance theater is as thin as most postcards, and as banal. It's also cryptic. Who is this nephew of the famous Mr. Jones? The program note gives his first name, Lance. But you have to have done research or maybe have seen Mr. Jones's 2016 work "Analogy/Lance" to know that Lance Briggs started out as a scholarship student with the San Francisco Ballet School and found success as a model and songwriter before getting caught up in drugs and prostitution, contracting AIDS and becoming paraplegic. "A Letter" obliquely suggests some of that dramatic life with simulated street fights, a hospital bed and a fashion catwalk amid artfully arranged fragments of dance. But rather than fleshing out a portrait, "A Letter" comments on the present moment and on each place it is performed. In this Brooklyn showing, the one line fragments of projected text include the sociological observation that "this neighborhood has changed." None of the commentary is any more illuminating, but it is up to date. Video by Janet Wong shows us torch bearing white supremacists in Charlottesville. We see the freshly controversial anti black verse of "The Star Spangled Banner." The projected text ticks off the names of places in the headlines: Puerto Rico, Barcelona, Las Vegas. Somewhere in the middle of these gratuitous reminders, the voice of Mr. Jones offers the avuncular admonition to "make a statement." It seems not to matter whether the statement is worth making.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Dance
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With Broadway still shuttered, Netflix is doing for the theater community what it and other streaming services have done for the movie business: airing content that can't be seen where it was initially intended. On Wednesday, the Los Gatos based company announced that it will stream a specially filmed version of "Diana: A Musical," a new show about the British princess, ahead of its debut on Broadway. "Diana" began previews on March 2, with its opening scheduled for March 31 at the Longacre Theater, only to be shut down because of Covid 19. It will be recorded without an audience at the Longacre next month and will feature the original Broadway cast, including Jeanna de Waal as Diana, Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles, Erin Davie as Camilla Parker Bowles and Judy Kaye as Queen Elizabeth. A promotional message added to the musical's website Wednesday morning said it would be "Coming to Netflix in Early 2021." Christopher Ashley, the head of La Jolla Playhouse, where the show originated, is the director of the musical, which features book, music and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan, 2010 Tony Award winners for "Memphis." The new show was capitalized at up to 17,750,000.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Theater
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MUMBAI, India India's central government moved on Wednesday to reinvigorate its sluggish economy by relaxing rules governing foreign investment in industries including retailing and air travel. The changes could lead Apple and other companies based outside this country of 1.2 billion to significantly expand their retail presence here. In addition to the changes in the retail sector, the government also said it would allow up to 49 percent of Air India, the troubled national air carrier that is now up for sale, to be bought by foreign airlines. The moves are the latest steps taken by the government to open India's economy up to outside companies. Foreign investment in the country reached 60 billion in the fiscal year that ended March 31, up 8 percent from the previous year. In a statement, the government said the changes would contribute to "growth of investment, income and employment." Among the potential beneficiaries of the changes is Apple, which has long sought to open stores in India. The company's iPhones account for only about 1 in 20 smartphones in active use in the country, according to the research firm Forrester, and Apple phones are now sold only by third party vendors.
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N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification
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Technology
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